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

 

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 

 

 

Happy New Year 2023

 

wherefore art thou

Where are they all?!

All those tens of thousands of people on SL inworld at any one time, where do they go? Frequently I’ll log on and see on the opening screen the numbers on how many avatars, or avis, are inworld right now which can be usually anything between 25,000 and 50,000 and sometimes even more, yet I barely see, meet, bump into a single one of them. Although, that’s an accidental lie, I do, a few, but literally only a few on my travels, in ones and twos, threes and fours here and there, sometimes tens of people, occasionally a few dozen at best, but that’s pretty unusual.

So, even if you add up these avis scattered across the plethora of sims that exist in SL there’s no way they can account for the tens of thousands, surely. It’s baffling, a conundrum, an enigma, a Mobius strip-shaped wrapped up in a Schrodinger’s cat sat a box wearing a hat.

But then, what I’m really wondering is, where are all the real people? Where are those who aren’t bots or zombies? I’m not talking actual zombies, by the way, that although being real people with real accounts, they don’t actually do anything other than stand or sit around, often just to camp for money or goods or whatever. I’m convinced their real-world owners are often not even at their computers, logging in only to go afk (away from keyboard).

Many of those I see around aren’t actually anyone at all but Bots, or SmartBots, but are nevertheless included in the numbers online because they are actual accounts. They are usually of one of two types of Personal Bot, ‘Standard Bots’ which function as such things as greeters, AI support, inviters, notice-senders; and then there are ‘Model Bots’ which are those used as mannequins, dance models, beautification, and usually moving in some way. These tend to do less than the Standard ones, but, in saying that with respect to both, they are actually real avis, it’s just that there’s no one behind the keyboard, no one at the wheel. Some can even be set to automatically log in and out like being on a timer. But, like I say, being actual accounts as such, they are included in the number inworld at any one time.

But these bots aren’t anyone you can have any meaningful interaction with, and that includes another relatively new thing I stumbled on the other day, another kind of bot in a way, “Smart-Mates”. There really is such a thing, I know, weird. They may sound a bit rude or naughty but nope, they aren’t, sorry to disappoint. They hang out with you, follow you, always want to be with you, which can be regarded either as welcome company, or, a bit creepy and clingy. Some have been lovingly called, ‘bodyguards’. Like the other kind of bots, they too are actual avatars with real SL accounts and also like them there’s no one at the wheel, so to speak, and you rent them as opposed to buying them. I think anyway, I am not totally clear on how it all works. How much control you have over them I’m not sure but might feel a bit like owning a blow-up doll.

Some days can really feel you’re wandering around an abandoned world where all the people have been stolen, kidnapped, abducted. So, where are they all? Or, have I got it wrong and in fact we the real people are actually outnumbered by the bots and zombies, and now, ‘smart-mates’?

© Anan Eebus

 

 

to name but a few

 

   When I joined SL way back in 2008, five years after it started in 2003, choosing a name was different from what it is now. Your first name could be whatever you wanted it to be, you choose it, make it up, whatever, a normal regular name, one with random letters or numbers, or a combination of both, a made up word, you could even name yourself after an object, wherever your imagination took you at the time of signing up, but once you’d done it that was it, your name, no changing unless you got a new account.

Your last name was chosen from a select list provided by SL at the time of signing up. Some of the names would have been familiar like real-world ones, while others completely made-up. This list every now and then be changed, some surnames would drop off it and new ones added. Whatever you chose that would be your inworld name, as in my name, ‘Anan Eebus’. The surname ‘Eebus’ wasn’t around very long I’d discovered and was lucky to choose it from the list at the time as now when I search there aren’t many with it. These names are now sometimes referred to as ‘legacy names’, so not only have I got a legacy name still, it’s an unusual one in that not many people ever chose it.

After a few years of being on SL, they changed the naming process to you only choosing one name, your first name essentially, which could be a single name or a compound of say what you might want your first and last name to be. Additionally they took away the last names lists completely making all new accounts be whatever you chose as your first followed by ‘resident’. For example, my name would have looked like this: “Ananeebus resident”. As it is I think I was lucky to get in before they made that change. I thought this was a bit silly, and I think it was at a time they were trying to take more control or something. I actually have no clear idea why they did it.

Moving on yet another couple of years and they have since abandoned the ‘resident’ surname in favour of you just choosing one name, whatever you want but it can only be a single word with no spacing, hence, if I were to join now it would be ‘Ananeebus’, and nothing else, or of course I could just have gone with ‘Anan’ as long as there wasn’t another already inworld with that name. That’s always been a rule, no two avatars with the same account name.

Just prior to dropping the 'resident' in favour of what we have now for new accounts they introduced an additional naming option, that is an ‘alias’. This is a name you can unofficially change you name too in your account so your avi, or avatar, will show up as that name inworld even though officially you’re still the name you originally signed up with. This means you can one more have two names, or more, and even symbols in your name, you can in fact if you know how get quite wacky and inventive with it or choose one which fits you character better for inworld roleplay.

I’m still pleased I have an original name, or what they call now a legacy name, and I’ve never used the alias option as yet, I’ve felt no need. Some people change theirs as often as every week, just for fun or for whatever, perhaps just being bored or a bad case of nominative attention deficit disorder. Those who do can make it tricky when looking for them in your friends list to IM or something as when they use an alias it shows up first and can take an age to work out who is who.

So that’s two things I’ve never changed since I joined, my name and the colour of my hair, it’s always been blue, since my second week here I may choose different styles on and off but the colour remains an obvious shade of particular blue.

~Anan Eebus