Me here now

It has been so long since that first day I found myself here, in Second Life, unsure of myself, not even knowing why I was here at all.

It was a radio program I heard way back on 2008 where SL was mentioned in glowing terms as being “the next big thing” in virtual reality since when it was launched back in June 2003, about five and half years before I discovered its delights. Not sure if I did so out of curiosity or maybe even boredom, although I hardly ever, if ever, get bored, but I was going through a rocky period in my life so if I’m honest, that was probably an impetus, an escape from the real sometimes seemed a good idea at the time.

Apparently, by 2013, SL had over one million users of which I was one, and still am, and now this year, in fact this month on the 23^rd it’ll have reached its 20^th anniversary. Nowadays its user-numbers bobble around 800,000 to 900,000, so they say, though how many of those are active, as in log in at least once a month of not more frequently, is hard to say. I know for a fact there are numerous dead accounts, avatars that still exist ‘on paper’, so to speak, or inworld, but are no longer accessed by their real world selves; effectively abandoned. People move on and don’t bother or remember to actually delete their inworld avis (avatars), simply walk away or even lost their password and rather than faff about trying to find it again they make a new avatar, while some people seem to drop in once a year maybe for whatever reason.

Whatever, many I think, we can become quite attached to our avatars, our inworld selves. The longer we’re inworld with our inworld persona the harder it can be to just erase it from existence. The thought of doing so might elicit feelings of grief, the idea of maybe losing a part of yourself, this you that is you while at the same time isn’t. It’s a weird psychology and potentially a huge personal dilemma.

Now, I know of some who make avatars and throw them away regularly, never get attached, move on, and seem to have no problem with that approach. Personally, I’d find that impossible. Is it healthy to become so attached to something that’s on the face of it little more than pixels, ones and zeroes? I don’t know.

I was SL born on the 8^th February, 2008 which makes me, as I’m writing this blog, 15 years and 4 months of age, a total of 5603 days since I first ever logged into this alternative world created, founded, invented, whatever, by Philip Rosedale. It feels kind of like time in a bottle. Even though for now I seem to do less inworld I’m in no rush to leave, it’s still a part of me.

I remember how I felt when another virtual world, Inworldz, actually closed down completely, and quite suddenly, so much so most of us had little or no time to properly finalise our affairs there or even say goodbye to our inworld selves, many actually lost real money. As with SL I’d invested quite a lot of myself, not so much financially but emotionally, and as such felt, in a way, grief-stricken. I know some people might think it potty to be like this, but it’s no different from anything you put a lot of yourself into to have taken away.

These places can get under your skin, you have to be careful sometimes to get the balance right, which as I’ve said in previous blogs I’d got wrong numerous times, but I think finally I’ve found a kind of equilibrium, for now anyway.

Then again, I seem to keep changing my mind on this, some days I want to get more involved again, others am happy to keep connected but also a distance. Either way, RL rules! For all it being stressful and not being able to fly unaided, like you can in SL.

© Anan Eebus 

a place of my own– nekopolis tails

I joined Second Life (SL) in February 2008, and wow, that was so long ago in a world so different from what it is now. I’m not sure what the age-limit is for SL but by US standards I might have not been old enough but as I am in the UK, I was and still am most definitely an adult here.

For the first year I didn’t have anywhere of my own to live, as such, I’d never thought about it until I saw that people did have homes of different kinds. Once I’d become a vampire I made my ‘home’ the land of whatever clan I was in, but it wasn’t ever anywhere I could call my own private space.

Then, while on my random travels I discovered a sim called Nekopolis, and while there met someone who is even to this day still on my friends list told me about a block of apartments with rooms to rent for 1L a week for 10 prims. I thought, brilliant! Until I remembered I had absolutely zero money/lindens. I’d even become part neko at the time, I had a very cool blue-shaded tail.

So, I took up a combination of camping, which was boring and didn’t do for long, and hunting out places where magic chairs or lotteries, whatever, were giving away lindens if the first letter of your first name landed just right. This got me 1L here and 1L there but it was incredibly laborious and tedious. That’s how it came about I started pole-dancing for money.

I went around the various pole-dancing clubs and places, like beaches and bars and anywhere really that had a tip jar you could freely log in to and just go for it. But then it also had to be somewhere for people otherwise I wouldn’t have earned many tips with no one there.

