In Limbo

Over the past couple of months, I have started to feel like my blog is dying. The downside to blogging about my personal virtual experiences and applying a (super vague) performance theory framework over them is that...well...a lot of my virtual experiences are the same. And blogging about gender inequality, unfair expectations, and, I don't know, pubic hair, doesn't automatically change the entire system. The SL I was writing about two years ago is the same SL that exists now (except now we're all wearing clothes made out of chicken wire) and I have, like many of my friends who seem to own land in SL, become something of a shut-in. 

I'm afraid that this blog is dying - and I don't want it to! Writing is one of my absolute favourite things to do in life, and writing about SL has been fun and interesting, and sparked a handful of pretty intense debates with people I have met in-world who read my blog. As you may have noticed, I tend to tie SL issues in with RL ones, and these are issues I care about, or that I think are important. I don't want to stop investigating, I don't want to stop exploring, I don't want to stop writing.

But I'm not sure where I'm heading, here. And I don't really like that. This isn't a goodbye, at all. I'm dithering in limbo. For now, I'm still here. Don't let me go just yet.

Talking about things that are dithering in limbo; I have been dressing Kitti recently in increasingly more gothic-style outfits recently. There are so many Summer fairs on at the moment offering bikinis and beach clothes, but designers Glam Affair and Pixicat have brought out a range of skins and dresses (respectively) over the past couple of weeks that have fed my all-too-English desire to hide from the RL wrathful Sun who has been trying, desperately, to burn me to a crisp. Kitti, being not only English but ginger, looks all-too at ease in her paler than pale skin and decadent dresses, lurking the corners of her skybox. She's been looking increasingly less than human - beyond human, one might say. Preternatural. Maybe even supernatural. I'm working the vampire/ghoul vibe. 

But it's just a vibe, right? It's not like, heh, gingers don't have souls or anything.

...right, guys?

...right?!

[I need to get out more. Would you like to help me get out more? Click here for more info - here!]
[P.P.S.: the images from the post can be seen full size on Flickr - here!. I promise it's worth it.)

A Date to Remember

This week has been busy in terms of dates, and it's fantastic. Yesterday, Norah took me to Rose Borchovski's in-world installation, The Inevitability of Fate. I had been before, but much more briefly and it became apparently very quickly that I had only seen half of what the sim had to offer. Norah's quick wit and considerate, empathetic brain deepen any and every experience, and I just love spending time with her.

but then the war came

Borchovski's piece is part installation, part experience, and part memorial. The Holocaust has had, now, a lot of artistic treatments, and there's always a danger in approaching a subject as painful and enormous as this with any kind of creative lens. It's too easy to dismiss, to belittle, and to appropriate. Of photographing atrocities, Susan Sontag wrote "people want the weight of witnessing without the taint of artistry, which is equated with insincerity or mere contrivance", but looking at a photograph of a past event is passive and in many respects, too safe to provoke anything more than compassion. 

That isn't to say that compassion is useless or pointless - not at all - but it is an "unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers". Compassion for the victims of the Holocaust has a limited ability to manifest itself in action because the event is past and, as I have said, attempts to create additional memorials are fraught with difficulty. 

At no point during the installation is the word "Holocaust" used. We are introduced to the characters of Beth and Lot, whom the narrative follows, and at no point is it stated that what becomes of them is a fate that was forced upon anyone else. It is obvious, though, from the semiotics and "the war" what this is about. In the subtlety, there are no label-boundaries, nothing separating the audience member from touching, if you like, the horror of what one might otherwise claim as a Jewish experience. At the same time, sitting before my computer, I know that I was not a part of this event, that I hold no claim over anything pictured on the screen before me. It is a flaw of empathy that we struggle to negotiate the ownership of suffering - and that, in my experience at least, we seem to find it easier to respond to the plight of an individual than to the mass murder of a whole.

I am tiptoeing, here, around my own explanation and analysis. I am wrighting, as opposed to writing, it out. If I can keep my foot out of my mouth, that would be a good start.

Beth reaches for Lot

Empathy and sympathy are dangerous, too, in that experiencing them whilst forcing ourselves to look at images of atrocity make us "feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering". If we look beyond the individual, do the multiplication to make the many Beths and Lots, we begin, too, to feel that "the sufferings and misfortunes are too vast, too irrevocable, too epic to be much changed by any local political intervention". Both of these systems allow for personal detachment, both from the event itself and from any responsibility to do anything other than remember it. "Lest we forget", we mumble as we file passed - and then we go home and put the kettle on and watch reruns of QI.

