Any Colour you Like, So Long as it's White

So there I was at Oxbridge, enjoying the traditional sight of a new avatar going up to anyone even vaguely female and asking for a date.  (He gave me a chance to use the "my girlfriend's just TPed in" excuse, which is always fun... and receives a special Clueless Award for trying to chat up one lady with her very obvious husband standing right next to her.)

But, both Clueless Boy and the husband-and-wife - and several others who wandered through - were wearing unfamiliar, and rather sophisticated, avatars for new people....

The reason being, of course, new default avatars from our noble benefactors at the Lab.  So, it became necessary to take a squint at these and see what is what about them.

What we've got, you see, are mesh avatars.  The basic body is rendered invisible by a full-body alpha layer, and a mesh shape attached which acts exactly like your basic SL body.  It's rigged, so it can change to reflect alterations in your basic underlying shape... up to a point; you can't do anything fancy like changing the face, for instance.  And of course system clothing and other system-layer stuff like skins won't work on these things. 

What are they like?  Well, they vary.  Some of them have really good detailed skins, others are... less good.  They come with various bits of rigged mesh clothing, some of which is very good, as in "cannibalize it for other outfits" good.  (Tali and I both fell with glee on Kate Beckinsale's "Vampire Hunter Alison"'s leather trenchcoat.)  There are other components which are worth nicking - one (otherwise fairly naff) female form has a set of included shoe alphas which might work with a bunch of pumps I can't currently use because they're invisiprim based.

The design of the avis is quite interesting.  By and large, although some are traditional SL Barbie-dolls, there is a tendency towards more naturalistic sizes and shapes, which is rather gratifying (says the seven-foot blonde stick insect).  The male avatars are pretty good looking, and certainly better proportioned than your usual SL man-mountain with very short arms.  One thing I noticed, camming around them, was that the faces are, in places, a little bit asymmetrical.  This is good: real faces are a little bit asymmetrical.  On balance, we may expect a more interesting and (arguably) more attractive set of new people running around SL.

Oh, they'll all be white, of course.

Well, no, that's not strictly true - Tali found one vampire avi who is unmistakeably African male, apart from the fangs.  So that's one unambiguously non-Caucasian.  And some of the others might look vaguely Asian or Latino, in the right light... or might at least look as if they know someone who's Asian or Latino....

It is at this point that I heave a sigh, because this is an old, old rant, but it still needs to be ranted.  It would not hurt, dear people in the Lab, to be a little bit inclusive.  Just to the extent of offering options for non-Caucasians.  Just to the extent of admitting they exist.  One non-Caucasian avatar in the new batch.  One.  And even that one isn't fully human.

The excuse for this, apparently, is that the selection of new avatars is based on an analysis of what people actually go for when they're developing an initial look.  The problem with this, it seems to me, is that defaulting to the majority choices makes the alternatives invisible.  SL gets flooded with lookalikes, and the next batch of new people to come along adopt the same look, to fit in, and eventually we all look the same....

Assuming new people do come in, of course.  I have to wonder just how appealing SL looks, based on its available choices, to people of anything other than Caucasian origin.  My guess would be, not very. 

Seriously, LL.  Options.  Inclusive options.  From the outset.  There is no excuse for failing to do this.

I am Woman, Hear Me Roar

So, about that protuberance mentioned in my last...

Well, I was at the Fantasy Faire, in Hope's Horizon (the Gondor-themed sim, if you recall), and I went in a shop, as you do when you are not setting yourself on fire and jumping off high things.  The shop was MD/ND, skins and avatar accessories and stuff, and they had these lioness avatars on display....

"Hmm," I thought, "that skin actually looks like pretty good quality, especially around the face."

Now, like a lot of people, I have acquired some freebie neko stuff over my time in SL, but I get rather embarrassed at the thought of wearing it and standing next to Tali, who is such a carefully and beautifully crafted example of a feline avatar.  But these things didn't look embarrassing at all.  And there were demos, so I decided to take one home and try it on.

And, I thought, it actually didn't look bad.  It was a style I could work with... and one of their lioness avis was in an RFL vendor, and the whole point of the Faire, really, is to raise money for RFL....

So, a donation to RFL later, there I was, assembling the various bits and pieces required to become part lioness.

