Turned

Vampires love knitted jumpers. Didn't you know?

sian pearl teleported to my skybox yesterday and found me on the roof, taking photos of Kitti posed with crystal tears and pointed white teeth. She said, 'Kitti has been a Creature of the Night a lot lately. Has she been Turned?' 'No,' I replied. 'Kitti is everything and nothing.' 

And then I giggled to myself (as I do) because I felt a little bit like Kohta Hirano's Warrant Officer Schroedinger, who likes to state often, courtesy of his maker's sense of humour, that he is 'everywhere and nowhere'.

I couldn't find any 'about' links that didn't lead to massive Hellsing spoilers, so I'm settling for this picture of him. Google his name at your own risk.

It's that line again, though, isn't it? - the making and breaking of Second Life, the reason to sign up and the reason never to sign in ever again. An avatar has the capacity to be everything and anything, but also to be absolutely nothing. Not everybody sees nothingness as a positive, nor as an opportunity. Freedom isn't necessarily the absence of all rules, regulations and obligations, but instead the ability to have decisions to make, and to make them for yourself. In nothingness, decisions have questionable use and importance, and if we cannot find a use or importance within ourselves, we flounder. I have said this a thousand times here, although I think that might be the most succinctly I have ever written it out.

It was kind of funny that sian made this observation, however, since all I think Kitti has consistently been lately is half-naked, and a little bit, well...of a fairy. This is new for me, as a lover of fantasy, because fairies have never been a creature I was especially interested in. And let's be fair here, Kitti doesn't look like the sort of fairy who is going to go around sprinkling magical dust or making flowers bloom, or collecting teeth - unless she'd knocked them out in the first place.

Mean Mischief

The naked-and-fey thing is courtesy of Monica Outlander and her BlackLabel collection. I haven't stopped wearing it for any real length of time since the Golden Thread show two weeks ago. It isn't that Kitti doesn't have other beautiful clothes - because she does - but I just keep switching back to the Miamai outfits. I'm addicted. And Monica Outlander is not a fan of t-shirts. We'll have the self-confidence conversation later.

I like the opportunity to play with Kitti's appearance, to dress her up sometimes as a vampire or a mean-looking fairy or anything else I can imagine. There are a few basic elements that I like to keep the same - her face and body shape, her hair colour (between two shades), her eye colour, etc - but everything else is up for grabs. And I enjoy that I can do it with such ease, and that the consequences of each change can be as significant or insignificant as I allow them to be. I am a whimsical shaper of nothingness. Let's go and play.

And on the subject of playing, I would like to wish you all a very Merry Christmas, and I hope that the new year brings you what you need to (or to continue to) be happy. I will see you on the other side of the sea of wrapping paper.

Miscellany

it's dark in here

Sitting in my unsorted screenshots folder is a small collection of random pictures I have snapped for various reasons that, by themselves, don't have enough weight to have their own blog post. I like to let them mount up in the corner, then post them all together in a swirl of dust. So here goes.

Chipped nail varnish

I am as big a fan as anybody of the SLink add-on hands, and the grid seems now to be awash with people making virtual nail varnish. At the Cosmetic Fair, I found this advert for chipped nail varnish. I'm not exactly a fashionista, but I'm aware that chipped nail varnish is 'a thing', if you like, in the real world, and so I suppose it wasn't going to take too long to make an appearance in the virtual world. I didn't buy the chipped nail effect, so I can't tell you first hand (lol) how good it is, but it looks pretty cool from the pictures. Nail varnish is something I own quite a lot of in real life, and this love hasn't been lost between realms. 

It's also worth mentioning that these varnishes, and the other make-up on sell by this vendor at the Cosmetic Fair, was all modelled by men. I didn't notice anything else at the Cosmetic Fair using male models, and I thought it was pretty cool. At no point did I think 'this must only be aimed at men, then', and I started wondering whether the appearance of more male models would open up the forum, and allow men to look at female models and still consider the product for themselves as I did. 

Unfortunately, I'm an idiot and I didn't note down the name of the shop selling these. If you have it, pop it in the comments? Thank you.

Moving on.

Apple for teacher?

Another fair: I snapped the above picture at the Enchantment Fair. The Enchantment Fair is offering fairytale themed items, and the first three months' are about Snow White. The first stand I came across when arriving at the fair was this one, selling necklaces featuring this wonderfully made poisoned apple, amongst other things. I just thought it was all kinds of wonderful. It was made by aisling, and I really, really want to buy it.

Do not adjust your screen

Yup, that's right - I found toothbrushes. Toothbrushes that sing to you. I have no idea where I was when I found these, except that it was at yet another fair that was selling a lot of things aimed at children. I'm not sure how legal these are, since they use what look like straight-lifted Disney pictures and no, I didn't buy one, but they did make me laugh. Dental hygiene is clearly very important to beings whose teeth are fake and who cannot eat, drink, or get gum disease or bad breath. I'm filing this one with the toilets and the washing machines that originally informed my original essay and the opinion that our avatars are nostalgic for a world we want to escape (which is an intellectual Chinese finger-trap).

Let's not linger here, we're not dentists:

Fighter pilot Vespers

I found a wonderful picture of this little space rocket on Flickr (which I am struggling to find again - sorry!) and, realising that I'm becoming a little bit of a hermit, decided I would go and explore the sim it was in. Norah Vespers came with me, which always makes any trip twice as fun. We found the pictured rocket and, of course, Norah hopped in it. Dressed as modern space-girls as we were, we made the rocket seem dated, retro, rustic, and I like the idea that we became a portrait of nostalgia on several layers.

