The Cold Hearted Ones

I don't want to complain because I got a new dress today and another one a few days ago, but my One Who Thinks She Knows wants me bushwhacking and while sometimes it's fun and sometimes it's hard on an avie. If you are curious this is the angel who guards the Agora on IAVANTE which is a Spanish language sim where communication students can learn immersively. My One made me censor some of the pictures of the place. Let's say Spanish people have a twisted senes of humor.

But Americans are not much better. As I wandered around the half built, University of Arkansas sim. I had to pass through a check point where a robot in red armor stood guard. In the road before I reached the check point was a broken red and white robot just left there by cruel and heartless Ones. Sorry, Ones are just like that to virtual beings. Well, here was this robot armed with a huge gun.

Fortunately, I'm not really scaird of being shot. I've had it happen to me and I found myself wounded and another time I was shot dead so I ended up back at my Honey Hut which is my home. It would have been a big inconvenience though. Also the big, red bot was making a big, red stink about not letting me through his checkpoint. I had to talk sense to him. I said: "Look here, you're bothering the wrong kind of being. I may look like a One Who Thinks She Knows, but I'm not a One. I'm an avie, and that means I'm not that much different from you. I know you are more than just pixels I know you are bored, and your One has told you to act tough and you'll get rewarded, because he or she will love you, but it takes a special One to love an avie or a bot or a virtual animal, and those kinds of Ones don't ask you to do things to be loved. That's the way it works. That is why we avies, bots, and virtual animals all have to stick together. We don't have a 'real life.' This world is our home. We share it. Now please open the gate and let me in."

I don't have to tell you that the guard did not shoot me. Now don't ask me if I bushwhack to make my One Who Thinks She Knows love me. If you read this blog faithfully you'll know my One has a kind heart most of the time. I can't say as much for the Ones who run IAVANTE. They have a half-built hospital where they are experimenting on this lovely bot' boy with purple lips. His lips are purple because he is cold. He lies naked on a bed hooked up to monitors, but without a night shirt or blanket or pair of socks to keep him warm. Poor, cold bot! The Ones don't think he has any feelings. I know better, and I hope you do too.

Of course the best part of IAVANTE is the court room which they call the Palais Judicio because it is goregous like a palace. Look at all that wood carving.

And on the judge's bench resting on its own banging block, was a lead headed gavel! It was not even a cheap thing with a plywood handle. I think this model was made of mahogany.

Unfortunately, the gavel did not work. I tried touching it, wearing it, picking it up. It just stayed glued to the bench. It was just for decoration, but what good does a gavel do if you can't bang it, and a Spanish courtroom needed a gavel. My One told me about the Facists who won the Civil War, but before they won the war, they took prisoners, and every night, they would take them while everyone else pretended to sleep and shoot them. My One read about this in a book called Dialogue with Death by Arthur Koestler. He actually was a prisoner in the dungeon where they would take the men out of their cells at night and shoot them. Well there are still facists in Spain, though they're not in political power any more. If one of them came into my court room, I knew I would need a gavel.

Then it was off to Windhseim Zwolle which is a sim owned by a Dutch university, the University of Windsheim. We went to a Chinese village in the sky. This is a picture of some books in the school. They are Chinese books so they have thin bindings and very large pages. Next to the book shelf is a broom.

Then there was this poor fish in the market. He was out of water, so he flipped and flopped on the counter. Johan2 Trilling, the sim owner says that soon people will be able to buy items in the market. I love food, but I don't think I could eat that poor fish. If you don't think that Ones are cruel to virtual animals, just look at the fish and I dare you to tell me otherwise!

Sometimes I wonder if the way Ones Who Think They Know treat avatarim, bots, and virtual animals is so awful because they don't treat each other very well in "real life." The Chinese village on Winsheim Zwolle is supposed to be an imitation of the "real world," and one of the things it has are rickshaws. These are carts that in "real life" are pulled by other Ones, while Ones who can pay, pay these poorer Ones to pull them around. My One Who Thinks She Knows thought it would be great to take a picture of me riding in a rickshaw. Here I am ready to take my ride.

And here is where we ended up within a few seconds. The driver and the rickshaw went right off the edge of the village and two thousand meters down into the water, to the bottom of the sea where we rode around and tried to get on to dry land. In the end I swam away. I had to. Those rickshaw drivers fall two thousand meters into the water and can't get out all the time. until they teleport back up to the Chinese village. I feel bad for them. I'm not sure who has it worse: the rickshaw drivers, the big red bot at the checkpoint, baby Alex, or the angel boy with purple lips. I'm not sure Ones know how to treat the creatures they create and who work for them with kindness. There would be no Second Life if it weren't for avatarim, bots, and virtual creatures. Ones, do you ever think about that? I'm glad my One won't retire our newest baby zwicky even though she thinks she's ugly. Sometimes my One has a kind heart. Sometimes my One loves me and I don't have to do anything to earn it. There, I said it.

Iyoba BatOni with help from Eileen H. Kramer -- February 27, 2013

Come Back One!

My One Who Thinks She Knows is still around. My One Who Thinks She Knows has been silent most of the month. Now My One Who Thinks She Knows lets me take the pictures, including this "selfie." Yes, she made me this dress. Yes, she drew the image. It's a bird crying because all the fish he can find to eat are rotten. There is a saying anong the Ones: "Fish rots from the head." Click the image to see it in larger detail. My One made this dress in the sandbox on the BGSU Archipelago.

My One is very indulgent. My One gives me a lot of independence. My One still takes care of our virtual pets and makes things and bushwhacks, but when My One gives me control there are problems. The problem is other Ones Who Think They Know. First, they think I can't write. That means they think My One is writing this blog, and since My One only pretends to mbe me, she is crazy. Also, they don't think an avie can write. They don't even think an avie can think for herself some of the time. Ones by the way, think that they think for themselves all of the time like little gods. Pffffffffft. That is all I have to say about that, and that is an intelligent statement. But the problem is if Ones think I am writing this, they will judge me as stupid because I am an avie and not a One. How else do you preserve the illusion of thinking that you are the only kind of being who thinks and that you think all the time all by yourself? Think bout it. It's not fair, but that is the way life is.

