Category: Uncategorized

 

Yesterday in The Refuge and Expansion, we explored its house, barn, and the house’s upstairs work area.

In the cramped confines of the house’s attic, we find a boy’s desperate attempts to reach out to an outside world that, before radio, television, and finally the internet, was hopelessly unreachable to a farm boy who craved more stimulus than what his farming community offered.  On two sheets of plywood laid over the bare joists and illuminated by a single bare light bulb, there is a basic radio and headphones, the sort of rig that a boy around World War I might have built.  It reminded me of an aspect of my own youth, in an attic similar to this, trying to escape the confines of my own small town life by finding broken surplus Army radio equipment and cobbling it together to build a functioning ham radio I could use for communicating with people far away.

Going back outside to the road and walking past the stop light, we find ourselves at a Texaco station, the sort of gas station where local guys could be found chewing the breeze on the chairs set outside.  Inside the garage is a hot rod – here call a “Rat Rod”, which you can buy and, suspended from an engine hoist,  an optional higher performance engine that you can buy for your Rat Rod,.  This is another aspect of rural creativity, finding its expression in taking garden variety cars, stripping them down, and converting them into magnificently performing beasts.

 

When we leave the gas station and walk a little further down the road, we see an ancient railroad locomotive rusting in a field and next to it, a shocking disruption to the carefully laid out reality we have seen until now.  It’s unexpected.  Everything else we’ve seen can be understood.  It’s all part of our culture, our background, a past that we know if only by reading about it and seeing it on film and TV.

But now cracks break through the façade of normalcy.  Big cracks.  near the locomotive, a large tree grows in the middle of the road.  It has obviously been here many years.  Even more incongruously, something unidentifiable, a tube of some kind, jabs into the road at the tree’s base.  At first I thought it was a missile, representing the fears of nuclear war that dominated the 1950s.  But that’s not it at all.  Not even close.

 

Click on the “missile” and you are teleported without warning underground, to under the tree, and suddenly this well ordered simulation of the past turns surreal.  Hammers and instrument dials float freely in the air.  A rowboat is moored to a table.  On the table, we see radio like the one we saw in the cramped attic of the house.  But this is not a cramped attic.  Far from it.  This chamber is how the boy in that attic sees his world.  This is where he finds his freedom.  Instead of walls and piles of limit his world in the house, down here in this subterranean chamber, the walls all open to the stars.  In every direction, we see the vastness of the universe.  Looking up, we see the roots of that mysterious tree in the road and among them, we see what that mysterious “missile” really is: a telescope, the same telescope we saw in the house, but huge.  This chamber is the imagination of that solitary boy struggling to expand his mind in a small town where the best minds are more likely to build planes and modify cars.  This is where his mind roams free.

Is it also madness?  Perhaps.  I don’t know message the creator, AM Radio, intends with these two sims that mimic rural America of the past.  For me however, having grown up in a smallish town with some of the same constraints of the boy I imagine in that house’s attic, it evokes memories and feelings of my own childhood.

This is what I suspect AM Radio means by the place’s name, The Refuge and Expansion.  I might be totally off base, but to me, the upstairs room and attic are the boy’s refuge, and the subterranean chamber is the expansion, where he can let his mind run free, where he can expand, totally leaving behind the limitations of his small town world.

If you buy the Rat Rod or any of the other items for sale here, proceeds go to Heifer International Charity (www.Heifer.org), a 65 year old charity group that donates animals to poor families in developing countries.

AM Radio has created a well done and thought-provoking pair of sims.  If you’re a Second Life member, you can teleport there by clicking  slurl.com/secondlife/Wales%20Springs/251/113/24.

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The first time I visited Second Life’s The Refuge and Expansion, it struck me as a well done reproduction of a quaint aspect of bygone America, but not worth a return visit.  Fortunately, I did return, because subsequent visits revealed deeper layers, both literally and figuratively.  For me, the underlying feeling of the place is the ways rural boys – and it does reflect entirely the traditional interests of young males – could express their creativity on a farm in the pre-internet and pre-television era.  It is a very male view of the world – the house doesn’t even have curtains in the windows.  I see the place as the story of several brothers, most of them fitting in well with their town, but one who does not, a boy whose imagination and creativity crave more than his rural world can provide.  Of course, this is only my own personal view.  The creator, AM Radio, might have something else entirely in mind.

