As I said on my last rezzday, I became a vampire. Not as the matter of fashion and/or lifestyle, of course not. But I got too old and not too many things on the grid makes me feel like they used to. Combined with one more reason that I haven't realized since yesterday (which is a topic for another post), that made me skip the logging in. 

But last night, a train of ideas made me want to come back, sniff the grid a bit and refresh the feelings. It turned out to be a weirder experience then I ever thought it can be.

(This story has a bit of a longer intro, but I'll get to the point. Hopefully. Stay with me.)

I grabbed the viewer and logged in. I didn't needed much, a bit of strolling around, maybe a nice chat with a stranger, a party would be great. It will turn out that it's not an easy task to accomplish if you're not a regular. But I ended up at a party, and it was fun. For the first time in almost a year I've  stayed up till the dawn in second life. 

This evening my SL related train of thoughts continued, so I went shopping. Like I needed a new hair *grins*. I found a shop, got a pile of demos, bought not one but three hairs and, by the weirdness of search system, found a nice club on the beach too. So I went to the club with the new hair and spend some nice time there. Not much, let's say half an hour. And logged out. 

But then! 

You know how treated alcoholics are not supposed to have a single drink ever again? Because, if they even taste the liquor again, the hell will break lose, and they'll be back in the problem in no time. 

It started about 15 minutes after logging off. Just a gentle tickling from the distance asking me to go back there for a bit more. To play with my new braids and googles. To take a photo or two. Nothing much. Then it started to grow. I felt a distinctive need to spend time under the nice windlight sky, to hear the sounds of wind, feet banging the wooden steps and occasional teleport wooosh. 

I had to resist. And I did. Suddenly I was aware of my strong second life addiction. It didn't took much to make me want to spend the nights again, exploring the world I know too well, to sit on the beaches and in the cafes, to browse the shops and talk to the strangers. To do basically nothing, but to do it in the cozy colorful atmosphere of a virtual world. 

I won't say that all my time in second life was empty answering to addiction, because it was not. But some of it surely was. Being there just for the sake of being there. Sitting idle. Screwing my own mind. 

And you? How's your addiction these days?

There is no digital self without interaction with others. And, indeed, it’s the mental image of what other people think you are that becomes your digital self.

Is it really like that? Maybe it is possible to develop a digital self without other people to see it. Maybe digital being can develop in solitude, like some weird kind of a cave man.

I am very fond of agreeing with Gwyn here. That is exactly what I thought in the first night of Mr. Dee’s life. An important part of avatar’s personality and identity comes from interacting with others. It’s not only the mental image of you in other people’s heads, interaction with other people discover to us things we haven’t thought about ourselves. It makes us answer the questions we never thought of asking. It pushes us into zones we didn’t want to face.

On the other side, second life is a narcissistic medium. Just consider the number of self-portraits we all do, amount of time and money we spend grooming ourselves. How much time you spend on the grid all by yourself? Before and after all, we stare at our backs most of our lives! Large part of our identities is made by our narcissistic need to play with ourselves. Question is, is it possible to create a digital identity in the solitude? Can avatar develop by spending the whole second life alone on an empty sim?

There is one tricky thing about this. Interaction in second life is not limited to meeting people and talking to them. If one wants complete isolation, then shopping and using stuff other people made might be excluded as well. After all, creativity is an important way of communication here. So our cave man should make it’s clothes and all the other stuff. Even the cave to live. If you think I am exaggerating think about how much your clothes, home and other things define and impact your digital personality. Sure, you choose them all, but it still have it’s influence. But let’s not go that far.

So our hero is somewhere on the grid, alone, meditating, digging and tweaking own mind, forming a personality. With a bit of luck and talent it seems quite possible. It’s nothing new, writers do that for centuries. Another question is, what’s the use of it. Why bother creating something that nobody will see?

