The images in this post are all images I created from scratch except the first one that I downloaded from an out-of-print book and cleaned up.
I thought I would share them, freely, as they are not the type of thing I can easily sell outside of a virtual world but they are occasionally of use for background images for blogs and such. Plus I like to give away stuff just for fun. Good karma you know. Enjoy.
If a link back to this site is provided by you, I would greatly appreciate it. I can use the link juice, as they call it these days.
In the next few days I will make these available as a set free for download as a test for a “gift shop” I will be adding to this site. Can’t wait! In the meanwhile, feel free to download and use as you see fit. Acknowledgment and/or a link back would be nice if you choose to use. Thanks!
GBE2: Week #105 Mentoring
I mentored myself, and sought out mentors, in Second Life® to learn how to “build” and create graphics in 2006 and 2007. I will never know their real names because we were all “avatars” with assumed identities due to the rules of participation in the Virtual world.
The Worlds Inside My Head and The Worlds Outside My Door
I've been neglecting my virtual world in favor of the physical world. This is atypical for me. The world inside my head, my thoughts, ideas, and my written expression of them have always been real to me. I can keep myself entertained for days on ends with my own thoughts. I tell people I could live in a cave if it had wifi. Actually my pencils and paper would see me through an awfully long time too.
Expeditions out into the physical world have been more frequent that typical for me even though I am limping around from an almost two week old ankle sprain. I attended two Meet Ups, Women Entrepreneurs Who Mean Business, and the Tucson eBusiness Owners, and I held the Meet Up which I coordinate, Tucson Women Bloggers, and made my weekly trek to my therapist on the other side of town, and headed just west of downtown, across I10 to the Microbusiness Advancement Center of Southern Arizona, one of 112 Women's Business Centers across the country, and the only one in Arizona, to an orientation session and an assessment session. I also almost made my target date for launching beta version 0.3.1 of BoomHer.net.
I am an ENTJ in Myers-Briggs speak. But the E is just over the Introversion/Extroversion line. Extroverts get energy from being around people and Introverts use energy being around people. I think there are long cycle and short cycle considerations. I'm an E for short cycles and an I for long cycles. I think heavy person to person interaction for many days in a row taps into my long-term personal energy reserves.
I've worked in tech positions with people who could be termed as healers. I know they have learned how to protect their personal energy reserves. Sometimes they would emerge from a session with someone often called a psychic vampire and look exhausted. This is all a bit woo woo for me, but there are individuals who are simply “draining” or “exhausting” just to be around.
I think I will begin doing some sort of ritual, perhaps something like this, to allow me to consciously remind myself of, and recognize, my energy levels. I will work this in to the Deepak Choprah and Oprah Winfrey's 21 Day Meditation Challenge.
I also need to read more fiction. I'm staring with Cory Doctorow's Homeland.
This all should help me focus on creating energy by working out at the gym too.
What do you think of all this? Are some people givers and others takers?
Follow Friday: Networked, Tweeted & Pinned
WHAT IS #FF
Two weeks ago, I mentioned the need to use the #ff hashtag on Twitter more effectively. My experimental change to this end has begun.
#ff is a Friday meme on Twitter that is connoted by the #ff hashtag and is used as a way to promote Tweeters you follow and find interesting.
It might look like this this, that just happens to be the people I #ff-ed today, individually:
#ff @mimiavocado @amnichols @Cecilyk @ABattheBurrow
A tweeted list of names, @ signs with a person’s twitter handle after it, without context, does little to inspire other than the most devoted of Twitter followers to check out the list of your followers that you recommend. I have seen the hashtag #ff used as a reward given for new followers, as a shout out to buds met in the physical world may not have a large footprint in the social media world. So, I’m approaching this hash tag a bit differently from now on through the end of the year, at least, to see if it makes a difference for the people I recommend, to my interaction with them, to my overall stats, or if it just gives me a platform from which to examine Twitter activity, and Pinterest activity, from a more informed vantage.
It will take me a while to play catch up with all the folks I should have already #ff-ed. Within a couple of weeks I will be caught up, though. Well, on second thought, give me through the end of the year on that too. It all starts with Pinterest, but I will get to that in a minute.
TWITTER, PINTEREST & INFO THEORY
I’ve been thinking about this whole “social media thing” for years now. I decided long, long ago that I wasn’t as into quantity as quality. That’s the whole “It ain’t the meat, it’s the motion,” thing.
