Hi! I’m back from doing ‘bird’ in ‘the pen’. 😉

We had a little bit of fun putting a bit of a photo essay together over several posts, and searching out new locations to photograph, during the tale of my robbery, arrest, trial and incarceration.

I’m not sure how well it all worked out in the end, photo wise, as it was a bit of a rush job, but hopefully it had a litttle entertainment value to it.

The real reason I’ve been missing from SL the past couple of weeks is because I’ve been in Austria, ski-ing. Haha! I sound so nonchalant! I’ve never skied before, and it was a surprise Christmas present from my RL significant other. So I moved from the ‘let’s try to stand up’ stage to the ‘let’s try falling down painlessly’ stage, to eventually mastering a nursery slope unaided. I enjoyed it, I have to say. 

Free at last, free at last.

My ‘release’ from a SL jail, and thinking about a title for this post reminded me of Doctor Martin Luther King’s words, ‘free at last, free at last, Thank God Almighty we are free at last’.

I’m typing this up at the same time I’ve got Nelson Mandela’s funeral on television. And Dr. King’s words would also serve, up to a point, as an epitaph for Mandela, who spent a part of his own life in jail, and who was eventually freed, going on to (at least symbolically) free South Africa from the scourge of the apartheid system.

As Ella has previously written, we’ve tried twice and failed twice to produce a ‘politics’ issue of SLN, so I don’t want to get bogged down here, save to say that in SL the colour of your skin is irrelevant. We can move from alabaster white, to an African black, to a Na’avi blue in a few key strokes if we wish. And, in the main, no one blinks an eye if you turn up in a sim with blue skin, a fox avatar or anything else! No one has any pre-conceptions, and you’ll be judged in SL by how interesting or idiotic you are. Which is one of the great, great things about SL.

As a caveat, I should add that this is generally the case, across most of the grid. Sadly, sims exist where there remains a little sense of being skins of a certain colour dominating those of a different colour (and the traffic isn’t all flowing in one direction). And there are a few sims where a sense of domination is related to gender (almost exclusively in one direction). And there we are….heading off into ‘politics’ and the arguments that can easily arise from it, hence the decision to cancel out two full politics issues of the mag. We come to SL to escape these things, and live well and free from such trifles.

Anyway, it’s hard to know if Nelson Mandela would have ever been aware of SL, and Dr.King’s death pre-dated it, but I think that both would have approved of a world where skin colour was almost totally irrelevant. Maybe SL has a key role to play in freeing people from the colour-shackles and prejudices that exist in their minds.

Pookes.