Quote of the Day: Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction." --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Adam Ramona's Seventeen Unsung Songs

Second life is primarily a visual treat, and so art in SL tends toward the fantastic, the improbable and the impossible. On the island of East of Odyssey, however, Adam Ramona--known in real life as Adam Nash, a 3D artist, performer, composer and programmer who uses online space (and sound) as a realtime performance medium--has taken the visual and integrated it organically with the aural and even the emotional in a sim-wide installation he calls Seventeen Unsung Songs.

Nash's installations use a combination of color, prim transparency, and scripting to make interactive art such as this complex piece: " Unsung Song #4: Mitosis." The central piece is an plant with a central shaft that responds to touch. Touch it enough and it ejaculates pollen which, if it falls into the cupped petals below, may turn into red eggs. The eggs hatch pink larvae which turn into blue bugs. Touch a blue bug and it falls to the ground as a blue transparent prim which begins to grow into a music tree, each square blue branch sounding a different chime when touched.




Another of Nash's complex pieces is "Unsung Song #16: Blue Sound Ground" a roadway made up of transparent blue prims, each of which sounds a different note when walked on by an avatar.

The notes range from percussive sounds to voices to melodious chimes. Multiple avatars walking on this road thus literally make a unique song of surprisingly harmonious tones.


The most amazing and perhaps disturbing of Nash's pieces is "Unsong Song #7: The Moaning Columns of Longing." Dr. Lisa Dethridge (Lisa Dapto) says in her paper on Nash's work:

The artist leaves less room for us to negotiate space around his highly interactive work, the Moaning Columns of Longing. This is perhaps the most mysterious and emotive of the works. Here artist toys deliberately with the “hot buttons” of love and pain that drive us all, especially those enmeshed in virtual affairs . . . In response to an avatar’s touch, tall, white columns spawn instantly with a phallic upward thrust. These gently swaying prims define themselves as artificial life forms that exist only in relation to a single, specific Avatar. They are exclusive and faithful to a fault.
The columns sway and ooze particles for joy or shrink and pine desperately when rejected. They communicate directly, challenging each owner/lover/user to prove their love and loyalty. In this giggly theatre of cruelty, the Avatar may choose to support and “love”, to ignore or even to abuse the artificial life form that is now virtually “theirs.” Like real life lovers however, the Moaning Columns make heavy demands on the avatar, challenging us to differentiate between real love and merely dizzy infatuation. Thus we earn what Nash wryly calls “an endless amount of chances to practice emotional responsibility.”

I have to admit that after three days of my "Column" moaning at me I couldn't stand it anymore and I let it die--if nothing else, Nash has reminded me in a very concrete object lesson about the dangers of emotional entanglement in SL. A lesson many of us need to learn. The Unsung Songs of Adam Ramona/Adam Nash are not your typical artistic builds, they are a multimedia treat and a closer look at in our own mirrors, and at our own obsessions, all rolled into one. Go visit East of Odessey and see for yourself.

The Carnival is in Town: Soup to Nuts a Blog Carnival Progressive Dinner!

You Are Invited To The Blogosphere's Only Progressive Dinner Carnival

I've been involved in a Blog Carnival before, but now there is something new out there in the Blogosphere! Have you ever been to a progressive dinner? You start out at one house or restaurant to have hors d'oeuvres and cocktails, then move on to a different one for appetizers, and continue moving from place to place all the way through dessert!

That's the idea behind a brand new "Progressive Dinner Blog Carnival" . . .

. . . Soup To Nuts is ONE BLOG CARNIVAL presented in five "courses," each with a different host! So, care to join me for dinner?

Dinner will be served on Wednesday, January 30th.

• The Hors d'oeuvres & Cocktails will be served at Fear and Loathing - The Gonzo Papers.
• For Appetizers we will move over to Change Therapy
• Then the First Course will be served at Fallen Words
• For the Main Course we visit Anja Merret - Chatting To My Generation.
• And finally Dessert will be served at Fiction Scribe.

This is quite a one of a kind Blog Carnival! Many kudos to Kilroy (*Tsai blows him a kiss!*) for setting it all up! He purposefully chose five blogs to host the dinner that would each get different organic traffic. If you migrate through each of the five courses it will be unlike any other blog carnival you’ve ever done. What a great way to "taste" the internet and the blogging comunity!

Want to participate? You can submit one post, per blog, on any subject (please do not use any post more than once).