But somebody will see. Even if our hero is the only avatar on the grid, even if the whole experiment is done on OpenSim running on local computer, there is one pair of eyes that will see. Yes, human’s. Avatar is never alone. The same mind that creates the digital personality, sees it and is being influenced back by it. The appropriate term could be feed-back. Musicians and sound technicians among you know the danger of feed-back. Yes, that’s the screetching noise that starts when you put the microphone close to the speaker. Sound from the speaker goes back to the mic, gets amplified, routed to the speaker again, and back to the mic, and again…. then your equipment burns. Or your ears get damaged. But usually, you’re quick enough to turn it all off or to bring it back into healthy measure. Does the same danger threats the lonely avatar and the human behind it? Would one go crazy in an experiment like this?

– You have what?!? – he asked
– I told you: Prim eyelashes.
– Prim eyelashes?
– Yes. – I knew this conversation will amuse me once it pop out.
– I don't believe you.

But he started to believe. He took a close look to my eyes, and he saw, for the first time obviously, the pure essence of femininity in the virtual world. It's not our sculpted genitals, nor big breasts, nor small (as a reaction to those huge made by men), nor dozens of skins multiplied by dozens of make-ups for each of them, nor hundreds of hairstyles, nor chosen jewelry… let alone inventories full of clothing followed by legendary scream of desperation: I have nothing to wear!

- But what's the point? Nobody sees them unless zooming too close. – he insisted.
– Exactly! You don't have to see it. They work anyway. And who said that we wear them for you guys and not for ourselves?

Then I told him about the pain of fitting the eyelashes, hours of simple but touchy editing which even the most skilled of us wouldn't even try without a posing stand, tweaking the size, moving them, losing them somewhere inside the head, calling a friend who has a mouse with the higher resolution, cursing the slightest lag… I gave him a glimpse of the joy of the accomplishment. I doubt he got the picture. 

He mentioned the prim count and the ARC. 

I smiled, revealing the secret: Yes sweetie, pure luxury!

It's not that I haven't said it loud enough and often enough. Something else is the case here.

It's not that the people who are calling themselves "immersionists" are not aware that they are augmenting themselves in virtual worlds. If you talk to them more than five minutes you'll see that augmentation is the corner stone of their existence. Same goes to the other side. As many times in history, terms are not used by the reason and logic. They are used as a tool to define tribes and make a conflict possible. They are flags. As such, they don't need to have a meaning but just a color to help differentiate "us" from "them".

Let's not lie to ourselves. That conflict is important. It, and it's outcome, defines the nature of the virtual realm we're conquering these years. And each side hopes to make it their way. Between them stands the few of us, choking in the fake definitions and wondering when will we clear the grounds and start doing some serious and useful job. But you know what's the fate of those that stands between confronted sides screaming for a bit of reason? They usually get killed in the cross-fire. Or, with a bit of luck, they keep their heads low and wait for the tribes to get tired and out of ammunition. So when they finally stop shooting nonsense around, we can take a look over the burned grounds and start repairing the damage. When will that happen?

We don't know when it will happen. But luckily, there is a bit of light on the horizon. Gwyneth Llewelyn calls it post-immersionism.

I believe that the dominant attitude will be to trust more and more what people do on the Internet (and write about themselves, and are peer-reviewed that way). We can get way more data out of the Internet about some person or some company than using any other method. In a sense, the “person” or “company” becomes the data we read about them on the Internet. And thus we’re back to the point where we started: once we cross back from the digital world into the physical world, and we begin to forge relationships on the physical world because of the ones we forged on the digital one, then we become post-immersionists: the digital world is where the focus is, the physical world — and what we do to establish relationships in the physical world — becomes less important.

It is just a matter of time. People are prone to distrust new things and their habits makes them show the lack of thinking and understanding.

While our society has fully embraced phone calls as being part of our digital self, and is slowly moving ahead to do the same with emails (specially once we can get rid of all those spammers), things like Group IM on MSN/Gtalk/Yahoo or even virtual worlds like Second Life are still too new for us to fully embrace it. But… it’ll come.

It will come. We will know that immersion is nothing more than getting the most of the virtual environment and that augmentation is the case in more than 95% of digital appearances. And that one can be both at the same time. We'll find it normal to immerse and be augmented at the same time. Because immersion is a prerequisite for the quality of the experience and the avatar, no matter how different from the human, is it's extension – augmentation. 

