Gifts

I received an order today for matching Ms.O.Lei-ny "Etched in Stone" sets with a custom message. The customer included a message for the recipient. She was releasing him unwillingly and this was a goodbye gift.

This is the first time I've heard of this product being used as a way to say goodbye. When I created it, it was meant to express love. I suppose, it still is. Sometimes, the greatest act of love is letting go.

From my perspective, she gave him two gifts. And the jewelry set is the lesser of the two.

I wish them both the best.


Happy Thanksgiving, everybody.

Positive spin

I've updated my profile. I've been reading all these Law of Attraction stuff on the web and it said to put your wishes out to the world in positive terms, because what you focus on is what you get.

Okay.

So instead of the "Leave me be..." tab in my Picks, I now have this tab instead:

Love me...

... only if you understand that SL is NOT a game, because it isn't to me and my heart is not a plaything.

... only if you understand that drama is necessarily a part of any relationship that involves strong emotions, like love.

... only if you see the beauty of my avatar as a reflection of my creativity and my technical skill, and you could love, not the beauty you see, but the mind that created it.

... only if you don't expect me to fight for your affections, because love should be a willing coming-together of two souls, not a chasing-after. If I have to fight for you, you're not worth fighting for.

... only if you understand that SL is NOT separate from RL, and commitments made in SL have the same weight as commitments made in RL. Meeting me in a virtual world doesn't make me less human or less worthy of respect than people you meet in real life.

Runaway bride

Gracie Kendal is building a collection of pictures of avatars for "a project on identity and anonymity."

One of her friends took her to my glass house to view the morphing portraits and she invited me to pose for her. She thought I was kidding when I asked, "The question is how you want me to look... with a mermaid tail, with legs, darker skin, fair skin, red hair, blond hair, dark hair, formal, casual, ethnic, strange, masked, tattoos? Do you want my alts too? My alts don't have as many choices."

*grins*

Well, I decided on wearing the Mer Betta Pasithea and made a pose for the shoot, which we did today.

When I did my interview for MODA Spotlight, one of the tasks was to wear something that I felt represented me, and I wore the Pasithea then too. And here's why: I created the first bridal mermaid in Second Life. Ironically, Opal has never been partnered. In fact, only one of my alts has ever been partnered, and then I put her in hibernation immediately after, because it really was just a symbolic partnership.

Now, the intriguing aspect of Gracie's project is that all the avatars are facing away from the camera. And one of the photos she took of me with the custom pose looked as though I was swimming away from the camera. I remarked that I looked like a runaway bride, and I thought it was so appropriate.

One of my "rules" is that Opal will only be partnered in SL if I am engaged to the same man in real life. But I have long-term commitment issues in real life. Ergo, the runaway bride.

Gracie took more pictures using the poses in my Kamihitoe AO, so I don't know if she'll eventually use that runaway bride shot. But the project is on display as she continues to add photos to the collection. And not all the photos show up in her blog or Flickr, so check it out inworld.

Personal space

Last week, I started uprooting some of the Linden plants on my parcels in Aglia and Zeuzera and replaced them with prim plants and trees from Organica and Botanical. I've been reluctant to make too many changes in Aglia because I want to preserve that parcel's history. Well, at least its history as it pertains to me. :)

For now, I've set down autumn trees which will change in a few months. Or maybe not, depending how I feel. And I'll probably reroute the stream and switch to better sculpts for the water. In any case, the re-landscaping is not quite done. And I won't be touching the main structures, like the glass house, the deck, and the gazebo. At least, not yet. I feel some pride in the fact that they've withstood time.

My neighbors in Zeuzera saw the changes I made to that parcel and noticed that I've updated the dividing wall. I met them when they first moved in, when they asked if I would smooth the dip in the terrain at the border of our parcels. Later, they purchased the parcel I had a bit north when I needed room in my tier. They wanted to purchase the rest of my parcel in Zeuzera but I refused. It is my buffer, in a sense, protecting the main parcel which is the first land I bought. When my neighbors saw the updated wall, they asked if I could remove it instead. I had made the walls transparent on their side, so I didn't see a reason why I should remove them.

