(un)Wise Adventures in Virtual Worlds

Philips Design laucnhes Innovation Quest in SL

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 17:33:11 GMT

Philips Design will re-launch its presence in SL today, starting with an Ideation Quest with the residents. The Ideation Quest is an "innovative and playful way to engage people in the creation of ideas and concepts, and a logical continuation of Philips Design’s ongoing exploration into virtual worlds as a platform for co-creation and innovation".

"In this version of Ideation Quest, people will explore the topic of sustainable living in the future. They will follow a route of five playful and creative steps, inspired by the design concept Off the Grid: Sustainable Habitat 2020. This concept looks at possible solutions for energy and housing issues predicted in the year 2020. Off the Grid is part of the Philips Design Probe program and is a continuation of the SKIN Probe which was listed as one of "the best inventions of 2007" by TIME magazine".

"The Quest will begin at the new Philips Design Co-creation island in SL on Monday June 16th at SLT 12 PM (CEST 21:00) and will continue for 4 weeks (Philips Design). The Ideation Quest is a collaboration between the University of Innsbruck, Avaty and Philips Design."

See also the livejournal of Philips Design.

Philips Design relaunches its island in SL, starts with Innovation Quest

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 17:10:58 GMT

I was rather silent lately, not because I lost an interest in SL (I didn't), but mostly because I would rather write here about something 'fresh', that is, something new and original happening with me (and not just merely rebroadcast somebody else's stories.

Looks like there is a good reason to re-start writing again :) Philips Design, which start working in SL last year, has also announced a fresh re-launch of their presence, this time on their own island in SL (Philips Design).

There are great plans, to my knowledge - to continue to work with the residents, to show various visionary projects (most from RL so far, but hey, the time will come). For starter, Philips Design decided to launch an IQ, stands for Ideation Quest.

That's how the endeavor is presented at the official livejournal of the company:

We will start with the ‘Ideation Quest’ in Second Life. This is, we believe, is an innovative and playful way to engage people in the creation of ideas and concepts. We see at as the logical continuation of Philips Design’s ongoing exploration into virtual worlds as a platform for co-creation and innovation.

In this Ideation Quest, Philips Design invites people to participate exploring the topic of sustainable living in the future. Participants at the Philips Island will follow a route of five playful and creative steps, inspired by the design concept - Off the Grid: Sustainable Habitat 2020. This concept looks at possible solutions for energy and housing issues predicted in the year 2020. Off the Grid is part of the Philips Design Probe program and is a continuation of the SKIN Probe which was listed as "best inventions of 2007" by TIME magazine.

The Quest will begin at the new Philips Design Co-creation island in SL on Monday June 16th at SLT 12 PM (CEST 21:00) and will continue for 4 weeks (Philips Design). The Ideation Quest is a collaboration between the University of Innsbruck, Avaty and Philips Design.

Sounds quite exciting, and I am eager to see what will be created by people (and how everything will evolve with such initiatives to use playfulness of virtual worlds (the topic I explored last year).

I am sure more pictures will follow :)

Playful Edward

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 21:44:25 GMT

As expected, this was a start presentation; Castronova is smart, is witty, and is refreshing, even if you know the main points of his talk by heart. It was a pleasure to listen to him, and to the people who were listening to him and asking 'right' questions.

The announcement presented it as "the provocative thesis that a continual migration is now happening between physical reality and the alternative realities offered by open virtual worlds and massive online games, and that the two modes of existence will henceforth co-adapt, competing for the attention, time, and money of users".

But more specifically, he was talking about fun, and how important to consider fun in decision making, and how - and why - the governments and firms should do it, and how they don't do it, and how badly it can all end up because of that. Or, rather, he was saying that he still hopes that the governments (as well as other bodies) will eventually learn to take into account the 'fun factor' (i.e., they will learn how to play). Ok, let's hope.

