Tuesday, 4th July, 2006

This May Be A Complete Disaster Of A Post

secondlife rant forums

Because it's unplanned, encompases a lot of things that I'm interested in, contains Second Life references, techie stuff, and only mentions crossdressing briefy — if at all. And I'm tired, my typing is at its worst, but hell, at least I'm sober.

('tis true. I've got a mug of Horlicks instead of a bottle of wine)

Really, this is just a general wander through my thought process — of how one thing leads to another, winding up in a "Can't we all just get along?" ending.

So, I'm checking my RSS feeds just before I go to bed, and I notice a thing on Wired about Robert Scoble getting booted off Second Life in the middle of a presentation about it.

I'll come back to that in a second, but my first thought was "Cool. Scoble has had a Second Life account".

Sometimes, I feel, it's all too easy to feel lost and isolated up here in the North West of England. I mean, Lancaster's not exactly the hub of New And Exciting Internet Things™ is it? And the chances of me ever coming into contact with people who swan their way through the (urgh) blogosphere — people I'd really like to sit down and have a chat with about a few things — are pretty slim.

But when I hear people have a Second Life account, suddenly they seem a little closer. Suddenly I don't feel like I have to jump on a plane for some conference or another, just to say hi and chat for a bit.

And I think that's great

But, going back to the banning ... Personally, I feel if you're going to break the rules, then you kinda have to take what happens in response. And from what he wrote, that seems to be exactly what he did.

I really like how he phrases it:

Anyway, it’s a good lesson for Patrick to learn. There are consequences for breaking the rules. “It’s your fault,” Patrick just said, in defense. I did tell him to do it on stage. But, even that’s a good lesson for him to learn. If his friends tell him to break a real law, that won’t be an excuse in front of the judge.

Seems like a fair and reasoned reaction to me.

But, read through the comments that have been left. They quickly polarise into a "Good Linden Lab" vs "Bad Linden Lab" slagging match.

...

And that's what really interested me — how things get so polarised so very quickly. It seems to me that on each side of any debate — whether it's an SL thing, or a Mac vs PC thing, or an Ubuntu vs Mac thing, or a TV vs TS thing — there are people who have invested a lot of energy (and sometimes money) into their particular experiences.

Sometimes those people have had to put up with being the brunt of ridicule for a long time — sometimes those people feel hard done to. But invariably, each of those sides have got so much to lose if the other side "wins" — or at least that's how it seems to them.

I guess it's related to my little thing about being wrong that I wrote a while back. It's really hard, having spent time and energy trying to argue your case with someone, to turn around to them and see their point of view. It's even harder to admit that they had a point and that you were wrong.

And because of that, things tend to escallate into a heated frenzy of mudslinging, getting more and more ridiculous, more and more personal, until the original idea or debate is lost entirely and sides become entrenched.

Ack. Why can't we all just get along?

On Cliques

forums clique rant

On the way back from Leeds the other day, April and I were talking to each other about cliques. Cliques bother me — when I was young, I was permanently skirting around the edges of little cliquey groups at school, jostling from one to the other, but never really being accepted in any of them.

It occurs to me that there are several little cliques of trannie on the Internets — ranging from the huge (Roses) to the tiny (like the Sometimes... group on Flickr). Obviously, there are cliques everywhere — and the idea of little pockets of connected people was the thing that prompted me to map out the Tranniesphere©™ about this time last year.

But it bothers me — that after years of unacceptance, I would be participating in some kind of 'exclusionist' strategies, employing 'in-jokes' and favouritism to scare away new people and assert my own importance.

I like to think though, that all of the little 'groups' I belong to, are incredibly open cliques. True, there's in-jokes and private banter — and I guess it can be pretty intimidating sometimes to someone who's just stumbled into one of them to pluck up the courage to delurk and contribute. But I'm convinced that the people who make up these groups with me — people that in some cases I've only known for a very short space of time — welcome fresh input. They recognise creativity, and actively encourage it.

I don't think it's a 'trannie' thing — but I do think sometimes that people, like us, who know exactly what it's like to be on the 'outside', who know exactly what it's like to feel 'excluded' and who understand the intense isolation that comes about from not being 'normal', are more ready to take people as they find them.

However, I think it's a two-way thing. I've seen a few cases recently where someone has lost control of their pram and crashed into a group, resulting in toys being thrown all over the place. I think, perhaps, that there's an assumption sometimes that all trannie-groups are essentially the same — that you can career from one to another and find the same kind of thing going on within each, and that reputations and histories travel with you.

Gah, I'm not really sure what my point is here, other than that I really love the people I know. And even if this is some kind of "mutual appreciation society", it's one that will glady spread that mutual appreciation to anyone who wants to join in.

As long as they're not an asshole.

Meh, I know what I was trying to say, but I don't think I've said it well..

No, I think I get you — that's a very valid point and probably one of the reason why I should plan what I write a lot more than what I do

I guess, in my head, I was referring in particular to trannyflickr. I'm not sure entirely why I had that particular group in my head when I was writing (and I probably should have alluded to it more specifically) — so the "us" wasn't directed here, it was pointing there.

(Is there a specific grammatical phrase to refer to when "us" means "you and me" as opposed to "us" meaning "me and some other people"?)

if there's an implicit assumption on your part that only trannies read here

Oh, not at all.

if someone "doesn't" feel that that describes them, might that comment not deter them from contributing, and thus result in the active Tranniefesto readership becoming what you describe, when it needn't otherwise be so?

Possibly, although I'm inclined to think not. I don't see this weblog as a trannie-clique. If anything, it's a clique of friends. I think I'm relying too much on the second paragraph up above to get across the idea that I'm specifically talking about my involvement in trannie-cliques, and maybe I should have reinforced that elsewhere in my post.

Only Siobhan knows what she meant

Unfortunately, that is all too frequently the case

Thanks Ciara

Lost And Found

moving-image

Amazing isn't it, what you find when you're going through your archives.

Lancaster, 28th May, 1999. I'm a little embarassed by the music (for cheeseyness and copyright-breakage in equal measures), but it's what I was into at the time.

...

Sorry — just to go back to cliques for a moment. I'm wondering if one blog in itself could actually be a clique. I think, potentially, it could — but it would have to have a seriously strong personality writing it (which I'm obviously not). I was thinking more about a network of blogs — and of comments. How they all interact and construct something with quite a thick shell, that's potentially hard to crack sometimes.

Ah, yes, sorry — I should explain maybe

It was my final submission for my degree. I'd set up several video players, TVs, and a video mixer in a local club, and projected the result of 48-days' rendering. I had a video camera filming it all (and a friend taking photos, which are on a CD somewhere in my loft), but there was something wrong with it, and that little segment at the end is all I actually managed to record.

The stuff before it then, is a feed taken from what I was mixing.

Pray I never post my final degree film...

Is it all moody and subtitled?

Wait! You and Neil aren't trannies?! BAN BAN BAN BAN BAN