Second Life is a great lesson in perspective. Moving your cam and zooming in and out of a scene can totally change your viewpoint, and the entire feeling you get from what you’re seeing. Life is like that too, if you stop and pull back from what you’re viewing.

I had an opportunity recently to gain a little perspective on some things in my virtual and real lives. By pulling back and getting a new look at the whole picture, I changed the way I saw my worlds and my place in them.

But there’s a delicate balance. Pull too far back and everything gets out of focus. Zoom in too close, and you lose sight of the big picture. Just like in Second Life, where if you zoom too far in, your camera gets all stuck up inside your own head and you can loose all perspective entirely.

I’m not trying to be obtuse.

Virtual worlds, blogs and social media sites make it easy to project a relationship that doesn’t really exist. Or rather, they make it easy to assume a relationship is deeper than it really is. When you have a blog and you talk about your life and your feelings, people often feel they know you- even if you don’t know them. Sharing on Twitter has a similar effect.

There are people who share every passing thought, breath and bite on social media. But does that mean I know them? Nope. I know about them. But it’s a small window and a little viewpoint, even when they’re oversharing- and wearing me out in the process. I’ve noticed those oversharing types tend to be very one-sided and myopic. They require a lot of energy to keep up with, but give back little in return. They enjoy their audience, but they rarely engage with them.

Sometimes it’s important to move your camera and change your perspective and get a clearer view of where you really stand in the frame. Especially in relation to others.

I’m looking for that balance, where the important people are in the frame, and the rest are there when I want to pan back to include them. My energy is limited and precious, and it’s better spent on those who return the favor. I’m gaining a little perspective, and that’s a good thing.

For a long while, it was difficult to find items in InWorldz (that’s not the case these days), and so I did blog my finds here, but even then, it was just quicky snapshots of things I thought were worth sharing or vanity shots when I was especially proud of my look. But, no, I’m not a fashion blogista.

One of my favorite designers in InWorldz is also in Second Life. Carrie Snowpaw a designer who makes dresses that move. My InWorldz inventory is heavy with Snowpaws Designs’ gorgeous pieces.

I stopped by Snowpaws in SL last week, and fell in love with a dress. I never go anywhere in SL worthy of such a piece, so I figure I’ll wear it here instead. It’s a work of art that deserves showing off.

But since I’m not really a fashion blogger, I hope you’ll please forgive my less than stellar shots and just appreciate the beauty of the dress.

These images are untouched, aside from cropping.

I may not go anywhere in Second Life that calls for such a dress, but the beauty of virtual worlds is that I can wear it anyway. I’m building a new room in our home, and I’ll wear this dress while installing a bathtub today. I can do anything a plumber can do, and in heels.

I’m wearing:

Dress: Watercolor from SnowPaws Designs

Hair: [e]

Skin: Curio

Shoes: Pixel Mode Baby T’s

For the first time last night, I immersed myself in an art sim on my new computer. I was so shocked I forgot to turn my graphics up, but even at medium settings, I was stunned by the project that’s up at Art Screamers. I snapped some pictures, but they don’t do the work justice. For some really spectacular shots of the sim, I recommend you check out Crap Mariner’s pics here.

Claudia222 Jewel’s exhibit is called Spirit. And it’s beautifully bizarre.

Be sure you pick up the avatar near the landing point. Being a part of the work makes it even more personal as you move through the exhibit.

I think every viewer comes away from a work of art with her own emotions and understanding of what the artist meant to convey. For me, the whole exhibit left me feeling very vulnerable.

It’s a massive work of art that would take hundreds of pictures to even barely give you an idea of the scope. Please stop by and see it for yourself at the Art Screamers Sim.

No matter what you feel when you see the work, I think you’ll agree that it comes from both the heart of the artist, and the viewer, together. I intend to go back more than once, to better appreciate Claudia222′s incredible works.

But for now I’m off to log into InWorldz and visit the Elf Clans Art Festival. Because I can! *happy dances*

I’m not a shy person, but I’m a private one. I don’t like to air my laundry in public. I’m not one to gossip in local chat or post long, angry, pointed blog posts without pointing at anyone by name. I prefer to deal with issues directly and in private. And I prefer to walk away from dead horses. (After just a couple of kicks, just to make sure they’re good and dead.)

