Africa

I went to pick up my husband at work yesterday. He comes out and says, "They're talking about Second Life on NPR." Naturally, being the talk-radio junkie that I don't admit to being, I said, "Oh! Turn it on!" (See, if I don't turn it on, I'm not quite as geekish.)

It was really quite interesting, and they had callers call in, some who played SL, some who had never heard of it. One lady asked, "So you sit in front of a computer and do all this?" I just had to laugh. They had to explain to her what an avatar is. I really wonder if that much of the population has no idea.

Then, some woman called and completely went off. She found it "disgusting" that people were spending this much time and creative energy in a virtual world on things that weren't even real when the world was in the state it was in. She went on and on, and got to the children in Africa spiel. Except it wasn't that they had no food, it was that they had no clean water to drink and how dare all of us play games when there were kids in Africa who needed blahblahblah.

The Reuters guy, Adam Pasick, was there and spoke up. He said something to the effect of, "not everyone can hop on a plane and go to Africa." I so laughed. But, next time you go to log in, you might want to consider heading over to Africa instead. Or at least think about building a sim named Africa.