Jacek Lives

I’ve submitted my entry to Dusan’s interface contest, so now I want to take the opportunity to open it up for discussion, feedback, and critique.

My design proposes:

• Reworking the bottom toolbar to be collapsible and customizable, and to feature chat, IM, voice, and friends list more prominently.
• Reorganizing the main menus to be less intimidating and more logically-grouped.
• Several enhancements to the Inventory floater:
  • “Favorites” and “Worn” item tabs.
  • Quick filter selection box to easily filter items by type.
  • Various enhancements to the right click menu.

The design document is available online, with purty pictures for your enjoyment.

Feedback and critique about the design are welcome!

I received an interesting comment from someone last night. He said that his first impression of me, from reading this blog, was that I was an “angry SL pessimist”. You know the type: no matter what happens in SL, they’ll bitch and moan about it. (more…)

The three-day bloggers “strike” ended yesterday, and Linden Lab issued further clarification on their new trademark policy. I wasn’t really sure what to say or how to feel about it.

At first, I was excited. We (bloggers, whether “strikers” or not) managed to evoke a response from Linden Lab. And a seemingly sympathetic response, at that. It was a well-spun post, I’ll admit. I was suckered in for a while. I so very much wanted to believe that everything was all good now.

But it’s not. Linden Lab has now confirmed that they are waving the banhammer threateningly at anyone who doesn’t comply. Their assurance that they will issue warnings first, reads like a sherrif from an old cowboy movie, brandishing his gun and saying, “Come along quietly, now. I don’t wanna have to shoot you, but I will if it comes to that.”

Linden Lab has also said, in plain terms, that they will use the Terms of Service as a tool to enforce compliance both inworld and offworld:

The Terms of Service are the conditions under which Linden Lab offers the Second Life services. One of those conditions is adherence to our trademark policy, meaning that any use of our trademarks–both inworld and outside of Second Life–must comply with our policy. (emphasis mine)

Clearly, this is a gun aimed squarely at the Residents, since the Terms of Service doesn’t apply to anyone except Second Life users.

And lest there be any confusion, this isn’t something that Linden Lab had to do to protect its trademark. This policy reaches beyond all logic, and beyond the requirements of U.S. trademark law. (As always, remember that IANAAL — I am not an anal-retentive lawyer. I’m just a concerned Resident with two ears and a brain between them.)

Firstly, non-commercial use of a trademark (e.g. on a fansite such as this one) is not considered infringement under United States Code, Section 15 (a.k.a. the Lanham Act) which spells out U.S. trademark law as we know it. The Lanham act also explicitly makes an exception for “All forms of news reporting and news commentary” regarding the thing the trademark refers to; that’s why newspapers don’t have to ask permission every time they print the words “Microsoft” or “Second Life”. Whether blogs qualify as a “form of news commentary” is not legally well-defined yet, but I think there’s a strong case to be made that many blogs do, depending on what’s posted. (This post, for example, is clearly news commentary: I’m commenting on the news of Linden Lab’s policy clarification.)

For the curious, I’ll excerpt the relevant text of the Lanham act:

The following shall not be actionable under this section:

(A) Fair use of a famous mark by another person in comparative commercial advertising or promotion to identify the competing goods or services of the owner of the famous mark.
(B) Noncommercial use of a mark.
(C) All forms of news reporting and news commentary.

Secondly, the risk of “genericide” from bloggers referring to Second Life by name is patent nonsense: not only does it fail to dilute their trademark, it actively strengthens their trademark by establishing and reinforcing the connection between the name “Second Life” and the services offered by Linden Lab. This non-dilution is recognized under the doctrine of “nominative fair use,” which has received significant support from judges in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in the time since it was first applied in 1992.

The deciding factors for determining whether something is nominative fair use are as follows (excerpted from this PDF by Chad J. Doellinger; and also spelled out on Wikipedia for your satisfaction):

(1) the product or service in question must be one not readily identifiable without use of the trademark;
(2) only so much of the mark or marks may be used as is reasonably necessary to identify the product or service; and
(3) the defendant must do nothing that would, in conjunction with the mark, suggest sponsorship or endorsement by the trademark holder

(And mind you, this is for commercial use of someone else’s trademark. Noncommercial use is already in the clear under the Lanham act, and doubly in the clear if it passes these tests.)

You’ll notice that I’ve said “Second Life” quite a few times in this blog post. Am I liable for infringing and/or diluting Linden Lab’s trademark? Let’s check.

