Second reverence

November 30, 2008 by 2 Comments

Coming across the Church of the Animated Bunny the other day made me think of the Church of the SubGenius, and I figured that there was bound to be some manifestation of the Word of “Bob” somewhere in Second Life. I couldn’t find anything though, apart from the Fool O’Beans Coffee Shop, which promises “Coffee … cake … praise [of] “Bob””, and when I visited the location there was nothing there apart from a snowy field.

It’s hard to believe that there is nowhere on the grid dedicated to the SubGenius, because it’s exactly the sort of thing I’d expect SL-loving types to be into. The in-world search engine is notoriously poor, so maybe the locations are just not showing up.

Anyway, thus inspired, I set off on a pilgrimage around some of the other spiritually-themed places in Second Life.

Most of the mainstream religions are covered; there are Anglican, Orthodox, and Catholic churches, a whole island dedicated to Islam, a centre of Sufi thought, a Synagogue, a Mormon Tabernacle, a Hindu Temple, a Buddhist Retreat, a Shinto Shrine, and a Confucian Oracle. I was surprised not to find a Sikh Temple, and there was nothing specifically for Taoists or Zoroastrianists either. Apologies to anyone else I’ve missed out.

I was expecting to find a few venues for devil-worship, but all the places that came up on a search for “Satan” turned out to be shops aimed at Goths. The Church of Frog and the Black Church cater to those with Vampiric tendencies, while the Church of the Seven Deadly Sins ministers to the BDSM community. If you follow the Cthulhu Mythos, you might run into one of the Great Old Ones in Innsmouth.

Finally, there’s the Church of Enturbulation, an anti-scientology outfit. They have a website too, but it seems to be down at the moment, which may or may not be due to the nefarious actions of Tom Cruise. (For more anti-scientology stuff, check out Anonymous).

The Scientologists themselves deny that they have any designs on Second Life, but then they would say that wouldn’t they? I’m not a great fan of the followers of L. Ron, but then I’m both a psychiatrist and a communist, so I’m sure that the feeling is mutual.

[Postscript: The title of this post reminded me of this.]

Filed under Culture, Second Life Tagged with , , ,

Bunny worship

November 24, 2008 by Leave a comment

Not before time, I’ve worked out how to embed slurl’s in this page, so you can click on places I mention, which will take you to a map of the area at slurl.com, and from there you can teleport into SL, assuming you have your browser set up correctly. (There’s a guide to enabling this in Firefox here).

Continuing my peregrination around the Zygaena Crater, I came across the Church of the Animated Bunny:

animated_bunny02

I can completely understand why someone would go to the bother of creating something like this; it’s not something you would ever see in real life, it’s quite amusing, you can ask your SL friends over to hang out, and people like me might feature it in their blogs.

What puzzles me more is why anyone would take the trouble to recreate a nondescript business plaza like this:

metro_plaza

This is apparently the headquarters of the Metro Corporation, who seem to have some sort of advertising business, though not a terribly successful one, judging by the complete absence of anyone other than me. I did wander around for a while, and I came across a poster that let me teleport to a couple of clothes stores, but there were also a lot of posters that had yet to be rented. Whoever owns this place must be paying quite a bit in land fees (it’s 35008 square metres, which would be $195 a month), and, unless I just happened to be there at an unusually quiet time, making no return at all. (Or maybe a little; I did end up spending L$100 at one of the clothes shops, so I guess Metro will get a cut of that).

Metro do have a plan to drum up some more business; they were advertising for “Personal Assistants to the C-Executives” (plural), to liaise with customers. If it was anything like a real-life sales post that would be a pretty intensive job. I doubt they’ll get many applicants with the salary they are offering of $100 a month (US$, but still).

Filed under Culture, Economics, Second Life Tagged with , , ,

Superstition aint the way

October 5, 2008 by 1 Comment

I started attaching tags to my posts a couple of weeks ago in the hope that my pitifully low traffic would pick up a bit. I’m not sure how successful this has been; the graph of my visitor numbers has been as erratic as the Dow:

I did get a comment yesterday, for the first time in a while, from Ann’s New Friend. It was a bit snarky, but any attention is good I guess. I felt it was unfair of him/her to imply that I wasn’t interested in reading opinions that conflicted with my own; I look at right-wing journals and blogs all the time. I was just worried that readers might interpret the fact that I had linked to Real Clear Politics without any comment as meaning that I had some sympathy with the views expressed therein.

Hats off to ANF’s work rate though; I had been feeling pleased that I had managed six posts in a week, but he/she is a true stakanovite who produces fifteen in a day. It’s interesting that the biggest item in his/her tag cloud is “Obama” (as indeed mine is “Palin”); it’s always easier to talk about your opponen’s failings rather than your candidate’s qualities.

It did make me think about why I bother commenting on the US election; hardly anyone reads these posts, and those few who do are unlikely to be swayed by a few links to stuff they’ve probably seen before anyway. I have previously expressed the opinion that blogs are vastly overrated as a medium of political discourse, but I am finding myself more and more drawn into the cross-linked world of the political blogosphere.

I made a light-hearted reference to voodoo the other week, but the more I think about it, the more it seems that blogging has a lot in common with primitive religious rituals. (No offence to adherents of voodoo; I’m using “primitive” in the sense of “uncontaminated by civilisation”).

Faced with a process that is likely to affect my life in many fundamental ways, yet which is completely outwith my control – like a volcano, or winter, or the US Presidential race – I am reverting to simple superstition, offering tribute to the secular gods of liberal elitism, and bowing before the mighty deity that is Tina Fey.

Filed under Blogging, Politics Tagged with , , , , ,

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