Why haven’t I been around Second Life much lately?  In my last post, I tried to describe my feeling of Second Life being a place had shifted and I found my interactions had a different quality to them.  Sure, this has been a factor in my being around Second Life less, but it wasn’t just that.  Nor was it ever because I felt like SL simply became a glorified chat room as some suggested.  As I alluded in the last post, there is more to the story.

For as long as I can remember, I have had a rich imagination; dreaming vividly of worlds and lives that I could clearly see in my mind’s eye.  Almost in the first minutes of being in Second Life, I felt plugged into my creativity and  imagination in ways that I didn’t expect.  Moreover, I found myself excited by the promise of SL; that it gave me opportunities for exploration and communication and connection that I would never have imagined. For an idealist with some deep dreams, it felt like a limitless horizon.

The real story here isn’t Second Life, but of me.  I’m a dreamer for all sorts of reasons, but one of those reasons has long been a means of escape; when things got unpleasant when I was little, I learned I could build something favorable in my mind.  So while I was excited by the promise of SL, it also became an interest at a time when my first life was filled with stress.   While it was true that I was coming to SL because of the promise I felt it held, I also came to SL to escape and to fill needs that weren’t being met in my first life.   Here’s where my spiral began: I would log into SL to escape and deferred addressing some of my RL issues which led to more stress and nurtured the need for more escape.  Let me be clear about one thing, I am grossly oversimplifying this with the benefit of hindsight; there were lots of factors playing into my issues with my SL and my RL, but I would also describe this as the overarching theme.  The upshot of it all?  I’ve been away because I felt I needed to be away.  My time in RL has been well spent taking care of some things that needed attention; while things are far from perfect, they are much better than they were.

What does all this mean?    I’ve not given up on Second Life at all, the same holds true about my belief in the promise of virtual worlds.  I still love SL, but will simply be around less.  For those of you who know me in-world, you *will* see me again, but it is likely to be for moments here and there.  In a related vein, not that I’ve blogged much lately, but this also likely to be my last post; I would like to thank everyone for playing along so nicely as I’ve thought out loud about my virtual life over the years.  So, thanks again, and so long!   And, as Vera Lynn so beautifully sang,  “We’ll meet again/Don’t know where/Don’t know when/But I know we’ll meet again/Some sunny day.”

In answer to my last post, nope, I wasn’t typing, sorry about that.  I’ve not updated my blog for the past six months for a variety of reasons.  Probably the biggest is that I haven’t spent much time in Second Life at all during that time.  The other is that I’ve simply not had anything  that I felt like saying about Second Life.  Lately, however, I’ve found myself reflecting on my experiences; wondering why I don’t think to log in much any more.  There are many reasons, of course, but I’ve broken them into two broad categories.  The first category is that *my* SL shifted and the second are my first life reasons for having a robust second life.  I’m hoping to blather some about each in this and a subsequent blog post.

The ways in which I interacted within Second Life changed for me.  One of the things that I felt when I started was an experience of place; that I was *there* through my avatar.  As time passed, I found that Second Life became more like a glorified chat room.  I would log in and my avatar would stay in one place while I would juggle conversations in IM.  I recognize that this is my own fault; I certainly chose activities that led to that sort of interaction.  While I chose those interactions, I can’t help but think that I followed some sort of arc of interaction with an avatar through the sorts of conversations I was having.  Like any context, I got to know people over time.  Where much of my conversation began as relating to the experience my avatar was having or interacting with the context of Second Life, with time more of my conversations were with friends about whatever we would feel like discussing.  In this case, much of the conversation eventually gravitated toward first life.   Talking more about first life reinforced those interactions and I realized that I was interacting through place and avatar less and less.  Not that this was bad, but it was different and marked significant shifts in my experience with Second Life.  The more I experienced it as a 3D chatroom, the less important Second Life felt to me as a place.

