diary of a tagalong

77 Million Mildly Interesting Images

2007-07-11T22:24:00.000-04:00

Brian Eno, a personal hero of mine, brought a project into SL a couple of weeks ago entitled 77 Million Paintings By Brian Eno: An Art Installation. I'm all for people pushing the aesthetic boundaries of Second Life and so was excited that legendary innovator Eno was bringing an installation to SL.

The project was described as follows:

Conceived by Brian Eno as "visual music," his latest artwork, 77 Million Paintings is a constantly evolving sound and imagescape which continues his exploration into light as an artist's medium and the aesthetic possibilities of "generative software."

Below are a couple of images from the exhibit. Note that the exhibit is only one screen, which visually morphs over time, so the following two images are just snapshots of different moments of time, these two obviously close together.

My reaction is in many ways anticipated by the description of the exhibit quoted above: "77 Million Paintings is a constantly evolving sound and imagescape." Certainly the abstract images were compelling, well textured compositions that occasionally threw in bits of recognizable photographs. The sound was actually a little bland for my taste, but it was a mellow techno groove that accompanied the image progression appropriately, if not compellingly.

But beyond the image screen, the exhibit was more or less an SL theatre, with seats arranged in rows facing a screen in a darkened room. I'm not crazy about watching video in SL, because there doesn't seem to be much point. I was mostly alone in the theatre (shocking, I know), though for about 1 of the 10 minutes I was there, another avatar was in there with me. He never said a word to me--possibly due to the cultural habit of shutting up (a) in the presence of art and (b) in darkened movie theatres.

So SL's two best features--3D and its social capabilities--are both neglected. Instead, a 2D animation is the focus, and the experience of it is largely solitary. Why not just create the thing in Java and throw it on an HTML page with a black background?

I believe that SL arts have a future (and even the beginnings of a present), but unfortunately the great Brian Eno has not advanced the cause with this installation.

Ransom!

2007-04-15T14:39:00.000-04:00

Ah the pranks we pull when we are bored. This is a message I sent to my friend P-- after her partner E-- and I spent an evening dancing together. Both P-- and my L-- have been largely absent this week, so it got the wheels turning....

------

Dear P--,

I regret to inform you that while you were gallavanting around some trivial and manifestly unimportant RL something-or-other last night, E-- and I spent a lovely evening together of intimate dancing and girl-talk.

After pensive reflection on the dreadful negligence shown to both of us by our respective partners, we decided to kidnap A-- [their Second Life baby] and take off on a continental rampage in a red convertible. Robbing banks has never been so fun or so stylish.

Sorry for your loss,

alle

P.S. If you ever want to see A-- again, please leave $300,000,000,000,000,000 Linden dollars in a Gucci purse in the shadow of the pi exhibit at Splo! We'll send you a 512x512 pic as well as a Notecard with A--'s first word on it. Oddly, it was Gorean in origin.

Paper Dolls (Copies without Originals)

2007-03-22T21:45:00.000-04:00

[Note: this post has been edited to correct a few errors.]

The complex relationships between real life and Second Life give rise to paradoxes and strange phenomena, such as copies without a source, because "reality" is never fully in real life or in Second Life, but in some liminal space in between.

Let me tell this as a story. Meet Luth, a dear friend of mine. She's a Second Life resident, its most successful animator, a successful SL entrepreneur, and a distinctive personality. She helps others and she also tells it like she sees it, without worrying too much about how it will be received. Luth is a real character.

One of Luth's colleagues is Elika of ETD fame, and Luth asked her to consider making a hair. Luth felt a little odd about showing her a picture of her RL self, so instead she gave Elika a copy of the picture she takes to her RL stylist when she gets her hair done:

What Luth looks like in real life, with her real-life copy of this model's hair, is unknown. This artist's rendering in Photoshop will have to suffice:

Some time passes, and the ETD Luth hair style is released. Though Luth's hair is almost invariably black and red in Second Life, the ETD Luth pack contains about 20 different color combinations. The model in the following vendor image is not Luth, but someone else who sorta (I guess) looks like Luth (green eyes and of course the hair).

Alongside dozens or more likely hundreds of other Second Life avatars, Luth wears ETD Luth, which is one of several reproductions of a reproduction of an image, which is reproduced on RL Luth's hair every time she gets it done in real-life, which is surely a reflection of her real-life (and Second Life?) personality and aesthetics.

What is the source of all these copies? Is it the hair worn that day by the unknown model in the photo? The image in the mind of the stylist who created that style? Some other image that stylist was looking at? Or is it the avatar Luth, since the hair style is, in fact, named Luth? Is it the real-life also nameless person behind the avatar Luth? Or perhaps it is the image in the mind of Elika--derived from the picture Luth sent as well as her perceptions of who Luth is--that is the truest source of this hair. There are as many sources as there are copies.

Not wanting to be left out, I, too, wear ETD Luth, sporting (of course!) the Chinese reproduction.

This blog post is dedicated to the memory of Jean Baudrillard.

SLivers of Joy

2007-02-07T12:37:00.000-05:00

So much of my time in SL has a "serious" element to it. Friends complain to one another about their boyfriends, jobs, and woes. Some are working to sustain their in-world businesses and need time to work, or feedback on a prototype gown or ceiling. We discuss the deleterious effects of the rise of evil companies like Electric Sheep and their ongoing efforts to turn our beloved world into Wal-Mart.

It's odd, because the perception of most people who don't spend time in MMOs is that we're just addicted to playing pointless games. We try to help them understand the value of spending time in MMOs, by describing the real friendships that develop, the opportunities for personal experimentation and expression, and the serious uses of these technologies by corporations, educators, and the military. They remain skeptical. But what's really funny is actually just how much time we aren't playing at all. We're scripting and modeling, cooperating on a project, launching a business, or just sitting and chatting.

Last night in Second Life, I played. It was pure silly cathartic play. It served no purpose other than the jouisssance of the moment. It was that surprisingly uncommon SLiver of joy, razor-thin lunar happiness against a beautiful and mysterious, but altogether dark, sky.

Three of us, Mistress L, dear friend C, and myself put on our bathing suits (and in one extreme case, snake outfit), whipped out diving boards and twisty waterslides, cartoon character inner tubes, swimming anims, and just played in the water for an hour. It was a lot like the experience of a child hanging out in a real pool with family on a hot summer day. What a delight! Here are some pics:

"Beautiful" Avatars

2007-01-17T12:10:00.003-05:00

0100101110101101.org recently published a list of Second Life's 13 most beautiful avatars and the press release circulated throughout the blogosphere. Curious, I went to look at the list, and what I found disappointed me; not only were the selected avatars not among the best I had seen, but worse, they were hardly better than average.

How were they "average"? Both as avatars and photos. The avatars themselves were all beautiful in the usual SL ways: nice skins mapped onto nice shapes. That just about all of the photos were closeups or even extreme closeups didn't help: so much of what makes an avatar a statement is her full appearance, including posture, clothing, hair, and accessories. It is very hard for most SL avatars to stand out when all you have is a face.

The best of the lot were the pictures of Aimee Weber, which showed her in a bit of a pose, giving some sense of her in-world personality. But Aimee Weber is Second Life's Jennifer Aniston: her avatar is beautiful and distinctive, but how many covers of People, Us, and In Touch does she really need to be on? Picking Aimee is just too easy.

It is, of course, very easy to criticize something as subjective as a top-10 beauty list. I want to do something more useful than that. I want to explore the criteria of beauty the collection suggests. First a compliment: Kudos for not showcasing only white females (which would be all too easy in SL): both genders and different races were included. But there were no furries or non-human avatars, no fashion-extreme vamps. The notion of "beauty" was Benetton shop-window multiculturalism beauty: race is a fashion we put on--Look at me! I'm the African Jennifer Aniston!

But the most important questions remain unasked: What is the soul of beauty in Second Life? Does Second Life have its own standard of beauty? The people behind the beautiful avatars exhibit at least superficially address these issues:

The portraits reflect Second Life aesthetics, featuring the bright colors, "artificial" light, broad flat areas, 3D shapes, and surreal perspectives that are typical of this virtual world.

Such a description applies to every MMOG I have ever seen and most video games in general since the NES. It isn't Second Life's aesthetics at all; it's video games. So we are still left to ask what Second Life's aesthetic is.
They continue:

Overall, the series draws on the technological developments which allow the creation of alternate identities within simulated worlds, and questions the impact such technologies have on art and society.

