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?!

T'internet at Twelve

Kitti says Trololol

 I have a feeling that this might be the most boring blog post I have ever written - and now I've just sold it to you so beautifully. I know, I know, I'm a genius. Anyway.

I have been online since mid-2002 when my grandad brought me my first computer. It was kept downstairs in the dining room and I was allowed to be on the internet for an hour an evening. To begin with, I spent most of my time on roleplay forums, but then my friends signed up for MSN Messenger and all-too-quickly my evenings were consumed (for an hour, anyway) by talking to people I had already spent six hours that day with. I have absolutely no idea what it was we said to each other, but we thought we were cool (we were twelve at the time).

The first thing I learned about the internet, aged twelve, was that we are alone here. Whilst the internet undoubtedly facilitates communication with people on the other side of the world, it is also a tool for isolation. I don't recall ever surfing the net with a friend sat beside me, and even when my friends and I were talking via instant messenger about homework or who upset who at school or something equally shallow and pointless, I would minimize the chat screens when my parents walked passed and might see. If this is how secretive those of us who are twiddling our virtual thumbs are, I cannot imagine how awful those who are doing things that are genuinely dodgy must be.

I also learned that if I got myself into trouble online, nobody was going to come to help me. That was a little more vague a lesson than the first. A friend sent me an email and, somewhere along the way, the email picked up a worm virus. I believed this friend had sent the virus on purpose, and when confronted, that friend cockily announced that he had (which I sincerely doubt). My parents were furious and called the Police, and an officer came around to our house to speak to me about Internet safety. Even aged twelve and new to computers and the Internet, I realise how out of his depth this officer felt, and everything he told me was stuff I had known since day one. Don't give out your name. Don't tell people where you live. Don't give people too many personal details about yourself. You have no idea who the person on the other side of the computer is (unless he happens to have the same Science homework as you, and saw that kid get hit in the eye with that snowball last week). Etc etc etc. The Police Officer had to agree that I was obviously clued up and he left having done exactly nothing to fix the problem at hand - the fact that someone might have fucked up our computer from the inside on purpose. 

The final maxim/rule I learned, if 'rule' is the right word, is that things said online could not be repeated offline. This came a little later, when I was around fourteen/fifteen. My school friends and I were still chatting on MSN Messenger, and one day I received a friend request from someone in my tutor group whom I didn't know particularly well. We started talking and became pretty good friends, although we only saw each other at school during registration as we didn't have any classes together. One evening, we decided to go on webcam and were just chatting and waving at each other when I realised this guy was flirting with me. We were talking about the non-uniform day we had tomorrow and what we thought the weather would be like and etc etc etc. He said I should wear this jacket I had on because it looked really good. Flattered, I walked into registration the next day wearing the same jacket and flashed him a big smile.

He didn't even catch my eye. He actively avoided me all day.

You knew that was coming, didn't you? Well, aged fourteen, I didn't, and I spent the whole day feeling so annoyed that this friendship I had with this guy online did not translate offline. By the time I logged into MSN Messenger that night, I was thoroughly pissed off. Of course, he wanted to talk to me then and put webcams back on, but I didn't want to know anymore. The separation between the Internet and 'the real world' did not - still does not to this day - exist for me in that way.

These might seem like such trivial anecdotes (and they are), but in the past eight years, things haven't changed that much. Admittedly, nobody logs onto MSN Messenger anymore and we now plaster the Internet with our real names and personal details a la Facebook, but you still cannot assume that something said online holds water offline, nor can we seem to stop being so secretive and alone.

And where online exists the culmination of these tendencies and behaviours? Where are they played out to extremes? You guessed it.

Where did you learn your Internet lessons? And for those of you who existed online in the days before Facebook, how many pseudonyms do you have? Maybe we've met before and known each other by other names ;)

Unready

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coming Out Party

Everyone, I've got a confession to make. Not really a 'confession', because the word 'confession' implies I've done something wrong. I haven't done something wrong - or, at least, I don't think I have. I'm babbling now. What I'm trying to say is that I've got something to tell you.

Some party, huh?

