Rollin'
The good stuff continues.
I had a picosecond of fame yesterday: the Metaverse Roadmap Project, a group doing some really creative thinking about virtual worlds, quoted me in the blurb for their invitation-only conference at Stanford in a couple weeks. Woohoo! (I'll be going, btw - and I'll have Friday February 15 free to play in the Bay Area, if anyone's around!)
The semester's going well: I actually really love all of my classes, which is such a change from last semester, it's like getting out of jail and winning the lottery. I'm working on picking paper topics for my two big term papers, and about to start getting my last two into shape to submit for publication.
I had my second meeting with the professor who's sponsoring my independent study yesterday: I gave him his first tour of Second Life, and we ran into somebody I've been trying to meet up with for months. Michel Manen is a European legal scholar who's re-creating the community of medieval Andalusia in Second Life as the basis for a progressive republic founded on a modernist, tolerant Islam, and open to all. I want to watch his work, as I'm most interested in how communities form and maintain themselves in virtual worlds. He gave us a tour yesterday, with my professor looking over my shoulder. The physical community is really beautiful, and he and his partner, a female US lawyer, are charming, open and generous of their time. I'm looking forward to working with them.
Allie and I are up to Season 8 in our SG1 watching, and I'm halfway through the most recent Harry Dresden book. It doesn't get much better than that.
OK, off to the grad student reading marathon -
I had a picosecond of fame yesterday: the Metaverse Roadmap Project, a group doing some really creative thinking about virtual worlds, quoted me in the blurb for their invitation-only conference at Stanford in a couple weeks. Woohoo! (I'll be going, btw - and I'll have Friday February 15 free to play in the Bay Area, if anyone's around!)
The semester's going well: I actually really love all of my classes, which is such a change from last semester, it's like getting out of jail and winning the lottery. I'm working on picking paper topics for my two big term papers, and about to start getting my last two into shape to submit for publication.
I had my second meeting with the professor who's sponsoring my independent study yesterday: I gave him his first tour of Second Life, and we ran into somebody I've been trying to meet up with for months. Michel Manen is a European legal scholar who's re-creating the community of medieval Andalusia in Second Life as the basis for a progressive republic founded on a modernist, tolerant Islam, and open to all. I want to watch his work, as I'm most interested in how communities form and maintain themselves in virtual worlds. He gave us a tour yesterday, with my professor looking over my shoulder. The physical community is really beautiful, and he and his partner, a female US lawyer, are charming, open and generous of their time. I'm looking forward to working with them.
Allie and I are up to Season 8 in our SG1 watching, and I'm halfway through the most recent Harry Dresden book. It doesn't get much better than that.
OK, off to the grad student reading marathon -