This meant opening up the shape editor for the first time in something like two years, ever since I fixed that glitch that was making my eyeballs come through my eyelids sometimes.  While I was quite definite about keeping the same basic Glorf shape that has stood me in good stead over the years, a small pointy human nose simply didn't fit the shape of a leonine muzzle, so a great deal of flattening, broadening and general softening of outline was needed there.

I know a great many people think nothing of chopping and changing their appearance on a whim, but (as people who've read my rubbish for a while may remember), I'm not one of them.  An actual change of The Way This Bulmer Woman Presents Herself Inworld is, to me, a significant event, necessitating a certain amount of consideration and introspection.  I know, of course, I can always change it back if I don't like it, but....

Anyway, you can see for yourselves.

The rounded lioness ears are not as mobile and expressive as Tali's, alas, nor are my whiskers as impressive as hers.

Snapshots taken while reloading on the sea bed at Pooley.  Any remarks about wet pussies will be treated with the contempt they deserve.

 

Of course, how I feel about it is by no means the only factor... there is also the reaction of the important catlady in my life to consider.  (By the way, the readership-at-very-small does realize that Tali and I are a couple, right?  That we weren't testing all those couples animations in the Steam Hunt out of a spirit of purely disinterested academic inquiry?  OK, just checking.)

In a sense, that is the important part of the whole undertaking.  Most people who opt for a furry lifestyle in SL, I gather, do so out of a deep-seated emotional connection to a particular kind of animal.  It's not something that I have, myself - I've always been quite adamant that if I have a "spirit animal", it's of the species homo sapiens.  But it turns out I do have a deep emotional connection with a particular feline... and the experience of being feline is something I'd like to share with her.

Besides which, she can do amazing things with her tail and her whiskers (no, no details, this is still Not That Sort of Blog), and I'm looking forward to trying those out for myself....

So, there we are.  An explanation for the tail.  Will this be a permanent change, or just another costume to wear in SL?  We shall see, as time goes on.

Changing faces

I have changed my SL profile picture.  Of course, very possibly the readership-at-very-small knows this already, since an event of this epochal importance is automatically announced via my profile feed.  (The same would apply were I ever to change, or indeed use, a Display Name.)  Some people, the real enthusiasts for Facebook and Twitter and their ilk, wax lyrical over these sorts of little details, imagining a world of ultra-connected social media in which everyone is announcing everything cool or interesting that happens to them, all the time.  I remain unconvinced.  In a world where everyone is talking all the time, who will have time to listen?

Anyway.  This is, in fact, the third profile picture I've had in all my SL career.  The first one, I put up simply to avoid having that dreadful grey silhouette facing me whenever I looked.  It was OK, I thought, but when I tweaked my face to remove some bugs, I thought I'd better put the new face where people could see it (even though I'd spent quite a bit of effort and ingenuity making it as much like the old one as possible, apart from not having the bugs).  I thought the second one was OK, too, though it did prompt one of my friends to IM me and say "Hello, Ellen"....  However.  I have settled on a pair of eyes I like, and am slowly updating my outfits to use them, so I decided a new profile pic was indicated.  Hopefully, too, it looks a bit less butch.  Ellen, indeed.

I suppose, really, the profile pic ought to say something about me, but I'm blowed if I can think what, other than "I'm Glorf and this is what I look like".  So, there it is.  That is what I look like....

Eyeballs in the sky

I have decided, with some trepidation, to update my image a tiny bit - specifically, by getting some new eyes.

Now, I operated for quite a while wearing only freebies, and operated pretty darned well, in my own opinion at least.  It's only fairly recently that I took the plunge and bought a set of skins, instead of wearing a set of (very good, by the way) freebies that I found at Tuty's & Mr. S.  (They don't seem to do that set any more, which is a darned shame.  At one point, Tuty's was my default place for sending new people off to get decent free skins and a pretty nice freebie AO.  They even had free skins in a range of ethnicities, which has always been a sore point with me - LL please take note: when the Nordic blondes tell you your virtual world is too whitebread, it is time to listen.)

But anyway.  I have, mostly, been looking at SL through a set of "Eyes - Blue-grey" that I think I found at Hyles infohub when I was about a month old.  And, when I happened to be wandering around the Ashraya Project fashion sim, and I happened to see a display of eyes for sale, I thought, what the heck, and went for some.

New peepers in place, I asked Tali for an opinion on them.  One of Tali's many virtues is, when you ask her for her opinion on things like this, she will give it to you, honestly...

