| Endings Are Only Places Where New Things Begin. |
[Apr. 28th, 2012|05:11 pm] |
Hi all,
Hunny Bunny’s totem human here, out of character today, to explain my not so sudden decision to pull the plug on Second Life.
Actually, I’ve known this was coming for quite some time, but I’ve put it off as long as I possibly could, in hopes that something would happen to make Hunny’s presence on the grid sustainable. But it suddenly became apparent that this wasn’t going to happen, and things were starting to progress beyond the point of common sense.
Basically what happened went like this. Circumstances conspired to get Hunny involved in doing an Anime event at her club, which was going to be a little tricky because I left Anime Fandom something like 10 years ago. So all the Anime tunes Hunny would have to work with would be over 10 years old. And we were kind of skeptical about how that would go over with current Anime fans.
But Hunny said, “If we’re going to do this, we’ll just make the most of what we’ve got.” Which is what she always does, usually to great effect. So she hit on the idea of making it specifically a retro Anime event, and we set about researching what tunes we had available and getting up a program. This kept us up all night, till about 8 AM.
The following night, Hunny wanted to make some visual adjustments to the club for the event. These were not particularly difficult adjustments by SL standards. Rather like the adjustments she’d do for any special event, but which she hasn’t been doing for recent events to save strain on me. Lately she’s just been playing tunes and letting it go at that. But her reduced activity of late hasn’t stopped SL from being a strain on me.
These adjustments ran smother than usual. In fact, we were both quite pleased at how smoothly things were going. But still, even with the super computer running SL at top speed, doing anything in SL is such a slow and concentration intensive exercise that I once again ended up plugging my entire consciousness into the computer for an entire 6 hours, between 2 AM and 8 AM.
At that point I started to detect signs of fatigue. And everything was set for the event. So I turned the computer off and went to bed – hoping to get some decent sleep so I’d have plenty of life-force to give Hunny during the event.
But no sleep was forthcoming. Instead I ended up laying there for several hours worrying about why my insides were jumping all over the place. Not to mention my total inability to sleep. But I could not explain what was happening. I just had this overwhelming awareness that something was wrong – really, really wrong.
I felt like there was a real possibility that I was pushing another stroke, or possibly having some kind of epileptic seizure from the constant intense concentration required to give Hunny virtual life. Concentration which is consequently unavailable to me in the real world these days. I burn up all my mental resources trying to provide a real life-force for Hunny’s pixel body.
Yeah, I know, probably not one other player in SL takes the game that seriously or puts that much effort into making it a true second life. But it’s just not worth doing for me if I can’t go all the way with it.
Anyway, this is hardly the first time I’ve had adverse consequences from SL requiring more of me than I had capacity to supply. There have even been several times when I had to back off of SL for a while to recover, each episode being worse than the last. And each one has made me more and more aware that I couldn’t possibly keep this up forever. But there are some people on SL who seem to need Hunny there – people that Hunny loves very much and doesn’t want to be separated from. That’s why she has continued to fight to keep going, long after it was apparent that the cost of giving her life was more than I could pay.
Possibly, if the Anime event had happened and been a success, Hunny would have continued to beg for more time. But it did not happen. Both SL and the entire internet picked that day to give me a hard time. Sites would not load, and it took an hour and a half to log into SL.
Hunny finally got to her club less than a half hour before show time, only to find her stream server was on the fritz.
“Just like old times,” Hunny said to me, recalling how things had been on the old computer where nothing ever worked, especially when it was important.
As we always do at times of crisis like this, Hunny and I batted around possible ways of pulling the event out of the fire. I even suggested I could try to buy a new stream and try to get it set up within 20 minutes. But Hunny said she knew it was too much to ask. She just threw up her hands and admitted defeat. Then she sent out a notice canceling the event, and the club.
We had both just reached a point where we could no longer deny that it was always going to be this way. No matter how small a task was required of Hunny, SL was always going to go out of its way to make it murder on me, and she just couldn’t ask me to keep wearing myself to a frazzle like this.
So Hunny gave the bad news to her friends that she wasn’t going to be on SL anymore. Well, the friends who were there, anyway. And they were all most unhappy about it. I suppose this may have come out of the blue for Bixyl and Jasmine, but REC might have seen it coming . . . or not. Hunny can never tell how much REC perceives about our breakdowns.
But, after various explanations of how trying another new viewer was not going to help the problem, everyone seemed to accept Hunny’s decision. And she spent the rest of her last day on SL chatting with friends and hanging close to REC until he logged for the night. And then I closed the SL viewer, knowing it was probably for the last time.
The next day I got an E-mail saying Hunny’s stream had expired. It shouldn’t have. I had just paid for another month. It was like SL reaching out to slap us and say, “Ha! I will torment you whether you log in or not.”
But the money was wasted anyway. We had no plans to use the stream. And Hunny was not about to demand more life just to straighten out a mistake of no consequence. Only if Hunny had continued trying to carry on in SL would this have mattered. And it would have been a big headache for me, having to change all my links for a new stream.
It just goes to show that SL had no intentions of lightening Hunny’s burdens, and she was wise to see that and hang it up when she did.
So, what does the future hold for Hunny Bunny? Well, I feel no need to put a definitive ending to Hunny’s story. I see no reason why she can’t continue being the mascot for the journal, and of course she now has a role to play in Spectral Shadows. So I guess Hunny will go on being my representative on the internet, where she hopefully has just as much life as she does on SL. And she can still be there for her friends – at least those who are willing to watch for her outside of SL.
As for myself, I’m going to be concentrating on getting my health back for a while. And hopefully finding a lifestyle for myself that will be satisfying without being detrimental. Then we’ll see where we go from there.
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