I can’t help but be curious if others have had this sort of experience.  So I put it to you, dear readers, have you felt your lives blurring together the longer you were in SL and got to know people in more real ways?  Did that lead to a change in experience for you?  Have you done anything differently as a result?

By my reckoning, Linden Lab owes me an hour or two of my life.  Not because of the time I’ve spent in Second Life, but because of time waiting politely due to the SL bug  in IMs where it will tell you that “so and so is typing…” when they really aren’t.  I can’t begin to tell you the number of loooong silences that have happened as a result.  I usually sheepishly follow up with “are you typing or is SL lying?”  The person then tells me they aren’t and we follow it up with a giggle, of course, but only after we’d been scratching out heads and wondered what happened.  A couple of minutes here and a couple of minutes there really do add up!  Anywho, just throwing this out there, dear readers, it is a bug that drives me up a tree and who knows, maybe some day Linden Lab will fix it…

Who doesn’t love a good time travel movie?  They can raise so many questions that seem challenging to answer.  So much is possible in Second Life, but sadly, time travel is not (And you know what I mean, so please don’t remind me that you can time travel with RP, k?).   But what if you could really travel back in time in Second Life?  I found myself asking this question, which became, “What would you tell yourself if you could travel back in time and give yourself advice as a new Resident in SL?”

Curious what I would say? Set your Wayback machine and look after the jump:

No, you’re really not missing anything when you’re offline. One of the wonderful things about Second Life is that there is *always* something fun going on.  Always.  Just because something fun is going on and you’re not in-world doesn’t mean you’re missing out; you’ll find more fun when you do have time to be on.

Learning basic building skills are important. You don’t have to be a master builder by any means, but you need to know the basics.  Play around with things, it will make your virtual life much easier!

Go ahead, buy some Lindens. Freebies, lucky chairs and contests are fun, but won’t get you where you want to go.  SL is easier with a little mad money, so think of it as an entertainment expense and spend some RL money.

Trust your intuition, that avatar really *is* creepy. You’re going to meet avatars that seem great but something in your tummy tells you to be careful.  It will be nothing specific, really, just a vibe.  You might try to talk yourself out of that vibe, too.  I’m sorry to tell you, but you’re going to find out that vibe you got was right.  So, save yourself some trouble and be cautious with people you get a funny feeling about, k?

Friending is easy, real friends are harder. Friends in Second Life are just like friends in your first life.  Sure, you can meet lots of people with whom you’ll be friendly, but be sure to cherish those people with whom you feel a deep connection because they’re much more rare.  And just like friends in RL, maintaining the friendship requires effort.

Don’t know what the hell you’re doing here?  Take a break! There can be some inertia to spending time in Second Life.  You’ll have periods of time where you will ask yourself “just why am I logging into SL?”   When you hit those times, be sure to take a good long break and ask yourself what you want out of maintaining your virtual life.  It is easier if you can purposefully answer to yourself what you want out of your experience.  SL will still be here when you want to come back.

Change is constant in Second Life. Repeat after me:  Nothing or no one in Second Life is permanent.  Sure, there are some people and things who are typically around, but just by the nature of it being a virtual world, people, stores and sims come and go all the time.  Understanding and accepting that will help.

You’ll actually have a few Second Lives. That point about change being constant in SL applies to you, too.  What captures your imagination and attention will change over time and, as a result, so will the focus of your SL.

Try it, you might like it! There is so much to do here, be open to giving things a whirl!

Forget Lindens, trust is the currency of the realm. Most of us are completely pseudonymous; since we can’t verify who the person we’re dealing with really is,  our actions become invaluable.  What you do and the ways you interact with people is how you will be known.

As real as it seems, it is all fake; as fake as it all seems, it is real. Honestly, this is one that you’re going to have to figure out what this means for yourself.  Don’t worry, you will, but remember to keep that in the back of your head as you do, k?

Don’t forget to have fun. Kinda sorta self-explanatory, right?   SL is an amazing, creative and wonderful place.  Enjoy!

