Philosopherintheory’s Weblog

It turns out I like Second Life a lot more than I thought I would. I originally logged in for research purposes. Work wants to make a virtual presence there and a few librarians are already looking around but it doesn’t seem like they’re making much progress. I think the project only recently got any serious consideration, so that may explain it. Actually getting an account took around a week; the server seemed to be down every time I tried. As soon as I was in and had spent a few hours getting familiar with the controls, I offered to help with the project.

Those first few hours were really interesting, to say the least. Second Life is like a cross between a game, a social networking website, and a shopping mall. There aren’t any quests, missions, scores or the like, so you can’t really call it a game, but it definitely looks like one. My avatar has gone through many looks, but this is what she looks like now.

The green fairy outfit was picked up at one freebie island and the hair, skin, and eyes at another. That’s right, in this virtual world, you can buy (or patiently seek out) things like hair, skin, and eyes. The appearance editor allows you to tweak these things, but there’s no way I could make hair like the one I found.

I spent a ridiculous amount of time messing with her appearance. Anything else I say now will only make me look like a huge nerd, so I’ll stop. A quick browse through Flickr shows that my avatar is far from advanced. But I’ve just begun, and at least my avatar has nipples now. Anyway, here’s another view of the hair.

These screenshots were taken on an island called Doom. There were very few buildings on it, but I only went there because there were no people and I wanted to try on all the spiffy new clothes I had just scored. I really like that Second Life has a built in screenshot function. When I began my research, I started by looking at slideshows online and assumed that someone had done a lot of work by taking screenshots the traditional way. The in-world function takes out all the little steps between print screen and image file.

When I first logged in, I teleported right past the orientation islands. The first place you end up in is really boring. I flew off in one direction and found myself in a shopping mall. I wandered around the mall for a while until I came across a terminal that gave away free prizes at five minute intervals. Every five minutes, a letter was randomly selected and if your name began with that letter, the prize was yours. I won a horrible dress. While I was there, another avatar walks up and chats me up. He looks like a troll with pink hair, grey skin, and cloven feet. He says he’s a goobie and I’m very lucky to have met him. I play along. I’m no noob, I’m sure he’s up to something, but I want to see what this place is all about. He gives me a lollipop and suggests I eat it right away, so I bite. My avatar starts writhing in agony, spinning toward the ground and clutching her stomach. I get a message that says she’s eaten too much candy. I find this very amusing, so I detach the lollipop and keep talking to him. He was very helpful and nice, despite having poisoned my avatar early on. Now that the ice was broken and we decided to be friends, he slipped into his regular get-up. The first friend I made on Second Life was a vampire.

I talked to him for a little longer and then we parted ways. He teleported out of there and I wandered off, not knowing where I should go. It was my first visit, after all. So, being the SL noob I am, I chose a ramdom destination on the map and teleported. I landed in the middle of a nudist island. I made a naked friend there, walked around, saw a unicorn and a few other virtual nudists, and then visited one of the shops my newest friend recommended.

That was it for that night. I couldn’t find any of the academic islands. When I had some spare time the next day at work, I asked the librarian which island he was on. My adventure would continue that night.

Myspace has finally proven its worth. Until today, I have only used it to keep in touch with old friends that I didn’t want to lose track of for various reasons. Today I ventured onto a friend of a friend’s page, where I found pictures of people in zombie make up, and then onto yet another profile before finding this gem. However, Myspace videos and WordPress don’t play nice, so you’ll have to click here to view it.

Ennui Prayer and I often toy around with the idea of making short films, but a zombie movie is something we both really want to do.

I’ve never seen an ice pop admit right on the package that it’s basically a plastic tube filled with Kool-Aid, or in this case, FlavorAid.

I’ll take mine frozen, thank you very much. If I wanted a drink, I’d have one. Anyway, I obtained this popsicle at today’s picnic lunch to celebrate UTPA’s recent SACS accreditation. My free lunch came with a price. I had to shake the university president’s hand. She gave me an insincere smile and didn’t make conversation. I wonder if she has her chronies scout out the blogosphere for her name.

