Mellow

Or: another blue. Weather continues wonderful, today was a warm, golden Autumn day, it was probably over 24°C this afternoon. Met G and U downtown, had a cappuccino (one each, to be pedantic) on the terrace of the Kunstmuseum and enjoyed watching the streams of people enjoying the day. The weather put everybody in a good mood, I was smiled at by random strangers all day long. Enjoy, grasshopper: winter will come soon enough. Sunset today was at about 7:30, three hours earlier than in mid-July when I was in Hamburg. I can feel the days getting shorter.

I continue to spend enormous amounts of time in Second Life, being shown the ropes (and the stores, and the libraries and tools and beaches and sanghas) by M2. It's an odd experience for me to be so thoroughly out-geeked by someone, I am usually the (comparatively) early-adopter who shows others how things work. [To be pedantic again, that's not quite true: I am usually among the first wave of pragmatists.]

I am becoming fascinated by the "life" of Second Life, by seeing an intentionally-created community bootstrapping itself into existence based on cooperation and mutual trust—and a buttload of high technology, of course. There are many thousands of groups, for every possible theme and interest, plus reconstructions of significant places in the real world like the Ryoan-ji monastery garden or Cologne cathedral. The latter recently caused a furious row by banning non-human avatars from online services, which I find staggeringly insensitive and quite foolish: human avatars are every bit (ha!) as unreal as the banned furries.

Finally, here's a bit of applied commonsense to think about this weekend, and a trailer for a new film that I really want to see.