You know which cloud I am talking about? The one that shows up before your avatar has rezzed. The glowing mass that floats and soon enough (providing that asset servers haven't gone to hell again) will get its shape and textures and become a nice looking avatar.
But before that, it can be anything. It can turn out to be anything at all. Millions of possibilities that glow right in front of your eyes. Why am I telling you this?
Because that cloud truthfully represents what the human being on the other side of the monitor might be. Just as the cloud can rezz into avatar of any shape, behind that avatar can be any of all sorts of humans. And you very rarely, if ever, know who that human in fact is.
But let's forget the facts for a bit. Have you ever played that game of placing different possible humans behind the avatars you know? Imagining them? Not guessing who is behind really, that's a fruitless job, but imagining people that are not likely to be there? Yes, all the people I met in second life were at least once imagined as truck driver in mom's basement, student procrastinating their studying for the exam, celebrity enjoying their anonymity, wife cyber-cheating her neglected husband and a whole range of less stereotypical roles. OK, now I have confessed my dirty little secret.
That game have another effect beside fun. Once you get carried away, you realize that virtually anyone (no pun intended) can be behind the avatar. It throws a completely different light on the scene. It's something like scramble suit from Dick's Scanner Darkly
It's a question old as our civilization, question of the essence versus the appearance. Since ancient Greeks we tend to think there is something behind what we see and perceive, something that we like to think is truth contrary to what our senses might lie to us. So we try to take off layer by layer of what we see, aiming to some inner truth. Like an onion. We peel layer by layer. And, while peeling the onion, we cry and the onion gets smaller and smaller. At the end, there is nothing, just a pile of leaves. There is no "real" onion inside, no truth, no essence. Onion is made of its leaves.
So you have reached the glowing cloud from the beginning of our story. Pure glowing existence of some avatar near you. And nothing but the existance. Only thing you know is that somebody IS there. Who? You'll have to wait for the avatar to rezz to know that. Yes, to show you all the layers you've tried to peel off. That cloud has a story to show you. That's your truth. What you see is what you get.
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