The Rules are simple:

1. Only English language posts will be accepted.
2. No posts with titles that include profanity or pictures of a sexual nature.

You can participate in 1, 2, 3, 4 or all 5 courses:

• Use "Progressive Dinner" as the subject line.
• Email your entry for the hors d'oeuvres & cocktails to Kilroy at: kilroy60@gmail.com .
• Email your entry for the appetizer course to Isabella at: moritherapy@shaw.ca
• Email your entry for the first course to Sara at: ilovetowriteSMP@yahoo.com
• Email your entry for the main courseto Anja at: anja@hqlondon.net
• Email your entry for the dessert courseto Jaime at: sylver1@tpg.com.au

Your Entry post should include:

• Your name as you want it to appear
• The name(s) of your blog(s)
• The corresponding URL(s)
• The title of your post(s)
• The corresponding URL(s)

This is a fabulous way to meet other travelers in the Blogosphere! So don't miss it!

SL and RL: Where They Touch and Where They Collide

Funny thing about having a Second Life is that it can be so much like all the good parts of Real Life (tm) without the negatives. In both there can be dancing and sightseeing, sporting events, movies, books, concerts, there are good friends and good conversation, and there is flirting and romance and even sex.

But in SL there are no dishes to do, no laundry or cleaning, no house painting (unless you count building textures), and landscaping and repairs don't involve getting messy or dirty or tired or sore. No one has to make the bed. Taking out the trash is just a click of a button. In SL with the right partner there can be very good sex--even if it is in the form of mutual masturbation.

One of the most obvious things most people notice right away about SL is that, although it removes the bumps and discomforts of RL, it also has it's own brand of limitations. In SL I can fly, in RL I am afraid of heights; in SL I can breathe underwater, in RL I can't even swim; but in RL I am an excellent dancer, have been a professional bellydancer, in SL (and for me here is one of the disappointments of SL) I am frustrated by the limitations of what a script, a dance pole, or a poseball will let me do.

SL relationships also suffer from similar deprivations. The lovely folks at Xcite! and Strokerz have given us virtual genitalia, love animations, and sex toys. Those things, together with a sexually experienced partner who has good narrative skills, can be very stimulating, but there is one significant element missing. Human touch. The feel of your lover's hands running over your flesh. The touch of your lover's mouth on yours. The soft, salty taste of skin. The sweet hot pleasure of penetration. These are things that cannot be replaced by virtual games. Or can they?

Now there are people working on the technology to provide some of that. Believe it or not, this is a serious field of technology which is called "Teledildonics." Now you can buy a kissing phone that will give you a kiss matching the kiss of your lover on the other end. You can get a shirt that allows you to feel hugs from your distant partner. And (no shit!) there are electronic vaginas and penises through which you can stimulate each other to orgasm!

doubt that anything will ever replace the desire for real human touch, and I am sure most of us don't have the funds to invest in an arsenal of electronic devices. But there is a trend for relationships begun in SL to escalate to higher and higher levels, including spilling over to RL, and maybe this sort of electronic toy is the answer to keeping your RL and SL from overlapping or worse from colliding.

Now I am not saying you shouldn't mix SL with RL, that is of course a personal choice. The difficulty is making that choice reasonably and rationally, and--being human and fallible--if we aren't careful we can make choices that affect us or our RL loved ones badly.

The press is full of articles that bash Internet relationships. There was the story of the fellow who spends nearly 20 hours a day in SL neglecting his real wife for his SL wife. Even if you are single you can make choices that turn out badly, like the chick whose ex-online lover killed himself leaving her with no closure, or the one who is moving to the city of her Internet pal but fears becoming a homewrecker. And, when online lovers do meet, there is the issue of possibly spreading sexually transmitted diseases from meeting online partners for a quick tryst in RL.

What we never seem to hear about in the news are the many couples that meet online and then succeed in establishing solid RL relationships. I can think of a half dozen among my friends and acquaintances in SL alone. In an SL interview with Reuters SL News Center, Internet entrepreneur Arianna Huffington has even noted that:

A lot of people who want to explore different possibilities, they can now do it in Second Life instead of, say, leaving their wife—fulfilling some other fantasy. Why not experiment? I think Second Life will save marriages.

