Location: Jessie Sim, Gunning for Cupid

“Give me danger, little stranger,“ croons (well, snarls) Iggy Pop on iTunes as my avatar enters the once-infamous Jessie, home to a shooting war between conservative and liberal SLers long ago and, apparently, between World-War II roleplayers and the developer of a mega-mall. Now THAT got my attention.  Given my hatred of suburbia and obsession with WW II, visions of P-47s strafing and dropping 500lb bombs on Abercrombie and Fitch were too cool to ignore. I HAD to go to Jessie.

In fact, a wall was built back then, later dismantled, to keep the warring parties apart.  Wagner James Au and the Second Life Herald covered the wars and this history of it is good reading…

I came to the almost-empty Jessie sim to see if I could indeed find some of the anarchic spirit of SL that may be driving the boring megacorps off our Grid.

At first the area was empty…I saw a game-style “health meter” appear on my screen, and an ominous sign…showing me that you can be “killed” there.  I searched in my inventory, and came up with only a Han-Solo style blaster I’d used with Di for our Men-in-Black Routine.  It’s a working gun, but if danger were present, I wanted a familiar one, like my favored real-life shooting-iron, the Colt M1911A1 automatic.  250 Lindens later, I had one from a talented virtual gunsmith (subject of a future blog) and went, packing heat, into Jessie.

I’ve only played a few first-person shooter games, and I find SL’s shooting interface clumsy at first, but then easy to master.  I did a bit of target practice at an abandonned factory, in case I got jumped, then strolled outside.

Remnants of some old conflict lingered.  On one side of a canyon, I saw a red building that is home to a SL Communist Party (more on this in a later entry as well).  Soon the Comrades came for me, their leader in a Soviet uniform and wearing a jet-pack.  Instead of combat, however, they wanted to give me a rifle (an AK-47) and invite me to their revolution. I agreed, and I invited them all to Stability Now!

After they accepted, we decided to shoot some cupids. A little heart-shaped dispenser on the edge of the canyon would release annoying cupids who would say little greeting-card stupidities “Love makes the world go round!“ until they were shot as they flitted about.  The Soviet Comrades and I took pot-shots, trying (well, not trying that hard) to avoid hitting each other as we blasted the cupids until they began to fall from the sky into the depths below.

“Love hurts!“ I yell as a cupid tumbles earthward. The Soviet workers raise a cheer.  More on Jessie soon—I like this place.

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

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