What the Inevitability of Fate does, then, is offer us a way in to the whole through the individuals Beth and Lot. There is a narrative to follow, but there is little to stop you wandering from tableau to tableau in any order you choose, doubling back to see them again or working backwards. It is still a flat image, yes, contained by the computer screen, but it utilises the liminal space of the virtual as best it can, and employs movement and sound in really interesting ways. Things spring up out of nowhere, other things drop down. You dance, you fly, you hide, you climb. You are bombarded, literally. You are given space to think.

 

There is no accusation in the installation, not pointed fingers. From the beginning, Borchovski has really worked to make the audience feel watched, but that watching is done by a faceless, nameless power that seems to be omnipotent, omnipresent. Placards fly up from the ground bearing the new rules for the new regime, and the voices that repeat them are heavily distorted, inhuman. You are watched by floating, disembodied eyeballs.

you are not allowed

A real effort has been made to include the audience in the narrative, with countless poseballs dotted through the tableaux allowing you to literally insert yourself into the frame. You do not, at any point, however, take the place of Beth or of Lot in any (virtually) physical sense. We are alongside, witnessing, sometimes joining in.

Happy Birthday, Lot!

 

up

 

in happier times

There are no images of atrocity, no reliance on the familiar photographs of the Holocaust that we have come to accept as part of a social consciousness (although there are some photos on display in the sim, they are not emblazoned across the walls and floors and burned onto the retina). Nothing about the scenes feels familiar in any boring, dismissive way, and there is so much going on that the act of looking and exploring never gets boring. At no point, either, does it become too much. The semiotics, as I have said, are recognisable, understandable, but not stale. 

Ultimately, I think the sim works because it can be understood as an expression and memorial of grief - Beth's grief for her daughter, Lot, who goes missing and can safely be presumed dead. We aren't asked to appropriate the horror that befell people who died before most of us were even born, and we aren't told to take to the streets and hang the descendents of those responsible. We aren't asked to imagine that we ourselves have been tortured or killed. We have all, at some point or another, felt the fear of potentially losing a loved one, and the personal horror of that is easily transmutable from the all-too-human and contorted faces of the models before us. 

 

Honestly, I think their expressions are the most human things I have ever seen in Second Life.

Lot and a forbidden book

Beth, in grief

 Again, personal grief is an individual route into an otherwise enormous and difficult subject matter, and taking such a personal interest in an event that categorically did not happen to you has criticism.

 

So much more could be said about this sim, and where it might fit within a canon of memorials and installations. I haven't touched upon the props we are given and told to wear as you follow the narrative (and which have an afterlife as they remain in your inventory when you leave the event). I haven't talked about the use of light, or the installation walls which are covered with names we assume are the names of the dead. I haven't made any kind of list of symbols for further analysis, and I haven't reached for any text books beyond Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others from which I have source all of the academic quotes in this post (if you'd like specific references, I will gladly give them). I haven't touched at all on the performance of guilt, nor on the significance of a memorial in an ephemeral realm. There is criticism in abundance of everything I have brought up here, but I wanted to focus now on what the sim achieved (which I think is a lot) and not what it may have wrongly assumed or been lacking in. But I think, for now, that I have written more than enough.

 

no chance

Thank you so much, Norah, for taking me here and letting me experience it with you. If you would like to visit the Inevitability of Fate, you can do so by clicking here - here! If you would like to share your opinions, comments are always welcome.

It was like that when I got here

Click here! to see this full-size on Flickr

It was like that when I got here, I swear it. There were no signs of forced entry, but the CCTV camera has been spray-painted black, too, so I doubt you'll get anything off there. Why would anybody want to do that to the BaC® Conflict Management Centre™, sian's new roleplay hangout? I simply cannot imagine. I'm not paid to imagine, right? Right. Anyway.

Click here to read about BaC on sian's blog - here! or click here to go straight to the hangout - here! Or do both. I'm not here to tell you want to do.

