I came, I saw, I partied

The Lindens threw a 24 hour long Roman themed party across 5 sims for Concierge Customers and their guests. The party favors were delivered in black and orange amphoras.  Festivities included lots of party conversations, music, dancing and trivia contests. Good thing I did not win any of the trivia contest questions, though I did try.  Prizes included various members of the Linden family, and I was not sure what you were supposed to do with your prize should you win one.  

The Temple was a starting place for many

 

Partiers at Mount Olympus

Transportation included ships and hot air balloons.  /me hanging my head in shame. I was such a noob; I could not figure out how to fly my balloon.

Cupid strikes the unsuspecting

Dancing at the Colesseum

Kara

Across all time

I was feeling sad and left all on my own;  

teary eyed because I had let you down; 

and sad ’cause you could not be at home.

 

I promised I would always love you and honor your first life.

Loving you comes so easily, but I missed you so, 

and jealousy cut my heart with her knife. 

 

Looking at my hand, noticing the ring, 

I’m reminded of the promises we made

and how we make our joyous hearts sing. 

 

I know your heart is filled with love, perhaps as much as mine.

While some may say we’re only virtual mates,

my soul sends you real love across and throughout time.

 

Kara 

 

 

 

Rez Day Reflections: One foot in each world

Wow.  What a year it has been been.  Just one year ago, I thought I would take a peek into Second Life.  I had been meaning to do so for several months and then one night I signed in and created an avatar, immediately discovering how much I loved 3D virtual worlds.   Then the adventures began in ernest.  I have been through so much. It is like a childhood and early adulthood all compressed into 12 months. I had to get through the big learning curve, finding out about clothing, traveling, interacting with objects, communications, building, and inventory management.  I took practical classes such as on basic building and branched out to university courses on the immersive environment and learning.  In the first few weeks I learned how to move my camera and take screenshots, and since then I have taken thousands and thousands of pics documenting my adventures.  I worked on learning photoshop (that is an ongoing process) and recently discovered the joys of Windlight, so my images of the virtual world are improving noticeably.

I discovered cybering. Wow! That certainly was not something I was looking for and now can not imagine doing without it specifically with the one I love.  I discovered the hard way about truth, lies and betrayal in virtual relationships.  I experienced the confusing overlap between real life relationships and the romantic/sexual relationships of the virtual world.   I had to re-evaluate my personal ethics about intimate relationships and commitment.

Most meaningful and joyous to me is that I have found the love of my second life. I have fallen in love and have committed myself to Beck, my second life partner.  I love the adventure of getting to know his inner self, his soul,  and opening up and revealing my heart to him.   He touches me so deeply in ways that I could not have imagined.  I can not and do not want to imagine my life (my lives, either of them) without that connection with, that love for this wonderful person. And so, I continue to experience the joys and the entanglements of a heart beating in a person who has feet firmly placed in both the virtual and the real worlds.

I am sharing some photos of some of those who have had the greatest impact on my second life. My thanks to each of you who have done so much to enrich my virtual and therefore my real life.  Happy Rez Day to me! Kara

        

Give me a land of boughs in leaf

 

Content creation is one of the exciting things to me about Second Life. The fact that all residents can help create the virtual world that we share is a motivating factor for learning new skills.  While I have learned so much in the last year, my skills to create (or do much of anything else) are still relatively basic, or maybe I should say positively basic. O.K., yes. I have made a few buildings, created some basic furniture, worked on an exhibit and learned photoshop for improving upon my screenshots and for future texture making. But I still have yet to create clothing or seemingly more difficult objects such as trees. I was not sure if I would ever get to make trees. And I love them as hopefully you can tell from this pic of me at home in SL.

So I was very excited to discover that Stanford Virtual Worlds Group designed a simple to use program for creating 3D trees of all sorts. I downloaded the program, Dryad, named after tree nymphs, and created a tree in minutes. So I can honestly say this is incredibly easy to use. It is perfect for people like me, who arrived in a virtual world with a high love of visuals and a minimal level of technical skills, and I believe this sentiment is conveyed in the titles of the two following articles; 3-D Design for the Masses in Technology Review and Researchers Hope to Enable Crowdsourcing of Virtual Worlds in Ars Technica.  Other thoughts on this topic include Ian Lamont’s Dryad and the 3D Modeling Challenge in his Computer World blog and Building a Virtual World, One Tree (or millions) at a Time published in the Stanford News Service.   Kara

“Give me a land of boughs in leaf,

A land of trees that stand;

Where trees are fallen there is grief;

I love no leafless land.”

A. E. Housman

He asked, I answered, We celebrated.

