Winter the Way I Like It

… in Slightly Twisted. The creator describes it as "A whimsical but  serene and peaceful  landscape filled with art, animals, and fun elements.” And indeed it is.

And much better than snow that requires me to shovel it.

Wonderland Again

Speaking of Alice in Wonderland, I realized I had several photographs from an Alice-themed sim, dated from last May. The name of the sim is lost to time - in other words, I forgot to write it down - but it clearly has some Steampunk elements.

Victorian Fantasy: "Through the Looking Glass"

This month, the Victorian Fantasy discussion group had a short field trip, convening on the Great Lawn of Victoria City, in front of the main library. The topic of discussion was Lewis Carroll’s two books about young Alice, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, though the thrust of the discussion was about the latter book.



Our normal master of ceremonies, Sir JJ Drinkwater, had transformed into the Mad Hatter, and his cohost, Dame Kghia Gherardi, into the Queen of Hearts:





Through the Looking Glass begins as Alice, playing with a white and black kitten as well as a chess set, steps through a wall mirror into a fantastical world in which the chess pieces are now life-sized and come to life. Alice, a mere pawn, starts on the second row of the chess board and makes her way across the board, to the eighth row, thereby becoming a queen. Along the way she has a number of adventures with strange characters, including Red and White Knights, Humpty Dumpty, and Tweedledee and Tweedledum.

Dame Kghia posed an interesting thought: "Are the rules a symbol of adulthood that Alice is trying to figure out?” She continued, "I'm thinking about White Queen's statement and the fact that the rules often seem arbitrary to Alice and children in general. [T]he book seems to be leading Alice through rituals so she learns the rules but things are still confusing to her, which is why words are taken so literally in this world.” In this view, the queens are the “adults,” and Alice, in becoming a queen herself, has taken a step into the adult world. It was a view that had not occurred to me, but seems entirely consistent with the book. (If this interpretation is commonplace knowledge, don't disillusion me.)

Some of the many attendees - only some of whom are pictured below, I fear - arrived in costume for tea and conversation:

Miss Janet Rhiadra as Alice, enjoying a cuppa 

Mr. Rory Torrance, with a Mad Hatter-inspired top hat

Miss Herndon Bluebird

Miss Aznana Shieldmaiden

Mr. Ludo Merit, with his wonderful Cheshire Cat avatar

Miss Eve Compton

Our White Queen...

…and our Red Queen, also known as Queen Mystic

And another Alice, your humble scribe

Next month’s discussion will be held March 19, and the topic will be The Novel of the Black Seal, by Arthur Machen. I am not familiar with either the author or the work, so I look forward to reading it. The 1895 work is part of a longer episodic novel, The Three Impostors, and is described as “incorporate[ing] several inset weird tales and culminat[ing] in a final denouement of deadly horror, connected with a secret society devoted to debauched pagan rites.” This sounds like quite a story!

Traveling to Oblivion

Thanks to the explorations of the indefatigable Honour McMillan, and a little sisterly nudge, I visited the Steampunk area of Oblivion.



Oblivion is pleasantly sepia-toned, reminiscent of New Babbage in that regard (though perhaps, unlike Babbage, not because of the incessant use of coal). Although one starts near ground level, where signs welcome visitors, much of the city is aloft. Alas for English speakers, the signs are auf Deutsch, but one gets the general drift of things.



Transportation takes the form of teleportation via the above-pictured person-sized cages, a smart-looking design, though cozy for more than one at a time.





As one is many meters above ground level, one must be careful not to stray too far off the path. And if one sees a “road closed” sign - in English, no less - one would do well not to depend on the macadam extending much beyond that point.



The sim is rated “adult,” and indeed one of the buildings in the floating city does house some… interesting contraptions, along with a few traps for the unwary. Keep your eyes open and step lively and all should be fine.

It’s exciting to see new Steampunk areas arising. It gives hope that the 19th century is not yet over.

Bryn Oh's "The Singularity of Kumiko"

Bryn Oh’s latest exhibit, on her Immersiva sim, is “The Singularity of Kumiko,” a story told in pictures and letters (in written and audio form) that unfolds as one moves through the sim. Kumiko receives messages in a bottle, as though from across a sea, from her friend Iktomi, and responds through messages of her own. (Miss Oh has an introduction and a brief video about the exhibit on her blog.)

In the arrival area, a visitor receives instructions regarding Windlight and other graphics settings, the main effect of which is to render the environment very dark. To compensate, there is a helmet-mounted flashlight, like a miner’s lamp, that allows one to see, imperfectly, in the dark.



The first scene one encounters is this accident: a car, a damaged bicycle, and a backpack, its contents strewn about the roadway. The roadway then peters out, and one is left looking for the next patch of light.



