Second Life is not for everybody. It is fiddly, cumbersome at times, everything takes time to be created. It is slow and quite unpredictable. It takes patience to even learn how to walk without running into things – sure, it’s mostly about your settings and computer freezing up and all that, but still. It isn’t for people who want everything done for them. A person who can’t think for themselves or learn things independently will struggle in our world.
What makes it special is our intuition. We instinctively sense others in the world; we connect without connecting. When we are together, we can feel touches that are only on a screen, and we feel the heart of people we cannot see. We sense things.
Consciously, we may pay a lot of attention to the avatar’s presentation; we don’t date system avatars and have no tolerance for over-sized ones, yet we meet someone in a flexi hair with two hands in each arm and think, “Wow, they’re special.” (Maybe that’s a bit too much; I mean, they must be a little dumb…?) Still, we find ourselves hit over the head with the presence of someone whose avatar or profile does not align with our preferences.
Some of us resist mesh avatars because they “take away the soul” of the character, but I don’t know. I don’t think it’s the avatar at all. The avatar can be just as perfect as you want it or just as sketchy as you prefer; it’s still about you. Your wrong ones may choose you for your avatar, but your right ones still choose you for you, no matter what your avatar is like, as long as it’s the way you like it.
And… Physical perfection on Second Life is in the planned imperfection anyway. It’s the nose you hated all your life that you buy your head to match, it’s a scar from a dog bite on your face that you put back on because without it you’re not you.
Second Life is for romantics, and everything you do must be your idea of romance… Even if a part of it is to be loved and to love for the darkest of adult fantasies.
This place is magic.