Why do people get married or partnered in Second Life?  It certainly is an equal opportunity for all avies as partnering is open to business partners, friends, same sex couples, opposite sex couples, furries and so on.  Any avatar wth 10 Linden Dollars can make or accept a proposal.  The Traveling Avatar writes about how to partner in sl.  The details of how to go about it are important.  The romantic face to face proposal is a real high when coming from the love of your second life.  But like real life, there is always paperwork to be done.  For example, do you know what happens to the LL proposal form once you fill it out? Is it delivered in world, to an email address, or somewhere else? Did you know that the proposal has a short expiration time on it? Potentially that special someone could send out a form and wait with excitement for a response only to have it go unnoticed until it expires. One more thing I want to share, Business Week on February 14, 2008 ran a story, “So I married and Avatar.”  It talks about meeting people online and about the science of matches. While that is interesting,  the reason I am linking to the article is the beautiful and romantic machinima on the sl wedding of Shava and Matthew who are marrying in rl as well.

I have a selfish reason for writing on this topic and the previous info is to give you some added value for your having stopped to read.  The reason I am writing today is to share my own excitement about my second life love.  He asked me to partner, I said “Yes!” and we have celebrated.  :)))

So back to my original question as to why do people partner in virtual worlds?  I can answer for no one other than myself.  For me, I am fortunate to have bonded with a very special person. I know him within sl, not in the real world. If I saw his photo or saw him on the street I would not know it was him. While I do not know the outer person, we are both getting to know each other from the inside.  I feel that in a way I have some of the best of him. Because of circumstances I would never irl have this access to his inner self. I am getting to know his language, his thoughts, his feelings, his sensuality, his heart.  His Heart. His big heart, his kindness, his intelligence, his sensitivity, his humor and his passions. Yes, if I passed him on the street, I would not know it was him, however, if we spoke more than a few sentences, I would recognize him.  Because I am getting to know and love his soul.  It is our souls that are connecting, sharing, and loving.  It is our souls that are out living an adventure together in the virtual world.  Beck, I feel so honored and joyful that we are continuing to share our time together.  Thank you, my love.  <3  Kara

    

Spirit of Valentine’s Day

Valentine’s Day is the time to recognize those we love.  In this busy world it is so easy to take others for granted. While we may feel love and think great things about our lovers or spouses, do we really let them know how we feel?  Everyone deserves love and deserves to hear about it often! Despite all the ways we have to stay in touch, it is easy to become disconnected and to feel lonely, even when surrounded by others.  What is life all about if we do not share our life and our love with others?  I extend these thoughts to both those I care about in the virtual world as well as to my rl loved ones.  What follows are a few of the lyrics from Snow Patrol’s Chasing Cars for Beck, my very loved sl co-adventurer.

We’ll do it all

Everything

On our own

We don’t need

Anything

Or anyone

If I lay here

If I just lay here

Would you lie with me and just forget the world?

I don’t quite know

How to say

How I feel

Those three words

Are said too much

They’re not enough

If I lay here

If I just lay here

Would you lie with me and just forget the world?

Kara

Awe Inspiring, Jaw Dropping, Visual Bliss of Windlight

I am positively in love with Second Life’s Windlight.  Wow.  What a difference it makes in viewing and capturing the sky, water and light (not to mention photographing the love of my sl.)  I have found some basic instructional information and tutorials and it is pretty easily to use.  The examples on this blog were all done with the default settings.  Torley Linden had been raving about it as the Linden Rep for Windlight, and others have been producing great photos with it. A Flickr search this morning of photos tagged with Windlight reveals some incredible screenshots.  I finally got around to installing Windlight just the other day.  My love and I both installed it and joyfully experienced it together for the first time.  I do not know why I delayed, other than perhaps I sensed (correctly) that my sl time would end up being utterly consumed in snapping everything (yes, that includes photos of  my co-adventurer in pixel life, fortunately he is so patient with me) from every possible angle in pure visual bliss.   Kara 

                     

Cyberotics: Pixeled Love

What do you need to know to cyber? Do you use text or voice?  Use pose balls, naughty bits, speaking attachments, your imagination or some combination of these things? There already is such a big learning curve when you arrive in Second Life, and if you decide cybering is going to be a part of it, there is even so much more for a newbie to figure out.

The blog posting by Aplink-Its Real,  Second Life and Sex-Get Some Lessons-It’s Real, is a great way to come up to speed on some of these questions. Bonnie’s Heroine Sheik, is also an ongoing stream of cybering info.  A recent post, Cybersex Reading List, is a great example. I especially enjoyed reading the Art of Giving Good Text, which was posted by Are We Not Men? I was very concerned, however, about the comments on spelling and typing.  To follow these suggestions, you just might have to slow down too much or forgo some great descriptive language.  Personally I would rather let the thoughts flow and live with some typos.