On wonderlands

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 19:38:03 GMT

Nicole Yankelovich, from Sun Microsystems, was presenting yesterday their Project Wonderland - a "3D Toolkit for Building Virtual Worlds". In reality, it was less about a toolkit, but more about Sun's own 3D Intranet (MPK20) and its new functionalities. And in fact, there was not so much new in this talk, I have a feeling that I've see all this stuff before. I am sure they added lot of geeky things, like directional sound, 'innovative telephony' and what not. But, as Shania Twain sings, 'that doesn't impresses me much'.

The only really coll thing (besides the fact that Sun does endorse these experiments) is its name, Wonderland. However, this very name points to source of my mild disappointment: while referring to this magical, experiential and deeply transformative space, they 'just' extend the existing practices into virtual worlds, merely replicating the 'reality' in 'virtually', without much efforts to sense what are the new dimensions and opportunities these wonderlands reveal (or can reveal).

PS: Ok, not fully true - I did notice their new musical browser; may be it is also old, but I don't remember seeing it before. Below are a few pictures that give some impression on how it looks/works:

Social Nets

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 19:21:57 GMT

Oh, I know now what they mean when talking about 'social networks'...

On real gems in virtual spaces

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 21:04:58 GMT

But what was the real treasure is to meet Soph (sophrosyne_sl) at this conference! During my drop-out from Second Life their sim Extropia (or should I write sin?) was one of the very few places I tried to visit from time-time. They are amazing, and I plant to write more about this community.

Soph was sweet enough to offer a Grand Tour through the place (accompanied from time to time by Vidal (vidaltripsa) and dandellion).

The space 'space' they created is really fantastic, I will surely will come back to play 'Yuri Gagarin'; speaking of who, I need to remember to gather some pictures of Baikonour for the Soph's party at April 12.

And few other fantastic views:

Finally, we tried to do underwater racing; truly entertaining, I even managed to take one turn without crushing into the walls!

Thank you, Soph! It was a real (sic!) pleasure!

Gazing at the gazers

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 20:44:45 GMT

The second presentation was by Nick Yee (mostly known as Deadalus man) who recently started studying social interactions of avatars; I missed most of it, unfortunately, and returned closer to the closure. But it was all his too familiar talk about how avatars 'gaze' at each other, and how much can we learn from studying it.

I was always quite skeptical this twist; of course, behavior of avatars does reflect behavior of the person driving them, but... first, the 'behavioral reactions' of the former are medicated by so many factors outside the scope of science, but most importantly, I am less interested to see how these avatars behave similarly to the people behind; in is much more interesting to see what are the differences created by the medium, and how, and what these differences can tell us about the 'drivers'.

The only real news was that Nick has apparently moved to PARC and is now affiliated with Xerox' PlayOn group (see their blog); before he was all Stanford man (Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab).

PS: The picture has not much in common with Nick Yee and his virtual research; it portrays two other virtual researchers I met last year in Vancouver - Sarah "Intellagirl" Robbins and Mark "Typewriter" Bell; it was nice to hook up with these two 'For Dummies' .

Some other 'gazes':

Second Life of Second Life - re-starting with second Life 2.0

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 19:50:41 GMT

I nearly abandoned SL, and definitely this blog was not a 'very' lively one since last October. Speaking about living, and life, it's interesting that the last postings were from the previous Life 2.0 conference in SL. And it was the next Life 2.0 that my reunion with SL so serendipitously coincided with.

A lot of things changed there (here?) in the virtual world, and everything stayed the same; surely, the problems with lags and rez-ing are those 'staying' with us, as the above pictures vividly demonstrates.

My first visited lecture was (symbolically) about the 'Future of Immersion', and given by Mitch Kapor, chairman of Linden Research (aka MitchK Linden inworld).

Semi-~~naked~~-rezzed Mike talking...

... to the audience of more than 100 people, quite impressive, in fact.

I was very pleased, and disappointed at the same time, to see all the same old buddies there; disappointed because it seems that the world is still a very tiny village where everyone knows everybody.