One lesson that I’ve learned in Second Life is that no one has your back. You must set your own boundaries, and protect yourself as best you can. I’m pretty good at that.

Seems to me that the best way to protect your back is to face things head on.

If you have questions or concerns about my integrity, my values, my words or my actions, I hope you will do us both the favor of coming to me with those questions.

Makes it easier to watch my back.

A furry maker has to create prim body parts, alpha layers, skins, tails, ears and shapes. Most furry avatars come with male and female versions, so they’re doing all of this times two for every release. And let me tell you, furries are picky. They won’t buy crappy avis.

There are a huge range of furries out there, from tiny realistic animals to anthropomorphic versions like I wear. There’s also some pretty fantastic mesh furries available. The first time I dropped a furry folder onto my avi, I have to admit I freaked out a little. The head of my furry avi is made of prims, and the shape, before those prims rezz, is pretty scary. The head is shrunken and misshapen to accommodate the prim head parts.

The avatar I’m wearing here is currently hugely popular, which puts me in the front seat of the bandwagon. It’s the chinchilla from Curious Inc. The creator is Uchi Desmoulins. But most furries running around in this avi have modded it, replacing ears and tail, or more. Furries are masters of modding- they have to be; there are very few clothes that fit furry shapes without modding, and no hairs that do. But I like my chinchilla, and only made a few mods.

My favorite mod, though, I didn’t do myself. A friend added my freckles for me. There’s no way I would be “me” without my freckles. While she used photoshop to add the freckles to the prim textures, I can easily add a tattoo layer of freckles for the body.

In this picture I’m also wearing Chinchilla Blush, which you can find here, and it comes with a kissy script. Next time you see me in Chinchilla form inworld, be sure to click my nose to kiss it!

The chinchilla avatar comes with a HUD for changing my eyes, opening and closing my mouth, and even changing my eye color and iris size. I hate that my photo cuts the HUD in half (I forget how to prevent this and can’t be assed to go back and figure it out now) but you get the general idea from this shot. The jaw is a separate, hinged piece that moves when I talk inworld. It’s incredibly well made and fun to watch.

Putting hair on a furry avatar is a challenge. I’m not even going to tell you how long it took me to mod this hair to fit (but it was 2 full hours). If you decide to try a furry avi yourself and want to add hair, you’ll find that the round, wide shape of the head lends itself to certain hair styles, while others can’t be fitted, no matter how long you spend modding it. Look for curls rather than straight, I’ve found, and hair styles with a “wider” profile are easier to size to fit.

Bangs are hard to fit, due to the generally larger eyes on a furry, so look for sideswept bangs instead of straight down. But I’ve found that the hairs that work best on the furry avatars I’ve bought have all had hair pulled back or to the side, with no bangs to hang into the prim eyes in that scary way you see. (That always makes me shudder.)

After you get the hair to even fit the head, you’ll have to get brave enough to use “edit linked parts” to further mod the hair piece by piece. I posted a tutorial on doing this a couple of years ago, you can find it here. It’s based on working in InWorldz, but will certainly work for any world.

 
 

One thing to note about furry avatars is that often their feet are made of prims, and the regular “human” shaped feet are hidden by alpha prims. Here’s my feet without the alpha.

You can see the prim feet and how they attach to my legs. (It looks like I’ve got a furry hidden under my skirt!)

Here’s after I wear the alpha prim.

 
 
The frustrating part about these feet is that I can’t wear pants over them. I can wear shorts, but you’ll usually see my chinchilla avi wearing dresses for this reason. My human avi is normally found in jeans.

I have to admit, it took a while for these chinchilla feet to grow on me. They weren’t my favorite thing when I first rezzed them, but over time I’ve grown to kinda like them. Many furries leave their feet human shaped and wear regular shoes. One of the great things about being a furry is that pretty much anything goes, no one’s gonna knock you for your choice of feet, hair or clothes. Furries are one of the more accepting groups in SL, I’ve found.

Dressing a furry can at times be frustrating. Now that I have a computer that can handle better viewers, dressing my furry is far easier. You need a V2 or V3 viewer, so that you can “add” more than one layer or attachment to the same spot. My skirt and my tail both attach to my spine, and reworking either is frustrating at best. Using an advanced viewer allows me to “add” one instead of wear it, and they both fit fine.