Figuring out what constitutes quality in the new world of Twitter and Pinterest is an anything but a concrete or well bounded endeavor. Life has never been simple, and that is infinitely more true now that we are but data bits churning within the swelling mass of everything that resides just before the event horizon of the Technological or Informational Singularity, put forward by Kurzweil. I’ve wanted to reference this fantastically titled article, The Information Singularity Arrives Next Tuesday, Around Lunchtime, for years. I’m sure it at first glance my mixing of the physics of the Cosmos with an explanation of why I think the link-up of Pinterest and Twitter is a good idea will baffle most of my college friends from Purdue who went off to work in Washington, Oregon, and what came to be known as Silicon Valley, in the late 1970s.
An informational change in kind is, and in fact probably already has, transmogrified all we know, and how we know it, and will continue doing so. My friends, “Welcome to the future fair.” As a comedy troop once said, “We’re all Bozos on this bus.”
This following You Tube video clip has nothing to do with Twitter or Pinterest. I recommend just listening to it sometime because… just because.
There is no way you can catch up. Just keep swimming, walking, writing, or thinking. Keep doing what you do. But knowledge, and the data connections that drive it, are so vast, and interacting and changing and creating new relationships at a such a near instantaneous pace (because that is what information does) that the very nature of information has
All of this is what has been bothering me about Twitter’s #ff. The information system has a life of its own. It may not be sentient yet, but it exists and is changing and adapting to what users think it is before anyone can figure out what it is. As amazing cultural and social media influencers, bloggy divas, and women of a certain age, my women friends and I drive the engines of the information economy who are incorporating women’s culture and knowledge into this new cosmic intellectual stew. My compadres and I are significant use innovators and the information we incorporate about women’s culture is essential to driving this new system to an equilibrium level that is more egalitarian, and more equitable, than anything that has previously existed.
PINNING MY #FFs
So, figuring out ways to efficiently maximize social media information and connections is something that we may or may not do “naturally” but it is something that we and new social media seem to be doing well. I love the linkages that develop between new systems. Tweeting my pins is something that seems like a no-brainer now that I am looking at both platforms. What I have decided to do is:
- Figure out which social media dudes and divas I want to feature on any given Friday
- Get the links to the most complete listing of those folks social presence – probably a blog
- Pin those links to my #ff board on Pinterest and choose the image you want associated with the blog among the options presented to you
- In the pinning process SKIP OVER adding the checkmark to the box that says, Twitter
- You will add the #ff before the text of your tweet on the next screen – and though I didn’t do it this week (duh! I forgot the at sign with twitterhandle) the text of the tweet should probably read something like “#ff, @twitterhandle, brief intriguing comment about the person, pinterest-generated url to the pin
Doing it this way, I think, has these advantages:
- highlights the individual
- links blogs with twitter handles
- crosses platforms and thus kills two birds with one stone… Hehehe twitter and birds, get it?
- is more permanent than a simple tweet that gets lost in the Dickensian world of the Tweets of Twitter Past
- allows the visual to accentuate text without detracting from either
So, what do you think? Is this a great idea or what?
Masks, Self, and Other
The word “mask” makes me think of the collection of masks from Mexico that were once a part of my daily life. Some creeped me out, some drew me in, some had a definite presence. I headed up the security section of the Arizona State Museum and routinely walked through and trained the gallery guards about the basics of an exhibit of 350 masks that was called Mexican Masks, Faces of Fiesta.
These amazing artifacts are the first thing that came to mind when I read about the Nablopomo theme on BlogHer for the month of October: Mask.
The second thing I thought of was the partial covering of a layer in of an image in a graphic.
The third thing I thought of was of the masks we all put on to cover, separate, or protect our private, personal selves from others. As a child I listened to the Beatles album, Revolver, over and over and over again. Eleanor Rigby, the woman in the song of the same on the album was described as “wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door.” I was always intrigued by the ambiguity of meaning in that phrase. McCartney wrote most of the lyrics. Only he knows what they really meant to him at the time, but to me it spoke of the masks we wear, the false faces we present to the world while really wanting someone to know the real us. In all of my wisdom, at age nine, I also thought of the cosmetic faces that women put on and how those are false faces we present too.
It is intriguing to me that masks can be used to an outer power into us, as when a mask is worn in a ritual to invoke a God or spirit, or that we can wear them to hide parts of our inner selves. Isn’t it strange that the word can cover such disparate behaviors.
