I'm blogging as my avatar dances

I know I seem somewhat obsessed with this dancing thing – but it is a fascinating 21^st century space to meet interesting people and listen to music that is not at deafening levels. I had a great experience clicking on someone’s profile. She had this wonderful quote about how important play is in life. I IM’d "her" for the title of the book the quote was from and we proceeded to have this extended conversation about play, life, education, perception and outlook. Now I may have had this same conversation with a random person at Starbucks, but it is unlikely I would ever be able to find them again. Not only does the computer hold a record of this conversation, but allows me to friend this person and find them again in the future. From the bar conversation I gather they are in Europe somewhere – another difficulty in this world. I find that the music in these spaces is only a shallow part of the draw for me. If the conversation is interesting – I go back. The fact that there can be multiple levels of conversation going on at once is another draw. Another club and another interesting conversation with an elementary school teacher. Interesting how education was a theme in both conversations - but from very different perspectives. It is like being at a great party where everyone has something cool to say and you get to talk to all of them with out having to ask "what?" every five seconds. Space becomes layered and conversations become entwined – but generally only from a single perspective. Private conversations, public conversations, add to this facebook asynchronous conversations, email conversations, conversations where I may be split between 5 or 6 spaces at the same time. Hard to imagine this in RL. But space is only defined by the avatars that are there. I find myself in the same space with different folks and my interest level is nil. Since SL is not a “game” with any tangible outcomes – community and experience are the only things that seem to be left – well – that and buying stuff – or finding free stuff – or making stuff – but stuff is important. In this respect SL is not too much different from RL – just on more of a global scale. The space of thousands of miles shrinks into the space of a teleport (have I mentioned how much I love the teleport sound – almost as much as I love the Mac start-up sound and the Play Station sound – highly underrated design aspects). These random connections are what humanity seems to thrive on – like minded folks with whom to share a few turns of the globe dressed as if they were 4 and had an unlimited closet to pick from. What more could you ask for.