1. A bed was one of the first things I bought for my house (which doesn't look anything at all like a first life house). I haven't really done much of anything on/in it since I bought it though.

I'm not sure that it's such a horrible thing though. RL stuff in SL can act as a bridge to help noobies over to the other side. I'm just not really sure what I'm going to do with it now. :)

Posted at 5:04PM on Oct 30th 2006 by Tad McConachie

2. It's an unfortuante consequence of people being comfortable with the familiar. I asked the same questions, I mean, in a world where you can fly, why have a front door? When there's no gravity, a chair needs no legs. Get with it people, design for the world you inhabit.

Posted at 6:11PM on Oct 30th 2006 by Vaughn

3. Well, dolls don't need beds. Dolls don't sleep. Nor do they need chairs or tables or couches or, indeed, the entire doll's house, which really, is a wasted effort on a series of useless inanimate objects.

Except for those like me, who enjoy having them, enjoy the fantasy of them--Second Life allows me to have my doll's house and my doll, and have them be whatever I want them to be and look like whatever I feel like at a whim. In Second Life, I'm not constrained to a crappy apartment in a questionable area of town. I'm not constrained to hand-me-down furniture from elderly relatives. I'm not stuck in a body that, in many ways, cannot change. Yes, this is a technology that allows for amazing builds that could never, ever exist within the confines of real life--but my house, my things, my avatar are all echoes of that same paradigm, to a much more personal, much more subtle extent.

Posted at 7:50PM on Oct 30th 2006 by Patience Xie

4. You think that's weird? Millions of human beings, sometimes by themselves, sometimes in gatherings, meet on a regular basis to get inebriated and watch yet more human beings knock around a stuffed animal skin. And they do this in a rich 3D organic world, where they could use that same time to achieve some higher order thing like a create a novel, scientific treatise, or new art form.

Life is short. As long as you're not harming someone else, if it makes you happy, go for it. Not everyone has to be cutting edge. SL is hardly devoid of weird cool stuff.

Don't fret about what other people do. Focus on what makes YOU tick and go make it happen.

Posted at 9:00PM on Oct 30th 2006 by forseti svarog

5. Oh, stop it Warren Ellis, get out of my free space with your Calvinist/communist/whateverist hectoring prescriptions for my Second Life and the second lives of thousands. They want a bed to do cybersex in or just look pretty or just sit on? let them.

You go and make your neo-geo Moebius strip gyrating and pulsating purple and go light on that will yah?

And what is so bland and boring and just plain God-awful STUPID about Warren Ellis' "big insight" is that in fact DROVES and HORDES of tekkie-wikinistas have been standing up and babbling this very bullshit for years in Second Life. They are a tremendous nuisance. They never make anything themselves, most of them, they just go around haranguing others. Those that DO make stuff end up making it look like suburbia anywah, or yammer abuot suburbia, like Maxx Monde did, and then LIVE in goddamn suburbia, even paying $250 US to live on a little square in Brown.

This is the biggest hypocrisies of Second Life, really, that people who view themselves as creative and original and forward-looking and progressive cannot seem to BE that without merely spending their time slamming the Babbits and the suburbanites. It's sick. Make something compelling and be persuasive in this 3-d streaming world or shut up.

So stop it now, Warren Ellis, I don't give a fuck what kind of cool famous dude you are, MAKE the stuff you claim to espouse, put it together, bring it about, make people love it -- or shut up.

Posted at 11:15PM on Oct 30th 2006 by Prokofy Neva

6. Many (most?) people fantasize about a life in which they can experience the things they don't have. They don't generally fantasize about existing in a world that is totally unlike anything they currently experience, or about an existence without at least some common frames of reference. So they have structures with walls and roofs, rooms with furniture that looks sort of like chairs and beds, and create avatars that are bipedal and wear things that look sort of like shoes and pants.

I don't understand why supposedly intelligent people seem compelled to belittle and demean this most basic aspect of human nature. There is nothing forcing the residents to make these choices, so obviously the pick things that make them feel happy: maybe happy is simply comfortable, but with a bit "extra" that the real world doesn't grant them.

It's a fair question to ask "why?" this is so, or even to ponder what it might take to break people out of this sort of rut, but I don't think it's fair to belittle the choices.

A bigger question to me, and one of more relevance, is to ask why some people come to a virtual world and immediately attack other virtual residents for being different. People throwing racial slurs at avatars with dark skin, or attacking residents who chose not to wear a human avatar...the level of intolerance that exists in virtual worlds makes me wonder if human kind is evolving or devolving.

Posted at 2:08AM on Oct 31st 2006 by Tomas_Hausdorff

7. I just wish people would stop bowing down to the laws of physics, gravity does not apply and we are all capable of flight please remember that!

Posted at 2:21AM on Nov 1st 2006 by Heiko Decatur