Christmas

Hello blogosphere, it's been a long time since we met. I've missed writing, and I deeply regret the loss of the community that had developed here and in the blogs I read. I'm not going to promise to write every N days in 2012, as that would just be another stick to beat myself with when I missed a date; but I will start writing again.

I'm in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan with cousins and other assorted family, eating and drinking and watching Jeopardy (don't ask). The concept of experiencing "together time" by sitting in front of a TV with the sound turned up too high for conversation is difficult for me to grasp, but we all have our foibles and mine would strike them as equally ludicrous. The weather here is odd, very little snow and unseasonably warm at only -7°C.

This is my second week in Canada, actually. I started in Calgary with Favourite Cousin, we spent a day drinking capuccino and stoking each other up for an active and growthy* 2012. She suggested the term "accountability partner", somebody to whom you report regulary and who calls you on your lazy-ass weak-excuse-finding bullshit; we'll be AP-ing each other next year as she gets her keynote-speaking business in gear and I try to level up after what felt like a year of stasis.

I've been working like the proverbial dog this year, building the competition project we won in the summer of 2008. Three and a half years, dear friends; I suspect that many outsiders have no idea how slow archtitecture is. It was a success: the public and the local press liked it, the staff find it convenient to work in. We were only around 6% over budget, which is pretty good; unfortunately it was months late and although it's been in use since the formal opening on October 8, there are still workmen onsite. When I left a week ago, the architectural snagging list was ten small-print single-spaced pages long. Just architecture, mind you, the electrical and services engineers have their own lists too. If you want to have a look at this, mail me (address is above left) and I'll send you a link.

It's funny that 2011 now feels like a static, almost wasted, year, because I did in fact do quite a bit of stretching socially and at work. I went onsite as supervising architect for the first time, all three of us were there six days a week for the last two weeks before the opening. That was a real growth experience, I can tell you. I thought I was just walking around talking to people all day, and at first felt vaguely guilty that I "wasn't really doing anything." It took me a while to realize that this is exactly what the job is, at least during the last few panicy days.

Funny how it worked out: G and Offsite Guy believe in supervising by shouting abuse, which is really not my style at all. I played good cop to their bad cops: encouraging the contractors, building up their confidence and courage, smoothing over tension between trades in favour of give-and-take cooperation. Another difference is that I always greeted everyone I met, every day, even if it was only to catch their eye and nod across a crowded room; G and OG seemed not to see people that they weren't engaged in shouting at. I think my results were at least as good as theirs. Certainly at the opening celebrations, people came up to thank me for my involvement. Even people I don't remember speaking to, like the wellness franchise women, knew my name and felt that I had helped them.

Other than that, I've been playing World of Warcraft and hanging out in Second Life, attending a meditation retreat in Halifax in July and an informal meetup of the same group in Berlin in early December. I think that SL, Facebook (spits) and Twitter between them are responsible for the decline in my blogging: not only the incredible amount of time that they consume (particularly SL) but that they came to fulfill my need to communicate. Second Life in particular has become a great part of my social life, I use it not for gameplay (it's not a game, as I have said many times) but to meet friends. It's my equivalent to going to the pub to chat with the guys, but without beer or second-hand smoke.

* Yes of course "growthy" is a word.

Tokyo: tenth day

Trainblogging again on the way home from Tokyo, heading into the sunset. For the first half-hour or so out of Tokyo, the train follows the coastline; as when travelling along the Mediterranean coast of France/Italy one gets tantalizing glimpses of the sea between the tunnels. [Written on Wednesday, but I was too tired to post it. It's funny, I am not having any of the usual jetlag symptoms, but I am tired all the time.]

I was mystified for a while by irregularly-occurring flashes of diffuse reddish light, off in the distance, well above ground level. Were they aircraft warning lights on hilltops shining through low cloud? Eventually the train changed direction and I worked out that they had been caused by the sun reflecting on pylons and posts by the trackside, which were themselves flashing past too fast to see.

I've taken many photos from the train, one or two of which might turn out. I have quite a few shots of sound-protection walls and the broad and featureless sides of huge buildings, and a surprising number of shots of the insides of tunnels. The Shinkansen goes so fast that there is no warning at all of these things as they approach. Even the tunnels come as a surprise: on the ICE one usually has time to note the ground rising before the train plunges into darkness; here the first you know of a hill is when you dive under it.

I guess I won't see the peak of Fuji-san this time either: we aren't yet in Mishima and it is already pitch-black outside. I saw the base of Fuji on the way to Tokyo: even with its shoulders lost in clouds it is unmistakeable, not just tall but broad, truly massive. It's very much bigger than any other mountain in Japan, a sumo wrestler among schoolboys.

Tokyo was … well, where to start? It was many things: "huge" is one; "new" another; "exhausting" a third. There was simply too much choice for such a short trip. I found it hard work in a way that Kyoto wasn't. I certainly had more luck in finding English-speakers in Kyoto. (That is probably statistically insignificant, btw: I guess that every foreign visitor to Japan goes to both cities; given the cities' relative sizes those N visitors encounter, and infect with the meme of English-speakingness, a far higher percentage of the population of Kyoto than of Tokyo.)

