Neo Cassandra

During my time in SL, I have come across not only a wealth of interesting and creative avatars and in-world designers, but also a whole horde of creative SL bloggers. Now, admittedly, most of these bloggers are fashion bloggers, creating catalogues of inventive and often beautiful combinations of outfits, but it does not appear to be an uncommon phenomena for them to add amongst the screenshots and the "my avatar wears..." lists some kind of alternative creative response adding to the image or the atmosphere of the post. 

Amongst the blogs I follow, Sian Pearl does this most often, giving us not only great shots of herself, but also some kind of insight, poetic or prosiac, into the mind of the variation of character she has chosen to adopt today, or the thinking behind her creation. This evening, moments before coming over here to start this entry, I found an image in the flickr photo stream of Aida Ewing (who, I understand, runs the Glam Affair store in SL) which she has captioned with a link to a music video on Youtube. The picture can be found here - here! Similarly, over at Renoobed, a blog post appeared today featuring an amusing anecdote that then slipped into the lyrics of a song. The point I'm trying to make is that people aren't just straight-forwardly documenting their adventures (and their outfits) in SL - they're making art out of it, enjoying a little creative freedom.

And why shouldn't they? Avatars take time and effort and, unless you've a super computer that can handle SL's demanding graphics rendering systems and its tempestuous shadows that seem to cause EVERYONE to crash (I have never even been able to enable shadows, ha ha), they can take time and effort to photograph, too.

This evening, I logged in to find a group gift from the jewellery story Amorous, and decided, since I'd a little free time, that I would try to design an outfit to match it. I wanted to mix the mysticism of Matchbook Monday's jewellery with something edgy, cold, and maybe a little sci-fi, and when I trawled through my inventory, I realised that I was essentially recreating an image that I have been writing about beyond SL for several years now. It is an image that intrigues me, and I have been playing with it, writing poem after short scene after poem attempting to realise and build on that image. So why not use SL to help create another piece of original material to go with the rest of my work?

Why not indeed.

Daughter of Priam...

Over long lashes

Curled over yellow eyes, they fought

Ham-fisted, ham-hammered,

Caved in head after caved in head,

And it is done. Helen is

Returned, and all other women be

Damned

To rot alone

As their men fight another man's war.

But wait:

Neo Cassandra - Daughter of Priam - 

Clad in latex and steel - 

Saunters through the ruins of Troy

On Agamemnon's arm,

Headed west: Greece ahead

And there to make

A blood bath of another marriage bed.

...in the ruins of the city.

Please visit my flickr via this link - here! - to see these images in full size.