Isaac Week 5 SL Journal

Part 1

I found a Spanish class that was still running, but the next free class is scheduled to run on tuesday 4pm. I'm not sure which timezone though, so I might have to miss out. I had a look around the classroom anyway. There were powerpoint slides containing vocabulary lists. They gave an indication of the content of each lesson. It seems that the main advantage in SL classes is that you can hold voice conversations with the teacher and other students from the comfort of your home.

After this, I went to Rocca Sorrentina, an 18th century Italian sim with a focus on teaching history.

Upon arrival there was an exhibition of the various caricatures of King George IV that were circulated in the 18th century. This was supplemented by some history of old media, which was rather interesting.

Within Rocca there were links to other historical sites, some of which I'd like to visit another time.

I tried on the complementary clothes and wore them around the Naples exhibition.

I tried to take a photo of my avatar's curtsy.

I teleported outside of the Rocca Sorrentina museum, and took a photo of myself on a galleon.

I then explored the township. There were shops where you could buy Enlightenment era clothes, wigs, boots; and several museums showcasing musical instruments, furnishing, and other objects.

A pleasant minature shrine of the madonna.

The island itself is quite large, and I was about to explore a Renaissance dome when my friend teleported me to another wedding. None of these people were from KOTA, and they all spoke Spanish, so I just stood around awkwardly until someone told me to dance.

Part 2

I spotted someone wearing a cool spiderman outfit, so I did a search for superhero costumes and found a shop called Heroes Unlimited. I bought Magneto and Batman disguises.

Magneto has been griefing the non-mutant citizens of Chinatown..

Just when all hope seemed to be lost, The Dark Knight appears..

SL seems particularly suited for Machinima because it's relatively easy to get hold of character models, and there are plenty of well designed locations to film in.

Drama in KOTA

A few weeks ago I met a couple of guys on KOTA, who weren't Korean but still interesting. One of the guys (let's call him Thor, because he was supposedly Scandinavian) said he was a diplomat and could speak 10 languages, and he was the self-proclaimed biggest troll on SL. The other guy was a British Chinese PHD electrical engineering candidate (I'll call him JungUK - Junguk means China in Korean). I can never tell who's lying about themselves on SL, but it hardly matters because I'm not invested in anyone there. When I first met these guys they immediately got into a power struggle, mostly because Thor wanted to assert his dominance over JungUK. I'm indifferent to where I stand on the totem pole, even in my actual life, so it didn't matter to me where I was being positioned. Watching them sort things out got boring after a few minutes, but eventually they came to some kind of agreement and became friends.

Anyway, just a few days ago I caught up with them. They told me they were kicked out of KOTA because they were annoying the other KOTA users by only speaking English (on voicechat) and playing music. I told one of my KOTA friends about this, and she requested a teleport to set the record straight. She then spent 10 minutes mouthing off to Thor, calling him a liar and so on, while Thor hopelessly tried to defend himself. From where I was sitting, it was entertaining, but none of it made any sense. Thor was being accused of trying to teleport people to random places out of the blue; Thor insisted it was a cultural misunderstanding, that in Western cultures, people send invitations to their friends without notice all the time. Eventually she left, and showed me screenshots of Thor trying to teleport girls in KOTA to various adult sims without an accompanying explanation or greeting. Thor sarcastically thanked me for defending him, which I found funny because he also had a massive hangover.

I then went to the KOTA and impressed the koreans there with my extremely limited korean. The girl who told off Thor (I'll call her Hyuna; she's not the same girl who 'broke up' with me) said that I was a genuine user of KOTA because my Korean has improved since she's met me. She said that many people like Thor and JungUK come to KOTA claiming to love Korean culture without knowing a thing about it. She supposed that they had ulterior motives and were just hunting for girls. That was an interesting revelation to me. While Thor and JungUK protested about cultural barriers, it seems that the Koreans were wary of Westerners looking for an angle. Even if you have no such intention, it pays to be aware of how you come across; unfortunately those two were too busy imposing their Western languages and culture. It's apparent that there was no cultural misunderstanding at all, it's more that they were not properly integrating themselves into the culture that was already there. Because of this event, I've decided to limit my use of English in that sim.