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Sweetie: Messing with the Fabric of the Metaverse

Written 9 February, 2013

Second Life blogger Pancake (thanks for the heads up, Iris Ophelia!) has issued a challenge to other bloggers-- and non-bloggers as well: create an intriguing character in Second Life. Check it out.

It occurred to me I have already created just such a fictional character-- the notorious, the infamous, the one and only Sweetie!

That's Sweetie, above, sitting, as is her custom with her face away from the camera. We can admire her couture, but her face? That's private. Notice how I'm looking on adoringly from the background.

Sweetie came about because someone I'm close to both in Second Life and in the real world asked me not to use her avatar's name. Mine was not to question why, mine was but to blog or die. Since I wasn't allowed to use her real virtual name, I call her Sweetie in this blog.

Although she's an avatar de plume, Sweetie soon took on a life of her own. She's rather like her doppelganger, only more so. Much more so. She manages to project an air of innocence and menace at the same time. I've no idea how. Perhaps it's her katana. She works in her fortress of solitude, poking at the boundaries of Second Life by doing things like seeing how deep she can bury her cache of exploding lipsticks inside nested inventory folders. Things start to get wonky, she tells me, at level 72. She says she's just keeping the world safe. Her most unstable cosmetics, she tells me, require at least ten levels of subfolders to be safe. Here's my post about her subfolder experiments.


Sweetie's obsession with her inventory eventually led to an intervention. I and three of her friends sat her down to talk. Things went horribly wrong-- so wrong it took three blogposts to describe her competency hearing.

In the early days all was bliss and innocence. We attached every flight enhancer we could find and flew upwards for hours.

Eventually we reached 15,000,000 meters.

As we passed one million meters our avatars began to distort. Our attachments jiggled and our limbs bent in ways for which they weren't designed. As we flew higher, our eyes bulged.

Eventually we looked like this:

Perhaps the lack of oxygen (we didn't think to equip ourselves with air tanks) changed Sweetie in some way-- but I don't think so. What made her radical was the Bush era formation of the Teleportation Security Administration. Before long there was the infamous incident at the Teleport Hub, which led to the 15-blogpart Trial of Sweetie.

And then there was our life of crime as the fashionista bandits. And our raid on the Bay City cop shop.

Oh, the fictional adventures we've had!

What's most endearing about Sweetie-- to me, at least-- is her ability to instantly go on extended nonsensical rants-- like this and like this-- and especially like this one, which transpired while I was recovering from a bad computer crash.

Sweetie even has a published interview. I appears in Whimsical Times, our sim's newsletter, but, hey, it's published. Read it here.

And so, I give you-- my Sweetie!