Standing infinity

I celebrated my 8th rez day anniversary by dancing naked. :D

And did you realize that the number 8 is like the infinity symbol standing on one end?

Maybe there's something of infinity in this rez day anniversary. I'm past the 7-year itch, if there's such a thing about being a virtual world resident.

I spend less time as Opal now, and less time inworld in general. But my heart is still in there. My loves are still there. It's still the place I yearn for when I get homesick. Sure, most of the places are different now, but there's still a certain ambience about virtual reality.

And because August always seems to start a new life for me, maybe the coming year would be something different. After my experience in Utherverse, I've had a paradigm shift, similar to the paradigm shift about the global community that I've had when I first joined SL. This time, the shift I experienced is about the universality of virtual worlds.

During my conversation with Knightman in Utherverse, I was surprised at how strongly he was attached to UV, just as I am very attached to Second Life. UV is home to him, just as SL is to me. I realized that, in the end, the place we call our virtual "home" has nothing to do with the technology or the avatar or what the place looks like. It has to do with the relationships that bind us to it.

In the end, these different virtual world grids are just villages, colonies, and tribes of humans, separated by differences in technology, just as villages, colonies, and tribes are separated in the real world by distances.

In the end, we are all humans behind the avatars -- a soul touching another soul.