New Girl...

This is Cindal:



Cindal is 6 years old and is the first alter to reveal herself to my therapist. She's incredibly shy and has a hard time speaking out loud. When typing, her spelling is horrible...she seems to spell phonetically. Because my father never would have stood for any kind of misspelling or anything else that was less than perfect, my therapist thought that it was probably Cindal's way of rebelling. She's very quiet and scares very very easily. As far as I know, none of my friends or family have ever seen her even smile. Cindal has been described to me as very sweet once you get to know her but always looks just a bit scared.
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This is Adelaide:



At least this is her second avatar. I had originally made this avatar to take my photos with so I wouldn't be bothered with messages from friends in the virtual world. However Adelaide decided that she knew how to make the avatar prettier and so she did lol. This was her first avatar, which suits her personality best:



Adelaide is 19 years old. It almost seems like nothing bad ever happened to her. She's very bouncy, always smiling and always looking for fun. She's obsessed with makeup, hair, clothes and looking at men, I suppose like most any 19 year old woman would be. She learned how to drive a car years before I did from a boyfriend I didn't know she (or I) had. My friends describe Adelaide as hyper, fun and very nice. Somewhat immature but what do you expect from such a young woman?

This is Twig:



Twig is the hardest for me to explain. We don't know if Twig is a boy or a girl...the other alters have referred to Twig as "it." We don't even know how old Twig is. When things get suddenly very frightening, Twig comes out, runs and hides. The others describe twig as a small, thin person with long tangled hair and very dirty, living up in the trees and never touching the ground. What I got from Twig is that it lives in the trees so it can't be caught by the people after it. I guess that's why Twig chose to look so...wooden for its avatar. I hadn't even considered setting up an avatar for Twig except that Cindal put in our journal that Twig often comes out and runs around the forest I created in the virtual world in the middle of the night when no one is there.

Twig doesn't speak in sentences. It speaks in one to three word bursts. Tanner is more protective of Twig than she is of any of the others, probably because Twig is more frightened than any of them and the most vulnerable. Getting Twig to even choose its look for an avatar was challenging. Twig didn't know how to go from one sim to another. All Twig knew how to do was walk around and fly in the virtual world. In the end I had to leave open the Second Life Marketplace website on several pages, one for shapes, one for skins, one for hair, one for clothes, etc etc, and then write detailed instructions on how to save what it liked so I could put together the avatar with things Twig wanted. It worked so well that taking Twig's picture for it's profile was challenging in itself....Twig blends VERY well into that forest I made lol.

Hi there,

I'm new here too but wanted to say welcome. Nice pictures of all of you.

Best,
M

Thank you, Micha .

This is Eve:



Eve is 17 years old. She's very calm...almost too calm. Eve is very submissive by nature. She's polite and speaks in very precise terms. I'm told she has a soft voice with a mild southern accent and smiles a lot, even if the situation doesn't call for a smile. She's easy to get along with but I think that's probably because of her submissive nature. My friends have several theories about her and why she is the way she is, first and foremost being that growing up I didn't dare not do as I was told. Eve's job was to submit to whatever we were told to do without a fight.

This is Elle:



Elle is 13 and rather sullen. She openly dislikes the male gender. My friends tell me that on the few occasions she comes out she's a little confrontational, like most teenagers are, and bores easily. She told my best friend that she liked being a mermaid in the virtual world because there's not many men to bother her under the water...it's more freeing. That's all I really know about her. She doesn't pop out that often that I'm aware of, at least not in front of my friends. I do have the impression that she'll log in late at night and explore the oceans of the virtual world. The only evidence I have of that is seeing her name on the log in screen the next morning and the occasional snapshot of underwater scenes in my pictures folder.

Hey cool images, nice to meet yall. That's a good idea using an character creator for games to make your alters. Now I have something to do later ha.

Second Life is more like a glorified chatroom than a game . I'm not sure "character creator" is a term that fits. There's no goals or prizes or any thing like that. I go there to socialize and to exercise my creative tendencies. People share paintings they made in RL (real life), poetry, music, photography, etc. Some of my best friends are musicians who play live in Second Life using a good microphone and a live streaming program. In the case of one friend, he plugs his keyboard set up directly into his computer so that we hear him as he plays, only switching his mic on between compositions.

