Love Zhaoying

If you read the article but never tried Second Life, would it pique your interest enough try it?

It doesn't make us sound TOO much like losers, it's just not a very good or fair representation of the current "state" of Second Life. If anyone read her article and then thought, "I'll go to Luskwood" - they would have no clue about what "Furry" culture is like from the tameness that is (or was) Luskwood.

Yiffing? Yeeting usually means "tossing away" The normal term is just, "Yiffy"! I used to go to the GYC - "Gay Yiffy Club" and drop a few L$10k's on their 'sploder just to watch 20 people or so TP in and pile on top of each other, as close to the 'sploder as they could get. I'd usually apologize to the host and DJ before doing it. I never saw "yiffing" there though. "Yiffy" has generally just come to mean, "furry fun". Like an in-joke. ("Yiff" is supposedly the noise a fox makes while um.."yiffing".) "How are you doing?" "Yiffy, thanks!"

I can see doing that if you're the Host / Hostess (and it's your shift), or it's a party where you should know a lot of people.. But even during the heyday when I would TP into a popular, maxed-out Furry club, I never would have said, "Hi to everyone I don't see yet". Because I'd have no reason to think that I missed anyone (when taking it literally). If I TP'd into a close group of friends (for example, into a Forum Cartel party, as if they'd have me LOL)..I can see recognizing a lot of people, saying hi, then feeling awkward about those I couldn't see yet. But it would still be a somewhat unusual sensation for me to feel awkward about it enough to say something. Guess I'm not sociable enough!

So: If the article had been written about the current angst and changes, then of course it would have a different tone. Darker (if possible), more "dystopian", more "evil lurking", etc.

I ran across someone the other day who was still using one of those! I thought the reference in the article was more to the "typing sound", "clack clack".

A lot of "first impressions" of Second Life, cached in colorful language and "anti-game-theory". I liked the "anti-fun" comments.

Ok, Ok.."Ms. Dr. Rhiadra".. Ok, but with no "examples" (except how avatars "work")..you're left with the impression that Second Life is "degrading", slowly "breaking down", and she did not provide any examples that resonated with the tone she used in describing the "glitchiness" (I dare say, a somewhat "post-apocalyptic" tone). She did give the "things not rendering" example, but as regulars know, that's just Second Life. You get used to it (or you don't). Depending where you go, and your settings, you may not really notice that much.

Found one instance: "Perhaps as the software of Second Life continues to age and degrade, more pockets of resistance will form" Like..whut? And: "Second Life could simultaneously be described as an infinite world engine, a terminally online exquisite corpse, a global economic model, an embodied chat board, and a social experiment." (off the current topic - but the author blames PRIMS for frame-rates LOL) "Despite major upgrades in 2023, Second Life avatars remain obscenely glitchy, with airbrushed faces and spooky, unblinking eyes." "The latent possibilities of Second Life’s glitchy, weird avatars "

OMG this misinformation is SOOO BAD - immediately following the text fro mmy post above: “Look for the green dots on the map for real active users,” she proffers, a parting gift of Second Life wisdom. “The bots can’t replicate those, at least not yet.” This is totally false. Bots still look like normal users on the map. Unless that changed? And even if it "changed", then "at least not yet" is still backwards.

@Scylla Rhiadra- I did find a "mention" of the Luskwood "shrine", I'll have to check if it really changed - her description doesn't include "statues" (rezzed avatars for each "model"): "She takes me to her favorite spot in the game, which happens to be in this sim: a gigantic redwood tree, stretching as high as any good skybox. Inside its cavernous undercarriage is a secret shrine to legends of Second Life’s furry community, including the grand architect of Luskwood herself. Photos of various community-builders throughout the years litter the walls. "

I saw a couple phrases while peeking between my fingers that basically implied "SL is degrading". I am going back to see whether there was anything specific. This had caught my eye earlier: "..catalyzed by the realization of just how reality-adjacent it is to First Life. This is a truism leveraged more broadly against the platform’s system architect, Linden Lab, than its users, who seem to delight in moments when that system breaks down, from avatars to property, scaffolding new social behaviors atop its fault lines." I come away NOW, thinking this means we (the users) seem to delight when the "system" of "being reality-adjacent" breaks down; upon initial reading, I thought it meant when the "system" of "Second Life itself" breaks down. Ms. @Scylla Rhiadra? Teacher? Essplain pwease?

Ok, then - to end such a story with a neologism is, I suppose, an intentional choice to end with some panache. I doubt that "reworld" will live on to be in our vocabulary, at least from this specific artwork.

This is a very interesting conversation!

Try parsing the last sentence or two, with at least one made-up word, when even a "Second Life" term would have been fine. "..the perfect place to respawn, reimagine, and reworld our own."

It would be interesting to see what they used for an avatar. (Putting together a "Wizard" outfit isn't that hard given the MP.)

I guess "demeaning" is close enough to "shaming". "Kink-demeaning" has a different ring to it.

Beef cake

..Thank you for giving us something to discuss beside the TOS changes..

The style of this initial section, is almost directly lifted from the style of Alfred Bester's seminal 1956 Science Fiction novel, The Stars My Destination - in which everyone but the severely disabled could teleport, or "jaunt" as it was called in the novel: "I’m on an outdoor dance floor that doubles as an ice-skating rink; strangers swirl around me while a full moon floats above in an incandescent purple haze. I teleport. I’m on a love island; wild flamingos dot an infinite stretch of ocean, and I crouch behind a tiger to eavesdrop on a proposal. I teleport again. I’m in the abandoned HQ of a property management group called Blackwater; Ukrainian flags decorate a neoclassical palace, strung-out meditation exercises play on loop, the backyard is a galaxy. I pause my e-tourism agenda and zoom out the map. This cluster of sims—the term for an area of virtual land in Second Life—becomes a tiny, twinkling node in an infinite sea of possible worlds." So, even though I recognize the imagery and story-telling style, in this part I do see some good prose. If I were to find the matching section in Bester's book - it could be shockingly similar. I will just leave that to my own imagination.

Like anyplace else, there are "events" so number of users are sure to vary.

I wonder how many buzzwords / terms are in the article, seemingly added to give it spice? Queer Space Heteronormative ASMR etc.

I'd have to go there and see. The absence of people wouldn't "prove" anything though, right? Even back in the day, if you went there at a random time, you may only see a few avatars. My own experience is mostly of the large Forests. (Not the malls or anything.) And a special place where an example of each avatar is rezzed similar to a shrine in a volcano (like where the statue of all the Avatars are in Avatar: The Last Airbender), as in a secret place to be viewed only by those who know it is there. (If they wrote about THAT, I would be impressed.) I think a lot of us may recognize the fact Luskwood still exists "at all" is the impressive part. If they still sell their avatars, even if mostly to "new" Furry users, that's still an indication of success.

I think their use of "queer spaces" and "time capsules" to characterize places they DID visit, was a way to give significance to those places instead of needing to research or write about more. While I have not read the entire article (and still am shy to), I will be surprised if anything I read is a "new, surprising, shiny" thing that I would only expect to stumble on or learn about on the Forums.