Five in a tent, TP, tipi

Hello Five, do you see this teepee, Amiryu said. Which tp? (Which tp is normally short for teleportation.) “And how can I ever see a tp?”, Five thought, seeing a teleportation is like seeing a thought, or a sentiment, a teleportation carries a name, but it is not a tangible object, not even in Second Life. But no, a teepee is a tipi, an Indian tent! Funny, the words tp and teepee having the same sound, even in chat. It is easy to get confused. Well Amiryu showed the teepee to get some work done: the teepee has to belong to a tribe, and each tribe has different decorative signs on their teepees and these tribes, being very sophisticated, change their symbols by a very smart dialog box appearing at the upper right corner of the screen of their laptop. But this nice blue dialog box, a sort of a menu has to be programmed. That is where Five March (who, by the way, is borne on the 6th of January) comes in. All sides of the tent, depending on which tribe, have to change in a given pattern, and the entrance has to be opened and closed. A nice fire must be around, and a powerful drum, which sounds makes all the tents in the neighborhood belong to the same tribe. Yes, even in Stone Age societies the laptop has been introduced, disguised as a drum. May be these societies even had their laptop before the cowboys, who knows what was hidden under the beautiful hides?
Well, an hour of programming Five thought, hmmm. This Five never learns anything. Five is always underestimating the amount of work. At the end it was a full morning, because Five wanted to program smart and because of all kinds of stupidities. Trying to be smart often leads to foolishness. In programming it is the stupidities which cost time. And in Second Life the transfer of the object worked on also costs time, because of the setting of the permissions.

Two examples of what can go wrong. To have a quick laugh! First all the textures were loaded in the sides and the part of the menu visible on the screen of the inventory of these objects were completely filled. In one side of the tent one of the textures, all with permissions copy and modify was accidentally introduced twice. What happens? Second Life doesn’t accept the same names in the inventory of an object so puts a “ 1” behind the second name. And at the same time sets the permissions as it normally does: no copy no modify! Logically, but when assembled, it takes an hour to find out where it goes wrong.
Second mistake: all the scripts where painstakingly set to copy. But in some inventory menu of some object of the tent another script was created. It disappeared under down under in the menu, which, because of the many textures, wasn’t visible anymore. New scripts: of course, no modify, no copy. This script, doing nothing, quite empty, also caused a headache, because it was invisibly hidden outside the screen border in a menu which was longer then the screen could show. And because all the other sides were ok…..
Some lessons to be learned here: be more careful Five, don’t mess around!
After a lot of transferring all resulting in “no modify”, the tent was transferred piece by piece, until the side causing all the pains showed up, and betrayed it evil intentions of not wanting to be modified by Amiryu. Then everything was quickly assembled. Only Amiryu had figured out a better name for a tribe! Never change names in software, after everything is assembled. If not prepared for name changes, these names can be everywhere….and they were everywhere. The teepee had to be disassembled again, all the scripts changed, reassembled again. All these simple tasks, after the writing of a really smart piece of software were killing Five. Five wanted to jump out of the window. But in Second Life, being perfectly able to fly, you only fall a bit on the ground, doing a falling animation, in this case in the desert, so happily no harm was done. The teepee was finished at last. Even the fire was an innovation. Using the time difference between touch_start and touch_end, you can make smoke signals!
Ok Five had learned another lesson. Actually quite a few. Some new ideas were developed too. All is well that ends well!
The teepees, or tipis, or tents can be found in Virgin Island in the desert. The tents are hidden in a no go area, so beware, don’t go there!

The real reason we cannot eat in SL

No eating in Second Life! Not really! No drinking either, no coffee, no beer. Ok there are animations, even of the famous whiskey bottle you are getting from all your friends: after sipping a bit, a lot, you will fall down! There are bars in SL, there are restaurants. Drinking champagne in Paris of around 1900! You can buy whole courses and eat them, forks and knives included. But it is all…….a bit dry? A far reminiscent of real food, of real pleasure drinking coffee or tea with friends, eating chocolates, or a cake.
No eating means no hunger. And this thought is more positive: a world without hunger! How many crimes are not committed because of hunger? It can even hardly be called a crime, stealing when you are hungry. Myths are built around it, Robin Hood! Stealing from the rich, to give to the poor!
No crimes of this sort in Second Life. No stealing either, not of this kind.
No eating because the avatar doesn’t need food? No real stomach! (No real brains either by the way…). No not at all: this is not the real reason.
The real reason we cannot eat in Second Life is hidden in the deep structure of this virtual world: the permissions! In Second Life every object has a creator and an owner. These might be the same, but when a creator sells his creations, the owner changes. Creator and owner can always be found by right clicking on something, then choosing ‘more’. A menu opens which indicates creator and owner.
Not only the objects you see in SL have a creator and an owner, also the sounds, the animations, the textures and the scripts, hidden inside the objects. When constructing something, you want to sell, or give away you must be careful to get the setting of all the permissions right.
For every part these permissions must be set, especially if you want somebody else to be able to work with your stuff. If you buy something, there are a few possibilities:
“no copy”, this means you have only one “copy” of the item, when rezzed, it disappears from your inventory - “copy” means you can rezz it, take it back and you already have two copies.
“no transfer”, you cannot sell this, nor give it away, only rezz it, or delete it.
“no modify”, you cannot rescale it, you cannot remove a script.
Ok, so an object and all its part have permissions set or not, influencing the process of transferring and being transferred. A bit dry this stuff isn’t it?
We now return to the eating: what is eating in real life: buying, preparing, eating, enjoying, munching, digesting…a shear infinite process of changing ownership mixing and remixing things, when you think about it from the world of Second Life!
Should real food and all its parts have all those permissions on them, we, real people would be starving before being able to eat the tiniest bit of a pizza. We would suffocate before being able to get a breath of fresh air!
So reality, or call it God, has thought this over and decided that there are no permissions or absolute ownership in real life. It would simple block the whole process of living, of changing, of processing, of evolution.
We now know the real reason we don’t eat in Second Life, the permissions! And we know why absolute ownership in real life is not possible: it would not permit ….life!