Like Lazarus

Like Lazarus

Happy Birthday Kitti! - it is my avatar's third birthday today, and what a strange three years it has been in the virtual world. It was completely by accident that Kitti's rez day (the day she was first rezzed in SL - the day I first signed in - my avatar's birthday) falls so close to my real life birthday, and that both are so close to Hallowe'en, but what it means is that I get to spend a whole week feeling celebratory. Hurray for that!

I want to take a look at the word 'rez'. A rez day is, as I have already clumsily explained (and in brackets, no less), effectively an avatar's birthday, and is the term used in SL to mean the day an avatar first appeared in the virtual world. The date is marked on our profiles for the world to see, and acts as an automatic and completely passive way of letting other SL users know that if you're looking a little blocky and you only rezzed for the first time last week, you might well be in need of a little help without you having to pluck up the courage to ask for it. Otherwise, it serves as a talking point when you've run out of things to say to your SL friends ('Oh, wow, so, yeah, looks like I've been in SL for three years now!' 'Yeah, what are you doing with your life?' 'You think I'd have learned how to edit prims better by now' etc).

Move Beyond

Whilst I am not the most widely travelled gamer, I have never heard the term 'rezzed' used anywhere beyond Second Life. In most other games, characters and monsters are 'spawned', which suggests something entirely different in terms of the way they are propelled into the virtual landscape. When I put 'rez' into Google, the only definition I found that wasn't trying to sell me something was an entry on the SL Wikia (here!) that suggests the term was pinched from the film Tron, but it doesn't offer anything else by way of explanation or origin. 

I haven't seen Tron to know if that connection should provide me with more information, so everything I say from now on might be even more obvious and/or made null and void by that film.

It seems a little obvious to suggest that 'rez' would appear to be an abbreviated version of 'resurrect'. When we log into Second Life, therefore, we resurrect ourselves from the first life into the second, as if our bodies and minds in the first world were now dead or obsolete, or perhaps killed in the transition. The logic there would be obvious if SL was a little more immersive, but we still become somewhat 'dead to the world' when our concentration is focused on the computer screen. When we are not signed into SL, our avatars vanish from the plane, banished, perhaps, to Virtual Purgatory until we log back in, when our first life selves resurrect them and bring life back to their intangible bodies. Upon logging out, our avatars are banished to the non-realm again to await our return. We are necromancers, using what our ancestors would have seen as black magic to reanimate a body we have conjured again and again and again. That, or we are ghosts...or our avatars are ghosts...I haven't decided yet. Either way, we are unsavoury and ghoulish types.

Resurrected

'Rez' is a loaded term, suggesting death and life and reincarnation and planes of existence and non-existence, and yet we use it without much consideration of what we are implying about our relationship with SL. And we will continue to do so - but I thought it made for an interesting and nicely sinister post for Hallowe'en.

Unless, of course, I've got completely the wrong end of the stick. Happy Hallowe'en, you wicked things.

[We had a little party last night. If you'd like to see the pictures, please click here and also here.]

Happy Rez-Day!

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.