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."

Dead Woman Walking

Last week, I managed to get myself involved in a roleplay scene that required me to play a role I have never really played before: the bad guy. More often than not, my characters are either down-and-outs who are forced to do distasteful and hideously unpleasant things for the greater good, or mercenaries-with-a-conscience that are forced to do really distasteful and traumatically unpleasant things for what they hope is the greater good. Whilst that might seem to be a pretty narrow field, it is, actually, inexhaustible, and I enjoy the infinite possibilities for variety that come with it.

But there I was, being a baddie. And looking like a complete bitch. Sian and I put our roleplay outfits together, well, together, and it was under her influence that Kitti ended up looking like the secretary from a science fiction film noir.

Space Noir

I am not a fan of planned roleplay (in fact, it makes me want to run away very very quickly), but having a character and knowing what it is that they want is endlessly helpful. That want doesn't, necessarily, have to be something that can happen immediately, nor does it have to be something terribly specific. This was actually one of the only times for me in SL roleplay where what my character wanted was very specific: to retrieve the errant agent P, and re-format her. This was made more complicated by the presence of Norah, a friend of the runaway who, let me tell you now, packs a punch.

What is it about roleplays involving Sian during which I get punched?! This isn't on. Back in the old days, when I first started doing roleplay via MSN Messenger, my first writing partner used to smack me over the head with a crowbar every time he wanted to change the locale. This did not amuse me.

Last week's roleplay scenario was interesting not only because I was a baddie, but because that baddie character I was playing could easily be an extension of the character I have previously roleplayed with Sian in the past. Little fresh-faced Kitti was offered a job by Sian in the very first roleplay we wrote together, and though the terms of that position were never formally laid out, it was abundantly clear that it would be in the sex industry. What became clear from this roleplay was that the world I had thrust my poor little down-and-out into was one that had expectations of her pretty face and young body, and for somebody like Kitti who had nowhere else to go, it was difficult not the see the security such an institution might provide. Are you repulsed yet? If not, I'm writing it incorrectly.

Those boots were so made for stamping on hopes and dreams...:P

 So this new, harder Kitti, made cruel by those harsh crescent moons of make-up and that brash red lipstick (not to mention the ponytail - that's gotta hurt when you take the band out!), is now on the other side of the sex industry system. To avoid joining the ranks of the pleasure dolls, she has joined those who look after them and keep them in line. And that is a wonderfully dark playground of possibilities and opportunities and complexities that I am rather excited to play out, and which give more depth and scope to my character than just labelling her a "baddie". Hopefully, I'll be able to deliver a few (emotional) punches myself before this story is exhausted. If not...I've got a really, really big gun to wave around. That should do the trick.

The scariest thing about being the villain of this piece is that I am, for the moment at least, the only one. Our roleplay scene took place at Hangars Liquides, home of the Crimson Merchants who had taken the errant agent in and made of her a friend. Now they've found out what went down in the Rainbow Bar (and if you want to know, too, I'll provide a link to Sian's posting of our log at the end of this post), they've declared that Kitti is a "dead woman walking". This is hilarious, of course, but still...scary. Sooner or later, I am going to end up in a room surrounded by people pointing guns at me, and I'm going to have to do some very quick talking to get my way out of that one. Hopefully, though, I've put a good word in about the choice of venue for this little showdown, so I'll at least get to meet them on my own terms. 

Fingers crossed, anyway.

If I get punched again, however, I might just rage-quit :P.

Click here - here! - to read a neatened up version of our roleplay chat log, as posted by Sian Pearl on her blog.

A Love Letter to Hangars Liquides

My favourite sim - aside from the one that houses my lovely skybox garden, of course - is Hangars Liquides. If you hadn't worked this out already...where have you been?! What I love about Hangars is...pretty much everything. It is a beautifully built science-fiction sim, and though it is dark and mysterious, and it is often raining, it is not without a sense of humour. 

