Second Life -- "a virtual environment."

Second Life, a potential escape from the first one. Kind of? Over the past week in class, we've gotten to experiment with this new environment. I had heard of Second Life already because of my love of the TV show "The Office", as Dwight creates his own avatar. Philip Rosedale, or rather Philip Linden, created Second Life a few years ago as a means to create a virtual world for others to use. You can literally be whoever you want to be. Plus the options for names are somewhat hysterical. For example, my avatar is named Hilary Adored. She looks kinda like me I guess. Brown hair, brown eyes. But I made her thinner. A girl can dream. And she's wearing pink, and I hate wearing pink. But I ultimately gave up on "personalizing" her because it was frustrating. You can make them look however you like, jump, fly, and even go to St. Joe's.

Residents, as we're called in this virtual environment, can interact with each other by means of conversation or, as my friend as I figured out, running into people. From my experience, these conversations are similar to someone IMing you. This is part of the whole experience that I didn't like so much. You have no idea who these people are, which can be good or bad considering it's not really REAL life. You can purchase land and essentially recreate yourself through this world that can be as similar or different to yours as you want.

So, this brings me to my main question: why create an avatar? Why become a Second Life "resident"? I feel like people could be wanting a brief escape, or possibly just for fun. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, it just didn't do it for me. The concept of a virtual world is becoming more common as our society becomes increasingly more dependent on technology. I think it's safe to say that at this rate, what with online shopping, online classes, and now Second Life and other technological resources, eventually people won't have to leave the house!

However...I think Dwight sums it up better than I do:

"I signed up for Second Life about a year ago. Back then, my life was so great I literally wanted to create a second one. Absolutely everything was the same...except I could fly."
"Second Life is not a game. It is a multi-user, virtual environment. It doesn't have winners or losers."

Digital Breakdown

Digital Imagery!
I used pixinate and picnik to make these images look digital and slightly resemble the visual representation from UTEOTW.
The first one is a picture I took while down the shore in Ocean City, NJ. I vacation there every summer.
The second one is another picture I took at Isgro Bakery in the Italian market (near South Street). For this one, the option on pixinate was called oil painting so that's hopefully what you all think it resembles!
The third is a picture of me and my 2 younger brothers. For this one, I took away a lot of the vibrancy of the colors and added lines that were supposed to make the picture look like it was on a TV, but I don't think that worked out very well.
The fourth picture is of me and my roommate and I pixilated this one so that you can hardly decipher who we are.
The fifth and final picture is another one I took down the shore while playing mini golf. I was overlooking Castaway Cove, the part of the boardwalk with the rides and, of course, the ferris wheel. I used a neon function on picnik for this one.

UTEOTW -- a visual dream?

I'll be honest, I was skeptical at first when I heard we were watching this movie in class. And then once we started, I was completely confused for the first few scenes. For a movie that was filmed in the 90s, it was one of the more futuristic works I'd seen in some time. After some time, the visual characteristics of the movie became more blatant and exposed. I feel like saying some of the images in this movie were very digitally enhanced might be an understatement. The scenes where Sam and Clare were with Sam's parents testing the machine that would allow his mother to see whatever he was thinking were especially concentrated with an array of different images. All of them were digitized to the point where I was straining my eyes to decipher what was on the screen. Personally, this type of visual representation wasn't at all aesthetically pleasing to me. Maybe it's because the images in movies I watch are in no way distorted or become cause for any serious looking into, but regardless I wasn't as drawn to the images as others might have been. I'm assuming the director as trying to get a point across by doing that, I'm just not sure I want to understand it.

The one thing that really bothered me, and it came up in class discussion on multiple occasions, was (that's right, you guessed it) THE SOUNDTRACK. I really can't come up with words to describe how bothered I was. For me, a movie soundtrack is supposed to make you remember the feelings that were invoked in you while you were watching it. Like when I hear "Don't You (Forget About Me)" by Simple Minds, I automatically think of "The Breakfast Club". Or when anyone hears the orchestra pieces from Harry Potter, you obviously think of Harry Potter. I relate music to how I felt during a movie or how the characters were feeling. If a slower song is playing, then it's a more melancholy scene. And oppositely, if it's a fast-paced song, then something that I should probably pay attention to is happening. This movie did NONE of that for me. I really think the downfall was picking the songs before the movie was produced. That's essentially doing it backwards because then you have these songs that you're desperately trying to make work instead of letting it all fall into place; it should be effortless. UGH I'm getting so frustrated thinking about it. It just didn't fit at all. I think at times (or through most of the movie) I was noticing the music rather than the images. But hey, that's just me.

All in all, UTEOTW wasn't awful, but it wasn't up there with the greatest either. However, I will give it to the director, the imagery was at times very interesting and like a breath of fresh air (especially with the road movies). Other than that, I can't believe there's a 9 hour version. UNREAL.