Are you a man in drag?

I was cleaning things up and adding items to the store when he accidentally deleted myself from the Neko group. This meant that I couldn’t put things in the store. I couldn’t find the page to join the group, so I sent a message to Roger to re-invite me.

A woman named Manalo stopped by. Everything she chatted ended with an exclamation point. I chatted with her a little while, asked how she found the mall. Then she disappeared and sent me a teleport invitation.

The location name seemed familiar. And when I arrived, I knew why. A friend of mine had been teleported there several months ago by a weird guy who didn’t speak any English. He had been teleporting a whole bunch of women there, and they disappeared as soon as they saw the red sex beds and cages.

On a stage amongst the red beds, Manalo was pole dancing. “Are you a man in real life?” I asked.

“No, Manalo is my boyfriend’s name,” he/she/it said.

I hadn’t thought of that, but since Manalo ends with an ‘o,’ it’s more likely a man’s name. Especially if it’s of Spanish or Portuguese origin. But I wasn’t guessing Manalo’s gender based on the name. I was basing my hypothesis on the actions. Not many women blindly teleport people to pole dancing orgy halls.

A-list your avatar

The pole dance club was still active when I logged on. Someone there told me I should buy a new animation override so I wouldn’t look like such a newbie. “I think it makes me look as though I don’t care for any of the AOs that are available,” I said.

And to tell you the truth, I’ve noticed that I don’t care for the avatars who have fancy skin, clothes, animation overrides, etc. either. To me, that’s an obvious sign of shallowness. I don’t want to chat with anyone who is preoccupied with the glamorousness of their avatar. I’d much rather spend my time with people who are here for intellectual reasons than with people who are trying to be digital A-listers.

Math insults the pole dancers

I went to a pole dance club where there were a lot of women hanging around, but not many men. Or at least not many male avatars.

The pole dancers chatted things about where they were putting their fingers and which items of clothing they were removing, even though you could clearly see that their avatars weren’t doing those things. I’m not sure if anyone thinks that’s erotic. It seems so contrived to me that it’s just silly. Weird what people choose to do when they’re anonymous.

I got bored of the finger chat, so curious about what kind of people stopped by such a place, I looked at the profile of the only other male avatar in the room. He had some kind of nonsense math equation in his real life profile, so in local chat I said, “If x+x=female, and x+y=male, what does y+y equal?”

“Gay?” one of the women in the audience guessed. Actually, I think that might result in some type of extreme physical deformity – if it’s even possible.

“There’s a naked blond on stage and you’re asking questions?” Well, there was a blond avatar near me, but I didn’t have her in my view.

“I thought the math question was more interesting,” I said.

Someone said I was being disrespectful to the pole dancers by chatting about math. And she meant it. Math is disrespectful, but pole dancing isn’t? In the Learn Avatar chat, I asked what the chat protocol was for pole dancing venues.

“That’s why I like Second Life. People can do whatever they want here.” Is that the kind of society we want to associate ourselves with? A forum where we can be rude and offensive, but we can’t talk about math for fear of insulting the pole dancers.