While this still doesn't get at anything in Second Life in particular--it seems to apply equally to text-based worlds like LamdaMOO--at least it brings up an interesting question (albeit one that has been asked in media studies circles for over a decade): How do simulated worlds "allow the creation of alternate identities"? More interesting (but not asked here) is how these alternate identities reflexively shape (or nihilistically pull the rug out from under) our "real" identities? And anyway (this is my question), how do a dozen or so extreme closeups of Second Life pixel-faces help us get at these issues?

They continue:

Despite the relative newness of using video game-derived source materials, the avatars' icons recall questions common to earlier eras of portraiture, including the cultural and psychological context of the images, and the relationships between high art and subculture, between contemporary art and "traditional" art forms, and between art and life itself.

Heavy rhetoric, but what does it mean? The analogy to portraiture is interesting, but what is the significance of portraiture in a world where our virtual faces are botoxxed into immobility by a technologically enforced lack of facial expression? Second Life avatars are profoundly expressive, but it is a misplaced real-life assumption that the expressiveness is centered in the face. This is a major flaw in the exhibit. (Another flaw is hosting it in a perfect reconstruction of the actual RL museum exhibit. Note to the organizers: in RL museums, we don't look with virtual 3D cameras floating 20 feet behind our heads, and your SL exhibit is in fact frustratingly incompatible with the everyday experience of being an avatar.)

I would argue that our true SL expressiveness comes not through the face but instead through (a) the disposition of the body as a whole--including race and gender, pose, fashion, accessories; (b) the backstories we provide ourselves in our profiles; and above all, (c) the words we say as we interact with our friends and the world through chat boxes and IM windows.

If I, in my way, embody some part of this "Second Life aesthetic," look for it in my words and look at my whole body (in where and what it is doing); look not at my face (which can tell you only the most rudimentary things: that I am Asian). And then forget about me: look for it in the words and bodies of those avatars not possible or practical in RL: the furries, mermaids, winged vampires, aliens. Their aesthetic goes far beyond their 3D-mesh cheekbones and pretty-texture eyes. What do these avatars tell us about how people live in Second Life, about where people find (and create) beauty in virtual reality?

As it stands, the exhibit "Second Life's 13 Most Beautiful Avatars" seems like a publicity stunt. Superficial notions of Second Life beauty can be passed off as "hip" for a now-credulous press, currently enamored with all those "cutting edge" people who are "driving" Web 2.0.

Even if they are, in fact, strangers here themselves.

Physiognomic Fluidity

2007-01-03T15:08:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, I was hanging out with Mistress L and our friend, C., when L noticed that my legs seemed a little pointy around the hips. I was wearing jeans at the time, so I switched to a bikini bottom to take a closer look. It wasn't pretty (and I won't be showing any pictures).

We spent some time monkeying with sliders in the Appearance dialog, and though I managed to make my legs and posterior look freaky in many new ways, we failed to solve the problem. Wondering if it is really a problem with my avatar shape (I'd never noticed this before) or a bug in SL that was causing avatar shapes to render incorrectly, I decided that rather than moving sliders around, I'd just put on another shape.

The only catch was that this was a shape I bought as a noob, and it was a tall, large-breasted, curvy affair. And it wasn't Asian.

Knowing that I was about to present a shocking visage to my two friends, I warned them in IM that I was about to undergo a change in race. Apparently, my warning wasn't clear enough, because when a white Amazon of an alle suddenly materialized in front of them, there were vividly expressed gasps of shock.

I won't deny it was a bit of a shock to me to see myself as a white avatar--it has been almost 18 months (and 17/18s of my SL existence) since I was white--but at least I had seen it before. (Incidentally, you can too.) I was surprised initially by the intensity of the reaction with my friends. After all, in SL, we can all change our skins, hair, clothes--just about anything. Our bodies, our clothes, our fashions, and a large part of our identities are just files in a folder tree.

What I realized, though, is that although we can change these characteristics at any time with a click of the button, people change some of them more than others. We change hair and clothes all the time. I know almost no one who has ever changed gender in SL. And interestingly enough, while a lot of people change species--human, furry, elf, tiny--people seldom change their races within a species.

For my friends, who know I am Chinese-American, and who have only ever seen me as an Asian female, this little inventory change, done to help me troubleshoot a technical problem, caused a rupture in their experience of my identity.

I never did solve that problem--my legs/butt still look funny. It occurred to me as I wrote this, that perhaps I should, while wearing my Asian avatar, change genders to see whether that fixes my legs/butt. If I do, I'll be sure to do so in the privacy of my own skybox.

Follow the Tagalong

2006-11-15T14:35:00.000-05:00

Much of my experience and even identity over the past year has come from whom I follow around. I have been lucky enough to create friendships with some important SL people, and these people know other cool people and all the cool places and events; thus, just following them around has become a fulfilling activity in its own right. Along the way, you landmark lots of places and make lots of new friends, some of whom delete your friendship card within two weeks. But the point is, as a tagalong, you follow someone else's agenda and are often perceived as and even introduced as someone else's accessory. (Not that I mind that, especially since I am usually someone else's accessory; I'm just describing how it plays out.)

In the course of such tagging along with others, I had the lucky opportunity to bump into Ms. P. on many occasions, and gradually, as we began to recognize each other, we began to hang out and a friendship developed. Ms. P. is important in her own right--she's a major part of a high profile project and close to some SL super VIPs and communities--but for some reason she seems to relate to me more as a fellow tagalong than as a VIP. In many ways, she seems at least as interested in alle's Second Life as I am in Ms. P's Second Life.

Lately, we've come to start checking places out together as fellow explorers, where neither one of us leads the other, or, more accurately, where we trade leader and tagalong back and forth. We first became good friends dancing together at Blue Note, where we took turns on blue/pink dance balls, alternating dancing as male/female, leader/led, and those dances have become an allegory of our friendship. I look forward to our continued waltz around Second Life, two tagalongs following only our own lead.

SL Machinima, or Half-Animated PowerPoint Slides

2006-10-31T16:19:00.000-05:00

I am a huge fan of machinima and obviously enamored of Second Life. But I am not at all a fan of SL machinima. The truth is, just about all of it that I have seen is weak. Worse, it is all weak in the same ways and seems to recapitulate the worst of SL: low quality graphics, minimal movement/action, and mind-numbingly slow pacing. And how often do we need to see someone scuba diving, someone sky diving, and a bunch of furries dancing in a night club? Rarely does it capture--or, better yet, build on--the strengths of Second Life, which is its "infinite variety" (borrowing Enobarbus's description of Cleopatra). Here's a rare exception, but though its good, it is not exceptional by (non-Second Life) machinima standards.

Some of it is surely the fault of the machinima makers. The pace of Second Life machinima is often slow and edited in self-indulgent ways. Shot lengths often last for several seconds at a time, and yet what they show is deeply static (SL animations are, as a rule, primitive). Most SL machinima look like half-animated PowerPoint slides--no thank you! The overreliance on the medium-long shot doesn't help; you can do wide shots (even though SL's draw distance is poor), and you can do closeups (even though facial expressions are limited, to say the least). Mixing up shot lengths enables you to establish different relationships between viewers and the content, and viewers therefore interpret and experience it in different ways.

Some of it is also the fault of Second Life. Its graphics and gestures are, comparatively speaking, poor. Expressions, poses, and gestures are what actors do, so SL's weaknesses in this area is no small handicap. Still, machinima from other games deal with these issues. Halo's protagonist doesn't even have a face, let alone facial expressions. That hasn't stopped Halo from supporting some of the best machinima films in existence. Halo and World of Warcraft both have limited gestures, but their machinimators have at least found ways to make use of what's there for interesting gestural expression (the famous Internet is for Porn uses the same small set of gestures over and over with great effect). And good storytelling can do a lot to compensate for weak visuals.

I thought I was just unlucky, having only seen crappy SL machinima at machinima.com and when friends email me URLs. But today I went to YouTube, searched on "SecondLife" and sorted by rating. Guess what? Most SL machinima have mediocre to low ratings. Those that were rated highly either weren't really machinima (such as U2's and Suzanne Vega's SL performances or various tutorials) or would be considered mediocre by the standards of other games.

I'm no film director, but I'd love to see evidence that SL machinima directors are aware of the following points.

Camera: The camera doesn't just capture reality; it frames it, focuses the viewer's eyes on some part of it; and establishes the viewer's relationships to it. Think about what you want the viewer to focalize on, second by second, and use the camera to facilitate that focus.

Production versus post-production: Many impressive machinima films use a lot of post-production. Post-production gives you the ability to shape your story, shape your viewer's experience. Even free/cheap software, like Windows Movie Maker and iMovie, gives you a decent set of capabilities to shape your story. (This is a call for smart cuts, not for cheesy transition effects.)

