Long Story Short
I wrote this page as an introduction to who I am inside and outside of Second Life. Sort of a bio/résumé, if you will. I’ve been “playing” Second Life since it was in beta, and I have seen it undergo a huge amount of change. I have built everything from furniture to avatars to jet planes, and most of what I have built has been scripted. I had planned to run a remote application logic/data warehousing system called DeepTeal, but that project is on hiatus due to the number of factors that can halt the service that are beyond my control. It’s not impossible that I could resume work on it someday, but I have no plans for now.
Who I Am As a person, I am an introvert. My personality type, according to the Internet, is INTP (described as “the architect.”) I have a rich internal life, and consider thinking to be of a higher importance than emotions, at least personally. I don’t know if I will be an INTP forever, or even if I still am one, since I took the test half a year ago, and have seen some changes since then. When I first joined Second Life in 2003, I was very shy, and irritable. Someone would walk up to me and I’d literally run or fly away, because I just didn’t give a hoot that they’d figured out how to use a beachball or something. (And to be fair, there are a lot of people in SL who pester complete strangers about inane crap.) I also argued a lot with anyone on the forums who typed anything I found patently ridiculous, sometimes spending hours going back and forth with them, quoting every paragraph and responding to each in turn, going on and on until the forum software said “look buddy you can’t just type a Russian novel and press post, this is too damn many words.” And it was satisfying, and I took my licks and got better at debate, but boy did it ever take all day to keep up with it! I realized that I was spending HOURS arguing with people who I would never convince. So I stopped doing it. Very late in 2004, I got a speeding ticket. I’d become tired of waiting behind some slowpoke on the freeway, and I just floored it. Right past the California Highway Patrol. The cop was nice enough, and even told me how to get where I was going after he finished writing me up, but I realized something. I’d driven like a maniac, and I didn’t even know why. I really don’t like to think that I’m some kind of automaton, driven by forces I can’t understand, much less control. Thus began a long period of introspection that lasted for pretty much ALL of 2005. During this time, a series of unconnected events happened that reinforced this process. I learned about futurism, which fired up my imagination and gave me a sense of wonder about the future. I learned about cryonics, and even though the jury is still out on that one, it gave me the idea - for the first time - that human immortality could actually be in reach. A possibility yet unproven, of course, but a possibility nonetheless. A conversation sometime in the spring of that year with Spider Mandala lead me to buy The Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan, and that is when things really started snowballing. That book caused me to wake up, to start to become truly self-aware, to understand some of the driving forces inside my own mind. I continued with Wider Than The Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness by Gerald Edelman. Dragons of Eden is very general, and Wider of the Sky gets into the real nitty gritty of how the neural substrate gives rise to consciousness. It’s an incredible trip to learn about these things. It’s like getting admin access to go poke around inside your own head. Later that year, a completely unlikely and random encounter with a goon lead me to buy How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. At first glance, you might think this book should be called, “How to butter people up.” But as I read it, I realized that it isn’t about manipulating or changing others. It’s about manipulating and changing yourself. This is really a book that should be on the required reading list in high school. It is infinitely more valuable than any classic of literature that you can name, because it gives you incredibly useful information that you can put to work immediately. It is, as Carnegie puts it, a new way of life. In addition to teaching you how to deal with really difficult situations, it also teaches you to get over yourself and to be nice to others, simply for the joy of being nice to them. At the time of writing, I am reading Don Miguel Ruiz’ Toltec series, particularly The Four Agreements and The Mastery of Love. Next up is The Voice of Knowledge. These books are astonishing. How to Win Friends and Influence People is jam-packed with useful information, but these books are really something else, a whole world beyond. When I joined Second Life, I was withdrawn, flighty, and surly. Today I am much more relaxed and open. 2006 is the year in which I plan to move from staunch introversion into a place of balance between introversion and extroversion; and to love openly, and for no better reason than that I simply feel like it. This does not mean that I will love (or even like) most people I meet, but it does mean that I can feel a more genuine appreciation for people who I think are 100% awesome. It’s possible these events might have happened on their own, had I never joined Second Life. In fact, a few of these events happened outside SL. However, SL is an awesome catalyst for getting like minds together, and I’m very pleased that this particular sequence of events has happened.
