RFL: My Mother's Caregiver

 
By Bixyl Shuftan

People in Second Life are often quiet when it comes to what happens on the other side ot their computer. In my case, some things I've been fairly open about. In recent months, there's one large detail I've revealed more and more about. One concerning my Mother.

Mother and I have supported one another in each of our online projects. With her, it was her various online businesses. With me, it was writing various stories, then writing about news on Second Life while doing a novel on the side. She continued to work online into her 80s until about a year ago when she took what she thought would be a brief break.

In August of last year, she fell ill and was taken to the hospital. It was there it was discovered she had a tumor. The cancer was successfully removed. But it was major surgery and the whole experience took a lot of strength out of her. Since then, she's been slowly recovering, slowly. Over a month later, she came home after time at the hospital and rehabilitation center.

The rest of our family is out of state. So it's up to me to watch over her. Thankfully I'm still able to get on Second Life just about every day. And we do have some help from Home Health Care. But some days can be very demanding. I've been trying to balance things between her recovery and her comfort, leaning to the latter when in doubt. 

And then of course, there's my energy level. I'm no longer the fairly young guy in my 30s that I was when I first came here. And the lost hours of rest catch up to me easily. 

So what does this mean for me and Second Life? It means that my time here is more subject to interruptions than ever. And while I'm still able to write about Second Life, sometimes things will get put aside for a while as I take care of details at home, then try to relax a little so I can keep going, or catch up on lost sleep. But it's certainly given me more reason to write about the Relay.

And as it was cancer, there's always the possibility of it coming back, which scares me.

But while her recovery has been slow, I am confident she will eventually be back on her feet and walking. And around for many more years to come.

Artwork by Panda Jenn (Jennifer Carnivele)

Bixyl Shuftan
 

Remembering Artistic Fimicloud

By Bixyl Shuftan

Cancer is a deadly disease. According to Wikipedia, almost nine million people a year around the world die from it. Striking down men and women, rich and poor, men and women, young and old, it takes away many individuals in the prime of their lives, leaving behind saddened family and friends. In Second Life, while avatars do not get cancer, the people behind them do. For the Relay for Life in Second Life, it's mission is to raise funds for research for cures and treatments has brought thousands to take part, from it's most active participants to those just stopping by to make a small donation. Sadly, along the way some of the Relayers have passed on. Catt Gable, Shady Fox, Alliez Mysterio and others would not survive their personal fight with the illness.

For the Sunweaver community and the Passionate Redheads RFL team in their early days, among their numbers was Artistic Fimicloud. In Second Life, she was known for her pink fox avatar. In real life she was Stephanie Koslow, an artist who did a number of pictures. Sadly, she also suffered from cancer, a struggle that had gone on for years. On May 26, 2008, the woman behind the little pink fox passed away at age 49, a sad day for both the Sunweaver community and it's team, and for the Relay.  Some days later, there was a memorial service in the Colorado sim. One artwork of her made since showed Stephanie's spirit rising from her body as her pink vixen avatar. "I Relay for Fimi" became a title seen on a number of the Redheads and others. Fimi's treehouse continues to remain up at the Sunweaver Estates at Sunweaver Bay (179/155/33).

Since her passing, every year there has been an event of some kind in her honor. The following year there was a candlelight vigil, of which Ishtarkiss took a number of pictures of, as well as a "Blowout" event featuring art and screenshots. Beginning in 2010 (more pictures by Ishtarkiss), there have been memorial dances in Fimi's honor. This year was no exception, with the Happy Vixen and Club Cutlass running events on the week of her passing nine years before.

The Happy Vixen's event was at Tuesday May 23 6PM, with DJ Tantari at the booth. Several people wore pink outfits or pink avatars in Fimi's honor. Tantari had made a "Pink Fox" track just for these events, "The search for a cure goes on in her memory. Never give up! Never give in!" The track was a combination of fox-themed and other tunes, but ended with a somewhat sad song, "Goodbye" by Ulrich Schnauss. "After every journey, one has to say goodbye," Tantari concluded the track.

