“The poet ranks far below the painter in the representation of visible things, and far below the musician in that of invisible things.” ~ Leonardo da Vinci

There are odd little paths we walk in virtuality.

When I joined SL, I had already been a writer for most of my life. When I was very little, I would cross out the parts of my storybooks I didn’t care for and rewrite them to my liking. As a tween I wrote terribly cheesy horror stories to try and shock the adults who endured listening to them (to their credit, they pretended to be disgusted enough to sate the miscreant in me). As a full-fledged teenager, I did that whole weeping heart in my poetry journal thing. In college I learned I was never going to become the reincarnation of Oscar Wilde; that took some time to heal. As a young adult I embraced the fact that while artful talent might take its sweet time to develop, I had an inherent skill that not everyone gets a chance to wield.

As an adult I have learned that a muse is a fickle whore of a creature and you take what you can grab from her when she deigns to show herself. Between visits you take turns hating her and pining for her and stitching together the remnants of your ego in cold sweat anticipation of her return.

My particular failing is a lack of brevity. If allowed the space, I will ruin my own writing with length. Even knowing this, I never considered myself a particularly good poet, nor did I ever consider that I’d have any gift for lyrics. It was only at the coaxing of musician friends in SL that I shared some scribblings. When I did, quite unexpectedly, a whole new world of collaboration and expression opened up for me.

I have been writing with Grace and Lyndon since 2007. January or February or June depending on how you want to start counting. I shared Lugo with Lyndon that January and wrote Fallen State of Grace for the girl in February. But it was late June when I sent Boxes to Lyndon and Last Chance to Grace and first heard them put their music styles to my words.

I don’t pretend to be able to express what it’s like to hear your poetry come out of someone else’s lips in a way you never imagined it yourself. I suppose, on an intellectual level, it’s a little like watching someone you love hold your child for the first time. There is a tender pride and a confusing loss that take place in tandem. You are parting with something that will never be wholly yours again, but in that giving there’s a sense of incredible connection.

Both of them have been performing collaborative songs for four years now. Four. Years. I consider myself to be at their mercy in many ways. Without me, both of them could go on to write and perform. Without them, this strange new way I’ve found to use my inner voice would be gone. I suppose I should be frightened by that, but I’ve never felt that way. I send them my scribblings and sometimes they like them enough to imbue their magic into my words. It’s a system that suits me. But I’m never quite able to get my head around hearing them play.

For a while now, Lyndon has taken to playing our songs at open mics around Seattle. And that’s where one of his musician friends heard him play our latest song, The Dangerous, and asked for a chart so he could work it up.

So today, I opened my mail and had a link to the above youtube video. It features a guy I’ve never met, never heard, never seen until today singing words I wrote. It’s one of the most strange, surreal three minutes and fifty one seconds I’ve ever experienced. Myriad flavors of emotion I haven’t begun to identify. (Although, I need to find out how to get in touch with him, if only to find out what the hell is going on with his lamp).

I get angry and frustrated with Linden Lab, Second Life, and humanity in general. I get exhausted by my disappointment at watching so much possibility squandered.

But some days I come face to face with the paths and possibilities that keep me on this particular road, and I remind myself that no one promised it would be paved in yellow bricks or lead to bejeweled cities. But the road does weave its way into places I could never otherwise explore or encounter, and I have to concede these small moments of awe.

People often ask one another why they stay in Second Life. I have several answers, but the one that I can’t get away from is that as a creative thinker and a tentative artist, there is nothing in virtuality that offers me the at-my-fingertips tools to unfurl the creative sinew more than SL. One day maybe open sims, etc will catch up. I embrace the possibilities of what is to come. But I’ve looked around at the newborns slouching toward Bethlehem and they don’t have the juice to fill my jelly jar yet. I’m beyond the whole novelty of the environment part. I’ve logged my time in someone else’s growing pains. If it’s not ready for prime time, call me later.

From now on, I’ll have a much simpler answer.

Why am I still here? That’s just the dangerous in me.

“Go then. There are other worlds than these.” ~ Jake Chambers (via Stephen King), The Gunslinger

If you have not read Stephen King’s Dark Tower saga, nothing in this post will make sense to you.

I have been thinking a lot of the parallels between Second Life and the Tower, as well as the figure of Roland Deschain. At its root, the Tower represents the unattainable ideal — something hopelessly broken that seduces pilgrims with the promise that it may be set right again. Roland is both cursed and elevated in the all-consuming quest to believe in that promise. He sacrifices everything precious in the crusade. His nobility endears us to him as a figure of literature, but I sure as hell would not want to be part of his ka-tet.

