So someone handed me a link to Youtube trailer for ‘Mozart and the Whale.’ It’s a movie about people with Asperger’s Syndrome. It looks pathetic, but I’ll find it and watch it anyway.

But the real reason I’m posting this is that all kinds of Aspies are talking to each other on YouTube. For instance:

And, most especially, the video that inspired me to post this: This one. She has embedding turned off, so I can only link to it. Go look now. She’s wrestling with it in all the good, interesting ways. And look what else she does. There’s a comic called Artist/Autist.

WTF? What magic spell does Ahmed Chalabi hold over US leadership? The military raided his compound in Iraq in 2004, and now he’s being introduced by none other than Gen. Petraeus in a new leadership role.

I repeat: WTF?

It’s amazing how having your little dolly avatar on Second Life leaning up against a giant animated cat can actually relax a person. The fantasy is compelling, especially if it’s on a beach on a sim called Happy Clam Island, with the sounds of a synthetic surf piping through your headphones. The cat doesn’t purr, but I bet there are plans to make it so.

So I sat my little dolly on the cat for a while, and did some other stuff like a little bit of revision on a writing project and so forth.

And then, lo and behold… Someone else showed up. They had come specifically to lay down on the cat.

There are two positions on the cat. You can sit like I’m doing in the picture, or you can drape yourself over it, spread-eagle, your face buried in its fur. And that’s what this other guy did. He explained that he had been working for 9 hours straight.

We sat there for a while, not talking to each other. After about fifteen minutes, he said, “Well, time to go make some dinner. Seeya!” And was off.

So I’m not the only one.

In order to belong, and have the ability to exclude.

Cuz that’s how it works.
   

I just answered this Featured Question, you can answer it too!

I keep writing about Second Life, but…. O well.

If you want an easy best-of list (with pictures) for thing to see in SL, you don’t need to go much further than this page on the Not Possible In Real Life ‘blog. The rest of the ‘blog is quite excellent, too.

At issue is mega-prims, which are single-primitive objects larger than 10 meters. You’re only supposed to be able to make a prim 10m or less, but there was a bug in one version of the SL viewer client that allowed you to make mega-prims, and so someone did. Even though the bug was fixed in the client, the cat was out of the bag and you could still copy the mega-prims and do what you wanted with the copy.

And if you click through that link, you’ll see some of the amazing things people have done with them.

So far today on SL:

A talk on electronic publishing, where I learned about three things.

1) Zinio.com, which is a proprietary magazine reader. I only learned that it exists, so I can’t summarize it, except that maybe you subscribe to magazines through it, and read them online.

2) The emerging EPUB standard, which is a very flexible XML format for e-books. One of my main gripes about e-books has been the lack of a standard. Even HTML would have been OK, but I suppose publishers have to do something different.

3) Amazon shorts, where you buy single short stories in any of a number of formats. Read it on the Amazon.com website, or download for whatever reader you’ve got.

This was from the publisher of The Seventh Sun, a prim-based tabloid on SL. ‘Prim-based’ meaning it’s an in-world object, and you can’t really print it out, it takes a year to load each new page, and you have to be an expert at camera controls to use it. That said, it’s a pretty good newsmag.

This was all at the Town Center on Cookie Island. Yes, Cookie Island.

Sometimes you plan to bus-hop from restaurant to grocery store and back home, and some times you end up walking 10 miles because you don’t feel like waiting for the bus.

And sometimes you end up walking 10 miles after night falls, some of it through a city park that’s in the bottom of a wooded ravine where you’ve never been before, glad that you changed the batteries in your flashlight before you left.

The ravine part was before the full moon had risen. After it came up, though…. No need for a flashlight at all, to see. I still had it turned on, pointed at the ground, to signal cyclists. People were out on their bikes tonight.

Except for the guy who was bringing his dog down to the trail to poop, I didn’t see anyone for the last third of the trail or so. Just me and my shadow.

My shadow and me.

I think I want to live at the southern end of the Ravenna slough, where Ravenna (the neighborhood) almost becomes UVillage (the neighborhood). Then I could walk past the soccer field and up through the reconstructed wetlands, and hanging out under the 20th Ave. bridge, which seems impossibly delicate.

Follow that last link. Really. It’s Seattle in a nutshell.

My first attempt at making clothing in SL.

What that really means is making clothing in Photoshop and uploading it to SL. Tutorials are not hard to find.

This is actually my second attempt. The first attempt… We will not speak of it. Version three will have different line breaks.

In the background: Arts and Letters.

emeraldgorp links to this test which covers multiple intelligences. My results:

The Seven Intelligence Areas

Linguistic: 6

Logical-Mathematical: 6

Spatial: 10

Bodily-Kinesthetic: 5

Musical: 11

Interpersonal: 3

Intrapersonal: 10

A Short Definition of your Highest Score

Musical – the ability to understand and develop musical technique, to respond emotionally to music and to work together to use music to meet the needs of others, to interpret musical forms and ideas, and to create imaginative and expressive performances and compositions. Possible vocations that use the musical intelligence include technician, music teacher, instrument maker, choral, band, and orchestral performer or conductor, music critic, aficionado, music collector, composer, conductor, and individual or small group performer.

These things are always imprecise, but music is pretty important to me. But my favorite question is, of course, number twentythree:

I’ve discovered I like dancing to goa trance music. Or at least my avatar does.

Where? Happy Clam Island, of course.

Even though the reality of a DJ spinning for a half-dozen people over the internet is a really wonderful, intimate thing, it’s really more about those half-dozen people than the music.

Friends of the Happy Clam include this guy, who I link to because of this project in particular.

And apropos of nothing:

See also. Search seeqpod.com and find most of these covers.