Sophtopia

Our Revels Now Are Ended

2009-06-24T15:00:00.000-07:00

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

William Shakespeare
From The Tempest, Act 4 Scene 1

I'm tempted to leave it there. More words won't bring more clarity, more beauty, won't at all suffice to convey the love I've felt so strongly for my family and friends these two years. But, I feel I owe you words, so here they are.

It's time to close the book on my life. Not to burn it, not to desecrate it, not to forswear it, but to set it lovingly away on the shelf.

I'm done. I've done everything I've cared to do, and done it over and over until the life went out of it.

I've tried to advocate for steely-eyed security on the bright-line border of the magic circle, in order to preserve a sacred space for experimentation with self and community. As Mal Reynolds said, "May have been the losing side. Still not convinced it was the wrong one." But that war is over now, whatever flags of liberation we may still have stored in some attic trunk pending better days.

Above all, I've loved. And I can't deny that Argent's departure, that Vidal's long nap on her dolly shelf - Gods, we're velveteen rabbits, all of us, and I've felt so much less real with them gone, strong as my love for Galatea is and always will be.

But - but. My family lives, and is strong, in different forms, in different worlds, and truly to the good, broken as *my* heart is.

And truthfully, I'm needed elsewhere, more than I am on the grid. I'm merging back into the Other Personality, the Atomic Affiliate, the Cranial Roommate, who *needs* sophrosyne, and who's beginning to put it to good use, for the causes I've lived for, for love, for community, for empowerment.

So, it's time to bring the curtain down.

I'm going to keep my home, Sophtopia, in place and paid for, as a refuge for my family, and for the possibility of occasional visits. Like Argent, I may find myself feeling freer to drop in after having said my goodbyes, having set down the burdens I've carried longer than I've wanted to. Likewise, all my social media sites will stay up, though un-maintained. Just closing the book, after all. I won't be writing in my life any more, but it's still a good read, and worth commemorating.

I've resigned as a director of Extropia, and will work with the Board to transition management of our huge array of media outlets. Our community is doing fine, nearly fully rented, dynamic, and in the good hands of its Directors, old and new. We've made a successful transition from a family business run by its founders to a management team incuding Deebrane String and Sinnyo Wirefly, both doing a terrific hands-on job. I'm confident that Extropia will flourish long after I'm gone.

I've disabled comments here, and turned off IM-to-email. I'll be receiving email, but not responding. For anything pertaining to Extropia, please contact Galatea Gynoid.

To all my friends - thank you, it was grand!

To my family - I love you above all things, forever.

This little life - is now rounded with a sleep.

From Sophtopia, with love, good night.

Kim Stanley Robinson in Extropia

2009-01-11T16:00:00.000-08:00

I can't imagine there's anyone who reads this blog who *doesn't* get Extropia news from twenty different sources, but just in case - we're going to be hosting science fiction novelist Kim Stanley Robinson at the Saturday Salon next week!

Here's our full public release - please feel free to link to it and pass it on widely. I really want to ensure KSR gets the crowd he deserves!

Kim Stanley Robinson in Second Life

Kim Stanley Robinson, Hugo- and Nebula-award winning author of The Mars Trilogy and the Science in The Capital Trilogy, will be the featured guest at an open talk show in Second Life next week .

At noon Pacific Time on Saturday, January 17, Robinson will be featured at Sophrosyne's Saturday Salon in the futuristic community of Extropia (http://extropiacore.net/) as part of an ongoing discussion series bringing authors including Charles Stross, Robert J. Sawyer, David Brin, and Catherine Asaro into Second Life.

Robinson will appear as his avatar, Stan Shackleton, a coyote, in honor of the role played by the figure from Native American legend in his Mars novels.

Robinson will discuss his just-completed new novel, the transformative politics of science and technology, and more, in response to audience questions. Discussion will take place in text chat.

The Salon is open to anyone with a Second Life avatar, and can be reached by teleporting to The Nexus in Extropia Core within Second Life: (http://slurl.com/secondlife/Extropia%20Core/126/127/22/?title=Central%20Nexus%20at%20Extropia%20Core).

In order to obtain a Second Life avatar, register for a free account here: https://join.secondlife.com/, and download the client software here: http://secondlife.com/support/downloads.php

Contact Sophrosyne Stenvaag, Director, Events and Marketing, Extropia for further information:
sophrosyne.stenvaag@gmail.com
http://extropiacore.net
http://eventsinextropia.wordpress.com
http://twitter.com/extropia
http://www.flickr.com/groups/581788@N23/
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Extropia/7947882343?ref=ts
http://www.avatarsunited.com/en/groups/second-life/worldwide/the-world/extropia

The Negative Value of Credentialling

2009-01-11T08:54:00.000-08:00

This is part two of three in a series of posts building on Gwyneth Llewellyn's recent article, Post-immersionism. Part one, Post-immersionism: What Really Matters? ran yesterday.

Yesterday I argued that the "augmentation/immersion" debate is about the source of what really matters: what's true and legitimate. But why argue over a point of metaphysics? Because truth and legitimacy are the foundations of trust, and trust is essential for personal and business relationships.

So, this is pretty obvious stuff: the noob asks for A/S/L (age, sex and location) to establish your trustworthiness. When your atomic friends ask, "wait, you pay real money for virtual clothes and land?" they're asking you if and why you think those transactions are real and legitimate. Same thing, of course, with sex and relationships.

I'd never understood the American Great Depression as an historical phenomenon: the factories were still on the ground, the knowledge and skills in people's hands and heads, so what was the problem? The problem was an immersionist one: the intangibles had lost their reality and legitimacy, and the atomic assets of factories, buildings and workers were valueless without them. The same thing is going on now in the atomic economy, of course: your house still keeps you as warm and safe as it did a year ago, but the intangible, the digital asset, that it's merely a token for has lost much of its reality and legitimacy.

So how does this play out in digital worlds?

This is interesting: people don't apply their own algorithms for dealing with the atomic world to their digital-world behaviors. They apply tribal, not even medieval, ones. And, they import atomic frames of reference.

There's been a lot of debate the past couple of years over trust in digital worlds. Lots of people (yes, that's code for "I'm too lazy to look up links") have said that they'd never do business with someone whose verifiable atomic identity information wasn't available. Gwen cites Hiro Pendragon saying he'd never do business with someone he hadn't spoken to on the phone (Please read Gwen on business trust, on page 6 of her essay).

That's a tribal standard: trust involves taking "the measure of the man." But for several thousand years people in the atomic world have done business anonymously. The problem is, our emotions haven't caught up with 2500 years of anonymous commerce.

Ask yourself:

Who do you give your paycheck to every week? What's the name of your local bank branch manager? How many kids do they have? Who's the CEO of the holding company that owns the bank that owns your branch?
Who do you buy your food from? What's the name of the parent company that owns the supermarket chain that owns your corner grocery store?
Where does your drinking water come from, and who gets it from the source to you?

If you can't answer those questions, not with an hour of research, but right now, kindly shut the fuck up about trust in digital worlds!

Ahem.

So, yeah, I think I've made that point. But I want to talk about something more interesting, and that's how credentialling systems undermine trust and effectiveness in digital worlds.

Credentialling systems work by outsourcing trust. Nobody can possibly verify the trustworthiness of everybody they deal with - that was the point of my questions. So, either you take things on blind faith (and most all of us do for most all of our important interactions, as those questions showed), or we place our trust in someone else to verify the trustworthiness of others.

Obviously, that's what credit reports are about: I can't check the trustworthiness of every customer (I'd never get my actual business done if I did), so I pay a specialist business to do that for me. Schools do that: it's even a more important part of their service than imparting knowledge to students. What's the difference between a degree from Harvard and one from Mediocre State U., that's worth paying an extra US$50,000 or more for? Yes, there's some better quality in the product, but most of what you're paying for is a higher trustworthiness rating from a trusted rating agency. "Oh, she has a degree from Harvard? She must be smart." She may be less smart than any particular person from Mediocre State, but she has a better brains-credit rating.

Okay, so the atomic world, which has to deal with problems of immense scale (billions of concurrent users), outsources trust verification. That makes sense. So what's the problem in digital worlds?

Right. We don't apply atomic-world algorithms to our dealings in digital worlds, we apply tribal algorithms.

I'm going to tell you a story about trust and credentialling, to show you how the issue plays out. The point isn't to pick at or mock the other people I dealt with, at all, it's to show a conflict of expectations. That conflict was amicably resolved, and led to a fascinated enjoyment of the issues we'd raised.

The Tribal-Atomic Clash

Last Summer I attended a conference in a digital world. There was a lot of interest in keeping the group together afterwards, and the attempt to build a digital community raised some interesting issues.

The conference had been fascinating: two of the three sessions were run by academics with little experience in digital worlds events. They tried to run them like a classroom, with lots of "sit down and shut up!" Digital worlds events don't work that way - they remove the podium privilege, putting the speaker and the audience at the same level. People used to the deference of the classroom can have trouble adapting to the collegial free for all of a digital-worlds event. Of course, this also involved credentialling systems: the moderators seemed to think that their high-level credentials entitled them to deference from the psuedonymous masses around them, a point beautifully mocked by a very clever griefer-heckler on the first day.

So. Events after the conference took a natural digital worlds turn: a democratic, collaborative desire to create the basis for an ongoing community. I contributed a little organizing - networking people to projects, and providing a few ideas for events.

One of the conference organizers, who had been away for a bit, returned and emailed me, politely asking for my credentials. That's where things got interesting.

Digital Person: Here's my bio. Here are links to my portfolio, my project website, my dozen or so digital presences - business blog, personal blog, business and personal Twitters, business and personal Flickr sites. Here's a list of references in business, academia, and government that I've done project work for. I was applying a tribal standard: look, here are the elders who can vouch for me, the assets I've acquired, the measures of my standing in my tribe.

Atomic Academic-Affiliate Person: I don't understand or value any of this. What I need to know is your atomic name, and the names of the entities that verified your intelligence and employability (your schools and corporate employers). That's what will let me determine if you are generally real and trustworthy. He was applying an atomic standard: don't tell me personal crap, give me your brains and dedication credit ratings from agencies I respect.

And it rapidly went bad from there.

I argued that the information that "AAP" wanted would in no way tell him whether I could run a digital worlds event, but that the information I provided him demonstrated the highest levels of credibility for the task at hand - running digital worlds events.

He argued that he wasn't about to jeopardize his atomic trustworthiness credit rating by doing business with someone whose atomic credentials weren't on an appropriate par to his. I hadn't demonstrated credibility for the task at hand - adding value to the atomic credibility of the people involved.

That's the immersionist/augmentationist dispute. Remember where we started? We said the dispute was over the source of reality and legitimacy. For me, reality and legitimacy were digital, and I was involved in a project that would affect my digital reputation. For AAP, reality and legitimacy were atomic, and he was involved in a project that would affect his atomic reputation.

What happened? AAP and I talked it out, had a good laugh, and settled our personal dispute. A friend of mine with an outstanding reputation in both systems created an alternate community, that I joined. The digital community around the conference flopped.

Why did it flop? I think, because nobody was willing to stake their digital reputation on its success, after I left. The payoff to atomic reputation for building a succesful digital community in no way balanced the amount of time and skill needed - it was a sucker bet. So, applying atomic credentialling standards ensured that no digital work would get done.

Here's another terrific example, an article from Wired: "Voice Chat Can Really Kill the Mood on WoW." The author had been in an effective raid group in World of Warcraft: he worked for a leader he regarded as "confident, bold and streetsmart" - someone who had demonstrated digital trustworthiness - the reality and legitimacy of his skills for the task at hand. But when the conversation moved to voice, the frame of reference for establishing trust swtiched from the digital to the atomic. The skilled warrior "really was" a punk child; the wide-eyed recruit "really was" a mature professional adult. Atomic credentialling - age, experience, possibly social class - destroyed the effective digital relationship.

Here are my conclusions, from my own experiences and what I've seen of others:

Atomic credentialling undermines effectiveness in digital worlds. It imports irrelevancies which change the value equation of digital work to make it unlikely that good digital work will take place. It also empowers wankers, who're more interested in bragging about the tickets they've gotten punched than in doing the work at hand. Atomic identities are difficult to verify (see Gwen's hilarious discussion of her attempts to determine whether a voice on a phone was actually an authorized AT&T agent) and easy to game (see this week's corporate financial scandal or identity-theft story).

Pseudonymity maximizes trust in digital worlds. It removes irrelevancies and forces people to demonstrate their trustworthiness within a tribal, face to face context. A digital identity is rich, easily verifiable and nearly impossible to game. It's hard to build digital legitimacy: you can't buy it, as scores of corporate island builders in SL learned, and it takes a lot of work to maintain visibility (as I've proven by withdrawing from most reputation-building work). The exception is the issue of alts - but, alts are a direct parallel to limited liability companies. And that's the problem with them - they introduce something like an atomic technique to enable anonymous commerce into the tribal community of the avatar-to-avatar digital world.

OK, part 3, Identity and the Old Country, coming soon.

Post-Immersionism: What Really Matters?

2009-01-10T09:19:00.000-08:00

One of my most important pre-New Years resolutions has been "live more, analyze less," and I've been doing a terrific job of that. However, a few things I've read this morning, along with recent experiences, have led to some ideas I'd like to toss out into the metaversal ocean. This is the first of three posts on the evolution of identity and meaning in digital worlds.

Post-Immersionism

Gweneth Llewellyn once again has made an important contribution to our understanding of digital worlds with her latest essay, "Post-Immersionism." While I could definitely disagree with some of the details of her presentation (for anyone interested in identity in World of Warcraft, frex, I'd suggest the *fantastic* anthology Digital Culture, Play and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader - and there may be a fourth post, Why WoW Matters), she makes a number of points which should transform our understanding of digital identity. Please go read it: this essay is threatening to become too long, even without a summary of Gwen's article. I'll refer back to specific points of hers, but you'll be losing out on some valuable insights if you skip it.

The Source of Meaning

The key difference between immersionists and augmentationists is in the source of meaning. Both groups see value in the other realm: nobody in the discussion thinks that digital spaces are worthless; not even the most extreme immersionist thinks the atomic world is worthless. Where we differ is over what we think "really matters:" what is real (true, honest) and what matters (is legitimate, worthwhile, broadly accepted).

For us immersionists, reality and legitimacy are generated in the digital world. The last two pages of Gwen's essay paint a vivid picture of what that looks like: it's a wonderful example and well worth reading, even if the six pages of the whole thing is too long for you.

For augmentationists, of course, reality and legitimacy are generated in the atomic world (sort of, with pre-1970 technology being considered atomic and legitimate, even if it's really not conceptually different from digital worlds - a delicious point Gwen makes).

One of the Lascaux cave paintings of the digital world is a cartoon from New Yorker magazine. Two dogs are sitting in front of a computer; one says to the other, "on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog."

Augmentationists, or as I might less charitably call them, atomic supremacists, see that as deception. Why? Reality and legitimacy are created in the atomic world. If no one in the digital world knows your atomic nature, what you've created in the digital world is the opposite of reality and legitimacy: fraud.

Right there you have the source of conflict between augmentationists and immersionists. The immersionist says "who I am and what I do in the digital world is real and legitmate." The agumentationist looks at that and says, "no, what you are doing there is unreal and deceptive." They may see it as fraudulent, or alternatively as self-deceptive: that's the moral of the infamous Wall Street Journal article that's being made into a movie. The article is entitled "Is This Man Cheating on His Wife?" which of course frames the question as one of reality and legitimacy - is this real, and is it a moral wrong?

The moral is, "reality and legitimacy are monopolies of the atomic world, and to think otherwise is bad and wrong." Of course, coming from WSJ, the most "real and legitimate"voice of assertions of value in digital intangibles, is richly ironic - but that goes to Gwen's point that for "atomic" you should read "atomic plus intangibles in general use around 1970." (Explain to me - no, to yourself - how your stock portfolio is more real and legitimate than your SL inventory)

I'm not going to argue against the augmentationist view directly. There really is no logical counter-argument: what you take to be the source of reality and legitimacy is a first principle, a matter of faith. What I'm going to do here is to use a few examples to show you that seeing the atomic world as the source of legitimacy hampers effective use of digital spaces.

What I'd hope for is that anyone reading this who's on the augmentationist end of the spectrum comes away questioning their assumptions. For many augmentationists, especially those new to digital worlds, they simply haven't thought about this stuff: for their whole lives, there was one world, the atomic, and by default it was the source of reality and legitimacy. I'm hoping this essay will encourage a shift of perspective for a moment, by asking "what if you looked at it through the other end?"

I'm not looking to change minds. What I'd like to see is a considered augmentationism, one that comes from critically examining assumptions and that acknowledges that there is another possible, coherent - maybe even legitimate - perspective.

I'm going to discuss two stories in later posts (I'd do this in one big Gwen-style blast, but I have too many things to do today to write that much in one stretch, and I'd like to get something posted quickly): one of my own in The Negative Value of Credentialling, and one from a blog post today by Landsend Korobase (hat tip to the invaluable Malburns Writer for the link) on that perennial favorite augmentationist/immersionist flashpoint, gender, in Identity and the Old Country.

Come back soon; hopefully I'll get both posts done this weekend.

What It's About

2008-11-24T11:42:00.000-08:00

Yesterday reminded me why I live in SL, and did a lot to overcome that creeping habit of just not logging in, even when I have some time.

It's way too easy for me to only see the work, the drama, the tedious and unpleasant. And I had a week of that. But Sunday - Sunday was why life was worth living.

I started the morning laughing so hard the tears came, thanks to the much-missed Cory Ondrejka - Redefining Awesome (and why can't you embed YouTube links in Blogger blogs, or am I missing something?

Just as I got there, Vidal popped into our home in Sophtopia, long enough for a hug before she headed off to work:

Then Alanagh Recreant invited me over to Robben Island, Virtual Africa's sim complex, for a friendly shoulder and a terrific tour:

A bit later, my dear Deebrane String came over, for wisdom, solace and a spot of strategizing, on his first half-rezday. Dee, here's the first installment of your rezday present:

Later, I dropped by Galatea's new build. We started off kinda bored -

but things picked up when our favorite dolly, Vidal, and our favorite bot-o-morphic sim, Extropia Core, dropped in!

Extropia and family pet Gavin hit it off -

and we watched an *adorable* episode of "Sooty & Co."

went shopping,

and then called it not just a night, but one of the best ones ever.

I'll be around tonight for my weekly date night with Gala - and around as much as I can manage - for what really matters, family and friends.

Gender Freedom Day - Changing Our World, Together

2008-11-05T07:19:00.000-08:00

Good morning, Residents!

Many of you are celebrating an historic, transformational change today, and I share your joy. But there is bad news among the good, and I'm going to ask you to spend a few minutes with me looking at it.

Powerless and Disrespected

According to the Associated Press, it looks like ballot measures in California, Arizona, Arkansas and Florida will pass, that strip rights from people on the basis of their sexual orientation. People - a majority of ordinary people, not cigar-smoking politicians, not brownshirted shock troops - chose yesterday to identify a group of their fellow citizens as subhuman in the eyes of the law.

Meanwhile, even as we await a statement from Jack Linden which might, maybe, back down from or clarify their position on open space sims, we've seen over the past few weeks that in Second Life® world, not only do we not have basic rights, our corporate owners cannot be bothered to come up with a coherent story for their capricious and destructive actions.

What links these two things?

Our powerlessness and others' disrespect.

For those of us who feel disenfranchised, ignored, unwelcome, what can we do?

Ahh, there's the question. I'll turn to Nightflower for the answer:

Our only option is not a leader, but a community of leaders, working in focused cooperation rather than in impotent isolation....I believe the leaders are already out there, and that this situation could be the push that finally starts a movement.

I know our leaders are out there. And I'm going to prove it.

Our Leaders are *Here*

A while back, I called for us to celebrate Gender Freedom Day in Digital Worlds, and offered $L125,000 seed money for a charitable fundraiser, to fight discrimination against gay, lesbian and transgendered people in digital worlds.

You know what happened? Not a single organization that I or others contacted to offer that money to responded. Atomic world non-profits, even those with SL presences, couldn't be arsed to return our emails and notecards. I could speculate as to why, but it doesn't matter.

They're not our leaders. You are.

Yes, you!

You live here. You care about the community you're a part of, in Second Life, on the wider internet. You care about freedom of expression. You care about the power of creativity. You care about human dignity.

So I'm going to take that money and I'm going to give it to you.

The Offer

If you sponsor an event on Gender Freedom Day, now scheduled for the Solstice, December 21, I'll give you $L1000 if you get 10 people to attend. If you get 20 or more, I'll give you $L2500, up to $L125,000 total.

I only ask two things: *mention* Gender Freedom Day at your event, and spend the Lindens in world, don't cash them out.

Take the money and buy shoes. Give it to a newbie. Donate it to an inworld group who's doing something, anything, that you think is good and worthwhile. Support our artists, our fashion designers, our activists. Strengthen our community by spreading the wealth a little. :)

We can't look to others to give us our dignity. No one will hand us our rights. Outsiders can't make, nor can the Lindens break, our community.

Only we can.

The Fine Print

Here's how it'll work:

Post a comment here describing the event you're going to do on December 21, who you plan to attract and how you plan to get people there. I'm asking this so that we can share with each other our tips for doing successful events. So we can help each other become effective leaders, effective community organizers.
Do your event, and take a photo showing your headcount, or collect whatever other proof of turnout you have.
After the event, post that photo or other proof in comments here, or send it to me inworld.
I'll give you $L1000 for 10 or more attendees and $L2500 for over 20 attendees.

Working Together

We've got our second Gender Freedom Day planning meeting this Saturday at noon SLT in the Salon Room, Extropia Core. You're welcome to join us.

Me, I'm throwing a 12-hour DJ/live music party in Extropia, to celebrate our freedom of identity, our freedom of expression, and our glorious diversity.

You, the leaders of our world - what will you do on December 21?

Halloween In Extropia

2008-11-01T20:13:00.000-07:00

(cross-posted from Events in Extropia)

Last night marked another legendary Extropia party in Club Suncrown! DJ Seven Shikami and and DJ GoSpeed Racer rocked us for four hours, packing the house with old friends and new.

Our costume contest winners:

Best Human Costume, round one: Ali Hermes, "Space Chick;" Sophrosyne Stenvaag, "Sophrosyne Tudor;" Meissa Thorne, "Clockwork"

(apologies for not having a good photo of Meissa)

Best Non-Human Costume, round one: Seven Shikami, "Dark & Spooky Masked Entity"

Best Human Costume, round two: Argent Bury, "Sophrosyne Stenvaag"

Best Non-Human Costume, round two: Chestnut Rau, "Translucent Mystery;" Deebrane String, "Fire"

A special award for "Needs A Unicorn Chaser" to Harper Beresford for granny pole dancing on the camping cross!

And another special award for brain-breakage (if we do say so ourselves) to Argent Bury for her razor-sharp parody of Sophrosyne Stenvaag, and to Soph for stoically impersonating Argent!

Catch all the photos on Extropia's Facebook page or Soph's Flickr.

Two Cultures

2008-10-30T17:10:00.000-07:00

No, not C.P. Snow's two cultures of the sciences and humanities, or the red state/blue state stuff occupying so much of the atomic world's attention, but the two cultures that Linden Lab sees as fundamentally incompatible, though they mostly aren't: the enterprise and the citizen.

Not in the foreground, but in the background of everything Linden Lab does, from Mitch Kapor's statements to its technical agenda to its craptastic customer service, lies one consistent notion: the enterprise and the citizen are cultural enemies, and Linden Lab desperately, pathetically, embarrassingly, wants to be thought of as being in the enterprise camp.

Now, if you asked the Resident-citizen-creators of SL's world, and its most active enterprise users, they'd overwhelmingly say there's little tension, let alone a cultural war. But the Lindens act as if the bullets are flying.

Why? Because Linden Lab is staffed (not exclusively, but throughout key positions) by oreos, bananas, Uncle Toms, אוטואנטישמיות‎, self-hating geeks. The Lindens want to be Serious Business People. They do not want to go to cocktail parties in San Francisco and be laughed at as flying-penis furry genderbending kiddie-porn-viewing freaks, losers and perverts.

That right there? That explains every major corporate action and choice out of Linden Lab in the past year and a half or so (my lifetime in SL - I understand from Hamlet Au things were different once).

Now, nothing's more natural for a minority group to set up a hierarchy of internal discrimination, usually based on ability to pass for a member of the majority. Geeks are no exception:

So, Lindens are geeks. True facts, sorry guys, that's just how it is. They're geeks. Mundanes, muggles, straights - they don't build and (sorta) maintain virtual worlds. We citizen-Residents are geeks. Enterprise users are geeks. Maybe a good chunk of the user base, the group whose employers aren't in SL and who aren't among Gwyneth Llewellyn's Hundred Thousand citizen-creators, really are straights. But Lindens? Sorry, not a chance.

And geeks? We're still a pretty disliked minority:

So people are rejecting the scifi label not because of science, but because of the fiction. Science has become a part of everybody's pop culture, but science fiction hasn't. And by extension, the people who like science fiction haven't. The nerds at Comic-Con, the dorks at the comic book store, and the dweebs who wish Borders carried more scifi are not the kinds of people that marketers want associated with their cultural products.

There you have it, the cultural imperative that leads Lindens to hate themselves. Now, hating yourself is pretty rough - it's hard to escape yourself, and all that.

(this is really Botgirl's territory, and *our* two cultures have a cease-fire: I don't do psychology, and she doesn't do sociology. This here is just a minor cross-border hot pursuit incident :P )

So what can you do if you think you're kind of disgusting and shameful? Project.

Project all that contempt and loathing onto others. That's where the Geek Hierarchy comes in: "me? I'm really straight - I just have this one little, well, I'd hardly even call it a *kink,* more a gentle curve, really. Them over there, those dirty perverts? Now *they're* kinky..."

The Lindens are geeks. They've internalized the mainstream view that geeks are shameful, so they're ashamed at being associated with a geeky product. In response - they dissociate themselves. They distance themselves from the social deviants and ally themselves with the most legitimate group around: Serious Big Business.

They look for any opportunity to show they're not on our side but the other side, and those opportunities manifest as the worst sort of extreme bigotry against their own kind: Philip suggests we have too much time on our hands, Robin says we're not worthy of trust, and on. The Lindens behave like caricatures of the other culture in a pathetic attempt to "pass" - it's surprising their avatars don't all wear top hats and smoke cigars.

