minding the gap

     It’s 2021, as if you didn’t know, and what a journey 2020 has been to get here. The time’s been both contracted and protracted, now we’re suddenly four months into this year and I’ve just realised how much has already gone.

     I felt it was time to catch up on my blogging here, and you, lovely readers, that’s if you’re still out there. So much has happened and is still happening to everyone it’s been too easy to get lost or mislaid in the noise of it all. RL (real life) time seems to have collided with SL (Second Life) time.

      For me, SL has always seemed to exist within its own clock, its own chronology, with usually more time passing there than actually had in the real world. Like dog years, a year in SL can feel like seven. Perhaps not as much as that but maybe you get the idea, that sense that you can live that many years in a mere actual 12 months- not only virtual characters and lives but virtual time.

      Second Life is a bubble into which whenever we log in we penetrate like tiny needles each time, not enough to pop it though. Or maybe it’s more like a virus, being absorbed while its integrity remains intact and like a virus we have an impact on events and actions which might result in changes or ripples for good or for bad. Oddly enough we never leave actual footprints for virtual archaeologists to find in the future.

      Well, I’m feeling very philosophical today, but in truth I’ve always been like this, thinking too much, a pocket philosopher (after all, I’m not very tall, in RL or SL). In SL we’re immortal, or think we are. I’ve known inworlders (SL players) who have vanished without a trace and live on only in my memory, not anymore even a profile. As we in RL return to dust, in SL we revert to pixels, maybe to be recycled, reused, becoming ‘preloved’, or even discarded into those vast oceans that exist between sims into which we aren’t allowed access, through which we have to ‘hop’, or teleport. They are the forbidden lands, lands of water, we’re tantalizingly teased but aren’t given the keys to unlock, or touch it, feel it, interact with it in any way.

      It is the nowhere, a final frontier. I think they should open them up, find a way, find the key. The future of SL I believe is there, joining the dots, so to speak. Then we could walk or swim or fly, take a train, drive a car, ride a bike between Sims, perhaps in glass bridges, causeways, following buoys or wandering stars, feel a freedom we’ve not yet been given inworld. I don’t think they’re reading this, those Linden gods, but if they were, that would be my suggestion.

 © Anan Eebus

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

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