If you die in SL...

Sucker Punch

2012-02-25T11:05:00.000Z

As the more canny among you might have noticed, I have changed my blog name to match up with my Second Life username. I'm not really sure why I ever decided it might to clever for those two names to be different anyway, but now they match up, so...identity mystery solved. Wytchwood is revealed!

Moving on. Swiftly.

I know I have written before - and at quite considerable length - about roleplaying in SL, but when I agreed to write another short scenario with Sian Pearl this week, I realised that there were a whole host of things I had not even begun to touch on.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then we'll begin.

Sian and I agreed a couple of days in advance that we were going to rp together. Such isn't always the case, and sometimes, I think, I prefer it not to be. Since Sian usually leads our sessions, she suggested that I try this time, and let me tell you, I have not been that nervous for a long time. I wasn't that nervous about my university audition! I wasn't given unlimited scope, however - Sian wanted to use a specific costume she had put together, which created the character of, and I quote, 'a cyberpunk hacker girl'. Short dress, full-sleeve tattoos, headphones around the neck. Slightly Rooney Mara-esque, I suppose, but Sian wasn't going for that. I'm just aware of the link as I have been bombarded with links to various pieces from the soundtrack to Girl with the Dragon Tattoo because my friends know I like (read looooooove!) Trent Reznor. So off I went and pieced together a little cyberpunk storyline based around a situation I thought I might be able to force onto this hacker-chick.

When I say 'off I went and pieced together...', what I really mean is that I went off and panicked like Hell for two days that I hadn't got the faintest idea about cyberpunk or hacking, or what might be an interesting storyline to make out of the two. I was also petrified that I would mess up my opening or miss something out that was crucial or, quite simply, be so deathly boring that Sian would never want to speak to me again. I am, I suppose, a rather shy writer. I have a love-hate relationship with the idea of people reading what I write, particularly in the fast-paced format of SL roleplay.

I believe I have written before about the notion of paragraph rp - where the participants write great long paragraphs, presumably into a Word document or something, then copy and paste them into SL - and whilst I appreciate the style, it is not for me. The beauty of SL is its ability for live responsiveness, and I enjoy the turn-taking and the ability to do exactly that - respond! - to what is playing out before me. That doesn't mean that sometimes my turn will not comprise of five or six lines, but I prefer to be concise and energetic. Paragraph rp, in my eyes, is for forums.

I put together my costume - which, I confess, was just too funny. I made sure that Sian wasn't around whilst I was doing it, and then, once done, I messaged a mutual friend to ask her to come over and tell me if she thought I looked bitchy enough. She said yes. All systems are go.

Go go mega-bitch?

When I logged into SL and teleported to Sian's house on Thursday morning - the agreed time -, I was confronted with a scene that did not quite look how I'd imagined it would. Sian had turned a room of her house into a space for us to rp. Without asking me, it would seem, she knew roughly what it was I would want, and how rubbish I am at finding appropriate sims. That, or she has some interesting photoshoot for her own blog in mind and just wanted another excuse to use her set.

It - and Sian - were not, however, what I had expected.

I walked into the room to find it clean and shiny - as I had hoped - but also harbouring a kind of giant test tube, in which stood not the cyberpunk hacker girl I had pieced together a plot for, but a hi-tech, half-naked cyborg woman with eyes fierce enough to leave Tyra Banks stunned. Suddenly, everything that had made Kitti look like a bitch before meant absolutely nothing. I realised that I was going to have to tailor my story to fit this new character, this new setting. I don't consider myself to be the most creative of people - I am better at building on other people's initial ideas - and so it was a challenge for me to do this, and one I took to with relish.

Sian, I think, assumed in the momentary silence that I was panicking. We laughed about this later. Impatience is a virtue, huh? One I am intimately familiar with.

How sinister-looking is that tube?!

That is one of the most wonderful, and the most annoying, things about SL rp - the ability for that change. You have to have a degree of flexibility because you don't necessarily know what the other person will bring to the table. This proved to be exciting in this particular rp with Sian. I provided the framework, the setting up of the circumstances, and she filled in the details, bringing to life an interesting character for whom you couldn't help feeling sorry, and yet simultaneously be afraid of. It gave a new lease of life to the character I had placed on to Kitti for this scenario, undermining her oh-so-sure sense of self and creating an interesting power-play between the two women.

And then she punched me.

Okay, so Sian Pearl, the virtually-physical avatar, did not punch Kitti Wytchwood. If she had, there'd have definitely have been screenshots, because that would be incredible. She punched her using the '/me' function - but that didn't make it hurt any less. Sian is considerably taller than the rather petite Kitti, and Sian as 'P', the character she used for this rp, is enhanced and mechanised and strong in a way that could - and eventually did - make virtual-mince meat of the all-too-human and squishy Kitti.

The capability for violence in SL is something that intrigues me. It is used in many scenarios, as I'm sure you can imagine, but it felt like the right conclusion for this one, as neither Sian or Kitti were going to give up intellectually. It was interesting, too, to see how the roles reversed and how, in the end, it was Sian/P that was the human one. Kitti just wanted to save her own neck.

I should perhaps add that Sian then effectively gave Kitti electroshock treatment in that test tube. No, that is not an innuendo. So if you're messaging Kitti in-world, I wouldn't expect her to be very coherent for the next few days. I have no doubt that if we opened the top of her virtual head, we could have some virtual scrambled eggs for breakfast.

This has been a long post, and I confess that I'm not one hundred percent sure what you have learned from it. I'd apologise but, quite simply, no.

If you would like to see Sian Pearl's (infinitely better) screenshot of the event, please click here. I tried to take some mid-rp, too, but they didn't really come out. All of the images used here were taken post-rp.

On Being Offended

2012-02-20T20:29:00.000Z

Now, I don't like to lie to you, dear readers, so here's the deal. I wasn't going to post today, or, at least, I wasn't going to post about this. I had another topic for discussion lined up, but the chances of me coming here today and committing it to virtual paper were incredibly slim. This evening, however, I logged into Second Life to scout out a couple of sims and found something that has genuinely outraged me.

Because I am outraged, I should probably not be writing this right now. But I want to write it right now, and so I am going to.

I will not reproduce the name of the sim, but when I landed there, I was directed to pick up a notecard (basically a Wordpad document) containing the sim rules and roleplay background. That's pretty standard procedure. When I opened the notecard, however, what I found is not something I consider 'standard procedure'. The notecard reads:

'BY ENTERING THE [name omitted] CITY SIM, YOU CONFIRM THAT YOU ARE IN REAL LIFE OVER THE AGE OF EIGHTEEN AND AGREE TO ABIDE BY THESE RULES.

BY ENTERING [name omitted] CITY, YOU AGREE THAT YOU ARE NOT OFFENDED BY VIOLENCE, ADULT LANGUAGE OR SEXUAL CONTENT, AND WILL NOT HOLD THE OWNER OF THE SIM, OR ITS LEGAL PARTICIPANTS LIABLE.'

...Woah! Hold the phone! Just a minute! Back it up! Let's look at that one more time.

By entering this sim, you agree that you are not offended by violence, adult language, or sexual content - by 'sexual content', of course, they mean rape and public demonstrations of BDSM which, I should like to suggest, are not the same thing.

Don't get me wrong - in many situations (political correctness not being one), I agree with Steve Hughes - but it seems fundamentally wrong to me that this sim is suggesting that it is creating, or collecting, a society of people who are not offended by violence and sexual assault. If you wish to write about these things, by all means go ahead. Many artists and writers the world over have sought to engage with these topics. But I am offended by the idea that people should or might not find offensive breaches of morality and human rights.

I am offended by the alternatives. What else are they going to do, if not find them offensive? - and, I think, this is the crux of it - Be entertained? Be amused? Should they find pleasure in them? Should they be indifferent?

There are no rules, I might add, governing what is or is not allowed to take place on this sim. When you sign up, as it were, agreeing not to be offended, are you taking into account all of the possibilities of what could happen within that sim? Perhaps I am overestimating the imagination of the average SL user, but there was a poster on one of the foyer-room walls featuring a pair of handcuffs and advertising the "Hard and Nasty" group. These people are hard and nasty enough to warrant their own group?

I reserve the right to be offended. I reserve the right to be repulsed by some of the darker things humans and avatars are capable of. I reserve the right to engage with material that offends me, but I also reserve the right to be offended by that material, and to draw the line where I want it.

Why should you ever, ever, give up the right to be offended?

Needless to say, I did not enter the sim.

I shall now cease this rant.

(I also touched on this topic, a little more eloquently, here)

Intimate Ethnography

2012-02-14T10:11:00.001Z

University deadlines make writing anything nigh completely impossible. A lecturer told me the other day that he was so sick of reading after he graduated that he couldn't even pick up a book to read for pleasure for six months after the end of the university year. I look forward to being able to write entirely at my own leisure again. I'm easing myself into the day with this post, which I've been meaning to write for a few days now - the problems of ethnography.

A Google 'define: ethnography' search brings up the answer 'the scientific description of the customs of peoples and cultures'. As I'm sure you are aware or can imagine, the idea of anybody writing about anything outside of themselves is problematic. Hell, writing about yourself is problematic. We are all automatically subjected to bias and cultural coding and all sorts of things that immediately begin to detract from our ability to completely understand, on an internal level, something else.

But that's fine. In more recent times, to be vague, we have stopped trying to deny this and moved into a space in which we simply acknowledge who we are and what we are bringing with us to the table before we begin to talk about whatever it is we are researching. And that suits me - that seems to make sense. I have attempted to do such myself a number of times in various ways around this blog, and I have found it important to inform those people that I spend any real length of time with in SL about my position in the real world. I also respect privacy: I ask permission before I write about anybody in particular and, a few posts ago, I refrained from making my observations and comments about slavery sim-specific.

I could write about the problems of ethnography and field-research until I turned blue, but instead I just want to bring up a few points about it, specifically in relation to Second Life.

Here, have a stereotypical image representing the idea of ethnography!

One. According to a website I would never normally dare cite, Second Life had roughly 1 million active users in 2011. That's apparently just under the population of Birmingham, UK (so says a slightly more trustworthy website). I think it would be rare to find all those users logging into the virtual world at one time; in my experience, I'm lucky if I bump into anyone at the times I myself choose to log in. The SL grid survey says that there are 30,592 different active sims (stretches of land/places) in Second Life currently. That's a lot of possible destinations for those 1 million people.

How is any of this related to ethnographic problems, you ask? Because it makes generalisations incredibly difficult. When I say "there are some people in Second Life", or "I have seen in Second Life", "or there are lots of...in Second Life", I am, completely and utterly, generalising. What I mean is that I have seen, with my own virtual eyes, a lot of whatever it is I am commenting on - but even that is problematic. As I have just suggested, I am incredibly lucky if I find anybody on the sims I visit, and I'd be counting on a miracle if I am expecting those avatars not only to want to talk to me, but to be able to do so in a language I am familiar with. I don't think that it would be appropriate to go up to random avatars and ask their what their views are on the purpose of a virtual washing machine.

Also, I have approximately 20 different sims bookmarked, as it were, on my landmark list. That's 20 out of a possible 30,592. Now, I've probably been to a lot more sims than those 20, but I have been to nowhere near all 30,592, and it wouldn't matter even if I had, because those sims are subject to frequent change and deletion. New sims arise. Some sims are private. What I feasibly have access to is very, very limited.

I can also see but a fraction of the sims I do visit. Without a better graphics card, I can only view Second Life on the lowest graphics setting, thus rendering many objects grey and blockish. Streaming sim music (which is not always a great idea) is difficult for my laptop to do without lagging Kitti down to a frame a minute, never mind a second, but that is a whole sensory realm I am thus missing out on.

Two. The level of customisation available to avatars is such that they could change their entire appearance, and through it their projected personality, from moment to moment. They could jump from science fiction sims to romantic sims to historical replica sims as quickly as it took you to read that. There is, arguably, little tethering anybody to anywhere or anything. It thus becomes difficult - though, of course, not impossible - to define groups, cultures, habits. You don't know when somebody is roleplaying a character or speaking as themselves - and, anyway, that 'self' is mediated by Second Life. Our avatars can become what is referred to in The Matrix as 'residual self image'; we perform how we think we act, we create something that represents how we think we look, or how we might wish we looked. But it is not a straightforward conversion, no matter how honest you might try to be.

A-ha! Another one!

Three. Many non-SL users view SL rather judgementally, and for somebody entering the world for similar reasons to the ones I did, those might be difficult to leave at the door. I was one of a class of around twelve students being asked to try out Second Life, and I am probably the only one still engaging with it. A couple of my classmates dismissed it out of hand, saying that they didn't understand what it 'was for'. That's a potentially dangerous question for anyone studying the arts to raise, but that is by-the-by.

Writing about SL without establishing some sense of superiority complex, then, can be difficult. Personally, I do not think myself to be superior to other people using SL - hello, I'm now one of those people! - but when writing about slavery, or about why people build washing machines, for example, it is difficult not to come across sounding like I somehow know better. I don't know whether or not I do a good job on that, but it is something I am aware of.

I only wish to place myself within the debate, be open to the ideas evinced/created by SL, and bring what I know about the world, and what I am learning in my Theatre and Performance Studies degree, to bear on what I am experiencing.

Four. Final point. On this blog, I only write about things that I deem interesting or important. That might not be what you find interesting or important, or what other SL users think is interesting and important. If we held a vote across SL, I doubt that everything I have written about here would prove to be important to many other people.

The information is being mediated - through what I encounter through my experiences in SL, my own personal bias, my slant as a Theatre student, my choices about what is worth writing up, and then through the way I write it and the way you come to understand my words through your own bias.

Having highlighted the complexity and near impossibly of conveying any real sense of 'truth', I shall now continue as normal. What you are getting here instead is a mix of my truth, as it were, and your own, personal to the both of us. How intimate is that?!

And speaking of intimacy: Happy Valentine's Day!

Don't Touch

2012-02-06T16:07:00.003Z

Something new for you - a little blog activism:

Both Kitti and I feel that we should be allowed to wear whatever we please without fear of "retribution". I "ask for it" with my mouth, not my attire.

"We spend so much time telling women how not to be raped and assaulted, it's almost like we forget to tell the culprits not to do it...It doesn't matter how drunk you are, or angry you are, or horny you are. All acts of abuse against a person physically weaker than you - rape, assault, theft, threatening behaviour, bullying - are unjustifiable. End of story."

These are the words of Sian Pearl, for the Concerned Bloggers Association - you can read the rest here. Again, I don't feel so confident, at least right now, to write too much about myself, but I felt it was my duty to spread the message. But I do want to push this a little further than Sian did.

It doesn't matter how drunk, angry, or horny you are. All acts of abuse against anybody are unjustifiable.

Whilst we're at it, let's stop slut-shaming, and generally making comments about other people's life choices, especially when we haven't taken the time to understand them. Slut-shaming seems to hold hands with the kind of attitude Sian is talking about.

So stop reading this, and go and read her post instead.

[For some reason, the hyperlinks don't appear to be showing up. I promise that they work! If you hover over the text, they will appear.]

Small Reprieve

2012-02-02T10:12:00.000Z

I'm aware that my last couple of posts have been a little heavy, and whilst I don't think that that is a bad thing, I don't intend to hammer you all over the head in every post.

So here. Have some screenshots of me exploring a pretty little sim whose name I have promptly forgotten. I'll sign back in later and find out what it is. I found it via the "Editor's Picks" on the Destination Guide, and it was certainly an interesting place to be. It looked something like an abandoned fairground, and by the shore, the fortune teller machine from the film "Big" (ya'no, with Tom Hanks) was lying crooked, half-beneath the water. For 10L$ (in-world currency), it would tell you your fortune. Having seen "Big" quite a few times when I was younger (it was one of my favourite films), I decided it was probably best to steer clear.