Resolution

We'd all heard about them before, of course, but they always seemed to be so far away. There were rumours and rumblings, but nothing that seemed close, pressing. Nothing that seemed...real. It didn't happen to anybody we knew and we ignored the warnings on the television because we stopped believing it told us anything close to the truth years ago. But we were fools, fools not to believe it, and when it came for us, we weren't prepared and all we could do was run, as fast and as far away as we could. We didn't look back until we reached the water - the edge of everything, or so we believed - and there it was, rolling out along the horizon like smoke but with the thick, heavy consistency of tar. Someone somewhere, God Allah Shiva Whoever, had finally decided that we had been a bad idea after all and pushed the button and so begun the system to refresh, reset, renew. Begin again begin again begin again. We were being wiped out. 

I wondered what it would be like to be crushed beneath the restart; at first to feel the coldness of it, the coldness of the fabled grave none of us had yet known but would know now, and then the stickiness, the weight, the collapse. It had been preached that this life, this world, this, our bodies, the air we breathe, wasn't real and never had been, but that storm looked real enough to me. I vowed I would never look back again - and I went forward into the water. Onwards.

That, ladies and gentlemen, was a spur-of-the-moment dramatisation of a rolling restart. I was minding my own business in my new skybox when my screen began to shake and I got the warning that my region would be restarting and Kitti would be logged out if I didn't move regions (like a group of sims). Not knowing exactly which regions were involved in the restart and where the borders for such things lie, I ran to the most remote place I could see in my landmark list and ended up in the sea. Cue drama.

It was more difficult than you can imagine not to make a "Rolling in the Deep" reference. 

In Print

I learned just now that today is National Poetry Day, and I decided to take advantage of that to share with you some news which I think is pretty cool (but then, I would). Apparently, National Poetry Day has a theme which, this year, is water, but I'm not massively interested in that. Sorry.

In May last year, I blogged here about the idea of using SL to create 'creative responses' - essentially, creating images or videos using Second Life that were inspired by, or helped to illustrate in some way, a poem or a piece of prose or a song. For someone like me who cannot draw, having a compliant model and an effectively limitless space to design and decorate and light are invaluable resources. My own creative response, written about in the same post, came about almost by accident: when trawling through my inventory trying to put an outfit together, I realised that what I was creating was a character I had been writing about for a while. I posted the latest piece about her, a poem, alongside pictures of Kitti, and ta-dah! My very first serious creative response. I think I described the situation a little better in the original post itself, but shh (I'll post a link to it at the bottom of this post). 

The news I wish to share is that just last week, that same poem appeared in print in a real life poetry anthology. It's called 'Neo Cassandra', and was published by Forward Poetry in their book 'The World at War'. Periodically, Forward Poetry run competitions, inviting the world and his wife to submit poems about a specific theme, then they pick the ones they like the best, and publish them (with your permission, of course). I was thrilled to be selected for the anthology, especially since I had submitted the poem months ago on a whim and a sense that I had nothing to lose. This is the fourth of my poems to be published by this company, though the other three were published almost ten years ago now. Jeez, that makes me feel old.

I'm not earning any money from the publication whatsoever, and the book is (in my opinion) really expensive, so I have no qualms about saying that if you wish to read my poem (and my original blog post about creative responses, as mentioned above), you may do so by clicking here - here!

Headed west

Some other related things: other creative responses / Sian Pearl does National Poetry Day / SLart for SLart's sake

Fall (from Grace)

Left to Rust

Strawberry Singh's meme challenge for today is a few questions about Autumn. It included suggesting we take an Autumn-themed picture to go with the post, but after despairing searching for good autumnal sims that weren't full of afk avatars photo-bombing every shot, I decided I'd take a different angle on the theme. 

So here - I give you Kitti-turned-Ariadne (if Ariadne had pointy teeth, and the sense to steal some armour, which I'm not wholly sure the Ariadne of the stories had). Ariadne put herself out to help Theseus escape the Labyrinth of the Minotaur, and received in return what amounted to a quick roll in the sack and then abandonment. Theseus got bored with her and instead of braving up and telling the poor girl how he really felt, he left her miles from her home, miles from everything she knew and loved, on a random island in the middle of the sea. 

What a bastard. Silly, silly Ariadne. 

If that island had been Autumnal England, Kitti-Ariadne would quickly realise that, beautiful as the island was, it was wet and windy and cold. The fog coming in off the sea would stick in her lungs and smell faintly of burning (am I the only one that thinks that?), and start to rust her armour. Hopefully she'd land somewhere in the North, because the South of England is pretty disappointingly flat once you get passed the pretty cliffs.