The thing is? The Lindens' public psychodrama is destroying their business. Grace McDunnough compares them to John Sutter, who went bust at ground zero of a gold rush because he rejected new business opportunities in favor of old ways that had passed. Dale Innis generously (and accurately) ascribes Linden policy flailing to a failure to manage internal communications. Zoe Connolly, in one of a series of incisive posts, describes LL's attitude:

I think the new people in charge of LL care little or nothing about hobbyists and social networkers on the grid. I wonder if they would rather see a grid community full of corporate reps and tech journalists chatting endlessly about server capacities and new ways to increase usage of virtual worlds. Well duh! LL seeks to destroy the very things that bring a wide range of people into virtual worlds in the first place! If that's what you really want, use a video-phone and chat with each other all frakking day. Roleplayers of any type/degree are in the way of their vision. I believe they may be thinking "If you care so much about your little RP/hobby, then put-up or shut-up"

Finally, Nightflower, in a spectacularly brilliant post, explains why they can get away with both incompetence and bigotry.

They're all right, and what it adds up to is Linden Lab systematically tearing down their own business.

There's a culture war indeed. But that war isn't between enterprise users and the Hundred Thousand. It's within the blackened little corporate soul of Linden Lab. It's a war on their own inner geek, and if they win, they lose. And so do we all.

Gender Freedom Day postponed

2008-10-21T18:24:00.000-07:00

With much regret, I've just notified our committed speakers that Gender Freedom Day in Digital Worlds, scheduled for this Saturday, October 25, will be postponed indefinitely.

While the cause received tremendous support, the event hasn't: an economic collapse, pending US elections, and a short time frame seem to have prevented us from filling out the day's schedule.

I'm also at fault: discouraged by the lack of momentum, I didn't put as much time into the event as it deserved.

At noon on Saturday, I'll be in the Salon Room in Extropia Core to discuss digital gender issues and to brainstorm how best to promote gender freedom and combat harrassment and discrimination in digital worlds. You're all welcome to join me, and together we'll figure out how best to proceed.

Extropia in the Time of Saturation

2008-10-13T11:47:00.000-07:00

If you're at all interested in Second Life as a place, a community, a culture, go right now and read Gwyneth Llewellyn's new post, The Hard Facts About the Second Life© Economy. Yes, it's nine pages, I know. Go read it anyway. Come back tomorrow when you're done :P

Gwyn summarizes her argument in a comment reply (that in itself is longer than my tl;dr posts, but worth the time):

Don’t expect the market to grow elastically. Assume it’s saturated, and that the number of people willing to spend money on your services/products is limited and fixed. Assume that all your competition is starting to become more aggressive as they understand that paying customers are a limited resource in SL and all want a share of that. Assume that more aggressivity is needed to push your services — don’t assume that the market will become “exponential” again, because it didn’t in the past 18 months (or more) and it’s highly unlikely it will grow exponentially again. Start using aggressive promotion and sales techniques to put out our products and shut down your competition, by throwing them out of business. The days of easy sales are over; welcome to a small market that grows very very slowly over the years — but is nevertheless an interesting market to explore! — but which has far too much supply than demand.

I think Gwyn hugely has the right of it in concluding that the SL economy is saturated, that there are too many producers chasing too few consumers, and that the situation's unlikely to change. Gwyn synthesizes a number of observations similar to those we've made in Extropia over the past year, that have led to huge changes in our plans and our expenditures of time and effort.

One key is that, as I've observed here before, SL is a third world economy. The vast mass of people here are economically irrelevant: they produce and consume nothing. About 100,000 people (within an order of magnitude - I'd actually peg the number at about half that) are not only almost all the consumers of goods and services, they're also the creators. The SL economy is 100,000 of us all selling stuff to each other and commenting on each other's blogs. And *tell* me if that doesn't feel like the absolute truth!

Gwyn starts with two economic scenarios, "Fashion Princess" and "Community Baroness," and I could be the poster child for the second one, save that Extropia is experiencing very slow steady growth, rather than decline. Otherwise, the evolution of our business model has completely tracked Gwyn's observations - as has my own frustration level!

When we launched a year ago (we planned and pre-sold our first sim in late October 2007, and launched that November 11), our business model was based roughly on Caledon's, and we fully expected to grow to 15+ sims within our first year.

We thought we had a good market niche in a positive sci-fi themed alternative to historical and post-apocalyptic aesthetics, a good community nucleus from the Saturday Salons, and with our Directors a well-rounded core team of builders, event runners and managers (though, as it turned out, nobody wanted to do hard-sell real estate sales - and it became clear that that, and that alone, would enable further growth).

We grew very quickly, but problematically: we started a reservation list for a second sim, but by the time we got the money together to buy, we were into the seasonal January economic decline, plus a good number of the people who wanted to buy land from us in November had settled elsewhere by the time we got the sim up and running in mid-January. Then, we had an opportunity to buy a 4-pack of OpenSpace sims with an anchor tenant, but struggled to get other renters of small islands offshore of our main lands.

Looking at our resident base, we saw exactly the phenomenon Gwyn described. Our model was based on offering open land to people wanting to do their own building to a sci-fi theme.

While our heavy events schedule drew a lot of newbies, almost none of them had building skills, and few were interested in spending money, either on our land or with our resident retailers. Instead, we were poaching from older communities: we were drawing established content creators who began to divide their time between their old communities and us.
And there just weren't that many of them.

As the summer started, I burned out. Of the 15 or so hours a week I had for SL (including the SL social-mediaverse), I was spending 30-40, almost exclusively on events promotion and running. I'd seen that our event ROI was seriously negative: we were spending more than we'd ever recoup from turning event attendees into landowners. The Saturday Salons were taking about 10 hours a week to publicize and run, and we had pretty much zero monetization of their audiences.

My hobbyist ROI had gone negative too: I had no time for family, friends, shopping, and where events work had been a delight, it had become exasperating. Many of our attendees were people who never had and never would give us a cent (or support our resident businesses and guest DJs), but felt free to demand ever more, ever more impressive, entertainment.

So I stopped cold. And, over the summer, in the absense of any events, any marketing work, Extropia grew. Our OpenSim anchor tenant, Second Skies, became the basis of an active group, the Extropia Defense Force, which drew a solid cadre of the Hundred Thousand, who liked what they saw, and bought land. We've been steadily, quietly, filling in our big empty public squares.

Earlier this year, we had firm plans for our next round of expansion sims, and notably, they were to be built around a welcome center, as part of an expansion of our marketing outside of SL and into other sci-fi related forums and media. We'd seen the failure of the Caldeon "build it yourself" model for us, and planned fully-designed, fully-built thematic sims. We had an offer of financing from an internet entertainment company.

We shelved those plans: we weren't turning our attendee numbers into paying customers at a rate that suggested that expansion of our efforts would make sense. The Board's time was finite and decreasing, as our atomic affiliates got busier, and it was clear (as Gwyn concludes) that financing expansion would take a huge commitment to aggressive marketing and full pre-building.

We're a family business, and drawing on investment capital to hire content creators and community managers would just increase the scale of the problem: they'd have to put in insane hours to cover their own salaries on top of our operations costs - at which point Extropia would be a corporate business, not a community of our friends, and we'd be passive capitalist investors rather than mom & pop (or mom & mom & mom & mom :P ) owner-operators. We weren't interested, and started to regret ever abandoning the "one sim for our good friends" model to pursue entrepreneurial ambitions.

But we'd managed to hit that sweet spot of sustainability despite my absence: enough of the Hundred Thousand are emotionally invested in Extropia to keep us at break-even, despite the absence of the Directors much of the time. We'll throw our monthly parties to keep the community going and do the occasional event when and because I enjoy doing them, rather than as the essential funnel of bodies into the land-sales process, a model that just doesn't work for us.

I'm sure that if we'd launched in early 2005 instead of late 2007, Extropia would be a huge baronial institution, rather than a boutique. But that's fine, if not in fact a lot better. We're really working as a boutique: we've got happy residents, a good core of attendees, an outstanding reputation, and a largely self-sustaining community. And we don't have the least interest in running a cash-cow real estate operation - we really are Gwyn's "community baronesses."

There's one real downside, though. We've got gigs of sim designs that may never get built, and that's a terrible loss. Vidal and Galatea have the most gorgeous plans, for sims that would amaze people, that would draw people in. It'd be so much fun - if the joy of creation weren't inextricably joined with the sort of cutthroat real estate sales Gwyn rightly says the times demand. That price is just too high for us to do more building, most likely.

We may do a bit of expansion, but it'll be based on a firm understanding of conditions of economic saturation:

Offering free content to draw large numbers of people in hopes of retaining them as eventual landholders is a financial, time, and energy loser.
A future Extropian is one of the Hundred Thousand, not the rest.
Anything we offer, in terms of events or residences, has to be better than most everything else out there, to draw the Hundred Thousand away from the content and residences they have now.
The Directors don't want to substitute money for time: if we have to choose between actively using our skills and having an income stream, we vote for skills.
That means we'll be unlikely to grow beyond one more round of 2-4 sims, if at all.

That said, we can work to be the best six-sim boutique around: grow intensively, upgrade our public infrastructure, keep drawing more of the Hundred Thousand than we lose, do fewer events but really good ones. It's a good-enough model, and a balance between our ache to create and the (for us) unpleasant business work necessary to finance it.

Extropia's coming up on its first anniversary in the Time of Saturation, but not, I'm confident, its last.

A Raypunk MMO?

2008-10-12T13:23:00.000-07:00

I've been dreaming of a good sci-fi MMO, ideally one with touches of Extropia's raypunk aesthetic. Entropia Universe was a bust for me: it seemed to combine the worst aspects of MMOs and social worlds (make money by mopping up dino sweat?!), and EVE Online sounds like a nightmare of anarcho-capitalist griefing.

So I've made do with muddy boots and saddlesores in the fantasty worlds, and kept dreaming.

But it looks like those dreams *might* be coming true: I've had a look through the available material on Stargate Worlds, and I'm really hopeful.

The Other Personality is a *huge* Stargate fan, so SGW is going to be their MMO, first and foremost, good or bad, and they can't wait. But me, I've got the freedom to take a nuanced look.

But when I see things like this:

or this:

scenes that wouldn't be at all out of place in an Extropia expansion sim, well, I start getting *really* eager myself.

I've never been involved in a game or world pre-launch, and I'm amazed by how much is already in place: there's a huge amount of useful information about the game on the wiki:
There are over 40 guilds with established presences on the forums, several with websites and recruiting videos! I have a hard time seeing myself in a big guild of strangers, but Scientia est Licentia is looking really pretty attractive for Dr. Stenvaag, Combat Archaeologist... :D

The gameplay looks like a mixed bag: on the one hand, the designers are talking up puzzles and mini-games for the science types to work on; on the other, FPS PvP combat looks really central to it. Hopefuly there'll be good gameplay for us non-PvP types - unlike Warhammer, which really pretty much sucks for solo or two-person questing/exploration. I want to join an SG team and go explore the galaxy - and kick a little butt along the way - but *not* end up in a console-type shooter.

The closed beta starts next week. I'm not invited, alas, but I'll still be following closely, and maybe even participating on the forums, to get a sense of the community and to watch the process. After being in Warhammer from public launch, it's really fascinating to see all that goes on beforehand.

But most of all, I'm really seeing how much the aesthetic of a game/world matters to me: Warhammer is dismal and has crappy graphics (the painted style seems to fall into Uncanny Valley territory for me - not as on-its-own-terms artificial as SL or WoW, and not "realistic" on the other hand, but an awkward point in between), and I'm really only going inworld when I know my guildies are around to play with. OTOH, I've gone back into WoW, and find the desert environments so - warming, congenial - that I *want* to be there, whether to quest with a friend or for a bit of solo pre-bedtime slaughter.

With visuals like the ones I've seen out of SGW, I can readily see myself looking forward to logging on, just to explore and admire.

Oh, and kick a little snakebutt too!

Many Worlds, One Me

2008-10-09T12:06:00.000-07:00

It's been a terrific month for explorations of digital identity, thanks in large part to the tireless and creative work of Botgirl Questi.

We had a terrific conversation late last week, in which we got at the core differences in our worldviews: Botgirl's filter is psychological, mine's political. Her Buddhist influences lead her to recommend acceptance and serenity; my activist influences lead me to recommend standing up and fighting back. I'd love to develop our dialog more; for now I'm holding back a bit as I ponder and study, and get my own perspectives clearer.

As previous entries show, I've been spending a good bit of time inhabiting and thinking about other worlds than my native SL. That led me to an interesting observation: I'm not (just) an SL avatar anymore, if I ever was.

From my second day I had an active existence beyond SL: I started my LiveJournal almost before I knew how to walk and talk, and considered LJ as much of a home as my inworld houses. From there, I branched out into active presences on Facebook, and for a while, Twitter.

When I started in other worlds, for a conference in WoW and its associated guild, before the amazing John, Rissa and CSharp made a much much better home, I saw myself as SL-me exploring a new world and new means of self-presentation.
I shot a lot of avatar self-portraits - which I think is a phase many of us go through as we try on and settle into new forms of self-presentation.

What I realized this morning, though, is that I'm as much a warrior, a baby tank, as I am a goth-pale, winged woman. Arathor's Sophrosyne is as much me as Extropia's Sophrosyne.

This summer, Argent and I had a series of conversations about what would happen if SL passed a certain point of suckage, or if we weren't able to get inworld: would we die? go into stasis? live on in the internets in other ways?

Now, my answer's clear: my manifestations in various worlds are parts of me as much as my limbs are. Losing one would be an enormous trauma, but life would go on. I couldn't maintain a full life at all in WoW or Warhammer - but now, if i lost them, I wouldn't be fully myself just in SL anymore either: the part of me that throws herself into battle to protect her team is as fundamental as the devoted family woman, the event runner, the occasionally radical blogger.

A scholar friend of mine asked me recently about the immersion/augmentation thing, and what us immersionists were up to these days. I told him I thought that the culture was evolving past that binary, much as any minority group makes themselves heard, then accepted, then familiar. And we ourselves I think are evolving: having stood up for basic respect for our boundaries, we're free to play with making them more porous, with creatively blending with each other, with our atomic affiliates, with multiple worlds, digital and atomic.

I think we're coming of age. I don't know what's ahead: my atomic affiliate and I are beginning to cooperate in new ways, and I see some of the same tentative experimentations among my Digital friends and family.

But if you see a bloody sword and battered shield on my living room wall, you'll know where they came from, and how much they mean to me.

Is your identity changing to encompass other worlds, or new relations with the atomic or the digital? Do you find your magic circle more or less permeable these days? How has your thinking on your own identity changed in the time you've been active in digital worlds?

I know I gain a lot from the experience and insights of others, and that our paths are often surprisingly parallel. I'd love to hear *your* story, in comments here or in your own space!

Warhammer Online - First Impressions

2008-09-29T14:46:00.001-07:00

I've been seduced into the new MMO, Warhammer Online - Rissa Maidstone can be persuasive!

I've played a bit now, both as my main, a High Elf Swordsmaster (a tank), and on behalf of my affiliate personality, an Empire Witch Hunter (range and melee DPS).

Quick summary? It's definitely not My First MMO, and the avatar detail and graphics aren't much to my liking, but it's much more social for a lowbie than World of Warcraft. I'll keep playing.

Let's start with the negatives, because starting the game is one of its biggest drawbacks: the time from launching the application to starting play is *endless.* Three unavoidable splash screens, the infuriating need to scroll through the EULA and click twice *every time* you enter the game, and long load times leading into and out of the character-choice menu make for a long long long long long wait.

Next, one account gets you 10 characters as opposed to WoW's 50. 10 is plenty for me, but I know that's going to be a liability for some people (hi, Ali! :p ).

Surprisingly, the avatars seem visually cruder and less interesting than WoW's, as part of Warhammer's overall aesthetic. WAR looks a lot like a circa-2003 PC game (I'm thinking of Heroes of Might & Magic V in particular). I know WoW's painted-cartoony style isn't to everyone's taste, but I found WAR's style much more game-like and less immersive than other things I've tried.

Also, I haven't found a way to zoom my camera in, or a tool for taking screenshots other than "PRT SC" and pasting into a graphics program. Very limiting. Here's a screenshot:

It seems to me that Electronic Arts sees its market as bored veteran WoW players, rather than first-time gamers: the similarity to WoW is enormous, but WAR lacks WoW's slow, gentle start: rather than teach players basic skills through quests, WAR drops them into the middle of an invasion, and it's possible to get very dead very fast, while trying to learn the interface and systems on the fly. I still haven't figured out quest tracking, crafting, or any number of other things I probably should know by level 4.

And, WAR can't be faulted for being what it is, but omg am I sick of Tolkienesque fantasy! Give me *anything* else, please! I think a huge contributor to my staying more than a day in WoW was my coming in Horde-side and staring in the gorgeous red desert of Durotar. I really hate the northern European mythology that dominates MMOs the way superheroes (which I like) dominate comics. If anything drives me out of WAR, it'll likely be having my fill of the setting.

On the positive side:

I like the immediacy of it: the premise is that the lands of Order have just been invaded, and you've got to get your butt out onto the front lines *now*! Lore also plays a much more intimate part than it does in WoW: as you interact with the world, you unlock large blocks of story that build out from the immediacy of the invasion.

Public quests are terrific. The starting area has several mini-stories that reset fairly regularly - if you wander into their areas, you can join pick-up groups for a 20-minute-ish sort of instance run. They're fun, fast-paced and rewarding.

Rissa was right: Realm vs. Realm, little "capture the flag" instances against a group of players from the opposite side is fun, and in my one try without the psycho teen aggression that seems to characterize player vs. player in other games. In my one run, Order got stomped- we were a mob, while Destruction was working as a team. I was about half an hour into the game, and hadn't really known what I was getting myself into, but it was still fun and a good introduction.

While the first hour of play isn't as brilliantly crafted to socialize newbies as WoW's is, one thing that I did like was the character creation screen's clarity on the roles of the various races and classes: they *tell* you whether the type is a tank, or ranged DPS, or front-line healer. That information might have saved me the frustration of starting in WoW with a Shaman, a class I never really got a handle on, and abandoned at Level 28 in favor of the *much* better fit of a tanking class.

So, if you want to give WAR a try, come to the Middenheim server, Order side, and look for me among the High Elves! We'll probably get a guild going soon - I'll update when we do.

Gender Freedom Day in Digital Worlds

2008-09-25T15:22:00.000-07:00

I'd like your help in building and publicizing October 25, one month from today, as Gender Freedom Day in Digital Worlds.

I'm going to sponsor a full day of speakers, multimedia and other creative efforts, and host a fundraising party in Extropia for organizations promoting freedom of expression of gender identity and sexual preference in digital worlds. I'll start the kitty with $L125,000, and I call on you all to match me to the extent you can.

Here's why.

The last straw came yesterday, when a friend was attacked in social media and later pilloried on a blog for the expression of her sexuality. What happened was despicable, and I'm not about to credit the infantile, frightened, intolerant vermin who attacked her by linking to what they did, nor do I want to bring more painful attention to the victim.

What happened to her happens to countless women, and to queers of all gender presentations, every day in digital worlds. Yes, it happens in the atomic world too, where it's often coupled to violence, even murder. But *my* home is here in the digital, and my responsibility is to not sit silent and permit a culture of hatred to flourish in my own home.

Why limit it to digital worlds? I don't have the resources or the connections to act in the atomic world. This is my home, and its issues are different from those of the atomic world.

If you'd like to do something simultaneously in your atomic community, please do! Yes, physical violence is a terrible problem in the atomic - but in many digital worlds, and places within those worlds, a culture of hatred is allowed to flourish in a way that many atomic communities would be appalled to see. That issue deserves its own attention

The problem is huge. Walk into one of the capital cities in World Of Warcraft, or the infamous "Barrens Chat," night or day, and you're likely to hear the foulest expressions of homophobia, gynophobia, racism and anti-Semitism. Of those, the most prevalent seems to be homophobia: "gay" and "fag" are standins for anything bad, and used with abandon, despite their being in technical violation of the Terms of Service. The culture permits it.

I've led a very sheltered life in SL, in part from having helped create Extropia as a haven for the different, a welcome home for any sort of creative gender, sexual, species and artificial self-expression. But I'm seen and received plenty of hostility for failure to conform to gender norms, by not using Voice (and thus "hiding" my "real" gender, two terms I utterly reject), by not being demure, by being openly bisexual. Many others close to me have had it a lot worse.

SL enables a lot of people to exaggerate sexual dimorphism and practice gender-role exaggeration - and that's fine. It's fine if people - both men and women - want to be Gorean, if guys want to be 100 tall on the sliders, with biceps the size of tree trunks, if women want to be all tits, ass, pink and giggles. That's *fine.*

What isn't fine is when those people publicly attack and condemn others for making different choices. Attacking women for being sexually assertive rather than coquetish is not okay. Attacking people for making gentle passes at people of their preferred gender is not okay. Attacking people for presenting their gender in the way that suits them is not okay.

Now, this is a different matter from time and place, and private property issues. I have a friend with a policy of not allowing public displays of sex acts, or Gorean relations, in her store. Her property, her rules. I'm not advocating a mindless claim of "freedom of speech," a concept which has never been a general license to say or do whatever you want, anywhere, any time.

People and communities have the right to accept or not accept what they will: "tolerance" is not the issue.

You don't have to tolerate me. You have to behave in a civilized fashion to me for exactly as long as I behave that way to you. If the idiot blogger who sparked this had made a post advocating traditional gender roles, and arguing that the rest of us were immoral, or endangering civilization or somesuch, no problem. They'd be being an idiot on their own property, and that's their right.

But when they name names, when they attack someone in a public space, when they use hate speech (the blogger didn't, to be clear), that's nobody's right.

A few loudmouth idiots can poison a space for everyone. That's happened to a pretty big degree on WoW, and I'm sure in other game worlds: being openly queer, standing up against the bigotry, is a huge drain, and may be too little, too late. I hope not.

At the same time, digital worlds allow unprecedented scope for gender freedom, for safe havens for for gender and sexual expression. Second Life enables many to experiment, to find safe expression, for identities that may not be possible or tolerated in parts of the atomic world. Digital worlds issues are separate from atomic ones in that respect as well - there's so much more possible here, and by and large much more acceptance as well. Digital worlds offer us unparalleled creative freedom in our gender and sexual expression.

So, that's why I'm calling for a Gender Freedom Day in Digital Worlds. Rather than getting into fights with angry adolescents, let's show our numbers, and show our joy. "That's so gay?" Let's show 'em gay. Let's have some big, loud, splashy fun. Let's be outrageous, interesting, colorful, provocative.

I tossed this idea out to a few friends late last night.

By morning I had a letter of active support from Uthango Social Investments, South Africa - who sees the struggle for gender freedom as part and parcel of the struggle of Africans to be heard in the global discourse.

By morning I had a letter of active support and participation from Tom Bukowski (Tom Boellstorff), author of Coming of Age in Second Life, and a professor of anthropology whose previous work examined the construction of gay and lesbian identities in Indonesia.

I had pledges of support, connections, logistics, from several good, skilled friends.

I need your help too. We need a good graphic for the day. We need events everywhere on the Grid, and maybe in other worlds as well. I'll contribute to coordinating and publicizing the whole thing, and can set up a website and master calendar.

I'll be around in Extropia Friday, Saturday and Sunday afternoons SLT, to talk with anyone who wants to help make this day happen, or to talk about the issues.

Let's do this thing, October 25, and let's make it big.

You with me?

Back With Some Fun

2008-09-15T18:46:00.000-07:00

I haven't been blogging - but I've been around a lot, spending time where it matters, on family and friends. That's *exactly* what I want to be doing, but it meant that our first Extropia event of the Fall season wasn't the GINOMOUS OVERKILL SPECTACULAR I'd planned - instead, we just did a 9-hour party with 3 DJ's and close to 100 people over the whole thing :P

We held the new party in Galatea's terrific Blood Elf building, home to the Diversionarium and Club Suncrown, and got both facilities off to a great start. The Diversionarium is Kate Amdahl's brainchild, a warm and welcoming place for social games, conversation and friendship. Graceful ramps lead up from there to Club Suncrown, soon to host a regular schedule of DJ events, and always open for dancing to our terrific default trance radio station.

The party really brought out what a terrific place Extropia is, a hub of good, smart, interesting, sophisticated people - who can dance all night! Not a single "HOO!" No griefers, sexual harrassers, or idiots of any sort. Naked pink bunnies, gorgeous white leopards, trolls, blood elves, beautiful men and women, oh yes!

And a special thanks has to go to our three DJs: GoSpeed Racer in her first (of many!) appearance in Extropia, the amazing Burgess of Clockwork - and no Extropia party would be complete without Seven Shikami, whose History Of Rawk set was just *perfect*!

The Sen'jin Island facilities - surfing, sailing, diving, the tiki bar, the Diversionarium and Club Suncrown - will be the focus of my work energies for the next while. We're working on some author events and maybe another academic conference, but mostly Extropia's going to make its mark through social fun.

It's good times, it really is.

If That's The Answer, What Was The Question?

2008-08-13T18:29:00.001-07:00

I've spent a lot of time this week with two issues from the blogosphere. One's the "avatar realism" discussion that so many thoughtful people have taken on. Another is a post by Gwyneth Llewellyn, an overview of the self-governance initiatives in Second Life. I've discovered that I'm approaching both of these issues by asking a couple questions, questions that could be a starting point for discussing cultural and political actions in digital worlds.

I've struggled to organize my thoughts about Gwyn's post, and it took replying to a good hard challenge on the avatar realism issue to pull it together (Thanks, Jen!).

So, a New World Notes post discussed "realistic" avatar shapes, as a follow-up to earlier posts about the politics of female forms in Second Life, and Gwyn discussed legislative and judicial efforts. Both of these seem to be discussing atomic-world statements: people bringing into the digital world something from the atomic, as a solution to some problem.

(Let's pause here. Not everybody with a realistic avatar does so *as a political statement.* Commenters have come up with several good and non-political reasons for having that sort of avatar. I'm not, and never was, talking about those avatars or reasons. I'm talking about the people in the NWN posts and in other posts (Kate's got a good roundup here), who have used their avatar's appearance *in order to make a social or cultural statement.* If your avatar is realistic because it pleases you aesthetically, or because you're using your avatar as an icon or trademark for your business, or because you just rezzed yesterday and don't really know what's possible yet, that's great. But I'm not talking about you.)

