Happy Blogoversary, Eddi Haskell´s Second Life!

Sunday was the third blogoversary of my buddy Eddi Haskell´s blog "Eddi Haskell´s Second Life" and I nearly missed it altogether. Thanks for the reminder to Avacar Bluestar at GWNews!

Another year down, Eddi, and many, many more to go!

Sorry for the belated greeting, you almost succeeded in sneaking it past me. If it hadn't been for Avacar you might have made it.

Southern Charm

The view we fell in love with at Southern Charm

Soon after Ars and I became a couple back in December of 2007, we started to look for somewhere to live together and spent all Ars free time sim-jumping to search for a place we both liked.

We had made a joint list of criteria for what we were looking for.

1. No boring beach property
2. Affordable
3. Big enough. i.e. with enough prims over after setting up the house.surroundings and furniture. to allow Ars to build without too many limitations
4. A reliable and secure landlord - we had both heard too many stories about the other kind

Usually Ars would have prepared a list of places to check out beforehand and pretty soon after I logged inworld we were off on our hunt. We had a good time doing this and enjoyed being in each others company.

After about a week or so we first came to the Southern Charm sim, which seemed to meet with all our criteria except the affordable. I was the stingy one, after all the relationship with Ars was so fresh and I did not want to commit to something that could be difficult to pull out from if things turned sour.

We both fell in love with the house straddling the waterfall at once, so after seeing that we just kept coming back. Finally I gave in and we started negotiations with the landlord.

The sim was at that time owned by Spyder Jewell, but was managed by his wife Jazzine, a smart, funny and wonderful American woman.

Jazzine took to me as soon as I had made Ars question her about the "no nudity" clause in the covenant. Finally we made an explicit agreement stating that I (and Ars) could run around on our property as naked as we wished as long as we did not tote a boner outdoors and wore clothes when visiting with the neighbors.

With that essential point settled we started negotiations on how many parcels we were going to rent, which parcels and what the total tier would be. I had complete confidence in leaving Ars to handle that when I logged off that night.

Next day when I logged in Ars told me triumphantly that we were now the proud tenants of two parcels on Southern Charm, including the one with the waterfall. We were jubilant and immediately started furnishing and decorating.

As time went by, we increased our land with a third, fourth and fifth parcel until we rented more than half the sim. At that point Spyder and Jazzine encountered financial difficulties (or perhaps just decided to move on from SecondLife) and offered us to take over the full sim so we would rent it directly from Linden Lab. (That´s called landowning in SecondLife.) Because I am a citizen of the European Union we decided to name Ars as the sim-owner so we wouldn't have to pay the additional VAT-tax on landowning fees that the EU forced on the Lab.

After Ars passed away in February 2010 there was some paperwork needed to transfer the sim from his estate to me. Luckily, I had the full cooperation and understanding of his father and family in doing so, everyone is not so fortunate.

In hindsight it is my firm recommendation to anyone who co-owns anything whatsoever in SecondLife, to see to it that you make a will bequeathing any joint - or for that matter personal - property to the survivor. It is actually also in accordance with Linden Labs rules to bequeath the avatar itself and all of it´s possessions to the surviving partner.

Ars and I were too happy together and probably thought nothing bad could happen to change it to do any of those things, it almost cost me the dearest memories I had of him and our time together. Do not make the same mistake!

不要诅咒黑暗 - 点燃蜡烛

As we are moving into the two darkest months of the year. before and after the winter solstice, here on the top-of-the-World, we Swedes are following the advice of the ancient Chinese proverb "Don't curse the darkness - light a candle". (I used the simplified Han Chinese in the title of this post in the vain hope that you illiterates would understand.)

In fact Swedes light millions of candles to combat the darkness, starting on the first Sunday of Advent (today) until the twentieth day after Christmas eve (January 13th).

During this period every decent Swede - and some not so decent Sweden Democrats also - places a lit candlestick or a star in almost every window of their homes to light up the darkness. It does help!

And we burn a lot of ordinary candles as well, but we never ever leave a burning candle in an empty room. (The last part was a paid public service announcement.)

Mr December 2012

Yesterday there was a contest at the Bunker club for Mr December in the Gay Archipelago Almanac 2012. As soon as I got the notice I hauled ass to get some good pictures of the hot men I knew would assemble for that.

I was not disappointed! In my previous post you saw the pictures of Torro Spyker and he alone was worth the trip, but here are a few more pictures.

