Tina's Second Life

Forgive me for not rating you

2005-01-11T10:43:00.000-08:00

So, today it was announced that several rather extreme changes are being made to the economy in SL, all with the stated goal of slowing down inflation. One of these changes is that each rating, positive or negative, will cost L$25 after tomorrow.
I'm not stingy in Second Life. I love rating people positively (and most people I know in Second Life merit kudos since they are some of the best people I've ever met). But I'm sorry, call me what you like, I'm not spending that kind of cash on rating people. $75 for a triple positive rating? I can buy something fun with that.
So, don't think that I don't like your buildings or don't find your avatar very well designed, or don't think of you as an asset to the community. I really do, and I'll be giving you positive ratings - in spirit. But I'm sure we can all agree, there are far better things to spend our L$ on.

Happy birthday(s) to me!

2004-12-21T13:58:00.000-08:00

It's funny, as a kid I often really hated the fact that my birthday was so close to Christmas (it's tomorrow, December 22nd) so really in retrospect it probably wasn't the best thing in the world to join Second Life the day after my birthday and now have the two kind of merged into one surreal double "birth" celebration.
Oh well, who knew I'd be here for a whole year? I signed up expecting to stay a few hours. :)
So happy days for me, happy holidays for all those who enjoy such things, and hopefully more happy years ahead for all of us in SL!

SL Getting Boring?

2004-12-09T17:18:00.000-08:00

I was going to post this as a reply to a newbie who's leaving SL after 6 days in the forums, but it turned kind of long and rambly, and I didn't feel right kind of being down on SL in the official forums. This is a lot of how I feel about Second Life lately:

This was a really interesting and useful post. I only wish more people who try SL and decide it isn't going to meet their dreams would take the time to share their impressions.
I think a lot of us who have sort of "bought in" the the vision of SL are a little guilty of drinking the kool-aid sometimes and will just repeat mantras about what SL will be someday or that it's on the edge of becoming something great or the new 3-d internet or something like that.
As someone who's been in SL for almost a year now, I think there is a lot of validity to the idea that it is sort of an oversized chat program with some creation and commerce toys to play around with. The lack of new, interesting features since animations and streaming audio were added have lead for me at least to a sort of boredom with the place.
Don't get me wrong, I still love the people of Second Life and really admire the tenacity, vision, and optimism of the Linden staff. But, I guess a place that is so powered by hopes and dreams and "what if"s and "someday"s can only keep you interested as long as they keep delivering hints of that future to come.
I think the combination of the performance issues that lasted way too long, the rapid drop in land values, the decline in L$ value, and the utter stagnation of features and things to do or buy have left SL feeling a bit like a dream unrealized. Every sim has buildings that look like 100 you've seen somewhere else. Most events are cheap ploys to get dwell or hosting fees. The number of "wow" moments in SL has dropped to a trickle and the number of yawns has increased. Its bigger, more spread out, more populated, but not really more interesting. If I were new this December instead of last December, I don't know that I'd stick around beyond a week either.

What is fun?

2004-11-06T13:14:00.000-08:00

Of all of the questions new people often ask in Second Life, one of the hardest to give a straightforward answer to is "what is fun to do here?" It's certainly not that there is a lack of entertaining things going on, great events, wonderful people to meet, it's just that it is a question that is so open ended and so much based on the personality of each individual.
Ask me how to make a sphere, or how to make it rotate, or how to get your newly purchased light saber out of a box and I can answer without even giving it a second thought, but "how do I have fun?" and I feel like I end up going to clichés: "You can do whatever you like." "Explore, go to events, see what appeals to you." "Well, what's your idea of 'fun?'"
All of those are okay answers and about as good as I can do, but I feel like I'm letting the person asking down when I say that because the truth is everyone finds "fun" differently in Second Life. It's a bit like getting off a boat in New York or hopping in a cab in Chicago and asking "What's fun to do in this town?"
My very best times in SL are so serendiptious and non-engineered. Like last night, for example: I was at DJ Miggy (AKA Aeguvas Ritter)'s weekly live music party that he does via SLive. It's always a good time and he's one of the most entertaining DJ personalities anyway, but what made it an awesome night for me was sitting there in this virtual world with people from all over the planet and two other people from Las Vegas were there in this crowd. We ended up chatting and joking about, of all things, silly local news personalities and which local reporters have had cosmetic surgery and which ones do really silly ratings ploy stories. It was a total throw away, almost stupid conversation, but it was just so much "fun" for lack of a better word. That sort of random silly connection with other people I guess is what I love the most in Second Life and the sort of thing that is almost impossible to tell someone who is looking for fun how to go find.

