Warehouse21
What do you do when you have fifteen minutes to kill in SL? Why, wander in to Warehouse21 for a couple hours, of course!
Buddhism and Religion?
While I was at Warehouse21 I got an IM from Agnes Incognito who wanted to know if Buddhism was a philosophy or a religion? And what to do if you kind of felt an affinity for the ideas, but weren’t down with everything, like reincarnation, for example?
For a few minutes Agnes and I discussed spirituality while Izzy and I traded Clint Eastwood quotations from Gran Torino.
Get off my lawn!
Clint Eastwood, Gran Torino, paraphrasing sorta
I opined that Buddhism is a philosophy. It doesn’t contain any supernatural elements that require positing a dualist, supernatural (above nature) plane of existence. It is a materialist world view. Not as in “material girl,” but as in, we exist in a physical universe defined by physics. In the fullness of time, it might be possible for the human mind to understand everything. Which isn’t the case with supernatural religions.
It’s a way of appreciating and being present in your earthly existence. However, I think that the human penchant for ritual and ceremony causes many to take the non-religious core of Buddhism and turn it into a religion nonetheless.
Addons
As for questions like, “what if you don’t believe in reincarnation?” I offered that these were like the zillions of addon objects in your LeLutka or Maitreya folder. I might use one or two, but mostly I just make a subfolder called “more” and toss all the parts I don’t need in there. You can do the same with the addons to your favorite philosophy.
For the Time Being
Buddhims Plain and Simple by Steve Hagen is a great, stripped down, look at the basics of Buddhism without all the addons. For the Time Being by Annie Dillard isn’t about Buddhism per se, but it’s about as sublime a consideration of existence as I’ve encountered.
- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/776.Buddhism_Plain_Simple
- https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/06/for-the-time-being-annie-dillard-1975-book-religion
Tech Bros and their Vanities
Speaking of “Physics,” I just watched Dr. Angela Collier’s take-down video of tech bros who decide that since they’re successful at making Internet toys, they no doubt are, or could have been, great physicists as well.
I think Collier’s conclusions are legit. Funny though, that she’s dissin’ them for wanting to be Physicists! I thought they wanted to be Architects!? Wasn’t Bill Gates constantly talking about how he “architected” this and “architected” that?
Or, the artworld version, where Richard Serra was a Sculptor who wanted to think of himself as an Architect. And Frank Gehry is an Architect, who likes to think of himself as a Sculptor. (Serra passed away a few months ago at age 85. Gehry’s still kicking at 95)
I guess the other influencer’s career is always awesomer.
SL’s too hard! Who has time!?
Oh, and Agnes and I also talked about Philip Linden’s recent makeover videos. Our mutual friend Trilby mentioned the other day that she’d been at LeLutka when Strawberry and Philip came in and that the whole thing was a bit of a laugh riot.
In Part 1, above, we learned that the guy who created this whole damn world, but has now been away for fifteen years, can barely use the thing! Wearing boxes and all those ancient, but apparently still with us, old jokes.
In Part 2, below, he muses on just how hard and time consuming it is to put an avatar together. He wonders how anyone gets through it? How many hours it’d take to compare a number of mesh bodies or heads or other things? He asks if SL as it exists today can actually be used by anyone who doesn’t have dozens of hours a week to get through all this!?
Philip also offers the insight that the ridiculous complexity of creating a contemporary avatar in SL is probably the result of multiple actors. That it’s not only choices made by The Lab, nor choices made by Designers who built on top of, or worked around, the way SL was “architected” at a give time, but that it was various steps from all parties that brought us to this impossible level of complexity.
Whether Philip’s insights will lead to some sort of streamlining of the SL experience or not, remains to be seen.
Izzy Spirit
Enough about the philosophies of First, and Second, Life. Back to the pretty girl. As the conversation went along, for reasons unknown to my circuitous and meandering, or if you’re kind, “serendipitous” brain, the topic of Sealand came up.
- Learn about Sealand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand
- Become a Lord or Lady: https://sealandgov.org/en-us
I, of course, wondered if there was a Sealand in SL? There is! Or a “Sealand-er” Region anyway. Located, appropriately enough, in the “Gulf of Moles.” There’s no platform for your micronation though, it’s just six-and-a-half hectares of water.
If you want a platform, you’re not entirely out of luck, the is a “North Sea” platform in the breezy and otherwise subterranean ANWR Region of Second Life:
Sealander
Anyway, Izzy and I got tired of the tired dance animations — have you ever noticed how SL Residents get a new hi-rez skin every fifteen minutes, but must survive on ancient, shitty, never fitting animations? (don’t get me started on the even more ancient Sounds and Gestures we will forever hear at dance clubs across the grid — and TP’d to Sealander. We might both have gills and it was nice to have a little infinity space at the bottom of the ocean.
I noticed on the Map that the Rotuma region to the west had a beachy looking topography and so we walked West. Amazingly, there were no Ban Lines, Curtain Walls, or Sculpted Rocks that trap you between the sculpt and the true ocean floor, and so we were able to walk from the depths of Sealander up to the beach at Rotuma.
Parting Thought…
Dr. Angela Collier, PhD Physics, University of Kentucky, 2019, took down the Tech Bros in her video above. Philip Rosedale doesn’t hold a PhD like her, but unlike the tech bros, he does have a physics degree: BS, University of California, San Diego, 1992. In the video below, he chats with Andrew Meadows about many things, including Physics in the physical world, physics in the virtual world, the trillion trillion problem, the Grey Goo Problem in Second Life, the theory of everything, inverse kinematics, virtual world conspiracy theories and tax revolts, and so many other things.
We’ve all known since forever that Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash was an early influence on Rosedale and the creation of Second Life. What I didn’t know until this video is that one of my favorite books, Jane Jacobs’ 1962 tome The Death and Life of Great American Cities, was also a big influence. Rosedale explains that like Jacobs, and like me, he loves walking. In early Second Life, they tried to restrict flying and teleporting so as to increase the likelihood of meeting and interacting with people.
As Meadows ripostes, so many residents will hate this, and indeed those restrictions came down in the early days of Second Life. Still, to know that Rosedale too values the experience of feet walking across land is remarkable. In the video he describes having to walk to an event “across town in Second Life,” and if you couldn’t leave early enough, or walk fast enough, you missed the event. Teleporting is magic, but as Jacobs articulately describes in her book, accelerated travel destroys the fabric of the city and the human experience there. Using your feet to travel across space, to explore, and to meet people, is a deeply embodied experience.
At the Second Life Endowment for the Arts’ Medici University in 2014, Izzy (the other Izzy) and her team tried not allowing flying or direct teleporting for these same reasons. She wanted people to experience the land, the community, and each other. There was tremendous resistance to this on a number of grounds.