home: https://starling.us/sl/2008
by Ĝan Ŭesli Starling
(aka Aplonis Ember)
copyright 2013
Actually this is the story about the migration into SL of a single avatar, one Aplonis Ember by name. Formerly Aplonis Dark of RLC, here's how I came to find my way from there into the much better world of Second Life.
I can remember when the name geek was no compliment on your skill. If instead of playing football, you enjoyed to stay home and dissect broken transistor radios, build model rockets, make things go boom, that made you a social pariah. Then dawned the age of microcomputers. But for me that came a bit late. I was already done not only with high school, but also four years in the Navy , where they liked I knew how build things that go boom (just not anywhere they'd let me watch). By then I was even out of college after the navy and beginning my first good job. Following the examples of fellow technicians working in at Allen Test's R & D department, I built my very own first computer. Cobbled together from discarded bits and pieces of prototype analyzers for the automotive market, and quite powerful for its day, still it didn't do much. The only software for it was that which you yourself coded in Forth. Not very adept in that language, my own didn't do much. Less cutting edge but with commercial software was the Vic 20 that I bought soon after. Not until the Amiga 2000 can I lay claim to having owned a real computer. For its day, that little beast was a marvel. It could do actual 3D graphics even before Apple came out with the Mac. The Amiga was several years ahead of Microsoft's copy-cat Windows OS for the PC.
Seeing those graphics is really what got me. How I marveled to read an Amiga World story describing that issue's cover image so detailed you could mistake it for a photo. Ray-tracing they called it. Depicting just a mirrored ball reflecting the room in which it floated, seven days it had taken to render. A long time to wait, but oh what results. Who could not envy such talent?
But no such great talent as that had I. Not with just a two-year degree and in electronics rather than software. So continue to envy I did. And learn more and more coding I did. But such coding as I could find time to learn was almost wholly for whatever job I then held. So first I learned Forth and after that PostScript (not just a font type but an actual OS) then finally Perl. You can't make 3D models with those (at least I don't think so). So my envy for the artistic talents of others continued to simmer below the surface. Meanwhile technology advanced until those others were building whole worlds. And as they built them part of my own world, the real one, was coming apart. My marriage of a full twenty years was to a degree that in name only for the last ten. During the final two of those my days consisted of rising early, commuting 65 miles to work, putting in eight hours plus, returning to eat a warmed-over dinner all by myself and capped by having to sleep alone. During those sometimes two-hour commutes, I had plenty of time to mull over all the things I'd wanted to do but never found time for. Also, I was lonely.
Mixed in among those several other dissatisfactions was a long unscratched itch for trying my hand at 3D sculpture. At freehand artistry there was always somebody better. In grade school there had been Cathy Oats. In high school there were several who could draw cicles around me in art class. But never so in technical drawing. Standing at a drafting machine, I got straight A's. So this I'd always thought I could do.
With such as my secondary motive, I finally succombed to click okay on one of the spam links daily filling up my inbox. This was for a new kind of 3D avatar porn. Call it a two-for. I'd been discarding that link en masse with others for some time. It would arrive in my email along with many an add for Viagra (when really an anti-Viagra pill would have served better) and lucrative offers to help deposed officials in Nigeria launder their stolen millions. Clubs in the real world sometimes have two ways to go in by. Likewise this virtual one. All the same place but differently named depending on which door you go in by, this was called UtherVerse and/or Red Light Center.
The luridly advertised attractions, were not entirely without their appeal for someone as completely rejected as I was then feeling. They were even foremost in my motivation for clicking that link. But it was for the computer modeled 3D which induced me to click that particular link. The first part of that two-fold appeal eroded away in very short order. But still there remained the other. Plus I discovered yet something more, something wholly unexpected. Within that very tawdry place I chanced to make a few actual friends. How so, you ask, when both they and I all hid our identities behind the anonymity of cartoonish avatars? Oddly enough, you can. At least that is so if through the avatar of each its driver does nothing to conceal their true personality. That is to say, if instead of playing a role, they are just being themselves. A very poor actor myself, I gave this up before very long. So too do many. In fact, many there were wholly ignoring the attractions choosing instead for their avatars to simply meander around, to stand in the public square just outside the entry portal or else to congregate in music halls where their avatars simply danced, usually with all of their clothes on. What they were doing was using it almost like Facebook. Like that except in addition to private chats, you could also have public ones, your text appearing on the screens of everyone whose avatar was within hearing distance of yours. I ended up doing that also.
Others there engaged in different kinds of role play. A whole sub-culture had migrated into Red Light Center from another virtual world called IMVU. These were virtual goths, some few of them actual goths. Among the vampyres there existed competing covens. These plotted against one another in a context so very labyrinthine as might well merit a PhD thesis in alternative social structures. But even divided as they were, all stood united against the werewolves. These latter formed packs no less complex. And all of it went on entirely below the surface of what you could see, this because the avatar types supported by the video server only allowed for a half dozen body types for each gender. Sexy twenty-somethings these all were. So all the variety that you had were very slightly different shapes, differently painted skin textures and colors of hair. There was, however, a great variety of clothes. With a paint program, you could even design your own clothes, which a very great many did. Using game money the game supported a fashion industry to rival Milan or Paris. I too, dabbled in this, it being almost the only creative option open.
