Sledding- Stacey Cardalines Reporting...

 

Winter can be a drag in the real world, with freezing cold temperatures, driving on ice and all that. It is important to remember that it is also a season of fun, especially when you factor in sledding. January and February need not be a season of misery. You just have to know where to go to find fun winter things to do. Enter Stacey...

Sledding is a lot like her cousin, skiing, but sledding is easier to do. Skiing involves buying a bunch of gear and driving up to Vermont to go to the mountains. Sledding can be done in your hometown (if your hometown has snow) with a sled you got for $9.99 at Target. You don't have to buy a ridiculous spandex bodysuit to go sledding, although I did so. 

I have an image to uphold, and I also wanted to dress brightly so the St. Bernard dogs could find me in whatever snowbank I sledded into. I then went off in search of somewhere to go sledding.

I went to a place called Brave Island, which has the Wonderful Winter Wonderland theme going, at least for the season. I had the place to myself, although I keep odd hours and the place might be jammed during different parts of the day. Either way, I went to the top of the mountain and got ready for some downhill work. It took me a while to find the sledding part, but you are most likely less stupid than I and would probably fare better in a search.

Brave Island provides the sled for you, a simple one for a single sledder and a team bobsled (?) type for couples or very good friends. Once you sit on it, you start heading downhill. You get a good ride, not too fast. The ride could be a little longer, but you can extend it somewhat by sledding through the non-sledding parts of the sim. It's very impolite, but I was there by myself, and someone had to do it.

I would estimate that I got going 35 mph or so, which is like 70 kph for all you Europeans reading this. I never quite figured out how to stop, other than crashing into something that halted my forward progress. I used a head-first sledding methodology, as I'd rather crack my head than break both legs and maybe the ol' Five Hole as well.

Sledding into a wall is usually the worst-case scenario, but the other sledding sim that I tried out- one with a mammoth luge-style elevated track- actually saw me fail to negotiate a curve and sled off the sim into whatever passes for outer space in SL. I actually had a picture of me doing so, but I was very small in it and would have been unrecognizable without the caption.

I did think of a sport that I would like to try... Sled Bowling with humans! Line ten people up in Candlepin formation at the bottom of a hill, go to the top of the hill, come down heavy on the sled and see how many people you can deck. It's got speed, exotic settings, violence, humor and appeals to a wealthy demographic... what's not to like?

I'll have to get Lanai to pay me enough to hire ten models to act as bowling pins, but I think I can make a go of it. Some clever animator will have to make an animation that mimics pins falling. Who knows? Maybe I can give up journalism and feed myself by running a Human Sled Bowling operation. It might be illegal in the US. Someone told me to maybe try Indonesia.

There was no NBA or NFL 150 years ago, and now you can't turn on the TV without seeing someone dunking or throwing a touchdown pass. Who's to say Human Sled Bowling won't catch on in a similar manner? 

The fun thing about SL is that Human Sled Bowling probably exists somewhere, perhaps in BDSM form. I just haven't been crafty enough to find it... yet. 

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ONE LAST LOOK AT FALL FOLIAGE BEFORE WINTER HITS! Stacey Cardalines Reporting...

 

Before we begin, I should not have to mention that a person wishing to look at fall foliage should get off the computer and drive out into the country. Fall foliage is a once-a-year event, and there isn't a lot of colorful time between green summer leaves on a tree and brown dead leaves on the forest floor. The time between those is where the true Leaf Peepers work, and most of them don't have time for the okie-doke.

I live in New England, so naturally I am an utmost authority on fall foliage. Most New Englanders I know are aware that other regions of the country have the same stuff happen in October, but enough of them aren't aware of this so that we have an enjoyable snobbery which I indulge heartily in. I do so even though I am in enough fall foliage Facebook groups to know that states like Tennessee, North Carolina and Colorado all represent hard.

New Englanders, especially the Massachusetts ones, are odd ducks anyhow. We feel that Massachusetts is where the Revolution started, and that therefore July 4th is sort of our holiday. As the home of both Stephen King and the Salem Witch Trials, we feel that we deserve a disproportionate say on Halloween. As the region with Plymouth in it, we own Thanksgiving ouright and only share it with the other 49 states. We claim Labor Day, as the labor movement in America began in Massachusetts mills. We even think Martin Luther King Day is ours, because he went to BU. You can guess how we feel about Fall Foliage.