I walked around Akihabara last night, checking out the otaku/manga/animé/geek culture. At first I was taken by the stores selling electronics and gadgetry (e.g. a tiny shop selling only sixty different types of electricians' pliers) but eventually the animé/manga scene captured my attention. The stores selling manga/animé figurines were a revelation. I'd heard about them, about the collectors and their seriousness, but I wasn't prepared for the reality. There are differences of quality and purpose (for want of a word) in the figures that even an outsider like myself can see, and the prices reflect this: from around 800¥ for a simple, static, two- or three-inch figure, to 2500¥ for a six-inch articulated figure with exchangeable heads/hands/accessories (i.e. different gestures and facial expressions), to around 5000¥ for the Gundam weaponized cyborgs that we Westerners call "Transformers," and on upwards to 20000¥ for a seriously creepy foot-high too-young-even-for-Lolita figurine.

Most of the smaller stores specialized in a single animé "franchises;" in the case of larger stores these were displayed on different floors. I'd guess that there is little overlap between the fans of e.g. Evangelion and those of Gundam, or between them and the fans of Dragonball and the Sailor Moon imperium. Not to mention the Star Wars imperium, which is nowhere near as present in Japan as in the west.

When I first started walking around Kyoto, looking at the Japanese, I thought that Japan looked like Second Life; having been to Akihabara and Harajuku, I now think that SL looks like Japan. So much of the common dress and appearance in SL is rooted in Japanese styles: the thigh-high boots, the straps and buckles, the stripes of fur along the touchable edges of jackets and boots, the mini-skirts that are hardly more than wide belts worn low. The "sexy schoolgirl" is common in Japan, but then she was already an erotic archetype in England thirty years ago so that doesn't really count towards my view of SL. (There sure are a lot of them, though most seem to be in their early twenties. I admit to enjoying the six or more inches of bare skin between the tops of their over-the-knee boots and the bottom of their miniskirts.) Even the tiny heads and bulging muscles of many male SL avatars have a Japanese root: most male action-animé characters have heads far smaller than their biceps. (Bishonen and yaoi animé characters, and the male supporting-cast of animé featuring women, are improbably good-looking but do have realistic bodies.)

In sadder news, I left my kangol (flat hat) on the subway train on the way back from Ueno, so I'll have a chance to investigate a question that puzzled me all last week: Kyoto is full of hat shops, I noticed at least six of them while walking around — yet nobody wears hats. No-one. So who buys all the hats, and what do they do with them? Is there a secret indoor hat-fetishing scene? A mystery.

One more point about the JapanRail pass: I forgot to mention that you should allow at least forty minutes to have it validated before you first use it. In Tokyo there is a special office for this near the Yaesu central exit; in Kyoto it was just a desk (singular) in the ticket office, where a young woman struggled valiantly against the tide. And note this too: visitors to Japan, especially those who don't speak Japanese, should allow a good fifteen minutes extra time in each station for getting lost and misdirected (or rather correctly directed to a misunderstood goal).

Kyoto is next, I'll pack up and get ready.

[Later: An amusing thing happened during the subway journey home to Uda-san's B&B. While standing around on Kyoto subway station platform waiting for the train, I was approached by a pair of Europeans with a map and a problem: Which train should they take to get to their B&B, and how would they go about finding it when they got there? As it happened we were heading the same way, so we talked for a while in the train. I was able to tell them roughly what to do, and how to go about getting the information they'd need to get to the rest of the way. Being able to help them promoted me from "stranger" to "insider." Nice.]

In transit

Sitting at the gate in FFM, with an hour to go. There is of course no free public wifi here, but I still have the UTMS usb stick that I used to access the Internets all those months (I now have a working ADSL connection at home, btw, after two false starts when the installers screwed up). The stick works here just fine.

This will have to be a brief post as the battery is running down faster than the hour of stick-time that I bought.

Next stop Osaka and Kyoto. It's been a really hectic couple of weeks lately, getting everything shipshape for the holiday season. And it is a season: I'll be away in Japan for two weeks, then two weeks home, then off to Canada and the States for two weeks over Christmas and the New Year.

I'd been a bit apprehensive about the chance of flying on an A380, given the recent engine trouble. As it happens, this is a 340; definitely large enough. I've now seen a 380 "live," there is one across the way loading up at one of the A terminal gates. It's huge. It's REALLY huge, even bigger than I thought it was. Imagine taking two 747s, slicing the roof off of one and the belly off of the other, and glueing them together along the seam. That's a 380. It's as long as longer than a 747, but at first glance it seems short because the body is so oddly tall. I'll admit to being relieved that I'm not flying on one, but I am also vaguely disappointed.

So, to Kyoto. I'm invited by friends from SL to talk to them for a week about the societality (nice word) of Second Life; specifically two topics: identity and character, and how these are developed; and the development of ethics and community values in a virtual world where neither of these needed to develop (consider the level of vitriol and abuse in the typical chatroom for an example of VWs where they did not develop). After that, I've got a guide book and a handy-dandy-phrasebook and a JapanRail pass that takes me almost anywhere on almost any train, and I'll let the Moment move me. I'll keep you posted, here or on Twitter or even on the dreaded FB.

Next post, gods and terrorists willing, will be from Kyoto.

Quickly

I have 19 minutes to post something before going to work. (I start at noon on Fridays to accomodate a meditation/discussion group thing that Susan runs in SL at 10am my time.)

Work has been utterly crazy lately. The concrete work is falling behind schedule, the steelwork is being held up by the façade contractors who can't get themselves organized, they are being held up by the electrical engineers who keep discovering new things that need to be cabled up. That we have been asking the steelwork and façade contractors since February to send us detail plans for approval is somehow irrelevant to the fact that they cannot send their unapproved plans for fabrication today. And all of this is of course the architects' fault.

Anyway.

