Was Homer run off a cliff-hugging mountain road by a pack of wild hyenas bent on world destruction only to die a horrible death in a firey conflagration caused by hunters who mistook his destroyed van for a moose and shot the shot that hit the gas tank?

No.

There were no hyenas involved.

My excursions into Second Life have absorbed the responsibility for avoidance and denial that writing here used to take on. My little avatar has a social life, meaningful work, good friends, and can sit around thinking about the philosophical implication all day.

So much so that there are two little avatars. Most of you already met Cinco, but here’s Solo:

Solo is building a piano. Solo is an old Japanese man. Why do I have an old Japanese man as an avatar? Initially, I saw the skin for sale, and I had to have it, because it’s a work of art. It’s advertised as ‘charming old man avatar.’

Here we see Solo in some cliff-edge ruins within the wonderful Forest of Kahruvel, about which more later.

But after wearing it for a while, I discovered that it’s fun to watch people’s reaction to an older person on SL. I go to sandboxes and newbie landing points. People ask me who I am… *really?* They ask me for advice, usually in IMs. The secret is always to look like you know what you’re doing.

And this is true in many ways, of many things. They say that clothes make the man, but what about skin and beard of inscrutability? Plus, there are very few ‘old’ avatars on SL. Mostly they all look like 25-year-old supermodels. It’s more unusual to be old than to be a monster, a zombie, a vampire, a soul-sucking ghoul, or even a hooker.

What this says about society at large, as reflected by the SL demographic, isn’t all that pleasant, which is one reason I enjoy wearing this particular skin. It gives me plenty of opportunity for subversion.

The other side of Solo, of course, is that I’m not Japanese. I go places and people start chatting with me in Japanese. They’re charmed, too, but then I’m the bad guy for pretending to be something I’m not. Just as Homer isn’t Japanese, but Solo looks like he is, Homer also isn’t wise, but Solo looks like he could be. It’s all a big lie, but I’m up-front about it. Solo’s profile says: I’m not Japanese, and I don’t speak the language.

By the way… MacCaching has improved a great deal. Namely, it implements everything I wanted to do in my own scripts, and all I had to do was wait.

It goes like this: Make a pocket query on geocaching.com. It arrives. Unpack it. Import it into MacCaching. Plug in the GPS and iPod. Click ‘To GPS…’ Locations appear on the GPS, notes appear on the iPod.

Rawk.

…But still nerdy nonetheless.

I got a free font from some web site. It was old enough that it was in the BinHex format. It has a file extension of .hqx, which means it dates back from the good old days when Mac files had resource forks.

Once upon a time, Mac systems shipped with a program to decode BinHex files. No longer, however. Imagine my astonishment: My parents’ Mac couldn’t decode hqx!

Google helps. It leads me to a piece of software called NutCase. Yay! Freebie hqx decoder! Download it…

It’s an .hqx file.

There’s probably a command-line way to do it. I’ll learn it later.

Embarrass yourself.

Oh wait.. It’s supposed to be the *best* thing. Hmm. Dunno

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Update: the blip.tv version is higher quality. And Steff has a ‘blog: http://rustipixel.blogspot.com/.

I’m in there for a split second.

I’m not frightened of growing old. I’m frightened of growing weak, of losing my capacity, of being a burden, of being unable.

And I’m not really frightened of death, either. It’s a fact of life.

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