The Enquirer has paid me to write this stuff before, so they are aware of this parochial mental defect which their Plymouth-based writer suffers from. Naturally, that made me their go-to girl for a Fall Foliage article. As guitarist Albert King once told Stevie Ray Vaughn, "I'm qualified." 

When Lanai was looking for seasonally appropriate Fall Foliage articles, I answered the call, put on something orange and headed out to the woods. 

In the real world, you wear orange when hunting so that hunters won't mistake you for a deer and shoot you. I make a great effort to do nothing which could be viewed by a hunter as deer-like when I am strolling through the woods in October. I also wear orange when leaf-peeping on SL out of force of habit. I even have orange Air Jordans.

In spite of my exhortation earlier about getting off the computer and out into the country to see the real thing, I happily freed some time from my usual BDSM activities to sim-hop into a few virtual regions that were going all in on Autumn. Virtual leaves are enjoyable, and they usually co-exist with other fall activities if the sim owners are putting forth the seasonal effort. It is a worthy expenditure of your time.

Fall Foliage sims aren't something that you are going to plan on visiting with a half-dozen friends. There's nothing wrong with rolling deep, but the "Hey, come here, look at this" stuff that comes with sightseeing in a crowd will throw a true Peep off her game. The author of this article, who works along a certain MO, does her dirt by her lonesome.

About a zillion sims have some sort of Autumn theme or undercurrent happening, but I found just a few who really devoted themselves to Fall Foliage. One of them was the Fall Autumn Fest at Evolving Images (http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Evolving%20Oceans/210/35/2011). I popped in there one October morning to see how they  were hanging... hanging leaves, that is.

They have a seasonal thing going there year-round, as they had some sort of teleport system based on SPRING, SUMMER and WINTER and all that. I would have explored that and may some day return there to do so, but I was hyperfocused on the Leaf Peeping for this trip.

They had a central area, with a couple of walking paths into the woods for fall foliage viewing. They even had a section of the trail that is haunted. I got my prowl on, took out the camera, put in work... it was an enjoyable visit. I like when sim creators get an idea that they pursue into a whole sim, and this was the work of a fellow fall foliage fan.

I should add that the pictures here also include some from French Farm, where I was for my last article. Pictures I took at French Farm get jumbled in with pictures from Evolving Images in my Pictures folder. I lose... you win!

Here's the French Farm addy (http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/The%20French%20Farm/52/85/24), they also went nuts for Autumn, and anyone who enjoys the Fall Fest at Evolving Images will also enjoy French Farm.

Leaf Peeping leans heavily into the ROY part of the ROY G BIV color spectrum. There is plenty of green as well, and the sky seems to always be blue, but ROY is driving the car in October.

I can't design sims, I can barely dress myself... but if I can make one recommendation to sim creators who venture into fall foliage, I would say to include a mountain. Mountains aren't foliage, but if you get a higher vantage point, you get more sweeping views of the forest as a whole. I live in the flatlander coastal part of Massachusetts, we have no mountains, and this is part of why a Massachusetts girl has to tap out to a New Hampshire girl when Peeping is discussed in depth. You can get good views from the ground, but Height is Might.

Sometimes, you get stuck inside at an office or babysitting or whatever, and you can't roll out to the Berkshires to see Mother Nature break out the crayons. Fall Foliage sims on SL help ease that pain, and I strongly recommend that you check out and support these places. 

An avatar isn't fully self-actualized in Autumn until they go Leaf Peeping, no matter how many pumpkin spice lattes they drink. That, and money/fame, is why I go hunting for cool sims for you to visit. I love my readers, and I want you to be the best you.

Since I was wearing orange, I did try to hide in the trees for a few shots. I was sort of planning a Where's Stacey? theme to the article, at least with the pictures. I thought about lying and saying that I was somewhere in every picture in this article, so that my readers would waste time and effort looking for me in every picture... but I won't do that to you. I was also bare-legged, and not a good enough photographer to shoot compelling pictures which also hid me effectively. 

If some of my sports betting loses me money, I may return to these sims and try to make a quick buck hiding the reporter in the foliage for your viewing and gaming pleasure.

Until then, fear not. I have a bunch of pumpkin patch, apple picking and Halloween stuff in my Pictures folder, and I will produce articles on those themes soon enough. Sometimes I don't write anything for fiv months, sometimes I write four articles in two weeks. That's how Stacey rolls, kids.

