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JK and I have been indulging in Second Life a little bit; for those who don’t know SL is a virtual reality environment where all the objects are fully interactive, and anyone can own land and create things from scratch. It’s just starting out, so the possiblities are still quite open.
However, the sad thing I’ve seen is that the online world mostly revolves around commerce. Since people pay to play and their real money is converted in to “Linden” dollars – the main thrust of the environment is to find a way to do accumulate these fake funds, which can be traded back in for real life currency. Supposedly there are people subsisting on this as a form of legitimate income.

Naturally, two obnoxious effects spring out of this:
1. TONS OF ADVERTISING EVERYWHERE.
2. TONS OF SEX EVERYWHERE.

So it’s my hope to find a way to subvert the premise that second life is based upon, and to somehow orchestrate a virtual salvation. Either something secretive and hidden that spreads like a soul-virus, or maybe something more public like getting everyone together to try to levitate Governor Linden’s giant estate.

My first job was to procure some land and to set up a Palm Tree Garden, which you can see here:



It seemed like a relatively nice spot, though it was hard to know exactly what it would look like cause when I made my decision it was still dark “outside”. The thing I didn’t know until I had purchased my new plot is that MY NEW LAND IS UNDERWATER. Which is funny, because it makes me a “fish”.

So things are starting to be quite mystical already – that is, when I’m not too busy trying to fend off JK from trying to make out with me:

Here’s something wierd: just this morning Jeremy found this picture on the Propaghandi website (since we’re both going to their Seattle show later this month). On the front of the website is a portrait of a fellow that bears a very striking resemblance to my second life character. So what’s the deal, is my second life avatar starting to appear in my real life?

This is just fucking ridiculous. I must be trying to connect dots where there are just chips in the paint. But here’s a dream from the 19th of October:

“Dreamt last night that I was living inside of my SECOND LIFE and that I was being attacked by miniature people. “Minature” is relative in this sense because we’re talking about a video game – but to be more specific, this was probably an allusion to the Army of Darkness that I had fallen asleep to. Perhaps the strangest aspect had to be waking up to my computer speakers going haywire (they do that whenever a cellphone get’s a call) – but no one was calling. Was there some negative force in both the electrical lines and my subconscious mind? How do these two planes of nonreality relate?”

Yes. Where does my my waking life and my dreaming life and my second life and my no life meet?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 2nd, 2005 at 12:16 am and is filed under Open Discussion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.