Its builder, Djehan Kidd, is probably a genius. She pays so much attention to detail that there is even graffiti on the walls, and, in one apartment, there is a smoking cigarette resting in an ashtray. The sim features almost every kind of setting you could require from a science-fiction sim (at least in my limited experience of sci-fi, anyway) and probably some settings that had never occurred to you before: including busy streets, a market, a nightclub, a sky garden, a temple, public baths, holding cells, scanning machines, offices, junkie apartments, a taxi system and the most beautiful virtual beach I have ever seen...and the list goes on. 

It is presided over, too, by Lawrence Celestalis, who is a wonderful and charming gentleman who was totally cool with me repeatedly throwing my avatar off high objects and attempting to photograph her mid-fall. That was one of our first encounters, actually, when he caught me doing that, and do you know what he did? He laughed.

The one thing I hate about Hangars Liquides is that, no matter how many times I have tried (and I have tried many times), I cannot take good photographs of the sim when my intention is to take good photographs of the sim. In other words, I only seem to be able to capture the beauty and the intricacy of Hangars Liquides when I'm trying to photograph Kitti in that setting. My general landscape-type photos fall utterly flat, and do the sim absolutely no justice whatsoever. 

So here. Instead of posting a whole bunch of flat, useless, unflattering landscape-type pictures of Hangars Liquides, I am going to post utterly un-new pictures of the sim, some of which may have appeared on my Flickr before if not on here, and hope that these give you a sense of what an utterly wonderful place it is. If you want some more, please click the links at the end of this post - or visit! 

Scanning

Le Jardin Electric

The Beach

In the street - the streetlights make me want to be a saint

Apartments for rent

Apartments for rent - with the wonderful Mr.Celestalis

For more: Hangars Liquides in my Flickr stream / Hangars Liquides on the whole of Flickr.

Want to visit Hangars Liquides? Taxi!

Daredevil

As you may have noticed from my last few blog posts, my avatar has a new skin. It's a couple of shades darker than my usual, but I really like it, though it has meant I've had to darken her hair by a few shades, too. She's still ginger, though - to keep my anxieties at bay. What a new skin usually means is a whole new set of images - profile pictures, blog banners - and this time has been no exception, as you may have also noticed by the shiny new banner at the top of this page. But here it is again, because why not:

Oooo, shiny!

I'm quite pleased with my banner, not in the least because it proved itself to be so difficult to make. I did try to replicate the old one, going to the Blade Runner sim and using the fall poses, but it wasn't quite working out for me. So I went to one of my new favourite places, Hangars Liquides, and began throwing myself off buildings.

That isn't a joke. There are, at the present at least, no handily set-up falling poses in Hangars Liquides, and I wasn't sure how else to get a falling shot. I made Kitti fly - HL is one of the few sims that actually lets you fly! - up high above a road, then positioned the camera just above the road, looking upwards. Then I hit the 'stop flying' button, meaning that Kitti would plunge to her death. I think I get brownie points for the idea, but no matter what I did, I couldn't lie the camera up with Kitti and she would end up landing just behind where I'd positioned the camera. At the time, I didn't think of doing a blog post about it, so I didn't keep any of the out-take images. Sorry. 

After a few tries, I gave up, and went onto the marketplace to look for a set of falling animations. I found one, though the animations in the pack seemed to have more agency than simply 'falling'. They were all 'falling-on-purpose' or, like the one I ended up using for my banner, 'jumping off a ledge'. But I figured that, with a pretty cool sci-fi outfit and a pretty cool sci-fi city like Hangars Liquides, jumping off a ledge could be. Well. Pretty cool. 

There were a few hiccups. Positioning my avatar right on the edge of the bridge-thing proved difficult, and sometimes Kitti fell off. But then I realised that I could activate animations whilst flying, so I could fly up, position myself just off the ledge, and use the jumping animation to make it seem (hopefully) as if Kitti had just leapt off.

These were the shots I ended up with:

Looks like I'm virtually on the edge, right..?

...I wasn't. Oops.