Paladin and Utopian tropes press heavily upon idealists. We want to believe. At the same time, the world we live in has assured us that Paladins and Utopias are fools and false hopes. Don Quixote is beautiful in his tragedy for tilting at windmills, but he is also an old man on a broken down horse risking his life for nothing real. He stands no chance of lifting the world. His only victory lies in the fact that his worlds are within him and he may teach a handful of others to recognize that their worlds are within themselves as well.

Second Life is a virtual platform. It is not Utopia and never will be. All of the Paladins need to comes to terms with that. Tilting at windmills and questing after towers may seem noble, but it’s an awful lot of energy to waste on the impossible and you end up sacrificing a great deal of yourself and others chasing after smoke and mirrors. In the worst cases you become a demented gender-bending Smeagol, or the court jester who foolishly engages her over and over and over. In the best cases you simply realize you don’t have Cuthbert’s horn this time around and you wait to see what improvements the next cycle will bring.

Our worlds are within us, the rest is just what we draw from the battle lines between possibility and compromise.

To defeat zombie monkeys, you need ninja pirates, and those are pretty hard to come by. Why is life so hard? Oh, and whatever you do, don’t watch Dirty Jobs season 6 episode 3, “animal rendering”, okay? luvukthxbai! Sent from my iPod baybee!!!!11!!! ~ JTL

In January it will be a year since JTL. I’m trying to reconcile that, but it doesn’t quite work. As another friend of his said to me earlier this year: “there is this JTL-sized hole in my life.”

The loss is still palpable for me. Some days it manages to fade a little. Other days, it’s all I can see and feel.

Last year around this time I thought my router had died along with some other electronics in my house after lightning hit near me (it turned out to be a power cord on the router).

I sent JTL the following email on this date last year:

So I ordered a new router:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000BTL0OA/ref=ox_ya_oh_product

It says Linux-friendly but I have to believe since over 70% of people bought it, it’s also good for what I need. I’m over-nighting it (yay Amazon prime!). But , I have concerny-type feelings. Didn’t we have to get in and mess with a bunch of stuff in the admin area of my router when we were doing magical torrent and Civ stuffs? Will I have to redo it or are there elves and fairies that handle that sort of thing? If I have to redo it, is there away to get the old settings even though the current router is fried? If not, do you have any memory what-so-fucking-ever of what the fig newtons we did?

Halp please and crackers and love you big.

I got the following back:

I wonder if lightning rods really work?

your new router is fine — the ‘linux compatible’ bit doesn’t actually mean what it sounds like it means, even. The first WRT-54Gs actually ran linux themselves, which meant amongst other things that you could replace their software with your own, letting you customize it. At some point, they changed the hardware to be cheaper, replacing the full linux system with something that ran with less memory and a simpler processor, only to apparently discover that a non-ignorable piece of their customer base was actually replacing the software, so they split the line into two, and the wrt54-GL runs linux while the current wrt-54g doesn’t.

The part I don’t understand is why the GL is cheaper now than the normal G, since the whole point of them splitting the line was to let them drop costs on the G while keeping the GL for people willing to pay extra for the customizability.

I think all we did was set up some port forwarding so no elf labor will need to be exploited unless you want that for the kink factor. You’ll just need to figure out how to arrange your ports again, but that’s easy enough. The only hard bit is figuring out which ports, and presumably that’ll be obvious as you notice things not working…

so when something doesn’t connect you will have to call me for halp, thus preserving my evil plan to keep you router-dependent and at my mercy.

Did you get your non-turkey turkey stuffs yet? I could find out myself, but the tracking numbers are way over there…somewhere.

love you, will call soon.

I don’t know if it translates when you can’t hear the words spoken in his voice, but years of mail were exchanged like this and I miss it as much as I miss the sound of his voice. I would make a casual musing comment or ask a simple question (rhetorical or not, didn’t matter) and in return I’d get the entire history of the subject, rattled off from his memory. He just knew it. Technology. History. Politics. Porn. Buffyverse. Comic Books. Anime. Finding something he actually had to look up was a sort of victory.

Going back another year: Thanksgiving Week 2008:

I sent:

Thought you’d enjoy this — Oh noes! It’s sex, drugs, and nuclear war!

http://www.cracked.com/article_16767_6-most-unintentionally-hilarious-old-school-psas.html

He sent back:

What Cracked didn’t point out, for some reason, is that Citizens for Decent Literature (later renamed Citizens for Decency through Law — they were at least clear about their censoring goals) was founded by Charles Keating of the “Keating Five” scandal of the 80s which almost killed John McCain’s political career before it really got started.

