Politics in second life.

Ok so I was going through Second life in class on tuesday and I took a look at two lands. One was for Obama and the other was for John Mcain. Now me personally I have no personial opinon on how those two go about advertising there campains. They both had pretty much the same set up. A bunch of pictures of their faces and hen drop boxes  that will take you to their websites. These stragites are pretty effective but  they are lacking in two main areas. The fiest being that there wasn't anyone there to talk to. I mean if you are going to try and promote your self in a world like second life then it might be a good idea to keep someone in your land in order to have them talk to people.  but other then that it seems that they are attracting  enough people to make it worth while. It does a good service to people who dont have a television.  because they can learn about the two opposing politicians. all in all it seems to be working out for them but I cant really tell yet if these ideas will swing the votes in one direction or another. 

   More coming soon Godzilla.

True obsession?

   I know people have said something about this subject before but they were just defending themselves that they weren't obsessed even though it seems to be all they do all day.  Should we have a WoW version of AA for people who can't stop playing long enough to have a normal interaction? Should they just be left alone so that when they want to interact with someone in real life, they try to put their hand over someone and try to right click them? I can see playing the game for a few hours then go off and play a different game or at least take a break and be somewhat a living object. I've taken note of some people who choose to spend their class time not doing class work (no surprise) and just play WoW the whole time and act disappointed because they have to pack up and leave the game for about fifteen minutes before they can become lifeless again. I understand some of the feeling, I played WoW casually for three years and as an elite for one year, but I never got to the point that I didn't want to do anything but play it.

   But I can't give all the credit just to the WoW crack addicts. Some people bring Game boys, Nintendo DS, PSP and their laptops to play and not pay attention in class, just so that they can get the gaming fix. I may be totally wrong, but that seems to be for all the slackers I've noticed in my classes and I think that's the biggest reason, that or because they are so bored and care so little about classes,grades, and assignments that they would rather play a game and ignore the professor rather than putting the game away for an hour and try to get a good grade. Also I don't care if you select few notice enough and just to attack me, I won't be watching so you can cry if you want...

  

Spam and Jam

     Not the yummy meat that everyone knows and loves, but the Stupid Pointless Annoying Messages(S.P.A.M.). Normally this is just a normal Internet issue and wouldn't be considered part of a virtual world, but SPAM can be E-mail,game,or anything that can be online. In Second Life for example, people try to invite me to stupid groups or send cards that I should go to the landmark inside. Exactly what provokes this behavior? All it is is a cry for attention, or to attempt to inform by randomly choosing people.

   What exactly makes SPAM, SPAM?  The first sentence explains why it's called SPAM. It has to be a pointless message, which could make it stupid and in many cases, annoying to many people. In my opinion, it's just because people have nothing better to do, or that they want to have their opinion forced down your throat so you must listen or you can try to dodge it. 

    All pointless message within themselves are annoying since they are a paradox, a message is only a message since it has a point. I know that most of you will think " Oh, what a stupid topic, I just delete all SPAM and I don't need to care about it." But if you truly think about it rather than be the normal close-minded human, so messages may actually not be SPAM. 

Blog about blogs

Why? Why bother to type ones thoughts up on the interweb (lolz) for all the world to see? The answer is simple. And you must find that answer out for yourself. I myself have not gazed upon many blogs, but i have been on a few forums, which may be called the distant cousin of the blog. In this blog family you might also be able to call the grandpa of the blog a diary...a diary that is open to the full view of the public. Anyways...forums are pretty awesome...in a very odd sort of way. They open up many doors to do random things. Forums allow 10 year olds to rant about many things that only adults should be exposed to. One of these things is a game called Halo, you may have heard of it. To the parents who are buying their little son (or daughter) Halo, you are a dumbass. My biggest pet peeve is logging on to xbox live and hearing the squeaky voices of younglings claiming that they "pwned me, bitch". I absolutely abhore little kids being in places that they shouldn't, especially when they are there because a parent thinks that they are mature enough to handle it. Whenever i encounter one of these youngins i simply tell them to hit puberty, then come back. This was the most random branch off of a main idea that any of my blogs have ever seen, wow.

3.0.2

The patch of patches called by many. This is a patch to the retal version of Wow. This patch upgrades the game to the newest version and prepairs the game for the Wrath of the Litch King expansion. This patch fixes many of the broken skills and specs from the current patch of wow. This patch also realeases the new talents points that enhance player characters. This will be the final patch of the Burning Crusade and will be the first the brand new content of the new expansion. This patch will be deployed Tuesday of this week and is over half way downloaded on anyone who has the background downloader running.

PS1

So was playing Chrono Cross on my PS1 last night (quite you...it the only system I have up here >.<) and all of a sudden it decided to be like 'I hate you!" and it just restarted my game. At the time I was distracted by Daria on my friend Allie's computer but when I looked up I was like 'WTF?!' So I started playing again and it did the same damn thing. -_-" So I decided that maybe it was having issues from being on too long or something so I turned it off for the night. I got up this morning to see if it was better and at first it wasn't and believe me when I say I was pissed. After a few more times of trying to get it to work, it did! Well, the game keeps turning off my Analog so every once in a while, like after ever fight I get into or after the cutscenes I have to turn it back on, which can get extremely annoying, but whatever, I'm just glas the system is working again! :D

Second Life AV

My Seconld Life Avatar's name is Alyssa Turbo. She's a winged ninja who loves to cause trouble...when she feels like it. >:) Anyway, she loves the colors red and black, (if you hadn't noticed), and loves flying more than anything else. She spends most of her time wandering around Second Life checking out new styles and just hanging.
She may not look like much of a ninja, but hey? Who really knows what an actual ninja DOES look like? Her favorite time of the day is...well night actually, then it's even easier to blend into her surroundings. She used to have a permanent home, but she became bored with her non-eventful life and set out to explore the world. Now she wanders between sims looking for excitment of any kind to occupy her time.

Random blog

Well now I am hanging out with my two friends. Alyssa and Allie, Alyssa is playing a video game called Chrono cross, and Allie is reading a fan fiction about Naruto which she claims is the best one out there. now we are debating about characters from Inuyasha and it is interesting because now we are just sitting around in her ( Alyssa's) room.  Now she has no idea about what to do. It seems like I am not doing a blog but you said that we could talk about anything. so let me talk about a video game called Devil Kings..It is almost an exact copy of dynasty warriors but with different character names and different story lines. In the beginning you only have access to four of the main characters. In order to unlock the other four you need to defeat each of the main characters stories. there are different difficulty levels, They are easy normal and hard. Throughout each level you will be fighting thousands of enemy soliders that are all comming at you at once. I know that you guys have heard of dynasty warriors and I dont know if you like the series or not but I enjoy the series a lot. :) any way this is probably more then the standard 200 words.

 More comming soon.

  Godzilla

Myself

    Ever wonder who the person is behind the post that you all hate so much, what he looks like, how he may act? Do you ponder what I, Donut, look like? I change my look all the time, never content with what I have on but lately I found something that looks like it would suffice for me. I make all my clothes myself, my hair is the only thing that's not 100% my idea, I had a slight amount of help when doing it. And as you may or may not know, I am very picky about what is unique and is not, that's why I choose to have stuff that either only I have or have made. You may think that people could take a picture of me and then say I'm not unique anymore, but wouldn't that just be them copying me and I still hold the original "Donut" look?

