Stuck in Yesterday

Tiny irony: I took this screenshot last night...so technically, I took it yesterday. That is the level I'm at here.

Plurk has been buzzing lately with conversations about the changes Linden Labs have been trying to make to the Terms of Services and, freshly, news about the Australian annulment of same-sex marriage. I know very, very little about the former issue, but I saw the second on the BBC, and right in the middle of the television screen was a placard held by who-knows-who dismissing gay marriage because it isn't accepted in the Bible.

How are these two issues connected? They both represent our attempts to make new rules and regulations for today's people, and we aren't finding it very easy. If anything the media says is to be believed, there are many other ways in which our law system is becoming out of date. The very foundations of our societies are formed by treaties and agreements signed over fifty years ago by people who thought we'd all be flying around on jetpacks now if they could imagine this time at all. 

Those treaties and agreements are intensely important, and whilst they do the job generally, they don't take into account the way we have changed. They don't take into account the Internet, nor the collaborative way in which it allows people to work and to share ownership. In an age of CCTV and Obama reading our emails, we need to redefine 'privacy' and what we are entitled to. In an age of school shootings and children on Prozac, we need to have a conversation about mental health and gun ownership. I could go on.

That people think they are exempt from the law, even when that law has been revisited recently, is obvious: Mark Duggan, slavery in Bristol, even the crisis in Syria are examples of that. These issues should, technically, have been covered by the Geneva Convention, as well as anti-racism initiatives and on-going investigations into police brutality and what it does to your brain to hold a gun in your hand. It's a huge job but we have to keep going back, to look at these problems, to look at the laws and the attitudes that govern them. We need to make sure that they are applicable and relevant to the people they are governing, and we need initiatives in place to spread awareness, understanding, and acceptance of responsibility. 

I am not so naive as to think that there will never be people who commit crimes, and I know that there are a million mitigating factors that come into play, but I don't see how we can be ready to deal with those maturely and sensitively if we are not sure of what, exactly, we have allowed and not allowed in the first place.

I admit, I am not a religious person, but I have grown up in a country whose laws come from the Bible, and I have respect for the Bible as an important and sacred-to-some text. The Bible encourages us to be responsible and to be conscientious - to think of others as well as ourselves, and to look at each other with love. When in doubt, I understand that it is one of many places people go to look for an answer, but I think it is very, very important to remember that those words were committed to paper centuries ago. They weren't given to us; they were given to the people that lived centuries and centuries ago. They were given to people that couldn't imagine the world being anything like the way it is in 2013. They couldn't imagine a jetpack to even begin to envision us flying around with them right now.

The rules we make have got to take into account the way we have changed as well as the ways that we haven't. Go back to Geneva, make our current leaders sign the treaties they weren't even alive to agree to the signing of in the fifties after we have updated them to talk about Guantanamo Bay and the Internet and the liminal space of an airport. 

This will take time, and I am sure that we will face teething problems. The trick, I think, is to be patient but determined. Keep going, keep pushing, keep being sympathetic to everyone, not just those that share your cause. Keep going keep going keep going.

We are not the same people we were twenty years ago, let alone fifty years ago, or a thousand years ago, or two thousand years ago. And we all deserve happiness, safety, honesty and love.

Unobviously Obvious

Ha-rumph

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

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

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

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

Like I said, unobviously obvious.

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

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

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

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

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