The Return of the Undead

The other day I was quietly enjoying my late night blues hit at a favorite club, the tunes filling the air with that wonderful, soothing heartbreak, when an ex-friend suddenly appeared. Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, he TPs into mine.

“I thought I'd find you here”, says he. Brilliant deduction, Sherlock.

You know, when people become our exes in Second Life-- when they are wiped from our friends’ lists and we gamely decide to “move on”-- there is a usually a very good reason. Something unforgivable was said or done. Or you suddenly realize this person is not who you thought he was at all-- I think everyone has been guilty of the I-wish-it-was syndrome, where faults and missteps of a beloved friend or lover are conveniently overlooked, and we fill in the blanks with our wishful, futile “if only”s. This can work well for awhile, at least until you see the light and realize you've been almost as big an oaf as he was, for your deliberate blindness.

But I wonder, why do they come back? The split might take an hour or it might take days, but by god, it’s over at last. They say relationships have a kind of half-life: how ever long your serious entanglement lasted, it will take half that time again to get over the relationship. So if your romance lasted a year for example, you can anticipate six months of mothy moping until your pain-free butterfly emerges. When that happens, however long it takes, it’s possible to go forth with a shred of self-esteem again.

But just as this is about to happen, the zombies crawl out of their graves and do a “thrilling” choreographed dance. Or, the undead one rises again and turns up at your blues club.

“I thought I’d find you here.”

Where you found me is in “Over You” land. The land where it is safe for a young girl and her new friend to walk hand in hand on a darkened road, even on Halloween, even with a graveyard nearby!

Remember how that story ended? She woke up. It was all a dream.


Zombie avatar by Rage Hyx.

Rocking out at One Billion Rising Second Life

DJ's are spinning tunes from house to club to jazz for the full 24 hours, on a spectacular stage. A fantastic turn out, by all accounts, which means the lag is atrocious, but still manageable. Rise up and dance!

A couple more pics....

Where is the Outrage?

Why I'm participating in 'One Billion Rising'
in both Second Life and RL

Violence is a global issue. But here are some girls and women I've known during my privileged life as a white female in the First World:

Gail*, a young classmate, asked me if my father beat me up. She wondered if it was normal.   She didn't like it.

My sister’s best friend Mallory was repeatedly raped by an older family member.

My mother was intimidated, bullied, humiliated and threatened so repeatedly by a male boss that it destroyed her self-esteem and changed her life (that’s all she would tell me).

Mrs Connors, a science teacher at my school, was stabbed to death by her husband.

Rant: Second Life’s Revealing “Secret”

As a surprise to no one scientists and people living under a rock, female avatars in Second Life expose more skin than their male counterparts.

“The human tendency to cover up stems from climatic, environmental, physical and cultural constraints,” say the researchers of a Canadian study, “so measuring people’s propensity to reveal skin can be difficult in the real world.” So they donned their lab coats and tripped around an unreal world called Second Life for awhile, scribbling in their virtual notebooks and measuring with their virtual.. skin measurers.

Their exact findings?

Having the time of my Second Life

“Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.”

― Marthe Troly-Curtin, Phrynette Married

Thank you for this lovely thought, Madame Troly-Curtin, because there are some of us Second Lifers who feel we spend far too much time in our virtual world, and we appreciate your assurances. The key word in this quotation is “enjoy”. How many of us can say we explicitly enjoy Second Life enough to justify our time investment?

Discovery and Adventure

Well, the awe I feel when I stumble upon an impossible and fantastical place in SL, the intensity of emotion I feel about those I love here, the thrill of creating something or of marveling about the profound creative talents of others-- these distill into a sense of discovery and adventure, which I do find extremely enjoyable. Those times, however, are fewer and fewer, and I find my time in SL is often “wasted” (as in bored and thus unenjoyable) time. So I log in less often.

Why?