Location: Just back from ICT Library, Info Island

I’m learning to make clothing in Second Life.  The process, explained to me by a lady-friend of Pappy Enoch’s, has been straightforward: you only need Adobe Photoshop, a digital camera, and a cavalier attitude toward copyright law.

Linden Lab gives away a set of templates for making clothing, and the really skilled can even make custom avatar “skins” like the one I bought from Lila’s store.  I’ll probably never, ever have that level of skill.  Any skin I made would look to be straight from Victor Frankenstein’s lab.

So I began with a plain black Devo T-shirt and the Linden templates; they look like the dressmakers’ patterns to which one pins real-life fabric.  With lots of judicious cutting, pasting, re-sizing, and a little cursing, I uploaded my custom T-Shirt at a cost of 10 Lindens, and now Ignatius is stylin’ in a big, geeky way.

Since I first encountered Devo during their Saturday Night Live debut in 1978 (those nightmare-dark days of Disco) I have continued to regard their songs and philosophy as prescient. The band’s take on American popular culture is that we are a bunch of submorons besotted by violence, sexual repression, fast food, and a dumb popular culture.  We are, thus, sliding into devolution.

Need I say that I’ve always agreed?  My proof in two words: Paris Hilton. Anyway, I could go on and on about one of my favorite bands while I was in college, but the Devo philosophy—that beautiful mutants must rule and normal people be unmasked for the suit-and-tie clowns that they really are—is alive and well in Second Life.

You can be a “beautiful person” in SL, and can either embrace that or have fun mocking our real-life cult of beauty and celebrity.  Or you can be a morbidly obese Moonshiner, a bipedal raccoon, an ape, a tiny kitten, or even a walking ham-hock (I saw one). 

Who owns this particular tomorrow? Not the Paris Hiltons of SL. I’m betting on the ham-hocks.

And I have at long last, a duty, now, for the future. See you in-world, beautiful mutants.

All I can say is “Dit!“.  Yet more evidence of devolution in the early 70’s.

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