Vive la difference

So, I'm checking out a protest going on outside the offices of Le Pen's Front National party in Matrix Mall, Porcupine. It's a juvenile affair, with lots of name calling and childish over-excitement, made none-the-less-so by my presence.

"Je suis Anglais," I loudly declare, "Je pense que vous etes les idiots. Qu'est ce que vous pense?" It's a trifle harsh, I know, but I don't know the French for misguided. "Et comment est ce que mon francais?"

No one replies. They are ignoring me. I'm impressed.

On a neighbouring rooftop some tooled-up guns-for-hire are unloading copious amounts of ammo in the general direction of anybody venturing near their small but heavily fortified patch of metaturf.



Suddenly they abandon their rooftop and descend on a small sauna-like residence nearby. I drift past the open front door and glimpse a guy called Johann standing inside, naked, and somewhat alarmed. Johann slams the door shut, but not before I IM him to try and get a glimpse of his state of mind.

"Don't worry honey," he tells me.

"I won't," I reply. " Does this happen often?"

"Who the hell are you? Leave me alone goddammit."

Then this happens.



Down there in the bottom the picture you can just make out the body of one of isolationists jerking like a rag doll in the throes of what begins as an explosion and ends as all the colours of the rainbow radiating out towards me through a technicolour haze.

I'm airborne when it happens. I think that's what saves me.

What is it?

Answers in a comment pls...

The first casualty of war is underpants

It stirs me from the haze of another brutally early morning. At first it's just a whisper in the breeze, almost imperceptible, the patter of hooves across a distant plain. A sparrow chirrups in the trees and takes flight, only to be intercepted and savaged by a sparrowhawk. I can't decide if it's a good omen, or a bad one. I listen awhile, and a clamour begins to swell, a battle roar hot on the heels of a lone outrider, all of it headed very much in my direction.

It was a bad one. War is upon Second Life.

Who else would be the bearer of such grim tidings but self-appointed sidekick and mistress to the masses Emilly O, coming to me from the frontline. "Airlift me in," I tell her, "I've always wanted to cover a warzone." Well, ever since reading Dispatches. If they ever bring back conscription I want to be a shoo-in for the Press Corp. Conscientious objection looks great on paper, but I bet when it comes to the crunch you end up sloping round town feeling like the only guy not packing heavy artillery.

I check my map on arrival. The sim is heavily populated, and I can see a cluster of bodies to the north. I try to fly in that direction, and spin out immediately, flung away on a crash course with nowhere. Damn my laptop, drunk on my excesses and clogged up with skin, semen and faecal matter. Damn the six Greeks living next door, who sit their with their laptops drinking my precious bandwidth like cheap Ouzo. And damn the Lindens, trying to power their precious grid, our precious grid, with a hamster on an exercise bicycle. Damn them all, and damn you too. War is hell.

"Bring me back," I tell Em. She TP's me back in, and this time I take a moment to survey my surroundings. It's night time, and the sim is full of dark corners. Nearby I can see a deserted building, the Second Life Developer University. It seems to be abandoned, presumably by students and professors running scared from the dogs of war. Speaking of which, where exactly are the dogs of war? All I can see is a throng of unfeasibly beautiful women, wearing even more unfeasibly pointy hats. And... hang on... isn't that a burning body lying on the ground between them. Oh, and look, there's Em, gleefully circling the fringes of this miniature conflagration, adding fuel to the fire with occasional, highly provocative remarks. Hang on a second. This is no war. This is something much, much worse.



This is a fracas.

A fracas, I immediately construe, with its origins in disorganised religion.

I have an instinctive aversion to most established faiths, but at least for the most part they keep themselves to themselves - and erect attractive buildings - albeit in the name of whatever ludicrous omnipotent force they've conjured up to subserve. The kind of DIY allegorical demagoguery you find in SL is far more insidious.

In here every flea-brained Joe can start their own cult for less than the cost of a hand shandy. What's more, they onlt need drop in on their local strip club to find a more than willing flock, punters and pros looking for something to do between hard-ons. Nothing illustrates this better than the story of Stiv:

"One summery day in Rivula, the itinerant wandering musician Stiv was burned to death by his soon to be nemesis, forever after known as the Anti-Stiv."

