Airforce's Atavist Outlook

I heard something that made me quite angry this morning, that I had to write about.

One of my good friends is experiencing some anger issues and general insecurities. This can happen to anyone, and the sane thing to do when it happens to you, is to talk to someone about it. I suggested she see a psychiatrist to work out her issues.

She said she couldn't, because the Air Force (who she's employed by) would remove her from flight duty. Apparently the Air Force feels that anyone who's got problems is unfit to serve their country, and unreliable in their duties. This is ridiculous.

I wonder how such an outdated philosophy can still be alive. In the 50's and before, it was taboo to need to see a psychiatrist, but in the modern era, I don't know anyone who hasn't at least once. I have, my father had me see quite a few as a child. Maybe more zealously than I think I needed. But, I don't know anyone who's been HURT by seeing a shrink.

The part that sickens me the most is that it's the fact that they'll PUNISH someone for trying to better themselves. If a person NEEDS that help, the military is slowly pushing them into a corner where they're only able to move downwards.

I've seen it happen. I know a guy locally who got an honorable discharge, despite pulling a gun on his sergeant in Iraq, due to being damaged in such a way.

Dear Crossroads,

It's over. I honestly thought we had a mutual respect going, but apparently all you want is your freedom. You took, and took, without a thought to give back, and.. *sniff*
Anyhow.. our time was good.. but lately, it hasn't been the same..

---

Okay, seriously though. I'm trying not to bring drama to my blag, but I'm sincerely unhappy with what happened. I was away for a Christmas vacation and needed some time away anyhow after some RP that caused some damage to my character.
I returned, to find all of my prims returned, well, all but six. I had not received any IMs asking if I intended to keep them, or even an explanation, they were simply returned.

That, itself was enough to stir anger inside of me, but THEN I happened to walk by the building I once inhabited there. The mini loft I'd built on top of the building was still there, I thought maybe they'd left it there for me, but taken the rest..
THEN, I happened to notice the prims weren't mine. They not only prim cloned the build I'd created, they screenshotted the textures.
I looked to see what they were doing with the warehouse below, and.. not surprising, it was the same thing as I had made - a curiosity/antique shop. Owned by Guinnevere.

I have to assume by the above that the sim owners, Guinnevere and Ravenal thus have no respect for me, or any of their userbase. If money was an issue, I'd offered to PAY for my prim usage, and they had yet to get back to me on it. If prims were an issue, well.. I'd already scaled back my usage upon being requested.

Being a reasonable individual, I would have been willing to work with them. But forget this this. Forget their sim. I won't be returning unless there's some SERIOUS oral pleasure offered by the two sim owners. And then, I still won't respect them.

ALSO-- Angels inducing lust and beating up people in the middle of town!? ...Ang-- Okay, whatever.

Oh! And those six prims that were still mine? The roof of the build they stole. I took them back in an act of civil disobedience.

Situational Reality

This is kinda scaring me..
Background: Late September I got sick, really sick. I was out of it for two weeks, only a few days of which I remember. I was hallucinating with a major fever on and off, and on Halloween night, Jamie dragged me to the ER, where they found I had a lung infection. I also lost like 30lbs, so.. rock on lung infection! But, um.. I saw some crazy shit during it.

In one multi-day hallucination, I was Jacen Solo from Starwars, and my pack of sith homeboys got into brawls with the Jedi in the middle of Wendy's (yes, the restraunt).

In another, I was at work. I remember seeing myself leave the office, and then looked out and saw that I was standing in my apartment complex's parking lot. Oh, and I locked myself out, at 10pm. I had to ask a person who arrived shortly after to let me in the gate.

I had another I woke up from where I'd been at work, somehow dimension crawled into my apartment, couldn't find my glasses. I called a friend who lives nearby to help me find them, but wouldn't let him go in my room, since it was the 'gateway to another dimension'. He eventually went in and it was my bedroom (shocking), where he found my glasses by my bedside table.

Another one expanded my apartment into a mansion, where my living room and the hallway to the mansion intermittently flickered over each other, fighting to decide which was going to be there. I also, in this one, decided Jamie and I were going to become demon hunters and go on a roadtrip. I packed my bags and called him, waiting outside for his arrival until I decided he wasn't coming and went back inside. (Not allowed to watch Supernatural while sick anymore).

Right after that, I had a hallucination where I jumped to the far, far, future, and earth was dead. The only living creatures were reptilian monsters.

Now that I'm well, I keep finding myself brooding over various hallucinations, and begin to wonder if they were 'situationally real'. I don't mean to say that Luke Skywalker exists, but when he told me the soul of Mara Jade was trapped in my blanket, it has situational reality to it. What's the value of experiences that you experienced that didn't have basis in reality? Like Pip in Moby Dick -- he fell overboard and 'experienced God'. Is man's insanity heaven's sense?