Am I a snob?

2004-10-28T01:13:00.000-07:00

A funny thing happened tonight. A friend and mentor who I've known almost as long as I've been in Second Life sent me an IM when I logged on. He asked if I would be willing to teleport over to a location where his friend had made a new hot tub to get in and pose for a photo with a crowd (one of the selling points I guess is that it has room for many people and they wanted to highlight that in the photo).
Well my reply was something like "Thanks for thinking of me, but that's not really what I'm about or the the image I want to portray of myself in SL." An honest answer, but it made me wonder - am I becoming some kind of snobby, too controlled, unfun caricature? Am I more concerned about maintaining some image rather than maintaining friendships and relationships?
I guess, in my defense, a big part of why I learned to be wary of bikini beach parties and dance club "sexiest outfit" contests and so on is that people will pretty much treat you the way you act or seem to act. If you are a woman in SL (in my case a real one, not just living out some cross dressing fantasy) you have to work a bit harder to be taken seriously and have to swim upstream a bit against assumptions that come about from the big community of "dancers" and women who are looking to hook up.
So because of that, and just being true to my personality, I've always tried to make it really clear that I love so much of SL, love playing all kinds of games, building, exploring, etc, but that I'm not an object, am not looking to be someone's girlfriend or meet guys or any of that crap. Maybe I'm too sensitive about it, really. I wonder if I come off as cold or aloof in SL or if people who know me just get that I like to draw a line and have my boundaries. I sure hope they see it for what it is.

Sad Day, Neighbor Moved Away

2004-10-20T13:41:00.000-07:00

One of the things I learned quickly in Second Life is that all relationships on line have a fast life cycle. It's very easy to make Internet friends, but they also disappear quickly. Most of the people I consider friends in SL, I think I pretty much just clicked with after the first few times of talking to them. That's one of the really cool things about that kind of social environment. On the flips side, so many people who I really enjoyed hanging out with just moved on to other things or stopped coming to SL or simply found a clique in SL that doesn't include me. As I said, I learned this quickly and have accepted it as kind of the normal reality of my virtual life.
But knowing all of that, things have been worse lately. It's like the process has sped up or at least been more focused on people I know - with every few days bringing an announcement by someone that they are leaving SL and selling/giving away their land (a pretty clear sign they are serious). It's kind of depressing. I'm almost afraid to read the forums now for fear of another "Goodbye" thread popping up. I don't really know why this is happening. SL has been a little more buggy than usual in the last few releases, but nothing that by itself would drive lots of people off. I've seen things like permissions bugs or ghosting or frustrations with social stuff like dwell, competitions, land speculations, and so on cited as reasons, but they really sound more like excuses to me.
The place is still growing like crazy. I don't think the Second Life community is in danger of imploding. But I guess when one of your friends or a couple of friends start announcing they are leaving the little part of the world you live in can feel sort of like it's missing something.

Addict

2004-10-14T09:32:00.000-07:00

You know you probably spend too much time in world when the first thing that comes to mind about a trip to visit relatives is "Oh no, they don't have broadband! Too many days without SL!" Thinking about all the fun events that will be missed, friends not seen for days, forum drama that will pass you by (okay maybe that one isn't such a loss), it *almost* makes you not want to leave home. :)
Of course, it's probably good for perspectve to force yourself to take little breaks like that every once in a while to see that the second world doesn't crumble without you babysitting it. It's kind of easy to get so into whatever you enjoy in SL that you begin to think that it all revolves around you. I guess I'll find out for sure in a few days when I get back from broadbandless-hell.

A "Trivial" Complaint

2004-10-08T06:58:00.000-07:00

As long as I've been in SL, what has always kept me coming back and having fun more than anything are the contests, games, and events. Specifically, I really love trivia and jeopardy type events where I get to use my wealth of otherwise useless knowledge about things like European Geography and 1980s Sitcom Stars. It's a blast to realize just how much useless info we all have and to compete for L$ and fun to be the one to dredge it out of the recesses of the brain the first.
However, lately there are a lot of trivia events popping up that are making me lose my interest in them completely. The main problem? They all utilize either a very primative "buzzer" system or are multiple choice questions. To their credit, I suspect that the hosts of these events are doing this because they believe it stops them from being "typing contests" but instead they cease to be much about knowledge and more about buzzing in first or hitting A (enter) B (enter) C (enter) D (enter) before anyone else. These are all newer people who maybe haven't been to many standard trivia events or don't have any great love of trivia (I'd never accuse anyone of simple mining the event system for free L$ and dwell, but a buzzer based trivia is a very "easy" hosting job).
After attending yet another mindnumbing buzzer based trivia yesterday in which the same people buzz in first on every question and then play for time and say "ah I umm don't know" while another person who buzzed in fast googles it, I have decided I am boycotting any event done with that format. It's nothing personal, but these events are not fun. If it's too much work to watch the screen for the first person to answer correctly or if you can't come up with questions that are challenging enough to avoid typing contests without being all stumpers, then maybe you should not be hosting these events.

