Half Dome: You fly down to the virtual Harbin Temple with your new avatar friend,

Harbin ethnography:


You fly down to the virtual Harbin Temple with your new avatar friend, where you land with a 'splat,' due to the Second Life scripting of landing when you press the no fly button, on this beautiful cobb and hay bale Temple structure (Figure 1.7), which roof looks like an old, straw hat, with cupola and crenela (decorative element at the top of roof above cupola?). Your avatars jump from the roof to the ground in front of one of two main entrances, and you both enter the rose-colored, swirly-stucco building, with the peaked spiral, wood-roof dome, which looks somewhat native American in origin. The skylight at the top makes the light inside soft, yet not too bright. The three avatars who are practicing yoga with each other in the Temple all live in the actual Harbin and Middletown area. Both you and your avatar friend join the virtual yoga practice. You live in the actual San Francisco Bay Area, and you don't know yet where your virtual avatar friend is from. Although her profile allows her to state something about what she does in “1st life” - real life, or RL, as many SL people say – she has only noted her Second Life interests. Since you are within a 30? SL meter radius of each other, all of you click and lock on your sound so you can speak, and don't have to type, which allows you to draw a whole range of avatar yoga pose positions from your inventory, as well as script new related movements. Some of you explore these movements in your own bodyminds at home in front of your computers. As you watch what your new yoga avatar friends are doing with yoga in the virtual Harbin Temple, they too are watching and learning virtual yoga from you. One of them mentions that someone is doing Yoga Contact-Watsu up at the virtual Harbin Domes. You and your friend walk out the other door of the Harbin Temple, and fly northeast over the Harbin Garden, across the Harbin creek, which becomes a stream in winter, and head for the Domes, some distance away.

“Om Shanti Padma Om – How ya doing?,” someone in the virtual Harbin Domes ...














(http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2010/03/half-dome-you-fly-down-to-virtual.html - March 24, 2010)