Tuesday, June 19, 2007

All big things start small...

or, a long and obscure fairy tale about SL, and SLuniverse, and SLeverything :-)

There is not going to be any links in this post, nor the "real SL names" mentioned (although I do thank a lot anonymously those who made this post possible), to avoid inadvertent PR which I do not think is appropriate for this occasion - these are my personal conclusions of an SL avatar and I would prefer them to serve only my selfishness :-). If someone recognizes themselves in this post - this event is purely coincidental. I'll lay it out in a series of wide splashes, which may or may not be related with each other - it is up to yourself to decide...

First, there is a communications culture. If you think your communications party's point of view is not the same as yours, you never ask them "are you nuts?". Repeat after me. Never. Ask. Them. Are. You. Nuts. Good, so I think now this is quite a clear message. The reason for that is twofold - first, you might offend the other party. Not really the case with me - as I find the ill-tempered communications standards merely being the consequence of the lack of general tact - which is really none of my business to be a replacement for the missing educational classes; However, there are people who might not understand such a "sense of humor", and will get offended - which is unfortunate, right ? The second reason, being purely pragmatic and selfish - making others unhappy, despite of being a reasonably inexpensive way to achieve the relative happiness, does reduce the number of those willing to be considered as the "ground level".

The amount of work. It is a very frequent misconception that I have seen over and over again - that every task needs to be accomplished with a half-a-liter blood loss by the person accomplishing it. It's all too tempting to see a professional working quickly and "easily" and judge ("wow! how comes they are even being paid for that ? It's just all too easy!") There's probably a dozen or so areas which I might name off top of my head, which exhibit these properties, however, I would think it is a mistake to think that if any average person can try themselves in that area, everyone in that area is just an average joker. Color blindness is quite not a proof of the non-existence of colors.

All big thing start small. This is really the quint-essence of today's world for me. The internet has society now a highly nonlinear dynamic system - you can no longer consider approximate the "internet crowd" by a gaussian noise cloud. It is much more chaotic, which may even make it possible to predict it at macro level, however assuming you know where the bifurcation points are :) Each individual may be such a bifurcation point, and disrespect to an individual, whatever your opinion is, may unleash one of those unexpected bifurcation points. By no means I am a preaching saint, however, it is just a practical conclusion that I made for myself and which I usually try to follow.

Excuses. There are always rational and even the truthfully sounding excuses for anything. For the others that is. Finding an excuse for oneself in front of oneself is eventually bound to fail in a most painful for oneself way - regret. The most interesting property is that the artificially built system of such a kind tend to get bulkier and bulkier overtime, harder and harder to maintain, and eventually becomes impractical.

Hmm. Looking at the number of words, I think this post sucks. As far as I know - every good post has to have pictures. People like visual stuff, no ?

Totally coincidentally, yesterday I've stumbled across a piece of art which would be a brilliant illustration to my musings. I can only applaud the humor, generosity and self-criticism of the author who made such a beautiful piece of art =) Thank you!

paradox



Upd: spellcheck("generoucity") = "generosity". Must have mixed it up with genericity. Thanks Vint! :) Although the term "genericity" might attribute as well. But I promise work hard not to create my own words!! :-) And, no, I do not use the spell-checker. All the typos are a fully authentic work of mine. :)

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