The Horrifying Chair Experience

OK, so if I had a clue as to how to script in electricity for this "chair" I would certainly do so because I felt like this Second Life exercise was going to be the death of me or at least of my avatar.

I had high hopes for this project. I have always wanted to be an artist--a real artist--you know the tortured painter hacking off body parts to send to all those silly men who have spurned my affections. Two things have prevented this from occurring: my inability to paint anything other than stick figures (and even those are more or less abstract stick figures rather than anything remotely resembling realistic stick figures) and my severe aversion to pain.

Second Life, however, I thought might provide an outlet for all of this pent up desire. The textures are already created requiring no painting ability of my own to bring them into being, the objects or 'prims' are prefabricated requiring only my ability to stretch, shrink them, hollow them out, rotate them, move them up and down, and then assemble them all together into one happy completed object. It really appeared not much skill was required.

Ah, how wrong I was. First, I more or less started the project at the end, trying immediately to link my prims. Not only was I more or less doing things out of order but I also was completely misunderstanding the concept of linking--seriously misunderstanding the concept of linking.

Maybe I've dyed my brown hair blonde just one too many times or have suffered some other form of brain damage but I honestly thought that linking the prims meant that I would select them one by one and then they would somehow magically assemble themselves into the object I had pictured in my head. Yes. I really did. It took consulting with another class member to understand that as advanced as Second Life is, it is not in fact, some sort of mind-reading holodeck. Initially, my classmate thought my question of, "How does it know which prims go together," was a good one. That was of course, before she understood the level of my misunderstanding. What my classmate thought I asking was the how to select the 'parent prim'--the prim to which all the others are subordinate. She had no idea that what I was actually asking was how to select the items so Second Life would somehow magically know to form the prims into the object I had in mind.

Finally understanding that linking is basically virtually gluing the prims to one another so that they stay in place once assembled, I then set about attempting to actually create the chair. This was another time consuming ordeal. As detailed as the tutorial at the "Ivory Tower of Primitives" is, it apparently was not quite detailed enough for a fake blonde. In addition to completely not comprehending the concept of linking, I also misunderstood how to get the prim from the 'build' menu onto the ground. After using up a substantial amount of time, I learned that dragging a prim onto the ground does not garner the same results as clicking a prim and then clicking the ground.

After mastering these key concepts I then set about attempting to fashion the chair. My original idea was to construct a throne. This seemed easy enough as I thought pretty much the only prim I would need to work with was the cube. While this was by and large true, I had great difficulty attempting to see all sides of the object, great difficulty shaping this very simple prim, and great difficulty assembling the prims once they were finally, successfully clicked onto the ground. At long last I finally settled on something resembling more of a bench--if one can called something that looks like several two by fours tacked together a bench.

Did I enjoy anything about this experience? I did enjoy selecting the texture, having collected a number of free textures from various different Wal-Martesque freebie sims. In a desperate attempt to give the chair some 'personality' as our assignment required, I selected a pink marble texture for my disaster--I mean chair. I also enjoyed the scripting part, mainly because the scripting only required me to learn a tiny bit of the language and did not require much manual dexterity on my part.

One might assume that this experience has put me off of Second Life construction forever. Not so. Second Life fascinates me for some reason that I can't quite explain and the possibilities for exercising creativity, especially by constructing items, seems endless. As frustrating as this experience was, it actually reminded me of the way I felt years ago as a child learning to play piano. I desperately wanted to learn to play but had great difficulty learning to read music and even more difficulty getting my hands to follow my brain's instructions. Many times I threw fits and music all about my parents' living room. Despite all of this, I never gave up. The frustration appeared to be some kind of demonic exorcism of fear of failure and once the fear was spent music came easy to me and in the years that followed I became quite the virtuoso.
I'm hoping to have the same experience a second time as I work my way through Second Life.