Week 2 - Rezzing a monkey and other (second) life skills

It was bound to happen.  My first attempt at "rezzing" an object (I'm hoping that's the correct use of the word, it's still all new to me) ended up with me wearing a large monkey which, for a short time, I genuinely feared might never be removed.  I'd heard the guys at AAI talking about noobs ending up accidentally wearing all manner of strange objects but, with unabashed hubris, I'd believed that I was already beyond that kind of rookie behaviour.  Heck, I was into my second week in SL so I knew how to dress myself at least, right?  

Wrong!  

Fortunately nobody else was around to witness a somewhat panicky noob running around the place with an oversized primate attached to him.  If only my accidental (and at the time also seemingly irreversible) blonde flexi-hair episode a day or two earlier had similarly transpired without witnesses.  Let us never speak of it again - I'm looking at you Pixie Arcana!  

So how did I come to be running around various sims trying to conjure a monkey out of thin air?  A not unreasonable question.  I'll do my best to paint the scene for you.  

Much of my first week, in fact virtually all of my online time, had been spent at AAI enjoying the tunes, the laughs, the gestures and most of all the company of some mighty fine people whom I already considered good friends.  I'd also spent a bit of time wandering around some freebie shops which had kindly been suggested for me, suggestions which I had great fun feigning massive umbrage at, accusing people of implying that I had bad hair….which to be fair was pretty much exactly what they were saying and rightly so.

During this time I'd accumulated a number of items in my inventory, either from the freebie shops or as gifts from many kindly souls, but most of which already had origins lost in the mists of my fickle memory.  I thought it would therefore be advisable to take some time and explore not only some other sights & sims of SL but also some of the stuff which I seemed to be rapidly accumulating yet, thus far, remained untouched.

Now, I can't tell you where I got the monkey because I have absolutely zero recollection of it.  But I remembered someone explaining to me how you could "rezz" items from your inventory so I thought that this would be a good way of figuring out what the hell this thing was whilst also practicing what was no doubt a basic life skill which I'd be needing on my SL journey.

Of course I couldn't quite remember what had been explained to me so I did what I always do, and just randomly clicked on buttons and items to see what happened.  Needless to say, what happened was that I ended up wearing the aforementioned large monkey.  Oh the shame of it.  

Fortunately a good friend of mine, in fact the very same friend who had originally suggested Second Life to me all those years ago, happened to also be online at the time so I directed a virtual cry of "help" in the direction of Min Fairweather.  Min was kind enough to walk me through a quick crash course over IM and I was finally able to rid myself of the monkey on my back (see what I did there?) with a not inconsiderable sigh of relief.  

Of course, what I'd not realised was that as soon as you start talking inventory to people they send you yet more random and obscure toys to play with.  So it was then that, thanks to Min, I was able to spend the next half hour or so parachuting over the SL landscape and larking about with a lightsabre pretending to be Obi Wan Kenobi (geek in RL = geek in SL).  

There's still plenty of stuff in my inventory that I haven't checked out.  Some of it I'm almost scared to touch (Mericat Ireland you know exactly what I'm talking about!) but no doubt I'll acquire even more over the coming weeks and the lessons learned this week should serve me well when it comes to trying these things out.  In fact, I think there might be some hair in here which I've not tried out yet……

……will I never learn?