To Mr. Kahvy Smith: "You Are Already Old!"

Yesterday I had two discussions with my friend Kahvy.

The first one occurred when I logged into SecondLife and received a gesture from him. It seems we both suffer from being married to men with the same hoarding addiction, boats.

I tried it out on my sweet hubby immediately and this is the reaction I received:
[13:48] Bock McMillan shouts: "** You don't NEED another Boat!!!**"
[13:48] Tomais Ashdene shouts: "Dream on, Monkey Boy!"

I was not at all surprised by that response, and to be quite honest, I don't really mind Tomais buying every damn boat that is put up for sale in SecondLife. Kahvy confessed feeling the same way about Garrett's hoarding. We decided that both our husbands are wonderful men and this little flaw of theirs is not much to make a fuss about.

Later, about ten minutes before midnight CET, Kahvy and my local time, Kahvy got back to me and complained that he "in ten minutes would only have a year left as a young man" because today is his 34th birthday. It seems that he lives in the erroneous belief that the official age of becoming "old" is 35.

I feel the need to correct him and perhaps also sooth him, so my birthday present is this statement.

"Kahvy, my dear friend,

Age is but a number, but always remember that ageing is mandatory but growing old is optional. You need not worry about being 35 in less than a year, because you actually have six more years until you are "old" as the official age of becoming old in the straight culture is 40. 

However, on the other hand in the gay culture, you have already been old since you turned 30 as that is the official age for turning old among us gays. Enjoy the rest of your life as an old queer and get the f-u-c-k over it!

Many happy birthday wishes, my dear old friend!"

Protection Against Gesturbation

In SecondLife we have something called "gestures", which are pre-programmed messages often combining sounds with words or other signs in local chat.

Gestures can be quite amusing if they are not used too often and are reasonably short and sweet. 

As an example of this kind of gesture I will one I received as a birthday gift from my dear friends Vampi Twine-DeSantis-McMillan- McMillan (honorary) and her husband sirhc DeSantis-McMillan.

Having activated the gesture beforehand all I have to do to play it is write the trigger in local chat. The trigger to this particular gesture is "/bock". So when I (or anyone who happens to have the gesture) write that trigger in local chat and press enter everyone in the room will hear sirhc saying with his sexiest voice; "Bock is in the building" at the same time as they see the same line appear once in local chat.

Another example is the popular gesture "Yeahaaaawwwwwwwwwww!" where you will hear a someone shouting yeahaw. A third example is "Mmmmmmm Bock, is that a gun in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?". The last one was a present to me from my buddy Regi Yifu so you hear his sexy and very dark voice speaking the words.

The best thing about the three examples I have given here are that they are one-liners and last at the most about five seconds, so the interruption in chat is minimal, both with sound and text.

Evil people in SecondLife have spent a lot of time making gestures that last extremely long and fill the screen with jibberish for up to - or sometimes even more - than 100 lines. If such gestures come into the hands of unscrupulous avatars - especially if there is more than one in the room - the result is pure havoc with spam filling your screen. The most notorious gesturbation-lovers in my experience are generally Italians, Germans and Americans (not necessarily in that order). As always you should be careful when reading generalisations because they do not mean that every individual of the mentioned nationalities gesturbates.

Previously the only option has been to block/mute the culprit(s) after you have gotten sick with them, in the Firestorm viewer there is however now an option that, if you activate it, automatically detects and protects you against the gesturbators. You activate it by going to your viewers Preferences and in the Firestorm tab go to the Protection tab and check the box that says "Enable Spam Protection" (see the red arrow in the image below). 

In the same place you are also able to choose the options when you wish the spam protection to be activated. There is also an option to immediately protect you from repeat-offenders.

DJ World - 4th Anniversary

 
 

Oh what a night it was! What a beautiful, wonderful, laggy and nostalgic night. I haven´t crashed so many times since early in the spring of 2008.

The music was good, people were in a great mood and the chatting in local and IM was funny. Jeff Ellsworth, Ziggy Starsmith, Larz Kaz, Khar Indigo, DJ Insyx, Flad Dagostino, Justin Pastorelli, Flupke Bekkers, Adonis Lubitsch and Trace Junkers were all there looking hunky as ever - except Khar who was sweet and not hunky at all - together with a lot of avatars I had met in my early days and some I had actually never seen at all. Sasch Petrov, the organizer of the event, was even seen dancing with this awesome Jimmy-hunk I remembered seeing at Second Pride.

Sure there was a bit too much "gesturbating", after all the event was at the Arsenal club in Gay Zone Germany and our German brothers love their gestures as we all know. I only had to mute about three Germans to get a tolerable noise level.

Sadly though the organizers decided to cancel the event after the third or fourth sim-crash, when we had only gotten through half the line-up, but Sarco Halderman had done his set and the time was getting late in real life so I was not too upset.

Sarco´s voice sounded hoarser and sexier than ever, Millimina Salamander and I suspected he had a very bad cold or a throat infection. When I asked him after his set he told me he had been whispering so as not to wake up his man, Harley, who was snoozing away in the next room.

I also enjoyed listening to the music of Sasch Petrov, Ralphy Triellis and Karl Kalchek for the first time, I hope to hear them again in the future.

In short everyone was there - or wished they had been - and some of the straight people too. Both my bosom-buddies sirhc DeSantis and Apmel Goosson made an appearance and even ush Underwood, who set foot on a German sim for the first time ever if I understood correctly.

UPDATE: I just caught this news on the Gay World News blog: Due to sim lag issues and because it went offline and restarted each hour… we regrettably had to cancel the DJ Night for today. We hope to have again this great event at a later date. Thanks All for coming !