Whilst I was walking around, a man in camo trousers decided to follow me. He didn't say a word, and, eventually, he took his trousers off - he had khaki shorts on underneath, thank God - and walked off into the sea. As you do.

A view of the sim from the psychic's hut

I think, after the collar post, my mother is going to start worrying about me...

O, woe is me!

The pose ball said "freak out"...so..um...okay

Tea with the Hatter

Er...not really sure why this was there...

To get these images, I had to turn my graphics up to "medium". It was a risky move even trying to do that, since my system isn't really up to even running SL in the first place, but the difference it made was incredible. On "low", absolutely everything was grey and texture-less. In SL, your graphics card determines the strength of your eyesight, and as somebody who enjoys very good eyesight irl, it can get a little tiresome looking at virtual grey blobs.

Enjoy the reprieve. I cannot promise it will last long :P

For more/bigger images, see my flickr.

Choose Freedom?

2012-01-29T11:41:00.003Z

A few posts ago, I decided not to attempt to write about slavery in SL, as a friend of mine had done a better job on the subject than I could hope to. Well, whilst I still hold this belief, I have decided that I do want to say something about the matter.

I apologise for lacking screenshots in this post - I did not want to implicate any sims or sim owners in this subject, as it is not meant to be an attack on such, but the start of a discussion of.

It would appear that the terms "sci-fi" and "human slavery" are synonymous in SL, and I suppose that the notion arises out of the anxiety over controlling something as unfathomable as space. There are plenty of areas on our own planet that we have difficulty in policing, and it is easy to imagine how such a problem might multiply as humans stretch out onto other planets. Many of the most popular sci fi sims appear to be through-points - space hotels, markets or truck-stops, designed to cater to the (temporary) needs of those passing through. As such, they can be read as liminal spaces, the nature of which is defined by whatever community happens to be gathered there at a time - soldiers, slavers, salvagers, clones, exiles, whatever. Taking into account the size of such sims, it is possible that the nature of the sim will be constantly in flux as new avatars teleport in, and resident avatars hop out. Given how easy it is for an SL user to change their avatar's clothes, it is possible that I could be the captain of a ship one minute, and a space hitch-hiker the next (I always have a towel ready in my inventory for such a purpose).

That these sims locate themselves on "the outer rim" - on the edge of the known, mappable universe, as it were, suggests a desire to be liberated from police-able systems. In terms of role-play, that is understandable, as it destabilises previously accepted social norms and makes possible a wider range of simulated activities. If the fear of punishment - albeit a questionable fear - is removed, how do humans behave? What governs them - and how strong is that governance? I think it is fair (if a little general) to say that, as a race, we are fascinated with the breakdown of society. We want to see what happens if we take on board the philosophies of, say, those in "Trainspotting", or "Fight Club", and SL offers a space in which we can do this without fear of permanent death.

Slavery works to challenge notions of equality, and represents for us, I think, the ultimate image of a person devoid of agency. Perhaps it is the closest we can come to the idea of "Hell on Earth", and I don't think it would be beyond reason to suggest that we (as society) view slaves as the lowest of the low. Are there any rungs left on the ladder to slide any further down at this point?

To return to "Trainspotting" and "Fight Club": it seems to me that many of the rules these films present to be done away with by their characters are rules concerning social responsibility. In becoming a slave, your actions become devoid of responsibility because you are no longer the one controlling them. When you place that situation into a world such as SL, it opens up a space of freedom that might begin to look attractive to inhabitants of a real world in which we are encouraged to constantly be aware of the consequences of every action we take.

Slavery is a fact of life in most parts of the Rim and Deep black, and arguably in most parts of the ‘verse. Slaves in the Rim and Deep black are acquired by many means. Slaves have a legal status, as property but with limited rights to care for their health and welfare. - "Slavery in the Outer Rim and Deep Black ver b-02" (a notecard available in SL)

However, when human trafficking and slavery is a fact of the real world, and we hear on the news stories of hundreds of victims the world over being forcibly removed from their home country and forced to work in another as labourers or prostitutes, where does that leave us? Suddenly, the social responsibility denied to a real slave becomes doubly encoded upon the virtual - and I am talking here, of course, of those who consent to allow their avatars to work as slaves, however temporarily, in SL. Bringing the word "freedom" into the discussion, on the side of the slavers, seems morally repugnant. Does the virtual world or, indeed, any world, have the right to take such an atrocity and turn it into a form of entertainment?

I am not suggesting, by any stretch of the imagination, that slavery as recreated in SL is anything akin to the kinds of slavery that go on in the real world, and nor am I saying that SL must become a site of protest for every ill that transpires in the realms of the palpable. But do we have an ethical responsibility, if we are to engage with slavery in SL, to stage some kind of political statement? Do we have a moral duty to denounce such practices and those that get direct enjoyment out of them - to de-eroticise what has arguably become a fetish?

The subject becomes difficult when you take into considerable the consensual nature of SL. Nothing can be done to your avatar without your consent, and so the "plight" taken on by those in the virtual world is one that, for whatever reason, they have chosen to take on. It is not slavery, and not even a representation of slavery. It is the aesthetic, perhaps, of slavery - it looks like slavery but, actually, most of the agency lies with the slave. Ultimately, even if you feel as if you have been forced into slavery in SL, you can press the "escape" tab and the whole virtual world will vanish from your view. Your avatar will be wrenched out of that life instantly.

Now, I do not engage in slavery, in SL or anywhere else. I have never dressed or cast Kitti as a slave, nor a slaver, and I do not frequent slave markets. I did try to free a slave character in a role-play scenario once, the subject of which became interesting when the slave had been conditioned such that she didn't quite want to be free, and Kitti had to begin imposing her own will upon the poor woman. It was an interesting situation, and one that, true to my maxims of role-play, was very difficult to write; but in agreeing to participate in this story, was I condoning slavery?

In visiting sims, sci-fi or not, that contain slave markets and holding cells and which encourage human traffickers to pass through, are we condoning the mimicry, the attitude, and, in a wider sense, the cause? I am not even talking, here, about sims designed purely for that purpose, and in several of the sci-fi sims I have in mind, the slave markets and quarters are hidden beneath the floor or down lengthy tunnels that is difficult to get to. It is not, necessarily, out and open, on display. But is that, in hiding the truth, as it were, making the situation worse?

Should we boycott them, all?

It is food for thought, and I'm not one hundred percent sure how I feel about this one.

Box-Head Eternal

2012-01-14T16:57:00.002Z

Remember this?

How could you forget?!

That's right - Sian Pearl's house, a few months ago, when I went AWOL and she saw fit to put a box on my head. No matter how "seasoned" a user of SL I might consider myself to be, I have yet to learn my lesson when it comes to going AFK in your friend's house. The simple answer, it would seem, is "just don't do it!". That would appear to be easier said than done, however, as the box has made a comeback - you guessed it! - courtesy of my AWOL head.

You can't deny the hilarity of it, though!

Ever the creative (:P), Sian engineered a set-up so that she could rez the images behind me (if you are a non SL user, imagine them as canvases, stretched over a frame - which is essentially what they are) and take another screenshot, repeating the process and layering up the Kittis, as it were. The effect is quite amusing, and so I thought I would share it with you.

Also, I'm going to indulge in a little vanity here. Kitti's skin is really pretty! If you remember a few weeks ago, I wrote a post about trying to find a suitable skin, and I have to say, I'm very pleased with this one ("Aleria Surf" by Plastik). I still haven't got over the peculiarity of the idea of changing one's skin.

Today's lesson: Don't go AFK in Sian Pearl's house - or rather, be prepared for the consequences if you do!

Maybe I should just start wearing the box permanently.

If you desire to see the image in its original setting and size, click here. Thank you Sian Pearl for letting me use your images, and for making me smile with them.

Kitti Collared

2012-01-02T11:03:00.000Z

Happy New Year!

As the holidays draw to a close, so the return to university looms - and the return of my status as being in a long-distance relationship. My boyfriend and I spend term time a four-hour train journey apart, and sometimes that can be tough. Due to a pretty poor internet connection and download allowance at his end, we've spent the past few months relying upon phone calls - but now all that has (potentially) changed. We can now use Skype and, as I suggested a while ago, Second Life, to communicate and spend a little virtual time together. Icarian's induction into SL is a subject for another post, and will be appearing shortly, but today I want to address another issue that has been bothering me for a while, but which has been brought up again by him.

Icarian and I spent the best part of an afternoon kitting him out for SL - new shape, skin, hair, normal clothing, and then a fantasy outfit and a sci-fi outfit, so he can join in the various little role-playing scenarios I have been involved with, or set out on his own, should he choose. I have been harbouring items for him in my inventory whenever I have seen them, so promptly logged into my account to send them over to his. Whilst doing so, I showed him a couple of my outfits, and we talked about the nature of the sci-fi sims I was also sending him landmarks for. As the discussion continued, he asked me "So, is the collar Kitti wears a slave collar?"

"a real collar", or so it claims, found at marketplace.secondlife.com

Well, I had to laugh. Like I said, this is an issue I have been considering talking about before, and have kind of shied away from because...well. It's a difficult topic, and I could probably write about it forever. As Sian Pearl has written very recently over at her blog, "Parthenoid", slavery forms a whole sub-culture within SL - so much so that a viewer has been designed and built to allow for the deprivation of certain virtual senses and operation of animation overrides (the infamous "Restrained Love" Viewer, which I believe was previously known as the "Restrained Life" Viewer). What Sian also brings up is how everything within SL slavery is consentual, though she writes about it far better than I could, so I'll leave it up to her.

There are several different ways in which the topic of slavery pops up in SL, and you may recall my anecdote about my first day in SL, when slavers tried to pick me up in the Necronom VI bar. I have also written a role-playing in which Kitti was being persuaded to sign herself over to what was essentially a sex-slave agency. I have met several avatars on sci-fi sims that claim to have a history as a slave, and they have invariably risen up, killed their masters, and are now amongst the dregs of the sci-fi world. In my understanding of sci-fi, however, unless you are a Jedi, everyone is amongst the space dregs.

But I have never thought of Kitti's collar as a slave collar. Kitti certainly does not behave as a slave in SL, and I personally find the idea of belonging to someone in such a fashion, in the real world, never mind the virtual, absolutely abhorrent. It is not, one might say, my cup of tea. Kitti's role-play back story does not involve any slavery, and when the rather seductive agency worker tried to recruit her, she did not jump to take the position, if you will excuse that rather hideous pun.

So why does Kitti wear a collar? Or, rather, why do I dress Kitti in a collar?

To start with, Kitti's collars are absolutely nothing like the one in the picture above. They are not scripted to do anything but glow sometimes, and even then, I have complete control over that glow. They do not feature hooks for the attachment of chains or ropes or anything like that. They are purely aesthetic - radical necklaces, if you like,

Kitti Collared

or a choker, only without the rubies or diamonds or pearls or whatever else women wrap around their throats. Is it the lack of jewels that thus makes them obscene?

I am aware that such is a rather dull answer, but it is the truth - and it makes me wonder. Do other people in SL see Kitti in these collars and think that she is a slave? Do they think she wants to be enslaved? A quick conversation with me would kill any ideas of that nature, and in role-play scenarios, Kitti has a little bit of a reputation for being somewhat unruly and taking the piss out of her superior officers when they show arrogance or chauvinism. She is not a collared pussycat. - But I cannot pounce on everyone I walk passed and announce my intentions. I would appear to be protesting "too much", and that wouldn't go down so well, either.

But awareness of this view has imposed limits on what I am comfortable with Kitti wearing. Whilst the collars above fall into my comfort zone (just about), this one I have more trouble with:

Meeow

It is the socket at the back that bothers me. It is the post-"The Matrix" version of a hook, and I guess I don't like the idea of being fastened to anything. I also don't want to be a cyborg.. Kitti does own a couple of plug-suits, but I shy away from dressing her in them, unless I can cover the plug sockets up as I have done above (see those two white stripes in the middle of her back?). You ain't uploading any data into me, thank you very much! I don't want to be a slave, to a human or a computer.

Is it possible for the collar to be a symbol of freedom, as well as of oppression? Kitti can wear a collar because she is free to do so, should she choose. She is not bound to wear one. She can take it off (or rather, I can take it off her) whenever she pleases. And yet my own hesitation suggests that somehow, the symbol doesn't quite fit. The freedom isn't quite there. The symbol isn't recognised.

And is it ethical for Kitti to wear a collar? When there is so much of this culture, within the real world, is it right for me to casually slap on what is, at least originally, a representation of ownership, suffering, and deprived free-will?

Will I continue to wear my collars, and not succumb to slavery? You ought to know me well enough by now to know the answer to that. But I cannot say that I will not continue to feel a bit awkward about it.

Though, I have no doubt that my mother (hi mum!) will make some comment here about other things in these outfits that I ought to feel awkward about :P

'Tis the Season...

2011-12-20T16:38:00.000Z

Looking a little flat there, Father. Get this man a mince pie!

As the big day approaches, I decided to investigate the destination guide for places I could go and maybe catch a glimpse of a virtual Santa Clause. I knew somebody must have built him a grotto, and, sure enough, I found one. Or two. Or several. Or more than I could count. The SL community are clearly invested in the holiday season...and why not? If Second Life offers an opportunity, a space, to replicate the things that we most love about the real world and our first lives, why shouldn't we be able to recreate Christmas? In fact - why shouldn't we be able to recreate Christmas every day? The answer, I imagine, is economical. And sure, Christmas is fun, and snow is fun. Your cousin's new karaoke set is...relatively...fun. But there are so many times you can listen to her sing "Santa Baby" before you wish you're wanting to hang, draw and quarter whomever built the infernal contraption, and the cold snow becomes a nuisance when you start remembering how fun last Summer's BBQ picnic was, and how good you felt with that Summer tan (I have never, ever, had a Summer tan. Ever). Remember the days when your feet and the bottom of your trousers didn't get trenched just going outside to call the cat back in? It all becomes just a little bit duller, a little less fun, as the days go on. We like the Christmas season, so long as it stays right there - within its own little allocated section of the year. We need variety. We need change.

Theoretically, however, we have the power within SL to return, at least in part, to the sense and atmosphere of that season - of whichever season, really - that we miss, even if it has long-passed. Now, having not searched for them before, I cannot say whether these Christmas sims stay up and running all year, or whether they only appear as the December days creep by. Perhaps the sims are used for different purposes throughout the rest of the year. I cannot say. But that isn't wholly want to I want to talk about.

What I find the most interesting - and the most bizarre - about SL is not that it follows the seasons in terms of important holidays, but that fashion follows those seasons, too. You might recall that a couple of months back, I mentioned an Autumn Hunt (or, at least, I believe I did) that I went on, finding small pumpkins in shops which held Autumn-related gifts and clothing. I have been getting notecards from shops for a while now, announcing their new Winter lines and Christmas sales. Better wrap our avatars up against the virtual cold...but what cold is that?

Now, I am guilty of it, too. As you may or may not have noticed, I am wearing a new woolly jumper in that screenie up there, which in new, for Winter, by Leezu. And I am not naive: I appreciate that shops have seasons to convince us that our previous wardrobe of clothes is completely inadequate to protect us from the unique trials of this new season. Perhaps in other countries, this is the case, but here in England...I think we have five truly hot days, and five truly cold days, a year - and the rest of the time it's kind of grey and rainy.

