Facing Reality

Yes, this is a generic picture of Kitti. No, I couldn't think of a picture I could take that might be related to this post.

I wanted to talk, just a little bit, about that giant of social networks, the book of faces. Yes, I've seen The Social Network (the best bits of that film were the ones where I could recognise the soundtrack as being from Nine Inch Nail's Ghosts, or variations of, anyway. And, of course, the bits with the very attractive Andrew Garfield). I know what a big baddie Mark Zuckerberg has become - and yet pretty much all of us, for all of our whinging, still use Facebook.

As I understand it, a growing number of SL users have taken to making Facebook pages for their avatars, and in a few instances, those pages have been removed from Facebook on the grounds that they are not 'for real people'. In terms of Facebook policy, I understand the move, but from the perspective of the people who have put time and effort into these pages, it sucks massively. Often, there was no plan to deceive or trick anybody into thinking the SL avatar the page was for was, in any way, a flesh-and-blood being. 

On a related by tangential note: there exists now a search engine that apparently beats the Turing test - Eugene Goostman. The creepy little guy in the top left-hand corner looks like an SL avatar from 2009.  I wonder if he has a Facebook page.

There are, however, plenty of flesh-and-blood beings out there that use Facebook to create accounts for people who are not real in either life. You only have to watch five minutes of Catfish the TV show to see that, and to see the lengths some people will go to to maintain these false accounts - with intentions to deceive. 

There's no guarantee, either, that the accounts created by flesh-and-blood people using their real names and faces are any less deceptive. There are no restrictions on the number of personalities we are 'allowed', if you like, to play out on the Internet, and there's no obvious way to weed out the fake personalities from the real. It's also possible, depending on the way you engage with Facebook, that the information on your profile and/or your wall could create an image of you that is nothing like the real. And what I understand to be 'real' from one person's page might not be what you perceive to be 'real' from that same page.

As I have written about before, the levels of reality involved in avatar creation in SL vary drastically, and I suspect it might be equally difficult, in some instances, find the line between first life personalities and second, even amongst those who claim to take on a role when interacting in SL. How do you begin to prove the reality of a virtual existence that represents perhaps one side of your first life self? Is there a button you can tick on Facebook's Prove You Are Real system for 'this person is all my good bits', or 'this is a version of me who gets to live out some of my crazier dreams'? How about 'me, but with the legs that go on forever' - because I bet most of us would need to tick that option.

I realise that there are systems in place with Facebook that mean flesh-and-blood beings - 'real' people - can be investigated and asked to prove their reality, too. But it's still a complex issue. Being asked to prove that you are 'real' is a weird request, a really bizarre thing that we are being asked to do more and more frequently these days as computers become ever more wired into our lives. Passwords, your mother's maiden name, your first primary school, the name of your first dog, captcha forms, pin numbers, separate pin codes, alternative email addresses, someone-in-Korea-has-signed-in-to-your-account-is-this-you-? emails: it's only going to get worse and weirder.

Some laptops, designed for personal use, have face scanners and fingerprint readers built into them. My laptop has the latter, and when I first got it, a little icon would pop up in my taskbar practically begging me to create an electronic fingerprint lest some awful being attempt to switch my laptop on without my consent. I've a slightly better idea, Hewlett Packard - how about I just don't let weirdos who might attempt to use my computer without my knowledge into my house in the first place? It's not like it's an anti-theft device, really, either, because burglars are not really the types to hand my laptop back once thwarted.

Whilst setting up to take the picture for this post, Norah appeared behind me doing what appeared to be a sneaky pose. When I asked what she was doing, she said, and I quote, "photobomb = reality". So there. P.S. - no, I changed my dress for the opening shot, your eyes haven't gone squiffy.

I'm not really trying to start a philosophical debate here. I don't have the philsophical knowledge to back it up, and frankly, the nature of reality is interesting but has been debated a thousand times by a million people, all of whom are more interesting than I. What I wanted to do was draw attention to this phenomenon, and say...since when did we allow Facebook to weigh in on this? Since when did Facebook become a philsophical heavyweight?

And the bottom line is: understanding the necessity of such does not make it cease to be WEIRD.

Wussy Tuna

~ (o.o) ~

This morning, I was whisked away, spur of the moment, by Ruina to Innsmouth. Although I haven't read any Lovecraft (shock horror - I know, I know, pipe down), I am familiar with some of his themes and ideas, and even if I hadn't been, this little town was a treat.

The sim is pretty old school in that pretty much everything appears to be made out of prims. But it's done really well, and there is obviously a lot of love in those broken buildings and rusted, broken cars. Right at the beginning, there's a tunnel bridge that reminded both Ruina and I of the film Beetlejuice, and I should have known then from that shared recollection how awesome this date was going to be. 

We toured the ruined town, getting rained on and being sure to steer as clear of the water as we could. There were monsters aplenty, and when forced to confront them, we realised that actually, they were pretty wussy.