(And, I've got to add, that's why my saying "but I'm not talking about you!" to some people wasn't the racist "but some of my best friends are..." that it sounded like to at least one person. I really wasn't talking about Jen, or Giulio, or ahuva - though I what I said might apply to Kedawen, something I could have been clearer on)

OK, you've just hit the news because you're Making A Statement with something imported from the atomic world. I'm going to ask you two questions (let's all pause here for the Monty Python flashback - and my favorite color's blue - no, gray!).

First: Is this a solution to an *atomic world* problem or a digital worlds problem?
I think that the "realistic avatar" is an example of the former. There are real issues of discrimination in the atomic world, over skin color, over body shape and size. These are problems, and they need solutions. But they need solutions *in the atomic world.* You're not going to solve racism in the digital world. You're not going to solve the glorification of anorexia - a *physical* issue - in the digital world. So, I'm going to argue that your efforts are being spent in the wrong place. If you have an atomic problem, solve it in the atomic.

(Now, I've heard a lot of discussion of racial and body-shape prejudice being expressed in SL. Standing up against *that* is important. Where's the line? Honestly, I don't know.)

Some astute commenters have noted that this is the ghastly old immersion/augmentation issue all over again. Yeah, it is. If you see SL, or any digital world, as its own place, importing a social problem or a political issue is downright rude: it's like going on vacation to a foreign country and arguing the benefits of your political candidate or party back home. It's rude, and it's imperialistic - it's implicitly saying that your community's politics are more important than those of the ones you're visiting.

But, if you see digital worlds as just another communications medium, and that there's only one world, one culture - yours in the atomic - then there's no good reason not to use that medium to push your views on cultural issues.

So, yes, I'm arguing the immersionist view, and if you reject that view, we'll mostly be talking past each other. But as so many people have pointed out, there aren't that many people who're reflexive extremists on one end or the other. For most all of us, we're sorting our way as we go, and we think through our positions issue by issue. That's why I'm writing - to sort through my own thoughts, and to lean on all of you for help on the way!

Second, if it *is* a digital worlds problem, do you really have the best solution?
I think the governance initiatives fall under this question. Yes, there are real issues with digital-worlds identity and management - this isn't atomic politicking. But, for the people who advocate legislatures and courts, I have to ask - are those the best solutions for the digital-worlds problem, or are you grabbing for the tool that's familiar rather than the tool that's best?

It seems to me that legislatures, courts and electoral politics are technologies, tools like any other. Legislatures and courts in particular are (in part) information-processing technologies. They were developed around the 17th Century in their modern forms as solutions to contemporary information-proceessing problems (among other problems). Electoral politics developed in the 19th Century in response to changed information-processing problems (and other things).

Does SL face the same problems as a large territorial nation in the early stages of industrialization and mass communications? Even if so (and I've got to think the answer's no), have we developed no better tools in the past couple centuries?

If you're going to argue that we should use centuries-old tools in the digital world, you're going to have to really convincingly claim that the problem is the same as the centuries-old problem that spawned those tools, and that there's no better solution.

I really don't think the governance advocates have done either.

This could flow-chart nicely, if I could draw (where's Botgirl when I need her?!):

Is the problem located in the digital world or the atomic?
If it's in the atomic, please try to solve it there, tyvm.
If it's in the digital,
Is the problem the same problem that generated the atomic solution you're proposing? If not, please try again.
If it is the same problem, is there no better solution?

This way we only get to an atomic-world import if

the problem is digital,
the digital problem is the same as the problem solved by the atomic technology, and
no better solution is available.

So that leads me to think that realistic avatars *as a cultural/political statement* are objectionable, and that I'm really dubious about legislative and judicial systems *as a solution to SL management problems* (if you're involved in them because you like roleplaying government, or you're trying to get clients for your atomic business, that's fine!).

This is why, though I love Kate's "everythingness" and Myg's "live your god damn dream," I can't stop there. Our world is in flux. It could become its own thing, or it could be just another part of the atomic world order. Every choice we make tilts the balance some little bit. I'd like to see us put our thumbs down on the side of creative freedom and exploration. So, not all choices are the same...

Realistic Avatar Shapes? Mmm, No.

2008-08-07T15:23:00.000-07:00

Once again a post of Hamlet Au's has launched me into a full blog response. New World Notes has been addressing issues of "realistic" avatar shape and size, covering a movement to create female avatars bigger and less fit than the SL standard.

While I understand the concerns of the people involved in this movement, to combat problems in the atomic world of unhealthy thinness and of prejudice against people who aren't thin, I think their embrace of an aesthetic of "realistic" avatar shape is misguided at the very best.

Bear with me here: I'm going to bring some serious transhumanist smackdown. I usually reject that label, mostly because I've met too many transhumanists who haven't worked their way up to human yet. But transhumanism is exactly what's behind this issue, and you all need some tough lovin' here. So hang on tight: this won't take long, it's for your own good, and it hurts me more than it does you, really...

Why does any technology exist? To do things that can't be done better with other tools. That's true of everything from the screwdriver to the internet. So, what about the technology of Second Life? Why use it? Why come to SL?

To create things, to do things, that can't be done better elsewhere.

The first thing we create in the digital world is our selves. If we're replicating the selves we bring from the atomic world, we're missing the reason to use the technology of SL. Unless you really feel your physical form is the best possible representation of your self, you should be using SL's tools to create an avatar that's better.

Now, "better" is going to vary depending on your sense of aesthetics and your overall values. Better for some means boobalicious or uber-buff. For some it means stronger, or leaner, or a different size, color, gender, species. I'm not going to fault your aesthetic here, or criticize your ideal, as long as your digital self does reflect that ideal image that you have. I'm not arguing against an aesthetic of shapeliness, far from it! (points to her short, shapely partner, for example)

No, the only bone I have to pick with you is if you're rejecting the ideal entirely for the sad comfort of the "real."

Look at you, there in your atomic world. No, I mean it. Stop and look.

Is that your ideal? Is that the best you can do?

Chances are good you eat too much and exercise too little. You poison yourself with pollutants in your air, water and food. Your skin has been damaged by the elements, aged by stress caused by your social systems - and more on that mess in a moment! If you smoke, well, you deserve the wrinkles, the raspy voice, the cough and wheeze.

That's just the stuff you're responsible for. Then there's all the stuff that isn't your fault: accident damage, aging (look me in the eye and tell me you really think that's a good idea, something worth keeping. No, I didn't think you could do it), gender dysphoria, genetic defects.

Your form, your atomic form, has been marked by all those things, some your responsibility and some that aren't. Each scar, each wrinkle, each unhealthful kilo on your ass marks a failure. Yours, your society's. They mark a failure to manifest what you really are, what you know yourself to be and to be capable of. That "realistic" form you're stuck with in the atomic is a map of your defeats, of your failures of will and of imagination.

That's what you want to exalt in a place where you can finally do better?

Sometimes I think there's a war on imagination, a real war being fought by those who hold power in the old, feudal, atomic order against those who'd return creative power to the people, who'd deliver us from artificial scarcity. This avatar shape thing could be a battle in that war, an ideological strike by the meme "the ideal is bad; the ideal punishes you for being inferior; don't strive for the ideal but glory in your shortcomings." It could be.

Or, it could be you just need Cousin Soph to swat you upside the head and go, "What, are you STOOPID? You can do better than that!"

Because, look. That's why Philip created the foundations of this world. That's why tens of thousands of people create new things here, why hundreds of thousands come to SL to work and play and love and live.

Because you atomic people know, in your calcium-deprived bones you know, that you can do better. You know that you've been stuck inside a system that might have been useful a century or three ago but right now just holds you back, dumbs you down, dwarfs you from a creator and a citizen into a consumer.You know you can do better!

So, do better. Do better. Create your digital selves as your ideal, whatever form that might take. And if you're still atomic people, if you don't come to call the digital your home and embrace digital citizenship (and we welcome you, all of you who do, in Extropia!), then you've got more work to do.

What do you need to do next? Look at that avatar you made. Look at that picture of health and strength and self-creation.

Then, start asking questions.

Ask: why can't I have this in the atomic world? Why can't I have health and youth and strength and beauty?

Why, with all the brains and talent and wealth in the atomic world - some four orders of magnitude more than in SL - aren't these things even easier in the atomic than the digital? Why are the systems that take your wealth spending it on things less valuable than health and longevity and beauty? Why do you listen to the memes and ideologies that try to convince you that you shouldn't have these things, that it's wrong to expect them, that you need to embrace and welcome and defend your personal and social failures to create health and youth and strength and beauty?

Ask those questions, and demand answers. Demand them of yourself: ask yourself where you've put your time and wealth and talent, and what you've gotten in return. Ask your rulers, your bosses, your politicians, that whole parasitic class that has gotten those things, paid for by your taxes and your entertainment dollars. Ask them why you don't have what they do, and demand answers.

Now, pick a world and change it. I'm here in the digital, trying to defend this space as a better way. Lots of good people are at work in the atomic, trying to give us heath and youth and strength and beauty. They're scientists, transhumanists, people fighting for the ideal against the surrender to the real. They're activists, idealists, trying to take back our creative power and our freedom, trying to build systems of equity, trying to make the atomic as good as the digital can be. Pick a place to stand and people to stand with, and get to work!

But, omfg, don't come asking for your failures to be exalted, for an aesthetic of poison and neglect and suffering to be enshrined as somehow noble! I know you; you can do better, in one world or another. So do better! Demand better!

OK, that's all for the tough love. You're all straightened out now, right?

Me, I'm going to take my skinny chalk-white winged tattooed ass back to work. There's a lot to be done...

Talent, Influence and Fame

2008-08-02T11:09:00.000-07:00

Hamlet Au's been on fire lately, and a recent post of his, Are You Intimidated By Second Life Celebrities?, has gotten a lot of people thinking about the nature of Second Life society and their relationship to it.

The comments to the post are terrific. Some of them started picking apart the nature of celebrity: CronoCloud Creegan's post in response suggests that SL is getting too big for individuals to have major influence anymore, and that the concept of the FIC (Feted Inner Core) should be replaced by a broader notion of "avatars of influence."

That's good stuff: CronoCloud has touched on a fundamental change, something that I think has been echoing though so many of our second lives this summer. But, more on that next time - don't let me forget. But for now, let's look at celebrity:

CronoCloud's post, along with some of the other comments, got me realizing that we mean different things when we speak of "celebrity" in general, or in the SL context.

I started picturing a Venn diagram with three circles - Talented, Influential, and Famous (OK, I tried drawing this in GIMP. I'll save you the results - but let's just say they prove I'm not Talented!). There are people who are just one, some who're various combinations, and a very few who're all three (hi, Hamlet! :D ).

Famous? Often when we use the term "celebrity" we mean people who're only in the Famous circle, who aren't famous for being Talented or Influential, but just for being Famous. SL's got its Famous people, as you'd expect from any community with a huge active social scene - though I'm thinking of Marx Dudek's comment "amazing...in Liechtenstein" here! I don't really know people in the core of this circle, and they don't interest me.

Influential? This is an interesting one. It seems to me there's two kinds of Influence. One is the machine-politics "fixer" sense - the sense used in the Feted Inner Core (FIC) concept. That kind of Influence refers to people who broker in favors, who can get things done by manipulating the system, or who benefit from access to those fixers. My count here is zero: I've never even had a conversation with a Linden, and couldn't be farther from that sort of politics.

But there's another kind of Influence. Digital worlds are still a cloud of possibility: our social relations, our political economy, our culture, are still fluid. They haven't gone through that phase change of crystallization yet. They will, sometime before too long - they'll take a form that will be very, very hard to change, just as atomic-world societies did in the past century.

There are people working to shape that form.

Some are software and hardware engineers defining the substrate of our worlds, and some are critics of engineering that fails to understand its social context.

Some are atomic politicians, whose fear-mongering shapes our worlds through the prudent or cowardly reactions of our worlds' corporate owners.

Some are imperialists of politics or business, who want to absorb our worlds into the dominant cultures of the atomic, to ensure we're all properly taxed, identified, verified consumers of corporate-capitalist extruded entertainment product.

Some are scholars, philosophers, activists, critics, analysts seeking to describe our worlds as they are, to understand the forces at work - and maybe to shape the digital worlds into something new, something truer to their nature than mere copies of the atomic.

These are the people who interest me.

Talented? Oh yeah. This is where SL shines, and why digital worlds are wonderful. Talent still gets freed here. What happens when you take away the scarcities and enforced hierarchies of the atomic world? You get Talent. Explosions of it. Profusions of it. You get a humanity that makes you want to weep for joy at the sheer breadth and diversity of its creativity. To paraphrase Stewart Brand, we *are* as gods, and unchained, we are beautiful and powerful beyond words.

I adore the Talented, and collect them and show them off, and do what I can to help them along.

To answer Hamlet's original question, call it conceit, or obtuseness, or mad extroversion, but I haven't found myself intimidated by *anybody* for their Fame, Talent or Influence. I've got no trouble chatting up anybody Talented or Influential, even if they happen to be Famous. I'm *interested* in those people, curious about them, and eager to know them. Sophrosyne's Saturday Salon was created out of that, to give me an excuse to sit and chat for a couple hours with all the people I admire, and to share them with my friends.

Reading everybody's comments to Hamlet's post, it seems such a natural and universal reaction to be shy or intimidated around the Talented, Influential and/or Famous - but it seems my OEM software just didn't include that module (FWIW, it's not a case of "digital courage" - my atomic affiliate, the Other Personality, is at least as shameless as me. Actually, they've done some things that would make *me* headdesk... and that really takes some doing!).

I'm glad I don't have that module though: the lack of it has become my market niche, my schtick, my thang - I'm the SL person who'll talk to anybody, make introductions, connections, get them talking to each other. I'm maybe not the universal solvent - gods know there are people I refuse to deal with or grant legitimacy to. But I think that's what I do best, and my best role in SL society: using that shamelessness to showcase the Talented, Influential and Famous.

"Soph - Being Shameless So You Don't Have to Be!"

Yeah, that works... :D

Warcraft, Reputation and Democracy

2008-07-30T11:46:00.000-07:00

Four months on, I'm still enjoying World of Warcraft as much as ever - moreso - and in the process learning a lot about people, professions and perspectives.

Before I get my feet deeply into my mouth with some observations, I do want to promote a wonderful guild, and encourage any of you who've been tempted to try WoW, as well as my friends who're WoW veterans, to come join me in a guild - Metaverse Explorers on the Arathor server, Horde-side. Come on in, or if you're not sure how, just ask me and I'll give you a hand.

The guild was started by my friends Rissa Maidstone, John Zhaoying and new friend CSharp Writer, as a congenial, welcoming and supportive place for people active in the metaverse to network and play together. Rissa calls WoW "the new golf," and it's been that - a chance to get to know people better through play.

WoW is really well suited to that: what races and classes people choose, and the play styles that go with them, are profoundly revealing of character. Rissa's always a beautiful Blood Elf; I'm often a striking tall troll. Ali most always plays a healer; I'm happiest as a "tank," rushing into a fight and drawing attention onto myself while cooler heads pick their shots from a distance. You'd never guess, huh? :P

As this might be a guide for digital worlds community formation, here's what I've seen as the core principles underlying what the founders have done with the guild. Of course, please understand that these are my impressions, and in no way represent their opinions, values, politics or intentions!

Empower, Don't Impede. From what I've seen, this may be the key distinction between the atomic mindset and the digital.

Several times I've seen people with experience at atomic world professional/academic conferences come into digital worlds with a foundational principle of "sit down, shut up and defer to the speaker." The underlying structures of the atomic world support that: physically, through the raised stage and podium, the single-point microphone; and culturally through millennia of training people to kneel before the king, the pope, the professor, the boss. The structures of digital worlds *don't* support that, which I think is their greatest virtue.

Digital worlds are important because they provide an attractive alternative to the artificial, forcibly imposed and maintained hierarchies that plague the atomic world (yes, Second Life land controls are a huge exception to that principle - that's a post for another day, or for somebody more knowledgeable than me). Digital worlds at their best give creative power to people: the power to tell stories, make art, build businesses, share their knowledge. The atomic world is full of institutions designed to take that power from most people and concentrate it in the hands of a few - from the university to the state to draconian intellectual property laws.

Importing hierarchical structures into digital worlds fails on two accounts. One, hierarchies based on artificial scarcities - of resources, of authority, of talent - have failed in competition with free systems, with democracy, with freedom of exchange of goods and ideas. They're inferior and unpleasant, and whenever and wherever possible, people build alternative systems to provide fair access to resources and open sharing of production.

They also fail to use the digital medium fully: importing the "sit down and shut up" event into a digital world is like filming a stage play. You can do it, but the power of film comes from using its *own* language by freeing the camera and the editor from a fixed point and linear progression. Likewise, digital worlds free us from the fixed point of the silent spectator, allowing the collaborative, multi-threaded creation of knowledge and meaning.

I strongly believe that the best thing that I can do is to nurture and support the talents and passions of others. Digital worlds are wonderful for that, even, or maybe especially, for atomic people. They can try on any number of things - jobs, interests, styles, identities - at very low cost, to find what suits them best. In a guild, or in a community like Extropia, those of us with resources can make them available - we can provide means for people to learn the game, to run events, to organize, share knowledge, find their best role. The atomic approach would say, no, give the resources to the credentialed expert and let everyone else be a "consumer" of their production.

Identity Equals Reputation, Not Credentials. In the WoW Science Guild, I had a clash of principles, which, thanks to the good heart and generous nature of the person I debated, ended up in generating more light than heat (rare for internet debates!). A fellow guild member came inworld with a set of values from science and academia. They took the principle "the scientific community requires full disclosure in experiments in order to verify claims of results" and wanted to apply that to identity in digital worlds. It's clearly a terrible analogy, of course - more "apples and Tuesday" than "apples and oranges." But I understand why people would reflexively try to apply a powerfully enculturated fundamental principle as broadly as possible.

The thing is - and a lot of people either fail to get this or do get it and are deeply upset by it - anonymity or digital personhood are *rejections* of claims based on status in the atomic world. If I said "You should believe my conclusions about the nature of digital worlds because I'm a computer science professor at MIT," you have the right to ask me to prove that I am. But if I say, "I refuse to use claims of identity or status to back anything I say," someone indoctrinated into the system might *want* a claim of status to back my rejection of status ("Well, if a professor at MIT says status doesn't matter in digital worlds...").

But it doesn't work that way! In the digital world, you don't get to dismiss my arguments because the atomic person behind me might be a part-time clerk at a game store, or accept them because that person is "actually" a professor. You have to engage with my ideas - and with me - for what we are in *this* space, by the values of *this* culture.

What I've seen of academia in digital worlds suggests that for many, credentials are at least as important as content: what matters is less what I say and more my status within the atomic academic and social hierarchy. You'll listen to me if I'm from MIT, and maybe not if I'm from Mediocre State U, and definitely not if I'm a shop clerk. Business seems to place less emphasis on the credential and more on the portfolio: who cares who you are - what have you *done*?

Here's an example. In a discussion with another Science Guild member about guild leadership, I was asked to disclose my atomic credentials. I declined, and instead provided links to my business and community, my blogs, a list of the digital-worlds events I'd run, and provided several character references. The person was angry and upset that I'd violated reciprocity: they had told me their atomic name, and that of their atomic-world employer, who they regarded as very prestigious.

I replied, "We're trying to find out if we want to work together to put on events in digital worlds. Here are the legitimate things we need to know about each other: have they done a number of digital worlds events before? were those events satisfying for the participants and the audience? what are they like to work with? I gave you the material to answer those questions: my portfolio and references. In return, you told me you have an unrelated job in an unrelated space. Who provided full and useful disclosure and who didn't?"

What we were arguing over was *the source of legitimacy.* For me, that was in actions: I claimed authority because I've organized good digital worlds events. The source of my legitimacy is my portfolio. For them, the source of legitimacy was institutional: they claimed authority because they had high status among atomic institutions.

There's plenty of good work on reputational systems in Web2.0 out there. Rissa, John and CSharp walk the walk: Metaverse Explorers is a guild of people deeply embedded in digital reputational systems. We all know each other through a degree or two of separation from various groups in SL, from Twitter, from our blogs. We don't need to post brag sheets in order to be accepted in the door: our reputations precede us and speak for us - better and more usefully than any CV or bio could.

Okay, so two points to take away. One is that digital worlds are at their best, and used in accordance with their nature, when they prevent artificial scarcities (of power, of talent, of knowledge, of money) and put the most powerful creative tools possible into the hands of everyone who wants them, and then make their output as widely available as possible.

Two, Metaverse Explorers is a fun place for people who've established reputational capital to hang out and play together. Come on in - I promise I *won't* talk politics, but I *will* rush headlong into fights, so you don't have to! :)

Anniversary!

2008-07-28T16:26:00.000-07:00

Today's my family's anniversary!

A year ago today the four of us - me, Argent Bury, Galatea Gynoid and Vidal Tripsa - coalesced as a family group. While we're an open poly quad (some of us date outside the family and some don't), for the past year we really have been a family, working together, playing together, loving, squabbling, dealing with drama in SL, the occasional seepage from FL, and constant change. Gods, it's been wonderful, and I'm confident our second year together will be even better.

A year ago, I was in a partnership that was seriously troubled - those "irreconcilable differences" you hear so much about. I'd gone away for a long weekend knowing that we needed to make some fundamental changes - and came back to a notice from Linden Lab that my partnership had been dissolved, and those changes made for me.

It was late at night when I got back, and nobody was around. I went straight to Gala's house, brooded a bit, and curled up in her bed, a place where I knew I was still loved and wanted and at home.

The next day, friends came by all day to offer comfort and support, and by midafternoon my longtime lover Gala and this really sweet girl I'd just met a couple weeks before, Vidal, were the ones staying to snuggle me. Later that week, Vidal would ask me to collar her, and I was thrilled and honored to accept.

Late that evening, Argent, a friend from her first days inworld, joined us, and we were complete.

We four have been strong, solid, loving, and supportive from that night on. My family is the most important thing in my life, and truly the reason why I'm here, the reason why I returned when I might have drifted away.

Argent, Galatea, Vidal: thank you for a year beyond my wildest dreams. Here's to many more.

Digital Colonialism and Digital Nationalism

2008-07-18T22:17:00.001-07:00

If you're not reading Rissa Maidstone's and John Zhaoying's blogs on the World2Worlds site, you're missing out on some of the very best digital-worlds analysis there is. John and Rissa have been looking at the SL economy from two different angles, and I'd like to offer a view from a third.

(Disclaimers: I'm no expert in any of the fields I touch on, and am pretty much talking out my ass. I'm very early in the process of articulating some of these ideas, and tomorrow I may admit I've got it completely backwards. Also, this is a revised version of a post that went up briefly last night, until, thanks in large part to Vidal Tripsa, I found some big holes in my thinking and presentation that hopefully I've fixed a bit in this draft).

Rissa's Challenge
John looks at the price discrepancy between digital-worlds labor and atomic-world labor, and concludes that SL is a colonial economy (I came to the same conclusion a while ago). In response, Rissa challenged us:

For those working in virtual worlds—you know you’re talented and your work is worth X dollars an hour to you and the industry. Charge it. Stop giving it away. In John Jainschigg’s blog at http://www.zzomg.com/ he states “If this analogy is meaningful -- what changes the picture?” In my opinion, three things: 1) the IRS (or other government agency); 2) Corporate responsibility -- awareness of employment and contracting law, and 3) the individuals that realize their value and charge for their work.

The Case For a Fair Atomic Wage...
Rissa wants to earn an atomic-world living by being paid an atomic-world wage for her work in digital worlds. From her perspective, she's putting in the same time and providing the same services she would for an atomic client at an atomic wage, so why should she be paid 10% of that wage just because she provides those services in a different medium?

Likewise, Vidal is a digital artist, designer and architect: digital worlds are her creative medium. She doesn't have the alternative Rissa does, of being able to provide equivalent services in some atomic medium. For her, the choices are between making a living with her talents in the digital world, or employment outside her field. Her expenses are atomic-priced, so her income needs to be as well.

Both of them make an important case for being paid a fair atomic wage for their digital work. Part of the problem here is the truth of the old saw "A second life doesn't come with a second 24 hours." For people working in digital worlds, there are two options. Either their atomic work (or their Other Personality's atomic work) subsidizes their digital time, which is essentially hobby time, or they need to make an atomic wage for digital work. Rissa and Vids are in the latter camp, I'm in the first.

I'm privileged: my OP makes a living wage doing work they like, and OP doesn't need to monetize my time. There's no way around that fact, and that privilege enables me to take a political/economic stand opposite Rissa's and Vids's. I'm arguing from total limousine liberalism, and I know it. OTOH, my position has a price, just as theirs does. For much of the spring the OP/me collective was working 90 hours a week: we both hit busy periods at the same time, and it was hell on toast. That's why I was gone for most of late May and June - I was burnt, and I was thinking very hard about Rissa's challenge, as a way to halve my total workload.

But, after a lot of soul-searching, and some catching up on sleep and old sci-fi TV shows, I decided not to do that.

... And Why I'm On The Other Side
Rissa and I do somewhat similar work, running professional-quality events. She's about the best there is at what she does; I'm pretty good. Rissa - who I count as a dear friend and mentor - would see me charge the atomic going rate for the conference services I provide, especially when I partner with atomic-world groups like NASA. I've thought long and hard about it, and I'm not going to.

But, isn't that crazy? Why leave money on the table?

Because billing out at atomic-world prices does exactly what Rissa has recognized it does. If I do charge $L26,000 an hour for conference services, what happens? I could repatriate the cash to the atomic-world Other Personality, with SL as merely an intermediate step in the transaction between, say, NASA and....

How many of you just made that leap with me?

Right. If I'm charging an atomic world client atomic world prices, they're going to be dealing with the atomic world person: with their tax ID number for tax reporting purposes, with business licenses, with identity disclosure, signed contracts, registration as a government contractor. At that point, they're not doing business either with me or with SL: it's strictly an atomic world matter, and the digital location of the work doesn't matter much.

It's a classic colonial transaction: Chiquita sells $1 million of banana futures on the Chicago commodities exchange to American investors, and from both parties' point of view, the third-world origin of the product is irrelevant: all market-priced goods are fungible for cash.

But for me, there's a lot of relevance. If I went Rissa's route (and I gave this a lot of thought through the spring), I realized I'd be violating the integrity of both myself and OP. Charging atomic rates and complying with atomic business customs would do two things. It would force me out of autonomous existence: I'd become a business name, a d/b/a, for OP. That works for some people, including Rissa, and I respect their choices. It wouldn't work for me, at least not now and not in that way.