Ready for Winter?

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Corn Maze! Stacey Cardalines Reporting...

I grew up in a suburban part of New England, and a major rite of Autumn was to go to a corn maze. 

Autumn is unique in that there is no major participatory holiday like the 4th of July or Christmas between Labor Day and Halloween. Many people therefore use Autumn as a sort of minor, extended celebration that ranges from pumpkin patches to apple cider donuts to hay rides. This gets them through the end of October, where they can hang ghouls off the house and dress like a Scary Nurse.

The town I grew up in was not immune to this, so every year would see a bunch of us- sometimes drunk- head out into the farm country to wander through a corn maze. I only say "sometimes drunk" because I was both doing mazes as a child (not drinking) or taking the kids to it (drinking after), which balances out my teens, early twenties and going-with-friends part of my life where one would have to be drunk to go to one.

About half the time, we never finished the maze, backtracking our way out and vowing to whip the maze next year. This happened every time we went after drinking, and a lot of the times where the children wore out easily. I can't actually remember beating the maze, to be honest, although I suppose we probably beat it a few times as children and I just can't remember. 

There are corn mazes in every county where I live, and where I live is only semi-rural. I can't imagine how many there must be in somewhere like Iowa. I recall reading that driving through there was basically "corn corn corn Walmart corn corn corn Gas Station corn corn corn Burger King corn corn corn..." They must have mazes everywhere there, and it would be cool to connect them all into an Iowa-sized maze and trap like 3% of America's population there during Tourist Season.

Corn mazes came into vogue in the 1990s, although no one knows who the first genius to try this out was. The idea sprung from the fact that you have to grow acres and acres of corn to make a profit, and the stalks have to be cut down after. Some great human figured out how to make a maze from this, people showed their interest with their pocketbooks and a new tradition emerged. Many farms rely on this part of the year to stay in the black.

With the bleedover into Halloween season, many mazes are also "haunted," and feature various goblins and serial killers. At least one horror movie- Chlidren Of The Corn- is set in a cornfield, and I am probably forgetting others. A corn maze is closely related to a hedge maze, and even an amateurish corn maze somehow looks creepier than the hedge maze at the end of The Shining. That's not easy to do.

They are best as a rural thing, however. Not many people farm these days, and a corn maze is often the only time a lot of people get close to a way of life that almost everyone practiced at one time.

I went to French Farm on SL to check out a SL corn maze. I was not disappointed. The sim is wholly decked out for fall, and I plan to get several articles out of my visit there. I must have took 100 pictures. They did a really nice job with the season, and I advise you to check it out for yourself. I don't know if they are French or just named French.

Their maze is easy to navigate, and has lots of surprises. There are enough dead ends (each with something cool in it) to make it so you have to at least concentrate a bit. I only took pictures of a few things in the maze, leaving the rest for our readers to discover on their own. It doesn't take long to go through, but you can stretch that out by looking everything over real slow. There are other activities on the im to keep you busy if you make it out of the maze. 

French Farm must be running this through Halloween, because they have a haunted maze, featuring various spooks and haunts and He Who Walks Behind The Rows. It's more cutesy than terrifying, and is a lot of fun either way. If they are smart, they will run it through Thanksgiving. Harvest Season sort of runs, at least in American imaginations, from the day after Labor Day until the end of November.... even late December, if you throw in Christmas tree farms

Please note that I included a picture of me finishing the maze, just in case you think I cheated my way out or anything.

French Farm:

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/The%20French%20Farm/52/85/24

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Buying a Dance Pole- Stacey Cardalines Reporting...

 I have a side hustle as a dancer. The SL Enquirer pays just fine, I'm nowhere near poor, but I am a hardcore kind of girl and I also make sports bets that lead to arrangements where I work as a dancer. It's a long story, probably more interesting than what I am to write about today, but it is also a story for another day.

I'm not a stripper. I'm too short (I look a lot like that Boston girl from the Olympic gymnastics team a few years ago, especially if I hang around with people who are taller... a group which, at last count, includes everyone) to make a real living as a dancer, and the sim I dance at is Moderate, so no T&A from your favorite sportswriter. I wear as little as I can, but there are parts of me that I am only comfortable having seen by my doctor and my husband. "Dancer" is only part of my job duties there, which also involve Greeting, Modeling, Security, Orientation and even Scouting. Again, this would probably make a better story than what I am writing about, but it is also a story for another day.

