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So, I'm glad to report that "The Great SL Struggle of 2006" seems to be coming to an end; service in the grid in the last week has both improved and stabilized quite dramatically, to the point where I can once again spend hours online without my computer crashing. And this of course not only makes it much easier for me to get daily updates done for this site again, but also gives me a chance to do some late-night clubhopping again, for the first time in awhile, which frankly was one of the first activities here I really started enjoying, and part of what originally led me to sticking around in the first place.

Here I am, in fact, over at the ITG headquarters last Friday, wearing a new outfit (or rather, a new combination of old clothes), getting ready to head out. And oh, how can a young feisty lady go wrong with this combo you're looking at? For any readers who still don't know, I'm actually male in real life, but known as an 'omnisexual' in the grid; rather than referring to orientation, it actually means that I exist as both genders, and metamorph between the two during an evening like a bad Canadian science-fiction television show. My male av is fairly accurately designed after what I look like in real life, except of course for it being seven months now and still without a decent hairstyle (and seriously, I'll pay a talented designer L$1,000 to make me a gorgeous prim-based Kevin-Spacey-style haircut, which is the hair I have in RL); my female av, however, is more designed around the type of women I date in RL, all sassy and spunky little short-haired, tattooed, chain-smoking hellions. And it just so happens that this is a very good look for going out clubbing at night; which is why I tend to get all gussied up and do a lot of it in the grid, as opposed to real life where I rarely bother to put on more than black jeans and a black sweater.

Now, as I've mentioned here before, with the grid getting to the size and complexity it is these days, I think a whole new metaphor has to be invented for getting used to that environment and eventually deriving pleasure from it; that it's less accurate anymore to compare it to learning a new piece of software or game interface, and more like actually moving to a new big city. A lot of us have that real experience as part of their past; I myself, for example, moved to Chicago in 1994 after a quarter century in small Missouri towns. In fact, no matter where in the world you are, the process of assimilating to a new large city boils down to a generally similar set of steps:

1) First you start the only place you know -- the newspapers, arts weeklies, cool websites and online event calendars. It's a hit-or-miss proposition when beginning; for every agreeable new place or event you find, you often slog your way through five or six unbearable environments, and of course find it very difficult to randomly stumble across the exact crowd you like the most.

2) Eventually, though, you do find some random places you like, as well as stumbling across cool little underground holes in the wall in your neighborhood, or seeing a place advertised at another place where you already hang. As you make your way to these places more and more often, for whatever thing it is you like venues for the most, you start meeting a community of people who are already regulars, and with luck will invite you into it.

3) Then of course you start slipping from an "arrival" to a "citizen;" you start learning of the places that exactly match your interests, that maybe don't advertise at all but are known only by word of mouth. Those regulars also have activities of their own; you suddenly find yourself invited to house parties and other private events, and forming a stronger and stronger network that inspires you to come back more regularly.

Some people, frankly, never get out of step 1; they're the ones that quit SL after a week and tell everyone else how pointless it seemed, also the people in my old Missouri collegetown who'd come back from Chicago after three months, complaining how expensive and difficult everything was. In Chicago in the '90s, my particular hole-in-the-wall saving grace was an old Wicker Park bar called the Rainbo Club, which was four blocks from my first apartment (including an old black-and-white photo booth, incidentally, where Liz Phair shot her infamous topless cover photo for her first album Exile In Guyville); and in SL it was Joseph Montagne's Big Horn Lodge [Selby 38/201/57] that first helped me go from a newbie to an emotionally secure resident.

See, for those who have never interacted with me in a club (either SL or RL), I'm that person who usually ends up standing around in the subtly-lit corner, watching others dance and hopefully ending up in an intense and interesting conversation with just an intimate number of acquaintances. This is pretty accepted behavior out in the real world, in fact, especially when frequenting pub-style venues where dancing isn't a priority; but for some reason this is considered unacceptable social behavior within the grid, with everyone there instead expected to jump in the middle and dance no matter how many interesting dark corners there are. Perhaps it's because dancing is an automated function here; that everyone dances perfectly at the touch of a button, never run out of wind, never need to stop for the bathroom or to order another drink. Or perhaps it's the social aspect of it combined with a physical 3D rendering; that clubs are supposed to be a place where a group can come together and equally add to the conversation (much like text-only chat rooms), so etiquette dictates that they all meet in a central group space, again like a chat room.

In any case, the fact is that in many clubs across the grid, some go as far as to consider a person a troublemaker for not wanting to dance; and then the irony to me is that at many of these same clubs, not a single bit of inherently interesting conversation takes place, bur rather a lot of silent dancing punctuated with irregular screams of "WOOT!" and "1337 N00B RULEZ" and whatever else your kids are talking about on MySpace these days. It's hard to find a place that regularly has stimulating discussions with intelligent and funny people, while still having great music and sexy avatars; so when I stumbled across Big Horn accidentally soon after joining and did find such a thing, it quickly turned into my "neighborhood haunt" for whenever I felt like yakking it up with like-minded people.

These two photos above, by the way, show off something that's becoming more prevalent these days all over the grid; more of a concentration on how artificial lights look within a space, and where they're placed. People used to not worry much about this when I started, last spring, because rendering support for artificial lights was still pretty lousy, and a lot of people (myself included) chose to keep them off in our desktop clients altogether. (Rendering options are in fact quite varied in SL, and all controllable from a central preferences page, for those who don't know.) With better and better versions of the client, though, and with the ever-increasing amount of players with upgraded home computers, such focused indoor lighting is becoming more common; and once again, it just highlights even more these ultra-immersive nooks and cubbyholes many of these clubs have, and again makes me baffled why no one ever uses these but rather all dance in a big central common area.

And let's face it, another reason I like stopping by Big Horn is that there are a lot of cool people always there, people in the same demographic as me; highly creative slackers, coders and artists in their thirties and forties, old enough and far enough in their careers to now be pulling off some pretty impressive things. They are the ones in the grid most regularly designing and putting together great outfits, new applications, fascinating live projects; they're the people who want to stand around and gab at clubs too, about all the things that have been going on in each other's lives. Many of the club's regular patrons, in fact, double as the official DJ staff; with many of them former college DJs, of course, and with just this insanely impressive pile of music in their home computer's iTunes, which for those who don't know can easily be streamed live into a piece of land, DJ style, using nothing more than Nicecast/Winamp and an internet radio station (or "streaming server"). The interesting ebon fellow you see above, for example, was last Friday's DJ at Big Horn, Barney Boomslang, actually out on the floor and dancing with everyone else while spinning the music at the same time.

So that's my profile of Big Horn; and needless to say, if you're a person like me who enjoys these types of things in a social setting, I encourage you to stop by as well. It's an interesting phenomenon, I think, the radical differences in social structure the grid goes through, depending on if it's daytime or night in RL; it's something I'd like to do some more writing on here, frankly. If you have a live evening event coming up, by the way, like a fashion show or special themed dance night, do let me know and I'll try to come by. Ah, how I do love the virtual clubhopping, I tell you!