…I’ve delegated some authority.

Meet Selenalore Michigan, my SL spouse and my RL girlfriend.  Since she and I share the same address in RL space and in SL space, I figure sharing the same address in blog-space isn’t too farfetched, eh?

Selena has been a top hostess in Second Life for the past year or more, and she’s seen it all with regard to club drama, group drama, and drama of all natures.  Her expertise will lend some additional color to this blog.

Since the Evans Family Compound is moving to Lexxotica, I had to take a new image for the top of the blog…and I built a road out front of the Compound with this shot in mind. Naturally, I had to use the latest WindLight viewer to get the sky just so…and I adjusted the sun position and cloud cover of one of the presets to make it look right. You can see the main house in the background there, with the flagpole in front flying its Colorado and New York state flags proudly; unfortunately, the big Yagi amateur radio antenna (tuned for 40 meters) atop the house got cropped out of the image…

Oh, and the redhead in the front passenger seat is Alexzandria Aeon, my newfound daughter (as Danielle told me) and the CEO and Supreme Dictator For Life of LexxCore, so don’t nobody be gettin’ no funny ideas.

Man, some of those links over on the blogroll were old and stinky.   I’ve cleared off a number of people who seem to have abandoned their blogs–including at least two that were gone entirely–and fixed the links for a couple that have changed around.  If you were on my ‘roll but aren’t anymore and you think I screwed up, do please let me know.

In addition, somehow I missed the whole folding of Second Life Insider into the all-encompassing Massively site, so I’ve switched links appropriately. Hmm!  Massively even has a category about the game Samaria and I have been playing recently on the side…Hellgate: London.  It’s good to be able to go kick some demonic ass after a hard evening of managing a club.   Perhaps I’ll write some more about that later, as we’ve been having a hell of a good time in that game (no pun intended).

I’m going to respond to the invited “self-tagging” of Tateru here, and give you eight pieces of information about the human behind this avatar. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.

1. At one point, I had an extra tooth growing between my two front teeth. It’s called a “supernumerary tooth.” It was extracted when I was quite young, so you’d never know from looking at me today that it was ever there.
2. I was a precocious youngster. I was always taking math classes a grade ahead of me in elementary school…until sixth grade, when I was spending afternoons at a local high school learning algebra, and also taking an electronics course in which I was soldering together various projects…even etching and drilling my own circuit boards. One of my projects even won my elementary school’s science fair.
3. This was kind of mirrored in high school, where, during my senior year, I was in another program where I worked at a local company in the afternoon, doing programming in Pascal on an HP minicomputer.
4. The first computer I ever owned was a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A, for which I had many of the accessories, including the Peripheral Expansion box, disk drive, expanded memory, and Extended BASIC. I wrote a number of game programs on that machine, though, looking back, I wish I’d learned a little more about programming the thing in assembly language, because it had a rather unique architecture.
5. My ex-wife and I both loved the TV series Babylon 5. In fact, our wedding bands had, inscribed on their inner surfaces, a quote from Ambassador Delenn: “Faith manages.” Now, I finally have the entire series on DVD.
6. I have some musical talent; I can play keyboard a little bit, and I also know how to use a MIDI sequencer. One of my hobbies used to be transcribing sheet music for popular songs into MIDI files and filling out their arrangements to sound decent. The first song I ever sequenced like that was “Layla,” by Derek and the Dominos. The one I think I did the best job on was “Another Day In Paradise,” by Phil Collins.
7. I was a frequent chatter for a while on the BIX network’s conferencing system, but wound up being forced away from it when I fell in with “the wrong crowd,” as it were. I think that whole experience kind of soured me on live chat-type technologies, including instant messaging, and only recently have I begun to overcome that. Even now, I rarely turn on an IM program, except to communicate with people I know. And that’s despite the fact that I worked for an IM company at one point…
8. I am terribly bad at flirting (so I never do it, in practice), and I’m also terribly bad at recognizing that I’m being flirted with. Even in the case of the woman I later married, it took a month, and the input of a friend, for me to realize that she had been flirting with me…and an additional several weeks, plus the input of a couple of friends, to decide to do anything about it. I cut it so close that, if I had waited any longer, she would have moved cross-country and I’d never have gotten together with her at all.

And there you have it. As for who I can tag with this…well, it’s been awhile since Danielle has written anything…don’t hate me for this, Danielle!

I’ll warn you right now:  this is probably going to turn into one of those “damn, I haven’t posted anything in awhile” kind of posts.  Well, as Johnny Lennon said, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans,” and, without getting into too much detail for an SL blog, I’ve gotten that, in spades, doubled and redoubled.