Physically we are probably relaxing indeed, but our thoughts go on and on and we won't give them a break. We don't give our grey cells a chance to start slumbering as long as we are chatting or building, even if they'd like to. We ARE tired but tend to ignore the symptoms – do your eyes ever itch after logging off? – or even laugh about it: haha typonese!

Still, forgetting the tiredness, we are reaching the peak of productivity then.

Let's not full ourselves. Many things we do in second life require exercise of skills, concentration, imagination and memory. You know, fresh and working brain. And we get all those out of nothing, when it's supposed that we're dead tired and uncapable of serious mental activity.

What makes us so concentrated while we are inside the virtual world? Why writing a LSL script in-world is so harder to interrupt than writing PHP off-line? I doubt that has anything to do with LSL and PHP. It's something about the environment. What is the magic that keep us going for another meeting in-world while we are hardly capable of another phone-call? 

One of the first answers would be that virtual world is so much more interesting that meatspace. And that in second life we are doing the things we always dreamt of. Those two are highly inspirational so helping us to forget about the fatigue. While it would be silly to neglect the influence of those two, there might be something more. After all, not all the things we do in second life are our dreams, nor even interesting. 

Are we projecting our tiredness to the avatar which can't be tired, so the feeling gets lost in the dead end until the brain burns itself? Is it the colorful environment of the perfect sunny world that keeps us going for one more, long after we should have been in the state of rest? Is it just the flickering of the screen that jamms our brain-waves and keep us active on some kind of electro-drug?

Because, that chunk of data, that grayscale image that renders into 3D mesh with ground texture, is a very personal thing.

Many newcomers into second life ask how to get land. And the answer is always the same:

You don't need land yet. You can live happily for months, even years as a nomad, exploring the grid, crashing at friend's place when needed, finding secluded spots on good-looking sims…

But eventually, you'll need land. You'll want to start a shop, or a club, or just want to have your own spot to do whatever you do. A place to call home. Place where you don't worry if you saved your last project or just left it to stay around. Place where you control the music stream, quiet spot to change the clothes or sort the inventory. Place for which you choose all the furniture or maybe which you have completely built.

Land is one's second extension into pixel-world, avatar being the first. Just as with the avatar, we build and represent ourselves with our use of the virtual land. It cannot move, but it stays there when we're logout. It's the place your friends drop by to feel you and leave the message when you're not around. It's a manifestation of our dreams and ideas. That's what this world is all about, remember?

And human mind is a very tricky mechanism. It connects the ideas. It connects people with events and events with images. So that piece of beach on the image above, right under the hill, means something to me in my sweet little heart. Because of one morning. Because of who I spent that morning with. It doesn't matter that piece of land is covered with prims now, it's there. It flashes occasionally while I am rezzing slow, like in the moment that picture is taken. It makes me smile, it makes my thoughts stray for a second. Then gray prims rezz all over it, hiding it back in safety. And that happens with prims as well. Like a freebie prim tree a friend of mine rezz wherever her home is. Trust me, sitting under that tree is a different experience.

Yes, I will agree that virtual land is just server space. But, this is not about server space. It's about what we are doing with that server space.

It was last Friday that I had to rethink this world and our lives. Human was struggling with approaching migraine attack and everything sounded like another evening spent in bed with no sounds and no lights. Still, no matter how being in front of the monitor is painful in those moments, I had to log in. It was my rezzday. Of all the days in the year, how could I miss that one?

What is so important about rezzdays? Well, nothing. But we have to celebrate ourselves from time to time. Birthday would be a nice date too, but in second life nobody knows your birthday, and you usually cannot afford to spend a day with computer on your birthday. That would really piss off human friends.

Beside that, it’s good to place some milestones in life. What nobody tells you when you start your second life is that it easily turns into deep and weird psycho adventure. To make things more interesting, it changes as you go. It rarely has sudden turns that you notice immediately, but once you take a look behind, you can find yourself surprised. Especially if you take a look over the whole year. Another year!