Wearing mesh clothing can be a challenge for a furry, mainly because a furry shape tends to be far different from a human shape, and you can’t mod the mesh to fit. Also, mesh generally comes with an alpha layer, and if you’re already wearing an alpha for your avatar, you’ll again need to be able to “add” the layer to wear more than one alpha at a time. I’ve only bought one mesh dress for my furry so far, and only because it came with a demo so I could try it on first.

I still tend to spend more time in my human avi, but being furry is a great change and I’m still amazed by how different I feel when I slip on my chinchilla or bunny avi. It’s easier to goof off and have fun as a furry, not to mention furries tend to be inherently kinky, which works for me too.

If you’ve never tried a furry avi, why the hell not? They’re not too pricey, they’re fun and they can make you creative in a way that a human avatar doesn’t. Maybe it’s the amount of work that goes into fitting stuff onto a furry avi, but I feel like a more artistic version of myself when I’ve put my furry avi together.
 

I’m wearing:

Chinchilla avatar from Curious Inc.
(pretty heavily modded in shape, head and size of ears & tail)

Hair from [e]

Outfit from The Sea Hole

Pearls from Dark Mouse

I celebrated my 5th official rezz day in December. All the years I’ve been in virtual worlds, I’ve been using an ancient desktop and various sub-par laptops. I’ve never had a machine that met the minimum requirements for Second Life. Since that’s all I’ve ever known, I’ve learned how to enjoy virtual worlds my way, through various basic viewers and lowest graphics. In most situations, I’ve had to zoom my camera into the floor to reduce the lag enough to type. I have loved my time in virtual worlds, even with the limitations I faced.

One of the most difficult things about having a laggy, low graphics experience in Second Life is keeping up with chat. I’m an outgoing person and enjoy fun local chat. But when you have  3 FPS and you’re looking at the floor and every letter you type shows up on the screen 2 seconds later, it’s hard to talk. And so you wind up being quiet at events, and people have a hard time getting to know you, and they might think you’re shy or snobby or buried in IMs, when in reality you’re seeing chat pop up out of order or far too late to respond. It’s incredibly frustrating and makes it hard to do  much of anything. I’m always patient with people inworld when chatting, because I know all too well the feeling of being left behind by local chat.

Even though I have a gorgeous home on a great sim, I logged in and out underwater on a sim with no textures to bog down my machine as my inventory slowly loaded each time. Even on this underwater sim, I often had to cam into the ground in order to chat.

So when a friend sent me a pretty fierce gaming laptop to see if that would help my experience, I was excited, but the most I hoped for was to be able to type or walk around my home sim freely. So I unpacked the beast of a machine (it’s ginormous!) and the first time I logged in, I’m not ashamed to say that I actually got teary eyed. I felt like I was seeing Second Life for the first time. And I guess in some ways, I was.

For years, I have crashed every time I took a pic. It’s just what I did, and I’d become so used to it that I fully expected to crash after taking this first snapshot on the new laptop:

My underwater home away from home.

I didn’t crash, and I could see. Really see, in a way I’ve never seen before. Sure, I’ve seen pictures of what others see inworld, but those snapshots can’t compare to being really immersed in it like I suddenly found myself.

Even my home sim, which has been a huge challenge for me (sculpty hell), looks amazing now. I finally saw my home, which I had only really seen in parts and pieces, or in photos like these kindly taken by others for me. And guys, it’s gorgeous. I kinda love it there.

So I finally see the world. And it’s stunning. Have you seen the water? I hadn’t. I had never seen water move, never seen it reflect, never been able to use any water windlight settings… the water looks like water! Who knew?

I can’t stop looking at it. And I can’t stop playing with windlight settings and camera angles and yes, I’ll be honest, I keep looking at myself too. I am truly falling in love with virtual worlds all over again, but this time with an appreciation I might not have had before, had I started out with this view of it. Feeling this sense of wonder and amazement 5 years in? That’s a gift. And I’m thrilled to receive it.

I’m going to take so many pictures! I’m going to explore sims I never got to see before, artist’s work I could only see in the most basic of ways. I want to visit  races and plays and events! I want to go to Soror Nishi‘s sim in InWorldz! I want to use exclamation points! (Apparently.)

