Incidentally, this month's issue runs a feature - STAND4LOVE - with photography from one of my other all-time SL favourites - Paola Tauber. Well worth checking out.
Of course I miss the people; of course I miss all those
regular events: these, after all, were the things by which my SL was defined;
it was the fabric of my virtual universe.
Life’s old tapestries fold all too easily into boxes if new occupations
tumble upon their space, however. Be they
physical or digital, past times are past times – it’s not important to the
brain the medium in which social connections took place – and we’re used to
moving on. I made a book of pictures at
the end of my five year run as Huck (you can see it for yourself at http://issuu.com/huckleberryhax/docs/five) and
largely this has served when the mild urge to reconnect to those times has
asserted itself.
What’s surprised me, however, is just how significantly I
miss building. Never really, a mainstay
of my SL – more of a side-line; something I dabbled in from time to time – I
didn’t for one moment assume that this would feature at all prominently in any
tug back towards the virtual world.
Don’t get me wrong: when I was in the mood to build, I could do it for
hours and barely notice that the time was passing. I built things from that post-war period when
the future we now worry in was gazed upon as a luxury time of atomic rockets
and robot servants and flying cars: 60s and 70s artefacts such as Danish Modern
furniture, teak-veneered electronics and concrete buildings with angles that
seemed determined to defy nature in every manner possible. But this celebration of the childhood
memories and fantasies of Generation X was more about nostalgic play than it
was about any determined effort to make and sell retro-futurism
merchandise. The grand opening of my
Second Life shop was always just around the corner because the small business
of actually building my Second Life shop was something I was just too lazy to
do. I never bothered learning how to
make my own sculpties, buying off-the-shelf blanks when I needed one for
furniture I was building, because getting into third party software was just
too much like hard work. And there was
about as much chance of me learning how to design mesh, once I’d seen the user
interface for Blender, as there was me spending the several weeks it would take
me to sort my aforementioned inventory into neatly categorised folders. Basically, I built stuff for occasional,
therapeutic fun. And nothing more than
that.
Yet, bizarrely, building is one of the things I miss most of
all about SL right now. Building, after
all, wasn’t a set of people or a place belonging to a time now over; building
was something I did – albeit only
occasionally – and did throughout my entire SL.
Many of the other things I did whilst I was inworld, like writing poems
and stories, I actually did alongside it and can continue to do now; building,
however, is an SL-only activity. Yes, I
know I could learn 3D modelling in an external application, but given the
amount of commitment to such paraphernalia I indicated earlier, do you honestly
think this likely?
One of the things I loved about building was the keen eye it
gave me for potential textures in the real world. The sheer joy at finding a texture that both
offered a good angle and looked like it could be made seamless without too much
effort was a difficult phenomenon to relate to those unacquainted with its
quality. Some 1970s sky blue tiles
between two shop fronts which had just been revealed by a large patch of
plaster falling off. A 40 year old
wallpaper in a beach shop in Normandy.
An avocado-on-white lattice design on a ledge in the gents’ toilets of a
conference centre that used to be a secondary school. Yes. The
mobile phone camera is a wonderful thing when such treasures reveal themselves
to you in your passing (the women in the beach shop to this day must wonder
what the hell I was doing taking photographs of her wall). My most used texture of all was the teak
veneer I used for my DM furniture: part of the reason I love this style is that
my parents had loads of it when I was growing up and my mother still owns quite
a bit. But the years haven’t been kind
to these surfaces (I confess, I played my part in their current grubbiness) and
none of it looked good enough to sample for the creation in SL of something I
wanted to look brand new. Imagine, then,
my excitement when I remembered the rarely used expansion leaf hanging under
the centre of my mother’s dining room table and rotated it out to reveal near-virgin
quality teak veneer. I felt like a
five-year-old at Christmas.
I’ve written here before about how immersion in SL can
sometimes bring about a heightened sense of awareness of RL detail; to be able
to look at a blandly refurbished 60s building a thousand times previously
ignored and spot suddenly a glimpse of its original design and aspiration – a
miniscule breakthrough of the recent past, blinking through a crack into the
future – is a new pleasure I relish and one I would not have if it wasn’t for
my building in SL. I enjoy my
surroundings more, even if I don’t now rush every time to take pictures of what
to everyone else looks like a badly maintained bit of wall. Simply looking and relishing the look is
enough.
There’s a lot made of building in SL from the perspective of
creating saleable content. I, for one,
will always maintain support for the notion of a virtual world in which the
content is user created: this is one of SL’s defining and most magnificent
features. But building is also just fun
and everyone should at least dabble in it from time to time. And if the cost of uploading textures puts
you off, I feel duty-bound to point out that InWorldz® has an identical
building system to SL, except that texture uploads are free. Don’t worry about making something that’s
going to earn you millions: just find a sandbox and build something you’d like
to build. It’ll make you happier.
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