vickie i bet ur hot

I ignored him and continued to play (casually noting to myself that I seemed to be the only person who knew how to play). After a while, I got vote-kicked. I found out they’re all friends of one another.

The sad thing of all this? I was actually surprised I only experienced this after a hundred hours or so of playing the game online, because I know I’m not alone.

Really, Straight Male Gamers^TM, is that how you want gay men to treat you, too?

Friendly warning: Do not attempt while eating or drinking, or literal death may result.

Steps: Remove the best grabbed onto that daddy proud

It’s making me meet jeff on racism

Remove the baby

Who would be executed and the rough dept human rights

Entering the comedic effect

Serve?

Note 1: Not making fun of people with accents (fake or not). YouTube Transcribe Audio is just hilarious.
Note 2: Screenies are from this particular video: How to Make Omurice オムライスの作り方. Yummy.
Note 3: cookingwithdog is one of my favourite YouTube cooking channels.
Note 4: Actually, now it’s probably my favourite.

When I get the hang of it, I'll make you a ROM named Sandwich.

What.

Old Hardware and Phone

Notable deaths:

• Keyboard: Death from poisoning drowning. A cockroach crawled on it so I sprayed it. And by “sprayed it” I meant I emptied half a bottle of bug spray into it.
• Earphones: Stomped to death. Clean one-hit kill.
• PSU 1.0: Died when I shoved a screwdriver into it. Don’t ask. (This is not PSU 2.0, the one with the fan that died recently. I’m on 3.0 now.)
• Motherboard (micro): Capacitor leaked, motherboard caught fire, panic ensued.
• Floppy disc drive & non-smartphone: I’m too young to know what these are. *blinks*

Most of these were previously seen in the pictures of the 2006 entries Meet the Diablos and Shop-Ping!. Wow. I feel old.

So I was recently playing Alien Swarm and couldn’t help but notice something that might be of interest to you. These images were collected from different teams of self-identified male subjects within a very short period, and there’s no shortage of them.

Attached are the files in question.

P.S. Don’t get too excited, hey?

Vickie

Attachments:

Attachment 1

Attachment 2

Attachment 3

Attachment 4

*Get over it! Amirite?

And so I met up with fellow bloggers Amanda, Belinda and Chrasy/Tracey/spelling a million days ago, but, thankfully, panel 3 didn’t happen.

But they’ve also not mentioned anything about meeting up with me so I’m pretty sure it was something I said during. Or maybe it’s something I didn’t say. Or maybe because I didn’t eat while I was with them. Or maybe because I was just all-around awkward.

Social interactions. *shudders*

P.S. Turns out when you put “eating out” in quotes, it will come out totally wrong.

Mmm Bacon

Well, now I have 3 plates of them. Yay!

Blog entry in comics to follow, because I just never die.

Note: Quite a few resized or cropped screenshots after the cut. And as Second Life is the other virtual world I’ve actually spent enough time in, I’ll be making many comparisons throughout.

Right, so, signup. Twinity is meant to be a true-to-scale virtual replica of the real world, so not surprisingly, you can link your Facebook account to it. I initially signed up with my half-real online name (Vickie Diablos), but once I discovered that we can change our name any time by editing our profile on the website, I switched back to my common virtual world name (Naomi Skosh). So far, so good.

Twinity login screen showing a spacious living room, with the words 'A Free Starter Apartment is awaiting you' on it. There *is* a starter apartment waiting for you once you complete enough steps in the welcome tutorial, but it looks nothing like the image. Nothing.

Character customisation is as expected with sliders, and there is a tool for you to try to create your real-life face from photos. I tried it with one of my Second Life avatar’s snapshots… let’s just say I decided to use the default slider tools in the end. You’ll probably have better luck with a real photo.

Create Face from Photo Tool

But, additional character problem: Other than that sex is binary in this world as with most virtual and game worlds, I noticed that there’s no way to change your sex once you’ve chosen one when you sign up. I guess I’m spoilt by Second Life.

By the way, if you created a female character and her head-tilt and creepy smile keep getting in the way of face customisation, it’s her animation. Changing it from “confident” to anything else will stop it.

Animations panel showing available dance moves, emotions, flirt & tease and so on

Speaking of animations, you are only allowed to choose from one mood at a time. So like, you can’t stand happy, walk confident and afk flirty. I find the confident stand annoying (head tilt, creepy smile), the happy walk cheesy (skipping, seriously?), the flirty walk too unnatural, and I’d rather not be blue or drunken.

