A little blurb about my recent experiences in Second Life; if this isn’t something that interests you, feel free to skip. Most of my time-sensitive workload for the week is past, so I’ll try and put something together on a couple recent hardware projects by the weekend.
Second Life, a virtual world created by Linden Labs, is something I’d heard much talk around for years but had never tried. A frequent darling of the media, Second Life is often equated with tales of get-rich-quick land barons, rampant pornography and failed corporate presences.
I decided to give Second Life a try myself in early December after a Slashdot article mentioned Reuters’ decision to end their virtual reporting presence. Up until that point I’d been playing the recent World of Warcraft expansion in my spare time, but the constant grind was beginning to wear thin.
I created an avatar named for the Silicon Graphics Iris machines; I’d recently obtained a Personal Iris 4D/35 and it seemed a fitting name for a virtual 3D character. Thus, Iris Ireman was born.
A month and a half later, I’m a resident of the Independent State of Caledon (a virtual nation in a Victorian Steampunk theme), a volunteer for New Citizens, Inc. (NCI - an amazing community-run help center for new residents), and taken part in numerous discussions covering a wide spectrum of my interests — quantum physics, retrocomputing and vintage synthesizers to name a few. These discussions have afforded me glimpses into all manner of neat and interesting things, including the shockingly awesome Hammond Novachord (I’m going to have to write about this synth separately at some point), the recently released Korg microKORGXL and even contemporary PCI cards and MIDI boxes wrapped around the vulnerable SID chip of Commodore 64 fame.
Aside from sitting around and discussing topics much like on IRC, there are many other things to do and see — far too many to go into here. I find avatar customization to be quite a bit of fun, especially if you lean toward the artistic side of things. I personally chose to manually tweak the sliders and create a custom character shape, which I’ve refined over a period of a couple weeks. Others head to the fanciful and create avatars of gigantic dragons, tiny ferrets, rolling cars — just about anything you can imagine. Even if the thought of creating content in-world doesn’t appeal to you, there are all manner of custom avatar bits out there for the taking.
NCI offers in-world classes on a variety of topics, including avatar customization, content creation (building), scripting and much more. They also host weekly “Blitz Builds” for old and new members. Participants in a Blitz are given a theme to work around moments before the start (such as “Space” or “Steampunk”) and entrants must complete their themed masterpiece within a 40-minute window using no more than a set number of prims (object primitives). Cash prizes (in Linden dollars) are given to the winners which are chosen by audience vote.
There are many other topics I could cover, from my fondness of Japanese sims to the best places to visit and shop. For brevity’s sake I’ll cut it off here, but if there’s interest, I’m open to writing more on the subject. I’ve also started a Nekochan (SGI) group in-world which is free to join.
Second Life is not for everyone; there are a going be plenty that will point to the faults the media throws out so often. Yes, you can find shady characters, porn and all manner of questionable content on Second Life. But I look at it this way - in any given town or city, if one barrels off straight to the “wrong side of the tracks” looking for trouble, you’ll find it. This doesn’t mean that the city as a whole should be written off as garbage. Just watch where you choose to step.
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