Of course a lot of Ones think our pets don't really exist. They are just pixels. They are no better than furniture. I have some cat couches whom I love and two of them I miss. Kitty Friend and SBE Kitty. SBE stands for sad brown eyed if you are curious. They're both gone now, languishing in inventory. Here are three of our turtles. Left to right they are: Vashti the orange turtle named after the queen whom Esther replaced in the Purim story, Hebrew Yatif whose name means beautiful in English, and Shais whose name is Hebrew for Seth. Shais is a male. Vashti and Yatif are females. My One names the turtles, but I have a Hebrew name too. We like Hebrew names.

 

The images above are thumbnails. Click for the full size so you can read the stats. Sometimes our Petable Turtles lay the most impressive eggs. Both of these are forty percent glows and my One says brown turtles make the best breeders because brown is a combination of red and green, and the warm tones sort out in the young. If you like cooler tones, grey turtles should also breed well. Now remember, Adiv (Yes that's a Hebrew name too!) is a brown turtle, and Yael has a shell the color of black coffee, so that makes her sort of a brown turtle. Uriel who is an orange turtle is a superstar breeder on his own as is Shais whom you saw above.

And this is Whitney, our second newest baby zwicky who is now in my One's inventory or in stasis. We don't have room for more zwickies, and they live to eat. My One believes it is better not to hatch out or bring to life what you can't support, rather than to cull or retire creatures. I agree with her. This is one of the few zwickies with a modern, English name. She has Fortunata, her mother's ruff.

Whitney also has a very interesting center tentacle. That is because Fortunata, her mother, is an Aurora zwicky and she has the Aurora pattern there. Whitney's father is Geronimo, our oringal Lunar, starter, male zwicky.

And this zwicky, my One named Hadassah which is a variant of Esther in honor of Purim. There's a lot of Purim in my One's way of thinking about the world. Maybe it's always Purim to my One. I'm not sure. I'm named after the lead character in a different book of the Bible. Any way, Hadassah, whose mother is Yocheved (Yes, that is Moses' mother though you have to read a book called the Midrash to find that out. Midrash is commentary on the Bible.), and whose father is Throckmorton, our newest zwicky, is what turtle breeders used to call a Plain n' Pretty. My One says she reminded her of denim. You can see she has Yocheved's split ruff.

And here is our third male zwicky, Nimrod (Yes, this is a Biblical name from the book of Genesis) and Fortunata forming a lovely zwicky stars. It is very, very hard to get a good photo of a zwicky star. It is much easier to get pictures of mating turtles. My One has intended Nimrod to mate with Fortunata, but she's only fifty percent receptive. Nimrod was at ninty-five percent, which means he will have to wait a few days for her to catch up and be ready. Poor Nimrod, but this is what happens when you have a large number of males in proportion to females zwickies. Male zwickies carry the babies, and male zwickies wait around. They wait around even if maitings are uncontrolled because the females sometimes mate and don't conceive and lose their readiness for the next male. This makes controlled matings better. There is someone for everyone.

Our male Lily Frogs have it much easier than our male zwickies. we have three females and three males at The Honey Hut, our bit of land on the mainland. One of them is Absalom, whom my One thinks is the handsomest of the frogs. He is a pickerel frog, and so is Tamar (not pictured), a female pickerel frog. For some reason though, we never get any pickerel frog young. It seems the Refuah Shelema phenotype jumps from Tzipporah to Tamar and overrides her markings. My One has considered drastic measures, but she is waiting until Tzipporah can't lay any more eggs.

My One Who Thinks She Knows can be very patient with our pets. I am glad of that. She used to be a lot more ruthless, but she has more heart than most Ones. At least that is what I think. And even if Absalom can't pass along his markings. Lily Frogs pass their markings through mitochondrial DNA which comes from the mother, NOT the father, he can pass his coloring. This egg is Raine's (She's a green, Mississippi Gopher frog) and Absalom's. His lovely coloring has toned down some of the greens and made a "plain and pretty."

I realize this egg would not be worth much, but no egg is garbage. Most are beautiful in way that would appeal to someone. Glow and shine can just be distractions. Yes, eggs cost money to feed, though Lily Frogs are cheaper than most breedables. Yes, there are more eggs than buyers. Yes, eggs and what hatches from them will never make you rich, but that does not stop them or the creatures that emerge from being beautiful and valuable in their own right. This is a very beautiful egg in spite of the fact that it will never make you rich and that it will cost money to feed if you hatch it outand it will produce other eggs that will also cost money to feed if you hatch tehm out. Beauty is not how much money you can make with something. Beauty is not exploitation! Ones often seem to forget that and I have every right to call the Ones who forget heartless!

And yes, my One still takes me bushwhacking. She does this so other Ones will respect her and her Explore SL Spread Sheet. I don't mind. It can get boring though. Basically My One says, and I agree: Someone rents a big island. They put up big buildings. Hopefully, they build something useful or make a sandbox to give back to the community. Sometimes they can give back without getting on the spread sheet with a sandbox or plenty of fun things for avatarim to do. Solent Life had both a library and an exhibit on youth subcultures in England. It got on the spread sheet twice, but the island had not only really, gorgeous plants, it also had wonderful animals. All you had to do was wander outside the big building and you found them. I don't care if Ones don't consider these real. Isn't this bunny who can not breed cute enough to melt your heart?

And these black swans took my breath away. They are a mated pair with their own baby, the only one they will ever have because these are not breedables. My One says that black swans are very unusual. People in Europe used to believe they didn't exist. A black swan among Ones means a supremely, unusual event.

I found this hummingbird in the garden. He was very hard to catch with the zoom in. He moved so fast he was still hard to photograph even when I photographed him. There are days I'm glad my One lets me have the camera.

