A is for Animation

1 April: A is for:

Pick anything in your inventory that begins with “A”

• If it’s an Object, rez it!
• If it’s a Landmark, go there!
• If it’s Clothing, wear it!
• If it’s an Animation, play it!

Then take a photo of yourself with “it” and post to: Your Blog, Flickr, Instagram, Pinterest, whatever floats your boat!

And then add a link to your post here on the iRez Comments, as a daily Alphabet Archive!

I is for Item

These things always evolve (you know, because we just make them up as we go along! 😛 So some of the Alphabeteers have actually gone with Inventory Item starting with A, B, C… And some of us have evolved to Avatar, hmm “Experience” that starts with A, B, C…

E is for Experience

So in my case it’s turning out something like:

A is for Animation
B is for Bun-in-the-oven
C is for Catsuit (and Cleavage!)
D is for Drum Circle (in Deep Space)
E is for Ethereal Plane

S is for SLesame Street

Also I’ve wound up making a special home for my version of the alphabet: Alphabet.VanessaBlaylock.com

Also I’ve wound up making videos for each.

Also I’ve wound up finally buying the Vimeo PLUS I’ve been meaning to get for a while!

Y is for the great video sharing site that sucks

YouTube is a great service. You can learn how to do anything on YouTube! Want to work on your Ballet Turnout? Lisa Mareee can help! Want to make a flower shaped bowl? YouDanXXX can help! Want to know about Internet Hacktivism? Cory Doctorow will tell you about the life & work of Aaron Swartz.

But for all it does offer, YouTube has been pretty much corrupted into the recapitulation of Old Media right here in the heart of New Media. The ocean of “television commercials” on YouTube upsets me in so many ways. First, they actually are television commercials in the sense that they’re moronic ads promoting the most fake “good life” imaginable. People debate about whether avatars are real or fake, but I promise you, just about every avatar alive is more real than the ridiculous world of endless Western consumerism as embodied in moronic television commercials.

I also hate that my thought process is given a 15-second time-out. Ironically, YouTube’s parent company, Google, has lots of research showing that even a 100 millisecond delay in search results entirely changes the way people work in online space and the number of possibilities they’re willing to explore. So what does YouTube do? Insert a 15,000 millisecond delay before what you were trying to think about.

I could go on about how much YouTube frustrates and upsets me, but suffice it to say that I thought I bid farewell to the money, power, and fake culture of big, old media when I killed my television some years back, but their tentacles have caught up with me again on sites like YouTube.

V is for a better Internet

The antidote? It’s called Vimeo. Revver is dead. Blip has morphed into something else. To a fair degree, if you don’t want to buy a ton of server space and software to host your videos, you’ve got 2 sharing choices: YouTube and Vimeo. YouTube is free, as in €0. You can’t pay for it if you want to. The real price, of course, is that you’re old media’s bitch again. Vimeo is “freemium:” you can do pretty much anything you like for €0. But they also have a couple of upgrades that give you slightly fancier service, and also let you vote with your money for the kind of Internet you believe in.

€0. is good! It means access to almost everyone with an internet connection. But voting with a few euros for a better Internet that’s about ideas more than fake corporate culture, to me that’s priceless!

SLesame Street! What a cool project! The alphabet of avatar life! And for me, the invitation to finally get around to doing the right thing that I’d been meaning to do for a while.

Photo by ohallmann