On the same sim, we found these:

Got milk?

 Police golf cart milk float Robin Reliant things. Yup, wouldn't you be just petrified if one of those was coming after you? With our fit space-girl bodies, we could almost definitely out-run those things were we to get into trouble - which, of course, we never ever do.

And finally, a werewolf tried to scratch me. No, really, it happened!

see dialogue top left

Except that, because of the way SL almost pedantically upholds social maxims (namely, thou shalt not do anything to anybody else unless they give you expressed permission), he had to ask me if he could cut me up with his claws first, and I of course said no. I have no idea where this guy saw me to even attempt to attack me, but attack me he did. I was in the comfort of my own skybox when I saw the notification, and that seemed to make the offer simultaneously more funny and more scary. I've written a little bit about Bloodlines here, which I shall lazily paste a link to rather than explain again - here. Personally, I think he might have been more successful had he forced the action on me using the /me function, but I'm also kind of glad he didn't do that, for obvious reasons. Polite werewolves are definitely a thing now, especially since Anne Rice is writing their life stories. Being English, and a lover of Anne Rice, I appreciate politeness ;).

Yes, Kitti is wearing cat ears in that last picture, but is that really the oddest thing in this post?!

Naked Truth

In a recent blog post, sian asked 'how nude can an avatar get?', and then 'does it matter?' That wasn't throwaway rhetoric on her part, and she explained her reason for asking in the subsequent line: 'our identities are mutable.'

I asked exactly the same question - 'does it matter?' - in a post I wrote on this blog in June, and concluded, a little uneasily, that for reasons I couldn't wholly put my finger on, the nudity of my avatar did matter. It does matter. And it matters moreso now than it did in June because the pictures in that post featured an un-naked Kitti, wearing a skin that was beautiful but which appeared to be made of porcelain. In the picture in this post, Kitti is wearing her everyday non-porcelain skin, and combined with Second Life's advanced rendering and lighting settings, it looks all too real. And, of course, this time Kitti is naked.

 But this brings us back to sian's first question- 'how nude can an avatar get?'. Whilst Kitti might not be wearing clothes in this picture, she is not naked in terms of avatar-nakedness. She is wearing mesh hands and feet, hair, eyelashes, eyes, skin, and a body shape. It is impossible for an SL avatar not to have a shape and a skin and eyes - those are a given, simply part of the way SL works - but I have chosen to put on everything else. 

And why have I chosen to include these 'wearable' items in my attempt at a tasteful nude of my SL avatar? Because these are the things which allow the picture to be about Kitti's nakedness. Without them, it would be impossible, after the initial oh-she's-naked, not to notice the unreality of Kitti's virtual body. Her blocky hands and strangely triangular feet would act as a barrier between the point of the picture and the viewer (and so would her baldness, but that's mostly because Kitti doesn't look good bald). They would serve to alienate, in more ways than one, her nudity, perhaps offering it up instead as a critique of Linden Lab's graphic skills. 

Don't get me wrong; the supposed reality of this image could also be used to offer a critique of Linden Lab's graphic skills, and a whole lot more besides, but that it not its primary purpose.

This isn't the picture that I wanted to take. I wanted to take a nude photo which revealed precisely nothing, but avatar limbs don't always play ball, and finding poses that weren't uncompromising in one way or another was impossible. Whilst I didn't want Kitti to be flashing her bits, so to speak, I didn't want her to be actively hiding them either. I didn't want her posed with the intention of being seductive, nor did I want her nudity to seem like a mistake. This turned out to be quite a tall order, and in the end, I felt forced to compromise, although I did so on my own terms. 

Posting this picture here is still something of an ordeal for me, and I still cannot put my finger on why exactly. Perhaps it is partially because, as I began to say in my original post (link at the end), Kitti acts as my medium in the virtual world, and her body is the only body many will ever come to associate with me (That I could change everything about the way she looks the moment I released the picture into the world, making the photographed body no longer even exist, is not the point). Whilst she speaks with my voice and shares my thoughts and opinions, and whilst I have always acknowledged the differences between my avatar and my self, her nakedness is a kind of honesty I have not yet ventured to share. Would her nudity be so important to me if that gap between us was greater, or if the truth of it was not so broadly known? Would I feel so uncomfortable if I wasn't going to post a link to this blog post on my Facebook profile where it will be seen by people I am friends with in both lives?

The picture I mentioned in the opening paragraph of my June post has never been posted. It is buried, as it were, in a folder on my laptop, and there it remains. It might seem strange not to post it now, along with this picture, but the truth is that Kitti's pose in that image is far more revealing. When I published that post, there were no rallying cries, no pledges of support, no encouragement to post the image if that was what I wanted to do. There was no conversation at all. Whilst that might be the reaction I was expecting, I don't suppose it was the one I was hoping for.

I'm going to see sian's questions, and raise her a couple: What does it really mean to be naked in SL? Is nudity in the virtual world measured by how many clothes we are wearing, or by how honest we are about our real and virtual selves? How naked is your avatar now?

Related/further reading: my original post, 'Stripped' / sian's post, 'Naked' / 'the intrepid reporter on: nakedness'

Unready

 

 A thought: Second Life is a wide and varied platform for social creation and experimentation. It is a new world, ready to be shaped by our values and desires. It is already well-established, both on this blog and abroad, that those values and desires are pre-conceived, and are often implemented wholesale in the virtual world without any interrogation. We haven't created a new world so much as re-created the 'old' one, making changes that are based on ideas from our real-life selves living in a world of more-limited creation and social rules. We know this.