And I pay my poor One Who Thinks She Knows back. She said that orange hyacinths are very rare. They are not as rare as black hyacinths, but they are still unusual. My One did not think there were any in Second Life. She really liked these. As I said, there are days when I'm glad my One Who Thinks She Knows lets me handle the camera.

Iyoba BatOni with Eileen H. Kramer in the background -- February 25, 2013

Great Art Comes from Being Out of Sorts

You know my One Who Thinks She Knows by now. You know she is so out of sorts, she sometimes calls herself "pissy." She was so pissy in fact that back in late December/early January she fell in low with the above image in the art gallery on Anima. The sculpture, which came from a plumbing supply store in Paris, France is called Fountain, and there are Ones who think it was a great piece of art. Well that kind of makes sense because Ones let their avatarim build toilets all over Second Life, and many of those toilets come with animations so we can actually use them, and it is a good thing that there are animations for washing our hands afterwards. After all, I've got all five senses you know, and I like being clean!

Well you can kind of guess what Duchamp's fountain inspired. I figured as long as the toilet was unused or cleaned out really well, let my One use it as an image on lovely, batik fabric. My One says people have tried to deface the Fountain in "real life" but the image in Second Life is perfectly pristine. I hope the Ones who went in the Fountain washed their hands afterwards. Sometimes I think we avatarim have way more sense than Ones who think that we're just pixels or extensions of their Onenesses.

Of course we needed a sandbox to make the dress and TTU Libraries 3 was our choice, even if it had that nasty sign. Like the Fountain, my One loves this sign. Here I am reading it and wearing my blueberry bathing suit. See how scantily I am clad. It is a good thing the Modesty and Decorum Patrol had the night off.

Here we are working on the waist band for the dress. It's actually a sculptie, one of the demo sculpties my One picked up from Es0 Torok's rooftop sculptie yard. It turned out to have a very cute shape even when squished flat for a waist-band.

Click this thumbnail for a full size image of fitting the Rainbow Fountain dres. This was a hard dress to make because the skirt was slightly skewed to one side. My One likes to try new building techinques. This one was more trouble than it was worth. This is one of the reasons I think my One gets out of sorts and sometimes downright pissy.

Of course I really liked my Rainbow Fountain dress. Our boss at Info Island even said she liked the fabric. How good is that? Also, the dress did not get us in any trouble with the sandbox police. You know, I'm not even sure they exist. My One believes they do though. I'm not sure why.

Anyway, we got through the TTU Libraries 3 sandbox unscathed. Here I am taking a bow at the sign. Yes, my silly One Who Thinks She Knows wanted one more picture of it as a souvenir, and I obliged her. She really is pretty good to me, sometimes even too indulgent these days.

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Of course like any other dress, the Rainbow Fountain got dirty after a day and I put on my old Rikki Tikki Tavi dress to explore Iona College and Iona Island which is right next door. We found an art gallery for the Explore SL Spread Sheet, but we also found a kind of sweetness built into the sim. There were all kinds of little features in the build that made students happy or would make at least some students happy.

My One was thrilled that there was no explicit orientation area with directions to follow. Instead, there were fun things to see and do, like the crimson willow tree above and this lovely piece of round art work above a couch in the Business Building. There were several kinds of vending machines, jet skis, a balloon ride, bumper cars, and more, including a pool with a water slide. This she said could teach Ones to help their avatarim move and make them want to explore with the avatarim.

Here is the piano in the business conference center. Any one can play it. I did not have time to swim, but I did have time to play a few tunes. My One loves to take my picture when I play. She can be a sweet One. Maybe this kind of art with "an edge" will make her feel better.

Iyoba Bat-Oni with help from Eileen H. Kramer -- February 22, 2013

A Place that Made My One Tell Stories

My One Who Thinks She Knows is super-indulgent sometimes. My One Who Thinks She Knows is out of sorts nearly all the time. In the right mood and in very unexpected places, my One tells me stories. The stories are weird. Sometimes she tells them because she is angry.

My One put her anger and sadness aside long enough to make me two dresses. The green one has a banana leaf for a background and a pattern of sugar gliders which are flying marsupials. The salmon one has a scarlet octopus pattern from Mark Laita's book, Sea. My One had to scale it down quite a bit. I like patterns with lots of plants and animals and so too does my One.

My One made the sugar glider dress on USDLC Star Island and we made the octopus turtle neck dress on DCCCD which is mostly abandoned except for a sandbox. My One does not think this last island is long for this world.

Then it was off to Great Controversy and Great Controversy Island (right next door) where there is a huge immersive exhibit on the Bible. My One loves the Bible and she loved finding Baby Moses in his basket of reeds among the rushes of the Nile. She told me the story of how his mother put him in a basket and sent him down the river to Pharaoh's daughter to keep him from being killed. There he floated all defeneless and vulnerable. He reminded me of baby Alex. Maybe we should go back and visit him. Hey One are you reading what I am writing?

There were also tableaux telling the story of the Exodus of the Hebrew slaves from Egypt, including the Ten Plagues and the parting of the Red Sea. I wanted to include some pictures of plagues on this blog, but my One said "NO" She said the Egyptians were people too and while there are plague toys for little Ones, for grown up ones to look at and bandy about plague tableaux that made light of other people's misery and made them "other" was crass and ugly. Yes, the Biblical tableaux have a place on the Explore SL spread sheet, but that doesn't mean my One has to like every piece of content that goes there.

What my One asked me to do was invade the Holy of Holies within the Tabernacle or Mishkan as it is known in Hebrew. Click the thumbnail for a full sized view of the Mishkan. All right, I've invaded a lot of homes and businesses. I even snuck in on squatters in their cave in the sky, but this invasion was different. My One told me the story of how in the times of the Second Temple, the High Priest would go into the Holy of Holies with a rope around his waist. Why did he have a rope around his waist? It was because HaShem (God) could strike him down if He didn't like him or the way he did the service. This was why ordinary Ones and certainly avatarim like me were not allowed in the Holy of Holies.