1. Since I cannot readily identify the Second Life service or world without using the trademark “Second Life”, the first test is passed.
2. Since I’m not going beyond the bare mininum, e.g. using the eye-in-hand logo or the font used in the Second Life trademark, the second test is passed.
3. And since I’m not implying sponsorship or endorsement by Linden Lab (and in fact, I’m going to extra measures to expressly disavow it), the third test is passed.

I can therefore be quite confident that a judge would find this to be nominative fair use, and thus neither infringing nor diluting the trademark. Add to that the fact that this blog is noncommercial, and that it also might qualify as a form of news commentary, and I’m in the clear under the Lanham Act, too. In other words, Linden Lab has no legal basis to object to my use of the words “Second Life” throughout this post.

But as I mentioned above, Linden Lab’s legal department has decided to reach beyond the law, and add further constraints under the terms of service; they have decided to be bastards above and beyond the call of duty. Noncommercial use, nominative fair use, news commentary use… they don’t care about the law, they just want you to obey their nonsensical, self-destructive whims.

Well, I’m going to continue to talk about Second Life and Linden Lab. And I’m going to call them by their names. And I’m going to continue to do all the things that I and other Residents did to give life to Second Life and get Linden Lab where they are today.

Linden Lab can go ahead and smack me with the banhammer and send me as many baseless Cease & Desist letters as they want. The moment they do, I’ll willingly stop talking about Second Life, contributing to Second Life, or logging in to Second Life, because at that moment I would know that Linden Lab had fully deluded itself into believing Second Life can exist without a community.

Wowzers, Squidograms are selling like hotcakes! I guess people must like the slimy personal touch that comes with expressing your love via cephalopod courier! And really, who can blame them for that?

Anyway, in response to the fantastic demand for squiddy action (see, I knew I wasn’t the only one!), and to save you guys from Repetitive Stress Injury in your mouse-clicking finger, I’ve set out Squidogram Multipacks! Now you can buy 5 or 10 Squidograms in one shot!

But remember, these loverly Kissing Squidograms are only available through today! (Actually until whenever I wake up tomorrow morning/afternoon.)

So tell that special someone how much they excite your neural fibers and make your chromatophores quiver and dilate with glee!

Regarding whether images captured in SL should be considered “photographs”, Hamlet writes:

I’m not totally convinced. Photographs, after all, are created by exposed light hitting a film or data strip. That doesn’t happen in Second Life. And while I think it’s fair to say that an image which is captured “raw” from SL is very similar to a real world photograph (I discuss that here), it’s also possible to subjectively manipulate the world’s appearance in a way that’s totally different. (When an RL photographer needs more light, he can’t just move the sun where he wants it.)

What’s more, many SL images are drastically altered in programs like Photoshop. A lot of real world artists use photographs as their medium, staging them in fictional narrative scenes, say, or even painting on top the actual photo, and because of that very process, they’re not called photographers– they’re called artists.

I consider Hamlet’s view here to be somewhat narrow.

There is no significant difference in the amount of scene-manipulation in RL photographs versus SL photographs. RL photographers may not be able to move the sun on a whim, but they can and do carefully schedule the time of day of their shoots, and use bounce cards and/or studio lights to manipulate the lighting of the scene. You can bet that they’d move the sun if they could. (And I bet some SL photographers would die for the ability to have light bounce off cards in SL — both realities have their challenges.)

Nor is the amount of post-processing (Photoshopping) significantly different between RL and SL photographs. We’ve seen the Dove Evolution film that demonstrates how much manipulation goes on before, during, and after a RL photo shoot.

Both RL photographs and SL photographs run the gamut from casual snapshots (”This is us having a good time at Jack’s bachelor party”), to careful attempts at capturing reality (”Behold the natural beauty of a majestic waterfall”), to highly manipulated digital imagery (”I cloned in the crowd of a thousand cheering fans later”), to strange and beautiful photo-collage and mixed-media imagery (”I think you’ve been sniffing too much rubber cement, Marcel”), and so much more.

The compositional skills — framing, balance, depth, contrast, and so on — apply equally to RL and SL photography.

So we’re left with one distinction. RL photographs are created by photons bouncing off physical objects, passing through the lens and aperture of a physical camera, and stimulating photosensitive materials. SL photographs are created by careful mathematical projection of virtual objects, rendered as polygons onto a framebuffer in a computer. In both cases, the result is a 3D scene being projected onto a 2D image plane.

It’s just that one of the scenes exists inside the computer.

I’ll leave off with one last thought: Photography has long been about capturing the vision of the artist. That’s not always the same as an accurate representation of the physical world.

Attention, readers: I’m looking for an enterprising geek to OGLE my avatar — that is, to capture the 3D mesh of my avatar shape.

