Chi-Chi VI: Decoration Day

Written 28 December, 2006

Chi-Chi

VI. Decoration Day

When Chi-Chi furnished her house, her bed, which fit nicely into one of the leaves of the clover, clocked in at 45 prims.

“That’s, uh, a nice bed, Chi.” I wondered how many pose balls were hidden in it.

I left her to her work.

It was the following morning I discovered Chi’s outrageous prim count.

Chi is a very nice person. Of course she took the prims away as soon as she got my message, and of course, she was most apologetic.

“I had no idea!”

I wish I hadn’t told her it was the sex machines. Before I did, she was secure in her knowledge that her windows were one-way and her door was locked. I had shattered her world.

“But my door is locked! Isn’t it?!”

Chi-Chi lives in an SL that adheres to the laws of energy and matter of the physical world. Walls are walls and locks are locks, and that is that.

I didn’t tell her her door (perhaps because it wasn’t really locked, and perhaps because I was owner of the land) had opened right up for me, and I had just walked in—after using the map to make sure she wasn’t there, for I didn't want to intrude on her privacy. Instead, I widened her reality by explaining camera control.

“If you click on a wall and rotate the view, Chi, you can see on the other sides of walls. I only wanted to see what was causing the high prim count. I counted the prims in your objects, and it was the sex machines that ran the count up. One of them has 89 prims.”

“They aren’t mine! A friend put them out for me!”

Last time I looked, Chi’s prim count was 43.

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Photo: Sex Machine, owned, for some reason, by Chey. I have no idea how it got in my inventory. Really.

Chi-Chi V: Prim Count

Written 28 December, 2006


Chi-Chi

V. Prim Count

I initially gave Chi-Chi a prim allowance of 50 (house prims included in count). When I acquired an additional 2048 lot, I bumped it up to 75.

Call me stingy if you want, but my friend Kal pays for his place in a rental sim, and he is allowed only 30 prims.

Chi’s house sat vacant for several weeks. Then I got an IM (frantic, of course) from her.

“I have three landmarks for my skybox and I can’t get to it! Flint is coming to lock the door for me!!!”

Maybe it’s the exclamation marks that give Chi’s IMs their frantic air.

“Can you tell me the name of that place where we were shopping the other day?”

Maybe not.

“Two guys just gave me and my GF 5000 Lindens!”

Maybe so.

I was dancing with my sweetie, but left to go check the property. Sure enough, I had somehow set About Land to exclude teleports above 200 meters. Another stupid mistake on my part. I removed the restrictions and hurried back to my sweetie’s arms.

The next morning, I logged onto SL and happened to check Pele’s prim count.

Chi-Chi Columbia: 189

WTF?

It was far too early in the day for Chi to be online, so I sent her an IM.

“Hon, you have 189 prims on my land. That’s 114 more than your allowance.

“Prims are of critical importance in Second Life, maybe even more important than money. The land only allows so many. If the prim count goes too high, it could wreck the land.”

Maybe it would wreck the land, and maybe it wouldn’t. I had never been close to the prim maximum before, and didn’t really know. Perhaps, I thought, I could ask Artik.

It’s important to note I had presented Chi-Chi with a four-prim sofa (and a nice leather one at that!) and a one-prim table I made myself. I had been sending her messages whenever I would come across low-cost, low-prim household furnishings.

“Here’s a four-prim bed, only $200 Lindens. It has twelve different wood types, and twelve different sets of sheets, and it has single and couples sleeping poses.”

The bed was so nice, in fact, that I bought one for myself.

But Chi-Chi wanted—

“I want a sex bed!” That frantic tone.

Of course. How stupid of me.

I thought about telling her that pulling out pose balls would turn any bed into a sex bed, but decided to keep my mouth shut.

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Photo: Sex Bed

Chi-Chi IV: Replacement Skybox

Written 28 December, 2006

Chi-Chi

IV. Replacement Skybox

I didn’t realize until it was a done deal that I had killed Chi-Chi’s house in the About Land menu.

She was offline, so I send her an abject apology via IM.

“Don’t worry. It just went back to the Lost and Found folder in your inventory.”

A few days later we met at the caldera to rehang the box. But the P20 was not, in fact, in Chi’s Lost and Found folder. It was not, in fact, anywhere in her inventory.

I was soon convinced this was more than a problem of messy inventory; it really wasn’t there. To be sure the house was named P20, we even contacted Mr. Stantz, who assured us it was.

“It’s not here!” Chi-Chi wailed.

Of course you can’t wail in IM, but believe me, Chi was wailing.

“I’ll make it right,” I said meekly. “I’ll buy another, if need be.”

I mean, $500L or so wouldn’t kill me.

But when we got to his lot, Mr. Stantz, gracious and generous as ever, gave Chi a replacement. Then he customized colors and textures (well, for a four-leaf clover, the house was awfully somber in aspect) until weariness overtook him.

By then, Chi’s formerly black skybox had a pleasant stucco texture and color.

We stuck the house back in the sky, Chi set a new Home spot, and Bob was your uncle.

