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?

Unname Me

Believe it or not, I don't like to whinge (I can hear you laughing!). But this phenomena seems almost too funny - to me, at least, with my probably pathetic sense of humour - not to comment on. I have been in Second Life now for what I consider to be a fairly long time, so this isn't something that has only happened to me once. And I am not, really, complaining, so keep your hair on. 

Naming my avatar 'Kitti' was asking for it a little bit. I really didn't think that one through. I have now heard probably every cat-related joke in the book, from the crude to the yawningly boring. Most recently, I've been told that my SL name sounds like that of a burlesque dancer, and I kind of like that idea, in a romantic kind of way. But that isn't the phenomena I'm talking about. Out of all of those jokes, the people making them have probably only spelled my name correctly once - and that is probably an exaggeration. Once is probably one too many.

Here's the punchline. In SL, your avatar's name floats above your head. Even if you have the floating usernames turned off (which I do usually), your name accompanies everything you type in any chat field, MSN/Skype/Facebook style. It's written right there. 

The Owl and the Pussycat

Genuinely, it doesn't bother me too much. I think it has more to do with that fact that "kitty" is an accepted, well-worn word, and typing it becomes a habit, than ignorance. I have even made that mistake myself a couple of times. But I cannot help laughing, just a little bit. It's that final sneaky 'i', complicating things and tripping people up.

To make it worse, this is also a problem I suffer in the real world. My real name isn't difficult to spell, and it certainly is not uncommon, but there are a number of different ways to spell it and, despite the fact that I could have it written on my forehead, people spell it wrong. It's only got three damned letters in it! "Kitti" only has five.

Some of my SL friends have eliminated the problem by calling me 'Kits', the filthy cheats (I love you guys really), which is kind of ironic because they're usually the only ones that know that it ends with an 'i'.

Do people get your name wrong?

Shut Up and Eat It

Meeow

My cat is still missing. I know now that I need to file a ticket (essentially a missing persons report) with my landlord and the place I got my cat from, and hopefully they will be able to trace her/bring her home/give her a stern telling off. Thank you to everyone that offered me advice about that.

I was talking to a non-SL-using friend this morning about the aforementioned missing cat, and how it was slightly amusing that she had gone missing the morning after I had her neutered. Feeding her was becoming expensive, and so I made the (actually quite difficult) decision to buy the bottle of permapet and stop my cat from being a breedable. It only makes sense, of course, that cats getting a lot of exercise eat more than cats that only think about getting a lot of exercise, but by administering this permapet solution stuff, my cat no longer even knows what sex or breeding are, and never will again, so she apparently doesn't need to eat anything at all.

Anyway. What this led to was my voicing of something strange that happened when I neutered my cat. Over her head, as you may have seen from previous posts, used to sit a set of little meters that told me how hungry she was, how tired she was, and how happy. Once I had her neutered, all of these bars vanished. All of them. Suddenly, because my cat was no longer of breeding stock, keeping her happy and well-rested ceased to matter. I wasn't expecting this, though I appreciate how such things might work to create a game out of breeding cats. Poor Party Cat went from being a slightly more realistic tamigotchi to a cuddly toy in the click of a button. 

"You took her feelings away," said my non-SL-using friend. "That's cruel." 

"No," I clarified, "I took the measurement of her feelings away." It was pretty arbitrary, anyway, and I found it insanely difficult to balance her tiredness with her happiness. She would be miserable, but I couldn't cuddle and play with her because she was insisting on sleeping, and vice versa. Useless. But if what I said is true, why do I still feel uneasy about the idea? 

But did Party Cat ever have feelings in the first place? If we are talking on a plane in which she even exists, then yes, she does have feelings. But in a wider world context..?

I wrote a post on a popular SL forum the other day about the wording on a notecard of rules for the space brothel bar I mentioned in my 'ad(Mired)' post - which was along the same lines (and using the same lexis) as the sim rules I wrote about in one of my most popular blog posts, 'On Being Offended'. The response I got was less than enthusiastic - or, rather, less than enthusiastic about my take on things. Despite my explanations, I couldn't quite seem to articulate myself properly, and was basically told, in the end, that I was being picky and pedantic. I had got my cake, and I should just shut up and eat it. 

This, I confess, I disagree with. I think I have a point there that is, if only on a semantic level, important. And like I said, my post on the subject from a few months ago remains one of my post popular posts with (at the time of writing) one-hundred-and-sixty-one views - which is a hell of a lot for me and IYDISL! So I can't be alone in thinking that such is important. 

But where is the line? Despite my sense of unease, I'm not really sure that whether or not SL has a measure of my cat's happiness is ground-breaking digital journalism. A better question, perhaps, might be why you never see my avatar Kitti smile, and if there is a measurement for her happiness. Is her happiness my happiness? What does happiness mean in a virtual world context, and how is happiness measured, anyway?

Now the line is well and truly muddied. My little paragraph there has made it the muddiest line I have ever sought to draw. But right now? I think I should just shut up about my cat, file the damn ticket, and eat my muddy cake.

A Bit Wobbly

I'm going to give it to you straight here: this isn't really a post about Second Life. It's not not-a-post-about-Second-Life, but you aren't going to learn anything new about the virtual world from me today (as if you do ordinarily!). 

I'm feeling a bit wobbly today. Somebody give me some stablisers (remember when you used to need those on your bike? Doesn't that make you feel old? Ugh)! I awoke early this morning, turned on my laptop, loaded my undergraduate dissertation file, and wonder how the Hell I was going to get through the rest of the day. Three hours later, on a word count of three hundred and eighty-two, of which only eighty-one words are new, I am wondering if my target of one thousand words today is even remotely realistic. It's not even the only thing I have to do today. Damn university.

It isn't that I don't find my dissertation topic interesting - I do. I picked it because I was most interested in it. But 'most interested in it' doesn't quite translate into 'easiest or most accessible to write about', and that's where I am floundering. And, with just under two months to go before the final hand-in date, I'm wondering if I shouldn't be writing about something else. Something else such as...oh, I don't know...maybe a little something I've been keeping a blog about for almost a year now?!

The idea is redundant, of course; I can't change topics now. And it is highly possible that I would be getting frustrated right now with any topic I had chosen to write about, blog or no blog. But I am tired and fed-up, and it is oh-so-easy to wander over here and start writing about...well. Whatever I want to write about in relation to Second Life.

I even have an alterior motive for writing this. Okay, 'alterior motive' is the wrong phrase. I sat down to write this little whinge, and realised I could make myself feel better by relating it to something I have been meaning to making a little post about for a few days now. I think that the two go hand-in-hand rather nicely.

Ordinarily, Kitti Wytchwood is useless at hugs. For whatever reason, whenever Sian Pearl offers to give her a hug (I have to click 'yes' to allow it to animate Kitti), Kitti just kind of stands there like a dummy and does nothing. Or she waves her arms around in a manner reminiscent of a Dalek. Or her legs start to move but she doesn't go aware - spontaneous treadmill? 

But the other day, it worked! Kitti gave Sian a hug back. Sort of. 

Hurray!

I could use a hug right now.

Also - I think it was the same day as the Successful Hug - this happened. I'm not really sure what 'this' is, beyond that it most definitely happened:

What is going on, SL?!

Apparently, nobody could see it but me. On everybody else's screens, Kitti was doing just fine. Sigh. It did make me laugh, though.