Follow Up: AWOL and Abused

Back in August, I made a post entitled "AWOL and Abused" which aimed to highlight and briefly discuss the kind of "abuse" that can occur in SL when avatars go afk (away from keyboard). The example I used to demonstrate this was taken from a textbook, "Coming of Age in Second Life" by Tom Boellstorff, but yesterday I gained some first-hand experience.


Sort of.


I was pretty much afk for the duration. I signed into SL yesterday morning, then, seeing that no one else was online, went off to do something else. When I came back, I realised that Sian was online. She was standing near me in her skybox, and she'd sent me an image via the private messaging window. Sian quite often sends me such things if she wants me to look at an outfit, or she's taken a particularly good screenie of myself or one of our friends, so this in itself was not unusual. When I opened the file, however, this is what I found:

Image property of Sian Pearl - her flickr

She had placed this rather amusing box on my head, taken a screenshot, then taken it off before I got back to the computer. If she hadn't sent me the screenie, I wouldn't have been aware it had even happened until she uploaded it to flickr. I think Kitti looks like some kind of risque teletubby, but hey-ho!


I think it's the expression of the box-face that makes the picture. Ha ha!


So there you go. I have, officially, been AWOL and abused.