Mr.+Dumpling's+Journal

1/27/2008
//11:15AM// I just finally got my lazy butt off of orientation island, which may be the biggest bucket of suck ever. The lag on that insipid little island is intolerable. Can't these Linden folk get their orientation right? If this is an accurate precursor to the Second Life experience, then this might not be as fun as Dr. Freenote told us... more to come later.

Metajournal: Howdy, y'all. This Isn't much of a journal yet, as I am writing this entry from work. I'm the guy behind Garbage Dumpling, an experienced MMORPG-er who has never explored the Second Life grid, though other members of his household have been there. The beauty of all of this is that I am not sure what to really expect - I am beginning this experience with an empty slate.

//12:38PM// This isn't from Second Life, but there were a couple of news stories which relate to the material this class has been covering (Naomi Kleine's __Shock Doctrine__) [|This] is an interesting story about the diversion of Katrina housing relief funds to the construction of a new expanded port in Gulfport, Mississippi. [|Here] is a story about the death of General Suharto, Indonesia's brutal dictator who was an early example of the execution of the 'shock doctrine' both in economic reform and interrogation/torture technique. Rest in peace, funny man. Not linked but worth mentioning is the upcoming Russian elections, which are sure to be as legitimate and free as the last ones. That is all.

01/28/2008
//10:01AM// I finally made it off of Orientation hell and Second Life dropped me off in a random place full of very annoying people with whom I could not communicate due to lag. Maybe they seemed annoying because I couldn't really do anything. After fiddling with the graphics options I have come to the conclusion that my relatively new Dell is a POS when it comes to Second Life, though LOTRO and WoW run fine on it. To this day I have never experienced these kinds of problems on an Apple computer. Go figure. Finally made it to UK island and set it up as a landmark. I tried to take a picture of my avatar to post on the avatar page but then Second Life promptly crashed. More to come.

01/29/2008
//10:32AM//

I didn't make it to my first class today and I was too hung over to read, so I decided to go to the Young library and get on the grid for a few minutes so I could make some observations. I picked up a SLURL (http://slurl.com/secondlife/Osato/45/55/43) to a 'freebie' shop - most of the items there were not free but cost 1L$ (L$ = Linden Dollar, the currency of the Second Life grid). However, there were some free things that were mostly women's clothing, when I was looking for something more like a dirty poncho. This page is going to get ridiculous if I don't start linking to my entries.



Of interest was a small corner of the room full of frantically dancing people - here you could click to 'sit' on a spot and end up dancing for money, 15 minutes for 1L$. At first I thought 'wow, that's pretty exploitative'. Then I realized that I had exactly 0L$, and promptly started dancing. In fact, I'm dancing as I type this. That's all for now.

1/30/2008
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