Out, Standing In Her Field

I’ve posted before about live music on Second Life, and now I can show you some. Montavious Peccable was a neighbor of mine when I lived on Darkstar. He’s still a good friend and an awesome musician. This clip was made at a club called Nadima’s Magic Bean (as in coffee bean) on Happy Clam Island, one of my favorite music venues. No, I don’t appear in the video, but some of my friends do.

This is for everyone who doesn’t “get” Second Life. Normally I wouldn’t post YouTube videos because they’re generally an enormous waste of bandwidth, but this one involves three things I really like: Second Life, the art of Van Gogh, and the song “Vincent” by Don McClean

Living in a Painting

So, call me mushy; I was moved to tears. But, this is the sort of thing that you can do in SL if you have the motivation.

An article in The PETA Files blog hails the upcoming anti-fur protest rally that the organization is going to hold in Second Life on July 12. Their slogan for this rally appears to be “I’d rather be pixelated than wear fur.”

Ooookay. I won’t wear fur in Real Life, and avoid doing so in Second Life as well. One of my favorite SL clothing designers makes outfits trimmed in “fur” and it makes me sad. I love animals (see the multitude of critter and cat-centric photos upstream). However, PETA chaps my butt for their extremist views for the general treatment of animals, so this move is giving me pause. I’m not quite sure what to make of it.

I’m also curious about how PETA regards Second Life’s community of Furries — people who would prefer to interact in SL using animal, mostly mammalian and fur-bearing, avatars. This is the ultimate in the wearing of fur by humans, IMO, though your mileage will vary, depending on the furry to whom you speak.

I may send my alt (alternative avatar) to the rally wearing his fox AV, just to see what happens…

Concerts merge live, Internet and virtual world - CNN.com

Well, I dunno — I’ve been attending live concerts in Second Life for months now — and CNN is finally latching on to the fact? The region where I rent, DarkStar, has it’s own house band, two venues for live music, a radio station venue, and a dance hall that plays streaming Grateful Dead and Phish concert recordings. We have several musicians in residence as well as artists in other media.

Second Life is a great venue for small-time musicians: They can be heard by an audience that spans the globe, in real time. Back in the day, garage bands never had it so good, even with the occasional technical hiccup.

Mother Jones Online makes me think and frequently makes me laugh. Their article, “Even Better Than The Real Thing,” does both.

Why do people get hooked on their virtual lives? Because of my medical issues, I’m more or less house-bound. However, I know I can do things in Second Life that I can’t in Real Life: I’m nesting, building and furnishing a virtual house on virtual land which I’m leasing, on a virtual island that is the ultimate aging hippy’s daydream. I can even make a buck doing art: I “sold” one of my 3d graphics images to a friend, and have been told I should post them in a gallery, and take in some real money. (I’m of two minds on that.)

My therapist tells me that this is a good thing; I’m connecting to other people and exploring outside the confines of my apartment.

I wonder, though, if or when I’ll cross the line…