/ic/ - Artwork/Critique

When I was working 6 nights a week tossing boxes around in a supermarket, I wanted a relationship. I would walk to work, looking at New York City from the Jersey side of the Hudson river along a road from the top of the Palisades cliffs to the bottom and thinking how nice it would be to have a girlfriend to explore that place with. I found solace through Second Life, of a sort. Convincing a woman avatar out of her clothes to have advanced pixel sex became a sport with me,and a gift for gab had women making appointments for me to inspire them to masturbate furiously. It is a remarkable art medium all its own. Conjure blocks from thin air,shape them to fit,link them together into complex objects,and you can even program them in their own scripting language that you stick like a scroll into a golem to get it to function. You can texture the blocks as you wish,with your own textures that you can upload, 1024x1024 being the largest at my time,2014 or so when I left. What you see is a ballroom that I created,with Mandelbulb flowers,color changing crystal grass and trees. New age music ,commercial free from a streaming service I was happy to pay for. The fog rolled underfoot as you danced,in essence your avatar and your partner are using an animation program, and the skirts flow behind like the trail of a comet. To cause Romance to happen for others was magical to me,and selling my animated paintings was fulfilling too,since the only resource that is expended in making 99% of SL stuff is time,and once made,you can sell copies of it forever. And it can lead to real money, since you can buy the currency, called Lindens,and sell it back to them for your country's cash.

I say all this because I know the burden of crushing loneliness. Second Life is like fast food,nothing in the way of the nutrients you need psychologically, but it stops the hunger pangs.

Game design IS an art form.

Back in the stone ages of computing,my roommate and I would deathmatch in a map that he created and filled with hidey holes and deathtraps, and I had to find him and lay ambushes of my own. I tried making a map and it turned out as a Temple to the OctaGod ,with a hole in the basement that dropped you out of the ceiling. I found Second Life and spent 5 years being amazed by the stuff that could be made. This was a dance club I made. New age music to slow dance to,scenic views to meditate in,and concealed beneath it was my store where I sold animated paintings and other stuff. Art is where you find it, and don't be constrained by your choice of mediums .

Everything in the gameworld engine was made by someone,and anything could be made by anyone given enough time and skill. Now that the prim blocks can be far larger than what I had to deal with,even more can be made with the allowance of prims each land mass allows. And not only can you make objects,but clothing too,fashion from fashioning textures on a template for covering an avatar,even as skin. Since I was active,polygonal stuff is the new normal, because hackrrs found ways of copying others hard work by divining the unique keycode of items and textures,but that has worked itself out,so don't be afraid to try your hand at making things. There is even a place called Builder's Brewery that teaches all the fundamentals of making things. Second Life remains a vibrant playground for the Adventurous Artist. If you have no other calling,may it be yours.