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?!

Not Too Soon

Not Too Soon

I have a friend in Second Life whom I haven't heard from in weeks. I'm sure she's fine, but there's always a little worry in the back of your head when someone goes quiet for a while that maybe everything isn't fine. There's a kind of arrogance that goes with the it-won't-happen-to-me assumption that none of us want to be found guilty of, and it feels too much like tempting fate to be something most of us are comfortable with anyway. I've written before about this strange missing-persons problem, and - don't worry - I don't have any real intention of repeating myself. I wanted to focus instead upon another, equally strange, idea involving people that go missing in SL.

Half of the time, we're not sure we want them to come back. 

As I have said on more than one occasion (oh hush), there are a myriad reasons why people sign up to and engage with Second Life, and since many of them are rather on the negative side, it is very difficult not to worry about the quality of first life your friends might be languishing in when not plugged into SL. However, it's also impossible not to hope that their absence might mean that whatever they came to the virtual world in search of might have materialised for them in the real world, and thus their need to log in has been diminished dramatically if not altogether.

The second friend I made in SL was sian pearl, back in the days before she fell out with capital letters, and at the end of one of our first proper conversations, she said to me something along the lines of 'I hope to speak to you again soon - but not too soon'. It's impossible to ignore the idea that spending too much time online and in the virtual world can be unhealthy and detrimental to what may already be a difficult circumstance to exist within IRL. With that in mind, it's easy to see why we might not always want to log in to SL and find our friends online.

I'm not saying that this is the case for my friend. I think she's a pretty well-rounded person and her priorities seem to be in what I would think of, at least, as a good order. Her absence just gave me cause to talk about this. 

I bet she's off somewhere skiing in a bikini and Trent Reznor 'Closer' -esque goggles doing super stunt tricks (safely) and quoting, I don't know, e.e.cummings, to a line of adoring fans. 'Listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door; let's go'.

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.

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.

Playing Away

Wish you were here

This is just a place-holder, really, to let you know that I am going to be going away for just over two weeks to visit my family in the US and, as such, I don't expect to be around here or in-world much (if at all) until I get back. I leave bright and early Monday morning (18th), and I will land back in the UK even brighter and earlier on December 6th. If it's snowing when I get back, I swear to God I'm going to become an arsonist.

I really like the new gif function...but I need to find more exciting moments to make gifs out of...

It's not that I think I will be so missed, only that after all I have written here about people going AWOL in SL and the confused thoughts of those left behind, it seemed immoral to simply vanish. Don't get your hopes up: I'll be resuming blogging once I am home again.

I do have some exciting news for you - but I can't tell you what it is yet! Keep your eyes peeled, and if I get the chance, I'll come and break the news here just as soon as I'm allowed to. If I don't whilst I'm away, you can be sure as sure that I'll be spilling the beans once I'm home again.

Wish me luck in the land of bears and scorpions and Thanksgiving?

I'll see you soon!

Naked Truth

In a recent blog post, sian asked 'how nude can an avatar get?', and then 'does it matter?' That wasn't throwaway rhetoric on her part, and she explained her reason for asking in the subsequent line: 'our identities are mutable.'

I asked exactly the same question - 'does it matter?' - in a post I wrote on this blog in June, and concluded, a little uneasily, that for reasons I couldn't wholly put my finger on, the nudity of my avatar did matter. It does matter. And it matters moreso now than it did in June because the pictures in that post featured an un-naked Kitti, wearing a skin that was beautiful but which appeared to be made of porcelain. In the picture in this post, Kitti is wearing her everyday non-porcelain skin, and combined with Second Life's advanced rendering and lighting settings, it looks all too real. And, of course, this time Kitti is naked.

 But this brings us back to sian's first question- 'how nude can an avatar get?'. Whilst Kitti might not be wearing clothes in this picture, she is not naked in terms of avatar-nakedness. She is wearing mesh hands and feet, hair, eyelashes, eyes, skin, and a body shape. It is impossible for an SL avatar not to have a shape and a skin and eyes - those are a given, simply part of the way SL works - but I have chosen to put on everything else. 

