So the fun thing is when you know all these characters in real life, I mean, in Second Life, uh… hmm… ok, I hope you got what I meant!

I apologise in advance to all my friends if you didn’t appreciate the irony Well, after you read the explanations, you’ll might be even more furious with me, of course…

‘Commander’ Hamlet Au, of New World Notes fame, is our former-Linden-turned-editor. He’s criticised for never getting his own ideas for writing about them. Instead, he assigns ‘friends’ some ‘assignments’, which they gladly will do, and then posts these on NWN. In this story, he sends Gwyn around to “find about the news on the mines” — he never bothers to go there himself. And obviously, forget about “background”. That’s for them to find out

We then meet Prokofy Neva as Stargate-keeper. Well, he’s always furious because the FIC — specially the friends of Hammie, of course — always want to be at the forefront of everything, even if really there are more really important things than what the FIC want or not (that’s why the trade ship goes through the stargate first — commerce and economics, in SL, exist in spite of the FIC, and are far more important than them). We all know about that, of course, but Prok’s always prone to lecture us ad nauseam. This is what he does here. Also note that here, at least, he is in charge. Worth thinking about what that means — or why he actually just makes the FIC wait, but at the end of the day, they’ll let them through.

Tateru Nino’s character was particularly naughty. Tat’s a wonderful friend whom I’ve met when she was drawing a lot of attention as a community leader among the many helpers and volunteers in SL. In fact, one might argue that she was the community leader, at least of the helpers in SL. In this story, she’s a manager of a whole mining complex — that is full of robots (“[...]almost everything is remotely controlled. Humans only come here for maintenance mostly.[...]“).

So she’s down a few notches, isn’t poor Tateru? Now she just orders robots robots around to do exactly what she wants. But… they’re breaking down… and require human maintenance teams to get them working again

There is a hint at the statistics and metrics, something very dear to Tateru indeed, as probably SL’s oldest statistician. Frans Charming has recently joined the group of stats-and-graphs providers, so I thought to mention him too (he’s certainly FIC enough!).\

On the secondary roles, Mera Pixel is mentioned, but just “to fix things up”. Mera and Tateru used to be very close (sadly, not any more), but Mera behaved as she were only Tat’s sidekick. And, well, since BanLink opened, Mera’s shown her talent at putting incredibly powerful and complex projects out, so it’s naturally with irony that she is barely mentioned here — in real life, I mean, in the real Second Life, Mera’s probably done quite more for SL than most people I know. She just never gets the credit for it.

You’d have to know how SignpostMarv Martin codes to appreciate the irony here. Let’s just say that if you want to have something simple, easy-to-understand and remember how it works, user-friendly, and, well, working, you should not look at his projects. On the other hand, that’s how SL looks under the hood — and that’s probably why he’s campaigning to get hired by LL.

Morgaine Dinova (a strong critic of LL’s grid architecture and a leading member of the Architecture Working Group) and Extropia DaSilva (who is an extropian — now, how did I know that before I met her? and a fellow Thinker) make a short apparition here. I’m sure that both would delight in getting those dumps from the robot brains. Extropia, for instance, managed to host a meeting today just about warbots. So, yes, I knew she would have fun tinkering with robots’ memory dumps…

And of course, there is the star role. I’m amazed that no one commented on that; perhaps you guys are too used to my own persona and were too polite to comment.

I think it pretty much resumes how I truly am:

- I tend to run errands for anybody that asks gently, even if I have no clue of what’s all about
- I underestimate the complexity of problems
- Any job that gets me to talk a lot, has to be fun!
- I do things way beyond my level of knowledge and never ask how to do them, or try to learn how they work (beyond, well, reading on Wikipedia). See, I’m sure that if someone gave me a spaceship I’d behave exactly like that — “oh, I’ll figure it out somehow”.
- I disregard people’s snarky comments
- Fashion/design/looking cool is often more important than function. Yes, I like pretty graphics and nice outfits — why do cool things have to be ugly? Look at the Mac! It’s just plain old FreeBSD beneath, and hardly anything to get excited about, but looks so cool!
- Note that in the conversation with Tateru I have absolutely no clue of what she’s telling me. But she says that to figure things out, I should talk to people and robots. That’s cool! I can do that!
- Still, I’m lazy. Maybe there are better ways of doing things? Like hmm, don’t starships do scans of everything while in orbit? Why do I have to go down the mines? Arrrgh… well, ultimately, procrastinating leads to nothing, but I usually realise that too late.
- Thus people never trust me with anything important (aye, that’s why Hamlet Au has a Space Patroller… who goes around unarmed. Who knows what would happen otherwise??)
- I delegate everything. Talking to robots is not fun, so, well, I just dump their memories into a stick and get the experts to look upon it. Did I fix anything? No, but I was great at pushing work to others. Specially boring work. Who wants to have philosophical discussions with robots, anyway??
- The most obvious answers always elude me. I was never good at “Keep It Simple, Stupid”.
- And most important of everything: I never finish my tasks. Either there is someone else to finish them for me, or everything will, ultimately, fail. Unless it’s open-ended.

So there is actually not going to be a “sequel” since the fun part of the ending is that the main character never “ends” anything

The last I heard, Miss Arai did 65 sim crossings in 19 minutes with no crashes.

Oh and I will pay this sim a visit. It’s been too long since I’ve seen new stuff.