I will pay L$ or USD$ for a mesh capture of my avatar. I have the following modest requirements:

1. The final result must be in Wavefront OBJ format.
2. Will pay extra if it has UV texture coordinates intact.
3. Attachments and skin textures not needed.

If you can do this for me, please leave a comment, IM in-world (Jacek Antonelli), or email (jacek.antonelli ~ gmail.com).

[Update: The ever-cutetastic Patchouli Woollahra very kindly OGLE’d my avatar. Thanks, Patchi!]

Back in May of this year, I posted about my work on a script to export animations from Blender to SL-compatible BVH files. Well, as you can see from the comparison screenshot below (click to enlarge), I’ve made a lot of progress since then.

(Mind you there’s some difference between the camera angle in the two shots, and possibly some slight mis-rotation of the hands from SL’s rather zealous animation ‘optimizing’ algorithm.)

Some difficulties I’ve encountered:

• As mentioned in my earlier post, the axes of rotation for the bones in the SL skeleton differ from the Blender skeleton. That is, in the Blender skeleton, the Y axis always points along the length of the bone. In the SL skeleton, it varies between bones.
• Furthermore, the order of rotation for the Euler angles varies from bone to bone in the SL skeleton. I have had to employ code to convert from one order to another to correct for this. It seems to have done the trick.
• SL has a bug which duplicates the first frame of an animation. (VWR-3783)
• Using IK on the Blender skeleton, especially in the legs, tends to cause jittering in the SL skeleton — that is, wobbly knees and ankles. My best guess at the moment as to the cause of this is SL’s insistence on converting all joint angles to integer degrees. Subtlety, be banished!
• Certain rotations result in a significant difference in the appearance of the animation. I’m pinning the blame for this one on Gimbal Lock. That’s right, I’m looking at you, Mr. Lock.

Nevertheless, my animation exporter script is a very significant step up from Qavimator: smooth blending between keyframes (controlled by my most-beloved Bézier curves); custom rigs for different types of animations; inverse kinematics to provide that extra stick in the feet; layering and blending single actions to create longer animations; and all the rest.

And as it happens, I’m currently in a trial period as animator for one ChronoForge 4D, a manufacturer and purveyor of sharp, pointy things with which to poke and jab at other similarly-minded avatars. So next time you stab someone through the heart and then kick their body to the ground (in SL), you might say a little thanks to the kindly, peace-loving artist who made it all possible.

Linden Lab has rolled out a new release candidate today with two of the most talked-about features since Windlight! That’s right, age identity age verification and the new web-based authentication method are here!

Did I say most talked-about features? Maybe a better phrase would be most lambasted features. There’s a lot of talk about these new mis-features, sure, but not in favor of them. Opinions range from “they won’t work”, to “they’re not working”, to “even if they did work, they wouldn’t accomplish what LL claims they will”, to “thank god they’re not working, the damn things are security risks”.

But Linden Lab is not in the habit of letting insignificant little things like the scathing criticism from their customers, the people who put the Life into Second Life, ruin their master plans. Onward, valiant policy-makers! To death and glory!

It’s a good thing I’m still doped up on Windlight, or I might be really upset.

Funny how the tiniest little remarks can inspire the most interesting ideas. I was chatting with Chrysocolla Rau in SL yesterday, and the conversation turned to the topic of tentacles, as conversations with me are wont to do.

Chrysocolla (perhaps prompted by my last name, Antonelli) mused that the Italian word for ‘tentacle’ is probably quite wonderful. Despite my name, I am neither Italian nor fluent in the language, so I looked up the translation: tentacolo (pl. tentacoli).

One tiny mental connection later, the concept of “Tentacolor” was born! I worked feverishly lazily into the night to produce something to show this remarkable Tentacolor. The image above is one frame out of a psychodelic, hypnotic, tentacolored animation. When finished, I’ll put the movie up on YouTube or similar, for the enjoyment of all!

• What: Meet-and-greets for people interested in learning about or participating in the content creators’ play group.
• When: Saturday, August 18 at 10AM, 1PM, 6PM, and 9PM 10PM SLT (each lasting about 1 hour from the given time; come and go as you please)
• Where: Jacek Antonelli Gardens in Hallasan
• Who: Anyone interested in learning about or participating in the content creators’ play group.
• Why: To mingle and get to know interested people; and to discuss plans, goals, meeting times, and other details about how this crazy thing is gonna work!

I’ll be hanging around for about an hour starting at the 4 times listed above. If you’re interested in attending but can’t make it to any of those times, please IM me in-world with a time that would work better for you, and I’ll see what I can do.