( In Four Pictures . . .  )

All in all, it was a lovely rezday. Four is an interesting age to be in a world that is itself only seven. The time the grid existed without me is now exceeded by the time the grid has existed with me in it. And I'm still here. Sometimes frustrated, but still fascinated and hoping to see and do more in this virtual place.

When Miles Montgolfier made it her mission to de-noobify my appearance, one of the things that she insisted on correcting was the way I walked. Before then, I'd been stumbling around with the standard issue dorky-looking walk that avatars come with when they enter Second Life. I didn't see anything wrong with it, but then I didn't see anything wrong with avatar hair, either. Miles dissuaded me from both notions by tossing me a few hundred Linden Dollars to buy my first prim hair from Deviant Kitties and then taking me to a shop that had a free Animation Override and insisting that I put it on.

Suddenly, my gawky stumble became a sexy saunter and my hair flowed behind me as I moved. Second Life became a more glamourous place.

When I first shifted to boyshape, the sexy saunter didn't really work as well so I reverted to the dorkwalk until I could find a better option. By then, spending money on enhancing my appearance came naturally to me, so when I asked caliburnsusanto for advice, he pointed me to a HUD that sat discreetly in the corner of the screen and gave me a manly sort of stride.

For a while, changing genders (as I still do) caused me to change Animation Overrides to the point that I tucked a copy of the sexywalk freebie in the folder for my girlshape so it was easily gotten to. Once in a while, I'd forget, at least until I took a few steps and realized which AO I had on. Then one day, I decided to leave the manly stride in place while in girlshape and decided it didn't look so bad. (Certainly not as bad as leaving the sexywalk in place when in boyshape, at least to my eyes.)

So I think I'll keep it. It seems that even in girlshape these days, I end up retaining a number of my more 'masculine' aspects, such as the indie rock glasses, the clothes and even the hairstyles. I suppose I'm the butch to Beginning's femme when we're in 'rezbian' mode. Plus, it makes shifting back and forth much less of a hassle, which is always helpful.

argent_bury posted a meme of sorts here, and asked:

If you are so inclined, give me a few rules you live by in SL, and a few things you get out of being here. Don't talk about your expectations on others, talk about you.

So, in no particular order, here are a few of mine:

( Cut for much ramblage . . .  )

I am large, I contain multitudes.
--Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

So I've been pondering--a lot--about the nature of my Self in Second Life, particularly in light of the fact that I now have more than one self running about in there.

( Cut for circle-breaking and a bit of tl;dr )

( Addendum added, also cut for circle-breaking... )

Yeah, it figures, no sooner did I announce to the world the location of our shiny new shop, I met with Miles this evening and we decided to move to a new location!

It's here:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Quantum%20Fields/223/83/23

It's a shop in the mall that the QTLabs people are setting up. There will be a grand opening soon, which should probably encourage us to get things going in terms of new product. I've already set up the salesprims of our first three items and the freebie box and the sign.

The rent is MUCH cheaper, and we're already on great terms with the QTLabs folks, so it's a win-win situation all around.

Feeling much better about this now that Miles is back from her exile. Watch for updates.

Most of my rezday was spent with Miles. We looked at and ultimately settled on a location for our Social Butterfly store. Talk about motivation to get things moving!

Alas, I also had some RL drama going on at the same time, and Miles was unable to offer me comfort. I talked to Sacred Singh about it, who was incredibly kind and insightful, and who gave me the clarity to make a very difficult decision.

The repercussions of that decision are still reverberating in my life. I won't go into details--that's for the other journal. But, at any rate, Second Life held no appeal for me for the next several days. (And, as it turned out, it was a lucky thing it didn't, because the infrastructure was gafarked for much of that time.)

Sunday, I'd sufficiently (if not completely) recovered enough to have my weekly goal-setting Group meeting. Two made it, one sent regrets (she was still cleaning up messes left behind by the SL troubles of the past few days) and one wasn't even logged in. I touched briefly on my RL troubles and then focused on the meeting. It was good.

