The Other Me....

They forced us to get accounts in Second Life for one of my foundation courses so we could have an educated opinion on whether or not the university should teach a class in Second Life. Yes, apparently many educational institutions seriously do this. Now, while I acknowledge its use as a tool in distance learning, the fact that people could feasibly come to class with rabbit ears (or as a rabbit), with green hair, or decked out in a leather catsuit troubles me. I dunno. Maybe I'm just old fashioned. I also had to take on an alias because I couldn't use my real name since last names are selected from a drop-down menu. I like my last name. And Cherie Lee is not the same as Cherie Eel (one of the options I did NOT select). I ended up with MeiLing Greenwood since the first is my Chinese name and the second just sounded nice. I was tempted by the name "Darcy" which was available, but I didn't like how it sounded with MeiLing as much as I liked Greenwood. There were no sensible Chinese surnames or I would have chosen one. My dear friend Punya would likely find this sacrilegious, but she's free to snap up the name Punya Darcy in Second Life. It's probably still available.

The average SL resident is too cool for me, though. So this is my avatar. I tried to keep her as toned down as possible, but I couldn't resist giving her radiant green eyes. This is not so much because I don't like having brown eyes, but more because the poor girl couldn't look as beautiful as me no matter what I tried, so she needed something to console her. I also kept on her lipstick because I couldn't make her lips naturally as dark as mine. You can adjust both shirt and pants, but this is as far as either would go to cover my avatar. I guess Second Life didn't get the memo that midriff shirts went out of fashion last season. At least she's wearing chain mail, though. That's cool, I guess. It was free, which is why she's wearing it.

The fact that I spent most the time designing the appearance of my own avatar, and that was mostly in an effort to make her look quasi-respectable since the default appears to be "preppy teenager", also makes me dubious of Second Life as a serious or professional environment.

So on a whole, I still have to agree with the First Life website.