under my skin

SL, Second Life, provides the perfect getaway staycation from CL, Covid Life, though some people seem to have let it seep in here too. Not me though, and anyway, vampires, which I am, don’t get Covid. Of course, I suppose some of us vamps might have rabies, so we’re not so squeaky clean, although, I am very particular about my fangs being well-brushed and razor sharp. I like a good clean puncture wound, none of your shredding and tearing by me.

I just realised I been here over 12 years. 12 years! Actually nearly 13 now. That makes me quite elderly in SL terms, here before mesh, even before sculpties, when it was just a totally prim-world and we didn’t look quite as lifelike as we can look now. I still have my original avi too secreted away in my inventory, which is basically not much different from me now, although now I hope I am much upgraded. I know it might seem really boring to some to just remain pretty much the same even though I’ve experimented too on and off, not to mention my mermaid form. I’ve messed around with being a tree and a panther, to name just two non-human shapes, but I always come back to me. What does that say about me? That I’m boring? Or perhaps I’m lucky that from early on I been comfortable in my own ‘skin’. 

 

Maybe that’s had something to do with my longevity here, why I’ve made it this far and this long and still in one piece, relatively anyway. Emotionally it’s been a roller-coaster up until recent years as if you’re not careful SL can have a habit of getting under your skin and not always being the escape from real turmoils you thought.

I’ve definitely outlasted many of my peers who’ve either left or dumped their original avi for a new one. Also those who drop in once in an SL moon, as in rarely. Sometimes I’ll log in to find a message from some long lost name on my friends list from years ago, and presumably I must still be on theirs. They are like ghost messages really, as though they’ve been left on the answerphone from another time and hadn’t been erased. They all mostly always say a similar thing, like, “are you still playing here?”, or, “just thought I’d join SL again”, and even when I reply rarely do I ever hear from them again.

You need to be a bit schizophrenic to be here, to add another you to the many you’s out in RL. Like for me, I’m a daughter, a sister, an aunt, a student, a volunteer, a model, a photographer, a waitress and probably more, so my SL avi becomes just another facet, one always with blue hair, but one totally down to me and not at the whim of others or society.

© Anan Eebus

 

dancing queen

It’s about time I posted my first blog of 2020 here. I’ve been tardy of late and been pondering my place in SL for a while now, it having changed so much in the past few years and me having been there for so, so, so, so long, which is a long time, very long, so, so, so, so long.

Not that I still don’t enjoy it, I do, just its hold on me has loosened, lessened, not what it was. Thankfully in some ways in that once upon an SL time I was so enmeshed in it, it started spilling over in m RL which is not what it’s supposed to do as far as I’m concerned. What did leak through was mostly the worry, the angst, even some of the drama, some directed at me some just happening around me. Of course we all know and loudly proclaim in SL it should be drama-free, there’s even signs affirming that on some sims: “This is a Drama-free Zone”. A bit like “this is a Zombie-Free Zone” except without the zombies, although I’m sure some of the people I’ve met here can seem a bit brain-dead.

If you’re not careful though things can snowball, get away from you, gather unexpected momentum and before you know it: madness!

Well, fortunately for me I’ve learned through my mistakes in investing too much ‘me’, so to speak, as in my emotions and trying to spot and head-off any potential drama before it becomes drama, which can be a bit of an inworld skill in itself and not a perfect science.

I always keep myself busy though and never understand those who say, “I’m bored”. It’s strange because f you are bored then why are you even there, online, inworld, and if you are go do something else instead. Some people seem to need to be ‘entertained’ all the time, and if you look hard enough, even thuogh SL isn’t what it used to be (i.e. admittedly not as much fun or interactive) there are things to do, place to explore, amazing builds and sims to see that are just a feast for the eyes and dancing, I love dancing.

So I’ve been thinking lately about why I’m still here. One thing for sure I am loyal to my avatar, or me, which sounds strange to anyone who’s never done SL. It’s like after a while because it is like: are are you your avatar, or, is your avi you? Either way you can feel incredibly protective about her, and in my case I do, and the thought of losing her after all this time is almost unthinkable. It would be like losing a part of me, because she is in a way, my avi is me in so many ways: my beliefs, attitudes and, even though you can choose any be anyone or anything here, I have actually very closely physically modelled her on me. Not sure why although I feel most comfortable in my own skin, although my hair in RL isn’t blue, although sometimes it has been, as it has been other colours too.

I’ve never been a tree or a dragon or a zombie. I am though a vampire, and a photographer. Some things have stayed with me pretty much from the start or at least from my first year here, like the blue hair I actually had sorted by my third week. I’m still finding new things too, adventures, friends and such, though have never been into anything overly competitive.

I haven’t come to any conclusions yet except that I’m not going anywhere and staying here in SL happily as me, probably because you just never know what might happen next, and that for me, is still most exciting.

~Anan~~

the inbetween between

As of today I have been in Second Life (SL) for, would you believe, 11 years and 6 months, a total of 4,202 days. OMG! Surely that is madness. I’ve actually been here since the 8^th February 2008.

Quite honestly it’s too hard to get my head around when I think of the time that’s past and what I’ve done in both SL and RL, my real life, my first life. I sometimes wonder if I’m sane or not, but rather than answer it and drive myself even crazier most probably going around in circles I’ll put it in a small jar in the back of an old cupboard, inside an even older wardrobe in a shadowy corner of a room I rarely go in at the end of a corridor I even more rarely dare to walk down behind the kind of door one meets and think, woah! No way am I going to open that!

