Amazing Boat Ride

Wandering around near my home I found this wonderful scripted boat ride.. It takes you around and over a mountain through a series of fantastically scripted docks. The water rises to the level of the next dock — the beautifully textured mossed over gates open and the boat glides through. You have to have the Map open to appreciate it.   You can wait for the boat on the dock here: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Lakeville/132/42/22

DJ Idyll “New Year’s” Playlist 12/28/10

DJ Idyll “New Year’s” Playlist 12/28/10
Sunset Jazz:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Laurel%20Arts%20Isle/148/79/301

Delibes – Coppelia – Variations on a Slav Theme
Delibes- Coppelia – Waltz
Strauss – The Blue Danube
Handel – Trio Suite in G  (two movements)
Scarlatti-Piano Sonata in D K491
Scriabin-Piano Sonata #1 in F
Mozart-Overture-Don Giovanni
Donizetti-Lucia Di Lammermoor-“Chi mi frena in tal momento” (sextet)
Puccini-Turandot-“Ho una casa nell Honan”
Tavener “Many Years” (choral)
Vaughn Williams “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis”
Tchaikovsky-Eugene Onegin-Polonaise
Tchaikovsky-The Seasons-December
Hurst, Adam-The Secret
Schubert-An Die Musik (lieder)
Puccini-Gianni Schicchi – “Oh! Mio babbino caro”

DJ Idyll “Solstice” playlist 12/22/10

(Sunset Jazz 12/22/10)
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Laurel%20Arts%20Isle/148/79/301

Bach – Cantata #78 – BWV 78  ‘Jesu, Der Du Meine..”
Bach – Brandenburg Concerto #3 in G
Schubert – Impromptu no. 3 in Gb
Offenbach – Tales of Hoffman – “Belle nuit…” (Barcarolle)
Vivaldi – Four Seasons – Winter
Boccherini -String Quartet in E-major – Minuet
Puccini – La Boheme – Musetta’s Waltz
Saint-Saens – Organ Symphony #6 (“Babe”)
Verdi – Don Carlo – Act 2 Duet “Dio..”
Beethoven – Fidelio – O Welche Lust (chorus)
Mahler – Symphony #5 – Adagietto
Bach – Cello Suite #1
Debussy – The Girl with the Flaxen Hair
Satie – Gymnopdie
Glass – Opening

Proust in Second Life

Proust would have been all over Second Life. This is a man who could, and did, go on for three pages about talking to his grandmother on the telephone , which was new at the time. He gives detailed consideration to the psychic aspects of this dramatic change in technology. He notes, for instance, how his perception of his beloved grandmother changed at the moment that he heard her disembodied voice. We are so used to this phenomenon, we don’t even think about it, but Proust realizes that for the first time in human history, with the invention of the telephone, it is possible to have a voice without a body.  Can you imagine the torrent of words he’d have to say about our world of avatar identity? The mind reels.

It is a lot of work managing your identity. Especially when they multiply on you. Whoever ‘you’ is. The fact is that even the flesh and blood version has a serious problem with identity that philosophers have struggled with for millennia. Who is the ‘you’ which is not your mind or your body? Who are all the voices within each human being who sequentially take the wheel and drive all the others offstage? And then come these digital versions.

A friend of mine reminds me that all science fiction must be an extrapolation of our past and present. We cannot create from nothing. The base clay of our avatar is not value-free. Everything in SL is a projection of the human mind and has a context, history and aesthetic. I guess that’s what makes it infinitely interesting, even when painful or ugly.  And this is why if Proust were alive today, he’d be living in Second Life.

Playing With Dolls

Perhaps many of you, (well, OK, all two of you who may read this blog), get this reaction when you try to explain the profound and transportive experience of Second Life.  It’s like playing with dolls. Well, I was a little girl once and really did enjoy playing with dolls. Mostly paper dolls as it happens, which is interesting in view of my future digital concerns. As with so much of childhood, there comes a moment when these pursuits are no longer encouraged. Otherworldly concerns are no longer appropriate.