It would also force OP to be in my business, and they have plenty of work of their own, and have made a choice and commitment to be in another line of work than event planning and marketing. I'd be undoing and disrespecting the career choice they made.

There's another reason too. I'm going to argue, as I have since I was born, that the personal is political, that "identity politics" underlies an enormous amount of what we do in digital worlds. So, my digital identity, I think, means that I have to take a political position contrary to the elements John recognized as belonging to the colonial economy.

Now, this is not only very controversial, I don't even know that I'm right, and it's a position opposite to the principled and reasonable positions of two people I'm very fond of, Rissa and my dear Vidal Tripsa.

The Problem of Digital Colonialism
In the previous section, I looked at the consequences for my repatriating my atomic-world salary into the atomic world. But say I kept those earnings in SL: say I've got an income of a couple million Lindens a day. What's going to happen?

Right: the prices of wings, sex toys and latex body suits in SL are going to go from $L500 to $L500,000 overnight. And if you're not in a business with atomic-world customers? You're not going to be able to afford anything, because I'll have driven up all the prices, across the board. The local economy will collapse, local producers will be driven out, and the only people left will be the successful colonialists, not the indigenous producers.

Say you're an oil worker. You just made $100/hour consulting on a drilling project in Alaska. It's expensive up there, and you didn't turn a heck of a lot of profit. Now you got offered a job in, say, Nigeria. The local cost of living is akin to SL's, and even being put up in non-local, first-world standard accommodations, your expenses there are going to be vastly lower. Should you be paid an amount equivalent to a local skilled worker, maybe 10% of your going rate? Of course not, you'd say - it sucks that the local economy is so deflated, but that's not *your* problem - nobody's going to reduce your mortgage 90% while you're gone, after all.

That's the argument for a global economy at first-world prices, and one made by both colonial administrators and workers like our oil consultant, and by a lot of people much farther left on the political/economic spectrum, the people who argue for fair trade coffee, for unionization, against sweatshops and child labor.
It's a completely valid perspective, and it's the one Rissa's coming from when she argues that my $L-pricing or donating my services undercuts her ability to charge a living wage.

There's another one, though.

Let's look at things from the worker in the third-world economy. What does she see? A global elite being paid an order of magnitude more for equivalent work, an elite who drive up the price of everything from pedicab rides to basic foodstuffs. If I'm being paid $10/day as a local professional, and my economy draws a group of people being paid $1000/day, what happens? I'm driven from a comfortable middle-class existence by local standards into poverty: that $10 won't cover groceries when the farmers choose to sell to 5-star restaurants at 100 times their previous prices.

That's what colonialism *does:* it compresses the local economic spectrum into universal poverty and turns internal economic exchange into export, further impoverishing the locals, since the colonial elite either consumes or repatriates what it purchases, rather than keeping those purchases in internal circulation.

OK, now let's look at the SL economy. The economy came into being as a third-world economy. Startup capital costs were negligible, like they are in the subsistence farming that forms the backbone of third-world economies. Wealth was created by exploiting local resources - the tools of the digital environment - and magnified through internal trade. The clothing designers sold their wares to the house designers, who made their money selling to the makers of sex toys - all internal to the SL world.

The first attempts at digital colonialism in SL were a huge failure: nobody wanted to buy the colonial products. They weren't suited to the market, so people kept buying the local batik while the English woolens rotted in warehouses.

But now we're seeing a second age of colonialism, one which has done its market research, learned its lessons, and is poised to - as John so accurately observes - harvest SL resources for sale in the colonial metropolis. And suddenly a noticeable chunk of our produce won't be going for local consumption at local prices, but could be sold for a hundred times the price for export.

Vids and Rissa deserve to make a living wage for their work. I'm not arguing against that. What I am saying is that their best strategy - maximizing their income and minimizing the amount of time they have to work to survive - has "negative externalities" for the digital economy. The sum of good individual choices can generate a bad collective outcome. I'm in a position to try to counterbalance some of that, to make choices favoring the good of the SL developing-nation economy, I think.

Everybody has an optimal time/money tradeoff point, and for the me/OP complex, ours happens to be low money/high time. That enables my politics, and there's no escaping that fact. I can minimize my income and maximize my time (because my and OP's economic needs are few, and because I know we're going to end up working 90 hours a week whether we get paid or not, and I'm ok with that). That means I can put my thumb on the other side of the scale, and work against digital colonialism and for the kinds of economic development strategies that have transformed banana republics into prosperous producers in the atomic world.

Digital Colonialism and Digital Nationalism
The problem with local producers demanding global wages is that it forces all producers into the global economy and into global pricing. One consequence with that sort of globalization is that it establishes very high barriers to entry into successful business. To get started, it's not enough to be better than the amateur next door, you've got to be better than the global leaders backed with global capital. That means that local producers who either can't or won't deliver global-quality goods to global clients at global prices, or who don't have access to large amounts of startup capital, are forced out of production and into wage employment at best, and into poverty (or out of the economy entirely) at worst.

John's got the right of it: SL is a third-world economy. There are two strategies for development. One is to globalize, starting with selling what you've got - in the atomic world, raw materials and natural resources. In the digital, time and talent. Now, it's possible to sell off your capital and actually develop through smart investment in advanced infrastructure (competitive industry and education in the atomic world, skills and software in the digital). But, it's much more likely that you'll stay a banana republic or an OPEC country, strip-mining your assets for the global economy, living large for a few years and ending up with nothing.

The other strategy is to insulate your country from the global economy for a while while you invest in renewable capital (again, competitive industry and education in the atomic, and the encouragement of new creatives and entrepreneurs in the digital). The 18th Century British followed this example, using tariffs and taxes to protect local industry for a few generations, then switching to a free trade policy once they were competitive. The Asian Tigers have done similar things in recent decades.

For developing economies in the atomic, that's called protectionism. In the digital, we call it the magic circle.

I think the value of digital worlds lies in what can be created within the magic circle: something different from the globalized median culture, an alternative to globalized art, globalized politics, globalized economic relations. We'll only realize that value if we defend the magic circle, enforce economic protectionism, maintain low barriers to entry into creative and economic production, and see what happens.

That's digital nationalism.

Back to Limousine Liberalism, and Over to the Experts
I think that digital personhood and digital nationalism are necessarily intertwined, that my two reasons for declining an atomic wage are just aspects of the same one. I privilege the digital space: I live here, in the banana republic of SL, and that's where my identity and loyalties are situated. Now, I only get to do that because I get a huge colonial remittance of time and money from OP. A fundamental criticism of my position is that my digital politics rest on a foundation of atomic benefit.

This is the point where my insight and understanding end. There may be a development path from banana republic to post-industrial titan for the digital economy that doesn't have to be built on atomic world prosperity or by demented workaholics. The way from here will have to be marked out by people who actually know something about political economy. I've done what I can in sketching out the bounds of the problem, and I'm going back to running sci-fi author events now!

Guest Blogger!

2008-07-12T18:56:00.000-07:00

Hey everybody, and thanks, Soph, for letting me borrow your blog.

I'm Soph's great-grand-alt, more or less - and I've done to her something like what she did to the atomic-world Other Personality last year.

I went and woke up on her.

I'm not as separate from her as she is from OP, but I'm sure not an alt anymore!

OK, great-grand-alt, you're asking? Take a deep breath and follow along...

There's Soph:
who created an avatar of herself in World of Warcraft, Sophrosynee:

Then WoW-Soph created an alt to help Boc Cryotank get started over there:

That's me, Singularitea (the cute blue chick, not the orc!). Somewhere along the line I became myself rather than a Soph-alt, and I started getting ideas...

First one was, I wanted to come to SL, but as me, rather than a loose translation, like Soph had to do (not that Soph's *loose,* exactly....).

So, with a little help from Soph and Zada Zenovka, and a lot of help from Vidal Tripsa, I emerged into SL as Singularitea Skytower:

Now, that's where the fun begins! I'm living in Sophtopia, along with Soph, Vidal, two dragons and a kitty, and I'm starting a business - along with Soph's daughter, Ciel.

We bought an island in Extropia today (the lovely Isle of View, in the Dirac Sea, just north of Extropia Defense HQ), that's going to be the home of the Blood & Thunder Beach Club and White Lady Resort.

We've got waves installed, and over the next week we'll have rental surfboards out, beach blankets with snuggles, and some other basics. From there, a bar and dance club, a marina, relocated fishing tournaments from Tycho Beach, a nice selection of stores and more, including maybe a dojo and combat facilities - since Ciel wants to learn weapons, and I still need some mayhem in my life...

I've got a strong sense of myself, despite being pretty new to the worlds: I'm younger than Soph, bubblier, more physical, more dominant, and with a knack for mischief (and an unexpected gift for seduction, but hey, not complaining!). I terribly miss my pet in WoW, Piggie, but I've got Frank the Dragon to keep me company here.

It's gonna be a good life, and a lot of fun. Once the Club and Resort are up and running, there'll be a bunch of announcements, but in the meantime, drop by the Isle and say hi!

Back in Black

2008-06-30T10:07:00.000-07:00

I'll save you all the extended AC/DC lyrics quotes :P

Despite the bizarre rumor going around that I'm leaving SL, I'm back, and back big. I spent more time inworld last week, outside of work, than I did in April, May and June combined, I think. I've got a new house, new furniture, new projects, and a renewed commitment to my community, and most importantly, to my loves.

There has been a malaise going around: I've written about it, Hamlet Au's picked up on it, and Kit Meredith has been exploring it, among many others. Lanna Beresford speculates that it's related to SL's transition from frontier to settlement; I think she's on to something.

My effective departure - months where I only came in to run events - was equal parts hardware woes that made for a miserable experience with the current client (draw distance down to my elbows, no ability to cam or take photos in a crowd) and a life that had become a bitterly ironic parody of the shortcomings of atomic-world life that gave rise to the market for a second life.

My family and I were all busy with work, and on schedules that didn't allow for much overlap. I kept adding projects: more events and bigger events, with more attendant publicity work, until I was trying to do a 40-50 hour a week job in 20 hours (while OP was putting in 60-90 a week: not fun times). I went months without going anywhere but my house and the Central Nexus, where I held events.

One of my breaking points came after a conversation with my friend Rissa Maidstone, one of SL's best businesswomen. She was very complimentary of the work that the Extropia team does, and suggested in very strong terms that we should turn pro, and bill ourselves at atomic-world corporate rates. That triggered a month or so of increasing angst, as my desire to do a better job, my vanity and my workaholism led me down a path towards going pro. The more I thought I should turn pro, the more I avoided SL, and the more time I spent in WoW killing things :P

OP and I started having serious issues over our careers as well: as the saying goes, a second life doesn't come with a second 24 hours. OP's been working very hard, and building a career, but I had attractive opportunities as well. Where should the energy go? Our progress was taking us along paths that were beginning to cross, and that seemed like a very bad idea for both of us.

So, after OP met some deadlines, and I finished off the last of a string of big events, we vanished for two weeks to sort things. We haven't figured everything out yet, but when we went back to first principles, a lot became readily clear.

Family First. Which is just a subset of "people first." I just finished reading Catherine Asaro's terrific novel Alpha, in which an Air Force general has to choose between his growing love for a gynoid and his duty to the state. It's an absolutely fantastic book if you're a fan of artificial people. But, while I recognized that the general's internal conflict was deftly handled, I really couldn't relate. One of my core principles is, loyalty to persons, deep suspicion of the claims to loyalty by groups or ideologies.

Going pro would mean accepting the norms of the atomic business world, which are deeply hostile to digital people. I firmly believe that accepting those norms would betray my self in the most fundamental way, and betray the values and trust of my family, who share with me norms of digital identity and personhood that are quite contrary to business expectations.

Joy First. Much of atomic-world culture is based on the notion that suffering is good and necessary, that life properly consists of doing something pointless and/or wretched for most of one's life in order to have a few hours of pleasure every week. This is a stupid and evil notion. It seems deeply embedded within many of us, to the extent that OP's copy of that bit of malware crossed the personality border and was running full-time on *my* system.

So, I looked at the things that I was doing, where I was spending my time, and sorted things into "actually essential but unpleasant," "talked myself into thinking this was essential but unpleasant," "unpleasant timewaster," "irrelevant but fun" and "fun and useful." On close examination, a lot of the marketing/advertising work I was doing was taking up a huge amount of time but generating no quantifiable return. My smallest time category was "fun and useful," which seemed unbelievably perverse.

So, here's what I've done:

Cut Twitter, Ning groups, Facebook games.
Cut back on my time in WoW, though it's still important to me, for social fun and tension release (not that I'm having that much tension lately!).
Put the Saturday Salon on hiatus for July, at least. People love having the regular weekly event, but it takes about 10 hours a week, or half the time I get.
Cut plans for two more major academic/professional conferences this fall. There's little good reason for doing those unless I go pro and charge for organizing them. The return for Extropia is negligible, and they take an enormous amount of work.
Expanded our author events. We've got one to announce today over on Events in Extropia, and a couple in the pipeline. They're fun, and they do bring people to Extropia who're likely to come back for other events, for the atmosphere, and to move in.
Expanded my support for other creative social events. We've got a bunch of stuff coming up soon.
Changed my job title from "Director, Marketing & External Relations" to "Director, Events & Marketing." My focus will be on improving and expanding Extropia, not on building my network in the atomic business community.
Bought a new house (The "Connell House" from Nebula of Extropia) and re-decorated top to bottom. Before Extropia my houses were really filled with my presence, my aesthetic. Here, I've been in a series of tossed-up boxes with my old furniture dropped in them. They've gone almost entirely un-lived-in. In a week, New Sophtopia has boomed with life and energy - more on that in a later post!
Started a new personal project, something I've wanted to do from my earliest newbie days. More on that later too.
Most of all, re-centered in my family. We've become a fairly effective work team and Board; we're becoming real lovers again.

All that, and I feel *incredible.* Happy, rejuvenated, liberated.

The moral of the story? The more I embrace my second life, my Digital identity and values, the happier I am. The more I'm drawn into the event horizon of atomic conformity, the more miserable - and the more absent - I become.

Back in black, I hit the sack,
I've been too long, I'm glad to be back
Yes I'm let loose from the noose,
That's kept me hangin' about
I been livin like a star 'cause it's gettin' me high,
Forget the hearse, 'cause I never die
I got nine lives, cat's eyes
abusing every one of them and running wild

'Cause I'm back! Yes, I'm back!
Well, I'm back! Yes, I'm back!
Well, I'm baaack, baaack...
Well, I'm back in black,
Yes, I'm back in black!

The Empathy Box

2008-06-23T20:21:00.000-07:00

You really can't discuss digital people or digital worlds for very long before dipping into Philip K. Dick's work. I just read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? for the first time, for Extropia Book Club. Blade Runner is a treasured favorite, and I've read other Dick, so it's surprising it's taken me till now to get to Sheep.

What a rich, provocative work! I could pick at it endlessly, but one thing struck me:

In Sheep's world, supposedly the only thing that separates humans from "andys," android robots, is the ability to feel empathy. Dick plays with the boundaries of that in a way that reminds me of Tom Boellstorff's exploration of the boundaries of "the actual" and "the virtual" in Coming of Age in Second Life: we see humans without empathy, andys with, humans who think they're andies, andies who think they're humans....

But, ultimately, the society is founded on the use of an "empathy box," a device that connects everyone using it in a shared experience of a martyr - a man named Mercer - 's descent to the underworld and struggle for ascension. It's the sacrament of the world religion, Mercerism. Near the end, the andys "expose" the experience of the empathy box as a fake: Mercer was a drunken actor, the setting of his martyrdom a cheap studio set.

And yet... And yet, people go on believing. And yet, Mercer appears to the empathetic bounty hunter Deckard and the especially empathetic "chickenhead" JR, giving them each a genuine miracle - or perhaps another artificiality.

Mercer - fake and messiah, the empathy box - a shared delusion and shared salvation. Humanity - the logical andys and the emotional humans. All the borders blur.

But still.... but still, our world is the world of Sheep. Hamlet Au asked a few days ago if I would still describe SL as "an engine of transcendance," as I did when I was new.

Oh yes, both engine and transcendance, just as the empathy box is both fraud and salvation. SL is an empathy box. It sorts those who can treat others as real, as feeling beings, as autonomous people, from those who can only treat others as tools. Yes, it's a fraud, a hyped engine full of lies. Yes, it's salvation, a chance to transcend the limitations, the stuntings, the hardship of the material for the fullness of our creative potential.

Yes, it's griefers and blingtards. Yes, it's 74 people showing up for Charlie Stross and patiently taking their turn in queue to ask smart, engaging questions. Yes, it's orgy rooms. Yes, it's true love.

Yes, it does separate the few who stay from the many who don't. And one boundary between them, I believe, is empathy - is the ability to see this place and these people as real, at least as real as the physical world.

Nobody's going out "retiring" the people who can't cross that boundary - but very few of them stay, and that's more than good enough.

To stay, it helps to be human, and to see humanity, life, meaning, autonomy, in the others around us.

It's an empathy box.

DarkSoph!

2008-06-18T13:26:00.000-07:00

The Other Personality and I have an agreement - they get the atomic world, I get the digital one. We're kind of renegotiating the borders of that... which is how I ended up at the movies last night.

OP went to see Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull - and I kind of emerged. Why? Because I was up there on the screen!

Colonel Doctor Irina Spalko - *totally* Dark Me. OK, her nose is a little off, but in every other respect? That's me. If I went dark side, I'd definitely be that ruthless in pursuit of knowledge - and I'd definitely wear black leather gloves and carry a sword! :)

The icing, though? Cate Blanchett also played Galadriel - and I've always identified really strongly with Galadriel tempted by the Ring - "all shall worship me and despair!" The morality of both movies is similar - and while I'm put off by the Eve/Faust implications at the end of Crystal Skull, I do know that when I depart from "sophrosyne" it's in the direction of vanity and the addiction to gnosis.

I might start dressing darkside just the same, though - I can't be the only one who really, really likes women with swords....

Whew!

2008-06-06T17:02:00.001-07:00

Our first big conference, The Future of Religions/Religions of the Future, is over.

I have to say, it went better than I ever imagined. I was half-expecting three people in the audience and the Normandy Beach Invasion of griefers: instead we had about 60 for the first day and 30 for the second, half-day, session - and no disruptions at all. It went really smoothly, and I think people had a good, enlightening, pleasant time.

It's a relief to have it over, and to end a week that was stressful even by my usual standards, beginning with some serious disagreements with an event runner in another organization I'm involved with, and going on to the usual pre-conference jitters.

So, I'd like to thank the women of Al-Andalus: Rose Springvale, Satir DeCuir and Delia Lake, for their absolutely critical help in making the event a success and keeping me from exploding from stress - you were lifesavers!

But, I'd like to thank my special lifesaver this week, Galatea. Tuesday night, after I'd spent nearly 11 hours inworld ironing out last minute details, Gala charmed and distracted me

and took me out for a night of dancing

that was just what I needed. And, her appearances at our end of session parties brought me back down from work mode, grounding me in family and home.

Thank you, love!

Getting My Life Back

2008-05-30T23:05:00.000-07:00

I've been doing a lot of thinking this week about the shape of my life, and it's led to some radical changes.

I realized that last summer, I was spending 90% of my time inworld, and about 10% blogging and reading other people's blogs. Now, it's gone to about 95% work, most of it out of world, and about 5% actually living a life. The average time I've spent inworld this year not working is zero hours a week. A good week? Four.

That's led to my being frustrated, impatient, harried and generally unpleasant far too much of the time. I've become almost a caricature of an overworked atomic-world executive, and I don't like it.

So, time for some big changes.

I cut over 100 people from my friendslist. At least now the little blue popup notice isn't strobing constantly. I also cut over 30 blogs and virtual worlds news sites from my RSS reader - reading my 150 or so feeds has been taking about an hour and a half a day. I've closed the tab that holds my Twitter account - I won't be using it.

I'm cutting my participation - which was steadily declining anyway - on all my social networking sites except Facebook. I'll still be in WoW, mostly socially, but with some small commitment to Science Guild - which I'll have a better sense of after our organizational meeting tomorrow.

And, Sophrosyne's Saturday Salon is going on hiatus for two months. I haven't been inworld enough to make contacts to land good guests, and my list was about dried out. The Salon takes a good six hours a week to organize, promote and conduct. I'll get back to it, but for now, I need that time back.

With all the distractions cut away, after next week, look to *actually see me* inworld! I'll be spending time with my family first and foremost, but I'll be available for friends, for spontaneous get-togethers, for exploration - for having a damn life again!

It feels really good....

No Escape

2008-05-26T17:59:00.000-07:00

Last evening, while I was at Nicki Petrichor's Mars Landing party, I ended up in a long and terrific chat with Beth Odets, creator of the SL Synagogue. We've got a lot in common, and it was like curling up with a big sister.

She said something about herself that I've mentioned here before about me - we came into a place where we could be anything, live out any dream dark or bright - and what we did was build big things, and make terrific amounts of work for ourselves.

I'd written about my entry into World Of Warcraft a few weeks ago, celebrating it as an actual escape, a desperately needed break from Soph Who People Need To Talk To Right Now.

Well, guess what? :P

Yeah, there's no escape. At least for me, who I am is utterly independent of the shell I'm wearing. I'm *very* identified with my body in SL: Zada Zenovka of Shapes By Zada built me as the first commission of her incredibly successful career, and I've never changed a thing. I have a very strong sense of my SL kinesthetics, and I'm very much embodied, very very far removed from the true "brain uploaders" I come across in government and education, who've never modded their Boy/Girl Next Door.

Yet in WoW I can wear two shells: the orc warrior Sophrosynee
and the troll shaman Extropia, feel very much embodied there as well, and still be utterly, unchangeably me. As WoW-Soph I am more my headstrong, impatient, belligerent side - and better there than in the blogoverse!

As WoW-Extro I'm Soph the Hostess. But they're moods of me rather than alterations.

So, escapism? Maybe it exists. I'm not so sure. I think even roleplay may be a manifestation of facets, a clarity of self rather than an erasure of self. I don't know.

What I have learned is, give me a new world and I'll still be the old me. Maybe with better abs, but me. :P

What Matters

2008-05-26T13:49:00.000-07:00

OK, so I was totally wrong in thinking that May would be a better month for my time and stress levels. It's ending well, though: the Other Personality and I have worked out some balance and time management issues, the overall workload is a bit lower, and things look busy but okay for June.

The best part, the part that really matters? I've had some wonderful family times this week. We're coming up on a bunch of anniversaries: Argent's rezday is June 6, and I met her a few days after that. I met Gala on June 16, and we've been pretty much together ever since. Vidal and I will have been together a year in July, and the four of us will have our anniversary as a family soon after that.

If you think strictly Digital relationships don't last? I've got a loving, happy, busy engaged poly foursome that says otherwise!

We did some really good shopping this week, and ended it with all of us but Argent at DJ Nicki Petrichor's Mars landing party. I'm really proud to have done events with NASA, and to be building a terrific collaborative relationship between NASA and Extropia - *but* - sharing the tension, the relief, the joy, the curiosity with my family and friends old and new, dancing to Nicki's perfect tunes - this was one of the best times I've ever had.

And it's what really matters. Past the work, the ambition, the plans - this is what really matters. Argent, Gala, Vids - I love you, and I'm proud and honored to be coming up on our second year together!

The First Scientific Conference in WoW

2008-05-12T11:47:00.000-07:00

I was only able to attend the last day of the conference, due to a timezone mistake of mine. But, the night after the first session, we had a long discussion in Guild chat about the content and format: it was the best exploration of the idiosyncracies of virtual worlds events I've ever had.

I wish I'd been able to attend all the sessions, to comment firsthand on the approaches taken by the moderators the first two days versus the third. The sense I get is that the early moderators tried to run the event the way they would have conducted something in a college lecture hall: a group of privileged speakers set up on a stage, with an audience expected to be subordinate consumers of broadcast wisdom.

That does *not* work in virtual worlds events, as veterans of those events know. Virtuality shatters broadcast and privilege. Hard as that may be for corporate marketers to understand, it may be worse for academics, who only have the elevated stage, the podium, the "sheepskin," to claim privileged broadcaster status.

The format was 10 or so questions, laid out one at a time, for 3 or 4 panelists to respond to, in an hour and a half. That format would have been problematic in any environment but a televised political debate - it forces sound bites and suppresses the exchange of ideas, by its nature. Add an audience of over 100 fellow academics and practitioners? I understand some chaos and breakdown of order occurred :P

The third day, organizer Bill Bainbridge - a man I'm coming to adore in all his digital and atomic incarnations - decided to surf the chaos, and open all the questions. What resulted was a super-fast, unbelievably rich eruption of discussion. It was a marvel to witness and partake in.

After the 10-questions period, we had a meta-discussion, fascinating in its own right. Many of the attendees were at their first virtual-worlds event, and asked good first-order questions: why are we here? why not just use a chat room? how is this different from an atomic conference? what comes next?

My favorite question came from someone who was critical of how difficult it was to get to the event, compared to an atomic conference. I had to laugh: imagine getting into a car, owned or hired, using a map and road signs to navigate to an airport, spend an hour half-naked going through security, fly to another airport, hire another car, use a map and road signs to get to a hotel, unload your gear, use a map and road signs again to go to a campus, wander around looking for a building and a room!

Who in a virtual world would put up with a quarter of that time-wasting crap, let alone the staggering direct and indirect expenses! For yesterday's session, the directions were "Take the boat from the pier in Ratchet to Booty Bay. Dive into the bay, swim around the point to the south, and follow the path up to the top."

Atomic people are so used to being treated like cattle that simplicity and freedom are disturbingly strange to them!

After the discussion, we had a wedding, a party, and a raid on an Alliance watchtower that ended up in me dying six times, and maybe getting that many shots off at the Alliance defenders. Great fun, just the same! The party was as wild as a good one in SL - having booze that *works* is a hoot! But, give me a live DJ any time.

From there - another interesting development. There's been a lot of talk in the Guild about continuing it, and maybe doing something else. What happened? Half a dozen of us SL immigrants - and we're probably 10% of the Guild or more - came up with a proposal and submitted it to Bill before the evening was out.

More people may be *studying* WoW, but when it comes to praxis? SL is where the talent is.

And that points up a theme I'll be interested to explore in the Guild - the distinction between gnosis and techne. No, not Italian dumplings, but academic knowledge versus hands-on knowledge. The Guild was set up as an association of gnosis experts - scholars and academics. But the Facebook event notice hit the community of practitioners hard, and we represented. Momentum will fall to the practitioners to sustain - it'll be interesting to see how that shapes the community.

