Interesting bit from George R. R. Martin's blog -- he's doing a virtual reading this Thursday (May 31st):
quote:I'm making a virtual appearance in Bantam's virtual bookstore on Second Life. For those of you who don't know it, Second Life is... well, sort of like World of Warcraft without the axes, swords, and monsters. Our world, kinda sorta, virtually. Anyway, I'll be there this Thursday evening, in avatar form, doing a reading from A DANCE WITH DRAGONS and doing a Q&A afterwards. Proceedings will start at 9:00pm eastern and run about an hour. This will be a first for me, so it will be fun to see how it goes. Ah, 'tis a brave new world, surely.
If you'd like to be part of the festivities, get thee to www.secondlife.com. You can sign up there, download the software, and design your own avatar. (I've never done a reading with monsters in the audience before, at least not the sort you could tell my looking at 'em).
The virtual bookstore can only hold about sixty avatars, but the overflow will be able to see and hear the reading from satellite sites, and send questions via IM.
Fun! I don't have the bandwidth to see this myself... but interesting experiment...
Posted by MightyCow (Member # 9253) on :
I love GRRM, but sadly, I won't be seeing this.
I really can't see what the point of Second Life is. I tried it out, the graphics were horrible, it ran slower than heck, 75% of everything there was sex or gambling - not even high quality - and the interface was bad.
I hope they really fix that place up if it continues to be popular. Actually, I hope a 2nd or 3rd generation version does things right and takes over.
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
Every time somebody tries to do something in Second Life, I can't help but imagine it being interrupted by porn-gif wielding 13" naked anthropomorphic furry tigers.
Posted by Puffy Treat (Member # 7210) on :
Unofficial "guides" to Second Life have been popping up in book stores. They seem to consist mainly on essays on why watching a movie in a VR theater is -much- cooler than watching it in a RL theater, why it is -not- just a chat program with a bunch of bells and whistles...and why the nude, winged, goth fox/unicorn hybrids you may encounter are saintly and pure beings. Certainly better than those awful HyOO-mans!
Posted by Mabus (Member # 6320) on :
I went to all the trouble of downloading Second Life only to find I couldn't run it without major, expensive upgrades. Well...so much for that.
Posted by MightyCow (Member # 9253) on :
A week after I installed Second Life, I got an email from them that some of their personal information had been compromised, and they recommend people change their login.
Heck with that! I had given them my credit card info. If they can't keep my money safe, there's no way I'm going to give them access to it.
Posted by Stephan (Member # 7549) on :
Tried it, erased it. If I want to chat with random people all over the world, I'll stick with Hatrack.