The virtual world has no temperature. Sure, some sims might be covered in snow, and I understand the logic of wanting your avatar to look the part, but, essentially, that is all it is - aesthetics. Kitti is not going to be cold wandering around the Antarctic, because she doesn't have any kind of skin and temperature system to be able to register that cold, any more than the virtual world has any way of physically creating that cold. The only way we can read the temperature of a sim is to look for markers, such as snow, or palm trees, or maybe an ice cream van parked on the road (though I have seen ice cream vans through the fuzzy fur of my rl winter coat's hood before now...seriously, guys?!). Whether or not you choose to recognise and adhere to the advice of those markers, however, is entirely up to your discretion.

And so, of course, I went against everything the polite Englishman within me stands for, and I decided to rebel against the system - just to highlight, in case it needed underscoring, the complete arbitrary nature of virtual seasons. Enjoy; doing these cheered me up immensely...for a short while.

Hmm, where to start?

Tangled in the light box...or so the pose ball said...

A present for me? Aww, you shouldn't have!

Fancy a skate?

Aaaaand just to flip it on its head - because I don't know about you, but this cold greyness is really getting me down -

Yes, this is a Winter coat...yes, I got it from Leezu...go away!

Hmm...why isn't Kitti tanning?! She's been sunbathing all day!

Well, maybe you would need to wrap up like this to go and sit on Brighton Beach...

Merry Christmas, everyone! Don't let the snowy season get you down. If you are feeling a little down, maybe this (click here) will cheer you up, and this (click here) will warm your heart :)

The Skin(s) You're In

2011-12-14T17:39:00.001Z

"Love the skin you're in" - in the Real World, this is probably pretty sound advice. My Nana is often telling me to look after my skin with various cleansers and toners and moisturisers and things. It's the only skin we've got, and we have to protect it from general wear-and-tear, as well as from the Sun, the cold, malignant moles, each other, and each other's vicious pit-bull terriers.

But in the age, or at least the world, of the avatar, the same rules do not apply. Just as you can have a million-and-one different pieces of hair (as you may have noticed by how often I change Kitti's), you can have a million-and-one different skins, in a range of different shades.

Admittedly, until very recently, I only had one virtual skin (the one from my make-over that I wrote about here) and I didn't really feel the need for any more. As skins go, it was a pretty good one; it covered the whole of my virtual body, at least, and it was, as pixels go, relatively pretty. Like my irl skin, it was never-seen-the-light-of-day-pale, and that suited me and my supposedly inherent Englishness (which I will write about another time) perfectly.

"Naoko: Pale" from Bird Next Door

It was then suggested to me that I could try other skins by joining various shop groups and trying out their freebies (which some shops in SL give out fairly regularly). Sian Pearl took me to one such shop, Plastik, and demanded, without explanation, that I click x-y-and-z and pick up a pack of free skins from there entitled "Nightbringer's Breath".

Slipping on a new skin takes the click of a button, and the Nightbringer's Breath skins looked pretty good on Kitti's frame. They also seemed to make her look older - an effect achieved by a lessening of the blush of her cheeks. The grey, instead, gives her cheekbones definition, without the rosiness of youth.

"Aleria: Nightbringer's Breath: Bare" from Plastik
...doesn't look so great with the ginger...

If, irl, someone offered to give us a new skin that made us look older, I think that we would run a mile! In SL, however, this skin seems to transform Kitti from a young girl to a young woman. She crosses the barrier into twenty-somethings, which is fine by me...if I have to, why shouldn't my avatar?! Age in SL is quite a fickle thing.

Much as I like the "Nightbringer's Breath" skin, it is not the most human-looking colour and so, casting aside any discussion about the questionable need/merits to remain human in the virtual world, I began looking for other skins that would have the same ageing process, without the discolouration. I also wanted to remain pale - because being tanned would feel like too much of a lie.

"Wish: Aether: Starlight" from Heartsick - comes with make-up tattooed on.
Saves time getting ready for a night-out, I guess!

Another from Heartsick, "Wish: Illusion: Ghosts" - again, with make-up tattooed on

Final one from Heartsick, "Rumour: Muse: Woodland" - a group gift

I like the Heartsick skins, but they somehow make Kitti seem severe, aloof. Both of the "Wish" skins, as I mentioned in the captions, come with make-up already (and permanently) applied to the skin, and I think the rather fashionable Cleopatra-esque eyeliner is at least partially to blame. The "Woodland" skin manages to look as inhuman as the "Nightbringer's Breath", but it's pretty good for a group gift.

Oh dear - I'm starting to sound like a fashion blog. That is not my intention!

Just when I was giving up, I received another group gift - this time from a shop called Glam Affair. For Christmas, they have realised a new skin, "Linn", which you can buy in a variety of tones. The free gift was entitled "Snow White", and the odd thing about it is that it has rosier cheeks than the "Naoko" skin, but still manages to make Kitti look older...

"Linn: Snow White" from Glam Affair

...though not too much older.

Would you ID her in a bar?

Well...you probably would. I maintain: age in SL is a fickle, fickle thing. And so, it would appear, is skin. Perhaps the lesson for SL is not necessarily to "love the skin you're in", but to find a skin you'll love to be in...at least for the next five minutes.

If nothing else I have written here has been entertaining, perhaps this will be: whilst on the Tableau sim mentioned previously, I came across a shop that sold skins and items for elderly avatars. That is, to make your avatar look elderly.

I kid you not.

Wrinkles, thick-rimmed glasses, bow-ties, and a glass of prune juice

Merry Christmas!

[See all of the skin screenshots in full size on my flickr by clicking the link on the right-hand side of this page]

Nuke Tableau

2011-11-28T09:49:00.001Z

This blog is not a lonely planet guide, but, occasionally, I find myself drawn to singing the praises on certain sims I have stumbled across. Please, bear with me.

Ordinarily, I ignore the Destination Guide. The Destination Guide is a kind of lonely planet guide of places Linden Labs thinks are cool, or that just seem to be popular with the SL populace right now. But it seems to be a little too much like an instruction manual, and, like any good student, I have an instinctual loathing and complete disregard for anything trying to tell me the rules.

Often, too, this "popularity" is quite a tricky statistic to deal with, because there are so many inhabitants of SL, and so many sims, that fifty people visiting one can make it rocket right to the top of the "What's Hot" list. In defence of this list, I am not sure I would willingly go to a sim that was populated with fifty other avatars. My laptop isn't capable of holding that many pieces together all at once, and I'd imagine that lag would be through the roof.

To get to the point: at some point last week, I decided to be a rebel and take a look at the Destination Guide, and I found this place: Tableau.

Aside from being a well-decorated, sun-baked little town, the sim is also home to its own theatre; a charmingly decadent proscenium arch balanced on the sand before only a couple of rows plush seats. The whole is rather reminiscent of Baz Luhrman's "Romeo and Juliet" and, loving that film, and in particular that image, as I do, I was immediately drawn to the stage.

Finding theatres within SL is always a little thrilling, and seems to back up the sense of the centrality of the theatre to society. What most theatres do not have, however, within SL and the real world, is an unexploded nuke for a backdrop.

A (nuclear) plague on both your houses!

Oh, you know the non-manual reading rebel in me loved this!

The juxtaposition is quite a strange one, though such stories of bombs being dropped but not going off, and instead just hanging in the rafts of various buildings, are not so rare. Did such not happen to St.Paul's Cathedral during the Blitz? I am ashamed that I can't remember.

The post-apocalyptic aesthetic is one that holds hands quite nicely with the rest of the baked/desert/South American feel of the rest of the sim, and the gilt skulls that are scattered around.

The best thing about this little theatre are its puppets. In the little wooden chest you can just about make out on the stage above are a whole host of puppets that you can pick up, for free. And they are wonderful!

I don't know much about puppet theatre, and the quick search I ran on the names of each of these figures turned up precious little, but I am half in love with these. Each is bigger than the standard-sized avatar (which is taller than people are generally irl) and held up and moved by a pole attached to the head. The fabric hangs down to simulate the body, and also to hide the puppeteer behind.

Puppet show for a non-existent crowd

The potential with such a little set-up is kind of exciting. Would it be possible to put on a little something here with these puppets? Where would we get an audience from?

If anything comes of it, I'll let you know.

Happy Rez-Day!

2011-11-18T18:26:00.001Z

Wednesday just gone saw the happy occasion of the anniversary of Sian Pearl's rez day. A rez day is basically a virtual birthday; the day you were born (or reborn?), if you will, into the virtual world of Second Life. My own rez-day passed me by without me noticing, mostly because it is pretty close to my birthday and I was at home celebrating sans laptop, but it is not uncommon, it would appear, for people to arrange parties and get-togethers to mark the occasion.

I received the invitation via notecard the night before, and then spend much of the following morning wondering what to expect. What is the etiquette for this kind of occasion? Do we, for example, have to turn up with presents? Is there a dress code? If any of you have followed the link to Sian's blog, you will see that she is quite an avant-garde-ist when it comes to fashion, and it seemed almost rude to suggest turning up to her party having not made an effort to dress up. I would not, after all, turn up at a birthday party in the real world without putting on something vaguely nice and throwing a bit of war paint at my face.

I actually saw Sian on the morning before the party, putting her outfit together, and suddenly the worrying I was doing over the bareness of Kitti's legs seemed quite ridiculous. I also felt hideously under-dressed. The question of why I cared so much about virtual nudity is not one I will even begin to try and answer with in this blog post. (For some reason, I cannot embed Sian's screenie of the two of us together within my post, so, if you wish to see it, click here).

The party itself was a little late to start - but that's the nature of online get-togethers, I suppose. Computer problems, time zone differences, and children refusing to go to bed can put the kibosh on even the best laid of plans. It was also a little slow to begin with; I got the impression that I was not the only one present who had not been to a rez-day party before. We were gathered at Sian's house, and the only music available for the party was whatever the sim owner happened to be streaming which, I am sure I heard Laertes mention, was some kind of violin concerto. Not, perhaps, the kind of music one normally associates with a party.

Sian Pearl greeting Laertes Modan (now known as Jaegen Fenris)

The ever-charming Gibson Kamachi

Sian Pearl and the slightly elusive Columbine Lavender...and Jaegen on the sidelines there...

After a while, however, more people turned up, and the conversation began to flow, and we were having a good time. Everybody looked great, and pretty soon Sian had us all dancing - even without the music.

SL dancing is a bit of a peculiar phenomena. The best way to explain it is that it works by animation override, but, as was the case for us, the AO belonged to Sian, and she made an offer, as it were, to each of us to invite us to join in. By saying "yes", the AO took over our avatars and we began to dance in unison. The effect was quite hilarious, particularly since many of the dance AOs Sian owns would appear to be female orientated, contorting poor Jaegen into the kinds of shapes the YMCA would have been jealous of.

You strut your stuff, Captain Fenris!

Go Jaegen! Not sure what Kitti is doing here...lol

He was a great sport.

As Sian was having computer troubles and was, really, lucky to be in SL at all, I became the designated photographer. Unfortunately, my SL photography skills are not that great, though I did my best. I tend to find with most party photos - in real life -, the images you think you are capturing are always much, much better than images you seem to find on your camera the day after. This...was pretty much the case for my SL party photos, too, as you may have noticed.

What can I say? I tried.

We had a good laugh, and I got to meet a couple of new people who seem lovely, and I think, all-in-all, we did a pretty good job of celebrating the virtual birth of a person without whom our second lives would be rather dull.

Maybe I should try and throw a rez-day party for myself next year. But who would turn up?!

More photos can be found on my flickr stream.

Virtual Philosophers

2011-11-03T09:07:00.000Z

So, my internet problem seems to be fixed - yay! The past few weeks have aged me (literally), but now I'm back and can hopefully fall back into some vaguely regular pattern of posting.

A few posts ago, I raised the issue of the necessity of shared time to a virtual world such as Second Life - you cannot interact "live" with other citizens of the virtual world if you are not together at the same time, and how time works seems to be one of the ways of defining whether or not something is a game, or a world, or...a glorified version of the Sims. There seems to be a lot of discourse out there on the subject (and a lot of it is written really neatly in Tom Boellstorff's "Coming of Age in Second Life").

That is not to suggest, however, that there are not ways to interact with Second Life "residents", as Linden Labs calls them, when they are offline. The IM function allows messages to be stored until the user comes back online, and there is nothing stopping me making a new notecard (a notecard being like a WordPad file) and sending it to some of my offline friends, to be received and read when they come online. But that is much like sending emails, or using Windows Live Messenger, and I'm not sure that anybody would really consider either of those to be virtual worlds. Plains, maybe, but not worlds.

That aside: the biggest enemy of any theory about shared time is lag. Lag is pretty much an accepted evil these days, it would seem, with it infecting almost everything that engages with the Internet. I seem to experience particularly high lag, since my laptop is not really up to running the Second Life Viewer, and my network connection is often under a lot of duress from my university housemates watching videos and probably using utorrent to download a whole bunch of stuff that they shouldn't. If I venture into a highly populated or intricately detailed area, it's highly unlikely that my laptop will be able to rez (load) the sim as it actually should be. But that's pretty much "c'est la vie".

What does that mean for the concept of shared time? Can a virtual world be "declassified", so to speak, because it suffers with lag? Just within SL, it starts to raise a whole bunch of existential questions: if I change my hair from brown to red, but, because of lag, everyone around me can still see it as brown, is my hair really, in fact, brown? What colour does the Higher Being of the Linden Labs server really think my hair colour is? If, for example, Salix tries to take human form after being a dragon, but, on my screen I still see her as a dragon...which is she?! It is often things such as changing your hair, or your clothes, or your shape that offer the most obvious examples of lag. So is it how we see ourselves that matters, or how we are seen? How can we trust anything that we see? We are creating a generation of virtual philosophers over here!

We are also creating a generation of people who really, really cannot afford to take their (virtual) selves seriously - not when you are aware that, at times, you look like this:

I entered a new sim, and it couldn't load my clothes properly. How attractive.

Ah! My inner-clown is showing

Space seems to have leaked through the walls, and I got tango-d

You know I've got a whole folder of images like these. You just know it.

Catching Some Zs

2011-10-24T18:35:00.003+01:00

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been having some trouble with my internet connection. As soon as I log into SL, the net goes down and Kitti becomes trapped on my screen, severed from the server but held in place by the slow-to-respond viewer, able to walk around and look at things but unable to interact with them. Eventually, the viewer catches up and throws me out, and I have to spend another three hours on the phone to Virgin Media trying to get them to understand that there is absolutely nothing wrong with the filter and yes, I have, of course, tried turning the router on and off again.

Managing to find a pocket of stable internet time, I logged into SL and decided that I would take a look at the list of recommended places to visit in the destination guide for something to do, since I didn't know how long my luck would last. As it turned out, it didn't last very long - however, I managed to stumble across a sim listing that caught my eye before I was booted from the virtual plane: Nexus, Embracers of Darkness.

Nexus is a zombie-killing sim that is also used by the Bloodlines Vampires for what would appear to be a sim-wide version of the game Capture the Flag. It is some kind of city, covered in red and pink obelisks which, in turn, appear to be covered with Bloodlines Clan tags, and milling around these obelisks with their arms outstretched is a horde of npc zombies.

Can zombies read? Do they obey signs?

Now, there isn't anything particularly special about that. With my low graphics settings, the zombies are relatively unthreatening, and not much of the city itself seems to materialise on my screen. I have seen npc zombies in SL before, and whilst the concept is quite clever, their existence itself is not really worth a blog post. No - what I find interesting about the Nexus sim is the idea behind it: the intention of imposing a game onto/into Second Life.