Shot length: Keep the viewer's eyes active; don't let images go stale (hint to directors: no one likes looking at your avatar as much as you do, no matter how cool your skin is). That means either put something to look at in images (emotions, gestures, actions) or make quick cuts (MTV style, which creates its own action).

Shot arrangement: The shot is the basic unit of the film and the way that two shots are connected is meaningful. One shot may give the lie to a previous shot, or further illustrate it, give the viewer an alternate perspective on it, or extend it in time and/or space. Don't just stick one after the other, especially if the machinima is a narrative.

Narrative: You don't have to tell the story in order. Mix it up. Use frame tales. Narrate from the point of view of a minor character. In other words, not only is the story significant; so is its telling. Writing scripts in advance and storyboarding them may help people develop more compelling stories.

Self-referentiality: Machinima is shot in games. Many of the best machinima films refer to the reality of the games, comment on it, and make players appreciate a new aspect of it. No SL machinima that I have seen (and I have seen many) cinematically captures the possibilities, the true soul, of Second Life, the way Red Vs. Blue or Warthog Jump: A Halo Physics Experiment capture the soul of Halo. This one at least captures the brains of Second Life.

Who the hell am I to say all this? I am no one. No one but a machinima fan who wishes Second Life machinima didn't suck, didn't make really amateur mistakes.

Final thought: Just about every non-Second Life machinima I linked to here is considered a classic for its system. What World of Warcraft player doesn't know about Leeroy Jenkins? Which Half-Life fan hasn't seen Still Seeing Breen? Are we going to let bland footage of a U2 performance stand as the best SL machinima has to offer? According to YouTube user ratings today, it is the best SL has to offer.

Beauty Surpassed

2006-10-28T13:28:00.000-04:00

I've had occasion in this blog to discuss Asian avatars--Second Life's assumption that everyone is white, the difficulty of creating an Asian avatar, and the deployment of my race in exploitative ways (promoting stereotypes to enjoy a certain kind of cybersex). It's been almost a year since I wrote that post, and yet I can count the number of Asian avatars I have seen on my two hands. We are rare. And moreover, most of them, not to put too fine a point on it, suck. They are often ugly, revealing more what white people see in Asians (apparently very small eyes and rather odd skin tones, as if they take "yellow" a bit too literally).

Well, all of these terrible Asian avatars naturally have given me a little sense of pride in my own avatar, perhaps misplaced, because I at least believe that mine doesn't suck. Last night, though, I encountered an avatar that was not only Asian, but beautifully and tastefully so (the outfit was a little iffy, but it was a costume party). I even have a shot of me looking jealous in the background:

I have been out-done! In RL, there's only so much I can do about my looks (creative uses of hair dye are among my favorite tricks). But in SL, I'd gotten used to (and complacent) about being the prettiest Asian girl, competition being what it is. Alas, Nessa, you diminish me! Still, I am who I am (even in SL, whatever that means) and don't plan on any changes now. I do have a few Linden dollars in my account, so perhaps a few new outfits would provide consolation.

Ghastly Ghoulies

2006-10-12T17:40:00.000-04:00

A most unpleasant bug has become common in Second Life: the textures that make up one's skin and clothing fail to load, and instead a stark white default texture appears, with the word "Missing" appearing across it in bold black letters:

The result is that our avatars are truly horrifying to behold. But even worse, we ourselves don't know when it's happening; because our avatar textures are stored in cache, we look fine to ourselves. Only our friends see the ghastly ghost look.

(N.B.: You can fix the problem by going to Client > Character > Rebake Textures, and once that is done, go into and cancel right back out of Appearance.)

It is strangely alienating, this bug. When my friend s.c. sent me the picture above, I was shocked that that is what everyone else was seeing. One invests so much in one's appearances that when you discover you look so bad that it's scary, it is a little upsetting. Over the next two days, it happened to me several times (where people asked me to rebake my textures) and it happened to several of my friends. I never thought a software bug (especially someone else's!) could make me feel ashamed of myself!

Perilously Rooted

2006-10-12T16:34:00.000-04:00

It has been months since I attended an event at Perilous Pleasures, the community that effectively ended my run in World of Warcraft and brought me to Second Life in earnest. Since my first visit to PP, now a year behind me, I have made friends, learned a lot about the lifestyle, and found an SL partner. But in recent months, for various reasons, most of them external to SL, I have spent less time in SL, seen fewer of my friends, and expressed some doubts about my future there. And I certainly have blogged less, as a scan of my postings reveals.

Yesterday, I got an email spam inviting all members of PP to the weekly meeting, and I decided to login and attend:

It was a smallish crowd, probably no more than 15 participants or so, but the conversation was unusually thoughtful, and for once I even participated. Time expired long before we were done talking. Afterwards, I caught up with some old friends. It was almost as if the harrowing summer never happened.

The Builders' Dance

2006-09-04T19:05:00.000-04:00

One interesting characteristic of Second Life is that its authoring/development can be done collaboratively. I'm used to working in my own closed environments by myself (Flash, Final Cut, Dreamweaver, and even Word) and only later distributing what I've created for criticism, reaction, fame, and glory (OK, I tend only to get the first two, lol). But in Second Life, I can build furniture or a place, or script an object, or design an interaction, and when I do so, I can do it with friends/colleagues. We can literally work on a single object at the same time.

This of course changes the nature of the designing processes, introducing synchronous collaborative possibilities not available in traditional multimedia authoring environments.

Yesterday, I learned of a really cool spin one couple put on this. While they build together, they "park" their avatars in a dance animation (the "Lindy Hop," a jazz dance popular in a bygone era). This in no way prevents them from building, but it establishes a visualization of their intimacy, with connotations of earlier days and sounds, that plays while they work together. This would not be possible IRL, since it is hard to construct houses while doing the Lindy Hop! Very cool.

alle on the Holodeck

2006-09-04T10:38:00.000-04:00

One of the benefits of being a tagalong is that if you can find yourself following cool enough friends, you occasionally see some very interesting things. Last night, I was hanging out with two very cool friends, when I was invited into a Second Life "holodeck."

The holodeck is a room inside a smallish cube. Each of its walls has a photo from RL, which are joined seamlessly together to create a 360 degree panoramic view of a scene, such as the sea and cliffs of Monterrey, a ski chalet in Slovenia, or the flowery fields shown in the picture below.

The holodeck contains 25 such scenes. The trick is in getting the photographs to line up seamlessly, which the designer accomplished using a QuickTime VR camera. In essence, all that is going on here is a simple application of QTVR in SL, which as a technical strategy isn't terribly exciting conceptually.

But the results actually are unusually compelling. The reason, I think, is that we're not used to seeing our avvies (a) in photorealistic environments, and (b) in environments with draw distances above a couple hundred meters. Interestingly, once the photos load, the illusion is quite compelling, both disorienting and creating a sense that you are in a much larger space than you really are.

Fundamental Instability

2006-07-10T17:12:00.000-04:00

My identity is eroding. The "tagalong" thing only works if you are actually tagging along. But for the past few months, I have not been. First, I made a trip overseas and didn't log in for almost a month. Since my return, it seems like my closest online friends aren't on when I am. The disruption to my "second habits" is changing my online activities, and since one's online behavior is closely associated with the self, with these changes, I am becoming not-me.

So to deal with my online boredom and loneliness, I have gone in two different directions. I can't say which, at this point, is going to prevail (or if miraculously the tagalong thing will revive). First, I started to get serious about developing content in SL. This is a radical departure from the "tagalong" identity I've had all along. Well, I am interested in machinima and envy people who have ever raised a Linden Dollar short of their allowance (and without being an escort). So I've started to create a little content and I am thinking about opening a store and selling it. I doubt I'll make any serious money, but even a couple hundred extra Lindens a week would let me upload lots of textures and buy more outfits!

The second direction is an even more radical departure. Many of my friends know that I came to SL as a refugee from World of Warcraft, which I stopped playing for almost a year. Well, I've started to go back to it of late. There, I have no friends, since everyone I knew a year ago is offline or level 60 or whatever and not interested in me. And I have not made any new friends. But if I DO make friends in WoW, or I join a guild or something, it could threaten alle's very existence. What if I stop SL for a year and lose all my friends there?

For now, I am going back and forth between the two worlds. Two massively-multiplayer virtual worlds, but two grayed out social networks.

Maybe I'll screw everyone and go back to Grandia III or Kingdom Hearts II.

Sins of Weakness

2006-05-10T16:45:00.000-04:00

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, and I am in Hell. Yesterday, with the best of intentions, I fucked up, and in doing so, hurt my Mistress. I can't write about it here. I feel nauseous with remorse and anxiety.