The fish jokes are endless

The real monsters on the sim were Ruina and I, laughing at the poor fishy men and making awful jokes about feeding the fish lord Dagon tuna for his lunch. Coming out of His Almighty Wetness' hall, we came across a gentleman who attempted to engage us in roleplay. We played along, but only half, and pretty soon the poor sociologist was more scared of us than any finned god. We were pretty sassy.

On a more serious note - just for a moment - the sim really is fantastic, and there are some wonderful little details that really make it really interesting. You could spend a long time just wandering around it, and Ruina informed me that those little details change periodically, so it's worth stopping by every now and again for a peek. You can visit it by clicking here - here!

This stunning lady was standing in a church, right about where the cross would usually be. She's horribly beautiful.

I am always drawn to windows. I've yet to decide whether I like this shot or not.

And - less serious now - there are some brilliant poses just waiting for you to click on them.

Oh no!

Ruina, jealous, wanted some slime t0o. I had to take the picture from this angle because her cigarette really makes it.

I feel as if I haven't written substantially enough about this date here, but I don't know what to say beyond that it is a fantastic sim, and that I had a fantastic time. Thank you so much, Ruina, for taking me there!

And - I almost forgot. We got to meet the Great Cthulu. Cthulhu? Cthulululuh...lu? Am I spelling that right?! Anyway. Him. We got to meet him.

Yeah. Him. See, you knew who I meant.

Ballooning Vulnerability

I don't consider myself to be a particularly weak person. I have my soft points, but I think anybody who knows me would probably agree that they are not easily got at. This morning, I was made to feel more uncomfortable and more vulnerable than I have ever been in Second Life.

The worst part is that the person who IM'd me and landed their hot air balloon, uninvited, on my skybox roof this morning was not unpleasant. At no point did he insult me, nor make any stupid sexual advances or comments. He sent me a message saying he was in the sim, had seen me on the map, and was saying hi. He told me he was in a hot air balloon, and was coming to find me. Was I in my skybox? I was? Cool. He was coming for a cup of tea. He did ignore my attempts to point out the weirdness of him inviting himself into my virtual home, but I wasn't especially insistent with them.

And why wasn't I? Whilst this was happening, I was relaying the chat to my friends sian and Norah, and they were equally weirded out. Norah was especially uncomfortable, and began to talk about the way girls are taught to be nice in the face of awkward and unwanted advances of all kinds.

She's right, of course. But this is something I am aware of, and something I have seen in my own behaviour and tried to moderate. It isn't that we shouldn't be nice to people because we should, whether we are male or female, but where and how do you draw the line? How do you make the switch from nice to firm? To nasty, even? 

With obvious provocation, it's easy. I kept expecting this guy to sudden realise I was trying to repel him and break out into insults. I expected to be a 'stuck up bitch', or a 'slut', or some 'prudent' combination of both, and had he begun down that path, I'd have had no trouble drawing the line in the sand and linguistically annihilating the bastard. 

But the insults never came, and when he landed on my roof, he still didn't understand that I didn't want him there and that I wasn't about to invite him inside. He stopped just shy of coming in of his own accord, but had my skybox possessed an obvious door, that wouldn't have been the case.

I had thought, as I could see him getting closer on the map, that he would get lost on the way somehow, or that he would get bored and go away. I thought he would get the message and stop. I considered, laughingly, moving the house when he got close by - but that wasn't a particularly practical notion. I also considered teleporting out of the sim and going somewhere else. I'd vanish from his map, and then maybe he wouldn't even be able to find my skybox. 

That's when the vulnerability set in. I had been told when I moved in to this sim that people could only access it if their names were on an 'accepted people' list, and I dutifully gave my friends' names to my landlady so that she could add them to that list and thus they would be allowed to come to visit. The security system in place stops people on the list from teleporting into the sim - but it doesn't stop them walking in, or, say, flying in in a hot air balloon. I have no system for ejecting someone from my house, and I seriously considered leaving it because of somebody else.

That annoys me. The idea of giving up my own turf for fear of somebody else annoys me. And yet, even with that realisation, I didn't know how to make the transition from being nice to telling this guy where to get off. I was afraid of judging it wrongly, of being, ultimately, impolite and/or more heavy handed than the situation called for. 

If it had been sian or Norah, or any of my other friends, faced with this situation, I would have had no qualms about stepping in and telling this guy where to go. I wouldn't have had a single one of these worries. It wouldn't have mattered.

...What is that about?!

Giant Mushrooms and an Alien Bike Ride

Aletheia

Out of the blue on Monday (I think it was Monday), the lovely Bunz IM'd me and invited me out on a date. Bunz and I met through a mutual friend, and we got chance to bond one afternoon at the bottom of the sea beneath my skybox when Party Cat went missing and Bunz volunteered to help find her. We didn't find her, but we did find a massive shark that you could ride on the back off around and around in circles. As you do.