And why have I chosen to include these 'wearable' items in my attempt at a tasteful nude of my SL avatar? Because these are the things which allow the picture to be about Kitti's nakedness. Without them, it would be impossible, after the initial oh-she's-naked, not to notice the unreality of Kitti's virtual body. Her blocky hands and strangely triangular feet would act as a barrier between the point of the picture and the viewer (and so would her baldness, but that's mostly because Kitti doesn't look good bald). They would serve to alienate, in more ways than one, her nudity, perhaps offering it up instead as a critique of Linden Lab's graphic skills. 

Don't get me wrong; the supposed reality of this image could also be used to offer a critique of Linden Lab's graphic skills, and a whole lot more besides, but that it not its primary purpose.

This isn't the picture that I wanted to take. I wanted to take a nude photo which revealed precisely nothing, but avatar limbs don't always play ball, and finding poses that weren't uncompromising in one way or another was impossible. Whilst I didn't want Kitti to be flashing her bits, so to speak, I didn't want her to be actively hiding them either. I didn't want her posed with the intention of being seductive, nor did I want her nudity to seem like a mistake. This turned out to be quite a tall order, and in the end, I felt forced to compromise, although I did so on my own terms. 

Posting this picture here is still something of an ordeal for me, and I still cannot put my finger on why exactly. Perhaps it is partially because, as I began to say in my original post (link at the end), Kitti acts as my medium in the virtual world, and her body is the only body many will ever come to associate with me (That I could change everything about the way she looks the moment I released the picture into the world, making the photographed body no longer even exist, is not the point). Whilst she speaks with my voice and shares my thoughts and opinions, and whilst I have always acknowledged the differences between my avatar and my self, her nakedness is a kind of honesty I have not yet ventured to share. Would her nudity be so important to me if that gap between us was greater, or if the truth of it was not so broadly known? Would I feel so uncomfortable if I wasn't going to post a link to this blog post on my Facebook profile where it will be seen by people I am friends with in both lives?

The picture I mentioned in the opening paragraph of my June post has never been posted. It is buried, as it were, in a folder on my laptop, and there it remains. It might seem strange not to post it now, along with this picture, but the truth is that Kitti's pose in that image is far more revealing. When I published that post, there were no rallying cries, no pledges of support, no encouragement to post the image if that was what I wanted to do. There was no conversation at all. Whilst that might be the reaction I was expecting, I don't suppose it was the one I was hoping for.

I'm going to see sian's questions, and raise her a couple: What does it really mean to be naked in SL? Is nudity in the virtual world measured by how many clothes we are wearing, or by how honest we are about our real and virtual selves? How naked is your avatar now?

Related/further reading: my original post, 'Stripped' / sian's post, 'Naked' / 'the intrepid reporter on: nakedness'

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?

Terminal

Am I terminal?

The bubble of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival popped last week, and when it did, the world came crashing back with a certain brutality. My body clock is shattered (my show was on at 1:15am every morning for two weeks), I've no energy, and every time I log into Second Life, I find the virtual world deserted.

And I've been wondering...and I've come to think that maybe I'm getting old. That's right, ladies and gentlemen - I think I might be in my virtual old age.  Virtual old age can come at any time, and I don't think it has much to do with how long you've actually been active in SL. However, I have now been in SL long enough to have made friends who have since left the virtual world. I've gotten to know people that I genuinely love and, on the flip-side of that, I've burned a couple of bridges. Most of my favourite landmarks have vanished or sneakily changed their places without me realising, and although I know there is a whole virtual world out there, I'm not sure how to find it anymore.

That must sound stupid; however, the Destination Guide refuses to load most of the time, and SL's in-world search function appears to have a permanently seedy agenda. That's fine, if you also have a seedy agenda - but I don't. I'm not interested in SLex and SLovers. I'm interested in making friends and exploring interesting sims and, more recently, finding art in SL. I've a new skybox to furnish and walls to fill with SLart (too far?), and I just don't know where to begin finding that artwork to put there.