Below is how the Mike's talk was announced:

"Deeper, more satisfying immersion hangs fire on the emergence of a new generation of interfaces, which harness gesture both to project identity and assist communication, and to enable simpler, more vivid means of interacting with objects and people. Continuing the thread begun at Davos and Metaverse U., at Stanford, Mr. Kapor will describe and chart the implications of one such device, nearing introduction."

I was somehow disappointed with talk too, in fact. It was all about 3D cameras, and photo-realistic avatars, and more 'intuitive' interfaces, the usual technocratic bla-bla-bla. I don't think that the 'future of immersion' is about that.

OnRezzing

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 05:20:50 GMT

Trying new SL viewer, from OnRez. Perhaps, nothing stunningly new, but the movement and navigation seem to be quicker and smoother. I also like few interface improvement, and button placement make more sense compared to the default one from LL.

As a bundle record, just came back from a week-long trip to Canada, where I attended a conference by the Association of Internet Researchers this years called Let's Play, including a pre-conference workshop entirely on Second Life. The workshop, and many other presentations and conversations, including with Pathfinder Linden who was also one of the keynote speakers, triggered lots of thoughts and ideas, which I do hope to put in writing here, well, one day.

What is Smell + ?

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 17:15:48 GMT

To learn the answer in the subject, please come to the Philips Design's site - guess where? - in Second Life, the least smelly place on Earth!

James Auger from RCA will be presenting his ideas about smell, design and life (the presentation is modestly titled 'The sense of smell in the 21st century')

The very first round is today, October 3rd, 11 am -1 pm SL time (an hour from now). The talk will be repeated this Friday(5th October 3.00 AM - 5.00 AM SL time)

Kourosh Dini Live in SL

Sat, 22 Sep 2007 14:44:13 GMT

Somehow in between the lectures at Life 2.0 I stopped by at the Red Rock performance center [will try to get SLurl later] where Kourosh Eusebio was giving live performance. It was a very, very good one! He played few pieces, some pure piano, and some others with a mix of electronic sound, quite diverse, but at the same time very tranquil and soothing.

He has a blog (Mind, Music, and Technology) where you can also listen to few pieces and buy (download?) his CD and MP3s. Apparently, he is performing in SL relatively regularly, I am planning to enlist myself into his funs.

Virtual Worlds Connect

Sat, 22 Sep 2007 08:30:02 GMT

Welcome, centrasian_wise! You are member #59 of Virtual Worlds Connect.

Thank you, sophrosyne_sl! Looks like an interesting community brewing, and I feel strangely close to the founding fathers, mothers & 'other creatures' ^_^

Fri, 21 Sep 2007 21:47:10 GMT

As I mentioned already, during last few days I was attending multiple lectures and events at the Life 2.0 conference. Never being a very disciplined blogger [could very well be an oxymoron], and also concurrently fightings with a few RL assignments, I didn't manage to write about my impressions and experiences as they go; too bad, and lessons learned (or so I hope).

I will try to compensate it, somehow, by writing few mini-reports on the lectures or presentations I liked most. These will be mostly pictures with minimal comments (also because I often don't have any chatlogs - the site was constantly crashing, whipping them all).

Above is the picture of the very last day (=today), showing a very typical setting of the conference. By the way, the event only confirmed that audio-conferencing is sooo last century, in terms of information transmission. A differentiating feature is that in SL you *can* actually massively multitask during the event, perhaps even more than you usually do during similar gatherings.

Special thanks to sophrosyne_sl, who not only let me know about the event in a first place, but was also an inspiring interlocutor during few sessions which we attended together.

Second Music

Wed, 19 Sep 2007 21:25:22 GMT

Small, but interesting article on the SL project by the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra - Watching a Cyber Audience Watch a Real Orchestra Perform in a Virtual World.

I still didn't make it to the site, to have a look (and may be even listen to the performance), but (or perhaps therefore) it's worth to write this post, even as a placeholder for future commentaries.

Besides, Nobody Fugazi is mentioned, so you will have a bonus track.

