Oh fuck -- I've joined Second Life again.

You know that I used to be a heavy player of the "gameless" virtual world Second Life, right? What, you didn't know that? Well, that's a shame! Because for about a year there in the mid-2000s -- fall 2006 to fall 2007, specifically -- SL was one of the main things going on in my life, taken up literally days after The Great Fucking Startup Disaster of 2006 (in which I was going to use the profits from my new high-tech job to start up my arts center, CCLaP, then got screwed out of the thousands of dollars I was owed), done essentially as a mental diversion while I fumed and fumed over the dual massive failures I had just gone through. I played an "omnisexual" character named Miller Copeland, a shapeshifter who could morph between male and female forms at will; that's Miller in her female form you're seeing above, the gender I mostly played since being a cute pixie-like girl in SL is a lot more fun than being a male, in some of the many amazing outfits I ended up picking up for her over the months.

And that's really the first big thing to understand about SL, to understand both that environment and why I've recently chosen to go back to it; that since there's no proscribed "game play" there like you'd see in, say, World of Warcraft, people just make up their own things to do whenever they're in-game, and with Linden Labs (owners and puppetmasters of SL) providing an unusually robust system for creating your own clothing, buildings, vehicles and just about anything else you can mention, as well as an extremely simple-to-use virtual currency system that can be "cashed out" every so often for very real money that you can actually spend in the real world. So for example, single pieces you see above like t-shirts, jeans, arm tattoos and bracelets might cost an American quarter or so to purchase, from one of the thousands of digital entrepreneurs you'll find in SL, while something like that blue alien full-body skin might cost two dollars, while something like that elaborate black dress or the erotic elf costume might cost five bucks. And so that's how a lot of people in SL are making a surprisingly big chunk of spending change there per month, by constantly creating new content, amassing a catalog of hundreds of items, opening a retail store within this virtual city (for those who don't know, SL in 2012 is now roughly the size and population of Seattle), and doing all the normal things that a traditional small business would, like maintaining a mailing list, holding sales, sponsoring fashion shows, etc etc.

I just happened to join SL in 2006 right when the first big wave of national publicity hit it as well (it made the cover of Newsweek in the months I was playing it); and so the blog I was doing about all the interesting artistic, entrepreneurial and sexual things that were going on there, In The Grid, blew up at the same time, and at a certain point was within the top ten most popular Second Life blogs on the entire planet. But alas, at the same time Linden was constantly in the process of adding more and more code and more and more graphic details to this virtual world, which is what eventually both drove me away and stopped the national fawning; because by the time I left, it was nearly impossible for anyone besides 17-year-old boys with Alienware gamer setups to have a truly immersive, truly real-time experience in SL, which none of them wanted to do because of the correct perception that SL is a "videogame for your freaking mom," and which eventually pushed away all the middle-aged casual gamers like me with non-souped-up computers who were generating all the national publicity in the first place. And in fact this problem got so bad that even the founder of Second Life and CEO of Linden Labs, Philip Rosedale, left his own company soon after I quit myself, although to be fair that's probably more because he's a serial entrepreneur and always likes working on cutting-edge projects. (Before Second Life, he had been a senior executive at RealPlayer in the '90s, and was one of the people who helped stabilize the MP3 format; he's now the founder of Coffee And Power, a website/physical hybrid in which people advertise for small jobs with small pay like proofreading and light construction work, with regulars encouraged to hang out at a specific associated coffeehouse in their city to better be able to pounce on these micro-job offers when they come in.) And besides, this was now happening a full year after my failed attempt to open my arts center, and I was finally feeling emotionally recovered from that; so in fall 2007, I quit Second Life for good and started devoting all my spare time to the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, which has been growing by leaps and bounds ever since.

