Single Frame Stories

Single Frame Stories: Community – A Gaggle of Bloggers

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ACK! I know, I know, this photo looks eerily familiar 😉 I was actually going to make my previous post a double-shot for Avatar Blogger Month and Single Frame Stories, but then I remembered Whiskey asked us to use a landscape format. So…I went back and did some more editing on the same raw shot to make sure my entries don’t cause her grief!

I’m getting this in a bit late – the post for this week’s prompt, “Community” has already been published, but we have a grace period, since this is part of the display for SL10B. If you want to participate in Single Frame Stories, you can get in now with any of the three selected prompts: Identity, Community, and next week’s, Creativity. Just upload them to the Single Frame Stories Flickr group by Friday of next week.

While blogging is often a solitary endeavour, there is a huge number of bloggers in Second Life. Many may never meet another SL blogger. Yet there is a true sense of community through blog comments and other social media platforms. A blogger’s words can be nothing more than a personal online journal, or it can reach hundreds of thousands of readers. But no matter where on the spectrum yours sits, it’s a bit frightening – yet empowering – to realise that once that post is published, even if you delete it, there is still a copy cached somewhere on the interwebs. It’s a connection we all share and links us together.

A gaggle of bloggers – a group of individuals who face the same hurdles with every post they write – constitutes a community where I am happy to belong.

Just as an aside, neither thesaurus.com nor synonym.com have another word for “blogger”!

Single Frame Stories: Identity – From A Child

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Nature vs. nurture. The age-old question. Which is more important?

This week’s Single Frame Stories prompt is Identity, part of a larger theme of why we are in Second Life (more details below). I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what I should do for this challenge. It’s tricky enough to decide how to tell the story of one’s identity without being limited to a single frame. Volumes of books have been written on this subject, and I still don’t believe anyone can give us a definitive answer. It’s not black and white; there are always shades of grey.

I finally decided that who we are begins at birth and never actually ceases until we draw our final breath. For me, if I think back to my earliest memories, my family helped define the person I would become today. And their influence will continue until I die. No matter how much time passes, those early experiences are the building blocks of who we eventually become.

Single Frame Stories will be on display at SL10B. If you have been thinking of participating in Single Frame Stories, now would be a fantastic opportunity to have your works seen by hundreds of Second Life residents. Check out the link above for the full post, but this is the relevant passage of the blog on what is coming up in preparation for SL10B:

The birthday celebration officially opens on June 16th. That gives us exactly three weeks to work on stories to feature in our build. I’ll create the display build, and you all tell the stories. Deal?

For these next 3 challenges only, I’ll be asking for a new format for your stories. Please submit your stories in Landscape orientation only, so that our display can be cohesive. The prompts will be a series of words that describe just some of the reasons we are in Second Life. The overall theme of the celebration is Looking Forward, Looking Back. Feel free to incorporate this theme into your stories. Otherwise our normal rules apply, with a 140 character limit for text, which can be in the title or featured on the work itself.

All you have to do is post to the Single Frame Stories Flickr group if you can identify with this challenge.

Single Frame Stories: Invisible – Almost

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This is my entry for this week’s Single Frame Stories. The prompt is “Invisible.”

I took the photo at Harlow Heslop’s Pixel Bean Coffeehouse in Second Life. It’s a lovely spot, whether it’s full of happy, smiling people. Or if you’re alone and feel invisible.

Almost.