A combination of lacking reading material and my month-out at the Fringe Festival seems to have killed my streak of live readings. I enjoy reading at both the Library and at Commune Utopia, and have met some great people through those events, but they were bound to come to a grinding halt (please excuse the pun) since the material required for those events is erotica and I don't, actually, ahem, well, read very much erotica. Anne Rice is about my limit. I - I hold my hands up - am actually a fantasy lover. Magic, swords, rituals, spooky books, alternate worlds, daemons, dragons...I don't know...pixies, elves, dwarves, werewolves, vampires, etc etc etc; I've got plenty of material about those. If either the Library or the Commune, or anybody else, want readings about those things, I can be there like a shot. 

Not everything is heading south; as I have said, I am now in the position of having some really good friends in SL, and I have reached a place with my SL photography where I think I am producing decent work and my pictures are getting a stream of favourites on Flickr. I enjoy taking photos in SL, and that I'm getting feedback and positive responses is really encouraging. Thank you! If you'd like to check out my Flickr, you can click the button in the right-hand column labelled 'Flickr' :).

I'm also in love with mesh. I love Kitti's new mesh hands and feet. I love her mesh hair - and how much hair Kitti owns! There are so many beautiful things being made for SL, and that kind of thing excites me.

But you see...I sound like an old person. A really old person! And I'm not sure how to get young and hip again. 

Am I terminal?

A Handful

Also in love with this skybox from Scarlet Creative, created by/for William Weaver as a gallery space

That's right - I did it. I gave up. I gave in. I gave - sigh - all my money to SLink (no, the prices are very good) and bought a pair of their mesh hands. They match my mesh feet perfectly, which I also have on in this shot, you just, obviously, can't see that far down. I'd been putting it off and putting it off, and then my friends went and bought them and I wondered why it was that I'd been putting it off. Perhaps it was out of loyalty to my lovely nail add-ons from Izzie's, but that isn't really fair because Izzie's makes nail varnishes for the SLink hands, too, so I don't have to give all those lovely nail colours up. And now I'm just babbling.

To the point: mesh hands. Kitti has mesh hands, and they're beautiful. There isn't too much more to it than that. 

I've been waiting for an excuse to use this pose for literally months

There is a teeny bit more, though. The mesh hands work by using an alpha layer to hide your system hands, then the hands themselves go on top. That reminds me of the hands the inventor makes in Edward Scissorhands, and, I suppose, it is a little like that. But when I put the hand-alpha on this morning, Kitti's breasts suddenly burst out the front of her shirt. Confused, I went into the shirt folder and put the alpha that was supposed to be keeping her chest hidden behind her shirt back on - and her system hands reappeared again. I am a magician, ladies and gentlemen, with a handful of alphas and alphas that are a handful.

When I'd finished scowling (and reluctantly giggling), I remembered that there's a limit on the number of alphas an avatar can be wearing in one go, and Kitti was already wearing four to begin with. A fifth was too many, so was knocking the others off. Her shirt, trousers, hair and feet only attach to her body and appear to lie neatly against her skin because an alpha has hidden the limbs beneath. If I kept going, chasing fallen-off alphas through my inventory, perhaps I could make all Kitti's different body parts appear and disappear like a macabre kind of circus side-show...

But enough. I'm starting to sound hysterical. Who knew a pair of hands could cause such (trivial) trouble.

Stripped

I've been finding more and more lately that I'm photographing Kitti wearing fewer and fewer clothes.

Upon my request, Sian Pearl made these wonderful bracers (full mech arms make me nervous), and when I came to photograph them, I found that they actually looked best when Kitti wasn't wearing anything else at all. "I'm going to take this picture," I said to Sian, "And then bury it." I knew I had to have something somewhere within my inventory to go with the bracers, and eventually I found it - though, admittedly, the outfit is still a little on the naked side. Somehow, posting the nude wasn't an option, despite the fact that it is still, even after I found an outfit I was happy with, a better photo.

