Tag Archives: The Guardian

Current Affairs, Games, Memories & History, Science & Health, Times They Are A-Changing, Web & Technology

Who needs the Metaverse? Meet the people still living on Second Life

Mark Zuckerberg’s grand vision for an online existence has been laughed off as a corporate folly. Meanwhile, those still existing happily on a virtual world launched 20 years ago may be wondering what all the fuss is about …

By Simon Parkin, Sat 10 Jun 2023 08.00 EDT

Virtual worlds: Second Life and Metaverse. Illustration: Nicolás Ortega/The Guardian

On 14 November 2006, 5,000 IBM employees assembled in a digital recreation of the 15th-century Chinese imperial palace known as the Forbidden City. They had come to hear IBM’s CEO, Sam Palmisano, deliver a speech. Palmisano’s physical body was in Beijing at the time, but he addressed most of his audience inside Second Life, the online social world that had launched three years earlier.

Palmisano’s trim avatar wore tortoiseshell-frame glasses and a tailored pinstripe suit. He faced a crowd of digital, animated dolls dressed in the business attire of the day: black heels, pencil-line shirts, Windsor-knotted ties. Looming out of the throng at the back stood a 10ft IBM employee, his digital face plastered in Gene Simmons-style white makeup, with shoulder-length, Sonic-blue hair.

It was a historic moment, a journalist for Bloomberg reported at the time: Palmisano was “the first big-league CEO” to stage a company-wide meeting in Second Life – “the most popular of a handful of new-fangled 3D online virtual worlds”. IBM, just like any other denizen of Second Life, paid ground rent to own a “region” of the game, one region representing 6.5 hectares of digital turf, currently rented at $166 (£134) a month. Renters could build whatever they wanted on their turf.

Editor’s Note: Read more, see link below for original item…

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jun/10/who-needs-the-metaverse-meet-the-people-still-living-on-second-life

Books & Reading, Current Affairs, Film & Movies, Memories & History, Pleasures, Television

Make it so! Star Trek: The Next Generation remains radically hopeful television | Television | The Guardian

By Paul Verhoeven, Tue 11 Apr 2023 11.00 EDT

An enterprising crew: Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Denise Crosby as Tasha Yar, Marina Sirtis as Deanna Troi and John de Lancie as Q in the first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Photograph: CBS

In the 1992 comedy Wayne’s World, Wayne Campbell makes a wise observation about the comparisons made between sparkling wine and champagne. “It is a lot like Star Trek: The Next Generation,” he notes of sparkling wine. “In many ways it’s superior, but will never be as recognized as the original.”

Wayne was right about many things, but even he couldn’t have foreseen the cultural impact of Next Gen from his vantage point in 1992.

The original Star Trek series, starring the likes of William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, was great, and the Star Trek films were intermittently so too – all following a crew of spacefaring idealists exploring the universe and having velure-ensconced adventures. But in 1987 the story of Star Trek recommenced with a new series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, which skipped a century ahead and charted a fascinating new course with an all new crew on a new and improved USS Enterprise, a ship with a continuing mission to explore the universe under the steady hand of the uptight but charming Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart).

Source: Make it so! Star Trek: The Next Generation remains radically hopeful television | Television | The Guardian

Arts & Humanities, Books & Reading, Current Affairs, Libraries, Pleasures, Politics, Science & Health

This year I’m thankful for US public libraries – beautiful icons of a better civic era | The Guardian

The US can often be cruel to its citizens, but the public library is a sanctuary and a vision of what our country might one day be

By Moira Donegan, Wed 28 Dec 2022 10.13 EST

‘The public library does not understand its patrons as mere consumers, or as a revenue base. Instead, it aspires to encounter people as minds.’ Photograph: BA E Inc./Alamy

If you proposed it now, at any town council or city hall meeting, you would be laughed from the room. The concept is almost unthinkably indulgent, in our austere times: an institution, open for free to anyone, that sells no products, makes no money, is funded from public coffers, and is dedicated solely to the public interest, broadly defined. And it’s for books.

If the public library did not already exist as a pillar of local civic engagement in American towns and cities, there’s no way we would be able to create it. It seems like a relic of a bygone era of public optimism, a time when governments worked to value and edify their people, rather than punish and extract from them.

In America, a country that can be often cruel to its citizens, the public library is a surprising kindness. It is an institution that offers grace and sanctuary, and a vision of what our country might one day be.