First, Bunz took me to Aletheia, home of europa. Although I've shopped at europa before, I've never been to their in-world store, and it was pretty cool! Everything had a larger-than-life cartoon aesthetic, and the water was crystalline and beautiful. We bounced around on the enormous mushrooms, and tried to climb on top of the goblin statue you can see just on the edge of the picture above (but we couldn't - he was a hollow phantom and when I tried to stand on his head, I fell straight through him). I got the urge, too, to throw Kitti off the edge of the highest mushroom down into the water - so naturally, we gave in to my impulse. I tried to take a picture as we did it, but Bunz accidentally flew instead of jumping (non SL users: it's controlled by the same button), and thus all I managed to photograph was Kitti's hair de-rendering because I had zoomed too far out.

Bald Kitti and Non-Existent Bunz. Oops.

Next, Bunz took me on the most insane and hilarious joyride of my life...with ET.

Here we go

Henry Thomas and Drew Barrymore, eat your heart out!

When you arrive, a bicycle for two plus a fruit crate containing a wrapped-up ET appears on the floor of the forest. As soon as you hop on, the race begins. We were chased through the trees by police vehicles with flashing lights before we zoomed up into the sky, and cycled passed the Moon to recreate the classic ET image. After that, though, the ride stopped resembling any Steven Spielberg film and just turned to the insane. We were bombarded by all kinds of aliens and weirdos perched on different levels in the sky (but unfortunately, we moved far too fast for me to snap any pictures of them). They were hideous, and looked like something out of Monty Python.

At the end, we landed and the bike vanished, and ET appeared in a stereotypical flying saucer and took to the sky in the wake of a pretty impressive firework display and light show. However, I obviously triggered the button for ET's ascendance a second time when I tried to leave the scene because it started up again and the ever-charming Bunz laughed her head off and said ET wanted to abduct me. 

Attempted abduction

You'll be relieved to know that I didn't get abducted. We managed to escape off the mud and out passed a whole wall of aliens-for-sale. If you're looking for some aliens to jazz up your house or whatever, I'd recommend seeing ET about them.

I had an absolutely fantastic time. Bunz is lovely and hilarious, and this was a fantastic and certainly original date. I laughed for the duration of the sky bike ride, and for a good ten minutes afterwards. It was brilliant. I'd recommend it to everyone and I am seriously going to be taking/sending everyone I know to experience it :P.

If you'd like to see it for yourself, click here - here! Likewise, you can visit Aletheia by clicking here - here! Thank you so much, Bunz, for a great time.  

If you'd like to take me out on a non-romantic date, whether you know me in-world or not, please don't hesitate to send me a message :). I'd love to hear from you.

Om Nom Noming into Forever

Simon took this. His shots came out much prettier than mine.

So the feedback I've had to my proposal idea has all been positive, and I'm excited to say that people are starting to message me and ask to take me to places. This is exciting!

My first came on Saturday in the form of Simon May and the Pixel Pot Restaurant and Cafe. The only warning I had about where we were going was "for dinner", and Simon had never been to this place before either.

The restaurant was very prettily put together, with indoor and outdoor dining spaces and, across the way, a stretch of pretty prim-sea complete with a ship and a lighthouse. The best, weirdest and most interesting thing about the restaurant was that the owners provided a waiting-on service, a full menu, and what we ordered was actually brought to the table, in actual pixel-food form. I'm just going to let that sink in a minute.

This is one of my shots. See, not half as pretty as Simon's.

There it is, see. The waiter showed us to our table, sent us a menu, took our order, took it away to the kitchen for the "chef" to "cook", and returned with plates of exactly what we had ordered. Here's my spaghetti and meatballs, and Simon's tuna steak with asparagus. There were animations in the chairs that allowed us to simulate eating, and knives and forks were given to us to make the experience all the more authentic. We even had a glass of white wine each. And dessert.

I took a shot with the interface in view, so you could see the menu and how the ordering worked. And our waiter, Gavin :). In the background is the main restaurant itself.

The desserts too pretty to eat, even if we could.

The restaurant even has a reservation system, although it was pretty quiet whilst we were there. You do have to pay for the experience which, I confess, I found slightly odd since we weren't actually paying for any ingredients. However, the owners of the restaurant must still have to pay rent, and I guess we were paying for the waiter's time (and I have no issue with that). We spent about as much time there as I would expect to spend in a real life restaurant, and it didn't cost anywhere near as much as that real experience would have.

Whilst we were eating, too, the waiter, unbeknownst to us, took our picture, and when we came to leave, we were presented with the picture in a frame and stamped with the restaurant's logo. The idea seems more reminiscent of rollercoasters than restaurants, but I think it says a lot about the kind of experience the restaurant owners expect it to have been.

Simon remarked that it was funny how something as mundane and normal as eating could be transformed into something I considered to be weird in SL (and I do think it's weird, really weird), especially considering the time I spend in science fiction and fantasy roleplay and dress. We can be anything we want to be, and that is normal, but eating? Eating is weird. 

I see his point, but I think the strangeness of the concept is rooted in something other than flouting supposed impossibilities; it lies in necessity. It reaches back to the first essay I ever wrote about SL wherein I commented on virtual washing machines and toilets. Why worry about eating when you don't have to?