Recently, though, I purchased a new bottom-of-the-line laptop so I could finally start going to neighborhood cafes and getting a good internet signal (my one at home is through Virgin Mobile and doesn't work for shit); and while Second Life still remains as processor-heavy as it always has, the processors themselves have gotten remarkably more powerful since 2006 when I was last logged in, with even my cheap little $300 "mom laptop" still having four times the data-crunching power as the Mac Mini I was originally using for SL back in 2006. And so spurred by my Chicago friend Jim, who is still to this day making several hundred dollars a month in SL (yes, real spendable American dollars) on flyable steampunk spaceships he designs, I've joined up again! Although let's make no mistake -- I'm not there anymore to socialize or sightsee or write a blog or attend sex-club parties, all of which are still as laggy to do as they were when I first quit in 2007; I'm there very specifically to make another go at Fabb, the prefabricated housing company I first tried opening back when I was first there, which I was just never able to make a go of because I literally didn't have the computing power even to finish the houses themselves. But I got close, though, which is why I've still been thinking about it ever since; for example, above see the screenshots of "Asimov," the very first house I designed there, which back in 2006 would sell for around ten to fifteen American dollars. (I'm going to have to shop around soon and see what the going rates are anymore for such prefab housing. And by the way, note that this doesn't include the furniture you're seeing in these photos; in fact, that's a big part of the "fun" for a lot of SLers, is simply the shopping and interior decorating of their home. For those who are confused, you can think of a person's home in SL as kind of like their profile in Facebook; it's where you start every time you log in, a place you can customize to show off your unique personality, where you can invite friends to gather when you want to have a chat session with them, and where you can have information from all your other friends flowing in if you want.)

Or for another example, check out "Ion," the second house I designed, about half the size of "Asimov" and that would sell for no more than five bucks, perfect for a "starter plot" of 512 square meters. (For those who don't know, one physical server in the Second Life system covers what's called an "island" of 32,000 square meters, or one square on the SL big map; you can own one yourself for a one-time fee of a thousand dollars, plus another $4,000 per year in server maintenance fees. This large standard unit, then, keeps getting split into smaller and smaller parcels depending on what an individual person wants; the smallest unit available is 512 square meters, exactly 1/64th of an island, which is given to a person for free as a perk for becoming a premium member, and with the maintenance fee waived if all you own is this starter plot. [If you later choose to purchase a plot somewhere else in the universe that's twice the size, for example, you start paying $8 per month in "land fees;" add together 64 of these $8 monthly payments, and that equals the $4,000 per year a person would pay to own an entire 64-plot island unto themselves...which, by the way, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people do.]) There is a very real market within Second Life for stuff like this -- they have something like three million members now, after all, who spend on average something like a hundred bucks a year just on in-game content like houses, vehicles and clothing -- and given that it only takes me about a week to kick out a new house like the ones you're seeing above, which can then be easily converted into five or six different actual things for sale once you change up the colors and textures of the walls and floors, it simply makes sense to have another go at the whole Fabb business, now that I have the means again to do so. Like I said, my friend Jim makes a couple of hundred dollars a month while now spending only maybe five to ten hours a week in-game, so there isn't a single reason why I couldn't be making the same amount with my prefab housing, if I would simply get my shit together and get serious about all the crappy little summing-up details of such a business, not just making the houses but bundling them up, getting a merchant system in place, adding the right animation scripts for opening and closing doors, etc etc etc.

Anyway, I've decided to make a completely clean break from my time there before; so say hello to Zad Cornell, my new in-game avatar who I just created yesterday, and whose look will be getting profoundly changed over the next several weeks. (Once again, Zad will be a dual-gender shapeshifter, although I imagine once again that I will spend a good 90 percent of my time there in the guise of a cute little punk-rock girl.) I literally joined only yesterday, so the only things I've been able to do so far is get my premium membership set up ($6 a month, for those who are curious) and to stake out my starter plot of land. But, I've already noticed, there's a big change between 2006 and now on how this actually works; because now when you get your starter plot, you're only allowed to pick between five different types of terrain (flat, woods, mountains, etc) and something like three or four types of houses for each terrain, and once that's established you're no longer allowed to change the terraforming, or erase or modify your house, Linden now basically maintaining an entire "suburban continent" (see the screenshot of the big map above) that might be called "The Land That IKEA Built." And I have to say, as bland as that might seem, this is a huge improvement over how it used to work before; because I will take IKEAland any day over an entire landscape of casinos and 50-foot-high neon-green penises, which is what these vast fields of starter plots used to look like back when I was originally there in 2006. You're still allowed to add things to your starter plot like furniture and wall hangings, which is all that most beginning players want to do anyway; but if you want to demolish your house and build another, you now have to go and actually buy a plot on the mainland, away from "Newbieville" or whatever you want to call this suburban continent, which I think was really smart of Linden to do. (Also smart -- as you can see in the above photos, these starter plots are no longer stacked up directly against each other like a grid, but instead have these little irregularly shaped triangles of blank land that allow "breathing space" between each plot, owned by Linden and not individual players so that no development can take place on them. As you can see, my starter home basically fills up my entire rectangular 512 square meters of land; so when these were being originally laid out in a grid fashion like when I was there before, often you would get these "suburban ghettos" where one building would literally bump up against its neighbor, and the neighbor after that, and the neighbor after that.)