As always, when I think about meaning I end up finding out something about myself. Durng the writing of this post I realized that when I used to don costumes for Halloween, that I never wore a mask. I think I used costumes to accentuate a part of myself rather than to hide a part of myself.
Costumes, masks, and avatars are wonderful semiotic elitication tools. How do you feel about masks?
Revisiting the Virtual
Today I spent a few hours playing in a virtual world. Actually, I was building 3 dimensional graphic representations of an open air meeting space in my virtual world, Virtuality, on the Kitely Grid.
Why do I do this?
Practicing Positive Behaviors
I spent lots of time in and on virtual worlds between 2006 and 2011. The featured image for today’s post is from a blog post from early 2007, and it is a captured image from the gathering space I built in a virtual world. For five years I had a very active presence in Second Life® where due to account and “naming” constraints I “became” Ana Herzog, my avatar’s name. I learned a huge amount about computer graphics while I practiced being who I wanted to be. I actually talk about partially reinventing myself through the use of practicing positive attitudes and behaviors through the use of virtual worlds in the book I’m putting together on surviving being the proxy to my mother’s Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.
Women’s Community
I also loved the community of intelligent, savvy, women who were peace activists, professors, artists, stay at home moms, authors, and business women I met in my feminist and social activist circles. I ran an “island” called The Women’s Center and leaving it behind was one of the hardest decisions I ever had to make. It was “real” in that I used it as an information hub and a social media portal as did many other people. But the prices I had to pay to keep it functioning were just too high. Way too high.
Options and Change
So I spent over a year trying out different Open Sim worlds hosted by different vendors, but the prices were still just a bit too high or a little bit of wonkiness in the stability of the platform. But thanks to Maria Korolov over at HyperGrid Business I found out about Kitely, which is an only pay for the computing resources you actually use model being developed and implemented over on an Open Simulator based grid, i.e. group of worlds, or environments, is very reasonably priced.
Avocation and Skills
I love creating graphics and designing buildings and other material world replica items. I didn’t know this until I began using Second Life in the summer of 2006. I hadn’t done anything like it since I used to build space ports for my Barbies using aluminum foil and corrugated cardboard along with my vivid imagination. Then it came together for me as to why I would like these activities when I remembered that the vocational testing in High School results said I one of the career paths I should consider would be related to architecture and design.
Virtual Worlds Change
While the technology of virtual worlds and artificial realities, or as I prefer to call them, virtualities, evolve at breakneck speeds with the prediction that depictions of virtualities will be indistinguishable from reality in under 10 years. While the most successful virtual world to date, Second Life, is losing ground from the massive popularity it saw around 2007 and 2008 height of media coverage of virtual world sex animation tycoons, millionaire virtual land barons, and the threat to real marriage and lives that virtual world relationships can have.
Virtual Worlds are Here to Stay
The linked header of this section takes you to a fairly current assessment of the state of virtual worlds that is worth reading. For me there are several reasons I am keeping a toe in the virtual pond.
- Meetings: there is increased value for extended meetings or conferences that take place in virtual worlds where attendees or participants can change sessions, come and go between tracks, go to a breakout session, or go have a coffee or cocktail (virtual) with other real attendees.
- Team Building: for people who can achieve some suspension of disbelief when navigating created landscapes, and that is everyone who can get “lost” in novels, games, and other situations where real, physical world goings on are tempered, distanced, or ignored, the virtual world seems real and interactions that take place in them are processed the same way in the brain as interactions that have taken place in a physical space. Relationships built in virtuality, especially a virtuality that is visited again and again, are more nuanced than any relationship forged in a confined, real world meeting room, or “watched” as a non-interactive streamed meeting.
- Cafes and Klatches: virtual spaces where like minds can drop in and chat with other like minds at or catch up with the recent achievements, feeds, streams and blogs of other members or participants can function like any other gathering space, except that they potentially can serve global clients, groups, or organizations.
Being a bit of a nerdy girl I had waited for virtual worlds to come into being without the layer of a game over the environment ever since the first days when cyber punk was in the air. I’m glad that open source worlds are multiplying and becoming priced to where individuals can create small environments to serve group needs. The ability to “teleport” or navigate directly from one world to another on different grids is in the works and should be available by the time I have Reason Creek flowing by The Nest and the Women in Virtual Worlds Conference and Training Center, and the Pink Frog Cafe (I’m still working on the name of the later.)