Some people have absolutely the wrong idea about what Jesus Christ is supposed to do for you.

To put it in a nutshell, if it walks on two legs and doesn’t lay eggs, it has sinned, and come short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). Because of this, God can no more accept us into His heaven than we can accept cockroaches into our kitchens. So the plan is for His Son to come to earth, live among us without sinning, and then sacrifice his life to pay for our sins. We can then be looked upon by God as perfect, and worthy of His heaven.

But that’s not what some people think a relationship with Jesus is supposed to do to us. They think it’s supposed to make us act perfectly to the outside observer.

So let me tell you about a motley bunch of hypocrite hunters who invaded Club Eternal two days ago. Turns out I have a bit of history with the ringleader, who contributed to a blog named Rappy World, two years ago, back when it was a staunch bunch of manly men seeking to rid Our Internet of the most stomach-turning, filthy atrocities. They found me guilty of being a child molester (admitting such thoughts cross my mind, for their money, is as good as deed already done) with an evil talking fursuit. I was so hopeless to them that they urged me to commit cyber-suicide by removing all traces of my LiveJournal from Our Internet, lest all who read it puke up their guts and die.

Rappy World, incidentally, is back up and running, but is now focusing on ridiculing SL dwellers who have no fashion sense at all. One among this gang that came to Club Eternal to confront me was shirtless, and wore upon his head a large yellow sphere with a “have a nice day” happy face on it, topped with hair, and swim fins on his feet. If that’s not a fashion faux pas that should keep RW occupied for several posts, I don’t know what is.

So here I was, before six outrageously-dressed punks with the voices and demeanor of teenagers. The best thing I could do was say nothing. The very next thing I say or do could be tomorrow’s front page news for these freak hunters. They had now stumbled upon a whole nest of massively phony-as-a-$4-bill hypocrites just like me, and with enough in-your-face provoking would soon make us act imperfectly, and would have proof of our baldfacedly lying ways.

Savannahgrace Constantine banned them for 72 hours.

See what they did to us? Here’s your hands-down proof, people! Christianity hasn’t changed them at all! They will still bite your head off all the way down to your knees! They are still every bit as hateful as they were before! Their “religion” doesn’t work, people! Don’t be caught dead in the same area code as these full-of-themselves con artists!

Seriously. If what you’ve been led to believe about Christianity is that it’s supposed to turn people into docile milquetoasts who will never raise their voice at another, then you need not test today’s Christians for proof that this religion doesn’t work. You need look no further than Christ’s cleansing of the temple. Jesus took one look at how the moneychangers were cheating good people in more ways than I can enumerate, and got royally honked off! He dumped over their money tables, whipped them, and called them thieves! (Matt 21:13, Mark 11:17, Luke 19:46).

“Tolerance” be damned! I’m standing up for My Father and His house!

And when he drove out the moneychangers, something was proven wrong. Either my Lord was proven in the wrong, or the cockameme idea that God’s people never get angry. One of the two.

I’ve now had the opportunity to sample how Christian worship is conducted in Second Life. I find that my head goes through some mental calisthenics that threaten to stand in the way of truly enjoying the worship experience.

A lot of premeditated thought goes into making my avatar behave the way I would were I actually on that round rug deep under the water. Barring the fact that I would drown to death, that is.

Take for instance a Bible study led by Zang Itano. When Zang leads us in a prayer, I would have to press Escape twice to get my follow cam back to its home position two meters behind my avatar and then hold down Alt and click a space immediately in front of me to make the avatar bow his head. When Zang asks, “Amen?”, looking for agreement, I would type “/yes”, triggering a programmed gesture that makes the avatar nod his head.

Or, take for instance a Praise & Worship service led by AcousticEnergy Nitely. I would have to fish a special animation out of my Inventory called Worship 1.1 and play it to make the avatar raise his paws to heaven and sway side to side.

To make a long story short, my head is still too much involved in the nuts and bolts of digital puppetry to really lose itself in the worship experience. It’s a lot of work—brainwork—to make Skye Vanistok do what comes so naturally to my real body.

So the question that comes to me is this: Is it really worship, this pulling the strings thing that doesn’t really let you feel it?

Yesterday I attended a talent contest in a very uneasy part of the Second Life grid called New Jack City. I’ve already tried to look up New Jack City in Microsoft Bing. It’s very likely I will write the first authoritative article about this hip-hop community “‘hood”.