I'm not ginger in real life. I'm not blonde/white-haired in real life, either. I'm not 5ft3" tall in real life. My feet aren't that flat. I can only dream of having a ski-slope nose, high blue-blooded cheekbones and pouty lips (And - just to clarify - I only have one SL avatar. If I want to change Kitti's hair colour, I just change it. And her eyebrows, of course. I made this picture by overlaying two pictures. This is the extent of my photo manipulation skills).

Deception was not my game here, it was just that nobody told me that I had to make my SL avatar look or be anything like my real physical first life self whatsoever. That wasn't even in the fine print of the terms and conditions - which I didn't read, of course, but ctrl+f is pretty handy. Kitti is my representative in the virtual world, yes, and I have expressed before a certain guilt curtailing the way I style and dress my avatar, but at no point have I ever set out to make her a replica of me.

In many ways, we are similar. Kitti has the appearance of a young woman. In real life, I am also female, and also in the 'young woman' category, though Heaven only knows how I made it there. At 5ft3" tall, Kitti is one whole inch taller than me. She speaks with my voice, and the only time I have ever put on a kind of play-pretend voice for her is during role-play scenarios. Of course, it is not wholly my voice - it has been mediated not only by my real-life physical body and presence, but also by Kitti's virtual body and presence. I don't think it lost anything along the way. If anything, my voice gains something different when coming out of Kitti's mouth.

'Coming out' - acknowledging the gap between user and avatar - can be a much bigger deal than I have made it out to be. For me, that gap has always been acknowledged, and never hidden. A number of my SL friends have seen my RL face and heard my voice, and I have seen and heard theirs. We're friends on Facebook. But that was a personal choice of mine, and is connected to my intentions within the virtual world. For others, that gap can be narrower or much, much wider - a chasm, almost - and admitting to that can be arduous. 

It is not always met with the greatest acceptance and understanding, either, and I would go as far as to say that some relationships only function within the virtual world if the real world is censored utterly from the equation. As long as that is known and agreed upon by those involved, then there's nothing wrong with that. But what if someone slips up? What if someone changes their mind? What about if a third party, unaware of the agreement, says the wrong thing? There are so many ways things can go wrong and it's not difficult to see why relations might then turn ugly, especially, I would venture, if sexual intercourse has been involved. The situation can also go sour if one person wasn't made aware of the game in hand.

Ultimately, it boils down to lies and expectations. If I poured my soul out to you in SL under the impression that you were going to do the same back, and I learned later that you had spun me a set of well-written lies, I might well be upset. If you tell someone explicitly that you are male in real life, and later on they find out that you are female, or vice versa, they might well be upset. There are a thousand similar situations you can come up with, taking into consideration even the tiniest details which might seem like nothing out of context but which could mean the world to somebody else.

What I think is unfair is when there have been no lies, and the expectations built up have little to do with the person then accused of betrayal. I have friends in SL who were afraid to 'come out', as it were, about their real life selves and were afraid of how I would react, knowing it made no real ounce of difference to me what colour their hair is or what nationality they are or what their sexual orientation is or what they have between their legs. Imagine how difficult it must be to come out to someone who you suspect does care, or will feel lied to, especially if you yourself have gone to extraordinary lengths to make sure you have never lied to this person about the truth of the matter.

I'm not saying that everyone who gets upset by a revelation of this kind is a terrible person. I'm not saying that you are never allowed to lie about who you are, or that you should tell anybody in SL or any other virtual world anything about your real life self. Those aren't the issues here - because there is no obligation anywhere to tell the truth or to say anything whatsoever in the first place. I suppose what I am saying is that we need to be understanding of each other, in all situations and positions, and try our best to work these things out. To be supportive, and to consider our own motives for being in the virtual world and for presenting the face and persona we choose to present. It isn't really mid-life crisis kind of stuff; we don't need to sit in dark rooms and contemplate the meaning of life for an hour before we log in. I have already written at length about why our avatars can mean so much to us, and I barely scraped the surface in terms of energy and emotional investment. We need to remember, too, that the reason our words and choices have an effect on other people is because we are connecting with them not only avatar to avatar, but mind to mind. And I think that connection is a good thing, even if it means we get hurt sometimes.

So will you forgive the real life me for my brown hair and superior foot-arches?

Head-first into the Water Feature

This is another anecdote post. I guess, in a way, all of my posts are. Feel free to skip this one, if you like. Just, jump over it. 

