Adventures in nowhereland

            There are lots of nowherelands here, lurking at the end of a random teleport where you’ll land in the middle of nowhere, empty, sometimes jagged, sometimes rolling, sometimes dead flat and featureless.

            Then there’s where the land is no longer land at all but open water and you appear falling down and down and down into the however deep its watery depths are, which could be very or not at all. One just never knows when the ground may open up beneath your feet without warning.  This is especially so when you teleporting finds you in mid-air as high as a few metres to even thousands and you find yourself falling down and down and down.  Just as well we can fly here, or mostly as long as the land permissions allow you and when they don’t, well, brace yourself for impact.

            Nevertheless there are still adventures of a sort one to be had in nowherelands like seeing if is somewhere or something or someone in nowhere, signs of life, habitation or anything: a discarded prim, a pixel out of place, a breadcrumb or even something invisible that isn’t visible as invisible things tend to be, not visible.  Watch where you ‘tread’ though as you just never know what may be lurking, in a virtual world virtually anything is virtually possible.

            All land in Second Life has a name, some are brilliant, some baffling, some boring, some utterly bizarre and I’ll blog on some of these another time, but this land, this nowhereland is most often found to share one thing in common in being called ‘Abandoned’ which sounds most mysterious and sinister, if not a teeny bit apocalyptic.  Strangely sometimes these nowheres aren’t labelled ‘abandoned’ and yet have no obvious evidence of ownership or use one way or the other.  Yet more intrigue.

            Probably one of the biggest baffling mysteries in all this is why Second Life still charges huge amounts of money for land purchase and rental.  Not only that, whether you buy or merely rent, everyone pays a ‘tier’, the real fee behind the costs which even though charged in lindens, which is the currency here, this actually is done with real money in the real world.

            But if you are a landowner as opposed to a renter, you don’t really own it either, not really. Everyone pays a tier fee even though you might have bought the land for a bargain 1L, or linden, equivalent to pennies or cents in the real world.  Not only this but if you decide to give it up you have two choices: find someone to buy off you or simply hand it back to SL, in other words, ‘abandon’ it. 

            No one truly owns anything, not even anything you might ‘buy’.  It’s all smoke and mirrors.

            See, I said it was all very strange. I would think it’d be better if as much land and space as possible was being used, ‘owned’, and not how it is now with vast tracts of empty, or nowheres. Surely it makes sense to lower costs and fees, even have giveaways, which has to be better than lots of barren and abandoned nowheres.

© Anan Eebus/ Emma Calder

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 

self-fulfilling- a second life of photos

            I’ve been organizing what I hadn’t realized is an enormous archive of photos I’ve taken in Second Life, and am still adding too weekly and sometimes even daily.  It’s insane to discover they number in the thousands. Yes, thousands.  I was also shocked when I checked. 
            Luckily I have image software in which I can view and catalogue them by date or title, size, however pretty much I need too.  I am renaming them more accurately than they have been when I saved them automatically at the time, and they go back to 2009 which is the earliest photo I have though I remember taking a couple though not many before in the few months before that but I don’t seem to have those anymore, in my archive or inworld, more’s the pity as I remember distinctly taking a picture of my avatar on the second or third day in SL when I first realized I could take photos.  How basic and raw I must have looked then hardly knowing a thing about how to interact or live inworld. 
            It’s been kind of a mixed experience, which by the way I’m still doing, a little each day as it’s so vast there’s no way I could do it all at once, evoking memories and emotions of all kinds, some good, some not so good, some ugly, some maybe I’d wish to forget but then again maybe I shouldn’t as they all happened to me and are part of me however they felt at the time so there’s a place for them too. 
            I also knew I’d been through a lot, and as a consequence I think learned a lot too and hopefully gained a whole lot more perspective in SL in how to live there in conjunction with RL, real life, the real world, and basically not let it get to me in the ways it has in the past when I really should’ve perhaps just shrugged more off than I did than carry it like it was more important than what it really was. I continue to live and learn but only going back through all these photographs do I realise how much and how intense it got at time. 
            The happy times are many, but there are also sad ones too, especially when I’ve lost people to them leaving SL usually which incidentally I’ve never done and have been here since I first ever joined in February 2008.  Yes, all that time ago, though for the first maybe three months hardly spent any time here but then come the summer I started probably what I’d call my SL journey proper. 
            Most of my photos unsurprisingly have me as the prime subject, but they regularly include others I’ve known and the things we did, including portrait shots not just of myself like I say but also friends for their profiles or whatever reason they’d commissioned me to take them for, being I am a professional photographer and artist in SL too.  I do though have a record of me, as in my avatar, throughout my time here and all the physical changes I went through and something really obvious is I’ve always had blue hair, and still do, and I remember having  decided on that for some reason within my first week inworld.  I’ve accumulated many hairstyles over the years but the colour remained the same in various hues of blue. I also noticed that I haven’t actually changed that much, just updated to looking less of a newbie to something a little more individual. 
            I’ve included just the one photo here from the thousands, which as hard to choose, but this one evoked a moment in 2010 when I really felt things were collapsing around me, a very intensely emotional time and I was writing a resignation letter, not just from my vampire clan inworld but maybe even from SL.  Clearly I didn’t, though I did write the letter and think I still might have it somewhere, which has to be my next task to try some time to catalogue all my SL writings such as those for clan including vampire stuff, for my gallery also and who knows what else may be lurking there still. 
            There’s of course the other reason why sorting through all these photos takes time, seeing them arouses these very emotions, losses, fears, sadnesses and also good times, funny times, loving times too, of which there have been and still are many, and it’s a lot to feel and take in all those years at any one time. So, it’s best I spread it out over however long it takes. 
           Anyway, just thought I’d share this with you all, or anyone who even reads my blog, it’s fascinating particularly so as SL is real and it isn’t, such a strange state of being.