Braced

A couple of weeks ago, I took photos of Kitti on the shore at Winter Moon wearing, once again, only a necklace and a pair of pointed elf ears. I wasn't trying to create a fantasy pin-up, only something that seemed ethereal and beautiful. I only shot from the waist up, and had to summon all of my bravery to post the pictures on Flickr (you can see them here - here!). When my mum saw the pictures (Hi Mum!), she posted a comment saying "Hmmm", and when I spoke to her on the telephone, I laughed, a little sheepishly, and asked if she disapproved. I can't remember what her exact words were, but they were basically to the effect that it was unlike me to post images like that. When I told her how difficult I'd found posting them, she laughed and asked why - "it's not your real body, it doesn't matter!"

Does it matter? I think it does. This is the only body that many people are ever going to associate with me, and I'm not sure that I want to show all of it to everyone. On the other hand, why should I hide my body, virtual or tangible? Is my reticence based on archaic, patriarchal, Adam-and-Eve-esque self and sex shame? Is nakedness reserved only for sex and porn, and thus can I only be naked when I intend to arouse? Is there something wrong with wanting to take pictures that do or do not arouse the viewer? Can I not be naked for the sake of being naked? Is my picture somehow lesser if I want it to arouse you? Is my nakedness a gift I can only give to a few before it gets worn out?

I don't think that the pictures I took at Winter Moon are particularly arousing, and when I took Kitti's clothes off this morning and realised she looked beautiful and powerful and vulnerable all just as she was, it wasn't to create an image that I would label as pornographic. I appreciate that this is the internet, and Rule 34 of the Internet states that if you can think of it, there is porn of it, and I accept that arousing images and pornography are subjective. What I am trying to say it that creating something pornographic was not my intention. Can I honestly say, however, that I didn't want Kitti to look sexy? That I didn't want her to look beautiful? No. I wouldn't even try. It pleased me that Kitti looked beautiful, and, as I have said, strong and vulnerable all at once. Combined with that Jessica Rabbit -esque hairstyle, Kitti did look sexy.

The atmosphere of the naked picture is soft, and I could imagine that it was taken mid-stride as Kitti made her way over to a wardrobe to don the rest of her gear. In the images I have posted here, I tried to keep that strong/vulnerable aesthetic, but I lost that sense of movement, of direction, of intent in the bargain. Kitti's lacking attire is now on purpose, her outfit already complete, and it looks as if she has paused to consider something, rather than having been caught mid-stride. The tunic with its red buttons forced me to bring more colour into the picture, tying in the red with the blue that had previously been the focus of the picture. Now the blue pops because the red makes it - which, don't get me wrong, I love, but it all adds up to make a different photo. And has, arguably, a much more sexual agenda.

Braced II

All because I didn't think it was right to post a picture of my virtual body naked on the internet.

Feminism isn't, truly, about papering the streets with images of the naked female body and expecting everybody to simultaneously notice and appreciate but not be aroused, and just accept it. Sometimes, I think the feminist message gets confused in that way, and it's not helpful for anybody. Feminism is about having a choice, and being able to make it and have others judge you on the merits of you and the choice, not their pre-defined idea of what you ought to do based on what you have between your legs. It is also about feeling confident and stable enough to defend your position when challenged, and to not let the opinions of others sway yours without your consent. If somebody else came to me with this conundrum, I would tell them to follow their instincts and their heart, and only do what made them comfortable. Whilst I don't think I am the kind of person that lets others beat me with pre-conceived notions about my gender, I don't know what makes me comfortable in this situation. I am stuck in a limbo between guilt and more guilt. 

And as you can see, I have not posted the picture here. Perhaps I will yet. I honestly do not know.

Drawing a Blank

Same self, different facade

It became apparent when I started university that, if you weren't on Facebook, you didn't exist. In my first year, many of the notes for my seminars were posted online to a Facebook group, and if you weren't on Facebook, you missed out on all kinds of helpful essay materials. Also, if you weren't on Facebook, you couldn't be invited out for drinks or parties, and you didn't know when your rehearsals were scheduled for. You couldn't contribute to group discussions. You were a nobody. 