Or maybe I'm going batshit insane.

I know I've been kinda quiet on the blog front the last few months.
I said I wouldn't turn this into a diary about my life, but this one's worth posting.
My 'rl' job has changed immensely, yadda yadda, work, yadda yadda SL.

Everything is just line noise at the moment.
Alykia is coming here in one day.
I am way nervous. But also very excited.

Gotta clean my apartment, get a haircut, do laundry.
-Micheru

Journalistic Integrity

So, I've been reading the SL Herald lately! I won't even bother to link to it, because it's all libelous vitriol, conjecture, and it's writers, for the most part are charlatans.

The ammount of posts focusing on the issues of the PN, griefers, Justice League, and making fun of furries has left them at the status of tabloid, I feel like I should be picking up a copy at the supermarket checkout line or something.

But it's not just the herald, Wired recently had a piece glorifying griefers, and making them seem like a valid subculture or hobby. News blogs are recycled in a circle of hype and then disrespect - an article on SL is posted on some website, a day or a week later, it will be paraphrased without credit as a new article on another blog. The Google News listing for SL will show that - http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&q=Second+Life .

Facts are copied from sources without being checked. Parody blogs are taken as serious by 'authors' looking for a quick post topic, and replicated as serious (See the latest parody article about Halo soldiers invading SL - copied and reprinted as the own work of other authors in the news circle).

It makes me sick. And the fact that this is happening with something like SL, makes me worry about -REAL- news. How many news organizations are doing this on articles about things important to 'first life'?

-Micheru

Species Differentiation

I had an awkward run-in yesterday with a robot. I was logging into SL, just before I had to go to work. I just wanted to check my IMs, send a message, grab a notecard and scrawl it down on a piece of paper so I could remember what I had to do after work.

Someone-- some THING, was walking into the outside wall of my living room. Repeatedly, and from the way I caught them mid-stride, it was apparent they had been doing it for some time. So I strolled out my front door, and approached it. It's avatar was black with jagged splayings of random color all over it, like a corrupted image file. Ruth skin, completely newbie shape. That made me a little wary, and still I tried to talk to it. After a moment, it stopped walking into my wall, and turned to stare at me. No words were spoken, and I kept trying to talk to it, even making sound emotes to grab it's attention.

It didn't move, or talk, or do anything. So I eject-banned it, and watched it go flying to my neighbor's parcel. I walked over there and tried a line of german (most of my neighbors in the sim are german), still nothing. It walked into a neighbor's wall for a few moments, then turned, and stared at me. By this time I had given up communicating, and simply stared back at it. After maybe four minutes, it spun around perfectly symmetrically in a 180 degree four times, and disappeared.

There was no way that the avatar was controlled by a human - movement is awkward in SL, and it's almost impossible to spin around four times, stopping on a dime at the exact rotation you started at. Trust me, I spent half an hour trying last night.
So.. assuming it was a bot.. What was it doing? Scoping out my land? Looking for a camping chair? Some more insidious purpose!?

I was quite creeped out for most of the morning, and my coworkers didn't get it when I told them what happened. I called Jtox and he thought I went off the deep end.
Sen Pixie said she thought it might be a database ghost. Piero thought it may be some sort of avatar that had lost it's connection and gone phantom, or a bot script running on auto.

Either way, I don't like waking up to budding new AI trying to get into my livingroom. It can wait until I'm home from work!

-Micheru

Nothing Is True, Everything Is Permitted

"Nothing is true,
Everything is permitted."
-Hassan-i Sabbah, last words

This statement has come to be one of my primary memes - a philosophy in it's obscurity and bluntness, multi-fasceted. Of course, what it originally meant is different than the modern interpretation. Disinformation has a good post on the ancient meaning of this axiom.

How do I interpret the phrase? It's a simple outlook, broken into two pieces:
"Nothing is true"
If nothing is inherently true, then there is no imposing divine law, no earthly binding commandments, no single path to tread, and no punishments for not following any of these.

"Everything is permitted"
If there is no true law, then there is no punishment for not following a true law, that means that your path in this life is free to do as you whim-- to tread where you will, to study all manner of subjects, to not be constrained in a search for information, for love, lust, whatever it is you wish to entertain for a time.

Naturally, this idea is chaotic. Paralleling Allester Crowley's "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."
Innate freedom requires immense compassion. "Discipline precedes freedom." - You may be free to bring a gun to your office and splatter your coworkers' brains across the walls, but this takes a freedom away from others - and eventually, your own freedom. There are always choices, but you greatly limit your own the more you limit others'.

-Micheru