AmandaKeen

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Technology has leveraged the greatest OPPORTUNITY for behavioral change within gender roles. Instant global communication has increased awareness and therefore enlightened many to *new* possibilities. Good ideas are hard to kill once they get communicated. Tools have made former gender-based restrictions based on upper body strength and reproductive (gestation) cycles largely irrelevant - although still enforced in many areas. Technology and Social Media have also caused some of the most conflicted messaging in history...the modern woman is supposed to be financially and emotionally independent while *at the same time* remaining ”forever 21”, having some version of a “perfect” body shape, buying shoes that kill their feet and generally conforming to Pop Cultures version of what “normal” looks like. ......and we tune in daily to make sure we know what that is.

BDSM in Second Life is hard to quantify as “all one thing” because - just like in RL - it’s practitioners vary in ideology, motivation and the soft skills that underpin a good Dom/Domme. This leaves us with trying to narrow down the specific fetishes the Domme/Submissives wish to address and what hard limits they might have. That information -can- be quantified on a list. The value of that on an Avatar matching service means you can narrow the field of possibles considerably, and much faster than talking to one person at a time. The other virtue has to deal with anonymity. The person “seeking” has an opportunity to “screen” potentials without revealing their identity until they feel confident that they have a viable candidate. This reduces the chance of having people with a penchant for “stalking” behaving badly if they are -not- the One offered a Negotiation. Many people have issues with Rejection, so the anonymity of using the service is probably an emotional cushion for people -not- selected as they might not even know their profile was considered. Less drama is always good for SL. Avatar marching is no better overall than going door to door from the aspect of -knowing- who a person is; but it can help you rule out people whose compatibility would be low and spare everyone’s feelings in the process.

Thank you Orwar.... This will be a shocker, but AvMatch.com did a great job of putting what I was looking for in front of -the right audience. Avatar matching services are looked at with a good deal of skepticism, but for this specific purpose - top marks 🙂

Just a thought, but I had massively better success locating a Submissive by *not* looking here on the forums. The SL Forums involve only a small fraction of the SL population, of which only *some* are on the Scene. Checking out the BDSM venue of your choice *or* using one of the Avatar Dating Services might work better as people who are “actively looking” can be found in either locale. I’m unsure if I can actually Name the service I accessed (without getting in trouble) when I was looking for my Girl, but the results were abnormally good as their search base had lots of “possibles” to scrub through. Specific to BDSM - its handy to be able to search by the particular Kinks and Time Zones you’re interested in. There *are* unicorns out there - they just need to be hunted in the right places 😉 Big Datasets = Higher Quality Results

I love San Antonio 🙂 My son attended training there and I visited to see him graduate. San Antonio has a deep and mixed cultural heritage and like you; I can see myself living there someday.

Second Life is certainly influenced by Americans, but the influence is what some might call a “skewed sample”... Americans in Sl tend towards the sector of population that would have a need or propensity towards online, virtual worlds. Geeky people like me, people with life-limiting disabilities (me to some degree), gamers, people with a specific intrest in SL’s sex content or people who don’t “RL” well and prefer the digital world (also me to some degree after the Balkans). The end result is that a big chunk of America is un-represented here because “its a really big place”, like China... Generalizing about Americans based on Sl behavior might be a little off kilter, just like generalizing from popular media would be as media tends to only report the sensationally BAD to sell advertising with. My Sl Partner is a proud Canadian and I love her dearly - so I would point out that hers is a distinctly different culture than what we have in the lower 48 states. My Sl Friends encompass several Australians and Germans as well as people from the UK, EU and even California 🙂 I consider myself lucky to have such a global collection of friends and I didn’t have to work hard to find them. My personal belief is that *if* we all worked at trying to get to know each other in venues like SL, it could make small difference in how we get along outside of it. I’ve got to see personally what happens when supposedly civilized people decide that ethnic cleansing is the way to go, so I am really in favor of any platform that offers us a chance to see one another as people instead of “them”. SL is largely what you make of it, and if you’d like some help meeting a broader swath - I’d be honored. RL gave me the chance to see a big chunk of the world when I was young, my unscientific observation is that “people are people”, so how we get along iss entirely up to us.

