April 2012 – Ahuva’s Blog

Disillusioned or Comprehending?

Linden Lab has decided not to sponsor SL9B this year. As expected, the SL community is debating whether this is a good thing, a bad thing, both, or a non-event. I’ll give you the link to Honour’s post and you can blog-hop from there if you want. Let me get this part out of the way: I have mixed emotions and thoughts. I can argue all those points of view. That immediately disqualifies me from the conversation, imho. 🙂

So why am I posting on this issue if I’m not discussing it directly? I attended a presentation the other day that I found very interesting, informative, and I think it relates to the LL/SL9B situation. The presentation was by David J. Lanners on Ethical Influence. Most of the talk was on working with other people, both on your team and people outside of your team. The part that resonated most strongly with me was Lanners’ summary of Abraham Zaleznik’s work on the difference between good managers and good leaders. I’m paraphrasing, but basically the point as I understood it was:

If you want things to stay the same, hire a good manager. If you want risk, innovation and change, hire a good leader.

As I do not have permission to share the slide nor the material directly, please understand that what I am posting here is my understanding of what was said and the notes I jotted down from the talk. Any mistakes or flaws in theory are mine.

Good managers are systematic and patient. They are objective and they compromise and reconcile differences. Leaders, by comparison, are emotional and subjective. They are uncompromising and intuitive and, interestingly, anxious. By the way – please note that a good leader is not “better” than a good manager, nor vice versa. They perform different functions.

I think that your reaction to LL/SL9B will be governed a lot by whether you think like a leader or think like a manager. Are you are looking for a leader or a manager for your SL experience?

I don’t know if I’m a leader or a manager. I think the best compliment I have ever received was from one of my mentors who said “She makes things happen.” I look at the adjectives for leaders and managers and I see myself on both lists and on neither list. *grin* But here’s my thinking at this moment….

Maybe a good manager might help at this stage. Someone who could find the proper person at LL with the authority to have a conversation. The manager could try to negotiate a compromise: LL provides sims and the residents (users) can run the event. It’s been done in the past (I believe for SL2B and SL3B). Once the manager changes LL support to limited LL sponsorship, it will be time for the leaders to stand up and bring SL9B on home.

Oh wait. I guess I DID comment directly 🙂

Sanctuary

Things are a bit turbulent in my life these days. My husband suffered a serious accident and much of my time, energy and thoughts are dealing with the aftermath of that. Most of the “heavy lifting” part came immediately after when I was helping my sister with 1st night seder for 26, then my 2nd night seder for 16, Pesach brunch on Sunday, and putting back all the tables, furniture, dishes, etc. on Sunday and Monday. Yeah, some people will do ANYTHING not to help. *laughing* But since my husband already helped with a ton of the preparatory cleaning, his timing wasn’t all THAT escapist.

I’ve not been inworld much lately. I mostly get there for Friday nights at Tribeca and maybe another evening or two for some music or a chat. Since the accident, I’ve been inworld every night. It is my community, my support network. Immediately after the accident, people were in an out of our house for three days. They were visiting my husband and here for the holiday. But then comes Monday and everyone goes back to their routine. Except for the 2 of us. Our routine is a bit disrupted. So we get a few phone calls, a few emails, a few pokes on Facebook and that is as it should be. But I find that I am craving some sort of balm for my stress. I’m finding it inworld.

I don’t know how you get people to survive the first hour experience. I don’t know what makes one person decide to live in SL and another decide to leave. All I know is that I am still at home in SL. This is still one of my major communities, one of my major networks of support and love. There is nearly always a friend online. I can reach out to a friend and say – please, come dance with me, I need to feel arms holding me for a bit. I have friends who give me virtual hugs which I can feel on my skin. I have friends who will distract me with chat or listen to me vent my frustrations with the medical process. Always there is the music. I have blues music playing on my home property if I don’t want to interact beyond a chat. I go to FogBound where there is always a DJ playing fantastic music. I am a regular, a Fogette, and there is always someone there to say “heya Ahuva, how are you today?”. Monday nights I usually catch Taunter performing live. Last night karma was kind and one of my favorite live performers returned to SL.

Last night (BigJim Allerhand (BigJim Adam in RL) returned to Club CTO. He’s been absent awhile now while he was winning acclamation in the physical world. He was playing with Uncle Leeeroy and CharlieJosh Digfoot. They play blues and pickin’ til you are moving right along, playing the air washboard. You know a musician is A-1 quality when the other SL musicians are there in the crowd. Taunter left for her own performance before I snapped the photo, but there is at least one other big-name SL musician in that crowd, not including club owner Cranston Yordstorm. There were a lot of familiar faces there – folk that I see when I’m listening to Von Johin and Ziffy Zarf and Noma Falta and other top-notch performers.