In addition to SACS accreditation, the lunch party was the celebration after the annual staff awards ceremony. Many people from the library got longevity awards, including two from my department (20 years) and one from circulation (30 years). My old friend Karen received an award for 10 years of service, which is hilarious because she left quite a while ago to become a library director. I got my award (5 years) last year. I don’t expect to be here for the 20 or 30 year award.

My brain is numb. I can’t tell if I need to sleep for a week or wake the fuck up.

The secretary left work early yesterday to drive herself to the doctor’s office because she thought she was having a heart attack. As I suspected, she had an elaborate story for me the moment she walked in this morning. Her 10-minute diatribe boiled down to one word - stress. Her doctor diagnosed her with severe stress, gave her some pills, and sent her home. Instead of taking some time off to rest, she came in to offer us some badly needed comic relief.

I tell my friends this a senior citizens job because you don’t have to think, you just have to match. If everything doesn’t match, you know you did it wrong.

And then she picked up the phone and called her doctor’s office to call in a prescription because she was having chest pains again. As soon as she hung up she told me she was changing her contact information, as if I couldn’t plainly hear her. Sometimes I pity her. She’s a paranoid, self-important, mean person, possibly on the onset of Alzheimer’s and most definitely suffering from some kind of psychological disorder. But it’s hard to distinguish whether she’s just the sum of her negative characteristics or if they’re a result of some medical problem, and if that even matters at this point. Anyway, the quote struck me as funny considering her (in)accuracy record here.

On to more pleasant things!

Either someone has a sense of humor or that’s a strange coincidence. I have a knack for finding humor in series of book titles. Maybe I’ve worked in a library for too long.

I bought a journal at Barnes & Noble during my last escapade. It’s really quite beautiful and I haven’t brought myself to write in it just yet but I think today is the day. I also picked up The Wild Trees by Richard Preston. I haven’t opened it yet, but as soon as I finish my final project for creative writing…well, American Gods can wait. Anyway, I probably wouldn’t be so interested in reading The Wild Trees if Eric hadn’t talked it up, in fact I may have never even picked it up. I usually skip right over the nature section to browse science or evolution.

I wish I could sleep for a week.

I laid my fingers upon the keyboard with intentions of hammering out some thoughts that have been bobbing around in my head but instead find myself drawing a blank in the midst of a coughing fit. I’ve been sick all weekend. I stayed up late on Saturday screwing off on Facebook and reading the Friendly Atheist when I probably should have slept to speed up my recovery. I’ll give blogging a shot anyway, despite the fog in my head.

I went to Barnes & Noble the other day and came across the latest in apologetics, The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions.

For now, I’ll just give you Amazon’s product description. I’m sure it sums it up pretty well. When the library buys this book, and it will, I’ll read it and post a little write up.

Militant atheism is on the rise. Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens have dominated bestseller lists with books denigrating religious belief as dangerous foolishness. And these authors are merely the leading edge of a far larger movement–one that now includes much of the scientific community.

“The attack on traditional religious thought,” writes David Berlinski in The Devil’s Delusion, “marks the consolidation in our time of science as the single system of belief in which rational men and women might place their faith, and if not their faith, then certainly their devotion.”

A secular Jew, Berlinski nonetheless delivers a biting defense of religious thought. An acclaimed author who has spent his career writing about mathematics and the sciences, he turns the scientific community’s cherished skepticism back on itself, daring to ask and answer some rather embarrassing questions:

Has anyone provided a proof of God’s inexistence?
Not even close.

Has quantum cosmology explained the emergence of the universe or why it is here?
Not even close.

Have the sciences explained why our universe seems to be fine-tuned to allow for the existence of life?
Not even close.

Are physicists and biologists willing to believe in anything so long as it is not religious thought?
Close enough.

Has rationalism in moral thought provided us with an understanding of what is good, what is right, and what is moral?
Not close enough.

Has secularism in the terrible twentieth century been a force for good?
Not even close to being close.

Is there a narrow and oppressive orthodoxy of thought and opinion within the sciences?
Close enough.

Does anything in the sciences or in their philosophy justify the claim that religious belief is irrational?
Not even ballpark.

Is scientific atheism a frivolous exercise in intellectual contempt?
Dead on.

