Second Life, or Why Can't I Hit People.

Having spent some of my impressionable youth, and many of my father's dollars, "interacting" with other sheltered horny dorks through the magic of my Commodore 64 and QuantumLink, I have felt some twinges of interest in Second Life.  A recent series of articles about how not-far this sort of idea has progressed over the years in between has made me have Second Thoughts, har har. 

This one pretty much seals the deal; excerpt:

Yesterday I downloaded something called Second Life. It is like Grand
Theft Auto: San Andreas, except you can't shoot anyone, and you can't
hit people. You just walk around. There are no prostitutes, and
everything costs real money, and you can't rob anyone to get money. You
have to use your credit card, with real money, to buy fake money to use
in the game. It's not actually like Grand Theft Auto at all.

Second Life is free to play, and I keep seeing people referring to it
in the news, so I had to take one for the team and just dive on in. I
knew it probably wasn't going to be intriguing when I got to the signup
part and couldn't even make a one-word name. I had to use some
fantasy-ass last name and I couldn't even use cusses. The best I could
do was call myself Wenis.

Wenis Swindlehurst: How do I hit people
Foxbrand Leprechaun: You can't
Wenis Swindlehurst: I need that shit you drive....

I flew up and out of the Freebie Warehouse, and landed in some
quasi-construction zone. There were walls and floors scattered about
the landscape. Occasionally, I'd come upon a red dot, which I'd click,
and it would make my character do some kind of humping motion. That's
what I came to do. Hump in the construction zone.

Everything in Second Life seems to be coated in a preteen's
understanding of sex. It was very titty-booby pee-pee doo-doo. From the
fantasy asses to the cyber-ruins surrounding Freebie Warehouse, there
really was nothing but clumsy cybersex. I wandered through this
wasteland for a while, until I finally came to a normal-looking store,
with windows, and people inside, so I went in.

The store sold penises, and penis avatars. I didn't actually get to see
what they looked like, because I didn't have any fake money to spend
(and I wasn't really interested in chipping in twenty bucks to these
cats' weird sex trip.) A pet penis, which would follow you around and
"come on command" (I'm guessing you have to right-click and load a
script and wait thirty seconds is what they mean by "command") was 100
fakebucks, which converted to US$0.68. Okay, that's not bad.

You could transform yourself into a giant penis for 200 fakebucks, but
one could argue that you do that anyway by spending time in Second Life.

OK, so unless I'm willing to dig up my first pair of glasses (rose-tinted, it's true) and one of my innumerable Cosby sweaters, I think I'm better off without.