The one thing that none of these articles addresses is feelings; the fact of how amazing, incredible and awe inspiring this can be, when done with someone you love.  Do not get me wrong, sex for the sake of sex is great, but WOW, nothing compares with mixing pixels with the one who stirs your heart and soul as well as your virtual body.  Kara

Pants on Fire

Friend? Lover? Player? Liar? In a virtual world, such as Second Life, you truly know nothing of the other participants unless you already know them or come to know them in real life.  You may think you do know them, but you do not truly know the gender, age, or real life circumstances of those you talk with, befriend, or love in a virtual world. Scrawled in Wax writes about this topic of online identities.  Anyone can fabricate anything and you just have to decide on a case by case basis that you are or are not going to trust the person you are getting to know.  In the blog, Almost Clear, the writer discusses having developed a very close friendship while keeping a big gender related secret.

Not only do you have to decide if you want to accept that what the other person tells you is true, you also have to decide how much of your own real life to share. So while you are evaluating the veracity of what is shared with you, you are also faced with where is the limit between sl and rl. How much will you reveal?  How much will you allow rl and sl to overlap or blur?  Not only is there the potential for someone to lie and cause hurt or misunderstandings, there is the danger of someone being careless with or even taking advantage of the information they have about you.

There are only 6 Rules in Second Life and one of them, Disclosure,  is that you will not divulge the personal information that you know about others.  You may not share information beyond what is listed on the Real Life Tab of the profile.  You may have some special virtual friends with whom you had grown close and been completely honest about yourself.  And they also shared much personal information with you.  While it is in a virtual world , it feels like it is a genuine friendship.  So what do you do if you feel betrayed; if you believe your virtual friend has shared personal information about you with others you do not know; without your permission? What if when you try to confront the individual about how he violated your privacy and about how wrong it seems that he shared information about you, you are met with evasiveness, indignance and anger. Has this happened to you? How did you react?  I would be happy to hear from anyone who has been through this and would like to know how you handled it.  Kara

The Chemistry of Love

 

He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me…..  Are you thinking about each other all of the time?  Are you feeling like you can not get enough of each other? Are you counting the hours until you can be together again?   Is it love?  Is it evolution and chemistry?

Our previous posts, “Torn and Twisted” and “Virtual Semantics”, have generated several comments, the most recent one of which recommended that we take a look at the book, Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love (Henry Holt, 2004) by Helen Fisher.  While our discussions have been about Second Life relationships, there seems to be so much cross over between real life and virtual world feelings, that the book seems appropriate to at least ponder in the context of virtual world relationships.

The book is a fascinating look at how brain chemistry and evolution play a part in love, romance and lust.  While it may sound clinical to approach something as passionate, exciting, magical and well, uh, romantic as love and romance as being based on chemistry, I do not see it that way.  For example, you easily could make the case that the drive to have children, bond with them, and raise them is all chemically based for the survival of humankind, however, that in no way takes away from the magic of a child’s birth, the joy of little baby kisses and smiles, bedtime stories and so on. Some of the points made in the book include that the feelings of concentration, ecstasy, and energy which are often considered symptoms of falling in love are related to the effects of Dopamine and that the exhilaration, sleeplessness and loss of appetite also linked to the feelings of love relate to the increased levels of Norepinephrine. Fisher explores the possibility that romantic or obsessive lovers may have low levels of Serotonin (more on this by H. Fisher and JA Thomson Jr. in “Lust, Romance, Attraction, Attachment: Do the side-effects of serotonin-enhancing antidepressants jeopardize romantic love, marriage and fertility?” in Evolutionary Cognitive Neuroscience. 2007, MIT Press, p. 245-283) in addition to the increased levels of Norepinephrine and Dopamine. The role of dopamine in stimulating the release of testosterone and therefore increasing sexual desire, and the role of “cuddle chemicals”, Oxytocin and Vasopressin,  in forming adult male-female attachments is also mentioned.

Fisher makes comparisons between romance and addiction.  ”Dopamine involvement may even explain why love-stricken men and women become so dependent on their romantic relationship and why they crave emotional union with their beloved. Dependence and craving are symptoms of addiction-and all of the major addictions are associated with elevated levels of dopamine.  Is romantic love an addiction? Yes… a blissful dependence when one’s love is returned, a painful, sorrowful, and often destructive craving when one’s love is spurned.” About addiction to love, Fisher has also written  ”Because romantic love is such a euphoric ‘high’, because this passion is exceedingly difficult to control, and because it produces craving, obsession, compulsion, distortion of reality , emotional and physical dependence, personality change, and loss of self=control, many psychologists regard romantic love as an addiction-a positive addiction when your love is returned, a horribly negative fixation when your love is spurned and you can’t let go.”

Helen Fisher is a research professor at Rutgers University.  She has a website packed with information and she has her own blog as well. She was hired as the Chief Scientific Advisor for Match.com to develop the chemistry.com personality profile. The service aims to match people not only with the hopes to fall in love but also to stay in love. Kara