As I have said before, I do not personally view SL as a game, but that is not to say that SL cannot be used like a game. In a safe-house across the street from the initial teleport-point, you can pick up a simple HUD that will allow you to register injury should the zombies get you. And the zombies will get you - they are scripted with some kind of tracking programme so that if you walk passed one, ten will magically appear and waddle after you, murmuring "braaaaains" and breathing heavily. Why do zombies, virtual zombies no less, need to breathe?

The idea is that you take the HUD, and a gun and, presumably, take up a position behind a wall of sandbags (which the zombies apparently cannot get passed) and use the creepy dummies are target practice. If you're really brave, I suppose you could jump the sandbags and run around the city, shooting the zombies, and maybe even the mummies that randomly spawn, as you go. The sim is labelled as being for role-play, and there is, as I have mentioned, a rather large building labelled "Safe House" that offers a refuge for story-creating to take place. The sim is also used, or so it says, by the Bloodlines Vampire Clans (that is, actual SL users, not npcs), both for some kind of virtually-physical game as well as role-playing.

One of them had to have some nudity going on, hmm?

It seems like an odd juxtaposition to me, zombies and vampires, and I'm not sure that any self-respecting vampire aristocrat would be caught dead (ha ha!) rubbing elbows with the rotting flesh of the Zs next door. Both seem to offer a completely different image of the body in un-death, particularly when you consider that these vampires are, in my experience, often modelled on Gary Oldman as Dracula rather than those creepy window-scatchers from "Salem's Lot".

Oh drat! Guess I made that picnic for nothing!

But beyond that: how much of a game is this? If you consider "Call of Duty", for example, it is possible to load levels full of Nazi Zombies which you then spend the next ten or so minutes shooting. The zombies head towards you and, if you are well organised, you can control where they will materialise and take them out one by one. If you are not organised, it is possible that you will be overwhelmed with Zs and end up as mushy Z-food. Such, however, is not really possible at Nexus. If you stay behind the sandbags, the scenario becomes target practice, but even if you venture beyond, the zombies move slowly enough to allow you to take them out one at a time. They cannot hurt you unless you are wearing the HUD (which, sportingly, you should be), and it takes a while for them to gang up on you. I am not sure that the resulting scenario constitutes anything like a "game" - or, at least, a fair one.

If you are not wearing the HUD - or even sporting a gun, as I was not -, when the zombies gang up on you, all they can do is push and breathe down your neck. Being pushed around between decaying, scantily-clad meat-bags can be quite infuriating, but I couldn't help but find it funny. I did become quite stuck between them at one point -

Zombie Sorority?

- but as soon as I found an opening and began to walk away, they struggled to keep up, and the resulting image made me laugh even more. Between the dominantly female z-horde, and my supermodel AO, the game became something a little more playful and a lot more silly than I think the original sim-owner intended.

Z-Catwalk

Looks like a scene from some kind of music video to me...

Follow Up: AWOL and Abused

2011-10-14T17:34:00.002+01:00

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.

Poor Pierrot!

2011-10-11T21:58:00.001+01:00

And now for something completely different: or rather, it would be, if I was actually doing anything on this blog by the book.

As a final year Theatre and Performance student at Warwick, I am required to write a dissertation of around ten thousand words on a subject of my choosing. The subject I have chosen to write about is clowning. In a meeting with my dissertation tutor yesterday, I brought up a rather vague observation I had made that there don't seem to be very many clowns in Second Life, and she suggested that I could try turning my avatar into a clown.

That was easier said than done! When I talk of clowns, I am not referring to the apparently popular image of the clown as murderer/zombie/pervert, possibly made popular by things such as Stephen King's "It", and the Joker -

This is the first image that comes up in a Google Images search. Creepy, huh?!

You expected this to be an image of Heath Ledger, didn't you? Didn't you?!

- though I do accept that these types of clowns do exist. The kinds of clown I am most interested in are these:

Slava's Snow Show

Marcel Marceau

and so this is what I was aiming for when I began my search of the SL Marketplace for clown-related attire. What did SL have to offer me, however? You guessed it!

"Zombie clown female"

"Nose (with squeeky sound!)"- like that is a redeeming feature?!

I even found this delightful creature -

Wouldn't like to come home and find him!

In light of my findings, it is easy to see why SL is not populated with clowns - because they're damned creepy! It is disturbing how little there is of clowns even in the style of the children's entertainer. I suppose some of it comes down to the inability of an avatar to demonstrate the necessary tricks and acrobatics without you going out to buy extra gestures and pose balls and things - and they are not cheap. Although I haven't included those images here, there are quite a few "sexy" clown outfits, mainly for women, but these outfits are mostly made up of brightly-coloured underwear, and well. I'm sure you have a functioning imagination.

Eventually, however, I did come across a neat little Pierrot costume and a red nose, and I trotted off to a circus sim to take some predictable screenshots. I appreciate that there is a certain acceptance of stereotype here, but this is a blog about SL, and not about clowns, so I accept my hypocrisy (if that is the right word). The make-up has been pieced together by me from various non-clown related make-ups, as Pierrot masks were few and far between - and incredibly incredibly expensive. Poor Pierrot!

So, without further ado, I give you Kitti the Clown:

Did you know I could do one-handed hand-stands?! With the help of a pose ball, anyway

Posing under the Big Top

Relaxing with a cup of tea

I will write on this in more depth later, I'm sure, especially as my dissertation work develops. I will also upload the screenies to Kitti's flickr in case you wish to view them full-size.

[I do not claim ownership of the first seven images in this post. The last three only belong to me.]

Of Jurassic Proportions

2011-10-08T16:30:00.000+01:00

In a previous post (namely, "What the Dragon Said"), I introduced a friend of mine, Salix Southpaw, who enjoys spending her time in SL pushing the limits of avatar customisation by wandering around hilly sims and not-so-accidentally stepping on elves as a rather large and majestic black and purple dragon. Deep breath. More recently, she has taken on the guise of a komodo dragon (screenies on my flickr), and even that of a raptor. And what better a place to be an SL raptor than in the SL version of Jurassic Park! Naturally, she invited me along to investigate the sim with her.

The black circle? A poseball - but only for raptors. Discrimination!

It's been quite a few years since I last watched "Jurassic Park", but Salix assures me that this is a pretty good replica of the museum in the film. Beyond the museum is the dino park and copious amounts of laboratories - only, we don't think that these are film copies. At least, I hope they aren't, because I don't remember "Jurassic Park" being quite so disturbing...

Seems like an excessive punishment for wearing flip-flops, if you ask me

...and I also don't remember anything about a desire to combine human DNA with dinosaur...

Click to enlarge to read the text

With this...ah, intention...in mind, this poster I found on the upper levels of the museum seems to take on a much sinister tone:

You knew the offer of "free food" was too good to be without a catch

I'd like to suggest that no raptors were harmed in this little experiment by Nargus Labs, but their holding tubes don't look so cosy, either.

Well...maybe it's safer for us humans this way!

Scientist Kitti checking on captured raptor-Salix, ha ha!

So heaven help us when they escape!

Not sure if Salix looks like Kitti's doom, or her right-hand dino, lol.

What was most discomforting about this sim wasn't all of these weird genetic experiments, or the horrid raptor harnesses - it wasn't even this scarily self-assured banner I found hanging high above the museum foyer:

Shall they now?!

Or this advert for juice from the vending machines dotted around the place:

"fresh as a fossil"?!

Or the seductive pose of the anthro-raptors (skins) available for purchase in the museum shop:

And here was me thinking that the human-dinos were being bred for science...pfft!

No - what was most unnerving about the Nargus Labs sim was how healthy the food from the restaurant seemed to be. Even the hotdogs came with great slices of watermelon!

A whole plate of fruit?! At a museum restaurant?! Is this really an exhibit?!

Balanced diet?

Psycho Tots

2011-10-03T14:20:00.000+01:00

Surfing the web, as you do, I found an article entitled "Ten Reasons to Avoid Second Life". It is four years old, and thus rather dated, but I don't think it is far off the mark, and it offers a pretty concise explanation of SL for those who don't quite understand what SL is yet.

Click here to read the article - here!

I am not suggesting that this is some kind of SL encyclopedia, but...it is quite interesting.

The aforementioned article mentions Gor. From my understanding, Gor is a fictional place/world pulled from an old series of novels in which a class of "free" men and women use other men and women as slaves for sex. I first stumbled upon the concept when I managed to wander into a Gorean sim in Second Life. A signpost issued me with a set of rules and a HUD which contained an AO that would basically bind my avatar up like some kind of kinky parcel. One Google Search later and I was starting to think I needed to get out of here. It all seemed rather violent and grim, and also rather serious - but then I came across this:

"Do NOT Climb :)"

Maybe it only looks like it was written by a five year old in crayon. Maybe that five year old is a psychopath who daubed it in his slave's blood. I suppose anything is possible - this is SL, afterall!

How did they know I'd want to climb the waterfall, anyway?!

Like a Second Skin

2011-09-29T19:56:00.000+01:00

"Try before you buy". We've all heard that phrase before - heck, my high school form tutor, a Christian woman in her fifties who tucked tissue up the capped sleeves of her floral print dresses, even suggested that such was a good policy to adopt with regards to sex before marriage - but within SL, it takes on a whole new meaning.

You walk into a shop and you see something you like. Like this, for example. It's a wonderful hairstyle created by Wasabi Pills, "Up in the Hair". It comes in a whole bunch of different colours, and you can change the colour of the balloons to match your dress. When I saw it, I got a little bit too excited, and thought it was wonderful.

So then came the all-important question. As great as it looks there...will it suit my avatar? I suspected that half of the fun of the style came from the expression on the girl's face - like someone had managed to sneak up on her and tie balloons in her hair. An unlikely story. But instead of hedging a bet and risking two-hundred and fifty Linden dollars (SL currency) on it, I picked up a demo.

That's right. I tried before I buyed...bought...by picking up a demo of the hairstyle, and putting it on my head. A note for thosewho do not use SL: demos are not meant to be perfect. If they were, people would not pay for anything, so the big box floating next to my head and the fact that I could only try it on in blonde or dark brown, as opposed to choosing from all of the colours in the screenshot with the ad, are the "imperfections" that make it not suitable for general use.

Now, whether you engage with SL or not...just stop and think about that for a moment. Wouldn't it be fantastic if we could go to the hairdressers and say "I want to try out this style" - and then you could, without affecting your real hair? Just like that? I know that there are websites these days which allow you to upload a photo of your face and then try other photos of hair on over the top, but that is not the same. I have three-hundred and sixty degree access to my virtual head to check out the hair and see how it looks.

And, as it turns out, I do think that half the fun of this style is the expression on the model's face, and...well. The balloons look slightly out of place in Laertes' sci-fi bar.

The idea of demos never gets old for me. Maybe I'm just a big child. I don't care!

I suggested to Sian yesterday that I was considering buying a porcelain doll-style skin for my avatar, and she suggested that we head over to LionSkin to pick up some demos. So we did and - of course - I have screenshots to prove it.

Creepy, huh?

I have no explanation for this one

If you want to see some more creepy mannequin skins, I have uploaded several screenies to my flickr - along with some other miscellaneous pictures I've been taking during roleplays with Salix and Sian. They're completely unrelated, but still pretty cool. Take a look!

What I find with demos, however, is that often I pick them up when I have no real intention of buying the item in the first place. Sian and I quickly decided in the LionSkins store that these were not the style I was after, but I took back a whole box of demos anyway, and spent a good twenty minutes or so just trying them on. I also proceeded to chase Salix around Sian's skybox (the room I was in for the above two screenies) pretending to be a zombie whilst wearing one of these skins. I had turned my animation override off, so that Kitti would stand still whilst I was trying to look at her, so when I began to chase Salix, I was doing the default duck waddle, and that just seemed to make me laugh all the more.

I'm also a sucker for trying on hair at the Truth Hair store:

I seem to gravitate towards styles that make me look like Princess Leia.

But you can get demos of almost anything! - including clothes and shoes.

What is the point of this post? I'm not sure. But demos are great fun...and one of those weird things you kind of take for granted within SL. The world can be your dressing up box. Can you imagine what the real world would be like if demos were possible?!

I know, I know. I need to get out more.

All Work and No Play

2011-09-21T14:58:00.002+01:00

There are many sources I could call upon to back-up and probably better explain what I want to write about today, but I am not going to use them. They are easy enough to find online if you are really, really interested.

Also, if you are interested: a cut-down version of the role-play scenario I mentioned in my post, "Make It Hurt", has been uploaded by Sian Pearl to her blog, parthenoid - which you can read by clicking here.

I have been doing some reading related to my final year research topic today, and I came across several essays on the idea of "play". It's a pretty central concept in theatre, obviously, and something that I have been urged to look over in many a class. We perhaps use it a little heavy-handedly, and I personally have been known to daub many a rehearsal session or dramatised play-reading with the frame of "we're just playing". To watch, it can't seem much like playing. The most successful rehearsals I have been involved in have often ended with hot, sweaty, exhausted tears - but what we were doing is little more complicated than what happens when you place two children together in front of some building blocks.

You know you needed to see it again.

Often in my oh-so-few blog posts, I have suggested that the flaw, if that is the right word, with SL in the eyes of the general populace is its freedom - the unlimited space and resources it offers for people to play. Confronted with the possibility to do absolutely anything, we seem to cling to recreating and playing with ideas from real life, just like those children with the building blocks do. With those building blocks, you could build anything, things you could only dream of seeing out and about in the streets, but what do you build? Houses and towers and cars and police stations and, need I remind you, washing machines and toilets.

When considering play, it is almost impossible to avoid the idea of games.

There appears to be quite a controversy surrounding the labelling of Second Life as a game. Some SL users don't seem to care, but others get very hot under the collar when the g-word is mentioned. When my brother has walked into my bedroom and found me logged into SL, it has not been uncommon for him to enquire "What game is that?", and I haven't quite had the patience to sit down with him yet and explain why called SL a game is a pretty bad idea. He's still quite new to the Internet, and he doesn't understand how dangerous being considered wrong upon it can be yet.

http://xkcd.com/386/

Now, obviously there is no way I can really argue the issue one way or another, cohesively and taking into account all of the material on the subject, in one blog post. I'm not intending to write a tomb, and if you want to discuss it with me, or voice your opinions, there is a comment button below this post and I encourage you to use it, as always.

In my opinion, SL is not a game. If you take a look at other popular games on the market right now, such as World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, or even the new Deus Ex, they have very little in common with Second Life beyond the fact that they both use virtual plains and are made up of pixels. In each of the aforementioned games, bar SL, there are relatively clearly defined objectives which the player tries to hit. The success of such is measured in experience points, gaining bases, upgrading armour, unlocking cut scenes, and staying alive until you have reached the goal and it is game over. Admittedly, with World of Warcraft, there is no such "game over", but there is an "end" in terms of having worked through the storyline, the side quests, and earning the highest grade of armour in the game. I have no doubt that Blizzard-ActiVision will continue to invent new levels, new side quests, new patches, etc etc, but I have no interest in arguing that WoW is not a game today :P Games are full of work, disguised as play - a disguise made all the more convincing if you enjoy that work. But it has none of the freedom and need of imagination of play.

SL has none of these objectives. There is no real end goal, no game-over. You exist within the virtual world, and you do as you please, and your success, unless you enter into the commercial side of things, is marked only by your own understandings and desires of the world. The only work is the work you set yourself - designing, building, creating - and it is possible to get a job within SL, as a bouncer or a dancer or a model or whatever else you can imagine. But for people like me, even using the building tools to create something in-world is about play. I have no real idea how it works, no real idea how to make something look like anything, so I play - I press buttons, I double-click everything, and eventually my laptop has enough and the viewer crashes.