Still, I figured if I sneaked in real quietly, I wouldn't disturb any one not even God who had better things to do than send me home with a lightening bolt. Avatarim after all only die if their Ones kill them. That is a scarey thought. Maybe God left striking down avatarim to their Ones.

Any way, I got to spy on the High Priest as he stood before the arron haKodesh or Ark of the Covenant, and my One had to spoil it all by telling me how many things the Ones who made this Mishkan got wrong! For one thing, the curtains are tapestries in dark, rich colors. Two, the High Priest when ministering inside the Holy of Holies wears linen vestmants and that does not include the royal, blue apron. The High Priest was also missing his rope, and last but not least, my One told me that the High Priest only entered the Holy of Holies on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, and when he did, everyone who was any one was in the Temple (or Miskan) courtyard. This Mishkan was deserted.

The High Priest had no audience. Maybe that was worse than going in without a rope or wearing the wrong color apron. I mean if he died, no one would pull him out, but no one would care if the blood of all those poor bulls and sheep slaughtered that day would atone for their sins. The poor animals would die for nothign and the poor High Priest would risk his life for nothing! This is a very bad thing.

And no, I wasn't struck by lightening, and I couldn't feel better. Last night, Yael laid this single egg. Jurgis is the father. It is the most wonderful colors of red and green. Back in the hayday of Petable Turtles, ruthless and heartless Ones would send those eggs off to the Trader to die, because they were so much garbage, but does this beautiful Green Cosmic Starter cross look like garbage to you?

And look at the parents of this egg. Remember my One waited up late for Adiv and Jurgis to mate. Well this is one of three eggs, Adiv laid from that mating and it is a 40% glow and handsomely colored as are all Jurgis' and many of Adiv's offspring. 40% glow eggs are not all that common. Maybe the egg was HaShem's way of sending a blessing. I'm not sure HaShem cares about avatarim or even Petable Turtles. We kind of third string creations, but we are creations all the same. If Ones come from HaShem and we come from Ones, and bots and virtual creatures come from Ones, aren't we all ultimately from HaShem and can't we all receive blessings? I certainly hope so.

Iyoba Bat-Oni with help from Eileen H. Kramer -- February 20, 2013

"I'm in Control"

I think for myself and these days, my One Who Thinks She Knows is letting me run this blog. This is my third entry in a row. I'm not sure why this is happening. My One is sometimes out of sorts. Heck, she is always out of sorts. I have to live with that whehter I blog or not. A lot of my One's "real life" is unbloggable, but I think it's always been that way too. Any way, she's letting me write the blog.

Of course my interests are a bit different than my One's. I love my zwickies. Here I am dancing in the air with a green, female, starter zwicky named Fortunata. Fortunata is nearly two years old, and she is an Aurora zwicky. To dance with her, I take out my waltz animation, touch Fortunata, and switch her to Follow On. Then I start dancing. This makes me interesting to follow. Then I start flying so I can dance in the air. It's really not so hard. My One was happy to photograph me like this.

Of course our male zwickies (We have three males nad four females) keep having babies. This time around, Nimrod who gave birth to the zwicky in the picture, had a hard time becoming pregnant. His intened female was not ready. My One had to pick a new female for him, and then... The baby looks a bit different from most zwickies. It's pattern is reddish rather than black, and its undercolor is blue. I really like it. I also like the way its ruff almost looks split but not quite.

The new zwicky is a specialty, limited edition breed, called Luv, for Valentine's Day. It is also a MALE. Only five percent of all zwickies born are males. We were lucky to take one male out of stasis when he was born, and we got another male for free besides our starter. We really don't have room for an eighth zwicky without retiring one of the present crew, and neither my One nor I want to do that. On the other hand, my One, who can be utterly heartless at times, said she would consider retiring one of our zwickies if there were female Luv zwickies for sale reasonably cheap. I don't want to think about that.

And last night, my One asked me to stay up and wait around for Adiv, one of our turtles, one my One thinks is very ugly, to mate. The weird thing is Adiv has surprisingly beautiful offspring. It also looked like she might mate with Jurgis, who is our miracle turtle, because he has cheated death two or three times. Sure enough, she did, and my One who was manning the camera almost missed it. Well she's happy. Adiv will lay eggs this evening. I don't think there will be anything special to them. My One says Petable Turtles are egg laying machines. I am not sure whether our male zwickies envy our female Petable Turtles or vice versa. Maybe it is fun to lay eggs since they are beautiful and it means we pay attention to you. You should see how my One ignores our Lily Frogs that only lay eggs twice a week if we're lucky.

My One even forgot to put out the free, Zelly flower, which keeps zwickies young and fertile. We picked up the flower at Zwickies Main Store now located on Serena Wyndham. My One may not be writing blog these days, but she likes to take pictures. She really took me to the Zwicky Main Store to look at the other Luv Zwickies and take pictures of them. She says there is nothing like live, virtual creatures on display.

These days my One is far more indulgent with me than usual. I'm not sure if she feels guilty for "making me" run into a burning building on Thursday or if she just wants me to be happy even though she is not. Friday I got to go to Siggy's Waterworks, the swimming capital of Second Life. I did not even have to ask. I tried out all the water slides. I have Siggy's Swimmer HUD so I swim a lot. It's one of the best things you can buy an avie. Ask my One Who Thinks She KNows. Here I am on the boardwalk that leads to the water slides. There is a lot more to see on this island, but my One was not up to taking pictures, and I was too busy having a good time to bother.

Of course we are still bushwhacking. We had seen a Supreme Court exhibit on Democracy Island, and my One thought it belonged on the Explore SL Spread Sheet. Well, I felt a bit scaird entering the Supreme Court room. I mean, how many courts are Supreme for a whole country. The Supreme Court is kind of like a holy temple in "real life"

But it really wasn't as scarey as I thought it would be. Unlike the court room on TeesLife, the nine Justices (They're not called Judges) sat on one skinny desk, all nine together. Also, the desk was not that high up, and none of the justices had even a teeny, tiny gavel. I thought this was awful. I said that if this court was Supreme, wouldn't the worst criminals be tried here? My One said: "No! The Supreme Court is where cases get appealed, and many of them are civil. The defendents if they are criminals are usually back in their prison cells, hoping that the court will spare their lives. It's just polite lawyers in clean, white shirts who argue cases and they do so quietly." If the prisoners are crying or screaming, no one hears them.

