What’s up

I’m making it into SL a little more often these days than has been my custom over the last few months, though not usually for very long at one time. It’s been good to see old (by SL standards) friends and meet some new ones, though.

The big news chez Tzara, as some of you know, is that we’re expecting a baby. The due date is a little uncertain at the moment — it’s sometime around the middle of December. I have the good fortune not to be the one who has to carry the baby inside her for four more months, but I still have plenty of responsibilities, and the number will only increase! We’re very excited, though. If the sonographer two weeks ago was right (and it seemed pretty clear when I looked at the screen), it’s a girl.

Rethinking

I may be spending a bit less time in SL for a while. Not taking a vacation from SL as such, just trying to make space for some RL activities and people I’ve been neglecting recently.

Thinking about this article.

La.

Lately, I’ve mostly been hanging around The Shelter, taking pictures… wait, that’s not a change!

Won’t be around much this weekend, except maybe for some time Sunday afternoon and evening. I’ve got a retreat for work that starts Friday night. It’s not a bad bunch of people to spend a weekend with, so I’m not complaining. It just means you won’t see me much in-world, unless I sneak in from the hotel room late at night on a laptop with questionable SL capabilities.

Not-a-Meme #14 – Usage Habits

Dolmere asks, “Do you have any Second Life usage habits?”

I, like Rose, use the camera incessantly. My avatar usually stays in one place and I move the camera to see what I want to see (or what I don’t want to see, as the case may be).

I sometimes force noon if I’m in a place that has bad night lighting (for example, The Shelter), but usually I let the sim decide what time of day to resemble.

Other than that, I don’t think I have any quirks — at least in terms of how I use the software!

Not-a-Meme #13 – Secrets and Confessions

Okay, so I’m behind on these non-memes. But they’re not memes, so that’s okay. And if they were, well, that would be okay too, now that I think of it.

Vint Falken started off #13 by asking for secrets and confessions from our Second and First Lives. I’ll see what I can come up with.

Second Life

A few weeks ago, my new female avatar might have been a secret, but no longer. However, what I expected to be just an avatar creation experiment has now become an avatar I regularly use, another expression of my personality. You can probably expect to see the new avatar more often as time goes on.

First Life (and some Second Life, too)

I’ve got a tendency to be shy, both in my first and my second lives. I fall a bit on the introverted side of the introversion-extroversion spectrum. I do well in small groups and one-on-one, but large ones can be a bit overwhelming for me, at least until I’ve gotten to know the people in the large group a bit. It’s difficult for me to invite people I don’t already know well to do things, and I avoid ever inviting myself to things. An example of this in SL would be the fact that I very seldom extend offers of friendship. It’s not that I don’t like you – I might like you a lot. It’s that I’m afraid of rejection, and have been since a young age. For months I forgot the SL software even let you maintain a ‘friends list.’

This is a part of some problems with anxiety that have dogged me for ages without me even really being conscious of them. I’ve become more conscious of them in the last year and have been directing energy toward improving things over the course of the last six months or so. And things are improving. But I still perceive that anxiety and shyness as my greatest weakness, and overcoming it, getting past years of mental conditioning, is slow going. The funny thing about that shyness is that I really enjoy interacting with people – I’m not a hermit, and I have some wonderful, close friendships. But most of those close RL friends don’t live anywhere near me. It took what felt like a long time and just the right conditions for those friendships to develop. I wish it were easier, because I’ve felt a bit isolated since moving to Denver, and working the kind of hours I do makes it that much harder to have any energy left for social events. I think people tend to be more self-protective once they cross out from school into the “real world,” too.

Crossed over

It hasn’t been unusual to see me as a female avatar recently, but tonight I was joined by a few others.

While smoke came pouring out of the asset server’s vents

The grid, or at least the asset server, seems to be having a meltdown of some sort today. It’s been going on for at least a few hours but there’s been no mention of it on the official blog. Lovely! I tried to connect a while ago, started out Ruthed, then tried switching to various outfits. Some clothes and attachments would rez, some wouldn’t, and when I gave up I looked like an incompetent transvestite.