Anyway, the goal for now is to get up and running on a minimal professional basis as quickly as I can; so I'm basically dedicating my evenings for the next week or so simply to doing some shopping, getting myself some decent skin and hair, a few outfits that won't embarrass me, and a decently sized piece of land so I can start building. Oh, and that's another big difference I've already noticed between SL 2006 and 2012, is that the land boom that was taking place when SL first got massively popular has now completely crashed and burned; even just looking around a little yesterday, I saw that plots that would've usually gone for a hundred dollars back then are now going for only ten, although of course don't forget that your real expense is that land-usage fee you're paying Linden every month, which hasn't changed since 2006. So if I get a plot of around 2,000 square feet to serve as my workshop and retail space, that'll be a monthly "property tax" of $15, which combined with my $6 per month to be a premium member will be basically $21 a month I'll be shelling out to Linden simply to exist; and so that's a minimum of $21 per month I need to be making from Fabb sales, in order to not be a big fucking moron who didn't learn his lesson the first time he was here. How long before I'm making "Not A Moron Money?" We'll see, I guess!

Dance review: Esoteric Dance Project, "Craft"

As part of my challenge this summer to get out more, I've decided to start attending dance recitals on a regular basis again; I used to do so regularly back in college 25 years ago, back when I would occasionally date dancers here and there, and especially now with my hearing problems is usually a much more pleasant way for me to spend an evening than at a movie or play. And I thought since I was doing so, I would do write-ups here of all the shows I'm seeing too, not only to keep me more motivated for going out but also as an interesting intellectual exercise, in that I don't know the first thing about the formalities or history of dance, so cannot write essays based on any learned or traditional standpoint.

The first event of the year was last night, at Links Hall just down the street from my apartment, picked totally at random simply because I didn't feel like traveling far; it was the show "Craft" by the Esoteric Dance Project, a fairly new company founded by husband and wife Brenna Pierson-Tucker and Christopher Tucker, and now in just the second year of performances. It was an interesting line-up of five pieces, including three premieres, plus a piece that intriguingly combined classical ballet moves with modern steps; but overall you could say that most of the show was dedicated to a sort of fascinating obsession with rhythm, order, geometry, and the way all these things could be played with within the square confines of the beautifully unique Links Hall performance space you're seeing in these photos. (And note that these shots are actually from a previous performance by the group last year.) It was a kind of hypnotizing experience of simply done but complexly rigid group movements, sometimes traveling large distances quickly and sometimes concentrating on just one specific spot, and I found the complicated ins-and-outs between the players to be really mesmerizing at times.

Plus I have to admit, although this might sound a little weird, I found it really joyful that many of EDP's dancers are…well, not 'overweight,' that's not the right word, because all of them are definitely at the top peak of conditioning, but certainly many are larger or stouter in general than the typical waif stereotype we think of when thinking of ballet, for example. Maybe it's because I'm middle-aged, and now have this ten-inch steel rod in my hip that puts permanent limits on some of the things I can do in my life; but I found something really celebratory about EDP featuring the kinds of dancers who would normally get pushed to the fringe in a more traditional company.

And this show also gave me a chance to contemplate something again that I always find really fascinating about the arts, of why certain artists make certain choices at certain points in their careers concerning what they're going to do with their lives. Because the fact is that everyone involved with this show was roughly the same age; but while some of them were dancers and choreographers, and had bios that reflected this kind of concentration, some were simply dancers, and their bios more emphasized starring roles in famous productions, while of course the twentysomething husband-and-wife founders (pictured above) thought it important enough to actually go to all the trouble of starting and running their own company. Why each of these artists picked those particular things to do within the dance world is something I find endlessly interesting to contemplate; and Chicago is full of these kinds of places, not just in dance but literature, theater, music and more, where a group of equally young people will come together with their different concentrations and pull a whole show together by the end.