I had a really nice day so far. Went to bed early last night (before midnight, for the first time in ages), got up early, went to the post office to collect two books from Amazon, and took them downtown to my favourite cafe on a nameless square to open. Perfectly blue sky, gentle breeze, birdsong, temperature around 28°C which is in my opinion all it ever needs to be.

I bought two books on virtual worlds, which will feed into Susan's workshop this summer. Zach Waggoner's "My avatar, my self" is about the construction of identity in real and virtual worlds, and how these affect each other. Edward Castronova's "Exodus to the Virtual World" seems to be primarily about how RL and VL will be affected by the withdrawal of the time and money that we VL'ers are not spending in our RL environments. It seems like he will have a lot to say about happiness too:

For every happy, fulfilled person, how many are there who are bored, frustrated, unappreciated, defeated, unhappy? There's quite a lot of self-medication going on. Whatever people learn in schools, it doesn't seem to be leading to stable homes, happy childhoods, and emotionally grounded adult lives.

I'll be in Canada in less than a month. Sis and BIL are getting married this summer, after twenty-five years together. There will be a small but select ceremony and celebration, with only the most immediate of family in attendance. Various other plans are afoot too, including a further meditation retreat in Halifax (after Malta, and in the place of San Francisco in April).

Harpier cries, 'tis time, 'tis time.

Awake

Woke at around 6am from dreams of being peripherally involved in an inter-family Mafia scam; blogging briefly while the hot chocolate cooks. The clock says it's late enough that I could declare this to be early morning rather than insomnia, but that is not how it feels. I definitely need more sleep.

What's new? Not a lot. Working long hours on the project; the official "breaking of the sod" ceremony is on Saturday, so construction will start very soon indeed. It feels like we are desperately far behind in producing the drawings, but nobody is much worried. I am still the only person actually drawing on this project, and since the weasel-like prime helper is going to be doing the site supervision (touch wood, better him than me) he's not going to be drawing much in future either.

Winter continues, the length and severity of this one are practically unprecedented. Still, I walked home last night through slush and the drip and trickle of meltwater rather than the soft rustle of snowfall, so perhaps there is hope. We shall see. [Later: Froze overnight and currently snowing again. Ah well.]

Reading three books at once: "Anna Karenina" by Tolstoy, in the new-ish translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky (and how smug am I that I got those names right without looking them up?), "The ascent of money" by Niall Ferguson, and "The folklore of Discworld" by Terry Pratchett and Jacqueline Simpson. No prize for guessing which is the most fun.

I'm going to Malta at the end of the month, for a real-life meeting of the SL meditation group that Susan joined. I flew so much and so far in the last two years that I was able to get the flight for free. More about that as the time approaches, though in fact it is less than two weeks away. My gods, where does the time go?

Counting the days

I arrived safely back in Stuttgart nearly a week ago, on Thursday morning, after a suitably boring flight (no upgrade this time, alas). The plan was for me to help move the office to G and U's new, not yet completely renovated, house, and you can guess from the subclause what happened to that plan. (The original plan was for us to move at the end of June. It is to laugh.) I took Friday off, spent it unpacking and washing clothes and hanging about in Second Life, then back to the office Saturday morning for the first half of the process: moving the library, model workshop and inactive-project files to the new house (which needs a name, I'll think of something).

Naturally things were taken that should not have been (empty file folders, milk for coffee, the kettle for making tea, the system CDs for repairing the hard disk that of course started throwing out error messages today. (shrugs)

I am really going to miss Rose Street. I have come to love it here, being at ground level in the midst of a dense city neighbourhood, and with a bakery on the corner and three supermarkets and two dozen restauraunts and cafes in walking distance. And I'll miss the people walking past, all the little kids looking in and grinning.

The new place will have absolutely none of that. It is at the dead end of a residential street, 14 minutes on foot and 52 metres uphill from the nearest tram stop, or 5 minutes and 8 metres downhill from the nearest bus stop. It's a storey up from the untravelled road, behind a forecourt full of cars. There is a kindergarten four houses along the street, but that's it. No bakery, no butcher, no cafe, no restaurant: just No. The nearest place to obtain food is at Farmers' Market near that tram stop. It was suggested that we might use the kitchen in the "house" part of the building, but I confidently predict that U will quickly tire of that — if we ever start.

I am missing the hell out of the wedding party, that was such a wonderful time and such a lovely bunch of people. I'm working on a few posts about it and matters arising, but not really getting very far with any of them. I talked to Noctis (the groom) about this, and he kindly agreed to have a look at them in raw form. His reply: words to the effect of "You started well, grasshopper, but there is much that you have not understood." And it is certainly true, his further comments opened my eyes to many things I had overlooked or misunderstood at the time.

I'm considering sending Susan to the next DanceClubConference meeting (there will be more meetings, we were determined that the joy must continue). I think she would possibly have more and different fun than Udge did.

[Updated: I've just remembered something. This post points to the event that started the process that lead to the weddingdanceconference.]

Summer has peaked, and we are starting the slow downhill slide towards autumn. It is pitch-dark at 9:30pm as I write (waiting for the disk-repair utility to finish work). Ah well, it's been a good summer mostly. The weather in North America was pretty well perfect: sunny, warm but not hot, always a pleasant breeze.

Which reminds me that there was a whole 'nother week after the wedding that I have not yet talked about. I managed to meet about a quarter of my SL friends this summer! After Toronto, I went to North Carolina to meet two others (great fun), then took the train up to New Jersey to meet four more. The connection to these six was the meditation group that Susan belongs to. Ha, I hadn't thought of that before: the two halves of the holiday corresponding to my two identities.