Game?

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Kress/172/160/2501

I'm traveling IRL at the moment, but will as soon as I get home 🙂 Thank you !!!

Thats a very good question; and I have a probably so-so answer 🙂 ”Stolen Valor” is principally a USA term, so I’ll confine my answer to thatn demogeaphic. Military veterans in the USA make up a very small component of our population, relative to the number of civilians they represented while on active duty. Many Americans have no one in their extended family who has ever served in peacetime or war (and thats a good thing) and therefore have no frame of reference bout who the are, how their experiences shape them or the challenges they face. My grandfather came home from War and had a very hard time shifting from “Marine Infantry” mode back to “Cattle Rancher”, but he made it. His travails trying to find “normal” again were painful, as were his physical disabilities - which is why he has always been my personal hero (much of that for his determination to live a good life with my grandmother after the war) and he was the reason I scandalized my mother by enlisting myself when I turned eighteen. Veterans in the USA had a very hard time after Korea and Vietnam, either ignored or actively despised by some of their own countrymen. This makes the “veteran community” perhaps a litte bit sensitive to people who never served, but claim that they did and process to behave like jerks. Being badly represented by someone “claiming” to be a veteran tarnishes the public reputation of those who did, and sullies the reputations of friends who never got to come home and make a life like my grandfather did. There are so many people willing to think ill of veterans, especially combat veterans, that the community doesn’t really need Posers giving them any fuel by behaving badly. I won’t say anything about the morality of war except to say as a veteran myself I passionately wish our political leaders would figure out how to stop making new ones. As an aside, I will note that *rarely* will you hear a genuine combat veteran boasting about it, telling gory stories or posturing in public. Going to “the bad part of your head” is painful and usually something that only gets unpacked in the presence of others who have seen that particular elephant. My grandfather never really opened up about his experiences until I came back from my little misadventure, and told me only a tithe of his experiences even then. All this being said, I see no reason to ban Military Posers and no way to police it if there was. Those of us who *have* served can usually identify our own with a few questions, as the military is an insular community and a Pretender just won’t know some of the answers 🙂. If someone takes too long to respond, its fair to assume they’re googling and google notoriously gets “insider” military culture wrong. The resentment of veterans against Military Posers bears great similarity to the concerned about non-minorities who play minority “blackface” avatars or RL males posing as women in SL. It treads the line between Offensive and Free Expression, and as someone whose job it once was to protect Free Expression for my nation - it would be bad for me to come down on it even when it leaves me furious. This probably was unhelpful, but I tried 🙂

Firestorm 6.0.2 (56680) Feb 9 2019 18:55:39 (64bit) (Firestorm-Releasex64) with Havok support Release Notes RestrainedLove API: (disabled) libcurl Version: libcurl/7.54.1 OpenSSL/1.0.2l zlib/1.2.8 nghttp2/1.25.0 J2C Decoder Version: KDU v7.10.6 Audio Driver Version: FMOD Studio 1.10.10 Dullahan: 1.1.1080 / CEF: 3.3325.1750.gaabe4c4 / Chromium: 65.0.3325.146 LibVLC Version: 2.2.8 Voice Server Version: Not Connected Settings mode: Firestorm Viewer Skin: Firestorm (Grey) Window size: 1920x1017 px Font Used: Deja Vu (96 dpi) Font Size Adjustment: 0 pt UI Scaling: 1 Draw distance: 64 m Bandwidth: 1200 kbit/s LOD factor: 2 Render quality: High (5/7) Advanced Lighting Model: Yes Texture memory: 1024 MB (1) VFS (cache) creation time (UTC): 2018-7-26T1:30:59 Built with MSVC version 1800 March 23 2019 10:33:59 SLT

I seem to be having some kind of systemic incomparability with the change. The colors on everything are off, lag has jumped to "horrible everywhere". I haven't done any photography here since the change hit. I run a Asus ROG PC with a decent GPU; at the moment I'm slightly underwhelmed with this improvement.

Right in the mark Skell !!!

Normally that’s not a peeve unless they also resort to #2 when the uninitiated use the wrong name for the situation....