I can’t remember my phone number, but that, I know.

Also, did you see bones? RFID access cards are “super high-tech”? I have four of them right now and first had one at least 10 years ago. wtf?

eat yummy foods and have extra stuffing!

And another: Thanksgiving Week 2007:

From him, after yet another episode of Bones with bad tech research:

the Commodore Amiga used the Motorola 68000, not the Motorola 6800, and it used a 3.5″ floppy, not 5.25″. And if that disc came out of the muck, there’s no way it’d still work. Shows and movies that feature geeks should keep geeks in the writer’s room just to make me happy. Why aren’t we working on that?

grumble

I’m sending you non-turkey foods — eat or I will send cranberrylicious lolcats with emoticons until you do!

Reading all the brick-a-brack between us makes me laugh and it makes me hurt, but mostly it amazes me how tangled within those exchanges were the briefest nods of humor and affection; it was effortless and just there — so easily taken for granted between the other data.

I’ve been struggling — finding it hard to feel thankful this week with his loss pressing so deeply into my heart. Amid all the things and people I have to be thankful for, there is still this JTL-sized hole that continues to ache with no sign of healing. Sometimes it overshadows everything else. I think the only way to look at it without losing my mind is to keep believing the hurt is something itself to be thankful for. The hurt reminds me I should be thankful to have known him and to have been lucky enough to have him put up with my silly questions and flittering. The hurt is the other side of having something that was precious and rare and wonderful.

So I am thankful for all the love in my life, past and present and yet to come. And I am thankful for those who offer their affection to me and allow me to express it back to them. And I am thankful for the patience and understanding from them while I have navigated this difficult year.

I hope you all enjoy your turkey stuffs, and, if you are like me and do not like turkey, then your non-turkey turkey stuffs.

“Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

When I was little, my father was extremely fond of Don McLean’s American Pie album. Being a hippie child, I, of course, knew “American Pie,” the song, by heart, but my father maintained it was far from the best song on the record. I thought he was out of his mind.

Years later, as a teenager, I found the album hiding behind Rick Springfield’s Working Class Dog (yes, it’s a horror and a blasphemy, but it was the 80s — no one got out clean, okay?). I removed the vinyl from its sleeve upon which was printed a poem to William Boyd, and listened all the way through. After that, while I maintained a fondness for “American Pie,” I understood my father was right. There were far more interesting secrets whispering in its grooves — and not just “Vincent” (which was my father’s favorite).

I’m not sure why I identified so deeply at that youthful age with “Crossroads,” but it is a song that I come back to over and over and feel kindred toward. It speaks to me, and it always speaks the truth. While others I’ve shared it with tend to find it sad, the song always rings of hope and patience in my personal interpretation. The way forward can’t be reached by turning back, and in the end, we’ll be where we are, no matter what we may have intended. Practical. Peaceful. Perfect.

Every crossroads in life should have a sign with these lyrics printed on it. The simple reminder always makes choices so much easier.

Crossroads
Don McLean

I’ve got nothing on my mind: nothing to remember,
Nothing to forget. and I’ve got nothing to regret,
But I’m all tied up on the inside,
No one knows quite what I’ve got;
And I know that on the outside
What I used to be, I’m not anymore.

So there’s no need for turning back
`Cause all roads lead to where we stand.
And I believe we’ll walk them all
No matter what we may have planned.

“There are places I’ll remember
All my life, though some have changed
Some forever, not for better
Some have gone and some remain”
~ John & Paul

Salome’s Ode To Gaming Friendships and Virtual Places – Take 1

Having decided to give up on WOW and been through the detox phase with very little pang, it occurs to me that the only thing I’m really going to miss is a handful of friends — two in particular (it would be three, but I’m disqualifying one because she’s been stuck with me since high school and her friendship is not WOW-centered). My memories of these two people are heavily tinted in WOW-filtered colors. I’ll explore one later in a small rant on why I’m anti-guild. For now, I’ll focus on my “WOW best friend.”