Avatar customisation is left almost entirely to the SL user. The loneliness of this is enhanced by the way it is deemed inferior to dress yourself in the library stock clothes and accessories provided by Linden Labs. And in the age of free-things-on-the-marketplace, and mesh, it's not difficult to pick up 'better' items.

In the past, I have decried the sense of 'variety' Linden Labs advertise Second Life as having when it comes to avatar customisation. Logging in and deciding you would like to be a cyberpunk tortoise today is the easy part, but finding the type of neon-filled brain tubes you're looking for, in a colour that isn't pink, is much more difficult than dreaming them up in the first place. The masochistic would say 'build it yourself!', which is an option open to all SL users, but again...this is not as easy as it sounds like it might be (and if you think it sounds tough, the reality is probably double that).

Technically speaking, you can build your avatar from a thousand assorted bits and pieces. But there is another limitation I haven't talked about, and which I am finding now endlessly difficult to word. Despite the advances made in the last sixty/seventy years, race is still a difficult issue in real life worldwide. In the UK at the moment, we are contending with a huge percentage of the population expressing fears of a 'flood' of Islam - as if being a Muslim makes you automatically of a different race, and not a different religion. Personally, I don't care what country you're from, what colour your skin is, or what your religious beliefs are, but this is not a viewed shared by the majority. 

Here's the more difficult-to-word bit. Avatar customisation is also inhibited by those real life fears and prejudices.  We are not yet in a position, in the real world or the virtual, to pull apart the pieces that make up what we call 'race' and use them in any way we see fit. There are too many tensions and prejudices involved - too many connotations, too much fear of national identity and cultural appropriation. To wear a black African skin over a white American shape, just as to wear a white American skin over a black African shape, is to make a political statement and not an aesthetic one. I can't decide to have thick, long black hair like one of my university friends today because I find it beautiful, because I don't share in her French-Algerian descent. What this fails to take into account, too, is the way our real life world is changing, and the way immigration has allowed people with completely different physical characteristics to come together and produce children who have a share of both.

The countries we are attempting to tie ourselves don't even exist in SL - at least, physically. Admittedly, a few have been recreated, although if anybody tries to tell me that the numerous sims claiming to be London (UK) look like the real London, I'm going to start laughing hysterically. They are brought into the equation more truly by our real life selves, sharing the information that we are English or French or Indian or Japanese because we like to share, and/or because we are trying to make friends across time zones.

How is any of this policed in SL? Vigilante-ism. I don't think Linden Labs care one hoot, but some other users do, and something as simple as sharing your time zone could start a riot. There are two instances that I am aware of in which people have 'come out' about their avatar not being of the same race as they are, and the responses that each faced were vastly, vastly different. I'm not going to share the details of those instances, but I will say that if we began to unpack either, our sense of race and gender equality would take a thorough beating.

I'm not saying it should be a free-for-all at the table of worldwide physical characteristics. I'm certainly not saying that SL needs to invent an entirely new combination of features to create a look we can attribute to a 'Second Life-ian', separate from everything else. I'm simply pointing out another way in which our second world lies in the shadow of the first. And it's a damned thorny shadow.

Unobviously Obvious

Ha-rumph

A conversation with Norah Vespers in-world yesterday made me realise something unobviously obvious. No, I don't care if that doesn't make a whole lot of sense right now - it will by the end of the post. I hope, anyway.

When I wrote about the effect SL could have on RL for my essay two years ago, I didn't realise that I had not taken into account a whole vague and difficult-to-fathom relationship between the two worlds and those of us that skip between them. This relationship, as I have said, is vague and difficult-to-fathom, and is based mainly on discontentment. 

An awful lot of time and energy goes into the creation of an avatar, and in my experience, one of the most deterring things about SL to new users is the enormity of such a task. The controls for customising your avatar are not the most intuitive, and though it becomes incredibly simple once you have got the hang of it, I have no doubt that had I not received help from various mentors and friends along the way, I'd have given up trying to make Kitti look good, and would have left SL a long time ago. Your avatar, and the time and energy put into it, represents a kind of stake in the virtual world, especially early-on when you might not have a strong base of friends or a long list of sims you enjoy spending time in.

The problem with this - one amongst many, I'm sure - is that avatar customisation never really stops. I know I have had particularly bad influences in this department since I was effective brought up by fashion bloggers, but I think it's true across the board. Fairs selling new hair styles, new skins, new shapes, new clothes, new furniture in SL remain immensely popular to the point of stupidity, and there are Flickr streams and blogs and in-world groups designed with the specific purpose of informing fanbases when the latest items are going to be on sale. Clothing in the virtual world falls prey to fashion seasons just as it does in the real world - it is a perfectly replicated copy of the capitalist system. And why shouldn't it be? But what it represents is the continual desire to better ourselves physically even in the face of the expanded choices available to us in Second Life. 

Like I said, unobviously obvious.

So were am I going with this? Here: our relationship and continual renewal of time and energy and thus our stake with/in SL is predicated on our continual discontentment. If we feel like we have seen and done everything, as if there is nothing about our avatars we can improve, what would we do? We'd probably log out.  When we begin to feel the malaise written about in my blog post, 'Sick and Tired', the 'cure' is often a partial, if not total, revamp of our avatars. 

Told you Kitti was going to be barefoot forever...except when she's wearing roller skates...