I spent most of my time in SL playing. If I am not pretending to be somebody else in a role-play, I am exploring sims, pressing buttons, trying to sit on everything, and taking screenshots of things that intrigue or amuse me. Right now, I am logged into SL, and I am sitting on a bench on a sim called Alpha Point. The bench has several seating animations within it and, naturally, I have tried all of them.

Inherent to playing, however, is the idea of fun, and I cannot say that I always find my experiences within SL fun. If there are people to talk to and things to do, then yes, I suppose I could say that I find it fun. I have described in previous posts the kind of effort (and work?) involved in role-playing, and I'm not sure that I used the word "fun" there, though it is certainly enjoyable. But there is also a strange phenomena that takes place wherein you log out of SL after five hours and you find yourself thinking...where has my day gone? What have I done? Because the answer is nothing and that you didn't have fun at all - but you stayed logged in, anyway. That, I cannot explain, but I'm pretty sure other SL users have experienced that effect, too.

So...we reach my conclusion - and it's a weird one, isn't it? Second Life isn't a game because it is about playing, not working, unless you want it to, and since the work that can be taken up often involves real money, it's less of a game and more of a serious gamble...How am I meant to explain that to my brother?

And, just to make the whole thing more worthwhile, I am going to point out that I personally don't particularly care whether SL is considered a game or not. I will continue to play, and to sit on things, and to log out when it makes me unhappy.

Trying on hats....

...clicking "get murdered" pose balls on romantic sims...

and flying by dandelion seed.

All work and no play makes Kitti a very unhappy avatar.

Conditional

2011-09-19T16:31:00.000+01:00

So, it looks like SL hates me today. I got logged out for no apparent reason, and now I can't even get the viewer to launch - it just says "Oh, darn, there seems to be an error and SL is not responding". So now I'm giving in and downloading a completely different viewer to see if that fixes the issue.

Ordinarily, I use the default, "official" Linden Lab Viewer. The terminology used there, "viewer", sets an interesting tone for your engagement with Second Life. You aren't creating it or loading it or building it into your computer or something. It does not come into being when you log in on your computer. It is there all the time, you've just gained the ability to see it. It's clever.

Doesn't look like Firestorm is any more tolerant than Viewer 3, lol. Sigh.

I have, however, managed to set up a flickr account to run alongside this blog. Hurray! It can be accessed via this link here, or by the link in the right-hand sidebar. There isn't all that much up there at the moment, but I'm intending to use the space to upload the prettier of my blog screenshots, as well as to hold those that didn't make it into the post themselves. Feel free to follow and/or comment there - just like you can here :)

I'll be back with another (proper) post asap. Until then, please enjoy this screenshot of two frogs on a bench:

Pretty much what it says on the tin

Eat Fruit!

2011-09-15T14:53:00.000+01:00

During my adventures so far in Second Life, I have come across a number of interesting and humorous posters that I would like to share. Unfortunately, either my brain has exaggerated the number, or I have managed to lose some of my poster screenshots along with all of the others that seemed to go missing, but I still have quite a few.

I am considering making a Flickr account connected to this blog to hold all of my screenies, hopefully in slightly better detail. Then anyone wanting to have a quick look over my images could do so without having to scroll through all of my posts to find them. What do you think?

The Posters

on Botany Bay Colony (before it was re-vamped recently):

Don't want to catch space scurvy!

Button Your Lip!

on the Doomed Ship:

My question is...which Sun? We're in deep space!

Can't have been very capable hands if this ship is "doomed"...

No "I" in team...but there is a "me"

Apologies for the darkness of those last ones...I didn't think to change the light settings. They like the Doomed Ship's default settings to be dark and eerie, to make up for the total lack of anything actually scary happening there.

in the hangar of the Pike Encounters Bar, Botany Bay:

I think I've seen enough tentacles to last me a lifetime...

on a waterfall - a waterfall! - on a slightly Gorean sim, "The Central Fire":

Gorean men apparently like forced sexual slavery, and crayons...

These last ones come from sims I am afraid to say I cannot remember the names of. I saw them when I was taking part in the Steampunk Hunt, which entailed teleporting all over SL to find cogs with prizes hidden in them. All I know is that they were from a very detailed steampunk sim, and that I really enjoyed being there:

Click to enlarge. I'm afraid the text isn't massively clear. I believe it's talking about the Babbage Machine, or something like it.

Anti-Automatons? An interesting idea, no?

I should get this put on the opening page of my life!

Role-Playing: Part Four - What the Dragon Said

2011-09-13T21:13:00.001+01:00

Okay, so, this truly is going to be the last in my running series of posts dedicated to RP. That does not mean, unfortunately for you, that I am going to stop talking about it altogether, however. Sorry. And I have decided that I shall write about the aforementioned "Restrained Love Viewer" as something completely separate. Let's just say that when I do, you will understand why.

So, I made a new friend this week. No, she is not imaginary. Her name is Salix, and she is often involved in role-playing of a more fantasy based nature, which is handy for me because I am a huge fantasy buff, but have had absolutely no luck finding decent fantasy RP sims within SL. From what I have learned, most fantasy sims only accept role-play about happy Tolkien-esque elves or forced sexual slavery, and I must confess that neither of those themes particularly appeals to me. Salix seemed to know some good ones, however, and I had a great time writing with her.

Did I mention that Salix spends much of her time as a dragon?

If I didn't have a height complex before...I do now...

Whilst we were writing, Salix's computer crashed and my new purple acquaintance vanished from the sim. Left alone and feeling somewhat vulnerable in unfamiliar territory, I was soon accosted by a much smaller dragon who introduced himself, told me that he had seen Salix vanish, and asked if we had been writing together. I replied that yes, we had, and we got talking generally about RP. He suggested to me that I wouldn't be such an amateur writer if I went further up the hill and engaged with the people who usually role-played there.

What was so special about the hill-people? Well, to be perfectly honest, I have no idea because they weren't logged into SL at the time. From what I could gather, however, they write in paragraphs. Great long paragraphs of text, heavy with speech and detailed actions - which isn't something uncommon in SL. I have seen it taking place at Necronom, and a little at Botany Bay. What surprised me was that this man quite brazenly suggested that this style of writing RP was the "right" or "best", or even the "elite" style. He had, as far as I am aware, not seen Salix and I writing together, and thus had no idea what my writing style was like. It took quite a lot of my resolve not to turn around and tell him that, actually, I was a published poet...but that small success was a long time ago, and the only person that really cares about it is my mother (Hi Mum!), so I held my tongue.

I also held my tongue because I appreciate that he was trying to be helpful, and he said that he compared himself to them and had thus decided that he was a bad writer. I am quite sure that that is not true! And it made me wonder how many other people are wandering around role-playing sims avoiding active players because they think they can't hold their own. That makes me sad.

As I have suggested...this kind of posting of text-walls is, in my opinion, simply another approach to role-playing. It is not any higher or lower than any other form. For some people, this works, and that's fine - but it is not the style for me. What I like about SL is the capacity it has for a kind of quick-fire, quick-response; the story can move at pace, if you allow it to, and there is the capacity for a good rapport to build. I personally don't necessarily need or want to know that your character took a puff of a cigarette in text when I can see them doing it live on my screen, unless that particular puff is significant to the plotline - but that is entirely my preference.

There's a kind of formula that a lot of my role-playing responses generally follow, though, of course, if every line I wrote was like this, it would become very dull very quickly. I like to give myself an expression, put an emotion on my face."Kitti Wytchwood looks distraught". Then, I add in an action, even if it's only a small one. "She sighs heavily and rubs her eyes" (before you jump on my back, I don't have an animation for that gesture, so shush) . Finally, she should say something, "..."I'm so sick of all this fuss!"..." or make some kind of action or movement that does the talking for her. "She moves towards the door as if to leave". And that's about as lengthy as I get.

One of the major flaws with SL RP demonstrates itself right there, however; not all participants are massively active. Often, writers will be doing other things whilst writing, and so the gaps between responses can be quite lengthy and, for me, it thus loses its punch. If I wanted to wait half an hour for a response, I'd be opening my old role-playing forums again, not dancing around forests and sci-fi bars in SL. It can be very frustrating, but you can hardly blame someone for having a life, and as you wait for someone to type back, you often find that your mouse, having a mind of its own, is moving across the screen to the "Mozilla Firefox" button....

Less "dancing", and more "standing around looking surly", but you get the point.

There is also an often large gap between what is written in the text, and the visuals. This is something that I feel has been running through all of my posts about role-playing - the kind of ineffectuality of it all. If I slap you, via text, my avatar will not raise her hand to slap yours. I have no doubt that animations exist that allow you to make this kind of thing happen, but they are not something I possess, nor something I would look to possess, and they make for a kind of disjointed chronology.

The most obvious disruption of this nature actually demonstrated itself this morning in role-play with Sian. I wrote that "Kitti Wytchwood slipped through the door", but I had not, in fact, slipped through the door. I was standing on the other side of a closed door, which, once I clicked it, slid wide open. I then walked through the door, clicked on it again and watched it slid back into place with a clunk. There was nothing "slippy" about it. I then said that Kitti was hovering nervously near it, when in actual fact her AO was making her wander all around the small room, waving her arms around.

So this, right there, is my big conclusion. The one I have taken four posts to get to :P. SL does not aid RP, come to take a pleasure in realising a character's physical appearance line by line. It provides a medium with a pretty backdrop, and no doubt makes Linden Labs a whole lot of money as we all scrabble to make sure that we are dressed correctly.

And, for the record, I'm not dressed correctly in that screenshot. There is no way that those boots are fantasy regulation. Don't tell the elves.

Is it going to stop me role-playing? No it is not.

Role-Playing: Part Three - Denizen, Deviant

2011-09-08T19:46:00.001+01:00

Almost an ideal world? (I jest)

I'm imagining that this is going to be the second to last post specifically dedicated to role-playing. Hurray! It could probably be the last, but I have a feeling that I'm going to have an awful lot to say about the Restrained Love Viewer that I promised to write about in part one, and I'm also concerned that I am far too wordy, and won't be able to get my oh-so-enlightening conclusion into this post, either. We shall see how it goes.

The most confusing thing about SL RP, in my opinion, is that the medium itself seems to require a level of role-playing, anyway. When I joined SL, I made it quite clear to those who answered my questions that I was a student, carrying out a kind of enthnography for my Performing Online class. Not long after I joined Laertes' crew, I met a lady who said she was a Sociology lecturer who was investigating the virtual world, too. I excitedly told one of my university housemates this and he replied "Or so she says". I felt a little put-out. What motive did this woman have to lie? Where was her verification that I had not lied to her? It doesn't sound all that likely, really, does it? What business has Theatre and Performance Studies in/with Second Life? But at the same time...in a world where the only limits are your imagination (and maybe your bank account), what tethered her to the truth?

You've got to admit, though; Sociology sounds a lot more plausible than Theatre.

From what I have observed of SL, there seems to be a particularly large community of RPers who surround themselves in vampire lore - and I don't think it would be wrong to say that it is lore heavily inspired by Len Wiseman's "Underworld" films. Many of the vampire sims I have explored are very dark and blood-laden and, as much as I am totally in love with "Underworld", I wish I would come across something a little more inspired by Anne Rice and her beloved Vampire Lestat. But that's beside the point.

"Behold, the Queen of the Damned"

There is a system in place within SL that allows for avatars-turned-vampires to "scan" other avatars and see which ones are fresh, and which are blood dolls - that is, which have never been fed on by a vampire, and which are routinely fed on. Not being a vampire, I have no idea what this looks like, or what form the information takes, but I have friends in dark places, and they tell me it is so.

If they wish to feed on you, they have to send through an attack request. A little message pops up on the bottom of the screen, announcing that "Dracula would like to attack you. Do you accept?". If you do accept, a whole system of animations are set into motion: the vampire will pounce onto your avatar and bite your throat. You as the victim will struggle a little, before collapsing onto the ground. I presume that, after a short while, you can get up and act like nothing happened. There is certainly no lasting damage to the victim. No lasting physical damage, anyway.

Disturbing as it may seem, I actually think that the system is really clever. Though the requests remove any kind of surprise or danger from the attack, the animations give it a slight tangibility that, say, the slavers text-shoving a grenade in my mouth did not have. It does not rely solely upon the text to make it happen, and I think there's a brownie point for SL in that.

It is more complex than that, however. As a vampire, you have a blood level of five litres that you must keep replenished. If it hits zero, you will be sent to a kind of limbo, where you have to pay an arm and a leg (not literally, I don't think) to get out again. What that basically means is that you have to find a willing victim and feed each night - or at least fairly regularly. I have no real clue how fast the blood level drops. But still: that seems like a lot of work, particularly if you weren't planning to do some vampire RP that night...

When I was told about this, I was concerned that my vampire friend was stuck in this system forever. She did assure me that there is a way out of the needing-blood system...she just doesn't know what it is. I'm slightly worried that one day I shall log in and she will have vanished from the face of SL because she forgot to get all deviant.

In the spirit of RP and sims with a dress-code, I tried to make myself over in vampire-style. I was not particularly successful. Perhaps I should stress that I spent zero money on this, lol...it made me laugh, at least:

The screenshot at the top of this post, "in character, no guns, no kids", is a sign from an RP sim that I confess, I cannot remember the name of. Those were the main rules for the sim, along with the suggestion that I pick a role type to play as:

"Lurker, Innocent, Deviant, Denizen". None of them sound particularly appealing, huh? And once you picked one, it send me a ream of information via a notecard, and asked that I submit my application to take on that role to this, that and ome other person. I checked the radar, saw that nobody else was around, and walked straight passed.

In their notes, however, it was suggested that this was a dark sim, where dark things can happen, and that we should dress according, so...

I put my dirt layer on:

Alarming poses in the background, huh? What was supposed to take place on this sim again?

You knew I was going to mention the dirt again.

Role-Playing: Part Two - Make It Hurt

2011-09-06T20:00:00.000+01:00

The ship I had to "work on" was considerably bigger than the one above.

After saying in my last post that Kitti the Mechanic rarely gets called upon to do anything...well, mechanic-y, I found myself blagging my way through conversation of power flux, tractor beams and redirected energy at the Splintered Rock sci-fi sim last night. Laertes introduced me to the bar as his mechanic, and suddenly I had a lady asking me if I'd take a look at her ship. I managed to put it off long enough to have a laugh (at the expense of poor Captain Laertes) with another Commander and his crew in the bar, but then - all too soon - I was being escorted to her ship and plonked infront of some shiny-looking monitor that claimed to be showing me the ship's reactor and power systems.

Did I mention that I haven't taken a science class since high school? I'd have found it easier to list the British monarchs since William the Conqueror, or...I don't know...the chronology of American Civil Rights Movements since 1948...than sit there and pretend I had a clue why this strange lady's teleporter beams had gone all fuzzy since she decided to do a bit of DIY with her ship's plasma cannons.

Whilst I'm sure it is possible to become embroiled in deep, meaningful scenarios on the Splintered Rock sim, we were mostly just playing a kind of hot-seating game - like the ones they make you play these days in schools, where you have to imagine what the favourite colour or flavour of ice cream of Lenny from "Of Mice and Men" might be. We were just talking in character, shuffling around a relatively crowded bar, remarking on Laertes' obvious fondness for pretty women. It was light, and fun, and we were occasionally making comments out of character, too ((such is marked by double-brackets, like I have used here)). There was some guy with a fox's head sitting in the corner, complaining that he'd got sand in his tail, and when nobody knew how to respond to him, he left. I think he thought we were ignoring him.