Queen Edman was the DJ this evening, he is an experienced DJ with a sure taste for good club music.

Hurtfulsplash Solis won the title of Mr December 2012.

Mr December 2012, Hurtfulsplash Solis

Torro Caught In Action

SecondLife is never safe from paparazzi.

One would think that a man of the world like the very sexy British stud, club owner and blogger Torro Spyker would know that already. Nonetheless here he is caught in action checking out the men at The Bunker last night, in some cases the inspection was very close indeed.

Torro had to kneel to get a better look

New Label, Same Nasty Content

The Sweden Democrats has today decided to change what they call their political ideology from "democratic nationalism" to "social conservatism".

The change is yet another step in the party´s attempts to clean up their act and become more appealing to the Swedish electorate by trying to cover up that the the party´s fundamental political perspective is xenophobic, anti-Islamic, antisemitic and anti anything whatsoever that is not Swedish according to their definition.

The party continues to work with a double set of political thought and language. One to hold the party members together and another on the public scene. Unfortunately for them - but luckily for the rest of us - sometimes leading members of the party cannot distinguish between the linguistic levels, which has lead to a series of rather comical mishaps and ensuing exclusions from the party due to racist comments posted on the internet.

According to the newly adopted policy program, the best thing for Sweden is if as many as possible have a "Swedish identity". The Swedish identity is defined as speaking fluent Swedish, living in accordance with Swedish culture and feeling more loyalty to Sweden than to any other country. Consequently, the party's main issue is still massively reduced immigration and, whatever they may say publicly, their main argument is still  that it is reprehensible to mix ethnic groups, religions and cultures.

Sven Analyzes "the Threshold"

Swedish virtual worlds blogger Sven Idyll over at Svens(k) Idyll has been thinking over Philip Rosedale´s statement to the New York Times recently and come up with this interesting analysis (rough translation by me) in his post "It becomes impossible only when you know it is"

"Philip Rosedale made a statement recently about the threshold of Second Life being high, and to some extent it is true, but one thing is absolutely critical, the willingness to learn and explore. I have in the past month seen how quickly primary school pupils will take on such a thing as building in virtual worlds like Second Life and Open Sim. They do not think it is particularly difficult - if they have the interest they learn extremely fast. Learning how it works is not the hardest part for them but to learn to utilize the many options that are available is difficult. Children do not see so many obstacles, but they try - and often several times. Sometimes, the impossible happens.

Children have not acquired the limitations that we have as adults. We as adults mean something else with "impossible" than children do. Impossible for us older people is a pretty solid stop but for the young, it is a condition that exists until someone finds a way. A few adults manage to keep this desire to conquer the impossible and I would have liked to be one of those but I have put up too many stop signs and signs for both "one way traffic" and "forbidden passage" in my mind.

If you could make a wish for new feature or something else new in Second Life would it be something that has a counterpart in real world, or you could come up with something completely new - something that can only exist in the virtual world? Some children just spurt out such ideas. We are well accustomed to some of those things, being able to teleport, fly and change our avatar anyway we wish - or so we think.

We have a whole new world waiting for us where everything is possible, but we just copy things from real world into virtual reality. When will things start coming in the virtual worlds that we can copy over to the real world? Lack of imagination is in short supply in the virtual worlds!

We want to come to the virtual world because it is different but when we get there we immediately start converting it to a copy of the world we want to disconnect from.

In how many areas of your life are you free from rules and patterns and have a belief that there are no limitations? If you have that, can you describe that which has no borders and that cannot be captured by rules or exhibit patterns?

Second Life needs pure imagination to grow but to let go of the rational thoughts completely and let your imagination reign free is probably the hardest things to do."

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I must say I agree with Sven, if a total gaming idiot like myself - and a few other fools I know all to well - could learn to enjoy SecondLife and develop our skills inworld by ourselves and with the eager help of our friends I do not really see where the huge threshold problem is. There is nothing "impossible" with SecondLife!

Sven is also correct in my mind when he calls for even more imagination in virtual worlds.

Challenges should not be easy, but they must be fun and interesting and allow us to develop in our own pace. Only then will the curiosity and childlike creativity be awakened that makes life so fun sometimes.

Model: Millimina Salamander

I am still waiting in vain for my fashion statement "The Jesters Hat - only for the boldest among fashionistas" to be copied into first life.