shifting masks

[egypturnash]

I just counted: on Second Life, I have sixteen distinct, different avatars in my inventory. Two are ones I got handed. The rest are all my work. Some are half-finished sketches; some are in the 'depreciated' directory because they're not so good. About half of them are ones I really call "done". There's a few more, but they're slight edits, or archived old versions.

I don't build there; I don't socialize much there; I don't make clothes; I don't sell stuff. I play with code a little, but mostly... I make things to be.

I don't know why, quite. Back on Furrymuck I just never quite trusted people who shifted a lot. Maybe because most of them weren't very interesting, regardless of what shape they were in.

When bluewyrm and I were talking, before all the Residents silliness happened, she suggested it might be cool to make a Peganthyrus avatar. I'm done with that mask, I explained; lots of history behind it I needed to get away from. But several of the avatars I have share important characteristics with that mask: blackness, spikiness, and wings. That same feel keeps coming back. I'm just used to being a dark, dangerous thing.

And some of my other avatars are exaggeratedly harmless. Shortish, cute, prone to wearing a turning windup key.

I'll stick to one look for most of a day, when it's done. If that.

I am not any one particular thing, there. I'm one particular thing less, in general, in virtual worlds - on Puzzlebox I mostly play Sosael/etc, who has four codified forms, and several that come and go on the edges, and a tendency to fragment into a swarm of insects. And when I'm a more solidified character, they're still one of five logins I have there. (I haven't been around PB lately; telnetting to my web host to use tinyfugue is terribly awkward and roundabout.)

Do I change masks because I'm looking for a new way to see myself? What am I hoping to see in the shattered mirror of this assortment of femmy, inhuman things? What's missing from them all that keeps me making new things to be on SL? or am I just using SL as a visual medium, and doing what I do all the time in 2D: draw something different every time?

Aside from worries about hormonal backsliding, which're about to be calmed 'cause I got the other check from that freelance stuff, I like what I see when I look in a real mirror.

Comments

[kinkyturtle.livejournal.com]

[looks at your new icon]

You're an... assemblage! Of... thingies!

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

"I am a collection of loosely-assembled prims*, as twisted as my soul," as I am prone to say when wearing that avatar.

*prims: short for "primitive object", the basic building block of SL's weird little parametric modeller.

[ceruleanst.livejournal.com]

Like many artists, your strongest identifier is a style. Yours is particularly distinctive. Perhaps that extends to your personal identity as well, and this style is who you are, so applying it in as many ways as possible is the only way to express yourself, indeed to be yourself.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

And it's just odd because Sl is the first multiplayer game I've been in that really lets me easily apply it multiple ways? After all, mu*s are all text; I'm not looking at Twin or Inhatti on my screen, just reading about them, while in SL I'm staring at one avatar or another on the screen, and getting tired of it?

There's also the fact that SL feels like it discourages RP by its basic construction, to me. No matter what I do, I'm "Mechanique Thirty", which is the name I accidentally picked due to a cut-and-paste error. And M30 is just my presence in this anarchic, whimsical world of fantasy, rather than being a particular persona. Yeah, that works with what you're suggesting...

[neillparatzo.livejournal.com]

I'd be careful what you build in SL. Their guarantee that they'd honor your content rights is bunk. And of course, they take great pains to prevent you from exporting your SL work into a usable off-world format.

If you invest too much time in SL, I fear you're going to regret it. I got sucked pretty deep into SL myself, and I'm regretting it now. Wishing I'd spent that time coding instead. The fact I made a little cash on the side is cold comfort.

[(Anonymous)]

>Their guarantee that they'd honor your content rights is bunk.
Really, do you have examples of Linden exploiting content outside the terms of the contract?

I don't think that they take great pains to stop you exporting things, file compatibility might be a big issue as what Second Life is, is a graphics streaming platform, I guess they could add in a layer of near-online storage into some kind of common 3D / Animation program but that would be extra work, but that’s not the same as taking pains to stop things happening.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I don't think they're taking pains to prevent exporting as much as not putting any pain into providing one - their method of representing geometry is strikingly different from everything else. There's a long bug-list, and "lack of a way to get your work out" is probably way low.

I definitely regret most of the time I've spent in SL. There was a lot of time at first, then I quit. In fact, I got queenofstripes to order me to quit. It turns me into an antisocial hermit iRL and in VR, because my own machine's too slow for a crowd (and the crowds are usually pretty avoidable), and Ken's machine started hating crowds in SL since I upgraded his graphics card drivers for System Shock 2. I've been there this past month 'cause I've been knocking around LA in [Unknown site tag]'s apartment, with absolutey no money to go out, and none of my usual art tools.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Unknown LJ Tag = ultraken.

[inaki.livejournal.com]

You should really say hi to Inaki Meiji sometime.