What I didn't realise was how much this could carry on over into Second Life. In terms of a virtual presence, Kitti exists, obviously, in SL, and here on Google Blogs, and on Flickr. She does not, however, have her own email address. She doesn't have a Facebook page - I was under the illusion that Facebook had a rather severe definition of what it meant to be 'real', and deleted the profiles of those that did not match it, SL avatars included. Today, Strawberry Singh has written about Google +, and Kitti doesn't have one of those either. Come to think of it, the only reason my outside-of-SL-self has one is because Google made me. I don't use it. Another platform, particularly favoured by those who use SL, is Plurk, and Kitti doesn't exist there, either. Now, it seems, it might be prudent for all sorts of self-promotion reasons to consider kitting Kitti out with some more of this social media stuff. 

Along the same vein...there is a feature in SL that gives every avatar, whether they want one or not, a profile. This consists of a Facebook-style feed, an about page, a page for 'picks', and a list of all of the groups you are a member of. Until today, all Kitti's SL profile consisted of was this groups list, and a link to this blog. 

I am not somebody that looks at profiles very often, but I have come to realise that I am part of a minority. And because I don't think about my profile, I get caught out all of them time when people I've never met before as me if I'm visiting a specific location to write about on my blog. 'How do you know I have a blog?' I ask, bemused. 'It's on your profile', they reply. D'uh.

However, it has occurred to me that the SL profiles work much the same way that Facebook did during my days at university. A number of bloggers have confessed that if you have got nothing written in your profile, they won't speak to you, no matter how nice you may seem, and now I'm wondering how many other people I've missed speaking to because my profile just reads 'I blog here'.

How do you present your whole SL changeable self in one image, one short biography?

 But what else can I really write? When it comes to writing biographies, I can do all the obvious stuff, like tell you where I studied and who my friends are and what colour my hair is. I can tell you where I grew up and how I managed to get this accent. But is that what you want to know? I'm not sure, and I'm not sure that it is always appropriate for everybody to all of that about me straight from the off. Surely, you're more interested in whether or not I am friendly or generous or mean or interested in SLex? - and that's the stuff I find it really difficult to write.

How are you meant to put the sum of your existence, real or virtual, into one hundred or so characters? I don't think it's pretentious to suggest that even avatars are more complicated than that. I'm aware that the profile is not, at all, meant to outline every detail of your entire existence, but I also know that if I only wrote 'I like cats', providing no context, you might go on to think something about me that was utterly unfounded, and made obviously so by another factor I have chosen to leave out of my biography ('I like cats' is probably a bad example for that point). 

Don't get me wrong - if you have found a way to utilise the SL profile, and have defined yourself there in a way you are happy and comfortable with, that's brilliant. I just haven't reached that stage yet.

My SL profile now says that I am curious, and that I am interested in role-playing, photography and blogging. There's a picture, and I added a couple of my favourite sims to the 'picks' section. Is that enough? Will you talk to me now?!

It strikes me that the reason these bloggers felt that their 'coming-out' about not speaking to people who have nothing in their SL profile was a 'confession' is that actually, when you think about it, it's a little bit silly. It's the kind of thing that comes from a generation of people who can't remember what the world was like before Facebook, and I understand it completely, but it's not something I want/think/believe. Not speaking to somebody because their SL profile is blank - or expecting to be able to open someone's profile and learn things about them before you've even said hi - is like refusing to speak to somebody in the street because they're not on Facebook. Is that how we will work in the future? Will we have our Facebook URLs tattooed onto our foreheads, and those without them will be exiled to the social life-less fringes of society?