The Gin Rummy has adapted to the new anti-gambling policies in SL fairly well…we had to ditch our old faithful Sploder, but quick-thinking manager Samaria Martynov located a replacement, the “Party Popper,” which is, as far as I can tell, 100% legal under the new rules.  It bases its payouts, not on random chance, but on the proportions of votes players receive during a “voting phase” following the closure of entries after a time limit.  (The voting phase itself is time-limited; only players can vote, and a player must vote to share in the pot.)  In effect, it’s like our contest board in miniature, and it definitely plays as fast as the Sploder did…and the fact that its outcome is not based on random chance sidesteps the anti-gambling policy.  We won’t be able to get around the restricted-content requirement, if and when it becomes a full-fledged policy requirement, quite so easily…though I do wonder what, exactly, this requirement is for.  LL claims it’s to “restrict access to content that is inappropriate to minors,” but, by definition, minors aren’t even supposed to be on the Main Grid!  (Yes, we all know that there are some that are…that doesn’t change the “LL speaking with forked tongue” aspect of this policy.)  The only way this would make any sense is if LL decides to fold the Teen Grid into the Main Grid, which nobody even claims is in the offing…or if, perhaps, LL is going to embark on some sort of major marketing push into Saudi Arabia and Iran.  Hey, it could happen…

Perhaps related to that last quip I just made is the advent of the Al-Andalus Caliphate sims, as reported in Second Life Insider.  This is supposed to be a set of sims run as a private government (the way the Confederation of Democratic Sims runs theirs, for instance), but based on Muslim culture and Shari’a law.  As someone who has been keeping an eye on the actions of Muslims around the world ever since September 11, 2001, this raised a few warning bells in my subconscious.  It’s been well documented how Muslim enclaves in Real Life, both in Europe and the U.S., have successfully lobbied for more and more special treatment, or intimidated others into giving them special treatment.  (Recent case: Oak Lawn, IL school districts are considering banning Christmas celebrations because they offend Muslims…right after having removed all pork from their cafeteria menus.)  Will the same thing happen in SL?  They say not; they claim to be basing the community on 13th-century Moorish Alhambra, one of the high points of Muslim civilization, not the more modern, fundamentalist views (Wahabbism and similar) that are more prevalent today.  Yet I am mindful of the Muslim doctrines of taqiyya and kitman, which, briefly stated, deem it acceptable, even praiseworthy, for a Muslim to lie to an “infidel,” if doing so helps advance the cause of Islam.  Are the organizers of this community telling us the whole truth?  And, even if they are, isn’t a community such as they propose kind of an expression of these doctrines in its own right, by putting a “friendly face” on Islam that does not correspond to reality in this day and age?  I’m not ready to condemn the effort out of hand…but it bears watching carefully.  Very carefully.  And at least one communication I’ve received since expressing sentiments similar to these in comments over on SLI gives me the distinct impression that I’m not alone in believing this way…

Not all is doom and gloom though.  The establishment of the Second Life Grid project and the introduction–finally!–of Havok 4 physics, at least on the Beta Grid, give one hope for the future of SL as a platform.  (And it’s rumored that HTML-on-a-prim may not be long in following…good Lord ‘n’ butter, am I dreaming?)  And voice, while it has had some effect on SL, doesn’t seem to have been nearly the disruptive force it might have been.  (I’ve used it, at least the voice IM/conference mode, a number of times.  It works, but it seems to be neither better nor worse than Skype for those purposes.)  Of course, the closure of Ginko Bank has affected the advice I just gave out in my previous posting about managing cashflow; boy, does that make me look silly.   Fortunately, I had only a few hundred Lindens affected by the closure, though I’m still looking around for a good replacement for cashflow management…perhaps Apez is it; I’ll have to look more closely.

Hopefully, it won’t be another two months before the next entry on these pages.  It’s certainly time to shift back into gear, put the pedal down, and get back on the road…

Oh, I’m drivin’ my life away, lookin’ for a better way… – Eddie Rabbitt

Another couple of new entries have made it onto the Elite Evans Avenue Exit Blogroll that you should know about.