And I have no idea what to do next. Should I IM Her? Watch to see when She logs in? Leave Her alone? I am sick with fear and the not very helpful knowledge that I totally brought this one on myself, because I was too weak to think straight and do the right thing.

Mistress Appreciation

2006-04-30T00:31:00.000-04:00

It occurred to me that the casual reader may derive a negative view of my relationship with my Mistress, given how much sadness and self-doubt can be found in my posts. Let me reiterate that these are the reflections of someone surprised by her own behavior and not the complaints of a dissatisfied submissive. As I write in an earlier post, I am recording here my internal monologue, not a historical record of objective facts.

But I would like to write a happier post, to state why I like my Mistress and feel that She earned my loyalty. Such a post is overdue, because of course this appreciation is also a major part of of my internal monologue. In no particular order, here are some nice things that I want to say about my Mistress.

She and I have great conversations, in which She shares her thoughts and takes mine seriously.
She tries to understand who I am so She can make my second life happier.
She protects me when I get into trouble, which isn't often, but it's happened and She was there and strong for me.
She strokes my hair when I am sad or particularly well behaved.
She treats me with dignity, even though I am her sub.
When I've needed discipline, she has provided it with both firmness and humanity.
She made me (by more than one account) the most adorable animation in Second Life (in which I jump and clap my hands).
She puts pictures of me on the walls of Her studio.
She often drops everything to be with me when I log in.
She teaches that RL>SL, which means both that She understands when I can't log on and that I should understand when She can't (not that I'm terribly good at that).
Her rants are hilarious and yet also insightful.

With a Mistress like that, can you blame me for being depressed when She is not available to me?

It is late spring now, and the coming of Mother's Day and Father's Day is on my mind, since I live some distance from my parents and I have to factor in mail when it comes to getting presents. It seems to me that there should be Dom/mes Day, where all the subs express their appreciation for all their Dom/mes do for them. If I ever get to attend a Hallmark Board meeting, I will make this proposal--and see how quickly I get invited back to said board meeting.

/me smiles broadly....

The Guilty Abandoned

2006-04-28T21:53:00.000-04:00

She felt as though she were a statue of ashes--bitter, useless, damned--like the salt statues of Gomorrah. For she was guilty. Those who love God, and by him are abandoned in the dark of the night, are guilty, because they are abandoned. They cast back into their memories, searching for their sins.

--Pauline Reage, The Story of O

The quote from The Story of O typifies how you feel when deprived of contact with your Master or Mistress. The isolation is hard to bear, and your imagination takes over and you start to wonder what you did to cause it. Of course, often you have nothing to do with it in reality, so you are just swimming in your own paranoia. So it is this state, where your own mind tortures you with relationship chimera, that is most dangerous to subs. It is dangerous because it is an unhappy place to be, and also because it makes you more needy when you finally get to see your Master or Mistress again (running the risk that you will frustrate Him or Her with your neediness).

Understanding this state in turn helps explain what what one does (as opposed to merely thinks) during the twilight girl times. Visually, it looks something like the following, with me kneeling before Her image or Her empty chair:

But what is going on while I'm in that pose? A couple days ago, I had three "accomplishments" from that position.

I IMed but declined to visit some friends. I had a bad connection, so that was a part of the motivation for not going out to be with them.
I watched a photo album wall hanging in Her studio and fretted that the number of pictures with me in them may have decreased as a percentage over the past month or so. Note that the images are randomly displayed and in reality I think all that happened was the script didn't show any pictures of me for a few minutes. In other words, I was just being paranoid.
I hunted through my calling cards list and friends list to see if any of my friends deleted me. This would be a paranoid activity, except in fact one of them had deleted me, someone whom I really like and respect. I IMmed her, and she told me that her master had asked her to remove all friendship cards that he didn't know about. In other words, it had nothing to do with me, per se, or at least that's what she claims.

OK, so this all probably sounds pretty dark and maybe a little pathetic. But let me clarify some things. I write this not because I am depressed and miserable in RL (probably I am both of those things, but not because my Mistress and I have been on different clocks for much of the past month). It is not my desire to complain or blame anyone. I write entries like this because I am surprised by my own behavior, surprised that in Her absence, I do things like act out the twilight girl routine. My purpose here is to describe my internal state, no matter how divorced from any reasonable reality it is, rather than to describe objectively what is going on.

Emotional Noxema

2006-04-25T23:15:00.000-04:00

RL has been emotionally trying lately, and if you've read anything else here in the past month, you know I haven't seen much of my Mistress, either, much to my disorientation and sadness. So RL and SL have both been rather painful of late.

So today I logged on, and of course She wasn't there. I sent Her an IM, just fishing, basically. After a few minutes, She didn't log in, so I started wandering around alone. I wound up at one of Her stores, looking at Her picture in a vending machine. More pathetic twilight girl pining, but that's where my head was.

Suddenly, a blue dialog appeared on my screen: "L--- is online." My Mistress and I were actually online at the same time!

Immediately, I teleported to Her studio, and we hopped onto a hammock and snuggled. We talked about this and that for a half hour, nothing earthshattering or particularly deep. But the experience was to my emotions like Noxema to sunburned skin.

Twilight Girl

2006-04-25T12:34:00.000-04:00

This blog has been quiet of late. There is little to report, hence the silence. My Mistress's absence continues (actually She tells me She is online often, so I guess we're just missing each other). In the past three or four weeks, we have spent about one hour together. My emotional rollercoastering is past: fear, anger, hurt, blame, self-recriminations have all been replaced by a serene numbness that doesn't really hurt, but which isn't good.

Before I had a Mistress, my virtual life was fun and diverse. I was seeking some steady companionship to be sure, but I was content tagging along with various friends, meeting new people, going to new places, having new experiences. Since our courtship and my collaring, I became (appropriately, I believe) focused on Her. For weeks, I experienced the world with--and through--Her. It was a happy and fulfilling time for me. (Did I focus too much on Her and inadvertently push Her away? I hope not.)

But with the two of us pretty much disconnected of late, I've found myself in an awkward spot. With Her unavailable to me, I cannot see the world with and through Her. This leaves me with several possible options:

I can stay offline
I can log in, go to Her space, and wait/mope by myself
I can log in and return to my life before as much as possible
I can log in and do something "useful," such as learn to build or script, go to a library and study more on how to be a good submissive, etc.

I have not really settled on any of these options, and have actually done a little of each. All are vaguely unsatisfying, since they underlie a basic lack of purpose, hence my notion of "twilight identity." In my everyday activities, I am neither Hers nor not-Hers; regularly online or off; a tagalong socialite or a budding contributor to SL. Some people, sensing my new freedom and availability are starting to hit on me. But they will not get anywhere with that: I belong to my Mistress and that is not about to change (unless She releases me, of course, which I hope She doesn't do). My loyalty runs a lot deeper than a couple unhappy weeks!

I can honestly say that sitting around moping is not a lot of fun, but of the four options listed above, it is surprisingly the most common option for me to do. Sitting in a tower (submissive) position in an empty space waiting for someone to log on who doesn't (and whom you don't expect to) seems like a ridiculous way to spend time in a virtual world as rich as Second Life; you become a piece of furniture, a disused toy, waiting for someone to use you. This is not the best person to be, and yet it is true to how I feel, which I guess is why I do it. (And for what it's worth, I do IM friends from that position.)

An avatar is already a strange mix of in-world persona and real-life person. As we form relationships online, we perform our roles but we also develop and experience real emotions. Online, we are always twilight people. When you add the present disorientation I am experiencing to that, I am even more so a twilight girl.

A citizen of the sunset, I follow the Evening Star while the silent Earth spins beneath me.

Worlded Companionship

2006-04-05T12:42:00.000-04:00

This week I had a realization about virtual relationships, and that is how dependent on the worlds in which they take place they are. This should have been obvious, and in many ways it is: I cannot separate my notion of my Mistress from the image of Her avatar or from Her studio where we often hang out. But this week I discovered a new way that is less obvious (at least to me). Let me explain.

Last week, my Mistress, who can be scarily focused when She wants to be, got into a groove with a build She was working on. In two days, She took the sands of a desert sim and built a sizable castle-like structure and a separate pavilion with a speed and on a scale that I would have never thought possible. Kudos to Her for Her amazing ability; kudos also to SL's screwy modeling environment, which for all of its shortcomings, was robust enough to enable this particular accomplishment.

Anybody after a productivity marathon like that would require a little downtime. My Mistress didn't take it, though, first continuing to build Her pavilion and later moving onto all manner of related business matters. Also, I am ashamed to admit, I demanded some of Her time, in part because She had been so focused on other things the preceding days.

And after that, She crashed.