Kitti jumped over a table today. I didn't ask her to. General lag, combined with a terrible internet connection, means that navigating Kitti through the virtual world has become something akin to navigating an ice cube across a frozen lake - literally. You give her a little nudge, and suddenly she's halfway across the sim and trying to push herself face-first into a wall. 

Whilst trying to be classy at the classy shop Ladies Who Lunch today, Kitti jumped over a table and fell into the water feature. Luckily, nobody was there to see - but what this almost meant, I soon realised, was that there was also nobody there to over her a hand out. She was utterly and completely stuck. I tried making her jump out. I tried making her walk beneath the glass on the other side (the gap wasn't big enough, even for short Kits). I even tried jumping and flying out. For some unknown reason, Kitti just would not budge. 

See that little ginger head? In the water feature?!

Just in case you needed clarification...

Needless to say, my amusement quickly died. A very kind person finally appeared and offered me a hand out - after laughing at my misfortune, of course.

I thought my troubles might have ended there - but no. I attempted to guide Kitti up some stairs, and ended up underneath the building. It's easily done, I'm sure you will agree, but every time I tried to walk out, Kitti got all confused and walked further underneath. 

Sigh

So I guess the point of this post is that, if anybody ever tells you that navigating gets easier the more time you spend in SL, they're lying. 

The Ladies Who Lunch stop is a very lovely shop to get stuck under, if you have a choice.

Steel Buns

Today, I threw together this outfit based on a prize Sian Pearl has created for the hunt her shop is taking part in, and I skipped off merrily to investigate sci-fi themed sims in which I could snap some vaguely interesting photos. I ended up - against my initial, better, judgement - in an aforementioned notorious space brothel bar, but managed to find a relatively quiet, relatively plain, spot in which to take what I hoped would be a decent shot. 

I had not been there five minutes when the IM came through: "Come join me", it read, "I'm in a dark alley."

"Why are you in a dark alley," I replied, "When there are all these lovely electric lights to bask beneath?" God only knows how he found me in such a large sim when, according to my mini-map, he was nowhere anywhere near me. 

"Come and join me," this male avatar wrote to me again. "Do you want to play?"
"No," I replied. "Sorry. I'm sure you'll find somebody who does!"

Considering the reputation of this notorious space brothel bar which labels itself a place for "rape, forced sex, alien sex, and bdsm", these IMs were very unforceful and not as presumptuous as some I have received on much nicer, happier sims. But doesn't get away from the fact that what we are talking about, here, is the proposition of a rape fantasy. The proposition of forced sex and, I'm sure, some kind of sexual enjoyment of the scenario in the real world by this person. That he propositioned me is not the issue - I was in a place where people go to do that kind of thing, and he followed the etiquette perfectly by asking me rather than attempting to force the fantasy upon me. No; the problem here is my response.

What did I do when asked if I would allow my avatar to be potentially forced into all kinds of strange and definitely uncomfortable-looking sex positions and acts? I apologised. I didn't just say "no, thank you" and move on. I apologised, and felt the need to offer him a bizarre kind of compliment.

Why did I do that?!

I got the photos that I wanted at Insilico, not the unnamed notorious space brothel bar. They weren't what I originally wanted, but I got to be a little bit more creative in my self-portraiture, I guess.

Gaaaah.

Steel Bun(ny Ear)s

Click the image to enlarge, or click here to see it on flickr.

Happy Exaggeration

As life and work go on, it is becoming more difficult for me to hook up with my good friend Sian in-world. This morning, we were lucky enough to grab a couple of hours and talk new skyboxes and home renovations and, of course, my missing cat. But when I turned up at Sian's place, I had to laugh. 

Not the best quality, I apologise, but...

"We are simultaneously the best and worst thing about Second Life," I said to Sian. 

"Why?" she asked, "Which is which?"

"No - we are both both. The best of Second Life is that two people, dressed as differently as we are, can occupy the same space happily. The worst of Second Life is that two people, dressed as differently as we are, can occupy the same space happily."

That is probably an exaggeration; there are definitely better and worse things about SL than what Sian and I choose to wear when we have no idea in what state we are going to find the other. For example, sitting in really big, comfy chairs, and space brothel bars. But it does make me laugh that an image such as this could be taken as an example of the nature of SL - because I think it absolutely could. And I love it. Perhaps in some perverse way, we are dressed entirely appropriately to be in each other's company? I don't know!