© Anan Eebus/ Emma Calder

into the e-scape

It can be so easy to take for granted and become blasé to the virtual worlds in which some of us choose to while away some of our hours.

Of course they aren’t real as such, though they are just as real as anything else just they aren’t the real world in which we wake up at the start of every day and drift to sleep at the end, but they are real.  They are real imaginations brought to life in the same way as words in a book or drawings on a page or paintings on a canvas are, it’s just that these are done using the tools of codes and pixels.  People are so ready to accept a digital photograph taken with their phones and yet can’t see that these other worlds are imaged in pretty much the same way.

There are differences obviously but they do allow for something we can’t do outside our own heads normally, and that’s to interact with still-life, as though with a piece of artwork, in a sort of tangible way.  Not tangible as in tactile but insofar as one can ‘touch’ a world normally closed to us with our minds in a way that takes us one step beyond just imagining and provides a bridge that wasn’t there before; a place to be, to stand, to exist between worlds, a kind of insatiable limbo.

As these worlds have grown more and more sophisticated in their 3D-modelling and the degree with which one can interact it’s been incredible to look back and be surprised at how what we now see as so basic and simplistic has progressed, albeit still with so many limitations and frustrations at what can’t be done. Nevertheless what people, creators, manage to achieve despite such limitations has produced a plethora of the weird and wonderful, wacky and wayward, just as any artists does by letting their imagination master the medium at hand.  For a writer it’s a pen, for a painter it’s a brush, for an inworld avatar it’s a mouse and keyboard. The principals are the same it’s just this latter artisan and related aren’t as yet given their due in the world outside these realms.

You see, not only are these creators creating worlds within worlds they are also sculpting in some cases entire cultures, with their own histories, timelines, mores, traditions, even in some cases languages.  But what I’m talking about mostly here is some of the most inventive and immersive of inworld environments: landscapes, seascapes, skyscapes, alienscapes, fantasyscapes, futurescapes, spacescapes. All of which I could call e-scapes, as in  not just electronic landscapes but also in the sense of ‘escape’, a place far removed from our real, physical world with all it that goes with it, good, bad and downright ugly things.  Inworld there’s no illness, there’s no death, no worries unless you make them for yourself.

I’m not naïve though, I do understand I’m painting quite a rosy picture here of something that is essentially just seen as a game, a toy, a frivolous and hedonistic pursuit, as such an utter waste of time and merely wishing one’s life away. It’s no Utopia, no nirvana, no moksha or heavenly realm (though you could build any of these if you wanted), and some people do have a habit of invariably bringing  their real world prejudices, angsts, fears and narrow-mindedness into these spaces, havens, but that’s their choice and they rarely last long.  These worlds aren’t to blame for people like that, they exist anyway and in the real world we have to put up with them all the time.

I think today I must be feeling particularly giving, so who knows, on another day I might just remember how one of these worlds almost buried me in so much ugly stuff, but again, that was down to people being people.  But I dug my way out and learned how to leave that for the real world and keep this one free of niggles, mostly.

Obviously there are rules and such, but that’s no different from anywhere.  Not only isn’t is a Utopia nor is it Anarchia, for better or worse.  But still I find myself visiting, spending time, discovering yet another amazing creation born of someone’s incredible skill and imaginings and appreciated the sheer amount of time, work, learning, patience and understanding that’s gone into it, sometimes just for the sheer pleasure or artistry, and where I, me, myself and I, simply at the end of a day escape into the e-scape. 

© Emma Calder/ Anan Eebus