There are a number of problems with eyes in SL.  One of them is that they are, often, too small on your screen for you to notice details.  I've got some quite exotic and beautiful designs from some places (freebies, or from hunts, mostly), but when you've got them in and are looking at your avi from normal ranges, all you get is a vague impression of "something's odd about those eyes".  Details being too small to notice is not a problem restricted to eyes, of course.  It happens with jewelry quite a lot, too.  And this is why bling was invented, to draw one's attention to a fine-cut stone by creating a fugitive gleam of light.  Or, in most cases, to give the impression that the wearer's hand is the centre of a feeding frenzy of miniature comets.  Never mind.

Another problem is photo-realism.  You'd think, wouldn't you, that an actual photograph of an eyeball would look convincing, right?  The problem, though, is that the lighting conditions under which the photo is taken can differ a lot from those under which it's seen... and there seems an awful tendency, among some designers, to include spectacular and therefore overcomplicated reflections and silhouettes and whatnot in the design.  (The problem pre-dates SL by a generation or more; eyes were always a weak point in Gerry Anderson's puppet shows.... hmm, I have the remake of Captain Scarlet on DVD, maybe I could copy over the iris maps used for the CGI characters there?  No, maybe not - I don't want Destiny Angel's eyes, I'd be too worried about getting her bum as well.)

Anyway.  Latest sit-rep is, I found a pair which are OK in terms of detail and reflection, except they are a somewhat darker colour than the blue-grey I'm used to... Can I live with that?  Or will I have to engage in an unending quest for ocular perfection?  The eyes, after all, are (proverbially) the windows of the soul - do my soul's windows need a good cleaning?

More SL misandry... justified?

They do seem to be coming out of the woodwork at the moment - obnoxious males!  Since the "hello whores" guy a couple of days ago, I've run into two more who made him look almost charming by comparison (one earned an eject from Oxbridge, the other a full-on AR, and no I am not going into details about what they said and did!).  And my friend Lindal Kidd has done an interesting and insightful post here about the effect this has on the demographics of the grid....

Now, I will bend over backwards not to be a knee-jerk man-hater, despite my own preferences... but some of these guys are not making it easy for me!  And the question in my mind, of course, is why should this be the case?  After all, I have many male friends, both in RL and SL, and they are all perfectly nice people, and only one or two of them are idiots who persuade me to let myself be called "Glorf"....

I'm inclined to think, frankly, it's down to gender roles.... There are, in my opinion, roughly as many dumb-and-unpleasant women as there are men - believe me, I have known many people whose two X chromosomes didn't stop them being massive dicks!  But, dumb-and-unpleasant often goes with dumb-and-unimaginative, and that means dumb-and-unpleasant people tend less to think for themselves, and more to conform to existing stereotypes about gender behaviour.  And, well, those stereotypes tend to require men to be more pushy, more macho, more aggressive than women.  You do meet the dumb-and-unpleasant women, and they have their own dumb-and-unpleasant ways - they are the spoiled whiny princess types, the ones who say everything is "lame" and demand to be flattered and entertained.  They are toxic in their own special way, but they stand out less than the males.  You have to talk to them before they show you how awful they are.  The awful men, unfortunately, let you know right from the start....

Lindal's suggestion, that this state of affairs drives lots of nice men into female avis... is an interesting one, and I wouldn't be the one to say she was wrong!  (Should I be angry at those men for representing themselves as something they're not?  Well, no, I don't think so, because we all do that, to a greater or lesser extent - trust me, I don't look anything like my typist, and the way I look in SL does make a difference, because it influences the way other people act towards me, and that in turn feeds back and affects the way I act towards them.)

In the final analysis, I suppose, the toxic minority make life unpleasant for everyone, each in their own way.  Perhaps we should even be glad that the dumb-and-unpleasant males are up front about it!  But there's no denying they make SL hard for the smart-and-pleasant males... and, in a world where you can be who or what you want to be, is it right to blame them for turning into smart-and-pleasant females instead?

Loot and Faces

This is one of the best bits of booty Tali and I scored off the Fantasy Faire hunt - described as "Free Tunic - Violet" from De La Soul.  (The boots aren't included, they're a set from Elvenbreath that I happened to have.  And happen to like, too.)

