2Cast 2 Go Live In 2Life 2Nite
by Alphaville Herald on 19/04/06 at 6:42 pm
That’s right, Johnny Ming and the SecondCast crew will be coming to you live from Second Life this evening, taping an episode with our special guest, The Writer Formerly Known As Hamlet Linden. Now going by the name Wagner James Au (though still a Hamlet in-world), Au recently took his New World Notes independent, and also pens the occasional column for Kotaku.
Join us at 7:00pm SLT at Pooley Auditorium in Second Life.
Prokofy Neva
Apr 20th, 2006
Having endured this painful two hours, I’m going to point out some of the obvious here:
1. Technical difficulties — we don’t care about those. It does mar the broadcast, and interrupt it a lot, but it’s not worth really fussing about. The show could simply be shorter, then, taking only 45 minutes/60 minutes when live, so as to reduce the number of times everyone has to go offline.
2. The radio show host/editor has to make a strategic decision: what to do about typists? Engage or disengage? There’s a ridiculous dynamic that SL has created whereby voiced people are thinking about what they are saying, listening to their fellow panelists, multi-tasking and not even paying attention to the typed chat, and maybe not even logged into SL.
Meanwhile, the typists are left to feel like boys in the back of the room in school calling out shit and throwing spitballs. That’s why some lame prankster like Jauani Wu starts putting out plywood boxes that appear to be self-replicating and frightening Miss Midnight, or people like me, who can’t resist when we get a fed a home-run pitch like Walker Spaight’s marvelous line, “Now we can RSS feed your cock, Maxx, and get broadcasts from your cock.” Of course I felt it my public duty to begin typiing the feed from Maxx’s cock: “Maxx Monde’s Cock: ‘I Get Shiny When You Touch Me!’” etc.
The way to prevent the back-of-the-room prankster dynamic is to engage the typists somehow. Walker tried some of this, as did Johnny, sometimes responding to typists’ comments selectively.
I think probably more responses to coherent typist comments could be included, but it gets wierd if other people listening to the cast later can’t see all the typing, etc. Anyway, this has to be thought about and managed to avoid stupidity and antics. I would probably try this: ignore all the typists competely so as not to encourage their lame antics, insist that they IM questions to a host or assistant, and focus only on the voice. I actually personally don’t like that idea — I’d rather err on the side of engaging typists because I think the whole voice thing is really stretching the world too far, but I realize for the purpose of what Johnny is trying to do, it’s necessary to dump the typists.
3. Johnny Ming just needs to interrupt and ask questions and guide the speakers more, or else they just go on and on and ON, boring even themselves. It’s hard to step on people in this format where it is so laggy and crashy that you can’t tell whether silence means they went off line or can’t hear or are thinking or what the hell, but probably there’s no substitute for just stepping and trying to guide the convo to go more briskly. I think the persona is good to have as the cool, calm, but questioning radio voice of reason, that stays away from the clod-hopping friskiness of Charlie Rose, or the emotionality of Winfrah, or the snarkiness of David Letterman.
4. I guess the embarrassing truth is that Hamlet is dull. I tried feeding him softball questions in an uncharacteristic burst of magnanimousness, just to see if I could get him on his favourite topic — himself — where he might get a little more lively and enthusiastic. Somebody asked him whether he liked SL and liked doing what he does or something, and he waited so long to answer that I wondered what was up, then answered so unenthusiastically that I wondered why the Lindens kept him on the payroll as long as they did. Maybe he’s suffering SL burnout and needs a vacation.
5. Cristiano gave an embarrassingly long and stupid and complicated and pretentious sort of “set the record straight” intervention about some arcane point having to do with something he said about Metaverse Messenger and another style magazine. This sort of thing is silly and best left out. If Katt Kongo protested about his remarks and let it be known she was upset, and he felt compelled to respond at length, then I understand, because I went through the exact same thing on my blog, where Katt came in long after a blog was posted, expressed some unhappiness about something, and it required a long-winded answer. But we don’t know that she did!
To which I can only give a shout-out to Katt: everyone loves and appreciates the Metaverse Messenger. It’s the newspaper of record these days. By “everyone” I mean thousands of people, including those whose opinion counts because they post on the forums, blogs, etc. It’s a great paper, and it really lives up to its credo of “A real newspaper for a virtual world”.
But you’re in a world that is competitive. None of us can hang on to pride of place without having happy customers. We can’t maintain happy customers by squelching their complaints, then shaming them into rectifying what they said on some public space. There’s going to be critical comments made about MM. So? It’s a combatative, churning, and turbulent world where people make critical comments. Don’t become oversensitive to them, and just let them go — most of them have no bearing on anything and shouldn’t be allowed to affect your good work.
6. The concept of the permanent cast of these FIC characters is really unjustified, creates all sorts of problems of resident government as I’ve already exhaustively explained (giving the blurred distinctions here of Johnny’s role in broadcasting the Town Halls) and lurches from the obnoxious to the boring…and mainly more boring than anything.
You begin to see what a blowhard someone like Maxx Monde is who writes all these cutting comments on the forums, and behaves nastily to people inworld, but then has nothing to say in a format where in fact the microphone is turned on and he can talk. Maybe a prima donna like him needs to be fed more questions to um get him talking about himself but I guess I’m not surprised that this show’s highlight was Walker’s ingenious concept that we should all get RSS feeds from Maxx’s cock. If Walker can figure out how to wire up the RL Maxx’s cock, I’m sure Maxx would enjoy even more popularity.
7. Walker emerges as the star of the show. Thank you Walker Spaight, wherever you are! But…is this the Walker Spaight show? I just wish the guests would rotate more as well as the panelists. I feel like I’m trapped on one of those endless 1950s-1960s game shows like “To Tell the Truth” where Kitty Carlisle, Joan Fontaine, and Nipsy Tucker appear over and over and OVER again only to be interrupted by Merv Griffin or Bud Collyer. In fact, I realize that Johnny may be reaching for the 1950s cultural meme of a game show panel and host precisely because SL just feels like a game…
(BTW, not only is Kitty Carlisle still alive, she was born in 1910. So…wow! She’s still going strong at the age of 95, God bless her. Blindfolds in place, panel?)
Lordfly Digeridoo
Apr 20th, 2006
Hey, prok, you have some brown stuff on your nose.
I’m amused how terribly sycophantic you’re being to Walker, who has deigned you to be a guest rambler on the SLH, while proceeding to lambast everyone else on Secondcast. I thought we were *all* hegemonic meglomaniacs who were trying to oppress the Ficerati… or whatever? Now that Walker has given you another pulpit to bully, you’re suddenly tripping over yourself with praise.
I swear; I miss two weeks of Secondcast and all the interesting stuff happens.