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When you first teleport to The Refuge and Expansion, you are standing on a two lane road that appears to stretch as far as the eye can see, complete with power lines on wooden poles, surrounded by mid-America farmland.  A single 1940s car is on the road.  Not far away, a billboard stands at a blinking traffic light where another two lane rural road intersects.  Turning to your right, you see a farmhouse, not American Gothic, but reminiscent of it.  You almost expect to see the man and woman from that painting step out from the house and invite you inside for some fresh made apple pie.  In the hazy distance on all sides, barely visible in the simulated mist at sim boundaries, outlines of buildings suggest nearby farms.

Inside the barebones house, you find simple vestiges of a past age: stiff backed wooden chairs, a wood burning stove, complete with axe and firewood, and in the kitchen, a water pump in a wooden stand for pumping water from the well.  In the back, you’ll see doors leading to the storm cellar, but they are non-functional and there is no storm cellar.  I wondered, if a tornado struck while I was there, where would I take shelter?  Of course, this is Second Life and there was no tornado nor any risk of tornado, but the setting felt real enough that doors to a non-existent storm cellar were a letdown.

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The barn across the road contains some important aspects of rural creativity in a past era.  A 1912 airplane sits at the center of the barn.  On one side, a late 1940s style car sits near a racing car such as might have been seen in the 1930s.  In the right rear corner, what appears to be a 1960s MGB. In the center, you’ll see an old style band saw and on the back wall, airplane engine parts carefully laid out on tables beneath blueprints of an airplane.  The place reminded me strongly of visiting the Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome when I was a child and flying in a 1930s plane that my favorite uncle had rebuilt himself – my very first flying experience was taking off from a rural dirt field in that plane. 

Returning to the house, if you go up into the second floor, you see another aspect of rural creativity – the solitary brother, bored by the mechanical things that excited his brothers and craving the education and intellectual excitement that his small town could not provide.  I could see his brothers finding outlet for their creativity by building planes and cars in the barn, while their more bookish carved out his own tiny workspace in the attic amidst detritis that other members of the family have stored there.  He has a work table with a microscope and a telescope pointed at the stars and on the floor, dozens of books stand in stacks scattered around the floor, surrounded by a pile of wooden chairs and a spare wind blade for the nearby windmill.  This is the first hint we have that The Refuge and Expansion is not just a paean to an idealized rural past.  The boy who sat at this desk, at a window overlooking the feverish activity of his brothers in the barn, was lonely and frustrated.

Tomorrow in part two, we’ll explore more of The Refuge and Expansion, and further down the road, we’ll see reality morph into something very different.

If you’re a Second Life member, you can teleport there by clicking  slurl.com/secondlife/Wales%20Springs/251/113/24. 

I apologize for being AWOL for so much of the last two weeks! My First Life has been seriously interfering with my Second Life.

I’ve found a free and very useful Second Life tool bar that you can add to your Internet Explorer or Firefox browser, SL-ToolBar.EU. The toolbar provides:

• The latest news, blog, and articles about the Second Life world (mostly in German, but there are links for translating them to English and a long list of other languages)
• Learn the current status of the Second Life grid and read the latest status updatereports
• Get current Second Life stats – how many people are currently logged on, how many have logged on in the last sixty days, total membership, and how many US dollars have been spent in Second Life in the last twenty-four hours (as I write this, it’s $2,044,854).
• Links to useful sites with information about building, textures, and scripting in Second Life
• Links to a wide variety of Second Life related website sites around the world
• Teleport to useful locations in Second Life
• Links to websites that sell merchandise for use in Second Life
• Links to blogs around the world about Second Life. They are mostly in English, but there are also links to blogs in French, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish
• Play internet radio stations
• If Second Life is down and you’re really bored, there’s a "Grid down?" button that takes you to a variety of entertainment and game sites.

SL-Toolbar.EU is a European product, so much of their website is in German, but that doesn’t affect the usability of the toolbar for non-German speaking people, and there is an English language page for downloading the toolbar. English speakers can download the toolbar at www.sl-toolbar.eu/sl/english/english.html.