And next? Well, most likely "Return," by what's being billed as "Rachel Thorne Germond and Friends" (formerly RTG Dance, but who are going through a re-branding process right now), again at Links Hall next weekend, which at a typical $10 to $15 admission at these "storefront theatre" shows is really hard to beat. (And a little trivia, by the way; back when this neighborhood was the epicenter of Chicago's punk scene in the '80s, there used to be a basement "black box" performance space in this building called "Club Lower Links," which was the first Chicago home for such touring performance artists as Karen Finley, Henry Rollins, and Eric Bogosian.) As always, I'll let you know about that one next week.

Everyday Sightseeing: Senn Park and the "Seven Mile House"

Now that the weather's starting to turn warm again in Chicago, I thought I'd start getting back into the habit of going to the gym and/or taking a bike ride almost every day, as well as starting to update this "I Am A Camera" blog more, which after all exists mostly just to post photo reports from various things I'm doing while out and about. So I thought I'd combine the two and start up my "Everyday Sightseeing" series again for 2012, in which I blog not necessarily about big tourist things here in the city but rather the small yet fascinating little things that I always seem to be coming across in various neighborhoods while on my bike rides. Today, Senn Park in the far north central area of the city (Clark and Thorndale, to be specific), which used to be famous for being the location of the so-called "Seven Mile House" of Nicholas Kransz and his family, called that because of being exactly seven miles from the Chicago Loop via the old Green Bay Road. Legend has it that Abraham Lincoln made a stop at this location during his 1860 Presidential campaign to talk to a gathering of neighborhood farmers, which is why Charles Keck's "Young Lincoln" statue is now located here. I find it hilarious that the teens from the massive Senn High School next door keep Lincoln's toes painted in elaborate colors all year round.



View "Everyday Sightseeing" Chicago 2012 in a larger map


And hey, since I've enjoyed doing this so much in the past, I decided to start up a "place-blog" version of this year's Everyday Sightseeing series, in reality a customized Google Map; that basically lets a person navigate all these blog entries in the future not by date but by location, which always ends up fascinating once you get to the end of a year and have several dozen placemarkers scattered around the city. I'll make sure to embed the latest version of the map in these blog entries all this year, like you're seeing above, so that you'll be able to explore the archives that way as well.

Everyday Sightseeing: Montrose Dog Beach at sunset

(This is part of a new series I'm doing here, mostly to get back into the habit of blogging, in which I post photos and short write-ups of various interesting things here in Chicago that I see on a regular basis during my ho-hum neighborhood errands.)


The dog-friendly area of Montrose Beach, the area of Lincoln Park closest to my apartment, spied at sunset one evening as I was biking home from Rogers Park. There are miles and miles and miles of views like these along the lakefront path here in Chicago.

Everyday Sightseeing: Ravenswood Baptist Church

(This is part of a new series I'm doing, mostly to get back into the habit of blogging, where I post photos and write-ups of interesting Chicago things I see on a regular basis here, when out doing just my usual ho-hum neighborhood chores.)

Over near Montrose and Damen, nestled in the middle of an unending series of upper-middle-class 19th-century mini-mansions (originally built for the first wave of German and Swedish immigrants in this neighborhood, who slowly over a century turned this from a lower-class to an upper-class area), is the charmingly bizarre Ravenswood Baptist Church. Built right at the end of the Victorian Era, it shares that period's fascination for "Oriental" touches -- it's hard to tell in these photos, but the building is basically an octagon fit inside another octagon and then twisted a bit, with double mini-octagons serving as its front and back foyers, already joyfully strange for this being essentially a Midwestern Protestant church, then doubly wonderful by it being built with those chalky red and brown bricks that were so favored in this neighborhood back then, and that Chicagoans usually associate in their mind with much more European, Christian-looking structures.

The specific street this is on is Sunnyside, two blocks north of and parallel to Montrose, which is my preferred street for bicycling between my home of Uptown and the neighborhood of Lincoln Square where I spend a lot of time. This street is just loaded with interesting things, so I'm sure I'll be posting more from here in this "Everyday Sightseeing" series before too long.

Everyday Sightseeing: Logan's Run house, Rogers Park

(This is part of a new series I'm doing, mostly to get back into the habit of blogging again, in which I shoot pictures and do a little write-up about interesting things that I see here in Chicago on a regular basis, during my usual ho-hum daily errands.)