She disappeared from Second Life for four days and counting (as long as I've known Her, She has not been gone so long). Surely this is a healthy thing. Maybe She's spending some quality time with her RL husband. Maybe She's killing orcs in some other MMO. Maybe She took up knitting. Whatever She's up to, She isn't up to it in SL.

My realization in all of this was this: Once She was burned out on the world, She was burned out on everything in it, including me. I don't believe Her departure was allecto-related. Maybe I flatter myself by thinking perhaps Her departure was in spite of me (rather than in part because of me). Either way, I will confess to having the hope that even if She blew off the rest of SL, She would still come on to see me, when she knows I am most likely to be online. She didn't.

Thus, whereas we all like to believe that amor vincet omnes, that our relationships matter more than the material surroundings in which they take place, I think that such a notion is naive. Even when our material surroundings are pixels and chat interfaces, they are constitutive of, rather than incidental to, the social relationships we form within them.

During the time of Her absence, I have also barely logged onto to Second Life. I have friends there, ones I really care about, ones I like to hang out with. But with the absolute absence of my Mistress, I just lack the motivation to go in. It works both ways: the world is constitutive of my social relationships, yes; but my social relationships are also constitutive of the world. When the relationships aren't there, the world itself shudders and blinks out of existence.

A Sense of Protection

2006-03-19T18:58:00.000-05:00

In my previous post, I described the end of my relationship with Ms. M. Originally, when I first heard that she had removed me from her friends list, but regretted it, I thought about how I might handle or even bring about a reconciliation. I thought about those parts of our conflict for which I was responsible, and I thought about her responsibility as well. I wondered what exactly I wanted by way of a resolution. Resumption of our prior friendship? A more tentative, probationary friendship where we rebuilt our trust?

I shared this episode with my Mistress. As I laid it out in chat, my intention was to ask Her to allow me to deal with it. On some level, I feel like I should clean up my own messes, and I don't want to burden Her with them.

But this is not what occurred.

For even while I was laying out the sequence of events to Her, She was already contacting Ms. M. via IM. By the time I got around to saying I would like to handle it myself, it was already more or less handled. This outcome surprised me, but it shouldn't have.

First, because I am a sub, if anyone has a conflict with me, they should take it up with my Mistress (this is BDSM 101). In fact, to not take it up with my Mistress is an insult to Her as well as me.

Second, when I get into trouble, it is my Mistress' job to deal with it, not mine. In a way, She is my advocate, because my behavior reflects on Her. She has every right to discipline me, as She deems appropriate, in private (or even in public). However, any conflict I have with another person immediately becomes Her conflict.

Of course, this also means that once a situation is resolved to Her satisfaction, She also tells me how to handle it. In this case, She has asked me to desist all communication with Ms. M., even if she approaches me, on the grounds that she seems to cause me more pain than anything else. At first I was a bit surprised by this turn of events. But I admit I find comfort in the protection and am quite willing to accept it as-is.

A Friendship Burns

2006-03-19T18:17:00.000-05:00

Today I write about how a friend of mine virtually murdered me. Perhaps that is too strong a phrase, though I am now, thanks to the technology of Second Life, assuredly dead to her. How exactly our friendship came to this, I cannot say. Though she once praised me for my intelligence, her twists and turns as my friend confounded me. Her final twist into ex-friend confounds me more. Now I cannot say when she was, and when she was not, my friend. I recall the day she became my friend (it is described in my very first ever blog entry), and I thanked her the day I was collared, but I cannot say on which day she became ex-friend to me, for it was not a mutual decision.

I learned recently that she deleted my friendship card, which irrevocably puts us out of touch with one another. Isolated in a sea of sims, if she is more than 10 meters from me, she is now invisible to me, and I her. To one friend, she said that I had hurt her and that she deleted me in a fit of anger, an act which she now regrets. To another, she said she was merely clearing out her inventory. Which to believe? I'm not sure which is worse, actually. Am I such a bitch that she can no longer bear me even as an acquaintance? Or am I so inconsequential to her that I am relegated to inventory rubbish?

In my heart, I feel that I should be neither of these. For if I hurt her, it was surely accidental, part of a constellation of conflicting signals of which I was but one participant. And if I represent folder clutter, then it is in spite of showing her my vulnerability, my deepest fears, and (yes!) my most forbidden desires. Let me declare then before all, that I am hurt. And I remain confounded, for there is no resolution to our tale; it just ends. Here.

Resubmission

2006-03-16T17:20:00.000-05:00

Lately, my blog entries have focused on fear. My fear. My fear of overstepping my boundaries. My fear of losing my Mistress' favor, that She might rather be with her talented and glamorous friends, instead of tagalong me. My fear of abandonment and neglect. I talked about these fears somewhat obliquely on this blog, perhaps not really acknowledging even to myself how stressed I actually was.

The other night, my Mistress and I had a very nice chat about these blog entries, and eventually we managed to get to the real basis of my concerns: my insecurities about whether She is tiring of me and my tendency to try to read between the lines.

I will confess an example. A few nights earlier I had logged on, and after 10 minutes of pleasant conversation, She had asked whether I might like to go hang out with another friend of hers, C. (C. is very nice, and I like her, so this was a very reasonable suggestion.) But as we teleported, I actually wondered if maybe She had found me boring and wanted to go hang out with Her friend because She found C. more interesting. I know--and I knew then!--that this thought was unreasonable and uncharitable. But I had it anyway, and it ate at me the entire time we were with C. My Mistress' coincidental preoccupation with something in RL made her slower to reply than usual, which seemed only to confirm my anxieties.

Back to our conversation the other night. My Mistress pointed out the following to me: by definition of our relationship, I put myself in Her hands. If She has a problem with me (finds me irritating or boring), She will tell me. In fact, as my Mistress, it is Her job to do so and She has implicitly (now explicitly, thanks to my carrying on) agreed to do it. Therefore, if She isn't correcting my behavior, She doesn't have a problem with it. Likewise, on those occasions when I actually behave, she rewards me with a hug or a stroke of the hair.

Moreover, the fact that I was obsessing about these insecurities is itself a manifestation of mistrust (and in a way, insubordinance) on my part! If I trust that She will take care of me and correct me when appropriate, then I never need to be insecure. I agree that this is logically true.

Still, it is a habit for me to fret about whether my friends find me tiresome, and I cannot separate my Mistress from my friends! This is something I will have to work on.

Punishing Silence

2006-03-13T12:05:00.000-05:00

The other night I was at Perilous Pleasures chatting with some members of that community, and a question came up regarding punishment. Punishing a masochist is a tricky matter, since tying someone up and or spanking her (or him) may arouse pleasure. How do you punish a submissive?

I thought about this a moment, and I realized immediately what I would consider the worst form of punishment: denial of attention. I can bear just about anything, except silence. I said so to the group, and all the subs agreed, as did community leader and experienced Dom, David Valentino.

I guess underlying the submissive nature is a craving for attention.

Slipping Across the Thin Line

2006-03-12T16:08:00.000-05:00

If you like me, it is "because of" or "in spite of" the fact that I am articulate, honest, and sassy. Most of the time, people like me because of, not in spite of. But sometimes, I slip across the line. Two different episodes in the past week have me thinking about this, though both are quite different. One is largely trivial, and the other is more serious.

The trivial incident occurred when I was spending a nice evening with my Mistress, and She invited a friend of Hers, T, over for a visit. Uncomfortable with Her friend, but wanting to be friendly, I got a little silly. At some point along the way, I apparently crossed the line from silly to a little annoying or possibly offensive, and my Mistress gave me a gentle, but firm rebuke. Needless to say, I stopped. In fact, I more than stopped. After my sincere apology, I lapsed into complete silence, not because I thought that's what my Mistress wanted, and not because I was sulking; I was flustered, and it stopped me dead in my tracks.

Trying to recover, and also trying to figure out exactly what I did, I read and reread the chat history (which of course only increased my silence). I never quite figured out what exactly I said, which makes me wonder if I intended something in a totally innocuous way, and She heard it in a different way. But because I never quite figured out what it was, it has made me unusually cautious in my use of humor around Her--something I don't think She actually wants.

The second "episode" really isn't an episode, but rather a type of episode. Every now and then, my Mistress talks to me about more serious things, such as her relationships (rl and sl), Her real feelings about something or someone, some conflict or dilemma She is facing, etc. Now, this is delicate, because a true friend is honest and sometimes has to say something their friend does not necessarily want to hear. If I am superficially roleplaying as a sub, of course it is doubtful I should say such things. But I say them anyway, because my Mistress is a friend first, and a Domme second.

