I'm done with him. He's become a cruel, mockery. Where there was fun he's been replaced by the burden of definition. The gay toungue-in-cheek of cartoonish buffoonery has become the master of the puppeteer, scolding him in the dressing room for being such a fool. I declare myself free of him. I am not, will not be he.

Then there are the times when the medium breaks down for you. The nuance of a statement gets lost or misunderstood and so the next and the next and the next and you want to be able to stop that twisted unlovely momentum, to grab a hold and look into those eyes and say "Hey, where are we at?"

But you can't. You're a thousand miles away and there's a metaverse between you.

Let's make one thing absolutely clear. Second Life is many things. But the one thing that it is most importantly of all, more than all the *sociological* implications, more than the business, technological and WEB 2.0 implications, more than the design and creativity implications. Second Life is a scream. It's a flying roller coaster of laughs, friends and emotions. It's an explosion of interactions that happen so deeply, so fast and so incontrovertibly that it makes RL look like a horse and buggy in a bullet train universe. The barrier-smashing drive to your heart is complete and immediate. The effects as lasting as your sixteenth birthday.

Where else can you laugh off a 35-year difference between you and your magic carpet riding co-pilot? And actually, no, you never laughed it off because you never even noticed there was one. Or where else can your dance partner twirling across a glass roof be as real to you emotionally as your fist love while the greenhouse you're dancing through the moonlight on top of grins at the very thought of failure.

All this without voice, with limited gesture, almost non-existent facial movement, with server crashes and re-logs in adamant denial of denial-of-service, with Walt Disney beauty without the disbelief, with commitment in the face of attention deficit disorder.

With happiness on your sleeve, the jaded you is slain without a whimper.

I'm adding all this and back dating it just to put it here though it's all in the threads. Also don't miss Moriash's great comments on his experience in SL as a Star Trek half-white/half-black, one of the great episodes. (So say I, a decided non-Trekie.) http://moriash.blogspot.com/2007/01/mlk-day-avatar.html

http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2007/01/open_forum_king.html
http://moriash.blogspot.com/2007/01/read-this-now.htm

Although I think James’ presentation differs slightly in tone from my original idea (See below) I agreed to that presentation and in any case that difference is irrelevant to the concerns expressed on Moriash's blog. To do something to “learn what it’s like to be of another race” is a laudable but dubious condescension. Something like we (white middle-class) fasting for a day to learn what it’s like to be starving in a forgotten country or anywhere. While fasting for solidarity in certain cases may have its place, I couldn’t agree more that in this case that idea is misplaced and the thought of learning in some empathic way “What it’s like” never crossed my mind. Of course, that interpretation exists. Perhaps, it exists strongly enough to have scuttled the action. That’s a second guess which unfortunately it is too late to consider.
The blackface analogy did cross my mind but I decided that the history of that genre also includes the jujitsu flip of socially progressive applications and its discussion in this context is a long and subtle one. Perhaps someone will take that discussion up but I didn’t find it problematic that this action could engender it.
My intention was far simpler. It was simply a numbers game, in a sense, the SL equivalent of marching in an MLK Day parade. My thought was, imagine “an announcement by the Lindens of a concurrency of 20,000+ non-whites” from an avatar world that is decidedly, on a day to day basis, white. In an environment where changes in gender, species and even into non-existent forms are lauded, why is race change so revolutionary? It's obvious there's an RL crossover here that's deeper than we've acknowledged.
I also felt that once was not enough. I suggested the 15^th of every month thereafter. I felt this is necessary to build an ongoing consciousness of diversity, a consciousness that does not seem to be served by fairies and bunnies and the current manifestations of avatars. I think, perhaps, only in this way can SL be truly about breaking barriers, be made something more than “just another costume-fest”.

I had a very interesting conversation last night especially in light of the Log-in of a Different Color for MLK Day on Monday the 15th, (See previous post). It was about looks. How you look. How you should be concerned about how you look. How important it is or how not.

I was just coming off of 18 almost straight hours of reading vehicle scripts in preparation for my island coming on-line, unshaven and sort of bleary-eyed I checked in. L had promised to take me skydiving. We stopped off at Susi's to sit on the couch and watch some machinima, took a jaunt to Trent's Cycles so she could try out one of his demo models, went skydiving and then to the Flintstones where we discovered a secret dance floor. Did a few dips. Talked about AFI Davey's tattoos for a bit and called it a night. I was still buzzed. Decided to check out the show at Moulin (NSFW) and on the way ran into (not literally for once) a lady on the sidewalk.

She hated my purple hair. I said I always wanted purple hair. She hated my haircut, said I should buy a new coif. I haven't taken the time. That didn't seem valid. In fact, she hated my entire look. In the space of that short moment she'd managed to look up my profile. (While I was bumblingly trying to maneuver my avatar into a position of engagement.) "You've been here more than a month! You look like you've been here two days." she said. "Yes, I was still somewhat 'off the rack', " I replied, "but was too busy with other things to worry about it. Do I look like someone who has no class or style?", I asked.

"Yep."