Watching a Cyber Audience Watch a Real Orchestra Perform in a Virtual World
By ANNE MIDGETTE
The New York Times
Published: September 18, 2007

People really dress for concerts around here. One man sports a bright purple suit, with a hat and roller skates to match. A woman wears a gown that appears to be made of peacock feathers, and a large blue butterfly flaps gently in circles around her.

We’re not in Kansas anymore, or even in Liverpool, England, where the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic opened its season on Friday night. For the occasion the orchestra went to the unusual extreme of building a new hall: a virtual environment in the online world Second Life. In a virtual replica of the Art Deco hall, an audience of animated figures, known as avatars, watched the orchestra perform live in a choppy video streamed over the Internet on a screen at the front of the room.

Call it the future, call it a stunt, Second Life is attracting more and more attention, and classical music is starting to get in on the act. Universal Classics has built an online island where visitors can inspect a replica of the exhibition of artifacts associated with the legendary mezzo-soprano Maria Malibran that is now touring Europe to promote Cecilia Bartoli’s next Malibran-themed album.

In May the pianist Lang Lang, in the form of an avatar, gave a live concert. And the Liverpool was the third orchestra to give a live concert on Second Life this year, after Sinfonia Leeds, an amateur group in England, and Red {an orchestra}, a chamber ensemble in Cleveland.

There are technical and conceptual hurdles in watching animations play live music in a virtual world. A YouTube video of a Dutch pianist playing Beethoven’s "Pathétique" Sonata on Second Life illustrates some of the issues: the performance is fine, but the figure’s fingers keep disappearing into the keys [They most probably refer to this video].

"It’s an odd medium," said John Shibley, the director of organizational learning at the consulting company EmcArts, which helped manage Red’s performance. "It’s sort of like listening to the radio and watching a puppet show, and the puppet show is not synched to the radio."

Each of the three orchestras to perform so far has taken a different approach. Leeds offered live streaming audio, with a small orchestra of miming avatars. Red created the equivalent of a television broadcast. Liverpool opted for a cheaper solution: a single static camera.

This approach, though inelegant, may have been the most workable. Red’s chief executive, John Farina, estimated that had the orchestra not received many services pro bono, its event would have cost around $200,000. The orchestra was left with a professional-quality broadcast tape, which, because of restrictions in its contract with its musicians, it cannot broadcast again.

Liverpool, by contrast, paid only $16,000 or so, $6,000 of which went to buying the "sims" on which the concert hall was built. (A sim is the unit of land on Second Life.) The orchestra also has the advantage of a new contract with its musicians that involved buying their potential share in broadcast rights [I assume, these are average prices for the small and mid-size projects in SL].

"We can use any material in any way we like," said Millicent Jones, the orchestra’s executive director of marketing and communications, who is already looking into future Second Life performances.

There are certainly limitations to the Second Life concert experience. A sim can hold only 50 to 70 avatars without crashing, so even though Liverpool built its hall over two sims and broadcast the concert to other Second Life locations, it had a relatively small audience.

And as with any streamed Internet broadcast, transmission quality depends on your Internet connection. On my computer the sound was so distorted that a preconcert lecture was utterly unintelligible; the soprano, Kate Royal, sounded as if she were singing a duet with herself in Ravel’s "Shéhérazade." It was impossible to assess the music, which included world premieres by Kenneth Hesketh and John McCabe.

Other listeners said their connections were fine. And afterward the audience, congregating in the bar for virtual drinks and a question-and-answer session with the conductor, Vasily Petrenko, seemed to have loved the whole thing — perhaps as much for the experience as for the music.

"Classical music is not very accessible where I am, so I really appreciated it," said a user whose Second Life name was Nobody Fugazi [Hi, Nobody!]..

Despite predictions that virtual worlds will become increasingly prevalent, the technology of Second Life is in its infancy. Both within classical music and outside it, there is debate about whether the place represents a brave new world or simply a curiosity.

"It’s still kind of in the stunt phase," said the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, though he personally knows the people at Linden Labs who invented the site and is a fan of the novel "Snow Crash," by Neal Stephenson, which inspired it. He and Linden Labs, he said, are "talking in friendly stages about something we might do."