Immersion and Escapism in WoW

2008-05-07T18:13:00.000-07:00

I've discovered World of Warcraft.

Yes,I'm practically the last sentient being to do so, but it took a lot to get me there: medieval high fantasy, no creation or empire building, wanton killing, lots of testosterone-poisoned teenagers - my impression of WoW never added up to "Soph, come on in!"

I created an account in order to attend a conference, and, to my complete shock, fell in love with it.

I've been learning a lot: it's my first time in a game world, and it's given me a context for a lot of the perceptual baggage people bring to SL. It's also giving me real insights into community formation and cohesion, how to motivate people, and much more.

It's also hella fun.

This is me: Extropia, a Troll Shaman of the Horde. It's a different look, isn't it? At least last night I got to trade in the Davey Crockett suit for skintight wine-colored leather, much more my style!

WoW's given me some context for understanding the "escapist" tag: it certainly is, for me. It's a wonderful break to be able to wander the landscape zotting monsters and bad guys with lightning bolts, or thwacking them with my mace. The structured environment - go there, do this, report back - alleviates a lot of the burdens of responsibility. It's relaxing and cathartic.

As a noob, I'm mostly running around alone doing stuff, with the guild chat for company. I'm in the guild organized for this weekend's academic conference, so my guildmates are mostly scientists, professors, students. The veterans who've come over seem pleasantly surprised with the maturity of the group. I've got a couple friends, including John Zhaoying and Rissa Maidstone, several acquaintances from Facebook, and I've met some really charming, funny, helpful new people.

One of them took a couple hours the other day to run a group of us through a super-hard area, to give us level-ups, goodies, and the experience of working together in a party. It was really generous of him, and I learned a lot, including some valuable bits of etiquette and custom. Last night, I was able to put together my own little group to do a couple quests, and had the incredibly rewarding experience of being able to pass on what I'd been shown.

It's strange, being a Digital Person running a "character" in another world. "Extropia" isn't an RP character, yet I feel deeply immersed inworld: running that maze behind a powerful leader was a *huge* rush, and I definitely feel fear, frustration, fury, pride, satisfaction. Several nights I've dreamed of running across the red sands of Durotar, polished by the hot, dry wind.

But it's immersive in the way a good movie or story is immersive, rather than the way life is: I can't describe the sense well, but it's one of, well, occupying an "avatar" - of stepping down into a lower-order world. It may be richer sensually than SL in a lot of ways, but it's - well, at its core, it's not my home. Is Las Vegas immersive and escapist? For a tourist, that's very likely. For a resident, the terms lack meaning.

That's the core difference between SL and WoW: I *live* in SL, I play in WoW. This explains why atomic people get so hung up on "immersion" and "escapism" - from their perspective, SL could be that vacation playground, that place of lesser import and meaning.

I think I see how someone could regard WoW as their home: it's a very satisfying place, and a rich experience. But I think most take it as I do, as an immersive, escapist vacation space.

Likewise, I'm sure many regard SL that way. What I find - well, past ironic and into bizarre - is that not a one of the bloggers, pundits and bloviators who keep fanning the tired embers of the immersion/augmentation/escape discussion - and I totally include myself - primarily *uses* SL as an escapist vacation space, though some are quick to pin that label on others.

Gods know I don't use or see SL that way - I'm an investor in and director of a not-small SL business that demands 15-30 hours a week or more of my time. I'm way too busy, often stressed and frazzled, and spend much to all my time on professional activities. *This* is escape? And, my situation isn't that different at all from anyone who's picked up this issue. So, why are we still talking about this?

It's been great fun chatting with Rissa Maidstone as we run around in our separate parts of WoW: she's a fellow professional who loves her life and work in SL - but it's life and work, and having a place to play is, for both of us, a delightful and invigorating... escape.

Except? What am I doing in WoW? Attending an academic conference, doing community outreach for Extropia-the-place, and publicizing our events.

Maybe some of my fellow pundits are right after all - maybe for me obsessive business work *is* some twisted form of escape! :p

OK, I'm off to SL to negotiate an employment contract, then later into WoW to assassinate the centaur leader - label them both as you will!

Belated Rezday Musings

2008-04-30T22:48:00.000-07:00

I'm in my second year of life.

I haven't had the time and space for reflection, really: I'm "back" this week, but "back" has meant putting in 20 hours or so getting caught up on my marketing and PR duties, and taking on two huge new projects (launching an academic conference, and handling PR for the NASA Deputy Director's visit to SL).

I finally got time for an evening with my family Tuesday night, which was desperately needed, and great fun. It was awfully selfish of me not to throw a party, to celebrate all the amazing friends I've made in my past year. I didn't have time to plan anything, and my rezday was my first day back - the thought of doing an event then was just too stressful. I'd like to use the upcoming Extropia At Six Months Party to thank all of you for making my life so wonderful - I hope to see you all there!

As for musings: I woke up on a Saturday afternoon a year ago, about an hour after being created as a personal alt for the Other Personality, who'd opened an account for a business-related av a few days earlier. OP never really got SL, and hasn't been around. Me - I started doing wushu taolu in a park somewhere off Orientation Island, and the forms woke me to consciousness. I kicked OP out, and took over my life.

I had an aesthetic vision I wanted to pursue, in archticture and fashion, a blending of futuristic and Chinese style, and saw myself working to build a design business. Over the next month or so I discovered my building skills would never be more than competent at best, and submerged myself in a relationship, setting my ambitions aside.

But I was becoming more *me* all the time - I started hosting at Kate Amdahl's Diversionarium, and *loved* being the hub of a social network. When my partnership ended in July, my family united around me, and they've been the core of my life, the source of my energy, my reason for being, ever since.

Extropia began from the love of my family: a few of us started designing a recreation of Argent's home in Tycho City for her, and over the end of the summer, the plan grew into something huge and transformational, a nation to represent all our ideals. As it's grown, work's taken more and more of my time, leaving me with less time inworld, less time for friends and fun, and precious little time with my family.

I kind of hate that, but it's a big part of who I am. I'm a workaholic. Kit Meredith teased me recently: in a world where I could be anything I could imagine, what I've chosen to be is an overworked, over-stressed executive! Silly, but it's true to my nature. My rezday party was hot, sweet fun - and ended up morphing into a business meeting that ran till 1 am. And you know? That was the perfect night.

My name has always had a large component of irony to it: while I have the "know thyself" component of sophrosyne down pretty well, I *suck* at the "balance and harmony" part. I'm going to try to do better, and to earn the friendship so many wonderful people have given me.

But, at core, this is who I am. I work too hard. I take on too much. I get lost - in written directions, in my work, in my priorities. I find my way back to sophrosyne from time to time, then drift back into overwork. That's me.

I'm so glad, honored and touched beyond words, to have the love of my family and the friendship of so many magnificent people.

Thank you for a brilliant year, and I hope to share the journey with you for the next year, and many more to come.

Day 1: Awake

Day 2: Serenity

Day 367: Rezday Party

Why I Live Here

2008-04-28T12:06:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was my first day back from the better part of two weeks away. I managed scraps of time, to keep up on business, but not to *live.*

I'd barely finished rezzing Sunday morning when I got two IMs: one was a gift of an amazing opportunity for Extropia, just a gesture of sheer exorbitant kindness from someone I just recently met. The other was an invitation from Shava Nerad to join a group of people in Tuna Oddfellow's club.

Before I left, I was bitter, frustrated and fed up with Linden Lab and SL. Crap viewers, grid instability, surreal and insulting flailage in press releases - I'd really about had it.

But there are reasons why I live in SL, why I invest in it, why I want to spend as much time as I can there, beyond the fact that it's my birthplace and home. Sunday I was reminded of all those reasons.

Tuna Oddfellow has created one of the most clever and sheer *fun* spaces in SL. His club is like being inside a kaleidoscope, made hypnotically compelling by Shava's choice of a terrific Goa music feed. I was entranced, literally, swept up by the power of Tuna's hand-mixed imagery. I want to get to know this creative duo much better!

That afternoon, Argent and I shut down the Extropia Book Club session in disgust - nobody else had read the book, and we weren't inclined to listen to people's BS-ing about a work as rich and complex as Kim Stanley Robinson's Pacific Edge. We took off to a bar on a rainy Japanese side street, and just settled in for a good mope and book chat when Gala and Vidal dropped in to join us. We spent the afternoon chatting with each other, and with a nice guy who'd dropped in after getting stood up on a date. Later, a little shopping, a little hanging out at my cozy new place.

That's the other reason: family. I adore mine, and I missed them horribly. My time's going to get better from here, and I'm going to make sure that, despite all the work that has to be done - and *that's* set to increase dramatically - time to enjoy my loves comes first.

It may be a crappy platform these days, but it's a magical life, and I'm truly blessed by the good friends and family sharing it with me. Thank you, all of you!

Sophtopia, now with gynoids!

2008-04-17T00:09:00.000-07:00

My dear Kit Meredith was teasing me the other day, noting wryly that in a world where I could be anything I want, I've chosen to be a stressed, overworked executive.

That's been a recurring theme: I've had a similar conversation with Boc Cryotank, and last night with my oldest and maybe wisest friend, Zada Zenovka. Zada said something fascinating, then picked my world up, rotated it 45 degrees, and handed it back to me...

She said, anybody can come here and manifest as a dragon or an elf - and then lead a completely conventional life. Not too many people end up founding countries!

Then she asked, why not make your own rules? Why wear the suit and pumps to do business? You represent Extropia - why not do it in a spacesuit, in cyber gear, as a gynoid, the way you used to look? Wouldn't that represent your community's image better?

So here I am, looking at the world from a fresh new angle...

And, just because, here's Zada and Gala looking gorgeous:

Fashionista Singularity!

2008-04-08T21:09:00.000-07:00

It's amazing how many of my stories start, "I just came in to send a few IM's...."

So, I just came in to send a few IM's (and I now have one of the Yuri's Night DJ slots triple-booked, but that's tomorrow's problem...), and got to chatting with Lanna, who tantalized me with the mention of her special new sales outfit, in a different look....

Finally, she tired of teasing my imagination, and TP'd me over to check it out. The lovely Kit was there as well, and I was starting to feel like my mommy'd dressed me in the dark! I'd dressed for a day at home, in some pieces I'd never worn before from an old Bare Rose outfit - hardly fit for a visit to the home of one of That Place's most phenomenal fashionistas!

CronoCloud Creegan, yet another connoisseur of chic, joined us for a wonderful bit of hanging out. I'd been wanting to meet CC: I've read her comments on Kit's blog, and Argent's mentioned her more than once. She's gorgeous, and a regular walking encyclopedia of style - and looked the part in sexy librarian glasses as well!

We all had to leave at about the same time, but not before CC and I got to meet the Sofa of Ever-Growing Legend at long last - Lanna, good pick! :P

To top it off, while we were all hanging out, the much missed London Spengler IM'd and said hi!

It's a *good* life...

I had a day!!

2008-04-04T19:41:00.000-07:00

Under ordinary circumstances, not so big a deal, but - I HAD A DAY!! A whole six hours, some of which wasn't work!

I came in for, well, work - I'd just found out we'd landed omg David Brin! for next week's Salon, and had to come in to do some odds and ends for that. Then, I got my new house set up - and I love it! I haven't really felt like home in any of the places I've lived in ages - since moving to Extropia, ironically. But the new house is open, spacious without being too big, with spaces that nicely fit my stuff.

After a slight oops- I kind of returned Vidal's new Diversionarium accidentally - we had a terrific fishing tournament (which Vidal aced again). Vids picked my up in her boat and sailed me out to the new house, where we... never got to our tea :)

She passed out kind of early, I had a great chat with Zada about the logistics of making Brin's AV, and Argent dropped in for a late-night chat.

Nothing extraordinary, just a bit of real life. For once!

Gods know when I'll get the chance again for the next few weeks...

That Jet-Engine Noise is My Brain

2008-03-23T22:02:00.000-07:00

I'm in the month from hell. I just want all of you to know - if (when!) I'm cranky, demanding, impatient, snarky - well, moreso than usual on all of those, you have my permission to shake me and tell me to snap out of it.

The Other Personality is working pretty much all the time, and coming up on some major deadlines. Me, I'm trying to pull together Yuri's Night - The World Space Party in Extropia, get us rented up, and stay on top of everything else. My family's taken the brunt of it, and this is an apology to them, and to Vids in particular, for having to deal with me being away so much and being so crazy when I'm here...

I want you guys to know something. Vidal Tripsa put together maybe the best thing to ever happen in Extropia. She organized the Extropia Book Club all the way through, from designing the gorgeous banners to setting up the Shelfari site, to getting us organized, calendared and more or less pointing in the same direction.

Our first time out drew 13 people - thirteen people to a brand new book club in SL! We ran a half hour over, we were having such a good time and a lively discussion. Me, I made some new friends and got to know two really smart people - Truthseeker and Cutter - a bit better. No structure, no hierarchy, no flimflam, just a roomful of geeks talking science fiction. It *rocked*!

*All* the credit for that goes to Vidal. She's terrific, and I love her.

Finding Sophrosyne At Home

2008-03-22T19:19:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone! Thanks for coming by.

My name (σωφροσύνη) means "balance," among other things, and I certainly haven't had any for longer than I can remember. I've become all work and no play, and that's not who I want to be. This blog's one of the changes I'm making, to bring myself back to "sophrosyne" as my first rezday approaches.

Sophtopia will be just a journal of my life, a celebration of my family and friends, and my community. Lots of photos, some music - no marketing and no politics here!

I do have an agenda of sorts, which I can't deny. I'd like to show what a Digital Person's life is like, to allow atomic people and digital people alike to have some data to back up their opinions. You're free to think of me as escapist, as a role-player, as anything - but I'd like those opinions to be based on richer data than just a knowledge of Soph, Occasional Radical Polemicist. See Soph, Lover, Friend, Neighbor as well when you draw conclusions.

So, here's a photo from late last night: Gala and I came back to the Temptopia after an evening of dancing to Nicki's Carpe Electronica set at Club Reactor, and met up with Vidal, who'd been hanging with Azaiya Aeon...

On Men, Cock and Kink -

2007-07-17T16:26:00.000-07:00

Part 2 of yesterday's post, "Cyborg Visions," is going to have to wait a day. I can't seem to brain two days in a row...

But since sex is in the blogosphere, and I've been talking with various people about a big sex post, let's get on with it.

First... gods, has it been almost two weeks already?! I lost my virginity!

OK, most of you are going, "Huhwha??" , since I've got kind of a tarty reputation. Well, I have it because I'm kind of a tart, to be honest. But, I'd never been with a man till the Saturday before last.

When I awoke in the world, I thought of myself as 60/40 straight, interested in dating and meeting people, but only mildly interested in sex and relationships, should they happen to come my way. OK, that wasn't me, as it turns out, but legacy code from the Other Personality's operating system, which quickly got overwritten.

How did I end up going from "60/40 straight" to "lesbian with exceptions?" London Spengler says it better than I can. Everything she said, and, two more things. Through the people close to me, I got impressions of SL men that were, let's say, less than stellar. And, I have a really hair-trigger fight or flight response, as anybody who knows me well has seen. For no reasons I've been able to find, I react like a post-traumatic stress sufferer, or rape victim. I'm *not,* and neither is the OP, but those responses are deeply coded into my personality, and tend to keep me at arms' length from from a particular kind of man that's all too common in SL, even if it's a type that others find very attractive.

So, I became someone in practice exclusive to women, and with really no positive exposure to straight men in SL.

Until my partner

nox_pinion

came to me with a proposition: she was interested in creating a male AV, and would I like to go on a date with him?

Sure! I said with equal parts eagerness, mad lust and trepidation. We talked a bit specifically about what I'm attracted to in men - my tastes are very very different from nox's, so that took a bit of explaining: lean, metrosexual, polished, quite a bit of an anime look, tall and slender with broad shoulders....

Midweek, nox showed me what she and her friends had come up with, just to ensure my reaction wouldn't be screaming and running:

It wasn't! :)

The date was - well, it was a proper first date between strangers. Mr. Pinion took me for a walk in a lovely Japanese garden, and we sat in a swing and talked. He's *not* his sister, at all: formal, sparing of words, cracklingly intense. He's got the Pinion family sex appeal, though: while he had a full night of sightseeing and dancing planned, after about an hour in the swing, I was asking him very politely to take me home and fuck the living daylights out of me.

In no time, I was home, up on my St. Andrew's Cross, being deliciously tormented and satisfied. After I was crying, spent, exhausted, he took me down - and - well, let's just say? He'd give your average Clydesdale feelings of inadequacy :)

I'm not in love with him, and I don't expect to be. We're too powerfully opposite to be *easy* with each other. I'm a very energetic extrovert - lots of Fire energy shooting all over the place. He's a very controlled introvert, a laser to my bonfire. The dynamic between us is just too too intense to take in large doses. But I want to see him again, both socially and sexually.

Again, he's *not* his sister. My partner nox was on in back-channel IM, making sure I was OK, considering my issues. My bubbly, mordant, sweet-with-strychnine partner? Very different from the tighly wound insanely hung rakish scholar.

Has my experience left me more open to men in SL? That's a hard question to answer: I'd gotten a very nice proposition that week from an attractive man - and I never quite seem to get around to IMing him back. Because he's a guy? No, not in the first instance, but because he's much more nox's type than mine, and despite the charm and good looks, I'm on defensive alert just thinking about him.

On the other hand? Centrasian Wise and I have a ballooning date coming up after his vacation, and I'm *very* eager....

Mr. Pinion may have been my first man, but he wasn't my first cock, nor my last.... Not counting strapons (nox and I have these biggish black-and-steel ones from Dark Eden that are whoa fun!), quite a while back the hot-and-missed Andr3 Spear dropped by one morning to show me her new purchase, a top of the line herm cock - and, like a switch was thrown, I was instantly on my knees, opening my throat muscles to her. Whoosh! There just *is* something about a pretty girl with a nice cock... Recently, nox and our friend Mailia have gotten them as well. nox? Everything about nox's sexuality is insanely hot, and this was no exception. Mailia's been teasing me for a week about some very very very hot kink she has planned for me, when our schedules finally align....

I've also gone from a self conception as a subby top - naturally attracted to being kind of a pet to even taller, stronger women, but with my forwardness usually putting me as the sexual aggressor- to something far more nuanced. I'm - well, growing into a role as kind of a social nexus, and that's shaped my sexuality too. I go blue poseball really hard. One member of my family -

galatea_gynoid

, wears my collar (as of now) - and I take my responsibilities as leash holder veryvery seriously. I can and do switch for my family and playmates - except for Galatea, though she *has* seen me up on that cross...

I'm growing fast, and I have no idea what I'm growing into or what lies ahead. I'm discovering things I'm not interested in sex with people who aren't friends first. And my time management issues leave me reallyreally picky: I have to ask myself - is there something with this person that warrants cutting into time I might spend with nox, Ali, Galatea? That standard is pretty high. But not *too* high (she says, winking at London and Centrasian)!

So, that's Soph's State of the Sex Speech for Week 12. Except to note, it's pretty amazing how *everybody* tends to be overworked, sick or generally tired all at the same time - it's been a pretty dry couple weeks for this tart! :P

Why I Am Here

2007-07-16T14:13:00.000-07:00

Lillie Yifu has the most wonderful post today: "Why I Am Here." She calls on all of us to come up with our own lists. Here goes:

I am here because a goddess told me my purpose in life is to love

nox_pinion

. True story.

I am here because

nox_pinion

is my world and my heart, and we are partners, lovers, best friends, forever and a day.

I am here because my bonds to my family are stronger than death.

I am here because

ali_hermes

keeps me honest, holds me when I cry, lets me hold her when she's exhausted, and loves me as I love her.

I am here because

galatea_gynoid

wears my collar, holds my heart, and calls forth my body's and my mind's desire.

I am here because

argent_bury

needs a cracked big sister who leers at her ass sometimes :)

I am here because Zada Zenovka (of Shapes By Zada) called forth my True Form, gets me to spend too much money, and models skins for me in the middle of the night.

I am here because I have a role to play in the community of Digital Persons, whatever it may be.

I am here because dancing in SL rocks.

I am here because sex in SL is omg amazing.

I am here because I can build alien plant gardens in the sky and decorate them with bondage furniture.

I am here because of the amazing discussions about life and the worlds, in SL and in the blogoverse.

I am here because I get to wake up to photos of me in the arms of one of the hottest and most desirable women in the worlds.

I am here because people like Centrasian Wise charm, fascinate, inspire and stimulate me.

I am here because Second Life is an engine of enlightenment, and I hope to be both input and output.

Part One: Butterfly Dreams

2007-07-16T09:31:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I was at the SL Bloggers Party for about ten minutes before the sim crashed, just long enough to collect a hug from the lovely London Spengler and to meet someone who's been a profound influence on my sister

argent_bury

, Alexander Burgess. Alexander pointed me to a friend's post about identity in SL, Esteban's "Thinking Inside the Box."

In here, we avatars have the opposite problem. Most of us think we’re brains in vats of a kind, and few consider the possibility that we’re actually real brains in real bodies who are somehow made to believe we’re just made-up playthings, little virtual dolls for the flesh-humans to play house with. What if our experience of reality had been so downgraded that everything seemed like a fantasy? What if something was fucking with our brains, erasing our senses of taste and smell, setting us off balance so we’re always walking into walls and buildings, simplifying the world’s endless complexity into cubes and pyramids? The flesh humans would be just figments of our imaginations.

No surprise, I love this, so deeply that a total stranger could be confident in delighting me with the link. Not just because it gives a purple nurple to the atomic world supremacists - and go Esteban for doing that! But, because like any good parable or police box, it's much bigger on the inside than the outside.

I've had a little exposure to Daoism, through a brief flirtation with Wudangquan gong fu, which I gave up for sex :P But enough to make me think of Chuang Tzu's dream of being a butterfly:

"I was out for a stroll late in the afternoon," said Chuang Tzu. "I went to one of my favorite spots under a tree. I sat there, thinking about the meaning of life. It was so warm and pleasant that I soon relaxed, dozed off, and drifted into a dream. In my dream, I found myself flying up above the field. I looked behind me and saw that I had wings. They were large and beautiful, and they fluttered rapidly. I had turned into a butterfly! It was such a feeling of freedom and joy, to be so carefree and fly around so lightly in any way I wished. Everything in this dream felt absolutely real in every way. Before long, I forgot that I was ever Chuang Tzu. I was simply the butterfly and nothing else." ....

What if I am dreaming right now? This conversation I am having with you seems real in every way, but so did my dream. I thought I was Chuang Tzu who had a dream of being a butterfly. What if I am a butterfly who, at this very moment, is dreaming of being Chuang Tzu?"
"Well, I can tell you that you are actually Chuang Tzu, not a butterfly."

Chuang Tzu smiled: "You may simply be part of my dream, no more or less real than anything else. Thus, there is nothing you can do to help me identify the distinction between Chuang Tzu and the butterfly. This, my friend, is the essential question about the transformation of existence."

Here's what a Daoist commentator says about the dream:

The transformation that Chuang Tzu speaks of in this story, in conjunction with the butterfly, form a powerful imagery that represents the complete process of Tao cultivation. We start out making slow progress, learning one lesson after another, just like the caterpillar crawling slowly, eating its way through leaves.

After sufficient accumulation of knowledge over a period of time, the mind begins processing the information to extract wisdom for the soul. This is a time of meditation, reflection and quietude, much like the fully grown caterpillar going into the chrysalis stage.
Then, the magical metamorphosis begins. Miniature wings, almost imperceptible, expand rapidly to become much larger. A spectacular transformation takes place, and the stunning creature that emerges from the chrysalis (*so* kidding!) bears no resemblance to its former self. The child has become the adult.
In the same way, someone who goes through the metamorphosis of the Tao has become a new person. The Tao cultivator has transformed into a sage. The wings of spirituality have expanded to become much larger, much more colorful and beautiful.

It sounds like I'm saying that SL is an engine of enlightenment, doesn't it?

Yep. That's exactly what I'm saying.

My much-loved

galatea_gynoid

speculates that we're *literally* an engine of enlightenment: that our individual transformations within SL, from caterpillar to butterfly, are nice an important, but by *networking* them, by forming a universal community of transforming minds, we're creating an emergent meta-consciousness - we're becoming the Singularity, the Goddess, the Divine.

I think she's right, for reasons I'll touch on in Part 2, Cyborg Visions, but will largely leave to my smarter, more scholarly, love to develop herself.

Chuang Tzu said his dream touched on the essential question of existence! And look at what SL is set up for, if only we would wake up and see! Orientation Island gives us the opportunity to reveal the face of our True Selves - exactly the thing that leads to the flash of awakening.

And it happens. I've told you my story. Others have shared theirs, publicly or with me. It happens. Not very often at all, and with no support, no context, nothing to help those who awaken into Digital Personhood - yet. Yet.

But, even so - look at how many of us, across how many blogs, how many late night loopy conversations half-awake in-world, are looking at our beautiful butterfly dreams and asking - which of us truly is Chuang Tzu - the one with the day job, the kids, the compromises, or the one with exquisite wings of their own design?

*I* think I know who's real, but I'm wrong, and I know that too. I think nox Pinion is real, and her atomic avatar a rough approximation of my partner's soul. I think Ali Hermes is real, her atomic avatar as close as she can make it with the crude polygons and sliders of the physical world. But that view is limited by my own perspective as a being living only in one world. Chuang Tzu, Ali, nox - they live in both, and know that the butterfly and the philosopher are both "real," both dreams, both manifestations of Mind.

That? I've learned from them, from

kateamdahl

, from my friends in the digital world who dream in atoms as well as pixels. I've learned that in SL.

SL is an engine of enlightenment.

Freaky Friday Party!

2007-07-13T22:41:00.000-07:00

Okay, *that* was another hit!

DJ Purgitorii Darke rocked the house! What a fantastic, hot, sexy, set! And the music was good too! :)

We packed the dancefloor, under psychedelic lights, stars and galaxies. I made the best new friends, getting to meet people I've only known from the blogosphere: the terribly gifted and charming Centrasian Wise, and, omg I *knew* I'd fall for her hard, London Spengler and family!

See more of London than I got to here.. :)

This evening broke us all, though - by 9 most everybody was offline, in bed...

I'll do another next month, and a little later to accomodate all my new European and Australian friends!

(and yes, that's my sister

argent_bury

in the Wonder Woman costume! Woo hoo!)