But the most engaging role-plays that I have been involved in were those with my aforementioned friend, Sian. We have only written a few of scenes together, all of which were led by her, but each was intriguing and - perhaps most importantly - painful.

Image property of Sian Pearl. See it full-size on her flickr here.

The subject matter was hard to negotiate, and there was a real pain involved in imagining the situation and any implications it may have in the world beyond - both virtual and tangible. To make a moral judgement and dismiss the topic out of hand would have achieved nothing, and it feels futile to me to be involved in something if you aren't going to commit yourself to it. It sounds really heavy, and I suppose that it is, but at the same time I think that many writers slip into the required empathetic role automatically. You want to work at it, to compromise and negotiate to build the best scene that you can.

In our last RP (pictured above), Kitti was struggling with herself as much as with Sian. What Sian was suggesting, oh so persuasively, was something that to begin with sounded like Hell on Earth; but the more the two women talked, the more Kitti began to realise that she was stuck. The beauty, I suppose, of being a traveller is that I have no written no home for my character, and she has very few friends. She comes and goes without leaving much of a trace, and thus it is simple (and fun) to push her to the extremes of martyrdom, or self-preservation, and anywhere on the continuum between. Kitti could have left at any time she wanted, but she had nowhere to go, and the community Sian was promising, however flimsy, became more and more inviting.

The first time Sian and I wrote together, our scenario was very much about Kitti trying to rescue Sian. It was interesting to then go to that sterile, glowing-white interview suite and have Sian try to put that situation onto Kitti, and watch her previously self-righteous "This Is Wrong" begin to crumble, no matter how desperately she tried to cling to it.

Pain becomes a factor, too, when you consider how it feels to be the character in the "wrong" role. Many RPers in SL place themselves in the roles of trafficked slaves and subordinate cyborgs because they enjoy the masochistic side; but, for Sian, I feel pretty confident in saying that it is more about exploring the pain and underscoring the immorality than any sense of enjoyment. The pleasure there is the enjoyment of being appalled, not the enjoyment of the appalling thing, which I am sure is not the case for everyone creating these RP situations. A level of trust has to exist between us; she has to know that I am repulsed by what she is proposing, because she is, too.

So, I suppose that that is my advice for today: if you are going to be involved in RP, in SL or on any other platform...feel free to play around with darker ideas. Pick on something that you know is alittle too close to home once in a while. Ultimately, you are in control of the material and you can stop it at any time, so push yourself. Put something at stake.

Make it hurt.

Role-Playing: Part One - God-Mode Engage

2011-09-04T23:33:00.000+01:00

Disclaimer: Due to the nature of this topic, I am going to split it into several sections, and place each in a new post. This might make going over the basics a little dull, and for that I apologise. I'm trying to cater for quite a varied audience. I promise that I am trying to make it as interesting as possible. If you find this a little tedious...come back in a few posts? I have already spoken in bits and pieces about this topic in various previous posts. If you wish to view them altogether, you can click the "role-playing" link in the tags cloud and it should display them all for you.

God-Mode Engage

Role-playing appears to be a pretty staple part of Second Life. To put it basically, role-playing in SL is pretty much like role-playing in/on any other medium; it requires you to take on a character and a personality, usually at least marginally different from your own, and then engage with a story or situation in accordance with the behavioural traits of that persona. It's relatively simple, and people have probably been doing it since the dawn of time. I myself have spent many years writing such stories on various forums, developing my characters and satiating my need to write (that these days, just tends to drive me crazy). There was something cathartic about it. I roped my friends into it, and eventually set up my own forum for it. It was quite successful for a while, but then my two most avid writers fell out, and then fell out with me, and...well. The rest is history. A dull, petty history.

RP in SL utilises the /me function (as outlined in this post here...which also contains a better description of role-playing that the one above), allowing characters to take turns at communicating their actions and responses in the third person. Occasionally, you will meet someone who thinks that their character is God, and they will try desperately to engage in a text battle with you. Often, too, they impose actions upon your character. An example of this may be:

"Kitti Wytchwood pounces on her blog viewers, knocking them to the ground. She then proceeds to beat them with a length of rusty pipe until their skulls become a reddish dust".

Funny as that may sound here, in the safety of my blog, it is pretty annoying if you have placed your avatar in a bar and are just trying to write a short scene with your friends about...kittens or something. It's also breaking a ton of unspoken (though I have received several notecards from role-playing sim owners, warning that people who RP like so will be kicked from the sim) maxims. What I should have written, if I wanted to attack you, was:

"Kitti Wytchwood pounces towards her blog viewers waving a piece of rusty pipe, hoping to knock them to the ground"

I would have to hope that you replied with:

"The blog viewers were taken totally unaware and, before they realised what was going on, found themselves on the floor, being beaten about the head by a metal object".

SL has many sims dedicated to role-playing. The sim I introduced you to in the afore-linked post, the Necronom VI, is one such sim. When you arrive in these sims, you are usually automatically sent a notecard, detailing the specific rules for the sim, and any requirements regarding the nature of behaviour and dress-code.

The Necronom VI guidelines are pretty lengthy. Normally, they just say "Don't swear. Don't god-mode. Don't get naked".

So far, I have only really been involved in sci-fi RPs, and as such, I have only really developed one character. That is plain Kitti, part of Laertes' crew for his spaceship, the Beowulf. She is a young, human, woman with no real specialist area of knowledge or expertise - but she is eager and quick to learn. Years hitch-hiking and paying her way through labour have given her a willingness to chip in wherever a hand is necessary. She has been recruited by Laertes as a mechanic. As such, she is required to maintain a level of uniform and to be armed at all times, but as she is a relatively simple, un-vain creature who works with oil and grease, she has to look a little grubby, too...

To be grubby, I have to wear dirt as a jacket. My mother would kill me if I got up and announced that I was going to wear a layer of dirt over my nice clean clothes :P

I began to find that, in sci-fi RPs, many of the characters you meet are not human, and they adopt a merciless, cold attitude towards hardships, because that is what is necessary to survive. Whilst Kitti is not naive to that mechanism of survivalism, she fights it, and I enjoy bringing something warm and human to the RP table. RP stories rarely involve me having to fix something on the ship. We go on missions and haunt doomed ships, looking for salvage. Inevitably, something or someone will be lost, or found unrescue-able, and Kitti will usually be the first to try and help, and the last to let go.

And she'll probably end up arguing with the Captain about it all the way back to the base.

Coming up: overriding the (virtually) physical, HUDs, RP content, SL as a backdrop, RP anecdotes, and Restrained Love.

Clever Kitty...

2011-09-01T10:30:00.000+01:00

Now, I would be the first to say that cats are clever creatures. My own cat, in the real/first world, has demonstrated her intelligence many times. She has even shown an interest in literature - when she was just a little kitten, she would often climb into my lap when I was reading and try to bite the pages as I turned them.

This, however, took me a little by surprise:

I should have thought of some hilarious pun to go here. Any suggestions?

A post about roleplaying will follow.

Make-Over

2011-08-28T09:54:00.005+01:00

There seems to be a common meme, if that is the right word, amongst blogspot blogs to have "Silent Whatever-Day-It-Happens-To-Be" posts occasionally that only feature photos. I clearly love the sound of my own voice too much to do that, but I do have some photos (and by photos, I mean screenshots) to put up here.

My avatar had a bit of a make-over. She is now a less-cartoony brunette who only walks a smidgen like a supermodel, though she is apparently still sexy as pixels go. I'm very pleased with her, but she doesn't really look like my old avatar, so I figured that I ought to introduce you before I start posting new screenshots and you think I've stolen someone else's. Apparently, she looks quite a bit like me. Somehow, I think she manages to look super-English, and I can't quite put my finger on why.

The Second Life viewer has been updated, too, so that now the interface does not appear on screenshots. Before this update, as you have seen, the basic framing of the viewer was visible on screenies, though any open windows or tabs, say, to my inventory, or any chat boxes, were not visible (to create those screenies of the chat panel that I used a couple of posts ago, I had to hit the print screen button and paste them into Paint Shop Pro to save them as jpegs, which was incredibly tiresome).

Either way...they will now supposedly look more like realistic photos of a (more) realistic person. I shall let you be the judge.

Say hallo to the new and improved Kitti:

Kitti 3.0

Because screwing my face up and sticking my tongue out is one of my favourite things to do.

I shall return with a less show-y post pretty soon, I'm envisioning. Maybe something about lag, or the gender politics of my new AO. Or maybe role-playing. Stick around?

World's End

2011-08-23T19:58:00.001+01:00

Bit of a different post for you today. Not so much sarcastic and analytical as..."ooh, look what I found". It kind of relates back to a post I made at the end of last month, "Deus ex Machina?", and it was in that spirit that I thought I'd share these screenies. They are of two places - one rather romantically called "World's End Garden", and the second "Crommhold" - that I found via the blog of Sophia Inkpen. I'm not the best at scenic shots in SL, but...yeah. I thought that they were quite pretty, and quite well-made, and there was enough interactivity in them to keep me entertained for a while.

World's End Garden:

First time my avatar has ever brushed her hair, lol


The island from above

Crommhold:

A waterfall of stone faces

A hidden temple

I liked the detail in the face of the Moon

The slurls (URLs used to teleport to places in SL) are available on Sophie Inkpen's blog, the link to which can be found in the opening paragraph of this post (or here, if you're too lazy to scroll back up).

Consider this a short reprieve from my usual wordiness :P

AWOL and Abused

2011-08-21T14:05:00.003+01:00

To keep my mind off life in general, I decided this morning to do a little reading from the book I bought for my course last year, "Coming of Age in Second Life" by Tom Boellstorff. In particular, I've been reading a chapter about lag and afk ("away from keyboard"), and how both complicate issues of time and space.

To put it simply: time, and unity of time, is a major factor in the creation of a world. If I arranged to meet my friend in a bar in Second Life, we would both have to log in and teleport to that bar at the same time for us to be able to see each other and converse. It seems like a fairly obvious point to make, but I could not go to the bar alone, host my side of the conversation and then leave, and expect my friend to be able to turn up later on and fill in the gaps. If that were the case, we'd have been better off emailing each other - and one does not seriously talk of entering a virtual world when loading their email inbox. You might feel like you're entering another world if you've been away on holiday for a month and don't have a system in place to filter spam, I suppose, but that's beside the point.

When considering time on a very basic level in relation to SL, the gaps begin to appear. Your time in SL is marked by logging in and logging out. When you log out, you cease to exist in the virtual world and are thus not connected to its time. It's not like in "The Matrix" where your body drops to the floor dead when you get disconnected. You just vanish from the virtual plain - which is a relief, really, because SL would be a much more morbid place if everywhere was littered with lifeless bodies!

Time does continue, however. If I log onto my account and look at my profile, it might well tell me that my avatar is nine months old, but I have not spent nine month's worth of time actually logged in to SL. Other SL users may see that and thus adjust their expectations of my competance that then do not match up to how much time I have actually practiced not walking into things, mastering flight controls or trying to adjust my clothing.

Most of the friends I have made in SL actually hail from real world America, and so I often have difficulty catching them online. The virtual world cannot bridge the time zone gap. I can stand in the Necronom VI bar, say, at five pm my time, and Laertes can stand in the same spot at five pm his time, and we would not see each other. There would be no trace that I had been standing there previously, nor, when I returned to the spot, would I know that he had been there. There is no unity of time there, despite the fact that there is a unity of space.

Now, that is also true of the real world. Unless Laertes and I were standing in the same space at the same time, we would not see each other. As Laertes lives in the United States, and I in England, the possibly of such a thing occuring is only made possible by Second Life - but Second Life only guarantees a unity of space, and not a unity of time. Do you follow?

In the top right-hand corner of the SL interface is a clock that, by default, runs on Pacific Standard Time. It would appear - and Boellstorff backs this up - that many SL users are from North America. If the screenshots I have uploaded previously seem empty, that is because I am logging on at three or four pm GMT, which is far too early in PST for anybody to be around. They're all either at work or lazing in bed.

AWOL & Abused

What makes this more interesting is the issue of afk - people being logged into SL, but away from the keyboard or the computer. They are not present at that time in SL - but they are present in that space. Their avatar is present and unresponsive. It is a relatively acceptable occurrence, which is almost odd because if someone was standing and staring at you irl, you'd probably think they were drunk or ill, or very rude.

However! In my last post, I introduced the "/me" function that SL offers for verbal-turned-physical interaction. Just because someone is afk does not mean that other avatars cannot interact with them via the /me function. To use Boellstorff's example:

Joe: Tom, are you here?
Joe gets out a pen and draws all over Tom
Joe: hehe
Tom: yes sorry was afk

Now, in that kind of situation, there was absolutely nothing Tom could do to stop Joe from drawing all over him. Like when the woman put the grenade in my mouth, by the rules of fair play you cannot refute someone's /me claim. Their words count as actions. Joe could have done absolutely anything he wanted to Tom. If Tom hadn't been afk, however, he might have been able to say he dodged the pen, or that he, in return, snatched the pen from Joe and used it to scribble all over him. It becomes a text battle, and in text battles...there are rarely any winners. Whoever first said "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me" was an optimistic idiot.

The other day, I was taken to a sim by Laertes that is used primarily for role-play (which, as I'm sure you have realised, works pretty much the same way as Joe drawing all over Tom, just usually on a slightly more descriptive scale). When we got there, he advised that I pick up a HUD that I could put on and which would make other role-players aware that I was only there to watch. HUDs work by displaying text over your head, like a kind of label - so I could set mine to say "Just watching" if I wanted to, and other people would leave me alone. I could avoid getting into a dreaded text battle with some kind of bigshot in god-mode who wouldn't appreciate that it was getting on to ten pm UK time and that I really wanted to log off.

The red text above my head is the HUD.

But outside of role-playing, there is no "don't-hit-me" badge. We could, effectively, do anything we wanted to each other using the /me function, and nobody could do anything about it but request that we be ejected from the sim. By logging on to SL, you are agreeing to be subjected to that possibility - without the kind of burly bouncers and law enforcement that protect you in real life.

But if I type "/me punches you", nothing actually happens...right?

I think I have successfully confused my readership for one blog post. I shall return later to write about time and lag.

Eyeballing

2011-08-17T23:58:00.003+01:00

I thought today that I ought to introduce you to my usual (if I am active enough in SL to have a "usual") virtual haunt - the space colony of Necronom VI. The sim is owned/built by someone named Oni Horan, whom I've never met, but it's a pretty interesting place. I have introduced it to you informally already, as that is where I found the pose balls labelled "fucked" and "sucking" (if you need refreshing on that subject, clicking here will open the post in a separate window).

Essentially, the sim is a place primarily for role-playing on the themes of sci-fi horror, mind-wiping, and tentacle rape porn. Even with my low graphic settings, it's pretty creepy, and if you wander around long enough, you come across an infestation of eyeballs that would give Monna Lisa a run for her money in a staring contest. Unfortunately, I'm having problems with my SL viewer, and couldn't get on tonight to take some screenshots of these, so you're going to have to put up with Google Images finest representation:

It's times like these that I really question what I'm doing with my life.

As I write, I am reinstalling the viewer. If I manage to get it up and running, maybe I'll add a screenshot of them later. I'm kind of surprised to find out that I don't already have one.

Alongside the tentacle pose balls (suddenly "fucked" and "sucking" makes sense, huh?), there is a pretty spacey looking bar, and the remains of a docking facility to explore. Beyond Necronom VI, there would appear to be a kind of lobby area leading to other sims, but they are blocked off, and this one is so big by itself that I got kind of lost anyway and ended up just heading back towards the orange flashing lights.

The bar. The orange lights dance, and it's always happy hour!