We were moved to head off to the De La Soul main store, in fact, to see if they had a version in Tali's preferred colours (she is not into blues and violets, they don't really go with her fur).  We spent a while there, looking around, and the conversation got onto personal appearance - as it will tend to do, in a place full of avatar components of all kinds for sale - and onto faces.

Here, I recalled a post here by my friend CronoCloud Creeggan, about the way female avatars are (or, at least can be) presented in SL.... I am a long way from being pouty or chubby-cheeked enough for some tastes, clearly.  Now, there may well be things wrong with my face - in fact, it has been back to the shop a couple of times to panel-beat defects out of it - but most of how it looks is down to my deliberate choices... and that soft-and-dewy-eyed look was one I deliberately chose to avoid.  I went, instead, for a look that goes some way towards suggesting a decent bone structure, the sort of face that might grow old gracefully and look distinguished.  Much more Katharine Hepburn than Marilyn Monroe, that sort of thing.  Tali, too, has strong and definite facial features - partly out of necessity, due to the fur, and the need to approximate feline features, and partly, again, out of personal choice; hers is a face with a very marked character of its own.

Should we both be soft and pouty and dewy-eyed?  I'm not saying that that's wrong, exactly... but there is more than one way to look good, and SaPaDE is not the way I choose to go.  (Is that a word, now?  Sapade?  I shall try to make it one, I think!)

Mind you... when I logged in today, I found myself being pushed to join the Bimbo Cheerleaders' Sorority House.  So evidently some people, at least, don't think I look like Katharine Hepburn.

:: takes her pom-poms and retires ::

A Glorf by any Other Name

Revisiting the topic addressed in this post in the light of Rodvik Linden's very disappointing response on the subject.  (Bad Rodvik!  No plaudits-from-obscure-SL-blogger-nobody's-ever-heard-of!)

There has been a lot of heat already shed on the question of names, and I doubt I shall be able to shed any more light, but here goes.  It seems to me that the problem is reducible to a couple of bullet points:-

• New users want to be able to have a user name that looks like a real human name.
• Right now, they can't do that.

There has been much shouting about the (frankly dubious) merits of both the new Display Names and the old pick-a-last-name-from-the-list system, and really, one could address the central issue without either.  I'm sure nobody wants to get rid of Display Names (although, as I said last time, they really are a hopeless compromise that pleases nobody much), and as for the list system, it just takes time and effort from someone at Linden Lab who could probably be more usefully employed fixing the damn bugs already.

Rodvik's last pronouncements on the matter contained, to my mind, a germ of common sense, in that he suggested being able to use some special characters, like dashes and underscores, in a new user name.  Being able to be jack-bloggs instead of jackbloggs12345 would, at least, be a tiny step forward.  Presumably, some client-side validation is going to be needed to make sure people don't call themselves "--------" or something.  Or maybe not, what do I know?

The more-or-less obvious solution, it seems to me, would be to allow periods in the name - remember, when the Great Change In Naming occurred, all existing avatar names were converted to the unitary format, only with a period to indicate where the first name left off and the last name began.  I am "Glorf" to some and "Miss Bulmer" to others, but to the servers I am simply "glorf.bulmer".  A bit of software finagling allows that to appear as "Glorf Bulmer", on my nametag and where scripts call for two-part names.

I don't pretend to be privy to the internal workings of the SL software, but I don't see any reason why, in principle, if "glorf.bulmer" is a workable name, I shouldn't be allowed to sign up as "glorftwo.electricboogaloo" tomorrow.  (I mean, apart from obvious ones involving good taste.)  I'm sure I'm not the first person to think of this - in fact, I'm told the whole idea has been explicitly disallowed already, and why, I cannot for the life of me imagine.

But, then, I don't understand the reasoning behind the single-part names in the first place - the back-end changes must have been a chore to do, and I can't think of anybody on the user side of things who actually wanted this change.  It would make sense if, as with (say) Dungeons and Dragons Online, you had a login identifier you came in with, and then picked which character/identity you wanted to appear with inworld.  But SL doesn't work like this, and there are no signs that it ever will.

It is always a bad idea to impute motives to people you don't know, but I wonder if the whole Display Names thing isn't somebody's pet idea, and they are plugging it, and shooting down any suggestions of viable alternatives, in the hope that eventually the user base will get tired and give up and go along with it.  If so, bad idea.  As I pointed out last time, the reason why Display Names haven't taken the world by storm is not because SL users are reactionary and afraid of change; it's because Display Names are an inadequate compromise attempt to meet two different demands.  Ploughing on down the "get everyone to use Display Names" path, therefore, is a Bad Move.  The Lab has reversed itself and backed away from Bad Moves before now, and I hope they will have the wisdom to do so again.