New Jack City is where black people go out of their way to be black. Here the people dress in muscle shirts and bling-covered cargo pants, speak in vulgarities you would not utter around your children, and call each other the dreaded n-word. They drive low-rider automobiles with tricked-out hydraulic suspensions and wear low-rider pants that give an unobstructed view of much of their Fruit of the Looms. It’s as natural for them as breathing.

Outside the theater, flying is not allowed, and your health percentage is displayed, suggesting that this is an unsafe combat-enabled area (under the Linden Lab Combat System) where avatars can be killed and sent back to their homes in lieu of heaven.

It was not easy to sit amongst these people in its counterpart to New York’s Apollo Theatre. I was worried that the universally honored good citizenship practice of sitting quietly and saying nothing would not work here. After all, I am, avatar-wise, a bear with white wings and a halo of stars over his head. And a ballcap worn country-style, with the bill up front.  In the ‘hood, just looking “wrong” can attract unfavorable attention.

So what the heck was I doing there? Eliana Paine asked me there, for moral support as she entered a talent contest in that same Apollo Theatre. She is an unusually highly educated African American who spent much of her childhood in England. This can make her every bit as out of phase with New Jack City as being an angel bear. But she still considers these her people and wants to perform for this audience, even if she gets more than her share of heckling from the haters.

One can get as much or more entertainment from the audience as from the stage. Just as people were getting seated for the talent show, a guy comes in with this huge rocket stuck to his head. He claimed it was put there by some racist white kids using some kind of HUD-controlled program. The 20-foot tall missile flailed about wildly from his neck, colored gray, waiting for the sim servers, overtaxed from all the bling the avatars wear, to provide it its texture.

The Apollo Theater can benefit from a trick used at the Jericho Hill Hockey Arena to help control their lag. Here’s what they’re doing.

Jericho Hill Arena straddles a borderline between two sims, the hockey rink on one side of the boundary line, and the spectator bleachers on the other. This way, any scripts being run by the spectators do not contribute any lag to the game being played in the rink. If the same tactic was employed by the Apollo Theatre, the spectators can wear as much bling as they want to and not affect what is happening on the stage.

I’ll be more than happy to tell you how Eliana did in the next post.

Preparation

The seven days since my last post came and went, and since being offered teleports by singer Harmonia Trefoil to some places she was performing does not yield much in the way of content for this blog, I decided to scrap what little I was writing about that and do something about my comedy night at Club Eternal.

I went to a place called TechGrrl Mountainside Village and Store, not far from The Shelter, dedicated to the housing and shelter of new SL residents. I wanted something that I could use for either a blackboard or a whiteboard. I found something called Angrybeth’s Communal Whiteboard, a great big screen with some buttons on the bottom for showing slide presentations, with several other features for adding, circles, arrows, and other embellishments. The downside is I have to make them in OpenOffice first and turn each slide into a JPEG image for uploading to SL. And each uploaded slide costs L$10, of course.

But with that, and the fact that I now know how to make, within minutes, T-shirts and ball caps with just about any logo and slogan I please (in accordance with the Terms of Service), I’d have to say I now have quite the arsenal for putting many a point across. Assuming I have points to put across.

The actual performance

When I got to my “You Might Be a Furry” jokes, I notice that somebody out in the audience was making a rimshot drum/cymbal noise after each one. I didn’t know where it was coming from, and it’s a pretty darn insulting noise to have to hear. It insults both me as a comedian and my audience. It insinuates that I’m not that good and my audience is so simpleminded as to have to be told when to laugh.

After I leveled a few false accusations at Syruss (Scaleskin) Tiraxibar, telling him to cut it out, Sonic Rang, the owner of Club Eternal, finally came clean. He had been using the accursed sound effects gadget. He even gave me a copy of it. It’s a HUD like thing that attaches to the upper right corner of the screen and sounds several varieties of rimshot and a sad wah-wah-wah from a muted trumpet.

Thanks, Sonic. But I don’t expect to ever use it. I have too much respect for my audiences.

Something happened to me last night over which I am nothing short of thrilled.

Last night was supposed to be the weekly Comedy Open Mic, but Mr. Constantine Paulino, renowned En Garde duelist and comedian, was nowhere to be found. He’s the manager of the TLE Comedy Zone, and if he can’t get online, we have no show. I was kinda bummed, because I had this boffo new set of routines about the Huh! Preacher, and CNN I-Report Press Kit, and how to tell if you’re a furry, I didn’t get to do any of them.

Well, I went to Club Eternal to see this live music act called Acoustic Energy, and while I was there, Sonic Rang, the owner of Club Eternal, was scouting around for some talent to grace his newly redesigned stage. He looked around in my profile and found where I had been doing Open Mics at the TLE Comedy Zone and he books me for a show next Wednesday at 7:00 PM Second Life time, which is also Pacific time.

