Stem

Posted on: February 15, 2006

I had a dream where I walked into a flowershop and there were no flowers, only stems. It was like going into a restaurant to find that people were trying to eat without heads—just stems.

And what is it about a face?

One more photo from Jukai Urbaine, stemming from the last entry…

I think Shiny is a utility for recreating Don Johnson's sunglasses from Miami Vice, altho I haven't seen anything that comes really close yet. Another on my list. But I was at Slackstreet, an' I thot about racing down the roads in a high-powered sports car. It's going to be quite a momentous occasion when bullet trains come to SL. There's something utterly devastating about a form of locomotion with a cat face that can fly. I'm talking about the anime variants, of course, but I've been long obsessed with why the word "train" rhymes with "plane". As in the case of a certain Transformer.

Something challenging to pull off in SL today, in 2006 AD, is a timely and acrobatic escape from impending synthetic disaster. Yes, there's a certain guardian aspect that's beautiful about the slomo that results when physical blocks are crashing down and time dilation drops to nil, but all too often, combined with that, comes delayed control and response. And if the Pending Uploads are clogged, tough hope teleporting out!

I totally understand when someone gets upset over loss of control with their av. Some may say, "Don't take it so personally, it's just a computer character!"—but no, that's dumb as a bowl of mice! If you're reacting intensely, that reflects how you see yourself, and it's like a part of you is out there and you want to grab you back and hold you dear, but you can't. And that's sooo frustrating. This, beyond seeing a word processor crash and getting upset because you just lost a report you neglected to save, is even more impactful. There's emotional investment in an extension of yourself.

Science fiction speaks highly, often lowly, of "life extension programmes". What we have today in Second Life, literally, is the whole undertaking of shaping how you appear to others. I remember when Tony Grace aka Zero Walsh used the term homoculus in connection with this, and on a base, primal, absolutely nontechnical level, have you ever seen someone set chat on fire when they got "Ruthed" (hideously malformed and reverted to a default avatar state which resembles a Cro-Magnon woman following a botched TP)? How about the horror expressed by someone who unintentionally removed their hair attachments and couldn't find them—especially in the middle of a social situation like a packed club? Why will people (and consider all the offline guys who are girls in SL) pay for skins, clothing, all manner of gadgets to look fabulous, dahling? I have.

And what is it about a face?

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