Shattered

What is a community?  To some it is a group of people living within the same neighborhood, city etc.  For others a community means people who share a particular trait or traits, some familiarity bring them together.  According to Webster's Online Dictionary, A community is ' a body of persons or nations having a common history or common social, economic, and political interests'.  That is but one definition, I would like to amend that to include 'for the betterment of everyone'.  The term community has become a buzzword as of late, it is being tossed around and used too loosely.  I am so honored and grateful to Osuntomi Melendez for allowing me to join the Kiko Life community.  When people come together and donate their talents, their time and their resources to a cause, a beautiful idea is birthed.  I am still new to this sim but I know Kiko Life is that community.  Yet we spend a lot of time porting from sim to sim & renting from absent property owners when everything we need is already in place.  If enough people actually were involved in ‘their community’, there would never be a boring moment in SL.  There are enough vendors to supply a variety of products, there are enough deejay’s to stream music at least 12hrs a day.  Our sense of community is shattered.  Many people with the resources tend to go and buy their own piece of SL.  They spend an enormous amount of time building their vision of their personal community where everything is centered on them instead of forming connections with others who share the same goal and making their dream a reality.  Why are we shooting ourselves in the foot?  Rent a slot to place your product, if you are a deejay then offer to stream on Sampler Saturday’s or anytime that you can spare.  SL is not all about the lindens; it is an opportunity to enhance who you are as well as who we are.  Kiko Life is an ethnic sim built from the ground up to promote culture, fellowship and networking opportunities, a true sense of a community.  Visit the website www.kikolife.com and register after visiting or revisiting the sim to see what all this community has to offer.  We are still in our infancy but with leaders, visionaries and members, Kiko Life will make true community a reality.

Second Life Relationship Part III

It has been three weeks since you read my first blog & now you have hooked him.  You took your time, have gotten to know him and now you two see less and less of each other as you two fall back into your old SL routine.  You are working on your projects & he is working on his.  The visits get less and less but do not let the conversations dwindle.  The challenge is to keep the interest alive in SL.  Not easily done but the rewards are worth it.

            I still say keep your personal 1^st life info separate from your 2^nd unless you are looking for that relationship outside of SL so some of this will not pertain to you, keep the lines of communication open outside of SL.  You are not logged on 24hrs a day (and if you are something is seriously wrong with you lol) so you cannot be available to talk to in SL.  Create a Gmail or Yahoo account for your avatar, with this you can still send little messages to each other throughout the day and also use their built in chat feature for the times when you don’t want to log in.

You need something to talk about besides big bootied avatars and guys wearing too much bling, get them engaged into conversations that challenge the mind.  I like to watch one dramatic movie a week because they a person can have more to say than ‘It was good/bad’ or ‘that was funny’.  Instead, it opens up a person to deeper conversations because the subject matter requires you to place yourself in that situation.  So break down music, art, movies, books and anything else that requires a person to think and keeps their attention.

Group get togethers are necessary as well.  If we all are in the same place to local chat then that reduces the amount of IM’s a person receives.  Also take classes together in SL, they are a great way to get a common interest that you two can combine resources on and really grow.  I am really proud of my SL sister because she has taken photography( follow this link to see her work) to a new level when she met her now current partner.  He enjoys photography so she found a way that the two of them can bond even more.  I am not saying that you need to change your lifestyle or take on the hobbies of your loved one but think about this…..if you can’t relate to her when she is focused on a project someone else will and when the communication breaks down, that sexy avatar will begin to look less and less attractive as the mental side of the relationship dissolves into conversations about ‘want to try out my new digital genitals?!’

To summarize all three sections: 1.take it slow & 2. Go beyond the sexy avatar 3. Plant seeds of intelligent thought into their minds and nurture it.  If we do not have anything good to say then we tend to say nothing at all. Don't have chat boxes that look like this:

PersonA: How was your day? PersonB: okay A:I missed you B: aww ty (20 minutes go by) A: I'll brb B: K ttyl.

As always I welcome your comments, hate mail & voicemails! Have a great one everyone!

Emotional Perception

Impressionism, modern, abstract and realism are just a few types of art/painting that exist.  What is it about art that captures our attention?  Why do we look at those blobs of colored ink or streaks of charcoal and either fall in love or heave in disgust (I would hate if the latter has happened to any of you).  Some of you might be thinking that you don’t know the first thing about art or qualified to critique it but I digress.  In each and every one of us is a critique because art is created for you to view so automatically you are an art critique.  All you need is an open mind.

Even before spoken language we humans have been drawing and making pictures to describe how we feel and how we view our surroundings.  We use the resources around us to tell others ‘this is what I am going through, can you relate to me?’ The same goes on for artists.  They use their blank canvas or whatever medium along with what resources they have to show us how they feel at the time.  We are bound to our memories and our brain links strong emotions to certain situations to form lasting memories.  We also use color to describe such intangible notions as feelings, I’m so sad I’m blue, red & angry, green with jealousy.  Even animals use colors to both warn off potential threats as well as seek a mate.  Our mind also analyzes shapes to describe what we are seeing. Certain shapes automatically register as a particular object, four legs must be an animal, tall and bushy that should be a tree.  We label an object before we actually ‘see’ the item in our view.

Artists have taken advantage of this process; they blend color, lines and shapes into something that we all should be able to relate to.  That is why we tend to pause and stare at works of art a bit longer than a picture. Our brain is trying to find out what it is, once it can’t find a shape of a known object from memory it decodes the colors and then it cross references those colors with memories or at least the emotional roadmap of memories.  That is why certain works of art puts us at ease or another just makes your eyes bleed.  Our mind is finding some way to tell you what it sees so when nothing matches with our ‘map’ it just uses emotion ‘That painting just looks angry’ etc.

We like to adorn our homes and businesses with art to create certain moods so I challenge you to go to an art gallery in your home city if you can or follow this Slurl to a gallery in SL at the least. Open up your mind and critique; try to imagine what the artist was going through and what they are trying to tell you.  The more we do it the bigger and more accurate our mental road map will become. The better our road map is, the smaller the world seems. The smaller the world seems then aren’t we all just neighbors…at least that’s the way I ‘see’ it.