personal notes

Death and The Divide Between Meatspace and Cyberspace

The Ebbe Altberg Memorial Islet, Altberg
The Ebbe Altberg Memorial Islet, Altberg (Rated: Moderate)

This is not my only blog, nor is it my longest-running. That “honour” goes to one of my RL-related blogs, which I’ve been managing since 2006. I still write the occasional post there when I feel like it. In the fifteen years that I’ve been managing that blog, I’ve been able to befriend like-minded friends; we’ve exchanged links to each other’s blogs, we’ve had long-winded and often heated discussions, we’ve come to understand each other, and connect with each other. As blogs gradually gave way to the fast-paced detritus that is Facebook, we connected with each other there. And also on Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media that are more RL-centric.

With some people, we got to meet in person, talk on the phone, on Skype, whatever. With others, our communication, heartfelt though it was, remained within the confines of text-only exchanges – that’s what they felt comfortable with, so that’s what it was. Some people drifted away and went their own way. Others made themselves sparser than before due to family and work obligations. Some others sadly passed away.

As might be gloomily obvious from the title, death is precisely what I’ll talk about this time. More specifically, the death of a person you only know from online, with whom you’ve connected on all sorts of levels, yet you haven’t talked on the phone with them and / or met them in person. You may have spent hours chatting, exchanging comments on each other’s blog, emailing back and forth, even helping each other out with various difficulties. Still, for some reason, your connection with them isn’t “normally” considered a friendship, however heartfelt and sincere it may be, for the sole reason that you haven’t crossed the meatspace / cyberspace divide.

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The Great Purge

It took me nearly eight months to sit down and write a post about anything. The past two years have been fraught with all sorts of RL difficulties, some of which were exacerbated by in-world events I hinted at in some of my past posts. It was a very hard, uphill struggle, but I found the courage to carry on through therapy and all other efforts I took to pull myself up. Now, our (yes, our) life seems like it’s back on track. Getting my life back and getting it back in order was an arduous, painstaking process, and it necessitated a serious offloading of baggage – and much of this baggage had to do with SL. A clean-up was in order.

Today, I made a blog-related decision that will certainly cost me a good number of pageviews, but I decided the emotional benefit from removing that stuff was infinitely more important than having pageviews from a community I don’t care to even pretend to flatter, as my experience with D/s “romance” was immensely painful. I deleted the essays on the topic of D/s (Dominance and submission) that I had written in 2012 and 2013, and moved several others to other, more appropriate, categories. You can call it “The Great Purge”, if you like.

Usually, when I update a post, I make the changes visible for the sake of transparency and honesty, and, if it’s something I had first published elsewhere, I mention where I had originally posted it; if anything, this approach made it clear how my views on certain topics evolved over time, and why. Not this time. It was way too personal. I decided to sever all bonds. After what I’d been through, and considering where I’ve come back from, I didn’t want my blog to offer pro-D/s catechetic material. After all, if a dom(me) needs such material, other dom(me)s and subs have made sure there’s plenty of drivel on the internet and in bookstores, all of it written either from the dom(me)’s point-of-view, some of it with the express or implied purpose of indoctrinating subs, or written to satisfy the writer’s dom(me). So, if you’ve come to my blog from a D/s-related website that listed me as a fine proponent of D/s, you’ll be disappointed. The pro-D/s posts aren’t here anymore. Perhaps you’ll have better luck if you try any of the various internet archiving services. I know it’ll cost me perhaps up to half my page views, but I don’t care.

Over the next few days, the only D/s-related posts that’ll remain will be my blunt, rude and brutally honest critique of D/s, my heavily-edited post on the “drop”, and my post on “separating the wheat from the chaff” w.r.t. dom(me)s in SL (funnily enough, it was also liked by the exact person who had earned the “chaff” characterisation with her behaviour towards me). And that’s it about D/s; it shall not be a subject matter for any of my future blog posts. There are other things in SL that I find a lot more interesting and pleasant to talk about. Also, I’ll sit down to reorganise my blog, in order to make past, present, and future posts easier to read.

