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

Fan Art

I love my friends, fans, and various artistic aquaintances. Saokymo has been drawing me alot, recently. I thought I'd upload a few of her pictures and post them here:

http://img248.imageshack.us/img248/2823/michipdatb1.jpg
http://micheru.com/dump/michbp.jpg
http://micheru.com/dump/mrenoutf.jpg
http://micheru.com/dump/RM128.jpg
http://micheru.com/dump/MDK.jpg
-Micheru

My Transhumanist Thoughts

I've been thinking lately, about the relationship between humanity and it's surroundings. I am a transhumanist, in the way that I think we are meant to be.

I don't see a true order behind nature, I see chaos - not in the negative aspect of the word, but a random generator - chaos decides what color leaves of a plant will be, how a human's skull will be shaped, how a rock erodes, and so on. Nature may have a guiding force behind it, but that force is definitely rolling dice to see how things come out.

Our goal here is to make our own decisions, and the decisions of our environment. I believe that evolution does exist, but it's also wildly chaotic - a force that can make or break a species, a culture, anything. I think the eventual goal of our species is to evolve individually, be it through chemical methods (drugs, street or medical), psycological methods (psychiatry and meditation), scientific methods (stem cell modification, genetic hacking), modificational methods (cosmetic or functional surgery). I want to see people saying, "Hell no, this body isn't good enough for me, I want to make it function as good as it can, and then BETTER!"

Individual mutation, culturally, physically, and emotionally. Making decisions for ourselves that were not made by our societies, by our genetics, by our 'Gods'.
St. Jude would be proud of me.

My goals for the year are three:
Pefect my body - lose what I want to, gain more muscle mass.
Learn to eat better - feed myself in a way that I function to the fullest extent.
Further become self sufficient - allowing myself the freedoms I wish.

Live long, become more than human, more than SUPERHUMAN. Become You.
Mutate and Prosper,
-Micheru