First up is Super Calamari, better known as Cala, who is a transgendered person in both RL and SL.  As she’ll tell you, SL is a big outlet for a lot of people in RL who are “closeted” TG individuals, as they can use the virtual world to see themselves as their “true” gender, rather than the one they were born with.  I first encountered her words when she rightly took me to task (in this post) for a rather flippant comment I made about voice in SL in this post, which then inspired this post.  Since then, I’ve encountered at least one other TG person in SL (in fact, she worked for us for awhile), leading me to believe that it may be a more common thing than people think.  (And of course, some of the “girls” in SL are just guys presenting themselves that way on a lark; hence the title of Frogg Marlowe’s album, Ain’t No Women.  Then there’s the phenomenon of avatars that start out as one gender in SL but switch to another…but I’m getting away from myself, here.)  Cala and I encountered each other at one of Tateru’s office-hour sessions at Mars Japanese Gardens, thus fulfilling that admittedly-eccentric requirement for a blogroll entry; she has thus been duly added, with the tagline, “One Good Woman.”  Because, well, she is.

The second addition is someone I’ve known for awhile…in fact, she’s been a Gin Rummy employee for months.  She’s been a dancer for us for all that time; however, since the club is now going ladies-only (and hence only employing male dancers), we’ll be retraining her as a host.  She’s one of our most loyal and most personable employees, and she’s a great asset to the organization.  So, when I found out she has a blog…well, fast-track that addition! Welcome, Bells Semyorka, to the ranks of the Extremely Elite Evans Avenue Exit Blogroll.  Her tagline describes her perfectly: “Hot, Sexy, and Loyal.”

Well, now that that’s all over with, I thought I’d share a few little “behind the scenes” tidbits with you fine folks out there in Blog-land. Consider this kind of the “insider’s tell-all book” of the Evans for Governor campaign. Read on for more…

How it got started: Vint Falken was, I think, the primary instigator here. I found two copies of the original “Concerned Residents Letter” (shown here) in my inventory, one from her, one from Dolmere. At that point, I figured, someone was trying to send me a message…so I declared my candidacy. I borrowed a tagline from the campaign of Tirebiter for Political Solutions Committee, Sector R, as chronicled in the Firesign Theatre’s Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers.

The Position Paper: This was the backbone of my early “campaign strategy.” Having had experience in the past with political campaigns–and considerable experience dealing with SL–I was able to craft a statement that sounded glowing and was comprehensive enough to establish my bona fides as a “real” candidate. It was also aped by at least one other candidate, so I must have done something right.

The SLGOP: With other “party” names in play like the Grid Democracy Party, the Punched Cards as Law Party, and so forth, I knew I needed a party organization of my own. As an RL conservative, I wanted to pick a name that reflected my particular viewpoints…and perhaps to show people reading this that, contrary to “liberal” opinions, not all “conservatives” are religious-right authoritarian bastards. Hence the “Second Life Grand Old Party,” inspired by the nickname for the Republican Party (and maybe also a bit by Frank and Brian Herbert’s Man of Two Worlds, where it was a political party on the skids). For a mascot, instead of the GOP elephant, I picked a T-Rex…and soon was able to put together the official announcement.

Campaign Personnel: I knew I wanted Danielle on my side, so, as soon as I’d persuaded her to accept the Campaign Manager post, I rolled out the press release. Danielle was, of course, groaning throughout the rest of the campaign…when she wasn’t laughing hysterically at posts like this one, for instance. Fiona was also a natural to add to the team; she’s really cute and bubbly, and proved to be an asset in more ways than one.

Campaign Posters: My first poster was relatively crude, but the second one was a big improvement. The third one was one of my favorites; Fiona did a great job with that pose, even if it was hard for her to stop giggling long enough to take the picture. The fourth one was more “high concept,” but fell kind of flat…and I rightly got called on a couple of the images I “borrowed” from a fellow candidate. Then there was my definite favorite of the posters, Number Five…which featured the red-hot Danielle, of course, but which also sparked controversy when Tyffany Flintoff accused me of stealing her idea. I still maintain it was an independent creation. Of course, what’s a political campaign without a little controversy?

All posters were created in The GIMP.

Radio Spots: I wanted to do something unique that other candidates wouldn’t necessarily be doing, and my experience with audio production and DJ’ing came in handy here. The two 30-or-so-second spots were recorded, processed, and mixed with Audacity, with bits of background music added for the convincing touch. The first one echoed the general theme of the campaign as a whole, while the second one mirrored the theme of the third (“Fiona”) campaign poster.

I actually played these spots during my DJ sets at the Gin Rummy, too. Usually, they would elicit another groan from Danielle.

