I've never played Second Life because I'm a graphics snob. Every screenshot I've seen looks like final exam projects from Poser 101. They might as well call it Uncanny Valley Online.

That said, there's an intriguing three-part article by a SF Weekly writer who got knocked up in Second Life, and lived to tell the tale:

The whole delivery took exactly an hour: I showed up for my scheduled appointment and wham, we went straight upstairs and got started. I had a few gripes about the clinic: Shouldn't the woman who delivered my baby have tied back the silvery mane of hair that made her look like an alien love interest from an early episode of Star Trek? And is hip hop the best soundtrack for a delivery room? What expecting mother wants to hear Khia sing, "Lick my pussy and my crack"?

What expecting mother indeed, my friend.

More STUFF and some links after the jump.

I find myself more and more intrigued by the aspect of futurism in the various articles I read about Second Life. Remember back in the days of Shadowrun and Snowcrash, we all thought the internet was going to be a totally immersive, avatar-based, 3D virtual reality experience? I was baffled during the nineties because we seemed to have been completely wrong. The internet was just a big BBS with no user limit and onscreen graphics.

Instead of logging in and finding myself in a digitally constructed, Tron-like city, inhabiting any physical form I wished, flying around like a maniac and busting into corporate mainframes with my leet deck, I was playing whack-a-popup while cruising Geocities and stealing spinning ankh GIFs and embedded Cure MIDIs. Horrible.

Oh sure, there was Palace Chat and other avatar-based graphical chatrooms, but they were hideous without exception. You know this.

So I realized a few days ago that with the advent of widespread MMORPGs, we're finally getting the immersive, graphical internet we always dreamed of. We just took a roundabout route to get there.

Admittedly, it's not really the internet. Aside from EverQuest's pizza button, I can think of very few utilitarian aspects. It's still a glorified chatroom. And I highly doubt the basic internet interface will change all that much. The textual, newspaper-like model is too convenient to be messed with much.

But it's a wee bit more Future, and that's at least as promising as it is frustrating. Eliza Gauger

I Was an Online Mother: Part One, Part Two, Part Three [SF Weekly, via SugarJoy]