Torley Lives

ok. so… what?

HELLO!!! I'm TORLOP, another parallel version of the Torley Jr. you've come to know and love. T-Prime, as I'll refer to her, has started jaunting outwards on a limited series of time-travel adventures. So yeah, she's already gone off in her De Lorean and should be rocketing through the angoradora section of the fabric of spacetime right about… now. Me? I'm a friendly furry who loves to have fun — who doesn't? I mean, not everyone's a furry, but?I would think everybody enjoys having fun.?;)?I showed up yesterday so some peeps were wondering if I was a festive Easter one-off or what. While?I'm all for celebration, remember this, as told to me by a new friend: "Bunnies aren't for Easter, they're for life!"?Second Life in this case, so while T-Prime is way out there, I'll be filling in. *waves and smiles*

Before T-Prime left, she wanted me to fill you in on some things. Like, oh, how cool it is to go over the (unnamed) new continent of the gridverse and go parachuting. Parachuting was quite a popular pastime in SL, having been featured in past demo videos and whatnot, and it's been seeing a resurgence with this lush untouched land that won't be here for long, so enjoy it while you can. See if you can find the waterfall in a certain sim too, and go gliding past that — it's quite breathtaking!

And… before you go so north, you may be inclined to stock up on some supplies and unrelated stuff that may nonetheless come in handy later. SL has had its share of yard sales, but they've mostly been one-off or otherwise unenduring events that haven't sustained over a few days. There are treasure troves in the world to be found like the Free Bazaar in Stillman (148, 83)?, but for the persistent bargain?hunter, a mess of treasures — I mean that in the best of ways — is hard to come by. Guess what??Mash Mandala and Baccara Rhodes, a lovely couple who were recently married in SL, took the opportunity to?set up Continental Madness! You can find it at Purple (65, 200) on Destiny's Landing. Still running strong, so feel free to read the rules and buy and sell as you please… a great sort of "flea market" and a fave of mine everytime I'm going to the new sims just to see what's new.

Second Life 1.6 is slated to be released, like, soon! Here's a snap of the Preview grid the way it was today. Reporting from that reality would be the blue-and-orange variant of Torley Jr., aka TORANGE. I saw familiar faces shuffling about and testing for bugs, and among other oddities, a trio of Vektor Lindens. (It was mused that "One is too many already". ) I found a few bugs, reported them accordingly, and have been pleased by the overall increased?responsiveness of this new version,?although I experienced a few bouts of odd lag which?Torange will no doubt?be fixating upon…

… LIKE THIS.

ThunderCloud Partridge has some delightfully whacky things cooking: namely, his own amusement park. It's got a boring name though — Alua Park @?Alua (194, 213) has several fun rides, some of which are likely under construction as evidenced by the plywood. Explore around and make sure to read the signs and perhaps you will also find ThunderCloud's store, which I bought a squid from to watermelonize. I asked why his Easter bunny models had no eyes. Via IM, he responded to my compliments:

"Thanks, Torley. Many of my creatures are eyeless. Sometimes, if I give them eyes, I think theyre watching me. Hehe. Probably too many horror movies as a kid."

Sounds like a great reason to me… my kudos, TC! Sidenote: I felt an eerie tinge of familiarity when I visited the park. Turns out the ALUA CEMETARY used to be here, which I previously visited. YES, YOU HEARD IT RIGHT, A ROLLERCOASTER WAS BUILT OVER THOSE GRAVES. Yikes. =))

There haven't been many instructional classes in SL lately, which is a shame. Toy LaFollette, who I've known since I began my Second Life, took it upon her dimunitive-in-body-but-not-in-spirit self and to brave the stage, teaching a rapt class how to make waterfalls. Attendance was packed and I dropped in midway not just to learn, but to admire. It seemed like a full circle thing because I believe it's been months since Toy last taught one of these classes, and in this time of needed direction, it's more welcome than ever.

Tuesday Weary is a newbie. I'll say that out loud, ever since she snuck aboard our ship with Baba "Crunchy Captain"?Yamamoto piloting haphazardly. This is where words really fall short, as you have to live the experience to really understand it. I'm happy the three of us were able to have so much loony fun in the span of a day. Tues quickly struck us with her dilligence and her cheeky sense of humor, not to mention she could fully-form sentences so well. o.O It'd be pretentious to say "She reminds me of myself" and in actuality, she really doesn't, but Tuesday does remind me of certain oldbies in SL I've come to admire… and here I am, recognizing that you can be a totally fresh Resident (about 3 days old as per this writing) who can make an impact on an aging bunny (I'm 6+ months) and BABA WHO SUCKS (he's almost 2 years old)!! Tues has already gotten into building, inspired Baba to get housemaking and me to try to wrangle prims into a set of facelike furniture, and she's played Tringo. In fact, inventor Kermitt Quirk was flying by and dropped in to chat with us. Oh, Tues has?started using Snapzilla too — why?don't you check these?out?and?join?in?on?the?fun?