I am beside myself with joy. This is awesome, to say the least. To the toilet with America! Only in the Kingdom of God can this happen.

I gayly doff my beaver low
And freeing hand and heel
My heavy mantle off I throw
And I draw my polished steel
Graceful as Phoebus, round I wheel
Alert as Scaramouch
A word in your ear, Sir Spark, I steal
At the envoi’s end, I touch!
— Cyrano deBergerac, Act I, Scene IV

First, a few notes. A beaver, in this piece, is a plumed hat, a mantle is a cape, and an envoi is the final, dedicatory stanza of a ballade poem. To make a long story short, Cyrano deBergerac is promising to make shishkabob out of the Viscount by the end of this very poem.

I can’t help but admire a man who can compose poetry and turn another man into Julienne fries at the same time.

Okay, so what’s that got to do with me? Well, I’ve discovered a game that’s very widely played all over Second Life called En Garde, a very successful adaptation of a fencing-themed card/board game by Reiner Knizia. In the three days I’ve been playing this game, I’ve gone from zero to 140 points, a ranking of #453 on the grid. I’ve taken a couple of very noteworthy scalps along the way, such as the #8 ranked MasterZed Zessinthal and #24 Captain Blinker.

I’ve also watched my views of the tactics of said game evolve rapidly. At first I saw no point in making multiple strength Advance-Lunge attacks, where you use three or four cards to first advance, and then attack in the same turn. It is a weak attack because even when the opponent cannot match the pairs or trios of cards with which I attack him, he still can use one of his other cards to retreat out of harm’s way.

And then I later found that the tactic, while useless for scoring actual touches, is great for forcing the opponent back toward his end of the fencing piste. He uses up his turn in retreating, so it’s my turn again, and I can mount a second attack. Barring an unlikely last-second touch when the deck of 25 cards runs out, I stand to win the round on position alone. It’s a very cerebral game which makes you think long and hard about what position you want to be in when you finish attacking, or how to stop an opponent from pushing you back too far.

This game is addictive. It’s going to busy me right out of a peaceful career of sightseeing and roller skating, if I’m not careful.

80% and hawks

A couple days back, I purchased a MuzzleTalk kit which is supposed to move the jaw of my avatar as I talk. I felt that I needed this in my capacity as a stand-up comic on Second Life. I don’t suspect there will be an Open Mic at the TLE Comedy Zone this week, as Constantine Paulino will be away from home this evening. He still does access SL from a hotel to play his beloved game En Garde! He is a good player, currently ranked 40th in the entire grid.

Before I went out to the Furnation Vista sandbox to install it, I wrote up a special notecard called the 80% Debrief. This is because I expect the 80% Rule to be in effect in such public sandboxes as Furnation Vista, which states that you will not get more than 80% finished with a building project before some passer-by will ask, “What doest thou?” I don’t want to stop and talk, so I wrote up the notecard to pass to them. Damned impersonal, like a form letter, but it does the job of informing them on what I’m doing.

The passer-by that came at the 80% point of this project wanted to test his new attack hawk on me. The furshluggin’ bird of prey would get into my avatar’s face and rip particle splashes of blood out.

Note to self: never volunteer to be a guinea pig for someone else’s building projects.

Good results

The work went remarkably smoothly. The inventor of the virtual device, a Norweigian blue fox in a black trenchcoat named Matti Deigan, who also demonstrates MuzzleTalk on YouTube, did a very good job on the manual that explains how to install MuzzleTalk.

The jaw seems to move randomly, irrespective of the volume of my voice. I suspect some fine tuning will be in order in the days to come, but for now, I’m pleased with my new animated jaw.

My Internet service went down last night, and when it does, it’s fascinating the panicky thoughts my head goes through during these outages.

One of the more farfetched explanations for what’s happening to me  suggests that there is a battle raging around me in some unseen spiritual dimension, invisible bombs and bullets flying everywhere. I am a target, and a demonic bomb took out my Internet.

This is all happening because someone or something sees me as a threat. Or so I’m given to believe.

Perhaps I need to go backward somewhat. My religion teaches me that I have an enemy, a wily one, if not one so powerful as He who is on my side. The number one power of this enemy is the introduction of false ideas to our minds, ideas we mistakenly think we thought of ourselves.