I often share my poetry, short stories and photography there as well as building sims (simulators) in a fantasy forest theme. Virtual building and landscaping is limited only by the imagination and creativity of the person behind them. Most of the pictures you'll see here https://www.flickr.com/photos/94585373@N06/ were taken in the fantasy forest I created. A sim can only handle so many prims (primitives) and most objects are made of more than one prim. It takes a lot of planning and care to make an environment look as real and beautiful as possible and still stay within the limit of prims allowed on the sim. There's A LOT that goes into it, including the visual quality of the things you put out. People make and sell items for landscaping, including using programs to make sculpted or mesh objects and applying hand painted textures to them to make them more realistic. I know my limits. I can't sculpt or make mesh or textures, but I buy the most visually effective things from many different creators and put them together in a way that looks beautiful to me. Some people think I'm far too picky when it comes to what I will use, but as a result of my being that picky my sims have become two of the most popular places to visit in that virtual world. I'm happy with that .

The reason my alters started making their own avatars is that they would use mine...which got complicated. It's easier for people to see in real life when person is not themselves. Voice and body language change radically. My son can tell easily that he's talking to an alter and not to me. But when socializing virtually it's not always that easy to tell. As a result I lost several friends who didn't know it wasn't me they were talking to. So asking them to make their own avatars was a way for them to have some freedom of expression and for me to have less misunderstandings among my friends. And since I'm disabled, MOST of my socializing is done in that virtual world. Some of my friends in there have become closer to me in the past 7 years than my family has ever been apart from my son.

In the end it evolved into something more than just a way for my friends to tell them apart from me. It became a way for me to get to know them better. In Second Life, a person's avatar reflects who they are as people, just like clothing in RL does for us. Seeing how they chose to look gave me some insight into them. Also the SL viewer automatically saves chat, so I'm able to look back at conversations they had and so get to know them even more. It really has been a very useful tool for me .

Wow, very interesting. Everything that you said that is. It seems that second life has changed a lot since I checked it out years ago. I think that was the same game/sim. You seem pretty good at all this stuff.

I've been there for coming up on 8 years now . Second Life is set up very much like a world. A sim is 65,536 m² and can support up to 15,000 prims. That's a full region. A homestead is the same size but can only support 3750 prims, so it takes up less space on the servers. There are literally thousands of sims in Second Life. They started with the first mainland...a mass of sims all put together. There are three mainlands now. What I have are private regions, of which there are thousands more. Having a private sim is a lot less limiting than mainland sims. Private regions are spread throughout the virtual world like islands are in real life.

The owners of private regions can either make them public so any one can visit or they can make them completely private so that no one but their own specified group can visit. I preferred public. I'm always looking for places that are beautiful that I can sit in and reflect or write, etc. What I wanted to create was a place where people could be comfortable and made to feel welcome and respected. As in any online place, there are people who will cause trouble, but owning a private region allows me to ban trouble makers as they come. These days they don't come to my sims too often. We don't discriminate against how people choose to look, etc, but we don't tolerate excessive rudeness and lack of respect to other visitors. People have finally gotten the idea.

Having spent the last 4 years making those two sims safe made me even more comfortable allowing my alters run around them...especially the child alters. A safe environment for the littles to play in is always important I think . At one point my former therapist was so fascinated with how the alters developed their looks in the virtual world and how it helped them to open up that she considered recommending a separate Second Life-like virtual world specifically for use in therapy, to be accessed only by therapists and their patients. It was an interesting idea .

rain wrote:At one point my former therapist was so fascinated with how the alters developed their looks in the virtual world and how it helped them to open up that she considered recommending a separate Second Life-like virtual world specifically for use in therapy, to be accessed only by therapists and their patients. It was an interesting idea .

That could actually be something that worked out pretty well.

I am pretty sure that this si the gaem I tried a long time ago. I wonder what my avatar was even names or looked like? Hmm. I might check it out again since it seems way more advanced now. Also, that does sound fun exploring different user created lands.

This is Kathy:



Kathy is 8 years old and is rather bright and happy most of the time. She's very smart and somewhat hyper. I wasn't allowed much fun as a child and I suspect that Kathy was there to have fun where no one noticed. When in the virtual world, she likes to run around and visit new places with my friends. I'm not very clear on her back story. She doesn't really talk about the past to any one. It's like none of it ever happened for her.

This is Greta:



Greta is 12 and I don't know a whole lot about her. She only started popping out recently that we're aware of. From the two encounters my friends have had with her they described her as very solemn and quiet. When talking to anyone older than her she ALWAYS uses "ma'am" and "sir" without fail and she never speaks unless spoken to first. That's all I really know about her. She's still somewhat elusive.

It was only recently that I discovered that this avatar was hers. I'd been trying to find out which alter created it for some time. One of my best friends answered that one for me recently. The size of the image is misleading in relation to the size of the avatar...I had to zoom in to get the picture. Greta chose a "petites" avatar. When compared to a full sized adult avatar or even a child avatar, a petite is only about the length of a hand tall. Which tells me that despite her age, Greta must feel very small and insignificant.