Treet TV

I don't spend a lot of time watching the in-world Second Life television network Treet TV, but I continue to be utterly amazed at the production values and the immense amount of work Saffia Widdershins and her crew put into the wide variety of shows they air. Since 2007 they have produced a wide variety of programs-- dramas, talk shows, fashion shows, sports events, tutorials, business-- and they've been doing it for seven years now.

Saffia

My television allows me to select from nine streams-- business, community, fashion, lifestyle, metanomics, music, shopping, sports, and live broadcasts. Wow!

What astonishes me about Treet is how very much like real life it can be. The first sports event I watched was an ice hockey game, and the sportscasters could have been from NBC. They were talking about the strengths and weaknesses of the players, getting all excited like sportscasters do. Except for the occasional SL-specific comment like, "The coach has called a time-out because Jaworski seems to have crashed," it's utterly like any hockey game.

Photo by SL Newser

I can't say the same for the giant snail racing.

Photo by SL Newser

Snail racing is just absurd from top to bottom. That's its charm. It has to be seen to be believed. You really owe it yourself to watch a race in person or at least on your television.

Tonight Sweetie and I tuned into the live channel and watched the Designing Worlds program; it featured a team from the Firestorm Viewer Project and went into considerable detail about the viewer, the team's processes, and the support network.We also watched multiple episodes of the drama The Blackened Mirror.

Oftentimes a show will send us out exploring. When she saw her first pro wrestling show, Sweetie was enamored. We had to go to an actual match.

Now, I grew up in the South, where "professional" wrestling was once a fact of live on Saturday television. I knew how things will unfold. Sweetie, on the other hand, had never seen a wrestling program. When two wrestlers were in the ring with a table to sign a declaration of peace, I knew what was about to happen. Sweetie didn't. "Oh, look, they're making nice," she said.

Two minutes later, of course, one of the wrestlers was lying unconscious on a broken table. Sweetie couldn't believe it.

"I can't believe it," she said, as I laughed into my sleeve.

So anyway, Saffia, if you read this, or if any of your partners in crime see this, congratulations for doing such a marvelous and no doubt mostly thankless job.