This is clear enough in my head, but in practice, it can become a little fuzzy. Last night, my Mistress was feeling tired and sick, and I felt that She should probably go to bed and catch up on Her rest. I guess I got a little enthusiastic in this particular recommendation, and I suddenly found myself involuntarily on my knees before Her, facing Her rhetorical question, "Who is in charge here?"

Now, a number of factors should be clarified here. First, I interpreted Her reaction (putting me on my knees, asking this question) as playful. I don't believe She was offended or that She really felt I was being insubordinate. Second, you should know, dear reader, that the advice I was giving clearly went against my own self-interest, since I had hoped to spend the whole evening with Her! My motives could not have been more selfless. Third, lest you infer from my writing here that being forced to my knees is somehow a bad thing, I beg you to consider your author. For I must confess that it was thrilling and greatly rewarding for Her to assert Her control over me in this way. (And I'm pretty sure She knows that.)

But I also backed off of encouraging Her to go to bed. She did, anyway, which suggests that I had made my point before I wound up on my knees. Regardless, I definitely would have shut up after that point, at least with regard to Her going to bed.

The bottom line is that I will continue to treat my Mistress first as a friend and second as a Domme, and I will accept whatever consequences this policy has. I trust that She will communicate with me when I step across that thin line, and I only hope that I have the strength and maturity to deal with it well when She does correct me.

Worlds of Pain: Thoughts on Virtual Jealousy

2006-03-01T17:45:00.000-05:00

A recent conversation with my Mistress began with Her saying, "There's something you should know about, and I wanted you to hear it from me first." Now, this is not a promising beginning to a conversation, and I won't deny sweating a little during the moments during which my Mistress typed the next sentence and dropped the bomb: "I developed a new [Second Life commercial object], and for the vendor image for it, I took a picture that featured me and [Her male business partner] S."

That was it, the bomb that wasn't a bomb. My Mistress appeared in a commercial picture to be used in a vendor with another avatar and was concerned for my feelings. I appreciate Her sensitivity to my feelings--still more evidence of what a great Mistress I have. And yet, Her concern aside, I felt not even a twinge of jealousy. The only thing close to a negative feeling I felt was a bit of envy: I wanted to be in the picture too! But I certainly didn't feel threatened, neglected, or cheated on.

That this concern--She did something (posing in the picture) that She felt was appropriate, but then worried that I might be hurt, when in fact it didn't bother me at all--was even raised was possible because there are no established standards of fidelity, and so on in virtual spaces. If my RL boyfriend appeared in a romantic-looking picture for commercial purposes, there are a lot of ways we might handle that, but no one would think I was nuts if I had some discomfort with that. But what sort of fidelity is owed to me by my virtual Mistress (and vice-versa)?

My Mistress was concerned, because a friend of Hers had complained that her in-world partner appeared in a romantic pose with another avatar. For Her friend, this picture was a violation of the fidelity of their relationship. For me, the picture in question was my Mistress marketing a creative product of Hers. For her friend, real life romantic issues were tangled with the in-world romantic issues. My Mistress and I have a strictly virtual relationship; She is happily married in real life, while I am very happily boyfriended in real life.

So far so good. But then I started asking myself "what if" questions. After some reflection (and I did need to think about it), I decided I probably would have some issues if my Mistress were to take another submissive (this is strictly hypothetical; I don't expect Her ever to do so, as long as I am Hers). At first, I thought that in this hypothetical scenario, perhaps I could just ask Her to talk to me about why She wanted to do this and what its value was for Her. Then, I would try to understand it from Her perspective and deal with it that way. Well, that would be very generous of me, but I have serious doubts that I could really pull it off. So I guess there is a line. But posing in pictures for commerce is way, way on this side of it.

Creative Contributions

2006-02-25T22:03:00.000-05:00

In an earlier post, I wondered what I could possibly do for my Mistress in return for all that She does for me. Part of the previous post about my Second Life value is related to this question--identifying one's value in a world that values intermingled RL-SL 3D multimedia creativity.

She has answered this question for me. She wants text, one thing I am unquestionably good for! She asked me to write down my thoughts, journal-like, when I have the time. Of course, this blog is already set up just for that purpose, though a glimpse of my publishing history reveals that I am a little inconsistent with postings. At Her request, I will try to post more frequently.

Valuable Residents

2006-02-25T17:39:00.000-05:00

This post is about my value as a resident of Second Life. I don't feel very valuable, and I was trying to think about how an SL resident becomes valuable. Certainly there are celebrities; but what makes people value them so much? In traditional video games, going back to the 1980s, the celebrities were those with the high scores. Even now, on Xbox Live, various systems make it clear who the great Halo and Project Gotham Racing gamers are. On such games, it is easy to know what constitutes a great player, even if it is not easy to become one.

But in Second Life, the nature of the superior resident is not clear. After some thought, I can offer a guess: The great ones are those that contribute something important (not necessarily good) to Second Life's economy and/or culture: Builders (Aimee Webber), clothiers (Nephalaine Protagonist, Munchflower Zaius), animators (Luth Brodie), subculture community leaders (David Valentino), real estate moguls (the controversial Ansche Chung), trolls (Prokofy Neva), and even professional SL consultants (Satchmo Prototype).

Thus, elite SL status often hinges upon mastery of one or more multimedia authoring platforms, from SL's own simple 3D environment and scripting language to external applications such as Photoshop and Poser. In addition to mastery of these apps, one also has to know how to use them in the context of SL. I guess it is the permeable walls that interest me: elite status in SL can hinge on the interactions between one's professional skills inside and outside of Second Life. In contrast, in Project Gotham Racing the only skills that count (more or less) are in-game skills. As Aimee Webber noted in a forum, she doesn't see Second Life as a "game" (not many do) or even along the lines of the more common metaphor of the virtual "country"; increasingly Aimee Webber instead sees it as a social authoring environment (or something like that--I forgot her exact words).

If I am to have such a value, I need to learn to integrate my real life creative skills (I'm capable enough with image editing and 2D multimedia software) in Second Life, something I have not yet been able to do, probably because I spend all my time socializing instead of creating or even learning how to work with content in SL (such as using prims to do more than make big cubes). The problem is, and in contrast to my RL personality, socializing has turned out to be my passion.

The Meaning of My Collar

2006-02-17T02:21:00.000-05:00

It has been several days since my Mistress gave me my collar, and sadly we have had little opportunity to interact since. We have not yet had adequate opportunity to talk about what it means. Often the giving of a collar takes place in the context of a public ceremony and even a contract. Mistress L. is not one for ostentation, so I am not surprised She didn't want to make my collaring a big ceremony; I think the exchange between the two of us meant more to Her than a public ceremony would have.

I am sorry that we haven't had much chance to talk about what it means, though. I wear Her collar; She is my "owner" (in the language of the scripts attached to the collar). Does this mean I should change the way I address Her--in public, in private...? Should I precede all of our meetings with a request for a sub hug? If I am with friends and She suddenly appears online, what do I do? If I need to log off while She is online, what do I do? Above all, how should I serve Her?

Now that I have put myself in Her hands, and She has implicitly agreed to care for and educate me, what can I possibly give Her in return?

Collared!

2006-02-16T23:41:00.000-05:00

This week marked a major event--perhaps THE MOST major event--in this sub's life: Miss (now Mistress) L, with whom I had been engaging in a courtship ritual for some time, offered me my first collar. Of course, it was my great honor to accept!

My collaring represents a major transition. I first became interested in the D/s lifestyle last fall, and I have been learning about D/s since then, mostly through reading and by attending D/s-themed events. I have also had instructive discussions with several lifestylers, including SC and Miss. M; sincere thanks to both of you for your patience and honesty! It is not easy to find a good Dom(me), and it took me some time before Miss M. introduced me to Mistress L.

Mistress L. and I have spent a lot of time together over the past weeks, mostly hanging out together on Her property (of which I guess I am now a part--yayy!). She also took me to some beautiful locations, such as L'Utopie and to various pirate ships. During this time I developed both a friendship with Her and quite a bit of respect for Her--which seems like a very good combination for a D/s relationship! A couple of times I screwed up or got myself into a bit of trouble, and She stepped up and took care of me. She has earned my trust, and I am happy and honored to put myself in Her hands.

The collar She gave me is the most beautiful one I have ever seen, and I don't think I am being biased when I say so. She really knows my taste! The collar was also fun to learn how to use. It has dozens of animations in it (the usual submissive poses), some of which are a tad racy. Not only can I initiate these anims, but Mistress L can as well.

