Tangs, Dragons, and Decatur Georgia

Singapore Retailer Tangs will be opening a storefront in Second Life in March, 2009, apparently unaware that Reuters--and all legitimacy--has already left Second Life like the air out of a balloon. It does not matter that IBM sees itself having 15,000 corporate users of the Second Life platform in the near future, the minute that Eric Kragel (formerly Eric Reuters) took a step down and left Thomson Reuters for the much more prestigious Silicon Valley Insider Blog, Second Life has been dying a slow death.

A student at Phillip Linden's Alma Mater of University of California San Diego recently immersed into Second Life for 365 consecutive hours in a study of personal transformation. "People are now undergoing all sorts of extreme body modifications," said Micha Cardenas, a visual arts student at UC San Diego. "They're getting scales tattooed all over their bodies, horns implanted on their heads, tongues forked. It seems crazy right now, but I wonder how far we are from actually being able to change species. And if we could, what would that be like?"

"Perhaps we need not conceptualize RL (real life) and SL (Second Life) as separate and opposing realms," said Stelarc, a 62-year-old Australian performance artist who is one of Cardenas' inspirations and collaborators. "SL is a second skin. SL extends our bodily boundaries. Virtual experiences are RL experiences. Micha's extended period of immersion in SL enhances RL and actualizes SL as an alternate operational system, one that allows us to perform beyond the boundaries of our skin and beyond the local space that we inhabit."

In other news the City of Decatur, Georgia, has decided to launch it's own Virtual City, ignoring existing Virtual Reality platforms and starting from scratch. In what could become an innovative use of taxpayer money to fund works-projects for out-of-work tech designers, the budget of the project has not yet been determined but could cost in the millions of dollars.

Said one Decatur resident, " I fail to see the point and I have to wonder why they think it's a good idea to spend money on this. The government should focus on upgrading our crappy municipal wifi that you can find everywhere, but seldom use."

Setting up an island in Second Life for massively less overhead cost is apparently not an option for the wise City Council of Decatur, who view the recent economic downturn as a time to take "aggressive and proactive steps to spend taxpayer money on useless things few residents will actually use."