Sunday, May 18, 2008

Going through withdrawal

I realized today that i was going through escorting withdrawal. The reality of my time on sl was that from almost the first I had a determination, and my ability to play the escorting game was an almost impervious armor to anything that could be said or done to me. Whatever people told me, however bad, it was not as bad as clients would say to me in the course of ordinary business. Call me a whore, so did the last three guys when I wouldn't come down to 250L :15. Scream at me, so did a heavy tipper at a bondage club. Spit on me. Had that happen too. And the Linden kept rolling in, and I could make myself better and better.

It was the adrenaline rush and the mastery. It was a place in sl in a world when there were hundreds of would be escorts, and dozens of clubs. And I rode that wave. It pulsed and surged through my finger tips. Paypal, linden who cared? Cyber, vox when it became possible. I had my bad days, and customers I could not please, but many came back and back.

Quitting this does more than dent my income, it makes me look out on SL, and want to throw up. This must be what it is like to quit drinking, and see squalor in bleeding colors. It isn't just the massive mounds of mainland cluttered with ugly, it is the social world here, which is so much like the stupider parts of high school as to make one's teeth hurt, and the lack of taste in what is hip as to make one bleed tears of blood and soul.

Bebop reality is rapidly becoming beslop reality.

I'm not going to name names, sometimes telling the truth is so pointless as to be an exercise in emotional masturbation with a curling iron. It's just going to sear your insides and no one else will even get off or get up about it. Is there anything to be done? Well of course, and it will be done. People don't want to live in squalor, well most people don't. It's that squalor is what they are being sold, and the people who make squalor well are busy making large exhibits of their pointless mediocrity.

But that doesn't need to be, and often it occurs because people with talent allow their egos to run riot, and forget that all the world doesn't play SL on some computer with an air conditioner crazy glued to an overclocked something or other 3000 video card with more ram than I have hard drive space. What they present stops being bleeding edge, and is instead makes you want to cut your cornea's out with a razor blade rather than suffer it for another moment.

Again why name names? They won't listen, if they did, they wouldn't have done it in the first place.

So this is why I believe we are going to have to go the long way around, with people fleeing both mainland, and what is considered hip by the narrow world of sliques and slugliness. Avatars aren't mere decoration on primotonage, they are the point of this world. If pushing pixels is what you want to do, then you can do it with Maya much better. But that is the sad reality, avatars are often smarter than their human creators, who rush to slag, slugly, and slop, only to be pinned down.

The future will get here, if we listen to our avatars a bit more, and less to the still screen shot mentality and easy herd driven grapevine.

Sorry, I just had to vent before getting back to work. It's moments like that that I put on music which is the cry of the forgotten, the genius overlooked as people stumble from one bad rendition of the well known classics to the next, interspersed with the latest lay of the artistic director or ballet master whose ideas on choreography compare favorably with the tortures of a madhouse in the darkest dickensian days.

I need to build something, I am not sure what yet, but there are a few thousand new huge prims, and imagination is free if you have it. And unchained by the prattle and cant of those who can't do, but can self-promote, maybe it will be worth something.

4 comments:

  1. I'm a programmer, not an artist, if I may paraphrase a well-known fictional doctor, but I think programmers (the good ones, anyway) and mathematicians are familiar with part of what you're getting at: elegance, achieving as much as possible with limited resources. Admittedly, those who work in SL may tell you that's what they're doing; just last night I was reading Dusan Writer's blog post on how SL building tools have fallen behind the curve.

    The more important thing you point out is that to concentrate on gee-whiz graphics is to miss the point, or rather a major point of SL, the avatars and their interaction. Your references to environments where the avatars are the center of attention and the build conserves resources that the avatars may shine and not have to pare their ARC back to the absolute minimum. I hope we'll see such parsimoniously beautiful builds in the future.

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  2. Go and hang with the Role Players, take your pick where and how - but after nearly two years here I'm convinced that RP is the very heart of what's most interesting and challenging about SL. RP builds are generally among the best, RP avatars are assembled with care and although there are the inevitable issues with drama most RP'ers are commited to what they do and as they know they their reputation is of importance they behaviour both in and out of context is rarely poor.

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  3. I got a second wind in Second Life when I started playing with SL role playing. It was sort of like a Third Life. What was even more fun was being part of a group, rather than more of a loner. I know you have been in The City of Lost Angels. If you join one of the better factions, like the Brood, you can be part of something akin to a family.

    It can actually be rather soothing to belong to a group.

    The Brood has quite an interesting site of their own going now, http://www.thebrood.org/

    Maybe try it out with an alt...

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  4. hmm...barely enough time to be Lillie. No I'm going to go the other way... you'll see.

    But thanks all. *hugs* to Melissa and V,and welcomes to cruachan...

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