Of course, dining has become an activity for pleasure as much as need - for some, I guess it could even be considered a hobby. And whilst there is nothing stopping me from going out to a restaurant in the real world, it would take an awful lot of time, effort and money to arrange to go out to a restaurant in the real world with Simon because he lives quite a way away from me. There is something good and happy, I think, in the spontaneity of virtual dinners with faraway people. We take intimacy from breaking bread with each other, and after this experience, I think it's fair to say the breaking of virtual bread feels no different.

I found it absolutely impossible not to laugh. Set up with the repetitive eating animations and what was, essentially, plastic pixel food, Simon and I could have sat there eating for all eternity. The food would never run out. Our arms would never get tired. Our bellies would never be full. The waiter might get a bit bored, I'll grant, but unless he's got a hud that allows him to twist his avatar's face into an expression of annoyance, we might never know. We'd be om nom noming into forever. If that isn't funny, I'm not sure what is.

I'll be over here laughing in the corner by myself. 

The conversation was sparkling, of course, and Simon is a charming and always impeccably dressed companion. I had a great time, and it was certainly a unique experience in my Second Life. Thank you, Simon :).

If you're like to visit the Pixel Pot, you can do so by clicking here - here!

Proposal

Text reads: I would like you to take me out on a (non-romantic) date. Where we go is entirely up to you,  but please tell me if I need to put shoes on before we go. I'm usually barefoot.
 

When we go is also pretty much up to you. I'm in the UK, so my clock is eight hours ahead of SLT/PDT - so please bear that in mind when making time suggestions. Times don't have to be exact, but obviously I need a rough idea so I can make sure I don't miss you! If you want to IM me out of the blue and see if I'm free, I'm totally cool with that too. Whatever works.

I'm not expecting you to entertain me for hours - I just thought this would be a good way of exploring SL, meeting new people and getting to know others better. If you let me take our picture there, I'd be very grateful (but you are under no obligation to allow that, at all).

So, show me what you've got up your sleeve? - pretty places, quirky places, silly places, whatever you like. Please IM me, or drop me a message on Flickr or Plurk or wherever - my username on pretty much every platform is Kitti Wytchwood.

Junk Shop of Eternity

Junk Shop of Eternity

Sentimentality is a cute but largely useless trait to possess - and possess it I do. Aesthetics and pragmatics don't stand a chance against But It Was Made Especially For Me or The First One I Ever Bought/Made/Was Given. It isn't that I was brought up to be a materialist, nor that I place value and security in palpability (although many writing about my generation say that we have and do), but is instead based on something that goes beyond the realms of capitalism and being just plain shallow.

The danger, perhaps, is that our understanding, appreciation, and love of Beyond Face Value Worth predates the internet and cloud storage. So does its slightly less sophisticated cousin I Just Really Like It.

In many games, avatars are limited in how much they can carry around with them at any one time, and even when games permit the buying of houses and safety deposit boxes, they are generally used to store items that will, at some point or another, fulfill their purpose and thus vanish from existence. That Second Life is not really a game is pretty well-established, and one of the smaller reasons for this is its deviation from this practical limitation. What I am trying to say is that SL avatars have the potential to be wardrobes-to-Narnia; they can walk around carrying as many things as they like in their inventories, and they don't have to worry about overtaxing their agility or juggling heavy garments with the invisible item bag. The items they carry, too, are rarely of the one-time-use variety. As I write, Kitti has an inventory of 12,384 items, and from conversations with other SL users, I've come to realise how small Kitti's inventory is. 

If a large wardrobe can hold, let's say, 100 items at the outside limit, that means Kitti is effectively carrying around 1,238 wardrobes, all of which lead to Narnia. As Louis said to Lestat, we're making a junk shop of eternity.

If there is a limit on how large Linden Labs allow their user's inventories to be, I have no idea what it is, and it isn't any limit I'm afraid to hit any time soon. Of course, having a large inventory stored somewhere in the internet isn't quite as carefree and easy as it sounds - your computer has to haul up the list of items in your possession and recall all of the pathways that lead to those intangible objects, and this can create a serious amount of lag. But lots of other factors contribute to lag, and they can be overcome by super fast internet connections and super fast computers. And we're not the ones doing the heavy lifting. It's just not the same thing.

The maintenance and curation of our inventories is left entirely up to us, and that's where sentimentality comes into play. As technology develops and the quality of items in SL gets better, how do we balance innovation with sentimentality? How do we manage the deeply capitalist SL system of AcquireAcquireAcquire? 

These thoughts were prompted by, of all things, my virtual cats. Scout and James refused to produce more kittens, and whilst I was getting disappointed about the lack of new cats, I started wondering just how many cats I could fit in my skybox before I lost my temper over tripping over the damn things. And when I logged in this weekend and found almost all of the cats were sick and I had to pay for medicine for them, I realised I had to give the question some serious thought.

When KittyCats get sick, they magic up these little beds and thermometers. They're obviously carrying them around in their own little invisible inventory bags. Since these cats live out of Kitti's inventory, there are bags within bags. Bagception.