An attempt to use a falling animation whilst flying...didn't quite look right, though the rain looks pretty cool!

Somehow, I seem to have positioned Kitti just on the outside edge of the rain, lol!

Getting somewhere!

The image I used for my banner :)

To become a fan girl, just for a moment: I really do love Hangars Liquides. Before I got my new laptop, there is no way I could have gone there and seen all this. It is a beautiful build, created with such attention to detail, and, in places, such a sense of humour. It's stunning, and this section with the rain is, at the moment, my favourite. The builder, Djehan Kidd, is incredibly talented, and incredibly nice, and the sim owner (I believe that's what he is!) Lawrence Celestalis is kind and charming and full of fun. 

Lawrence and I, best viewed on flickr

 He spied me whilst I was trying to position Kitti for these shots and was giggling at me and asking if I needed him to come and catch me. Hilarious. Once I'd finished, he offered me a teleport link to join him and Djehan in a different part of the sim where he had decided to rez a tank and take us for a ride. A tank, ladies and gentlemen.

I also asked Lawrence if I might take shots here for my Kit 49 comic, which has been suffering since I have run out of places in the original sim I was using to take shots. He said yes. Exciting!

Thoroughly Kicked

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

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

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

This chrome bucket is thoroughly kicked.

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

Good Faith

Hi there! I realise that my blog has been a little quiet for the past month, and I just wanted to assure anybody who is still checking my site (hallo, lone follower!) that I have not forgotten about IYDISL. 

Yesterday, I graduated from university and had to stand around in a bat-cape and a silly hat for a few hours, and my family, who live spread across the world these days, all came to England to visit and celebrate with me.  Next week, I will be hopping aboard a plane and going to spend five weeks with my immediate family in sunny SoCal. Normal service should resume then, since I will have lots of long and (far too) hot afternoons in which to blog.

I have a couple of blog posts in the pipeline, but I have been struggling to find a moment to get them posted. I am hoping to rectify this - possibly today! - but ask that you please please don't stop coming here! You were very kind to come here in the first place, and I don't want to lose you now.

Here - have a screenshot I took to use as part of my Kit 49 comic, a few "strips" of which I have waiting to be posted soon. I thought it was pretty cool, especially since, you know. I took it. And, kind and loyal as you are, dear blog readers, you have to admit that I am not the best screenshot-er in the world. I haven't scaled it down, as I often do, so there is little anti-aliasing at work. And this was the best my laptop could do with my graphics whacked up to 'high'. But yes - I am quite pleased with it.

Take it in good faith?!

Ka-pow!

I will upload it to flickr, too. If you wish to view it there, there is a box on the right-hand side of the screen that should take you there.

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).

Kicking the (Chrome) Bucket

Revising for my only written exam of the year, I came across an article by Svetlana Boym entitled Nostalgia and Its Discontents. I remember reading it the first time and finding it not only informative, but enjoyable - which is rare for theatre and performance articles, let me tell you - so I set about quite happily reading it again. My exam is for my Theatre of New Europe module - New Europe being the struggle for a new European identity after the trauma of the Second World War (an attempt to move away from the fact that, as a continent, we managed to slaughter three whole generations of people). About halfway through my re-reading, I found that I had unlined this quote: 

Yet the nostalgia that I explore here is not always for the ancien regime, stable superpower or fallen empire, but also for the unrealized dreams of the past and visions of the future that have become obsolete.

Boym is referring here to the hopes of a newly-'liberated' East Germany, but, perhaps influenced by my recent excursions as a latex-clad Cassandra in the midst of space-Troy, I realised that Boym could quite easily have been talking about science fiction and the genre of cyberpunk. Second Life seems to have a fairly popular cyberpunk scene or, at least, to cultivate cyberpunk themes into their more general science fiction sims. It allows for the performance of the nostalgia of a future that was outdated before it even arrived.