The cynicism of this is not lost on me, nor do I really think that the only reason anybody logs into SL is to buy new things to make their avatar prettier. That doesn't always mean buying new things - sometimes, finding things we had forgotten about in our inevitably extensive inventories can breathe life back into an avatar, too. For example, I'd completely forgotten about my roller skates from the Secret Store. And although I logged in yesterday with the expressed purpose of going to Glam Affair and buying the new 'Lucy' skin in the palest shade, then hung around in-world to decorate my largely-empty skybox, what I got the most enjoyment out of was finding that Norah had logged in and talking with her for a while. Then, when she logged out, I proceeded to roller skate around said skybox (which is shaped like a rectangular doughnut) as fast as I could make Kitti go until she spontaneously tripped up over nothing and went somersaulting through the air and into a wall. Hilarious.

Norah has since inadvertently suggested that my skybox could be used for a roller derby, and I reckon that could be really cool! Anybody want to join us? I'm deadly serious. IM me. But that's beside the point.

I suppose what I'm trying to say is that whilst I enjoy dressing Kitti and making her look good, that is only a portion of what I enjoy about SL. But it is still a portion.

Stripped

I've been finding more and more lately that I'm photographing Kitti wearing fewer and fewer clothes.

Upon my request, Sian Pearl made these wonderful bracers (full mech arms make me nervous), and when I came to photograph them, I found that they actually looked best when Kitti wasn't wearing anything else at all. "I'm going to take this picture," I said to Sian, "And then bury it." I knew I had to have something somewhere within my inventory to go with the bracers, and eventually I found it - though, admittedly, the outfit is still a little on the naked side. Somehow, posting the nude wasn't an option, despite the fact that it is still, even after I found an outfit I was happy with, a better photo.

Braced

A couple of weeks ago, I took photos of Kitti on the shore at Winter Moon wearing, once again, only a necklace and a pair of pointed elf ears. I wasn't trying to create a fantasy pin-up, only something that seemed ethereal and beautiful. I only shot from the waist up, and had to summon all of my bravery to post the pictures on Flickr (you can see them here - here!). When my mum saw the pictures (Hi Mum!), she posted a comment saying "Hmmm", and when I spoke to her on the telephone, I laughed, a little sheepishly, and asked if she disapproved. I can't remember what her exact words were, but they were basically to the effect that it was unlike me to post images like that. When I told her how difficult I'd found posting them, she laughed and asked why - "it's not your real body, it doesn't matter!"

Does it matter? I think it does. This is the only body that many people are ever going to associate with me, and I'm not sure that I want to show all of it to everyone. On the other hand, why should I hide my body, virtual or tangible? Is my reticence based on archaic, patriarchal, Adam-and-Eve-esque self and sex shame? Is nakedness reserved only for sex and porn, and thus can I only be naked when I intend to arouse? Is there something wrong with wanting to take pictures that do or do not arouse the viewer? Can I not be naked for the sake of being naked? Is my picture somehow lesser if I want it to arouse you? Is my nakedness a gift I can only give to a few before it gets worn out?

I don't think that the pictures I took at Winter Moon are particularly arousing, and when I took Kitti's clothes off this morning and realised she looked beautiful and powerful and vulnerable all just as she was, it wasn't to create an image that I would label as pornographic. I appreciate that this is the internet, and Rule 34 of the Internet states that if you can think of it, there is porn of it, and I accept that arousing images and pornography are subjective. What I am trying to say it that creating something pornographic was not my intention. Can I honestly say, however, that I didn't want Kitti to look sexy? That I didn't want her to look beautiful? No. I wouldn't even try. It pleased me that Kitti looked beautiful, and, as I have said, strong and vulnerable all at once. Combined with that Jessica Rabbit -esque hairstyle, Kitti did look sexy.

The atmosphere of the naked picture is soft, and I could imagine that it was taken mid-stride as Kitti made her way over to a wardrobe to don the rest of her gear. In the images I have posted here, I tried to keep that strong/vulnerable aesthetic, but I lost that sense of movement, of direction, of intent in the bargain. Kitti's lacking attire is now on purpose, her outfit already complete, and it looks as if she has paused to consider something, rather than having been caught mid-stride. The tunic with its red buttons forced me to bring more colour into the picture, tying in the red with the blue that had previously been the focus of the picture. Now the blue pops because the red makes it - which, don't get me wrong, I love, but it all adds up to make a different photo. And has, arguably, a much more sexual agenda.

Braced II

All because I didn't think it was right to post a picture of my virtual body naked on the internet.

Feminism isn't, truly, about papering the streets with images of the naked female body and expecting everybody to simultaneously notice and appreciate but not be aroused, and just accept it. Sometimes, I think the feminist message gets confused in that way, and it's not helpful for anybody. Feminism is about having a choice, and being able to make it and have others judge you on the merits of you and the choice, not their pre-defined idea of what you ought to do based on what you have between your legs. It is also about feeling confident and stable enough to defend your position when challenged, and to not let the opinions of others sway yours without your consent. If somebody else came to me with this conundrum, I would tell them to follow their instincts and their heart, and only do what made them comfortable. Whilst I don't think I am the kind of person that lets others beat me with pre-conceived notions about my gender, I don't know what makes me comfortable in this situation. I am stuck in a limbo between guilt and more guilt. 

And as you can see, I have not posted the picture here. Perhaps I will yet. I honestly do not know.

Cast a Shadow

Light and shadow

As Second Life advances, everything within it is taking on more of an air of realism. Okay, well, maybe not everything - but it is fair to say that everyone from skin creators to those who make grass and water are producing new levels of verisimilitude. Graphics are getting better. Cameras are getting better. Software for drawing is more sensitive. 

Part of that bid for realism, perhaps, Linden Labs introduced the concept of shadows. As I understand it, this was foreshadowed (I'm sorry, I had to - but even I am cringing) by content creators who had already begun giving their objects shadows by attaching a shadow texture to a very skinny prim they could slide beneath their object (non-SL users: imagine cutting out a circle of black paper and placing it beneath a tennis ball. Ta-dah, a D-I-Y shadow). 