So what do we do to mark an another year and celebrate it? We jump naked from the sky. With Mary Poppins umbrella in the hand. It’s Moggs Oceanlane that invented the tradition:

Retrospectively this could look like a deep statement… you know… jumping naked from the sky is a symbolism of jumping into the unknown world of second life. But it’s not… it was just me being silly.

So many times we meet avatars with names which provoke only one question: "What the hell were you thinking during the registration?" Problem is that while everything else in your identity (look, character, specie, gender…) is changeable, name is permanent. It stays with you for the rest of your second life. Or until you decide that you are sick of that stupid numbers and hardly pronounceable set of letters so you go to the registration page and start it all over again. 

Which is really a problem. Most of us had no idea what we are jumping in while we were filling that registration form. We do those all the time, all over the Web. Nothing says this one can be any different. While most of the usernames are just something we use for logging, second life user name is an important part of the identity.

It is a problem without solution. One rarely knows those things about life before living the life. And when the things are learned, it's too late to change anything. So avatars and humans go hand in hand about this. Some had luck with names, some didn't.

It would be really nice to have some warning there, on the registration page. It would be great to have some guidelines like Vint's 10 tips for choosing a good name or ArminasX' How Cool Is Your Avatar's Name?. Many people would have easier lives and we would not be littered with joHn84's or something that's impossible to spell correctly. If there is a correct way to spell it, that is.

I just opened an JIRA issue for some name guidelines on the registration page. Please, vote for it. Thanks.

Name has the special meaning for each of us and changing the name, or getting a nick-name is kind of a magickal thing. That's why all those artists made new names as a part of their public personas. That's why so many monarchs got their new names when achieving the throne. Name is a tool of creation of one's self. And it doesn't affect only the public, it affects you as well. At least, that is the case if you do it right.

At the same time, being pseudonymous is a kind of hideout. We all need to change our clothes when we come home. And while you can hardly imagine Madonna sitting on the couch being comfortably bored while watching TV at home, drinking beer from the can and not caring about a pop corn that flied under the table, Louise Ciccone can feel quite relaxed doing that.

There is also another kind of hideout that we might need, at least if we enjoy carnavales and dancing under the masks. Identity, reputation and self-image are sometimes restraining us more than any chain can do. They keep us from from exploring and knowing some hidden or neglected parts of us. Or they just simply keep us from having fun, joy and fulfillment in things we are thought we shouldn't enjoy.

Masks work even if everybody knows who's behind. I remember my human's first practice with sabre. As long as I was only trying my attacks and while only my opponent had all the protective gear, I couldn't do a proper strike. I was slow, weak and hesitating. I just couldn't hit somebody with a sabre. I knew that it is not a dangerous thing to do, that I wouldn't hurt the opponent, but nevertheless. 

Then I put my mask on. The next second, I was striking and hitting as mad. It was still me, I wasn't hiding or been anonimous. But I was looking through the steel net and there was no inhibition in my moves anymore. To do a good attack you have to let your impulses go, you have to feel something similar to anger. And I couldn't let that thing go out of myself until my face was covered. It's kinda paradoxical: to give full expression in action you have to hide your expression on the face. So much about all of us being more daring as avatars than as humans.

Beside these, there is one more use of pseudonyms. One that is connected to more dangerous stuff, the one that is internet-specific. It's the dark side of the Internet.

Sometimes, though, our Goldilocks stay AFK on the scene or home-owning bears show up… and there the drama start.

We also know of the cases that can be considered harder. Like rezzing into your home to witness a young couple having lots of fun in your bed poseballs. 

Both sides have their arguments. Home is home, it's private space, keep out if not invited. On the other hand, hardly that Goldilocks will leave dirty sheets after them. Unless bear accidentally shows up, and there is no security script logging the visitors, it's like nothing ever happened. 

Sure, that story extends to how we perceive second life. For some, home is personal space which makes it sacred. For others, it all "just digital" and no big deal. And they will hardly come on the same grounds. Rarely they will find out that they are both exaggerating. If somebody find their home personal, it doesn't matter what you think about it, respect it and go away. And if the kids find your place amusing and cozy while you were not there, chase them but don't scream around, they meant no harm.