Exhibit ‘A’
They drift through the night, lonely, bored, itching to vandalize; weapons of creation on the tips of twitching fingers, eager to leave their mark across that vast, digital landscape of Second Life. Their prey? The sleeping, the unattended, the distracted.

Exhibit ‘B’
I recently set my account to never be away from keyboard (AFK). I did this for personal reasons; my Second Life girlfriend has done the same, and we can ‘spend the night’ together, should we desire. It is a pleasant way to go to bed, and a pleasant way to wake up. It rather helps bridge the time zone gap; two hours, in our case.

Exhibit ‘C’
In their heyday of world fame and fortune (not that it’s ever really dwindled, but when it was forefront, let’s say), The Police had a thing they called being “taken to the party”; this evolved from efforts to relieve the boredom of traveling, and resulted in a sleeping member of the entourage being dressed up in all manner of found objects, such as swizzle sticks, gaffer’s tape, magic marker, articles of clothing that didn’t belong to their gender, etc. It made for some interesting images and stories. Later, the practice extended into the studio, culminating in one episode where a crew member was sound asleep in the control room, snoring loudly, even while music was blaring from the speakers. A microphone was hastily applied, the sound recorded, slowed down, and very nearly made it as a sound effect on ‘Synchroncity II’, as a monster. They chose to replace it with Andy Summers’ guitar work, towards the end. We should be thankful, I guess.

•••••

As with so many things in life these days, it seems, the obvious cannot be stated enough. This would be the point in my ramblings where I point out that exercising the privileged option of ‘never AFK’ be conducted in the privacy of one’s own quarters, with appropriate security measures in place. On a recent evening, my SL girlfriend, “M”, opted to log off and go to bed early. I took the opportunity to do a little more building, constructing some cabanas and tweaking a few details on some apartment buildings. (Did I mention that I’m doing building, now? No? Oh. Sorry. Yeah, I’m kinda hooked on it. I’ll bleat about that at some other juncture.)
After a while, I tired, and figuring that since she wasn’t at home, I’d camp my pixel posterior on the deck of one of the cabanas; being a new, private sim, I didn’t reckon there’d be much interference, if at all.

If I could earn a modest stipend for every time I’ve been wrong, I could probably buy out Linden Labs, or at least become a majority shareholder.

When I came ’round the following morning, I found that I’d been ‘taken to the party’, replete with a large turd stuck to my head, and an equally large penis stuck to my crotch, with a proportionately-sized pool of man-butter attached and resting at my feet. The culprit was someone who had been introduced to the property just hours before, by one of our friends. In fact, she is an SL ‘old-timer’, having been around since almost the inception. Fortunately for me, her building skills had diminished significantly, a nugget of info I discovered upon viewing the public chat log, racked up whilst I slept. Payback, as they say, can be a bitch. How to administer appropriate payback to an SL old-timer is quite the conundrum, I assure you, and not a task to be taken lightly. Very little they haven’t seen, by now, and aren’t likely to be taken by surprise.

I was not bothered by this affront in the least; we are, after all, cartoons in a cartoon world; our entities can be pushed off buildings, hit by cars, roasted by flamethrowers, and crushed by 1-tonne weights, only to spring back out of such events looking as fresh as the day we stepped out of the portal. It did, however, get me to thinking about my own real-life reactions to similar things; I’m one of those people who, ten, maybe fifteen years ago, would have been incensed at such a prank, but in the years following, I’ve learned not to really give a damn. As long as nothing gets destroyed, I’m good. And SL pranks such as that can kind of help nurture a more balanced, good-natured approach to life.

So, if SL could help a former hothead such as myself learn to brush things off, imagine what it could do for foreign affairs and international policy? Imagine if we could somehow let Hugo Chavez put a big brown turd on Bush’s head while he slept, or give Putin a bigger penis than Bush, while he was busy quelling ceding factions of his once-intimidating empire? Merkel could have a slender, model-like figure, always a sure-fire tactic in negotiations. North Korea? Well, that might be the ‘wild child’ in the batch. Someone might have to put some account limits on that one. And the Middle East is anyone’s guess. In any case, an international game of ‘kick me’, SL-style, might be just the ticket to turn back the Doomsday Clock.

“Giving someone shit” takes on a whole new context, especially when inked in official government documents.

“Turds For Everyone”… truly, a ‘one-world’ policy.