Think about it. It took no less than a talking reptile to get Adam & Eve to bite the forbidden fruit. This is probably because they had not yet fallen. Later, when Abel’s sacrifice of blood from a lamb was accepted and Cain’s sacrifice of vegetables was rejected, nobody or nothing had to audibily talk to Cain about how he P.O.-ed he should be about it, or to whom he should target his hatred. Nobody or nothing had to audibly suggest killing Abel. Cain seemed to have come up with that idea on his own.

That’s what man’s fallen nature will do for us. It’ll provide a permanent backdoor access in the operating system so the most horrid ideas can download themselves into our heads.

Right now, I’m dealing with some scarewares in my brain of the really wildest type. I’ve written before about scarewares, and how much they are like our thinking processes. They want to convince me that I’m in more trouble than I’m actually in, hence, the idea that I am a threat to a powerful enemy, and that so-called powerful enemy has the Internet in his icy, iron grip.

Hard to say about the icy, iron grip part. After all, the number one arrow in this guy’s quiver is the baldfaced lie.

Shelindrea

I was marvelling at the crazy tricks that I can do with my Skoopf skates. On the Insane jump boost setting, my avatar can turn his backflip, and then from the resulting dizzying heights  enjoy coffee and a donut before lightly floating back down to the ice (or other solid surface), both feet together.

Wasn’t quite expecting this. In going after a pair of skates for potential use in playing hockey, I ended up with an amazing new power to make bounding leaps that should help me even in no-fly zones.

Now Shelindrea Ireland, God knows I like her a lot, as both a singer and a mutual friend of comedian Constantine Paulino, but whenever she sends out notices through her group, she always seems to perform in venues that are no-rez and no scripting.

I suppose this is to guard against potential griefer attacks against a public venue, but still, no rez + no scripting = no fun!! I now have two pairs of skates to Skye Vanistok’s name, both roller and ice skates, and summoning up jumps and tricks for these skates invokes scripts.

Jack Belvedere over at Jericho Hill Hockey Arena also gave me a new picket sign to carry around that instantly displays any text I want. I can’t use it to show my support for Shelindrea, because that sign also invokes scripts.

So, as the long and the short would have it, thanks to some very prominent practical jokers, I’m being told to sit down and shut up. I just wish someone would say the same thing to that idiot at the Shelindrea concerts who keeps playing that “Woot-woot-woot!” sound effect.

I can’t help but admire Jamie Jordan, a.k.a. Jwheels Carver. In his own profile, he writes that he suffers from cerebral palsy, which accounts for his slurred speech and a first life confined to a wheelchair. Other than that, he’s very sharp and observant. His railing against the nonsense of avatar women becoming pregnant with virtual babies and hiring real gynecologists to care for them bears this out.

There’s a lot to be seen in SL that just doesn’t make a lick of sense. My target will eventually be the Global Online Hockey Association. Here are hockey players who play in the summertime on ice that is not cold, and never gets treated by a Zamboni between periods. Some players are wearing no skates, one woman playing in nothing but a jersey and Daisy Dukes, bare all the way down to her toes, and yet they still skate about effortlessly, passing and shooting this puck that has this blue halo around it with inward pointing arrows. Humans and furries seem to play on equal terms.

Even a pint-sized Care Bear named Bedtime Bobbysocks can excel as a goalie. Those of you who went to the Ocean City Doo-Dah Parade will remember him. He played Love-a-Lot Bear. Never knew this myself until he encountered me at the Jericho Hill side of the rink.

I suspect that hockey in Second Life will not yield its full wealth of laugh material until I pick up a hockey stick and start slapping some pucks into the net. So I went to Jericho Hill Arena to get my copy of sticks and a head-up display. I learned how to milk the scoreboard over center ice for practice pucks. It was very early in the morning,

It didn’t feel right to skate around on my bare footpaws, and it didn’t feel angelic to have to wear the boot part of the skates. I still needed that “glued-on” look.

So I bought a pair of Skoopf Icicles this morning. I took them to a sandbox and and overlaid them with copies of my footpaws. To whatever parts of the boots still stuck out of my feet, I applied an alpha texture to turn them invisible.

I wasn’t happy with the more cartoonish skating gait they gave my avatar, but they do have an impressive array of stops, twirls, flips, and jump boosts.

Not a one of which can be shown off in a hockey arena without labeling oneself gay. I guess they’re not impressed with the potential ability to leap from the floor to the press box in a single bound.

The important thing is the skates have hockey-style blades, and all the bells and whistles can be turned off with but a click to let the animations in the hockey stick take over. I have another Tuesday at the Blue Moon Bordello and the TLE Comedy Zone coming up fast, and I need to glean my blog entries for some fast material.