Milwaukee and Toronto

I haven't written about being in Milwaukee yet, because I couldn't find a way to say anything worth reading (assume for the moment that my ramblings are potentially worth reading) that didn't get into matters that should remain private. "What happens at [the wedding] stays at [the wedding]," as it were. There is much that I would like to say about it, about the people I met and the things I learned, but these stories are not mine to tell.

I can say that it was the happiest wedding I've ever been to, completely free of tension and status games. There are two reasons for that, I think. First, that no family members were present (other than N's daughter): the group consisted solely of friends, and while nobody but the happy couple knew everyone, it is also true that everybody knew at least a half-dozen of the others. Secondly, and relatedly, that we were composed of two overlapping self-selecting groups: we had a buttload of common experiences and interests to unite us.

The ceremony was conducted in the couple's back yard; a friend from Second Life officiated, and we all took turns to say a few words of congratulation and blessing, after which we celebrated with margaritas, sparklers, live music and waterpistol fights. Woot.

On the last evening, we had a spontaneous meet-up in Second Life, which was vastly amusing: picture us sitting at our laptops around the dining table or in the living room, chatting both in SL and across the screens in RL. It was vastly amusing; but you probably had to be there to appreciate the humour of the situation.

It was a wonderful weekend, full of joy and companionship and great conversation and fine food, and of near-constant and near-random hugs and headscritches. What I miss most is the hugging, actually, the easy and comfortable bodily contact between friends. There's not enough hugging in the world, peoples. Get to work on this, please.

I have been in Toronto for four days now, talking with my parents and hanging about downtown. I'll write about my father's condition another time. Tomorrow I fly south to visit another SL friend.

"Infinite Jest" is proceeding well. I'm reading the chapter about AA meetings, and am finding it so rich and so thoughtprovoking that I am artificially slowing myself down, making myself take time to think about it as I read. There were several Twelve-Steppers (as they call themselves) at the meeting, reading this makes me see them with different eyes.

Shabbat shalom, my dears. I hope you are happy and healthy, and encourage you to hug a friend — or even a stranger.

More geekery

Three years and a week after I said "by the time the database software is optimised for Mac-Intel, Alberich will be ready to retire," I have bought his replacement: a new Mac Mini named Maimonides (because it's my thirteenth computer. Consider that a challenge, he said and grinned evilly.)

It's a wonderful machine: absolutely silent, even quieter than Alberich, and under real-world conditions it is at least twice as fast. I compiled the database on Alberich and Maimonides as a test:

                     Alberich    Maimonides
Syntax check             10           4 seconds
Compile                  50          19
Generate application     46          29
Total                   106          52 seconds

(I bought the "larger" version of the Mac Mini this time, because it had a significantly better graphics card than the "smaller" one, and increased the memory to 4 gigabytes.)

The betterness of this becomes clear in a computationally and graphically intensive environment, for example in Second Life. Alberich would struggle to get frame rates of 2 to 6 images a second (imagine a jerky old newsreel film), with his little fan blowing its heart out all the while, even though I had turned the resolution and image quality down as far as they would go (no anti-aliasing, no shading, no shadows, no reflections, no texture mapping, no sky details, no water details, nada y nada y pues nada as Hemingway once said).

I set up SL on Maimonides using the same conditions as on Alberich, and went to a site where I would usually get 6 fps. Maimonides got 32 frames per second! I couldn't believe it, that is better than cinema quality. I could see my avatar moving smoothly in real-time as I pressed the arrow keys. That got me curious to see what else might be possible, so I turned up the resolution and turned on all those filters and shaders and whatnots — and still got around 16 fps. Second Life is so beautiful! Who knew?

I have to admit it wasn't all joy. Setting up Maimonides was an unexpected and unnecessary pain in the arse. I can't put it better than Tim Bray, who also struggled mightily and in vain: In the old days, I would have been happily running on the new machine by now, cheerily blogging about my shiny new Mac. As it is, it looks to me like Apple, not to put too fine a point on it, removed a killer feature from a flagship product. This doesn’t feel like a good idea. I will write about this at length another time.

What Second Life is really about, Part one

Shari asked some time back, "I don't really know what SL is, have never looked at it, don't understand it. So please do explain how it had such an effect on you." This is the first part of an attempt to gather some answers to that question. In this piece a dear friend in SL (and perhaps soon RL, gods of finance willing) talks about the community and connection that SL can enable.

It's funny how so many people are suspicious of virtual lives. A textbook I use to teach social problems describes feeling strongly invested in online environments as mentally unhealthy and antisocial. It's said to be isolating.

I came into Second Life socially isolated by disability and sexual status and geography. I found community and connection and love, first inworld, and then crossing the boundary between worlds. When I proposed marriage to my partner Beta a few days ago, I did it inworld so that I could make this move in the presence of dear friends. I know the idea of proposing in front of a computer screen with my love sitting downstairs in front of hirs would strike many unfamilar with virtual worlds as crazy, but we were not separated or alone, we were in the midst of a circle of cheering friends, scattered around the globe, dancing together, bound by love.

Virtual worlds have brought connection and joy into my lives, first and second.

Amen.

For certain values of "fine"

I'm here, still, and much better than I was a fortnight ago. The week after that last post was pretty tough, I had no energy and less appetite, but I am now back in gear. Working, reading, playing about in Second Life: the usual.

Talking with a friend in SL recently brought back a knot of memories of schooldays.

