tricks of treats #10- Hallowmas

 

Hallowmas
where the past
catches up with you,
flaunting
and taunting
haunting your every step
scratching at the truth
tooth and claw
until your skin is raw
oozing from each pore
feeding on your flaws
reading every twitch and tell
and using them against you,

pulling out your roots
tearing at your seams
shredding your defences
poisoning your streams,

feel it brush
against your thoughts,
feel it creep
into your sores,
feel it pouring
acid in your wounds,
too late to be saved
from the things you crave,
careful with that dream
in case no one hears you scream,
can you recall a past
that you hoped would last?

© E. Calder

tricks of treats #9

 

© E. Calder

tricks of treats #8

 

© E. Calder

tricks of treats #7

 

© E. Calder

tricks of treats #6

 © E. Calder

tricks of treats #5

 

© E. Calder

tricks of treats #4

 

© E. Calder

tricks of treats #3

© E. Calder

tricks of treats #2

 

© E. Calder

tricks of treats #1

 

© E. Calder

Family ties

 

I’m a vampire.

This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who regularly reads my blog or knows me inworld, even though I been very lax in not having posted anything since, oh my god, November last year! So, this will be my first blog of 2024, and it’s already June!

I’m a vampire, I’ve said that already, but, spoiler-alert, I’m only one in Second Life (SL) and not for real. Although I might be, I wouldn’t admit it though because people tend to get weird and run away if you do, or start whittling stakes. I’ve been one since soon after joining SL in February 2008. I hadn’t planned it when I entered this world, didn’t even know about it, but after a mere few months suddenly I was, almost by accident, I’d been embraced into Bloodlines.

Bloodlines, or BL for short, for those who don’t know, is an SL inworld roleplaying game that has thousands and thousands of players. Players, among other things, are defined as ‘active’, or not. I’ll explain this the best I can soon. Most players are a member of a ‘Family’, the umbrella term for clans, hordes, covens, guilds, etc. Of those who don’t have an allegiance to any family are regarded as ‘clanless’, the Bloodline’s term for it being in ‘Curse’. This can be by choice or circumstance.

I’ve worked out that there are currently 5,692 Families in the game, all pretty much being a mix of races, such as vampire, lycan, angel, demon, or a hybrid of any of these, i.e. a vampire/lycan is called a ‘vaewolf’. One other race is humans, and as with all other players are either in a ‘family’ or not. Families lead by humans are known as guilds.

5,692 is a lot, the largest family in sheer numbers to date have 78,522 members, while the smallest ones have only one. These are ranked according to the number of members who are defined as ‘active’. On saying earlier that I’d explain this, truth is I’m not entirely clear on what defines ‘active’ in Bloodlines terms, it may be those not ‘destroyed’, as in bloodless (or empty of your particular race’s vital life-source, of which we lose a little each day unless you regularly feed on others, or, you’re protected with a special amulet), or it might be how recent you’ve logged in to SL, or something else entirely. Perhaps someone can tell me.

I am the head, or leader, of my own family, or clan, called Veiled Fang. I founded it years ago after having spent a couple of years in other clans learning the ropes, finding my feet, or, my fangs, so to speak, then suddenly found I had my own clan. Out of curiosity, I did a few pointless sums on my BL family’s statistics to work out what percentage of our members are actually defined in BL-terms as ‘active’. So, out of our total 394 members, only 49 are shown as ‘active’. This is only 12.44%.

This sounds low but it’s not bad at all in comparison to many other clans. Some, especially those with huge numbers in the thousands, can have as few as anything between 1.5% and 9% active. I think though that this metric can’t be used as a reliable measure, because of those families with, say, only one or two or three members, many show all one, two or three members to be active, which is 100%, that’s hardly a fair comparison when working out how active a clan is or isn’t, or at leats its members.

Another interesting sum I did was that out of the total 5,692 Bloodlines families to date, a whopping 1,880 have only one member, that’s 32.92 % of the total number of families. If you include those families having only two, three or four members, that’s 3,831 families, equating to 67.30%. Phew!

This is what a few empty moments in the day can do to me, make my brain want to play with pointless things. Still, it gave me something to write about, even though it may not be of any interest to you at all, and may even have made your brain hurt.

