(Click on Image for full screenshot)
(Meet on Yin-Yang, central area of the Luminere
World.)
KT: Well met, indeed.
KT:
Let us make such a circle.
PPE:
Let us work towards Illumination.
KT: In the South is an Oasis, symbol of rest and
recovery.
PPE: Let
us build such places.
PPE: I
invoke Melchizedek, namesake of ICOM, and Anubis, faithful companion through arduous
jouneys.
PPE: Then let us spend our Time sharing information.
KT: Let
us complete this exchange and work onwards.
KT: Melchizedek! for his continual presence in our thoughts and
works.
PPE: All
those present we thank and bid thee peace as we close this circle of exchange.
I must admit
that when PPE suggested that we should perform a “virtual ceremony”, I quailed
slightly. As I’ve been an isolated worker
all of my life and completely hidden up until about six months ago, my previous ceremonial
experience consisted of a handful of consecrations and absolutely nothing which involved
anyone else. I trusted PPE to guide me well,
but I was also concerned about my computer’s ability to handle the 3D graphics, and
as it turned out, my concerns were well-founded.
Over the next
week, PPE and I explored “Active Worlds”, the virtual reality host site which
has more than 30 “virtual worlds” to wander through. PPE originally wanted to use a world called “Atlantis”
-- a visually stunning world -- but the graphics were too heady for my poor 486 to handle. As I wandered from world to world, I discovered
that my biggest problem was movement: the
delay between when I input a command to move and when it appeared on my display was often
20 seconds (a function of inadequate processing power), thus, even if I counted “move”
commands carefully, I was reduced to what must’ve looked like a drunken stagger --
and worse, I kept running into things!
I knew exactly
what a ceremony with me as a participant would look like if it involved movement -- rather
like a
While I was
exploring, PPE came on-line and sent me an ICQ message to ask how my virtual experience
had gone. I wrote back to him that I was in
the world named “Avalon” right then, and was having a lot of trouble with my
computer. To my amusement, he wrote back
“I’ll meet you in Avalon. I don’t
get to use that sentence very often!” Moments
later, a really stunning babe appeared before my virtual eyes and minced her way over as
if she knew me. “You need to change your
Avatar, sir,” I said when it became apparent that he didn’t realise he was a
“she”. “Ohmigod, what happened
to me?! I didn’t use to have these...!”
came the embarrassed shriek in reply, and a few manly-man comments later a very handsome
Nordic type stood where the babe had been. “Much
better,” I replied with a wink. He couldn’t
stay long, though, so I was quickly off again on my search for a “homeworld” for
our ceremony.
A few worlds
later, I came upon a world named “Castles”, which was very beautiful, and had at
least two scenes which would have been very amenable to our ceremony which were close to
the “teleport in” point, and would have required little movement on my part. For a moment, I thought I had solved our problem,
but then the “proprietress”-- the woman whose world it was -- showed up, and
moments later a friend of hers teleported in. As
I explored, I could “hear” the two of them talking. It seemed that this lady had set up her world to
encourage “virtual lovers’ trysts” and that she took great delight in
eavesdropping on whatever was going on. Sickened,
I departed quietly and marked her world as one to never visit again.
After about 20
hours in Active Worlds, during which I went through the list of worlds from top to bottom,
I decided to recommend a world named “Lumiére” which had the right ambience --
spiritual with a strong nod to magick -- and graphics which, once loaded, were not so
intense that I couldn’t move. I
forwarded my suggestion to PPE, and he agreed to my selection. The next day, he forwarded a draft of the proposed
ritual to me, and to my surprise, I discovered that despite the fact that I had thought
that I was quite the non-ceremonialist, I had additions and modifications to suggest! A little research and fact-checking later, I
returned a proposed modification of the ceremony, which was also accepted. We set a date for a practice run-through on June
12th at the same hour the actual event was planned for in order to test how Internet
traffic would affect our ceremony.