It is hard to describe the shock and thrill the first time She forced my body into a tower pose without warning or my consent. Probably it sounds crazy to someone outside the lifestyle, but knowing that I was putting that kind of control in Her hands, and trusting that She would use that power wisely and for my own good, is a head trip all on its own. Of course, we were just learning together how the collar worked, so I haven't yet gotten myself in a position where I need to be forced into a pose or (loved this one) put into a cage. Maybe I'll have to misbehave a little and give Her just cause for such treatment. *grin*

The collar also features a particle chain, so that She can take me around with her on a leash. The first time we tried, the leash connected to Her in a strange place (Her thigh), so we might need to do some tweaking. Sometimes I fantasize that She will leash me to Her and then take me places and introduce me to Her friends.

Perilous Displeasures and the Prospect of a Domme

2006-01-20T18:47:00.000-05:00

I haven't blogged much of late, but that doesn't mean that a lot isn't happening.

First, due to some mysterious turn of events, one of my social hubs--Perilous Pleasures on the Isle of Bliss--has imploded. I am inferring (but have no direct knowledge of this) that there was some personality dispute, which apparently blew up a week or so ago, leaving many of the principles pretty mad at each other. These things happen, and one can only respect their privacy. But it was a sad turn of affairs for me, for it has left me feeling a little exiled and disoriented.

On a brighter note, I have been getting a lot closer to a Domme, who has expressed interest in taking me on for training, so that I may enter her service. I find this simultaneously exciting (and quite an honor) and also a bit terrifying, since I am not quite sure what I am getting myself into. However, she has been the very soul of patience and understanding, and she has earned my trust. If I am fortunate enough to enter her service, I believe I can trust her to take care of and protect me, even if at times I don't quite understand how. Such is that nature--and appeal--of submission to another.

Confusingly enough, while (I think) she is courting me, she also is trying to hook me up with another Domme (Ms. L.). I don't know whether Ms. M. wants to encourage me to get into the D/s lifestyle but simply doesn't want the burden of taking me on personally (hence pushing me toward Ms. L.), or perhaps Ms. L. asked her to help find her potential subs, or if there is some other explanation for this conflicting message.

I Can Make You Asian

2005-12-10T18:50:00.000-05:00

Recently, a few people have asked me to help them make their avatars Asian. In Second Life, everyone is born white. Changing race is not a trivial matter. Of course, there are color sliders that enable you to change the skin tone of your avatar. But most people use "skins" anyway--they look so much better than the default skin that you get when you join Second Life--and the overwhelming majority of skins are also white.

I assume the reason I am getting this request is that my avatar is Asian. In two cases, I have spent considerable time helping people create avatars, which is a difficult mix of reworking one's "shape" (the 3D model of your body), which again is by default set to a Caucasian physiognomy (thin pointy nose, etc.), and finding a skin that would look right on an Asian body. My own avatar took me many, many hours of tweaking before I got her right.

So I helped two of these avatars "become Asian." I'm not sure either was entirely successful, because I can only help out with the shape. They will have to find appropriate skins, which could take some traveling around. But both of them seemed happy enough.

The next day, I read an article about race in virtual worlds. Exploring the realities of race online, the author observes that even in the supposedly race-free utopia that is the Internet, racial stereotypes are pervasive. One form of this is when white people play (stereotypes of ) Asian people online. This practice, unfortunately, does not contribute to more dignified conceptualizations of race. Rather, racial stereotypes--such as the geisha or the samurai warrior--are commodified, sold, exchanged, and worn for a time.

In light of the race-change operations I had just facilitated, these words troubled me. As an American-born woman of Chinese descent, had I just sold out my own ethnicity (metaphorically speaking, that is; I did not accept any money for my help), commodified my own skin as a toy for the virtual marketplace? Neither of the women (by which I mean female avatars; I have no idea of their real life genders or races) I helped said anything that made me feel uncomfortable. Sometimes online people make jokes about Chinese restaurant menus around me. But these women didn't speak of becoming geisha or any such. And presumably if I didn't help them, they would have found a way to make themselves Asian.

I don't really have an answer.

The Inadvertant Stripper

2005-11-19T16:49:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago, while shopping at the futurist-Japanese store, Curious Kitties, I made a new friend, whom I'll call V. She was relatively new and trying to build a cool avatar look--on a budget. She was doing a great job, by any standard (budget or no). But she made it clear to me that money was an issue, asking how one can earn it in SL and/or the mechanics of buying it on the SL exchange.

Time passed, and she and I just were never on at the same time, or we were hanging out with different friends. At any rate, we didn't see much of each other (though--side note!--V is featured in the elevator pic blogged about a few posts ago) during this time.

So, the other night V IMmed me and we started chatting. I asked what she was up to, and she said she was working, by which she meant dancing in a sex club. She TPed (teleported) me to the club. Once it rezzed, I sat on a stool in front of her and watched the show.

Maybe it's my time with the BDSM crowd at Perilous Pleasures, or perhaps taking Ms. M's tour (complete with her maid, slaves' quarters, and exotic bedroom), but the sex show at Barbie's struck me as a little banal. This is not a knock on V or any of the other dancers, who were trying to please a demographic that I obviously am not a member of. But the name "Barbie" said it all: the dancers almost all had the blond, tanned Playboy bunny California girl look going. (I liked V's avvie better at Curious Kittens, but that's just my taste. And probably hers!)

But then things got interesting. For whatever reason, a lot of the guys started hitting on me. Let me contextualize this. I am an Asian avvie amongst milk-white California girls. I am small-chested amongst the buxom. I am sitting at the bar rather than dancing naked on it. My clothes are not even sexy (I was wearing my elegant red outfit, which is kind of my default), in a room of thongs and belly rings with bling. I was also the only female non-sex object in the room.

IMAGE: My standard red outfit goes for elegance, not explicit sex appeal.

Thus, nothing about me projected sex; in fact, most of my features projected quite the opposite, in that context. Given all this, it seems superficially puzzling that anyone would hit on me, rather than abundantly available sex toys in the room.

I asked the guys who were hitting on me why they weren't hitting on the other women. Their predictable replies focused on how pretty I am, etc., etc. But I don't believe them. I think I was attractive to them because I was so radically defined in opposition to the rest of the people in the room that I stood out. I probably also threatened to shatter the illusion of the place--unless I can somehow be turned into a sexual object by consenting to flirt or even strip for them--in which case, I would become a radical dancer.

V invited me to become a dancer myself (she makes decent money at it--$400L - $1,000L per hour). I thought about it, but I probably won't. I don't need to. I mean, that evening I had already become a stripper without assent or even cognizance. The male gaze can be transforming!

Virtual Friendship, Ugly Avatars

2005-11-14T17:34:00.000-05:00

"Real life is for people with ugly avatars."

So spoke my friend SC, from an island floating miles above a neon-lit nighttime metropolis. Aside from the humor value, it reflects another interesting issue: the fact that our avatars are, if done well, idealizations of ourselves. And if my avvie is an idealization of me, does that mean that the friendships that she enters into are somehow idealized? If so, does that make virtual friendships inauthentic, at least somewhat?

It certainly doesn't feel that way. I have developed friendships with a number of SLers, SC most notably, but there are others. And even if they see a sexy form of me--sexy in both the superficial sense of my avvie's looks but also in the deeper sense that my avvie probably has a more interesting personality than I do (anyway, she makes friends a LOT easier than I do)--I don't think I'm flattering myself when I say that after the first 15 minutes, it is ME that they like, not merely my sexy projection.

Still, it is interesting that the idealized projection of me opens doors that I don't think I could ever open in RL. When I first visited Perilous Pleasures for the submissives and slaves retreat, I put myself in a situation unlike anything--anything!--I have ever been in my comparatively vanilla RL. But this situation, whose starting point was that we were all going to share our psychosexual experiences, fetishes, and fantasies (embodied in our avvies), created an instant intimacy simply impossible in RL. Well, simply impossible for me in RL. So, perhaps our idealized forms are fictions, constructions; but perhaps they also open doors of friendship that otherwise would remain closed. If a part of me yearns for those sorts of friendships, a part of me that is genuine, private, and largely unacknowledged, I don't see how it can be inauthentic.

SC: Your avatar is beautiful! I hope to see her time and again in SL!

Allecto and Friends' Elevator Ride Immortalized!

2005-11-10T11:34:00.000-05:00

My adventures last night included an elevator ride with a bunch of friends. I took a snapshot, cuz we were having so much fun. Here is the snapshot:

Guess what?! Our picture wound up as the picture of the hour on the SL home page! Why? Because we rule! Yayy us!

Fitting Identities

2005-11-09T15:22:00.000-05:00

As I play around sl and get to know people, I've begun paying attention to the development of avatar look and identity. From my own experience, I know that one can trace an evolution of my avatar from the default sl avatar I was given, through a series of concepts and approximations, before I finally figured out which one was "me."