These set pieces contain objects in Miss Oh’s distinctive style. Often animal forms mix with machine parts, such as the giraffe swing set below.



Be careful, however, and do not linger in the woods. The sim is damage-enabled, and the sound of a squeaky wheel signals the arrival of a lunatic homicidal mechanical rabbit, Mr. Zippers, who will kill you if possible. You will encounter Mr. Zippers later on as well, in an abandoned, dilapidated house.



Because a visitor may encounter the tableaux in the “wrong” order, one has to puzzle together the narrative from receiving the exchange of letters between Kumiko and Iktomi out of order. Ultimately, however, one reaches a resolution of the story, even if some of the specifics remain left to the visitor’s imagination.



In mathematics, a singularity is a point at which an object is not well-behaved - for example, undifferentiable. However, perhaps a better definition of the word in this context is “the state of being singular, distinct, peculiar, uncommon[,] or unusual.” As the story unfolds, we discover that Kumiko is all that.



The darkness adds to the unsettling atmosphere of the exhibit. On my monitor everything was so dark between the set pieces that I sometimes felt as though I was stumbling blindly through the woods. I wonder if increasing the light a little would still allow the spookiness while making navigation easier. And while I’m on the subject of minor cavils, I’m not sure that allowing Mr. Zippers to kill visitors was necessary, especially as it removes one from the exhibit, at least temporarily, and breaks the atmosphere.

One interesting decision that Miss Oh made was to limit the number of visitors at any one time to 10-15, both in order to minimize the likelihood that visitors would run into one another and, more importantly, to minimize lag on the sim. I had no trouble teleporting into the sim several times (damn you, Mr. Zippers!) and experienced no noticeable lag, so this seemed to be a good idea.



“The Singularity of Kumiko” once again demonstrates Bryn Oh’s, er, singular vision and her use of Second Life to provide a multimedia form of narrative. It’s a fascinating, emotional, and disturbing journey.

For better pictures and a better description of the project, see Inara Pey’s review and Honour McMillan’s review.

Climate Change and Faith

One of the ironies of the debate on global warming - or, as supporters are wont to call it during cold spells, “climate change” - is that proponents of the view that anthropological warming is real and an urgent problem claim that they, unlike their opponents, are on the side of “science,” but their absolute belief in their point of view despite the accumulating evidence against it is more akin to fervent religious belief than science. Much as some fundamentalist Christians persist in the view that the world is around 6,000 years old despite evidence from fossils and rocks, global warming are not disturbed in the least that predictions of climate change models are way off. 

As Charles Flemming notes in “6 Pro Tips on Persuading Global Warming Deniers to Come to the Light”:

Appeal to “science” is an illegitimate appeal to authority. A way to shut down dissent. Real scientists don’t appeal to authority. They appeal to data.

And, as a bonus tip to the article, a reader contributed:

State what data or outcomes would DISprove AGW.
(Hint: If none, it’s not science.)

Indeed. ("Freezing is the New Warming," at RealClear Politics, makes a similar point.)

All the more dispiriting, then, to see that  Ars Technica, in a blog post entitled “On moderation in climate discussions”, has sided with the forces of anti-scientific nonsense. In the guise of better moderating discussions, the post says:

When it comes to climate discussions (and science discussions in general), we identify trolling based on two simple principles that apply to all discussions on the site:
1. Article discussions are meant to be just that: discussions. Contributions should be beneficial to the discussion.
2. Misinformation is not beneficial to discussions. Furthermore, discussions do not exist in order to give a platform to broadcast misinformation.
Starting a discussion by throwing out phrases like "the whole thing is a giant fraud" is a quick way to get a moderator's warning. Even if you're not aware of the history of our understanding of the greenhouse effect (there's over a century of it) or the decades' worth of work that has built our modern understanding of the climate, it should be clear that diverse governments, private organizations, companies, and scientists all recognize the reality of climate change and take it seriously. So this statement clearly violates principle 2, but it also violates 1. There's really no possible useful discussion that can grow out of a statement that's completely oblivious to reality.

While it’s hard to argue with the two principles articulated, the example below the two principles shows what Ars really means. Not the “the whole thing is a giant fraud” part, but the blithe claim that “diverse governments…and scientists all recognize the reality of climate change.” So what Ars means is that you’re a troll if you don’t buy the line. It’s a consensus, so shut up.

Of course, in today’s group-think, this “moderation” finds a receptive audience with the faithful. A  comment by “chipmunkofdoom2” seems to be representative of those I skimmed:

Incredibly balanced and unapologetic. I don't know of any other site that moderates straight up denial of years upon years of scientific data.

