The Icarus Society

Written 17 January, 2007

The Icarus Society

We like to get silly in Forsaken.

Dodge and Damian, their friend Renamon, and Exuberance have a great sense of the absurd, and we’ve had some great times together.

Witness the dragon party in the caldera.

Sweetie and I have had some great times together.

Witness our high flight adventures.

And so, Sweeetie made her first group.

It’s called the Icarus Society. It’s named for the Greek of legendary fame, who flew too close to the sun, melting the wax on his artificial wings and plunging to his death.

The purpose of the Icarus Society—if it has a purpose—is to do noble and ridiculous and wonderful things.

Sweetie’s suitor, whose name I can never remember, is in Icarus, and so is my friend Jesse Prior, who would love to join our antics but whose throughput is too slow to run SL properly. And, of course, Sweetie.

While we were discussing the ridiculous and the sublime, Sweetie and I—mostly Sweetie, I think—came up with the idea of making a giant drinking bird.

You may remember giant drinking birds.

They were little heat engines that bobbed back and forth, the bird dipping its beak into a glass of water at the end of its swing. Look at the photo.

It was my impression that the Icarus Society would build the drinking bird as a cooperative project, but Alan showed up one night with a working model.

It wasn’t nearly as big as our dream, but it was big enough, 40 or so meters in height, and it worked well enough, or at least for a time until script errors accumulated and it fell apart.

Sweetie's suitor dropped it off and left—he doesn’t seem to do much hanging out—maybe he’s just busy in real life—and Sweetie started it up. We called Dodge and Damian, and soon we were all four riding on the great bird, laughing our asses off and getting a bit dizzy.

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I can’t explain just how darn funny it is doing something like riding the big bird. All I can say is I laughed so hard in real life that my sides were soon hurting.

When the bird fell apart I rezzed a horde of battling daleks (fighting robot inspired by Dr. Who), and soon the great flat area of East Beach was filled with talking robots, flying robot parts, and flaming and smoking wreckage.

After that, it just got silly.

We began to rez vehicles.

I brought out my Rocket 88 hovercraft and was soon zooming about, not only on the flat land but over the water, and climbing the side of the mountain.

Then I rezzed a UPS truck and set it afire. That’s a trick I learned from Jesse. He would have been proud.

Then Dodge and Damian and I rode around in a Mustang rezzed by Dodge, spending a lot of time underwater and finally buzzing Nikolas’ house. Sweetie, whose laptop is slow to rez, couldn’t quite catch up to us.

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Photos: Icarus Society craziness at Pele.