"As he lay under the blackjack tables of the Enigma, he reflected that even here, there was gum on the underside of the table. He swore in that smoking moment that if he lived, he would dedicate his life to making sure gum was removed from all places of gambling."

"He died, so the next day he decided on a new goal--be God. God, that night, called forth the people in his holy place, and bade them join him to spread the gospel of Stiv. This is why there's so many sex workers in the Church."

It was Emilly who regaled me with the story of Stiv. Yes, that Emilly. She's a resident of Rivula. And a dancer at the Enigma. Oh, and a member of the church. In fact, you might say, she's a Mary Magdalen to Stiv's messiah, and, in current context, the Helen to his Menelaus.

Stiv is not alone in having found in SL a loyal congregation, where in RL he could have hoped for little more than ridicule and alienation. Take for example the deity Bib. Little is known about Bib, nothing in fact, except that his many followers signal their devotion to his cause by wearing pointy hats, channeling the fruit of their doctrine-addled brains towards the heavens in which he claims to reside. Bib, being a celestial body, requires ambassadors on earth. Ninja Tsiolkovsy is one of them.

Tsiolkovsky, a gentleman of leisure and soldier of fortune, is known for expert martial artistry and keeping snails under his hat. Many have speculated that Bib is but his invention, and that his parables are but crude, plainly derivative devices for soliciting money and liturgical sexual favours from impressionable young women. That is to say, I have speculated to this effect, and I can't believe that I'm alone in doing so.

Tsiolkovsky also happens to be a recent flame of Emilly O. A very recent flame in fact, when you reflect upon the fact that his is the freshly incinerated body now smouldering on the ground in front of me. Even as whisps of smoke rise from his ashes he can be heard imploring his attendant minions not to permit the followers of Stiv to steal and desecrate his body. There doesn't seem to be any danger of that, given that the followers of Stiv have apparently followed him all the way back to Rivula, where they are no doubt banqueting on marshmallows and char-grilled chicken.

Except for, that is, for Emilly O, who was plainly the catalyst for the whole sorry shenanigan. I later learn that she felt it necessary to introduce Tsiolkovsky to Stiv, driven by some perverse logic leading to the cataclysmic conclusion that the metaverse would be made better for this meeting of minds.

Just as I am coming to reflect on the fact that even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day, and that the fall of Bib may have taken place to the betterment of us all, Em makes a desperate attempt to revive hostilities. She invites her trigger-happy cohort Ryce - and his bazooka - to join the fray, and transforms herself into a zombie, intent on devouring the brains of all and sundry. I feel a gentle stirring in my loins, and sense that this is an appropriate moment to withdraw.



Standing on some ethereal plane and raising my eyes to the virtual heavens, I feel confident that neither Stiv nor Bib is frowning down upon me. I feel confident in fact, suddenly and completely, that there is no god.

I bet this sort of shit doesn't happen in World of Warcraft.

Happy New Year!

Just gone midnight SLT in Steelhead, and I'm watching a fireworks display on one of the sim's many wood-panelled rooftops. The owner of the building promises that eventually this clock tower will have fully working innards running like... clockwork. This the kind of painstaking labour-of-love Steelhead is built on. And, for that matter, built of.

I'm already planning a piece on steampunk in SL. For the uninitiated, steampunk is 'a subgenre of speculative fiction set in the past, or a world resembling the past, in which modern technological paradigms occurred earlier in history, but were accomplished via the science already present in that time period.' Think LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN, meaning Alan Moore's original - make that highly original - comic book series rather than the (reportedly woeful) film adaptation.


There are two SL sims best known for celebrating the kind of esoteric Victoriana steampunk feeds on. Steelhead is one, home to Le Jardin, surely the finest bordello in all the metaverse. The other is Caledon, a larger, fast-growing sim that recently became home to a new bureau of your favourite news network and mine, SLNN. Does this have any bearing on the decision to let a piece of gratuitous advertorial dominate the homepage for the best part of a festive fortnight? Probably, but no more so than the fact that Christmas is when the metacorps go quiet and stop issuing press releases just because a CEO thinks about tying his virtual shoelaces.