Why the Unwonted Silence?

Not much in the way of posting, yesterday, because I was being interviewed by webspelunker Ghostraven - the results can be found on his blog here , if you're interested.  Webspelunker is one of those people who actively go out into SL and seek out new experiences, and so his blog is a source of much interest to more stay-at-home types like me - honestly, there are days when I never venture out of Caledon.  (To those who say, "But why would you want to venture out of Caledon?" .... umm, I'll get back to you on that one.)

Birth of a Legend

Was amused to see this item on New World Notes about Kingdom of Loathing... I don't play it myself, but it's where my name comes from, as (bad) luck would have it.

What passes for my mind, you see, went blank when I realised I had to make up a name for my Second Life avatar; as it happened, an idiot friend of mine was around at the time, and he suggested... the name of his KoL character.  So that is how I came to be called Glorf.  (My friend has a long and silly explanation of why his character is called "Glorf Pwlg", but I really haven't the strength to get into all that right now, and anyway it is extremely distasteful.)

We had been leafing through the recently published (at the time) reprints of the "Steel Claw" comic strip that day, and when I paged through the last names, I chose one in honour of the creator of the Claw, hack SF writer and editor Ken Bulmer.  And that's how I became the Brady Bunch - wait, I'm not the Brady Bunch.  Pity.  That name would have been almost sensible.

After all, I thought, it didn't really matter, I would just poke about this whole SL thing for a little while, see what it was like, and probably just let it drop when I got bored with it....

Well, that was March 2010, and here I am, still not bored yet.

I'm not sure if there is any moral to this story, except maybe "think about your name, you may be stuck with it for longer than you think", and also "I need to start hanging out with a better class of people".  (He doesn't read this, don't worry.)

Possibilities, Filters, and Identities

"Huh," says the readership-at-very-small, "didn't take you long to break the one-post-a-day pledge, did it?"

Mea culpa.  Yesterday turned out to be a busy, busy day, with lots going on at a personal level, that I don't propose to discuss any further here, because it is private, and anyway this is not That Sort Of Blog.

However, it led to some generalized musing, based on the idea of how people use the many possibilities of SL to present themselves inside it.  Such musings on personal identity have featured here before, I know; I am actively interested in the relationship between Glorf Bulmer as she appears inworld, and the real-world creature currently giving voice to her opinions in between ham sandwiches.

The interesting question is: when you can be pretty much anything inside SL, why and how do you choose what you are?

Some people, it seems, make sadly limited choices, and I honestly do think that represents a failure of imagination.  The epitome of this, I think, was a guy I saw once, who opined that the great thing about SL was that you could say whatever you liked without getting punched in the mouth.  (He was shouting this on voice in an infohub, thereby getting full marks for some sort of cliche trifecta.)  Now, this is a freedom which has been around online before SL - it was pretty well established when I first ventured online on JANET in '89 - and, well, it seems to me a very meagre sort of ambition, in a world where you can dream golden palaces into existence with a mere effort of will.

But, in a way, the shouty guy had a point.  You pick and choose so much of how you present yourself in SL, and you have a pretty complete freedom to do that picking and choosing, so much more than in RL.  You can check your gender, skin colour, ethnic heritage and even species at the door and pick new ones more to your liking on the inside.  The shouty guy chose to check a whole set of social constraints, so that he could behave in SL in a way he'd probably never do in RL.  And this is fine; I don't have to listen to him, people like him are why God gave us the "block" option.  (Also, of course, he's technically wrong; anyone who's explored SL's possibilities more thoroughly can, in fact, punch him so hard in the mouth that he flies off the Grid - although the resulting AR wouldn't be worth it.)

But... you choose what you bring in to SL, and what you filter out, and you can choose to filter out the bad stuff, too.  I don't mean lie about your criminal past and multiple convictions for mopery or whatever; I mean you can choose to exclude a lot of personal and emotional baggage which colours your expectations in RL.  I came into SL with a general idea of making a fresh start in a new world; my social relationships were a clean slate; my expectations shiny, untarnished and optimistic.  And you know what?  For the most part, they still are.  I have met my fair share, of course, of griefers, liars, trolls and general pains in the backside.... I have also established that they are a lot less common than they appear to be, and that the majority of SL residents are, in fact, decent people who will be delighted to be treated decently and will respond in kind.

