May 21, 2008
-
Second Life: Elpis
A while back I had the idea of doing little profiles of people who are important to me on Second Life. I was hesitant, because first of all it could be sort of like sucking up to them or something, which I don’t want to do, but mainly because it would require making a list of why they’re important and trying to communicate those things without being maudlin or, you know, sincere.
Sincerity is so far out of fashion it’s hard to even say the word. But say it we must because we need to re-engineer the culture to accept it as valid.
So I’m sincere when I say that I really enjoyed hanging out with Elpis Oh this afternoon.
She showed me her grove of trees that illustrates deforestation issues. Or more accurately, illustrates what is required to slow or halt deforestation.
Here we are hugging trees. The whole sim is covered with a randomly-generated forest of trees which will be felled at a rate proportionate to that of deforestation world-wide. You can save the trees, though, by paying them money, or by hugging them. Of course, hugging only prolongs the inevitable; the one way to really put off the destruction of your little tree is to pay it money.
The money collected will be donated to an as-yet-undecided charity working on the problem of deforestation.
But as you stand there hugging your tree or paying it, it tells you all about the value trees give to people.
This exhibit will open soon; I’m not sure when.
I mentioned offhand that I was trying to solve a tricky scripting problem: How to orient a prim to reflect the slope of the land. She said, “Oooo….” and I knew we’d spend the next 45 minutes trying to do it. Which we did.
Elpis is brilliant, and I’m glad to know her as a friend. But we never did figure out what the llGroundSlope() function return value actually means.
Comments (3)
“Sincerity is so far out of fashion it’s hard to even say the word” Yeah, even my spell-checker lists it as “archaic”, ha. …dreamed non-stop about running around in the woods with an extremely sincere girl last night. Hmm.. (I may just take a look at this-here ”World II’, now that my work is through here in the United Snakes.
So, something for Elpis to ponder when she is not scripting … just one of the huge number of issues involving deforestation is population (or maybe more accurately, overpopulation). So, to make this analogous to SL, would she support a ceiling on the total number of avatars allowed to be created in SL as one method of “birth control”?
@beautifulwolf – You’re so right..and in fact the deforestation exhibit is just one of several exhibits we’ve got planned. We now have a full schedule of exhibitions for the next nine months; from this year’s summer solstice right through the fall, winter and lasting through to the Spring Equinox next year. And yes, a population exhibition is one of those planned.