Jonathan Gruber, the vice president for new media of Universal Music Group, said: "We’re not 100 percent sold on it. It’s experimental. We are interested in making sure that if there are opportunities for us to reach people through a medium like Second Life, we’re there for it."

The medium may be cutting-edge, but tastes remain rather conservative. Some listeners reacted in horror to the exuberant loudness of Mr. Hesketh’s piece, and one called it "just noise."

Dave Schwartz, the founder of Music Academy Online, where he conducts small listening sessions, dreams of bringing classical music to a wider audience by creating a "Disney World of classical music" on Second Life.

But Mr. Schwartz is also trying to bring newer music to this environment. .

"You haven’t heard ‘Poème Électronique,’" he said [Oh, Yes, we did], referring to a piece by Edgard Varèse, "till you’ve heard it streamed over the Internet in a virtual world."

Factz, and Figaz, on AvaStar

Wed, 19 Sep 2007 17:56:22 GMT

IHT, one of the (shamelessly borrowing the term of sophrosyne_sl) hard-core atomic editions of the RL, publishes a HUGE piece on Second Life - Reporting the (virtual) facts: Online papers covering Internet communities mix fictional news with a branding sense (as you will see, in their on-line version the title was changed to AvaStar: Virtual lives, lively gossip).

The article is not so big itself, but it is placed as a lead story of the paper's Media & Communication section, and together with the picture above (enlarged) and few others takes a good half of A2(!) sheet. That's what I call a PR-tanking.

Though expectedly with such not bad a paper as IHT, the article is quite informative and relatively accurate. 'Accurate' perhaps not in a sense that it tells *all the truth* about SL (and who can do that?), but in way it translates all the weirdness of SL into something relatively understandable of the key audience of the publication. So, well done, Andreas Tzortzis! (for some strange reason I still thin it's an avatar name. Hmm).

Because the text will (or at least can) disappear from public access, I am copying it under the cut, with some minor remarks here and there.

So, if you want - here is the paper:

AvaStar: Virtual lives, lively gossip
By Andreas Tzortzis
Published: September 16, 2007

BERLIN: Tabloid editors and gossip columnists in Europe and America have a long list of celebrities like Pete Doherty, Sienna Miller and David Beckham to help them fill space. The AvaStar [I expected SLurl here; wrongly], a tabloid publication in the virtual community of Second Life, does not.

Instead, The AvaStar covers fictional people like the Aimee Weber, a persona, or avatar, created by a real person who in her time in the virtual world has developed a reputation as a fashion designer and one of its foremost property developers.

"If you're not in Second Life a lot, you won't be a celebrity," said Rowan Barnett, editor in chief of The AvaStar. If you are - and the creator of Second Life, Linden Lab, says that almost a million people regularly log on - then The AvaStar, a virtual weekly tabloid downloaded free 100,000 times a month in a PDF format at the-avastar.com, can help you on your way.

Along with real-life media like Reuters and the BBC and virtual-only rivals like The Second Life Herald and The Metaverse Messenger, The AvaStar is part of a bustling news gathering culture in the large and unwieldy virtual community.

But Bild.T-Online, the publisher of The AvaStar, is the only organization to set up a news gathering operation in, of and about Second Life.

The AvaStar, first published in December in English and now in both English and German editions, has the considerable backing of Axel Springer [I didn't know that], one of the largest publishing houses in Europe and majority owner of Bild.T-Online, which sees its modest venture into the three-dimensional world as a small part of its digital strategy.

"An important part of this is learning how to activate a community," said Maurizio Barucca, who heads the newly created Innovation Lab [That's getting interesting] at Bild.T-Online, of which the German mobile phone network T-Online is minority owner. "It's about bringing the user in, because the integration of a reader, of a user, is becoming more and more important."

The AvaStar, with a heavy reliance on user-generated stories [I didn't know THAT, either], is an important testing ground for the Bild newspaper, the highest-circulation tabloid in Europe, according to Barnett.