The analogy comes unstuck. You can learn a lot about a person, both in RL and in SL, just from the way they dress, the way they move, the way they speak (or don't) in public chat. And the SL profile isn't like Facebook because, in my experience anyway, Facebook is used to keep up and communicate with friends who already know you, not new people wondering whether or not they want to start a conversation with you. I'd be scuppered if it worked like the SL profiles, because my Facebook biography contains only two words and I haven't used it to list every book and film I have ever read and watched, so nobody would ever speak to me. I would imagine that the 'biography' section to Facebook is a ghost from the time when it was used by rich American university boys to pick up rich American university girls, anyway. 

So there we have it. My name is Kitti Wytchwood and I am curious and I like to complain about Second Life and its inferences, coincidences, and ramifications. If there's something you want to know about me that isn't answered by the four words on my SL profile, say hi and ask me a question, like you would do if this was RL and you'd just walked up to me in a bar. I'm not getting my Facebook URL tattooed on my head, and anyway, I think I've got most of it set up so it can't be viewed by strangers.

A New Fetish?

This, I realise, is not a revelation. I am just slow. But look! - Kitti has proper feet! Mesh feet have been around for a while now, but I have held off picking them up because, in truth, they seemed like a lot of effort, and I wasn't sure how much I'd actually use them. But more and more, I'm wanting to throw Kitti's shoes out the window - it's not like she needs them, really - and so when I heard yesterday that the lovely lady at Glam Affair had released an applier pack that made colour-matching the feet super easy, I gave in.

For non-SL users, or those who have missed the whole mesh-feet thing, mesh feet are worn as attachments over your avatar's real system feet. System feet are strange and all your toes are smushed together like you've been wearing stilettos since you were three. They're really not good. But the mesh feet are much better, and once you have them on, you have to use a heads-up display menu to change the colour of them to match your skin tone. That's not half as easy as it sounds when you've given the colour palette from Microsoft Paint to work with (you know the kind I mean). But lots of skin makers, catching on to the trend, have begun to bring out their own HUD menus that allow you to change the feet to match their skin tones with just the push of one button.

I've made it sound much easier than I believed it was, and when I opened all of the little boxes (there were so many!), I did have a little tantrum because I could not make the applier work. Norah explained it to me, however, and...I was basically just being a plonker. Thank you, Norah.

So now I'm going to be barefoot forever. All I have to fear are lego bricks.

Dummy = Dirt

When dressing Kitti the other day, I realised just how complicated she has become. My little avatar not only has nice skin and hair, and clothes made out of mesh, but now she has mesh shoes, which mesh feet included, and mesh toenails that I can change the colour of. She has fingernails that aren't just painted onto her skin. Outfits aren't complete without jewellery, or eyelashes (although she isn't so advanced that her eyelashes aren't painted on). 

A Complicated Sort of Cat

Kitti rents a patch of sky in-world in which she has a house. She owns furniture - sofas and beds and coffee tables and easels and wooden chairs and even a television set. She has a whole folder of poses - static animations to hold her in place while I whack the graphics settings up to take screenshots. She has a(n admittedly small) set of windlight settings (lighting settings, basically) that I have created for her.

This is what it means to "not be a noob" in SL - and why people can tell when you are new. Sometimes, it feels like such a hassle to remember everything, and I wonder if people are going to call me out for being a fraud if I have forgotten to put my fingernails on, or if I let Kitti walk around barefoot with what are, admittedly, very hideous basic SL feet. The basic avatar doesn't even have proper toes.

But at the same time, I really like how Kitti is looking. I'm proud of her, and I think I'm getting better at photographing her, and the prospect of making my own lighting settings seemed so daunting but was actually really easy. Have I grown up in SL now? How much further have I got to go before I get so old that I really do throw my dummy in the dirt and start using only Linden Labs' library-provided materials? Do people ever do that, just for the Hell of it?

The Theft of a Virtual Body

Boo

I posted this on Flickr the other day, but decided it deserved a post of its own. Please click here - here! - to go and see the picture there.

Sian Pearl has been writing recently about the idea of pornography stealing the nude from art. You can read her post here - here! - and it's worth noting that some interesting ideas have emerged in the comments beneath the post. It has opened, I think, some interesting questions, but also made me think about a few things.