My screenshot didn't come out too well. See Sian's (much better) version here - here!

'Tis the Season...

Looking a little flat there, Father. Get this man a mince pie!

As the big day approaches, I decided to investigate the destination guide for places I could go and maybe catch a glimpse of a virtual Santa Clause. I knew somebody must have built him a grotto, and, sure enough, I found one. Or two. Or several. Or more than I could count. The SL community are clearly invested in the holiday season...and why not? If Second Life offers an opportunity, a space, to replicate the things that we most love about the real world and our first lives, why shouldn't we be able to recreate Christmas? In fact - why shouldn't we be able to recreate Christmas every day? The answer, I imagine, is economical. And sure, Christmas is fun, and snow is fun. Your cousin's new karaoke set is...relatively...fun. But there are so many times you can listen to her sing "Santa Baby" before you wish you're wanting to hang, draw and quarter whomever built the infernal contraption, and the cold snow becomes a nuisance when you start remembering how fun last Summer's BBQ picnic was, and how good you felt with that Summer tan (I have never, ever, had a Summer tan. Ever). Remember the days when your feet and the bottom of your trousers didn't get trenched just going outside to call the cat back in? It all becomes just a little bit duller, a little less fun, as the days go on.  We like the Christmas season, so long as it stays right there - within its own little allocated section of the year. We need variety. We need change. 

Theoretically, however, we have the power within SL to return, at least in part, to the sense and atmosphere of that season - of whichever season, really - that we miss, even if it has long-passed. Now, having not searched for them before, I cannot say whether these Christmas sims stay up and running all year, or whether they only appear as the December days creep by. Perhaps the sims are used for different purposes throughout the rest of the year. I cannot say. But that isn't wholly want to I want to talk about.

What I find the most interesting - and the most bizarre - about SL is not that it follows the seasons in terms of important holidays, but that fashion follows those seasons, too. You might recall that a couple of months back, I mentioned an Autumn Hunt (or, at least, I believe I did) that I went on, finding small pumpkins in shops which held Autumn-related gifts and clothing. I have been getting notecards from shops for a while now, announcing their new Winter lines and Christmas sales. Better wrap our avatars up against the virtual cold...but what cold is that? 

Now, I am guilty of it, too. As you may or may not have noticed, I am wearing a new woolly jumper in that screenie up there, which in new, for Winter, by Leezu. And I am not naive: I appreciate that shops have seasons to convince us that our previous wardrobe of clothes is completely inadequate to protect us from the unique trials of this new season. Perhaps in other countries, this is the case, but here in England...I think we have five truly hot days, and five truly cold days, a year - and the rest of the time it's kind of grey and rainy. 

The virtual world has no temperature. Sure, some sims might be covered in snow, and I understand the logic of wanting your avatar to look the part, but, essentially, that is all it is - aesthetics. Kitti is not going to be cold wandering around the Antarctic, because she doesn't have any kind of skin and temperature system to be able to register that cold, any more than the virtual world has any way of physically creating that cold. The only way we can read the temperature of a sim is to look for markers, such as snow, or palm trees, or maybe an ice cream van parked on the road (though I have seen ice cream vans through the fuzzy fur of my rl winter coat's hood before now...seriously, guys?!). Whether or not you choose to recognise and adhere to the advice of those markers, however, is entirely up to your discretion. 

And so, of course, I went against everything the polite Englishman within me stands for, and I decided to rebel against the system - just to highlight, in case it needed underscoring, the complete arbitrary nature of virtual seasons. Enjoy; doing these cheered me up immensely...for a short while. 

Hmm, where to start?

Tangled in the light box...or so the pose ball said...

A present for me? Aww, you shouldn't have!

Fancy a skate?

Aaaaand just to flip it on its head - because I don't know about you, but this cold greyness is really getting me down - 

Yes, this is a Winter coat...yes, I got it from Leezu...go away!

Hmm...why isn't Kitti tanning?! She's been sunbathing all day!

Well, maybe you would need to wrap up like this to go and sit on Brighton Beach...

Merry Christmas, everyone! Don't let the snowy season get you down. If you are feeling a little down, maybe this (click here) will cheer you up, and this (click here) will warm your heart :)

Happy Rez-Day!