But how do I get rid of my virtual cats? I feel highly sentimental about them, for no real reason I can rationalise, and at the moment at least, I can navigate about half of the skybox without tripping over one and going cartwheeling into the wall. 

Where do I draw the line? And then, once done, how do I process the guilt of it?

Souls

A couple of weeks ago, Strawberry Singh challenged her blog readers to take and post black and white portraits of their avatars, and it got me thinking (read her post here - here!). Being something of an amateur photographer in real life, I have dabbled with black and white photography, but it hasn't been something I have given much time to when it comes to my Second Life photography. 

We tend to use black and white when we want to capture something beyond the immediate - beyond the tangible, the obviously-present, the singular moment. We use it to photograph the soul. I'm sure that there's a lot of philosophy and photographic theory out there to support/condemn this idea, but that's back-up I'm not sure I need right now. The idea is just interesting to think about by itself, isn't it?

Kitti

Does a Second Life avatar have a soul? Do you even believe that humans in the first life have souls - as something distinct from the body and/or brain? You could argue that avatars don't have souls...but you could also argue that we imbue them with our own souls. If that is the case, technically speaking, looking at a black and white portrait of my avatar and then a black and white portrait of my real life self, would I be looking at the same image?

You could also argue that, despite what we might say to the contrary,  our minds and souls are married to our bodies - or, at least, to the concept of flesh and bone. So Kitti's virtual flesh placed around my soul could create something different, something new, purely through the new combination. If these new virtual souls exist, do they exist on the same level as souls in real life, or are they somewhere else? Would they existence mean the existence of a new virtual metaphysical realm?

Posting a picture of my own virtual face here didn't quite seem like enough, so I roped sian and Niri into posing for me, too. I asked sian and Niri because they are good friends of mine and because they happened to be online when I was shooting my own portrait, but they are actually desperately interesting subjects to examine for souls.

sian

One of the other places we look for the soul, whether they happen to be in black and white or in colour, are the eyes. sian doesn't usually have what we might consider to be 'normal' eyes, but opts for these white-outs. She has said before that the realism of SL eyes makes her uncomfortable, but she's hasn't gone so far as to remove the sight-organs from her face altogether, and often her blank eyes are still decorated by make-up and eyelashes to die for. 

Niri

Niri is another interesting case in the soul-discussion because she is only one incarnation of her creator. Sometimes Niri is Nero, and everything about her changes except her creator's account name. Such drastic changes - including gender and skin colour and species - are not exceptional in SL, but the decision to label them are distinctly separate characters is. These are not alternative accounts: both Niri and Nero occupy the same virtual space, and because of that, they cannot both be present at the same time. Where is the soul division here? Is there any?

I am aware, of course, that all photography is subjective. Both knew I was taking the pictures for a post about souls, but neither knew how that might play out in practice. I asked that they pose for me in whatever pose they liked, and they had free reign on how they looked for the shoot. My only requests were that we use a white wall as a background, and that the poses be simple and allow me to clearly see their faces. In terms of post-processing, all I have done to the images is crop out the excessive white space and press the preset 'Greyscale' button in Paint Shop Pro. I began messing with the Channel Mixer filter, but that felt like I was having too much of a hand in the way the black-and-white worked, so I settled for the less impressive and less intrusive method. There would be no way to make it any less biased than this unless I did not know my subjects. 

Niri introduced her hands into the photograph, and I think there is the basis here for a whole study on where we look, and where we find, the markers of the soul in the virtual. Niri's picture is changed by the inclusion of her hands - and not only because she's using her fingers to tell us all to fuck off.

At the end of Strawberry Singh's post, she encouraged her readers to post links to their own images and thus inadvertently created a potential soul catalogue. 

What do you see here? Anything? Nothing?

Thank you sian and Niri for letting me take your picture. P.S. - nobody gets any points for pointing out that Kitti, as a ginger, has no soul.

The Red Pill

Let's see how deep the rabbit hole goes

Because I'm as mad as a hatter, I logged onto Facebook, and then Tumblr, this morning and invited questions from non-SL users about Second Life. I thought I might get a little variety in the questions, maybe get asked how something worked, or if such-and-such was true, but the four - I know, I know, I need to sit down, it's so many - responses I received were all to the tune of one question: What is Second Life, and why would you ever 'go' there?

Deep breath. 'What is Second Life' has got to be up there with the great unexplainable mysteries of life. God, the Big Bang, dark matters, why washing machines make widows of socks, why toast always lands butter-side down: we may never know the answer to these, nor may we ever come up with a completely satisfactory answer to What Second Life Is, but - take another deep breath - I am going to try and answer it nonetheless. I am going to bravely go where a thousand pink-haired rabbits have probably gone before me (we are talking about the Internet, after all). 

We're going to take the red pill. Fasten your seatbelt, Dorothy.

What is Second Life?

Second Life is a virtual world that exists somewhere within the Internet. When you download SL, what you are really doing is downloading what we call a 'viewer' - software with which to open a portal to allow you to see into, and create an avatar within, Second Life. The language of this suggests the opening of a window - literally - to view something which is already in existence just, usually, beyond your line of sight. When you log out and the window closes, the world carries on without you.

