March 18, 2011
My 9000-word article about Second Life appears in the most recent issue of Kill Screen Magazine, the Intimacy issue.

My 9000-word article about Second Life appears in the most recent issue of Kill Screen Magazine, the Intimacy issue.

Message from Second Life

You have been ejected from ‘Steampunks of New Babbage’ by Mosseveno Tenk.

January 6, 2011
“Mixed reality” artist Gracie Kendal (Kristine Schomaker) is hard at work on her 1000 Avatars, a tower of “life”-size avatars, photographed from behind. (Get it? Because, in a third-person game like Second Life, you only see your own backside—Gracie’s photos reflect how Second Life users actually come to visualize their virtual selves.) Pretty freaking cool.

“Mixed reality” artist Gracie Kendal (Kristine Schomaker) is hard at work on her 1000 Avatars, a tower of “life”-size avatars, photographed from behind. (Get it? Because, in a third-person game like Second Life, you only see your own backside—Gracie’s photos reflect how Second Life users actually come to visualize their virtual selves.)

Pretty freaking cool.

I’ve been trying, with difficulty, to write an article for a magazine, and especially to flesh out a shorter section about the Anglican Cathedral of Second Life. But I’d had no idea—until just now, anyway—that “Religion & Ethics” on PBS did a Second Life segment last year. The Anglican Cathedral gets a little airtime. Here it is.

January 3, 2011
How to stop looking like a newbie in Second Life
December 31, 2010
The Wastelands

The Wastelands

December 30, 2010
Infinite Lives - Identity in Second Life

I’d forgotten I posted this! It’s, uh, about falling in love with yourself.

Red Windsor Arcade and Billiards

Red Windsor Arcade and Billiards

November 6, 2009
In my RL I’ve been contemplating joining an Episcopalian church—I was raised Southern Baptist, while my elderly parents recently returned to Catholicism—and I think maybe my entire family appreciates strict liturgy, even though we have not always practiced that. So pretty unsurprisingly, my Jenn Avatar has infrequently dipped a toe into the Anglican Cathedral of Second Life. There’s a strong, active virtual community based around its daily or almost-daily services, and I really like many of its members’ British and New Zealand accents when they read call-and-response selections from the, uh, the Anglican Readings Hymnal thingie. About this: I really like the call-and-response, especially in a liturgical context (writer Amy Fusselman has a beautiful passage about sea shanties in her novella The Pharmacist’s Mate), but there’s something really magnetic and alienating, in turns, about the virtual call-and-response. One person will lead, reading canticles aloud via voice chat, and the rest of us will follow along silently. That’s the “call.” Then it’s time for our “response.” And the leader will pause, waiting for all of us to repeat the words in bold type, and during that silence, we are all whispering to ourselves at our computers all over the globe. And I imagine other people whispering to God with me. This is kind of a haunting feeling but, as many of these services occur well after my midnight, I know the rest of the world is awake and alive and swathed in daylight. Maybe this feeling is not what the Bible is talking about at all, when in certain passages It imparts the importance of establishing and maintaining churches and relationships and flocks, but I don’t know for sure.

In my RL I’ve been contemplating joining an Episcopalian church—I was raised Southern Baptist, while my elderly parents recently returned to Catholicism—and I think maybe my entire family appreciates strict liturgy, even though we have not always practiced that.

So pretty unsurprisingly, my Jenn Avatar has infrequently dipped a toe into the Anglican Cathedral of Second Life. There’s a strong, active virtual community based around its daily or almost-daily services, and I really like many of its members’ British and New Zealand accents when they read call-and-response selections from the, uh, the Anglican Readings Hymnal thingie.

About this: I really like the call-and-response, especially in a liturgical context (writer Amy Fusselman has a beautiful passage about sea shanties in her novella The Pharmacist’s Mate), but there’s something really magnetic and alienating, in turns, about the virtual call-and-response. One person will lead, reading canticles aloud via voice chat, and the rest of us will follow along silently. That’s the “call.” Then it’s time for our “response.” And the leader will pause, waiting for all of us to repeat the words in bold type, and during that silence, we are all whispering to ourselves at our computers all over the globe.

And I imagine other people whispering to God with me. This is kind of a haunting feeling but, as many of these services occur well after my midnight, I know the rest of the world is awake and alive and swathed in daylight. Maybe this feeling is not what the Bible is talking about at all, when in certain passages It imparts the importance of establishing and maintaining churches and relationships and flocks, but I don’t know for sure.

February 5, 2009
Narshe Talbot announced that he was off to attend a SL discussion group, so of course I invited myself along. During the discussion, I actually changed shoes, having noticed that my feet weren’t quite fitted into them properly. But I didn’t change shoes before Narshe snapped this photo, hence all the awkwardness at the ankles. Ths discussion itself was interesting (you can read about it at Narshe’s Tumblog), and I was, of course, completely delighted to meet up with a real-life friend-not-met (to use FOAF parlance) via virtual circumstances. Very, very cool.

Narshe Talbot announced that he was off to attend a SL discussion group, so of course I invited myself along. During the discussion, I actually changed shoes, having noticed that my feet weren’t quite fitted into them properly. But I didn’t change shoes before Narshe snapped this photo, hence all the awkwardness at the ankles.

Ths discussion itself was interesting (you can read about it at Narshe’s Tumblog), and I was, of course, completely delighted to meet up with a real-life friend-not-met (to use FOAF parlance) via virtual circumstances. Very, very cool.