People who do not spend a lot of time in virtuality tend to roll their eyes at the notion of friendships that develop based on a format, gaming or otherwise. The idea of a forum friend or gaming friend is less legitimate in their eyes. But, it’s really no different than a friendship that develops over shared work or living spaces. The chemistry of such friendships is always the same, physical or virtual. And, even the strongest of those friendships strain when the format is taken out of the equation. When leaving a job, for example, there are always promises to keep in touch, and often we do, but generally, we don’t. Even under the best circumstances, with effort on both sides, the relationship moves into an at-fingertips arrangement where lunches and meetings have to be scheduled and maintained; that casual familiarity of the everyday joke or encounter is removed. This is true with friends in virtual environments as well.

The randomness of how such people come into our lives, and the places that mark the important events in those relationships are just 1′s and 0′s lurking on a server somewhere. On some level we know that. But then randomness of how your dorm or cubicle mates get assigned are no less random. And a “home” is more than just stucco and cinder blocks with tar paper on top; the materials of construction do not equal “home.” Some would argue that houses and office buildings are more “real” because they are permanent, while virtual places can be destroyed in a few minutes. But anyone who has been through a natural disaster understands the foolishness of attaching permanency to physical objects as a measure of their value. Most things in life can be gone in the blink of an eye under certain circumstances. The concept that they could be lost, worn out, destroyed is what makes them all the more precious. A house can be set ablaze or foreclosed; a server can be wiped. Experience and memory are the real currency of how we assign value to the places that take up real estate in our emotional ether.

Everything beyond that is just paperwork and security measures.

The First Time I Saw Dun Modr

So, I was working up my first WOW character (human priest, of course) and even though I was in a guild, I was generally off by myself (later entry on guilds, I promise). As was my wont, I was leveling in an area about 2-5 levels higher than I should have been — my best guess is that I was between 25-27. WOW was new and shiny, I was coasting on newbie immersion and eager to see as much content as possible. I have no idea how I got to Menethil Harbor. Truthfully, everything from Fargodeep Mine to the Wetlands is a blur.

Dun Modr (Wait, Where Am I?)

At any rate, while dodging bluegill murlocs, black ooze, and mosshide gnoll-thingies I turned north up a road, entered Dun Modr and accepted The Dark Iron War quest which innocently ordered me to kill some evil dwarves. Sure, no problem.

Dark Iron War - How Hard Can This Be?

An hour (and multiple corpse runs later) I was making frequent use of four-letter words and considering giving up. The innocuous looking encampment is (or, at least, was) a devil of a place for level-appropriate characters. It’s packed tight, aggro ranges are wide and most of the mobs are linked in pulls of 2 or 3 so you can’t patiently single-kill your way through (the mid-to-low-level priest’s bread and butter method). I was getting my priest ass splattered all over the place. And I was getting grumpy in that “why am I paying money to bash my head into make believe walls” way.

I was about to die — again — when, from out of nowhere, there was a dwarf warrior beside me, tossing a group invite, which I hastily accepted. Sure, the stumpy little guy was a level below me and named after a Forgotten Realms sword, but he was warrior DPS and he killed the bad, bad dwarves that were chewing me up like it was free.

For those of you that don’t play WOW, a warrior-priest leveling team is (or, at least, was) better than peanut butter and jelly sammiches. Warriors wear a lot of armor, suck damage down like water and hold aggro (the algorithms that are used to determine which player a “monster” attacks) so a robe-wearing priest like moi can stand back and toss out heals at my leisure. With Aegis, we had 80% of the quest done in minutes. All we needed were the pesky Dark Iron Demolitionists. As it turned out, the five demolitionists were, however, a particular flavor of bitch. They were entrenched inside the tight-packed barracks buildings and there were only a scattering of them amid all the other mobs. To make matters more frustrating, they stood back and lobbed high-damage explosives while letting their little army of friends hack at you. It didn’t help that Aegis and I were under-leveled for the quest.

More four-letter words and corpse runs, only this time with a stumpy little dwarf in mail armor ghosting beside me.

Refusing to be defeated, we found a demolitionist in one of the barracks that was less populated and opted to wait out respawns and kill him over and over. We cleared all the mobs down to the bottom level where we found a handy little alcove to sit and wait for respawn so we could kill them one at a time as they reappeared. I don’t remember how long it took. Long enough for us to rattle off conversation tidbits with enough sarcasm and personal exchange to realize we enjoyed the company. We’d also exhausted all the /flirt and /joke options for our races. One of them for the human female was (I kid you not) “I need a hero” and one of which for the dwarf male was “I like my beer like I like my women: stout and bitter.” These sound bites would later become in-jokes between us.