   As I have said a million times I choose to do/wear unique things and for me to acquire or do these things, I need an idea or the item, which many would find hard to locate. That's another thing I like to do, I love to hunt for rare items or just look around places that would otherwise be impossible or hard to find, which would make normal joes give up quickly and go with the generic stuff. I also love to dance and go to social gatherings. As you can see in the picture above, you'll note I'm in the church of Techno with it's blaring music and weird but cool layout. People used to be crawling all over here but now that Burning Life is over, all the people are off doing their own thing again.

    My background is about as deep as my wallet(to those who don't know, I'm poor) I just grew up like a normal person, which to me was a bore, I lived as an only child and grew up like a normal person, which is why I choose to be so unique now, I have to make up all the years of the boring generic childhood I lived. I never keep in touch with my family, nor do I really care to, not because I think it is cool or unique, I just don't have the time or care enough to wonder about it, "It's my life, it's now or never!" that's how I see it. 

    All in all I guess I'm just a regular weirdo who likes to speak his mind since no one else will. I like living this way and I'll just keep on keeping on till I grow tired of it and decide to change. My only goal is to change the world and how people think and this blog is one way I'm doing it. So if you like my entries, stay tuned to more later on in the week, till then I'm Donut.

Zeb Breen (my avatar)

Hellow my name is Zeb Breen. I am twenty years young and second in command of the great Empire of Second Life. Officially, I command the military and Naval brances of the Imperial army and report directly to the emperor. I was born on the back water sim called Mos Eisly. I was found to be very strong in the second life force and became a jedi knight. I was even directly responsible for the fall of the pathetic Reprublic of Second Life. My favorite activite are enforcing the imperial law and serving the Emperor. I wear black armor that enhances my combat abilites and keeps me alive due to injuryes suffered back during the fall of the Republic. I can normally befound around the sim of Moonglade due to the free placement of items rule. I like to fly ships!!!

Mein Avatar

Hello, i am Edgar Karillion. I am eleventy billion years old. I've been around awhile. I am, of course, a vampire. How else could i possibly be eleventy billion years old? I have many activities i enjoy doing, but my favorite is flying around in random vehicles. I have had my current look for about 8 of those eleventy billion years...before that, i was the kool-aid man. I enjoy visiting the black swan island...a very peculiar place indeed. Basically, i am the coolest.

Blogging about me

     My avatar's name is Godzilla2000 Mavendorf and he is about 7 feet tall and he is a metal dragon. Surprisingly enough he is the complete opposite of me in every way. he is sane and very friendly and extremely sociable he has tons of friends and hangs out with a vampire and a slave more then any one else.  

   To describe my background I was once a normal human being who was walking home from school one day and the next thing he knows I am waking up in a black room chained to something. After about 5 minutes I  got knocked out again and then when I woke up I found my self in a suit of metal armor. After my eyes adjusted to the lack of light I  breathed fire from my mouth and I scared myself. All of a sudden I found myself falling down and after what felt like three hours I finally landed in water and started to sink. Meaningless to say I was panicking but wasn't drowning. After about an hour I woke up on solid ground and found him self inside of a class room Moon dust. When he looked around he saw a bunch of people surrounding him and then they told him that he was apart of there class. Still confused and dazed I decided to go along until I could become a human again. My likes and dislikes include dancing, flying,dying, and a multitude of other things. I like long flights through the sky staring up into space. hanging out with Black Rose or Jewelze vodkia or even aylssa Turbo. or chatting with Kristain lacava. when I can catch him. Other wise I am just exploring this world that I ended up in. My sense of fashion is pretty much null and void because I am in a suit of armor that makes me look like a dragon. My dislikes include but are not limited to ass holes. the dutch, the irish and people who try to look like me.  I am 18 years old and my race is metal dragon. My name is GODZILLA2000 Mavendorf.

Burning Life

Burning life is an event on Second Life that is dedicated to the Burning Man festival. So how does this show what Second Life is about? First off everything is user created, just like everything else on Second Life, but it is a little more restricted. Lidens restrict the type of content that can be shown to make it friendly to younger members. Generally though it gives someone an idea of what a part of Second Life is about. The creating part. When visiting Burning Life you can see the the ideas of it's users spread out across many sims, this is a large part of Second Life but isn't the only part. Second Life is highly social, and I guess Burning Life shows that too, many people come to check out the art of it's fellow users, but I'm unsure if it's as casual as one of the many clubs located around the land. So when it comes to showing what Second Life is about, Burning Life does it, to an extent.

Burning life man thing

I noticed in burning life that there was information about about the real burning man. Reading that it was largely a "hippie" music festival, i then realized that burning life was almost an exact emulation of just that. Burning life was filled with interesting looking people, amazing structures that most likely took hours to create, interactive environments, retailers and merchants, and much, much more. I was fun to walk around and interact with the different things that were going on. I ended up trying to ride a bike, and figured out that it is extremely difficult to ride a bike in second life. I ventured around, looked at different vendors and watched a few music acts that were pretty good. I really liked the atmosphere of the place. It was very relaxed and chill. The people were very nice and the sights were gorgeous...well, gorgeous for second life standards.

My new 70!

This weekend my newest wow character hit the level cap of 70. This time around I decided to level a hunter. I really enjoyed the trip to 70 and look foward to spending the few days before patch 3.0.2 gearing it up and makeing some money. Out of all the 70's that I have, I really enjoyed leveling the hunter. It was very easy compaired to my other characters and the aspect of having a pet made soloing group quests a breese. My main is my Paladin which I will be leveling to 80 come the expansion, but I think I may level my Hunter second because of the fun I had from 1-70. Being the anti pvper that I am, I wont be farming pvp trash, but instead try to get a basic set of Karazhan gear to help the future grind to 80. Hunters may be fun but, Retribution > all.

Burning Life

Burning Life is the Second life recreation of the art festival Burning Man. In this festival, people create strange and weird works of art. Burning Life is the same thing. Users can created art displayed it in a location that simulated the desert that Burning Man is located in. The major diffrence between the two events is that the Second Life version is much more limited and censored. Some of the art had to be censored to fit the Second Life terms of use and not to offend viewers. The real version of the festival, art can be anything and displayed. My only complaint about this in Second Life was the low FPS expereinced while in the zone. So many objects and people really took a toll on my computer, It felt like Hyjal Trash before I discovered high preformance mode on my laptop (wow joke).

my adventures at burning life.

My burning life adventures can be summed up by these two pictures. the first one is of me standing in the middle of that giant lotus and surveying my surroundings. All I saw was red for about ten feet around me and then green. well after that I went and saw a teardrop tree and decided to stand on it for a while. That was fun and then I went and hung out with Godzilla2000 for a while. But Yeah I had a really nice time there and it was interesting to see everything that burning life was that cool.