Campaign Events: Danielle slipped in a ringer on me with the “meet and greet” event at the Gin Rummy, but I just rolled with it and took the opportunity to recruit a couple of Party members. And Forsythe did his part by saying encouraging things about me during his live set.

The club described in this campaign stop, Desire Gentlemen’s Club, really did close down, and, last I saw it, was just as it’s described here. However, the reason it closed had more to do with its owner, Bane Darrow, getting burned out on the whole thing…but it made a useful backdrop to emphasize the “broadly offensive” issue. Danielle DJ’d and danced there, and several of the dancers that were there have since become friends of ours…and one, Fantasia Tripsa, now works for us as our Host Manager.

Reactions: As much as I enjoyed producing all this material, I enjoyed seeing how others reacted to it. Here’s some of the reactions I got from fellow bloggers in the SLelections:

Wrath Paine: “Who is this up and comer in the political arena? Let alone, the blogosphere? Look at the sharp and polished made-for-politics suit and tie, and that news anchorman perfectly coiffed hairstyle – oh, we’re not dealing with an amateur here folks, not by a long shot. This is politics as smooth as it gets. Why, if incumbent Gov. Phil Linden had an alt running in this election, he’d want it to be in the form of Erbo Evans.”

Vint Falken: “Looking at him in a business suit, I’m so considering letting him have my vote.”

Ordinal Malaprop (in comments): “You know, you cannot hope to win against Science.”

Tyffany Flintoff: “What can I say? He seems like such a nice young man. And SO earnest! So earnest in fact that he lets us all know at the end of each missive that his campaign is all satire and a work of fiction. This leaves me confused of course as I take that as meaning all of his policies and platform are fictional as well. No matter, just look at his picture, he brings that much needed dose of good old plain boring reality to the proceedings in here. Residents of Second Life; if you trust men in grey suits please vote for Erbo.”

Zoe Connolly (in comments): “My dear Mr. Evans, I can admire anyone who can reference ST: TOS episodes into their arguements.”

Wrath Paine: “First, a campaign manager (of which the staff at The Inside Scoop® fully approves) is named, and now this? The Second Life Grand Old Party (SGLOP) [sic] is born! Dude, they have a logo and everything! … Oh yes, the campaign trail is certainly heating up over at the Evans camp and we’re pretty sure it won’t stop until somebody loses an eye.”

Triste Bertrand (in comments): “Don’t make me start the Second Life® Theocratic Party, y’all.”

Vint Falken: “What Myg is to Wei shall Ferguson be to Erbo: Erbo Evans appointed Danielle Ferguson as campaign managar. We at the Grid Democracy’s campaign office hope that she knows what she’s doing by accepting this. Remember lady: why did you un-partner in the first place?”

Samantha Poindexter (in comments): “…I would like to extend Mr. Evans my best wishes, and agree that Mint Oreo is indeed a fine indulgence.”

Dolmere Talamasca: “I’m going to go ahead and respond to Erbo’s position paper here but I think it may be a wee bit of a time waster for us both. You see… Erbo knows I have those pictures – the ones where he’s enjoying his REAL position papers, you savvi? I’m creating my Flikrrr account now just in case he sends his goons over to get them back. Livestock should not be subjected to such embarrasing situations, Erbo!”

Wrath Paine: “What can we say about this candidate folks, that he hasn’t already said himself. We now know who the big money maker is this campaign season, as the campaign contributions must be coming in from all directions (except left – Ed.) for Mr Evans – thee very first radio spot we’ve heard getting airplay, not too mention a new billboard for every rebuttal his press team releases. We have to ask ourselves, can anyone working this hard for the job… have anything left once the term begins? And will that hair gel hold up under pressure? We’re staying tuned, you should too.”

Vint Falken: “The Grid Democracy Party here wishes to make the following statement: when in office we shall take a very thorough look at all AR’s filed against Danielle Ferguson, her staff and and Erbo Evans conserning orbiting residents and we shall react appropriate.”

Wrath Paine: “I have to admit, I was not familiar with Erbo Evans before now, but his work has been so realistic in its parody I wouldn’t be surprised if actual US Presidential candidates didn’t start copying his style.”

Tyffany Flintoff: “After reviewing the tape of the 67 minute answer he provided to our opening question of “How are you today Mr Evans?”, we decided to curtail the interview. It was a boring answer and we misplaced our notes because we couldn’t take our eyes off his campaign manager Miss Ferguson. Boy, she sure keeps him on a short leash. Maybe too short, the collar he was wearing under his suit (which read “Danielle’s Bitch”) was clearly biting into his neck as he knelt on the floor in front of her.”

