The Metaverse Journal - Virtual World News

I didn’t write last week. Why? Writer’s block, plain and simple. All bulk, no fiber, no water. Nothing flowing. Staring at blank document. No juice. Cranial constipation. (And, at the moment, I am battling some kind of cold that really, really, really, wants my attention, like a needy 5-year-old tugging on the kitchen dress of my awareness; shooing it away with a flour-dusted hand is ineffective and laughable.)

As it happens, I am kind of experiencing a similar thing in Second Life. (God, are my segues cool or what? Inelegant at times, but it comes with the territory. Suck it up. I have. ) I’ve found I’m running into a similar malaise in-world. If it weren’t for the building I’ve been doing for a friend who is developing mixed-use facilities on a private sim, and my SL girlfriend who– despite our occasional miscommunications and her somewhat lengthy bouts of afk, is still my source of energy– I’d be in-world a lot less these days. RL pressures are mounting, and I am a lot less inspired to hang around a sim. I continue to beta-test, running to SL in order to escape some RL grindings, only to find similar grindings in SL. However, the approach in SL allows me to work out some RL things, if only by virtue of the fact that I can de-pressurise the brain long enough to allow some blockage to clear. This is not a fool-proof theory; to wit, last week’s absence. But with a little more application, it might be a workable one. “Keep banging it with a hammer, you’re bound to fix it, somehow!”

On a marginally related note (and this does not qualify for a ‘cool segue’ award)…there’s an interesting backlash of sorts beginning to occur. I find myself wishing I could walk to the bottom of the lake that I live next door to, as easy and as unencumbered as in SL. What would I do there? Dunno. Can’t rez an object, so I might be limited to sucker-punching a couple of aggressive fish. But walking at the bottom of the lake or ocean or other body of water, to get to the other side, is starting to sound perfectly doable.

On a more practical note, I was out shooting photos on Sunday–good day for it, too… overcast, snowing, big city–and I found myself wishing–nay, expecting–to be able to fly up two or three stories to get that particular angle of Union Station I wanted to, without having to burden myself with contacting the tenants of the offices above me, explain my request, and jump through hoops to point a camera out a window. It’s amazing how quickly one can adapt to the creature comforts of SL. The line gets blurred with mental statements such as “Well, I’ll just fly up there and….oh, hell.”, statements that suddenly seem perfectly normal in RL carry the reality of encouraging men with white jackets to engage in footchase through the city streets.

I looked up the offices in the building directory…I’ll ring them this week.

Y’know, whoever makes this daytime cold medicine–shilling on the premise and promise of “non-drowsiness”–should really own up to the other side effects of the concoction. The pine trees outside my townhouse are bending down, trying to open my windows from the outside, my cats are dialing the telephone and ordering pizza (in perfect German, no less), and the entire contents of my closet are rearranging themselves in order of color. To make matters worse, I can’t really focus my eyes.

Perhaps that’s a good thing.

Maybe it’s even better I don’t have a wetsuit.

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