Finding Second Life
I joined the open beta on May 9, 2003 after seeing the “|SLing” tags some of my IRC friends were wearing. I asked them what it was, and they said it was like an MMORPG, except that -
Wait just a damn minute. MMORPG? One of those severely addicting games where you spend countless, boring hours trying to level up? One of those games that causes you to rarely leave the house, and to gibber about getting PKed when you do? No thanks, I’ll pass. “This is different, Huns. You’ll love this. The whole place is built by the users, and you can even program the stuff you build.” There was no levelling either! Well, what the hell, I thought, and I gave it a try. The version number when I first logged in was something like 0.6.1. It ran slow as molasses on my old computer, a 1.5GHz P4 that I’d built in 2001. I turned off local lighting and got a much better framerate, which made it possible to move around through the world without the experience turning into a slide show. I spent some time walking around underwater in Orientation, then made my way back to the shore and did all the tutorial stuff. A dispenser gave me a landmark to some invisible place about a kilometer to the northwest of where I was, and then I found myself in the welcome area. |
Early History I was brought into SL by Nikos Stephanopolis and some others from the Fearsome crew. I spent some time running around with him, Everett Lupis (now Gabo Stephanopolis), and Datura Fairchild. GD later joined us as Dee Bukowski. I spent the first three days flying around the world, taking a look at the various things people had built, and generally being amazed at what the community had put together. I settled down and bought a plot in De Haro, which used to be zoned for tents and cabins only (and looked a lot better for it.) I experimented with changing textures in my cabin, then built a few things, like a deck and some benches for the front yard. I took apart a scripted lamp (I think Eric Linden made it) and figured out things like states, events and link messages, then built some Greene & Greene-style lighting. Days turned into weeks, weeks into months. During beta and 1.0, you could teleport right to wherever you were going, but it cost a few Linden-dollars, depending on how far it was. I didn’t want to pay even L$1 to get where I was going, so I built a functional jetpack. I had also built a radar dish and ground station, and a professional-looking satellite antenna installation for someone in Kissling. I was a Kazenojin member as well, and I had a rather large spaceship docked at the spaceport in Gray.
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After a few months of dawdling around on hoverboards and motorcycles, I decided I wanted to explore SL in an airplane. It had to be my airplane, too, because I insisted on building and texturing everything for myself. I decided to make a small one-seater that was ridden motorcycle-style, styled it after the A-10 Thunderbolt II aircraft, and set to work writing a script for it. It used variable-rate pitch and roll controls, and it had an afterburner that could propel it a little over half the speed of sound (which is practically Ludicrous Speed as far as SL is concerned.) It was highly maneuverable, and because it was designed to float, it had a high-mount intake bolted to a distinctive twin-screw supercharger. Sound was synthesized from an actual jet engine, and featured actual pitch-changing transitions rather than just “on and off.” This made it one of the most realistic-sounding vehicles in all of Second Life. It went on sale sometime in February 2004 as the “A-11 Slipstream,” and became very popular.
The vehicle system introduced with 1.1 was fairly good, but it made airplanes act more like submarines. The lift effect was very minor, engines always had the same efficiency regardless of altitude and pitch, and the stalling effect was next to zero. I spent the next two months developing a somewhat realistic physics augmentation system, fixed a few bugs, added tandem rider and custom camera support, better engine sounds, a stall horn, and a few other odds and ends. The end result was rolled out as the A-11 Slipstream II in April 2004. I gave a free copy to everyone who had bought a SS1, and sales continued to increase.
There is a video of the Slipstream II performing various acrobatics. There is also a short segment of me riding Francis Chung’s Turbo Jet Ski, which is awesome.
Team Artifex Xylor Baysklef wanted to put together a RTS game for the 2004 Game Developer’s Competition. He invited me to join his team because he had seen my mechanical-looking creations and wanted someone who could build robotic characters. Hiro Yamamoto was also brought on board, as well as Ananda Sandgrain. We wound up settling on a Classic Games theme instead of an RTS. I wound up doing lighting and some of the furniture, and I set up a local-area network that used llShout() and operated Token Ring-style. I also built a security drone in order to make sure that interlopers couldn’t “look over anyone’s shoulder” at a poker game that was planned. In the end, we went live with just two games - XyChess and Mahjong - both written by Xylor. They proved to be extremely popular, just like they are in the real world, and we took first place.
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Role Playing (Note: I don’t actively roleplay this. It’s more of a creative writing exercise than anything else.)
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The “Huns Valen” character is a member of a race of humanoids with advanced technology, one of several races that inhabited the world of Second Life before a cataclysmic event known as the “Great Erase.” (This is sort of a user-created “history” that makes the world a little more interesting.) As the story goes, these races inhabited what is now Second Life, and were compelled to leave by sudden natural disaster. Now, they are slowly re-entering the world and rediscovering their old abilities. First and Second Life Stages
My “race” exhibits numerous skin colors (but usually tends to be some shade of blue). We have three basic life-stages - biological, cybernetic, and fully mechanized. The first stage is humanoid and does not wear a harness of any kind. It is totally organic; there is no cybernetic machinery involved. The second stage receives augmented musculoskeletal and cardiopulmonary systems, and a basic brain-computer interface is integrated into the cerebellum to provide wireless, “computerless” network access. It also maps the cerebellum and does a few other things in order to prepare for the third stage.