The easiest thing to do is to liken SL to a game - preferably, an MMO like World of Warcraft, except with more possibilities when it comes to character creation and customisation. Whilst this analogy works to explain how SL exists in the first place, it doesn't take into account that SL has no predefined objectives, no scoring system, no health or experience bars. In WoW, you can create characters that all exist in the same world, from the same lore, and all learn and level-up based on the same markers for advancement. In SL, not only do you not 'level-up', but the people you are meeting and interacting with may be pulling ideas and information from entirely different worlds and lores from you. The basis for the creation of their characters might be wildly different from yours, and you cannot even rely on the idea that the person before you comes from the same society as you in the real world, because that person could be from a country on the other side of the world from you. 

It's impossible not to draw similarities between SL and The Matrix. A whole virtual simulated world, a replica of the real world, which you reach by plugging yourself into a computer. If you die in the Matrix, you die in the real world - not the case with SL, but then that's because you cannot really die in SL. If someone upsets you in the virtual world, however, it's not so easy to let that emotion go when you go back to the real world. Whether you like it or not, just as your mind travels into the Matrix, so your mind travels with you into SL. And as Morpheus says and as I have repeated here ad nauseam, 'the mind makes it real'.

It's not all nearly as scary as I have made it sound there. Most of the characters I have come across have been 'normal' humans, so to speak, and because of time differences, and because of the social circles I have fallen in with, most of the people I meet are British or American. Those contexts are not, exactly, worlds apart. The only people I have come close to offending with my foreign-lore-ways were the Tolkien elves, and they turned out to be more laid back than I had been warned they would be. Usually, if you say please and thank you, and know how to take turns in a conversation, you'll be just fine.

In fact, SL seems to thrive on a kind of honesty not found, at least in my social circles, in real life. Anonymity can be a great bolster to confidence, but people in SL are often very forthright and open about things as personal as mental health, and sex. Sometimes, they can be a little too forthright, and as such, a lot of 'drama' takes place. Drama is a major issue for SL, and it's something that has been known to drive people away from engaging with the virtual world. 

Because of the drama, and because there is no specific law (that I am aware of) for SL, SL is populated with vigilantes. On forums, personal blogs, and social media networks such as Plurk, vigilantes launch attacks, rightly or wrongly, against those they deem to be wrongdoers, accusing them of everything from copyright infringement to child pornography. Charity fundraisers that didn't give the money they raised to charity, people that think it's O.K. to sell clothes featuring swastikas or dressed inspired by the Columbine school shooting, insensitive remarks about rape - it's all happened in SL, and it's all been pointed out and dealt with by vigilantes. In terms of social and individual empowerment, it's fantastic; but, with any good vigilante film, there's always the fear that people see and accuse first, and ask questions later. Butchering one person doesn't change a general attitude.  

In terms of physicality, SL looks like...well...a whole lot of different things. There is no one aesthetic, and no rhyme or reason to how the virtual world is arranged. If you owned the land and the building skills, you could place Australia beside, say, Sweden, and have one foot in each replica-country, except SL is usually more diverse than that. Instead of building two countries next to each other, more often than not I find I could have one foot in a boxing ring a la Fight Club, and the other in a meadow which is home to a race of fairies with mermaid fins. 

Because there are so many individual creators and designers, the lands (sims) you can walk through can change as often and as quickly as the English weather. Since there is no are-you-any-good-at-this test, the quality of the builds can vary dramatically, too, and they will only exist as long as you keep paying for the land you are renting from Linden Labs. If you stop paying, you lose your right to build there. If you choose to rent land through a middle man, and someone offers you a better deal, you can move your building to another virtually-physical location. In that way, you can never wholly be sure that the place you are trying to visit is still going to be there. I tried to teleport (main method of transportation, after walking) to the World's End Garden earlier (see what that looks like here - here!), and instead ended up on a sim full of everyday-looking houses and great big palm trees.

Why Second Life? What is the point?
Second Life means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, and what drives them to the virtual world in the first place is not necessarily what keeps them there. There's no way I can account for everyone's motives, but here are some thoughts.

SL is, potentially, a fantastic platform for design, creation, and money-making. Designing avatars and building houses in SL has the same appeal as designing avatars and building houses does on programmes such as the Sims. In SL, however, whilst you can get a limited about of clothes and items for free, things cost money, and land to build on costs money, and so many people turn to creating and selling their owns items or clothing in order to make SL pay for itself. For creatives, it's a great way to make a bit of pocket money, and also another forum for you to spread your artwork. I know of more than one real life artist who uses SL to sell artwork in various forms and to build up another fan-base. SL also offers access, thusly, to a wide range of other creatives with which you can bounce ideas and collaborate. That's exciting, no?

Some people with anxiety and/or depression also find solace in the virtual world. Being able to hide behind a different face can be a confidence booster, and it allows greater control over who you interact with, and when - especially since there are a thousand legitimate and familiar excuses you can employ to soften the I-don't-want-to-speak-to-you blow. There is one person I call friend who uses SL to get out and socialise because he is a full-time carer and cannot leave his house for personal time very often. 