Me: I had no idea. I was clumsy as an ox, and shy, and afraid of everything that I didn't know.
She nods.
Me: I don't think I really believed in learning then.
She nods. "In learning by trial and error, you mean?"
Me: In being able to learn at all, at least about things in the physical world.
She: Oh, I see.
Me: My belief was that everyone but me already knew everything about sports and activity.
She snorts lightly. "Yeah"
Me: And so I was not at all surprised when phys ed class did not teach football but simply sent us out to practice it, because of course everyone already knew! I took that for granted.
She nods. "I hated playing it..cause everyone else knew how."
Me: You too?
She: And..I couldn't catch or throw. I could tackle far better than my little body should've been able too...but we always played touch! Oh yes. I was pretty hopeless at "sports" despite being a died in the wool tomboy.
Me: Huh. I remember what as called "swimming lessons" one winter, maybe that was still in primary school...
She nods.
Me: I was terrified of the lessons (as soon as they were announced) because it was obvious to me that I was going to drown, because I knew that they would not actually teach swimming. I knew that they would just throw us all into the pool and everyone else would swim while I drowned.
She nods.
Me: I was so scared of this, so miserable, that I finally broke down and told my mother. Begged her to write a note excusing me from the lessons. Oh I know, that was during grade 3, before I got my glasses.
She nods.
Me: She did write a note, not excusing me but explaining my fears and my not knowing how to swim. And so I went to the lessons, and walked across the pool bottom with my hands above my head in diving posture, but bent over parallel to the water (if you see what I mean). I never did get comfortable enough to take my feet off the bottom.
She nods, smiling.
Me: But somehow during the summer after that, I did learn. Probably my mother taught me in the local pool. I remember meeting Annie Something in the pool that summer, I was doing a very splashy and inefficient dogpaddle, bent nearly into a ring, back of my head nearly touching my arse, to keep my mouth and nose out of the water -- but nonetheless in the water and moving more or less under control.
She smiles at the picture.
Me: And Annie, who had been in the so-called "lessons" with me, said "Udge, you learned to swim!"
She grins.
Udge smiles and chokes back a tear.
She strokes your head, feeling the silky fineness of your very short hair. Smiles at you, bent over the keyboard.
Me: That was my approach to everything and anything physical. I knew that I was the only one who didn't already know how. I knew that I would be mocked and humiliated for my inability.
She nods, listening.
Me: I remember Barb Realname sitting on the bench in gym one day, watching someone and myself stumbling about trying to hit a badminton bird to each other, she said "It's not Shakespeare, is it Udge?" And it suddenly occurs to me just now to wonder whether that was not meant kindly, meant to wake me up.
She sucks in a breath.
Me: Perhaps she wanted to tell me that we were all only human, that we all had a weak spot or two.
She hugs you tight.
Me: Perhaps I had been overcompensating by being obnoxious in English class.
She: You were NOT obnoxious..you were engaged.
Me: Oh no, I know that I was pretty obnoxious! I was so unsure of myself that I pretended to be totally sure of myself.
She listens. "Were you? or were you interested in Shakespeare? You might have also felt pretty proud of yourself for being interested in something esoteric..."
Me: I am afraid that I would have mocked the kids who couldn't parse a play, as harshly as they mocked those who couldn't catch a thrown ball.
She nods, thinking...mmm.
She kisses the top of your head and grins.
She: Love you anyway, Udge.
Me: Awww, thank you.

On answering a good question

Dale asked, "Why do you guys *do* this to yourselves? Isn't life hard enough already?"

Why, indeed, do we do this to ourselves? In my case, I was trying to use NaBloPoMo as a jumper cable to recharge my batteries which had gone flat sometime this last year.

I had hoped that writing every day would help me recover some of the joy that leached out of blogging during this year. That hasn't happened, this posting-every-day routine remains a burdensome duty which I will hereby lay down. (NaBloPoMo that is, I shall continue to blog at semi-random intervals.)

I was also hoping to recover some of the joy that had leached out of my life during this year. I have been living in monochrome for quite a few months now, maybe most of the year. I can't tell you when the colours went missing, I hadn't noticed until quite recently. I had thought that my malaise was situational: everything will be fine once I get the competition finished, once I get the scripts written, once I get the database sorted out. Well, those things have come to pass and I am not fine, and the world is still mostly grey.

Oddly enough, this comes at a time when I am actually working on the state of my soul, trying to bootstrap myself into calm and happiness. My alternative, now principal, Second Life avatar (whose name is not Susan) joined a meditation and discussion group in SL, and the three of us (SL-Udge, Susan and the blogging Udge who is also the physical Me) have been trying out the practices, with much talking and listening and feeling and thinking. It is having an effect, slowly but certainly. That I have spotted the greyness in me is due to the inward looking-and-listening that we have been doing. It is also in large measure due to the assistance and encouragement of many dear SL friends, even if they might have thought that they were asking me to help them. I am very grateful for your kindness and your company, my dears.

I don't know what happens next. I have work to do and enough spirit to get out of bed each morning, I have friends physical and virtual to stand by. For now, I guess that will have to be enough.

I'm done.

Awake

Rain falling against my window woke me from a pastoral dream which had turned to dystopian violence. What I feel in such dreams is equal parts fear and humiliation at my helplessness in the face of unreason, my inability to do anything about the situation.

It's been two weeks since I posted. What have I been up to, you ask? 'Tis a fair question, for which I have no particularly pleasing answer. I might well say that I have been on a sort of internal holiday, since I have also done very little work during this time. I have spent a lot of time, entire working days, in Second Life; though again even there I would be hard pressed to tell you what I did in SL too. Mostly talking and listening and a fair amount of worrying, about two friends who are going through rough patches in their real lives. I don't feel that I can say much about this, because they aren't my stories to tell. I am slightly uneasy at the amount of time I spend in SL, and the increasing proportion of my emotional life that takes place there.

