Émigré
My neglected old blog is in peril. My other sites with that hosting company were hacked, turned into “attack sites” with the insertion of evil Javascript by some other customer with a shell account. I’m not sure if I’ll abandon the whole place and move house to here, but in any case I’ll start blathering, I mean blogging here, in lieu of my WordPress blog and LiveJournal. Why? Tumblr seems like a pretty darned cool platform, and I likes me some platform.
Speaking of expatriation, I recently returned from a technologically-driven exile to Second Life, and have begun to catch up on the lives and dramas of my imaginary playmates there. Well, not so imaginary, as I just came from lunch with one of them. She seemed real enough, but then so do the flying eels that settle in my cubicle.
And speaking of flying eels (really), I have not been in World of Warcraft much lately, precisely because I’ve again been able to spend time in SL. The contrast between these two non-places is so striking. One is a game and one is not, of course, but…hmm, how to put this? The particular ways in which social discourse decays to a very juvenile level are quite different. And yet despite the fact that WoW contains many more actual juveniles than SL (we hope), the general maturity level seems a bit higher among the orcs and dwarves of WoW than among the hipsters and goths of SL.
Second Life’s owners Linden Labs have, as many people know, been involved in a campaign to remove “adult” content from SL, presumably gambling that by making it safely PG theywill gain more business than they will lose. I have my doubts about whether that will work out for them, but the censorship is vexing, even to those of us who remain SL-ibate. The message I suppose I ought to actually send to Linden Labs: If I wanted to spend time in a virtual world where sexual ideas were totally filtered out, I would stick to World of Warcraft, where young children can gleefully commit bloody murder, using poisoned swords and flaming axes to hack up farmgirls and housecats.
*extracts self from pulpit*