It's a wonderful Second Life!

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SPECIAL THANXIES . . .

• Ryntha Suavage of Rynworks, several locations including @ Beverly Hills (139, 201)?for the fantabunnylous Easter rabbit avatar. I've raved bigtime about it.?Only L$250 and such quality. WOW.
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• Cubey Terra of the Abbotts Aerodrome for the parachuting and rocketboarding gear. Also thanks for the watermelon-flavored cold smoke.
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• Peter Guillaume and Angelina Becquerel?for the LOVELY watermelon necklace. Details are to my liking. I had to carefully group and link it with the <3> collar my Jadey put on me. Their shop's @ Mieto (102, 59) .
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• Talila Liu for the awesomely cute device that allows me to create clones of myself in the form of "mini Torleys". You can see them standing strongly here, hats on,?alongside Kats Kothari's Torley dolls.
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• Tya Fallingbridge for the heels I've been seen wearing lately — correction, shoe SINGULAR because I kicked the other one off somewhere on the new sims. @_@ Hopefully it'll get returned to me. Her store's @ Missauke (106, 171) .
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• Chloe Platini for the unusually yummy plaid watermelon wear I was wearing during my aerial adventures, part of her BeBe Doll Plaid Sensations and available @ Hiaka (217, 28) . Such a… tasteful job.
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• Nephilaine Protagonist for the mandarin tops as seen in the very first pic wayyy up there. They look so gilded and ornate, and I can imagine how silky smooth they'd be. Her clothes are synonymous with excellence in SL: PixelDolls is located @ Chartreuse (228, 100) .
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• Aimee Weber for her funny "interview" with me in this hilarious article she wrote for Second Life Herald.
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• Neal Stewart for the?recent?SLH article about me?titled "The Birth, Death, Release and Rebirth of the Torley Threnody Melody".
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• Walker Spaight,?who just dropped something on my Inv, and now I have to find out what it is.

Hay, if ya got questions about me, there's no better person to ask than — me — so send me an electronic mail… until next time, mine is a melon forever voyaging. Thank you for reading along for the ride.

*smiles and waves*

The stories seem to find me — if I go looking for them, they are chased away like shadows, but from day to day, things just have to come up, and come to me they do. Ah, I've got a lot to share, and today's tale involves neg-rates. Short for "negative ratings", it's part of the SL system that is technically used to evaluate people with pluses or minuses (or you can abstain and leave it neutral) based on three self-explanatory categories: Behavior, Appearance, and Building. There's also a row showing how many you've given out. I think my Jadey holds the all-time record for that, with 10,000+ before the ellipsises disappeared due to ratings decay. On a side note, I just looked up Robin Linden's profile and noticed her sig?quote:

"Story is a side-effect of interesting experiences." -Will Wright

Well then! Much has already been heatedly discussed in the Forums about the rating system. I'm not here to talk about that, but I do want to spin the yarn of something that happened to me a few days ago. Bad at?the time, looking good now. The current Welcome Area is the Waterhead one because of construction happening at Ahern and the surrounding environs, and I happen to visit often because it's such a transient hub of people coming and going, the kind of hustle-and-bustle in SL I like to see. Unfortunately, there are also troublemakers who are there for various reasons: some know they'll find a captive audience because it's a public area where landowner ejection doesn't come easily, and they know a steady stream is sure to come through sooner or later. And then Lindens swoop in to oversee the "friendliness factor", but they have much work to attend to elsewhere, so the cycle continues.

I was hanging out with friends, some of them newfound, when a fellow whose name I won't disclose as it's not important — what is important is what I learned afterwards, as you'll see — walked up to me to comment on me and my website. He quite enjoyed it from the tone of his typing, but then, that's when things got ugly. He asked if I had Asperger's Syndrome. I answered affirmatively. I saw his fingers get to work, typing on air?and as they did, I began to wonder if he had crashed. But he hadn't, and the following soon appeared in blocks on my screen:

Avatar: How DARE you claim to have that horrible disease when my OWN BROTHER suffers from this HORRIBLE syndrome, he cannot even TALK or make sentences, yet you claim to have that same disease and are sitting here making coherant sentances right now??