Anyway. The Challenge.

1. Is Autumn your favourite season? Why or why not? - Autumn is my favourite season, but it is often disappointing. As I look out of the window now, the leaves on the trees are green and muddy brown, and it's raining. Autumn is supposed to be thin jacket/jumper weather - not too hot, not too cold. Red leaves on the trees would be very, very nice. It's also my birthday next month.

2. Do you call it Autumn or Fall? - Autumn. I exploited what I believe is the American term, 'Fall', for the title of this post, but that's about it.

3. What kind of weather does your area get during this season? - The same as the rest of the year. I live in England! :P No, seriously. It's a little cooler, and the Sun can be lovely and bright...but it also rains a lot, and is damp. Apparently, it's unseasonably warm here right now, but I think the weather is just being a bit crazy. 

4. What colour do you associate with Autumn? - a nice crisp red :)

5. Which Autumn related sim is your favourite at the moment? - I don't have one! If anyone has any suggestions, please send them to me. I tried Strawberry's suggested Tempura Island, but there were afk avatars everywhere. I took the photos for this post at a completely unrelated sim, but I was inspired by the grey-greenery and the oh-so-English Autumn fog. The name of the sim is The Citadel of the AdEternum Horde.

Oh - one last thing. The Kitti-Ariadne should have a conclusion. I think she's a savvy kind of girl. Maybe she used Theseus just for the lift, knowing he was a bastard. She was probably weary of these 'heroes' to start with, especially after hearing what happened with Jason and Medea. I reckon Kitti-Ariadne would make this little green island work for her.

Weary

Click here for: Strawberry Singh's original post and the pictures from this post (and many that don't get blogged) on Flickr.

Bold

Yesterday morning, I logged onto Flickr and found someone had left a comment on a photo I had uploaded back in February. The comment was a request to do a pile-up, and it was the first such request I have ever received and, of course, I said yes. 

Often, people post their SL shots with a green background (like a green screen in film, I understand), and other people download that image and doctor it, usually by adding in a background. This is a pile-up. The wonderful thing about pile-ups is that your original picture could have been taken in a forest, but I could take it and put you, instead, on the Moon. Alternatively, I could just edit the colour of your hair a little, or crop it in. There are no real rules attached to the creation of the pile-up, and as I said, it's a pretty simple idea. In the end, you end up with a collaborative image that adds something new to your original concept. From all angles, it's cool.

When I posted my picture - with its green background - I didn't have a pile-up in mind. In all honestly, I'm not sure what I had in my mind when I posted my picture, except that I was having fun with the beautiful make-ups from chelle and I wanted to have lots of arms. And I realised that I could join in the SL naked party without revealing too much because my hair totally had it covered.

See this, my original image, full size on flickr - here!

I had no idea what to expect from my first pile-up, or from Crystal, especially since I don't actually know her. She began following my Flickr stream yesterday, I believe, and I am now following hers.

Thank you, Crystal, for taking the time to look at my pictures, and then for taking the time to make a pile-up of me!

What Crystal created is absolutely brilliant, and I love it. It is so vibrant that I wonder that I ever thought the green of my original image suggested anything of life at all. She added something utterly new to the picture, and linked it to a song that conspires with the new colouring to make Kitti into an LSD acolyte, as well as nymph of free love.

See on Crystal's image on Flickr - here! - and on her Tumblr - here!

And wouldn't you listen to every word she said? I think she makes a most persuasive disciple.

Blue (a kind of creative response)

Above Hangars Liquides South

"You know what coming to the city taught me?" 

She crushed the cigarette she hadn't been smoking into the windowsill. The paper tore, and the unburned tobacco spilled on to the floor. Beyond the window, the city stretched as far as the naked eye could see, but, somehow, the warmth of all those bright lights twinkling in almost every window could not reach us here. The ice blue of her eyes and the hard line of her mouth kept it at bay, perhaps, and I wondered if, were I to reach out and wipe her silver lipstick where it had smudged, I would find her skin cold. I shivered. 

She didn't notice.

"It taught me just how little a fuck people really give. I mean, really. They're all bastard sons of bitches and they're all the fucking same."

If she hadn't sounded so serious, I might have laughed. I didn't think she was the type of woman that would take too kindly to being laughed at, though, and I didn't want to offend her. I wanted to know what silver lipstick tasted like. 