Yay for referrals!

2004-10-07T05:50:00.000-07:00

Very cool. I got my first referral in Second Life based on someone clicking my link. For those who don't know, the reason most people who have blogs or websites about SL have a very long link with all the extra numbers and letters in it to Second Life is because it lets us get credit for referring you (L$2000 for basic accounts I think).
So thank you person who clicked and signed up to Second Life via my site. I hope you're enjoying it so far. Feel free to find me and ask questions. It's the least I can do to earn my little bonus. :)

Oh and anyone else thinking about joining just let me say Second Life, Second Life, Second Life. There, that should do it. :)

SL and Politics

2004-10-06T13:53:00.000-07:00

No, not a post about who should be the President of SL (I'd rather be Czarina of SL anyway). This is about the political landscape of SecondLife as it relates to offline politics.
I was thinking about this as I sat watching the U.S. Vice Presidential debate last night (a requirement for one of my classes). What I really wanted to do do was log back into Second Life and ignore the debate since I found it boring and, like most people who aren't being asked by pollsters, I decided who my candidate was months ago.
Anyway, my impression of most of our little community is that it is far more liberal than the average populace. In a way this really shouldn't be too surprising. The SL community standards are based on generally liberal, or at least libertarian, values like tollerance and respect for diversity.
I've seen several John Kerry signs popping up in SL. So far I haven't run into any for his opponenet but I've heard rumors that there are some in Jessie - our damage enabled war sim. I See paid political ads on websites like Yahoo News all the time. Maybe someone should see if one of the political parties would consider placing paid advertising in world? They could probably get free news coverage of "Taking the campaign to a new virtual world" or some silly news cliché like that. :)

Celebrity

2004-09-29T13:44:00.000-07:00

One of the strangest phenomena in such a basically egalitarian place as Second Life is "celebrity." At first thought it seems like there wouldn't be such a thing because anyone can create objects, anyone can import textures or sounds, anyone is free to host events, buy up land, open a store, start a social group, etc. There are no major barriers to acheivement in SL, aside from maybe real life time constraints or limited imaginations.
Still, from almost my first day, I became aware of various social strata. Some of this is based on accomplishment and talent. Some of it is based on social networking and being in the "right" clique and knowing the "right" people. And I suppose more recently some of it is based on the intentional cultivation of ones image (done most amusingly by some by posting a million threads on the forums so that "everyone" knows the name even if they've never met the person).
One of the first events I went to was something called, I think "Second Life Stories" where Marilyn Murphy and Baccara Rhodes. It was amazing to me that people were able to recount full "lives" in an online world and that they had been involved in various businesses, rivalries, relationships, and had climbed to be two of the most recognizeable "celebrity" figures in SL. At the same time, I thought it was very cool that I could meet and chat with and learn from the upper crust of SL society. Within a month, of course, I found out that the occasional chat with Philip Linden wasn't out of the ordinary.
So, all that said, it still amazes me when people who I've never met before come up to me in SL and already know me or know of me. The idea that someone is excited to finally meet an internet slacker/partygoer/minor landowner/moderately good trivia player/perpetual just more skilled than any given newbie like me just makes me laugh. I guess in a twisted sort of way, blogging about SL only adds to that. :)

Tina, the lag monster

2004-09-26T15:39:00.000-07:00

I got my first ever unsolicited IM from a Linden a few minutes ago! "Some attachment you are wearing is causing serious sim lag.."
Umm, the only attatchments I had on were an unscripted 3 prim hat, and two unscripted earings. Very very bizarre. But you know, I always try to help. I mentioned that and asked if she was sure and the reply was "Yup, you come up on top scripts, hehe."
So citizens of SL beware! :)

Some things are better left unsaid

2004-09-26T01:28:00.000-07:00

I've realized I have a nasty little habit of typing out what I really think, what I'd really like to say in SL and saving myself from fights by using the Backspace button and deleting it instead of hitting enter.
It's not that I'm some caustic angry girl, I just have opinions and get tired of certain tedious games I see people play. But as good as telling someone "you suck!" might feel I know that it would just make me petty and poison the environment we all live in.
I'm reminded very much of Phillip Linden's plea on the forums: " You must sometimes censor your own words, if they do more harm to the community than they might in the short term give you pleasure."
I've always taken the approach to SL that it is a place where I need to be better, be the adult, turn the other cheek, etc. Sometimes being the grown up is very hard.

