trippin' the All Hallows fantastic

 

I am what the darkness made me
I am what the darkness makes me do
I am the shadows
the absence of light
I am the offer
for you to take into the night

© Anan Eebus 

 

spookier times

Continuing my Halloween stalking. (No avatars were harmed during filming).😁

 

 

Beware, beware that Halloween stare...

 

 

 

 

As you can see, I have webbed feet!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Making new friends.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When you need a helping hand.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I can't understand why I have a headache.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I wonder if they'll be my friends...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ring around the cauldron...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

New designer backpack.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reach out and I'll be there.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Eek!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Something is afoot!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What's for dinner?... Brains!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I think I'm getting ahead of myself.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Not my idea of a cosy night in!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ouch! That tickles.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What the fork! Double ouch!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Not exactly being stabbed in the back.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After a hard night's haunting it's good to just kick back and let a weird vortex sing you to sleep.

 

And then there was one.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I hope you enjoyed my little Halloween experience, I did, and despite having seemingly died several times during it I'm still here, mostly intact!

~Anan x 

 

 

 

 

tricks of treats #10- Hallowmas

 

Hallowmas
where the past
catches up with you,
flaunting
and taunting
haunting your every step
scratching at the truth
tooth and claw
until your skin is raw
oozing from each pore
feeding on your flaws
reading every twitch and tell
and using them against you,

pulling out your roots
tearing at your seams
shredding your defences
poisoning your streams,

feel it brush
against your thoughts,
feel it creep
into your sores,
feel it pouring
acid in your wounds,
too late to be saved
from the things you crave,
careful with that dream
in case no one hears you scream,
can you recall a past
that you hoped would last?

© E. Calder

tricks of treats #9

 

© E. Calder

tricks of treats #8

 

© E. Calder

tricks of treats #7

 

© E. Calder

tricks of treats #6

 © E. Calder

tricks of treats #5

 

© E. Calder

tricks of treats #4

 

© E. Calder

tricks of treats #3

© E. Calder

tricks of treats #2

 

© E. Calder

tricks of treats #1

 

© E. Calder

hello Halloween

 

‘Tis that time of year
again, be a-feared
quiver and quake
shiver and shake
the veil between
the seen and unseen
is tearing again
into tatters and shreds
as one world is bled
and seeps into the other
to claim the unclaimed
souls without names
the walking undead,
despairing, the dread,
breathless the screams
unravel from dreams
severed the veins
that trickle, that stain
there’ll be no escape
from this your wake
now all you can do
is wait.

 

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

 

A sense of grief

A sense of grief, the weird feeling I got recently as I was doing something so boring and benign as clearing some things out of my Second Life (SL) inventory. All of a sudden I felt a growing overwhelming sensation of grief, of loss, of a distance moving further away from me.

It wasn’t feeling of mortality or anything like that, just a realization of how long I’d been in SL and how much it felt like so much longer: a lifetime, or several.

I was sorting through my vampire stuff, which to anyone not in SL would sound utterly bizarre, and realised how many different vampire RP systems I’d been part of, some more than others, and how most of which are now gone, defunct. I was left with just the two active ones now, which is probably just as well, being they can take a huge amount of time and commitment.

As I was packing all the bits and pieces, HUDs, associated regalia and weapons of the now deleted systems into single boxes to rationalized them and reduce my ever-bulging inventory I felt this sense of grief. I couldn’t face getting rid of them completely yet, even though they no longer worked (crazy, I know). 

I found myself remembering the people I’d met through them, the adventures, inn-jokes, laughs and tears and suchlike, and how all that’s gone as are most of the people, having left not just the RP system but inworld SL entirely.

I recalled the process of learning each one, meeting sometimes new people, new vampires and other weird supernaturals, each system often so different from the other, each with their own quirks and sims and worlds and objectives. I have probably tried pretty much every single vampire RP system going in SL at one time or another and still play two. 

But it isn’t so much the vampire thing that made me feel this waves of sadness, it was that the act of sorting through signaled some kind of precipice, as I remembered people who had not just left SL entirely leaving behind their memories, but those who actually died, as in really died, in real life and how now for many of them their avatars still exist in SL. Although not in body but there in friends lists, clan lists, their profiles frozen forever in inworld time.

This is the grief I felt. Unlike most of the time in RL grief is shared and released and come to terms with, here in SL it can’t be in the same way and can’t be done with anyone outside of SL who’s never played, never been, or not even heard of. 

There are lots of us for whom being here is very personal and not shared with anyone within their immediate real life circle, and because of that there’s nowhere for this grief to go. Most people who’ve never experienced SL think we are a bit nuts anyway wondering why we waste our time here.

So it eats away inside and sometimes wells-up as it did with me recently. It’s very real, this grief, its deep, embedded and sometimes catches me unawares, all the deaths, losses, experiences, adventures which were just as real as anything in RL, but real in a different way: the relationships, friendships, the bonds, just as real because we did so not just as comic avatars but as real people. 

© Anan Eebus 2019