As SL time is so different to RL time, something which those who have never used SL would fully understand, it doesn’t at all feel like I’ve been there that long but at the same time I’ve done so much there I’m surprised I’ve fitted all the experiences and changes and ups and downs in the time I have.

Most of my time in SL has been spent as a vampire, which is one of the few consistent things I taken with me throughout this journey, along with my blue hair which strangely I’ve had from the very start, and my shape and size and essential appearance which has changed very little and in some cases like my height not at all.  I’ve obviously updated myself as things got more clever and available inworld, like my skin though that has also, despite tiny changes, stayed the same.  I think I was lucky I finding myself and who I wanted to be inworld very quickly, without weeks of joining in fact. Some people seem to take months and even years going through constant morphing and changing with many giving up sooner than later.

Because of this I’ve enjoyed myself there extracurricularly as myself without having to spend all of my time, apart from like I say occasional tweaks, making who I am. I basically decided I wanted to be as close as possible to me, happy in my own skin, more than I am in RL.

Through my years there I only now see looking back how much has changed, some monumental, some very challenging, some for the better for sure some most definitely for the worse, but one thing that hasn’t changed is the market-economy culture. Although you can quite happily live in SL without spending a penny, and I don’t mean needing a wee, as there are loads of free stuff in everything, skins, body parts (sounds gruesome!), clothes, avatars of all ilk, furniture, trinkets, toys, vehicles, building materials and even roleplaying materials and stuff, you name it it’s there and as much for free as there is at a price. It still remains though that a lot of the best things and some games require money and unless you can pay from an RL account into your SL account you have to think of ways of making money inworld which can be anything between fun to frustrating to near-impossible. Hence, shopping is big inworld and it takes practice, cunning and experience to sometimes tease out the best freebies.

Soon it will be 4,203 days and I will be one day older, not just inworld but here too, as me, the real me, older and probably a bit weirder.

© Anan Eebus

a sim’ple life

            Another somewhere, another space in time where I find myself again wandering, almost but not quite aimless among the silences, where echoes have not learned to be echoes yet. 
            Another land into which I’ve landed, or teleported, if only it was so easy in RL, or real life as we in the know call it, we on the other side. In the blink of a click the pixels rush in like fans to a stage when the band steps out. And so it resolves from not really there to still not really there and yet, really there, manifesting especially for me and not anyone else as I know for sure there’s no one else here. My radar tells me so, just another useful thing to add to my RL wishlist. 
            I wish I may I wish I might stay in here forever and a day... 
            Simulation, or simulacrum, could be either as both in their ways fit with this extradimensional landscape, digiscape, unfolding, unraveling with so much colour, form, even movement  all the way down to the sea, or a sea, a nameless body of water across which I can’t go.  I’m not allowed, no one is, not by sea or by air, only by magic unless… unless there’s a crossing place where two lands meet like tectonic plates having shifted and thrusted and crashed into each other at some point in this land of no time to merge as, almost, one. 
            I can see it, over there, another landscape but can’t scan it with my all-singing all-dancing radar, but I see it merely the tiniest of steps away. There might be a momentary lapse where it’s like being catapulted and no matter how hard you flail you’ve lost control and you find yourself walking through walls or in mid-air, or even burrowing into the earth, below which incidentally and a void and usually avoided. 
            I can see where I’ve been but to go back I’d have to experience yet again those waves of drunken lag.  But the temptation to press on into the unknown is far too tempting. 
           “Beware: Sim Crossing”, read the sign. I should’ve seen it coming, though not all sim-crossings have them. It’s a bit like saying “mind the gap” as you step over in the hope you don’t fall down it and disappear forever into some otherwhere maybe even on the other side of the planet! 
            So you brace yourself, like at the start of a fairground ride, the one you’re not entirely sure if it’s going to make you throw-up or not. Hopefully the worse that’ll happen is a crash, as in logged out. Simple, just log back in again, but this was more in the old days and not so much now. Of course it’s still wise to wear a harness, just in case. With any luck then once you’ve made in one piece, and hopefully still with your clothes on, as yes, embarrassingly in the olden days that used to happen, an entire new simscape (my word) opens up, or resolves prim by prim as in literally appears in rapid little increments until it’s all there spread out before you virtual and real eyes. 
            What’s a prim?  These are the building blocks basically that make up this world, even you, it’s weird I know, sort of like the atoms although they would probably be more accurately called a nanoprim, as opposed to megaprims which are obviously the opposite in scale and vast. Prim? It comes from the word ‘primitive’ although now there’s also sculpties and also mesh which is essentially the same thing or at least work along the same principles but being way more advanced, especially mesh, though like prims also have their limitations and preferred uses. 
            But beware and mind how you go because there are also off-sim hazards, although these are really hazards they are the spaces beyond which you, or your avatar, can’t ‘physically’ go and are duly stopped by like an invisible wall, or force-field even though you can see beyond it like the horizon and sun setting and such they are out of bound.  Most probably it’s where there be dragons. 
            But that’s enough for now, to have found a sim, seen a sim, crossed sim-to-sim and discovered the dangers lurking off-sim. Now it has to be tequila-time, a prim-tequila of course.

© 2018 Anan Eebus