My sister Courtney and I are under a certain obligation to a woman known as the Sea Witch, and we formerly worked as dancers at this nasty racial slavery sim where we suffered every abuse imaginable. We were quite happy to be moved by the Sea Witch to Divas, which is a professional wrestling sim. We were nude all the time at our former spot, but Divas only required that we dress like wrestlers in gear from their wrestling-themed mall. Not a bad gig, if you can get it. I refuse to wear wrestling boots- I'm short, wrestling boots tend to be large, and I look like I am wearing Daddy's boots when I wear them, which isn't often- but that is also a story for another day.

The Sea Witch just sort of gave us to Divas to serve as dancing tips jars for the sim, and they really didn't know we were coming. A stage was assembled, and dancer poles were set up. The poles were from like 2008 or so, you had to move through the dances individually, and you'd sometimes de-hover into the floor. I would often forsake the poles and just rely on my Cheerleading hud. Stacey Cardalines does not complain, but I bitched enough that the managers there eventually gave Courtney and I permission to upgrade the infrastructure. 

Armed with two dancers' worth of salary, off we went to get a stripper pole. Again, we aren't allowed to strip, but a certain lingo exists among professionals, and semantics matter little in that crowd. I'm checking my pockets for the newspaper version of Payola, I don't see any, so I won't get into the names of all the stores that we visited. I don't look this goddamned good for free, children, and mesh shapes don't grow on trees. Just make the check out to Stacey Cardalines, yes Cardalines, C-A-R... ah, however you spell that.

There are several factors to consider when shopping for a dancer pole. Artistry is chief among them. You have to be doing dances that make people want to stay around and watch you, and perhaps even return again some day. Some poles are way better than others at this. You'd think it would be hard to make a dancing supermodel look stupid, but it can be done, and you can see so for yourself if you go to enough vendors. There are also some ones which are works of art. This leads into our second consideration, Cost.

You can drive a Toyota or a Tesla and still get to work at the same time. Differences exist between the two, however. Dance poles are like that. Sometimes, they cost more because they are significantly better. Some stores just hack together a dance pole that gets boring, for the dancer in ten minutes and for the audience in fifteen minutes. Some stores overpay a creator and then overcharge a consumer. Shop according to your need. If you are going to be dancing in the lobby of a popular sim, you will need a great variety of dances. If you bring a guy home and spin around on a personal dance pole as a prelude to sex... well, you really don't need 75 dances for that, at least not on the pole.

More popular brands of dance poles may be more expensive because they are better. However, the more popular they are, the more likely it is that customers will have seen some other girl do these very dances somewhere else. "Homogenous" is not how you want your dancing described. If you get a bit obscure, it may be a treat for the more veteran dancer girl fans. 

There are certain features shared by several manufacturers. One is having a pole that both male and female dancers can use, either via Unisex dances or by distinct menu settings. Another is having two girls be able to share the pole at once, usually known in the trade as Dual mode. We actually ended up getting the dancer pole with male and female dances, even though we are a female wrestling sim and seeing a guy dance there would be disappointing to most of our visitors.

An important thing, and I was told this by many different dancers at many different clubs which I visited while researching this article, is to get Auto Sequence. This is a feature where the dances are cycled through automatically, thus saving the dancer from having to click a menu every 30 seconds. I found that it is ideal to have a lot of dances in the quiver if you plan to rely on auto-sequence.

Land Impact, or whatever they call that, also serves as a possible deal-breaker. Some poles have the land impact of a cat sleeping on the rug in an unused corner of a living room. Some have the land impact of a border collie chasing a butterfly through a dining room. Prims are like what Mark Twain said about land, "Buy it whenever you can, because they ain't makin' any more of it." If you don't want the sim owner to hate you, get as low-prim as you can stand.

One thing that is oh-so-important is to get out in the world and test drive the pole. Ride it for every dance it has, take note of the good ones, lose the landmarks for the bad ones. Drag a friend along for a second opinion. Establish a group of favorites, and then it is decision time. There are certain things that only the experts should buy on SL Marketplace, and a dance pole is one of them.

Take it home (or, in our case, to Divas), set it up... Voila! You have a strip club. I didn't set ours up, Courtney did, so I have no technical insight here.