Working slightly less than half-time with G and U on the two competitions due this summer, with moderate comfort. Working very semi-occasionally for the Münsters, I've hardly lifted a finger since delivering the last batch of changes.

Reading quite a lot: the King James Version Apocrypha, Terry Pratchett's "Making money" which I found quite good despite the Lioness's poor opinion of it, Michel Houellebecq's "Plateforme" (in German, a Christmas present; very disturbing, quite a good read), "The black swan" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (expect the unexpected), and currently both Charles Frazier's "Thirteen moons" (coming of age in the Appalachians during the Indian Wars) and a collection of essays on reading "the classics" by various German authors. The disappointment of the summer has been re-reading T.S. Eliot after more than a dozen years, sparked by my remembering "Prufrock" recently: much of it is unreadable. Many poems come across as badly dated, as fusty as the Victorian stuff that the Modernists opposed. I still have a soft spot for Prufrock and "Ash Wednesday" and the "Four Quartets", but the rest is superfluous. Sorry, Tom. And let me draw to your attention a book review in a New Yorker from this Spring, about economics and choice and what utter fools we mortals be: fascinating stuff, well worth reading even for non-economists.

Hot chocolate is ready, so I shall sign off and take it back to bed to read myself to sleep. Shabbat shalom, my dears, may you all be happy and healthy this weekend.

Escalation

Doc poked and prodded (gently) this morning and said that the lump appears to be reducing slightly. He extended the prescription for heparin but not for penicillin. Apropos which, I mentioned that I still had the feeling of a lump in my upper thigh when I sat, so he suggested making an appointment with a vein specialist in case there is a second clot there that he missed. I'll keep you posted.

Went to the office today, and had a very hard time of it: there isn't a single non-ergonomically-awful chair in the place. I shall have to work from home for the foreseeable future, as I can't afford to get a second chair like the one I have here (400 Euros and it was definitely worth every penny, but I don't have that many pennies).

Today is Udge Watanabe's rezzday, he was born in Second Life a year ago. Such fun I have had! Thanks to all friends real and virtual for the encouragement and amusement and tears, it's been a gas.

To blow my own horn just a little longer this is my nine hundredth post, just short of my blog's fourth birthday (on August 20th, if you want to bake a cake). Hooray!! Once more I must say: such fun I have had, with your able assistance and encouragement. Thank you all so much for reading and commenting and writing back.

Report: Progress, lack of

Preparing madly (as in "insanely" not "with great haste and effort") for another week in London, to celebrate my fiftieth birthday this weekend. I have been avoiding thinking about this for weeks if not months now, because I find it just too depressing for words. How can I be a half-century old already with so little to show for it? Blah.

Flights booked, again through Zurich: trading money for time in well-established late-capitalist manner. Readers in or near London who might wish to meet for a drink (or a bookshop or whatever) are encouraged to send me a tickle by e-mail (top left).

I hesitate about the job in Münster still. Part of me says — with a certain amount of impatience — that the universe has given me the nudge that I wished for at Easter, and that I should bloody well grasp the chance to make some long-desired and overdue changes. I should therefore embrace this earnestly and with both hands, and move to Münster as soon as possible. Another part reminds me that it means leaving all my contacts, friends and customers, leaving the shops and cafés and restaurants where I am known; in short, leaving behind most of what makes my life comfortable. This part suggests that I should rather delay moving as long as possible, to wait and see whether the Münstermeister will really insist on my presence there.

To tell you the truth, I am getting somewhat tired of that second voice. It sounds like the backdrop to every decision I ever made (or fudged for so long that Life let me off the hook by making it for me). I think I should fire that voice and get some new advisors.

Fragments of a recent conversation in Second Life.

Me: I have noticed in myself that I often aim to miss, because success brings responsibility and the risk of making changes to accomodate it.
Me: I have been quite thoroughly irresponsible all my life, really.
She nods understanding.
Me: Here I am at age 50 without pension or health insurance, living alone and from month to month, no savings at all -- and the second-largest chunk of my time and energy goes on Second Life.
She strokes [my] forehead.
Me: He needs it.
She: Yes.
She: You have been sounding lonely lately.
Me nods.
Me: Yes, I have been lonely. I am coming to terms with leaving Stuttgart and all my friends and business partners and the stores where I am known.
She sighs.
Me: And frankly I don't want to do it.
She nods.
Me: But I sure as hell need the money. And the health insurance and pension that it would bring. The hourly rate isn't great, but there are enough hours that it would increase my income by over a third.
Me: There is no reason I could not save that third right off the top.
Me: I don't know whether to mourn this or welcome it.
Me: And I cannot talk about it with anyone in RL because they are all involved. G and U are furious and heartbroken at my leaving, they feel abandoned.
She nods.
Me: And I have realized that they are about 70% of my social life here.
Me: I will have an *enormous* amount of time to fill in Münster; either tango or SL or the gin bottle. and god help me if it's the latter.
She: I hope it's SL.
Me: Well, no, I don't fear that. I have no inclination to drink or drugs, none at all. Unless you count this as a drug
Me: or Internettery generally.
She: Misread that as "internuttery"
Me: ha!
She laughs.

Busy doing nothing

Somehow a week has flashed past since I last blogged, though it hardly seems possible. I've been running fast just to stand still, it seems, going flat-out to little visible effect.

