pixel pixies

 

Yet another of my favourite shops in SL has closed, land abandoned, sims dissolved. It follows the fate of so many I’ve been fond of over the way too many years I’ve been here, all consigned to the primyards to be disassembled, composted, and one hopes at least eventually to be repurposed as something else and not just rotting away in some sl’andfill.

Then there’s my friends list, my avatar’s and my Bloodlines online profile. All those I’d bitten and all those who’d bitten me, all those still in my clan’s bloodline, of a sorts, where are they now?

As with these, alongside my list of friends, so few are even here anymore, more gone than not, less are active than not, some most likely not logged on for years even if they could remember their passwords, or their names. Their avatars exist now only as ghosts: there and not there, so transparent they can’t be seen at all and yet there they are still lounging in my lists.

That’s life, even Second Life, time and people move on, change, die, my friends list reading more like a memorial to lives past than present, rows upon rows of gravestones overgrown with lichen and ivy, missing presumed. Occasionally one will suddenly appear after years, an IM (instant message), usually sent when I’m offline to be found like a message in a bottle washed up on my shore to be uncorked and read, quite often beginning, “I don’t know if you remember me, but,….”, or a more succinct “I’m back!”, sometimes leaving me scraping my brain as to who they are. I usually remember though, weirdly I’ve always remembered more detail than I would’ve thought, on how we first met, or something particularly notable we did, even if it was only the once. So strange how all we pixel pixies leave an echo however brief the acquaintance may have been, a different kind of byte caught in these memory banks.

I sometimes look through my list and think, I should purge this a bit, tidy up, as I do every now and then with my bulging inventory, which by the way keeps bulging no matter how often I sieve it. It’s actually a shame more of this stuff we accumulate isn’t set as ‘trans’, as in with transfer permissions, because it would be brilliant to be able to do the preloved thing and instead of throwing things away, pass them on. As for my friends list, I’m reluctant delete those names long gone or forgotten or those I haven’t heard from in years, they are people after all. At the end of the day they aren’t just pixel pixies but real people beyond their screens even if they aren’t inworld, so to speak, anymore. 

In a way I’m a carrier of part of their story, even if it’s a part they’ve long left behind.

© Anan Eebus

 

another isolation tale

I think I’ll self-isolate. . . . . . . . .
in SL!

Seems to me a much safer place to be at the moment, but would you believe it, there are even people here exploiting the virus for personal financial gain, selling products with the word coronavirus to make money. I mean, really, how cynical. I suppose we don’t need to buy them, but really for it to be in the true spirit of things then maybe all virus-related products should be free to encourage looking out for and looking after each other.

Or maybe, horribly, this is reflecting real life and all the greediness of it. Which is sad but out of my hands. Itis as bad as people stock-piling and hoarding toilets rolls, and who would’ve thought of all things that would be fought over come the apocalypse, it wouldn’t be oil or gold or water or even land, but toilet rolls! It’s totally mind-boggling. Again, luckily here in SL we don’t actually need toilet rolls either.

Anyway, I am sort of semi-self-isolating in RL though this has impacted on my studies which are all only now entirely online and my part-time work as an artist model for life-classes, which means no extra income. Oddly enough, or maybe not so oddly, I feel perfectly fine going anywhere I like in SL and doing anything I want. Even without a mask. Not that a mask really helps at all, but I suppose it makes some people feel better, like some kind of security blanket.

Anyway, I thought a lighthouse would be the best place to do it, on a rock off the coast with only birds and seals for company, and an endless supply of coffee (I made sure of that). Hopefully it won’t be toooooooooooo long as seagulls aren’t the best conversationalists.

 © Anan Eebus ~x

Adventures in nowhereland

            There are lots of nowherelands here, lurking at the end of a random teleport where you’ll land in the middle of nowhere, empty, sometimes jagged, sometimes rolling, sometimes dead flat and featureless.

            Then there’s where the land is no longer land at all but open water and you appear falling down and down and down into the however deep its watery depths are, which could be very or not at all. One just never knows when the ground may open up beneath your feet without warning.  This is especially so when you teleporting finds you in mid-air as high as a few metres to even thousands and you find yourself falling down and down and down.  Just as well we can fly here, or mostly as long as the land permissions allow you and when they don’t, well, brace yourself for impact.

            Nevertheless there are still adventures of a sort one to be had in nowherelands like seeing if is somewhere or something or someone in nowhere, signs of life, habitation or anything: a discarded prim, a pixel out of place, a breadcrumb or even something invisible that isn’t visible as invisible things tend to be, not visible.  Watch where you ‘tread’ though as you just never know what may be lurking, in a virtual world virtually anything is virtually possible.

            All land in Second Life has a name, some are brilliant, some baffling, some boring, some utterly bizarre and I’ll blog on some of these another time, but this land, this nowhereland is most often found to share one thing in common in being called ‘Abandoned’ which sounds most mysterious and sinister, if not a teeny bit apocalyptic.  Strangely sometimes these nowheres aren’t labelled ‘abandoned’ and yet have no obvious evidence of ownership or use one way or the other.  Yet more intrigue.

            Probably one of the biggest baffling mysteries in all this is why Second Life still charges huge amounts of money for land purchase and rental.  Not only that, whether you buy or merely rent, everyone pays a ‘tier’, the real fee behind the costs which even though charged in lindens, which is the currency here, this actually is done with real money in the real world.

            But if you are a landowner as opposed to a renter, you don’t really own it either, not really. Everyone pays a tier fee even though you might have bought the land for a bargain 1L, or linden, equivalent to pennies or cents in the real world.  Not only this but if you decide to give it up you have two choices: find someone to buy off you or simply hand it back to SL, in other words, ‘abandon’ it. 

            No one truly owns anything, not even anything you might ‘buy’.  It’s all smoke and mirrors.

            See, I said it was all very strange. I would think it’d be better if as much land and space as possible was being used, ‘owned’, and not how it is now with vast tracts of empty, or nowheres. Surely it makes sense to lower costs and fees, even have giveaways, which has to be better than lots of barren and abandoned nowheres.

© Anan Eebus/ Emma Calder