Thursday night, and the sunglasses twirl. I arrived two minutes early to tonight’s Pixel Sumo match, intending only to observe, annotate, and heckle. How was I to know that what lay before me would change the very face of simulated sumo wrestling, and of amateur lepidoptery, for generations to come?
I took a random seat. Eventually, I noticed that everyone was cheering and laughing at me, as if they were looking forward to my participation. No no, I babbled, I am here to watch! It was pointed out that I was on the red bench, which meant I was competing. Bees are colorblind, I retorted, but was eventually goaded into laying down my dignity and the dignity of my species in a balls-out Second Life sumo match. And I got my stinger handed to me.
Allow me to lay the scene: this is the sumo ring, as it were, surrounded by audience and participant benches. Red is for the wrasslers, blue for their doting crowd. The man on the purple block is one Ebenezer Pixel, the appropriately-attired referee. In the middle is the actual fighting ring, the gray person in the upper left is Bender from Futurama, and that terrifyingly daffodilian mass of prims on the right red bench is yours truly.
Here I stare adoringly at the best avatar I've ever seen, a giant rusty robot. Notice that there is a naked man half inside me there on the bench.
The first two contestants face off in the ring. The ref called them to their respective poseballs, called READY, and then GO. Second Life allows collision between avatars, and the goal is to physically bump your adversary off the ring. Every avatar is exactly physically as strong as every other one, so it all comes down to timing, skill, and most important of all, lag.
I stare at my adversary's poseball, awaiting the plunge to my dishonorable demise on the cruel floorboards. "Float like a butterfly, sting like a ME!" I screamed, more for my own benefit than the intimidation of my much more experienced nemesis.
Eventually and at long last, this filthy goblin won the day. Congratulations and banzai, filthy goblin. May the honor won this day rain down on your descendants like the cleansing urine of the variegated snow baboon.
And the crowd. Goes. Wild.
If your adventuring dander is raised by the idea of hurling your digitally generated body, over and over, against similarly unrealized wretches in the ring of honor, they hold matches every Thursday down at the ol' Pixel Sumo dohyo, and they're constantly howling for fresh meat.
I hope you enjoyed this episode of I Hate It There, because you cannot possibly conceive of how many crab cakes I can fit into this bee suit.
