It wasn't a gift

[2011-10-09 11:26:59]
Kev Sweetwater: Thank you for this gift, Treasure
Treasure Box: My pleasure.
Treasure Box: It was more a personal tradition.
Kev Sweetwater: =)
Kev Sweetwater: maybe we can burn some other stuff more often
Treasure Box: lol
Treasure Box: I said "tradition".... Not "psychosis"....  ;)
Kev Sweetwater: hahaha

It wasn't a gift.

A gift comes from an overflowing cup.  My cup is empty.  When you give up something that you need, it is a sacrifice.  So, it wasn't a gift.  It was a sacrifice.

But it was not a sacrifice for the event or for the principles of the event or for anyone at all.  It was a sacrifice to That Which Is.  It was my rite of worship.

2011 Burn2 Temple, built by Damanios Thetan

When Kell contacted me this year about burning the Temple again, I was already swamped.  I told her it would take at least a week out of my schedule.  It took three solid weeks.

In those three weeks, I wrestled with design decisions, cussed at bugs, berated myself for making a commitment I could not afford, and cried in anguish for falling short of my own expectations.

When I scripted the burn for the first time in 2007, it took me four or five very long days to script and to test.  The day before the event was to start, we were left without Man or Temple, so I was scripting as the event was going on.  And I had to burn both The Man and the Temple.

It's not that simple anymore.  In the quest for a more realistic burn, I've tried to innovate and create some new technique or new way to do some part of it.

I raised the bar for myself every year.

In 2008, Damanios added glass to the Temple design, so I experimented with breaking glass.  The broken shards were particles.

It was the year my grandmother passed away and I was triggering the burn from a little Internet cafe in a small rural town in the Philippines.  The trigger wasn't coordinated by script.  Poid Mahovlich had to help me trigger each piece.

In 2009, I coordinated the trigger by "cocking" the scripts to listen for a code, switched to prim glass shards, added sparklers for the "bones" inside the temple at the start of the burn, and introduced the megaprim fire, which was a disobedience of the explicit rule that megaprims not be used in the event that year.  But there was no way I could achieve the same effect with 10x10x10 prims.  The flexy prim was a simple and elegant way of simulating the movement of fire.  And with glow and transparency, the dark silhouettes of the objects inside created a dramatic effect.  I overheard someone in the audience say that it was the best use of megaprims he had seen yet.  Somehow, that comment justified my transgression.

But the burn had now become much more complex.

It was also the year I became disillusioned about the whole event.  I was reprimanded because I blogged about my disagreement with their plans to desecrate the Temple and turn it into another party venue.  That reprimand made me feel like a hired hand who should shut up and just do as we were told.  Except we weren't really "hired" because we weren't paid.  Neither did we volunteer on our own; we were asked to do it.  I could have left; instead, I chose to stay because I had made a commitment.  But the work became emotionally painful.

After the burn, Damanios said, "I was worried your heart wasn't in it, but you proved me wrong."  It wasn't that my heart wasn't in it.  It was that my heart was broken.

I didn't think I could handle another burn.

When Kell asked me this year, I was torn.  I really couldn't afford to do it, but it felt as though a long-lost lover was asking to be taken back.  Damanios already agreed, and I had told Poid in the past that I'd burn any Temple Dama builds, so I chose to say yes.

This year's coordinators are much nicer; the issue this year was time and personal resources.  I had to give up a timeshare week that I had scheduled months ago.  I had to postpone projects that I am already behind on.  And because it was on such short notice, I didn't have time to think about the design or to experiment.

There had been significant improvements in the Linden Scripting Language to make scripts more efficient, so I knew that I had to rewrite all the scripts at the very least.  But there had to be something innovative somehow.