Come watch Stacey dance, or have the other dancers tell you how awful she is... http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Grant/116/145/461

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It's SUPER BOWL weekend! Stacey Cardalines Reporting...

 

The Super Bowl is this weekend, and it may be America's most social event that isn't Christmas or Thanksgiving. Even people with no interest in football can enjoy the Super Bowl, either for the funny commercials or the A-list musical acts or even just to gather together with friends. Yes, the Super Bowl has something for everyone, even on SL.

Ideally, you'd be out with a bunch of friends at some gathering for the big game, but life isn't always ideal. Instead of chomping chicken wings with your friends, maybe you're stuck at home or work. That sucks because no one likes to miss a party, but there you are. You may even be such an intense football geek that you can't properly concentrate on the game if there are a bunch of non-believers there who just want to see the Doritos commercial. I actually get like that when the Patriots make it to the big game. Regardless of your motivation, you're still alone for the game.

However, if you have a computer, you can still at least experience the game with people. Just log on to SL and find a party! Don't know where the party is, you say? No worries. I know just the place.

First, we need to make sure you are up to speed on the basics. I can't have my people go to sims and be complete football zeroes, can I? I have a reputation to live down to.

The Super Bowl was born from the merger of two rival football leagues, the traditional NFL and the upstart AFL. At first, the AFL champ would play the NFL champ. After the 1970 merger of the leagues, they mixed the teams up, and the game was played between conference champions. The NFL won the first few, before Joe Namath scored the first AFL win. The Pittsburgh Steelers and the New Engand Patriots lead the list with 6 Super Bowl wins each. The Los Angeles Rams won the last one, and this year's game is between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles.

The Eagles are favored to win by 1.5 points, in a game where the mob has decided that the two teams will combine for 51 points. There is no way to score half a point in the NFL, but that 1.5-point spread is just a gambling failsafe against the game being decided by a point. You can also bet on goofy things like who will score first, whether one team or another will fumble, and stuff like that. These are called Prop Bets. You can bet on how long Chris Stapleton will hold the "and the rocket's red glaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaare" note in the national anthem, and you can bet on whether Rhianna will open an umbrella during the halftime show. I know a guy who won 500 bucks once when Christina Aguilera wore pantyhose to sing the national anthem.

I have no idea who Chris Stapleton is, but that's more my fault than his. I'd guess that he's either a country singer or a pretty boy/dancer-type guy. I stopped being musically hip when the Wu-Tang Clan started to fall off.

The Super Bowl is America's most-watched television event and is second only to the World Cup if you count the rest of the world. The seven most-watched American programs ever are all Super Bowls, with only the M*A*S*H* finale cracking the top 8. The 2012 Super Bowl was watched by 111 million people. The first Biden/Trump debate, which would help decide who would be running the free world for 4 years, only got 63 million viewers. Of course, nobody got their spine snapped at the Biden/Trump debates, and there were no cheerleaders.

If you want to run a commercial during the game, you'd better have $5 million handy. The high price stems from the massive viewership the game draws, as well as the fact that the advertisers go out of their way to make the commercials be very entertaining. Many, many people go to the water cooler the day after the game and only talk about commercials. The Bud Light Frogs, Where's The Beef, "Thanks, Mean Joe" and Puppymonkeybaby were all Super Bowl commercials. Betty White's career revival was born out of a Super Bowl ad. Farrah Fawcett's first national gig was a Super Bowl commercial.

One year, my husband and his friends got very drunk for the game, which was being played in California or somewhere while my native Massachusetts was having a fierce nor'easter. Our power went out. Faced with a no-TV disaster, I had everyone make a plate, we loaded into the largest SUV that we had, and we drove laps around tiny Duxbury while listening to the game on the car radio. We got pulled over by the police once. I got about halfway through the story I just told you, and the cop just shook his head and goes "Drive up and down the beach road, you won't kill anyone that way." He took a Cop Tax of several buffalo fingers and a Pepsi. I believe it was St. Louis/Tennessee Super Bowl.

Now, back to stuck-on-SL-for-the-game You. Rather than insulting my readership by saying "You have no friends and no party invites," I will instead assume that you are such a football fiend that you can't watch with other people. Yet, you may still wish to be among people, just for the camaraderie. SL is good for that. There are sims that host Super Bowl parties, and you can go to these sims and pay as much attention as you feel like paying.