I had my six-month anniversary (reziversary?) Friday. I celebrated by, uh, not really doing anything unusual. In fact, I barely made it in-world for a few minutes on Friday. But that’s okay— I’d spent a lot of last weekend in-world.

I spent a lot of that in-world time last weekend shopping. I finally bought things like a skin, prim hair, and AO, among others. On a whim, I also created a female av and gave her all of those things and a few outfits. She was a lot more fun to shop for than my regular av, mainly because there are so many more things one can buy for female avatars. Do the changes represent a change away from my post a few weeks ago when I observed that my avatar vaguely resembled me? Maybe. I’ve made a few more steps away from my own RL appearance with my avatar, and of course the female avatar looks rather different from me, though it was a bit eerie to note when I first created the female shape that it vaguely resembled a few family members. But regardless of what avatar I’m ‘wearing’ or what the avatar is wearing, the personality that you get is basically my own, to the extent I can express it in the context of

I seem to have gotten back in-world, and at least some of my attachments are rezzing. So if you see me bald, or shoeless, well, blame LL.

Now, I’m starting to think that I might like a little land of my own in SL. I’ve been avoiding both the expense and the headache so far — it seems like a lot of people who acquire 512 m2 parcels acquire with them undesirable neighbors who build undesirable builds. I’m looking for a nice place to return to. If you’ve got any advice on finding land that is affordable but not surrounded by builds full of litter or spinning signs, I’d love to hear it!

Jacek’s Challenge – Avatar and Identity

Jacek Antonelli asks, “Personally, do you consider your avatar an extension of yourself, or a character you control?”

From the answers people are offering so far, there seem to be (at least) two questions here. One is, “Do you role-play a character in SL that is different from your RL personality, or do is your SL personality basically the same as your RL one?” The second is, “To what extent do you identify with your on-screen avatar?”

For my own part, I haven’t crafted a separate SL personality. Kieres Tzara in SL is basically me. Usually listening more than talking, occasionally coming up with odd bits of trivial knowledge (and seldom anything important). Yeah. Sounds about right.

If you’d asked me a few months ago whether I identified with my avatar, I would have said “no” — it’s just an avatar, nothing more. But that answer would be betrayed by the appearance of my avatar, which looks as much like me as I can accomplish using the built-in generic body parts and textures. I find myself hesitating to change my avatar’s appearance to something with which I can’t personally identify. I had trouble hair shopping because I couldn’t find anything that I would wear on my own (RL) head. This might not be such an issue if I chose an appearance more different from the basic human appearance, but I can only guess. At least I’m not alone – Erbo not only fashioned his avatar to make it look similar to himself, but he finds himself dressing like his avatar, too.

So, to answer Jacek, I guess I treat my avatar as an extension of myself in both senses. I have a quirky side that doesn’t come through very easily in SL, mainly because it’s hard to express in text (even with the help of animated gestures). But I guess Kieres is me, at least to the extent the technology permits.

Mistaken premise

The problem with the premise of this blog is that I haven’t really done much wandering through SL. Sure, I wander from time to time, but most of the time I end up back at The Shelter pretty quickly. I started to think of this while talking with Tiyuk a few weeks ago. I’m at a point in my RL where the RL stuff is consuming enough that I don’t have a lot of energy left to invest in SL. It’s probably going to be that way for a good long while. And who knows what SL will be like in 3 years, let alone more? I like SL, and I especially like certain places that I visit regularly and the people who congregate there. I just don’t have much time to invest in it beyond that.

So, this blog probably will not become a story of travels through SL.  A road trip journal this is not.  But that’s fine.

Miscellany

I’ve been visiting my first life family for the last several days, so I’ve been OOW. Right before I left, I finally built a new PC, so once I get back home on the 1st, I’ll be able to visit SL without being impaired by a computer system that can’t really handle SL. I’m excited by the prospect of being able once again to attend live music events, enjoy parties, go sailing with Alexander, fly anything, and skydive.