Outfit options are also limited: jackets and tops share the same layer, dresses take up both the top and bottom layers, and so on; meaning that you can’t, for example, wear a jacket over a dress.

I also can’t touch any of the clothes marked for male. This is even so for supposedly unisex items in the real world, such as vehicles. Fucking vehicles. I hope I’m not the only person who thinks this is annoying and highly problematic.

Inventory showing items marked with a 'not for female' symbol on it.

Self-expressions, why you no give me more?

On to a more positive note, I do like the Achievements system of Twinity. The Twinity currency is the Global, and you can earn a few by completing the tutorial and other available achievements, such as by exploring the world on foot, attending events, making friends and so on. This is a great idea — if you’ve been on Second Life, you’ll notice that the number one question from newbies is “How do I make money in this game[sic]?”. But this is also not a good idea — Globals will be worth very little real-life money; it’ll never be like the Linden currency in Second Life.

Achievements

And they hand out a small Berlin starter apartment clone to you after you complete the welcome tutorial regardless of your account status! Speaking of which, premium and merchant accounts are still free at the moment.

But, well, the world is still in public beta. Things will change.

Oh wow, how did I completely forget to write about the controls and camera even though that’s probably one of the first things you come across? Well, the Twinity camera? One word: terrible. You can do the normal pan around, zoom-in zoom-out thing with your mouse, and you can hold the alt key and click on a person and certain items to focus on them. But that’s pretty much all there is (that I’ve discovered).

Moving the character is done by using the arrow keys by default, but you can change that to my much more preferred WASD in the settings.

Placing objects in-world is similar to what you do in Second Life, except because the camera is so limited, it’s not as easy and fun.

Placing Objects in Twinity

Despite not being overly impressed at this stage, I dragged my Second Life meal ticket SL-equivalent It’s Complicated friend with benefits significant other on to Twinity when he came online. And once he’s relatively happy with his look (there weren’t many choices for men, according to him), we went out to explore.

London in Twinity

London, more specifically, since I might recognise some of the places. Other current cities available include: Berlin, Miami, Singapore, New York.

Picnic in London, Twinity

What I found interesting is that real estate in Twinity is based on real-life streets. If you click on a building you see on the street, you can check whether they’re renting apartments out (for real-life money).

All apartments and shops I’ve come across so far are in instances. It’s super for privacy, but not so super for shops, at least in my opinion.

But yes, unlike Second Life, mirrors in this world actually reflect! As they should!

An Actual Working Mirror!

Miscellaneous bits and pieces: I found the Event system slightly confusing at first because I thought it’s based on Twinity time, but turns out there may not be a global time, only your local time. I think. I’m still not completely sure.

“Twings”, I believe, are like Facebook’s poking and MSN/Windows Live’s nudge. I twinged my friend. He twinged me back. And I twinged him again. Yeah.

This sounds totally dirty.

TL; DR Twinity itself:

• The Achievements system makes this virtual world feel like a game, which is not necessarily a bad thing, mind you. (In fact, the message says “connecting to game server” when you connect to Twinity.)
• Twinity is a true-to-scale replica (or so they claimed) of the real world, so there are real-life streets and buildings, day/night cycle is 24 hours and avatars are human (adult).
• You get a small starter apartment after you complete the welcome tutorial.
• You can easily change your name by editing your profile.
• Sex is binary. Male or female. No switching.
• Non-unisex items, including some vehicles and animations, can only be used by one sex and that one sex only. No exceptions.
• Camera needs improvement.
• Avatars in semi-populated places take forever to load for me, and I’m on a decent connection and gaming computer. But yeah, I’m connecting all the way from Australia.
• I found at least one official casino. Gambling is apparently allowed here.

Visiting the/an official casino in my latest look

TL; DR Twinity vs Second Life:

• Twinity is not Second Life.
• Twinity will not replace Second Life.
• I don’t think Twinity is trying to replace Second Life, but what do I know?

I won’t be logging in to this world a lot, but when I do, I will most likely be playing the official Quiz Game (English) and earning Globals.

Quiz Game (English)

Well, I have to show off somewhere.

Now excuse me, I have a backlog of straight men to punch.

(But on a similar topic, I’m gradually adopting the “pansexual” label. I’m definitely not straight; I’ve never been 100% lesbian; “bisexual” isn’t an accurate label, either.

Just so the Internet knows.)