While the computer is back up and running fine, I lost all my bookmarks during my ‘crash’. That’s not as critical as it sounds as I, like many of you, visit the same sites again and again, so getting them on screen and marked again is a relatively easy job.

It’s a bit more difficult with many of the photo sites, many Tumblr sites, I visit for material to illustrate the blog. I don’t know the names of any of them, so rebuilding that links page has been this afternoon’s task.

While that’s been a bit of a tedious task, leaving me cursing Apple’s ill-fated ‘upgrade’, it has turned out to be a bit of a blessing in other ways. I’ve had to seek out pages, rather than just use my ‘go to’ pages, and this has led to me discovering new pages that differ, a little, from the tried and trusted sites.

And so it was that I landed on the Indoni. My heritage. My Pride site. This is a South African ‘beauty pageant’, of sorts, with the emphasis on men and women expressing their pride in their cultural history.

This means connecting with the traditions of various African tribes, and as you can see from the photo above, it means routine ‘toplessness’ for many of the tribes involved.

I explored further, because recognition of cultural diversity is important to me, in the context of both the real world and Second Life. There’s far too much homogenisation of the world, and the loss of tribal cultures is being keenly felt around the globe. Not just in places like Africa or South America, but in Europe too, where regional cultures, languages, cuisine, dress and so on are being squeezed out.

To see people take pride in their cultural heritage is encouraging.

There used to be a time when SL was more culturally diverse than it is now, and I have a couple of SL friends who tried to promote their ethnic heritage within the game, but report that it has become more difficult in recent years due to the lack of clothing available, hairstyles, and sims on which to live and promote their ethnic heritage. I’ll be examining that in a subsequent post.

Ella