Shortlink: http://wp.me/p2pUmX-OX

Changes…

Time changes many things, for better or worse. Not always for the better. Hearts get broken. Mine did a short while ago. As part of that change, the latex look that had become an integral part of me suddenly felt like a robe soaked in Nessus‘ blood. It became impossible for me to stand to wear it anymore. Or even look at it. So, here I am… Out of it. In the process, I’ve also ditched my previous hair (from Zero Style), and went with the “Chilali” mesh hair by Truth Hawks, which has also helped me reduce my render weight significantly.

Profile picture by Liara Okiddo
Profile picture by Liara Okiddo.

This picture, which will soon become my profile picture everywhere, was taken for me by the extremely talented and gifted Liara Okiddo. She asked me to pose for her, and for this I’m flattered and honoured. As cancould be seen from her (often risqué) Flickr photostream, Liara’s aesthetic standards arewere exceptionally high, and she’s extremely picky as to who she chooses to be her sitters. As she has explained to me, for her to ask someone to pose, she must not only like their style a lot, but she must also hold them in high regard.

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Shortlink: http://wp.me/p2pUmX-Kx

My avatar and me

As is the case with every user of any of the existing (or defunct) virtual world platforms, I do everything in there through my avatar, which is basically a graphical representation of my real self – a graphical representation of a fairly typical woman who works, runs errands, does all sorts of chores, pays bills, goes out, has friends, family, relatives, etc. I immerse myself in the metaverse because I want to (a) escape from Real Life, (b) indulge in my fantasies and whims, (c) enjoy surroundings, settings, happenings and experiences that RL simply can’t offer, and (d) meet friends I have made here. With my avatar, we coexist in a “meta-symbiotic” relationship. She – obviously – depends on me. She’s active in Second Life only when I’m logged in. I pay the tier for the sim that is her home. I buy things for her. I build things through her. I participate in various activities and events through her. Without me, she cannot exist. And, in a variety of ways, neither can I exist in SL without her.

Through her, I express myself; I have put a lot of my creativity, personality and soul in her. One could say I’ve breathed myself into her. This is a point that I would like to expand a little. I cherish, enjoy and guard the privacy and the disconnect from my RL identity that SL affords me as much as everyone else. However, I have found out that, regardless of the appearance I choose for my avatar at any given moment, she’s really me, because it is my personality, my attitudes, my values, my desires, my wishes and my way of thinking that manifest themselves through her.

My avatar is, therefore, a manifestation of myself – and in this, I can’t help but view her in a way that’s not entirely dissimilar to the Hinduist definition.

I’ll give a little background information on my manifestation within SL. I manifested myself in SL for the first time in September 2006 and kept her until early 2008. Then I deleted that account; if you want, I killed that first avatar of mine. With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, the reasons that led me to killing my then avatar could even be considered silly. At any rate, I came back a few months later – by a weird coincidence, it was September again. To be honest, none of these two avatars were really meant to be “me”; I viewed them both in a somewhat superficial manner and intended to use them firstly for savouring desires and fantasies that I could not easily or practically enjoy in RL; whatever attempts at being creative were secondary and, from time to time, merely coincidental, depending entirely on my mood.

In my second manifestation in SL, things eventually evolved further: whereas my first avatar was merely a tool for me to explore and enjoy what SL had to offer w.r.t. a small set of interests that I had (and still have) and was frequently modelled and remodelled to reflect this, my second avatar, the one through which I now exist in SL, became what it is now: a reflection of myself in the digital domain and a way for me to express aspects of my personality that RL doesn’t give me opportunities to express. Finally, I have found that my interactions with others through her has influenced, to a certain degree, my views on certain RL issues.

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Mona

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Shortlink: http://wp.me/p2pUmX-d0