mcpantz.org

For being in Chicago for almost five years, I’ve been fairly lucky as I’d never been mugged. I always wondered if it was because I didn’t look like the type that would be packing a fat wallet, because I’ve certainly traveled alone at night enough to put myself at risk.

Last night, I was riding home on the L, and the train was one stop away from where I get off. I was pretty tired but still lucid; as it was 4:30, but I was still lucid thanks to a very early post-party breakfast. I was dressed to the nines as well, wearing a vest, tie & fedora as I often do when I’m out. The guy sitting across the aisle then very noticeably put his hand under his hoodie, and then started fidgeting in his seat. I think me must have thought I wasn’t paying attention to him, as I probably looked pretty zonked. I’d had a good night, but i was meditating on the craziness of the past couple months of my life in general, which put me in a bit of an irate mood, as well.

The guy, this cooked scrawny bum-looking character then leans over and says “hey, I’ve got a gun.” No he doesn’t. He has a hand under his shirt. I saw the fool put it there. He was fidgeting with it. I saw his round finger, not a cylindrical barrel sticking out from his stupid sweater. He’d given me like, a minute to look at him fool and try and get it right. I looked at him, and went back to to ignoring him.

He’s obviously pissed, so he says “hey, I’ve got a gun. Give me your wallet.” Dammit. I don’t want to put up with this bullshit. I’m used to aggressive situations; I’ve been in a couple fights as an adult before (not proudly, being jumped in a foreign country sucks), so I wasn’t going to lose my cool here. I drew a blank stare, and put my hand in my front pocket.

Getting away with that, too, told me that this guy was an amateur. If he was serious, I should have gotten my ass beat. No one carries their wallet in a front pocket. He was too concerned with getting his cash to realize that. Poor bastard didn’t know I was calling on a friend.

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce Mr. Twisty:

Mr. Twisty is an Italian-made Damascus blade “leverletto”, which means that he is an Italian-style stiletto knife with a German lever release mechanism. Not as fast of an action as a traditional switchblade, but much safer to carry. When I reached into my pocket, I palmed my knife and flipped the trigger down, into a ready state.

I was still giving this guy a blank stare, just waiting for him to move. When you’re in a confrontation where you have an obvious advantage, you never want to tip your hand, and that’s what this guy thought. He interpreted my deal look as fear, but it was just calm and resentment. Here I was with this guy sitting across from me trying to mug me with a fake gun, and I have my hand on the trigger of a switchblade. He kept on leaving himself open, and I debated the merits of kicking this guy in the face when he sat in the seat on his bench nearer to me. Finally, he worked up the courage to do something. “So are you going to give me your wallet, or am I going to have to take it?”

That’s when he got up, and that was my cue. I pulled Mr. Twisty from my pocket and sprung from my seat. The scraggly bum damn near shit a brick, as I watched a cell phone fly from under his hoodie (his very poorly done fake gun), and he started backpedaling as fast as he could manage. I yelled at him to stay back, and he did a good job of it. Thankfully, the train was just pulling into my stop as this all went down. “I’m getting off, you’re staying here,” I said, “I can’t believe you tried to rob me with a cell phone.” I then backed off to my bag, and got the hell of that train.

Google Labs just released Lively, a supposed contender to Second Life. I played the latter a decent amount to see what it has become, which is mostly a desperate cry for more and more attention. People will wander about looking for someone to talk to, and run into a variety of weirdos. I predict a combination of late 90’s AOL chatrooms, IRC gaming, or any other effort at suspended reality that just feels empty and unfulfilling.

The general cycle will probably engender the following:

• early technology adopters and cool-hunters enter the scene, encountering a vast wasteland; declare it simultaneously the next best thing and a complete waste of time
• tweens, internet-based subcultures, and perverts invade the start inhabiting the wasteland. The first page is already filled with sex rooms.
• the technology languishes on in limbo with Google occasionally trying to inject life into the project, only to be met with general disinterest and all-around frustration.

I should probably note that I haven’t actually tried Lively yet. There are a number of things that Lively does get right, and should probably be adapted by any future virtual worlds:

• Separate rooms. Mind you, they could have called it something else that doesn’t make it feel like IRC, but it’s the right idea. Keeping every area of a persistent world totally active in a distributed environment sucks resources that may *never* be used.it makes much more sense to just enforce a boundary & throw up a skybox on users and make them talk to each other.
• Browser integration. No one wants to boot up a full-screen app to just see what rooms are popular and maybe if your friends are online.
• An offline editor. Rumors persist that Sketchup 7 may very well allow people to design objects in a dedicated atmosphere instead of trying to do so in-game, allowing people to focus instead of deal with a bunch of furries running by in morally repulsive costumes.

However, there are some other areas where it falls flat on its face:

• Lack of user content from the get-go. Google’s Don’t Announce Anything policy does give them the freedom to drop something When It’s Ready, and the lack of user content is just going to result in a bunchor restless users who are tired of seeing the same fucking samuri squirrel run around. On another level, it does give them the ability to establish a look and feel to the program, but users may find that more stifling in the end.
• Platform lock-in. I know, I know, most of the civilized world uses windows, but most of the world who is going to write reviews of the software does not. Especially design professionals; the ones who will actually be the cogs in the virtual market they are so desperately trying to create.

The real problem is that no one’s found a good reason to use virtual world technology in a non-gaming context. Second Life general offensiveness in getting *anything* done in a reasonable time in-world has turned off a number of potential users, including myself.  However, there is a lot of potential markets that a decent implementation could access.  It’s that latter part that really means something.

In the meantime however, I’m just going to curse until someone creates a virtual world that doesn’t completely mock the cyberpunk ideal.