The Outcome: Of course, I had the opportunity to give my reaction to the “election results” some advance thought…and I spent a good deal of time both crafting a worthwhile “concession speech” and making up that “GNN screencap” of myself, complete with “crawler” at the bottom. A fitting end to a very wild ride indeed.

So, was all this worthwhile? I think so; I got a good traffic boost out of the whole affair, got to encounter some fine bloggers I hadn’t previously known about (and hope to meet more of in person at the next SL Bloggers’ gathering, thus fulfilling the requirements to put them on the Evans Avenue Exit blogroll), met the creative challenge, laughed, cried, and generally had a good time. And that’s all I ever really wanted out of the whole thing.

But constant vigilance is still indicated…keep an eye out on the politics surrounding the Grid. Perhaps in future I’ll have a more active role in that as well. Maybe with a podcast…just gotta find some good theme music. Anyone got a copy of the Pretenders’ “My City Was Gone”?

OK, I’ve succumbed to peer pressure; I’ve now got one of those Twitter account thingys.  Of course, half the people on my blogroll have already gone that route…I know, because I’ve managed to load up my “Friends” there to 15 people just by locating a few key people (Torley, Tateru, Triste) and raiding their Friends Lists…and doing the same recursively.

Henceforth you may find updates from Twitter on the sidebar here, under “From The Driver’s Seat.”  I also found a Firefox add-on for Twitter, so it should be easy to add updates.

/me nudges Danielle to join as well…

Aside from being “information straight from the firehose” about SL and a variety of unrelated topics, Tateru’s office hours have afforded me the opportunity to encounter a number of other folks with blogs in-world. I’ve already mentioned Hamlet Au and his New World Notes, but I have a couple more to give a shout-out to now.

First up is Patchouli Woollahra, most often seen as either a blue cat or someone who looks elfin to my eyes. She’s another Aussie, and her involvement in SL runs the gamut from mentorin to building and scripting to instruction to just having fun. Her tagline shall, hence, be “The Fun-Loving Kitten.” (I know a lot of fun-loving kittens these days…including Danielle herself. She has different ideas about “fun,” though. )

Second is moo Money, one of the other bloggers on Second Life Insider, who is noted for her involvement in machinima, as Community Manager of Alt-Zoom Studios. (That’s a fascinating field…if I weren’t so busy with other stuff, I might look into that, too.) This led to an obvious choice of tagline for her, which was, of course, inspired by Gloria Swanson’s famous line from the end of Sunset Boulevard. I knew that Film Studies course I took in college would come in handy someday! She’s also one of the few adults who has access to the Teen Grid, after having passed LL’s background check (only slightly less rigorous than “Yankee White“), and she gave us the “inside scoop” on what it’s like over there. Without getting into details, let’s just say it brought the Star Trek Original Series episode “Miri” to mind. Or perhaps the “Wacky Molestation Adventure” episode of South Park…

And thus does the mighty Evans Avenue Exit blogroll become even more complete.

The other night, as I was kicking back on the lawn at Mars Japanese Gardens, at the feet of the incomparable Tateru Nino (who, incidentally, is being incredibly generous with her time in holding “office hours”), who should show up but Hamlet Au, her sometime boss/supervising editor and a top SL blogger in his own right.  By my admittedly-somewhat-eccentric rules (documented here, incidentally), I can now add his blog, New World Notes, to the Evans Avenue Exit blogroll.

There is little I could say about Hamlet–indeed, little that I would feel myself even qualified to say–that hasn’t already been said about him, and can’t easily be found out through NWN itself.  But it’s not stretching the truth to say that his writings were one of the things that helped draw me into SL.  So were Tateru’s, for that matter.  However, I believe that it was NWN that originally pointed me to Dwell On It.  The sequence, as I recall, led me from the SL website itself, to NWN, to Dwell On It, and thence to blogs such as MeraTalk and An Engine Fit For My Proceeding.  (And I suppose, from there, to Newegg.com for hardware and OS upgrades. )

Yes, I know that NWN is a semi-group blog these days, with contributions from other people, such as Tateru.  But I tend to file those blogs under the name of the person that seems to be their “primary owner,” which, in this case, is Hamlet.  (Similarly, I generally file Boing Boing under “Cory Doctorow” and Eternity Road under “Francis W. Porretto.”  Only in cases where a blog has no primary owner, or more than one, will I simply omit the author name, as is the case with Discarded Lies, and, for that matter, the Grand Unified Linden Blog.)