If your girl asks you some stupid question during a key point in the game and you are physically at a party, it would be considered poor form if you just ignored her question for ten minutes while the drama played out. You can do that on SL easily, however. I do it all the time, almost always for less important reasons. If your guy is a dinosaur and he thinks you're better served to feed him and his friends than watching the game (women make up 35% of the Super Bowl audience, and the number grows substantially every year), you'll be having an argument at a physical party. On SL, you can just tell him to order some Chinese delivery. 

This is important. I missed Janet Jackson's tits because I was handing nachos to someone during the 2004 Super Bowl.

You can avoid all of that by going to Rockin' Robin's for their weekend-long Super Bowl party. One of the pictures in this article is their schedule board, so that saves Stacey some typing. 

They have 9 live acts, a full football stadium with a performer stage set up, and the stadium even has locker rooms. You can get pom poms for your favorite team. The main event will be a weekend-long dance party on the football field. If you are alone for the Super Bowl, a good-sized crowd is just a teleport away. I was there taking pics at 1 AM on a Thursday, and the DJ had a good crowd. I'd imagine the Super Bowl will be teeming with folks.

Rockin Robin's is a go-to spot for me, as they always have the sim set up for various sports and holiday events. You could do a lot worse than to have RR as a regular stop on your rounds. Look for Eve Canadi, tell her I sent you, and you'll be taken care of.

Rockin' Robin's... http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Rockin%20Robin/132/134/81

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Happy Thanksgiving From the Sports and Leisure Desk at SLE- Stacey Cardalines Reporting...

 

Gobble Gobble!

Thanksgiving and Halloween are sorts of the co-anchors of the Autumn season. Autumn starts in September, but September and early October can still have some nice days, at least where I live (Massachusetts). Halloween and Thanksgiving fall (no pun intended) is a time of year when there is no doubt that Summer has left the building. I've bundled my children up in winter coats to send them trick or treating, and I've sat at a Thanksgiving football game where it was 12 degrees outside.

This cold dichotomy may lead some people to hate Autumn, but not this reporter. I love the change of seasons, I love the fall foliage and I love all the harvest stuff going on at local farms. One of the reasons that I haven't written here in a while is that I spent a lot of October and November driving around to look at trees changing color or roaming through pumpkin patches like Linus. There are other reasons, but they are sad ones, and this is supposed to be the Enquirer's funny column, so no need to drag that all up here.

I was looking to write about Thanksgiving and especially Plymouth. Plymouth is the birthplace of Thanksgiving (Jamestown had the real first Thanksgiving, but Virginians need to argue with their underperforming public relations staff, not me). I live deep enough in real-life Plymouth County that I can see the Mayflower II across the bay from my house. Seeking to capitalize on this unearned Dad-bought-a-house-here expertise, I hunt incessantly for Plymouth-related sims every November so that I can let the people know my wisdom.

Only once in my years working for this publication have I found Plymouth on SL, and- to be frank- it looked more like northern California... and I say that in the "Sacramento is not California" sense that Rush Street Reggie made famous. They had a Mayflower, a few colonial-looking cabins, and some turkeys running about. I was very pleased, and Lanai got a Thanksgiving article out of me that year. That sim is something else these days, and I could find no substitute for it any other year I looked.

This year also failed to net me a Plymouth, but that doesn't mean my deadline goes away, so I had to hunt me up some Autumn somewhere.

I found Autumn in spades at the Mieville Thanksgiving Street Fair. This is a very nice sim that is all set up for the Fall season. as you can see from the pictures, they have turkeys, fireplaces, fall foliage, November-blooming flowers... all that good stuff.  The sim is cleverly constructed so the visitor walks around a pastoral autumn scene, but as they do, they go by little sales kiosks where they can purchase seasonally-themed products.

It makes for a very nice walk and is a good setting for some cute pictures. I heartily recommend it. They have the autumnal theme running through the 25th, so hurry on down this long weekend. Much like real life, there isn't much time for you to see Fall things... it will be December before you and I speak again.

People take things in SL for granted. If you go to a sim where it is done up for Autumn, you should rightfully praise whoever set the sim up. You should also, however, appreciate the infrastructure which provides the things that you see at that sim. You have to find someone who sells Autumn trees, turkeys, horns-o-plenty, Mayflowers, and what have you. SL is funny like that- many people play SL just to have cyber sex, but there are people who log on to SL and spend the day making Pilgrim hats. Because of them and the sacrifices they made, the sim you get laid at has a nice, comforting Autumn look. A timeless Norman Rockwell background takes some of the shame out of av-fucking a stranger.

