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Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Chanson de la nuit: "All out of Love" by Air Supply

I'm lying alone with my head on the phone
Thinking of you till it hurts
I know you hurt too but what else can we do
Tormented and torn apart
I wish I could carry your smile in my heart
For times when my life feels so low
It would make me believe what tomorrow could bring
When today doesn't really know, doesn't really know...

Monday, August 27, 2007

No one says it better than the Bard

Today is a day for poets and for lovers... So here are a few thoughts on love from Shakespeare:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixèd mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his heighth be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom:
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.


Saturday, August 25, 2007

Music du Jour: Evanescence's "Bring Me To Life"



now that I know what I’m without
you can't just leave me
breathe into me and make me real
bring me to life

Thursday, August 23, 2007

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Identity and Alternate Avatars

One of the most fun things about Second Life is designing your avatar. For those of us familiar with roleplaying games this is easy, we don and doff alternate personas as quickly as real people change shoes. How much or how little these avatars, our second identities, resemble us seems to depend almost entirely on how much we like who we are in Real Life (tm).

I started out with a prepackaged avatar--you can buy skins and shapes that someone has already made beautiful for you. But my girl looked a bit artificial to me. . . too "Barbie doll." And, I have to admit, I had fun redesigning my avatar. . . Tsai is now shaped more like the RL me (well, the tits and ass part anyway, though I am somewhat thicker waisted, more cylindrical where she is hour-glass). Her nose is definitely my nose (kind of pug), and the shape of the face is close, though I think I am more square-jawed. Here's the thing, if you want your av to look like your real self (albeit a bit better) get an artist to help. My artist friend sat next to me as I built my avatar. He'd look at me, then at her on the screen and say, "No, higher cheekbones. Yes. . . No, a bit more muscle in the thighs. Good." and so on. When we were done I still thought she was far too pretty. But then what is the point of making a new you if you don't make it better?

So we are drawn to recreate ourselves new and better in SL. And we go on gathering friends and having fun, and suddenly second life is work. We get jobs to support our SL lifestyles, we do business, make partnerships, or at least acquire friends and fuck-buddies. It all gets overwhelming and sooner or later we get the idea we need an "alt" (alternate avatars). C'mon, admit it. How many times have you said you wished you could clone you to do all the things you'd like to do in a day. (For a really good idea of how alternate avatars should work read David Brin's sci-fi novel Kiln People.) By alternate avatar here I don't mean just changing skins, costumes, or species. I mean a whole new account so you can be multiple different people in SL. But the problem with alternate avatars is (even if you can run multiple computers and have them all going at the same time) you still need to split your attention. Who (avatar-wise) gets to be "on"?

There are some good reasons for alts. Say you want to be different genders or different species at times. Or say you need an avatar for RL work (and, yes, some of us do), for professional reasons you might want to have a different av for fun, too. One couple I know have alts for when they want private times (sort of like turning the phone off at home--no one can find you if they don't know who you are). Then there's the fellow who uses alts to keep all his lady friends from finding out about his multiple affairs. He has created seven different alts, he calls them "brothers," and each is "faithful" to a separate girlfriend. (I do have to admit I have a problem with this use of alts, as it seems a bit sleazy even to me who makes an SL living at selling sex!)

For whatever reason, the stats seem to indicate that one in four SL residents have one or more alts, and that if you are into having alts, the average number for an alt user is five. That said I admit, I too have created an alt. But here's the interesting part. Try as I might, she isn't much different from my primary av. I made her a bit less sexy, and I really tried to find blonde hair for her that was more like my real hair (of course, now I find I would like to have that hair on Tsai, too). This leads me back to my original point about identity. How much are our avs like our real selves? Clearly if you are a Neko (the SL term for Furries, from the Japanese word for cat) your av "looks" different, but are you roleplaying or is this just the real you in a furry suit? If we strive to be more like our RL selves in our SL selves is that an indication of self-liking? Or just a lack of imagination?

All this avatar shaping has made me think about my own identity in RL as well. Are we shaped mentally, emotionally, by the physical bodies we inhabit? Does the color of our hair, our skins, our eyes, really matter? I am more comfortable when my av is a blonde--is that because I have always been a blonde in RL? Here, where I have the chance to be anything, why am I going for the same hair and eye colors?

In RL it seems like most of us aren't happy with the physical forms we are given. If we were, why would we spend so much time, effort, and money to dye our hair, have surgery to change the shape of our breasts, work out to build the perfect abs? If you are prettier or more handsome, are you happier? You might be if that sense of attractiveness could make you more confident. But if we were confident in ourselves--in our Real Lives (tm)--would we need Second Lives at all? We all certainly seem more confident in SL. Women are sexier, men are tougher, everyone is acting happy. In SL it is easy to be confident simply because we tend to stay behind our masks, never showing our real faces to each other. This begs the question: can anything in SL ever be real? Can we ever trust one another when we never really know the other?

I have no answers. I'm just thinking out loud here . . . and wondering about the faces behind my fantasies.

Song for a rainy Tuesday night: "Everything Changes" by Staind



Somehow these lyrics seemed right for a night like tonight...

If you just walked away
What could I really say?
Would it matter anyways?
Would it change how you feel?

I am the mess you chose
The closet you can not close
The devil in you I suppose
Cause the wounds never heal...

...Sometimes the things I say
in moments of disarray
succumbing to the games we play
to make sure that it's real...

...If you just walked away
What could I really say?
Would it matter anyway?
It wouldn't change how you feel.

Monday, August 20, 2007

Today's Song: Your Song from Moulin Rouge



I hope you don't mind, I hope you don't mind that I put down in words... how wonderful life is now you're in the world!

Saturday, August 18, 2007

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Song du Nuit: "Strong Enough"


Nothing’s true and nothing’s right
So let me be alone tonight
Cause you can’t change the way I am
Are you strong enough to be my man?

Lie to me
I promise I’ll believe
Lie to me
But please don’t leave

I have a face I cannot show
I make the rules up as I go
It’s try and love me if you can
Are you strong enough to be my man?