Burning Lifesauce

Burning life is the virtual recreation of the art festival, burning man. Personally, i think that burning man is much more creative than burning life. In burning man, people make very creative things and put them on display in the middle of the desert. In burning life, it is nearly the same thing. But burning man is in real life. Burning life is in second life. In real life, it would be way out of the ordinary to see some of the things that go on at burning man. But in burning life, you can go to burning life and see some of the exact same things that you would see on a regular basis. Although i did enjoy my stay in burning life, i would much rather spend time at the actual burning man festival.

Spyro the Dragon

OK now its time for a blast from the past with another really good game called Spyro the Dragon.
the story behind spyro is that you ( the player) play as a little purple dragon. in the first game that is rightly called Spyro the Dragon and it follows spyro as he goes on a quest to save all the dragons from Gnasty Gnorc. Gnasty has turned your fellow dragons into statues and due to mysteryous circumstances you are the only one who is left. And it falls on you to save every one with your dragonfly. In the second one you still play as spyro but you are in a different world facing a different enemy. this time you are up against someone called Ripto. and then in the third game you face off against a disgruntled sorceress and then it was a freckin sweet game.

Sporesauce

So i recently went back into the universe of spore, and find that it is much bigger than i originally imagined. As soon as got my creature evolved enough to fly around space i thought, "well that was fun, im gonna start a new creature." i thought i was done with the game. I was horribly mistaken. You see, when you get to the space stage, you have two circles on the map. A solid circle, which marks how many parsecs away you can travel from your current location, and a dotted circle, which i thought was the boundary to which you can travel totally. After continuing on my space creature, i soon realized that i could move out farther then the dashed circle, and that this circle was merely the boundary to which i can communicate with other planets. After doing a mission or two where i had to journey to near the center of the galaxy, i saw how large of a scale this game was on. There are, quite literally, over ten million stars in the milky way. Ninety percent of these stars have a form of life on that solar system, and fifty percent of the total stars have intelligent life on its solar system. This is the largest game i have ever seen.

God of War

So i was at my friends house today and I saw that she had God of War for the ps2. This game is so awesome and has really good graphics for a ps2. In the game your name is Kratos, a former general of the Spartan army who sets out to kill Ares the greek god of war. The goddess Athena is the one who asks you to kill Ares and in return she says she will get rid of the memories that haunt Kratos. God of War is in third-person and you use melee moves and magic to defeat your enemies. But the games isn't just going around and hacking all of your enemies, there are a lot of puzzles that you have to solve to get through. The cinematics in the game are incredible. It is hard to believe that you are playing a on a ps2 when you are looking at the cut scenes. If you have never played this game I encourage it, its just plain fun to play.

Burning Life

So I tried to go on Burning Life on my laptop but it was very laggy and I couldn't see much. But from what I saw there was a lot of cool art all around the place. I guess the main difference between Burning Man and Burning Life is that in Burning Man you can be way more creative. Burning Man you can do pretty much whatever you want and put up any art you want and its not censored. Burning Life probably has a lot less drugs but users cant just put there stuff anywhere but i guess that isn't that bad of an idea when you think of what happened when we all got to put whatever we wanted to on the professors land. If SL let anybody put what they wanted anywhere it would be event more laggy than it is now. But still Burning Life is pretty cool and there are a lot of cool things to look at.

War of the Guilds

No, the title doesn't mean I'm going to talk about Guild Wars, I'm talking about Guild fights between servers, verbal and non-verbal. It is impressive and scary to think that two groups, each may contain up to 200 members, just because one member from each guild ( or one member from just one of the guilds) starts talking big and bashes the other guild or tries to anger someone from the other guild.
After the first little scrap fight, everyone starts a flame war in the first channel that everyone can hear and normally the other guild will go on that channel and retaliate with some trash talk of their own. Then after about a week of the verbal war it will do two things, stop or get intense to the point where it involves the whole server. Most of the time it will do the latter, and people bring it out side the games and sometimes it becomes a big thing that lasts for a long time. But most in any MMO I've ever played is seeing one for about three weeks and then finally died down and they actually merged the guilds together and became a half decent guild.
But fighting like this is not limited to fighting between two guilds, it can be a limitless number of groups and even one guild with the guild being split down the middle. When a guild fights between itself then it's certain it will split, the only question is how? Either they will be big boys and agree to disagree and one half leaves with their half of the guild and the other half stays in the guild with whatever is left. This happens a lot and is unavoidable because people are unpredictable and different from each other. About 4/7 of the time, it's a fight between the bad side of the guild and the good side, or the elites versus the casual which in my mind makes no sense since it's two different groups of people but it happens.
When I wrote this I had in my mind some of my WoW experiences from over the years and I used them to try to give examples without actually talking about it, because this can happen in any MMO and in fourms, anything that would be considered sociable/interactive online. I've had everything I've written about happen to guilds I was in and I was in a guild that somehow started a war with 5 other guilds at the same time. All from one person openning their mouth thinking their the big cheese... Moral of my rant, whatever you think, your not the best, GTFO and go farm.

WoW again

This week in WoW I finally got my shaman to level 70. And now I need to grind out honor to get better gear for PvP. Now that my shaman is 70 that bring my total to four which is no great feat in itself by a milestone for myself. I have decided that he will be my PvP character because I always have fun decimating my opponents with his fast attacks. Being of poor gear at the moment I usually am the one being decimated by the people who have been PvPing longer. I will probably change him, in the future, to a PvE role but not any time soon. I also must grind out dailys and other quests on him to build up the money I had to spend on him when he did reach 70 for his flying mount, which I imagine wont take more then a few days. I figure that I will begin leveling either my hunter or warlock when I grow tired of PvPing and need to take a short break from it, but as of yet I am undecided. I love to play on my lock because he is just fun to play on. His damage over time and fear spells just make killing mobs or players fun and easy. On the other hand, i do not really like to play on my hunter because less skill is needed to master the class or even to quest along and level. I might try changing her spec around to see if one is better in my opinion and hope to make her more fun to play. If anyone has any ideas on hunter specs in WoW that are a blast to play feel free tell me and change my mind on how hunters are boring.

Burning Life

A tribute to the ideas of Burning Man for the free expression of art that is based around a central theme. Both the Burning Life and Burning Man events cover a vast area be it land or server and a maze of activity and ordered chaos. While I have never been to Burning Man, and am unlikely ever to, I have been to Burning Life. I did not spend a lot of time exploring Burning Life, but I still managed to see a wide assortment of things to see, and it is a confusing mass of places to go and things to see. There are so many places and people crammed into a small area that it is a laggy place to be. I have seen places that depicted ideas such as dominatrices and legalize marijuana. Or cannons that will shoot you across the burning life event and statues of what could be Burning Men or Women. As well as several, dozen other odd ball objects in random places that would take too long to mention. Over all, it was an experience, I would not say exciting, but more of how creative people can be and how open second life can be to ideas without being overly restricted.

700 Billion Dollar Bailout

As you may know we have a crises on our hands.  Big businesses and banks are in huge financial debts and will fail if the government doesn't bail them out.  Is that fair to the average person?  First of all the government is taking our tax dollars to bail out these big banks and corporations.  Second, when banks didn't give a shit about who they lent money too and did it under adjustable rate mortgages without educating the loaners that the rates could jump to unaffordable costs.  This caused a domino effect across country, where home owners couldn't afford when the adjustable rates jumped up to 6 and 7 percent, which caused for closers to sweep millions of middle class Americans.  