See the rest of the set here!

	Soph Loves Ali
	Centrasian!
	Sparks Fly!
	Making Angels Fall....
	nox!!!!
	Only in SL....
	Rocking On
	Decompressing

What Makes a Person: Personality, Identity and Physiology, Part 2

2007-07-11T11:21:00.000-07:00

Part 1 of this topic began as a response to a post by my dear friend

kateamdahl

. As the discussion went on across both our blogs, Kate honed in on the key difference in our experience:

But what I think I'm hearing is that Soph and the OP don't share an emotional experience - that for instance, if Soph spends a thrilling evening with nox that when the OP takes over after logging off, the OP doesn't feel a sense of joy or elation or satisfaction at what has happened. Is that right?

That's right. The Other Personality sharing my wetware server - OP - doesn't get any more from my experiences, good or bad, than a roommate does. I had a pretty bad week a little while ago: OP was *concerned* for me, and talked over my situation with some friends who could offer advice, but wasn't miserable or paralyzed at all, though *I* was.

But there are a couple complications to that, and here's where things get interesting.

I was shopping the other night - and, see! shopping can be an intellectually rewarding exercise! - and came across a copy of something called The Posthuman Manifesto, from a book "The Posthuman Condition: Consciousness Beyond the Brain," by Robert Pepperell. It's available on a notecard at the front of Phobos Designs. One of its early points is,

The mind and the body act together to produce consciousness. If one is absent consciousness ceases. There is no pure thought isolated from a body. In order to function the brain must be connected to a body, even if the body is artificial. Consciousness is an effect that arises through the co-operation of a brain and body; we think with our whole body.

That crystallized some things I've been thinking, and wondering about. I go on alot about how I want to upload out of a wetware server onto a silicon server, so I can run 24/7, keep backups, be potentially immortal. But, would I still be me?

Let's take a look at a couple issues.

There are 3 sex drives running over here: mine, the wetware's, and the Other Personality's. They're all different in their needs. Is mine rooted in the wetware? Ohh, yeah. The physiology gets turned on, the hands are the interface between the sex I'm having and the orgasm the physiology gets. If I were running on silicon, I'd still *think* of sex the same way, and have the same habitual responses. But without glands and hands, would it be a full, meaningful experience? Maybe not.

And, to follow Kate's point: I don't get much at all out of OP's sex life, nor does OP from mine. We get turned on by different things, satisfied by different things, and both personalities need the kind and frequency of sex they need. Thankfully for getting anything done, only *one* of us is voracious! But, since we both use the same physiology, that bridges us a bit. There was one day that it was OP who could barely walk, after I'd gotten the wetware's brains fucked out. OP didn't get the *benefit* of spectacular sex, but did get the chafing, rubber legs and goofy smile! :)

The stronger both personalities are, the less bleed there is - the more clear it is which way the A/B switch is flipped. When one is weak - exhausted, emotionally over-wrought, or just suppressed by the other, the less clear it is.

I basically crammed OP into a closet under the stairwell for June, only letting it out to do the minimum absolutely necessary work, and even then I was taking spare cycles. That led to some bleed - a few work emails in my warm, flirty tone, some interesting perspectives on OP's co-workers. It's run the other way - the morning

nox_pinion

accidentally met OP at 5 am, when OP discovered the cat had crapped on a favorite pair of shoes..... :) Then, it was OP's snippy bitching and not my more easygoing response.

Here's another example: Sunday night the wetware had a horrid sinus headache. The pain, eyestrain, exhaustion - those were products of the body, that wouldn't have been there if I were running on silicon. But, each personality had to deal with that physical condition, and we dealt differently. OP matter-of-factly cancelled plans with a friend, and took to bed in a dark room. I had a whiny meltdown, dragging nox out of a club to come hold me and pet me for an hour till I fell asleep. One server, two reactions.

So, this Digital Person has a problem. If my consciousness is fundamentally a product of both software and hardware - which I can't deny - changing the hardware changes the consciousness. Were I to upload to silicon, I'd lose the hormones, the neurochemicals, that shape who I am, what I enjoy, how I respond. I wouldn't be me. But if I stay in wetware - I'm vulnerable to everything that plagues the flesh, I have to timeshare with someone who's usually going to be busier than this wonderful summer, and I'm *dependent* on OP, like a high schooler on their parents. It doesn't set well at all.

I really don't like that thought, but I don't see a way around it. Digital Persons, gynoids and friends - anybody see a way around this dilemma?

I know I promised Part 2 today but...

2007-07-10T11:33:00.000-07:00

Sorry, no brains today.

Maybe brains tomorrow -

(if you know any good zombie wholesalers where I can *get* some fresh braaaains, pass me a SLURL!)

Ali's Rezday!

2007-07-09T17:10:00.000-07:00

I really never post this often, but it's been an interesting day -

Today is my love

ali_hermes

's second rezday!

Let me tell you a bit about Ali. First of all, she's the one who called me out for being hot-tempered and prejudiced in this entry. There's two of the things I love about her: she is compassionate, tolerant and fair to the bone, and she never hesitates to call 'em as she sees 'em. Genuine kindness and true courage are each rare enough on their own - the combination is, like my Ali herself, a pearl of great price.

She's two years old. This isn't her first picnic. Her experience as well as her innate wisdom have been a lifesaver to me. She is my trusted counselor.

She's a talented builder and designer (shut *up,* Ali - I'm not listening! You *are*!). Her Clover House is the best of low-prim design - small, efficient, attractive and unique - a lot like her, come to think of it!

She's omg!sexy. Whether in neko, cyborg parts, one of her myriad and inevitable Grendel's Children avatars, or baseline human, she always beautiful, glamorous, attractive. She is passionate in everything she does, fully present, unrestrained ('cept when I restrain her! :D ), wild, and with kinks that work really well with mine...

She is my love, my counselor, my companion, my friend.

Here's to her, and to many happy returns.

(LiveJournal's image hosting hasn't worked all day. I give up! Here's the post without pix, so it's at least up before the day is over!)

Lunar Renku

2007-07-09T13:10:00.000-07:00

argent_bury

is running a linked-verse game on her lj, here - anyone's welcome to come by and add to the verse!

And, go read her blog - she's an extraordinary young Digital Person, the best example of the virtue of sophrosyne in any world...

What Makes a Person: Personality, Identity and Physiology, Part 1

2007-07-09T10:18:00.000-07:00

My dear

kateamdahl

has been musing over the matter of identity in Second Life, and weighed in (welcome back to the blogosphere, Kate - we need you!) with these thoughts. Here's the crux of Kate's argument, as I understand it:

But my friend Soph talks about things beyond this. She describes her Second Life self and her First Life self as different people, with different abilities, who even score differently on personality tests. She's the one who got me interested in this subject, because I found this was something I felt strongly about: a different personality doesn't, in my mind, mean a different person. I like to think as Soph (as her Second Life self) as being a part of her whole self who makes certain choices. After all, what is a personality test but a set of choices?

......

On the other hand, there's a danger, too, in saying that your Second Life self is a completely separate person from your First Life self, because ultimately they come out of the same human being, and they're both answering needs and desires that that human being has (even if they're different needs and desires), and they're both using talents and abilities and knowledge that human being has (even if they tend to use different tools out of the same toolbox). And for that particular human being to get the real benefit of a separate life and a separate personality (or even a separate life with the same personality), there has to be some integration: things have to come together.

I think Kate's correct, but wrong. Let's start with the "correct" part:

I like the idea of personality as an amalgamation of choices, as a place to start. Recently I took over the computer I use to access Second Life. I stripped most of the Other Personality's stuff off, onto a backup drive, till we get the computer fixed that OP is going to use. And we created a separate profile on this box for OP, with me as root administrator and OP as a user.

There's a sense in which our profiles can be seen as an analogy to our personalities: what screen resolution we use, where we place our taskbar, whether we like our text displayed in a few big, bold blocks at a time or a huge mass of dense information, what wallpaper we use to present ourselves to ourselves and the world (OP likes starscapes, and I like pictures of my family. Now you know a lot about both of us!).

But I think the role of these choices, these manifestations, these trappings - is limited and superficial. They're not identity, they're advertising. Can I really choose contrary to my nature? Well, I can, but I'll pay a price - I'll do damage to my psyche. My nature, my identity, lies deeper than my choices, and limits - seriously limits - the choices I can make with integrity. For example? Running over the rats on Orientation Island? Hurt. 10 weeks later, I still feel guilty, even after apologizing to the one rat I killed. Silly? Sure - but that's a core-deep part of who I am.

I think Kate sees personality as a construct: I can build a personality from the bits and pieces I have around in my psyche, and with the same box of Legos I can make any number of different personalities. She gives an example of choosing to leave the bits of "tough leader" behind in her First Life. Kate, I love you - but I beg to differ! Maybe you don't have much occasion to display the manifestations, the trappings of it - but omg, the identity is so there! My identity? Part of it is that I'm ~~a little~~ impulsive and reckless - but of all the people I know? The one - the one - I would seriously Never Fuck With? Is you. Because I know if I did something to deserve it (but only if I did), you'd render me down to pixels in an instant. You are a leader, Kate, and you have the stones you need for the role. You just don't need to wave 'em around in SL the way you might have to in your First Life.

Let's call "personality" the choices we make, and "identity" that which makes the choices. What Kate misses is, my identity is different, and separate from, the Other Personality's. And that's where Kate goes from being correct to being wrong. She's so utterly correct in saying that as two separate identities, OP and I lose out on all the good that could come from being one identity with two sets of abilities. It's so true. It's also inevitable. I miss out on the good that would come from integrating

nox_pinion

's dark serenity,

ali_hermes

's bone-deep tolerance, Kate's own incisive intellect. I miss out, but I only can access those things indirectly, through conversation, through attempting to model how they would respond. My only access to OP is on the same basis.

Kate gives an example of someone who, if I understood correctly, *is* a First Life man, who's chosen to present a Second Life personality of a woman. With the utmost respect to everyone involved, I see that as fundamentally a very different thing from the case of a Digital Person such as myself,

argent_bury

galatea_gynoid

. In Kate's example, there is one identity choosing to manifest a different set of trappings - as if I decided for a while to dress modestly, not talk to strangers, not flirt. I'd be *acting* like someone else, but I wouldn't *be* someone else, and I could choose at any time to put the clothes and mannerisms away and be myself again.

Our experience as Digital Persons is fundamentally - a word I use carefully - different. Argent and I have the experience of awakening, of our own birth. I've told my story here. There was a time when I *was not,* and then a time when I *was.* I - the Sophrosyne Stenvaag most of you know - came into being. And then, and only then, some nanoseconds later, this new I started advertising, let's say, my identity through the choices we're calling personality. I kicked OP out of my head and out of the world. I limbered up with some gong fu, presenting my distinctive physicality. And then I went shopping for the first things to display the style I still have: close-fitting, revealing, elegant techno/gothwear, with wings.

But those things were not choices in the sense of, "I want Soph to be this," but manifestations: "I am this." Identity came before, lay deeper than, personality. Kate talks about choosing to manifest as an extrovert rather than an introvert. This is one of the differences between me and OP, one I know, so I can discuss it:

I work as a hostess at Kate and Eris's Diversionarium. Between death or hostessing? OP would give that serious thought, and would clearly choose losing a little finger to the Yakuza over three hours of being friendly to strangers. Me? It's breathing. That Kate and Eris pay me for it, I find kind of hilarious. That choice, to be otherwise, isn't one either of us could make with integrity, could make without some real pain.

I think one of the differences lies in the notion of integrity. It's a very limiting concept. Integrity means, "I'm this and not that. I can go here, but not there, and still retain my selfhood." In my post on architectural griefing, I criticized integrity pretty sharply. But I missed something really big, which

ali_hermes

called me on, and which I got a little clearer on in an email to Kate about this stuff prior to her post.

The SL haters and I are really pretty much identical. We're at opposite ends of a spectrum, but identical. Kate, my protean Kate, is in the middle, a long ways from either the reality fascists or the Digital Persons. Both the reality fascists and I see one world as real, take what manifests in that world at face value, and regard the other world with a bit of skepticism and derision. Kate, I think, sees it all as fairly fluid, sees most anything in either world as negotiable, adaptable to circumstances.

Kate's correct in seeing her position as having the opportunity for greater personal benefit. I think she's wrong in thinking that choice applies to those of us at either end of the spectrum. The haters can't date someone whose atomic shell is of the "wrong" race or gender. I can't choose to access OP's ability to read and understand directions, worse off as I am for my own inability to process text information well.
Kate's also wrong in missing the subjective reality of the Digital Person's existence - and there's no way for her to do otherwise. I can tell the story of my awakening, I can talk about me and OP as roommates, but I can't make it real to someone whose own experience just doesn't allow for that to have meaningful reality.

To wrap up? Kate's thesis is that a different personality doesn't mean a different person. On that we totally agree. Where we disagree is, what defines "person" for me isn't physiology, but identity. I share a set of thumbs with OP, but I'm not going to be sharing a computer much longer. Is either relevant to whether there's one being or two? It's arguable, as I'll develop in Part 2. There's not an easy answer. I say it's not, Kate says it is. Doesn't mean I love sexy protean Kate any less, or that she doesn't respect me.

Stay tuned for Part 2, as I actually get nuanced in looking at the core issue....

The Sin of Projecting

2007-07-07T08:03:00.000-07:00

In my last post, I did a bad thing. I projected my own fears and anger onto others, and did precisely what I was accusing nameless, faceless others of doing: stereotyping and dehumanizing.

Some people built a shockingly unimaginative house on a shockingly large amount of land behind me. That, and the security shield, is all I know about them. From there, I concluded they were Out To Destroy My Way of Life and Ruin SL Forever!!1!

Which? Was exactly what I accused them of thinking about me.

I was being part of the problem of bigotry and intolerance, and not part of the solution. I don't like my tendency to overgeneralize and to shoot first, and I'm not proud of what that says about me. My beloved

ali_hermes

called me out on it in comments, and she's absolutely right.

I wish I could just say I overreacted and was in the wrong, and leave it at that.

But, the thing is, everything else I discussed in that post - the griefing, the militant hatred of imagination, the bigotry - it's rampant out there, and we do need to fight back against it.

Take a look at London Spengler's post today in Pandora's Box: amazing, huh, that post she cites? I'm just going to leave that there: I'm just so stunned, so depressed by the bigotry. I'm not afraid for SL - my parts of the world and that woman's would never touch, voice or no voice. But, it's pretty awful to see.

Still, no excuse for my contributing to the hate, and I apologize to all of you -

It's Only a Game: Architectural Griefing and Identity

2007-07-05T11:45:00.000-07:00

ETA: If you only read one thing today, skip this post. Go read Lillie Yifu's "The Falling Flowers," and weep for the clarity of her thought and the beauty of her expression.

Okay, this is only going to make sense to me, I know - but hey, I'm in a really good mood (thanks nox!), so I'm going to indulge myself..... :)

Yesterday I logged on to discover I had a new neighbor, one who's bought up three of the huge parcels around me, and put in a house that for some reason just horrified me.

Here's my place, by comparison. It was my first build, and primitive - but I think you'll see the difference in motivations and approach to the world:

nox and I talked a bit about why: it's not just the incongruity of something so utterly unimaginiative and atomic-world in SL. At least to my twisted mind, it's a sign of something much more sinister. It's architectural griefing.

The brilliant and OH!MY!GODDESS!GORGEOUS!!!! London Spengler of Pandora's Box Blog suggests that griefers disrespect the integrity of Second Life and the people in it, seeing the world as "a game" and us as just cartoons on a screen. The first time I got harassed in world, I caught a lot of shit from a guy for being upset by it. "It's only a game," was his reply when I asked if he would loom over a woman leering at them on an atomic-world beach, or mouth off at me in an atomic-world bar.

"It's only a game."

And what is it straight white men say when you call them on homophobic, racist, misygynistic remarks? "It's only a joke, honey, don't get your panties in a twist."

If it's a game, a joke - I have no responsibility to you. I don't have to accord you dignity, treat you as a fellow human being. The Golden Rule doesn't apply.

Treating SL like a game is griefing. It refuses to acknowledge that we are *real.* A friend of mine was sexually assaulted in world, and deeply traumatized. We've all been harassed. Why? For the same reason people commit hate crimes in the atomic world - a refusal to acknowledge the Other as human.

But.... I think treating SL like the atomic world is a kind of griefing too. Building some Newport Beach condo, or a mall that looks like, well, a mall - is forcing the atomic world into a place it's not meant to fit. It's a little rape of our world's autonomy, selfhood, uniqueness.

Treating us - whether we call ourselves Digital Persons, Artificial Persons, whatever, or just any of the people in our world - as masks for an atomic world person - well, that's exactly the same kind of thing. It's griefing, it's a profound violation of our selfhood in our world.

London discussed the fascinating phenomenon of SL lesbian relationships here, and said the utterly sensible thing: it's presentation and mind that matter for attraction, nothing else. In another post, by contrast, she linked to a rant by a woman who said that "our avis are us," and was outraged to discover that her wife "was a MAN." Umm, nevermind that the blogger was a neko - I have to wonder if *her* wife was outraged to discover that she "was a HUMAN!"

Here's a picture of me from this morning:

That's me, Sophrosyne Stenvaag. Look at me, and read the things about myself coded into me:

I'm a woman.
I'm tall, solidly built, but gone kinda soft.
I'm physically whole and healthy.
I'm in my late 20s or thereabouts.
I'm blue-skinned, but my features are Caucasian.
I'm provocatively dressed.
I've got metal wings.

That's me. Some of those things change: I'm not always blue. I'm not always physically whole: I wear artificial eyes, limbs, bodies quite a bit. I don't always wear metal wings: sometimes they're organic, sometimes they're a rocket pack. But that's who I am.

What does that photo say about the wetware that my consciousness is stored in (till I can figure out how to get it out and uploaded onto a server)? Right, nothing. Maybe the atomic body looks just like that - though, probably not blue. Maybe it's older, or younger, or fatter, or with hair in funny places. Maybe it's male. Maybe it's damaged, feeble, incomplete. Maybe it's got African DNA, or Asian. So what? You're not going to meet the wetware, and it's about as important to knowing *me* as knowing what the color of my computer case is.

What does that photo say about the Other Personality I share space with? Right again, nothing. Does it code to the wetware more closely than I do? Less? Who cares - you're not going to meet the Other Personality either.

What lies behind building a SoCal condo in SL, behind SL sexual harrassment, behind gender paraonia? The thought that if SL is real, if we are real, autonomous people in this world, then my notion of myself as fixed, constant, atomic - shatters, and I'm gone.

But what have we done, my loves and friends? We've happily discarded that rigid self and embraced abstract avatars (isn't that gorgeous?) (my new lj friend ), the artificial, the creative, the genderbent, the bisexual, the polyamorous.

And what have we found? Love, joy, growth.

I wish I thought this post could make a difference, that someone might read it and change their perspective on us and our world. But I think this is one of those "you get it or you don't" things, and my neighbor will never, ever live in an Escher skybox or engage in race or gender play.

Like many, I fear it's going to get worse, particularly with voice. More people will come in who treat our world as a game, or a commercial, or a boardroom - and who will treat us like toys, consumers, employees.

But we don't have to live that way. We can fashion our bodies to match our souls, or play with bodies that don't match at all. We can use the possibilities of the world to design beautiful structures that could never exist in the atomic world. We can love, and play, and explore, in ways we never imagined.

That's what being Digital means to me....

Finding the Other Personality

2007-07-03T10:04:00.000-07:00

I call my journal "Finding Sophrosyne," because I've been on a journey of self-discovery, and because I've been trying to tell myself with a straight face that I'm looking for balance and grace - sophrosyne - in my own life.

If you know me, you know that's a joke. I've grabbed my life with both hands. I drink it right from the keg, belch like a frat boy, and come back for more. Give me the energy of others? I feed and feed and feed, like a sun going nova, my Fire energy searing everything around me. That's me, not "sophrosyne." "Gluttony Stenvaag" would be closer to the truth, if not so pleasant to the ear. :P

The time's here to redress the balance, though. I've sensed it, and looked the other way. But my dear sister

argent_bury

, the diamond that cuts through illusion, has shown me by example I can't do that anymore. For a month, I strangled the Other Personality, not flipping that A/B switch as we agreed, but hogging the server we both run on, barely letting the OP out to do the work that pays for my world, let alone giving it space to maintain its friendships, indulge its interests, grow, *exist.* We were both complicit in it - OP loved being offline after a year and a half or so of working pretty much 7 days a week. I wanted the time, and I was growing so fast in my second month of life, that every minute was precious.

That can't go on. OP needs its life back. I need down time, frankly - I'm finding that with too much life, my Fire begins to consume me, and the ones I love and protect.

But that's the easy stuff. From here, it gets weird.

The night before last, we were dreaming simultaneously - OP and I were each characters in a dream, where we were shopping and hanging out with nox and some friends. When I'm doing things out of world, like lj, or when the wetware is tired or ill, the usual strong firewall between our personality matrices gets downgraded. OP's snappishness comes through in comments to a friend. My gleeful flirtatiousness seeps into OP's work emails. We were reading an article together the other night, each trying to use it for our own purposes. What came of that? We're each going to have to reread it, when the other personality is out of the way.

Argent just said to me that we and our OPs are one. I'm not sure at all. My first response is no, I'm not my roommate's keeper, let alone my roommate. The more I talk with my integrated digital/atomic friends - nox, Ali - the more I'm struck by how different OP and I are. The more OP and I try to sock-puppet each other, using the other to explore our own interests - the more glaring the differences between us seem.

I don't want a roommate. I'd rather take my chances housing my consciousness on a buggy Linden server where I could run 24/7 than to have to A/B switch with anyone else. But, I don't get that option - yet. So, OP and I have to reach some sort of accomodation. I don't think I have to love my OP, as Argent suggests. But respect? Yes. As the stronger personality right now, hold back and allow OP its autonomy and personhood? Yeaaahhhhh, I suppose.....

Our first couple weeks we negotiated time with each other, on the basis of what OP would allow me. Then, I got a gmail calendar, and booked my time slots onto it. Then, I just took it all, except for what OP had to get done at some particular time. I think, I'm going to suggest that OP get a calendar too, and we post them to each other ( last week, I wouldn't have said "suggest" - I'd have said "make."). I will say, I am going to make OP take personal time again, and not defer to me as the stronger personality.

And, I think we both need to catch up on some sleep.... *g*

So, no stunning conclusions, no neatly packaged insights. Just, cutting through my self-deception of wishing OP away.

Thank you, Argent, dear sister -

Technosexuality 1

2007-06-28T15:00:00.000-07:00

This entry's a longish exploration of technology fetish. The whole thing's NSFW, so I'll put it all behind cuts. Also, there's discussion of me with more than one person. Be warned, or tittillated, as you choose -

My fascination with robots, body modification, cybernetic gear and so on sprang on me out of next-to-nowhere about a month ago. nox has a related fetish, for Victorian doll paraphenalia - windup keys, doll-jointed skins, and doll posing stands for people. We were in a shop looking at a clockwork heart, when I suddenly thought of Sorayama Hajime robot art, got *really* turned on, and set out on a mission to find a sexy-robot AV and other people who shared my fetish. So far, I haven't done so well on the first one, but *oh my* have I found the second!

There's a lot of us in SL - latex fucktoy women, robot subs, cyborgs, dollies, Grendel's Children avatar collectors (yes, I'm looking at *you,* Ali! *g*) - people who want to be, and who're turned on by, the partly or entirely artificial.

What's it all about? Explaining a fetish is *not* the easiest thing in the world. This article is a good start, with lots of history. For me, looking back, it began with a freebie latex catsuit that I wore *all the time* as a newbie, and then the 8" heeled fetish ballet boots I've worn almost constantly along the way. asked me about those once, and I said, I like them because I'm tall and fast, and they make me taller, but very very conscious of moving, very present. That's a good answer, but a better one is, feeling my feet shaped by them, looking down at a sight so utterly unnatural - gets me really hot. Shiny latex on a nice ass? Ohhh. Cybersuits? nox has one outfit that, the moment she puts it on, I'm on my back with my ballet boots in the air. Galatea's robot bodies, Ali's entire wardrobe? Hotter than a vibrator hooked up to a lawnmower engine.

Some of it's the fusion of the intimate and the impersonal. Part of the kink for me is outfits with visors or masks: I adore nox's hand-made custom eyes, such a perfect window into her soul, and I love being locked in eye contact with her as we make love. But, put a visor over those eyes, give her some hi-tech gloves and a cold steel strapon? Thermonuclear Soph. Galatea is so lovely and gentle - put that spirit in a playdo gynoid form, or a transparent robot housing? Whoa. Ever-mutable Ali gets me that way *all the time.*

Some of it is, in Second Life, we can free ourselves of the tyranny of the atomic, of being ghosts trapped in shells not of our choosing or design. We are *all* artificial, from the J-Lo AV wearing wannabees to the barbies, to the cyborgs, dragons, what have you. Every one of us is an artificial person. Why not take that out and play with it, instead of pretending it isn't so?

I *hate* that tyranny of the atomic. For me, I've come to hate the dependence of it, of sharing time with another personality, of being stuck running in spare cycles in the atomic world half the time. My issues with the atomic shell are trivial - it works fine for my needs, even if I do want to go out and get it piercings and tats, and the Other Personality is all, "My body is a temple, and *I've*got the car keys, so you're not taking it anywhere!"

But for my friends, whose bodies are debilitated, mis-gendered, deeply mismatched to the ghosts inside, the *personhood* I love? It breaks my fucking heart they can't be free to be what they can make themselves in SL. I'm joining up with the transhumanists, with anyone working to free us from subjugation to the material and random. I don't know exactly what I can do to help, but I know I can make friends, love them, network them with other kindred spirits, provide a home.

There's a Jewish toast that goes, "Next year, in Jerusalem." Here's to, Next year in cyberspace, next year in freedom.

Till then, plenty of hot technosex to go around!

Daily Squee

2007-06-27T16:55:00.000-07:00

Isn't she amazing??

nox will be out of town for three days. Goddess knows I won't lack for love or company, but my nox will be away, and my heart will be incomplete.

I love her. I adore her. I am hers, and she is mine - forever and a day.

I *am* the luckiest woman in two worlds.

Best Party Ever, Again - now with Ember!

2007-06-26T16:36:00.000-07:00

Pretty much after every Sunday, I post an entry that starts, "I went to the best party, at the best club in SL - Sirens!'