Still I didn't really believe my One Who Thinks She Knows, even though her father in "real life" has actually argued a case before the "real life" Supreme Court. First of all, this is not "the real world" and many avatarim probably have Ones Who Think They Know who argue things genteely in clean, white, shirts, but when they come into Second Life, they dress their avatarim in torn pants and boots that could put a hole in another avie's foot if you know what I mean. They send their avatarim to dance clubs and they don't care when the avatarim beat other avatarim over the head with a bottle because that's the way the animation works. What I'm saying is when Ones Who Think They know come with their avatarim into Second Life's Supreme Court, they aren't going to be as polite and genteel as they are in "real life."

That's why those nine Justices in the photographs needed gavels of their own. I showed them my gavel that my One, who is really very indulgent at times, made for me. It's big enough to be noticed, but not too big to go through the roof of the building. It doesn't look cheap with plywood and black paint. It is made with ebony. All it takes is for me to wear it and use a few standard gestures. Here I am getting ready to slam my gavel again and shouting: "Order in the court!" so that those Ones who wear polite, white shirts, and their avatarim in torn jeans and spike-heal boots calm down and the Justices can learn the truth.

I wonder when my One will come back to blogging. I don't really mind writing. In fact, I kind of like it, but I worry about the One. Meanwhile, we are going bushwhacking tonight, and my One has promised me a new dress. She says she'll make me all the clothes I want and way more than I need. She's not going to let disappearing sims depress her. She all ready as out of sorts as a One Who Thinks She Knows can be!

Iyoba BatOni with help from Eileen H. Kramer -- February 17, 2013

"I Just Wanted to Wear a Shmatah"

Wearing a shmatah is just like sitting in front of a warm fire on a cold day or warming your butt after being out in the cold. It's something an avie wants or needs to do. That is why I am so perplexed when my One Who Thinks She Knows shares other blogs with me in which avatarot can not find what to wear. My One Who Thinks She Knows is not as clueless as most. When I need to be warm she lets me stand by a fire or a space heater. When I want to wear a shmatah, she also listens. I think she may actually understand. This is why it is important to keep older outfits in inventory. I can't be the only avie who likes to wear shamatahs.

Of course the day before the shmatah craving came over me, my One Who Thinks she Knows made me a new dress. The texture we used for it was called SealRomp because seals are romping on it. She also used a photo of tiles from the the Tile Shop store in Dunwoody in "real life." My One can make some interesting textiles. She also says she was sick as a dog, the day she went hogwild taking texture pictures in the Tile Shop, but while new clothes are good...I wanted a shmatah.

Of course before I could get changed into something more comfortable, how-ever, my One wanted to do some exploring. We went to a sim called Journalism, home of the Deadline Bar and SL Press Club, which has an exhibit that the One added to her Explore SL Spread Sheet. This exhibit put my One in a singularluy good mood.

We even stopped in the park where I got to ride the see-saw. This made my One sentimental and she started to sing:

See-saw Marjori Daw
Johnny will get a new master.
All he can earn is a penny a day
Because he can't work any faster.

Then of course it was back to work. We gave the sim a thorough workover even exploring the houses, looking for secret exhibitions and classrooms with useful PowerPoint presentations etc...

We did not expect to find the house on fire! We did not expect it even though we always christen new dresses by falling in water or running through fire. We did not expect it even though journalism exhibits usually include a role play that often includes a disaster. Click the thumbnail to see the stove fire that started it all.

I kind of knew what I had to do. My One did not have to ask me. Yes, my new dress was going to get Christened. Yes, I could forget about the shamtah. There were avatarim or bots upstairs. I don't care which they were. Cruel Ones had left them to burn and I'd have to find and rescue them. That's why I rushed into the flames. Click the thumbnail for a larger image.

I didn't find any body upstairs in the house. The stupid fire chielf whom I called a four letter word starting with p, was just standing around saying that his squad had rescued every one. I'm not sure I believed him, but I didn't see anybody upstairs. I also didn't see any one in the park where my One had sung the song about Marjorie Daw on the see-saw either. My One sings at the weirdest times. I collapsed in the park trying to get the smell out of my lungs. We avatarim can smell things too. We feel pain. We are not just pixels!

Finally, I pulled myself together, got up, and put on my shmatah. I felt better, but I was still not myself. I told My One that I was going to drown my sorrows in the Deadline Bar.

Fortunately, the bar keep in the Deadline Bar did not bore me with a lot of longwinded stories. He also knows what kind of beverages to stock. He has all five flavors of Mourning Dove soda. Here I am relaxing with a tall, cold date nut bread flavored soda. There is nothing like this refreshing drink. It is my favorite flavor. Of course I can't relax any where for long. My One Who Thinks She Knows wants us to move on to Mercer University next where there are two exhibits ready for our spread sheet. I guess it is my spread sheet too. After all I do most of the dirty work, have the real adventures, and deserve to wear a shmatah when I feel like it.

Iyoba BatOni with help from Eileen H. Kramer -- February 14, 2013

The Wrong Island

My One Who Thinks She Knows is out of sorts again. When is my One Who Thinks She Knows ever right? You know the answer to that. Well we were supposed to go to UTSA Roadrunner II. We were going to look at the art and confirm this magnificent sim on Explore SL Spread Sheet. I looked forward to the trip because it meant I would get to go swimming since the art on UTSA Roadrunner II's artwork floates on the water. That means I would really get to enjoy myself.

