Wanted to make my 1st SL birthday (2005.09.15) a nonevent with only the subtlest of hints?heh as my tendency is to celebrate others much, much more?as is the norm with me, nothing goes as I expect. So thankyou graciously for all the wishes and, it's funny, I'd be a lot more nostalgic today if I hadn't said so much along the way about how amazed I've been on this journey. I've looked back enough, so time to tuck these happy memories in my knapsack (or whatever those "running away from home" handkerchiefs-on-sticks are called) and I'm beaming now to the next. Here's the obligatory link to my first blog entry on Second Life.
Death by a thousand cuts also works in reverse, yaknow. For every great whole, it's assembled out of pieces. LIQUID METAL LEGOS! The sheer granularity of it is like some cosmic umbrella, its hierarchy looming over the orange skyline like the way a mother bird shelters her nest eggs, even in the gentle rain. I can point my fingers, both figuratively and literally, and see all these connections… these great things done in here which are just so freakin' fun! This picture here is Amberly Kinsella's most pinktastic, and appropriately-named Planet Pinktastic. Aren't the colors wonderful? We share a passion, and she's got some ideas that'll be making their way into our collective hallucinations soon. Batak (213, 21) is the place to be… pink! (And green too!)
Now, when I was off of the loading docks on my first day in SL, first thing I saw were cool avs. My memory recollection shifts depending on my mood but I'm sure I saw Psyra Extraordinaire, the great Birdman of Avatraz, flocked right in front of the Welcome Area gate. One day he just started talking about having to drag effects scripts into each and every prim for his wings, and I was like thinkin' Whoa he's got dedication. Varick Eisenberg was one of the first to amaze me with particle magic. The meek Kex Godel was there; it intrigued me because she's a humanform with cat ears… I saw her on the Preview grid a few weeks ago and geez I just hope to see her more. She's an important mentor of mine. Wrote the FAQ that helped many new Residents get started, etc. Toy LaFollette (thank goodness for Snapzilla) isn't in SL that I know anymore and I don't know why 
but she had a cute av in overalls, wire glasses, and springy blonde hair. There was also a guy in a cool Super Mario Bros. sprite av, almost 2D?I don't remember his name but he had vendors at the Mushroom Kingdom which is coming back… again! OMG I got it, Smitty DeGroot. His avendor are here. The other day, I saw Wheel Fizz (pictured), with this great, ORIGINAL-design av. Lo-fi stylee, get your MOS 6581 maxxed! He'll be making more soon… no names or definites at this point but HI THERE MR. COMPUTER PEOPLE!
I'm just gonna jaunt on now about how great avs are in SL. Here are some reasons why, relative to "other" online worlds and games and such:
- You can change your gender, look (both on the macro and micro level) at just about any time. No need to go into a spa or through any arcane rituals, just right-click on your bod and chose Appearance and WAHLA! Tweak your nose, make yourself short enough to crawl into a tunnel, or just drag an av folder onto you… and… presto! I should emphasize the switching gender part, as I am deeply familiar with it! =) SL is crossgender, transsexual, pansexual, anysexual?and nonsexual?friendly! There are some limits, like with the 200+ sliders you can't add a third boob without prim tricks. But who knows what might happen in the future…
- You don't have to pay extra for additional "looks". Your Inventory, as of this writing, can be a vast treasure trove of *STUFF* and you can have, quite literally, 100 different avatars in your Clothing folder or however you choose to sort it on out. Which doesn't mean you have to, but this choice exists for you and me.
- Avatars are easily shareable with others, provided that you are the creator and/or have permissions to do so. One of the best examples of this is creating an army of clones?infact, in SL, there are clonetroopers groups from the stories of Star Wars who do just this! Sometimes it's funny to be totally absurd in the WA and all dress in copycat business suits with friends.
- Prim tricks, as I mentioned, happen to be a big part of SL. In case you're not in yet (and why not?), a prim = a primitive shape. Like, uh, a box, or a sphere. And you combine them, twist them in many deviant manners, and join 'em up to make more complex geometries. The default appearance in SL is humanoid, but you can quickly become a furry by combining many curved prims to form a cute head, or you can take the more angular route as Wheel Fizz demonstrates and BE A ROBOT. I have been many things, all of them me. Prim tricks can also add more everyday items of clothing like skirts (something that went out of SL fashion but came back in), or wristwatches (I have some wikkid ones). Part of the fun is the firsttime frustration of wrangling prims from their crude defaults into something personalized. Now, I am no grand builder but I know what to look for! SL IS A GREAT ARTS+CRAFTS FAIR!
- It all brings us back to customization. I get such a big kick out of being able to imagine something, acquire and mod it usually, and then show it to others so they will see what I see. Flexibility in here, AFAIK, is unparalleled, and that goes with the openended nature of what Second Life is.
O heck where was I now, always hopping from train station to station. EVER SEEN A COOL CAVE IN SL? You have now. TEXTURE MASTERY! This is from one of the Burning Life builds?check it before it's gone in like three days!?dubbed The Magic Pirate Cave Adventure! I lurved the whole thing, really, such a retro adventure game vibe (even a Zorkian mailbox!)… the whole team that did it are such nice people to me, and heck, the whole collaborative spirit is in full force here. It's like havin' a furious Final Fantasy party that takes on this giant boss monster and completely whoops his @$$. Go play it for yourself?Burning Life 1 (63, 62)! Hint: it's actually the first in what hopefully is a progression of things to come and come.
Seifert Surface and I had an important chat. Think about sandboxes. Standard Linden ones, wiped twice a day, yes? OK, now think of somewhere like Stillman's Free Bazaar. Gets cleaned up on occasion, lotsa freebies. Experiments are grrreat, so Seifert has been encouraging Residents to participate in the Prim Wiki @ Burning Life (next to the pirate cave). Read the New World Notes article! Info on the SL Forums. Better late than never:
Especially with a targeted focus like volunteers all working on aspects of a house. Someone crafts the steps, someone else scripts the houselight, you got a roofmaster with some fancy schmancy textures nailing out the shingles. Someone sees the semi-completed house, decides to make their own alternative route (this is what'll make it so simply, fundamentally different from most housebuilding in SL today) so they just select all the prims, Take Copy, and rez a new copy and work on it with even more Residents. At a leisurable pace, no pressure, part of the house could even collapse. That's part of the fun.
My observation includes how centralized, yet how utterly decentralized this is, simultaneously. On one hand, if a region was assigned to a project like this. A problem I see is there's so many "open source" things which the creators boldly say, "C'mon, take this and make it better, and show it to me!" but the results are seldom spotlighted. The whole thing seems unlikely until more like minds buzzing on the same frequencies are actively involved in SL (which just hit population 50,000!), but something that I'm absolutely going to keep in my mind. Which is, of course, the whole exercise of sharing via blog.
P.S. Some way to autoset permissions, so every new prim you create and media you upload is automatically fully permissable, would sure be nice.
So, what if? Provided goodwill from human hearts . . . I'm really curious.
This last picture for now doesn't represent such a thing, as the objects were seemingly rezzed (brought into the world) by the owner and just left around in the sandbox corner, but I laughed so hard when I saw it. I really did. It again reminds me of what a GREAT ARTS+CRAFTS EXPO SL IS and…