On which note, I'm also planning a piece on The Avastar, SL's 'first' tabloid newspaper. I've checked out the first couple of copies, as well as the grilling they got on the 'always fairly unbalanced' Second Life Herald for ripping off photos in the first issue and subsequently banning a handful of unhelpful residents from entering an Aimee Weber designed sim that sounds like it needs all the visitors it can get. From what I've seen so far a lot of hard work has gone into it, but that's no guarantee of anything, and what I'd really like to see is some figures for their circulation.

So, like I said, Happy New Year! My resolutions? Keep on blogging, look after my wife and kid better, and GET MORE SLEEP...

My first time at the drive-in

SLNN gives me a couple of days notice that Eduardo Sanchez, co-director of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, is personally presenting his new film ALTERED at 5PM SLT on the 19th December. It's my first chance to see a feature-length movie in SL, and I'm not going to miss it.

The venue is Flux Hoyseck's recently opened Phreeq Drive-In. Flux is one of a selection of residents who've been given the green light to build in Motorati, Pontiac's sprawling six island sim, after submitting an idea to Land-A-Polooza. This inspired initiative positions Pontiac as 'insane landlords with a taste for fast cars and big ideas', and their sim as a user-created monument to the proud American automotive tradition.

ALTERED opens at 1AM GMT, on a school night, just 29 hours after Rivers Run Red launch their Virtual Life TV Network with a screening of the 1997 sci-fi movie VELOCITY TRAP, as reported in yet another press release vomited into markup and passed off as journalism by SLNN. The tickets, we're told, 'will be distributed via lottery. Only the first 25 people interested in the event will be invited to attend.' This marks a new degree of unintelligibility, even by SLNN's standards.

Any which way, something tells me I'll struggle to make the cut. Furthermore, given that my wife and I will be toasting her 30th birthday with hot wine and spit-roasted pork in central Prague when it happens - and that VELOCITY TRAP is an obscure sci-fi flick of little obvious distinction - I'm not going to try to put somebody, least of all myself, on the inside.

ALTERED, on the other hand, is shaping up like a fun night out. Sanchez made my fingernails itch with THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, so much so that I slept under a rug on our living room floor rather than brave the hallway, shrouded in darkness, to reach the sanctuary of my matrimonial bed. I used to play in the woods behind our house all day long, until it was almost too dark to find my way home. The thought of the trees and the twilight turning against me, driven by a force of pure evil, chilled me to the core.

I recce the drive-in early on the 19th, and I'm not disappointed. It's not just any old drive-in theatre. In Flux's own words, it's 'a 1950s themed malt shoppe drive-in theatre, combining two of the greatest cultural landmarks of the time'. The malt shoppe itself is decked out in chopshop furniture from Flux's store, Phreeq, and the theatre includes skateways for waitresses running between the cars. The prim count looks low enough, but I still worry about how that's going to change once avs start rolling up in whatever they're driving these days. I IM Flux and he tells me to arrive early to avoid disappointment.

Time ticks by. I get some meatwork out of the way, and drop in on Liam at Silverscreen to confound him with some impulsive feedback on the state of the build. I know it pisses him off when I throw these whimsical revisions at him, but he knows as well as I do that SL has to remain fluid, transient, whatever we want or need it to be. Build it, enjoy it, but don't get too attached to it. You never know when you might have to tear it down to create space for the next big idea.

I drop Emilly a line to see if she wants in. She's making good money out of me these days, especially since I got the expense account. She'd probably shoot it for free, but I pay her anyway, as a point of principle.

She sends through some shots from an SL launch party she covered the day before, marking the DVD release of A SCANNER DARKLY. The way she tells it everyone turned up at once and spread themselves too thinly over the four venues. There was no real cohesion and focus. She mooched around, took some photos, got chatting to some guy who was almost interesting. Then the sim fell over. She didn't go back.