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Photo: Chi-Chi’s replacement skybox, retexturized, on Mr. Stantz' lot, with Chey and Mr. Stantz. Chrissy asked for a mustard color, but hated it when it arrived.

Chi-Chi III: Hanging the Skybox

Written 27 December, 2006

Chi-Chi

III. Hanging the Skybox

The next task was to hang Chi-Chi’s skybox at Pele.

Chi-Chi met me at the caldera, and we spent fifteen minutes trying to find her skybox.

That is, I supervised from the sidelines while Chi-Chi rooted through her inventory.

Finally, she located it.

Then it was time to drag the skybox to the ground and materialize it.

Now, you have to understand about Chi-Chi. She is an SL innocent.

Yes, despite her occupation. She is an innocent.

Whether it’s by design or simply her nature, I don’t know, but Chi-Chi understands little about how things work in Second Life. She does not know, for instance, how to move an object from one side of a room to another. Locating an object in her inventory seems to take great effort—and is sometimes unsuccessful.

I spent most of my second week in SL organizing my inventory (and thank the volcano goddess I did!). I shudder to think of the state of Chi-Chi’s. Once, at PixelDolls, she tried on a skin, then couldn’t find her old one. I will forever remember her running naked in panic through the store.

I can absolutely understand why Chi fell apart. I would freak if I lost my own skin. But it was something to see.

“I can’t find my old skin!’

“Do you know its name?”

“No!”

You know, I rather wish I was more like Chi-Chi. I think hers is the more pure SL experience. As I wrote in the intro to this series of blogs, she’s purely a social being, while me, I spend time deciding whether the coconut palm or the banana tree with young fruit looks better at coordinates 14, 37, 28 at Pele—when, that is, I’m not wiping out the island with my terraforming attempts. Yes, I should be more like Chi-Chi.

Chi did eventually manage to find her skybox, and, after six or seven unsuccessful attempts, managed to rez it at the top of the mountain, where it would be more or less centered on my property.

Then I had her select edit, and, in the Z position box, type 300. She did.

“OMG! My house is gone!” she IMed, even though I was only four meters away.

I had already told her the house would jump to its final location. I told her again.

“It’s just where we need it to be. Wait a second and I’ll fly up and give you a teleport."

I flew up to the house and saw to my astonishment and delight that it was shaped like a four-leafed clover. Way cool! Way cooler, in fact, than the rather mundane model I had favored.

I landed on the outside platform, opened the door, walked inside, and sent a teleport assist to Chi-Chi. And Chi-Chi had a home.

Until I accidentally returned it to her inventory.

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Photo: Chi-Chi’s original skybox at Pele (right). The skybox to the left is an industrial-size low-prim job I couldn't pass up. It's now the Dragon Skybar.

Chi-Chi II: Buying a Skybox

Written 27 December, 2006

Chi-Chi

II. Buying a Skybox

So, Chi and I went skybox shopping.

A skybox is a house that hangs in the sky.

In Second Life, of course, you can hang anything in the sky, even a pose ball or a lost Damian prim at 243 meters. You can hang any building at 400 meters, but skyboxes LOOK as if they should be hanging at 400 meters.

I did some preliminary scouting and teleported Chi-Chi to a lot and left her to look over the various sky dwellings while I went to talk details of house construction with Aaron Vollmer and Exuberance Lefleur.

Before I left, I told Chi-Chi she should make sure the house she chose was transferable, so I could give it to her after I bought it for her, and that it had a low prim count. “No more than 30, if possible,” I said.

I didn’t think that would pose a problem, since the builder was online and on-site.

Soon, though, I was getting frantic IMs from Chi-Chi.

All IMs from Chi-Chi have a frantic tone, but these were especially frantic. She was faced with a decision and needed my support. Would I please come?

So I risked being rude. I begged leave of my hosts and jumped to the lot.

Chi-Chi had picked out a home with rounded sides. It wasn’t the house I would have selected, but it was her house, after all, and not mine. Who was I to argue with her choice?

The salesman, a nice man named Flint Stantz, had already cut his price by some 60%, but the instant I arrived, he for some reason dropped the price to zero. We stepped Chi-Chi through the Buy procedure, and she had her house.

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Photo 1: Model P20 skybox in Mr. Stantz’ lot

Photo 2: It's a four-leaf clover!

Chi-Chi I: Magic Chairs

Written 27 December, 2006

Chi-Chi

I. Magic Chairs

I have to tell you about my friend Chi-Chi.

Not her real name. Names in this section of the blog have been changed to (quite literally) protect the innocent.

I met Chi-Chi in my earliest (and her earliest) days in Second Life. She did me a kindness by introducing me to magic chairs.

Magic chairs, to those who might not know, give prizes to those who sit in them when the first letter of their first name matches the chair’s settings. When a chair awards a prize, it resets to a different letter; if no one wins, the chair will, after 15 or so minutes, change the letter it’s looking for. So, when one chances upon a magic chair, one has a one in twenty-six chance of getting a prize, so long as that C-named woman who just teleported in doesn’t manage to sit down before you can.

