Hysterical Historic Day
First, I should perhaps apologize for taking over a week to let the reader know that we arrived in Palm Bay safely, and not even too exhausted. Taking two weeks to make the trip that only took me three days by car was certainly not tiring, even if it did involve several stop-overs to visit friends and relatives. Being able to travel without a short-term, firm deadline is very luxurious! Although we certainly did not get here in time for Thanksgiving, we made it before Christmas and even before the three local family birthdays that happened last week.
Now that we’re here, we have been getting a lot of things done, but also not in a rushed way. You would never know it is a frantic time of year when people are rushing around trying to get ready for what some consider the most significant holiday on the calendar. Or maybe I’m just in denial, and it will hit me next week, “OMG! I only have a week to get ready! Panic! Panic! Run in circles, scream and shout!” But I don’t think so.
Anyway, yesterday I attended a possibly milestone event in Second Life™. Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) decided that rather than fly to the U.N. conference in Bali to cavail about the fact that the current administration is letting the whole world go to hell in a hand-basket by refusing to sign yet another anti-global-warming treaty (and add a few more carbon molecules to the upper atmosphere with his jet’s exhaust), he would instead give his speech in Second Life. The fact that the jet probably still flew out there with or without him didn’t really matter, of course. It was the principle of the thing, and the possibility of getting a little bit of press for doing something a little weird but maybe green-feeling, that mattered.
I had heard this was going to happen, so I showed up at the island that was hosting the event. Markey actually has a fairly decent reputation among techies, as congressmen go, because of his early (for Washington) adoption of several technologies. He was the first person in Congress to use email, apparently, for instance. Well, yesterday he was also the first to hold an interactive meeting in Second Life, and I was there. He really did show up as an avatar (or at least one of his staffers did), and he read a speech to the gathering of about 50 other avatars, then took a few questions.
Yes, that’s Kat Lemieux (my avatar) sitting front and center with her back to you, just to Aimee Weber’s left. Aimee is the one with purple wings.
It was interesting, particularly before the speech began when his staff apparently didn’t realize for about 30 minutes that the people in world could hear their chatter as they tried to get the unfamiliar setup to work. Finally, a few minutes before the formalities began, somebody there said, “You do know this mic is live, don’t you?” and everything got very quiet except for some nervous giggles. The people in world who had realized what was going on were amused, too, and not the least bit embarrassed about eavesdropping on the clueless interns.
But then I got to thinking. You know, it’s actually clueless interns who are running our government! That’s scary. They didn’t even do as good a job of the telecast (which was audio only, but using the video device to link it to the audience) as we did with the mixed-reality Stanford Metaverse Meetups the ISM has hosted in SL recently. The sound broke up constantly even using the weblink directly instead of the SL video feed, and it was pretty evident from the overheard conversation that they had not even tested the setup beforehand. Pretty arrogant of Linden Lab, who had at least one person (Sue Linden) on the ground at Markey’s office, and of whomever else was supposed to be facilitating this event. But so it goes.