She changed the label above her name from "Tranquility" to "Dominant" which definitely seemed appropriate. We were on the sidewalk in front of Moulin, remember. (Thinking about it now, perhaps it's a way for her to "chat" her mood, her role, a creative use of those ridiculous labels we have to keep deleting from our exploding brain matter.) So what could possibly be more important than how one looks? "It's important even here." she said. Now, I can think of a few more important things. How you live. How you die. How you negotiate Time. However, despite repeated attempts at deflection she was tying me to the proverbial BDSM chair and I was going to hear this no matter what. I didn't walk away. Behind it was intelligence which, even if it was role-play (and especially if it wasn't), could have benefited from a touch of irony. But the truth is I was enjoying it. I didn't feel it was at my expense nor for my good. And in fact, it's something that's been on my mind. I've had this feeling that I'm a bit newbie looking. When I look around I see some very decked out Avatars. Not the costumed ones so much. That's either just a click or a prodigious talent and there are few opportunities to find out which. But even in the modestly or re-imagedly dressed often there's a skin or a hair piece or a look in the eye that is truly not newbie and it can be impressive and arresting. I too want that look. But one month! Too little time and how much of it is actually spent in here? Too much to know in that little time. Too much to experience. Then one day the thought came to me. In the already complicated red herring of SL, the newbie look could be yet another undercover illusion. It could be one of those all-empowering cudgels, a choice. Though I never made that choice, the thought alone, in the subtlest way, undermined my will toward the pursuit of cosmetics. My look went unchanged.

Now in front of me a well dressed, intelligent woman was confronting that non-choice choice and in her eyes I was losing the argument. But what was the argument? I have purple hair. She is blond. How many people in SL are blond? How many purple? Is purple not a valid choice? Why then is blond? A gentleman TP'd down in a sort of Edwardian mash-up with a cape and morning coat. "Look at him", she said. "He looks great." How could one not agree? But he is he. I am not he. Thus he looks like him and I look like me. He thanked us both in a warm and well mannered way for our compliments and I knew he deserved them. But I do not want to be dressed like him. She is right. There is no comparison between his look and mine, no crossover. I hope he is as solid in his skin as I am in mine, as sure of his choice as I of my default. But this does not settle the argument.

"You should take time with your person." she said. "I spend every second of every day taking time with my person." I said being one-uppish and smug. I was beginning to be piqued and ruminating silently about the superficial versus the deep. "Perhaps you should too." I thought to myself meaning it differently. The conversation went on in this vein until it became boring and static. Something clutched onto, reached out for rather than invented moment to moment. How could an invitation to salsa in the Gardens of Apollo be less important than this. "I get the message." I said and turned decidedly to the dungeons. "I think I'll check out the show." I said, secretly pleased with my facile about face. Then instantly bungled the teleporter. That's really the case, half dork/half cool. But down at the love slave sale, (5,000L!) I had time to look up a few profiles myself.

Second Life the paramount transvestite/transgender opportunity. (Who's writing that perfect drag queen walk that's so unmistakably bumping into me on the way into Studio 54?) What a wealth of convincing self-expression this place is. You can be whatever you want. You can be straight. You can be gay. You can be male. You can be female. You can be white. You can be black. (Remember the 15th.) You can do all or any of that and, if you like, you can do it as a 6' rabbit or a 5' cockroach or a ninja or an Edwardian or a blond girl or a purple haired half-dork. It's your skin. It's your life. Don't let it down.

After reading this article http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2006/02/the_skin_youre_.html at NWN, I posted the following suggestion: I have been thinking about this for a while and Erika's experience has finally prompted me to make the suggestion. How about a day where everyone logs in as a person of some color other than white? How about more than once like the first Monday of every month or some such? How about an announcement by the Lindens of a concurrency of 20,000+ non-whites? I was going to suggest this during the Kwanzaa celebrations but didn't feel empowered enough. Now I do.

How about Martin Luther King day, January 15th? Then every 15th of the month after that!

I made a u-turn on the iced-over back road leading to the last party and decided to see what Midnight in a New Year's Eve SL was like. Pretty much a bust. At one point about 4:30 EST, I decided to take the plunge and clicked on "Topless Slave Party". Since I'd never even clicked on "Take off all of your clothes" I wasn't certain there was anything inside the tuxedo to bring to the celebration but I TP'd anyway. One person in a diaper listlessly moving on the dance floor and a couple of people in a corner talking about boredom. But when L and I jumped on my magic carpet (That took me all afternoon to build and everyone else in the class a 1/2 hour) and bashed immediately into red "no entry" fences on three sides and got ejected on the fourth, I understood what my new island would be. At least, for the immediate future, that is, while I spend the next eternity developing the skills I need to do what I want with it. After having had experiences in SL like buying a jetski for 750L and finding out that the beach was on the absolute corner of a SIM and there was nowhere to drive the thing except in the garage you bought it in, I have been bouncing my head literally off of red walls with this problem. And now I've solved it. Dune Buggy rentals on a completely undeveloped island. A floating observation platform and a dance floor where you can enjoy your downtime (or coupled salsa) while you watch everyone else crashing their buggy into the surf and sand. A place where a good time can be had by all. Have to have a skate pond though because skating is still my favorite activity in SL. Easy enough to do. I'll just build it on the roof of my underwater laboratory.