I’m sure that I’ve missed a whole bunch of things, but those are the high notes if I could go back in time.  (Oh, those and a few other specific private suggestions that needed to be whispered)  But wait, if I told myself those things, would I be writing this blog post now?  Or maybe this would be a fashion post instead?  Oh god, sometimes I get a headache with all these time travel questions.  I’m not going to worry about that now; instead, dear reader, I’m going to ask you:

What would you tell yourself if you could go back to the start of your Second Life experience?

I love Hank Williams.  He’s one of these people who displayed such a prolific genius so young, you can’t help but wonder if he somehow knew that he had a limited time and was rushing to create while he could.  I’m not normally what you would describe as a huge country music fan, but his songs have a stark passion and emotion that is so hard to resist.  Recently, a few things in SL have reminded me of one of my all time favorite Hank Williams songs – Your Cheatin’ Heart.  The biggest one of these is a recent conversation with my friend ChatBrat Pippita, in which we talked about how many people cheat on their SL partners.

This post isn’t about the question of virtual relationships and first life infidelity, but instead about infidelity within virtual relationships themselves.  (First, a very important caveat: This post is not about you or your partner.  I know there is a tendency among people to read into blog posts that intimate the personal and let me say for the record, this post is not about any specific person, it is simply my musing on something that I’ve seen. )  One of the things I love about Second Life is that relationships take all sorts of forms.  Monogamous, polyamorous, open, partnered, you name it and SL has it.  Of course, the most important part to all of this is how the two people in the relationship have defined it for themselves; if it is an open relationship, it is hard pressed to define it as cheating.  All that said, among the monogamous relationships in SL – partnered or unpartnered – it appears to be relatively common for things to go sour because one avatar has been unfaithful to the other.

I’ll be the first to admit that my evidence for saying virtual infidelity is “relatively common” is purely anecdotal.  But between stories from friends, observing some relationships break-up, and my own being hit on by avatars admitting to be cheating (either as an alt or more blatantly), I feel pretty safe to say that it does happens with some frequency.    It happens in all sorts of ways, of course, but the most common appears to be through alting.

My big question is why does this seem to be so prevalent in Second Life?  In a world where trust is the most important currency of all, why is it common for people to try to circumvent that trust?  I have some partial answers; I think one is that I believe people do it because they think they can get away with it.  Another is a belief that a little dalliance isn’t so bad, they still love their partner and this is better than breaking up.  Finally, I think that it also has to do with why people seek other relationships in any world; they’re trying to address some unmet need.  But as I mull over it, none of these seem to fully answer all the whys.

So I put it to you, dear reader, do you believe cheating on virtual partners is a common occurrence in Second Life?  And if you do, just *why* do you think this is?

If someone were to ask me, “Is Second Life progressing?”  Sadly, my answer would be, “I don’t know.”  Why?  Although I’d like to think that I’m a regular and somewhat well-informed customer, I’d have to say that I don’t have the slightest clue where Linden Lab is trying to bring Second Life. Yes, Linden Lab has been busy, but with a recent  run of what appear to be disconnected business decisions, I can’t exactly say at what.

Linden Lab’s lack of transparency and tendency toward miscues with the community are nothing new.  Effective communication with their customer base simply doesn’t seem to be in the organizational DNA.   Flawed as that communication may have been over the years, there was often a sense of collaboration or even belated responsiveness that helped create a feeling that things were moving forward.  I simply haven’t seen that in some time.  Philip Rosedale expressed the Fast, Easy, and Fun vision for Second Life at the end of July,  but since that time, little has come out since then to describe how they plan to get there.  To top it all off, the mood among Residents can best be described as anxious; it wouldn’t take anyone looking for very long in the SL blogosphere and associated forums to figure that one out.  I can’t help but think the heightened anxiety is correlated to lack of clear communication.

