Loose Thoughts… November 22, 2008

Strange… logged into my blog and found out I now have a total of 444 posts and 222 comments. Probably means something.

Maybe something about Ozmo.

Hucka D., are you there?

Hucka D.:

I am. Ozmo is here as well.

bb:

Baker Bloch?

Hucka D.:

No. Someone new.

bb:

Before we get into that, Hucka, actually just let me summarize my feelings at this point about the blog, galleries, Nautilus City, and so on.

Hucka D.:

Go right ahead.

bb:

So reader, I’m really pleased with progress on this blog, the galleries, and Nautilus City explorations, although I consider all a work in progress. I really like the new tunnels of the gallery… now they’re lighted, btw, and I also lined up the pieces of pipe better with each other. Or I should say Hucka D. did, since he owns them. Whatever happens with the gallery I don’t think I’m going to give up those pipes, and that probably means the intertwined Arab will stick around (note: make The Arab a blog tag). But I have no plans to get rid of the Rubi gallery now (Gallery at the Temple of TILE). In fact, I’ve made an impromptu website on the subject through liberal use of tag/category “Gallery at the Temple of TILE”. Check it out here.

https://bakerblinker.wordpress.com/category/gallery-at-the-temple-of-tile/

I also noticed in passing through that SL gallery list owner Sasun Steinbeck has an interview published on the front page from Crashnews, an Italian news show. Looks like some very interesting information and historical notes, and I’ll check it out this weekend. Dropping the link in here.

http://sl-artgalleries.blogspot.com/

And also if you haven’t seen the kiosk map she cooked up it’s quite nifty! I use it pretty often for gallery hopping purposes.

Getting back to that interview, that’s the kind of thing I’d like to do with several people/avatars I’ve met in Second Life: record their history and memories of SL, how they got interested in the virtual world in the first place, how they’ve developed in that world, and where they want to go with it.

(it’s Nov. 22, 2008 as well, 11/22)

(I wonder if Ozmo is here just through these number synchronicities?)

Anyway, back to the review. So I’m thinking of first interviewing Edna Blinker, the avatar of the RL wife. Now Edna has little inworld experience, but her art (photography) is what the Gallery at the Temple of TILE revolves around. So we probably have a lot to talk about in that respect.

Then — an idea — she could interview me, in turn (?)

Then moving out from that center I would like, at some point, to interview Headburro Antfarm, who, perhaps strangely, most definitely by fate, has been my friend since almost the beginning of my SL experiences this past winter. We connected at first through the Forest of Kahruvel owned by the legendary Salazar Jack (who I *might* have met *once*). It’s not like I see HBA every day. In fact, we’ve only met in SL a handful of times. I think we connect more through our blogs, and we’ve also developed a rapport outside of SL via email, which I think is important to do to really get to know someone. Interacting solely within SL, fixing a certain personality to a certain avatar and then interacting with other such “fixed” personalities, is not a primary focus for me.

And this would go for another important contact of mine in SL, who I’ve known for a considerably longer time, even. I’ll withhold her name for privacy purposes but I think that she’s obviously a candidate for the interview process I’m thinking of. Our connection is through “synchronicity” and all that entails. I was very pleased that this friend became interested in exploring SL this past summer and extending her RL interest in synchronicity into that realm. And we now own property in the same sim, even.

Other friends I’ve met (again, I don’t really see their avatars that often — at all — but I still consider them important contacts for sure), well I won’t give out their names, but 2 of them also “live” quite close to me in Rubi, and another was my landlord when I first moved the Edwardston Station Gallery back to the mainlands (Atoll continent, where I still am).

In comparison with some, and HBA would be an obvious one to point out here, I don’t do a lot of socializing in SL. Again, that’s not a focus. My two primary interests are building and exploration.* Also my SL experiences, as I’ve described it to yet another friend (forgot about him — will get to that in a minute, then), are very blog driven. Or it could be said that my SL experiences and blog post creations are two sides of one overarching experience, one not more important than the other. The blog, though, really goes beyond SL into other fields such as RL photography now, which I had little interest in until I started taking snapshots in SL. My interest in RL photography stems directly, then, from SL photography. I use the former mainly to develop another “virtual reality” I’ve concocted having to do with “toy avatars”, such as Salad Bar Jack (and the Mmmmmm’s), T-Bonz, and Gene Fade (and the Mossmen). Although I haven’t given the toy avatars as much press as the SL avatars (Baker Bloch, Baker Blinker, Hucka D., Esbum), I’m not so sure that they aren’t just as important.

