A Date in Space

Ganymede Mojito - with extra sparkles. It was pink and tasted like strawberries. There's probably a metaphor in there*.

Last night, I received a message from sian asking if I wanted a quickie down at the Necronom. No, really, she did - she just didn't mean like that. Get you brain out of the gutter.

Sup, space girl

It was in the bar at Necronom VI that I first met sian. She offered to dance for me, and I pointed out in response, painfully naively, that I was straight. Quite rightly, she replied with "so?", and so our weirdly uncomfortable roleplay relationship began. sian said afterwards that she knew she could push it like that with me because I'd made it blindingly obvious that I wasn't going invite or enjoy any kind of sexual relationship with her. That wasn't what I wanted. She probably phrased it better than that. 

It's been a long time since I have roleplayed in the Necronom bar, and sian's invitation to go back there last night - on a date - was a strangely sweet blast from the past.

We stayed for about an hour, re-writing and re-working the little scene that began it all. It didn't play out exactly the same way it had before, but that's what made it interesting. We weren't there to write something groundbreaking, but the short scene we did create was full of juicy tidbits for our wider role-play story.

We aren't the only ones who have grown up since then - SL has changed, too. Our catsuits were effectively sprayed-on back then, and sian's baldness seemed logical to me because my hair used to fight with my body and stick through my shoulder and do all kinds of unlikely (and unfun) things. Last night, sian was wearing a little anime/sci-fi number that would have been a nightmare to make fit properly were it not made of mesh, and whilst Kitti's leggings were old spray-on favourites, her hair, shirt, hands, boots, necklace, eyelashes and eyes were all made out of new-fangled mesh.

sian

sian 's hips move at identical, precise angles, each step perfectly modulated. She stops, pulls her skirt down, twice, each slight movement exactly as before. "Would you like me to dance for you?"

Kitti flushed pink from the thick, smudged paint of her eyeliner down to the wide band around her throat. "N-no, thank you" she stammered. 

sian moved close, her lithe physicality as precise as her language. "I can supply companionship at all levels, from basic phatic conversation up to and including physical congress."

"Physical what?" 

sian 's tone was matter of fact. She could have been talking about accounts. "Sex." 

Kitti suddenly felt stupid, as well as uncomfortable. "Really," she said, "That's very, eh, kind. but I er." She had no idea what to say. Her discomfort was acute. She'd never had sex, and had never dreamed of having it with a woman. Or a cyborg.

Kitti

I've written quite extensively here already about the role of discomfort in role-playing, and sian possesses a seemingly innate ability to make my characters desperately uncomfortable - across the board. Her comfort-stomping-out boots crumble genre fences. I think it's about time she got a taste of her own medicine. I have fired a warning shot. Watch this space, creepy space girl. I'm coming for you. 

If you'd like to visit Necronom VI, click here - here! That link will take you to a little control-type room, and in front of you will be a map that you can click on to take you to specific places. We were in the shuttle bar.

*I googled "sexual connotations of strawberries" and wish I hadn't, although the results I got genuinely don't fit our little rp scenario at all. A humorous dead-end with that one.

Drunk

It arrived - my new laptop! Once I'd set it all up and transferred my files across, I loaded Second Life to see how the graphics card was going to measure up. Boy oh boy, is it good! I am so thrilled. The difference is just...insane. 

For some of my more recent, pre-new laptop, screenshots, I had turned the graphics up and suffered incredible lag to take better quality pictures - before promptly crashing, or having to whack the settings right back down the bare minimum as soon as the picture was saved to avoid crashing. The screenshots I am using here for comparison, however, were taken with the graphics running at their normal running rate. They have not been edited in any way, and I have not changed the lighting settings.

Old laptop...

...new laptop

I know, right?! Ignore Kitti - she's wearing a different skin, and, obviously, different hair and clothes and stuff, so just ignore her here. 

Of course, this difference in vision and clarity can be seen in philosophical terms. It seems obvious to say that how we physically see the world affects the way we interact with it, but just how deep does that go? 