Because there are designers who make turkey tailfeathers and Pilgrim costumes, my sister Courtney and I have seasonally-themed outfits for our job as dancers. Being from Plymouth, I was a natural for the Naughty Pilgrim costume. Not being from Plymouth, my sister ended up having to be a turkey. I didn't think to include my costume, which is just black lingerie with a Priscilla Alden bonnet, in this article. There was no way in Hell I was going to forget to highlight my sister with goofy turkey feathers attached to her lower spine. 

I won the next season, too... I get to dance as Mrs. Claus, while Courtney will spend December wearing reindeer antlers with blinking Christmas tree lights on them. Much like her tailfeathers, she loves when people ask about her antlers, why she has to wear them, whether she lost a bet or not... go on down and say hello.

People should also not take Autumn for granted. Autumn gets a bad rap, basically because it is Summer's pallbearer. Never forget that Autumn stands between Summer and the ice/cold/snow of Winter. Winter's main holiday- Christmas- is all about snow and cold. There will be months where you'd be thrilled to see a forecast for the day as "highs in the 40s, lows in the 30s." People in western New York right now wish it was 48 degrees.

The key is to see the bright side. Go out even on SL- and see some trees changing color. Get an apple cider donut. Watch some farmer harvest something. Remember, in about a month, it will be too cold to go out. Go down to the Mieville Thanksgiving Street Fair and see some Autumn. Otherwise, once you go down the list some, you'll end up at Divas, watching a stripper journalist dressed as a Pilgrim... or her sister Courtney, dressed as a turkey.

The positive part of journalism is informing the public, sharing your adventures, helping someone who needs help, promoting good causes, blah blah blah... the negative but fun part of journalism is using your column to humiliate your sister, who might have to dance for all comers dressed as a turkey.

Mieville Thanksgiving Street Fair = http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Mieville%20Dragonsworn/130/198/701

Divas = http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Grant/116/142/461

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Woodstock Redux at Rockin' Robin's - August 13th-14th

 Woodstock was a music festival held in 1969, August 15-19, in upstate New York. It featured 32 bands, including many heavy hitters of the time such as Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Jefferson Airplane, CCR, Janis Joplin and Sly And The Family Stone. For those of you who aren't 74 years old, it was basically what K-Tel had in mind when they made Freedom Rock, man.

Widely considered to be the cultural apex of the 1960s, you old people better have a good story as to why you missed it, like "I was giving birth to a future Yuppie" or "I was in Vietnam, letting the people know my wisdom."  Well over 400,000 people attended, at a time when you could still see first-ballot Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame players like Led Zeppelin or The Doors in a 100-seat nightclub.

If you ever saw a guy playing a really discordant National Anthem on his guitar, it was Woodstock. If you've ever heard the expression, "Don't eat the brown acid," that also came from Woodstock. Snoopy's pal Woodstock is named for the festival, even though he predates it by 2 years. It's what the song "Woodstock" ("By the time we got to Woodstock, we were half a million strong") by CSNY is about.

It was an odd show. Led Zeppelin, Jeff Beck, and the Doors all declined. The Beatles were scheduled to headline but refused when the organizers wouldn't give Yoko Ono's band a slot on the schedule. The Rolling Stones couldn't be bothered. Jimi Hendrix's lead-in was 50s novelty act Sha Na Na. Bob Dylan, who lived in Woodstock, chose not to play. Santana debuted there. Bands such as Quill and the Keef Hartley Band made the big stage, played to a half million people, and then faded back into obscurity. Ariana Grande's parents weren't even born yet. There were two births, three deaths, and over 700 drug overdoses. 

It rained half the time, it was very muddy, there were a lot of smelly hippies around, and it is still instantly recognizable 50+ years later. you can say "Altamont" or "Monterey Pop Festival" to someone younger than 70 and they won't know what you are talking about. They will know, instantly, what Woodstock was.

Naturally, someone on SL decided to celebrate the anniversary. Rockin' Robin, an old friend of this column, has decided to commemorate the Hippie Haji  with a weekend-long show at her sim. 