Before the rise of postmodernism as the industry standard, and happening at the same time as the daring organic architects of the 1970s who got all the attention, there were also a series of designers who were stubbornly holding on to the Euclidean standards of 1960s Mid-Century Modernism, only were now trying to do funky things with their angles or material in an effort to stay hip in those countercultural times. Objects of scorn when I was growing up in the '80s and '90s, I find myself now with a much more charming admiration for such structures, or at least what few survived the mass destruction of them that occurred after their short-lived height of, say, the Ford and Carter years. Here's a complex of them, for example, right literally at the point where Chicago's massive lakefront bike trail has its official northern terminus, right at Ardmore where you turn west and re-enter the city proper; this is a common route I take whenever doing far-north stuff on my bike, and every time I pass them I think how these were designed in the same years that Logan's Run was filmed, and how that explains everything you need to know about them. There's a part of me (a small part, sure, but there) that thinks sometimes how groovy it'd be to live in one of these chrome-and-brick retro-sci-fi Way-Too-Late-Modernist funhouses, and especially one like this whose back door opens literally onto the beachfront, right here where Lincoln Park ends and the lakefront land reverts back to private ownership.

A loving ode to the crappy Dempster el stop.

So what's officially the crappiest station of the entire CTA system here in Chicago? Well, my money would be on the Dempster stop up in Evanston, part of the purple line that goes up and down that notorious collegetown, one of only three suburbs to have actual urban el stops (the others being Skokie and Oak Park). I've had occasion to go up to Evanston more and more often recently -- several writers I deal with through my arts center live up there, as did my intern this summer -- and I also like bicycling up there quite a bit whenever I'm looking for a day-long excursion, because as a collegetown it's not only very bike-friendly and full of funky shopping, cafes, etc, but also pleasantly reminds me of my own college experiences in Columbia, Missouri, which is never a bad thing to be occasionally reminded of.

The purple line was first established in the Mid-Century Modernist era, back when everyone was overly optimistic about technology and public transit and the like, and so there are just way more stations on the line now than the city really needs to have; and with this one serving the older, poorer southern side of town, and with there being other stops just four blocks north and four blocks south of this one, I suspect that this will be one of the first ones to be closed if the CTA is ever forced to start making decisions like this, which I imagine is why the CTA hasn't bothered to do any kind of major work on the station since literally the mid-1960s or so. It's like a little time capsule, a little crumbling post-apocalyptic Beneath the Planet of the Apes time capsule, which is why I always take such delight in entering and leaving Evanston here.

Plus, I have to confess that I simply like the funky, sorta worn-down section of town that's around the Dempster stop -- you know, that place in every collegetown not actually near campus and full of all the trendy bars and overpriced boutiques, but the quieter one full of the hippies and slackers who were never able to pull themselves away from the town, with that sort of shambling yet antique look that you also see in the Lower Haight in San Francisco. It's always great on a Saturday to start a bike trip around here, do a little sightseeing first, then wind my way through the Victorian mansion district to the east and along the lakefront, up north until hitting the main downtown, then up through the Northwestern University campus, then west to the North Shore Canal Trail and a straight shot all the way back to Lincoln Square, close to where I live back in the city. If I ever was to leave Chicago for some reason, there's a good chance that Evanston is where I'd land next, and very likely in this Dempster area that I've grown to like so much.

I like Lakeview.

A recent shot of this lovely little detail from the neighborhood around where I live; to the left are historic townhomes, but there on the right is a big giant cemetery and chain-link fence, so in recent years the city has turned the extra-wide alley between the two, for decades abandoned and filled with trash, into an extra-skinny, extra-long city park, complete with jogging track, fenced dog path, playground and more.

The area right around where I live, Lakeview, is considered by many to be a boring section of town by now; it was gentrified way back in the '80s, after all, and is mostly now quietly middle-class, the kind of neighborhood where hipster retail chains open new stores when they're not opening them downtown. But I suppose that's why I like it over here so much, exactly for details like this -- because everything's so nice, so taken care of, with so much historic stuff that survived the years the neighborhood was a slum, and with the city finding interesting new things to do with everything else. When I imagined as a kid the urban fantasyland that city-living must be, Lakeview in 2011 is what I imagined, which is why it always amuses me so much to walk and bike through little details of it like this.