But the One Who Thinks She Knows sent me to the WRONG SIM. I was on dry land in an administration building. Anywhere else, the building would have been ugly and dull, but UTSA Roadrunner II is part of a three sim archipelago that is drop dead, gorgeous. This building, however, was new. It was functional and a part of UTSA Roadrunner III (See the different Roman numeral. It kind of reminds me of Imperia and Utopia Portugal, neither of which exist any more.), and it looks like no admin building I have ever seen. A huge, walkable, spiral stairway graces a three story tower full of vines and with a rooftop garden. That's me on the stairs. It's what happens when you wear a bathingsuit on dry land, and behind me are the vines hanging from the walls.

And here is the administration building's rooftop garden. My One really liked this. She liked the pale, green leaves in the tree, and the reflecting pool and the silvery stones of the patio and the bronze tables and chairs which reminded her of a cafe. She said: "Get out of the way, Iyoba so I can take a long shot." Well she got her wish and her picture.

Then when I landed on the ground, I found the base of the moving water column we had seen. Neither of us knew where it ended. Both my One and I knew it was new. At the base of this column was this poem. I hope you can read it. My One likes small pitures, and she takes them most of the time. I guess I could take my own pictures. I may be an avie, but sometimes I think for myself which is more than most Ones do. Remmember, they only think they know.

The teleport sphere did not work in the tower, but I can fly. At the top of the column of water was another world. It was dark like a planetarium, but it was more a kinetic sculpture with rings, spheres, and toroids in lime green, orchid, and amber swirling around. If you touched the pyramid, more of them swirled and danced. My One Who Thinks She Knows named this place Dancing Spheres and Rings. She forgot the toroids.

After touring the realm of the Dancing Spheres and Rings, I finally got into the water and swam toward UTSA Roadrunner III. That's me doing the breast stroke on the surface for a change. I don't have a lot of buoyancy, but that's fine. That's how I like my Swimmer Hud set. If you are a One buy your avie a Swimmer Hud so he or she can enjoy the water as I do.

And yes UTSA RoadRunner II was still there. The trees, though are new. My One says sims either expand, change, get updated, or die. This is true of the sims in the University of Texas Archipelago which long ago broke apart. Some universities in Texas recieved grants to go into Second Life and in 2009/2010, they built a huge continent with many larger schools having more than one sim. That continent doesn't exist any more. Most sims went to waste. It took a while for them to disappear because my One explained that Texas passes a budget every other year, when its state legislature meets. My One comes from a state with a year-around state legislature. Any way, most of the sims that disappeared had no builds on them or squatter issues, but it is sad to see the University of Texas Archipelago suffer almost the same fate as that of the Information Island Archipelago.

By the way, tonight, my One noticed that Bradley University appears to be back. It's winter there, but we'll check it out any way. There's a reason I have turtle neck dresses and good thick thigh-highs. I can't go swimming in warm water every day. My life just doesn't work out like that.

Iyoba BatOni with help from Eileen H. Kramer -- February 11, 2013

Making Our World

My "real life" is now not only utterly unbloggable but crazy. I should be working on another project but I need to be here. I need to keep touch. I need to be sane. I need not always to be running errands. I need to create.

I can not say where a lot of this happened. I met one of the admins of the sim and she asked me not to disclose this location. It is a gorgeous build that contributed three sites to the Explore SL Spread Sheet. That said, I had an urge to make Iyoba a dress, to make something, to see my creation.

This dress was based on an illustration I found the New York Times. The orange background was designed to cheer me up over a Christmas Break that I spent mostly sleeping and trying to shake a retched cold that may have been the flu. When you are so sick that all you want to do is sleep most of the time, how do you know what kind of virus you have? This picture shows the waist for the dress. I was using one of ES0 Torok's bead sculpties, It is a very tortured prim as are most sculpties nad had to be streteched a good fifty percent larger than a typical sculptie or normal prim waistband. I made this waist a lot larger before I put it on Iyoba.

Here is a picture of me attaching the waste to the skirt. This is a process called linking prims. I was doing my handiwork behind a building that is full of stalls for unfinished study carrels. I liked the semi private area. The sandbox had a long autreturn but when I had to leave in an emergency, I found my ultimate posing stool and my looprez device (A device for making prim skirts) returned in a ball. Someone had cleaned up the sim. I knew the admin's name from an About Land command I used to help me fill in Spread Sheet. I was a bit embarassed, but I wanted to finish the dress.

And here is Iyoba enjoying her new sheep in wolf's clothing or vice versa skirt. Actually we called the dress Baa Baa Baa. A bit of humor makes both my lives much more pleasant. This dress is also a turtle neck. These are especially nice in the winter, when sims are often covered in snow or otherwise cold. A cold avie means a cold One who Thinks She Knows.

Still, avatarot go to clubs in the winter, and so they need short dresses as well. Here I am making a short skirt for the Baa Baa Baa ensemble. Click the thumbnail for a better view. The dots indicate that I am stretching (in this case contracting) the fabric. I also adjust the fabric weight making it less suscepitble to gravity. Marylin Monroe on a steam grate any one? For club wear this is very conservative yet it still often fits in. And when it doesn't I'm glad to have a warm avie inside all these clothes.

And here Iyoba jumps for joy in her short version of the Baa Baa. I have put an old braided hair style on her. I wanted to show off both the front and back of her outfit. Iyoba was wearing this dress when we met the sim admin. It was time for some profuse apologies. She in turn told me about how it was important to keep the island's sandbox secret and clean. She had had a squatter issue with a bunch of them building a hosue in the sky. I had to laugh. I told her about the squatter issue on UAA Seawolves. I did not tell her how badly it ended. I also introduced her to the Explore SL spread sheet. She was impressed. She lamented always having to update things. Updating for me is a way of life.