This seems like a natural progression, but, when you break it down, it's a very bizarre thought, since we take shadows so much for granted in our everyday life. Why wouldn't we? They are part of the very fabric of our world and the way we understand it. That Linden Labs noticed this - did they have any help from SL users? I have no idea, and Google isn't telling me - and implemented them in a more dynamic method than the black-paper-beneath-a-ball effect is completely miraculous and cool. 

Shadows are dynamic. I can mess around with the Windlight settings and, depending on where I place the Sun in the sky, the shadows move. Let's have a teensy deus ex machina moment. 

Okay, I'm done with that. Here's the other side of the coin.

Meeow

What's strange (albeit, wonderful), about having shadows in SL is that they are adding a layer of reality to something that...well...is perhaps lacking in the realism department. Let me say upfront: I know nothing about software and game-building, and I'm not criticising those who are involved in this, at all. I have no idea how hard it must be, and I appreciate the effort that goes into creating things like SL - which, as I have already said, is awesome! 

Anyway. Check out Kitti's elbow in the above picture. The shadow on her forearm and her shoulder make me want to jump up and down and clap, but her elbow looks weird. The avatar mesh isn't good with bent elbows. It's also really, really rubbish in the foot department. Avatar system feet are weirdly shaped and all the toes are joined together. Now, this problem has been solved by the introduction of mesh feet, I know, but I just wanted to highlight (couldn't avoid that one, sorry) the juxtaposition present here. 

There's a kind of comment on reality here, too, though it's not one that Linden Labs went out to make, I don't think. They have made Second Life and the avatars within it more real by allowing them to cast shadows. Kitti, although it is lost in the first picture amongst the shadow of the tree, casts a shadow on the ground, and is therefore there, present, and (virtually) real. She is interacting with a (virtually) real environment, a (virtually) real Sun. She makes a mark on the world.

Isn't there a quote somewhere by someone famous about the cruelty of humanity that leaves a mark on the world? Food for idle musings only.

Happy Easter!

Dummy = Dirt

When dressing Kitti the other day, I realised just how complicated she has become. My little avatar not only has nice skin and hair, and clothes made out of mesh, but now she has mesh shoes, which mesh feet included, and mesh toenails that I can change the colour of. She has fingernails that aren't just painted onto her skin. Outfits aren't complete without jewellery, or eyelashes (although she isn't so advanced that her eyelashes aren't painted on). 

A Complicated Sort of Cat

Kitti rents a patch of sky in-world in which she has a house. She owns furniture - sofas and beds and coffee tables and easels and wooden chairs and even a television set. She has a whole folder of poses - static animations to hold her in place while I whack the graphics settings up to take screenshots. She has a(n admittedly small) set of windlight settings (lighting settings, basically) that I have created for her.

This is what it means to "not be a noob" in SL - and why people can tell when you are new. Sometimes, it feels like such a hassle to remember everything, and I wonder if people are going to call me out for being a fraud if I have forgotten to put my fingernails on, or if I let Kitti walk around barefoot with what are, admittedly, very hideous basic SL feet. The basic avatar doesn't even have proper toes.

But at the same time, I really like how Kitti is looking. I'm proud of her, and I think I'm getting better at photographing her, and the prospect of making my own lighting settings seemed so daunting but was actually really easy. Have I grown up in SL now? How much further have I got to go before I get so old that I really do throw my dummy in the dirt and start using only Linden Labs' library-provided materials? Do people ever do that, just for the Hell of it?

The Theft of a Virtual Body

Boo

I posted this on Flickr the other day, but decided it deserved a post of its own. Please click here - here! - to go and see the picture there.

Sian Pearl has been writing recently about the idea of pornography stealing the nude from art. You can read her post here - here! - and it's worth noting that some interesting ideas have emerged in the comments beneath the post. It has opened, I think, some interesting questions, but also made me think about a few things.

I don't take particularly provocative, shall we say, pictures of my avatar. I wouldn't say she dresses massively provocatively in the first place. Maybe the odd sci-fi outfit with a bare stomach or whatever. But this is about as naked as Kitti gets. 

I don't know why that is. I seem to hold the same rules about self nudity in SL as I do IRL (maybe with some lessening - I wouldn't wear those sci-fi outfits IRL! Though maybe I would if my RL body defied gravity the same way Kitti's does). That wasn't a conscious decision, just something I have gone along with. Maybe I should examine that.

So here. I tried it. I tried to be provocative, whilst only being as naked as I ever really am in SL. Maybe you could say the outfit in the previous picture (entitled Pearl House) is more revealing, but somehow this outfit feels more naked. 

I am, temporarily, stealing the (semi) nude from Sian Pearl, who is brave in all the ways that Kitti isn't. I also took this picture in her house, when she wasn't home, and she didn't actually know I was doing it - just so it felt like real theft :P

From Jealousy Born

I seem to spend a whole awful lot of time at the moment talking about getting dressed. There's a point to be made here. I have probably spent more time dressing my avatar in the past three years than I've spend dressing myself in the past twenty (I don't imagine I dressed myself when I was two. Maybe I did. My mum reads this - hi Mum! - so she'll no doubt tell me). I have a couple of friends in-world that only log in to dress their avatars. Dressing your avatar takes more time than perhaps it should.

But anyway. 