I'd drop in myself to survey the aftermath and find the organiser there, one MSGiro Grosso of RL interactive services agency Green Grotto Studios. I ask him how it went and he's quick to note that people don't seem to arrive fashionably late in SL. I, apparently, am the exception to this rule. I nose around, watch some VAM in a tiny screening room, and sample a little Substance D freely dispensed on arrival. It's after the event, but I can see the potential, and MSGiro has clearly gone some way towards realising it.

Emilly and I are talking movies, and a certain amount of codshit, and all of a sudden it's the witching hour. I go to meet her in Motorati. It's dark now, and she's already there when I arrive, in yet another drop-dead outfit. Beauty may grow on trees in SL, but style still counts for something. She tells me these are FallnAngel's designs, the top hat, the tinted Lennon specs, the tailcoat. And she stands there, like Bram Stoker's Dracula, sucking down a malt. I don't dare ask the flavour.


A few other avs are already kicking around. Emilly and I get comfortable on the shoppe roof, which turns out to be the best seat in the house; the perfect vantage point to watch the movie and the crowd. Meanwhile I'm reading on SLNN that VELOCITY TRAP was successfully screened to twenty residents from around the world and 'kept most, if not all, viewers present and alert throughout the nearly 2 hour showing'. It seems like an odd choice of words. In fact, that rather neatly describes Garret Bakalava's entire piece.

The drive-in's getting busy. Now, avs might be avs, but you can still get the measure of an SL crowd. I was at the launch of the Avalon Film Festival in early December and it didn't take a genius to see that it had drawn a crowd of beautiful people, yours truly included. ALTERED on the other hand seems to have cooked up a mixed grill of motorheads, speed freaks and screen junkies, riding high and lying low in silver-finned cadillacs, gas guzzling convertibles and an assortment of other automotive curios. Somebody arrives on a supercharged sofa, with afterburners for arms. Rich red flames lick the burnished black bodywork; a high octane flying carpet, with genuine persian fire in its belly. The numberplate reeds PHREEQ.

1.15 GMT and the movie still hasn't started. Nobody seems to care. Emilly and I have been helping an over-excited noob get his video working, while frying his unguarded mind with a discussion of where best to sup blood from the human body. She plumps for the inner thigh, and all my blood seems to rush to the region in anticipation. I shift in my seat, in nervous discomfort. Emilly spots this and goes for the jugular, describing an act defying mention on these hallowed pages. I ejaculate vomit onto the ground below.

She mops at my brow with a black silk handkerchief, telling me everything's going to be ok. I ask her to define ok, and moments later the rest of my partially digested maraschino malt splashes against the sidewalk, like fresh news breaking on SLNN. I look up through teary eyes. The movie has just started.

My review of ALTERED (or, as it turns out to be, my review of the first fifty-seven minutes of ALTERED) will be available as a separate post, asap. For the purposes of completing this installment, know this:

1. The fact that the quality of the playback nosedives after just under an hour, such that I have to relog and get dumped back at the opening credits, bears no reelection on the the event or its organisers. Anybody who saw me a month ago, dizzy as hell and unable to stop myself turning circles on the spot, knows that my laptop is an antiquated piece of shit full of green tea and assorted human detritus. Rest assured, once I forge a tiny opening in my day to requisition a new one, this fucker will feel the full extent of my wrath.

2. Even in spite of any technical hiccups my experience at the drive-in is positive, and powerfully formative. I later read that 'the director hung out for a long while to talk with people. He was very friendly and pretty straightforward. You've gotta love SL - where one minute you're chatting with a friend, then you're talking to the director of the Blair Witch Project.' I'd go along with that, but for my part the main event is the opportunity to take in a movie with a friend and kindred spirit who just happens to live on the other side of the world; to share the same conceptual space, and the same utterly tangible sense of occasion.

It seems to me that theatrical cinema survives because people still enjoy being part of a broader audience, whispering in each others ears and poking fun at - or simply poking - the people sat in front of them. By extending this experience into SL we can create a worldwide audience gathered together around a common interest, sharing their enjoyment in real time, in something like real space. A few months ago I'd have been lying on the sofa right now watching tv, maybe a movie. Instead I can start to frame these experiences within a context of interaction, experimentation, adventure, choosing what I want to watch, and who I want to watch it with.

I fall asleep smiling.