The goal is to prepare newspapers like Bild and publishing companies like Springer, which owns Bild, for the transition into not just the digital world, but into the Internet that might emerge in the future.

"We're going to expand it so that it's not just for Web 2.0 but as a brand for the 3D world," Barucca said [/me *loves* the marketeers' joggling with numbers!].

Second Life has registered more than nine million people who have created their own avatars, or online personalities, and 10 percent of that number use the site regularly, Linden Labs says.

But in the coming months, The AvaStar will appear in Second Life competitors like There.com, Activeworlds and the Chinese version HiPiHi. Barnett said that creating a brand now was crucial as virtual worlds began to play a more important role on the Internet.

"At the moment, the largest and most suited are these," he said.

In an e-mail message, Peter Ludlow, a philosophy professor [I knew that he is a professor, but of philosophy!] at the University of Michigan and founder of the Second Life Herald, an AvaStar competitor, said, "You have to treat it as a way to learn how to navigate in virtual worlds and report on them."

"You are really using it as a way to 'level up' in online worlds, in the hope that when these worlds do become viable, you will have a competitive advantage," he said. [/me slimes when reading on leveling-up :)]

At the moment, the annual cost of producing The AvaStar is about €100,000, or $139,000 - a pittance for the largest cellphone operator in Germany and the largest German publishing house [That's a real wow, how do they manage to run on such a small budget, also assuming the salary rates in Germany; or else they don't reveal all the costs].

Most of the costs of the 39-page weekly are covered by advertisements from real companies, like Sony Ericsson and Galeries Lafayette, that cost $2,400 to $4,120 a week, Barucca said. (Advertisements by companies that exist only in Second Life cost about $30. [That's nice of them!])

Half of The AvaStar is produced by a staff of eight people, most of them journalists who work in a cramped office in the glass-enclosed Axel Springer complex in Berlin [Doesn't click with the budget figures two lines above].

The other half is written by residents of the Second Life community, who are rarely professional journalists but collect information with e-mail interviews and instant messaging programs.

With everyone from major companies like L'Oréal to governments and political parties, including the National Front of the French right-wing politician Jean-Marie Le Pen, active in Second Life, there is plenty to report on.

The "citizen-journalists," [residents?] as they are called, cover everything from money-making scams and virtual concerts to tips on how to make real-life money in Second Life.

There have been a number of lawsuits brought in the real world for Second Life crimes ranging from copyright infringement to child pornography, all of which are duly covered in the pages of the virtual newspaper. David Knight, deputy editor at The AvaStar, who worked at weekly newspapers in England before coming to The AvaStar, said the staff had brought the same journalistic standards and reporting methods as in the real world.

"It's like real life," he said. "If you have the contacts, you find out about things."

Often, real news, like the French presidential election or the Group of 8 summit meeting, will be reported on with a virtual twist. The AvaStar staff covered the French elections this year by following the Second Life platforms of French political parties and seeing how the issues were discussed by Second Life residents.

Criticism of bugs in the Second Life world, as well as certain measures taken by Linden Lab - like a recent decision to ban gambling from the community - are also given ample space in the pages of The AvaStar, something the company, based in San Francisco, does not seem to mind.

"We've been very hands off," said Catherine Smith, the brand director at Linden Lab [Phew, 'brand director'! I was once told that LLs have marketing team totaling one (1) person. Good progress!]. "We don't have the resources or desire to tell them what to do."

=== END OF TEXT

For some text-unrelated reasons I can't resist to post my own scan of the above picture. Don't ask me how I managed to get such surreal coloring; no photoshop involved, pure from the scanner.

Tue, 18 Sep 2007 22:39:04 GMT

Entire evening ~~wasted~~ spent at Life 2.0 (what a posh name!) Despite the name, there was a lot of interesting presentations, and panels, and discussions, questions, answers, conversations, pictures, sim crashes, new friendships, and 64 pages of text (that *despite* all the crashes wiping the chat logs). /me is exhausted, feel like switching to Twitter entirely, to merely survive this information overload.