Afterwards, I worked on a sort of tutorial kit on How To Make Prim Skirts to give to Miles, since our schedules are now such that coordinating time to meet is difficult at best. I'll be giving it one last review and delivering it the next time I'm inworld.

Working on Social Butterfly is going to be a little harder with the RL business still going on, but I hope to be able to keep things going in a forward direction. Watch this space.

Mastering the skills needed to ascend from mere observer to creator in Second Life can take some doing. Like everybody else, when I started out I couldn't do much more with building and scripting than rezzing a plywood box and making it say "Hello Avatar!"

A little Googling pointed me toward many wonderful online tutorials, particularly Natalia Zelmanov's blog, which I continue to use as a resource. (She's added a few tutorials on sculpties, which I've been trying to follow, but Wings 3D isn't playing well with my computer right now, alas.)

Lately, though, I've also been taking classes inworld. They're amazingly easy to find--just go to the Events listings, select the Education category and all the casino ads magically go away and you're given a list of places to go and things to learn. I found a class on how to build neko ears and a tail, and I ended up wearing the results for weeks afterward. I took a class in animation, so I was able to learn exactly how to use that Avimator program that came with my copy of the Second Life book. And I ended up taking a four day course called "LSL Boot Camp", which was a very intensive set of classes on scripting. I'm still digesting everything I learned from that one.

I also wanna give a shout-out to kherber who taught a fun class on furniture building, though I learned that from the second_lifers community, rather than the Events calendar.

I've gotten a little more used to my appearance in Second Life, and then I went and put on a completely new one. While I wasn't able to make it to grizzygriswold's discussion of race and gender (she asked that people try on an avatar of a different race or gender than their usual one and talk about how people reacted to it) I was still intrigued enough by the notion to try on a male body for a while.

So went into Edit Appearance mode, did a Save As on my shape, pressed the Male radio button and ta-da--insta-gothboy! With girly slit still between legs. Hm. I decided to pull the male version of the CyberGoth skin out of the Library and try that on for size. It worked for what I needed, since I was only doing it as a lark at this point. I did a little slider tweaking on the shape, then threw on some freebie hair I'd gotten somewhere earlier. While it wasn't perfect, it, again, served for a mere experiment. I donned the Blaze tux I'd bought earlier and went out into the world.

Nobody actually noticed, it seemed. Miles knew, but only because we were, once again, in the same room in RL and able to shoulder-surf. We went to a beach party that DJ Lysander was spinning at, and none of the usuals made the slightest remark on it. Then again, my boyself and my girlself are both pale and skinny, so it's possible people didn't even see a difference!

Seeing 'myself' as male was a curious sensation. I did gain a measure of insight into those certain men who apparently play female avatars in the shapes of their personal fantasies. When I looked at my boyself my thoughts were something along the lines of "Damn, I'd hit that!"

But there was also a sense of detachment that went with it. Part of it may simply be that I'm not 'used' to being in that shape. I also had a bit of that when my female face was changed in ways I wasn't comfortable with.

Note the number of caveats I put on my remark about the motivations of men who play women--my point is most definitely not that all men do this, just that some, possibly, do. I also know of RL men who play SL women as a way of expressing aspects of themselves that cannot be easily explored in that thing we call reality, particularly when their biology does not match what they feel their gender to be. It's also possible that the reason for my detachment is that I don't have as deep-seated a need to 'be male' as other people might.

My perceptions of this may change if I'm ever addressed and interacted with as a male, which hasn't really happened yet.

I've organized some folders for my two different bodies and I think I'll be jumping back and forth between them for a bit. I do need a decent AO with a male walk--my sexywalk AO just doesn't work for my boyshape, but I can't hack it to change walks. I've picked up a few more freebies to wear, but I'd still like to find a decent male skin that has the impossibly bleached pallor that I'm accustomed to. Some things, it seems, I just can't bear to change.