I may be an idealist, but I’m a realist as well; I get that Linden Lab is a business trying to maximize profits.  That said, I also believe communicating and profitability aren’t mutually exclusive.  So rather than guessing at how to glue all the random acts of progress together, I would like to make a simple request of Linden Lab.  (And I doubt any Lindens read my blog, but I’m all for putting it out there.)  And what is that request?  It’s:

If you would like us to come with you, please tell us where you want to go.

I’m not certain if anyone can answer that right now, but it sure would be lovely to hear something.  Thank you ever so much.

“Before you speak, think: Is it necessary? Is it true? Is it kind? Will it hurt anyone? Will it improve on the silence?” – Sri Sathya Sai Baba

/me steps up on her soapbox and clears her throat.

My mother always taught me, “If you can’t say something nice about someone, say nothing at all.”  As I’ve gotten older, I’ve grown to realize that what she taught me is only partially true; sometimes we have to say things to people that aren’t so nice, but I’ve found that those moments tend to work well if done with respect, grace, kindness and desire to be constructive.

I’ll be the first to admit that I sometimes am challenged in following that approach, especially somewhere like teh intarwebz.  But as I’ve looked around the SL diaspora on the web, lately it has felt like someone poured a big bottle of mean into the SL blogosphere and Plurk.  There has just been way too much nasty going around.  Of course, there is nothing new about people being cranky with each other on the internet; I think the first flame war started within weeks of the creation of the web.  I’m not even going to touch the whys and hows or psychology behind people being mean-spirited on the web, but I believe we have choices about how we respond.

This is one of those instances in life where I think the very vocal and small minority dictates the tone of the conversation.  Yes, some people are mean.  Or have different opinions.  Or something that just rubs you the wrong way.  Yet we consume it.  We read it.  We share it.  We talk about it.  While we might find some titillation in the drama of it all, I believe much of it makes us uncomfortable, too.

We’ve got amazing and unparalleled power in our ability to communicate on the web, but I’ve always believed that with power comes responsibility.   There will always be people who get their jollies out of being hurtful, but I believe that most of us care deeply about how we treat others.  It is up to us to take responsibility for how we communicate.

I believe we *can* do something to help change the tone.  So dear readers, I’m asking for you to think about doing two simple things.  What I’m going to suggest is nothing new or all that difficult.  For one week – just seven days in a row of your choosing – actively decide to:

• Stop consuming content you know will annoy you.  This list is different for every person, but you know which blogs, discussion forums, Twitterers, Plurkers, Facebook friends, etc., make you go from calm to irate in seconds flat.  Choose to go cold turkey on this content for seven days.  See how you feel living without it.

• Avoid generating content that pours gasoline on the smoldering fire. For seven days, take a moment to pause and ask yourself the Sri Sathya Sai Baba quote from above any time you put your thoughts out in the web (except maybe the improving on the silence part, otherwise we might see nothing posted ).  We can choose to be civil and still get our point across, even difficult ones.

Even if these don’t resonate with you, I hope you’ll think about the role all of us play in the civility of our little corner of the digital world.  Finally, my readership is tiny and have no illusions that this will do much; hell, I’ve been to baby showers with more people than typically read one of my blog posts.  If this resonates with you at all, I hope you’ll find a way to spread these thoughts in ways that work for you.  Write your own short blog post, retweet a link, whatever, just help spread the idea that we can create a more civil tone.

So, let’s hear it, who is in?

/me smiles, thanks you for your time and steps off her soapbox.

(Finally, props to ChatBrat Pippita and Harper Beresford.  ChatBrat has long had the  Sri Sathya Sai Baba quote in her profile; it was our discussion about this that helped get me thinking.  I’m stuck using an older computer while mine is out for repairs and Harper snapped the picture for me; thank you so much!)

