The Alphaville Herald

The W-Hat Birthday: Cake, Ice Cream and Murdered-Hooker Bloodbath (2/2)

by Alphaville Herald on 30/04/05 at 3:45 pm

By Neal Stewart

It’s the quick and the dead in Second Life. The murdered hooker I found at Baku today is not the murdered hooker she was yesterday. Yesterday’s corpse had character. A furry, she lay there with eyes closed and brows wrenched, as though her eternal sleep was wrought by nightmares. And who could blame her? But in today’s new face there is nobody home. The eyes stare wide open with the good-natured 2-dimensional expression of a vacant, non-furry, latex sex-doll.

I guess that’s celebrity make-overs for you.

In a crowded room, the situation was a bit different 48 hours ago…

Continued from Part 1.

*****

“Oh yeah, take it, take it hard” yells Loksr Mysterio, a W-Hat, pumping away at the bloody, avatar-less, furry hermaphrodite corpse. “Unf unf unf.”

“The hand twitches!!!”, one observer comments. Then, remembering it’s a furry, “Paw?”. “I KNEW I saw the foot move” says W-Hat Operating Thetan. Dave Eisenberg explains, “Yeah I made her twitch.”

“THERE IT GOES AGAIN”

“I saw the eyes open and close once…” another W-Hat says, “Never saw it again.”

“Wait, if her eyes are closed how can I stick my penis in them?” Operating asks.

“Stick it in da mouth,” suggests Eisenberg.

Some of the other W-Hats have a go at the corpse. Several at once.

“They kinda look like a rowing team” one onlooker declares.

She’s right. They do.

The Australian journalist Hugh Lunn says that one of the hallmarks of bad writers is that they start an article by just asking lots of questions in a row.

Because generally it ensures that they’re not actually going to provide any answers.

So here goes:

- Should artists have the right to decide what context their work is used in, once it’s been sold? In this case, does a builder have a leg to stand on if their avatar-creation is begenitalled, disembowled and covered in blood?

- To what extent can a group be blamed or held responsible for the conduct of it’s members? And under what circumstances?

- Do these pants make me look fat?

- At what point does a private build become public? How many walls must surround it and how thick must they be? If it has windows, what is an appropriate gap to have between blinds?

- Is it valid to be offended by an artwork if the artist claims that it was not their intention? To what extent does an unidentifiable red liquid become real blood, red paint, or Hollywood blood, when the artist designates it as such?

One W-Hat criticized the blood splatter in Dave Eisenberg’s murder-scene and characterized it as unrealistic-looking.

Another W-Hat asks, “How the hell is a dead furry transvestite hooker with two dicks unrealistic?”

This is the edited transcript. The unrealism has been preserved but some bits are removed for brev. There were also some parts where I explete and say out loud how much I like the build. These have been removed to make me look less like an embedded U.S. war-correspondent who garrottes one of Saddam’s Republican Guards with his camera-strap and then storms the palace.

*****

Dave Eisenberg: Just to clear things up – It’s not anti-furry [the murder-scene]. It’s the only all-prim av [avatar] that I could find. The only all-prims avs are furries.
Neal Stewart: I’ve seen human ones before. Starax does some I think. And Stormy Roentgen.

Neal Stewart: How long did it take to make, Dave?
Dave Eisenberg: Couple of days.

Neal Stewart: Why did you make it?
Dave Eisenberg: It was a simple idea. We created an e-Detective agency next door and figured it would be funny to create a crime scene right next door and a dead hooker in bed is the classic crime scene and then we just kept on adding to it.
The whole point is to be morbid and ridiculous at the same time.

Neal Stewart: Who made the original furry?
Dave Eisenberg: She wasn’t too happy about it. Lucah. That’s why we’re going to replace the hooker with someone else.

Neal Stewart: What are you going to replace it with?
Dave Eisenberg: Another hooker. Probably furry too. Someone else is actually going to make me one specifically for this scene.

Neal Stewart: How will it be different?
Dave Eisenberg: It’ll have all the blood textures on it already. And it’ll actually look like an over-exaggerated hooker with bright red lipstick and lots of make up.

Neal Stewart: Where’d you get the animations?
Dave Eisenberg: Made them myself.
There’s also 2 jerk off balls. For more people.

Neal Stewart: Do you think Furrys will be annoyed or upset by this?
Dave Eisenberg: Some probably. But it’s not anti-furry so they shouldn’t be. A lot of people in W-Hat are furries and they like it.

Neal Stewart: Do you see how it can appear anti-furry?
Dave Eisenberg: The fact that I’ve used a furry av, yeah.

Neal Stewart: Why use a furry av and not a human one?
Dave Eisenberg: Because I can’t find any all prim human avatars and I suck at making my own.

Neal Stewart: Would you use an all prim human avatar if you could find one?
Dave Eisenberg: Definitely, then people wouldn’t mistake that it’s a dead hooker.

Neal Stewart: Is this the avatar you always wear?
Dave Eisenberg: No, I just got it recently. I modified it, and like how it looks like.

Neal Stewart: What av did you have before?
Dave Eisenberg: Uh, lets see…
9 year old kid

Neal Stewart: Why 9?
Dave Eisenberg: Because it’s funny.

Neal Stewart: Are you going to keep your new avatar from now on?
Dave Eisenberg: For now yeah. I like it. I change them when I get bored of them or find something new.