But for now, I want to enjoy looking at my world through this new lens, and fall in love with it all over again.

If I can ever pull myself away from the beautiful water.

We are spread so thin, and across so many mediums; our ideas and creativity are diluted.  And you know I prefer my inspiration straight up.

And what of inspiration? My mom is an artist. Her inspirations over the years were generally the world around her, works of other artists she admired, and her own inner demons that she fed with paint and clay. My youngest daughter is also an artist, but I can see that inspiration for her is different. Between Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram and all of the vast oceans of internet, she has a whole range of inspiration that wasn’t available to past generations of artists.

But is this necessarily a good thing? I’m not so sure. I look over her shoulder at Tumblr and I see a lot of work that looks just like the work before it. It’s the same on Instagram. If everyone is inspired by each other, is anyone an original? Is any work of art truly original if it was directly “inspired” by one just like it?

I normally don’t like to post blogs full of questions, especially without answering them. But these are valid questions, I think. And asking them out loud, in a sense, might help me to make sense of them.

When I was a kid, it was unusual for someone to be an artist. Most people had day jobs, and explored their creative sides on the side, if at all. But an artist who worked at art for a living was rare. My mom has always been one of those, and until her head injury made a tidy living selling her art. Today, it seems like everyone is an artist, a photographer, a designer of some sort. The tools available to us make it easier for everyday people to explore their creativity.

But, watching my mom, I see the true artist. The rare artist. Even before she bonked her noggin, she would stop in the middle of a parking lot and wonder at the pattern of the water on the pavement. I’ve seen her pull out a sketch pad to record a leaf or a foot or the angle of a woman’s head as she chats on the phone. She simply sees the world far differently than the rest of us. Her inspiration is everywhere. She’s not looking at other artists for ideas; her ideas come from that burning place inside her that would consume her if she didn’t paint.

A writer’s inspiration comes from a similar place. But no one learns to write without reading, and the best writers are those who read. So, then, are the best artists those who spend time looking at other art?

Flying Backbone, by Georgia O'Keeffe, at Fisk University

Standing in front of this painting by Georgia O’Keeffe, I was moved to tears, and felt it in my heart. I’m no artist, but even I felt the power of creativity from the piece. Would I have felt the same looking at a picture of this work on Tumblr?

Inspiration is important. It’s a pilot light, kindling and fuel all at once for an artist. I wonder about the constant stream of bite-sized blips of inspiration from an endless flow of sources online. It may stimulate a surge of artistic creativity in more people than ever before; we’ll have to wait and see.

But that rare, true artist who must create or die, will they be overwhelmed, drowned and buried by too much “inspiration” from far too many sources?

Much of this thread I’m teasing out goes back to some posts by Botgirl Questi, exploring similar topics. But it’s hard for me to pull this thread out of the tangle of other thoughts and writings and artwork and platforms and conversations. I think there may be something to be said for being more selective about our inspiration, and the dilution of our creative fuel.

Now, before you go accusing me of being a drama queen, let me just say that I’m not looking for comments begging me to stay and listing reasons why my blog shouldn’t be deleted. I don’t give a flying shit about page hits, I don’t stalk my stats and I don’t fuck for fame. I write for me, and I love your comments.

But I’m scrambling for those things I can control. And there are so few of them.

Instead of living a deliberate life, I’m reacting to things as they happen. And that leaves me feeling out of control and off kilter. I spend far too much time picking up the pieces of broken things, and not enough time shoring up the sandbags.

It occurs to me that some of you might not know the cast of characters here in this lifeboat I call home. A brief intro:

I’m your inconsistent narrator. Currently unemployed after losing my job as an English teacher (it was budget cuts, not bad language that got me fired); I work from home as a freelance writer, homeschooling mom, caregiver and occasional bartender.

I have 2 daughters ages 18 and 19, and they’re goddesses, both. They both still live at home, and they are generous and amazing and beautiful and funny and I’m not the only one who thinks so.

On Christmas Eve last year, my sister was diagnosed with cancer. My sister and I never got along, and could best be described as estranged. Her husband died several years ago. The best thing she’s ever done for me was to give me a niece, who is 10 and one of the few things that reminds me of the good still in the world.

