One of the more colorful and contentious figures in SL's three and a half year history is Plastic Duck, later known as Gene Replacement. While it took a little doing, I was able to sit down with him and have a bit of a talk about himself and about Second Life.

He took the third-place prize of Avatar of the Year (2005), bestowed by the Second Life Herald. He's been flamboyant, artistic and edgy. He and some 59 others were famously purged from SL. Some consider him to be a rampaging rakehell, some a leader of a griefing army, some a sort of renaissance technojester, a dark god of ornithophobia.

Truly a lot has been said, done, understood and misunderstood, rumored and misconstrued. So...I didn't ask him about any of that sensationalist nonsense directly. Instead, I wanted to find out more about the man behind the duck.