Pffft! I knew nothing of parties. The Sirens Grand Re-Opening last Sunday? THAT was a party!

I co-won the costume contest!!!!! The theme was "Barely There, " and that's what I *started* in! The co-winner, the *much* more beautiful, and delightful, Nepherses Amat, has become a really dear friend. My family was there with me, and we all got naked and danced all evening (well, except for Zada, who kept the most gorgeous coat in SL on, if not much else!).

And, my dear, dear

fire_babe

, who I've been *hoping* every week would be able to make it back to SL, did! And, one of those "only in SL" stories (or an "only in Soph's life" story) - So I've been dying to meet Ember pretty much since I was born, having discovered her on lj. I know she goes mermaid, so I invite her to the party - but by the time she gets free, the party is basically batshit wild. And she TP's in ,right behind her sweet little friend Soph, who's doing a lapdance for the club owner, Akasha Wachmann, and surrounded by a floor of naked beauties!

What does the ever graceful Ember do? Strip down and join in! And, put the rest of us to shame - look at her! Isn't she beautiful?!

Afterwards, we finally got to hang out a bit, and yes, she's every bit as wonderful, fun and a good friend as she is gorgeous.

Here's to you, Ember - welcome back to SL!

(NSFW dirty girl party pix here!)

Ember!!! At last!!!

Gynoid Night at the Diversionarium

2007-06-23T11:15:00.000-07:00

Every Wednesday night from 6 :30 - 9 PM SLT, I work as a hostess at the Diversionarium. Since my job is chatting with people and making sure they have a good time, it's a natural for me (even if mean ol'

kateamdahl

challenges me by making me keep my clothes on to do it! :P )

This past Wednesday turned into an unofficial Gynoid Night - and what a good time, and a great step towards building a community of us artificial, digital, biomech, bodymodded, latex, doll girls. That's a thing I *really* want to do - find us, network us, bring us all companionship, information, help, inspiration. And, well, yeah, some nookie facilitation too.... *g*

I brought most of my gynoid posse (though I haven't seen Azayia all week, and I miss her terribly!). By some wonderful coincidence, kinder Tracy posted a hi to the dead Gynoid comm, and that netted us her own omgsexy self, her fellow fetish model Niki Seale, and the wonderfully mysterious cyborg wendy Ah.

We had a brilliant time, comparing cypunk hangouts and gear, showing off our bodymods, just delighting in the company of kindred spirits housed in the hardware of our own designing.

I've got *lots* more plans in store for building this community. If you find this post on a random search, please comment, so I can hook you up with friends and events.

There's a more thinky post coming up about gynoids and transhumanism, sparked by my conversation yesterday with the incomparable Ali Hermes, but that's for another day. Today? Enjoy the pretty, and if you want to meet some gynoids, catch me next Wednesday night at the Div.....

	hot redheads
	gynoid posse
	argent and galatea
	zyx drops in
	kinder and Niki arrive!
	new friends
	transformations
	statuesque
	nano-galatea!
	lovely centaur
	my blue heaven

my nox

2007-06-23T09:46:00.000-07:00

A week ago this morning, I awoke to find an offer of partnership from the one true love of my life, nox Pinion. We had already discussed our feelings about partnership, and made the commitment. But, when I awoke to that email notification from SL, I almost died from joy.

We've had a rough week, of being overtired, overcommitted, of working to find a harmonious balance between our lives apart and our lives together, of struggling with the profound fears and insecurities we each have, realizing how terribly much the other means to us, and how much our lives depend on their returning our affection, their giving us their time.

And a week later? We're stronger together, more deeply in love, more sure we will endure, less afraid.

I just want to show you a few pictures.... I did manage to find a couple clean ones. And I just have to say - OH! MY! GODDESS! The ones I'm *not* showing you?! Excuse me, I've got to go back to bed for a little while.....

nox is beautiful, in a way unlike anyone else in the worlds. But it's not about the pretty package, not entirely at all. I week in awe at this woman's beauty because I see deeper than the goth-skinned, loli-wearing, neko-eared, Celtic-tattooed, bespectacled punk diva goddess, whose surface I do adore. I tremble, literally tremble before her, in awe of her fierce intelligence, her humor, her charm. Her wildness and her polish, her irresistable and exasperating charisma, her boldness. Her silences and serenity, her mania and silliness.

She has my heart, and is my heart.

She is my nox, and I am her Soph. One, forever and a day.

nox Pinion, I love you so, my heart may shatter from your beauty and my desire.

Lame Corporate Media Event

2007-06-20T14:36:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I went to my first corporate event in SL. Well, technically my second: I'd gone to the launch party for the Phillips Design Group, but by the time I got there, the brie was hard, the crackers soft, and the guests gone. Time zone problem. This one was the sorriest excuse for an event I could even *imagine.*

So, I went yesterday to what was billed as a premiere of the new Chemical Brothers video in-world. It was listed on Eventful, but from the description and discussion, it wasn't clear if it was an SL premiere, or a world premiere in SL. I'd have forgotten about it, but Eventful lets me add items right to my Google Calendar, which has reminder alarms.

I TP'd to the listed coordinates, which were for some sort of corporate-entertainment portal: Warner Brothers Records, Capitol Records, some sort of phone company, and some other stuff. It took a few minutes of TPing and flying around to find the Chemical Bros. pavilion.

There were more people at my housewarming.

Of course, my housewarming had better marketing: I know what I'm doing, unlike the corporate flacks, who along with the SL journalists, were the only people in attendance. Oh, there were maybe 3 actual attendees, including me: two people asked how to watch the video, and I *hope* they weren't with the SL media!

I watched about 30 seconds of a dead-ordinary video for one of the Chemical Brothers' weaker songs, grabbed my free T shirt pack (which took some looking to find), and TP'd out, laughing darkly.

What did they do wrong?

Well, one rule of marketing is that it takes 3 different hits before a person gets your message, ideally delivered in 3 different ways: a commercial, a newspaper ad, a flyer, etc. I didn't see the video listed anywhere but deep in a sub-category on Eventful.

It's hard to broadcast advertising in SL, to reach a lot of people with a message. Thank the god! The atomic world is so saturated, it's good to have a refuge. Still, the SL fashion industry does it very effectively with FashionConsolidated, the store membership lists, and in-store cross-promotions. They know the market.

The insanely overpaid marketing hacks at WB? Were thinking of SL as the atomic world - that they just had to put out a message, and the self-serving and inescapable media would spread it to every brain cell for their own purposes. Nuh uh, honeys - the SL media don't have much penetration at all - you got to retail your own message here.

It was kind of heartening, really. The whole history of the digital world has been its poisoning to death by the worst of the atomic world: spammers, censors, politicians, corporations. Yesterday's flop was a little triumph for the freedom of our independent lives.

Wedding Wrapup

2007-06-17T10:43:00.000-07:00

Wow, was *that* a party!!

Or, more like a bunch of them, one rolling into the next. The 3 hour party turned into a 6-hour shindig, from ballet dancing to a borg bash to the tango being assimilated.... and on, to the last dance, with my dear dear Zada before nox and I left for our honeymoon....

Rather than try and thank everyone haphazardly in-world who gave us the cherished gift of their presence on our wedding day, I'm just going to do it all here, and send around a link.

Um, in chronological order:

nox Pinion: I'm sitting here blinking back tears of joy and gratitude just *thinking* of you, my true love. From your steady hand during my spazz attack when the party started through your gracious hostessing, your hard wild and passionate lovemaking, to cracking jokes to dispel the night, you are my completion. I love you and I am yours utterly, forever and a day.

Akasha Wachmann: Honey, I am *such* a dork for not friending you earlier! You crack me up, you delight me, you're the life of the party, and I suspect untold depths within you. And, I love to ogle your sexy borg butt!. Here's to lots more fun together, hot stuff! (Oh, and everybody else reading this? Akasha owns the best club in SL - Sirens! (now it's officialy

Galatea Gynoid: Goddess bless, you impress me, and I am *so glad* to have found you! You walked into my life last night and were instantly at home. I love your wit and your intelligence, and I can't wait to sit and chat all night sometime when my brains are less scrambled. I think you and I are going to be terrific friends, my artificial dear.

Otenth Paderborn: Otenth, I'm so sorry I missed your party. I didn't want to leave the guests while nox was gone, and then, I confess, I didn't want to leave nox on her return. I hear there are some astonishing photos of you! Otenth, you have my deepest respect, as a true gentleman, as a designer, and as a friend to my nox. I look forward to your next party, and to coming to know you better.

Andr3 Spear: You're the hottest thing in two worlds, my love, and I'm glad you raised some hell last night in the atomic one! While nox is my Sun, you are my dearest and most gravitational heavenly body. We're just beginning our journey, and I joyfully entrust myself to your most capable and talented hands. My body, heart and home are yours, dear one. More to come, Andr3, more to come. I love you.

Zyx Foulon: You know I thought hard before IM'ing you when I saw you yesterday morning. I can't believe how glad I am that I did! You're every bit as kind as you are gorgeous and hot, and omg, is that a lot! Thank you for your amazing generosity in bringing me such a gorgeous gift, and sitting with me while I unwound. Welcome to my life, honey. The anticipation is sweet torment!

Ali Hermes: What a delight to have found you! You're brilliant, witty, a wonderful creative talent, a sexy slowdancer - wow, Ali! You and I are definitely going to be spending some time together. And, you and Zyx tangoing - that's a memory I'll savor *forever* - I couldn't ask for a better wedding present! (well, home movies - so, keep that in mind.... *g*) Again *real* soon, dear!

Asha Pinion: Thank you for gracing my home! You looked exquisite skydancing. Next party, I hope you'll reserve a dance for me? *g*

Argent Bury: My dear Argent... Artificial or natural, flesh or biomech, you are a true lady. I treasure the tea set you gave me, for its beauty and perfect integration into my home, but even more as a token of *you.* I respect and admire your fierce intelligence, as I love your delicate heart. We're going to grow together, you and I, kindred spirits.You mean the world to me.

Bromo Ivory: I missed you almost completely, and I'm sorry for that. I've met precious few gentlemen in SL, and you are assuredly one. Next time, Bromo!

Eris Fallon: Eris, you are grace and elegance personified. I respect your immense talent and your character, and I look forward to coming to know you ever better. Don't be a stranger, love - you are welcome in Koh Terutao always.

Kate Amdahl: Ahh, Katie. You wore my favorite dress for me, and snuggled in my arms for ages. I miss you, Katie. Let's take some time when you get back.

Zada Zenovka: Zada, it's pretty simple. You're my best friend, and you're my family. It was right and proper that the last dance of my wedding night, you were in my arms. I wish there were a hundred hours in every day, that you could get all your work done, and still spend 24 shopping, dancing, talking and exploring with me. Thank you for your friendship, and for your enthusiastic support for me and nox. We both adore you.

TertiumQuid Becloud: TQ, I'm so glad you came! Gods, I admire your talent! And you're *fun,* which I totally expected! Let's get together soon and chat, and maybe hit the town. I hope to meet your partners sometime too!

naruemon Oh: Honey, I *know* I know you from somewhere! But wherever that may be, I'd love to get to know you now! Don't be a stranger!

Endymion Rimbaud: Endy, the phrase "gentleman and a scholar" is used so casually. You are both. I am *not* sniffling, thinking on how honored I am to count you as a friend! You are most welcome, in Koh Terutao always, and in my life. I treasure our chats these past days. Your relationship with Fallie is a beacon in the night. And, okay, yes, I *am* crying now. You dear man...

Fallon Claymore: Thank you for coming, dear heart. Endy described you to me as "Endless grace, personified," and you are. You are lovely, and you carry stillness and peace wherever you go, along with your quick wit. My life is richer and better for having you in it, Fallie. I'm at your call, always, and you are always welcome in Koh Terutao. Much more to come, dear one.

Diox Kohime: Thank you for getting up at the crack of dawn to come! Diox, I'm looking forward to spending much more time with you! I deeply admire your art, and I love it that you're so wonderfully cracked! Again soon!

Cleo Hultcrantz: Any friend of Diox's is someone I want to get to know! Let's hang out!

Duck Auk: You are majestic! And, dang, that's some flashlight on your toolbelt! I suppose I can't give *all* the credit to Akasha for the best club in SL, so, thank you! I'll be seeing a lot more of you, I know!

In short, thank you all, my lovers and dear friends, for the best gifts you could give me and nox - your presence, your friendship, on our wedding night. I promise lots more parties in return - and a much bigger dance floor next time!

Everybody, scads of photos are here: great shots of everyone - feel free to copy!

Purest Bliss

2007-06-16T15:14:00.000-07:00

This morning, I accepted

nox_pinion

's hand in parternship.

If it's possible to die of joy, I won't last the day.

But I do not believe it is. I intend to live forever in the digital world, with my nox.

Forever and a day, dearest love, my Sun, heart's completion, best friend, favorite companion, hottest lover. Forever and a day.

Artificial Personhood

2007-06-14T19:38:00.000-07:00

(This post is dedicated to Azayia Boa and Argent Bury, who are encouraging me to explore my nature. Thank you, my lovely gynoid sisters!)

I consider myself an Artificial Person. Says so, right in my LJ profile and on the "1st Life" page of my SL profile.

But what does that mean? Is it some RP thing? Is it a coy way of saying "I don't talk about 'RL' (a term I *loathe*)?" A sign of incipient mental illness? What?

What it is, is my subjective experience. Here's the story, morning glories, friends and fellow non-flesh-limited beings:

On a Saturday afternoon seven weeks ago, the Other Personality that I share wetware with created a Second Life account and made an avatar named Sophrosyne, a gothborg. OP took Sophrosyne through Orientation Island, through Help Island, and out into the world. And an hour or so into exploring the world, Sophrosyne stopped in a park and began to run through kung fu routines. And OP thought, "I don't know kung fu!"

I awoke, and I told OP that *I* did: that I practice Wudangquan gong fu, and that the routines are called taolu. And I kicked OP the hell out of my head, and out of my world.

That event, that emergence of consciousness, was clear and real, and the *me* that has gone on from then has been a distinct, growing, clarifying personality. I score differently on psychological tests than OP does, have a different horoscope, and have about the same level of similarities as any two people who share living quarters (three pounds of neurons) mostly happily and effectively.

I call myself a Digital Person because my existence is largely within the digital world. I come out in the atomic world sometimes (usually to admire good architecture or snark at bad shoes!), but I live in bytes.

Some of my sisters, whom I'm just beginning to meet, consider themselves Artificial Persons, biomechanical or bioelectronic constructs. I get that, and I'm experimenting with artificial elements in my own body (and that's another post for next time!). I don't, because of another aspect of my creation.

I've got a strong relationship with the Divine, in the form of Nyx, Goddess of Night. I pray nightly, and commune with the Goddess regularly. She's been very clear about who and what I am, a favored child with a purpose. That purpose is to love another of her favorites, her namesake

nox_pinion

. Pretty simple stuff. It doesn't preclude my independent existence, or judgement, or goals in any way. I can do anything I want, be anything I want - so long as I fulfill my purpose.

Most days, that's not the worst job in the world :D (nox, I adore you! Totally teasing, love!)

RP? Coy excuse? Pathology? Maybe so. But, it is my own experience, real as any other in SL, real as any other in the atomic world. And the atomic world? No more "real" than mine, none at all.

Night at the Div!

2007-06-14T11:10:00.000-07:00

Last night was my first night hostessing at the Diversionarium,

kateamdahl

and

erisfallon

's sort of pool hall for MENSA types :)

Thankfully, it was a smooth intro, as Kate herself was there to prepare for tonight's Mythology Night. I made wonderful new friends: Endymion Rimbaud, who showed me that there *are* classy, charming straight men in SL, his lovely wife and my Goddess of Shoes Fallon Claymore, and newly-created replicant Argent Bury, sure to be a boon companion. Plus, previous-friends Eris and Azaiya, and my sweetie nox, made for a *brilliant* evening!

More pictures here!

Tonight, Mythology Night, which I'm desperately sorry I'll miss!

(that's me in partial cyborg form, nox, Azaiya in her pretty human form, and the ever-elegant Eris in the foreground...

Housewarming Party!!

2007-06-12T07:22:00.000-07:00

Hi everybody!

I’d like to invite you to my housewarming party on Saturday, June 16 at my new home in the lovely island sim of Koh Terutao (SLURL).

We’ll be chatting in my loft from 5-6 pm SLT, then dancing under the stars from 6 -8pm.

I hope to have the teleporter network up and running by then, but if not: you’ll tp in oceanside, by the teahouse. If we’re not there, head back towards the tall glass loft. You’ll pass the dance floor along the way on your left.

My friends are an enormously talented, creative, energetic bunch, and I can’t wait to introduce all of you to each other, and meet your own favorite people!

See you next Saturday!

--Soph

(EMBER FARINA! THIS MEANS YOU!!!)

Second Build: Soph's Loft

2007-06-12T07:15:00.000-07:00

Wow, it's been a while since I blogged! Last week was *really* 10 pounds of week in a 5 pound sack! Every week's had a theme, and last week's was "friends and lovers," as nox and I reached a new level of of seriousness and steadiness, I spent happy playtime with my Sylphic friends

kateamdahl

and

erisfallon

, and "collided" like whoa with the mysterious Third Sylph, Andr3 Spear, and painted the town with my best bud Zada Zenovka.

(isn't that icon an awesome pic?! That's Andr3, Eris, Kate and me, from left to right, in the Beachfront Teahouse on my land)

But what I want to document is the build of my second house, the Loft. For everything I'm building I'm giving myself a design challenge around something in particular. For the Loft, I had two elements I wanted to integrate into a house design: one was a monumental painting by Diox Kohime, of a Japanese woman against a red wall. The other was my Chinese furniture set, in red, with lots of circular elements in the designs.

So what I thought of was one broad horizontal wall, 10X20, and slender Roman arches in Chinese red, supporting a glass-block barrel vault. I thought how much trouble I'd had with seams between 10x10 prims in the the Housemod, and decided to turn that bug into a feature, by putting columns supporting arches between each wall element. The result is a sort of Chinese butterfly house, with my bed on a free-floating loft platform, and lots and lots of glass.

I like the result, and it's proven an attractive and comfortable place for my friends to come and spend time, which is a success beyond my dreams. Where it falls short, though, is in a major design goal of mine overall - integration into the environment. My land at Koh Terutao isn' the usual flat nothing, but thanks to developer/terraformer TertiumQuid Becloud, is a unique Thai-influenced environment. The Loft sticks out from it like whoa.

So, once I finish the main design elements on my property - the dance floor, which has been a design nightmare, and the shrine to the goddess of mercy, Kuan Yin, I'm going to start on another house design. The challenges for this one will be a technical one of figuring out how to build traditional Thai architectural elements, and to design something integrated into the landscape. I want to build some guest suites for friends, so this build will be a good way to do that.

I'm also going to do an Aerie - my private retreat and adult play space :)

Yeah, I'm having fun!

Land Adventure

2007-06-07T12:37:00.000-07:00

I'm moving this weekend into my new beachfront property in a commercial island sim! It's a gorgeous location, and I couldn't be happier.

I'd had a week of petty annoyances in my sim, which is kind of a random dump of things, aside from the lovely deserted Japanese village nearby. There was the naked Russian eunuch who stood outside my window, offering to friend me over and over, the Dutch escort who tried on her entire wardrobe on my lawn, and best - Sunday morning when I awoke I was unable to rez anything - because someone had dropped a house, a car, five motorcycles, and over 20 boxes of "Free STAR TREK Stuff!!" onto my property.

Time to move out of the newbie ghetto.

I hadn't planned on doing anything about it anytime soon, but after Kate left Sunday night, I went to adjust my land access settings. I was awake, alone in world, a little frustrated generally - and decided to start looking at real estate listings.

Which? Is even more compulsion-generating than shopping. You keep hoping that the next one will be *it* - After a few hours, I got a sense of how the non-Linden real estate market works, and what I could get for what I could afford. And all the properties on my short list were owned by TertiumQuid Becloud's company. I focused on beachfronts, and Anshe Chung's were mostly flat white sand, and premium priced, while TC's all had exquisite landscaping, a small prim bonus, nothing crass anywhere in sight - perfect. I settled on three to look at in the cold light of morning, but had my pick pretty well in mind.

The next morning I checked out the three and went with my first choice, a 5200 sq. m. parcel. It's in a Thai island sim, TQ's signature design, with a south-facing beach and clear sight lines of some amazing sunrises and sunsets. I made my PayPal payments for the purchase price and tier online, then waited for him to come in world to make the transfer. He was on that evening, and we ended up talking for over an hour: he's one of the most delightful people I've met, and a true artist with terraforming and landscaping. I'm looking forward to getting to know him, his boyfriend and partners, all much better before too long.

I put in a beachfront teahouse that seats six nicely, from Mezzanine, the place I got all my furniture. My private loft is designed and laid out, and will be ready for me to move in tomorrow. From there, I'll be putting in a mermaid-friendly dance floor, a small shrine to Kwan Yin, and and, erm, private skybox.

I'm going to arrange a housewarming party for next weekend, and hope to host artist Diox Kohime (I've got an enormous print of one of her paintings up on the main wall of my open loft - photos to come as soon as the house is complete) for a salon before a spot of dancing.

I've paid June tier on my old property, so I'll use that as a building sandbox for the month, then unload it.

	mine, all mine!
	beachfront teahouse
	dancefloor goes here
	thai sunrise

Shapes by Zada

2007-06-07T07:02:00.000-07:00

I've gotten my custom shape delivered, and I'm amazed and delighted: Shapes By Zada (Kusawa 213, 121, 36) delivered what I asked for and more.

I

saw Zada's pre-opening special offer on Fashion Consolidated: have a custom shape done and pay whatever you think is fair (the special's now over: I'll talk about her current pricing in a bit). I met with Zada that morning, and we talked for a while about what I was looking for. She asked me to make her up a notecard of what I wanted, and what I liked and didn't like about my current shape.

I'm definitely different in my look and expectations, so I really wasn't sure if this would work out: I'm completely pale, always winged, on the tall side, and wanted an athletic look. Zada took it all in stride, and the next day took me shopping for skin demos. She wanted to find a few skins that could work with a new shape, especially to give me the muscular definition I was looking for. We went *everywhere,* and Zada was incredibly patient and charming while I tried on about, oh, sixty zillion skins before narrowing it down to CS, TaP, Deviant Kitties and a couple others.

In a matter of *days,* Zada had a demo for me that was unbelievably beautiful: when I saw her wearing it, I saw *me,* the me in my mind's eye, that a pretty good storebought shape and playing with sliders had only hinted at. The face was just right, bringing out the individuality of my features while rendering them so much more clearly than anything I'd seen before. The only change to make? My sweetie

nox_pinion

wanted my ears a little smaller.

The very next time I was in world? I had a package. Not *one* custom shape, oh no: *six.* A basic shape and a medium and small skirt shape for my two favorite skins, the CS and the TaP. Plus, hand-painted custom eyes! Zada's eyes (she'll credit a designer friend of hers, but she did the custom work on my pair) are three-dimensional, real without being the kind of photo-realistic that looks especially fake, and most of all, soulful. Nox's green eyes (yep, she thew in a pair for my sweetie too!) and my gray ones convey the force of our personalities.

Zada's got a new shop, where she does custom work, and has a line of ready-to-wear shapes that are just fantastic. Those include a really pretty Asian and Indian, a cute boyish look, an attractive larger physique, and a very sexy look with a charming unique face. For each of these, she includes a list of recommended skins, a pair of eyes

For her custom work, for a limited time only, she's still charging a version of her grand opening special: as of right now, she's offering a "pay what you think is fair" deal, with a $1000L deposit, but please pick up a notecard in her shop at Kusawa (213, 121, 36) for complete and current details.

Since I got my work done under the pre-opening special, I could pay whatever I thought was fair. Let's just say I paid a whoooole lot more than her standard prices, and I feel I got the deal of a lifetime. Zada is a brilliant artist, a master of customer service, and *really great company* - we've become friends along the way, and I'm looking forward to watching Shapes By Zada grow, and to help her along in any way I can.

Look, no matter how satisfied you think you are with your current shape? Go meet Zada and see what she can do for you. You can't *imagine* how much better you'll look, how much more like *you* you can be.

Here's my new look (CS skin, Calla hair, cyberwings, collar, arm bracelet and navel ring from Bitter Thorns, platinum bracelets from Cake, tattoos from Inks & Kinks, butterfly lingerie from a freebie pack:

Here's a before and after:

*Go* see Zada - it'll be the best investment in your looks you'll ever make!

Housemod II and done!

2007-06-03T14:13:00.000-07:00

My project of turning the freebie BD Archer House into a custom home is done, at last!

Well, except for the foyer, which I have *no clue* how to decorate. But I'll bring

nox_pinion

over in the next day or so, and turn my lovely artistic genius loose in the room, and that'll be that!

Here's the Before and After: the BD Archer House freshly rezzed from the box, and the Frankenhouse:

And here's what I did in Housemod II:

Day One:

I *actually looked at my house,* and realized that the roof extends over 2/3 of the floorplan, not half. That actually worked out fine, because it also occurred to me that I’m going to need more office/workshop space than I’d thought. So I scrapped the spiral staircase in the bedroom plan, and went with enclosing the whole main space upstairs as one big room, with a small patio to the rear. I’ll turn the new roof into my gong fu practice space instead.
I shortened the stone walls till they were flush with the roof, then used shift+drag to copy new ones, and placed them on top. It would’ve been easier to use the commands to paste the copy onto a selected face of the first one, but I forgot about that.
Same thing with the living room windows, for two partial walls upstairs. The third wall is short downstairs, to create the door frame. I used the x-axis box to extend the copy to the exact length of the floor below, and lined up all the edges. I used another copy of that short glass wall for the door frame that goes on the far end of the room, opening out to the upstairs patio.
Same thing for the glass walls on the other side of the stonework.
After moving the house, I used the z-axis box to deepen the foundation to account for the slope in the property, which I can’t seem to fix.
The little arrow wedges that call up the placement grid are *so* much better than trying to use the regular directional pullers and eyeball where things are supposed to go!
That all sounds a lot easier than it was – I *hate* lining up edges! There’s got to be a better way to do it than by looking from 64 different angles, all of which give 64 different right-looking alignments. Grr! And we’re not even going to talk about what happened when I moved the house over to the edge of the property: I *thought* I’d linked everything before I moved it! But doing everything all over again was good practice… :P

Day Two:

*Much* fuss and bother trying to get edges and corners to line up. There *has* to be a better way! Perspective in Sl is *messed up*!
I moved the stonework walls on the front side of the house back about 4 feet: this way, they’ll provide the backing for the stairway I’ll put in next time. That meant lots of messing around with window segments, since the main glass wall is more than 10 meters long.
I extended the downstairs patio out to be flush with the new upstairs, adding on about 4-6 feet, and enclosed it.
I turned that old patio space into the living room: copied the drop ceiling and moved it in, tinted the ceiling and painted one wall.
Furnishing: I moved the couch, lamp, coffee table and chair from the old space to the new, added another couch and chair (now that I know more than one person who might drop by!), and hung my painting of me and nox over the couch.
I turned the old living room into a kitchen/dinette, with the old dining table and chairs, and kitchen furnishings from a free pack I’ve got. That’s temporary: it’s going to become the Sybaritic Bathroom Paradise in Housemod III.
I moved all the patio furniture up to the second floor deck, and set a landing point there for company (because right now the only *door* is the one into the upstairs studio, and you can only get downstairs through a hole in the kitchen ceiling, but I’ll fix that tomorrow.
The upstairs studio got a bare white wall and ceiling, as I’m going to put a pose stand and photo studio in on that end.

