Twisting Around

Being a west-coaster, I have the dubious fortune of living in actual 'SL time'. I don't have to do any math to figure out when an event starts, but then most events start right at or before my dinner time. The east-coasters are usually going to bed around when I can normally log on, and the Europeans are waking up for work.

So I often explore a seemingly empty SL. It's nice, in that I can poke around and prod at things without interruption, but at the same time, it seems a little ... counter to the whole point of SL. Ha.


A field of flowers at Ode. Catch the butterflies and get pieces of jewelry.

The SL fashion blog Shopping Cart Disco has a regular feature on Sundays--SLsecret--modeled after PostSecret and it's many clones. A number of the secrets thus far have talked about loneliness and an inability to make friends in SL. As much as I'm enjoying playing in SL, I have found it rather difficult to make friends. Partly because of the time thing, I'm sure, but also because I have--in SL, as well as in RL--a very reserved manner. It usually takes me a couple of months to make friends in RL, and in SL a couple of months can feel like five years.


In a tree at La Reve.

I have a small circle of friends, and a slightly larger circle of acquaintances. I'd like to know more people (maybe even some in my own darned time zone! Where are all the Pacific coast SL-ers??), but I often feel stymied in this. One place I go to on occasion is friendly and fun, but also ... feels kind of insular and like a closed circle at times. Lots of places in SL feel like that, actually.

Also, I'm really enjoying building things and I need to balance social activity with that, all in the limited time I have to give to SL-related activities. Sometimes it feels like it's an either/or situation: do you want to play SL on the building track, or on the social activity track? If only I could gain XP by building that I could then spend on upping my charisma... or something equally nerdy. heh.


In the wheat field in the Refuge and Expansion.

Mellowing out at the Inspire Space Park. Everything kind of floats around as spacey, mellow music plays. There's meditation balls that will let you float freely amongst the space stuff. There's also dance balls and canoodling balls. If a date took me here, I would be impressed. That's all I'm sayin'.

A free--yes, free--blimpcycle! So fun to ride. Get one (and lots of other cool, well-done free stuff!) here.

Some pics so my rambling, talking out of my rear-end post isn't the top post. *g*

I run and I run but the scenery never changes.


Anyone have a carrot?


Um.... a little help here?

So I've been thinking a lot lately about how the SL-online experience is different from other online experiences, particularly the LJ-based fandom-esque online experience I've been a part of for most of the decade. A big part of SL is the... creating of identities other than your own. You can dress up as anything you want and play a role, in a way. And some people think of it as just that--a big RP playground. But not everyone thinks of it that way, so there's a lot of potential for crossed wires and hurt feelings.

For my part, I chose a gender-neutral name on purpose in case I should ever get the urge to try on a male shape. I'm too lazy to make a whole alt for that. I haven't done it yet (okay, once, so I could set a poseball, but I didn't change my clothes/skin/hair and I looked like the Elephant Man dressed up as Tim Curry in the Rocky Horror Picture Show), but I could.

And here's where I'm getting a bit stuck on the differences between my fannish/LJ online life and SL. In fandom (at least my little corner of it), there's a sort of semi-unwritten code of behavior. It's a huge breach of etiquette to 'out' another fan's RL identity, but at the same time you aren't supposed to lie (too much, at least!) about who you ARE. Especially in a journal-based environment, where people post about personal things as much or more than they do about fannish things. So you maintain your level of privacy and respect others privacy wishes, but you don't create an identity out of whole cloth and present it as YOU.

As an example, here's a scenario I was personally affected by: several years ago, I RPed for a while in an LJ-based game. There was a lot of OOC chat via IMs and I got to be friends with several of my fellow players, including a male player (which is unusual in the area of fandom I usually play in). After I left the game, I kept up chatting with my friends on a pretty much daily basis. The male player and I turned out to have very similar musical tastes, and we mostly chatted about that and traded tunes. After a time, we started talking about our personal lives and growing up (we were--supposedly--around the same age) and got to a point where--I thought--we were good friends.

Well, you can probably guess the rest: fast-forward a couple years and it comes out that this man was in fact a woman who had made up three or four LJ-indentities around the time the RP game started. None of the life history and anecdotes this man had told were true. The woman claimed to suffer from some sort of identity disorder. There was grumbling and anger and wank. For the most part, I just felt kind of sad that this person I thought I knew never even existed. And sadder still that the person behind my friend never trusted me enough to tell me. It was all a game. A separate compartment.

ANYWAY.

In SL, you kind of come in with the expectation that everyone you meet isn't exactly what they appear to be. It's dressup, it's costumes, it's theater! To a degree, at least. That big burly dude with the tats and the piercings might have an alt that's a blonde, double-D Gorean love-slave. Or the burly dude might be the love-slave's alt!

So I had to shift my perspective a bit when I joined SL. You really do have a better time if you just accept each AV as it appears. Don't waste time wondering who the AV 'really' is. Don't worry about gender.

Of course, that's easy enough to say. But SL isn't JUST playacting. People make real friends and connect on personal levels beyond the AV they present to the world. There's a kind of murky line that can grow between RL and SL once you start talking about RL things. What was a silly game, a distraction, can snowball into something larger than anyone ever expected.

You never know what will happen when you sit on a poseball. Sometimes you act out a scene from a romance novel:


Sometimes you just canoodle, until Cthulhu rises from the waters to eat you:


And sometimes you spend five minutes looking at the poseball name wondering if it's some sort of naughty euphemism:

I-- last night, I didn't build anything or explore any really interesting place. No, last night I put on a bunch of outfits from my inventory and took fashion show pictures of myself.

...lord, it is just Barbie in 3D, isn't it?





The rest are posted on flickr here.

So I made a building! It only took eleventy-billion tries, too. I had so many problems with the flickery seams thing, until I found prim docker. Thank goodness for prim docker. Did you know sometimes a prim will move just a teensy little bit when you click it to edit? I didn't, until I noticed the crappy seams and re-checked my position numbers. So. Frustrating.

Rear view:


Front view:


Inside, a loft (ooh, how completely uncommon! /me rolls her eyes):


Downstairs, workshoppy-area:


And the roof:


It's just a simple boxy-structure, but I think I learned a lot by building it.