Cloudy Thinking

Wagner James Au, a former “embed” writer with the Second Life massive multiplayer online game writes about Growing Your Own on his New World Notes blog. You owe it to yourself to read the full story. Here’s a quick excerpt:

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… the first credible genus of artificial plant life to appear in SL is cannabis — leafy, green, the weed with roots in hell (but legal for medicinal use in the state of California).

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Note: Torley Linden (nee Torgeson) mentioned below is the #1 “power elite” on Second Life.

It’s yet another demonstration of Gibson’s adage, “The street finds its own uses for things”, but as I learned, the project’s a bit more ambitious than a mere stoner gimmick.

Torley’s account is here /strong>; unable to resist, I had to check out the cannabis of Dave and Robbie Dingo for myself, and get their secret for making it grow, and grow so huge.

Invest (quite a few…) more minutes and visit this (most excellent) link from Au’s blog. It’s full of interesting stuff, including graphics from Second Life that will blow you away.

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In 2005, persistent online worlds — sometimes saddled with the unwieldy acronym MMORPGs, for “massively multiplayer online role playing games,” or somewhat less clumsily, MMOs — made the leap from niche entertainment to global mainstream medium. On a popularity metric, Worlds of Warcraft became the first game to surpass a million U.S. subscribers, while gaining a global audience over 4.5 million and counting (with a third of that from mainland China.) On an innovation scale, Second Life suggested the potential for MMOs to also be a development platform for commercial, educational, and research projects. As broadband and high end PCs saturate the international market, it’s time to consider MMOs as the likeliest candidate for the Internet’s next generation, supplanting the two dimensional, semi–interactive portal of the Web for an immersive, three–dimensional, fully interactive Metaverse of data.

[via Robot Wisdom]

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 25th, 2006 at 7:56 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.