© Anan Eebus

 

Oops Halloween

I’m sorry to say I missed posting here for Halloween and missed pretty much every SL Halloween thing. Although, it’s ok, I did have a rock on time in RL which kept me preoccupied, dressing up for a couple of Halloween parties and events, even a Halloween dog show, which was completely bizarre.

The competitions at the Show were, unsurprisingly all for dogs and some of the categories included 'Lovely Vampires', being the prettiest female dog, 'Dapper Druid', the most handsome dog, 'Fangtastic Fancy Dress', 'Jed-eyes', the most appealing dog that a judge would describe as a ‘take home’ dog, the 'Gruesome Twosome' where both dog and owner are judged, 'Hubble-Bubble (I get into trouble dog)' which is obviously the naughtiest dog, 'Trick or Treat' for the best, you guessed it, trick, 'Waviest Wand' for the best waggle tail and 'Perfect Pumpkins' for puppies up to 12 months old. Yes, it was weird and hysterically funny.

I don’t have a dog but my friend does so I went with her, and we both went with her dog who was obviously dead keen on going.

So, I feel I owe you, and my SL blog, to include a suitably Halloweeny picture which I’ve included here, ta-daa!

I know this isn’t a very SL-content-rich blog this time so hopefully my next one will be, that is when I find time to have enough time in SL. But rest assured, I will, for sure, in the build up to Christmas which now that Halloween is over I could say starts . . . . . . now! Ho-ho-ho.

~Anan~~~

full to bursting

From the simple days of 2009...

 

What are we like! Inventories, we all have them, like nipples, except with those we are limited to just two, and even though we’re limited to a single inventory, there seems no limit on contents.

SL inventory’s are prone to going awry, as in, becoming full to bursting, like mine is right now. Luckily nipples don’t go awry, or at least mine haven’t yet anyway.

My inventory has just over 35,000 items in it, which to me is a HUGE number, and a HUGE number of stuff, and as I call my inventory my wardrobe, some days I’m terrified of opening it lest I get buried in an avalanche of stuff Mostly clothing, probably unsurprising, clothing of one kind of anything, mesh clothing of course, as is the thing these days, but I’ve also kept quite a few prim bits and bobs and outfits, even though I never wear them now.

I can’t seem to bring myself to abandon them, as it seems the only way to remove them is to basically bin them. Which is a shame and wasteful. In RL I’d be taking them to a clothing bank or charity shop, but here, everything pretty much has been made non-transferable so even if I wanted to give them away, I couldn’t. This I think is a huge mistake people have made over the years. Why shouldn’t we be able to pass them on? I understand perhaps not reselling them, perhaps, but simply passing them on to someone who might want them seems a more user-friendly way of dealing with unwanted clothes and other stuff.

And I do have plenty of other stuff too, as I used to do a lot of building I have loads of building materials, and furniture too, some of which admittedly I’ve never used, some used only once, some often but probably won’t use again. But, I never know, maybe I might.

Prim, sculpt and mesh, all making a trawl through my inventory quite a challenge. Fortunately I have over the years had the foresight to at least to some degree order things into folders and sub-folders, and even in some cases rename items, though this hasn’t been the case with everything. Some stuff is simply listed alphabetically, a list growing ever-longer, stretching into an infinite nowhere.

Perhaps 35,000 isn’t so huge to some people but to me I am constantly frustrated at myself for my inability to part with stuff I’ve spent years accumulating. But I have too, cos it is driving me bonkers. I want to rationalize, downsize, though not my height as I’m already quite small, in RL and SL. Not of the SL version of what they call ‘Petites’, as in tiny avatars more the size of fairies in the bottom of your garden kind of size, just small as in human and avatar terms.

I keep having clear-outs, spring cleans, even when it isn’t spring, but then I find I’ve acquired yet more stuff, mostly I should say, freebies, or winning stuff, lucky chairs, or incredibly cheap being that I’ve not much in the way of lindens, and rely on meagre sales of my artwork, which is most definitely meagre.

I’m due another wardrobe blitz and will get around to it, eventually, perhaps this will prompt me to do so. Or maybe it might not.

 .... to the full to bursting days of 2023

© Anan Eebus