Spitting Out the Landscape

Guest blog by Alphonsus Peck; topic submitted by Uccello Poultry. This is part of the SL Bloggers' Mix 'n Match challenge.
 
 
Spitting Out the Landscape
My Life and Explorations in the Virtual World
 
 

 
 
I, Alphonsus Peck, came into being on March 25, 2006 at approximately 4:30 pm, and I promptly crashed.
 
Virtual existence is very difficult when your every movement depends on a machine woefully inadequate to the Godly task of giving you life. The machine, which could handle documents and spreadsheets with only minor strain, exclaimed a loud WTF when my existence fell into its cybernetic hands. It tried valiantly, but, it was like giving the management of NASA over to the Pillsbury Dough Boy; it just wasn't equal to the job.
 
And thus I struggled. I waited whole minutes between footsteps. I flew to unoccupied areas to change my shape and appearance, and I could move with comparative ease there, but life is not really living unless one can experience its beauty at more than 4 frames a minute, so I struggled to get myself to a camping chair in a relatively unoccupied casino and sat there for the next 9 months. Life was simply too difficult, and I was thus almost aborted before I begun.
 
But an in-world library conference gave me a second chance at Second Life. Running on a machine that found my life somewhat less intimidating, I went to the first Library Conference held in a virtual world. I had the pleasure of meeting an actual Linden that night (who would later be "relocated" for doing too good a job) and I was hooked.
 
How one experiences life is very much dependent on one's perspective, and, in SL, one's perspective is very much dependent on the hardware one runs one's life on. In real life, Zen teaches us that to fully appreciate life one must fully experience the moment. In SL, how that moment can be experienced depends heavily on your processor speed, your graphics card, your RAM, the version of the client being run, and various other very un-Zen-like things. From familiarity, I can say that it is more pleasant to experience a bouncing-penis-griefer moment with windlight, reflection and shadow enabled with a decent draw distance then the same with low resolution, sound disabled, flat, and shadow-less. From a Zen perspective, one must appreciate that both moments are perfect, but I think even the Zen-est among us would agree that the former is perfecter than the latter.
 
My S-life is shared with my wife Princess Ivory. My wife insists that Princess is her first name but also insists that she is indeed a Princess. Some people make the mistake of calling her Ivory, as if that were her first name, just as Diana was the first name of Princess Diana. In actuality, since Ivory is her last name and Princess is her first, she should be properly referred to as Princess Princess.
 
Anyway, I digress. We started our lives wholly devoted to the library community, which translated to a life running a small plot called the Reader's Garden within the library community, which by way of complex convolutions somehow got our lives wholly devoted to Renaissance Island, a quite un-library like place which was to be devoted to be an accurate re-creation of life in Renaissance England. I set up a small furniture shop there and had a pleasant little business running until that went splat for various complicated reasons.
 
I worked for a while as a cleric in a place called Everwind, which went splat, and then went to as the head cleric of Triskele, which I dropped from with a splat, all the while having my home away from home in a place called Faeria, which, eventually, also went splat.
 
My Princess and I moved throughout SL trying to find a place to call our own, living on platforms 400 meters in the sky one day and the next day finding myself falling 400 meters because Princess Princess moved the platform over to some other land that she bought.
 
Thus did I explore much of Second Life, flailing downward at 9.8 meters per second squared and watching it rise up to splat me.
 
I became so used to exploration by way of out-of-control crashing that I finally realized my dream and invented a device that made flailing in panic a legitimate method of transportation: the Cataporter. The Cataporter was a dream method of transportation, being a catapult that one could program with precise coordinates and fling you gracelessly across the landscape to land you within reasonable distance of your destination. It was the cream of my shop until Havoc 4 came along, which crashed the brilliantly subtle but inexcusably undocumented code of its execution. Thus my business sales did splat along with it.
 
My life in SL and my exploration of its wonders can be characterized by a trip by the Cataporter. Often my trip to the place I thought I was going would be hampered by the placement of a tree or wall and I would splat prematurely. If my destination had been unexpectedly lowered, then I would flail well past it, crashing into some person's perfectly innocent sadomasochistic porn shop. As always I would stand up, brush myself off, and wonder where the hell exactly I was.
 
And that, I suppose, is what I guess the great lesson of SL is. Nothing is really what you expect it to be, and you are never really quite sure that how you got to a place one day will still work the next. Places change, the rules change, the laws of physics change, and every day you find yourself falling screaming into new places of beauty. Never knowing what to expect becomes the norm, and spitting out landscape after each splat is just a part of everyday S-life.
 
And is this place called Real Life really so much different? Unexpected Presidents, collapsing world economies, sickness, death; all of these are things designed to keep out RL from getting predictable.
 
Sometimes the landscape is a little harder to spit out in RL, but the beauty is still there, if one chooses to look for it.