I don't take particularly provocative, shall we say, pictures of my avatar. I wouldn't say she dresses massively provocatively in the first place. Maybe the odd sci-fi outfit with a bare stomach or whatever. But this is about as naked as Kitti gets. 

I don't know why that is. I seem to hold the same rules about self nudity in SL as I do IRL (maybe with some lessening - I wouldn't wear those sci-fi outfits IRL! Though maybe I would if my RL body defied gravity the same way Kitti's does). That wasn't a conscious decision, just something I have gone along with. Maybe I should examine that.

So here. I tried it. I tried to be provocative, whilst only being as naked as I ever really am in SL. Maybe you could say the outfit in the previous picture (entitled Pearl House) is more revealing, but somehow this outfit feels more naked. 

I am, temporarily, stealing the (semi) nude from Sian Pearl, who is brave in all the ways that Kitti isn't. I also took this picture in her house, when she wasn't home, and she didn't actually know I was doing it - just so it felt like real theft :P

From Jealousy Born

I seem to spend a whole awful lot of time at the moment talking about getting dressed. There's a point to be made here. I have probably spent more time dressing my avatar in the past three years than I've spend dressing myself in the past twenty (I don't imagine I dressed myself when I was two. Maybe I did. My mum reads this - hi Mum! - so she'll no doubt tell me). I have a couple of friends in-world that only log in to dress their avatars. Dressing your avatar takes more time than perhaps it should.

But anyway. 

Yesterday, I found a picture online that stole my heart. It was uploaded by VictoriousVocabularly to illustrate the word 'thalposis' and offered a link back to the original as uploaded by the artist, 'thienbao on deviantART. When I found out that it had been published in Imagine FX magazine, I went on a mad hunt trying to track it down and get a copy, but I had little luck. In the end, I decided that I was going to try to re-create the image in SL using my avatar. This is the first time I have ever attempted such a thing. It felt kind of momentous.

'Plume' by 'thienbao

It got old pretty fast. I dragged my avatar all across the virtual world, making her try on more demos for items than I can count. I trawled the Marketplace (accessible through the browser - a kind of virtual Amazon, if you like), looking for corsets and boleros and feathers and windswept hair and all kinds of things. What I hit upon was something I had come to suspect, but had no proof of; that, despite the extensive length and breadth of Second Life, despite the hundreds of designers and creators and genres for clothing and items, the virtual world has not yet made everything. 

You might well laugh - I am laughing as I write this. In a logical way, I knew that Second Life could not be home to everything. But there is a certain frustration to be felt when I can type into the Marketplace search, right now...hmm, let's see...let's type in 'toilet seat'. And there we go - a whole page of just about every kind of toilet seat for just about every purpose you can imagine, and probably some you didn't want to imagine. Okay, let's try something else. Let's put in, I don't know, 'glass slippers' - ta-dah! One more (and I'm trying to be as random as possible here). Let's go with a 'steak dinner' - now, would you look at that! I can even get a bucket of KFC. But when I put in the components I wanted to recreate this picture, I could not find what I wanted.

I almost gave up - but I'm glad I didn't. I substituted a few things, and decided that my adaptation had to be true in spirit, if not in details. Because of the change in the make up of my avatar's costuming, I couldn't recreate the pose from the picture, either, so skipped over to Del May to pick up some new ones, and then skipped off to one of my favourite places in Second Life to take the pictures - the beach at Hangars Liquides. 

Here are the results.

From Jealousy Born - click here to view large on flickr

In these pictures, Kitti is a pale shade beside 'thienbao's creation, but I'm pleased with her. I think I created something unotherworldly, and beautiful - if it isn't arrogant to say so myself. I was going to mess with Kitti's shape, distort her face a little and widen the gap between her eyes, but as I've said in previous posts, the controls to do such in SL are difficult to manipulate, and I don't think they are elastic enough to manage to hold those proportions without making them seem grotesque.

If anybody knows how to get hold of back-issues of that magazine from 2009 (most of which were missing, even from the pdf downloads), please let me know. I think I'm in love.

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.