One of the things that separates Second Life from that pesky Real Life (and, indeed, from many other online environments) is the degree to which you can manipulate your appearance. The moment you enter this strange new world for the first time, you are given a choice of bodies to incarnate into. And while you are assured that you can change your mind later, at least in my case, the body I chose seems to have influenced my appearance ever since.

I picked the CyberGoth option, because it seemed the most like how I felt on the inside, even if I don't look much like that in Real Life. The other human bodies were far too mundane for me, and the furry bodies, while an interesting possibility, didn't really appeal to me as much as they undoubtedly appeal to others.

So I became a Goth. After I learned how to walk, I poked at tweaking my appearance a bit and did my time on Help Island before emerging into the big wide world.

As time progressed, I figured out more about how to refine how I looked, such as how to make my eyes look like eyes instead of blank voids and how to get rid of that weird headphone looking thingy on my head. I made some very simple clothes, uploading a few .jpg textures I'd googled and just doing simple length and color adjustments on standard clothing. Picked up a few freebies here and there as well, but mostly I was DIY. I gripped tightly to the few Lindens I had because I needed them for upload fees and I wasn't on SL frequently enough to hold down a steady job anywhere.

I looked like a newbie, dressed in freebies. I did what I could with what I had and was largely satisfied with it.

Then I met Miles.

Miles Montgolfier actually signed up for Second Life about two months after I did. She likewise started life as a CyberGoth, but spent more time and more money to become a kind of Amazonian Goth Goddess. When we finally met face to face in SL (we already knew each other in RL at this point, but kept missing each other inworld) I told her I was vaguely intimidated by her appearance. She was quite impressive, with her fluttering primskirts, huge black wings and flowing hair. I looked quite plain next to her.

This is when I was still only in SL about once a week on the borrowed machine, so we made a point of meeting up and hanging out on those Sunday nights. Miles gave me slews of freebies, including some skins that I tried on for size. I settled on some pale white 'vampire' skin that actually had nipples and tattoos on it.

One of those nights, Miles took me to Deviant Kitty to look at prim hair. I tried on various demos, but sighed that I couldn't really afford to buy anything, since I only had so many Lindens to work with and no source of Linden income. (Lindcome?)

"Whatever," said Miles, as she gave me 200 Lindens.

So I bought hair. It's actually the hair I'm wearing in this particular icon. As Miles took me to a few more places, I admired the way the hair moved as I walked. I was hooked.

A few days later, I bought Lindens with my PayPal account. Four dollars and some change (I was trying to round off my PayPal balance to a nice even number) bought me over a thousand Lindens.

I bought more hair (and accidentally botched some of it trying to edit it) and invested in a Deviant Kitty skin for a mere 100 Lindens that has served me nicely for many months.

Then I started getting, I suppose, restless again in terms of how I looked. I looked fine from a distance, but up close I looked a little too 'rendered' compared to others. I wasn't happy with my nose, but wasn't sure what to do to fix it.

So a few nights ago, at another laptop session at Miles' RL apartment, Miles offered to adjust some hair that I had that didn't quite sit right on my head. The next thing I know, we went from adjusting my hair to shopping for a new shape and skin for me.

The way we achieved this was a bit odd and kind of amusing. We switched bodies. Since we were both in the same room in RL, Miles logged into my account and I logged into Miles' account on our respective computers. I 'shoulder-surfed' (Miles' term) to pick out a new body and skin and Miles had me buy them, try them on and make adjustments.

I hated the result. Not that it looked bad, precisely, it just didn't look like me anymore. I fiddled some more with it when I had my body again, trying to get it back to the way it was. I ended up putting the old skin back on--which now looked completely different on this new shape--and ended up adjusting things back to something resembling what it was.

I can't find my original shape in my inventory, for some reason. I've made a point of saving and naming a copy of what I'm wearing now so I'll have a backup. But I still look vaguely unfamiliar to myself and I'm still trying to deal to it.