And just being free of RL niggles helps so much.... My avatar gets to be in perfect health, all the time, for instance, and looks it.  SL-me doesn't need glasses, isn't dolefully counting the calories in those ham sandwiches, doesn't need to fret about RSI and her workstation's ergonomics.  She gets to be free, and is a freer spirit as a result.  Sometimes RL-me is very, very jealous of SL-me!

In SL, you have choices.  You can, like the shouty guy, choose some simple and obvious things, and run with them to their conclusions.  But, if you give more thought to the possibilities, you can choose things that actually make you a better person.  And this brings benefits in return - I have made real friends in SL, and fantastical machines; I have explored wonders and had adventures, and in general I've had a heck of a good time.  The shouty guy got to call people arseholes and get away with it.  Is he having more fun than I am?  Somehow, I kind of doubt it.

On the catwalk

It's London Fashion Week or something - or maybe it was last week, I forget.

Anyway, that spurred me to revisit an old project and make some progress on it:-

I know, it's just too sexy for words, isn't it?

Not quite finished yet - I want to script that flashlamp along the left arm so it actually lights up, and some particle bubbles for the air tanks wouldn't go amiss, and I think I need to tidy up the alpha layer around the feet a bit.  But I progress.  Oh yes.

(I tried it in an off-the-peg male shape, too - seemed to work OK, though I don't know how well it might fit the muscly man-mountain avis that are so common.  Oh, well, it'll all be copy-mod if I sell it, so that's not really a problem, is it?)

All very unmilitary

An idea or two is revolving inside what passes for my brain, and part of it involves making a bunch of quasi-military uniforms.

Now, I may have mentioned previously that clothing design is not really my thing... so, to make my life simpler, I have been off trawling inworld stores and Marketplace for some appropriate template images.

And, after some hours doing that, I have reached some conclusions:-

• I am going to have to do the damn things myself from scratch.
• It is one whole heck of a lot easier to find skimpy crop-tops than it is to find complete coverage jackets or tunics.  Either the military is under-represented in SL, or it is under-dressed.
• I will never understand product pricing in SL as long as I live.  There is no discernible link between price and quality... and, presumably, someone must be out there buying the expensive tat.  Who are these people, and how can I persuade them to visit my shop?

The Name Game Blame Game

The naming of avs is a difficult matter,
It isn't just one of your holiday games.
You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter
When I tell you an av must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES...

To wit, your User Name, Display Name, Full Name and possibly Legacy Name.  Wait, that's four.  I'm confused already, and so are a lot of other people.  And it may be about to get worse.  Let's recap....

Prior to the late-middle of  2010, avatar names were actually quite simple.  You signed up for SL, and you picked yourself a first name, which could be any sequence of ordinary letters, and you then chose from a list of allowable last names supplied by Linden Lab.  This was not popular with everybody, but it worked OK, it created a weird sense of community among people with the same last name (I have wandered over with a cheery "Hello cousin!" to the odd other Bulmer I have encountered, and some of them are very odd, let me tell you), and in general people got by with it.  So, all right, some people picked silly names like, for example, "Glorf" and were then saddled with them, but that wasn't really all that much of an issue....

... well, except for two or three classes of people who wanted some ability to change their names.  The first group consisted of people with a legitimate reason for wanting a permanent name change.  These might be business people who wanted to use their RL names in SL, or it might be people who, for example, had taken SL partners and wanted to change their surnames to reflect their SL family status.  (A third example, of people who just had rubbish names and wanted to upgrade, can safely be ignored; they should have known better than to call themselves "Glorf" in the first place.)

The second group consisted of roleplayers who wanted to be able to shift between multiple personas as whim (or RP need) took them.  After all, if you start off in a Roman RP sim and drift away a bit and get invited to take part in a Star Trek RP, it'd be pretty grim if you had to keep an inappropriate name like "Tiberius".... wait, bad example.  But my point stands.

Now, it may be apparent to you that these two classes of people actually want different things.  One of them wants a permanent name change, one time only (or at least one time for the foreseeable future only).  The second group wants a whole constellation of different setting-appropriate aliases that they can change between at will.  Can you see the difference, there?  Well, that makes you smarter than Linden Lab, then!