And of course I also have been working on the Never Ending Project. This image is of a heavily modified Zebra viewer, a free Power-Point style viewer where any one can move the slides forward and backward. This one has been put on a demo sculptie stand and made large enough that the former lap top is now a DIY wall presenter in a lovely red bamboo finish. Why make everything in a computerized world of sleek metal. It also has a nine slide show about a visit I made to a largely empty but very lovely adult sim called FE Energy which appears to be a camping heaven. It's a shame because the build there is much better than most. I suppose Iyoba can use it as a quiet place to sort inventory. I did the work on this project at NSCC Island which does not have a secret sandbox but which is still in winter. This is why avatarot need thigh highs and turtleneck dresses.

Actually, I do not feel bad that the sim admin on the unnamed island where I made the Baa Baa Baa asked me to keep her sim a secret for this article. Her sim is still open to the public. She got rid of squatters without closing the whole place down and barring the public. She did not treat me like dirt. She accepted my apology. The build is in many ways as impressive as that on UAA Seawolves (link withheld intentionally because most of the island is now ban-lined.), and it's still here I'm happy to keep some secrets, just as I am happy to have some time to create.

Eileen H. Kramer and Iyoba BatOni -- February 10, 2013

Keeping Faith

With an abbreviation in its name, UDIMA, had to be an educational sim. I found it on the map. clicked teleport and waited for Iyoba's world to disappear. When the world faded and reconstituted itself, I felt a sign of relief. When we landed in a restricted sandbox, I felt a pang of disappointment. These things happen though, and Iyoba and I have plenty of sandbox links in our inventory.

The walk out of the sandbox made me realize this was no ordinary sim. The stairs are wide, spacious, and fun to climb. Most of the action on UDIMA is on a mountain top.

Here Iyoba stares down at the sandbox from the land outside the Exposicion building. No UDIMA is not an English language sim. That is fine. Five years of French helps me read most Romance languages. A trip to the Secretariat (administration building) clued us both in on the sim's owners, but before then, I realized that UDIMA was special. First, the buildings are original, not prefabs. They follow a 1970's, brutalist, style that makes me nostalgic and to which my photos do a gross injustice. Also the climate is temperate and Mediterranean and the vegetation and the climate matches. I could feel the sea breeeze or desert wind caress my face as I walked under colorful breezeways and down wide, mosaic sidewalks.

Those who built and who maintain UDIMA, however, have far more than a lovely build of which to be proud. UDIMA is Madrid Open University, Spain's equivalent of a cross between Georgia's ECore and New York State's Empire State College, but unlike New York and Georgia or the United States as a whole, Spain's economy is in much worse shape.

When governments go on austerity, sims in Second Life are among the first things to go. All too recently, the United States Army closed its religion library, and the Smithsonian Institution closed a five sim archipelago dedicated to Latin American culture.

Yet here is this huge educational build created by a Spanish university, five years old and going strong. Maybe for a few thousand students, $300.00 a month works out. Maybe those who built the place did so free of charge. Maybe with the Euro worth more than the dollar (The Linden is pegged to the dollar), the tier is a bit cheaper than for an American institution. Whatever the reason, they are here, and it is good to see a history of the big build in their Exposicion hall.

I guess I have always wondered how someone builds anything big. Part of the reason I am a fan of lean and mean educational builds is that big ones are beyond my scope of experience. If I had a whole island, I'd let the build grow organically and maintain order. I'd start with lots of plants, and simple pole barns and platforms, adding more, keeping out the vandals and making sure what we built was useful and up to date. Those who created UDIMA were definitely a lot more ambitious than I would ever be. What I particularly like about this image is that it was taken with the interface on.

What I also like about the Exposicion is that it includes not only interface photos and those like the one above (See the lights are on!) but also photos of the inspiration for the build, pictures of the landscape it tries to imitate but not mimic. Sometimes you can only transfer a feeling from real life, but it is the feeling that counts.

Something aboutUDIMA made me want to cry. The pride in the workmanship and the persistence in the face of adversity of those who built this place left me in a kind of sad, sweet awe. Yes, there are banlines here. Yes, the sandbox is off limits to nonmembers, but there are no softspots, the place works, and they'll even let you know how they put it together. There's something beyond lean, mean, and squeezing a Linden until it screams bloody murder. Thank you UDIMA for reminding Iyoba and me. And of course I included the Exposicion on the Explore SL Spread Sheet.

Eileen H. Kramer and Iyoba BatOni -- February 7, 2013

Twighlight for an Archipelago

Let's take a trip back in time, before Iyoba's rezz date of May 14, 2008. This is a picture of the Info Island Archipelago map in February 2008. It is large, solid, contiguous. I remember walking it west to east in the summer of 2008.

You can't do that today. You can still walk partially north to south along the Stanford University Libraries side all the way down to Long Island University or CSULB, but there are all ready almost too many gaps for the east west route to work, and when Bradley University vanishes, the island will be sundered. All ready EdTech Island and Cave are their own world in the far south of what once was nearly a full, small continent.

If you want to compare the current Info Island Archipelago with that of 2008, the current one is the dark squares superimposed on the colored squares of the 2008 version. A friend in real life asked me if libraries and those in the world of education were giving up on Second Life. My answer is that the price increase is to blame. My more nuanced answer is that property in SEcond Life means work, a labor of love if you are so inclined, but if you are not going to update your build and your links, don't get started with rezzing space. And third, a lot of educational institutions overextended just like individuals. As a now unknown avie said to Iyoba one night on the beach at Clemence: "This land costs the same as a dinner at Ruth Krist's Steak House." I don't much care for meat, so the comparison seemed unappealing and pricey but not so far from the truth. When times are tough, steak sticks in your mouth when you think of what it costs. I decided I was more the Subway type, but Subway sandwiches too are an affordible luxury. The trick wtih luxuries is to keep them affordible.

The real picture of the archipelago, however, is worse than the map. Info Island is disappearing at the end of the month. Community Virtual Libraries which runs the sim, will relocate some but not all of the facilities to Imagination Island.

If you work on the archipelago, as I have for several years, this is no longer new news. You can ask why it is happening. The short answer is lack of funding, plus the fact that Linden Labs doubled the rent for educational builds in 2012. We also lacked an angel who might have rescued us, but angels are creatures of miracle. Click on the thumbnail to the right to see a side view of the Info Island Reference Hut.