I am surprised by how little I have been eating since returning from Canada. My mother fed us four or five times a day, some of those were snacks but there were always at least two multi-course meals. Well, I get through the day on a small breakfast, a moderate lunch and a few cookies with tea in the evening, and cannot say that I feel hungry or deprived. On the contrary, I still feel that I am eating slightly too much of slightly the wrong things.

The Münsters presented a contract for my fulltime employment, which had a few oddities. The pay, for one: 23% more than I am currently getting, for 100% more hours per week (though that would include health insurance, pension and unemployment insurance). For a second, the statement that "up to 5 hours unpaid overtime per week" may be required—without limit in frequency or total. Well, I've been there before, and that means that every week would be 45 hours long, i.e. that I would get 23% more money for 125% more hours: quite unacceptable. So I made a counterproposal, which they are considering.

G and U went through the phases of denial and unreasoning rage and are now trying to negotiate. They presented a suggestion whereby they would pay me half of what the Münsters are offering, for not-quite-half-time permanent work in their office (based on the presumption that the office will soon have work). This is kind and flattering and very sweet, but leaves me exactly where I was last year when I advertised my services and ended up at the Münsters: I would still need to find some other work to fill those hours here, because I cannot live on that half-time job. It would be grand if the Münsters would agree to keeping me on part-time for the remaining hours, even at a lower rate of pay, but given the Münstermeister's expressed desire to have my colleague and I in his physical offices I very much doubt that they would agree to it.

On top of that, it's almost summer here. I ate a salad for lunch at an extremely un-chic restaurant with outdoor terrace by the Feuersee, and found that quite wonderfully refreshing. I have decided to do that once a week for the rest of my time here, or the rest of the summer, whichever ends first.

I am also spending too much time, too late at night, in Second Life. Much of that is doing good deeds: helping friends set up a shop, writing scripts and advising them on merchandise, but the rest has been just faffing about, talk and dancing and timewastery.

That's all for now, the weather is breaking and I am tired. Shabbat shalom, my dears.

Grumpitude

The man ahead of me at the neighbourhood mags-and-smokes shop spent 100 Euros on lottery tickets this morning. He looked like a local resident, an ordinary citizen, certainly not someone rich enough to spend (I'm trying to avoid the value-loaded word "waste") that amount of money with impunity.

The purchase didn't seem to make him happy, there was no sign of cheerful anticipation or even of a particularly generous portion of hope in his manner. I would rather say that he was resentful of spending so much money, perhaps even feeling himself a fool to do so; and I could hardly disagree with him.

And before you ask, the answer is yes: I too paid my share of the Idiocy Tax (as people call it here), and wasted 2.50 Euros for a single lottery ticket. I am amused to consider that my chance of winning is not significantly worse than his.

Second Life has been struggling for the last 24 hours with database-server and network problems, and at present is offline (closed entirely) for the second time in that period. I remind myself at such moments of the utter improbability of what the Lindens have achieved, how much like an absurdly optimistic science-fiction the current state of the art of SL would have sounded even five years ago. Nothing has ever been attempted on this scale before, neither in the number of concurrent users nor in the freedom of creation and movement allowed them. Most of the tools and technologies used are brand new, many are being invented right now as we speak; it's all running on prototypes and theories that need testing, and that some of these fail the test should really neither surprise nor unduly dismay us.

I guess I shall have to spend the evening reading more of the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace."* This is no hardship, it's a wonderful novel well translated and I am enjoying it greatly. But the physical book is infuriating me no end. It's been computer-typeset, of course, as all books have been for several years now; and an error has crept in. After page 157, the footnotes to page N appear not where they should, at the foot of that page, but at the top of the next page. I thought this was funny when I first saw it, presuming that the error would be solved in the current episode or chapter, or the next section at the latest. But the problem recurs right through the whole goddamned book, up to the very last footnote. What a miserable piece of shit! I am inclined to write and ask for my money back, just to register a protest.

Much as I admire the translators' efforts, much as I am enjoying reading this novel in its new form, I would advise book lovers not to buy this particular edition (purchased in London: Vintage Classics, a British Random House offprint). Wait for it to be revised and reprinted (as it surely will be), or for a paperback version of the translation to appear. Those who have already bought a flawed copy may register their displeasure on the VC website's contact page — and bloody good luck to you trying to get the "submit" button to work. Bah humbug. Incompetence abounds.

* Google bomb, hoping to warn anyone who might otherwise buy this flawed edition.

Further adventures of Susan

Readers new to the tale should probably start here to find out about Susan. To set the scene, Biff has just bought a very dramatic outfit, and is trying on hair and skin colours for effect.

Biff: hmm, what do you think?
Susan: mmhmm, a good compromise. Colours work well, strikingly. But if you do wear that purpley corset, your haircolour needs to be stronger.
Biff: I was thinking the same
[...]
Biff: I think it's going to want purple hair
Susan: Absolutely! Mind you I would rather aim for a dark rose madder like the corset, than a purple like your lipstick.
Biff: Agreed
Susan: I am pleased when you agree with my suggestions, because it suggests to me that my femaleness is not ....
Susan: What do I want to say?
Biff: I don't know that aesthetic appreciation is confined to the female sex, but I do understand what you're saying.
Susan: It pleases and *surprises* me that I am able to be this role so well, because neither Udge nor [my RL name] ever had this acute a fashion or colour sense.
Biff: Now that is fascinating
Susan: Isn't it just?
Susan: How many personalities do we all have, hiding away, waiting for a crack in the shell?