In the latter half of 2010, LL announced a completely new and different approach to names, and fur has been flying ever since.  The whole first-name-last-name thing would be gone; you would have a single user name that was just one single string of letters.  But, people said, surely people would soon run out of coherent and sensible things to call themselves, and would be forced to resort to things like "33434434" and suchlike?  (Genuine example, btw, I know the guy.)  That doesn't matter, said LL, because no one will ever see these names.  All they will ever see is the brand-spanking-new Display Name, which can be anything you like, can include all sorts of funky Unicode characters, and can be changed whenever you like!

Astute observers will have noticed that that's not the system we've got now; it was pointed out, with some force, to LL that a setup where anybody can change their name to anything is as close to a full-scale griefers' charter as one could possibly imagine.  And so, after some hemming and hawing, the current system was adopted, whereby:-

• The basic User Name is always visible,
• If you do bother with a Display Name, other people can choose whether or not they see it
• You can change your Display Name only once a week
• There are some protections against impersonation - especially in the case of the Linden last name, for pretty obvious reasons
• Because a whole bunch of existing scripts, and even the login screens of third party viewers, would get broken by the change, a setup was introduced whereby the word "Resident" was used as a placeholder for the last name in the case of a new, single-named avatar.  This is where the idea of "everyone now has the last name of Resident" comes from

Clear as mud?  Right.  But this is where the three different names come from.  I used to be called "Glorf Bulmer", but that is only my Legacy Name now, only it's sometimes also referred to as a Full Name.  My actual User Name is "glorf.bulmer".  I don't bother with a Display Name, normally, though I did once call myself "Brian Spartacus" just to make a point.

I sometimes wonder if the Lab could have come up with anything that so singularly failed to meet anyone's needs or expectations.  You want to change your User Name to reflect your in-world marriage?  You still can't.  You can change your Display Name, of course, but many people won't bother with it, and anyway it isn't the permanent change you were hoping for.  As for the roleplayer communities; well, I just hope you enjoy playing the same role for a minimum of a week at a time.  (Actually, you can change from your Display Name back to your User Name - well, OK, your Full Name - I think - any time you like, but you can't take on another Display Name for another week once you've done that.)

(Are you still mixed up about these Full Names?  So am I.  It might help to think about a newer, single-named avi; if their User Name is "affordablecustompcsdotcom" - again, not a made-up example - then their Full Name is "affordablecustompcsdotcom", but their Legacy Name is "affordablecustompcsdotcom Resident".  Clear as mud, I know.)

Ancillary problems have, of course, developed.  Gibberish User Names very quickly became the norm, as new users discovered the names they wanted were already taken, couldn't think of an acceptable alternative, and settled for adding on random strings of numbers and letters until they found something that worked.  The option to include Unicode characters in Display Names allowed many non-English users to have names in their own alphabets, a triumph! - except for English-speaking users who had no idea how to type in those new names.  (And if someone's Display Name is in Chinese ideograms, and their User Name is something like "ituweds7533dkfteq", one's conversational options are pretty much limited to "Hey, you over there with the face".)  The whole "Resident" marker became synonymous with "newbie" in people's minds, leading to discrimination and distrust, leading to resentment and further distrust.

And let us not even talk about the problems for scripters, or for merchants (LL made the boneheaded decision to use Display Names in transaction logs, the one place where you absolutely have to have a clear record of who you've been dealing with), or people with obscene or otherwise unacceptable Display Names and even User Names (like "affordablecustompcsdotcom" and his wife "mrsaffordablecustompcsdotcom", lovely couple that they were)....

Now, it would be fair to say that this state of affairs has attracted adverse comment.  Granted, pretty much everything LL does from breathing upwards attracts adverse comment, but in this case it was fairly well deserved.  A change request (SVC-7125 ) was officially made, and it has attracted thousands of votes and a comment trail a mile long.

And, now, Linden Lab is moving on this.  And I just hope they're moving in something like the right direction.

Granted, I am more confident about LL these days; under the direction of its new CEO, things seem brighter and happier than they were.  Rodvik Linden has not been afraid to listen to SL residents and introduce improvements (the new V3 viewer answers pretty much all the genuine criticisms levelled at Viewer 2, for instance) and even to reverse his own mistakes (the much-touted and thoroughly horrible "Basic Mode" was quietly dropped once its Bad Idea-ness was amply demonstrated).  So I don't think it's unreasonable to expect some effective change on this issue.