For the uninitiated, "designing" your avatar means constructing a person out of several parts: a "shape" (which is your 3D body measurements, without any coloring), a "skin" (which is the coloring that wraps over your shape and makes it visible), hairstyles, clothes,and accessories (such as purses, jewelry, and tattoos). This process sounds like a superficial one, simply a matter of deciding how you are going to look. But for me, and several avvies that I know, it is much more than than choosing what shoes you are going to put on in the morning.

The look of your avatar shapes your very identity, and not just in-world.

This process plays out in many different ways. Attractive female avatars get hit on, for example. A gothic lolita not only looks like a sexy, pallid vamp, but she tends to get treated as one. So other people interpret you (and hence the way you play, your hobbies, the ways you want to interact) based on your appearance. Then they act on those interpretations, and you become that which you dressed up as.

IMAGE: An older avvie of Allecto that looks cool but just isn't me.

But it's deeper than that. I noticed as I evolved through avatars and outfits, my own behavior changed. My goth avatar is more shy and introverted than my California girl avatar. I did not design them that way. But when I put myself out there as one of these women, for whatever reason, a part of me becomes them.

So when I decided to try out an Asian avatar, which not coincidentally reflects my rl heritage, my behavior changed radically--and permanently. In my early weeks of sl, I looked nothing like myself in rl, and yet I played more or less as myself. As my looks became more outrageous, so did my behavior (this marks the time I lost my cybervirginity to total stranger with whom afterwards I was too shy even to accept his friendship card). As I finally came back to a physical reflection that contained an important element of my rl self--my gender and race, albeit idealized--a transformation occurred in which my rl identity and self suddenly came through a second time, not as the naive newbie, but in the sense that I had found a way to fuse my virtual and rl identities in a thoroughly satisfying and authentic way.

In that moment, I went from sl player to sl resident.

This fusion is profound, in the sense that I am living a lie--a hot babe wandering in the sl universe--and yet I am incredibly truthful to my online friends about who I am, what makes me "me." It is a form of sincere truthfulness and intimacy that takes place behind the opaquely colored glass of the computer screen.

And strange things were born of this new fusion. One of them was the emergence of a new cybersexuality, one which is more brave and adventurous than I am in rl, and yet one which somehow also reflects my real sexuality. That my cybersexuality is leading me to new places is exciting and also scary, such as the realm of D/s (Dominance and submission) relationships. Initially, I was curious about the imagery. Then I went to some of the places in sl that practice this form of sexuality--Gor, Perilous Pleasures, etc.--and read about it. Then I started to fantasize about it. Then I got involved in the community, at least a little bit. Now I am freaked out! Where am I going with this? Will it change my rl sexuality? Will it affect my relationship with my b/f?

Am I playing Second Life? Or is sl as much a part of rl as Halloween, weddings, vacations, and holiday dinners, that is, any other occasion in which we dress up and play our real selves in front of people we love?

I don't think I'll ask my Mom about how I should deal with my D/s longings....

My New Cyberpunk Aesthetic

2005-11-07T09:36:00.000-05:00

The genesis of today's adventuring rises from the ashes of yesterday's unexpected sudden endings. Just before RL intervened, I was hitting if off with Ms. M., and she had just given me a new outfit. Presumably, she wanted to see me in it, but I never had the chance. So today, given that she was offline and figuring that I owed her at least some snapshots of me in the outfit she sent, I put them on and took some pictures of myself. (During that process I encountered a strange and amusing pony girl sub, but I don't think I'll tell that story today, other than to say I got to ride on her back while we trotted around Perilous Pleasures.)

I had a revelation as I put on the outfit: I was limiting myself unnecessarily to elegant clothes. The batsuit was a hit the day before, and here I was in a luscious purple + see-through gown. I decided I need to spice up my look.

Right around that time, my friend mCall logged in, and she told me she was looking for some exotic new hairstyle. Clearly, this was a call for a visit to Curious Kitties, in Bizarre. Though that store can be frustrating to move around in, it is generally worth the effort, stocked with punky-urban-Japanese themed outfits (some of the gothic lolitas look like they come right out of Fruits magazine, though I didn't get one).

For her part, mCall, who had never visited Curious Kitties before, was transfixed. I think she discovered her aesthetic. She's often complained that clothing in SL is either boring or slutty, with very little outside of these categories. Actually, there is a third category, I think, and that is fashion fetish, which is some theme gone wild: goth, robot, furry (when your avatar becomes an animal). So Curious Kitties has the Bladerunner fashion fetish (just imagine how good we'll look at the Bladerunner-themed Desert Moon!), and mCall was ready to phone home. She ran around from floor to floor declaring that she was going to buy these boots, that hair, that shirt, and the other skirt. She looked at arm bands, parasols, trailing particle bubbles (always a good choice, IMO), jackets, stockings, belts, geisha hairdos.

I don't have any totals, but I'm pretty sure a lot of Linden dollars went to Curious Kitties yesterday.

Nonetheless, mCall was a different person when she was done. Her hair was inspiring: big, teased, punk, and a nice mix of blue and black. Her outfits were modern and even a little dangerous. (She wasn't packing any guns or knives, though; something for her to work on.)

I got punked up, too. I have pink spikey hair, a dead bunny t-shirt, XXX jeans, and Hello Kitty boots (the latter were found at Perilous Pleasures). I added some spikey armbands and jewelry for good measure. Finally, I hopped on my free Desert Moon hoverboard and zoomed all over the sim, while mCall, as far as I could tell, bought damn near every thing in Curious Kitties.

Afterwards, I joined SC in Midnight City, on the frozen pond in the snow. Lovely place. We went on a magic carpet ride, drove some NASCAR cars around the city, and SC released a platoon of "mousies" into the city, I tried to follow the mousies, but they disappeared. (It should come as no surprise to anyone that someone took the time to model, animate, and script rats in SL.) We sat on a bridge in the city and talked. SC became pensive, and we had an unusually intimate conversation, which was thrilling to me. It's not appropriate for me to say more here, except that I was really honored that she was willing to share her personal thoughts with me. Yayy SC!

Black & White Dance at the Race Track

2005-11-06T15:04:00.000-05:00

Last night, I logged in to attend a truth or dare event in Perilous Pleasures. With a title like Perilous Pleasures, you might assume that the reason one goes is for cybersex. While no doubt that happens there, the reason I like PP is because of its community. The people there are not only extraordinarily friendly and cool, but they are also SL power users who know how to get the most out of Second Life. If you're looking for love at PP, you are likely to overlook violent octapi, one of the finest photo galleries in SL, and interactive hair scripts that let you introduce yourself to someone by braiding her hair.

Sadly, not enough people showed up for the truth or dare adventure, so a couple of us went off in search of other pleasures. We quickly found ourselves at the Silver Motorsports Complex, which is SL's home for NASCAR racing. How a couple of submissives trailing particle bubbles would up at a NASCAR track is a little hard to explain. I will only say that my hero and muse, whom I will refer to in this space as SC, is the one who led me there.

At the Silver Motorsports Complex, there was a black and white themed dance. We arrived too late for the contest, but I put on my party black, which in this case was my goth batsuit, complete with batwings, tall black boots, and what not. Normally, I don't wear particularly racy clothes. I like to think my clothes are pretty classy and a little bit, but not over-the-top, sexy. But the batsuit is pretty damned sexy, and whenever I wear it, I tend to get hit on.

Now, I'm not a prude, and I don't mind being hit on; indeed, I can even be a little adventurous, as long as I can hide behind my avvie. But getting hit on can also be a distraction, when people are just trying to get to know you so they can get in the virtual sack with you. I've got nothing against that, and I've even done it a time or two, but there's more to SL than iTrysting, and last night, I was looking for adventure, not digital booty. So these were my thoughts as I donned my batsuit and hit the dancefloor.

While I was there, my muse SC introduced me to Ms. M., a tall and commanding woman with a gun on each thigh. SC then took off to do some race driving of her own (!) and left us alone (on a crowded dancefloor). Ms. M. is a domme (her subs can be found listed in her profile), and she had the gravitas to make me want to get to know her better. She seemed interested in me as well--not in the crass way that noobs hit on you--but in a conversational way that included well timed compliments that I guess amount to a form of classy flirtation.

Are you piqued? Dying to know whether I took up Ms. M. on her offer to take into the back of her UPS truck and drive off and run out of gas somewhere? So am I! Unfortunately, a RL disaster showed unforgivable timing and took me away! When I returned, Ms. M. was offline, and I was standing alone in a race track yearning for a presence that was not there.