I got told! - pretty clearly.

As you can see in the first screenshot, I was armed with a pretty hefty gun. There's a story behind that gun and - surprise surprise! - I'm about to tell it.

I think I have already detailed that I was taken to the Necronom during my first visit to SL. My friend and guide Laertes thought it might be fun for me to try out the role-playing scene there (not with the tentacles and the rape, thank you). Once we got to the bar, I sat down on a stool. Laertes approached me, and we began to write out a little conversation as if it was our first meeting. Before we really got going, however, a couple of mercenary-types entered the bar and dived into action, claiming to be holding me hostage. When I tried to protest, the lady shoved a grenade in my mouth. Unfortunately for the couple, Laertes had a couple of friends nearby who came by with big shiny guns to stop them from carrying me away to their ship. The mercenaries ran away, and I was unofficially baptised into Laertes' gang. I was also told off for walking into a bar such as that unarmed. I have not made that mistake since.

The most disturbing, and the most humorous, thing about this little tale is what happened next. I received a private message from the grenade lady, telling me that it was "such a shame" that they had stopped them from taking me away, because I was "so good for selling". This, on my first day in SL - that I was going to have to report back to my class about!

Since then, I've been part of a couple of successful role-plays based solely in the tentacle-free Necronom VI bar, one of which even spanned the course of a few days, which would appear to be a rare occurrence. But I shall write about that in a later post.

Role-playing in SL is a pretty complex matter and despite the 3D nature of the program, most of the "action" is carried out via text, just like in a forum RP, or those games you used to play when you were little and you'd write a couple of lines, fold the paper over, and pass it along for your friends to carry on. SL has a pretty clever function where, if I type /me in the chat bar before I begin to write, it will italise the text and paste my name at the beginning, instantly placing me in the third tense. I'm really rubbish at explaining this, but, since my viewer is now working, I can demonstrate with a couple of screenies:

Type the action, starting with "/me"

Hit enter - and ta-dah

You can thusly do almost anything:

and screenshot it with terrible quality - yay!

The point I'm trying to get at is this - there was no grenade. No hostage situation. I could have got up and left the bar any time I chose. If I had, the mercenaries/slavers would have been completely scuppered! And I guess that tickles my sense of humour slightly.

Anyway - welcome to Necronom VI:

The pose ball here said "hiding". From what..?

Just hanging out...geddit..?...guys..?

Anti-gravity poles...interesting

Not a clue what this is, but it's pretty

Did I upload this already?

Again - not a clue what it is, but it's pretty

And finally:

The eyeballs!

There is a blogspot run for Necronom VI by Oni Horan, which can be found here. Horan also posted a video to Youtube about the sim, though its focus appears to be on the kind of avatars people create for use on the sim:

Thanks to Laertes for helping me with the "/me" demonstration and the capturing of the eyeballs.

Deus Ex Machina?

2011-07-31T22:49:00.005+01:00

It's been too long since I last posted to this blog - and for that, I apologise. I was swept off my feet for a fortnight, babysitting my younger brothers and looking after the house whilst Mum was visiting her other half in LA. Since I have no desire to turn this into a personal blog, however, I shall say no more on the subject other than that I was busy. As they say on the internet, TITS OR GTFO.

No, really - but I'm here now, and as my last post was kind of cynical, I decided I'd ease my way back into the subject with a softer, slightly more appreciative post. For all of the craziness (and trust me, there's plenty!) that goes on in SL, there are some absolutely fantastic things being created there, and I never cease to be amazed by how much attention has been paid to the smallest details. As I believe I have briefly mentioned, the crowd I fell in with, if you like, in SL almost seem to go out of their way to find interesting places to take me to.

I logged in one day and was instantly messaged by Laertes. He'd found a sim to take me to that he thought I'd like, and once we got there, he asked "Anything look familiar?", like I was supposed to know where we were. If I hadn't realised that there was a sign proudly proclaiming our exact virtual location, I'd have been at a complete loss.

Would you have recognised it?

In my defence, I've never been to Brighton Beach, but I still felt like I'd let him down by not recognising the scene. It was an amusing stereotype, however, that Laertes assumed that I, being English and living in England (and him being American, living in the US), would have been to Brighton; but the more I examine it, the more I feel ignorant about my own country, so I can't win that one, really.

Admittedly, the Brighton Beach sim isn't the most exemplary of sims when it comes to a discussion of intricacy and virtual art, but it was here that my understanding of the nature of SL and the things people create within it really began to take root.

Take a moment to appreciate what you're looking at here. Somebody sat down one day and decided to re-create Brighton Beach. Somebody designed and built each one of those scooters, as well as the lamppost, the railing, the promenade, the pier. There are waves in the sea. There's a pattern in the asphalt, a texture to it, that somebody has taken the time to render. Stopping and taking note of these things can get you hysterical, and if you're not careful, you're going to end up in the front garden come dawn, marvelling at each blade of grass. The postman is going to see you in your pyjamas, staring at the grass all starry-eyed when he comes to deliver the latest batch of bills, and he'll call the nice men in the white jackets to come and pay you a visit. I don't want to be responsible for that.

But hold on a moment - we're not talking about muttering to a deity we cannot prove or disprove the existence of, here. We're not battling with Hawking and the Divine Plan. There's no belief, no faith, required. This Creator is human, and chances are, if they're spending their time recreating Brighton Beach, they're either unemployed or a real computer whizz. Maybe both.

Okay, so the cynicism is seeping back in. I'll get back to the positive.

Whether the creator had too much time on their hands or not, the Brighton sim is pretty cool, and when I returned to show my mother (yes, I am that cool), I found out that you can even go for a donkey ride.

As if there weren't enough donkeys to go around...

Now that I've got you appreciating the miracle of individual asphalt particles, take a look at these. Bear in mind that my graphics settings are turned down low, as I run SL on my laptop, and that photos can be clicked to enlarge:

St Francis' Church

An underwater ballroom

"Labyrinth of Time"

An abandoned bus on "Hope"

Mirror Mirror

2011-07-15T21:10:00.004+01:00

The self and the avatar - a topic could probably be discussed until doomsday, and I will no doubt come back to it in later posts with new ideas or affirmations of the ones begun here. You're getting the idea of how this works already, no doubt.

In my essay, I wrote (emphasis added here):

In an article written about virtual avatars, Bailenson and Segovia suggest that there can be no connection between the Real Self and the Virtual Self if there is no physical resemblance between the two. I think that this is a very interesting idea, and can perhaps be seen within my own experiences. When it came to representing myself physically, I felt much less of an impulse to be honest than I had with my personality. Initially, I gave the idea of making my avatar look like me no time, and simply played with what was on offer in the default library of clothing. However, when others arrived to help me customise myself, they thought that my work was a little ridiculous, and sought to find for me items from the Second Life Marketplace so that I looked less new and more ‘realistic’.

It was then that I started to grow a little uncomfortable with the way I was being represented. The main items I was issued with were some long red hair and an Animation Override that turned the default duck-waddle way of walking into a style that wouldn’t have been out of place on a catwalk. I felt as if I had been instantly feminised in the extreme, and when I protested against the AO, half with amusement, half with discomfort, I was told that ‘that is how women walk in Second Life’, that this made me attractive. I had the option, of course, to deactivate the item and return to the default, and I didn’t have to wear the red hair, but my friend’s statement that this was how I was ‘meant’ to look and be made me wonder if I wasn’t just being childish in resisting.

I liked the claw, okay?!

In the beginning, as you may have glimpsed from previous screenshots, my avatar looked like this (left). She was built entirely using the SL default library of clothing which, helpfully, is arranged in folders such as "female student outfit", "female cyborg outfit", "female city outfit", etc etc. You have the ability to put on items from different folders, but as you can see from the screenie, the trousers I'd taken from the city outfit or whatever did not fit with the pink boots I'd take from the cyborg folder. The boots didn't know whether they were under or over my clothes. The black jacket was actually from the men's library - you have access to both - and looks like I spray-painted it on. For a first attempt, I didn't think she looked too bad.

I had learned how to zoom in by then.

I was quickly informed otherwise, though the friend who first offered to show me around SL was more concerned about the way I walked and my hair (which I thought was fine, really) than about my odd, too-small boots. He didn't like my claw, mind, and did tell me to take it off...which I only did because, well...not very subtle, is it?! Or friendly.

This (right) is the red hair I was first given. Admittedly, it isn't too far from my natural colour, but it earned me the nickname "Red" from the friends I later made, and because of that I became very reluctant to change my hair colour. With all of the freedom of clothing and accessories in SL, it seemed that the only thing making me identifiable as me - or is that Kitti? - in the virtual world was the red hair. I became, rather literally, attached to it, and as you can see in the "about me" section on the right hand side of this blog, my avatar still has red hair now.

The clothes worn by my avatar at this point would not have looked out of place in my wardrobe in real life (minus the claw). But as my friends began to "help me out", sending me clothing packages and things to try on, the styles and cuts became less and less familiar...


Possibly the worst thing I was EVER given to wear...seriously!

Now that I have learned how to get clothing items myself, my attire has become less "adventurous", and much more within the realms of possibility for my corporeal self.

To look again at what I wrote in my essay:

The way my avatar looks now, in her latest incarnation, is not drastically dissimilar to the way my friends contributed to make her look – the way I was uncomfortable with. Her hair is still red, and I am still using the same Animation Override. However, her hairstyle, make-up, and the way she dresses are not far beyond the realms of possibility for myself within the Real World, and this, perhaps is the crux of Bailenson and Segovia’s idea. If the Virtual Self seems impossible to connect to the Real Self, then the former cannot be considered to be a true representation and thus cannot influence the latter, whether that impossibility comes within appearance, personality, or actions.

The question this raises now, reading it back, is whether or not that influence is wanted. If you are engaging with Second Life to get away from your first life, maybe this disconnection between avatar and self offers a chance to move away from or beyond the first world. If SL is simply a part of something within the Real World, as it is for me, then this disconnection is dishonest - and that is why I was uncomfortable with it.

It also raises an emotion that is new to me - a kind of jealousy of myself. From the attention my avatar was receiving in SL, I realised that the bunch of pixels making up Kitti were generally perceived to be attractive, and I joked to a friend - and later, in my module seminar - that I was more attractive in SL than in Real Life. Being a redhead in the age of Amy Pond is fashionable, and the colour instantly turns virtual heads. I was also concerned that this supposedly more-attractive me was representing the more fleshy me in a way that was dishonest on yet another level. The supermodel walk, the red hair, the feminine, revealing clothes - they built this desirable digital creature. But all of these things had been built and scripted by people in the Real World, by their ideas about how women should look and move. So...is this what is expected of me in Real Life, too?

[The Bailenson and Segovia article can be read here, if you're interested. I had access via my university intranet, so not sure that you can access the full article, but still.]

Sitting in the Big Chair...

2011-07-10T23:36:00.004+01:00

I promise that there are some technical, intellectual, philosophical and ethical issues I want to talk about in relation to Second Life here in this blog...but I want to post this too so...."nurrr!", I guess.

In the previous post (posted seconds ago!), I said I wanted to post the screenies I have taken of myself thus far sitting in big chairs. I consider it an SL hobby of mine.What can I say? I've been taken to a lot of sci-fi sims and been aboard many spaceships, and thus I have seen a lot of important, executive-type chairs, and the child in me runs (and by "runs", I mean, "walks seductively towards as if modelling a new dress by Gucci") towards them, clicks the pose ball, and grins maniacally. Okay - so the maniacal grinning happens in real life, not in SL. Don't ruin my fun.

Without further ado, I give you Kitti in the Big Chair:

This was on a kind of Star Wars show ship. The whole place was a shop.

See chat bottom left in screenie. Eeeee! :D

This last screenshot (below) isn't of a big chair specifically, but it was, for a short time, my chair. Laertes told me that I could sit here and take a register of people going on and off the ship, and...do other important things on the computer you can see there. So there I sat. Looking important. Doing nothing because only he and were on the ship in the first place, and he was the owner and captain of it. The pose ball attached to this chair seemed to think that the arms of the chair were a whole lot higher than they really were...hmm.

Check out my sci-fi outfit. O simulated latex, you have so much to answer for.

I'll keep you posted on the big chairs front ;)

F*cked and Sucking

2011-07-10T23:05:00.005+01:00

Pose Balls. I've talked about them, but as before, I haven't really explained what they are. This is kind of another post for my readers who don't actually use SL (why are you reading my blog, then, weirdos?! No, wait, come back, I'm kidding...).

Put very simply, pose balls are coloured circles usually placed over objects that, when clicked, offer an animation override that will allow you to interact with said object. They are often colour-coded, so pink pose balls are for women, and blue for men. I have occasionally seen yellow pose balls, which I presume are intended to be gender neutral. They usually have text over them, too, suggesting what that specific pose is for, though sometimes their titles can be a little enigmatic. For example, if I walked passed a bench and it had above it a pink pose ball with the text "sit", I could click it and it would make my avatar sit on the bench in a pose it thinks suits my gender. It is not impossible, however, to click the pose balls intended for other genders. Often, I find, they are scripted with very, very stereotypical postures, and they usually make me laugh.

There are also some pose balls that have been scripted with moving animations - beyond the usual, attempt-at-natural fidgeting that most avatars do. Some allow you to carry out dance moves and, perhaps it goes without saying, but pose balls are how avatars in SL go through the motions of having sex.

The first pose balls that I encountered in Second Life were these wonderful pair. The pose balls themselves weren't visible, as they are in the crawl space beneath the floor grating, but make no mistake - those titles are the titles of pose balls. A flatmate of mine who tried SL (once, this time, and never loaded it ever again) clicked them and confirmed that they were fully functioning:


I should add that these actions are carried out by tentacles. I kid you not.

I was taken here by a friend who offered to show me the ropes. When I found these, my friend quickly explained that it had previously been a sim for tentacle porn/rape roleplay. Two questions went through my head at that moment. How popular is tentacle porn/rape that somebody designed a sim for it, and why did my friend think that this would be a good place to take me to?!

Once you get passed the weird pose balls, the Necronom sim is actually a pretty good build, and the bar is one of the most interesting places I've been to. I've seen avatars in there that have been customised to have dragon-heads, and cat-heads, and I've seen robots and alsorts - such is the extent of the freedom of SL.

So here. Have some more screenshots showing my avatar doing things because I clicked on a pose ball:

Like lying awkwardly on a bunk bed in the Botany Bay Space Station

Or sitting in a deck chair on what is supposedly a great replica of Brighton Beach


Okay, so I'm not doing anything in this one. But look at the pose balls on that bath. Do I even what to know what they make you do?!

And finally mimicking Kate Winslet on board the Titantic. Oh, come on! You would have done it, too!

Pose balls have also allowed me to do what has become one of my favourite things to do in SL - sitting in big chairs! But they deserve a post of their own. Maybe I'll post those screenshots to follow this post...

Sexy Doesn't Run

2011-07-05T13:46:00.002+01:00

I have a feeling that this might be a long post. I apologise in advance, and will do my best to break it up into digestible chunks. Stay with me here? I promise it's relevant...

SL offers three modes/method of propelling oneself into motion - walking, running, or flying. Most of the tutorial is meant to show you how to swap between the three (though swapping between them is the simple part), and then you are thrown into the SL realm and expected to not bump into things.

You cannot avoid bumping into things.