The deal is that it does not affect us as college students right now, BUT it WILL.  There is a great chance that millions of Americans will lose there jobs.  The economy is far from stable and people of lost billions in the stock market. 

SO PLEASE get educated on this topic, and study both sides of the political spectrum before you vote.  I promise you... this is one of the BIGGEST and most IMPORTANT elections of our lives.  

The Burn of Life

   The end of September never seems to have anything special in the real life, but in Second Life, it's the week of Burning Life( Second Life's tribute to Burning Man). Users everywhere come to see all the unique creations of other users. When I went to go check out the area, the computer kept locking up so I couldn't observe most of the creations and lands, but I was able to go to the area of mutant vehicles. It had stuff from random giant bikes to a rubber duck car and some things were actually able to be copied. I also noticed some more "creative" ideas such as the monster potty, yet not everything that I was able to look at was so different. Some areas had buildings that resembled tents, tarps , and umbrellas to give it a flea market-like theme but none of the items were purchasable.   After I was able to finally get to look around, there is a lot more to see then what I had originally said. All of the users take ideas or icons from movies,shows, and what not and put it in a form that we can view in Second Life. The wireframe sculptures are very well made and can almost simulate real wireframe artwork in the real life, although in Second Life, they choose to actually make it have an image projector as well or sparkles or something to make it pretty come out. Along with sculptures, the area had what looked like a fantasy carnival and buildings with scenes and props from movies, one such was the Back to the future set, with anything and everything that went through the time stream. But, the greatest of all was the "Church of Techno", which someone said it resembled a colorful Water Cube. It had the history of techno, some free items and a dance area with a dance ball for dances and music to listen to which created a great feeling of a rave. Most of the event I couldn't fully see given the short amount of time and the grand size of the event. The image below was only one of many I took when exploring the areas.

   The Burning Life received it's idea from the real Life event of the Burning Man, which is held in a desert each year to show the creativity of others. There is no buying or selling there, other than required items such as water and coffee and the like, but it's a place to bring your bike and view the unique creations of others. Burning Life does almost the exact thing as the event, even having a giant wooden man to be burnt at night just like in the real event. 

burning life

Ok burning life was intresting. I cant really say I experienced it that much because I havent been on second life like I  useally am. From what I did experience though it seemed like it was a a fun event. Taking from what was going on I think that I was enjoying my self because of the fact that no one stopped what they were doing and yelled out GODZILLAAAA. which is kind of annoying sometimes. but enough of that let me tell you about what I did at this event. First I ended up in a monster porta-potty and then I ended up in babbal and finally I ended my day at the church of technoo. Dancing all my cares away with my classmates and the professor. Then after that I went and wandered around and talked to some people before I jumpped on a hot air balloon and rode that for a while. Then I jumpped off and that was about it for my burning life adventures. any way I will come back with more about other intresting stories and pictures.

newest poses

Ok now its time for you to see how I died....I died in the first one from an axe in my back and then I died from being hanged. the last one isnt showing death I am just lounging about by the pool in second life while I worked on my tan.  lol....( full metal dragons cant tan.) but any way 

i am working on more intresting pictures and I have more to show so hold on while I post them up with theis one ok...now the one of me as a ( male) elf ( I say male because one of my classmates thought I was a girl but I AM NOT ) sitting in a tree. then after that one I found this avatar and I have been sticking with this one for two main reasons. The first one is because my name is godzilla and the second one is because it is so cool. ^^ yeah and I also like the fire that I can breathe.  oh and the girl that I am with is one of my friends. she goes by then name of black rose. She is a pretty cool friend of mine.  Any way its time to get to class so I will talk to you guys and girls later. 

 Godzilla

Chaos Theory

So I was really bored today and decided to play a game I haven't played in a while... Splinter Cell:Chaos Theory. This game is so ahead of its time, it was released in 2005 but it is still one of the best looking games I have played. If you don't know what Splinter Cell is ill bring you up to speed: You are a spy for the U.S. government in a secret branch called Third Echelon. The game starts off with an American ship sunk by a North Korean missile and its up to you (San Fisher) to find out who ordered the missile launch. The gameplay is incredibly fun, all the missions are at night or in a building and its your goal to sneak through the shadows and past guards to get to your objective. You have a bunch of really cool gadgets that actually exist in real life and you have to use them to get through without being seen. The main gadget is night vision, if you didnt have this the levels would be really hard to see. You also have two different guns, i silenced pistol, and a special gun that shoots out rubber bullets, sticky shockers to knock out enemies and sticky camera to look around corners. This game is just plain awesome and even if you start playing it today it wont seem like an outdated game. 

The Legend Of Dragoon

Well currently I am playing a great game called the legend of dragoon. this awsome game was made in 2000 and has really good graphics for the time. It follows the story of a young man by the name of dart and his adventures throughout the world Endiness. The game is four discs long and if your dedicated and play until 2:00 in the morning you can beat this game in about three days. any way this game is really good because of the unique story line, the plot devices and most importantly the four discs for the playstation one consol. That was never done before on the playstation consol and I guess never will be because the playstation has evolved since then. lol.........I Godzilla is playing the game right now in my room with me...our friend Allison is watching him play and he is on the forth disc and almost at the end of the game so now I am going to watch him.

Weekly Blogg: Spore

Spore is a game that I just purchased and is made by the creators of the Sims. It takes what was the original aspect of the game and advances it way beyond that. In this game, the player is allowed to create a creature and evolve it through Five time periods. The periods start with the Cell, Creature, Tribal, Civilized, then lastly Space. The First two stages allow for the player to evolve his or her creation and the last three are about creating alliances with others or creating the ultimate empire. The player has nearly endless options for costomizing the creation the player makes. Once the player enters the more advanced stages, Creation of buildings, cars, planes, boats, and even space ships is allowed. The last stage even allows for the player to explore the Milky Way and colonize planets and even destroy them. There are endless ways to play this game and I see it lasting for a long time into the future.

Second Life video

The movie that we watched in class was kinda dull in my point of view. But, Will try hard to not focus on the negative in this post but rather what was good. I think the way the game designers set up the game was very creative and unique. The ability for game players to do what they want with the land they have is very interesting. This allows for player to be creative and do what they want with their creations. This is what I believe to be the key aspect of Second Life. With out this feature, Second Life would be another online game that attempts to mimic real life Socialization.

Reaction to video

I was really surprised by the space that Second Life would take up on an actual CD/DVD. The fact that it would take up multiple terabytes amazes me. The reason that I am so amazed by this is because most of those multiple terabytes of information are all user created objects, buildings, and land. It is mind blowing that the game started out very simply and grew exponentially in terms of byte usage, all because of the users that play Second Life. Adding to the mind blowing-ness, all of the objects that are created, can be extremely detailed, and the process that one has to go through to create such objects, I find, is extremely difficult and time consuming. The fact that an online game like Second Life could grow to the size that it is now in such a short time is almost too much to comprehend. This is what I found most interesting about the video.

the video from class

the video wasn't very intresting but I did find the part about how they turned the atoms into prims. That was pretty sweet but I am not really in to all of that technical talk. I also liked the part about how they left second life totally in the hands of the players and didnt create all of the buildings for the players. I also liked how they talked about making the world's sky move continuously. Which makes the world feel more realistic then worlds like WoW.