So that’s a quick summary of where I am with the blog and the SL contacts. I am very happy with the contacts I’ve made and which continue, although I choose not to do a lot of inworld socializing.

Let’s bring in Hucka D. now… Hucka?

Hucka D.:

Good to get that out of your system, baker b. Well done.

bb:

I didn’t mention our many talks in the outline, starting way back with my phone calls to the desert and Charles Nelson Blinkerton, while he was still living.

Hucka D.:

He still lives.

bb:

Also interesting is possible ties between toy avatars and SL avatars, and I specifically think of what you’ve deemed as a friendship with Salad Bar Jack, the famous green Mmmmmm of shows and movies. You said you knew him through a Yahoo board.

Hucka D.:

Well, it’s not SBJ but Grassy Noll. He’s a good friend. He’s good at playing two roles in one film. Most famously as Salad Bar Jack — you even confused the two and you created them! He’s like Gilligan/Bob Denver, then — stereotyped. Like Miss Jane or Mary Anne also from Gilligan’s Island. Or Gary Coleman. And so on. You were a black child star at one time, weren’t you? You know the pitfalls.

bb:

I also played Little Ritchie Cunningham on the Dick van Dyke Show.

Hucka D.:

Har har. But back to Grassy, yeah we hung out in the real world for a while. Arkansas mainly, at that campground near Gilbert.

bb:

I’m still not understanding how you met and interacted in the real world, my real world I mean. So you got to know Grassy through that Yahoo board?

Hucka D.:

Well… yeah I think. We found out that we were old enemies, but we’ve buried the hatchet… sort of.

bb:

This has something to do with The Wilderness and the Battle thereof.

Hucka D.:

Yes. The Wilderness between New Hope and Jonesborough on the TILE Creek. That’s where our, ahem, direct ancestors met on the battlefield. And that was the last battle of the last war ever held in the toy avatar realm. War ended at that point. We just have to remember that fact and we get along famously.

bb:

But there’s still some underlying tension at times.

Hucka D.:

Yeah. And it’s come up in the Arkansas-Missouri debate. We should review that whole tension again, because you are directly involved. And [delete name].

*****

bb:

Doing some proofreading Hucka D. Please continue.

Hucka D.:

You and [delete name] are directly involved. In that battle, in that tension, in that war.

bb:

Hucka D, are you talking about reincarnation here? As in you and Grassy have interacted in the past — in this battle — through different bodies. Same soul, different body.

Hucka D.:

In a word: yes.

bb:

When did this battle take place?

Hucka D.:

1525? [he answers this like a question]

bb:

Were you both the leaders of your militias?

Hucka D.:

Yes.

bb:

Was this, though, just in a movie?

Hucka D.:

No. But it could be a movie if you want it to be.

bb;

So I think I remember that your army, your militia, was stationed somehow in New Hope, which is to the north of The Wilderness, as you’re calling it. And Grassy’s men were in Jonesborough [to the south]. Is this, then, a dividing line between toy avatars and SL avatars who have made some kind of transition to the RL?

Hucka D.:

Good question. The portal system set up by the Mossmen is on The RIVER. They are very old. Mmmmmm’s live much shorter lives. Grassy is only old as an acrument of lives, then. He remembers other lives. That’s how we became friends. The board we first interacted on was called… was called…

bb:

“I See Dead People”?

Hucka D.:

It was at the old Azure Islands house. When I first started using the laptop in the basement room you created for me. About the time I started hanging at Afar. The pools. That’s also when I was watching Tronesis almost nightly. I was thinking about robots a lot. Turning into one. Then I realized that I am Tik-tok from SID’s 1st Oz, the first robot of literature, some say. Tik-tok is directly associated with a bee — The Bee — in that synchronicity.

bb:

We’re getting a bit off the subject…

Hucka D.:

Tik-tok is the “y”, you see. When wound up. He’s the world clock. He’s the ground of it all. No more red-green-blue up-in-the-airyness. Mt. Airy.

bb:

Mt. Airy?

Hucka D.:

Let’s end here.

bb:

Thank you.

* by “building” here I mean mostly collaging together stuff that other people have built, like master builder Arcadia Asylum. Safe to say that if I didn’t run across AA and all the free stuff she’s offered up to this Virtual Reality, my own creative structure collaging would have come to a halt sometime during my Azure Island period