Time flies in Second Life

2004-09-23T01:48:00.000-07:00

This is true on the small scale and the large.
It seems like everytime I go in world I end up staying a lot later than I should have. I log in looking for an 8pm trivia event, run into some friends, help a new person fix a land problem, go visit a new store, try out someone's beta game, chat with a neighbor and pretty soon it is way past midnight! I'd like to complain, but the fact is I only lose track of time because I'm having so much fun.
But as I said, this happens on a large scale too. I jut realized tonight that I've owned my oldest piece of land for 6 and a half months. And this friday I will have been in my Second Life exactly 9 months. I know to a lot of people that is kind of a "so what?" statement. There are plenty of people who are a year or more old in SL But I guess I never saw myself as an old-timer there. I still always feel a bit like a pseudo-newbie. It just does't feel like it's been that long or that I've learned that much. But of course, when I think about it, I remember a lot of the big name people from when they started SL. At least half of the private sim owners are newer than me. I remember greeting several of the former URU people when they first joined SL and giving them some building tips before they eventually moved out to Telador Isle. I don't know everything, for sure, but a lot of people do look for me when they have questions and they don't ask "do you know how to . . ?" They ask "how do I. . ?" Which works out really well for me, because I find that new people are some of the best. It's so much fun reliving the process of discovering how "cool" SL is through another set of eyes, having someone else point out how amazing something is that you see almsot every day and never really think twice about.
It seems like only yesterday I was sitting on my big lawn in Ganymede shooting off fireworks for the 4th of July.
Now people are locking in their plans for Halloween and starting to talk about Christmas. Second Life isn't just a virtual community platform, I'm convinced it is also a time machine. :)

Enemies/Friends revisited

2004-09-21T10:04:00.000-07:00

I'm kind of pressed for time since I have a class shortly, but I thought I should update my little story from a few days ago. Unfortunately it doesn't have the best of endings. It turns out that the person who I mentioned who I showed around SL was paid 80,000 "Therebux" (about 32 US Dollars) by people on There to come to Second Life and firebomb the place.
Obviously he made a lot of enemies and got himself in trouble and quite a few people rightly would rather not hear his name again. Still, he took the time to apologize after the fact in the SL forums and in a comment on my post here in my blog.
So it's not a happy ending, but not a terrible one either. I got to share Second Life with someone and make a good impression even if that person had an agenda that was going to lead to disaster. He seems to have gotten something out of the whole experience.
If I'm going to make a mistake, I will err on the side of giving people the benefit of the doubt just about every time.

Cashing in

2004-09-20T19:50:00.000-07:00

I've never tried to make money in SL. I don't really have a special talent, can't script, don't want to learn a special graphics program, and don't want to "work" for anyone. But between stipends and dwell and winning prizes at contests and events I seem to keep racking up more and more L$ (the in world Second Life currency). Since computer errors or changes in policy or whatever could erase that at any time, I always get kind of nervous when I get to what feels like a lot of L$ in my account.
At first I would deal with this by buying up land. Since I figured like in the real world land is a good solid place to put your money and its something tangeable to hold onto. But after going up to higher and higher tiers I realized that this little land addiction had its limits. So my L$ started to climb again.
I had always resisted going to the Gaming Open Market to sell my L$ for real US Dollars because I kind of felt that it was feeding into the idea of SL being a place to try to make a buck instead of having fun. But facing no other real outlet for what had become too much currency, I gave it a shot back in June I think. It was a fast, easy process. The owner of the site was helpful and took care of my transfer almost immediately. I was very impressed.
Well, aynway, my L$ figures had now grown to what seemed to me high levels again when I read today about the plunging value of the L$ on the SL forums. So, once again I went over to GOM to sell off my L$ before it drops any lower. I still can't help that little feeling of guilt in doing it though. I mean it really is my money, but it's still kind of strange to me to get paid for simply having fun in a world I enjoy.

Turning enemies into friends

2004-09-20T01:50:00.000-07:00

Blogger eating a long post is a very annoying thing. Maybe it was a sign that I should be more concise. So here is the short version of what was a long entry.

A while back someone showed up on the SL forums and went from a few random comments comparing SL to There (an online VR/Chatworld that allows minors in, has very difficult and expensive standards to get any user created content in world, and is facing the possibility of closing services to the general public in the not too distant future.) This person then went on to get more and more hostile in trying to provoke a sort of battle between SL fans and There fans. in doing so, the things he said made it clear that he had never actually spent much time if any in Second Life.

