home: https://starling.us/sl
by Ĝan Ŭesli Starling
(aka Aplonis Ember)
copyright 2013
The continuing story of our long-distance romance first begun in the virtual world Second Life .
To read of our story from the begining, start here: SL — 2008
Our 2013 real-life honeymoon, should you wish to view it, is here: Real Life
So what do you do when the love of your life is three time zones distant? This is what we do, get together virtually. On Saturday nights, we'd opt for an evening at Drama Libre inside Second Life. Other nights what we'd do instead is sychronize our separate DVD players to both watch the same movie together, Karin in Canada and I in the USA. We use a program called VLC for that.
All the while, whether it be watching a movie or watching our SL avatars dance, we be chatting in audio. For that we use either Skype or Yahoo Messenger. Second Life has its own audio channel, of course, which we use sometimes. How it works out best for me, is to have Karin's voice in ear buds which I wear inside of over-the-ear headphones carrying the SL music-and-DJ channel. I do that so Karin won't hear an echo of SL's audio inside her own headphones on top of the music she's trying to hear. I know that sounds complicated, but it's still very well worth it to spend even virtual time with the woman I dearly love when we're apart. The real-life vacations that we spend together I'll build up a separate series of TGP's for, and eventually link them to here.
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Don't know if if I was having trouble with my login this night, but for Drama Libre's them of the Enchanted Forest my avatar is not in costume. Probably why I'm hiding behind the lovely Sylea for the last snapshot.
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On the 5th, Drama Libre held a Pompeii them. Somehow, on clicking for the couple's dance pose balls, we get the pink and blue mixed up. Maybe it was from the angle of view. Or maybe it was on account of server lag. Then again, maybe it was a Freudian slip on account of how my avatar's costume (proper fashion for the time) had a skirt instead of pants? Anyhow, it was funny, so that's how we left them to keep on dancing.
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Drama Libre's them for February 13th was When Machines Attack. At least semi-in-costume, this time, I teleport in with mechanical, prosthetic arms. Sylea comes in space marine mode. The car beside which we are dancing is also someone's avatar: the Deathmobile. It nearly smashes us flat quite a few times. My real-life son also makes an appearance as Marvin the depressed robot from the movie Hitchhiker's Guide. Drama Libre builds their whole set up from scratch every week inside of an SL skybox.
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One of DL's themes in March was Arcade. Suupposing this to be a kind of carnival theme, Sylea and I present ourselves as a dog-faced couple. So very romantic! Never shinking from PDA, we take possession of the roof-top pose balls for couple's dancing.
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On the 30th, Drama Libre holds a Discworld theme. I'm ready for this one, having bought my Death of Rats avatar upon first seeing it some time ago. I've read every one of Terry Pratchett's books, some of them a couple of times.
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I don't have personal shapshots for all the times we've gone to a theme night at Drama Libre. But each time we do, Peachy Sassoon, takes snapshots of us. Here are two. Sylea and I sometimes consider buying an estate on which to rebuild Murmuration, our long-lost estate.
Later in 2011 I started having problems with taking snapshots in the SL viewer. In high-rez, the originals for what I show here weigh in at between 2.8MB to 4MB. Taking snapshots that big would cause the viewer to hang, freezing up long enough to disconnect me from the server for whatever sim I was in. My DSL through AT&T may have been partly to blame, but I suspect the main cause to be SL no longer supporting Vista as Win7 had now long been out. I might have switched to running SL instead in Ubuntu, but that OS too had become an annoyance. They'd only just switched their entire GUI from the traditional Linux one which I'd gotten used to over to a new one that they call Unity (which I still don't very much like). And so, while we did get into SL from time to time, I no longer risked my login for the sake of high-rez snapsots. And snapshots in low-rez seemed not very much worth the taking.
I have none either from 2012, that being the year I moved from my apartment (within the boundaries of Holland MI) to the semi-rural, ranch home we'd bought. Before even making an offer I had checked with AT&T whether I could get high-speed Intetnet there. Immediately, they said yes. That important issue settled, I signed the mortgage, moved in and contacted AT&T for a hookup. Turns out they'd lied. No DSL available now for my address. So for some months instead I'd login, mooching the WiFi at restaurants and such like. Eventually, and at enormous expense, I contracted for a unlimitied bandwidth 3G network connection via a 3rd party reselling Sprint. It's never more than WiFi speed, prone to frequent, temporary moments of down-time and costs five times what I had used to pay for DSL. But it does get me on-line.
I'm still runnning Vista on my Dell M6300, however. And in addition to the snapshot freeze-up, I have avatar rezing issues. Logging in via the SL viewer in Ubuntu, though, my avatar rezzes very well. Nor do I get booted often. There is, however, a major issue to do with taking snapshots. In version 12.04 of Ubuntu (which although the latest has been out for more than a year) the viewer locks up. It locks up so hard when trying to save snapshots to disk that I have to open a command line window and type in the ps kill -9 command in order to close it. The workaround is to email them to myself, but this costs bandwidth, which I cannot much spare.
So while Karin and I still do log into SL as Sylea and Aplonis, it has not been too very often. Nor do I take many snapshots. So for the year 2012, a thumbnail gallery page I have not created. A skimpy one I'll now make for 2013, and perhaps continue from there. Still working on that, though, at time of writing.
To see the neighboring TGPs in this series, click here: SL — 2008 SL — 2009 SL — 2010 2011