As technology advances and our cars remain steadfast to the ground, we are realising that the future we dreamed we would be in by now hasn't happened yet, and probably never will. We wanted chrome and latex and flying cars and some kind of electric-magic that would allow us to communicate instantly with anybody across the global telepathically. Instead we got Facebook and Twitter; our cars are firmly rooted to the ground, and I'm pretty sure a new Primark, selling only cotton and denim, just opened in town.

Dissatisifed, then, we are nostalgic for the time when we believed in that future and this, I feel, is the crux of the cyberpunk genre. The aesthetic of cyberpunk is drawn from the grit and grunge of bygone eras; the spacemen that lurk in the shadows of the dystopian cities are clad in the spacesuits of Barbarella and paint their faces with the Bowie lightning bolt, because that is how we felt they would look twenty years ago.

They connect to the system, Matrix-style, by a series of wires. They have USB ports in their foreheads. They back-up their files to floppy disk. They store their spy-documents on microfilm. Never mind that we now in 2012 - the real future - have wi-fi and sharing platforms and Wikileaks. We liked those ideas, and, in that past-time, the flying-car future was still possible. The dream had not yet kicked the (chrome?) bucket.

Our technophobia, however, does not allow us to glorify the technology we desire too much. Our fear has been immortalised by films such as The Matrix (1999) and Terminator (1984), to name but two examples. It is not the fault of technology, however, but the corruption of those who use it, and so, invariably, we create images of slick, USB port-equipped, latex-clad, plastic-surgery-beauties with blonde hair, popping food pills in clean, chrome castles in the sky - but they're baddies. The goodies are miles below, tunnelled beneath the ground where they wave floppy disks around and have dirty, sweaty, needy sex. If they have hair, it's dark in colour, and their clothes show off as much skin as possible, perhaps reflecting another layer of nostalgia for a time when we revelled in the body and its physical, palpable beauty, rather than intangible computer coding and the invisible internet. And this is perserved in the presentation of the cyberpunk in Second Life.

An attempt at a cyberpunk aesthetic. Best viewed on flickr - click here.

This notion is depicted perfectly in William Gibson's The Gernsback Continuum - of which they made a short tv film in 1993. A photographer is commissioned to take photos of 'yesterday's tomorrow' which, in the examples he is shown, is bound up in the aesthetic of the American Dream - yet another highly-romanticised topic. Once he starts photographing, however, he is haunted by what his friend calls 'semiotic ghosts' from the 'mass consciousness' - the ghosts of the now-obsolete future and aesthetic that he is attempting to photograph.

The Starship Diner

What I find most interesting, and most amusing, about Gibson's piece is the idea that television will rid the photographer of these 'semiotic ghosts'. That's right - television. One of the landmarks of technological development. I like the idea that can be extrapolated from that - that the future didn't turn out the way we planned because we didn't go out and make it happen. We stayed home and watched TV instead.

It is interesting to note, too, the similarities between The Matrix and Second Life. Second Life allows us to plug our minds into a body in the virtual world which acts as a kind of residual self-image - or allows us to play up an attribute from our personality, or a personality we long to possess.  When we unplug, the character in the virtual world dies, vanishing from the system. As those who log into the virtual world, we are those tunnel-dwelling naked grubs, going for a joy-ride in the dangerous realm of the dystopian digital world.

But because Second Life isn't real, it not only facilitates the performance of nostalgia, but positively encourages it. It becomes a haven for what Boym refers to as reflective nostalgics - nostalgics who recognise the impossibility of the world they are nostalgic for and, despite their romanticism and their longing, avoid a 'homecoming' as much as possible - because they can recreate their flawed world without having to deal with the consequences such a world would invariably bring in real life.

In reality, Second Life allows for the performance of the nostalgia of pretty much everything. If you wish to live your life as a Tolkien-esque elf, nostalgic for a medieval period long since passed, you can do so. But this is simply looking into the past, and in the realm of the cyberpunk, we can look not only nostalgically at the past, but also at the future that the present made obsolete.

Maybe I will write more on this later - that is, if I don't get distracted by the television first.