Along with a super shiny graphics card, my new laptop also offers more memory, and SL can run on higher graphics settings without even a hint of lag - but this doesn't only effect the world around Kitti. One of the first things I noticed was that Kitti's movements (courtesy of her animation override that governs how she stands and fidgets and walks and sits) were much smoother than I had ever known they could be. The smoothness gives her body language a cool kind of confidence that wasn't there in the jerkier lines delivered to me by my old laptop. Will this effect how I view Kitti from now on? 

And if other people are viewing her as moving jerkily, does that effect how they view her? What about those people who have always seen her movements as smooth and confident - have they found my writing of her in roleplay situations disconnected from her body language?

As ever, I have no answers. But it is certainly food for thought.

Now, because I am a little drunk on my new graphics:

Check Kitti's flickr to see some of these screenies in full size.

Loose Ends

As I wander through SL, I seem to gather a whole lot of screenshots that go into my screenie folder and never see the light of day again. And a thousand tiny incidents take place, and I find lots of really cool things to share, and I never write about them because they aren't, by themselves, worth a whole blog post. So I figured I'd pile them all into one blog post, and...well. Be done with them!

So first of all; remember my cat? (If you don't, click here - here!) I logged in a couple of weeks ago to find that my cat was nowhere to be seen. I searched the whole of my house, and my surrounding 'garden' - which is empty, apart from a tree and a very small patch of flowers. When I couldn't find her, I started to panic. How had I lost a cat - a virtual cat, no less, that was tethered to this patch of ground?! 

You can see her name there, over the hedge!

Because the damn thing was hiding in my hedge. In the hedge. The hedge I had assumed was solid. My friend Croon found her for me - but then I couldn't get her out. A whole lot of cursing later, she came out of her own volition. Damn cat. 

Other than that, she's doing fine. She grew some more, and after a software update, she now has more cuddle options, and my inventory doesn't get filled up with cat-toys everything I play with her. That's good - my inventory is full of all kinds of random things that would need a post of their own to explain, let alone catalogue!

Friends again <3

 After deciding that I needed to get out more, I went to Torley Island and found these really cool pieces of giant origami...

I know Kitti isn't tall in SL terms, but wow!

 ...and whilst I was there, I got to sit in another really big chair - and you know how I live for that!

Really big chair!

  ...and  I was then given a really cool add-on type thing that allows you to defy gravity and walk on the ceiling!

Look Ma, no hands! - and no strings!

The add-on was given to me by Laertes, with the intention that I could use it for roleplaying scenarios on his new shipyard at Botany Bay, but so far all I have done is walk around my ceiling a little bit. The funniest thing was that when I activated the add-on whilst still wearing my animation override, I spun around in circles. I have absolutely no idea why that happened, but it did make me giggle. Sadly, I didn't get a decent screenshot, but I do have some game capture software on my laptop, so maybe I'll utilise that.

I've also been doing some building - which, after my first post about building, I'm sure you cannot imagine. It took me so long last night, and I found the whole thing so fiddly...but I was getting pretty tired of having to throw up a wall everytime I wanted to make my own background for my screenshots, and the wall wasn't the prettiest thing in the world. So I tried to build something a little cooler, and a little more discrete. I'm not really sure what to say about them, so I'll just plonk them here.

By some miracle, I managed to put this together.

Applying textures :)

I couldn't work out why the walls were darker than the floor -

- and I could only fix it by making the walls glow XD

The end result!

After a little more playing around with the textures, I managed to make the outside of the build glass. So you can see in, but, as you can see from the above image, you cannot see out. Cool, huh? Well, I thought so.

Not the best screenie, but, I tried. I'm learning!

Well, that just about concludes my loose ends post. It's pretty much tied up, and I think I have sufficiently overloaded this post with images. There is one more thing, however. 

Does anybody remember a time when the girls' bathroom at Necronom VI wasn't out of order?!

>.<

Role-Playing: Part One - God-Mode Engage

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.

Eyeballing

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.

F*cked and Sucking

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...