*sigh* I want my old face back.

We've all been there, of course. You stumbled from Orientation Island to Help Island, worked your way through until you kinda, sorta, felt you had the hang of it and then ventured past the point of no return into the big, wide world of Second Life.

I found it a bit crazy where I arrived. Fortunately, I found a teleport booth that pinged me to a little club that was pretty much set up for newbies to find their footing. There was a dancefloor and in one corner was a literal heap of boxes containing freebies for newbies to help themselves to.

I had a little bit of help, because other Duranies had ventured there before me and were able to devote more time to getting settled. We traded SL names on the Duran Duran message boards, and I soon friended some people I knew from there and at one point had a lovely little gossip session about certain Duranies we knew, while sitting around a patio table on the roof of someone's house.

Miles probably got me up to speed faster than anybody, once we started meeting up in SL regularly. She took me to Deviant Kitty and gave me Lindens to buy my first flexi hair. She directed me to Quantum Fields and introduced me to her circle of friends and acquaintances.

I don't hang in places where newbies show up much, but once in a while I come across them. Recently, I checked out a place on a lark and came across a rather endearing newbie named Rubber (I'll have to look up his last name.) He asked me where I was from. I told him "Livigno." Then I ended up taking him to my humble abode and showing him around. (I live on a 512 plot, so there isn't much to show.) I found out a nifty way to teleport somebody without having to friend them right away--just open their profile and leave it open when you teleport. When you land, the profile window will still be open and you can offer a teleport from there.

So I showed him my digs and he asked what my hangouts were, so I took him to Quantum Fields. DJ Lysander was doing his thing and people who hadn't seen me in a while were saying hello. It felt kind of odd to be that cool. Rubber got the hang of using the dance ball and we grooved for a bit before he asked to see the rest of the place. So we went off for a bit--I showed him the Saturn Grill, which is apparently a replica of a RL restaurant that sponsors the sim and we ended up on the boardwalk, watching the prim waves. He said he was interested in learning how to build things--I pointed him toward the Ivory Tower of Primitives. I finally had to leave--it was very late for me and my RL bed was calling, but I gave him a hug goodnight and expressed the hope that I'd see him again.

Sometimes hanging out with someone who literally sees this virtual world with new eyes can make you appreciate things a little more. I wonder if that's part of what drives the people who run that newbie club where I first found my bearings all those months ago.

Actually, it's not really a Maneuver, it's more of a Gesture . . .

No, really, Miles and I made a Gesture in Second Life. Miles wanted a way to type our logo in the chat window--:)i(:--with a shortcut instead of leaning on the shift key for four keystrokes. I suggested if we were going to do that, we ought to have a little sound to play to go with it, so Miles composed a little nine-second .wav file of a sort of fluttery ringtonish chime. (This is not as annoying as it may sound, since most of those seconds are a long slow echoey fade after the initial notes.) Miles uploaded the sound and gave it to me, and I went off to create a new Gesture with it.

( In case you were curious, here's how it works . . .  )

Once again, we did our usual rounds at Quantum Fields, with the Positive Quantum Energy Festival in full swing that night. Miles handed out the /bfly Gesture to the other Group members in the room and people were triggering it all night. Miles and Lysander wound up doing tag-team DJ duty--Lysander would play a few songs and then hand the stream over to Miles, who would then play a few tracks and then hand the stream back to Lysander. (I don't know the techy details about How They Did It, beyond the fact that they both have access to the Shoutcast server and used IMs to coordinate the changeovers.) It was a really fun night.

I also did some mucking about with prims, but that didn't turn out quite as well as I would have liked. The torus still baffles me in many ways.

There are big all-day events happening at both Quantum Fields and Caledon. I might check out Caledon; I'll definitely have to swing by Quantum Fields at some point. Of course, there is that pesky Real Life business to be taken care of . . .