The World According to Jennyfur

I’ve been contemplating writing this blog post for awhile. I’ve made draft after draft and subsequently deleted them all. Even now I am not sure what I am going to write or how I want to say all that I have to say.

It is no secret that Flipper and myself are leaving the SLCC Team and Future United Board come August 27th. We’ve already put the wheels in motion to turn over the “keys” to those that will continue on with future SLCC endeavors. Some were easier to turn over ownership on than others. Blog ownership, e-mail passwords, Google groups and SL groups are easy. Bank accounts and the registration code are a bit trickier and will take time. I think it is important that we are 100% uninvolved with future conventions. Even the remotest bit of involvement can landslide into full blown organizer status.

Neither of us wanted to be involved this year as we publicly stated numerous times. We remained on board so that we could get all the new organizers up to speed and get the proverbial ball rolling for them. It just did not feel right leaving our friends and colleagues to start from scratch in figuring out how to organize the convention. Unfortunately, we both got more involved that we initially had planned on and as a consequence got sucked into the public drama vortex. Even though our involvement this year was much less by comparison with the first two conventions people still see us as the two people in charge running the helm regardless of how many other people are involved.

The SLCC has dominated two full years of our personal lives and I really have come to resent it in some ways. I always joke that between the two of us we’ve probably logged upwards of $100,000 USD in billable hours given the time we have donated to working on the conventions. It has been a thankless task. It has caused considerable stress in our personal lives. The pay off is having a place to connect with our friends from Second Life that we see once a year. The mantra of the past few months has been ” I want my life back” and I am happy to be on the road towards that end result.

Certain people think that I can’t handle criticism, which couldn’t be farther from the truth. Over the years, we have taken much of the criticism to heart and made changes with processes and decisions accordingly. We are human and we make mistakes from time to time. It happens and is part of life. We also have been realistic in what we have the ability to do versus the lofty grand ideals of what we want to do. No one has ever set out to screw over the community or bilk the SLCC for personal gain.

What I do have a problem with is when criticism and opinions are expressed in the form of personal attacks on our characters; and/or stated as a concrete indelible facts impervious to logic, reason and truth and/or used to fuel drama for the sake of drama. We are far from astoundingly evil, mullah, bolsheviks, cyberaristocracy and what not. We are Second Life residents just like everyone else and thats why we helped to create the Second Life Community Convention. We thought it was important to have a place for people to connect from the virtual world to the real world under the common interest of Second Life.

All this brings me back to the initial point I was going to make. I think simply put in a nutshell I am over Second Life. As a result of riding the run away drama train for the past few years I’ve grown apathetic towards Second Life and the community of Second Life. No this is not one of those zOMG I am leaving and never coming back posts. I realize that the process of leaving would probably be more annoying and time consuming than actually staying. I’m hoping that I can reinvent my Second Life experience in the coming months and learn to love this crazy world and its community once again.

Every once in awhile I am reminded of why I loved Second Life so much. Thanks to Eloise Pasteur’s post over on Second Life Insider, I learned of a machinima by Second Life resident Robbie Dingo in which he recreates Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night. As someone with a degree in art history, I am deeply moved by the absolute beauty of taking a two dimensional painting and rendering it in three dimensions seamlessly. Sadly, the creation was done only for the machinima though I wish that I could have seen it first hand.

*Sadly it seems that the machinima is no longer available online. All the links appear to be broken.

Better late then never, last week saw the release of a podcast we taped On the Inside hosted by Akela Talamasca and the lovely Haver Cole. Believe it or not, this was the first podcast I ever did. Flipper has been on Second Cast numerous times. Listen to us babble about our involvement with the convention, our sordid lives and the things we do for amusement.

I started writing this post last week sometime, finished it yesterday only to have WordPress eat the final draft. But, now I am rewriting it in a different way.

The past couple weeks have provided yet another lesson in futility of community interactions. It reminds me of why I spend less and less time in SL. I have made some amazing friends in Second Life and ironically spend a lot of time in touch with the people that matter through other modes of communication – Instant message clients like Meebo, Twitter, various blogs, forums, Facebook, My Space and Pownce.

I try to think back to a time in Second Life where the drama was minimal or non-existent or even downright irrelevant. Suffice it to say, its been awhile. It seems like the drama started around the summer/fall of 2004 and just has been one steady runaway train ever since. Different faces, different situations, but still the same dramatic overtures. What started it all? Who knows? Sometimes I just don’t think that humans are meant to get along peacefully.

I can pinpoint my entrance into Second Life forum culture as a catalyst for certain drama facets. Forums always make things worse — no matter what the case. I’ve met some great people through forums and bulletin boards, but they are such hotbeds for drama at any given time. Blogs aren’t really any better, but given the multitude of blogs in Second Life — you know who to avoid and who not to.

I’ve been slowly, but surely trying to extricate sources of drama from my life. No one ever said it would be easy and I occasionally slip up. I stopped reading  SLH a few months ago unless someone sends me a link to a particular story in which the drama involves myself, which happens every few of months. Drama aside, SLH is so badly written that it makes my eyes bleed under normal circumstances so it was no big loss. I usually avoid the usual dramatobloggers. No names need to be mentioned here. If I don’t like you, why should I read your blog? That one is a no brainer. Occasional random dramas start on mostly harmless blogs — Its bound to happen from time to time. I left the official Second Life forums, which was easy to do once they closed down most of the discussion forums. Though I hear that they still have some discussion and ensuing drama in the Resident Answers forums to be precise and especially with regards to a certain forum moderator thug who is hellbent on causing strife amongst the residents from what I can gather.

When I stopped being a SL forum regular I started being a Second Citizen forum regular. The forums vary drastically – SL had its rules, while SC is a no holds barred steal cage death match most of the time. I like most of the people there save for a few muckrakers and perpetual dramamongerers. As much as I love anarchy and chaos, I think we do need some basic guidelines for human interaction. I’m just as guilty as everyone else for fanning the flames from time to time. I never thought I would say it, but I miss Jeska’s “This thread has outlived its usefulness and is therefore being closed” posts from the old forum days. I’ve taken hiatuses from reading and posting to Second Citizen in the past and I see myself growing more towards a permanent exit strategy. Ive found that the best way to quell drama is usually to avoid it. Now, if I could just follow my own advice we’d all live happily ever after.

I find myself more and more drawn to environments that I can control. With social networks like Twitter, Pownce, Facebook, Personal Blogs, Live Journal, My Space etc. If you don’t like someone you almost never have to interact with them. In Second Life and its ancillary forums there is almost a sense of forced interaction with people.

I don’t have any drama on the aforementioned social networking websites. Why? Because if I don’t like you I don’t have to deal with you and vice versa. In places like the Second Life forums such as Second Citizen unless the drama perpetrators completely leave and stop posting and/or reading the forums the drama never ends. One of the features I absolutely adore on Second Citizen is the “ignore thread” function, but there comes a time in which you have to say if I am ignoring 100 or more threads what the hell am I doing here anyways?

The point of all this is that I stopped enjoying Second Life at some point in time. It officially became not-as-fun in the Summer of 2005, a royal pain in the ass by fall/winter 2005, annoying as all hell throughout 2006 and now in 2007 after occasion renewed bouts of fun, its back to being utterly dreadful.

I can’t see myself ever leaving Second Life fully. I think what I need more than anything is just for Second Life to be fun and enjoyable again. Second Life was a hobby for me – for better or for worse. It was something I enjoyed and still do on some level despite a general feeling of dissatisfaction. It is only when it became a constant source of irritation that I started enjoying it less and then it just became a job to me. Right now, Second Life is one big multi-tabbed Excel Spreadsheet.