Now this was a lucrative occupation, at least for a while anyway, and fun, again, at least for a while. What I hadn’t realised was how exhausting it could be, and a steep learning curve though I did take to it quite well, I thought. I was earning sometimes hundreds for an hour or two’s work.

It was mad, but I worked hard for it, it’s not as easy as it looks even though some dancers just seemed to get on the pole and let the anims (pre-programmed animations) take over, like it was they weren’t there in RL. I didn’t do that, I was present all the time and interacting with any audience and happily chatted with customers, some of who were really nice and not all creeps as one might imagine in these places, and respectful too. Some places though did have so-called bouncers who ejected anyone rude. Pole-dancing doesn’t have to be seedy, even though I did do partial striptease with it down to lingerie for a while until I was brave enough to go topless, but only for the right tips and if it felt right. I never went total nude though, had to leave something to the imagination, surely.

Consequently, I was now earning plenty of L’s to get one of those single-room apartments in Nekopolis, finally, all I had to do was go there every day and keep an eye out for one to come free. Lo and behold, after a few weeks one did and I got it and moved into my first own place where at least I could rezz some seating and a pose stand, which pretty much took up all the ten prims. But that was all I needed. I loved the novelty of it and I set home there for a handy low-lag place to log in.

I stayed there for ages, more than a year, which in SL is a long time. The only reason I left was that, sadly, the sim closed down, as so many do. Such is the nature of place. It was a shame and I do miss it because apart from it being inexpensive to live here, it was just a cool place with plenty of hangouts, and shops! Who knows, if it was still there now I might also still be living there.

As for the pole-dancing, I carried on for several months, adding chair-dancing among other related things to my CV, including some perhaps less respectable skills. In time I moved on from the pole work into other stuff inworld. To this day it is still the best earning job I’ve ever had. 

 © Anan Eebus

 

free cookies

I’m not sure this should be a blog at all, being that all I’m going to say is as I haven’t been hugely active on SL of late, even though I log in every day it’s only mostly briefly, so I haven’t got much to blog about, so here I am telling you in a blog I haven’t got much to blog.

It’s not I don’t want too spend time there, as such, though right now I haven’t really felt that driven too, particularly as my RL is so all-consuming right now. It even makes me think back and wonder how on earth I managed to spend as many hours of every day that I did, and managed to come through all the stress I seemed to put on myself in the process. In fairness to me though, other people were often to blame for that stress, which is, from my point of view at least, not the point of SL or in fact should be for any online game/world/alternate reality.

It should be like in western movies when a gunslinger enters a new town to be told that all guns have to be handed in before he does, and that he’ll get them back when he leaves. Or more simply, when you insist someone takes their shoes off to come into your house. Well, similarly with SL and suchlike, before entering you should leave all your RL hang-ups at the door/login. Although I don’t meet as many people inworld as I used to, even though I still do on and off, I have a feeling that generally this is more the case now, much less grief going on. Either that, or I’m very good at avoiding it. It could be a phase though, SL, like anywhere and anyone goes through them, good and bad.

I wonder if, for a while, SL for me was like a crutch at a time I was going through a rough patch (which is a polite way of putting it, lol). Perhaps not all ‘rough’ as such, just difficult and was looking for ways out, or time away somewhere where I wouldn’t have to deal with the hassles and stress. It didn’t really work. That, I suppose, is the twisted psychology of it, even though there were periods at the time when I convinced myself it was. In fact, what did happen was my life became that little bit more complicated because I’d now added SL. Not just this but I’d also inadvertently ended up taking on responsibilities here when actually my aim was to have none.

I can’t help it though, seems it’s in my nature to take things on. I don’t know why or what compels me, again maybe it’s just my nature and that’s something that very tricky to get your head around, even though a lot of it is going on in your head, or actually most of it.

I did say at the start I had not much or nothing to blog; seems I was wrong, in part at least. There’s not much about SL in this, I admit, but that’s because, like I said, I’ve barely done anything lately inworld, that is, aside from setting up two art exhibitions at two different galleries which actually just involved me hanging my artwork and a little decorating.

So, ho hum, I’m sure you’re bored now, even if you’ve even bothered reading this far. But if you have, well done, you get a gold star and a freshly-baked cookie, plus a nude photo of me! That last one’s a joke, by the way, the cookie might be too because I just checked and I’ve eaten them all.  

 © Anan Eebus

 

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