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What has SL taught you about the world?


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One of my first friends in SL was a scantily clad stripper from Ireland who in RL was a grandmother, and spun and died her own wool. Another dear friend of mine was a college student from the Netherlands with debilitating agoraphobia and a foot fetish. These and hundreds of others of interactions with real people behind fanciful avatars have taught me that the world is much smaller with far more diversity and similarity than can be imagined. Here are a few lessons that added clarity to my life.

  • With respect to Alan Jackson’s light-hearted anthem of libation libertinism … It truly is always “5:00 somewhere.”
  • There are a host of people in the world who are fluently bilingual, but most of them don’t live in North America. 
  • Humans have more dreams and aspirations in common with one another than politics would have us believe. 
  • Fart jokes are universally funny. 

What have you discovered about the diverse RL world through the common SL virtual reality?

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2 hours ago, CaithLynnSayes said:

That furries exist. I'm not even joking. Before joining SL i had no clue this kind of joint thing was widely "practiced" lol

IKR? When I first joined, I spent three months as a furry. Furries were one of the first “communities” in SL. I was a rabbit with an avatar completely made of tortured prims. My furryness didn’t stick, but I treasure those times. They are a great group of people. I’ve never met an angry or intolerant furry. Before SL, my only connection to the furry world was in Stanley Kubricks the shining. 

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that some people really need to step outside, even for just a second. there are people on sl who absolutely lose it over the most benign things, luckily i've only dealt with this kind of unsavory person secondhand but it's still painful

on a more positive note, though,

that if you give people an outlet to create, they'll make since you'd never expect. i've seen stuff in sl i could barely comprehend and i love it. weird art sims/parcels are kind of a rarity but i adore them!

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36 minutes ago, Sam1 Bellisserian said:

That some things that are totally not normal are normalized in SL. 

Though I am the last person to judge (or even comprehend) what is normal or not normal, I do think that SL often strips away a layer of RL pretense exposing deeper psychological needs. Is it the anonymity? Is it the softened consequences of jumping off virtual (metaphorical) bridges? Why do you think that is, why are they normalized? 

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In the past I used to spend whole days inworld with just the necessary breaks to eat sleep etc.

Recently I almost never enter the grid.

At times suddenly several landscapes and momentums  in real life look very much alike to sl.

Perhaps it's due to some kind of depriving syndrome although this exodus of mine from sl is now like 6 years old and I'm rather used to it.

Anyways sl not really taught me yet implies that rl is or can get equally magical and beautiful as sl.  It's a promise.

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Second Life taught me that I like *people* better in a world where their Identity is up to them. 

I could explain a lot about that, but it has a mostly to do with the RL stresses I dealt with concerning speech deficits from a stroke. I’m much better now, but for a long time I had some major insecurities because people who *knew* me would still look at me like my IQ had dropped 100 points if I started speaking.

”Drunk or Mental” was the judgement written all over their faces and as someone who was always something of a brainy-type, it really killed my soul.

So I did a lot of speech therapy and learned something about Judging.

Second Life is a place where we all choose what we project to the world. *who* you are matters; not *what* nor what happened to you.

That’s probably as close to Heaven as I’ll ever get, so I’ll take it 🙂

 

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Edited by Amanda Crisp
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Directly from my profile tab “1 rule to SL”:  "Don't forget your ABCs: Assume nothing; Believe no-one; Check everything. And never take your eye off the bigger picture." -DCI John Barnaby, Midsomer Murders.

Jaded, sad, hinging on misanthropic.  But I’ve encountered several situations & individuals that I am very grateful I do not have to deal with in my everyday life.  With the exception of someone I dated in RL who turned out to be the most horrific sort of monster, there’s lots of really rotten apples drawn to SL.

Thankfully there are beautiful souls as well.  But I’ve learned to be most cautious.

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That Americans always expect everyone to speak their language but rarely speak any second language themselves.

I also learned that cultural differences are awesome and it's fun to see things from other points sometimes although if we can not understand always the why it's nice to know the why (´∩。• ᵕ •。∩`) 

I also learned that I hate to be called "babe" or something else from strangers, be it women or men xD

SL is smaller than you think sometimes you keep meeting the same people in several different places.

I learned alot about foreign holidays and their way of getting celebrated.

I learned alot of things about so many stuff, just from visiting art and Museum places that other residents built, in SL it's a little like walking through anotjer person's brain. It's purely amazing.

 

 

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SL taught me that it is an outlet for people who cannot explore RL like most of us.

My loved mentor who is over 70 and has Parkinson's. Because of SL she can interact and live free for brief moments of time.

My friend who suffers from severe anxiety, who with SL would never leave their home.

My friend who is bedfast and cannot experience the world as we know it. 

Someone who I know that is M2F TG, but can never transition because they have children in RL. And, yes, I know there are people who transition and have families, but SHE can't. Not and keep her children. 

 

THIS is the beauty and freeing experience of SL

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SL is just like RL.
There are all kind of people.  From super nice to complete jerks and everything in between, they are all there, in all gender variaties and from all available cultures.
But in SL it is most of the time easier to get those jerks out of your life again.

In SL tends to be more drama about unimportant stuff than in RL, at least compared to my personal RL, that is thankfully pretty much free from drama over unimportant matters.