Algren's Chicago.

Although the city's done a good job over the last half-century of securing and closing off various unsafe sections underneath their system of elevated train tracks, especially up here on the north side, there are still sometimes big parts (like here for example, near the trisection of Clark, Sheffield and Roscoe) where you can easily get back into the nitty-gritty of the forgotten urban environment, the old-school city of dirty tenements and rickety back stairways. And every time I pass this little section, I always think of the Nelson Algren novel Never Come Morning, which I had a chance to review a few years ago; because it's centered around this "street gang" of sorts, in reality neighborhood kids in 1930s Wicker Park who have nothing better to do than hang around in groups and cause trouble, and in the book they're constantly spending the night in these dark, grubby little hovels they've created underneath the blue-line el tracks over there in that neighborhood, literally because they're in no worse condition than the crumbling immigrant tenements they'd otherwise be sleeping in that night, in that case sharing the apartment with twenty other people and an alcoholic dad who beats them.

And I don't know, I guess it just strikes me in locations like this just how organic and chaotic the maturation of a city actually is, how an urban space doesn't just smoothly all start to get better at once but rather with these little forgotten pockets of "how it used to be" constantly spotting the landscape, these little oases of dirtiness and danger that are literally sometimes just around the corner from a Starbucks, American Apparel, and all the other shiny happy goodness of New Urbanism, like is exactly the case in this photo. (We're just two blocks here from the famed intersection of Belmont and Clark.) It's one of the things I really love about Chicago, how I can experience first-hand almost 200 years of history literally on the walk from my apartment to the grocery store on a random Thursday afternoon, and is something about the city I simply never get tired of.

Photo tour: Google Earth 6 on a super-fast computer.

I've been putting this off, because I knew what a pain in the ass it was going to be to upload all these giant screenshots, but it's something I've been meaning to share for awhile -- that back in December when I first got my brand-new high-end screaming fast quad-core 27-inch i-Fucking-Mac, one of the first things I tried was Google Earth, which had just released version 6 of their application a few days before. I was very excited about this, in fact, because this was the first time I had ever owned a computer with the kind of graphics processing power needed for an optimal experience on a piece of software like this; and since I've never really been into first-person-shooter videogames, this is one of the only times in my life that I have a chance to interact with a persistent 3D CG-rendered environment.

As you can see, the big news about version 6 is that Google is now starting to insert millions and millions of trees into their database of 3D information about certain cities, that show up whenever you have the "Buildings" layer on and that purport to not just randomly fill spaces with greenery, but actually reflect the type and density of real foliage found there. And since Chicago has always been one of Google Earth's top-ten core testing cities (meaning that we get stuff implemented faster and bigger than many others), it means the city even right now has something like three million trees to go with what I think is somewhere between 25,000 and 50,000 buildings? I think I read a number that was something like that somewhere. As you can see, then, when you combine this with a customized Google map, like the ones I do all the time for city bicyclists (jasonpettus.com/maps), it produces just this stunning experience, for example like my map above of southern Lincoln Park.

And then to show off another good example, here's the Chicago Loop, one of the most skyscraper-dense areas on the planet, which I'm sure is one of the big reasons Google picked us as a testing city, so to have something really impressive-looking early on; and impressive-looking this is, when combining the thousands of buildings now with the smattering of greenery around the downtown district's various historic boulevards and parks.

It's while zooming around the Loop in my invisible little helicopter, in fact, that I most start thinking along the lines of, "My God, we really are on the verge soon of having an entire Second-Life-style real-scale explorable environment that literally recreates the planet Earth." I mean, just look at that image above, and realize that even now with our home equipment, you're able to tilt and pan and roam about in that environment in a fully real-time basis; it doesn't take much to extrapolate that into a day where all those buildings actually have explorable floors, and rooms within those floors that are decorated with furniture you can actually sit on. I'm astounded that we're as far along as we are in the first place just here in 2011, so have stopped taking guesses at when I might be able to start "walking" around this rendering with my tattoo-covered avatar. Could you even imagine if something like this was an alternate user interface for Facebook, where all your friends lived at unique points in that maze below and chat rooms were literal pubs where you all meet up? Google Metaverse, here we come!