Except... the latest messages we've had on the topic indicate all sorts of odd things being considered, "user-community-granted titles" being among them.  And I am dreadfully worried that this might mean they are thinking of some new system of Byzantine and wonderful complexity - and that this might prove to be even more of a dog's breakfast than the current system.

So... all I can say is: please, Lindens, don't eff this one up again.

Questions of personal identity; or, Miss Bulmer wonders about her face

So, this is what I looked like when I logged in this morning:

Now, some people who know me will realise this isn't what I usually look like.  (In fact, it's an outfit selected from the goodies available on the Jaegerdraught Hunt, which is still running at the time of writing, and starts at this location: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Inverbrackie/96/117/64 ).

I've been musing on this topic, lately, because a friend of mine has been urging me to try out a new shape, even going so far as to make shapes for me to try - she's rather gifted in that regard.  Now, my first attempt at wearing one led to something of a disaster, SL being SL... the textures on my face obstinately refused to rez, leaving me with that ghastly blank-eyed death-mask one sees when such a failure occurs.  And when I tried to switch back to my normal appearance, a further entertaining glitch presented itself, whereby only I could see my clothing layers, thereby giving everybody else a right eyeful, let me tell you.  I wound up skulking in a suit of battle armour in a private location on the Mainland while my image sorted itself out.

Now, the whole sorry episode made me think for a bit about faces, and not unimportantly, why I was so darned unhappy about trying on a new shape in the first place.  And I suspect that some fellow SLers will nod wisely and say they understand, here, while others will blink in a bemused manner and whisper to themselves, "What on Earth is the silly woman wittering on about?"

It comes down to a question of self-image, I think; and different people think about their avatars in different ways, in this area.

When I first joined Second Life, I resolved to make myself a completely novel persona in this new world - indeed, I went so far as to make myself a male avatar at first.  I think that lasted about two weeks before I grew seriously uncomfortable with it, though, and switched, after some experimentation, to the tall skinny blonde familiar to people who hang out around Caledon Oxbridge.  And, apart from some minor tweaks to fix bugs in my face, that is pretty much the avatar I've stuck with ever since.

And the question which may spring to some minds at this point is why?  After all, this is a virtual world where one is absolutely  not constrained to play the hand that genetics dealt, when it comes to one's physical appearance.  Many SLers view their physique and their face as utterly plastic, variable from situation to situation; their self-image inworld is bound up, not with the way they look, but with the way they present their personalities in local chat or group chat, or by means of attachments and gestures.  To those people, my attachment to the mug you see on my profile picture must surely seem bizarre and irrational.

Now, you could advance the counter-argument that Second Life is a pretty bizarre and irrational thing to be doing anyway, but never mind that.  My feeling, though, is that my avatar shape is me, in a very definite and fundamental way; it's not just part of the way I project my personality inworld, it is a cornerstone of Who That Bulmer Woman Is.  Perhaps I am old-fashioned in my outlook (hang on, I hang out in crypto-Victorian steampunk-themed sims, of course I am old-fashioned in my outlook), but I like to think my friends could recognize me at a glance by my looks and my build, not by the nametag over my head or the tenor of my discourse.  Plasticity is not for me.  I may adopt the Jaegermonster form you see above, or appear as a crab, a Selenite, or a small and angry-looking pink dragon from time to time, but I return, with a degree of inevitability, to my usual shape, the tall skinny blonde with a slightly peculiar mouth.

Does it make a difference, I wonder, that I made this shape myself?  Certainly, I know other people inworld who have hand-crafted and fine-tuned their personal appearance, often to interesting aesthetic effect.  (And they're not all good-looking, or even unconventionally good-looking; one guy I often quote as a fine example of avatar-crafting appears as an elderly man of markedly sinister aspect.)  If I'd just bought myself an off-the-peg avatar shape (leaving aside the plethora of female shapes in SL that appear to have been made by someone who's never seen a real woman at a distance of less than five hundred yards), would I still feel the same way about plasticity?  If I had any hope that anyone was reading this blog at this early stage, I would ask the readership at large how they felt about this issue.  Does the readership-at-very-small have an opinion to offer?