My Hopes for 2013

At the end of a year it is customary to express ones´s hopes and predictions for what may await us in the coming year. I will - a bit reluctantly - follow this tradition, so here goes. Excuse the naivety!

Universal
The universe is. It was here long before us and will remain long after we are gone and forgotten, in one form or the other. This year I am not going to be so presumptuous to make a prediction about it, I will instead merely express a hope.

1. I hope that the universe as we know it will still be.

Global
On the global level it is easier but also more difficult, because there is so much that is simply "wrong" with the state of things, we all know it but we do not know what to do about it or cannot agree among ourselves what is the best way to go about correcting the wrongs. However, here are some personal hopes and wishes that are at the top of my mind and that I choose to air here.

2. I hope that Syria will be liberated from it´s butchering dictator as soon as possible and that he will not be replaced by another dictator.
3. I hope that the Arabian spring continues.
4. I hope that President Putin of the Russian Federation and the rest of the Russian political establishment realizes that world politics is not a game.
5. I hope that The Peoples Republic of China realizes that it has a great responsibility for world peace and acts accordingly.
6. I hope the United States of America leaves its road to isolationism and takes its responsibility as the leader of the Western democracies seriously and passionately.
7. I hope that the North Korean dictatorship implodes.
8. I hope that the people of the world gain further understanding that we share a single ecosystem and that what each of us does affects others just as what they do affects us.

SecondLife
My wonderful virtual world, which is as real to me as my equally wonderful first world.

9. I hope the technical improvements we have seen will continue, little-by-little it does get better all the time.
10. I hope SecondLife will grow faster, better and stronger in every possible way.
11. I hope that Linden Lab will realize that it needs to improve its customer relations and work with the community as a whole instead of catering to the whims and wishes of a loudmouthed and technologically hostile minority.
12. I hope that Linden Lab will get better in collaborating with the residents on future developments and at communicating its intentions for the future to the residents.

Metaversal
This year I will refrain from making predictions about other blogs. Whether or not a blogger wishes to continue blogging is a strictly personal decision.

When it comes to my own blog, Bock in SecondLife, I believe that my experiences, thoughts and feelings are still relevant, if not for anyone else then for me alone. After all there are so many other blogs that through their bloggers superior knowledge, experiences and contacts are better at financial, informational and technological issues.

13. I hope that the blog Bock in SecondLife will still remain.

Personal
In 2013 I and Bock will be 43 and 6 years old respectively. We will have reached the points in our lives where we should become more mature and less flippant, where we should realize that lives are serious matters not to joke around with. Let me assure you that we do realize it, but we still choose to ignore it - completely.

14. I hope that I will remain in SecondLife.
15. I hope that I will have reduced my medication with antidepressants.
16. I hope that I will have sex again, in both lives but most importantly in first life.
17. Most of all I hope that my loved ones in both lives will be safe and still with me through it all.
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That concludes my hopes for the coming year.

I would like to thank you all for the support and love you have shown me and the blog in the past and hope you will continue to do so in the future.

I wish you all a wonderful, prosperous and happy new year and hope to see you all in the coming year. If we should not have met yet I hope we do, I am actually a nice guy most of the time - even if I say so myself.

Follow-Up on My Predictions for 2012

Last year in December I felt the need to make a few predictions about the coming year. You can read them here Bock: "2023 Will Be Wonderful". As we are now getting close to the end of this year I thought it might be a good idea to see how everything turned out, so here goes (even if there are a few days still remaining)!

For my Universal predictions I would say: 1. Pass, 2. Uncertain and 3. Uncertain. The trickiest here are questions 2-3, because I have no reliable information at all.

For my Global predictions I would say; 1. Uncertain, 2. Pass, 3. Pass. Here the trickiest to assess is question 1, but I still have hopes even with the present situation in Syria where we are standing by watching with our arms crossed while the population is being slaughtered by the dictator.

For my SecondLife predictions I would say; 1. Pass, 2. Pass and 3. Uncertain. No problems on these at all, mesh seems to be on its way out already and will soon be replaced by something better.

On my Metaversal predictions I would say: 1. Fail, 2. Pass and 3. Uncertain. I saved my ass with the 42 answer on the third question.

On the Personal predictions I would say: 1. Pass, 2. Fail (in both lives) and 3. Pass. As for the second question I can only say I had high hopes but failed miserably.
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So there it is, of the 15 predictions I made I got eight Pass, five Uncertain and two Fail which seems to be a fairly reasonable outcome.