So this year, the censer played an important role in the burn itself.  I started with the idea of paper boats and I changed my mind.  It was serene, but standing water doesn't make sense in a desert.  I was playing with llTargetOmega on child prims when the objects in their orbits reminded me of planets, and that, in turn, reminded me of an old collectible Christmas ornament that I created for the International Spaceflight Museum in 2007.  Touching the ornament would change the sphere into the sun or moon or any of the planets.  And that's where the Lotus Suns idea came from, except I used the texture map of Venus instead.

Messages in the Lotus Suns inside the Temple.

If you didn't witness the actual burn, this is what happened....

When the burn was triggered, the messages were shouted out in public chat, which is the tradition.  In the past, each pod burns by itself after the messages it holds are shouted out.  This year, the lotus sun pods were pulled into the center sun which grew slightly with each pod crash.  At the same time, the lava-like fluid in the censer bowl started rising at the center towards the sun.  By the time the last pod crashed, the tip of the rising fluid had already reached the center sun.

The rest of the fluid was then "slurped" into the sun, which grew even faster and finally burst, as flames shot out towards the four outer structures of the Temple.  A few moments later, the outer structures burst into flames and the glass broke into pieces.  And the fire started.

In the past, I had always wished I could add a "story" about how the fire starts, instead of chalking it up to spontaneous combustion.  This year, I finally did.

I used megaprim fires again, and even though we could edit megaprims now, I decided to let the fire prims fade in, instead of growing in size.  That was an aesthetic decision.  This year, I also added fire licks, which took me a while to experiment with, and I'm still not entirely happy with it.

Start of burn, soon after the whoosh.

I had to cut some corners, so to speak, with the main burn, because I was short on time and because I was keeping the whole burn efficient.  Even on the day of the burn, I was tweaking settings and rewriting code.

[2011-10-09 12:03:44]
Treasure Box: I wish I had more time.
Kev Sweetwater: well you got a year till 2012 is needed  =)
Treasure Box: lmao
Treasure Box: Only if Dama is building.
Treasure Box: And he already said he wouldn't again.  :)
Kev Sweetwater: eh we'll see
Treasure Box: lmao

[2011-10-09 12:10:10]
Damanios Thetan: He's asking me for next year too... and told him i don't do it unless Treasure can burn it ;)
Treasure Box: omg
Treasure Box: That's practically a commitment!
Damanios Thetan: no... not really

*sigh*

If Dama and I keep pointing at each other as the condition for agreeing to doing it again next year, we're in trouble.  Thankfully, Dama won't commit because of his schedule.

It isn't so easy for me.  The burning of the Temple has acquired a spiritual significance.  To be asked to do it feels like a higher calling.  I cannot say no.  Even if it requires me to make a sacrifice.  Even if it consumes me.  All I can do is require conditions to be met.


I have a whole year to think up conditions to be met....  :D

Burning again

Kell Babenco: Greetings. I am contacting you on behalf of Damanios Thetan. Damanios is once again building the Temple for Burn2. You were the brilliant scriptor in the past for the Temple and message leaving device. Would you be able to help out one more time? I look forward to your reply. Kindest regards.

Now, how can you turn down someone who calls you "brilliant"?!? ;)

Actually, I had told Poid Mahovlich once that I would burn anything Damanios builds. I've burned every Burning Life Temple that Dama had built. And there's no point in breaking the tradition now.

I thought that Kell meant for next year.... I was wrong. She meant for next month.

Burn2 starts on Oct 1. The Temple burn is scheduled around Oct 9, my RL birthday. I have reservations for a trip that week. And I have a lot of projects that I'm already juggling this month, including finishing the book, creating two more stereoscopy tutorials, doing my taxes, job-hunting, and lots of other little commitments.

But, this is significant to me. Burning the Temple is a spiritual rite. It is deeply meaningful in ways I cannot articulate. And being the one to burn it, I feel like a priestess. How can I turn down that honor?

Before anybody gets any ideas, I only committed to burn Temples that Dama builds. And he said this is the last time he's building a Temple for Burning Life / Burn2.

So there.