Avatar: I am DISGUSTED

Avatar rated you negatively: DISGUSTED

UGH! My gut reaction was to be disgusted myself with what he said on so many levels, because of how wrong it is:

• Asperger's Syndrome is not a disease. It cannot be cured. I have it for life.
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• The majority of people with AS can talk.?Autism is a?spectrum and?what "Avatar" was describing is accurate of?some forms of classical?autism, but certainly not Asperger's.?It is more typical for someone with AS to ramble on and on about an obsession.
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• He certainly was quick to be hostile to me, especially after claiming to read my website which is really quite rainbows and sunshine. I don't exaggerate. And if he was really paying attention to my website, then of course, he'd?know I'm here to help others.

Quickly, Avatar vanished, presumably teleporting somewhere else but still online. Promptly, I fired a quick?IM off to him.?Avatar continued to be rude, threatening to report me for harassment, trying weakly to swing things around on me. I?camly told him to feel free to Abuse Report me if he wanted, but that I am here to help others. (Like I just said. ) I encouraged him to tell me more about his brother and told him that I'm here to listen, and left it at that.

I've not heard back from him. Of course, he might not really?have been DISGUSTED. He might not even have a brother. And it's clear to me he doesn't know what Asperger's is really all about. For all I know (or don't know), he might have just been an ignorant?jerk, or an alt of someone else who has a problem with me for some inexplicable reason and hasn't come to talk directly to me about it… so he resorted to?doing this?instead. Which makes it even more disrespectful to those who do have autism *points to self*,?which is why I emailed the Linden family?afterwards, hoping they can make sense of this with the logs on their servers. And I'd like to thank for my friends for being supportive when this was happening.

A red flag about this guy was that although I will talk at length about Asperger's if asked, you do have to dig fairly deep on my website to understand my context clearer. It's not like I shout out "I'M AUTISTIC!!!" at every turn and corner of Second Life's roads. That would be a RRL = Really Redundant Loop. So, he may have had prior knowledge of me. This may have been planned to set me up and peg me with -3, which isn't fair anyway — hey, who DOESN'T like a flower-hat? At least give me a +1 for Appearance! Sheesh. Seriously, speculation aside –

Now, this is not the first time I've been neg-rated. It's not even the second time. (I might save those stories for particle rainy days.) But this got a passionate?fire burning in my heart again. At the time it happened, I was honestly angry. But then I began to recall all the good, better, and best times I've had on here, and it all comes down to what I do best: being me. And I'm not going to be a fool and perpetuate a cycle of hatred by attacking others, even in retaliation. On the contrary, I'm going to see what I can constructively build upon from this little Second Life lesson. I've figured the following out:

• This is a blessing in disguise which has rekindled my interest in increasing awareness of Asperger's autism and related mental health issues. Heard of Brigadoon and Live2Give? If not, check 'em out! Wonderful examples of how SL is being used to improve real lives.
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• I'm more daring now of going into some areas in SL where controversy runs amuck. I used to be afraid of getting neg-rated en masse, but really, when someone unreasonably?neg-rates me, it says more about them than it does about me. And if I do wrong, I'll be the first to admit that and apologize.
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• It's thickened my skin up even more, both real and virtual. Sure it stings, but over the wounded flesh grows liquid metal. I am a cyborg after all.
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• It encourages me to discuss policy more actively with the Lindens and see what can be done to improve the way the system works. I don't discuss to be right; I discuss to learn.
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• It's reminded me and reinforced my belief?that Second Life is a progressive place where change is constant and dynamics are the same. And that I can't hold on to my ratings, positive or negative, but I can certainly let go of myself for the greater good. To make others's lives happier, and hoping the good vibes?keep flowing freely. To realize that while I'm just an individual, each person can make a difference if a lot of them come together with some great ideas to make dreams come true. Hurts can be?healed, childhood can be?rediscovered, and you have fun.?It's what happens in Second Life.

A picture is worth…

"Words without action are the blueprints that never gets the house built."
-Torley Torgeson, blue-and-orange variation

So I've been unblogging for a few days, busy working on preparations to jump gates and do some more time-travelling. As you may recall, I have the gift of chronohop, but cannot carry out my plans without sufficiently advanced technology (aka magic). I was stuck in this particular slice of Second Life for a number of months, unable to go between universes as freely as I wished. Apart from a wonderful reunion some weeks ago with my father, Torley Sr., I have essentially been grounded. This event was a rare phenomena involving the instability of a cosmological entity known as the "asset server" and many broken TPs… it was unstable but?I've managed to replicate the conditions which caused it, and with this knowledge in mind –?

