I have been playing, building, working and meeting people in a virtual reality environment for 15 years. It mystifies me that so much attention has been given to Meta—lately all of it negative—when “grids” like Second Life have been thriving for years. My avatar name is Hephaistos Semyorka. What do I like best? Together with my “real life” friend and colleague whose avatar name is Lucida Skytower, I “own” a private island that we call Mythomorphosis. Like all other virtual assets, it’s a stretch to claim ownership. But if ownership means we get to do exactly what we want with it and are able to create in accordance with our own personal aesthetic, it works perfectly. Luci is a fantastic partner, our sense of texture, color, light and elegance is very harmonious. We each have half the island (and the sky above it) to do exactly what we please.

I have a pet peeve about secondhand experiences, the kind that are ‘curated’ and in which one lacks full agency and instrumentality. Plenty of people prefer it this way: we don’t have to make choices, we can sit back and enjoy. Mmmm, not so much. Let’s not all be so quick to give away our imagination and outsource our creativity!

Truly the best part is the people. I have friends from all over the place I’ve never met IRL (“in real life”) but have deep relationships with. And, some I have met IRL after developing deep virtual friendships. I treasure them all. You may have heard both that people love to experiment with their avatars, and that they get very attached to them. Both those things are true, and the experiences are very rich. (By the way, none of us need helmets or gloves to project ourselves into a different reality; all of us come fully equipped with the wetware). And you can imagine how comforting it’s been for a lot of people to have a vivid social space to be in during the pandemic.

Anyone who knows me knows that Dia de Muertos is the most important holiday of my year. What’s especially sweet is that our family and many of our close friends seem for the most part to agree, and we have spent more time together on that holiday than any other.

Dia de Muertos combines a lot of things: memory and reflection, taking a pause to consider life and death and to call to mind people we want to miss. It’s also social and artful, and full of delight (and, at our house, great food). It’s a good time to remember we are all human.

Here are a few images from this year. It has been a rough year, following some of the hardest years many of us can ever remember having lived through, barring the personal calamities the flesh is heir to. The world is forever in ferment, but the pressing challenge of climate change and the specter of climate disaster is only one of the malaises, which literally include our global pandemic, that we are reminded of daily by our all too comprehensive immersion in the internet. What may have been all but invisible in times past is all too visible now, and we face daily trauma from having the violence that has gone on since time immemorial put into our faces every day. We cannot turn away, and we must not turn away, especially when the political and human stakes are so high.

I have been following events unfolding in Iran since the murder in September by “morality police” of a young Kurdish-Iranian woman whose name is Mahsa (or Zhina) Amini. Reports of her death sparked ongoing demonstrations against compulsory hijab, but more deeply and persistently, against institutionalized misogyny and the truly, inhumanly savage violence of a theocratic state against its people. I have been busy drawing portraits of women killed and detained, and in the traditional way, I have placed their images on my Dia de Muertos altar at Mythomorphosis, as well as at home IRL this year. In honoring these women—and too the men who stand beside them in danger—I am forced to reflect on the danger that my own country, the US, faces with a Supreme Court majority who are openly committed to a state-mandated, fundamentalist, merciless, cynically perverted theocracy. My Iranian friends especially know how deadly that prospect is. What better time, in our US election year, on a day which occurs close to Dia de Muertos, to reflect on our human vulnerability—and to stand for what we believe in. I believe in the right of all people to have the freedom to seek meaning and happiness in life; and to live by our best instincts in sharing life’s gifts with others. As an American, I believe it is the power of our democracy to give all a voice, and to mandate the social conditions for dignity and to fulfill the most basic needs of life. That death stands so near to us means very different things to different people; but to all of us it must mean that in our shared mortality we too share our humanity. That’s what I’m reflecting on in this very solemn and portentous year.