Bock: "2012 Will Be Wonderful!"

"Farm in fog", photography by Gary Hamburgh

OK, I felt the pressure building up inside me as the end of the year came closer.

Just as we watch the fogs slowly lifting over the farmhouse in Gary Hamburgh´s beautiful picture, here are my predictions for 2012.

Universal

1. The universe as we know it will still be here
2. We will have made contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence. However, they decline any further contact because they think we are dumb asses.
3. The answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything will remain 42.

Global

1. The Arab spring will continue with baby-steps and a few set backs, it will eventually also turn into a Persian spring. There will still be no Chinese spring in sight
2. The Internet will remain free, power mongers must realize you cannot put the genie back in the can once it is set free.
3. Barack Obama will be reelected for a second term as President of the United States of America

SecondLife

1. SecondLife will still be here, things will improve inworld when Viewer 1 has been dropped
2. Linden Lab will remain as owners of SecondLife and their financial situation will slowly improve
3. Mesh will...  ugh lets wait and see, my answer on this one is 42

Metaversal

1. The blog "Tinas universum" (Tina´s Universe) will be up and running again, the oldest Swedish avatar known to man cannot hold back long
2. "Bock in SecondLife" will most likely still be here, lets say 42 on this one
3. As for the rest - 42

Personal

1. I will be 42 and Bock will be 5, but we will still look like 32 and act like 12
2. I and Bock will have had sex again with another human being and/or avatar. Finally!
3. I will still be on antidepressants but vastly improved

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That´s it folks! All in all, we have a wonderful and marvelous year waiting for us. Enjoy 2012!

Damaged, But Not Broken

Yesterday was more or less a wasted day. I slept in long, woke up, drank some water, then crawled back to bed again. All day the only memorable thing I did was brush my teeth, nothing else really. I didn't eat, didn't talk to anyone, didn't leave my home and didn't get dressed. I walked around in the flat and slept in my boxers, a t-shirt under a hoodie and thick hiking socks. Not a pretty sight, I can assure you.

Luckily I am off from work until January 2nd, but still I want to do more in my free time than sleep, blog and be in SecondLife.

However I didn't do a worthwhile thing until I finally crawled out of bed at 9 PM to make some coffee. After my first cup of coffee I started reading predictions for 2012 in the SecondLife and virtual worlds blogosphere. That was to a large extent a dreary ordeal.

Every SecondLife blogger with any ambition or pretension to be a serious part of the metaverse had come up with some prophesy or other on what we could expect of 2012. Many seemed to have taken their starting point in Philip Rosedale´s views on SecondLife as he expressed it earlier this year. The "high threshold" and the residents being “Smart people in rural areas, the handicapped, people looking for companionship, they love it. But you have to be highly motivated to get on and learn to use it.” statements.

Some of them even went so far as to say that a vast majority of residents are "broken" (physically. emotionally, mentally and/or spiritually).

I have never ever considered myself broken in any way, shape of form, and certainly not when I first arrived to SecondLife and decided to come back again, again, again and over again for almost five years now. Maybe I have gotten somewhat damaged during my time here, but I sure as hell have not been broken by this life.

Although most of them predict SecondLife will still be around for all of 2012, they still rant on about its high threshold compared to online games like "World of Warcraft", which is one of the fastest growing games and is therefore seen as a model to which SecondLife should adapt to recruit new users. So I went ahead and tried that game to see how easy it would be to join, learn and how interesting it would be in there.

I spent four (4) hours in the trial version of the game. First I must say it was not that easy to sign into. One has to register twice, which I cannot understand the need for and which was totally bewildering because the sign in´s come at different points of the registering process.

Once you are in, you choose if you want to belong to "the good" or "the bad" side and what kind of apparition you want to be in those alliances and how you want to look. Creating your looks isn't as advanced as in SecondLife if you want to vary from the given avatars and the resulting avatar is a disappointment.

After downloading, registering twice on different services (the game itself and something called "Blizzard" - if I remember correctly) and creating my looks for about 30 minutes I spent 3,5 hours honestly trying to give the game a chance to intrigue or fascinate me.

There was never any interaction with real people, just with machine dummies who gave you missions or could bring you to life if you died, all the set was about clicking fast and hard on things you had to kill. I admit, I am easily bored sometimes, but after doing this for 3,5 hours my brain was numb and bored to death by the simplistic shit.

If that's what they think we should strive for I for one don't want any part of it - ever.

Do you finally see to what extremes I am prepared to go so you should not have to, my dear readers?