I continue to prepare myself, to be ready for bolder leaps yet. I hear rumors of the malevolent (?)?orange-and-blue Torley in the Preview Grid, and an assortment of other enchanting things which may await me on my new journeys. It's difficult to map infinity, but hey, someone's gotta do it. Pictured inset will be my vehicle of choice. Favored by other stars of time travel like the incomparable Marty McFly, it is a heavily-modded,?'proxed 500-prim?De Lorean DMC-12?as recreated in SL by the also incomparable ahkenatan Grommet. Also pictured happens to be ahk's town, filled with more automotive goodness and some detailed buildings to boot. Puts things in context like a fantastic Matchbox set. This is a masterful build with a lot of detail… your computer may weep due to the massive prim condensation (I wouldn't be surprised if a gravitational?singularity opens up in the middle), but let me tell ya, all that pain is worth it for the pleasure to come. Check it out at The Good Old Days - Dosojin (123, 22)

Next, we have a certain themed sim which may remind you of a certain Kevin Costner movie. It's one of several inspirations for Kris Ritter's new Krittannia. If you're missing Heaven & Hell already — 'twas a project synonymous with SL quality and one of the very first places?I visited inworld — then take solace in the depths of these seas. The textures are suitably gritty, arrr, and heck, what do I care, there's even a harpoon! Woohoo! I don't know the proper names of some of these supernautical structures, but as you can see, jetskis already get put to great use. Kris has told me there'll be quite an undersea section for exploration. So like H&H, expect an expansive landscape — er, seascape — being put to good use. I'm looking forward to sitting in the bar and watching brawls unfold outside, sipping my hot grog as the sun sets warmly. And then maybe a yacht regatta and giant turtle-riding or somesuch thing.

I was previously familiar with Versu Richelieu's craftswomanship at places like Rue d'Alliez, and now she's crafted a majestic castle on her own sim. Called Kastel Verloren, this is actually her personal residence! (Wow.) I dropped by one day after?previously visiting and she, being ever-so-classy, gave me a tour of places I had obviously overlooked earlier. She cites Neuschwanstein Castle – aka "that castle in the Walt Disney logo that doesn't have mouse ears" — as a primary inspiration, with the exterior being constructed approximately to spec, and the insides having many vivid spaces of her own imagining. Two of my personal faves are pictured: the kitchen, where YOU CAN LOOK AT A SLICE OF CARROT THAT'S DROPPED OFF THE TABLE, and the library, where she's upgraded one of Brian Mifflin's chairs to suit her desk and equipped the desk itself with elegant poses. Poses she created herself. It goes on and on… and 2D is lame compared to the exquisite environments you'll find yourself in, so get your avatass?on in and?get lost in the maze. Literally. Yes, there's a hedge maze too! And a caretaker's house thingie, and servants's quarters that look lived in, and on and on and on… did I mention the bell? It's fun to ring, like a real bell, and it also needs to be manually reset after a couple of days 'cuz it goes wonky. Like a real bell. And on we go…

I'd like to emphasize that all the aforementioned content was created by Residents of Second Life — peeps who got interested in this online world in various ways, and got immersed and started creating. Unique perspectives, but a shared connection of self-expression and the opportunity to show their labor (if it can be called that) to others, positively inspiring newer generations. Last up for today, we have an official Linden build as created by the multinational?megacorp (muhaha ) behind SL.?And more. THE NEW CONTINENT (name = —) opened yesterday.?I came across?many familiar faces?as?I headed north from Purple, up to the lagthargic ANWR region where the amazing prim rig?towered, and kept on going. Shown here are a "moth temple" which I believe was primarily constructed by Eric Linden, and the lush greens of the outer uncharted realms that I felt it was my civic duty to glide through. Already debate has been sparked on the forums about what might happen here in da near future. I just have to say, if you go out to the docks where the shacks are, will you wonder like me who used to live in them? And if they're already dead, will their spirits rise to avenge dishonor when their huts are paved over to make room for X, Y, or even Z? For that matter, I haven't seen Magellan in the flesh yet and am relatively disappointed, but am hoping for an encounter with him and his comrades…

When I put pictures on here, it's really a mere appetizer of what is inworld. Perhaps it's struck you this way, and if this is so, then I do hope that it compels you to hunger for adventure, explore further into the everexpanding gridverse?that is Second Life, and find your own journeys to be true. Having fun along the way, while making enriching self-discoveries and acquiring?knowledge of others no matter what climes you trek through. Sometimes it'll be harsh (i.e.?you'll be harassed by greefer kin, but Abuse Report the savages when appropriate), and climb higher to lower fathoms . . .?to go where no avatar has gone before.