By the time we finished The Dark Iron War and a handful of other nearby quests, we’d made friends, added one another to friends’ lists, yadda yadda. I sent him some potions. We suffered the abject horror that was completing Stranglethorn Vale (the WOW camaraderie equal of doing a tour in ‘Nam together). He left his crappy guild for my crappy guild and we alienated the other members together. Years of friendship followed and continue.

Whenever one of us would work up an alt, we’d always call or IM the other when it was time to do Dun Modr. “I need a hero” and “hey, short and bitter, get over here” were used in tells from server to server and faction to faction. Just so we could stand in the aforementioned alcove and jump up and down a few times while tossing /joke and /flirt emotes back and forth.

I cannot tell you how the poor fellow suffered. He leveled with me possessed of a patience that would make saints stand there and say “How the fuck does he do that?” He had to deal with things like:

1. I am a compulsive harvester and I will aggro an entire zone of mobs just to get that flower over there which I don’t even really need. He still has nightmares about killing packs of bats in Eastern Plaguelands because I saw a Plaguebloom node or two.
2. I cannot make two targeted jumps in succession with the WOW interface. (A fact that became painfully clear when we ran Blackfathom Deeps a few days later. He waited patiently while I fell, swam back, fell, swam back, fell… all the while ignoring the bitching and moaning of the other people we were grouped with.) You remember that early part of Tomb Raider 1 where you have to do the running jumps from pillar to pillar over the gator-infested water, timing it to miss the flames that shoot up? That took me DAYS.
3. He had to double back to get me when I inevitably got lost in anything remotely resembling a cave (actually, he learned to never run out of my sight so he didn’t have to waste time doubling back).
4. When we were using the “avoid Mazthoril cave” exploit to turn in for our Drakefire Amulets and he made it on the first try, he sat there and waited and waited and waited while I fell and retried and fell and retried and fell and healed and then remounted and retried.
5. Every time we had to run UBRS or LBRS, he went to get a drink while I missed the jump onto the frakkin’ balcony twenty times and ran back up the stupid rock into the alcove and…fell (I still maintain it’s just too damn dark in there to see the jump).

He never raised his voice. He never got all condescending and hissed and talked to me like an idiot. He knew that just because I couldn’t judge a jump didn’t mean I was stupid and it didn’t mean I couldn’t play my class. It just meant I sucked at jumping. Although on the screen it makes you look and feel like an idiot. A really, really lot.

In all fairness, he did get to mow down every mob without ever having to pause. And he knew that if I lost every other member of a party or died myself, he was likely going to be standing when the smoke cleared (my rule: when things get ugly, the tank lives, everyone else can wait for rez, corpse run, and/or suck it). This was back when priests were useful and hadn’t been busted down to second-class healers. Plus, while we were leveling he was fury. So we pretty much owned anything that looked at us funny, even when they were a few levels above us.

Aegis is one of those people who’s just instinctively good at gaming. He doesn’t have to learn it or work it like I do. He sees something once and knows how to do it forever. He knows where to go, what order to kill, where to stand, and what to ignore. He’s also evil and speaks my brand of sarcasm. When people would ask me why I so “shy” and didn’t get involved in guild events, I’d answer “I’m not shy, I just hate most people.” He was the only one in vent that knew I wasn’t kidding. He wasn’t a whiny little kid who thought his name was tattooed on my ass just because we gamed together and when someone was a dick about something he didn’t play the old boy’s club “let me take care of this” card. He just sat back quietly and let me demo the jerk if I wanted to. Occasionally he might toss out a “Dude, I really wouldn’t say that to her…” warning, but that was more for the protection of the noob trying to flex nuts at me.

I can honestly say that the biggest thing I’m going to miss about WOW, without question, is the realization that I’ll never again get a random tell that says “hey – short and bitter – get over here and help me with Dun Modr.” I even had to apply my lame video capture skills before I canceled my account so that I could go and nab a shot of the infamous alcove (after helping a random noob complete their quest).

When I cleaned out my bank vaults, one of the handful of things that I couldn’t bring myself to vendor was a stack of six Crimson Lotus — items that would show up randomly in my mail whenever he had a quest in Alterac Mountains or Desolace and one dropped. Why? Because no one thought much about them, you couldn’t buy them, and other than the token gesture between us they were worthless to the naked eye. Just like the places and experiences that people in virtual environments trade every day.

Crimson Lotus

And when you find a friend who gets that and knows how to express it, that’s the kind of thing you’re gonna miss. Just like a badly textured alcove made up of 1s and 0s.