Internet = A new creative outlet?

In middle school I discovered something: I could express myself creatively through the internet. No longer was I limited to email and IM, it was then that I discovered forums. Through this I was able to learn how to post pictures of my own creation. And now I've had a lot of practice with creating graphics directly through the computer. The internet allows us to express ourselves in a variety of ways, whether it be through music or art. There are tons of art and music sites that focus on the everyday person, rather then a celebrity or someone who is famous. For example, one of my friends has a guild on GaiaOnline that is entirely dedicated to art. All aspects of art! From drawing to music, and design to writing. Along with this new talent is discovered, a long with a realization that some of us lack talent. -_- But instead of looking down at this I believe we should use it to improve ourselves. I think that posting our creations on the internet allows use to get instant feedback from people who otherwise might be biased because of their like or dislike of us. These people, who don't know us, are able to look at our art from a less biased viewpoint. Unfortunately with posting your works on the internet comes a major risk: stolen art. I always find someway to mark my art but hows that supposed to stop a person from claiming it as their own? If you can accept this risk then posting your creative work on the internet will have and does have a lot of benefit.

The picture is something I created on a whim one day in a program called Gimp. The gif animation is something I created for said friend's art guild.

Always Growing...

One of the concepts of the video that I found the most interesting was the idea of Second Life always growing. In the video he mentioned Second Life started out looking like a ‘shanty town’, this I find hard to see. There are so many different sims, and I haven’t stumbled across one that looks the same. Along with these areas there are items created by the users and put together by them too to create a believable environment for your avatar to explore. The possibilities when it comes to creating are almost endless as you manipulate prims to your liking. I enjoy making something entirely abstract from what started out as a simple geometric shape. However, there is some limitations. Many of the areas having building disallowed to prevent griefers from littering up their sim and causing them to put a lot of work in keeping it tidy. If you want to build I suggest looking for a place that offers building like a sandbox or group land. Here are a couple of things to keep in mind as you build: First, respect the land and the people in it. If you don’t then you might just get booted from it and second, clean up when your finished unless you have permission to leave your creation in the land or you own the land yourself. This helps the sim look clean and tidy for other users, and frees up prim space.

The pictures are from land owned by Trilegy Corporation, that allows its members to build in it's provided free land.

Bucketheadness

A long time ago, in the summer of 1969, there was a preacher man. This preacher stumbled upon a helpless infant. He named him brian, and cared for him as his own son. He read his son many books, and once, while reciting lines from the bible to brian, he noticed that brians eyes were like that of a demon form the abyss. This scared the preacher so much that he cast him out of his house and condemned him to live in the preachers chicken coop with his chickens. He would toss KFC buckets filled with chicken bones that brian would eat and make grotesque sculptures with. Around the age of ten, the preacher tossed a very old and abused acoustic guitar into the coop. Brian picked up the guitar and instantly was making very beautiful music with it. But beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as the preacher only heard evil sounds coming from the instrument. Brian soon discovered cinema, and by lloking through the gaps in the chicken coop walls, he could make out the screen of a drive-in theater. This was no ordinary drive-in theater. This drive-in only played movies of terror and horror. Brian could not hear any of the audio coming from the theater, so he made his own soundtracks to the movies with his guitar. His favorite movie was the texas chainsaw massacre. Many times he saw this movie, and was so influenced by it that he made a mask for himself out of the chicken bones and a hat out of the KFC bucket. This is the fateful day that buckethead was born. It was on this day that Buckethead broke out of the coop, and was discovered by the world to be the greatest guitarist on the face of the earth. Many years passed, and although fairly unknown by most of the world, he still had a fair amount of followers. And then, on the night of September 25, 2008, he came to minneapolis, MN. It was a fairly average show for buckethead, a mosh pit here and there, people gaping in awe at his tremendous ability. Near the end of the show he decided to do the unthinkable. He came to the front of the stage, and, while soloing with his left hand, shook the hands of three young men in the front row. These three lucky guys were Brett Hiemenz, Luke Schwanke, and Tyler Kapus. It was glorious. His hands were like that of an angel.

Excited

Ok Today I am excited because I have some more pictures.  These pictures are of my new avatar.  I really do like him.  Ok I am meditating in these first two pages and in the last one I am in a spacestation that I found that is about 860 feet in the air the spaceship is called Space Station Alpha. I am having a lot of fun exploring Second life I have made some new friends and I am really liking my classmates.  It seems like two of them need me  to explain how this world works. But we are learning to use it togeather and it is cool. I guess that sometimes peeople just need other people to help them pass a class or something. lol

  Anyway I am having fun and I will show you more pictures from my adventures in SL. I will be back with more.  

I am back and better then ever. Man it isnt every day that I get to become a full metal dragon. lol Any way I have been finding more and more freebie lands because thats how I got my character to the way it is now. My dragon can breath fire and apperantly shoot out laser beams  but I cant figure out how to do it. I am keeping at it though so when I figure it out I will let you know about it. but from what I have read about it, its mainly for show and thats about it. Any way I beleive that despite every thing my classmates say about this world isn't true. if you can get into WOW then this should be a piece of cake. Any way that is all for today.

The Big WoW or the small Acclaim games

BEFORE I START COMPARING THESE: THIS IS NOT A "WoW is better than anything" post
This is a comparison of a widely populated server versus a smaller populated game/server.
For example, a lot of you know about WoW... I should say all of you actually, but I know something like Maplestory or one of Acclaim's games are less known than WoW. We'll say your a typical MMO player and have no clue about any MMO other than WoW. I play in a cworded server, no matter where I go there are people,and I myself am not a social soul online. So I must deal with gankers, Kill stealers and other idiots online. I would just have to suck it up or get on out of my schedule to be alone.
Now, think about a less populated game, such as Maplestory ( I know it has a lot of people to and not the best choice but it still doesn't have as many people as WoW does.) I get to choose between seven servers versus WoW's 20-30 something servers, but there are less people and since Maplestory isn't big main steam here, it doesn't attract the morons and fools you would be forced to play with on a big population server. There are enough people that you can meet and interact with others but you can't get too picky, and yet, someone who you can befriend and have fun with online.
The economy is another thing that is directly affected by this in more ways than one. If it's a big game, farmers will go to the trouble of gathering money/items of value to overflow and overthrow the market so that you have to pay through the nose to get what you want. Also, more people=more competition and more selling audience. So, it's a double-edged sword, low cheap economy or high priced awesome items. I personally, would love the former of the two, so that required or necessary items are easy to get to advance but the pretty items that most of the class values are very high priced or not even there. If you follow my posts (if your reading this, you better, or your just a fool all together for only looking at a page in a book) you'd know I'm a bit of a treasure hunter and I search out for valuable items rather than having them delivered to me on a silver platter.

Prim=atom? Ruh?