On my second or third day in SL, Chi-Chi teleported me to a magic chair that was set to C. I sat in it and won a set of pose balls. I had no idea what pose balls were, but, newbie that I was, I was thrilled to get them.

Since Chi-Chi’s name begins with C, she could easily have sat down herself. Instead, she, who, like me, had nothing, was magnanimous, giving me the opportunity to teleport in and win the prize.

It’s for this reason that when I bought property, I offered to let Chi live on my land

Chi-Chi and I have had very different SL experiences. I teleported in Lindens from my first life; she chose not to. Consequently, she took a job dancing in a club, and once IMed me, ecstatic about having made 300 Lindens. Since that’s a whole dollar for three hours’ work, I made a decision: I IMed her and told her I would buy her a skybox and allow her to live in it on my new property.

Since Chi-Chi soon moved on to table dancing, and makes as much as 5000L some nights, meaning she could easily afford to rent a place of her own, perhaps my offer was premature.

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Photo 1: Chi-Chi

Photo 2: Magic Chairs with Some Rare Letters

Photo 2: Many SL women make their livings in clubs like these

Chi-Chi Prescript

Written 28 December, 2006

Chi-Chi

Prescript and Postscript


If Chi-Chi (not her real name) should ever chance across the blogs that follow, I hope her feelings aren’t hurt. Most of the predicaments I’ll write about were of my own doing, caused by my newbieism.

Chi-Chi is a great person, and not at all shallow. We have, in fact, had some fairly profound conversations about, for instance, the nature of men. She has simply chosen to experience Second Life on a different level than people like me, who insist on knowing how things work and then spend their second lives tweaking textures and building things no one will ever want to buy. People like me, in other words. Chi is having a true second life, socializing and having a good time while I’m going geeky things like cleaning out my inventory or searching for a script to make lava flow. I wish I was more like her. I admire her for being her own person. And I have had a _ great_ time throughout the whole skybox experience.

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Photo: This woman is lucky to be Chi-Chi’s friend. And wouldn't you know it, she blinked just as the flash went off!

Miles High with Sweetie

Written 3 January, 2007

Miles High With Sweetie

My right eyeball blew out at 300,000 meters.

OMG, I thought. Now I’ve done it! Now I’ll spend the rest of my days in a Second Life nursing home, being turned by attendants who make $3L an hour so I won’t get virtual bed sores.

But it was too late to turn back, for Sweetie had just zoomed past.

We were flying high again.

I had taken off my Tes Valentine flight ring in favor of a pair of ram horns given to me by Aardvark-Spelled-Backwards. He had actually given me two pair, so I had passed one along to Sweetie. She couldn’t utilize it properly, however, as she has a Mac and has no page up and page down keys—but Sweetie is resourceful. It didn’t take her long to change the texture of the ram horns to beautiful semi-transparent stained glass and pull something out of Inventory that gave her Godspeed. In seconds, she was at 10000 meters.

I turned up the ascent speed of the ram horns and hit page up. Soon we were at the same general altitude, ascending rapidly.

We quickly passed our 50,000 meter record.

Our chatting was sporadic, as we had to stop ascending in order to IM one another, and often our messages were preceded by multiple e’s. E is the ascent key.

“eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee93k”

“eeee87k” Darn. She was ahead of me.

“eeeeeeeeeeeeI’ll wait for you just below 100”

When one of us got too far ahead of the other, or when one of us strayed off the land (easy to tell; Hawaiian music stopped), we would teleport one another.

We were fine at 250,000 meters, but at 300,000 or so we started to go.

Before long my eyeballs were on my cheeks and my arms and legs were weirdly contracted and contorted. As we flew still higher, our necks stretched to six times their normal length and our heads flopped over every time we moved. And our hair was gone, and our shoes, and our jewelry, and most of our clothing.

Alas, it’s impossible to be glamorous above 300k.

At 5,000,000 meters, we knocked off for the night.

I was ready to stop at 1,000,000, but Sweetie wasn’t about to. She’s the only person I’ve ever met whose sense of adventure surpasses mine.

I was curious see what would happen when we returned to earth, but in the chance I had permanently damaged my avatar, and because I, too, have an indomitable spirit of adventure, I flew higher with Sweetie.

And higher.

And higher.

I love getting high with Sweetie.

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I don’t know how high one can go in SL—and please don’t tell me—but it seems a waste of electronic space to build an array with such a big number for vertical space. Maybe there would be room for more frigging prims on one’s land if the Lindens decreased the maximum possible altitude to something reasonable like 50,000 meters. That’s like 29 miles, high enough for low earth orbit.

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Back at the House of 1000 Pleasures, we seemed to be normal—but clothing and jewelry were still missing, and my necklace was mostly inside of me. So I detached everything.

Which brings me to the next entry.

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Photos: Chey and Sweetie with Explosive Decompression

This Disturbs Me

Written 4 January, 2007

This Disturbs Me

Child avatars on the adult grid are unsettling.

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Photo: Child Avatars