sim'ptomatic

 

Wow, has it really been a whole month since I last wrote anything here? How time flies in Second Life, the place where time feels either frozen in time or moving at a totally different speed to RL time, slower or faster though I'm not completely sure.

Distances here are also tricky to comprehend despite the big map claiming to show the our entire inworld world, and when you think that distance and time are kind of interrelated, definitely interdependent then it can prove even more discombobulating. As you know, metres are used here, something you will know for sure if you've done any building or landscaping, but depending on the size of your screen it can still feel disorientating. Perhaps what most people are familiar with in size is the reliable and unchangeable 'sim', so I was thinking, maybe we could use that as a measure of distance. So a sim would be the largest and use variants for smaller measures within it, a simlet could be half a sim, a simling could be a quarter, a simcron could be an eighth of sim and a simtic could be a single step. So you could then work out distances between places here as like 12 sims away, or 42 sims and one simlet.

Is that all sounding a bit daft? Probably, and I can't imagine it would take off as a workable idea anyway, even I'm starting to have my doubts. It's good to puzzle though, even if it does turn your mind inside out.

I suppose with teleporting being almost pretty much instantaneous it doesn't matter how far away somewhere is in time. But still, SL time is like an anomaly, neither the time it is nor the time it isn't and the time you're there definitely doesn't correlate with RL time. But does it need too?  I think I am getting a little lost in my own rambling here, but I've been grappling this kind of existential dilemma in SL for ages now. Don't even ask me to measure it in SL time though, I'm already confused enough.

I think though that is why I can find SL so disorienting, the fact that you're everywhere at once but still in a sense travel to get anywhere, albeit almost instantaneously via teleporting. There's a whole philosophy going on here that I'm determined to get to grips with, maybe. Not making any promises as this clearly isn't a promising start in trying to coalesce my thoughts into anything close to coherent. Maybe that's what happens when you're also a vampire, and a mermaid, and have some wolf in you, and probably a bit of angel too, a mosh-pit and clash of supernatural sanities wondering who goes first. Or I could just be having one of those strange days when my brain does weird things to catch me off-guard.

 © Anan Eebus