"Do you hate us all so much?" I asked instead.

She sighed heavily. "I wouldn't be helping you if I did. Trying to help you, anyway."

Sinister and Saintly

Are you fed up of me yet? I've been blogging rather a lot recently, and I should probably have been clever about it and spread them out a little more, but I haven't. There's little use crying over spilt milk - especially when you kind of tipped over the milk on purpose.

I am reading again at the Library tomorrow (Thursday). Courtesy of Simon May, we're having an Anais Nin themed day. Simon and I will be reading at noon SLT (which is 8pm here in good old Britannia), and, I believe, Jett Roxan will be reading at 8pm SLT (which is 4am here in good old Britannia by which time, sadly, I will have passed out of existence). It's possible that Jett will be reading with Simon and I, also, so, basically, the only way you'll not miss out on anything is if you turn up. See what I did there? - Good. 

Jett made another great poster. Click here - here! to see it on his flickr, where I pinched it from. Naughty Kitti.

Anais Nin is not an author I have read very much of - in truth, I hadn't read anything of her until this Tuesday, when I was asked if I would like to take part in the reading of her work. She isn't someone I knew very much about, either, though I had heard her name before, and I had a suspicion that I'd heard some pretty mean words proceeding it. When I asked about her on Facebook, I caused a little bit of a storm, although I was surprised to find that none of my English student friends (of which I have many) had anything to say about her at all.

When I started to read her work, I can't say I was massively impressed. I do think, however, that maybe I've found a way into understanding her. I'm saying nothing more for now. And, after fifty pages, I've found something I think is interesting to read aloud.

I figured we were getting a lot of Kitti-face around here, so I'd jazz it up with some more of my untidy handwriting.

In the discussion after last week's reading, I suggested that often in the case of Anne Rice, the supernatural-status of her characters serves more as an excuse to view the world in greater detail and through heightened senses. Her vampires and her werewolves have a (preter)natural kind of omnipotence, even when indisposed, that is utterly enviable. We want to be the vampire, and to be seen by the vampire. In the collection of short pieces I have read by Anais Nin, the vampire - the greater sensitivity, the greater awareness and pliancy - would appear to be opium. I like the idea of that. I think we tend to romanticise opium anyway, since it is Eastern and Other and exotic and so much, in our popular culture, to do with tasselled rugs and white skin and cat-shaped eyes. It's inseparable from lounging around in silk undergarments and conversing with higher plains and dreaming strange dreams. I doubt it would be difficult to draw out further similarities between vampires and opium.

Sadly, perhaps, there is no opium in the piece I am going to read tomorrow, but there is another kind of drug that has a very similar effect. No spoilers, though. My lips are sealed.

On that note, I shall hush, and say only that I hope to see you tomorrow. If you would like a teleport link, I should be around in-world, net connection permitting, from around 11:30am SLT (7:30pm GMT). You know my name - my username is the same. Obviously, once the reading begins, I won't be able to send you a link, but I would be more than happy to beforehand.

If you would like to see the un-tassled, un-rug'd, un-cat-shaped photos I took in SL today based on the opium-vampire idea, please click here - here! They're best viewed large.

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.

Coming Up

I wanted to have a clown-face. So I had one. Possibly influenced by Slava's Snowshow, possibly not.

 Happy New Year! 

Kitti and I would like to wish you all the best for 2013, and every year here after, and to thank you for reading If You Die in SL... A lot has changed since this blog began, and posts are perhaps not coming in as thick and fast as they once did, but we are still here, and we are still interested in what Second Life has to offer. I graduated from university, the reason I entered SL, in July (2012), and will hopefully be bringing my interest in performance in/of the digital, and digital-based performance, into my real life work in the not-so-distant future.

Clown-face and shadows. What a start to the year.

Today's screenshots were taken in Kitti's new (jointly-owned) skybox home, the frame of which was designed and built from scratch. There'll be a blog about that coming up. Also coming up: Kitti's obsession with hair, Kitti's obsession with owning virtual cats, a post for the Concerned Bloggers Association on Saving the Arts (an issue understandably close to my heart), Kitti's "fat" thighs, and, hopefully, some more comic-type-things for Kit 49.

So, here's to 2013!