Club Cutlass would hold the larger of the two events on Friday May 26, the ninth anniversary of Fimi's departure. The event was also at 6PM. Sabine McGettigan, the longtime leader of the Passionate Redheads team, was among those at the tribute. Also there was Sunbeamer team captain Rita Mariner, Dusk Griswold, and Shockwave Yareach whom also knew Fimi. Once again, many showed up in pink avatars, pink outfits, or both. On the wall was a picture of Fimi, and on the floor one of the pink fox statuettes that represent her.

In the nine years since Fimi left us, much has changed with both the Relay and the community and team she was part of. Some have left, and others who never had the chance to know her, including myself, have come in. The Passionate Redheads team would fold and become a part of Relay history as a top-ranking team to the end, it's members of the Sunweaver community forming a new team: the Sunbeamers.

People continue to suffer and die from cancer. And there have been a few conspiracy theorists whom wonder if there is some kind of plot behind the scenes by the powerful of Capitalist and Communist and Islamist lands to keep a cure from ever being found, or that a cure has been found but the medical community is so fearful of quackery it will not accept anything more than strictly conventional medicine. But most of us realize the struggle to cure cancer is a more difficult one than getting to the moon. With that, we knew where to go and it was a matter of building a big enough rocket with the means to get a team there safely and back. Finding a cure for cancer has proven more difficult as it's not just one but a multitude of diseases with a multitude of causes. But every fundraising event, every dollar donated, whether to the Relay for Life or a number of other reputable charities such as the Susan G. Komen Foundation, brings us closer to a day when a cure for the last form of cancer has been found.

In the meantime, in and out of Second Life, people will continue to help, with time, money, and in my case a pen.

"We shall remember,"

Source: IshtarKiss Flickr page 

Bixyl Shuftan

Commentary: Once Upon a Cure

By Becky "Sha" Shamen

At a recent meeting of the Sunbeamers Club, Rita Mariner announced the theme of the 2016 RFL will be "Once Upon A Cure". For this writer, the theme is perfect, for reasons that follow.

I am a member of two SL groups, dedicated to helping find a cure for cancer. In "Sunbeamers" the goal is to gather donations, for use in cancer research. In the "Second Rife" group, the goal is to inform the public of alternatives to conventional treatment.

EVERYTHING that exists, in the world of form, was first an image in a thinking mind. Like it or not, any pictures we keep in our minds will draw that thing into our envinronment, as if by magic. This magic becomes super powerfull, when the same image is in the minds of many. Now, follow me in your imagination.

RFL teams are challenged to come up with fairy tale elements, that promote the curing of cancer. Our group, as it's centerpiece, could have a magnificent, steampunk machine, with lots of moving dials, gears and other parts. In front of the machine, we see a small platform. When clicked on, the platform puts you in a pose, bathes you with rainbow light and puts an object in your inventory, called "rainbow torus."  When it's worn, it makes a spinning rainbow, around your av, as shown in the above picture. In theory, this spinning rainbow is a protective ring that keeps cancer out. Here's the good part; there is no mental image for the word NOT, so it doesn't matter if our fairy tale machine really works. What our machine really does is churn out a stream of people that are presenting a symbolic IMAGE of [rainbow/cure]. Even those not wearing them will learn the symbol. With a positive image, over the rainbow,pot of gold sort of thing, planted in the minds of thousands, we now have a super powered force, that will hasten the true cure to enter our world. We are turning a fairy tale into real life science.

When the cure is manefest, it is simple and inexpensive. They'll even make apps for your phones and computers. Nobody will want the expensive surgeries and toxic chemicals. I now return your imaginations to you. These ideas may or not not be those of the newspaper and it's sponsors. It's all just my opinion of what would be a fun and useful adventure in Second Life.

Sha

Editor's Note: The article has been edited from the original.

Commentary: "Second Rife"

From Becky Shamen

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Sunweaver%20Bay/69/119/32

On Saturday, March 1st, Josh attended the SL Newser's staff meeting and announced that he and Sha had discovered a grand new adventure, a "mission impossible", as they say, and they had accepted it as their new course. We were given Hobdon's choice. For years, we had said, "Heaven is for Heroes", so when we saw the line drawn in the sand, we put on our armor and stepped over.