It is also, alternatively, a place in which to hide - just as people hide from real life in books, games, and TV shows - , a place where the thing you are running from doesn't have to exist for a while. There's a danger there, in that a lot of expectation is made of what the virtual world is capable of, and sometimes it is all too easy to hide within its virtual boundaries and not to deal with the issues that originally drove us there. Alternatively, it offers a sanctuary in which to gather strength and support until you are ready to confront the real world. SL can't give you any answers that the real world can't, but perhaps the performance of life, the framing of it - and the performance and framing of yourself - can help lead you to the answers we can only get from ourselves.

Other people use SL as a place for self-experimentation, whether that be on a shall-I-dye-my-hair-purple level, or a am-I-into-BDSM-sex level. This ties (ha ha) into roleplay, but goes beyond just sexual roleplay - SL presents another medium in which to roleplay, listing itself beside the tabletop and forums. People in SL take RP very seriously, and the creation of collaborative stories like this is a wonderful thing in my opinion.

As I have written about here (- here!), there is no obligation to be the person you are in real life in your Second Life. If you want to log on and act like a chauvinist, off you go (it happens more than you might imagine). You can use your avatar to pretend to be confident, to pretend to be a rogue - to pretend to be whatever you like. As I've suggested, you don't even have to be human. You could be an animal, real or mythological, or a car, or an aeroplane, or a robot. The limits are the building skills of the virtual community.

The point, truly, is that Second Life has no point other than the point you give it, and many people stop engaging with Second Life when their original motive finds some real-life conclusion. If you get passed the difficult interface and utterly unintuitive avatar customisation, as well as the idiots that line up to flash their fake penises at newbies, there are some fantastic things to see in Second Life. Virtual coastlines, beautiful dream-worlds, spaceships, dragons, diners plucked straight out of the 1950s; if you can think of it, it probably exists, and if not, you can create it for yourself. 

Of course, there are an awful lot of fake penises kicking around, too.

Does that even begin to answer either question? There seems to be so much to say, but I think that is enough for now. I'm late for a very important date.

Don't Nuke Our Cyberspace, Bro!

collective hallucination

I have begun reading a book, Technobiophilia, Nature and Cyberspace by Sue Thomas, and although I haven't read very much yet, it is really interesting. Interesting enough to send me scurrying back here to take screenshots of Kitti in space-soldier gear in the multi-coloured sensation that is the bar at Hangars Liquides.

Thomas cites John Perry Barlow's 2006 book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, as discussing how 'the notion of the disembodiment of cyberspace got mixed up with mysticism and LSD for a while',  and goes on to say that the term 'cyberspace' itself has long been out of fashion, except with the military, 'where it represents a potential combat area'. In 2011, the US Department of Defense issued a document entitled a Strategy for Operating in Cyberspace, the purpose of which, as I understand it, was to encourage a full use of cyberspace for offensive and defensive purposes. In the foreword (these documents have forewords?!), Barack Obama wrote 'the digital world is no longer a lawless frontier' - but does not go on to say what the virtual world now is.

Thomas goes on to say that the internet, the World Wide Web, cyberspace, the whole lot, has deep roots in nature: 'the bramble of interwined ideas, links, documents, and images create an otherness as thick as a jungle'.

And that's it - that's what I'm getting at, getting into. In a few short pages of this book, a wonderfully terrible and frightening and empowering image of cyberspace, of the virtual world, as being something strange and dangerous and other has materialised. And it is complicated by Thomas' definition of cyberspace as being something that exists only in the mind - so this strange dangerous otherness becomes something we carry around in our heads.

Are you still with me? Maybe this is a bit self-indulgent, but hang in there.

There's a series of episodes of South Park in which the boys have to try to convince the military not to nuke the world's imagination after the imagination has been taken hostage by terrorists. The imagination becomes a battleground, and, in true South Park style the military do, of course, nuke it, and Santa has to save the day. I'm not sure that Santa is going to come and save us if our cyberspace gets nuked.

And doesn't it seem all-too-organic that cyberspace would be associated with LSD and hippydom, since it is a potential space of threat to the US Government? The opposition is almost funny.

What it seems to boil down to is vagueness. We don't yet know, truly, the limits of cyberspace. There are so many dark and shady places online, and in them lurk things most of us couldn't even dream up on an LSD trip. But the worst thing is that it, as a space, is organised. There are groups and hierarchies and networks along which pass all kinds of information in all kinds of formats. Very recently, people have met in cyberspace to organise, and then to conduct, riots and revolutions on grand scales. Is it any wonder that cyberspace and indeed the internet can be viewed as a threat?

Amongst the general public, understanding of how it all works can get mixed up and confused very easily, and misapprehension and not understanding something at all are wonderfully fertile grounds for fear.