From the video that we observed in class, I can't stop thinking about how he classifies a prim in the game to an atom in the real life. To me, I can't fathom that comparison however anyone tells me. Something we can't see or feel that makes up the world compared to something we can easily shape, change color, twist, and make our own. From what I just said, it sounds like we get to play God, not until we go to scripting where we can actually make this object we create into something that can reply from touch or time ( all depends on the creator/scripter).
But, think back to what else he said, he mentioned he was supposed to be a physics man, and yet this breaks all laws of physics we can attempt in this world and yet he says this is a "sufficient" second world. I guess from the eyes of someone who knows coding languages, designing programs, and real world chemistry,physics, and then try to combine them is illogical.
I also understand that it's not our world and I should suspend my disbelief while in the game but this is just a copy of the what my disbelief is! I can't just say this is realistic and make up my own version of realistic like he says, it the definition and true form of Chaos, where so many mind come together and are not limited. So instead of challenging what he said about atoms and prims being the same, I think I more challenge his thought of Second Life being a virtual equivalent of our world. Because it's impossible to have stuff in Second Life in the real world until we realize two more dimensions and have the power to create stuff that can even hope to rival what the human mind can think of.

Inside Second Life

As i watched the clip, i was taught that the basic concept of the worlds physics was based on a simple atom. Not atoms that create our world but the create Second Life's world. Its a simple box. A box that you take and create an environment with. Second Life is based on simulation.

Most of the objects created in second life where created by second life users. An investor that posted a blog about second life commented on how he thought that second life was not mainstream enough for our society, unlike World of Warcraft.

Second life is all interconnected. You can walk from one place to an other or fly. Second life is based on the concept of "One World" that everyone can be a part of. Allowing anyone to created and add to the world of Second Life. There is a "magical" interaction between users. Because you can create yourself to look as you want and you have chat communication option, people in real life create friendships through this game. Its as if your right next to the person but your not. That's what attracts so many people in this world.

second life video

Well watching the second life video was pretty interesting. I was interested by the atomic system that they talked about.  using the cubes they created the whole world of second life. that since they couldn't make atoms they made digital atoms. they were mainly talking about how it would become physical due to the physic's engine. then they used a scripting language to it so anyone can use it. I found it very interesting because I could never do anything like that. But the techniques that he showed us I find are fascinating.  they made the clouds out of a fluid system. the whole second life uses 1 million mega volts. Its interesting but very complex. I liked how they made it like a lego land. where they lay down the land and then let everyone else create everything in the land. 

   I really  like how they made second life sort of like the real world. And not so much like world of warcraft. I think that they did make a good choice about making the world like that. Because It really allows for interactivity between players and it allows for more friends. I must say though It was funny to see how the former C.E.O of second life had to say about his the game that he had helped to create.

Friday Afternoon (McCain\Palin

It was on the 19Th of September, this last Friday, that i carpooled with two of my friends to see the McCain and Palin rally at the Blaine airport. Now that is an experience that I recommend to anyone. To see the potential President and Vice President of the United States is a very cool experience.

As we walked in, the airport was full of security, including the secret service and a few different city police officials. Have you ever seen the secret service in real life? They look and act like how "Hollywood" portrays them. They have the black suits with the earpieces and they are all huge men.

Outside of the airport about .5 miles away, a huge group of protesters where gathered together protesting issues on "peace," and "The War in Iraq and Middle East." The protesters took school buses for transportation. They where shouting out certain profanities and other such things.

It was quite the experience and I'm really glad i went. I will leave you with this.. I went for the experience and to gain some sort of knowledge behind McCain and Palin's beliefs.

Halo: MLG

Back in the days of Halo 2, Several friends and I decided to start our own Halo team. Our goal was to attend the local tournaments and try to win some money or other prizes. The team consisted of four friends that have know each other for years and know each others play style. The first tournament we went to we dident win but did very well for our first time ever playing against people at or above our own skill level. We ended up replaceing one of our team members after the first tournament, but that was only a minor setback. Our second time was our best. We placed third. We should have placed second, but lost the game by one kill. (I had the kill but my friend took a sniper shot to the face for the final kill.) We got free entry to the next tournament and placed third aswell. Even though we never made it to the major league, we still had alot of fun and I wouldent mind going back to some tournamets for halo 3.

If I had 1000 Lindins.

If I had 1000 lindins what would I do? Most of you would assume that I would purchase enough weapons to take out a group of Graboids (if you dont get this joke, for the love of God, watch Tremors.) you would be incorrect. I would also not choose to purchase a large spacecraft or fast car. I would purchase my own building. I would want a nice and tall building from which I start my own company in Second Life to make a pathetic attempt to generate real money. If this wasent an option, I would but my own island and become its ruler.

Zombies Attack!!!

If the apocalypse rolled across the earth and people started becoming zombies, there would be shotgun in hand. As we ran screaming  saw the blood soaked sidewalks. We wondered what the hell was going on. I grabbed my shotgun and as many rounds as I could carry. I led my friends out the back door of the next door neighbors house and went one by one. Everyone had the most random weapons such as: forks, knives, pool sticks, and much more. We secretly snuck from tree to tree to try and see what type of monster could rip peoples limbs off. We decided to go to the pub across town. That was one of the safest places we could think of. Running into danger is what we were ready for. We ran into zombie after zombie cutting off their heads and shooting them in between the eyes. As we gave into knowing we probably wouldn't survive we all decided to get completely belligerent and do a target practice from the roof of the bar. As we shot the local heroes and everyone we despised in the processed we saw Woopie Goldburg moaning and walking in a slow and unbalanced way. As we put down bets to see who could kill her first we took back a couple of beers and said, "Take it up the. . " BANG! And thats what would happen.

If I Had A Million Dollars

If I were to have any amount of money it Second Life I would have one million lindens. I know its a lot but seriously if i had a choice why not? Once I had all that money I would just gamble it away. Then once I made a bunch of money from gambling I would buy all the coolest things I could.

If I had a large amoung of lindens....=O

Well, there are two main things. *Tangy smiles* Heh. I would upload and shop! I love to create things so by learning how to create clothes I have found a way to express myself in the world of SL. I'm even tempeted to sell items, which I'm trying to do with my shirt right now, not working out so well. D= I want to learn how to make prim things....Anyways I would go out and buy the stuff I've had my eye on, like making my avatar a vampire with the Bloodlines system. I'm going to by their hud and wormwood potion, because I want to be able to choose my sire. Dx You know how I said I wanted to upload? I don't want to do this to create clothes but I want to upload all of my Hushy songs!!!! Why? Simply because I love the band. I also kind of want to start a group for them....the problem is finding fellow fans! Then we could have our own land dedicated to the group and it would be awesome. I've got a picture of the female lead in my textures that I plan on using to make a wall in my home dedicated to the band. =) Basically if I got a good amount of lindens, it would dissapear quickly.

What have learned so far?

I didn't know what to expect from the class this semester - especially teaching inside a virtual world. I knew that the normal issues (crowd control, focus, etc) would be important, but there was also the technological side to overcome. What happens when only some of the class can access the technology? What if there is an issue with the computers in the lab where we're teaching?

There have been some big technical issues, to be sure. Second Life certainly has more than its fair share of problems, and their servers tend to get overloaded when there are a lot of logins - which happens to be right when class meets. When I first began exploring SL, a high usage was about 20,000 at once. There was a lot of talk about the 30,000 barrier. Would the technology even allow such a thing? Today it is not unusual to see 70,000 logged onto the grid when class starts!