Edited by Sid Nagy
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8 minutes ago, Lewis Luminos said:

That it's possible to be in a loving relationship with someone for more than ten years, even when you've never met in RL. 

This and also it taught me that sometimes peoples true colors are behind the masks they wear. It's how you truly find the good people vs the bad. Best excuse I ever heard when someone has done something royally jacked up is I didn't do it my avatar did. My response is generally no idiot you did and wearing a mask absolves you of nothing. lol🤦‍♂️😎

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6 hours ago, Pixie Kobichenko said:

Directly from my profile tab “1 rule to SL”:  "Don't forget your ABCs: Assume nothing; Believe no-one; Check everything. And never take your eye off the bigger picture." -DCI John Barnaby, Midsomer Murders.

I love the Barnaby quote, Midsomer Murders is one of my favorite TV series, but that line is more for a good police inspector IMHO.
I tend to believe people until I'm proven wrong, but then again I don't have to solve murders on a weekly base.

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On 8/9/2021 at 1:33 PM, Alma Palmira said:

What have you discovered about the diverse RL world through the common SL virtual reality?

That there is a lot more stupid people on this rock than originally assumed. Or maybe the platform simply encourages it.

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Very interesting responses from all of you. I do find myself in a lot of them. Let me ask you this though. Have you seen the 2018 Movie Ready Player One? When i saw it, i could not help but think and kinda link it to SL and my experience in it. If you haven't seen it, its on Netflix.

Trailer:

 

Edited by CaithLynnSayes
typo
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1 hour ago, Sid Nagy said:

I love the Barnaby quote, Midsomer Murders is one of my favorite TV series, but that line is more for a good police inspector IMHO.
I tend to believe people until I'm proven wrong, but then again I don't have to solve murders on a weekly base.

I think with anything quotable, the relatability of a line differs from person to person & the miles they’ve walked & things they’ve seen.  
It is a really good show.

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That absolute anonymity, being behind these avatars, is both a blessing and a curse? 

That people don't change their stripes (their RL attitudes and/or behaviours) when they come here.

That there are far more men who are needing to explore a feminine side of themselves than even I had ever suspected. (And that open hostility and intolerance and hatred of this exists even here, where no one is necessarily what they appear to be. :( )

That you can't ever fully separate RL from SL, unless you're here strictly to RP a character. Your emotions will always seep through (or back to RL) a little, just in your behaviours alone.

People lie a lot.

That people can be wildly creative.

That people can be really brilliant and kind (see some of the regular forum posters as examples).

That people can be ever more wildly kinky.

That this is a neat experiment ... but can we please get it multithreaded and using our graphics cards better? Please? :)

And, finally, as an artist, judging from the size and proportions of most of the human male and female avatars in RL, that none of you has ever actually seen a real body. ;) (I tease.)

Edited by Katherine Heartsong
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29 minutes ago, CaithLynnSayes said:

Very interesting responses from all of you. I do find myself in a lot of them. Let me ask you this though. Have you seen the 2018 Movie Ready Player One? When i saw it, i could not help but think and kinda link it to SL and my experience in it. If you haven't seen it, its on Netflix.

Trailer:

 

The author of the book the movie is based on spent a lot of time in SL.   https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2012/10/ready-player-one-oases-in-second-life.html

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2 hours ago, Chris Nova said:

That there is a lot more stupid people on this rock than originally assumed. Or maybe the platform simply encourages it.

I wholeheartedly agree with this assessment. Just today I found myself quitting from a group, where I had the dumbest discussions about technical stuff... a guy insisting that scripts by themselves increase complexity... or the countless discussions I had about BOM being agnostic when it comes to UVs, and that BOM can be used regardless if a mesh has "SL Default UVs" or not. I am just absolutely done with trying to educate ppl. I'm truly sick of it. There is nothing wrong about being ignorant, we all are ignorant on something. But I don't understand why people that clearly know nothing about what they are talking about cannot admit they are wrong, even when providing them with the documention on these matters, produced by Linden Labs. I just can't... I've encountered countless people on the internet that suffer from the Dunning-Krueger effect, but nowhere near like in SL. It is uncanny.

 

2 hours ago, Katherine Heartsong said:

And, finally, as an artist, judging from the size and proportions of most of the human male and female avatars in RL, that none of you has ever actually seen a real body. ;) (I tease.)

I'm not sure if my avatar fits on your category, but the overly muscular avatar was a stylistic choice, not because I don't know the human body (Fashion Design degree, which obviously branches to subjects such as ergonomy and anthropometry).

I do have a pet peeve when it comes to proportions though, and I hate seeing avatars with T-Rex Syndrome... Most people do not realize that the arms span from fingertip to fingertip is the same as their height, which is clearly visible in the Vitruvian Man by Leonardo Da Vinci. I never say anything because I don't want to argue about that with anyone, but I find the little short arms quite disturbing.


Overall, I feel a bit disenchanted with SL. I have been a gamer all my life, since I was a kid, I have always helped other gamers modding their games, for free and because I like to educate people, it gives me a sense of accomplishment. But in SL, when I try to do it, I am barraged with attacks and insults, as if my good will, decades long experience with 3D and working with game engines is worth nothing. It is truly frustrating and disappointing, and I decided today I will no longer try to help anyone in SL. I'm done.

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