The Dusan definition: thumb sucking is the process of looking at something and finding meaning where there isn’t any. A thumb sucker is someone who ascribes some deeper truth to “shiny prims” when there’s usually no deeper truth than they’re shiny and they spin around a lot.

Thumb suckers standing around wondering about all the meteors wiping out the dinosaurs on Rezzable and believe it’s some sort of symbol of changing eras and a commentary on the impermanence of the build when in reality they had too many prims in the way of their next project.

Second, I didn’t mean to imply that Anshe Chung produces anything less than great content, and I’m fairly sure I didn’t say anything about the work itself in my post, but I can understand that in the wider context it may have seemed like a criticism.

I have no opinion, and it’s probably an object by object thing, personal tastes, whatever – I’ve seen 10L builds by Anshe and her team (a little bashed up looking little house, if I remember) that had character, great textures, and unique features. It looked as good as many of the Tiki Huts and beach houses (including my own) crafted lovingly by hand. My point wasn’t about the output, it was about the process of production. And let’s face it, a craftsperson who never thinks about creating greater efficiencies for themselves isn’t learning, and a mass producer who never thinks about aesthetics and quality won’t last long in a demanding, changing and taste-conscious virtual world. So I really didn’t mean to sound like I was disparaging the result, I was instead pointing to the tension between traditional notions of mass produced, factory line, “one size fits all” production and the (somewhat over-hyped) prosumer movement.

And as an aside, I lived on an Anshe sim way back when and one of the reasons I moved there was because it WAS beautifully terraformed, a lot of thought had gone into the relations of parcels to each other and to the overall configuration of public and private spaces, and the SYSTEM for renting was smooth and painless.

OK, I’m off to check out progress on the new Public Works.

=)

When people tell you they are leaving Second Life, they often don’t really leave. They lurk on forums, they read blogs, they come back on alts, and that’s all part of the cycle. Sometimes people really leave cold but then they merely go to some other game or to Facebook.

Castronova’s concept of the exodus is interesting, but unfortunately, he’s so mired in games and ludology that he can’t understand the more subtle complexities happening with open-ended worlds.

I remember a discussion about addiction on the forums once, and one geeky tekkie sort who scripted and made a living of sorts off his products sold in SL and then later consulting for companies basically sneered: “is a carpenter addicted to his hammer?”

He was trying to make it seem — trying to convince himself likely above all — that SL was merely a tool, a platform, something like me using Microsoft Word to do translation work (nobody would say “You’re addicted to Microsoft Word”).

But of course, we all know that’s silly as people really are addicted, not applying their talents in more lucrative ways, disrupting even their real lives and ceasing to care for their spouses or kids or themselves, there are piles of stories about this. I’m strangely unmoved by them, and I’m going to think some more about why, and write about it, but it has to do not only with the idea that games or worlds crack people along fault lines that they already had before they came to them, or with the idea that this sort of addiction at least doesn’t lead to road deaths from DWI, but I have to think more about it.

I think the compelling nature isn’t even so much visualization. I’ve been in worlds or on spaces in SL that have nothing particularly compelling or beautiful about them, but people will stay in them for days on end. I think what it’s more about is choice and control. They give people those two features they simply lack in real life: choice and control.

You still aren’t getting it about thumb-sucking. This isn’t a reference to children’s habits, infantalism, or uselessness about the art itself. It’s about articles that ponder things piously because pious pondered is what is needed for some reason. It’s a newspaper term, and editors will consciously plan around certain events that they “need you to do a thumb-sucker,” i.e. somebody has to write a thinky piece on what something means. The idea is that a ponderous type would be staring into the difference sort of biting his thumb.

Here’s how Slate magazine defines it, but they say it is derogative, it isn’t always:

“Thumbsucker: A usually derogatory reference to story that ponders a bit of news and doesn’t introduce any.”
http://www.slate.com/id/1003564/

(this has a good list of such slang terms btw)

I’m going to challenge your bashing of Anshe as some sort of crass mass market taste purveyor. Oh, how intellectuals must always prove that they loathe mass markets and mass culture! It’s humorous to me that you celebrate Rezzable as some antithesis, but Rezzable has more mass culture and mass taste that you could shake a stick at, what with little green martians and tropical beaches and urban-distressed canneries and all the rest. These are all hackneyed cliches.

Anshe actually puts a lot of effort into terraforming her hundreds of sims individually. You should fly around and look at them. Anshe herself personally is one of the best terraformers of SL, possibly THE best after the old Linden content team like Eric. Of course she has staff, and she has another problem: customers that wish to flatten the hell out of any sim she does produce nicely (most people can’t seem to get it through their heads that they don’t need to make a flat board to place a house, they can just place the house, then iron out the earth later.

The furniture made is actually pretty good looking. It beats by a long shot some of the “individually-crafted” mass-taste knock-offs of “modern” furniture which everyone imagines is “unique” but looks like Ikea or even Sears.

You would benefit from a thorough reading of “Bozos in Paradise,” Dusan.

For hundreds of thousands of years I have been dust-grains
floating and flying in the will of the air,
often forgetting ever being
in that state, but in sleep
I migrate back. I spring loose
from the four-branched, time and space
and cross
this waiting room.

I walk into a huge pasture
I nurse the milk of millennia

Everyone does this in different ways.
Knowing that conscious decisions
and personal memory
are much too small a place to live,
every human being streams at night
into the loving nowhere, or during the day,
in some absorbing work.

Rumi, ‘We Are Three’