I came early to
our practice, in order that I could allow my computer time to download and cache all of
the graphics necessary. By the time PPE showed
up -- also early, bless him -- I had most of the graphics downloaded and was ready to go. It quickly became apparent that due to differences
in machines, I could not keep up with him (literally!) , so we decided that I should
“teleport” from one section of the world to another in order to save time and
not look like I just came from a St. Paddy’s celebration! We had just reached the West where PPE “screengrabbed”
a virtual “snapshot” of “me” in front of the obelisk, and I had just
completed my section of the invocation when all of a sudden, everything went completely
weird. While PPE’s avatar remained
visible, it became clear that he couldn’t “hear” me in the virtual
environment. I tried to ICQ him, but ICQ
repeatedly told me he was off-line (despite showing him as on-line) before I finally got
my message through to him. He got two
similarly bewildered messages through to me before he finally appeared to get kicked
off-line permanently.
I chalked it up to the vagaries of the Internet, and
continued to work on refining my settings so that I could interact efficiently in the
virtual world for a couple of hours before I gave up on his returning. I sent him an e-mail to ask when we should
try again, and no sooner had I finished dispatching it, my hard drive began to make
horrible grinding noises! I shut the computer
off promptly -- and a few attempts at reboots later, I determined that the hard drive
controller had failed. Unfortunately, the hard
drive controller was built into the motherboard! Not
only had something apparently killed our Internet connection, it had likewise killed my
computer!
Determined not
to be defeated by the forces of dispersion, rather to turn a negative into a positive, the
next morning -- a Saturday -- I hied myself over to my favourite computer-parts vendor and
purchased a brand-new motherboard and a K6-233MMX processor plus an additional 32 Megs of
DRAM (okay, okay, it was on sale) -- quite an upgrade from my poor old 486-133! By that afternoon, I had everything installed and
was able to get back on-line. There I found
the following message waiting for me in my e-mail: “At
8:30 pm, just as we invoked (I think), my ISP’s whole routing to the USA fell over --
I guess we should have warned the engineers about the non-exoteric packets that would be
transversing the cables ...” The time on
the digital “snapshot” attached to the e-mail confirmed both of our memories: just as I had made my first invocation, the part of
the Internet we needed had collapsed.
I replied with the news that my old system was dead: “All I’ve got to say is that it had the
decency to wait to die after I had transacted all the business I absolutely had to
yesterday, and chose a time when I could afford to fix it.
So if something was shooting at us, it looks like M. (or somebody on
our side!) shot back and hit what he was aiming at.”
But the ordeal wasn’t over yet. I
hadn’t been concerned yet, as I had just been thankful that I was at all functional
again (and hadn’t lost any data!) but I hadn’t been able to get the new
motherboard’s on-board video controller to operate in SVGA mode. A few hours later, I determined that nothing I was
going to do was going to get me above 800x600, 256 color resolution -- completely
unacceptable to someone who does computer-based graphics for a living! In addition, I determined that whatever had
affected the Internet and my computer had likewise bitten a chunk off of my ISP’s
bandwidth and taken down a couple of sites I frequent.
Two more trips
to the computer-parts vendor later, I discovered that the fault in my video lay not in my
stars this time, but in an incompatibility between my old monitor and the new motherboard. I girded up my loins and bid adieu to a large part
of my savings for a new monitor -- but again, gracious influences were with me, as I was
able to pick up a nice 17” monitor for only a little more than an exact replacement
of my former 14” model would have cost.
PPE and I had
scheduled a final run-through for 2 hours prior to the actual event on the 26th, and of
course, the computers simply had to have their final laugh on us. In PPE’s case, his icons inexplicably
disappeared two days before the main event, and in my case, my ICQ decided to collapse --
also by losing its floating icons -- two hours before the virtual ceremony. I also had been working a week of twenty-hour days
to try to get my website at least minimally on-line for viewing at ICOMFest, and had been
forced to contend with a slew of problems associated with that which brought me up to
within literally ten minutes of ceremony time before I had the web site up and
working properly! The forces of dispersion
lost in the end, however, as we were able to get a good connection for the ceremony, and
the first-ever virtual ceremony was performed before an audience of nine -- eleven if the
participants are included!