Wednesday just gone saw the happy occasion of the anniversary of Sian Pearl's rez day. A rez day is basically a virtual birthday; the day you were born (or reborn?), if you will, into the virtual world of Second Life. My own rez-day passed me by without me noticing, mostly because it is pretty close to my birthday and I was at home celebrating sans laptop, but it is not uncommon, it would appear, for people to arrange parties and get-togethers to mark the occasion. 

I received the invitation via notecard the night before, and then spend much of the following morning wondering what to expect. What is the etiquette for this kind of occasion? Do we, for example, have to turn up with presents? Is there a dress code? If any of you have followed the link to Sian's blog, you will see that she is quite   an avant-garde-ist when it comes to fashion, and it seemed almost rude to suggest turning up to her party having not made an effort to dress up. I would not, after all, turn up at a birthday party in the real world without putting on something vaguely nice and throwing a bit of war paint at my face. 

I actually saw Sian on the morning before the party, putting her outfit together, and suddenly the worrying I was doing over the bareness of Kitti's legs seemed quite ridiculous. I also felt hideously under-dressed. The question of why I cared so much about virtual nudity is not one I will even begin to try and answer with in this blog post. (For some reason, I cannot embed Sian's screenie of the two of us together within my post, so, if you wish to see it, click here).

The party itself was a little late to start - but that's the nature of online get-togethers, I suppose. Computer problems, time zone differences, and children refusing to go to bed can put the kibosh on even the best laid of plans. It was also a little slow to begin with; I got the impression that I was not the only one present who had not been to a rez-day party before. We were gathered at Sian's house, and the only music available for the party was whatever the sim owner happened to be streaming which, I am sure I heard Laertes mention, was some kind of violin concerto. Not, perhaps, the kind of music one normally associates with a party.

Sian Pearl greeting Laertes Modan (now known as Jaegen Fenris)

The ever-charming Gibson Kamachi

Sian Pearl and the slightly elusive Columbine Lavender...and Jaegen on the sidelines there...

After a while, however, more people turned up, and the conversation began to flow, and we were having a good time. Everybody looked great, and pretty soon Sian had us all dancing - even without the music.

SL dancing is a bit of a peculiar phenomena. The best way to explain it is that it works by animation override, but, as was the case for us, the AO belonged to Sian, and she made an offer, as it were, to each of us to invite us to join in. By saying "yes", the AO took over our avatars and we began to dance in unison. The effect was quite hilarious, particularly since many of the dance AOs Sian owns would appear to be female orientated, contorting poor Jaegen into the kinds of shapes the YMCA would have been jealous of.

You strut your stuff, Captain Fenris!

Go Jaegen! Not sure what Kitti is doing here...lol

He was a great sport.

As Sian was having computer troubles and was, really, lucky to be in SL at all, I became the designated photographer. Unfortunately, my SL photography skills are not that great, though I did my best. I tend to find with most party photos - in real life -, the images you think you are capturing are always much, much better than images you seem to find on your camera the day after. This...was pretty much the case for my SL  party photos, too, as you may have noticed. 

What can I say? I tried. 

We had a good laugh, and I got to meet a couple of new people who seem lovely, and I think, all-in-all, we did a pretty good job of celebrating the virtual birth of a person without whom our second lives would be rather dull. 

Maybe I should try and throw a rez-day party for myself next year. But who would turn up?!

More photos can be found on my flickr stream. 

Sexy Doesn't Run

I have a feeling that this might be a long post. I apologise in advance, and will do my best to break it up into digestible chunks. Stay with me here? I promise it's relevant...

SL offers three modes/method of propelling oneself into motion - walking, running, or flying. Most of the tutorial is meant to show you how to swap between the three (though swapping between them is the simple part), and then you are thrown into the SL realm and expected to not bump into things.

You cannot avoid bumping into things.

Walking

When I first began using SL, I felt a bit like I was beginning to walk again. It goes back to that idea in "The Matrix" when Neo turns to Morpheus and asks why his eyes hurt. He's never used them before, and now he's getting electric-light glare from the hacker's shiny head. You have unplugged your brain from one body and fastened it into another, only this time, you're not only relying upon your brain signals and your body muscles to make your legs move. You also have to factor in the middle man of computer keyboard, and Linden Lab's scripting skills. And Linden Lab's scripting skills mean that you waddle around like a duck, or like you've lost your horse, and you look as if you could topple over at any minute - and just when you've got the hang of it and believe that you've got the mouse-controlled camera and legs-controlled arrow keys working in symbiosis, a wall will appear where there wasn't one a minute ago and you'll be stuck like a spider in a bathtub.  