And then to show off yet another great example, here's my bike map of the Prairie Avenue historic district, just south of the Loop, a whole six-by-ten-block area full of stuff worth visiting, which is why the whole zone is simply shaded in my map instead of a specific linear route drawn. Combine a rendering of the area like this with a good, detailed map, and you have the next best thing to a walking tour of that neighborhood you're ever going to have; and let me tell you, I'd almost be willing to pay money to get ahold of maps like this for various sections around London. If I've never mentioned this before, one of my bike maps has been featured before by Google on their Customized Maps front page, and has since gotten over 100,000 views in just a few years, so there are PLENTY of opportunities within a new technology like this to do something fun and hobbyist yet that a WHOLE lot of people get a kick out of visiting.

Once you get up to the edge of where Google's current database of 3D data cuts off -- which right now is around Wrigley Field, close to my place -- even though the tree data has long cut out by now, the amount of photo-realistic 3D buildings is still mighty impressive, giving you these sometimes breathtakingly realistic vistas when looking back towards the Loop. But in that bottom photo, though, you can see that by the time you do get up to my building -- about a half-mile farther north, near Irving Park Road and Sheridan -- the illusion of a persistent 3D environment starts breaking down heavily. Still, like I said before, I'm impressed that in 2011 Google has already managed to put together something like this, and especially can't believe that they've gathered up now so many real-life photos of the sides and roofs of all these buildings.

Google's getting pretty good at getting this 3D info collected and outputted to a growing number of American cities; that image above is of downtown St. Louis, filled in pretty nicely I think in comparison to what's actually there. But frankly, anything outside of major, popular cities still scarcely exists at this point; in that bottom photo, for example, you see that when you visit the sleepy St. Louis suburb of St. Charles where I grew up, there is literally only one 3D building to be found in the entire metropolitan area, which I just bet is only there in the first place because some enterprising entrepreneur convinced this cheap hotel chain to pay him $10,000 or whatever to do every single hotel in their system in Google Earth versions. Google makes it very easy to do this, by the way, providing not only a full-fledged powerful CAD/CAM standalone application called SketchUp, but also the grossly simplified Google Building Maker, specifically for making in just a few steps the kind of boxy, easy-to-render buildings that make up most commercial spaces and the like. (Just getting okay on the app should let you kick out a hotel like the above in a single afternoon, while pros can churn out four or five such buildings every eight-hour shift.) Google is then highly encouraging people to do 3D renderings of their own rural environments, part of their master plan to get all this info into their main database as quickly as possible; there are plenty of cases now, for example, of small-town chamber-of-commerces hiring some local college student to do their entire downtown districts in 3D, or high-school design classes taking it on as a semester-long challenge. This is extremely smart of Google, I think, and again makes me wonder just how soon it'll be before all that info actually has been filled in, and you can go to literally any podunk city in the nation and have a fully immersive 3D experience.

Anyway, I could go on all day like this, but I think I'll stop for here. How wonderful to have this computer that can render all this with so few problems! Ah, what a glorious future world we live in! EXCELSIOR!

My new mixtape, "Music for a Hipster Orgy," is now ready for downloading.

(Click on the thumbnails above for larger versions. If you're on a newer browser or iOS device, you should also be seeing an HTML5 streaming version of the mix above.)

Long-time readers know that among other activities in college, I was briefly a beat-mix-style club DJ; and so now that I do a podcast at my arts center that regularly features music specials, I allow myself twice a year now to do an all-electronic one where the beats have literally been mixed together, to produce what's hopefully one smooth track with unnoticeable transitions. Anyway, I just finished the latest, covering music from July of last year to now; and while the official version with the CCLaP logo will be going up at the site tomorrow, I thought it'd be fun to release a version with no voiceovers or center connections at all, which is the version you can download through this entry. The mix consists of mid-tempo numbers (124 to 131 BPM) that all have dark edges to them, hence the title; and of course I highly encourage you to drop me a line if you end up actually throwing a hipster orgy and playing this in the background, which will delight me to no end.

Anyway, here's the download link for the mix, which you can right-click on to save to your hard drive. Admittedly, both the songs and cover art are being used here without permission; but since I'm releasing this for free to just a few dozen friends, I'm hoping with fingers crossed that no one threatens to sue me for it. That said, if this entry suddenly goes missing at some point in the future, you'll know what happened.