fallen for autumn

I’m coming out of the cupboard because autumn is here, my favourite time of the year, definitely my favourite season.

I can’t say I am missing those baking hot days of summer, being of vampire skin, i.e. burns easily, I for one am pleased we’ve lost more than a few degrees as autumn, or Fall, depending on your preference, seeps into our days and our bones. Yes, it’s chilly, yes it’s a bit damp, yes it’s a bit more breezy and yes, possibly a bit more rain but not actually worse than summer rain as when we had it just made for flooding. So I welcome autumn with open arms as I always do.

And SL is all over autumn too, well, mostly. Or perhaps just where I visit as if you’re in the southern hemisphere then I know it’s not autumn for you but the beginnings of spring. Isn’t that just weird, you think, being on the same planet and yet here we are having not just different seasons but polar opposite ones. But I guess that’s what the poles are there for, to be poles apart. So now, as in RL I seek out Autumn in SL where also the colours are just so vivid and alive, even though technically they symbolize a slowing down, even death, as leaves change colour and drop to the ground to dry shrivel and decay, or get squirrelled, or wormed, away by worms underground, as that’s what worms do. Although I have to see if that’s also true in SL: do worms sneak leaves underground?

In fact, is there even an underground in any real sense in SL? We talk all the time about the ‘sea’ or the gap between sims where nothing exists, the Void Ocean, as it’s called, but rarely do we think about what’s under our feet. A bit like RL really, few ever wonder about what they’re walking on and what goes on down there which is just as much or even probably far more than what goes on above ground. An entire world out of sight and out of mind.

Anyway, here are some photos of my SL autumn travels. I hope to post more over the season, at least before winter gets a fingerhold.

~x Anan 

 

 

 

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

 

live and let bite

 

Well, it’s a new year here in Second Life and I enter it with two exhibitions going on at two different art galleries and I’m hoping to be hanging some new works at both very soon. Welcome also to my first blog here of 2022.

I used to have a little hideaway but wasn’t any longer able to afford it, even though it was really cheap, almost peppercorn, it was still tricky, so am once again effectively homeless in that I’ve nowhere I can call my own. This doesn’t really bother me though, it’s been a while since I was a nomad, of a sorts, and I quite like it, plus I don’t have to work about that weekly bill for rent. I did like my little skybox but needs must and change happens: one just has to go with it, such matters economic are still a hard reality, even in SL.

I’m still a vampire, and a few others things too, artist, photographer, mermaid, model, explorer, pole-dancer, and I’m still head of my own vampire clan, veiled Fang, which once upon a life was quite active yo-yoing in numbers depending on the whims of vampires who have just as many whims as non-vamps.  I set up Veiled Fang years ago after having spent a lot of time growing in other clans the length and breadth of SL and we’ve done okay, although now not exactly dormant as resting in peace for now as most of its members, I’m pleased to say, seem quite content with, especially as the majority are no longer active either on SL or in vampire roleplaying terms but have chosen to remain in Veiled, something I’m also heartened about and happy they have.

I probably suffered a bit of burn-out a few years back when pretty much hyperactively running the clan. I felt enormous pressure to keep up with other clan and what they do, and more importantly in what was expected of me by those in the clan as the leader or head. Not many realise what a huge responsibility it is to do so, and even fewer would take such a role themselves even though they complain when something isn’t being done to their satisfaction. Of course the buck always stopped with me as I had and took overall responsibility of all clan affairs and its member, that is until I realised, hey, everyone is their own person, or vampire, and as such are responsible for themselves, even if they are in my clan, I can’t hold them to account. This is SL after all where fun comes first and aggravation, last, or not at all.

I used to spend so much time worrying about people, fielding complaints from some people miffed about this vampire did that or that vampire did the other and instead of talking to them and them taking it on the nose they come to me and it was usually, pretty much always, so blah-blah trivial. Eventually, having gone through what I’d call a year or two baptism of fire- yes a very long baptism indeed- I had a lightbulb moment: this shouldn’t be this stress, so I stepped back slowly one step at a time to the point where the clan now no longer even has land, or a home, or Sanctuary as we used to call it. We are now just a clan bonded by blood, not by property, not by hassle, not by commerce, not by anything other than simply being, which I believe is something that should come naturally to a vampire, simply being.

I’m a much happier SL’er these days even though SL itself and even the vampire games I play have changed a lot through the years, and how others in SL perceive them. I’m much happier because I rediscovered its core: fun. It’s easy to just walk away from people being annoying or pushy or petty or basically just stupid. There are many stupid people in SL as there are in RL and because it sometimes harder to get away from all the stupid people in RL then it’s good to know that when I log into SL I am totally free of it to be a fun-loving cuddly avi-vamp that I am, and don’t stress over losing a little blood to me, be flattered, after all, one, you won’t even know it, two, it might even tickle, and three, I’m very choosey about who I suck.

© Anan Eebus

 

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