Walking

When I first began using SL, I felt a bit like I was beginning to walk again. It goes back to that idea in "The Matrix" when Neo turns to Morpheus and asks why his eyes hurt. He's never used them before, and now he's getting electric-light glare from the hacker's shiny head. You have unplugged your brain from one body and fastened it into another, only this time, you're not only relying upon your brain signals and your body muscles to make your legs move. You also have to factor in the middle man of computer keyboard, and Linden Lab's scripting skills. And Linden Lab's scripting skills mean that you waddle around like a duck, or like you've lost your horse, and you look as if you could topple over at any minute - and just when you've got the hang of it and believe that you've got the mouse-controlled camera and legs-controlled arrow keys working in symbiosis, a wall will appear where there wasn't one a minute ago and you'll be stuck like a spider in a bathtub.

Once you've learned to walk again, running is pretty easy. All you have to do is turn the "run" function on. I find it harder not to bump into things when I'm moving more quickly, so...maybe it isn't so easy...but what I mean to say is that you don't have to learn a complete new set of controls to operate it.

Flying

Now that leaves the one everyone gets excited about - flight. Humans are obsessed with flight. We're always looking up at the sky, our deities are in the sky, and the ambitious Americans took the eagle, a king of the skies, as their national mascot. The English flag is predicated on the cross of a man who conquered a dragon (though if the dragon could fly, I don't know why it didn't just fly away from George the tin-can). Maybe I'm getting away from the point. We have all longed to be able to join Peter Pan in the sky, and now here is a programme offering us a new body with the ability to fly - no impractical wings, no jet engines, no magic!


Hovering in mid-air...not sure why I need to keep my arms out like that.

My laptop cannot cope with flying and high graphics, hence the grey-blue shapes. Sorry.

In most sims (platforms/places), flying is not allowed. The screenshots above were taken in a sandbox, which is a place meant for building and such, so I had a pretty free reign with what I did there. But in structured sims such as cities, towns, amusement and leisure parks, it departs from a norm, a reality, that is trying desperately to instill itself in that virtual world. It isn't just that other avatars hit "/frown" if you swoop down on their picnic in the park or divebomb them on their walk down the Champs Elysee, either - the owners of the sims can choose to physically "turn off" the flight mode on their platform, and then no matter how many times you hit the "page up" key, your avatar will not take flight. Mankind has long dreamed of this power and, once given it, has banned it for unconventionality.

A round of applause for hypocrisy, ladies and gentlemen! Another for cutting your nose off to spite your face! And another, finally, for the fact that it isn't only the British who oppress themselves into muted formality. Once again, it would seem that the virtually limitless realm of the virtual is too limitless for us land-bound folks to be comfortable.

Running

I've not seen many avatars running around SL either, and - as a small dig at the nature of gender in SL that will be referenced later in a dedicated blog post, if I remember to include it -, in my experience, you are far more lightly to see men run than women. I'm going to take a premature stab at the reason for this and say that it is to do with Animation Overrides.

Animation Overrides

The only way to get rid of the default duck-waddle walk is to buy and put on a little device called an Animation Override, or AO for short. You cannot see them in my screenshots (because I use the in-game screenie function which automatically hides such), but down the sides of my SL interface there are two sets of buttons that allow me to turn on the override for individual functions, as well as choose from about five different styles of movement. That is because my avatar is actually "wearing" (they are not visible on my body, they are just attached to it, if that makes sense) four different AO systems. You don't need four, but I kind of had them heaped on me by friends, and thus I cannot work out which one is overriding which animation exactly and I cannot seem to work it out by mixing and matching them. The only reason I know that they are doing anything is because I have been transformed from a unseated cowboy to a supermodel. I did not choose to walk like a supermodel - all five of the options were variations of supermodel, and whilst it is funny to walk like that, it is a generally accepted norm that I should. Thus, the SL realm has become my permanent catwalk.

I suppose the other testament to their overriding success is that when I am standing still, my avatar will put her hands on her arse (meant to be her hips, I think, but it's not exactly well-scripted), or shift her weight to one leg and put her hand on her collarbone or fan her face or whatever it is she is doing. She also messes with her hair in a way I would personally never do.

Is this meant to be a flirtatious and girly pose? Fetch me a bucket.

What none of my four AOs seem to do, however, is override my run animation, so I run exactly like I did when I joined SL, and that just does not fit into the canon of sexy that the override is meant to imbue. In the AOs I have seen on male avatars, the emphasis is more on manliness and strength, and so they run like they are going to save someone's life in "Baywatch" - and apparently that is just fine.

I don't suppose people run around that much in the real world, though...and that's why we're all in a flap about obesity and Global Warming...

Nonsense and...More Nonsense...

2011-07-03T10:38:00.000+01:00

"If I had my own way, this blog would probably be all backwards". When I loaded blogspot today, I was thinking that that would be the opening line of today's entry. Then I realised that I do have my own way and that, if I wanted, I could write this whole thing backwards. Nobody might be able to understand what I was going on about, but I cannot exactly be ejected from the Internet for lack of cohesion. I cannot be ejected from the Internet! - unless Mum pulls the plug on me, but then her internet would go down and she wouldn't be able to write her own blog so that would be like cutting her head off to spite her face (never mind her nose). Also, she's out fishing with my oldest little brother right now, so...nahahahahahaha?!

Back to the land of sanity, well, sort of: what I'm trying to get at is that there would appear to be no real logical order to the way in which I discuss things here, and it would take me some impossibly long entries to be able to cover each topic in any real amount of detail. The only way around this that I can see is to post what I want when I want, and make sure that I have tagged it properly so all of the posts on, say, sexuality in Second Life can be found together under the tag "sexuality" which should be available for clicking on the right-hand side. You probably already knew that anyway.

In light of my lacking eloquence today, I've decided that I am going to jump into the deep end and make a post that possibly shouldn't be written yet.

In my essay, I wrote:

Second Life requires that the mind be transferred to a digital body – which is an idea I will come back to – and this digital body is completely without organs. The bodily needs and functions one must attend to in the Real World are simply not shared by the pixel-representation on the screen.

That makes sense, right? If there is something "wrong" with the human race as a whole, it is our squishiness, and our dependence upon produce, items, whatever, beyond ourselves to survive. When recreating the world, if it can be said that Second Life is such (which I think it can, but that's a whole other blog post), these are the first things we'd get rid of, and nobody could blame us for that.

I also wrote in my essay - just to clarify the context a little more, here:

All of the things you see in Second Life have been created by the residents themselves......It [Second Life] is marketed as a place to ‘be different, be yourself, free yourself'. If there is something we loved about our first life, we could repeat it ad nauseam. Also, because of the user-created set-up of Second Life, only the spaces and objects people want to build are materialised within the virtual.

Got all that? Linden Lab host only the servers, and the basic items for the Second Life user which includes the original base avatar, a handful of skins and clothing items, and obviously the software that allows you to "view" the SL realm. Everything within SL is conceived, built and used by the SL users.

And there is no limit to what you can build but your own imagination. It is possible to purchase templates for things, and, if a user allows, to edit them and custom items/clothing to your own needs, but each SL user also has access to sandboxes and the software to built and script items of your own creation. It's not quite as easy as it sounds, but there are plenty of tutorials available online, and there is even a museum is one of the main sandboxes that gives you a kind of step-by-step guide on how to begin building. To me, it seems like a cross between Paint and that horrible 3D design software they tried to make me use to build a mobile phone in Graphics in year nine.

So, with all that in mind, answer me this question: why did someone build these?

Do dirt and ketchup stains exist in SL? Persil haven't researched this market!

I took this to go into my essay. Looked a bit weird, me walking in and screenshot-ing the toilet. What was more weird? The dark smudge on the left-hand side is the arm of some guy who followed me in.

The weirdest thing - or, perhaps the most sane - is that neither of these items function. The washing machine didn't open, and you cannot sit on the toilet or flush it. Someone did go to the extent to build the toilet-roll holder, too, which I imagine came with the toilet itself. I should perhaps further explain that I found both of these on spaceships which are used for sci-fi role-playing. I have been involved in a couple of these sci-fi rps on these spaceships, and I have never seen anyone say "Ah, I just need to pop for a wee" or "Ooo, I got blood on my jumpsuit, better put it on a spin cycle...". Surely these rps are meant to inject excitement, give you a chance to exist beyond the mundane, do things you couldn't otherwise do...but apparently, doing your laundry is exciting enough for someone to want to make such an experience possible online. Does Second Life offer too much freedom for us to comprehend or be comfortable within? Do we just cling to what we know?

There is another theory. I was told by the owner of both of these spaceships (who I shall no doubt mention later, he has been a fantastic help to me in SL) that the toilets aren't used for...well...disposing of waste. There is no delicate way to phrase this, so I shall just refer you to this page here and offer this page here as a back-up, and hope that you can either put two and two together for yourselves, or remain blessfully unaware.

Newbs and Nudity

2011-07-01T14:07:00.000+01:00

As I've already posted two pretty heavy blog entries in as many days, I figured I should provide a little light entertainment - so here I am.

I am not "new" on the Internet, as it were. We got our first PC with a connection to the Internet when I was eleven, and I used to use my one hour of net time a night to post text-based roleplays (usually in the world of Harry Potter, do not judge me) on MSN forums. Remember when they were cool? No? Never mind. After that, I joined some other fantasy-based forums, and then ran my own. If you are unfamilar with the world of text-based RPs, I'd probably advise you to steer clear. For every decent writer you find, you find a weird who keeps his dead ex-wife in the cupboard. What I'm trying to get across is that I'm not a stranger to the weird and wonderful collection of items and people on the web - and doesn't everyone now know that the web is really for cat videos, emo poetry and porn? - but I was shocked to see my avatar appear in the Second Life for the very first time beside this:

Can't see it properly? Click to enlarge. Lol.

I think TraciAnne, the not-yet-loaded-white-circle hit the nail on the head. HAVE YOU NOT HEARD OF CLOTHES, MAN?!

The worst/funniest thing is that, as you can see from my avatar, the default skin SL provides cannot be made to be naked. You have to download extras skins from the Second Life marketplace for that. And I just realised that he is wearing a pair of white sandals. What is this man doing?! This is the Welcome Area. Right there, you can see the not-yet-loaded bee I mentioned earlier. This is not how I expected to be welcomed! I think this guy had decided what he wanted out of SL right from the off...I just wish he hadn't felt the need to enlighten all of us newbs, too...

I'll no doubt find some reason to refer to this horrific incident later.

Introductions - Why SL?

2011-06-29T23:37:00.000+01:00


My mother would kill me if I went out with that much skin on show!

So here is the virtual me - a pale redhead that I unwittingly called "Kitti" (if I'd thought it through, I'd have steered clear of the name) Wytchwood. I signed up for Second Life and downloaded the viewer in October/November last year (2010) and off I went into the land of spaceships and bite requests, whatever the Hell they are.

As avatars go, I don't think I look too bad. I have been asked several times by other SL users if this was my "alt" - an alternative character, as opposed to a "main" character, as I don't "look like a newbie". What does a newbie look like, I hear you ask? Well, I'm afraid that I'm perhaps still too new to be able to answer that, but I know that one of the first things my friends helped me do when I logged into SL was lose the default duck-waddle walk I had been assigned, and send me some hair that did not look like it had been painted onto my scalp. Maybe the fact that I now walk like a supermodel and have hair that waves around in non-existent breezes means I have been accepted into the fold as it were.

Upon logging into Second Life for the first time, you are put through perhaps the most useless tutorial ever, and then dumped into a pretty random place called "Welcome Island" that serves only to teach you that somebody at Linden Labs has a fantasy about being able to ride bees. I kid you not - a giant bee will give you a very boring tour of the island, and when you are done, you'll wonder why you bothered signing up at all.

Please don't mention the hair.

The only way, at least that I am aware of, to get off the island is to teleport - which requires you to be familiar with the Destination Guide and the teleportation system that the tutorial utterly fails to tell you how to use. It also fails to inform you of how to access the library of skins, hairstyles and outfits in your inventory so that you can dress yourself. Many of my classmates gave up trying to find things (though it's not actually that difficult) and decided to be bald. Well, whatever works for you, my friend.

But to return to that all-important question: why bother using SL? In an article I read when researching for my essay about finding love on Second Life, the author Marion Cox says that when his friend suggested that he turned to the virtual world, he felt that he was ‘"possibly insinuating that I was a giant failure in real life". It would appear that this is a general consensus amongst those who don’t like or don’t understand Second Life – that you must have failed miserably at life in general and thus need a place to begin again. For some people, Second Life offers a chance to try again, but for others it is merely an extension of the Real World, simply something else to ‘give a go’. It is a form of escapism, offering another world for your exploration on a rainy afternoon when you’re feeling particularly poor. But what you are expect from Second Life will undoubtedly shape what you get out of it, and reflecting upon yourself to understand your expectations gives you clues as to what you want to do within the virtual world. In my experience, if you want nothing out of it, you’ll probably find nothing to do within it - though I would suggest that a rollercoaster ride in SL doesn't quite get your adrenalin going like being on Oblivion at Alton Towers.

A new venture for adrenalin-junkies? I think not.

As said in the previous post, I signed up to SL because my lecturer advised us too, saying that it was the only way we could really begin to understand the topic in hand. I entered the realm in the mode of ethnographer, I suppose, wanting to see and understand and document, but at the same time staying somewhat detached. I was not expecting to get much out of SL other than understanding, and thus had little emotional attachment. I wanted to see what SL had to offer, and I have undoubtedly been treated to some odd sights.

Hallo!

2011-06-29T22:51:00.000+01:00

I started this blog some months ago with the intention of using this space to elaborate on an essay I wrote for a module I took this year, Performing Online. That essay was, as the title of this blog may suggest, about Second Life, and how engagement with the programme (I hesitate to call it a game) might provoke reflection upon experiences within the Real or "First" Life. Not the easiest topic to grapple with! - but I find the whole concept of Second Life interesting, and I guess...here I am.

Before taking the module, I knew very, very little about Second Life. I couldn't have told you what it was for, though an ex-boyfriend of my mother's had mentioned that he played/used SL and went around within it as a bunny-rabbit. When I mentioned that my lecturer had asked us to play SL, a couple of friends and an ex-boyfriend of my own came out of the woodwork and announced that they too had taken to the SL world - the latter, almost amusingly, as a transgender woman. Having friends "in-game", as it were, was a big help, and without them, I would no doubt still be wandering around Welcome Island trying to work out what the Hell I was supposed to be doing.

Although I seem to be sounding pretty negative about the whole experience (I'm not trying to!), I don't think badly of SL at all. I approached the realm with an ethnographer's stance, which may or may not be detrimental to my experience, but the point is...I wanted to see and experience Second Life. I did not sign up to slander those who use the application with more serious intent. If I ever come across that way, please slap me.

If you don't know what Second Life is, I'm afraid that I have no succinct answer. Linden Labs, the creators of SL, have very little to say in answer to that question, but they do provide a video which can be viewed here. It is, almost literally, a second life - only this time, you get to decide how you look, and you don't necessarily have to get a 9 to 5 job to be able to go out and see the world, though if you want to buy hair that doesn't look like it was painted onto your scalp, or somewhere to keep the potted plant someone just gifted you, a job is a pretty good idea.

In my essay, I focused on a couple of specific areas for discussion - SL etiquette and manners, the performance of self (I am a Theatre & Performance Studies student, afterall!), the self and the avatar, sexuality, and then several bizarre relevations that I shall term "curiosities". I'm hoping to use this space to discuss these in further depth, and perhaps to get some feedback on ideas or whatever else if I can find anybody crazy enough to read this blog in the first place.

Oh - and I'm a little trigger-happy when it comes to screenshots. Most of the images I use here, then, will be my own unless stated otherwise. If it interests me, I take a screenie, so, at the very least, this blog should be amusing for that. On that note, I shall leave you with this warning:

if you die in Second Life...

On with the introductions.