Neal Stewart: So you’re basically a furry yourself at the moment?
Dave Eisenberg: I guess.

Neal Stewart: What do you think about Furries?
Dave Eisenberg: They’re furries. I don’t know am I supposed to think something about them?

Neal Stewart: Do you dislike them, like them, indifferent, what?
Dave Eisenberg: As indifferent as I would be to anyone else. It depends on the personality.

Neal Stewart: Who else helped you with this build?
Dave Eisenberg: A couple of people from W-Hat and another furry from the forest.

Neal Stewart: Are they a W-hat [the furry]?
Dave Eisenberg: Yeah.

Neal Stewart: Is all the red stuff paint?
Dave Eisenberg: I put the bucket of paint as an inside joke because Feem didn’t like how unrealistic this scene looks with blood splatter and wouldn’t shut up about it, so I just put a bucket of paint here and told him that it’s all paint.

Neal Stewart: I see. So it is all meant to be blood on the walls etc?
Dave Eisenberg: Yeah.

Neal Stewart: There’s some conflict between you and some of the other W-hats because of this is there?
Dave Eisenberg: Not really. They all like it.

Neal Stewart: All of them?
Dave Eisenberg: Some are indifferent. Some are worried that it’ll get me in trouble with the TOS.
But considering how much stuff I see around SL…
The fact that it’s in a mature sim and covered, I don’t think there should be any problems. After all, it’s just art.

Neal Stewart: What have you seen worse than this?
Dave Eisenberg: Disgusting porn. All of these depraved sexballs, this scene is an over-exaggerated parody of it all.

Neal Stewart: Do you think that porn is worse than gore?
Dave Eisenberg: Not really.
I’m pushing some buttons here.
However this is entirely fake

Neal Stewart: How do you mean it’s fake?
Dave Eisenberg: Well like gore you see in movies. Gore in movies is more acceptable than porn.

Neal Stewart: So this blood on the walls is not real furry blood, it’s fake – movie blood?
Dave Eisenberg: Well obviously.

Neal Stewart: So, what is the point of the build? To stir up some controversy?
Dave Eisenberg: It wasn’t intended like that. And so far there isn’t much havok going on. It started as a crime scene next door to an e-Detective agency, as a joke and ended up as this.

Neal Stewart: You mentioned before about ‘pushing buttons’. Whose buttons is it intended to push?
Dave Eisenberg: This build is generally pushing the concept of what’s allowed and isn’t in this game.

Neal Stewart: I see, so it’s a joke that evolved into a statement about art and censorship in SL?
Dave Eisenberg: No, it’s still pretty much a joke. Some might take it offending, and that’s fine but if it’s covered, not many people will be seeking this stuff out.

Neal Stewart: Are you confident you won’t be banned? Because of this build?
Dave Eisenberg: I probably will, but if Lindens give me a reason on how it breaks the TOS I’ll tone it down, or take it off.

Neal Stewart: So how long has it been here for?
Dave Eisenberg: I think a week so far.

Neal Stewart: How is the detective agency going?
Dave Eisenberg: Well, we’re still hard at work trying to figure out who did this!
Other than that the e-Detective agency is a joke just as well.

Neal Stewart: Heh heh. So, you don’t have clients or anything?
Dave Eisenberg: Nope. It started when someone showed up claiming to be a Detective researching W-Hat. So we decided to make our own e-Detective agency.

*****

I stand there in the W-Hat Super Happy Fun Time Land and look towards the detective agency and crime-scene apartments. I try to see the blood through the blinds in the distance. Next to me, hovering in mid-air without reason or context is a photo of Al from Home Improvement. In a building nearby is a picture of Adebisi the rapist in Oz, the television show about a maximum security prison facility. There’s a DragonballZ-style picture of Colonel Sanders and Ronald McDonald, who are about to do battle. There’s a beautifully-drawn picture of a female Furry with huge breasts and a solemn expression, saluting with one hand and holding the American flag in the other. The cartoon is superimposed over a photo of the two-towers New York city skyline.

The audio-stream for the land is playing a song that talks about children watching inhumanity, bloodshed and violence on television.

“T.V. is not reality”, the song says.

“Neal, for what it’s worth,” Feem Lomax told me at the party, “We spend an awful lot of time making fun of how people view us as terrorists/griefers”.

He then paused to sing the chorus to the Facts of Life theme song. To win L$500.

You take the good, you take the bad,
you take them both and there you have
The Facts of Life, the Facts of Life.

“In Star Wars Galaxies, the Goon Squad used to run around making people sing the Charles in Charge theme when they wanted to join.”

“Please step away from the vehicle” says the red and yellow W-Hat TERROR Truck parked near-by.

“Neal: We make fun of people who think we’re griefers and terrorists. That’s what all the ‘cyber-terrorists’ propaganda is about.”

One W-Hat shouts over the din at the party, “Oh shit who is this ‘Neal’ fellow? I heard he likes boys confirm/deny?”

“In fact, we make fun of just about everyone,” Feem continues.

“Do you make fun of W-Hat though?” I ask.

“Actually yeah, we do.”

There’s more W-Hat banter. One of them shouts, “FEEM LOVES BUTTSEX. HE TOLD ME TO KEEP IT A SECRET”.