“Incredibly balanced,” eh? (I’m reminded of the line from The Blues Brothers, regarding the type of music played at Bob’s Country Bunker: “Oh, we got both kinds. We got Country and Western.”)

I take the view that, in a quote attributed to Daniel Moynihan, everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts. Of course, facts are endlessly malleable, aren't they? From a recent Best of the Web Today:

Two Newsmagazines in One! 

    "Scientists have found other indications of global cooling. For one thing there has been a noticeable expansion of the great belt of dry, high-altitude polar winds--the so-called circumpolar vortex--that sweep from west to east around the top and bottom of the world."--Time, June 24, 1974 

    "Not only does the cold spell not disprove climate change, it may well be that global warming could be making the occasional bout of extreme cold weather in the U.S. even more likely. Right now much of the U.S. is in the grip of a polar vortex, which is pretty much what it sounds like: a whirlwind of extremely cold, extremely dense air that forms near the poles."--Time.com, Jan. 6, 2014

One fact, two polar (ha ha) opposite interpretations.

I don't like being labeled a climate change "denier." No one denies that the climate is changing, anyway, but, more to the point, I'm a skeptic, not a denier. I'd like a hypothesis and then a test of the hypothesis. I'm not the only one, either. In "Freezing is the New Warming," the author concludes:

Note that there is never any pause to acknowledge that maybe scientists should investigate the hypothesis that warming isn't as big or inevitable as they have predicted. 

No, it's on to the next ad hoc rationalization. That's the basic pattern: an unproven theory reinforces itself in the face of contradictory evidence by generating additional unproven theories. 

What interests me is how global warming is degrading, in plain sight, into a textbook case of pseudoscience—all while remaining an unassailable article of belief among those who think of themselves as pro-science. 

One of the famous characteristics of pseudo-science is that it is "unfalsifiable." That is, the theory is constructed in such a way that there is no evidence that could possibly refute it. The classic example is Freudian psychoanalysis, which tells you that you have an Oedipus Complex, and if you deny it, that's just proof that you're repressing it. Or take the creationist theory that God created the world to appear as if it was older than it really is. So if we find evidence that the dinosaurs lived 100 million years before the events of the Bible, that's just because God planted the evidence there. Try refuting that one! 

Or try refuting global warming. Temperatures have stopped warming for more than a decade? That's just a temporary "pause" in the warming that we just know is going to come roaring back any day now. Antarctic ice is growing? That's actually caused by the melting of ice, don't you know. A vicious cold snap that sets record low temperatures? That's just because the North Pole is actually warming. So if the winter is warm, that's global warming, but if the winter is cold, that's global warming, too. If sea ice is disappearing, that's global warming, but if sea ice is increasing, that's global warming. 

Now we can see what they mean when the warmthers say that global warming is supported by an ironclad scientific consensus. The theory is so irrefutable that it's unfalsifiable! 

Which is to say that it has become a cognitive spaghetti bowl full of ad hoc rationalizations, rather than a genuine scientific hypothesis. 

I don't expect to change any minds, but I would like Congress to stop spending my money on this bowl of pasta.

Snow Daze

I really hate snow. There, I said it. I’m a hater. I watch people being interviewed on the TV news who are very excited. “Let it snow! I’d like a foot or more!"

Well, no. I live in a mid-Atlantic state (Maryland) that isn’t used to large amounts of snow, and I live far enough from anywhere that a big snowfall is a serious disruption. Around 360 days of the year, that’s not a big deal, and some years, like 2013, there isn’t enough snow to complain about.

Getting a snowfall of even three or four inches, however, creates problems on the roads - heck, even on my fairly quiet street I’ve seen two vehicles skidding across the plowed pavement; I don’t want to know what the highway to the Metro station looks like. The 7-8” expected before this storm system moves out is a paralyzing event.

People elsewhere make fun of the DC area for being so unprepared for snow. Those people fall into one of three categories: (1) people from places where it snows a lot, so it makes sense for people to have four-wheel-drive vehicles and snow blowers, and for municipalities to invest in extensive snow removal equipment; (2) people from places where it snows a lot but hardly anyone drives - particularly New York City, where four inches of snow just means wet boots walking to and from the subway; and (3) people from places where it rarely snows, who assume that because we do get snow we prepare for it like those in the first category.

The problem with snow isn’t so much the relatively minor disruption in our lives. I can read a forecast, so I can stock up on food and beverages. I can shovel a driveway and sidewalk slowly, taking breaks as needed, so it’s not terribly stressful. And I don’t have a sense of self-importance that compels me to go into the office when the driving conditions are bad. No, it’s other people, as usual: those who insist that the driveway has to be shoveled right now, because they have to get to work. (I share a driveway with two neighbors.) A boss that doesn’t mind driving into work, even though the government is closed. Front office managers who refuse to reschedule meetings, even though the agenda isn’t anything urgent. The who compulsion to show up to work, because you never know who will think less of you if you remain safely home.

