| Hipsters want your freedom. |
[Nov. 1st, 2006|04:32 pm] |
If there's one thing I've learned from an unhealthy comic book obsession, it's this: never trust someone who agrees with you. I can't count the number of "Oh, man, comix is teh dark, yo" spewing writers I've bumped up against who's basic repetoir was to, you guessed, make comics dark. (I can actually count them, and it's like four, I think.)
Never trust anyone who agrees with you.
This applies to Hipsters too, I just kind of hoped it didn't. Now, thanks to an article ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) khamon showed me, I have lost all hope. (Mmm. The bitter, almond taste of defeat.)
Second Life is the future! We heart Second Life! That's what they say out of one side of their mouths.
Apple sucks because they remove features! Windows Vista pushes old people down stair cases for fun! That's what they say out of the other side of their mouths.
You can't say that two companies who offer broken services are evil, but the third company who offers just as broken a service is cool and awesome and woohoo! Actually, you can. And that's my beef with the whole "Second Life is an operating system" Kool-Aid the Hipsters are handing out.
They give speeches about how great software has evolved from the mainframe days, and then they go off an endorse a proprietary, centralized mainframe archetecture! Second Life, for all it's limited glory, demands you go back eleven computer generations -- P4 -> P3 -> P2 -> Pentium -> 486 -> 386 -> 286 -> 8088 -> Z80 -> 8080 -> DUMB TERMINALS -- to the day when your desktop system was a dumb terminal streaming data from a centralized server.
If these futurists had any sense of the future, they'd be building their Creative Commons communes in OpenCroquet, Panda3D, or Garry's Mod; systems that can be distributed, run by individuals, and won't be locked down by one centralized group of people. Prokofy Neva says this is a bad thing and that I "just want to make a pirate ship in [my] basement."
Prokofy's wrong about that being bad, but (s)he's right about the last thing. I do want 3D technology so readily available that I can run my own pirate ship in my "basement" -- though I don't have a basement. So, from here on out, and anyone who wants to join me is welcome, I'm a Basement Pirate.
The website will be up shortly. |
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| Comments: |
Why do you have to do cool things in November? I'm *busy*!
I can answer this Jarod under the assumption that you've not actually played Second Life but only read about it. That seems apparent in your post. The management of Second Life have informed me many times that there is no basement hosting software project in the back rooms of Linden Lab. There is only the world, a world, one world on one grid, and that's all there will ever be.
Other teams are going to have to develop the kind of software you're dreaming of because it won't come from the shops of LL. That space is reserved for centralized, proprietary thinking straight out the Apple book of spells. I imagine the group will only ever be as successful, and only that if the invetors' new CFO ringer is allowed to wreak havoc (no pun intended) through the everlasting love machine.
I've already developed a term for the software I want: good. | |