The History
Few people in SL know that the man behind Josh and Sha is, in RL, a well known Scientist/Philosopher, with over 40 years of hands on experience with technologies, which even today are only guessed at by the majority of the world. I can't tell you what things I know, but if you knew what those things were, you would understand why, even my own family does not know the extent of it. Now, at this point, you might be thinking that I'm just writing science fiction, to sell more newspapers, and that's OK with me, because, well, that's my job. Keep reading.

Return with us now, to the 1930's. There were no personal computers or calculators. If you wanted to crunch some numbers, you either used a pencil and paper, a slide rule or an adding machine, that had gears inside and a hand crank, like a slot machine. The most powerful optical microscopes could not see a virus, unless it was killed and stained.

Then, along comes;

Royal Raymond Rife

 

 (from Wikipedia) Royal Raymond Rife (May 16, 1888 – August 5, 1971) was an American inventor and early exponent of high-magnification time-lapse cine-micrography. In the 1930s, he claimed that by using a specially designed optical microscope, he could observe microbes which were too small to visualize with previously existing technology. Rife also reported that a 'beam ray' device of his invention could weaken or destroy the pathogens by energetically exciting destructive resonances in their constituent chemicals.

Rife's claims could not be independently replicated, and were ultimately discredited by the medical profession in the 1950s. Rife blamed the scientific rejection of his claims on a conspiracy involving the American Medical Association (AMA), the Department of Public Health, and other elements of "organized medicine", which had "brainwashed" potential supporters of his devices.

Interest in Rife's claims was revived in some alternative medical circles by the 1987 book The Cancer Cure That Worked, which claimed that Rife had succeeded in curing cancer, but that his work was suppressed by a powerful conspiracy headed by the AMA. After this book's publication, a variety of devices bearing Rife's name were marketed as cures for diverse diseases such as cancer and AIDS. An analysis by Electronics Australia found that a typical 'Rife device' consisted of a nine-volt battery, wiring, a switch, a timer and two short lengths of copper tubing, which delivered an "almost undetectable" current unlikely to penetrate the skin. Several marketers of other 'Rife devices' have been convicted for health fraud, and in some cases cancer patients who used these devices as a replacement for medical therapy have died. Rife devices are currently classified as a subset of radionics devices, which are generally viewed as pseudomedicine by mainstream experts.

 

 Our stand on this is that we want to know the truth. When two parties give opposite reports of what is the truth, it's a safe bet that one, or both, are not telling the truth. We want to know the truth and will not blindly follow what either side presents. You cannot give knowledge. It must be gained, on an individual level, by creating a hypothesis and testing it for yourself, When the homework is done, then and only then, you can say you KNOW the truth.

We know, from experience, that a single seeker will often have obstacles thrown in their path, by those that don't want the truth known. There is safety in numbers and there are many in SL that would like to see an end to cancer and other diseases. With this in mind, we have started a new SL group, called "Second Rife". The motto of the group is, "There is a cure'. This does not mean we have or know the cure, only that we think it possible that Rife's theories might be something worth experimenting with. The group and it's members seek to [1] learn all we can about the theory and tests done by others, [2] buy or build Rife machines, to conduct our own tests and [3] inform the public of our findings, so they might become interested and add their own research to the mix.

 

We began by finding out how to start a new group in SL. Then Josh created the group and invited Sha in, as a co-founder. The two then began sending group invites to their friends.

For the last few months, Due to a growing lag problem at ground level, our home had been moved to a skybox, above the property Sha rents on Sunweaver Bay. To help make the project more public, she put her house back on the hill top, leaving only a small platform 1000 meter above it, which we both set as "home".

 

Josh created a group logo and began reading everything he could find on the internet. Sha bought a group joiner and donations kiosk and began furnishing the house to make it a good place for people to gather and chat. This project will take her a few more weeks, the end result being a peaceful environment, conducive to creative thinking. The house is opened to the public.

 

Becky "Sha" Shamen

 

Disclaimer: Rife's machines have not been documented to work by any mainstream publication.