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

Xmascellany #12

 Well, the world is getting weirder and weirder by the day, so you can't blame me for escaping every now and then and hiding away from the bluster and nonsense and the facemasks and pandemics. So I become once more the wandering vampire but instead of searching for tasty necks to nibble, though I'd never say no to one being offered, am still on the hunt for the lost snowflake and no, I haven't found it yet. It is most elusive but I am not daunted while wearing my Christmas sweater and Christmas boots and with my trusty reindeer will track it down, I'm sure. Enjoy my journey so far.

x~

(snowflake-hunting in Love Valley)

Xmascellany #2

A new episode of my Xmascellany photographic journeys around a Second Life wintry festive advent Yuletime, welcome back! I always make sure to be suitably seasonally and warmly dressed. I suppose I see this as a bit of an antidote to the coronavirus lockdowns here, there and everywhere, everywhere that is except in SL which makes it the perfect place to hide a while without having to wear a facemask.

~x

  

(baja norte set 2)

further isolation tales

Isn’t it strange how some in SL just want to mimic exactly what’s happening in RL, which I find a bit baffling as I see SL more like a bit of an escape, of a sorts, or a holiday from it.

I think the oddest thing lately is facemasks. I don’t enjoy wearing them in RL even though in some circumstances in these times of lockdown and Covid and social-distancing I have too, so why would I wear one in SL, especially as virtual worlds are pretty much the only place on the planet, apart from Antarctica, where there is no coronavirus. We should revel in that freedom to move, explore, mingle, ‘touch’, not have to socially-distant and not get locked down there too.

Although there are times in SL when one feels incredibly isolated, exploring lands where there is not a soul, or at best some mannequins or bots, but no actual ‘real’ people. It’s eerie, although it can be fascinating too traversing these shadow lands, dusty corners, forgotten swathes. Apart from ‘abandoned land’ it’s obvious someone somewhere is paying for it and yet there’s no sign of life, activity or anything. This is when it really feels dystopian, even more so than those sims that actually are meant to be and designed specially as a dystopian-theme. It’s these accidental and inadvertent ones that truly have an atmosphere and ambience of some kind of nowhere, end of the world scenario, probably because they weren’t intended to be so. They sit like a shock on the landscape, a moment frozen in the last moment anyone spent there, an intimate anonymity.

I still wish we could travel between sims without having to teleport, to actually, walk, or drive, or fly, or sail. I know this can be done with many on the mainland where they are joined together, but, there are still what feel like huge expanses of nothingness, impassable. What a shame they aren’t connected by the same sea and sky, because if they were then any new sims could appear tectonic-like kind of simulating volcanic activity, as in Iceland, throwing up new land in dramatic ways.

I suppose that’s probably a bit too much to ask of SL, who seem a bit stuck in their ways and still mostly unimaginatively focused on making money rather than making experiences. We may have funky new skins and mesh Christmas pubic hair (it’s absolutely true, the other day I found this for sale!) but the ground on which we stand still seems stuck in its ways.

I am still here though, isolated and not, still me, still looking like me, not yet turned into a dragon or a walking tree, still got blue hair as I have had from my very SL birth, pretty much, give or take a week, and here I still am, gosh, how many years later? Over 12 years! Madness!

 © Anan Eebus

more isolation tales

It’s not all fun you know, lockdown. Not that you probably think it is either, but it’s necessary, for sure, But even at times like these we still only have a habit of putting the best of ourselves online and neglecting to share the rest.

Although you most probably don’t really want to know about such things as I just washed the dishes, or vacuumed the stairs, or replaced a bulb in the bedside lamp yes I am quite handy to have around sometimes. Nor how long I been staring at trees watching leaves unfurl or the times, a lot actually, when I flop on the bed utterly fatigued at the end, or sometimes middle, of a day drinking in the lack of scenic views my ceiling offers It’s not overly interesting either knowing what comfort food I’ve just made for lunch, though I have just baked the most brilliant pudding that will last me days.

You definitely don’t want to know the times I feel utterly useless, or when I almost scream, missing the university atmosphere, even the lectures, the library, coffee shops, my life-class modelling work, which pays when I do it and not when I don’t, so a loss of income there. That kind of ‘when will it end’-feeling just sometimes overwhelms. You won’t want to know about the angst I can go through choosing which socks to wear that day nor how slowly I can eat chocolate trying, trying, trying to make it last as long as I possibly can while fighting my instinct to gobble it all down within minutes. I’m right-handed, which isn’t very interest either, see more mundane stuff, and apparently I have a pretty good left-hook, I’m told. Not an actual hook, I’m not a Peter Pan pirate.

When I get low I really get low, like lower than a worm burrowing as fast as they can to escape a hungry birds beak. Though I full-well know everyone does to different degrees for sure. Sometimes it feels like we are all being consumed by social-distancing and self-isolation, our chatter, our behaviour, the headlines, the advice, social media, all reminding us to stay away from each other. Of course, it’s all for good reasons but it doesn’t stop it feeling draining. You definitely don’t want a blow-by-blow wordy account of me crying here online just with the effort of everything.

Keeping physically busy helps, as a Covid Volunteer, for instance, and active with exercise, yoga, running, all obvious mindful stuff to do to stay sane but in the end it can’t stop the brain mulling over it all, especially when waking up in the middle of the night wondering if you spent the last few hours asleep holding your breath, all so seriously disorienting.

I always remind myself however bad a day I’m having, someone is having it worse, far worse. Sometimes that doesn’t really help to know or even tell yourself that, but it’s true for certain.

Off to make dinner now, probably a spaghetti thing, which again is probably something of totally no interest to you. Hugs, stay safe and home and keep sane, or sort of.

~x