Source: This year I’m thankful for US public libraries – beautiful icons of a better civic era | Moira Donegan | The Guardian

Arts & Humanities, Books & Reading, Current Affairs, Libraries, Memories & History, Politics, Religion & Spirit

‘Our mission is crucial’: meet the warrior librarians of Ukraine | Libraries | The Guardian

When Russia invaded Ukraine, a key part of its strategy was to destroy historic libraries in order to eradicate the Ukrainians’ sense of identity. But Putin hadn’t counted on the unbreakable spirit of the country’s librarians

By Stephen Marche, Sun 4 Dec 2022 03.00 EST

Left on the shelf: Russian troops deliberately shelled this library in Chernihiv, northern Ukraine, in April 2022. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock

The morning that Russian bombs started falling on Kyiv, Oksana Bruy woke up worried about her laptop. Bruy is president of the Ukrainian Library Association and, the night before, she hadn’t quite finished a presentation on the new plans for the Kyiv Polytechnic Library, so she had left her computer open at work. That morning, the street outside her house filled with the gunfire of Ukrainian militias executing Russian agents. Missile strikes drove her into an underground car park with her daughter, Anna, and her cat, Tom. A few days, later she crept back into the huge empty library, 15,000sqft once filled with the quiet murmurings of readers. As she grabbed her laptop, the air raid siren sounded and she rushed to her car.

Source: ‘Our mission is crucial’: meet the warrior librarians of Ukraine | Libraries | The Guardian

Arts & Humanities, Books & Reading, Memories & History

‘I just wanted my life to end’: the mystery of Agatha Christie’s disappearance | Biography books | The Guardian

In 1926 the world’s bestselling author vanished for 11 days. Did she really go into hiding to frame her husband for murder? Historian Lucy Worsley reopens a case still shrouded in mystery

By Lucy Worsley, Sat 27 Aug 2022 04.00 EDT

Illustration: Eleanor Shakespeare

Agatha Christie was sitting quietly on a train when she overheard a stranger saying her name. In the carriage, she said, were “two women discussing me, both with copies of my paperback editions on their knees”. They had no idea of the identity of their fellow passenger, and proceeded to discuss the most famous author in the world. “I hear,” said one of the ladies, “she drinks like a fish.”

I love this story because it sums up so much about Agatha Christie’s life. They both had her paperbacks. Of course they did. Christie wrote more than 80 books, outsold only by Shakespeare and the Bible, so the cliche runs. And she wasn’t just a novelist, either: she remains history’s most performed female playwright. She was so successful people think of her as an institution, not as a breaker of new ground. But she was both.

And then, in the railway carriage, there’s the watchful presence of Christie herself, unnoticed. Yes, she was easy to overlook, as is the case with nearly any woman past middle age. But she deliberately played on the fact that she seemed so ordinary. It was a public image she carefully crafted to conceal her real self.

Source: ‘I just wanted my life to end’: the mystery of Agatha Christie’s disappearance | Biography books | The Guardian

Arts & Humanities, Books & Reading, Libraries, Love & Relationships, Memories & History, Pleasures

What do you do with books you don’t want any more? | James Colley | The Guardian

By James Colley, Sun 8 May 2022 13.30 EDT

The Long Room at Trinity College, Dublin. James Colley dreamed of a home library with ‘a ladder that glides along the impossibly high shelves filled with more books than you could read in 10 lifetimes’. Photograph: Paul McErlane/The Guardian

I used to dream of owning a home with a library like the one in Beauty and the Beast. A ladder that glides along the impossibly high shelves filled with more books than you could read in 10 lifetimes. That was before I understood that the idea that you would have one house that you were able to live in for many years (and god forbid, add shelving) would itself be a fairytale.

Packing up these books, disassembling their low-grade flatpack bookcases, hauling them across the city and interstate, and trying to reestablish this budding library time and time again has made me thoroughly fall out of love with my old dream.

I do not wish to rid myself of every book, but I no longer wish to keep every book. At some point, I crossed the line from reader to hoarder and I need to go back. These are the books that do not pass the Marie Kondo test.

These books spark no joy. If anything, the many bookmarks still stuck less than halfway through them conjure embarrassment. I know I’m never going back to finish them. They know I’m never going back to finish them. It is time to end this charade.

Source: What do you do with books you don’t want any more? | James Colley | The Guardian