What does it mean if there are server issues on the Linden Lab side? Well, everything is effected: inventory, clothing, appearance, building and editing...it makes the experience quite frustrating, especially for new residents (like our class!).

On SCSU's side, we've had to deal with an odd bug in the cache that causes our computers to think that SL is already running. SL is limited to running in only one window (although there are methods of getting around this) and so we've had to learn how to delete our caches before we logon. The downside to this is that it takes a lot longer for everything to download.

In the classroom we've had some rocky moments. I've been very close to banning laptops in class - far too often it isn't a technical issue with SL that has caused a student to be unable to logon, it's been Spore, or some other application. I'm hopeful that those issues won't rear their ugly head again, but I'm on the lookout!

Once everyone gets logged on, it's utter chaos...wonderful and disturbing! In any learning situation it's difficult to manage 12 different personalities who learn at different rates (and in different ways) but for the most part we've managed to get most of the tasks completed. As I expected, some enjoy the social aspects, some enjoy the building, some creating clothing...

I could go on and on - but the bottom line is that I've loved every minute of it and I hope that the students have too! Now I'm headed back online...SL keeps crashing as I try to return the hundreds of objects that have been left all over my land :)

C G L

CGL. College Gaming League. World of Warcraft 3v3 tournament. There is a tournament on the horizon, everyone is warming up for it as i type. This tournament uses its own server, complete with unique vendors that sell season two gear and tier five gear as well, as well as all the enchants and gems that you can fit into your bags. To gain access to this tournament, you must verify that you are in fact a college student. After that, the tournament directors give you a choice of either alliance or horde. I myself chose alliance, because alliance pwn in arena. At the character selection screen, you have a level 70 character of every class in full season two. I decided to stick with what i know, so i selected the human rogue. As soon as i logged in, i realized that none of my gear was gemmed or enchanted. I also wasn't specced at all either. I went to go buy gems and enchants, which cost about 2 gold per gem/enchant. It doesnt matter how much things cost, cause you have 5k gold to begin with and you can replenish your gold supply at any time. After gemming and enchanting and speccing, i was ready to fight. A few of my friends hopped on and we played some practice matches. I have no chance of even placing in this tournament, but it would be nice to get the top prize, an alienware area-51 m15x laptop, one for each team member. For those who don't know, thats about a 4k laptop. Its pretty fancy. As i said before, i have no hope in getting a prize, but it is just good fun playing around with different classes and specs.

If I had 1k Lindens...

If i had one thousand lindens...what would i do? I have found, in my second life experience, that you dont really need lindens. There are tons of cool items floating around for free. You just need to know where to look. With my lindens i wouldnt buy any land, as it is pointless. It is pointless to buy land because even if you make some sweet awesome place, nobody will ever visit it. And to buy a parcel of land and seal it off from the rest of the world is the most pointless thing i have ever heard of. What would you do? Just sit there and chill by yourself? SL is a social network game. As for what i would do with my lindens, i would most likely hand them out to someone that is thoroughly convinced that the lindens will make the game that much better for them.

(Literal) Vent Rage

I know that all the big MMO players know about ventrilo, but for those who don't, its just a free program which allows speaking between teams/clans/guilds for better coordination than trying to get their typing WPM up to the 100s. From that sentence, it may sound like I'm going to talk about Ventrilo, Teamspeak and all the others, but I'm not. This post is about pointing out how people act when talking to other people over the Internet literally.
So many people are normal and talk and act normal over it like it was originally made for. But some people want to abuse this very useful program to have some "fun" by applying and spamming soundboards, the most common is Duke Nukem and then so boldly put it on Youtube so everyone can see what they did to piss off a group of people.
But if you keep the IP and port secure it's hard for something like that to happen, or your admins are always on and ban happy. I would personally know this because I am an admin on my old guild's vent and I'm on whenever I'm online, sometimes talking to the old friends or just in my channel which only other admins or myself can enter. If someone does something like that, I have the ban command linked to one of my keys so all I have to do is click the name and then hit the key, and then the person is not heard from again until I unban them( which is normally never.)
So if your admins are smart and on duty, you don't have to worry about vent harassment, but what if they are in your guild and an official spaz or the most hardcore person in the world, my best example is Troxed, the guild leader and main tank of the once great War Ensamble. The man was a psycho and a hell of a show(you can go see for yourself), but the man was a main part of the guild so the people had to get use to the psycho yelling at them and then it turned into a great soundboard and he became sort of a legend.
My whole point of this weekly rant is that, with the power to speak to other people around the world, what are we capable of? The real answer is to annoy the living hell out of other people, we are so screwed...

Lindens Lindens, Everywhere

If I had a million lindens, first I would buy my own land and block it off so I would have an area to call mine. I also noted that it costs Lindens to upload stuff such as sounds and textures. I would upload all new fabrics for clothes so I didn't have to pick from the ugly textures we are given. Creating new gestures would also be fun with some sounds and outside influence. So I think in total I would only spend some for private land to do whatever I wish and then add textures and sounds so that I could make my avatar as unique as I can. Other than that I have no other objectives or ideas to do with the lindens. This week's blog seems hollow and quickly decided versus a lot of the other assignments and blogs. The big reason why I don't go out and then buy like thousands of toys and other garbage is because if I look I can find something just as good for free. Which may raise the question of why would I rather look than just pay since I have so much money? I find joy in trying to locate hard to find items and the item itself is just a reward. Twiddles, I demand a more thought out assignment next time so that we can talk about it easier.

IF I HAD A THOUSAND LINDENS

 Well if I had a thousand lindens I would buy a lot of things. You know like a godzilla skin or a house or something like that. I suppose that I would have to think about some of the things  that i would buy though because I would get some clothes and mabey buy a piece of land. I dont really know though. Thinking about it I would more then likely save it for something important. Because I am kind of a tight wad when it comes to cash. :) any way thats what I would do if I had a thousand lindens. I know its not much but its all I could come up with. I dont know mabey if your lucky I will tell you more before sunday.  :P

LAUNDRY DAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Well its true..even giant lizards need to do laundry now and again. This time is no different for me. :) lol. Yeah I am just sitting in the laundry room washing my clothes and thinking about volleyball. I think that our team is good we just need more pratice and a better formation would be nice too. Currently we are 0 for 2 so we need to pick up the pace and get our engines up and running at 100 percent. The next team we face go by the name squirrels and they are 2 and 0 so we need to put a stop to them now. I beleive that we can because we have an original member of team gorilla coming back and playing with us. We call him lumberjack on the court and hes an ok player so we will see what is going to happen. We have decided to go with a 4 man front and it will go like this: if we win the serve then we will have server go in ( by the way I will be using their nicknames to concel their true identies) with "the souix" intimadtor and gorilla. if not then we go with the turnaround, the twins and spikers.  start us off. Because these two formations I beleive are focused on offense and defense. Of course there is some rotation involved but other then that I beleive that this new stratgey will win us the game. Hopefully any way its time to switch loads so I got to go now. Bye.