Obviously the pleasure I took in arranging these magical and adaptable (if a bit flat!) images never left me because they have burst out in full bloom within Second Life.  There is another force here as well. I was the kind of child who dearly loved any book where the children (it’s always the children) speak a spell or open a door and enter another world.  E. Nesbitt, C.S. Lewis, Edward Eagar, I adored them all. Second Life in all its splendor, danger and glory, is indeed that world for me.  As anyone knows who has experienced real emotion there, amidst a supposed bunch of pixels,  this ain’t no fake world.

Is there value in leaving the too-solid world behind? I can’t prove it, but I believe there is indeed a real benefit, one that adults have been, in the main, prohibited from experiencing. (Remember when Aslan tells Susan she’s too old to ever return to Narnia?) Mysticism, meditation and hallucenogenic drugs touch on this same territory. It’s a question of perspective. Using SL terminology, is it valuable to ‘cam out’ — way out! to look back upon your life and being in the solid world, from a place where those rules do not hold?  Undoubtedly.

When the Minds Meet

You know who you are. In the context of SL, “you” requires definition. Is “you” the persona that inhabits the Second Life grid, a persona that could change every hour, or be supplemented by an army of alts, or is “you” the typist behind the scenes. The typist, as a matter of fact, could ALSO be plural. I did meet a woman who “shares” her SL login with another person, and I’m not sure I really understood why that was, just that I had to tactfully inquire on “who” I was speaking to before continuing.

For the purposes of this entry, I’m defining “you” as a singular typist. Then the question becomes, what can you know of a person purely through their words? If you habitually make judgments about authors based on how they craft sentences, as I do, quite a lot. I don’t think you can fake intelligence or education or sensitivity and many of those qualities clearly transmit through the small keyhole of the chat window. Which frankly, makes many of the people one encounters in SL opaque. Let me clarify — I have been greatly enriched and learned a lot from real life people who are not verbal, but in SL, that dimension is completely missing, so for me it becomes boring.

So, from time to time, this typist meets SL typists that are stimulating, funny, mournful, interesting, informative, helpful, scornful, friendly or have some other quality that makes them individually recognizable. I’m making a broad generalization here, but the conversations I’d put in this category go beyond ‘lol’:) The concept of a conversation itself, let’s be honest, leaves many people in the dust.

Then there comes along, among the people I’m honored to have as friends in SL, the one where the minds meet. Then ensues the dilemma and the temptation. The temptation occurs when the conversation leaps out of the chat box, when you can’t type fast or succinctly enough to capture the thoughts that pour into your mind in response. When you wish you had a luxurious dinner and a good bottle of wine as a more appropriate time line, rather than a flakey viewer likely to drop you at any second. (Real life, regardless of its drawbacks, is remarkably persistent, you have to hand that to the Programmer.) The dilemma occurs when you think about being more candid, more disclosive. I have been online long enough to have had the extremely disconcerting experience of filling in the blanks between enticing words only to find out that the person behind those words did not, to say the least, correspond to that mental picture. We are story telling creatures who crave the ride, the plot curve, the pot at the end of the rainbow. So, I do not, as far as possible, jump to conclusions, but try to stick to the words themselves as the only concrete in the situation.

But I do miss you. There are probably many reasons why the conversation should not continue, due to other responsibilities, differences in real life circumstances or mere prudence. Frankly, I wouldn’t want any of those factors to be elucidated, if they would interfere with the sheer delight of verbal interaction. In the internet age, there should be a new category of friendship, one based purely on verbal affinity, with nothing more known or required. Platonic on a new level. To that friendship, I raise my virtual glass. It was grand typing.

First Build

Misty Lake Build

Not too bad for my first house, I thought, though it’s not perfect, by any means.

Come Live at the brand new Misty Lake Sim

Misty Lake is a Victorian Irish build, with the atmosphere of a friendly village, run by the able and accommodating Ira Zepp. Dance, socialize and celebrate at your own local pub. Homes for every budget and taste or bring your own (on approval). Come join us!!

Why Can’t SL have a better search?

Good grief folks. The Hair Fair has been clogging up SL all morning and it doesn’t even show up in Events search???

Raymond has a blog!

A great SL Blues DJ shares his thoughts Cheers, Ray on the new blog and wishing you further success!