dreamshovel

While The Oil Drum is mostly known as a well regarded peak-oil blog, the high density of oil industry expertise there has made TOD a go-to site for quality information on the Gulf Disaster.

A couple of weeks ago, partly as a move to reduce load on the Drupal-based web servers and also to facilitate real-time commentary of the various webcast ROV operations, the admins set up an IRC channel (Freenode, #theoildrum). This channel very quickly grew, often having over 500 people logged in and was (indeed IS) the Authoritative source of ROV play-by-play commentary.

At some point, as BP began preparations for adding the “top hat” oil capturing equipment, a large hydraulic cutter was lowered a mile down from the surface, in order to trim off excess chunks of the collapsed 21″ oil riser piping. This large yellow claw-like cutter was quickly dubbed the “CRAW” by various denizens of the IRC channel. Even more quickly it became an object of adoration, especially as made several important chopped through ridiculously tough metal tubing.

Soon, with the level of punnery and CRAW-LUV snark threatening to dilute the expert commentary for which #theoildrum was created, a spinoff channel was created and the Cult moved over to #craw. And it was Good.

Just another day in the emergent memeflow of online communities.

As for the CRAW, well like all great idolatrous movements there is…a tee-shirt. It probably would be a good idea to hop on over to CafePress and pick one up (all proceeds go to the upkeep of TheOilDrum.com), just in case.

Ceiling CRAW sees all.

Metaplace is gone. Along with the site, thousands of user-created worlds representing untold amounts of time and creativity have collapsed into canned screenshots and video clips. Call it business imperative, another walled-garden tragedy, whatever, in the end (that would be NOW) it makes no difference. Things existed before and now they don’t.

For my own SlideMountain world (a work that I’m most proud of) I decided that the proper send off would be via a blaze of scripted destruction. Performance art, in a 2.5D metaverse.

After a maddening series of lag and connectivity issues, I kicked off the process today around 8pm or so.

The harbingers of doom arrived early

It seemed only fitting that I use the Multim0d script sequencer that I released a few months ago (and I have to say it worked pretty well :-)). The various effects plugins were written in an insane rush, between holiday obligations, etc, and could only be tested up to a point. Oddly it was not easy to guess exactly how long it would take to erode things from fully-running world down to bare tiles. Turned out to take almost an hour.

Yeah, you really “had to be there, XD”, but here’s how it went: First random clusters of objects were suffused with a blue-ish glow and then slowly pulled across the world into cluster of 4 moai surrounding a sparking lava core. Once there they were slowly deleted. Gradually, the clusters increased in size and the sliding speed was increased until all world objects had been destroyed. Then the moai vanished.
For the last stage the terrain began to “melt” in a multistage fading and leveling process, randomly distributed across the world grid. This was the one part which worried me a bit and sure enough the “erosion” process code caused a stack bust when tackling the 100×100 grid and a crowd of onlookers. I quickly flipped to a fall-back that spiralled through quadrants and everything completed nicely.

And that was that, weeks of work nuked in less than an hour.

It was a sad but strangely satisfying end to something I’d worked hard to complete and which was a source of amusement for many people. But to me at least, better than letting things evaporate at the flick of a switch in a server room.

And to all the avs who popped in to watch the “Meta Meta Immolation” let me just say thank you for your attention, camaraderie and support. Indeed, Best Wishes to all the MP community!

Metaplace is dead: the metaverse is just getting started. Onward.

For a long time I had a Metaplace invitation in a lonely corner my mailbox. I’m exactly not sure why I neglected it for so long but around last June, I finally logged in for a look around and quickly began spending a lot of time in Metaplace.

So several months later and I have gained a measure of fluency with the Lua-based toolchain and the art and gameplay idioms, met a variety of amazing and creative people, produced a number of effect and tool plugins via the MP commerce marketplace and have made a couple of well-regarded worlds.
Yesterday morning I finished a new, large and richly-scripted snow sport world that I’d been working on for a few weeks. It immediately filled up with enthusiastic and complementary players, and rocketed up the ratings charts. Good Times.

So when I popped over to the MP forums to post the official release announcement and saw the sad sad news that Metaplace.com was closing up shop Jan 1 2010, I may have stopped breathing for a moment. All worlds, all content to be lost to the winds.

And of course a big gut-wrenching loss is to the staff who lost their jobs in the middle of the holiday season.

Now, businesses come and go and the loss of a web platform is not unprecedented, to say the least. Various web sites and services have been lost in the past. But while basic web such as text, images and video are common media forms which may be copied to a variety of archival platforms, when a proprietary platform like MP goes down, the “content” may well go with it. Sure we can do screen and video captures, but the live part of the environments, the actual magic of metaverses, just evaporates.

And while it’s easy to smug sagely about the eeeeevils of proprietary platforms and walled garden architectures, the loss of all that creativity is deeply painful. It is not, after all, as if the ‘free’ time was spent watching TV or some other passive dissipation.

True archiving would preserve the platform as well. I know an audio engineer whose priceless archival recordings of live jazz are accompanied by the tape recorder(s) and monitors used to make them. Perhaps this trends to the obsessive audiophile stereotype, but for metaverse preservation it’s a fair bet that preserving the physical server platform is essential.

Perhaps in the future the Internet Archive will expand into the metaverse preservation domain, after all it would seem to be a logical evolution for them. But for now it’s a matter of well, loss mostly. Someone with deep pockets could simply buy the MP rackfuls and employ some curatorial staff to keep them running, but I doubt that will happen.

So, it ends: the venue, the domainful of art and assets and the friend/buddy cohort. And we’ve got just a few days, right in the midst of a major holiday/vacation season, to make our screencaps and videos, assure our scripts are saved locally, revisit our favorite places and exchange contact information.

And to recall some highlights that will probably fall outside of the rough archiving processes:

• The first screening of the excellent (best yet, IMO) virtual world documentary “Another Perfect World”.
• The groundbreaking “Rockin the Metaverse” series of live music performances., featuring (among several others) Grace McDunnough, Doubledown Tandino and Raph Koster himself.
• Various industry ‘celebrity’ speakers holding forth generously at The Stage world.

There are also a couple of things whose loss will only reinforce their importance:

• A soon-to-be-dissipated vibrant and creative community. Some of the more hard-core are likely already present in other metaverses, so they may well just change channels, so to speak. But the easy-access web-based MP platform was really good at bringing in fresh metaverse users who will find few acceptable substitutes at the moment. Their “outsider” perspectives are extremely valuable.
• The open User Created Game platform domain for which the loss of MP leaves a large and damaging void. Although in any such open system there is a lot of crap, there were also more than sufficient gems to compensate. So also tally up a loss to gameplay innovation.

As for my own modest contributions I’m most proud of the Multim0d “script sequencer” tool and API that allowed non-programmers to assemble in-world effects and manipulations into complex composites (e.g., disco floors, swarms of angry penguins, simulating snowboard-style avatar movement and all manner of tile animations.)
I also made a popular set of animated fire, the web-embed Isoasis and Regionware places and of course my comically ill-timed “SlideMountain” world, released literally hours before the closing announcement.

But the real talent of Metaplace can seen in these amazing, entertaining and insprirational works:

Happy, Dark City and Wonka (by Xuemei, probably my favorite MP creator)
Kyoto, Steampunk (Dalian)
Space1599 (TheBeeKeepers)
Thousand Rooms, Atlantis (J9scarborough)
GeoQuest, ZooEscape (John)
Fishing, Metapark (Legend)

And well, a great many more. Metaplace is still for the moment a living thing, full of creative expressions. Check them all out while you can