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The third stage manifests as a transition from cyborg to full-on electronic life form. During the transition, the person’s brain lives in a powerful robotic life support system that allows the person to continue moving around and interacting with the world. When the transition is finished, the person can opt to live entirely within the Metaverse, or within a mech suit. It is also possible to have the original body preserved cryonically, and to then revive it and control it via radio link. In this way, the third-stager can revisit the second stage, while retaining the huge mental advantages of being in the third stage.
The Mech Suit
Externally, the mech suit can take a wide variety of shapes, but the most common form is a human-like chassis capable of bipedal walking as well as flying. This mech suit has a harness similar to the one used in the previous stage, but the reactor and thrusters are beefier, and the harness is integrated with a massively armored torso. The suit is made primarily of gamma-welded Unobtanium and is immune to rust. The limbs are driven by electric servos as well as linear motors. Cooling and lubrication are done with the aid of a built-in hydraulic system. The metal exoskeleton serves both as radiator and radio-frequency antenna. Internal equipment includes gyros that control attitude and balance during walking and flight, as well as digital radio that supports data rates in the terabit range (assuming enough spectrum is available), although typically this is not needed and the data rate is much lower. There are also several optical ports that can transmit and receive data at several hundred terabits per second. A Kinesiotron provides the ability to levitate objects. During transition (and usually afterwards), the mech suit is controlled by the person’s brain. After transition, it can be controlled via radio link.
The brain is removed from the old body and placed into a protected, shock-mounted vault in the torso, where it is hooked up to life support equipment and a spinal cord interface, which it uses to control the mech suit as though it was still in its original body. Over time, a small army of nanorobots converts the organic brain into a purely electronic brain, one piece at a time. Starting from the outside of the cerebellum and working inwards to the core, and then following neuronal connections that branch to the limbic system, cerebrum, and pons, the nanorobots locate a component - that is, a nerve body, axon, or synapse - and replace it with an electronic equivalent that exactly duplicates the original component’s function. The replacement interfaces with the existing biological components until they are ready to be replaced as well. The process is naturally very complicated and takes several months to a year to complete. During that time, blood vessels are reorganized to make way for the new cybernetic parts, and disconnected neurons, glial cells, capillaries, and other tissues are removed. Each time a biological component is replaced with a cybernetic one, there are several nanoseconds of “down time” while the connections are spliced. The software that controls the brain transformation process is aware of the strength of each synapse, and uses nanorobots to stimulate all post-synaptic connections in order to ensure that the internal timing of the neural network remains consistent during the splice. (Theoretically, a downtime of several nanoseconds is not significant, but no one so far has cared to test that theory on a viable brain, or indeed come up with an ethical way of determining whether any long-term consequences might arise.) After the very last neuron has been replaced with its electronic equivalent, the life support equipment is shut down and removed. The free space can be replaced with auxiliary hydrogen tanks or other equipment. The Fully Electronic Brain
The new electronic brain has a number of interesting features. It remains within the vault, and is liquid-cooled via several redundant hydraulic circuits. The spinal cord interface is 100% digital at this point, and is optically isolated from the rest of the mech suit, so that even a jolt of several million volts will not likely damage it. In the case of massive failure of either the power or cooling systems, it can be “halted”, shut down completely, sit without power or cooling for an indefinite period, and then be powered back up and “booted” without having lost any information. It can be tuned to function better than the original - for example, it can think and learn much faster, and recall with very high fidelity. It can interface directly with computers and other electronic brains, and communicate with them at very high speeds. The diurnal cycle can be altered as desired, so that the person needs less sleep - or none at all. Perhaps most importantly, there is a central “brain repository” which receives uploaded brain images daily. In the rare event that an electronic brain is damaged or destroyed, a new electronic brain can be composited, prepped, and installed into a new mech suit in less than a day. It is also possible to clone the original body without a brain (or retrieve the original body from cryogenic storage, if it was preserved in that way) and have the electronic brain connect to its spinal cord via wireless link. In this way, it is possible for the person to experience life in a “real body” as desired. Some third-stage people spend significant time “in their bodies.” Others do this rarely or not at all.
Contacting Me You can send me an IM in Second Life, or use the private messaging feature on the forums, which I check from time to time. It will be very helpful to me if your first communication gives me some indication of why you are initiating contact. Sometimes, complete strangers send me IMs containing just “:)” or “hi.” This doesn’t give me much to work with, and usually results in a monosyllabic answer. Also, I do not like getting random teleports from complete strangers, so please don’t summon me without IMing first. Friends and business associates are of course free to summon me, but it is still a good idea to IM me first, as I am usually in the middle of something. If for some reason you want to contact me, and you don’t have a SL account… well, what are you waiting for? You can get a 1-week trial for free, and a lifetime account costs all of