Yesterday, I found a picture online that stole my heart. It was uploaded by VictoriousVocabularly to illustrate the word 'thalposis' and offered a link back to the original as uploaded by the artist, 'thienbao on deviantART. When I found out that it had been published in Imagine FX magazine, I went on a mad hunt trying to track it down and get a copy, but I had little luck. In the end, I decided that I was going to try to re-create the image in SL using my avatar. This is the first time I have ever attempted such a thing. It felt kind of momentous.

'Plume' by 'thienbao

It got old pretty fast. I dragged my avatar all across the virtual world, making her try on more demos for items than I can count. I trawled the Marketplace (accessible through the browser - a kind of virtual Amazon, if you like), looking for corsets and boleros and feathers and windswept hair and all kinds of things. What I hit upon was something I had come to suspect, but had no proof of; that, despite the extensive length and breadth of Second Life, despite the hundreds of designers and creators and genres for clothing and items, the virtual world has not yet made everything. 

You might well laugh - I am laughing as I write this. In a logical way, I knew that Second Life could not be home to everything. But there is a certain frustration to be felt when I can type into the Marketplace search, right now...hmm, let's see...let's type in 'toilet seat'. And there we go - a whole page of just about every kind of toilet seat for just about every purpose you can imagine, and probably some you didn't want to imagine. Okay, let's try something else. Let's put in, I don't know, 'glass slippers' - ta-dah! One more (and I'm trying to be as random as possible here). Let's go with a 'steak dinner' - now, would you look at that! I can even get a bucket of KFC. But when I put in the components I wanted to recreate this picture, I could not find what I wanted.

I almost gave up - but I'm glad I didn't. I substituted a few things, and decided that my adaptation had to be true in spirit, if not in details. Because of the change in the make up of my avatar's costuming, I couldn't recreate the pose from the picture, either, so skipped over to Del May to pick up some new ones, and then skipped off to one of my favourite places in Second Life to take the pictures - the beach at Hangars Liquides. 

Here are the results.

From Jealousy Born - click here to view large on flickr

In these pictures, Kitti is a pale shade beside 'thienbao's creation, but I'm pleased with her. I think I created something unotherworldly, and beautiful - if it isn't arrogant to say so myself. I was going to mess with Kitti's shape, distort her face a little and widen the gap between her eyes, but as I've said in previous posts, the controls to do such in SL are difficult to manipulate, and I don't think they are elastic enough to manage to hold those proportions without making them seem grotesque.

If anybody knows how to get hold of back-issues of that magazine from 2009 (most of which were missing, even from the pdf downloads), please let me know. I think I'm in love.

The Boob Job - Follow Up

In my previous post, The Boob Job, I didn't include any pictures of how mesh looks when it doesn't fit an avatar. Whilst SL-users might be familiar with this problem, my non-SL user readers will not, and anyway - it's kind of funny to see when it's not your avatar, right?!

So here they are. In the first picture is Kitti with her original body shape, and in the second, Kitti's body modified to fit within the mesh clothes. 

naughty mesh!

(more) modest

As I said, I believe, in my previous post, I have compromised: I have modified the shape of Kitti's torso slightly to fit into the mesh, but I have not kept the downsized measures for her legs needed to fit into this skirt. Somehow, her thighs seemed too skinny, more from the side than the front, and changing their muscle and width levels made me feel uncomfortable. The mesh trousers I bought, pictured in the previous post, fit just fine without any leg modifications needed, and that makes me happy.

They are not, you might think, the most drastic of changes, but to me, they feel like it. I like Kitti's shape the way it is, and her body shape, combined with her ginger hair, are the only two constants that make Kitti Kitti, so to speak, so any compromise feels like cheating on her.

Should I just let it go? How much should we be willing to compromise on our avatar shape? Could standard sizing really begin to make us all look the same?

I would just like to state, as a disclaimer, that whilst the clothes in these pictures come from the same shop, it is a shop that uses standard sizing, so these problems are across the board. I also have a lot of love for the shop these clothes came from, and I am not blaming that shop for the inadequacies of mesh. I like mesh. I like this shop.

The Boob Job

I like mesh. I like mesh quite a lot. Mesh - for non-SL users - is the stuff that avatars are made out of, a literal kind of wire mesh, and previously, clothes had to be made of what were essentially cardboard boxes, textured and coloured and cut-out to hang from the avatar's body. But now clothes can be made out of mesh, too, and they can bend and move with the avatar's body in a way that a cardboard box cannot. 

(If you're an SL user, you might want to skip this bit.  Jump ahead to "Sort of". It'll be on a line of its own, you won't be able to miss it.)

This is great. Prims - the cardboard boxes - would often fight with the mesh and stick through the avatar's body awkwardly. The worse items for this, in my experience, were long hair. You must have noticed, on more than one occasion, Kitti's hair sticking through her arm or something where it shouldn't be. Mesh doesn't solve this completely, and mesh can still fight with other pieces of mesh, but it is much better than it was, and the quality of the texturing of clothing and hair has gone through the roof with mesh. There are some really beautiful clothes out there in the virtual world now - like Kitti's jeans in the image above, for example. They look pretty damn realistic to me. 

The main problem with mesh is that it doesn't exactly cling to the avatar's skin - it replaces it. To wear a pair of mesh trousers, you must first make your legs beneath invisible. If I took a picture of Kitti without those trousers on, there would be nothingness between the top of her hips and her ankles. This is achieved with what we call an alpha layer. 