Yep, I’m going to be inworld again tonight (after I do this evening’s running about). I’ll be sure to stop in at FogBound and then be wherever the music takes me. My sanctuary of sound.

The Unseen Posts

Among the bloggers I read there is another discussion going on about “real” identity versus avatar identity, meeting avatars in “real” life, are you your avatar? My avatar is not even 4 years old and I think that discussion has been around easily 6 or 7 times in my “life”. I am Ahuva and Ahuva is me. I see that Chestnut Rau, one of the very first, if not THE first, bloggers I began to read has come to much the same realization about herself. I am more than just Ahuva and Ahuva gets to be more than I can be in the biological tangible world (simply consider Ahuva’s clothing choices as a start). I’ve met many many SL avatars and Plurk avatars in “real” life. Quite honestly – for me – it’s ALL my real life. One of my mentors is a biological male and is a drop-dead sexy female avatar. No, he’s not gay, he’s not gender confused, he’s not a cross-dresser. He had his own reasons for his avatar. I interact with him/her. I have no problem with the picture in my head. They both coexist because they are both him. And I always know with which aspect of his personality I am interacting. Maybe it’s because for me, when I interact, it’s an overall emotional response that drives me, not images. I don’t know and I don’t care.

Blogging is intensely personal for me. *grin* Life is intensely personal for me. *bigger grin* But you knew that. What concerns me is not the integration of RL/SL, nor is it the exposure of my SL to my RL. Most people in my RL know Ahuva, or know of Ahuva. Many people in SL know my RL information. Let’s go back to the concept that privacy is dead, that there are no secrets on the internet, that you can run but you really can’t hide.

I want to post about many many topics. I hold back. Why? Am I a coward? No. Or rather – maybe I am. But I’m getting old, folks. I’ve got a son who has reached the age of majority. I’m in what I “lovingly” call the downhill side. It took me a LONG time but finally I have absorbed some lessons. First – the way I feel today, no matter how passionately I feel it, is not necessarily the way I will feel tomorrow. Or maybe I’ll feel that way tomorrow but next year I will have changed my mind. Second – words on the internet live forever. That may not be true, but from all my knowledge – that’s how I see it. Third – We are judged by other people’s perceptions. Their perceptions can impact our lives dramatically. Fourth – words wound. I might be writing what I see as simple truth, or my opinion, but people read my words through their own filter. If they are in a bad mood, perhaps they read my words in anger and therefore hear anger and hate. I don’t want to add more ugliness to the world if I have the opportunity to avoid it. There’s a time and place for constructive criticism and my blog is probably neither.

Which leaves me with my unseen posts. The ones where I talk about the lessons I learn in the workplace: working with others, managing expectations, the effect of good and bad management, the frustration of the current economy. The posts where I talk about being a real person who is aging: becoming the dreaded grown-up I swore I’d never be, realizing what is important in personal and familial relationships, the fear of the future, death of loved ones. The posts where I talk about being a woman: sexuality, love, parenting, sistering, daughtering, the effect of full moons. The posts where I vent the judgmental views of being a person: OMG, who let that person sing? Who let that person write? That has to be the ugliest build I’ve ever seen. That is the stupidest approach to that situation. And all the other posts where I let flow my momentary anger, frustration and fear.

I feel I have learned so very much in the last few years. I owe a good part of that learning to the fact that I freed part of myself into an avatar and then brought that avatar back into me. I want to try to explain to other people what I’ve finally learned about life and love, speaking and not speaking, acting and not acting. But I lack the skill to say what I want to say without getting the lesson bogged down in the personal details of how I learned it.

I’m not afraid of tying my avatar to my RL. I’m afraid of tying myself to the wrong moment in my life. I am evolving, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, but I AM changing. Words posted to a blog capture a moment of time in my life to me. But those very same words may stand as my image engraved in stone, stuck fast, all that some other will know of me. I cannot tell in the present tense what I wish to represent me in the future tense.

Or if you’d rather end on a lighter note – I’m afraid of writing under the influence of a full moon. 🙂 Which is when I wrote the first draft of this.

Caine’s Arcade

cainesarcade.com

This is a video about an incredibly imaginative, creative, determined 9 year old boy living in East LA who built his own game arcade out of cardboard boxes, tape, string and other odds and ends. Caine built his arcade in his dad’s store. Caine’s dad sells auto parts, mostly via the internet, so there wasn’t much walk-in traffic to see the arcade. Until Nirvan Mullick came looking for a part. And found the arcade.

Nirvan was inspired to make a short film about Caine and generated a flash mob to come and play. This 11 minute film will make your heart soar. Look at the smile on that child. Look at the intelligence, the determination, the joy.