Once you've learned to walk again, running is pretty easy. All you have to do is turn the "run" function on. I find it harder not to bump into things when I'm moving more quickly, so...maybe it isn't so easy...but what I mean to say is that you don't have to learn a complete new set of controls to operate it. 

 Flying

Now that leaves the one everyone gets excited about - flight. Humans are obsessed with flight. We're always looking up at the sky, our deities are in the sky, and the ambitious Americans took the eagle, a king of the skies, as their national mascot. The English flag is predicated on the cross of a man who conquered a dragon (though if the dragon could fly, I don't know why it didn't just fly away from George the tin-can). Maybe I'm getting away from the point. We have all longed to be able to join Peter Pan in the sky, and now here is a programme offering us a new body with the ability to fly - no impractical wings, no jet engines, no magic!

Hovering in mid-air...not sure why I need to keep my arms out like that.

My laptop cannot cope with flying and high graphics, hence the grey-blue shapes. Sorry.

In most sims (platforms/places), flying is not allowed. The screenshots above were taken in a sandbox, which is a place meant for building and such, so I had a pretty free reign with what I did there. But in structured sims such as cities, towns, amusement and leisure parks, it departs from a norm, a reality, that is trying desperately to instill itself in that virtual world. It isn't just that other avatars hit "/frown" if you swoop down on their picnic in the park or divebomb them on their walk down the Champs Elysee, either - the owners of the sims can choose to physically "turn off" the flight mode on their platform, and then no matter how many times you hit the "page up" key, your avatar will not take flight. Mankind has long dreamed of this power and, once given it, has banned it for unconventionality. 

A round of applause for hypocrisy, ladies and gentlemen! Another for cutting your nose off to spite your face! And another, finally, for the fact that it isn't only the British who oppress themselves into muted formality. Once again, it would seem that the virtually limitless realm of the virtual is too limitless for us land-bound folks to be comfortable.

 Running

I've not seen many avatars running around SL either, and - as a small dig at the nature of gender in SL that will be referenced later in a dedicated blog post, if I remember to include it -, in my experience, you are far more lightly to see men run than women. I'm going to take a premature stab at the reason for this and say that it is to do with Animation Overrides.

Animation Overrides

The only way to get rid of the default duck-waddle walk is to buy and put on a little device called an Animation Override, or AO for short. You cannot see them in my screenshots (because I use the in-game screenie function which automatically hides such), but down the sides of my SL interface there are two sets of buttons that allow me to turn on the override for individual functions, as well as choose from about five different styles of movement. That is because my avatar is actually "wearing" (they are not visible on my body, they are just attached to it, if that makes sense) four different AO systems. You don't need four, but I kind of had them heaped on me by friends, and thus I cannot work out which one is overriding which animation exactly and I cannot seem to work it out by mixing and matching them. The only reason I know that they are doing anything is because I have been transformed from a unseated cowboy to a supermodel. I did not choose to walk like a supermodel - all five of the options were variations of supermodel, and whilst it is funny to walk like that, it is a generally accepted norm that I should. Thus, the SL realm has become my permanent catwalk. 

I suppose the other testament to their overriding success is that when I am standing still, my avatar will put her hands on her arse (meant to be her hips, I think, but it's not exactly well-scripted), or shift her weight to one leg and put her hand on her collarbone or fan her face or whatever it is she is doing. She also messes with her hair in a way I would personally never do.

Is this meant to be a flirtatious and girly pose? Fetch me a bucket.

What none of my four AOs seem to do, however, is override my run animation, so I run exactly like I did when I joined SL, and that just does not fit into the canon of sexy that the override is meant to imbue. In the AOs I have seen on male avatars, the emphasis is more on manliness and strength, and so they run like they are going to save someone's life in "Baywatch" - and apparently that is just fine.

I don't suppose people run around that much in the real world, though...and that's why we're all in a flap about obesity and Global Warming...