A sizing system had to be created to market mesh, since it does not just snap to an avatar's shape - a sizing system that works exactly the same way sizing systems work in real life, only the clothes don't have the tiniest bit of elastic in, so you can't squeeze into this shirt, or cinch those trousers in with a belt. If they're too long (a common problem for the 5ft2 writer of this blog), you can't turn them up at the hem. You have to find mesh that fits your avatar shape, so that the hips the mesh trousers give Kitti, for example, follow neatly up to the tops of her real hips and her waist, without massive gaps or leaving a massive, shorn-off shelf of skin above them - that wouldn't look natural.

There are alternatives to standard sizing and I find, despite the system, that what one shop calls a medium is not necessarily what another shop calls a medium, even when both claim to use standard sizing. Finding mesh to fit Kitti has been difficult, but then I stumbled on a shop called coldLogic, and bam! They are beautiful clothes and they fit my avatar.

Sort of. 

To get some of the shirts to fit, Kitti had to have a breast reduction. She had to have a boob job. The alpha layer only makes invisible what it really has to, i.e. the main part of the body where the mesh is going to go, but where there are collars of open shirts or whatever, the avatar's flesh needs to be visible at the opening. These are the bits - around these collars, for example - where Kitti's body fights with the clothes, and where I find myself resizing Kitti's chest to make sure that it doesn't poke through the fabric of the shirt or the dress. 

And I have messed around with all of the shape sliders. Not only have I shaved ten points off her breast size, I've also lowered them - why were they so high, anyway?! - and pulled them a little closer together. From the front, Kitti looks great, but her profile seems to have lost what little curve it had. Kitti doesn't have a particularly curvy shape to begin with. You might note that Kitti isn't wearing a mesh top with her mesh trousers in the above picture. I decided she needed a break there. Poor, poor avatar.

This makes me sad. I don't want to reach a point where Kitti's shape is a factory-line reproduction. Nobody in SL really wants that. And I am a little offended, when I try mesh on from just about everywhere, and even the smaller sizes require a shrinking of her breasts, or the thinning of her arms. The worst offenders here are skirts, and as a result, I refuse to dress Kitti in them. Even in the bigger sizes, the sizes that leave great gaping holes between their edges and Kitti's hips, the skirts cut into Kitti's legs. To where them, I'd be forced to slim down her thighs, and that seems like the final straw to me.

The boob conversation is an old one. It isn't nice, but I kind of expect it in a dull way. Kitti's chest is hardly huge, and I have to shave half of it off to fit her into these mesh clothes. OK. I don't like that, but I'm used to that idea. I'm used to the idea of being too small or too big to fit into clothes. But I am not used to the idea of having fat thighs.

Kitti does not have fat thighs. I will not shrink them down to fit into itsy bitsy mesh skirts. I'm drawing the line. But how long will I hold out?

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.

Front Toward Enemy

Wow - this week I have been in a posting frenzy, it would seem! Okay, maybe "frenzy" is a bit too strong a word. And they have hardly been the world's longest posts. Today's might well be the shortest. 

After threatening to do so for months, Sian Pearl made Kitti a tattoo. I had no idea what it was going to be until she send it over to me. It sounded familiar, so I ran the phrase through Google...and then let myself feel all mischievous. There's only one other thing that makes me feel this mischievous - this.

So then I went out and made the best of my new tattoo like a good little firestarter. And let's face it - I'll take just about any excuse to get wear out of my dirt layer. It was quite strange for me, since I am still undecided about the idea of having tattoos in SL when I would not do so in the real world. I can't yet articulate my own ideas on that subject, however, so I won't speak on it now. I love my tattoo, despite that uncertaintly (thank you Sian!), and I love this pipebomb made by Marls Vaughan. 

A pipebomb! In SL! That seems to be all kinds of  cool, and all kinds of impotent, to me.

Front Toward Enemy - click here to view large on flickr.

Thoroughly Kicked

Back in May, I wrote a piece entitled 'Kicking the (Chrome) Bucket', talking about the cyberpunk scene in SL in relation to an article by Svetlana Boym on nostalgia. The cyberpunk aesthetic and the idea of a nostalgia for an obsolete vision of the future are both ideas that I am very interested in, and since I wrote that original post, I have acquainted myself with a very popular example of both: 'Blade Runner'.

'Blade Runner' is not the inspiration for today's post, however. When I logged into SL this morning and found a present from my good friend Sian, some science-fiction themed hair by Paper Heart, it was Effie Trinket of 'The Hunger Games' that popped into my mind. May the odds be ever in your favour!

So I popped some food pills, took a couple of screenshots, and sat down to think about the reflective nostalgic that I am. And how much of a pretender at it I am - the (outdated) vision of the future Kitti is modelling here is not even one that belongs to my generation, and her get-up certainly does not reflect a future I would desire. That future is soooo yesterday. Instead, Kitti looks like the love-child of 'Blade Runner' and 'Hairspray', which doesn't say an awful lot for poor Effie Trinket. 

This chrome bucket is thoroughly kicked.

(ad)Mired

(ad)Mired

Since the holiday season is now over, I decided that I ought to begin the rather tedious task of sorting through three years of university work to figure out what needs keeping and what can hit the recycling bin. In my sorting through and ordering and filing, I came across a sheath of notes I had made about an article by Saba Mahmood, entitled Feminism, Democracy, and Empire: Islam and the War on Terror. Bear with me here.

What interested me and sparked the ideas for this post were two quotes I had quoted from the text, one of them which begins mid-sentence but still captures the point of the idea. It's important here to outline that I am not using these comments to talk about Islam or Muslim women - I am using them only for the ideas they spark about the world of Second Life. I am aware of the danger of using a text like that, but am not going to shy away from such things when it is possible that they have something important to say in another forum. I will put as full a citation as I can at the end of this post, so that should you wish to find the article for yourself and read it as it is, in its original context, you can do so. 