Tomorrow the pics will be brighter.

Tue, 18 Sep 2007 05:03:25 GMT

IE pwns SecondLife

Symbolic enough, I've learned about this potentially very dangerous exploit via Twitter.

Hello, Garbage!

Sun, 16 Sep 2007 20:06:41 GMT

There are many, may more things to discover in the place (I have about 30 pictures ready to post, but I am bit tired already). And - I only talked about Part I! (There are at least II and III, and may be more).

It surely worth to come there and explore this lovely world yourself; I certainly stop by there many more times (also great place to bring your friends to show them SL).

Final (irresistible) posting - to all my surprise I found that this funny garbage collecting car...

...has Dutch number plates!

/me is most intrigued.

More loops!

Sun, 16 Sep 2007 19:58:09 GMT

There are even more direct loops here (both time- and space-related); browsing the pages of a photo-album, we suddenly see 'familiar places', The Mousetrap, The Vibrator etc; and - we see the new strange places too!

It's a double-cool trick (can we can it hyper-cool then?); not only it enriches the story-line with interesting, (sorry, but) post-modern self-referential loops. It also exploits so called 'user-generated content.

Oops. Should I better call it 'involves people in co-creative process?' Never mind.

Time for loops

Sun, 16 Sep 2007 19:38:03 GMT

We spoke about time-stamps a bit, and not to the time-loops; as in every story, there are plenty of them in the grneenies world too. This one is perhaps not so much time-, but definitely a loop, a funny reference to the SL world in general: a book with a title 'SL: Advertise & Market Your Self'.

Well, the guys who made it may very well be authors of such manual!

The next one is a nice 'story-loop': by peeking into the pages of the diary, we may start revealing what is actually happening with the RL-owners of the place, how frustrated they are (and how naively mislead they can be - with the same Alice-Writing-For-The-King kind of question: Wos is actually controlling with writing here?

Toast!

Sun, 16 Sep 2007 19:14:35 GMT

Greenie between toasts is *just fun* (but I need this image here, to refer to it later).

What I would actually like to figure out is whether they really had back in the 1950-s such an elegant cord-management system for household appliances:

Placements

Sun, 16 Sep 2007 19:02:17 GMT

Greenies swimming in sugar powder (or rather a Warning label on the pack - May Cause Tooth Lose) is another time-stamp, but a different one; it refers more to our times, with all our anti-sugar hysterics (but I may be wrong here). Again, the brand on the sugar pack tells me nothing.

But two other brands tell a lot, and very, very loudly, as always :)

Both these brands were there so prominently, and so to your face (and also without any particular irony attached), that one may start suspecting them somewhere in the crown of sponsors; I would not be much surprised if this is the case. And in fact it would be a case of one the (rare) cases of great product placement.

Getting NOT

Sun, 16 Sep 2007 18:51:52 GMT

I spotted few other gags - or so I think - but I was not able to clearly 'decode' them. Like this one with Powdered Turnips: is it another time-stamp? or a known put related to the aliens/space/green color?

Another example of 'incommunicado' for me is a greenish liquid for (dish)washing called Gleet; I am not sure whether it is mocking a known brand, or just a word-play around green. In any case, it produces very funny bubbles.

Russian Trace!

Sun, 16 Sep 2007 18:45:29 GMT

I happened to be on the greenies's site right in the middle of the new hurricane related to the Google's Moon 2.0 initiative; and it was therefore a particular fun, and a pleasure, to discover this Russian space stamp (the stamps commemorates the very first satellite send to the Earth orbit, in 1957 - and also serves as one of the few clear time-stamps of the scene).

Moreover, I visited Greenies House on September 14, the date when 48 years ago the very first human spacehip landed on a moon, Ironically,it was also called Luna 2 (=Moon 2).

Lolgate

Sun, 16 Sep 2007 18:28:45 GMT

Lolgate is one of the (brand) puns in the ~~game~~ world; another clever one is Whatever:

Here you can see it better (and also with a couple of fully doped greenies)