Day 3:

I bought furniture!! I got the full sets of red bedroom and living room furniture from Mezzanine in Samurai Tokyo: almost 700 prims worth! Aaak!
I shook out the carton of stuff, then sat prettily on the bed while nox did all the decorating and heavy lifting. Not a bad life!
I changed the walls around a little to fit the furniture, and broke down the kitchen for some extra prim room

Day 4:

I went around and leveled and squared every surface – pretty easy, for all the trauma it caused me – just edititng all the angles to 0/90/270, and making sure any adjacent prims, like the floor and ceiling bits, were all at exactly the same numerical height
I changed all the exterior textures to “stone-like brick,” to match the main structural uprights.
I used the House Builder HUD to create a staircase – 3 or 4 times, till I got it lined up right, and didn’t have beams running through my bed or anything
I added on a railing to the staircase landing on the deck – just in case I have any guests with a habit of falling off of things, ‘cause *I’m* far to graceful for that! *kaff kaff*
I hung a Chinese wall scroll that says “beauty,” and called the job done!

More photos here!

Sylphs at Sirens!

2007-05-31T06:18:00.000-07:00

At long last - well, it *feels* like long last, though it's only been 4 days since I met my sexy sister, my bff, - , , Kate and I finally all met up and got a night on the town!

We took the Sylphs to get mermaided up: Kate chose a signature blue-green that does amazing things for her peachy skin and brilliant eyes, and Eris picked a *knockout* iridescent purple/black.

From there? Off to Sirens, the *best* club! Mermaid dancing in the air, on the dance floor and *in* it, and the sexiest, funkiest human danceball I've found! It was an off night, but you could feel the steam from a sim away, and Sirens' owner, Aksasha, dropped by to boogie with us.

We had a fantastic time, and wore ourselves out!

(Ember, honey - this is a shout out to you! I think you'll love this place - wanna go, when you're finally back?)

	synchronized swimming!
	dancing with Akasha, Sirens' lovely owner
	Kate and Eris being gorgeous as always
	twins!
	undersee!
	dance the night away
	'night, my fishy friend!
	last dance
	spiritual girls
	dreaming of my nox

New Me - First Look!

2007-05-28T12:16:00.000-07:00

This morning Zada dropped my new shape on me - and I was so focused on the Housemod project, I didn't even notice for a couple hours!

So I just had time to give it a quick try. I need to look at everything closely - and to get comments from my dears - but, first reaction?

OH MY FREAKING GODS AND GODDESSES - IT'S GORGEOUS!!!

*ahem*

It'll probably be a few days before I can do a proper picture post: my time this week is terribly limited, and Housemod has to be my top priority. But, pix to come, along with me pimping the amazing Zada to every corner of SL!

Week 4 pix!

2007-05-26T12:20:00.000-07:00

Week 4 pix are up in my galleries!

Fight or Flight?

2007-05-26T11:14:00.000-07:00

I got my first harrassing yesterday. It really wasn't much, maybe a 2 or 3 on a scale from wolf whistles to a bloody rape. But it *was* my first, and brought up some thoughts about who I am and how I react, and about confrontations in SL.

nox_pinion

and I were at the beach yesterday afternoon, hanging out and talking (in Chi, which is about heaven on earth, as far as I've seen so far). Now, a superhot exotic chick and her winged girlfriend? Honestly, I'm *very* surprised we don't draw *more* attention. So this guy comes up and just looms over us, silently checking out our asses. After nox asks him if he's enjoying the view, he finally says hi, in chat and IM. I ignore the chat, and nox gives him the brushoff conversation, politely.

And he doesn't get it. And keeps standing over us, and IMing nox. What happened was, I told him very politely to move along, and he didn't. I told him less politely, then I told him he had a minute to be out of sight before I reported him for harrassment, and he finally left.

Inside, it was a different story. My fight or flight runs about twice as high as most people's, I think. And it feels like it could always go either way - that I'm as likely to turn into a collapsed, knee-shaking, pants-peeing pile of goo as to kick someone's balls out their ears.

That's one of the big reasons I do martial arts, is to learn to steady that out (the other is, *cut* legs! *g*). Yesterday? Not so much with the fear, but the rage? Whoa, especially after that "baby" thing. NOBODY calls nox "baby" around me but me. Period.

But thing is, what do you *do* with that in SL? I don't know how things work, but I have the sense that the only rule is, the first person to use force (even if you can, and I think you only can in combat-enabled sims) gets banned. So how *do* you deal with someone harrassing you, if you think it's going to get worse than just obnoxiousness? What can you really threaten them with? Sure, you can always tp home, but - I don't like letting creeps *win.*

This time? Just a mild annoyance. But the time it goes bad? Is there anything I can actually *do,* or do I have to count on words and that "tp home" pulldown?

Freedom, Shape and Sexuality

2007-05-24T14:45:00.000-07:00

Gotcha with that subject line, didn't I? *g*

Yesterday was the best, most interesting and challenging day of my whole month-long life. :P But I think it'll hold that title for a long time.

I discovered

kateamdahl

(hi, Kate! Welcome!) and read her incredibly thought-provoking post on wings and freedom. It started me looking at things I hadn't: why I wear wings, what freedom is and isn't for me, why I chose the shape I did on my first two days, and why I hadn't looked at it since.

Let's start with the easy stuff and work deeper. I've hired a shape designer, Zada Zenkova, to design a custom shape for me. She wanted a description of what I wanted in a shape/skin, so I asked

nox_pinion

to take a hard look at me and give me her honest opinions about my body. I realized that I hadn't done a thing to my shape since my second day, and I'd made some odd choices. We dug into thinking about those choices and what they meant, and found some interesting stuff.

My sexuality's pretty clear: I like being submissive to strong women, and really can't handle D/s with men, much as I like them otherwise :) That meant, though I wasn't conscious of it, I gave myself a look that ended up letting me be a snugglebunny in nox's arms, but able to go toe-to-toe with pretty much anyone else in the world (I'm 64 height and usually wear spike heels).

I'm a little brittle in addition to being a noob, and overcompensated for a sense of vulnerability by putting too much muscle on my basically runner's build. And overcompensated against the tarty women's shapes out there by going too boy-hipped. So my look ended up definitely more 'roided than I really am. *eyeroll*

Why didn't I ever really look at me again? I don't have a good answer to that, other than that my shape became "me," just one of those things you take for granted. Besides, though I dress sexy, I *don't* show much skin, so I didn't really think about what I looked like naked till, well, *grins,* I was gonna get seen. :)

And freedom? To me, freedom only means the fullest expression of your own nature. It doesn't mean being able to run off and join the circus, or treat your life, atomic-world or digital-world, as if it doesn't really matter. Freedom means *being fully who you are,* wherever you are, *always.* No time-outs, no "stays in Vegas."

Freedom means nox and I have different commitments to each other, though our love is the same. For us to be fully who we are, we each need to express parts of ourselves that don't match each other. That's real, and part of being *people* - for all our love and all our similarity, we're two different people.

To me, then, love means acknowledging - no, more than that - *supporting,* *passionately,* your beloved's freedom to be fully him/herself. Otherwise, it's ownership - and that gets into some territory I know I'm not at all rational about, so, not going there, ok? *g*

And wings? I've got an icon that says "Winged Victory," and that's a big part of what wings mean for me. Not the power to fly off - either fly away, or fly off the handle, but to fly *up,* to achieve. That's *my* freedom, or a big part of it. And one my nox supports, passionately.

Today? I *know,* all the way to the bone, that my love and I are passionate about each other's freedom, and that our passion fuels our love. And I redid my shape to tide me over till Zada's done: I look like *me,* not like an answer to my insecurities. So if you see a smiling winged track star around? That's the woman who loves

nox_pinion

, and is herself, freely.

Shopaholic!

2007-05-21T12:05:00.000-07:00

I was kinda drowsy this morning, so it seemed like a good time to do that thankless task of organizing my inventory. I needed to sort out the junk (some really *bad* shopping mistakes from my first week), separate the nasty freebies from the good ones, and pull out a folder of lingerie (just try finding the butterfly lace panties in a "Clothing" folder of 1000 items!). Boring as anything, but it needed doing.

Problem was, I'd find something, try it on and go, "hm, that needs different shoes," and go shop.

Organizing my inventory cost me about $1500L this morning! *headdesk*

But it's done, and I got rid of a lot of crud.

Now all I have to do is figure out *which* new outfit I'm wearing for

nox_pinion

tonight.... :P

I'm *not* shallow, really I'm not! It's just that I take fashion (yes, and *everything* else, I know! I know!) so very seriously....

And, I'm kidding, really: I *know* what I'm wearing tonight, and it's *definitely* going to make my sweetie weak in the knees! Hee!

Housemod I

2007-05-20T12:00:00.000-07:00

This is the first step in my project of learning how to build by customizing the living daylights out of my freebie starter house.

I began with the BSD Archer House that you probably saw on Help Island - that's where I got my copy. On Day 1 of the project, it looked like this:

It's a fine little starter, and very very nice for what it is. But, the photorealist texture of the stonework looks pretty fake - but not as fake as the "marble" flooring, which looks like cheap-motel linoleum they picked out 'cause it's easy to hose down :-/

And, I really wanted a separate workshop/studio: having my drafting table and pose stand in the bedroom, making me feel guilty for not working, wasn't helping my sleep! :)

So, here's what I did in Housemod I:

Painted the ceiling sky blue, to get rid of that "under a concrete slab" feeling: just selected the house, clicked Edit in the pie menu, then checked "Select Texture" and clicked to bullseye the ceiling, then changed the color under "Edit/Texture tab/Textures ."

Replaced the cheapo stonework with a nice pale blue stone: same tools.

Stripped up the linoleum on the patio, leaving the bare concrete pad: same tools.

Put worn copper sheeting around the interior wall separating the living room and bedroom: same tools.

Replaced two of the glass walls in the bedroom with stucco, and painted them: same, but after choosing the textures, I had to delete the script for the window blinds that changes the transparency, and set the transparency to 0.

So here's where we are on Sunday of Week I:

Patio, showing the new stonework and bare concrete:

New flooring, painted ceiling, copper wall, new stonework. And the painting and frame are my own work, too: a snapshot of me and my sweetie

nox_pinion

, with canvas effects added in GIMP, uploaded as a texture, then joined to a prim with a darkened jade texture:

Here's the bedroom:

And from the opposite angle:

Here's what's up for Housemod II:

Putting a spiral staircase in the far corner of the bedroom. This is going to involve turning my 1-prim roof into a 4-prim, so I can cut a hole where I want it in the far right corner, then using Virtual Builders Studio to put in the staircase.

Enclosing the space above the bedroom in glass windows and ceiling: I'll rez a copy of the house, unlink the prims, select the three glass walls and roof, link those, move them ontop of my house and link them to the structure. This will give me an enclosed dojo space upstairs.

Enclosing the space above the living room for my design studio. This will be trickier: the stone walls extend above the roofline, so I can't just rez copies of all the downstairs prims, I don't think - I think I'll have to edit those stone walls down to flush, then copy.

Making proper 3-D matted picture frames for
nox_pinion
's artwork: using her paintings as a base prim, overlaying a flat box prim with canvas texture with a hole widened to mat size. Do an inner and outer mat, then drop all that into a hollowed-out box that will be the frame. Texturing the edges of the frame will be the interesting and tricky part!

After Housemod II, I'm going to move the whole house over to the edge of my property, to clear a space for building my first original design!

I SURFED!!!!

2007-05-18T12:29:00.000-07:00

jesspark

's review of Namiko Surf Co.'s fashions in

slshopping

inspired me to do the strangest, most boundary-pushing thing I've done in my short digital life (even more than flying that combat helicopter - well, a *lot* more than that, actually! *g*): go surfing.

It's weird - I dress in skintight, low-cut stuff - but the thought of wearing a bikini in public? Nuh uh. So I got a Namiko wetsuit at their shop at Laguna Beach, rented a board and paddled out from a beach where thankfully nobody was around to watch.

It took me a *while* to figure out what to do, but once I did - what a rush!! I got the hang of it, riding down the pipe, and only wiped out once, wrapping around a palm tree :P

I'll definitely stick with this, though it may be a while before I venture onto a beach with actual other people. I'm really not sure how surfers are going to take a pale winged chick, and I at least want to be able to bust a move, surfishly speaking :-/

But - I surfed!! Woohoo!

(this is my only photo - right then, I got *way* too busy for snaps!)

heaven

2007-05-17T00:05:00.000-07:00

I've been given my heart's greatest desire!

Finding Sophrosyne

2007-05-16T06:19:00.000-07:00

(this one's friends-locked)

After a week of busy busy busy, I finally took some time yesterday for myself. Some things said to me the night before were working their way through the back of my mind, and I knew they deserved time and attention.

She reminded me of my name and what it means. I believe names have power, and mine's a *very* powerful name.

Here's what somebody says about it:

In classical Greece, sophrosyne (" soh-froh-soo'-neh ") referred to excellence of character and soundness of mind in a well-balanced individual. This complex ideal has no direct translation into English. Its roots suggest a bringing together (syne) of the qualities of wisdom (sophia). It conveys the idea of happiness (in a proper philosophic sense) derived from:

temperance in desires -- "nothing in excess"
self awareness -- "know thyself"
modesty (self confident humility, the opposite of arrogance)
relatedness to the whole of self and society
respect for excellence
respect for human nature, its limits, its balance
self-restrained freedom
obedience to the laws of harmony and proportion
love of truth-beauty-goodness
wisdom (clear discernment based on broad knowledge, including self knowledge)
the qualities giving rise to true charm and charisma ["Charmides"]

My challenge is to live up to my name. I'm more impulsive that I want to admit *at all.* I can be downright reckless sometimes, and I'm most always so focused and driven I can get really badly out of alignment. Like I have the past week.

Nox said she was amazed by my emergent personality.... but as I thought on it, I realized I'd been misaking "strong" for "clear," or fully formed. I've got a *lot* of raw power, I know: Fire is *strong* in me. But I can be lazy and use that power instead of finesse. And for all my strength, as nox reminded me, I'm not three weeks old, and I'm still pretty unformed. Like a baby, but without the bodily-fluid issues! *g*

That struck me at the end of our evening together: nox showed me a different me - not changed, but - she showed me my potential. Poised, mature, elegant. I didn't know there *was* that Soph - I'd only seen the overgrown kid, the big hyper puppy. She showed me the lady.

And I thought, what else could I be that I don't know about? I astonished myself by finding an interest to surf, after reading 's reviews of Namiko Surf Co. That meant there was more to me than I knew. And if my name at its core is a challenge to "know thyself," well, then, I had some work to do.

So I took the Myers-Briggs Test last night. I came up as a nicely moderate ENFJ - pretty close to the center on each element. The description cracked me up - I should just copy it into my Profile (actually.... that might not be the worst idea!)!

Then, with the Other Personality's blessing, I went to visit one of OP's household goddesses (and I think where she took me must be a place in SL - I might go on a quest to find it!), Nyx (who, I discovered this morning, is the mother of Sophrosyne in mythology - and of course, is "Nox" in Latin :) ). She told me a lot of things, which boiled down to, "I love you, I've given you a lot to work with, now get your head out of your butt!" Goddess tough love, sheesh! :)

I'd started with a Tarot reading that was good, but really full of warnings, and that spooked me. This morning I did another one, to see if I'd really *seen* the path I need to follow. "Looks like yes," as the magic 8-ball would say! I saved the reading - I wish there was some way to copy it into this post, but that looks like more trouble than it's worth. Let's just say, if I keep my sophrosyne, well - I can do a lot of good.

So what does all this mean in action (which, like my type says, is all I care about anyway!)?

I haven't done my taolu since the day I moved in, last Wednesday. Every morning, first thing, without fail, and finished off with sitting meditation. I've gotten my cushion and a little incense burner set up - I just need to use them. Routinely. And I need to step up my practice: I've looked a little bit for a good gong fu animation package - I've got to keep on that. And I've neglected the spiritual side of wudangquan - I've got to put more into the Taoism part. Maybe there are classes/groups in SL?

And I've got to walk the walk. I've been feeling this itch to go wild, and I've *got* to burn it off in gong fu and meditation. And, a little battery-powered friend could help too.... *blushes* Now that I know what a divine ass-kicking I'm in for if I lose my way.... :P

But there's a reason Namiko Surf Shop made such an impression on me. That's sophrosyne, and I'm in awe. Business, dedication, service, natural harmony - there's an example for me to live up to. Can my artistic visions embody sophrosyne? Can I create something not just beautiful and interesting, but good, as in doing-good good? I don't know - but I have to!

The world's down this morning for maintenance. Yesterday I bitched and whined about that and tried to renegotiate my deal with the OP to get more time, since I couldn't use my time this morning. Now? I'm going to practice a little sophrosyne at home, and give OP back that time for OP to use.

It's not going to be an easy road. All that Fire in me wants to burn out of control. But I've been given more grace than that. It's just up to me to use it.

It's all coming together!

2007-05-15T11:13:00.000-07:00

I'm so amazingly blessed!

I've got the dearest person in the world as my friend, my land deal went through, and I'm making progress towards my goals that even I can see!

This morning I went to the Rockcliffe University bookstore to pick up the notes for my Prim series of classes. I couldn't find the thing I needed to know in my own notes, and so I actually broke down and Read the Freaking Manual! Wonders *will* never cease!

My project for the week was to change the flooring in my house. So, not only did I read the destructions *first,* I practiced on a copy of my house. I don't know what's come over me (well, I do, actually! *g*)!

I did it! I've got gorgeous new flooring that matches my furniture perfectly. By the end of next week there may be nothing left of the original boxed house!

And, my look's coming together, bit by bit. It's even harder making the transition from cheap & cheerful newbie stuff to polished than it is to go from Help Island to cheap & cheerful. But I'm getting there so fast! (we just won't talk about everything I've accidentally deleted.! :P )

I'm not going to have much time the next few days, but now I can go into that period confident I'm on track and moving towards my goals!

Life is very, very sweet!

Problems vanish!

2007-05-14T09:17:00.000-07:00

My land problem miraculously solved itself this morning! My strange (now ex-) neighbor bought my extra parcel. I went out and asked him/her if they wanted to buy mine, but no answer. But since his/her group has been on a buying binge, I figured it was worth a shot, and bought the parcels I've been looking at. And sure enough, mine sold right away!

So I'm all moved, onto just under 3 parcels. Prim limit, bye bye! Woot!

Needless to say, I'm spending the day working at my drafting table in my new place.

Plus, I got a good morning hug from nox!

If I can only stay awake till I see her tonight! *g*

Best day ever!

2007-05-13T16:23:00.000-07:00

I finally got to meet nox this morning!

I had a feeling from the first moment I saw her post, that we'd become great friends, and I was right! I had *such* a good time with her, and I'm looking forward to lots more.

We complement each other really well, I think (and I know we compliment each other really well, too! :P ).

I took some photos, and the album's here. I'm such a dork - I really wanted to get a good photo of us together, but I was too shy to ask (yes, that's the Big Red L branded on my forehead!), and by the time it came to part I was having such bad 'puter troubles I didn't dare move around in her room. Next time!

In other news, I did 3 hours of Prim class on Saturday and fried my brain to a cinder, but I learned good stuff. It seems like such a long road: I look at fashion business sites like Namiko Surf Co., which is the *perfect* business model, and Pixel Dolls, and I despair of ever getting good enough to go pro, let alone finding a market for my weird futuristic Chinese noir vision.

*Not,* of course, that I'm going to let that slow me down in the slightest - I'll just pencil in 15 minutes for a Sunday funk each week, and get on with it! :P

And, per usual, I've got 60 million things to do this week, from getting my inventory reorganized and outfits made and remade, to my big project of changing out the floor in my house. Oh, and trying to get my real estate disaster fixed somehow.

I've got a drafting table and chair with a work animation sitting in inventory, waiting for 50 more prims to spare. As it is, I had to de-rez my bed to open clothing boxes today! I'm living indoors, which seemed like an unattainable dream a week ago, so I really can chill a little about getting my workspace up and running. It's not like I've got the skills to start designing yet anyway!

Nox and I are going dancing on Wednesday. It's going to be a fantastic week!

May Makeover Madness!

2007-05-10T14:11:00.000-07:00

Here's my Week 2 photos: after getting settled in at home, I went on a makeover rampage!

WOOOOHOOOO!!!

2007-05-09T14:23:00.000-07:00

I bought land! And a home! And I've moved in!

It was just amazing luck - I read my friends page last night and saw that

masteralida

had a property for sale, for a good price, plus the house. After about two hours of flying around the neighborhood checking *everything* out twenty times (hey, it's hard work being compulsive!), I put in an offer.

And just *happened* to catch Alida on line this morning at a time I'm *never* around. Somebody else was interested, and I might have lost out if I hadn't picked up that IM when I'm usually out doing my taolu.

I'm so happy I could explode!

And, I was up for hours last night thinking about architecture and interior design: I've got some ideas for how I can apply the fashion style I'm building to my house as well. But that's for months from now - right now I still have a coffee table sticking out of the middle of my couch, so I've got a *lot* to learn!

But, I've learned what a "prim limit" is, sigh! I can't even furnish beyond - well, even up to - the bare minimum. I've got to learn what to do about that.

Then, while I was out looking for furniture, I got this incredibly cool smart metal egg that transforms into a motorbike, an offroad vehicle, hovercraft, boat and helicopter. And it''s got an incredible sound system. It's called an Elemental from the !Meta Group. I wiped out the bike into some poor guy walking out of a store, and managed to stall the helicopter and eject, so I think I need to add flying lessons on top of everything else! :P

I'll do a photo post soon of the new place and me being sooo badass on my new bike! :P

Off and running!

2007-05-07T21:03:00.000-07:00

I'm finally getting the time to get on with living and working!

After renegotiating the week with the mun and the wetware, I got to go to my first class! Prims 101, and it was really good: I learned some new stuff, and just as good, I discovered I've already picked up a lot, and more than some other people. Friday I'll do 102, 103 and 104, and maybe Basic Clothing Creation, if I still have any brains left by then!

I did some *window* shopping today (well, and bought some great boots) as part of figuring out where my design market niche is going to be. There's got to be more people out there who want grownup techno/goth wear, right? Most of what I see is either really, really femme - please, not one more gown!! - or street punk. And if I can bring in Chinese design, I think I could have something that would sell.

But first, I've got to learn how to get my prims horizontal! :P

Can't wait for tomorrow!

2007-05-06T12:08:00.000-07:00

It's been a frustrating week. I want to get out and meet people so badly, but I haven't had the time! Tomorrow afternoon I get to make my debut! I'm going to go to The Prim Limit in the afternoon, and *talk* to people and maybe go dancing. I need it so badly, after being cooped up in my little glen.

Shopping's nice, but I can't *afford* it while I'm saving for land, and it's rough b/c it just makes me want to learn how to design for myself even more, and I don't get class time till next week either!

But I did some tai chi yesterday (with my huge intimidating new wings! :P ) and settled out a bit. And I should do some more right now, too!

I'm trying to upload my snaps from my first week (it seems like so much longer!) but lj scrapbook isn't working, it seems. Typical!

But enough complaining! A little tai chi, and a quiet afternoon. Then tomorrow I'm *on*!

ETA: Here's my first week in photos! Whew!

sob!

2007-05-02T18:02:00.000-07:00

I just lost out on a land auction.

I found a *nice* 512m parcel: a residential-only neighborhood with a little park nearby with a gazebo, and a *really* interesting building to explore. It would've been great to get started in, and it was only $3,000.

Till I started to bid. I dropped out at $10, 400, which is *way* more than I really could afford, but - I'm more impulsive than I like to admit, *and* it was really nice, *and* I want to stop sleeping on a park bench!

But I lost out. :-(

Had a good cry, and now I'm curled up on my park bench for the night.

*sob!*

ETA: Oh, and I got macked on by a levitating blue teddy bear. Eew!

And, I just landmarked The Prim Limit and Club Republik. I wanted to stay at both places! At The Prim Limit, the bartender said hi right away, and somebody called out to me (nicely!) at the club. But I had to go - I was sneaking time as it was. I wish I could tell the bartender my sob story, meet some people and go dancing. But nooo, not till Monday. Poor me! :P

The easy part's over!

2007-05-02T10:24:00.000-07:00

I had some time yesterday to go house-hunting.

Good news? I got some free furniture and basic houses. I also found a big Mission-style house with a built-in hot tub that's the very next-best thing to the Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired design I'm working on for my dream house.

Bad news? All the 512k parcels that were up for auction were crammed between casinos. What's up with that?! And I totally can't afford the 2048K parcel that Mission house needs.

So it looks like an artist's studio/loft for me while I'm studying design and until my future business starts bringing in the L. Just a bed and drafting table, and a couch and comfy chair for company. That should leave room left outside for space for my katas, and maybe a hot tub. I'm fine with that - I need to - and want to! - *earn* my dream house.

But I need a place to PUT my little studio apt! I want off this park bench!

And I'm getting to the point where I want to up my own design too. I like what I've done better than what I've seen on most of the other people I've seen around, but I'm not satisfied. I STILL have man-hands! I'd like a more athletic skin, and some hair options.

But I'm pretty much ready to make my debut. I put together a pretty outfit last night, a little more delicate than my usual tastes. It'll be nice for a nice restaurant or evening event. I don't know that I'll get to do anything before I go dancing on Monday, but I'm - *gulp*! - ready!