| Autistic Liberation Front on Second Life |
Events in Second Life
Tuesdays at 8:30 PM ET/5:30 PM PT/ 01:30 Greenwich time, in the Tesla Room: Weekly political discussion. Use the SLurl in the Tesla Room link above, or come to Porcupine 31, 187, 117. The meeting can also be attended via IRC by joining #SLALF on irc.quickfox.net.Snapshots of Second Life
More will be added as we get them. The links in the descriptions below are SLurls. If you have the Second Life client installed, they will take you to that location in Second Life.
Our main property as seen from the road.
One of the billboards greeting visitors to the Porcupine region.
This is the front door of the Main Building. You can see to your right a portion of the Memorial, and to your left a board promoting our weekly discussion meeting.
Inside the Main Building on the first floor. You can see a game of Towers of Hanoi in the lower right corner. Through the window you can see our park area and the working swing.
The Tesla Room on the second floor of the Main Building. The map on the wall charts our progress in turning Porcupine into an autistic-owned region.
A portion of the Memorialto the victims of autism hating.
Another section of the Memorial displays photographs of some of the autistics who have been murdered by their caregivers.
Looking up at the skyscraper which houses ALF's Autism Museum
The Borges Library on the Museum's fourth floor. You can see a few of the pieces from the art exhibit in the foreground. The books on the shelves (only a few, so far) when clicked dispense text files of the works of autistic authors and historical authors believed to be autistic. The computers link to websites.
Einstein Auditorium, located in the Museum building, is ALF's largest meeting room.
High above our property sits Club Nerd. Here visitors can play SL Trivia (a web link, not a SLurl).
| How to Get There |
Second Life basic accounts are free (though if you sign up using the link above and later become a paid member, we'll get a little over $2 US for referring you). There are clients for Windows (2000, XP, and Vista), Mac (OS X 10.3.9 or better), and Linux. But to use the official client you will need a computer with plenty of memory, a supported video card, and a broadband connection. Gamers probably already have such a machine; many of the rest of us will need to add memory or a new video card, or both.
Persons who don't have what it takes to connect to Second Life using the official graphical client are not entirely left out. There is an unofficial Windows text-only client, SLeek. If you know exactly where you want to go, SLeek will let you communicate with others once you get there. If you can hook up with someone who can guide your "blind" avatar around, you'll even be able to move around the virtual world with them.
If all you'd like to do is attend the Tuesday night political discussion, you can use our IRC bridge on irc.quickfox.net. Our channel on IRC is #SLALF. We have plans to hold an online conference for autistic people and allies in the spring or summer of 2008 and we will set up additional text-based ways for everyone to participate.
| How to Help |
What SL's Autistic Liberation Front can use is money, tier, and time.
Money is self evident. We're trying to buy up whatever we can of the Porcupine sim, to create an autistic-owned region of Second Life.
Tier, as SL paying members know, is really another way of saying money. Each level of membership in Second Life entitles the user to buy a certain amount of virtual land. Unused tier can be donated to a group. The group gets not only the amount donated, but an extra 10%. With more tier, we can buy more land.
Time may be the biggest need right now. Just to give one example, the Autism Museum is very much incomplete. More than anything else, we need researchers and writers to help fill in the displays. There are other things to be done (contacting prospective presenters or volunteering to present at the online conference, planning and proposing virtual political actions to raise autistic rights awareness as opposed to "autism awareness", etc.) I'm going to be adding a section listing our needs soon.
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