After some pretty heinous cancer treatments, my sister could no longer care for herself or my niece, and so they moved in here. Around this same time, our mom suffered a fall and a head injury that changed her forever. After months of hospital care, she came here to live as well.

So there’s 6 of us here now, and for all intents and purposes, I’m the only functioning adult- if you can call what I do functioning. My sister is still undergoing chemo and waiting for an organ transplant.

Chemo is a nightmare. These treatments have reduced my sister to a 98 pound shell of a woman who was cranky to start with but now is bitter and more than a little bit evil. There’s a reason we were estranged, and it wasn’t my rapier wit and stellar personality.

In the days immediately following a chemo treatment, we live in hell. I’m not prone to exaggerating; our home is the 4th level of hell where it smells of bile and sounds like retching 24/7, and the same episode of Hoarders plays on a never-ending loop.

I came home from taking my sister to chemo yesterday to find that my mom had helped out by hemming all of my pants. Which would have been great had my pants required hemming. My pants fit me just fine, as it happens. I now own 9 pairs of pants that are 3 inches too short, and 1 pair that still fits (the pair I was wearing to chemo). This is the kind of thing I deal with, caring for a parent with brain trauma. She hides shoes, floods bathrooms, and locks us out of the house on a regular basis. And don’t even get me started on her obsession with checking herself for new moles.

And so that’s what I mean by reacting to things, instead of living deliberately. I feel like I run from task to task, dealing with little (and some not-so little) aftermaths. Helping my sister when she’s puking, finding all of the spoons when my mom throws them out, chasing after the dog who ran away… I’m in constant crisis mode and it’s nowhere near as fun as it sounds.

The escape of online worlds is such a pull for me. If I didn’t have to devote so much time to dealing with all the shit here, I would no doubt spend days on end in a world I can control. In my virtual world, I’m the boss of me.

This blog started out as 100% inworld stuff. Very little of my RL me made its way into these pages. Over time that changed, and nowadays my blog is more RL stuff than virtual. And so I came to delete that. To throw back up the wall between my virtual self and my physical self. Since I’m the boss, and all.

But then I’d have to delete my Twitter account too. Because it also started out as a virtual world account, but has evolved into more RL than anything else.

So, it follows then, that I should end those relationships that have crossed over into RL too. Right?

But I can’t. I won’t.

And I don’t really want to. While I’m very protective of my RL world and especially those goddess daughters of mine; truth is, I don’t want that tall wall that used to live between worlds. So far, I’ve found a fair balance of divulging RL stuff without posting too much.

So instead of deleting, I’ve babbled.

Maybe I’ll do the same tommorrow.

“Good night, blog. Good work. Sleep well. I’ll most likely kill you in the morning.”

One of the things that helps me is writing. So, in an effort to slap myself around alittle, I’m gonna write more here. I make no promises that the topics will be grande and engaging. But it’ll be me, getting back into what I love- putting pen to paper, so to speak. I just want to write.)

There’s a bunneh in my life. No, that’s not her above. That’s me. My first ever furry avatar. In five years in Second Life, I’ve never been furry. But this bun in my life, she’s helped me to see things differently.

Part of the appeal of SL for me has always been extending myself out into the world from the comfort of my own home. Meeting people from all over the world and exploring places I’d never been. My avatars have always been “me.” Shaped like me, dressed like me; I enjoyed that projection of my real self into the virtual space. And it helped me to feel more “present” in the virtual world.

I’ve heard people accuse those who have normal human avatars of lacking creativity. I’ve always bristled at that accusation. I don’t lack creativity just because my avatar looks like me. I simply express my creativity in other ways.

But, back to this bunneh I’m hanging with. I’ve had furry friends before, and always loved their fun and kinky nature. I never felt inspired to join them, however, because it didn’t seem like “me.” But I’ve learned from my bunneh friend the joys of using SL to explore facets of my personality that I hadn’t really explored before. For the first time, I’m enjoying a version of myself, instead of just myself.

And now I get the whole “average avatars aren’t creative” complaint. Avatars with robot skin, or blue skin, or doll parts… they all wear that skin to portray a version of themselves. Just as some women are inworld as men, and vice versa, so too are avatars expressing their silly sides, their serious sides, their more creative sides- in their avatar choices.