The sim is well built and some would say beautiful as well as reasonably functional. Catalina, the Library Cat, is the sim's mascot. She doesn't like any one to pet her and she has survived the cold winter without a space heater or fire place despite Iyoba's and my urgent pleas.

Outside the reference enclosure on a pond that never freezes, this lovely mallard duck swims with his rubber companion and a fish that did not make it into the shot. I'm not sure if the duck is going to Imagination Island.

And this glass blowing lab will probably not travel to the new home. The glass blowing shop is a rather clever build and very detailed, but alas would only be y a temporary exhibit even if times were better.

And this old card catalog will probably survive, but probably not travel to Imagination Island because it lives in the SJSU (San Jose State University) LIS School (Library and Information Science School) Lounge, and SJSU LIS has a sim of its own and can move the lounge and card catalog there. Still, the lounge has some wonderful architecture. If you want to see Info Island please visit in the next couple of weeks. It's going to be history after that.

Eileen H. Kramer and Iyoba Bat Oni -- February 5, 2013

A Part Time Maya Seeks Order in the Court

My One Who Thinks She Knows does NOT have a monopoly on catchy blog entry titles or crazy ones. Actually, I have nothing against her getting me to join the Garifuna whom I learned are part African American and part Arawak/Taino and also part Mayan. Yes, I have the right skin tone. I even make a good part time Mayan, and now I have both African inspired long dresses and also one Mayan outfit.

Here is a thumbnail (Click it!) of my One hard at work on the skirt for my Mayan outfit. It's really not a costume even though it lives in the Costumes folder in my inventory. That is because Mayan's are masters of textile making. The women wear actual pretty dresses with loose sleeves. The top part of such two piece dresses is called a huipil. We needed to use sculpties for the sleeves. We did not have a personal box of sleeve sculpties, but we did have pant legs. They worked just as well.

And here I am atop the ruins of a fantastic temple pyramid in the lost city of Palenque. I'm wearing the completed dress. If you look carefully, in the patterned textured weave on the huipil are two toucans with huge teeth. Now, you can tell me birds don't have teeth, and I'll tell you the teeth are false. The toucan with big, false teeth was one of the demigods or gods, the Hero Twins defeated. The Hero Twins went on to defeat 1 Death and 7 Death. Oh they were clever, atheltic, and all around super demigods, so the Hero Twins went on to become the sun and the moon.

Well, the Hero Twins story is bull-you-know-what! People are still dying. Mosali who is the head of our tribe sacrifices captives to Au Puch the God of Death who took over after 1 Death and 7 Death were defeated. I guess they really weren't defeated. Ones have a saying about death and taxes. And the sun and the moon did not stop the Spaniards from taking over Mexico and Guatamala, and the English and the Duthc from taking over what today is Belize. The Garifuna and Maya role play takes place in 1750. Sorry, the old Gods failed. Maybe they failed more than once. After all, the Maya abandoned Palenque around the year 900 CE, long before any Europeans showed up. Therefore, it is appropriate to turn the Hero Tales story on its head with this outfit.

After my One Who Thinks She Knows made my Mayan outfit I wore it on a visit to Bearkat Island. Later I changed clothes and put on shoes. When I play a Mayan/Garifuna I can run around bare foot, but that's not particularly seemly on an island run by Sam Houston State University. In Second Life things are not always what they seem, and while the library is gorgeous...it's not really a library. This should have made my One Who Thinks She Knows very angry.

But my One noticed these flying orange wheel chairs. I knew I'd have to ride around in a wheel chair as part of some learning experience. I've done worse. The wheelchair though does not really work well. My One says that the camera angle is off and she seems me from the sky so I have trouble driving the thing. This would not happen in real life. My One says it's a scripting error. Still, the orange wheelchairs have a lot to teach. They give links to YouTube videos about the Texas Accessibility Standards which are similar to ADA regulations. The library does not meet those regulations and you get to watch the videos and then take a quiz and then walk around and see what is wrong and missing. My One says this is one of the most effective ways to learn, but that it uses a lot of prims.

Of course one part I did not enjoy on Bearkat Island was the visit to the courtroom. The problem is I always have to stand behind the judge's bench or sit there whenever we find a courtroom, and I don't mind that so much, but I'm just a hair under five feet tall and these things are built tall, and they try criminals in court rooms, and people get sued there which means they lose money, so there are very unhappy people in court rooms, which is why a judge has to say "order in the court!" to get them all to shut up and stop yelling or doing rowdy things. Well, since I'm small, if I'm going to be a judge, I need a gavel, so that people will listen to me.

And this was not the first time I was stuck at the judge's bench without the right tools for the job. Here I am on TeesLife in the courtroom, behind a huge, British, bench and utterly unable to keep order because I have nothing I can bang when the defendants start yelling and crying, so I asked my One. "Please give me a gavel from inventory." Of course I knew I did not have a gavel, but I might have a hammer. We pick up all kinds of junk, and inventory is unlimited.

My One Who Thinks She Knows found a hammer. It was a super-duper hammer. Here is a picture of me outside with it, because it went through the roof of the Crininal Justice Building on Bearkat Island. I said "One, this hammer is too big. It might be good if we have a real bad defendant like Bernie Maddoff or Charles Manson in the courtroom, but One, those are guys are all ready in jail. Most defendants don't deserve such a big gavel. Don't you have anything smaller?"

My One obliged. This gavel was not great, but it will clearly do the job. Unfortunately, it looks cheap and it's a bit big. My One made a better gavel with a nice, ebony finish. We don't have a hammer banging animation, but maybe we'll find one in our travels. My One also says there is a whole sky level on Bearkat Island we have yet to explore, but that's put off. She just took a look at GridSurvey and saw that a sim we just looked at and several more we plan to visit are gone. She isn't sure she believes it, but I know where we are going next.

Iyoba BatOni (Who else!!!!) -- February 2, 2013