Birth...

I was born in second life, rather i was spawned in Second Life a few weeks back...
I had only read and heard about it at that time. What i read shocked me.
You have to buy property with real money, you can go clubbing, be in a relationship with someone across the world, have sex with them(ahem 3D virtual sex...I'm still disagreeable to the whole thing), drink, smoke, fly.... attend virtual classes in virtual classrooms, teach, get a job, earn money.
And while you do all this guess what.... you can record it and make movies....

This form of filmmaking is called Machinima...

"Machinima history is difficult to grasp. While its roots can clearly be traced back to the early days of the demo scene in the 1980, actual storytelling and public distribution did not take place until the technology was ready for it. Thus, machinima history is bound to certain game releases and the technological
developments in the gaming sector. "
(http://www.zeitbrand.de/machiniBlog/WhatIsMachinima.html)

I got excited, and I'd be lying if I didn't admit that I am still seduced by the form and the largeness of the whole thing.

In my first day in Second Life I walked around looking at things, I tried flying and most importantly created my avatar : Spray Oceanlane.

Spray looks a lot like me in my Real Life (RL). Creating her was almost like still life drawing, where you are trying to represent something as realistically as the medium allows you to.
I still have a long way to go to look like me, but then its a start.

When you're born you have no clothes. In the beginning you decide if you're going to have a male avatar or a female avatar, so I have boobs but nothing else...
On my first day I set about making clothes for myself. And this is funny..
I made underwear, and then I made the rest. You can never really see your underwear because your clothes are on top, like in real life... only this is a 3D virtual avatar so who gives a shit about underwear right?! Actually who gives a shit about clothes!!!

BUT YOU DO!

And that's the thing, you can spend hours on SL indulging in yourself, how you want to look, what you want to wear to the minutest of details. And this indulgence gets quite addictive.
Now to get clothes there are two ways... make them, or buy them... actually there are three...
find them.
The currency in SL is the Linden Dollar, Linden because thats the name of the guy who came up with the damn thing.... anyhow so many Linden Dollars make up 1 US Dollar... and I say so many because its a fluctuating exchange rate, depending on the market everyday...!

So now I care about what I look like, what I wear, what my hair looks like etc...

And funnily enough the day I was born I found myself a quiet beachy place where there were no people... here I decided to make clothes for myself etc.
Anyhow the sun began to set at a particular time (SL has it's own time) so I find myself thinking 'hey let's go check out the sunset!' (CHECK OUT THE SUNSET?! A FUCKING VIRTUAL SUN!)
anyhow I get up and start walking up this cliff/hill type thing, and I go up and see someone standing there, a woman with a gown blowing in the wind and all...
I say to myself oh my god I'm naked!!! I dont have pants (nevermind the fact that I dont have much else either) I start running down to hide myself under the cliff and make pants!
At the point I have turned into a dark chocolate brown color because of the fading light... here is when I figure that you can force the sun to come up. (But I think that's just your point of view, at any point you can revert back to the actual time setting)

The whole day there I spent making myself look a certain way. I hardly spoke to anyone.
And I didn't even know how to sit. So I stood wherever I went or I flew.
:)

I realized that much like in films where we fill in the gaps, we also do it here. I figured that everything that makes us react is drawing on a memory hidden somewhere in our minds.
When we relate to something like the sun setting by the beach it is because we have seen it before and experienced it. The image has a starting point...

Anyhow I've written enough... here are some pictures...