Quote one:

...securing the judgement that Islam's mistreatment of women is a symptom of a much larger pathology that haunts Islam - namely, its propensity to violence.

Quote two:

Women who contend that the veil is part of a religious duty, a divine edict, or a form of ethical practice are usually judged to be victims of a false consciousness, mired in a traditionalism that leads them to mistakenly internalise the opinions of misogynistic jurists whose pronouncements they should resist.

In a sense, it is pretty easy to modify both of these quotes to make them fit just about anything and any way of life that we might disagree with, but I think perceptions and, dare I say it, realities of Second Life have much in common with what Mahmood suggests is laid (unfairly) at Islam's feet. That misogyny exists in Second Life is without question, and I would not hesitate to suggest that SL also has a 'propensity to violence', be that because of its use as a sexual playground or because nobody wants to roleplay situations in which everybody is happy and safe and at peace with everyone else and themselves. That would be unimaginably dull, I'm sure, and largely useless to the world at large. 

But how do these quotes, in particular the second one, translate out of a question of what women might choose to wear within Islam, and into what women might choose to wear within Second Life? 

With equally dire ideas, it would seem. 

When I logged into SL a couple of nights ago, I was invited by a friend to join him in an apparently notorious space brothel bar (which shall, for the time being at least, remain nameless). There were a few other women there, also friends of his, and they were dressed in all manner of different outfits. He asked a couple of them if they would mind getting up and dancing around the poles that were there, for our entertainment. One chose to ignore him, but then, when another lady got up to dance, she gave in and joined in, too. I was not asked to dance, though whether that is because I had chosen a markedly unprovocative outfit that evening, or because I've said "no" every other time I have been asked, I cannot say for sure. But that I have to question says it all for me.

Can you see me now?

There you see the trappings of these ideas emerging. Dressed sedately in a space brothel bar, I felt that I would not have been asked to dance for their entertainment, whether I had said no before or not. Alongside some of the attire the other girls were wearing, I would be willing to bet money on that assumption. A judgement was made, by me and by them and by the friend asking the girls to dance for him, based on our attire.

Judged

What one chooses to wear, especially in Second Life where the avatar is often seen as a canvas for the expression of personality, has an impact on what other people think you are or want. A short skirt or a latex catsuit with artificial nipples sewn in says 'I am flirty and up for sex', whereas a roughspun tunic or a turtleneck jumper says 'I'm just here to be your friend'. If your hair is blue and your clothes are impossible-seeming or strange, you smack of fun and frolic and a good laugh, but if you choose to make your avatar an advocate of as-I-was-born 'normal' fashion, you're boring.

(pretty)Boring

But also, whether you dress in what might be deemed a sexually provocative way, or you dress like you know your grandma would want you to, you are stuck as Mahmood suggests women who wear the veil are stuck. Both choices describe a miring in traditionalism - a traditionalism based on the points of view of misogynists, who simultaneously expect you to be a sex goddess and a private possession, seen only by them, who should be dressed for home life. People make judgements about you without hanging around long enough to find out what you are really like, or what you really want - and whether or not your choices for your attire are based on your own, sound reasoning, or somebody else's imported logic.

I have no doubt that, to some extent, SL is guilty of hoading women who feel the need to dress a certain way because of a misogynistic viewpoint imported from the real life into the virtual - and I think that can work both ways, in terms of taking your clothes off or piling them on. But I also have no doubt that there are plenty of women dressing themselves in SL based upon their own carefully considered opinions and desires.Why is it assumed that people are incapable of such? - isn't that a kind of misogyny, too?

It is also ludicrous, in my opinion, to suggest that any visual aesthetic could tell wholly and completely the personalities and desires of anybody. A fun person might wish to have blue hair, but that doesn't mean that everyone with blue hair is fun and un-serious. A short skirt doesn't automatically say 'I WANT SEX', and a plain white shirt is not akin to stamping the word 'ASEXUAL' across your forehead. Looking good and/or sexy isn't an invitation to sex anymore than looking scruffy and dirty is an automatic denounciation of it.

And here is where the 'propensity to violence' really comes in. In the quote about Islam, the idea that isolated cases indicates a sense of the whole is completely, completely unfair. But in Second Life, it doesn't quite seem to work that way. Because if you think these are things that only become relevant in notorious space brothel bars, you would be mistaken. This is something that chases all of us across the grid every time we log into SL. And as a testament to that, when a complete strange told me on a public sim a little while back that she thought I looked good, not only was I desperately surprised that she'd even noticed my sedate little avatar, but she felt the need to go to great lengths to tell me that she wasn't trying to chat me up or anything. I thought that was a little weird at the time, but then, stood in that space brothel bar, if someone had done the same, wouldn't I have run a mile?

It's a kind of violence, this. Because of the way we understand semiotics in relation to our patriarchal - and until very recently, really, our very decidedly misogynistic - society, a simple compliment can be perceived as an act of violence. Going out naked in SL and not engaging in sex becomes violence. Covering yourself up becomes a defense against expected violence. And it is so, so wrong.

It seems like such an obvious thing to say, and yet I have struggled with the wording of this post, read it over and over again, worrying that somehow, I haven't quite hit the nail on the head. This is going to sit uncomfortably within me now because I am not sure that I have phrased it correctly. But I felt the need to say something.

Why is this such a mire?

[Mahmood citation: "Chapter 8 - Feminism, Democracy, and Empire: Islam and the War on Terror" by Saba Mahmood, in Gendering Religion and Politics - Untangling Modernities ed. by Herzog and Braude.]