Large corporations building trust

I spoke about trust in virtual worlds, but I spoke primarily about trust between individuals. When a large corporation like Microsoft comes into Second Life, the same approach is necessary.

I remember a time when the name Microsoft brought up such passionately negative emotion in people, that employees were advised for their own safety to refrain from wearing Microsoft-branded merchandise in public. It was also during that time that employees were asked to participate in forums because customers tend to like individual employees, even though they hated the company as a whole.

In technology conferences and expositions, people meet Microsoft employees and feel better about the company based on one-on-one conversations with those individuals. Customers can ask questions directly and get a live response. Customers and company representatives have a real conversation, an exchange of information. As a result, the customers feel cared for and listened to, the employees get an unfiltered view of what the customers want, and the company builds goodwill.

There are ways for customers to reach employees online -- blogs and forums, for instance. But blogs tend to be one-sided broadcasts. Comments to blogs and tagging rarely develop into conversations. When they do, they tend to be short strings of exchanges, where each side simply takes their turn on the podium. Responses are edited and polished. Forums are more interactive, but, again, responses are edited and polished. And the asynchronicity makes the "conversation" disjointed.

Virtual worlds offer something closer to a spontaneous face-to-face meeting but with the cost-effectiveness and the convenience of online conversations. In a virtual world, it becomes warmer, more personal, more intimate.

And warmer, more personal, and more intimate are the right conditions for trust to develop in any interaction.

Trust in virtual worlds

It is amazing how we trust people online with so little to base that trust on. Trust is built even though we've never met each other in real life, even though we don't know much about the other person's background, even though we don't know what the other person looks like or sounds like, and, in most cases, even though we don't know the other person's real identity.

Trust is based on our interactions with the other person. It is based on our intuitions. It is based on our assumptions about the other person.

There is nothing more unfounded than the trust we give a stranger. Yet, somehow, we offer that trust. It's a trust in humanity itself. It is a trust that they are as trustworthy as we are. And most people prove themselves worthy of that trust.

Naturally, unbounded trust opens the door to deception. There will be a small minority who would take advantage of that trust and use it to benefit themselves to the detriment of the other person. That is true in real life as well, but virtual worlds - and the internet, in general, - make it easier for scammers.

However, developing trust is crucial in business relationships in real life and is just as critical in virtual worlds, if not more so. But how does one develop trusting relationships with other people in a virtual world? Networking. Interacting. Conversing. Sharing experiences. Creating experiences. It's how we develop our intuition about people. It's how we get a feel for their trustworthiness.

Just like in real life. But more cautiously.

Do you speak English?

One of the great things about Second Life is the opportunity to chat with people around the world from different backgrounds. Since Linden Lab is based in the US, the default language in SL has been English, although there is a large number of sims that are primarily Italian or French or German or another language.

Most people, however, tend to speak English when conversing with people who don't speak their own language. Or they use the Babbler, which is a popular (but primitive) inworld translator using web-based dictionaries.

However, it is all too easy to assume that you're getting your point across just because you're both speaking English. Idioms, metaphors, and cultural references make our language more descriptive and help us communicate better. But when the other party does not understand the idioms, metaphors, and cultural references, the message becomes blurred instead.

Before the holidays, Poid Mahovlich was telling me about her Christmas jumper and how it was making her feel itchy. In the US, a "jumper" is an overall, typically a loose denim pair of pants with a bib-like top in front and two straps to go around the back. Apparently, a jumper is a thick knitted top with sleeves that you pull over your head, what US people call a "sweater."

When I advertised my 3D Tic-Tac-Toe, Absolut Paine (also from the UK) asked me if tic-tac-toe was the same as the game Noughts-And-Crosses. And after doing some research, I found out that it was.

The techniques we learn in communication classes -- clarifying what the other person meant, avoiding assumptions, giving the other person the benefit of a doubt -- are even more important in online communications. It takes longer, yes, but a misunderstanding that's corrected early saves time and effort in the long run.