Where do we, as inhabitants of the virtual world of Second Life - a 'collective hallucination' that has begun to have more tangible, more visible, roots, if anything in cyberspace does - fit into all of this? How much power do we have to shape cyberspace, considering that the space exists inside everyone who is aware of its existence to whatever degree and it is unlikely that we know nearly enough of these people to begin to make a dent? Whilst we might all be connected in cyberspace, we are most definitely not all listening to each other. Second Life is bigger than any one of us, and it is only a small part of cyberspace in the first place.

Already, it's starting to sound messy. I'm going to stop.

But isn't it interesting?

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?!

Low Level Troll

Goodness Grief!

This is the closest I'm ever going to get to live blogging. As I write, I am being griefed. Yes, right now. This crazy person is wearing a cube that changes texture every few seconds, and literally bouncing around the shop. He's emitting all kinds of strange sounds from pop music to film soundbites and scary Hallowe'en voices. 

And he's just stopped. Maybe that in itself is part of the griefing experience - he took away my right to claim I was live blogging by vanishing the second I tried to make the claim. Boo!

Anyway: when he first appeared, I didn't notice him. I was talking to my friend Iahn, standing around in a shop at the Rockabilly Fair, and all of these grey squares started to fall through the ceiling. I had no idea what was going on - then the music started, and when I asked Iahn what was happening, he said 'it's Violent Noob'. Then the cube-man appeared, and everything started to make sense. I'd never been griefed before.

Then he started shouting in local chat. Apparently, his cube-dancing antics were supposed to kill us, and he got all subversive on us by shouting 'rape' repeatedly. He went on to tell us all to leave his shop, although I'm pretty sure Ducknipple, strange as their store name is, isn't run by one Mr Violent Noob. The grey squares that fell through the ceiling - a kind of picture-rain - were seriously laggy, but honestly, I started to laugh. What else was I supposed to do?

With the help of Gyazo, I managed to add to the live-blogging thing by making a gif of the picture rain. Here it is!

Cloudy with a chance of

For non-SL users, griefers and griefing are basically SL trolls and trolling. They're usually creative types (they rez lots and lots of items) who try generally to be disruptive and/or create so much lag that we all get kicked out of SL, or are forced to log out. Trolls exist everywhere there is the cover, however thin, of anonymity, and I'm not going to attempt to psycho-analyse the phenomenon because it's already been done a million times by people far more qualified to do so than me.

But I have to confess that I was kind of disappointed by this encounter. Although it created some lag, and shouting 'rape' in the face of the wrong person could cause a lot of distress, it seemed like a pretty low-level grief attack. It gets maybe a two out of ten for creativity and planning, and it did very very little to disrupt the Rockabilly Fair, which probably only had about five people in it, myself and the griefer included, when it happened. Really, I think this guy was just bored and figured he'd come and have a little rave. 

I only resisted making tart comments at his expense because who knows what else this guy would be capable of if I drew attention to myself. And I suppose that's the scary thing - I was afraid to confront even this low level troll lest it come back to haunt me later. I kept my mouth shut. 

One of the first videos I ever saw about SL was this one below. The video, and other literature surrounding internet trolls, made me think that griefing in SL was very common, and I expected to be griefed every time I logged in. This just has not been the case, and whilst I found this episode funny, I can't say I'm not pleased that I've managed to go three years without experiencing this.

I think Anshe Chung's griefer scores far better on the griefer scale than our poor joker.

Pussycat Pussycat, Where Have You Been?

Not to London to visit the Queen. Actually, I have travelled in the complete opposite direction, and am currently in a town an hour outside of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK.

What does this have to do with Second Life? Very little, actually. But I know I haven't been in-world very much over the past couple of weeks, and I'm afraid that this trend is set to continue, although I have managed to log in a couple of times.

My absence is due to the fact that my RL theatre company are performing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this month. Our show opens next Monday, and runs until the end of the festival, and there is lots of putting up posters and handing out flyers and paying of insurance to be done in the meantime. And lines to learn. Don't forget the lines I have to learn.

I'll be back soon. And I'll be back to some serious blogging. I promise. 

Where have you been?

When I logged in last night to take a picture to use for this placeholder post, I decided to stop by tram and try on a hairstyle I've been hoping will suddenly just magically fit Kitti's apparently huge head (still no luck). Standing in the hair room was an avatar dressed up as Deadpool. He proceeded to tell me that I had a beautiful mind, which he could tell because of the words I used (those words being "hi" "funny is one word" "that's very kind of you"), and ask me if I'd be his tea-crumpet. He was certainly an interesting man. A real philosopher.

In the end, I didn't get my picture, and had to log in this morning to snap this one. I'm glad, to be honest, because I teleported to the World's End Garden and found it just as the Sun was setting. It's too beautiful for words. Amongst the on-going stress of mounting a show at the Edinburgh Fringe, I needed those few moments with that light and the sea. If you haven't been to World's End, or haven't been for a while, I urge you to go. 

And if you happen to be in Edinburgh (UK) for the Festival this year, send me a message and I'll send you the details of my show. It would be great to see you there, and it's free! I made this picture here - here! - to advise my show a little while ago.