Me, myselves and I

I mentioned some time back having been to a long interview and a few seminars in Second Life on the subject of identity, body, image and embodiment. I have since spent quite a bit of time with the seminar leader and her circle of friends, discussing these matters but also just hanging out. They are all very much freer in their explorations of self and SL (and "self" in SL) than I have been, and in the course of time the desire arose in me to extend my own boundaries a little. But how to do so? The Udge who writes here is very much the Udge who is present in SL, and both of these personas overlap extensively with the real-life, real-world "I" whose physical identity is known to a select few readers.

I wanted to experiment, but felt constrained in the nature, appearance and actions of the SL Udge by his history there, by the people who already knew him in-world or from my reports here on his doings. I felt that "Udge" could not do the things that I wanted to do, even though I didn't yet know what those might be.

So, in mid-December I decided to create an alt, an alternative identity, a Third Life if you wish: a brand-new account with a brand-new name bearing no connection whatever to Udge. Her name is not even vaguely "Susan," which is why I'll call her that here. I played Susan exclusively for about two weeks, for many hours every day. (During this period, I stopped writing about SL, because I couldn't use Udge's voice to describe Susan's experiences. She now has a blog of her own, which I shall never link to.)

The discussions about alts in the seminar group have been quite fascinating. All of us have at least one alt, and one has (at last count) seven. It is very strange that one uses "I" for three distinct personalities in such conversations: Udge, Susan and the real-world "me" behind them.

We all experienced our first avs as being the projection of our RL selves into SL, and felt that this became confining after a certain point; we all experienced the alt as significantly bolder, braver and more open to experiment than our original avs; and also in a way freer, more playful and humorous. Which perhaps goes together well with the willingness to experiment.

I was at first very cautious and careful as her, because I dreaded giving the game away by letting slip something like "Susan scratches his head," so I gave her a style of speech and a syntax of her own. It soon became clear that my caution was unnecessary, as her style was actually so strong that it began to influence Udge (on the occasions when I logged in as him).

But I was even more surprised to find that she had a personality of her own: Susan surprised me by the things that she liked and wanted to do, and I have learned to let her have her way. She is much bolder than either Udge or "I," more willing to try new things and to state her opinion about the results. The difference expresses itself in strange little ways. Take the matter of camping (getting paid for parking your avatar on somebody's land, to make their site appear more popular). It's a really dull process, and poorly paid too: about 3 U.S. cents per hour on average, but Udge spent many hours camping on his own and with M2. Well, Susan tried camping too—and after about five minutes said "To hell with this noise;" she went out and got herself an e-mail account and a paypal account and damned well bought a thousand Lindendollars ($4 US). Jus' like that. I was most impressed.

This too is a common experience in the seminar group, that our alts develop in ways that we could not have predicted, like a child growing into its own personality.

I am very surprised that Susan fools people so well, even Biff who is a very clever and empathetic person didn't suspect. As far as I know the only person who has seen through her is an English teacher in RL, who claims always to be able to tell because "men and women speak differently."

I had heard but not really believed reports of women being aggressively chatted up by men in SL, to the point of being molested or stalked; and while that hasn't happened to Susan, she has seen and heard it happening. She is chatted up on average once a week, but (so far) always in a friendly and amusing fashion, by men—and women—clever enough to understand the subtext of a barely-lukewarm answer. The Barbie dolls and the Barbarians gravitate to each other and leave her alone.

I think it's because of her appearance (which principally means body shape, because it holds true whatever she wears). Susan is no more a Barbie than Udge is a Barbarian, though she is young-looking and very pretty. I spent quite a bit of time giving her a real-woman appearance with definite "problem zones" compared to the Barbies. I think she looks quite wonderful, and clearly so do many others because she won a dress contest at a dance club. The prize was a job in the club, which she accepted.

I am pleased to report that she's having a great time.

Trivia, Thursday edition

Winter has returned, it is clear, sunny and cold again. Relatively cold, of course, a mere -1°C; not to be compared with Canadian winters. But there was ice on the Feuersee again as I walked past it this morning.

Not much new. Working in Rose Street, enjoying the view of the neighbourhood. G reminded me again yesterday that they might have to rescind the offer (that I may work here) if their business picks up so far that they need to hire someone, or equally if it drops so low that they need to rent out space. I find this on the one hand understandable but on the other somewhat shitty, because it suggests that they did not intend the offer very seriously.

The search for a new apartment continues. I have learned a bit about where and how I don't want to live. Call this a "work in progress."

Reading, cleaning, using my new toothbrush (more about this later). Life goes on.

I have become active in the Second Life community, as it were, by editing and adding to the various SL wikis, and have recently signed up as a volunteer mentor for newcomers. The idea is that we (mentors) hang around Orientation Island (the very first part of SL that you see after creating yourself) and the various in-world Help Island areas, and offer advice, encouragement, information and general guidance to those in need. This is very new, I have just completed the training, so I can't comment on what it's like to be one; but I as have been offering advice, encouragement etc. nearly from day one anyway, it is unlikely to be a great shock to my system.

Second Love

Can one fall in love in three days? In the course of three short evenings, in fact?

This has been one hell of a rollercoaster ride. Calling SL a "game" does not make what happens there less real. These aren't just pixels, people do get hurt here.

A personality has left SL, has left my lives; and although we only knew each other a few hours, although I will see that avatar again today, I am crying as I write because it will be someone else standing there in that form. It's a strange situation, I know, hard to imagine unless you have been in SL and experienced it yourself.

I had thought that I'd be writing very different words than these when I came to tell you about it.

Let's see how long I leave this post up.