23 December 2008

SL / RL Parallel



Whether used as escapism or exploration, Second Life proves that old addage from that terrible movie 'The Adventures of Buckaroo Bonzai': wherever you go, there you are.


While continuing my Never-Ending Aimless Tour, in which I plonk a random word in SL's search engine and go wherever it tells me, I met a nice guy. Good attention to his clothes and appearance (even the eyes appeared to be the result of shopping, not stumbling a box of free eyes in the middle of a cornfield). An astute sense of humour - including fairly enjoyable bad-joke exchanges regarding angles (involving "obtuse questions" and "acute avatar" - groannn) and actuarials being the only people on Earth who could make accounting interesting to the regular world. A willingness to be lured away from a couple of stumbling noobs for a short dance with no chance of it going further than that.


And my first thought, as it is in RL, is: OK, what's wrong with this guy?
UPDATE -- I later found this fellow in real life - the hows and whys I will not go into. My journalistic instinct suggested I keep the information to myself. However, my personal instinct won out and I contacted him and told him how I found him, etc. Because he has a public position with authority, I advised him to get a different avatar if he wanted to pursue personal relationships (as he had intimated). He was a bit shocked by this revelation, and I admit to being a little concerned over how he would handle it. By the end of our chat, he appeared willing to consider a second avatar - one that would have no contact with his main one. I felt dead awful for scaring him like that, but better me than an associate of his.

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