I know admitting it is the first step. Okay, here it goes…whew….I have a serious lust for boots. For some reason, I always feel prettier, sexier, more in control, when I wear boots. The problem is my feet are not the same as they used to be when I was a teenager. They flattened out, grew wider, and trying to wear boots now in real life is nearly impossible for me ( I need a special type of shoe contour and really good arch support, aka diabetic shoes). Yes, middle age sucks. Back in the day, I wore Candies and Jellies, stiletto heels and the most incredible pair of thigh high boots. Now I can only look at them in store windows and lust.
But I did find an odd substitute. You see, in the virtual world of Second Life, I can wear some of the most wonderful, gorgeous, and insanely painful-looking footwear. Amazing how it satisfies my craving. :)
 |
| Baby Monkey, Ultimate Zsa Zsa Boots in Zebra Print |
| Barbarella, Leather Boots in Black |
Bootgasm,
Lost Boots in Black Smoke
Until next time…
~ Cass
Cass, I love those boots. I used to wear some of the craziest shoes when I was younger. I had a pair of what I call granny boots. They were black with lace and a 3 inch heel. They laced up right over my ankle length. They reminded me of something a woman would wear back in the victorian days.
But my calves are bigger now and trying to buy shoes, boots that lace up is just far from funny. They just won’t fit.
Ya know, I’ve tried 4 times to get into SL and the first time Firefox said it didn’t recognize the address and wouldn’t even let me on the website. The second time I used IE and my computer crashed. I went back two more times and tried to sign up and I kept getting flash player crash, fire fox crash…so I don’t know what’s up…my computer does not like that site for some reason.
Oh, I loved those Victorian boots too and I had a pair in black as well! Cool beans! Yep, I cannot imagine trying to squeeze my tootsies into a pair of those nowadays. Eeps!
Drats on the SL computer crashing. I know when I was first *lured* into SL, my computer didn’t like it and would crash every other time. Someone on one of the SL boards told me to upgrade my memory, clear my cache and to install the latest versions of Flash player and Firefox. And it still acted wonky. Then we got broadband internet and it stopped acting as wonky and I could go into SL. I admit it was a bit of a hassle. And then figuring out how to work the silly avatar at first was unbelievably frustrating, because it was ll so very new to me and I am not a very technically inclined person to begin with. lol. IT took about six tries before I started getting the hang of it. Now, if I don’t go in for a while and then have an event to go to in there, I forget stuff and can’t remember how to do certain things and have to ask Cora or another friend. lol. It’s not easy. But once you get the hang of it, it’s pretty cool. Like playing electronic paper dolls. :) But the best part for me is catching up with all my friends who pop in there to chat from time to time, and to meet readers and fans of my writing and simply talk about my stories. I also love doing the tarot reading in there. It adds another dimension and I do like that. However, there are a few things I don’t like about SL. One is how fast the dribbles of money can go. You exchange real cash for monopoly money called Lindens and it’s like a bunch of lindens you get for a measly sum of RL dollars, so it doesn’t seem like much–however, those measly amounts add up and before you know it, you’ve spent like $50 in RL money. Ouch. If you are on a serious budget like I am, then $50 is a lot for nothing more than playing paper dolls.
The other thing I admit I do not like, is how fast things change in there. One minute you are visiting this amazing and wonderful place and you go back to visit it like two weeks later and it’s gone. Nothing lasts (or seems to last) very long in SL. And that’s because the company that runs the entire shebang, Linden Labs, charges SIM owners too much for their place. The costs are prohibitive unless you have unlimited income and like to simply play on the there.
It’s like $300 Real money to own an island per month and you have to pay for it somehow and that money goes to Linden Labs. That is insane to me, $300 a month for a make-believe island. It reminds me of the old joke about the swampland in Florida for sale.lol
So someone buys an island, then throws up a bunch of houses and stores on their SIM, thinking that the rentals will pay for the SIM. But they don’t. And they really cannot afford $300 a month, but it’s their happy place, so they do whatever they can to keep it alive for as long as they can…and then the inevitable happens and they lose the SIM or have to sell it…and so the cycle of change hits pretty fast. Which is why so many places disappear or go from a cool jazz club and two weeks or three later, are now a faery folk hangout or a Vampire SIM. And those usually don’t last much longer before they too, disappear or change.
And the last thing I don’t like about SL is how it’s become a mecca or sorts for cheating spouses. They call it a *game* and that since it’s online it’s not really *cheating*. But my own thought is that if you feel you have to hide that you’re doing it on SL with other people you friended, and you are basically having texting sex with a graphical interface, so you can actually see them and what you are *doing* with and to them, then it’s cheating. Because I have heard too many stories about womens’ husbands who come into SL and develop a relationship and have sex and then it migrates into RL and becomes a problem in the marriage. And not to be sexist, because it goes both ways, and women cheat on their husbands in there too.
So feeling the way I do, why am I still in SL, you might ask? Several reasons. First, I have built something there with Cora for the MMC and I hate to abandon something I’ve built unless I absolutely have no option. Second, if you don’t go into SL looking for sex or exploring that part of SL, there are a lot of cool things to find and explore. SL is more than pixel sex. It’s just up to the person, and what you want out of the experience. and finally, it is a way to possibly reach new readers, more readers and offer current readers a way to directly interact with us, attend special events and get special goodies only available to our MMC group members in SL.
For as long as I can continue to help run the MMC website and blog, I’ll be there as well, to interact with readers, so although it would be cool if you could go into SL, it might be the universe telling you it’s better for you if you don’t. :P
I forgot to mention that you can also *talk in live voice* on SL, which is how I do my book readings, but also another added shaker of spice for the cheaters playing their *games* in SL. Oh, and webcaming, too, while in SL for their *games*. Grr.
Maybe I’m old fashioned, but games to me are like Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit, not cheating on your spouse in a virtual thing online.
Wow, lol now that you mention it, I think I might just be better off not trying to get into SL….I’ll just keep visiting both your blogs and MMC :)