A Watery Grave

Home Sweet Home

Carmine Chris and I are rebuilding our skybox. We felt that it was time for a change, and anyway, all that prim grass played havoc with...well...pretty much everything. Our new build is simple and pretty, consisting of two floors. There is a square cut out of the middle of both to allow for a courtyard garden. On the bottom floor, the inner walls are made of glass, so that we can see in to it. Norah's been helping (massively) too, which only seems right since she spends as much time in the box as I do (and more than Carmine Chris), and has fantastic design sense.

Yesterday evening, Norah and I stood out in the garden trying to work out what to do with the little green space, when I accidentally deleted the floor. Norah, myself and Party Cat plummeted instantly, and were only saved from a very, very long fall and a watery grave because we can fly and Party Cat has developed some kind of magical floating powers she's been keeping to herself.

It's so easy to forget that our skybox is literally that - a box in the sky. Very, very high up in the sky. It sounds so stupid, but in real life, we take the floor for granted completely. Even when we are thankful for a roof over our head and food on our table and water coming out of our taps, we never doubt the floor beneath our feet.

And it is with a childish, impish glee that I instantly go into giggles whenever I accidentally delete the floor, as I am sure you can imagine happens fairly frequently. I imagine it is possibly a need-to-be-there situation, but I cannot say from where comes my guilty joy in this silly mistake.

I'm giggling just thinking about it.

The other childishly amusing thing that happened yesterday evening was Norah's transformation into a bunny rabbit. On a whim, I put my projector on the top floor of the house and pointed it at the inner walls (which are solid). The way the light hit Norah, who was standing just on the edge of the beams, combined with the hat she was wearing, made her look like Frank from Donnie Darko.

I've been      expecting      you

Maybe it's all in my head. Maybe I'd been logged in too long, and needed some fresh air.

Return of the Party

When I said I'd file the ticket - the little message that tells KittyCatS that Party Cat is missing -, well...I didn't. 

(Remember Party Cat? Fibber. I bet you forgot all about her! Refresh your memory here.)

I know, I know. I wrote all about her feelings, and how uneasy I felt, but I didn't file the damn ticket. A little bit of me thought she would come back, but the rest had already decided she, and her balloon-patterned fur, were long gone. 

Well. Yesterday, someone was talking in the KittyCatS chat about a cat they had lost, and I joined in, sharing my experience. Also involved in the chat was one of the admin staff of the company, who urged me to file the ticket, sending me all of the links and telling me how to find the information I needed to fill in what amounts to a missing persons report. So I did.

And a couple of hours later, look who should appear.

I want to party again!

Now I feel even worse. I have been considering getting another cat, trying again, neutering the thing and somehow...I don't know...penning it in so it can't get the hump and run away. I'd even considered getting two. To rub salt into the wound, I lost Party Cat before I got my new laptop, and, at that time, I was generally unable to stream sound in SL. Now, however, I can hear every realistic meeow Party Cat makes. She sounds like a real cat - even if she looks like a cuddly toy with those balloons on her side and the cruel 'SL9B' logo on her side. 

I am a bad pet owner.

I still might get more cats.

Welcome home, Party Cat.

Shut Up and Eat It

Meeow

My cat is still missing. I know now that I need to file a ticket (essentially a missing persons report) with my landlord and the place I got my cat from, and hopefully they will be able to trace her/bring her home/give her a stern telling off. Thank you to everyone that offered me advice about that.

I was talking to a non-SL-using friend this morning about the aforementioned missing cat, and how it was slightly amusing that she had gone missing the morning after I had her neutered. Feeding her was becoming expensive, and so I made the (actually quite difficult) decision to buy the bottle of permapet and stop my cat from being a breedable. It only makes sense, of course, that cats getting a lot of exercise eat more than cats that only think about getting a lot of exercise, but by administering this permapet solution stuff, my cat no longer even knows what sex or breeding are, and never will again, so she apparently doesn't need to eat anything at all.

Anyway. What this led to was my voicing of something strange that happened when I neutered my cat. Over her head, as you may have seen from previous posts, used to sit a set of little meters that told me how hungry she was, how tired she was, and how happy. Once I had her neutered, all of these bars vanished. All of them. Suddenly, because my cat was no longer of breeding stock, keeping her happy and well-rested ceased to matter. I wasn't expecting this, though I appreciate how such things might work to create a game out of breeding cats. Poor Party Cat went from being a slightly more realistic tamigotchi to a cuddly toy in the click of a button. 

"You took her feelings away," said my non-SL-using friend. "That's cruel." 

"No," I clarified, "I took the measurement of her feelings away." It was pretty arbitrary, anyway, and I found it insanely difficult to balance her tiredness with her happiness. She would be miserable, but I couldn't cuddle and play with her because she was insisting on sleeping, and vice versa. Useless. But if what I said is true, why do I still feel uneasy about the idea? 

But did Party Cat ever have feelings in the first place? If we are talking on a plane in which she even exists, then yes, she does have feelings. But in a wider world context..?

I wrote a post on a popular SL forum the other day about the wording on a notecard of rules for the space brothel bar I mentioned in my 'ad(Mired)' post - which was along the same lines (and using the same lexis) as the sim rules I wrote about in one of my most popular blog posts, 'On Being Offended'. The response I got was less than enthusiastic - or, rather, less than enthusiastic about my take on things. Despite my explanations, I couldn't quite seem to articulate myself properly, and was basically told, in the end, that I was being picky and pedantic. I had got my cake, and I should just shut up and eat it. 

This, I confess, I disagree with. I think I have a point there that is, if only on a semantic level, important. And like I said, my post on the subject from a few months ago remains one of my post popular posts with (at the time of writing) one-hundred-and-sixty-one views - which is a hell of a lot for me and IYDISL! So I can't be alone in thinking that such is important. 

But where is the line? Despite my sense of unease, I'm not really sure that whether or not SL has a measure of my cat's happiness is ground-breaking digital journalism. A better question, perhaps, might be why you never see my avatar Kitti smile, and if there is a measurement for her happiness. Is her happiness my happiness? What does happiness mean in a virtual world context, and how is happiness measured, anyway?

Now the line is well and truly muddied. My little paragraph there has made it the muddiest line I have ever sought to draw. But right now? I think I should just shut up about my cat, file the damn ticket, and eat my muddy cake.

Missing!

I have looked everywhere and I can find whisker nor tail of her. My friend Croon came over and did some fancy-pants wire-mapping thing to see if she could see her, but that yielded nothing, either. I tried a bit of reverse-psychology and pretended that I didn't care that my cat had gone AWOL, and she still hasn't come back. She isn't in my lost and found folder (a folder that basically does what it says on the tin, non-SL users). I cannot find her anywhere. 

If you have any suggestions as to where she might be and/or how to find her, please let me know! I'm using the official Linden Labs viewer, with the latest update, if that helps!