Some little time before then, there had come to my attention rumors of the world's server engine being susceptible to hacking. Not the malicious sort, mind. Just a few, completely harmless, visual pranks. This another avatar explained off-handedly to mine on seeing another walk across the sky high above. A wizard, he seemed, for this was no in-game power won by the rules. It was against all the game's rules. Somehow he'd managed to spoof the server, feeding it a disallowed vertical offset. A real hacker he. No thief or vandal, just some smart cookie who'd figured it out. More power he. I made a note to somehow learn the trick of it, of that one and others.
On that score I procrastinated (like with many other things) until something happened to spur me to action. The occasion for that was that this world, like any other, has an ample quota of griefers and posers. One who was just a little of both had somewhere learned the secret of one single hack. Armed with this he then attempted to pass himself off as an employee of the company which ran the game. This he did to prey on the noobs. That it was not true I could tell by the lack of a tag floating over his head. The trick he had learned was how to jump a mile straight up into the sky. Pointing this out in open text, politely I asked whether he might share the lore. This he refused, still pretending to his false claim. Annoyed, I decided that I must ferret it out for myself. It was a quest to last for quite a few nights but learn it I did. And once I had, I shared the knowledge with all who had helped me along the way, even with those who did not know but had helped me rule methods out. One of these to whom my avatar made a report was the queen of a Goth clan calling itself (as near as I can remember) the Coven of Athalegais. For whatever reason, she deemed it worthy to invite me into her group. Curious now about how this goth thing could keep so many other avatars there in its thrall, I accepted that invitation. Thus did I too enter into the vampyre ranks, a culture about which I had very much to unlearn.
The first thing I learned was that I very much liked their music, the pre-courser goth bands at any rate: Bauhaus, Sisters of Mercy, and latter day Siouxsie, also The Cure. The polar opposite of thrash metal, Bauhaus especially reminded me the psychedelic hard rock so very much loved in my own youth. The rest of it was somewhat perplexing. Still I was happy to just go along. At least I was up to a point. Some things about it discomforted me much. And by that I probably don't mean what you think. Here I refer to soaring heights of very childish social drama. How to describe it? I shall try. In a 3D world expressly designed for the purpose of virtual porn, imagine thirty paying members choosing instead to assemble for a three hour meeting to discuss damage control for some ex-member having joined up with some other clan. Seriously, I kid you not in the least. Much of that meeting consisted of everyone having to endure the venting of their queen for such terrible infamy.
Among her court, the Princess did not take well to the waste of time. She too split off to form her own clan, one which she hoped might remain aloof from just such drama as that. This sounded very appealing to me. I had my avatar go with hers. We who went changed our last names (the way of showing group allegiance) and took to meeting in the lobby of the hotel. There did our new queen hold court, where rather than have to always refer to her a My Queen, we and everyone else just called her Vampy. Whatever the topic, she had a way to keep the conversation flowing. This was a special talent she had. It was very nice for a while. But, alas, the specter of Drama reared its ugly head once more in that circle too. Our avatar queen and her avatar consort had been trying to maintain a long-distance romance which in the end did not work out. They parted ways and our new clan split once again. There was no great big public scene, they simply went their own ways. Torn by divided friendships, I did the only sensible thing. I spawned a second, alternate self. This you can do, provided you do not mind paying double. One avatar I left as it was, the alternate joined up with the new group.
This proved interesting in its own way. I'd changed my avatar once before, about a week after that very first log-in. But then it was just trading one for another and cost nothing extra. This time, for owning two laptops (and enjoying a fast connection) I could log on as both at once. He of the left hand keyboard was something of stumbling klutz, prone to bump into things for my being slow on the keys. Also his spelling was much the poorer. Meanwhile, in-world drama only got worse. A number of my avatar friends began to log off never to be seen there again. Both Vampy and her ex-consort also did this. With them gone the place once again was revealed for its true nature...a very tawdry pretend world indeed.
Membership in the newest split-off clan was very shortly reduced to just four. Two were another long-distance couple, this pair separated not by just a few hundred miles but by the whole Atlantic ocean. Soon, they too announced they were leaving, not to simply log off forever but migrating two a new virtual world. Leaving behind RLC, they were switching to Second Life, a world orders of magnitude better. Called SL for short, there you could own land if you want, build whatever you liked upon it. That sounded very much better to me.
On their invitiation, I logged in there, received a teleport link to their rented home and checked it out. Truely amazing! Tech-savy as I am, still the new place came as a shock. There you had power to be creative in all kinds of ways. This, however, came at the cost of a user interface much more complex. Whole sims would crash sometimes, but this not really all that more often than the other one sometimes would do. Also it needed a speedy connection. I had one of the speediest then, so for me it was no issue. But it was a road block for some. Right up until my paid-for account at the first place came to the end of its final months, I tried my best to invite old friends to the new place. Only a few were willing or able to make the change. Some because of only having a dial-up connection. Others because the more complex interface was too daunting. Of those who made the migration with me I still have occasional contact. Most of the goth scene I've left behind, all except for still liking the music. And just as I myself branched away, so did the others, each in a different direction. But still I count them among my friends. Very glad am I to know them, even only just virtually so.
And I have gained new friends, of course. And not only that, but it so happens that it was inside of Second Life that I met the love of my real life, a wonderful woman to whom I'm now married. But that is a story needing to be told upon its own page entirely. Upon a whole series of them, in fact. Should you have surfed to this page via Google, then here's a link: Our SL Story