And I Feel Fine

So it's that time of year again. All of the SL bloggers are out in force, posting Christmas themed posts, and here I am, thinking I'll come and talk about building or buying more cats (which I have done) or Kitti's 'fat' thighs (more on that later), or, I don't know, rambling on about my ginger anxiety. I'm not going to talk about those things, however. I am really just going to post a picture and wish you all a merry Christmas. 

But there's a catch - ha ha! My 'Christmas' picture...well...it isn't so Christmassy. It's wintry, though, and I think Kitti's looking pretty bad-ass here, so that's got to count for something, right? 

Posing with me here is Carmine Chris. He's pretty new to SL, and is taking to it like Rudolph to the air on Christmas Eve (oh, come on, I tried). He's a whizz of a builder, and is turning his attentions to scripting, now, too. Keep your eye open - he'll be opening a shop before you know it. 

This is Carmine Chris' first photoshoot. He was very patient, and even suggested posing in other locations, but pickings were pretty slim. Everything is covered in flashing lights and cute scarfed penguins and stuff. Second Life has gone all-out, it would seem, to make its virtual inhabitants feel a bit of the Christmas spirit. Which is nice and lovely and sweet, but not what I wanted, here.

I feel pretty relaxed about Christmas this year. Everything is ready, almost. My family will be arriving on Sunday, and in the new year, I've tickets booked to see my absolute favourite stage-show for what will be my fourth time.  Sounds pretty good to me! There's got to be a catch here, too, right? I've yet to find it!

Anyway. I think we look like incarnate spirits of Winter.

The Winter is Coming!

...well...it might be here already...

Merry Christmas, everyone! Or Happy Holidays. Enjoy whatever you're celebrating, or enjoy the peace.

Oh - and that other thing that (isn't) happening today. You know. The end of the world. We're pretty relaxed about that, too.

And I feel fine

Being an R.E.M. fan, my first stop would, naturally, be to start blasting "It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)", but I have refrained.

Instead, Kitti and I are listening to: this / this / and this. We're not dead yet.

Acolyte

I thought that it was time for another creative response style post. They're kind of fun to do, and mean that I get to go and explore places I perhaps wouldn't have considered visiting before. This is just a short one, and wasn't at all what I had in mind when I began. When I began, what I really wanted to do was draw, but, alas, my hands and their lacking skill in that department betray me. I ended up with this. That's the way these things work, I guess!

In other general housekeeping news, I have found a new place to take shots for the Kit 49 comic, and am hoping to start working on the next strip (anew, I didn't like the old bits I had) very soon. 

Acolyte

 Acolyte, hide the questions in your eyes.

You're not supposed to look into the light and ask why.

[view full-size on flickr (where it looks better)]

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.

Kit 49 - Part Four

My real life trip to Southern California is coming to a close. This time tomorrow, I'll already have been on the plane for an hour, provided I managed to navigate LAX alone successfully. It's not LAX that haunts my dreams, however. I've never flown alone before.

Anyway: I give you part four. I had a lot of fun putting the outfits together for this one and trying to work out what looked cool and what just looked like poor Kitti had fallen into a charity shop basket. Don't get me wrong - the fallen into a charity shop basket look isn't bad, it's just not what I was going for here. And it was quite interesting trying to make Kitti look like several different people without once changing her shape and/or bone structure (I'm still not really brave enough to mess with that!).

View on flickr - here.

Though I've enjoyed making all of these installments so far, I think I'm perhaps losing some of the sense of play that I started with. I felt a bit repetitive, since many of the shots I have used so far have been taken in the same place, and that place isn't all that big. For part five, I have taken some shots across a couple of sims, and I'm trying to find a way to put them together seamlessly. I'm planning a longer strip, too, perhaps more akin to the style of part one. We'll see what I end up with, I guess. 

I'm not much of a comic-book reader. I am familiar with the general style, of course, and I have read quite a few manga books now (namely, Hellsing and Death Note and some of Black Butler), but I'm really just playing with the images I have and what I'm capable of doing in Paint Shop Pro, which is my photo manipulation tool of choice.

But more on that soon, hopefully!

Kit 49: part one / part two / part three on flickr.

Kit 49 - Part Three

Hello from sunny SoCal! As promised, here is another installment, if you like, of my comic experiment Kit 49. Woo! The shot I gave you in my previous post on good faith is not from this part, but from part five - so I've got a couple more installments heading your way. Hurray for being organised!

