Okay, my mind's absolutely bursting to the brim with ideas and recollections right now, so I'm going to try to get this down in as chaotically ordered a fashion as possible. (On a side note, it's 4:20 AM.) It's just been my Second Day of my Second Life and I'm quite impressed, not to mention excited about the possibilities such a techsphere holds. I also am starting to post on their forums, and since my regular tenure of forum-posting is simmering down while I go SL-crazy, looks to me like the balance will work out nicely after all.

Essentially, if I'm reading all of this right,?it's 10 US bucks for an entire second lifetime. You know me, keen on the deals and looking up to Donald Trump, so that sounds reaaally sweet. Monthly charges will only be incurred if you, say, want a virtual house. I might add. I've observed pricing for MMORPGs — an?increasingly?vague but usable term — and I wonder how Linden Lab does it.?Maybe they'll raise the price in the future? I hope not. Think about it this way:?a tenner, the price of a meal, or even two meals, for a?collective cyberspace experience? YAY.?Despite the bugginess I've heard of, and experienced to an extent, of the current 1.5 version, it works quite nicely.

And so, in recap, here's what happened: signup was quick and easy. Really. Despite the fact I couldn't choose the last name "Wong" and mirror my real name because they likely "ran out" of them and phased that family name out of the system, I went with "Torgeson" because of its alliterativity. Punchy as a phat trance bassline. I then proceeded to download the 22-odd-meg installer and went to work reading the Starter Guide. Which was nice, but had some spelling mistakes in it. I'm not a grammar archvillain but I should let Linden know about it. Unfortunately, when I tried to log in, the system was offline. Apparently there had been big technical difficulties that day that wiped out people's work building virtual skyscrapers-n-stuff, and so, had to wait until 8 PM to get in. In retrospect, I wish I had come 8 hours earlier, because there was compensation cash of 2500 L$ (Linden dollars, the in-world currency). But those who spent a lot of time constructing must have been frustrated.

I was assigned to the tutorial island to start with, and taught the basics. Pretty good stuff. There was one other chap there, but he (she? It?) didn't seem to be responding and I went on doing things like learning to fly and dropping a ball on the table. And from there on, I got TPed — TelePorted — to the Welcome area. Friendly interaction followed, with experienced and knowledgeable oldbies greeting a rookie such as myself. I waved and conversed, and even sat on a virtual park bench. Needless to say, I soon moved on and found myself in a game of… JEOPARDY!!! It was really weird. Well normal for most, but weird for me. I had been walking along the computer-generated landscape and saw an ampitheatre of some sort in the distance, so took another virtual seat. I soon found myself giving questions for answers mid-game. Some really nice people there. Apparently Pituca Chang &c. do this every Monday and Wednesday, I think, so I'll be joining in again. Was fun!!

I then proceeded to learn more about the controls and workings of Second Life. I had a lot of questions to ask the experts, and ask them I did. I also spent time customizing my avatar to make him look like me. He pretty much does as you can see from the previous pic, except for the red eyes and the fact that in real life, I have PINK gloves (which I don't wear anymore) and a neon GREEN jacket when it's flipped inside-out — so that too, is inversed. The T-shirt is based on my logo that means "Me, Torley". Height and weight are about the same I reckon. Eventually I learned enough to take the default outfit and craft it to my specifications. Thanks to a kindly fellow denizen, I learned that I could use a SKIRT and open the front?and turn it into the back of a very long, Matrix-style trenchcoat. Which brings me to this next saying which cracks me up: "I am NeoN, I am the OneN!":D

I even have a gesture to go with that. What's a gesture? Well, it's more elaborate than it might sound. I can program different ways to dance and kick like Bruce Lee and even float like… well, no human can (not that I know of anyway). So when I say "I am NeoN", yuh, I get all gravitationally challenged. I also later imported a clip of one of my tracks — "Gunmetal Tiara" –?and programmed myself to dance along with it in rhythm. Such amusement. It cost 10 L$ but it was worth it, I tells ya. The custom T-shirt with my logo was a stretch at first too, because I didn't think it would turn out right, but Linden Lab has templates on their website which made it easier. Thanks also to Nicola Escher of Space Think Dream, she's very classy and has a tutorial on how to do clothing stuff. She would know!

More exploring followed. I visited places as diverse as a cyberpunk city, which is totally my kind of place, but alas no one else was there at the time. There's places to go skydiving, sea diving, and art galleries and shoppes (lots of them) and even a snowslope to go skiing upon. I did not try that, yet. I visited Rave On The Rocks which is exactly what it sounds like, and some scenesque parks. Most of this content was created by the citizens of SL, so this makes the whole thing even more amazing to me. I remember years ago, there was a then-advanced program called Virtus VR which allowed you to build landscapes and dwellings. Speaking?of VR = Virtual Reality, I used to play Spectre VR a lot too, but it was more killing than exploration.?SL is the present culmination of a lot of earlier ideas. I visited FairChang Island which is the labor of love of the aforementioned Pituca and Garth Fairchild, and I went to several crowded clubs, including some "Rated M" adults ones! Some wild stuff in cyberspace for sure. You get the idea.

I saw an awful lot of gambling machines in a lot of places. I didn't play any of them but I did enter a raffle ball and try my hand at some other games. Not sure if I'd ever gamble, even virtually — my Dad would be rolling in his grave! But in a funny way, there is chance involved in social interactions with risks and rewards all their own, and to say the least, I have "met" some really nice, fun, awesome people! *wink*

And that brings me to my next point: that I like Second Life because it's not just a game. Hardly. It goes far beyond the scope of this and while "social experiment" sounds a little demeaning and limiting, I've seen some incredible things done with this emotional technology. For example, I travelled to a virtual schizophrenia simulator and I'm sure this is just the tip of the iceberg. I wonder what further system upgrades will bring. I?don't do a lot of Internet chat or IM because it bores me, but having the extra multimedia to humanize things further really helps in?this?dynamic environment. And to this day, it still floors me to know that we may just be "1's and 0's" represented by fancy pictures and name labels on the screen, but behind the computer terminals we operate, we are tangible, real human beings, and our interactions have an impact on each other, for worse and better. But hopefully more of the latter.

And well, that's the start of my Second Life. 2nd day of my 7-day trial. Will I sign up permanently? We'll find out together. Knowing me, I'll be REALLY obsessed with this for awhile, and then I'll simmer it down, but oh, it'll come back. Like waves in an ocean so blue. When I hopefully get back to making techno music, I'll have most of my life occupied with that 24/7?and won't be blogging and talking as much, but I'd like to have faith it will all work out in the end in some form of extreme moderation. Regardless, I'll be popping up virtually (a term which may be passe to some but not me) every now and then again, so see you in the Matrix, the Metaverse, or whatever you want to call it other than its proper name!

It is what it is.