The shows run from August 13 through the 14th, Saturday and Sunday, 24 hours a day. They have a full slate of nine bands scheduled, and the dress theme is Counterculture. Look like a hippie. If you're not that old, try to look like young Robert Plant. If you're not THAT old, try to look like you're going to a rave. 

You can take some LSD if you wish. I'm not sure if they have LSD on SL. I know they have weed, because I have some, and I know they have crack pipes because I have one. LSD, which is served on a small piece of chemically-soaked paper, would be hard to translate into the virtual world.

I took LSD when I was in high school. I just laughed for 9 hours and was endlessly fascinated by things like colorful posters and- for a strange half hour- a rubber duck. If I took it in a strange place with a half million people running around, I'd either be 1) dead or 2) still wandering around upstate New York, trying to find some cookies.

In case your 1960s knowledge is a bit jumbled, the National Guard won't murder you here. That was Kent State, a year later.

Be sure to pop in.... 

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Rockin%20Robin/56/180/81

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Stacey Visits The STOP WAR Sim - Stacey Cardalines Reporting

 

War is very unpleasant to think about, and many would view SL as a means of temporary escape. One can't actually do anything about those tanks, but one can get away from it for a while on SL. In a broad sense, it is sort of what SL is for.

However, what if you don't want to escape? What if you want to talk to other people about what is going on? SL is good for that, too. Many sims on SL get Ripped From The Headlines, and after a while it rebounds back to someone like me and what is Ripped From The Headlines becomes the actual headline. I visited one of those sims today.

The world watched in outrage as Russian armies attacked the Ukraine. It is a horrible thing to watch, and it has catastrophic potential implications if other players become involved. You'd think "worldwide plague" would be enough, but we just upped the ante. Russians have reasons for acting as they do, and "obscure SL sportswriter column" is most likely not where those reasons need to be debated.

Russia's invasion of the Ukraine is not fun stuff to play out at a sim. I'd greatly question the integrity of someone who made a first-person shooter Russia vs the Ukraine war game sim... right after I played it for a few hours, of course. Just kidding, I don't think I could perform the moral gymnastics needed to play something for laughs as people are dying for real in the Ukraine. I do some hardcore RP too, so my bar is pretty high, and my refusal to war-game the Ukraine horror is thusly notable.

STOP WAR is a sim which just went into effect last Friday. It is not a grand sim in any design way, it is in fact very simple. There are a few pictures, a chart showing NATO countries, a dispenser where you can get a free Ukraine flag and a game table. Nothing there that will stop a war, and at this point it is important to remember that wars aren't going to be stopped by video games, and in fact often resemble video games when you see someone guiding in a missile and so forth. 

Pela, who runs the STIP WAR sim, is no fool, and her sim title is more Idealistic than an aspect of a mission statement. I spoke with her a while while visiting her sim in the early US morning. She put the sim up Friday, and will leave it up as long as it is active and stays relatively positive.

Pela recognizes that, in times of war, people get traumatized, or even just upset, or even just intrigued. They need somewhere to go where they can discuss it. It may not be polite to take over someone's nightclub and turn it into a NATO discussion format. However, at STOP WAR, you can chat about the war all you like. 

Human nature being what it is, people sometimes choose Battle over Reason. However, there are places for both, and this sim falls into the camp of the latter. Anyone getting too close to the former will be asked to leave. This sim is meant to allow people to seek some comfort.

They are getting some good traffic for a sim that started Friday, so there is definitely interest in the topic among those who play the Linden way. Pela is running the sim for all the right reasons, and hopefully good beats evil. Pela told me that some Russian themed sims were having some problems with people arguing, and hopefully that doesn't go down at STOP WAR. 

I got some Ukraine gear from the SL Marketplace, not the STOP WAR sim. Pela- who seems pretty nice, and dresses cooler than I do- isn't running that sim to make a profit, and the only gear they had there was a free flag. I may wear my Ukraine outfit at my dancer job, although it might cost me Russian tips. I've had no luck finding Belarus gear. I do have a USSR gymnast leotard, which I saw at a store and I thought looked cool. I can switch between outfits from different nations, depending on the political affiliations of my customers. I never imagined that I'd have to think geopolitically when I accepted the dancer job at the wrestling sim, but that's how things shake out sometime.

Yes, that's my ass in that picture. Never let it be said that Stacey Cardalines shirks from the horrors of war. Spasibo.

STOP WAR = http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Coverdale/140/23/3820

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