Everyone (some people) keeps banging on about (occasionally refer to)
this Second Life thing. In a top piece of investigative journalism, I
am here to reveal this supposedly exciting new thing for what it: a lot
of boring old crap for hardcore mentalists only.
Their website says: Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by 396,616 people from around the globe.
I say: Second Life is an infuriatingly slow and invariably hideously ugly world almost entirely built and owned by people who like to pretend to be foxes. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has a grown a bit and now has 396,616 people who like to pretend to be foxes.
Essentially, it's a multiplayer version of The Sims where you control one character and interact with lots of other like-minded voyagers into the future. Supposedly you are free to do anything, but when you get down to it your options are to 1) pretend to be a fox 2) build an ugly house 3) "dance" with overweight men pretending to be ladies. (Alternatively, if you are over 18, you can go to a special sex room and have badly animated rumpy pumpy with overweight men pretending to be ladies.)
Apparently it was created with the aim of replicating the futuristic internet thing in Snow Crash, a virtual world like in The Matrix or hundreds of other naff Cyberpunk stories.
That's all very well, and a genuine virtual reality style method of social interaction might be great. But since this is about as close to that as throwing rocks at things is to nuclear warfare, it seems a little pointless; they've managed to simulate the most tedious bits of the real world without any of the good bits: WHO THE HELL NEEDS OR WANTS TO WALK AROUND THE INTERNET? When you're bored of walking (Or flying! Wow, you can fly! You can't fly in real life, can you? WOW.), you can trade real useful money for fake useless internet money with which you can make and buy purposeless crap! Wow, you made an internet house! NEWSFLASH: YOU DON'T NEED A MOTHERF**KING BED ON THE INTERNET! But that's alright, at least I can watch fox-people grinding against each other.
As if this wasn't pointless enough, musicians are using it to "perform", authors are doing "book" "signings". I mean, WHAT? Obviously given that it's an allegedly growing phenomenon and all, bully for them as they'll probably get free plugs in any articles about it, but that doesn't stop it from being ONE OF THE STUPIDEST IDEAS ANYONE HAS EVER HAD. (It was pretty bloody crap when Bowie did that computer game where you had to sit through a virtual concert, and that was years ago!) The latest thing is Reuters opening a "virtual news bureau"*, presumably to keep the world informed about how many fox-people are having retarded internet sex this week.
The first modern PC my family ever owned was a Packard Bell, and came with a very stupid piece of software that ran on top of Windows, giving you a user interface that was like a virtual house- you would go into the office to use Word, into the living room to play music, etc. That was hilariously patronising and utterly useless over a decade ago, but now someone's done it for the internet and people are getting excited about it. If there's one thing the internet needed, it was for someone to take all the things it can already do and offer a shittier version of them accessed through a terrible online game.
Second Life may be the stupidest thing on the entire internet, and I'm going to start a stall outside my flat selling house-bricks with "AMAZING VIRTUAL INTERNET BRICK" written on them in tippex.
*"Created by Linden Lab in San Francisco, Second Life is the closest thing to a parallel universe existing on the Internet." Yeah, but the second closest thing is that jpeg of a man holding his arse open really wide.
[I would have added some pictures to illustrate but, after loading Second Life, waiting for it to download a large update, and being told they'd reset my password, the game promptly crashed.]
Their website says: Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by 396,616 people from around the globe.
I say: Second Life is an infuriatingly slow and invariably hideously ugly world almost entirely built and owned by people who like to pretend to be foxes. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has a grown a bit and now has 396,616 people who like to pretend to be foxes.
Essentially, it's a multiplayer version of The Sims where you control one character and interact with lots of other like-minded voyagers into the future. Supposedly you are free to do anything, but when you get down to it your options are to 1) pretend to be a fox 2) build an ugly house 3) "dance" with overweight men pretending to be ladies. (Alternatively, if you are over 18, you can go to a special sex room and have badly animated rumpy pumpy with overweight men pretending to be ladies.)
Apparently it was created with the aim of replicating the futuristic internet thing in Snow Crash, a virtual world like in The Matrix or hundreds of other naff Cyberpunk stories.
That's all very well, and a genuine virtual reality style method of social interaction might be great. But since this is about as close to that as throwing rocks at things is to nuclear warfare, it seems a little pointless; they've managed to simulate the most tedious bits of the real world without any of the good bits: WHO THE HELL NEEDS OR WANTS TO WALK AROUND THE INTERNET? When you're bored of walking (Or flying! Wow, you can fly! You can't fly in real life, can you? WOW.), you can trade real useful money for fake useless internet money with which you can make and buy purposeless crap! Wow, you made an internet house! NEWSFLASH: YOU DON'T NEED A MOTHERF**KING BED ON THE INTERNET! But that's alright, at least I can watch fox-people grinding against each other.
As if this wasn't pointless enough, musicians are using it to "perform", authors are doing "book" "signings". I mean, WHAT? Obviously given that it's an allegedly growing phenomenon and all, bully for them as they'll probably get free plugs in any articles about it, but that doesn't stop it from being ONE OF THE STUPIDEST IDEAS ANYONE HAS EVER HAD. (It was pretty bloody crap when Bowie did that computer game where you had to sit through a virtual concert, and that was years ago!) The latest thing is Reuters opening a "virtual news bureau"*, presumably to keep the world informed about how many fox-people are having retarded internet sex this week.
The first modern PC my family ever owned was a Packard Bell, and came with a very stupid piece of software that ran on top of Windows, giving you a user interface that was like a virtual house- you would go into the office to use Word, into the living room to play music, etc. That was hilariously patronising and utterly useless over a decade ago, but now someone's done it for the internet and people are getting excited about it. If there's one thing the internet needed, it was for someone to take all the things it can already do and offer a shittier version of them accessed through a terrible online game.
Second Life may be the stupidest thing on the entire internet, and I'm going to start a stall outside my flat selling house-bricks with "AMAZING VIRTUAL INTERNET BRICK" written on them in tippex.
*"Created by Linden Lab in San Francisco, Second Life is the closest thing to a parallel universe existing on the Internet." Yeah, but the second closest thing is that jpeg of a man holding his arse open really wide.
[I would have added some pictures to illustrate but, after loading Second Life, waiting for it to download a large update, and being told they'd reset my password, the game promptly crashed.]