And finally, I am too. I’m not a furry, not in the sense that others are dedicated to their furreh selves. You’ll not meet me at any furcon. But I find it intensely interesting how different I feel in a furry avi. In my human “me” avatar, I tend to act just like my human “me.” It’s safer, somehow. But in a different avatar, I seem to be able to act in ways I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing in real life. Sillier, goofier; and I gotta tell you, that’s fun!

I recently read an article about a study called the Echoes Project, where teachers of children with autism used virtual environments to help their students interact in ways they were never predicted to be able to interact. And one of the biggest reasons these autistic kids were able to experiment with new ways of interacting was the lack of real world consequences. That made sense to me.

If I skip across the room and rub noses with my friends in real life, they’ll wonder what drugs I’ve been popping. It’s not “me” to do such a thing. Don’t get me wrong, I’m plenty fun in the real world, but not furreh fun. But inworld, in my furry avi, I can be silly in new ways.

But this lack of real world consequences for our experimentation, this can also lead to some behavior that might not be considered fun. Just as I am enjoying finding my silly side, there are those who use virtual worlds to explore their darker sides. And sometimes there actually are real world consequences.

I think of my friends with unusual avatars, and I wonder about the version of themselves they’re presenting.

Something else I’ve found interesting are my friends who make alts for their “different” avatars. Instead of changing avatars, they change accounts to “play” their different roles. Our attachment to our personas is pretty impressive. Even my furry avi looks like me. Instead of going completely different, I chose a buff color and added my blonde hair, my blue eyes, and she wears my clothes. My persona is that important to me.

This is all just thinking out loud. I’m not drawing any earth shattering conclusions here; I leave that to others. I think it’s important to keep Second Life fun and fresh after years of being here. I’ve seen so many avatars my age wander off after SL lost its shine for them. I took my own yearlong break from SL last year, so I get that.

But the appeal of virtual worlds is still the same for me. I still feel the same sense of excitement and wonder that I felt when I first rezzed eons ago. I still find fun and interesting things to see and do in virtual worlds, and even more now that there are more worlds to explore.

I’m not sewing a fursuit just yet, but I am enjoying getting to know my furry side inworld. Not to mention learning how to mod clothes and hair to fit a furry shape. Talk about frustrating! Why aren’t there designers making furry friendly hairs?

If you see my furry self inworld, don’t be surprised if I act differently. It’s still me, just another version.

Depression sucks ass, no matter how you look at it.

I was doing so well. I was handling all the medical stuff, the kids, the chemo, the houses, my mom’s insanity, the new hedgehog. I stayed busy and productive and absolutely certain that I would be fine. No worries- I’m busy and I don’t have time for depression. ‘Sal good.

Then it hit me right between the shoulder blades and sent me flying into a brick wall. I unconsciously started counting the number of drinks I had left in my bottle of vodka. I stopped getting dressed, started eating whole cakes, and screamed at ASPCA commercials. And I had to physically fight the urge to curl up in the fetal position and suck my thumb.

Before the tragedies that befell my family this past year, I didn’t understand depression. I thought I did. I knew and loved people who dealt with depression, and I never judged them for it. I never considered them weak or crazy. But it turns out, I had no idea. I didn’t realize how physical depression is. And how weak it makes me feel.

I have a wonderful life full of family, friends, fun and opportunities. There are a gazillion things I have to be thankful for, and I am grateful for each and every one of them. I know how lucky I am.

And yet, I feel the tug of melancholy and blue all the way to my core. Not even the reminder of all of the good things in my world can hold it at bay. It’s gonna eat me up and shit me out no matter how hard I fight it.

And that just sucks all sorts of rotten stuff, doesn’t it?

I don’t want to be resigned to depression. I don’t want to feel that it’s inevitable and hopeless. But it feels inevitable, and I feel very hopeless. I feel like I should be able to hold up my wonderful life like a shield to keep the depression at bay, but it just doesn’t seem to work that way.

And so, I find myself considering excuses for staying home, dreading the times I must leave the house, neglecting to return phone calls, and spending more time than I should in my pajamas. And I keep driving by my liquor store.

I want a drink. And it’s the fact that I so badly want one that keeps me from stopping at the liquor store.

I’m not gonna be able to drink this away, but I would sure as hell try.