Berlinski does not dismiss the achievements of western science. The great physical theories, he observes, are among the treasures of the human race. But they do nothing to answer the questions that religion asks, and they fail to offer a coherent description of the cosmos or the methods by which it might be investigated.

This brilliant, incisive, and funny book explores the limits of science and the pretensions of those who insist it can be–indeed must be–the ultimate touchstone for understanding our world and ourselves.

I’m sure David Berlinski thinks his little play on Richard Dawkins‘ The God Delusion is pretty clever, but I think I’m pretty clever too. I’m sure others who browse the philosophy section will appreciate my humor as I often appreciate theirs.

I’m glad the semester is about over. I took on more than I should have and ended up letting some slip. I just get so worn out during springtime. And work isn’t helping. We’re going through so many changes and I’m suddenly the secretary’s babysitter again. If I could just do my job in peace, work wouldn’t be half bad. Ever since my supervisor started having trouble with administration, the secretary’s been hollering my name every five minutes instead of hers and I’ve been wasting my time explaining the same things over and over again. How long does she think her training period is going to last? And just how long do we have to put up with her crap before they realize that she’s untrainable? She’s always bragging about how she’s been a secretary for 20+ years, she’s never had to look for a job because they always sought her out (blah, blah, blah), but she can’t even do basic Microsoft Office tasks on a computer or remember a series of steps for a repetitive task. She talks about our student workers like they’re second-rate employees, but they’re far smarter than she is and much more productive…even if they do spend half of their shifts on Myspace.

I might be less angry about this whole situation if the secretary didn’t make it her personal mission to fuck with me on a regular basis. Asking for help is one thing. We all help each other when we can. Lately she’s been testing my Spanish. I’ve told her repeatedly that I’m not very fluent in Spanish, and her reply is always that she had assumed I was because of my last name. Every time I don’t ask her for clarification when she says something to me in Spanish (in other words, when I understand), she carries on in Spanish. Everything is like that with her, all or nothing.

Her most recent mind game involves sneezing. It began on Friday, the day I started to feel ill. It started with a few sneezes at work. She made a big production out of blessing me each time I sneezed, and I politely thanked her. I think I sneezed three or four times throughout the morning, all spread out, so it wasn’t excessive. There was no reason for her to do what she did next, no reason other than asshattitude. She forced herself to sneeze eight, nine, ten, ELEVEN times in a row! And then I lost count. And as usual, I ignored her. I’m not in the habit of saying bless you, and not about to start just because some cantankerous old hag wants to out me as a heretic.

Because I don’t particularly like the idea of leaving my readers fuming over my coworker’s antics, I’ll leave you with an amusing Boondocks video instead.

I think the soda machine is trying to tell me something. Instead of dispensing the delicious beverage I chose, it decided I should have water.

Quit judging me, soda robot! Coke zero has just as few calories as your stinking water and only a few more chemicals.

Whoever is making the creepy phone calls can quit it now. Seriously.

It’s after 3am and I can’t sleep because I’m just so pissed off right now.  You want to know what I’m feeling?  Pissed, that’s what.  And hurt.  And rejected, which sucks because I never wanted anything but your friendship.

WordPress has implemented a search feature and the blog entry announcing it gives me an icky feeling. Here’s a bit of what Joseph Scott has to say about it:

We also feel like you guys are creating some of the best stuff on the web, there’s a natural selection of people tasteful enough to end up on WordPress in the first place.

So far every comment is a pat on the back for WordPress, with a few minor complaints about language issues and one gentleman questioning their method for determining the relevance of blogs to the search queries. Mr. Scott chimed in periodically to let us know that they were working out the language kinks, but he ignored questions regarding search results except to say that private blogs won’t show up.

Why do I care about this? Because Ennui Prayer had to move Sex Wednesdays to Blogger after they blocked him from the search engines. I suspect it’s not natural selection that’s deciding what’s tasteful on WordPress.

EDIT:
After reading their FAQ regarding nudity on the site, I see that it’s been this way all along. WordPress is childproofing their blogging community. I wonder what other topics are marked as mature (ie, not suitable for children).