Honestly, I’m sure I do have a lot of better things to do; Feck off! I get to define “better” and I just renewed this service so I’m going to get at least one post in before I forget it again and disappear. I have bills to pay and this isn’t helping.
Perhaps I’m of the wrong generation, but virtual worlds confuse me. But even back on a BBS (before the Internet and shortly after it started leaking out of institutions of higher education) I saw signs of virtual life. Thirteen year-olds would declare themselves engaged or married, or rather their in-game characters would. It was all part of the game on the computer; couples could share things that single characters couldn’t. But then you’d discover that some of the virtual couples were dating.
So here’s the question; are people using their avatars to live a life they wouldn’t think of living in real life, or one they very much want to live in real life? Are those two choices different? Maybe they aren’t. That flirt, or that bitch, in a chat room might deny being that way face to face and claim to never even think of displaying those behaviors toward another person. “Oh, that’s just a role played online.” But where did that come from? Is the avatar an object resulting from creativity or simply a loss of inhibition?
And what of the person that plays their avatar just as they would real life, simply as an extension of their self? To them, the virtual world is a different neighborhood to explore. New things to do and people to meet. And here is where the problems begin. Real-person-avatar meets unreal-person-avatar. Neither can know who they are interacting with. And maybe after all, this IS a model of real life, because we never do know whether the people we’re talking to are being honest. Even with themselves.
I only remembered that I have this blog because my host provider forced an update on the WordPress application and sent me an e-mail. So since then I had begun to consider whether I wanted to return to blogging or abandon it. Obviously I’ve written too much already for this to be a good-bye post (well, maybe not with my long-windedness). But is isn’t.
I’ve been thinking of a number of things to log about. Should I put them here? Should they be in their own assigned category? Should I put everything in one post or make multiple posts in one day if I’m thinking of different things? I really don’t know much of what I’m doing here and there aren’t clear answers because people blog the way they think. Some people blog just like someone else because they like to copy (sheeple come to mind). Independent souls have unique blogs. Finally, some blogs like mine evolve because their authors are just learning. So now I’ve convinced myself that it doesn’t matter. Thank you.
More later. I have no idea how soon or later.
Off to a start, good or otherwise. I’m trying to figure out how to fit content into this theme (which I like) while also discovering WordPress and trying to get some thoughts together. In some future pages and posts you’ll see why this latter effort may prove the most difficult. As a diversion, I may end up posting completely irrelevant (and irreverent) posts just because I can’t string two together.
You might want to try to make more sense of this if you use the “categories”.
If you’re a newcomer, remember the blog shows newest entries first, so go back and start with older entries to catch up.