I looked up his account name in world and found he had never given or received a single rating, which confirmed my suspicion since most people can't make it from one end of the welcome area to another without picking up a rating or two. So, in what was becoming a more and more hostile thread, I made an offer to personally show him around SL sometime to dispell some of the misconceptions he had. He sent me a private message on the forums a few hours later saying he'd take me up on it sometime and explaining that he was writing a news story for a There fan/news site. After that I didn't hear from him for a few days but noticed him making more and more inflamatory posts on the SL forums that went largely ignored. He even got one of his threads locked down when he tried to argue that There is better because the residents are so loyal they'd die to save it (or something to that effect). I figured he was just fishing for insulting reactions to put in his news story and I thought I'd never hear from him again.

However tonight, he got online and sent me an IM asking if I was still up for the tour. Although our first minute of conversation was followed by the Welcome area crashing (not a good way to try to convince someone that this place is really better than the misinformation he's heard), once we both logged back in things took a turn for the better.

I teleported him to my island in Ganymede, and once things started to load for him on his very slow connection, his tone took a big change. He started to see grass, and trees, and the flowing water in the river around my island, and the huge beautiful dam that I live right next to. SL, it turns out is not a boring, flat uniform terrained, ugly mess as he had thought! Immediately he asked how to build things, how to find people, if I could take him to a popular club. Since I hate clubs, I looked up one with a lot of people in it and teleported him there. He was fascinated and was ready to take off on his own for a while.

I logged back in about two hours later and got a message from him saying something like "Thanks so much for that post you made. If it hadn't been for that I never would have bothered to come into Second Life. Now I love it!" I was very pleased. About an hour later, when I was getting ready to log off for the night, he sent me another IM telling me he has a new look and asking if I wanted to see it. I went over and now he has new clothes, wings (every new person seems to grab a pair of wings, don't they?) and he told me he's really looking forward to making different avatars and wants to learn how to make non-human avatars.

I think there is a very good lesson in this all somewhere about combatting hostility with kindness and making the effort to expose bias and rumor to facts and experience. I believe that in the course of a few hours this person has changed from a rabid anti Second Life trouble maker to an awed fan who could turn out to be a new friend. :)

The dreaded first post

2004-09-19T01:28:00.000-07:00

So, here is the first post in my blog devoted to my experiences in Second Life. I tried the whole journal/blog thing before and got really frustrated with it very quickly. I think that was mostly because I fell into the usual trap of writing about my real life. I think that just isn't really for me. I don't feel comfortable or really interested in going on and on about what I do in my first life, maybe because it's tooo boring, or mabye because it is just too personal and not meant to be shared with total strangers.
My Second Life, however, well why not write about that? As someone who came to SL a total tech ingénue, I have gotten an amazing crash course in computers, concepts, a little programming, how different software works together, the psychological profile of the populace on the net (wow, are there some FREAKS out there) and a whole lot more.
I've made some friends, made a ton of acquaintences, and spent way too much free time staring at the beautiful sights of the world Linden Lab started and its residents have created. I'm still finding my way though. I'm stubbornly avoiding finding my niche and despite being a land buying addict (who now owns over 8,000 square meters of virtual land) my only "buids" are some flat panels on the ground with grassy textures, a few sidewalks and guardrails, and the occasional tree or shrub. Still, there is something kind of magical about having your own land. Even if it is a big expanse of grass, it is MY big expanse of grass and trees. And now I can even plug in my favorite mp3 or ogg music stream and stand around on my big empty plot of land listening to my favorite music.
Anyway, for those who don't know me, I'm "TinaStar Dawn." I live mostly in Ganymede, with a nice snowy plot nearby in Chamonix. I'm going to try to use this blog as a place to put my thoughts about all sorts of things in SL that are too long, too irrelevant, or just too unique to one or two people to ever imagine putting them in the SL forums. I think far too many of the regular posters there use it as their personal blog already and it just degenerates into tedious battles among the usual cast of characters who like to, as the fascinating Ulrika Zugzwang once put it "drop [. . .] snide little turds at the end of every thread."

Oops. . .

2004-09-19T01:06:00.000-07:00

I made that whole post and forgot to mention that it was Cyrena Zamboni's blog that made me decide to start this. I followed the example of someone else in the SL forums and searched the web for my name and came upon Cyrena's entry about a blimp ride of doom we took a little while back. I had no idea how interesting Second Life adventures can sound when put in print. I also ran across a post on LiveJournal with a picture of me doing a backflip. :)