Exploring In-world, Out-world...

While i've had great times with randomn SL meanderings, it's not necessarily the most efficient way to explore if pressed for time. Often the best way to find out about interesting stuff going on in-world is to explore SLifers Flickr sites, the result of which today I came across Therese Carfagno who works as a journalist for Second Life News Network. Therese has a blog and Flickr site, both of which point to places/in-world events and expos that look well-worth checking out...

So, inspired by Therese, my SL must-see list for today is as follows:

The Greenies - i don't think i can describe this until i've been but here's the SLurl

Sploland - 100 exhibits inspired by The Exploratorium, a hands-on science centre in San Francisco - SLurl

Flowerball - an interactive art thingy - SLurl

Big Chip Awards (SL version)

We had an interesting time several weeks ago when Misty and I simultaneously attended the Big Chip Awards - Misty in RL, myself in SL; 2-way streaming as can be seen here:

Weirdly enough, neither of us got to bed until 5am.

After the ceremony I went on to Flickr to upload the pics to our Second Life account and hopped over to my RL account (which is where the ‘action’ happens, as it were) and of course some of my friends from various other time zones were around, comment frenzy ensued and which spilled over into private flickr mails. HG and I then moved over to instant chat (google) as we wanted to have a proper conversation, and before I knew it, it was 4.30am – the same time that Misty rolled out of the press club in the ‘real’ world having consumed her own body weight in champagne due to a lucky win on a texting competition.
That one of the problems with online communities; the lack of shared (externally-influenced) circadian rhythms combined with the mock-alertness effect of life in front of a screen means that you’re friends are always ‘there’ – by the time your European amigos log off, your US buddies are live and kicking and then before you know it your friends in the southern hemisphere appear and they're all so bloody engaging that you literally have to peel yourself away from the computer!
By this time it’s about 5am, you need to be up at 6.45 in order to put the anti back into the social by choosing to enter SL at a time when it’s quiet - otherwise you end up having the same banal chit chat with different avatars and not getting anything done. Jjust for the record: 1) yes I DO know that my avatar is flat-chested, 2) I’ve been slifing since Christmas, and 3) NO I DON’T WANT TO HAVE VIRTUAL SEX.

It’s bloody knackering all this and i can regularly be seen sporting eye-bags the size of Cornish pasties due to living a significant portion of my life online. Because my social software addiction is becoming apparent visually in terms of under-eye baggage, I’m beginning to wonder if SLife will become increasingly desirable as no matter how much time I spend in-world my avatar doesn’t age. Basically, the more time I spend being Puli the more I age and yet she just stays the same. Yeah, it's vanity but she annoys the hell out of me sometimes – oh excellent, yet another socio-emotional digital identity discovery; envy of one’s own avatar!

It’s like one of those awful TV confessional shows (Jerry Springer etc) – ‘Avatar Envy’ or ‘My Avatar Ruined My Life’. Ha ha, could have fun with this: ‘My avatar slept with my best friend’s husband’, although an interesting one is ‘My avatar used to be a man’ – doesn’t really work does it? Obviously in RL this would be about a sex-change, but things are different in SL aren’t they? Rather than the dilemma of which workplace toilets should be used when a he becomes a she, our gender-related quandaries are related to whether the avatar you’ve been virtually bikini shopping with really IS a female (or is it a ‘man behind the mask’?).

Things should become a little clearer when voice finally gets off the ground in Second Life. Although I’m saying that as somebody who has actually been referred to as ‘sir’ during a phone call to a customer service centre, so perhaps not…

O.D.Catastrophe

I had a work meeting yesterday where the subject of Second Life came up (not my fault, honest) and once again faced the accusation that if someone spends a lot of time in Second Life it is at the detriment of their regular life which they will be unable to maintain to a satisfactory standard. Bearing in mind that this invariably comes from people who have never tried Second Life, I wonder where it comes from.

Media scaremongering and a surfeit of half-remembered science fiction plots are what spring to mind. Sure there have been times when I have accidentally stayed up till sunrise exploring SL, but personally I have been a lot more concerned about my Flickr addiction. It has proved much more time-consuming, yet you never read articles warning of the dangers of hanging about with virtual friends on a photo-sharing network - probably because it sounds utterly ridiculous and wouldn't sell many papers.

Is when I SL overdose (SL-OD?!) really so different to when I get my hands on a new Michael Connelly novel and spend all day at work thinking about it, and racing home to get back to it, staying up too late devouring it before lying in bed, eyes closed, mind racing and with minor heart palpitations knowing I should be asleep? It doesn't feel so different to me, but reading this post back I'm staring to wonder whether I just have a problem in general...