To their credit, they've done a wonderful job with their parcels. There are layers of landscaping areas and lovely hidden nooks among the foliage of the trees and rocks. But the sculpted cliffs that surrounded their paradise was transparent from my side yet showed strips of some of the faces perpendicular to the border. And it looked ugly from the wrong side. I explained this and they agreed. Instead, they offered to landscape my parcel as well.

I'm sure they meant well with that offer. And I thanked them but declined. Besides the issue of choosing between opening up my parcel so anybody could rez on it (so I would have to waste my time checking if newbies had left junk on the parcel) or adding strangers to my private group (which would reveal some alts that I don't want revealed), I felt insulted by the offer.

I have never said anything about their trees overlapping at least a meter into my land, which makes me feel like they were invading my personal space. It's not as though my parcels look awful. One of the things they said when they moved next door was that they liked the fact that I built a garden. And for them to build right on my land and impose their idea of a garden on me feels insulting.

I'm sure that's not their intent. They were probably just trying to be nice. But that makes assumptions about what people want out of SL. They probably assumed I just want a pretty place to live in. But it's more than that.

The end result doesn't matter as much as the process itself. I don't just want a pretty place. I want a pretty place that *I* built and put together, using pieces that *I* choose, placing them where *I* want. Only then can it feel as though the space were really mine. This is not a public parcel, although I allow people to spend time in it. It is there for *my* pleasure, not for anyone else's. And, therefore, it should be just the way *I* want it to be.

In fact, I don't spend much time in that parcel anymore, because I had moved my workloft to another sim, and the pavilion I set up for me and my lover is in yet another sim. But I keep Aglia and Zeuzera because they have personal meaning for me. And, because of that, those spaces are more *personal*.

It's not the space or the object or the avatar that matters, but the meaning we associate to them, the emotions that get attached to them. A virtual shrub of gardenias is just another pretty thing until a lover gives it to his beloved. A gazebo is just another nice place to sit in, until friends gather in it and share wonderful conversations in it. A song is just another pleasant sound, until a man dedicates it to a woman because it reminds him of her.

It is the same with these parcels.

Un mes

Well, there were 31 days in August, so this is Day 31. Very few of my previous lovers have gone past the 30-day mark. And none of them had spent hours with me almost every day. And the last time I had sex almost everyday for a month was a couple of decades or so ago.

This one is very different and could very well last a while. Sure, it's mostly about sex. But it clears my head! No tantrums, no storms, because I'm satisfied.

If nothing else, I'm learning Spanish. In fact, I've learned how to make the "ñ" on my keyboard. (It's Alt-0241.) Of course, the words I'm learning are words like conejos, potro, yuega, perro, perra, polla, pelotas, coño, follar, .... *giggles*

In the red

In light of EmeraldGate, I went searching for new Second Life viewers. And after installing and uninstalling a few, I've come down to two:

* Imprudence, which allows me to log into Inworldz as well. (More about Inworldz below.) Purple tag color.
* Emergence, which is a scrubbed version of Emerald. Red tag color.

I have both installed, but I may be using Emergence in SL primarily, for several reasons: a) It has the Emerald features that I want and it generally feels more stable than Imprudence. b) It has LordGregGreg Back's personal guarantee that the code is safe because he only included Linden Lab code and open source code that he had personally reviewed.

I have interacted with LordGregGreg only once because of an Emerald bug that affected my customers. I don't know much about him. But, after more than a day of reading countless blogs and forums and watching interviews and listening to voice chats in YouTube, it seemed to me that LordGregGreg had the most integrity in the whole lot. Even though his name is mentioned in the Phoenix project, he's not the only developer there.

So, I've gone in the red.

Now, about Inworldz. I've been invited to bring Mer Betta there twice. And mfpwtff also tried to convince me to try it. Well, I've tried OpenSim and I haven't logged in there again. Same with Blue Mars. But, LL's upcoming Display Name feature seems to be going forward anyway, in spite of a large number of people bringing up serious concerns about identity theft and its effects on the reputations and businesses we've built inworld, I'm starting to look elsewhere again. I might even just close up shop. I don't know yet. For the measly amount we earn inworld for the tremendous amount of work we do to earn it, is it worth the additional stress of worrying if someone is out there with your name over their head and wreaking havoc and ruining your business? We have enough trouble with copybots and copycats, do we need one more thing to keep us awake at night?

Four

Yep. Four. Still here.