The people I really feel for are those who have to be out, like the mail delivery lady sliding down the street, trying to reach mailboxes that residents haven’t bothered to clear. If the self-important would stay off the roads, that would improve the lives of people who really have to be out there.

So there, I said it. I hate snow. And boss, don’t expect to see me in tomorrow, either.

Victorian Fantasy: "The King of the Golden River"

As the discussion series on the fantastic in Victorian literature nears its end, this month we discussed John Ruskin’s 1851 novel, The King of the Golden River. A charming short novel, a modern parable of greed and kindness, this volume is Ruskin’s only work of fiction (he is better known for his works on art criticism).

The plot is a simple one: two cruel brothers, Schwartz and Hans, live with their younger brother, Gluck, in a lush valley in Austria. The two older brothers mistreat everyone, not least the younger Gluck. The rich land has made the brothers rich. Yet when a visitor, Southwest Wind, Esquire, receives ill treatment at the hands of Schwartz and Hans, the rich soil washes away, leaving their land arid and worthless. The brothers work as goldsmiths, but drink away their earnings. One day they melt Gluck’s prized possession, a golden mug, which frees the king of the Golden River, a finely-dressed dwarf. The king tells Gluck that someone who climbed the high mountain to the source of the river and threw in at least three drops of holy water would find the river turned to gold; fail, and that person would be turned into black rock. Naturally, first Hans and then Schwartz make the attempt. Their greed and indifference to the suffering of others cause them to fail in their attempts, and they become black rocks. Gluck works for a goldsmith, but he, too, succumbs to the temptation to seek the Golden River. He is kind, however, and uses his flask with holy water to slake the thirst of an old man, then a child, and finally a small dog, to whom he gives the last of the holy water. The dog turns into the King of the Golden River, who gives Gluck three drops of water from a lily plant and urges Gluck to cast those into the river. When Gluck does so, the waters of the river diminished and flowed into the valley, making the land fertile once again. Gluck became a wealthy man who, unlike his brothers, never turned away the needy.

Some of the discussants

Mr. August Dominicus, Miss Astridh of Hulya, and Miss Isabelle

One of our discussants

Miss Ellie Mink

Your humble scribe

Sir JJ Drinkwater

Miss Herndon Bluebird

Dame Kghia Gherardi

Miss Zanicia and Miss Janet Rhiadra

(Apologies to those not pictured (particularly M. Ravenstask Bayn) or not named - my note-taking skills were deficient. I attribute that to my attention being taken by discussing Mr. Ruskin’s book. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.)

Next up: Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll, on Wednesday, February 19, at 4 p.m. SLT.

Looking Through the Paper Observatory

Having seen the pictures from both Honour McMillan and Inara Pey, I had to visit the Paper Observatory myself. A temporary build on one of the Linden Endowment for the Arts sims, this build by Haveit Neox will eventually replace a build on his own sim, called the Paper Tower. Neox, in a notecard on the sim, writes:

The inspiration and initial model for this project is the 4 year old Paper Tower on the sim ACC Alpha, this tower being a giant structure in the center of my sim which harbors the visitor center and galleries. 

The new Paper Observatory on the LEA21 sim hovers above an ample arena. The city leading up to this build is concentric; rooftops conforming into one large sweep of concavity, suggests a satellite dish. The human activities displayed in the streets and the main square reflect on superstitious times before science’s tenet of universal proof, before disease was known to be microbial or before the earth was discovered to be round. In the sky, the Observatory catches the sunlight. This is Second Life, and we can flap our way up to the building’s landing. Requiring flight into the Observatory is an intended motion which I equate with the turning of a page in a book. The walls are of paper since this structure, as its predecessor, is my version of a book. During the month of January, I will continue to refine the textures and the shapes. The deconstruction motif at the base of the structure reflects directly onto the Paper Tower’s story, whose exposed girder skeleton belies questions of permanence.

As the Paper Tower is dedicated to arts, the Observatory will be connected to science and therefore be a venue where one could gather information and get in touch with thought provoking theories.

The Observatory from afar

People glide through the city...

…engaged in a variety of activities

Inside the Observatory

Miss Pey notes:

As the Paper Observatory will be under development and enhancement throughout the month, this is an installation one may well want to re-visit at least a few times to more fully get its entire measure. The completed build will be installed on ACC Alpha on Thursday April 10th, 2014, the fourth anniversary of the founding of the original Paper Tower.

A fascinating place.