Aquarium - JoeM Mills

Our class attended an aquarium in Korea town and analyzed what we saw. After doing so, we found a spot in the aquarium and used the "snapshot" option to take pictures of our avatars. Basically, we where literally inside the aquarium with the fish and other underwater creatures and plants. There was a sizable octapus hanging out by the left side of the aquarium. The aquarium is sour

I took my picture with Godzilla2000, who is a girl with wings and wears tight clothing. Behind us is the left part of the aquarium.

rage vent

Begin rant. I don't know if this is considerd a virtual world, but I want to discuss my extreme hatred for the online study program called Aleks. Aleks is an online program used in my Chemistry class, why the teached uses that over standard teaching I have no idea. The program has the used log on and complete questions in selected areas. This is where my hatred for this disgrace for a study tool comes into play. The questions are so horrible worded and pick that half the time spent is makeing sure you have the answer in the correct format. If get something wrong, the program offers a crappy description of what to do. I also think the program wasent even made for english speaking students. I have noticed many sentences that dont make any sence and look like they have been poorly translated. End rant.

Music

So I was thinking that music might be able to be considered a "virtual world," possibly used to communicate. It would be very easy for someone to create anything from a complex song to a simple beat, that would be able to have a message encoded into it using the beat or word patterns. This would be a very good tool for people to communicate messages that may have a sensitive or secret meaning, and communicate it to a large base of people. It would be very interesting to devise a code using some type of musical element and communicate using it, or even see if any previously recorded songs adhered to the code and had any messages within the music. I dont know. Just a thought.

Subliminal Messaging

So this is a kinda random topic but I wanna talk about subliminal messaging for a bit. I was watching TV the other day and during the show i was watching a quick message popped up and said "Rockband 2 in stores tomorrow!" and i was really surprised. I don't think that was the mistake of the broadcast station.  I looked into it and found that subliminal messaging originated in 1898 by a psychologist named Knight Dunlap and he found that it could be used in advertising. Fifty years later a market researcher tested subliminal messaging in his theatre to advertise popcorn and pop. He used a tachistoscope which is a machine that flashes pictures at very fast speeds to show his messages which included "drink Coca-Cola" and "Hungry? Eat popcorn". After the test he found that popcorn sales went up 57%. 

Yeah so I was just walking around in Second Life and I found this really cool but random place. It looks like stone hedge but there are crazy techno/rave lights going off all over the place. I think it would be an awesome place for a rave. If you look in the back of the picture you can three random teepee's just sitting there with smoke billowing out of them.The Second Life world has the most random things I have ever seen. 

Second life Snapshot

So I was in second life, and I teleported to some place that sounded cool. I ended up falling a very long ways, landing on a 2x2 platform, falling off, and then falling a while more, and landing on a stripclub. odd. I, not for the obvious reasons, but rather to see why there would be a stripclub in second life, ventured into the stripclub. Luckily there were no strippers in the club at the time. I noticed that it was also a place to buy clothes. However, there were some "naughty" pictures on the walls. They werent very attractive.
The picture is of me sitting on a swingset outside of the stripclub...(why the hell is there a swingset outside of a stripclub!?)

Sl photo : I am Bamph

This is a photo of my ingame avatar. I tried to make my ingame avatar look as strong and meanincing as possible. The reason that I added a gun to my avatar was to show that i like to play shooter type games. This dosent mean that I am a violent person, but rather that I like to act strong in the virtual world. I guess that this photo can also relate to my view on video game violence. I strongly believe that violence in games dosent make us more violent people. The violence in games is fake and unreal. It dosent even come close to the real hell that true world violence and war is. Rather then find some exotic location in second life, I took the photo in our online "classroom". I wanted this to show how I am currently a student at SCSU.

Cabin!!

Alright, so in this post I decided to talk about my cabin i just came back from this weekend. So the first picture is a picture of my aunt and uncle, Jean and Ken's cabin which we call The Lodge. Of all four of the family cabins, this one os the biggest, it has three floors, including the basement, while the other three have only once floor. The next one is my aunt and uncle, Katie and Rick's cabin. We just call it Rick and Katie's, i know, clever name, right? Next is the cabin I stay in, we call it the Red Cabin. (Gee, i wonder why we call it that :D). The next one is my three aunts' cabin, basically we just call it the grey cabin. (Again...can you guess why?)My dad is one of eight, one of his brother's doesnt come up to the cabin so the four cabins house the other seven siblings' families. I loooooove going to my cabin the summer because I get to see my cousins, aunts and uncles who live out of state. I was up there this last weekend, which is when I took these pictures. The only thing is, is that it rained all weekend. It was still nice to up there again though. :)

Virtual Worlds - Picture

This picture was taken in Urban Worlds and basically I'm sitting in this position cause...well..its the way my character just sat. It said 'Recline' so I'm just like, sweet, I can recline. I though it was actually gunna be me like sitting leaning back with my feet out in front of me, but this is what actually happened. The moral of the story? Don't believe everything you read....... :D

Meet Solisaaki

My characters name is Solisaaki. I chose to have that name because well I couldn't think of anything and so I just chose one of my characters names on WoW. I chose to dress him the way I did because I can’t ever get him to look the way I want him to so I decided to just conceal his appearance. I took this picture in a place called Crescent Beach, they sell medieval items and much much more, but none of its free : ( . They also have a couple chairs that you can sit at and earn two lindens an hour which is what I am doing in this picture at the moment. So far I haven't seen more than four or five people at this place at any given time so it’s a nice place to be if you just want to be alone for a while. I have been to a few other places trying to find a place where I can fight other people for fun since I like to place the first person shooter games, but since you can't kill anyone in this game it loses some of its appeal. But i suppose I'm still a little lost because of all the options of places to go kind of like "Where do I want to go today", but there is also fun in that.

Second Life exploration

Exploring in second life is easy but difficult at the same time. IT is easy because all you need to do is click where you want to go and teleport. But it's difficult because since there are so many place you can go in second life that you kind of need to know where you want to go otherwise it could take you several minutes to find what you need, but I think that that can be the fun of it. You can click to a place and have it not be the place you want to go but when you do get there it is actually a better place to be then where you had wanted to go originally, but also I suppose that that can be very frustrating. You might have to go to a a specific place and then not be able find it cause it’s lost in all the other places in the same area. But then again there is the search application that will let you search a word have everything that has that word in it come up to narrow down your search significantly. But I myself like the fact there there are so many places that you can go. It gives you so many possibility's to find an place that will give you nearly anything you want and then some.

Second Life

I think that second life is a good game in the fact that you can create items in the game and then sell them to people to make money in the game which is like WoW but with more variety because you can create basically anything. Since the last class i have been exploring a little bit of the world and have found a couple of interesting things. One of the being a medieval clothing and weaponry "store". Also several places that will just give you free cloths or weapons or attachments. But what i find most frustration about second life is the money factor. It is not that easy to get money in second life. You either have to buy it or find a place that will give you some for sitting on a place for an hour at a time. Now the sitting isn't really that bad but you cant just afk it all day and get free money. You have to do something at least every 29 minutes or you'll go into an inactivity faces and not get anything. Or you can go to some places and they will give you lindens just by putting them int your profile. But I figure that once I've been playing the game for a while it will start to get easier to make money because I'll know how tpo do many more things.