More posts (not comic related) are on the way.

Kit 49 - Part Three

To view it full size, please click here. Thank you for Sion Pearl for being patient enough to pose for me - and for not adding too much to my ginger anxiety by questioning Kitti's adoption of blonde hair for this character (:P).

Kit 49: Part One / Part Two

Kit 49 - Part Two

A plain old cat

Since I enjoyed creating my previous comic/montage 'Kit 49', and got quite a bit of positive feedback, I decided that I'd made another. It's not as long nor as detailed as the other, but there we go.

Kit 49 - Part 2

It is best viewed large which, sadly, Blogger is not the best at facilitating. Please click here - here! - to view the image on my flickr (in the largest size, ha ha. You can then click where it says 'Kitti Wytchwood' to return to my flickr stream, if you so wish).

Thank you for reading!

Kit 49

This is just a quick post because I wanted to share with you an image I've spent far too long this evening, in the wake of my final exam, creating. 

After my recent post, Kicking the (Chrome) Bucket, I have been keeping an eye out as I surf the web for cyberpunk images, and, after coming across a pretty fantastic Hong Kong-esque cyberpunk comic-style drawing, I decided that I wanted to give it a-go myself. You can consider this a creative response akin to the Neo Cassandra post if it makes you feel better, but, in all honesty, I just wanted to 'create art', in all its pretentious glory.

Kit 49

All of the screenshots used were taken by me, with Kitti as my model, of course. I am quite pleased with the results! I could have done with a few more images, maybe, and a little more...action. But I think there is a fairly strong aesthetic, and it's my first one, so...be kind!

Click here to see the image, full size on my flickr: FULL SIZE or FULL SIZE WITH TEXT (which I'm not so sure about).

Neo Cassandra

During my time in SL, I have come across not only a wealth of interesting and creative avatars and in-world designers, but also a whole horde of creative SL bloggers. Now, admittedly, most of these bloggers are fashion bloggers, creating catalogues of inventive and often beautiful combinations of outfits, but it does not appear to be an uncommon phenomena for them to add amongst the screenshots and the "my avatar wears..." lists some kind of alternative creative response adding to the image or the atmosphere of the post. 

Amongst the blogs I follow, Sian Pearl does this most often, giving us not only great shots of herself, but also some kind of insight, poetic or prosiac, into the mind of the variation of character she has chosen to adopt today, or the thinking behind her creation. This evening, moments before coming over here to start this entry, I found an image in the flickr photo stream of Aida Ewing (who, I understand, runs the Glam Affair store in SL) which she has captioned with a link to a music video on Youtube. The picture can be found here - here! Similarly, over at Renoobed, a blog post appeared today featuring an amusing anecdote that then slipped into the lyrics of a song. The point I'm trying to make is that people aren't just straight-forwardly documenting their adventures (and their outfits) in SL - they're making art out of it, enjoying a little creative freedom.

And why shouldn't they? Avatars take time and effort and, unless you've a super computer that can handle SL's demanding graphics rendering systems and its tempestuous shadows that seem to cause EVERYONE to crash (I have never even been able to enable shadows, ha ha), they can take time and effort to photograph, too.

This evening, I logged in to find a group gift from the jewellery story Amorous, and decided, since I'd a little free time, that I would try to design an outfit to match it. I wanted to mix the mysticism of Matchbook Monday's jewellery with something edgy, cold, and maybe a little sci-fi, and when I trawled through my inventory, I realised that I was essentially recreating an image that I have been writing about beyond SL for several years now. It is an image that intrigues me, and I have been playing with it, writing poem after short scene after poem attempting to realise and build on that image. So why not use SL to help create another piece of original material to go with the rest of my work?

Why not indeed.

Daughter of Priam...

Over long lashes

Curled over yellow eyes, they fought

Ham-fisted, ham-hammered,

Caved in head after caved in head,

And it is done. Helen is

Returned, and all other women be

Damned

To rot alone

As their men fight another man's war.

But wait:

Neo Cassandra - Daughter of Priam - 

Clad in latex and steel - 

Saunters through the ruins of Troy

On Agamemnon's arm,

Headed west: Greece ahead

And there to make

A blood bath of another marriage bed.

...in the ruins of the city.

Please visit my flickr via this link - here! - to see these images in full size.