And she may be right. While many people push the online envelope into their real life, there are many more who are perfectly happy having their cake in SL and eating it in RL, too--taking the stimulation they feel by sex in SL back into improving their real live relationships and experiencing with their real partners that experimentation they have been able to explore online in a safe environment first.

So once again it all boils down to choices. Have SL sex? Why not. It is safe and it can be fun. Is it cheating if you are already RL married or committed?--only you (and your partners) can decide that. (Hell, I have one RL girlfriend who considers her BF looking at porn magazines a form of cheating.)

Should you meet that online partner in RL? Now you need to slow down and think it through. There are a whole lot of "what ifs" to consider. If you are committed in RL will it hurt that relationship? Maybe a Same Time Next Year scenerio will hurt neither of you, but what if one of you wants more and the other doesn't? What will you do if you don't like the real person as much as you do the avatar? If he/she finds you unattractive in RL? Or, worse, has lied about his/her real self? These are things to consider before you let that second life collide with your real one.

The bottom line is that there are many wonderful things about Second Life worth exploring and enjoying--especially safe virtual sex--without worrying about how much better it could be in RL. Maybe we need to take each for what it is worth. Enjoy RL for RL's sake, and enjoy SL for SL's sake. I can dance in SL for or with a partner and enjoy it for what it is--virtual communication. And I can dance in RL with or without a partner and enjoy it for the exercise of my talent as well as the potential for human touch. These worlds may touch for me someday if I find the right partner to dance with in both--and I do mean "dance," in the ballroom and in the bedroom, with a partner who I trust in both RL and SL.

On the other hand, unless it is right for both of us, these worlds may forever stay separate. It really doesn't matter as long as I make the choices wisely. In the meantime I intend to enjoy each venue for all it has to offer.

Narrating the Sensual Senses

In RL we are bombarded daily with sensations: sound, sight, smell, taste, touch. In SL we are a bit more limited. All we have is the visual (our avatars and animations) and verbal (chat and IM) for expressing ourselves--although happily that verbal is sometimes now audio (the second life voice viewer is live) as well as text. But without the sensation of touch, the ability to run fingertips over skin, to let lips connect, to feel the pleasure of orgasm and ejaculation, how can sex in SL be as gratifying as that in real life? For some it can't. For those, however, who are willing to let their imaginations go, there is a a remarkable wealth of sensations that can be described and thus imagined along with the physical release that comes from the mutual masturbation that accompanies SL sex.

Think about it. Some of the most remarkable pleasures of a sexual relationship are not in the end product: orgasm, but rather are those small things that trigger imagination and desire. The warmth and strength of a holding lover's hand in yours carries with it the memory every hand that you have ever held, from the security of the parent's hand when you were a child to that first daring time you touched a member of the opposite sex, to the fingers of the most desired lover you can't forget. When you describe twining your fingers with those of your SL partner--describe the way your fingers slide into his, describe feeling the strength of his hand that could crush yours yet holds you with a touch as light as a butterfly--you evoke the memories he carries as well as your own. We connect best in SL when those memory patterns overlap, when both partners have the same sort of pleasurable memories to draw on. Another way of saying this is that you must be willing or able to connect on some inner levels with your partner. Know what he likes and dislikes.

Take scents for instance. Scents are remarkable triggers of memory. Lavender always reminds me of my grandmother, pleasant memories, but not conducive to romance. Jasmine, however, makes me feel sexy, exotic. I can trigger either scent in my own brain by its description, by merely naming it. No olfactory stimulation necessary. So if I tell my lover that I love the way he smells, like cinnamon and deep woods, and when I tell him that if he buries his face in my hair I will smell of oranges and jasmine, I am triggering my own memories of certain sexy men's colognes, of cooking in a kitchen with a lover, and of my own sexual identity.

He, too, has to on some level, think of those as sexy agreeable scents and also be able to imagine them. If he has never smelled jasmine he might be able to as least conjure an image of flowers and connect that to a romantic moment. But if cinnamon reminds him of pumpkin pie and Christmas and family things, that might not be the frame of reference I want to evoke for a truly lusty encounter. The important thing is to listen to what your lover is saying, pay attention to how he responds to your descriptive moments in IM or voice. Don't get so carried away by your own narrative that you forget to listen to what he is saying and especially what he is responding to!

If you can flesh out the narrative, clearly describing what the sights, scents, tastes, and touches are of your lovemaking, and encourage (by example) your partner to do the same . . . SL sex can be as good as (even if different from) RL sex.