Southern Comfort. I could use some.

Trivia happens in Second Life in myriad forms, and so I am no longer dramatically surprised when a venue holds an event with a format completely different from what I'm used to. Becki Verne's "Trivia with Dancing" and "Dancing with Trivia" distinction usually turns out to have very little gray area. Today, though, I attended an event that stretches the applicability of the "with Trivia" part of the latter classification.

The club is called Maggie's Southern Comfort, and the inside dance area looks like a country/western bar. The event was held on the roof, in a space called Ivor's Oldies. The listing advertised '50s to '70s music with some trivia. As Josh Schism later noted, the word "trivia" appeared three times in the listing. Any more than that, I'd suggest, and it would have been false advertising, since only three questions were asked during this two-hour event.

I've profiled events before that would be perfectly enjoyable if you attend for the music or the dancing or the socializing and not so much for the trivia. I wish I could be that charitable this time. Rach Borkotron and I were the only two people there unaffiliated with the club until more than an hour into the event. The DJ, Tryxie Seetan -- who was also asking the trivia -- and the hostess, Candee Baily, were very nice, and I was glad we were there for their sake. Running a successful club in SL is hard, and they were doing what they could to send out notices and teleport friends. I don't know what makes the difference when it comes to the longevity of non-trivia clubs, so I don't feel it's my place to critique Southern Comfort on that level.

I do, however, know what I look for in a trivia event, and I can say with confidence that this isn't it. The three questions were spaced about half an hour apart. The prizes were not in cash but in gift cards, which is fair: the listing did refer not to lindens but to "prizes," and if the gift cards were, in fact, awarded in lindens, they would have been well worth waiting half an hour for. The questions, meanwhile, weren't ground-shattering:

[2009/12/14 12:39] Tryxie Seetan: WHO RECORDED KATMANDU?

This one was preceded by the hint that it was related to NASCAR:

[2009/12/14 13:17] Tryxie Seetan: HOW DID FIREBALL ROBERTS GET HIS NAME?

[2009/12/14 13:35] Tryxie Seetan: WHAT IS THE BIGGEST ISLAND IN THE WORLD AND WHO IS IT OWNED BY?

I know I'm preaching to the choir, but the first question, as written, has several possible answers, and one could challenge the use of the word "owned" in the third. I wouldn't hold the trivia at a dance club up to the same standard as one expects at places that are all-trivia-all-the-time, but if I were asking players to wait for such a long span between questions, I'd want the trivia to be worth their time or, at the very least, not hugely flawed.

As I've mentioned in the past, I don't usually listen to the stream during trivia events, but I had the music on this time because at the beginning, we didn't yet know if the trivia would be about the songs being played. When Rach and I came in, Tryxie said it was a sock hop; she had '50s tunes playing and soon had a poodle skirt on. She spun some great oldies for an hour and a half but eventually ran out of era-appropriate tracks and began playing anything within reach. I believe she kept mostly (though not entirely) within the '50s-to-'70s range that the event listing ensured, but I still found it odd that a DJ at a club called Ivor's Oldies would run out of songs that are typically considered "oldies." And even if "Kokomo" is by the Beach Boys, the song is still very much a product of the late '80s.

I had a nice time hanging out with Rach, and since we each won a gift card to a store that an in-world search determined to be for biker clothes, we plan to spend it together on something Chaos-appropriate. Josh arrived only minutes after Rach left, and it was fun to be with him there, as well. It's never a bad thing to say that spending time with friends was the best part of an event. I do wish, though, that there was more I could say for the event itself. Regardless of how friendly Tryxie and Candee and the other staff were, it doesn't balance out against the mediocrity of the trivia.

The Specs:

=> Where: Ivor's Oldies @ Southern Comfort, http://slurl.com/secondlife/Southern%20Magic/133/89/36

=> When: This event was at 12 noon to 2pm on Monday, but I don't know if the trivia is a regular feature. When I asked what type of events they usually held there, the only answer I received was, "It depends."

=> Host: Tryxie Seetan

=> Prizes: A gift card for each of the three questions. Two were for L$299 to a store called V-Twins, and one was for L$400 to Sweet Creations and P&S

Answers to questions in article:

1) The answer accepted was Bob Seger, though Cat Stevens has approximately the same number of Google hits for the song title, and I was able to find a few other recordings.

2) His pitching: he was a baseball player before he was in NASCAR.

3) Greenland/Denmark.

********