One of my favorite pictures - taken by boheme Oh

Isn’t that how the song goes? Or was it about brown paper kettles?  Sometimes I get the lyrics to songs all jumbled up.  Well, whatever the words are, I really enjoy the iconic song My Favorite Things from The Sound of Music.  I’ve learned there is so much of life is about simple pleasures.  The way the sunlight hits dew on the grass on some mornings.  Waking to the smell of freshly brewed coffee and cooking bacon.  Things like that. The same applies to Second Life, of course and I thought I would take a moment to share just a few of my favorite things in my digital life. I’ve decided to keep *my* list experiential, but it could just as easily include technical items. Here are a few of my favorite things!

• The ding ding of a new IM
• Hugging animations
• When I don’t have to adjust the prim attachments on a new piece of clothing
• Randomly meeting an interesting new person – especially someone I wouldn’t likely have met in RL
• Connecting and sharing with people I love
• When someone says “Welcome back!” when I’ve been AFK
• Stumbling onto an unexpected and amazing build

My list could go on, really.  So, what is it for you, dear reader, what are some of your favorite things in Second Life?

Image from saltairealpacas.com

If you know me in Second Life or have followed this blog at all, you’re likely to know that I’m prone to periods of reflection.   I’ve been nosing around one of these reflective times for a little while now; asking myself “what do I want from my Second Life?”  What has come of this latest round of thinkiness you ask?  I haven’t come up with good answers yet, but I have found myself asking “why am I here?”   If I’m being brutally honest when I answer that,  I would say that I’ve been a little like I’m Doctor Dolittle’s fabulous pushmi-pullyu in Second Life.  On the one hand, I’ve found myself affirmatively exploring all that Second Life has to offer; drawn like a moth to a flame by the creativity, people and potential of Second Life (and don’t get me started on the concept of the potential of SL at the moment, I might get ranty.  Perhaps a blog post on that will follow.)    Yet on the other hand, part of my Second Life has been about avoidance of some complicated first life issues; the sort where this is not really a right or wrong answer, but likely to have some different sorts of ache no matter the direction (and if you *really* want to know all of the details of this, go ahead and ask; I’ll share them conversationally.)   So I am in SL for multiple reasons, some good, some less good; I’ve flipped back and forth between the two several times, but am not really certain if I could articulate how or why it has changed for me.

Leaping from the personal to the general, I’ve noticed that the same is often true for others in Second Life.   In one camp are the people being pulled into Second Life; drawn to the fun and creativity of a virtual world.  The other camp are people being pushed; taking to the comfort of a digital life as a distraction.  Of course, like all generalizations, these distinctions can be fluid; one is not inherently better than the other, but certainly lines can be crossed into negative behavior and your mileage may vary.   So the question is this, dear reader, what is it for you?  Do you feel pushed or pulled into your digital life?

I’m a bit of a virtual nomad.  Yes, I’ve moved my home again in Second Life.  In my almost three years in Second Life, I’ve had six different locations that I’ve set as home.  No, this post isn’t about owning virtual property but more about what home means to me in Second Life and why I’ve grown to love moving around to new sims. (As much as anyone owns land in SL; I like to think of it more as a long-term lease like the United States has with the military base at Guantanamo Bay but that’s another post altogether)  As time has passed, I’ve grown to enjoy moving more and more.  Why, you ask?  Part of it is about creativity and expression, but the other is the simple reason is that in a world where we can live anywhere and have any sort of home, I don’t want to stick with one option all the time.

I very much enjoy having a virtual home.  I find that it is another way to express myself and enjoy the creativity that Second Life has to offer.  Part of it is that I enjoy all that goes into setting one up; I like shopping for homes, furniture, and other digital goodies for my house that seem to match the feel of the property.  Yet I also buy into the feeling of place in Second Life.  Having a place I call home feels comforting to me and my virtual space becomes a haven that feels safe and cozy and mine.

One interesting thing about  my tendency to move is that at first blush, it counters my interest in building community in Second Life.  I’ve found this to not exactly be true.  While sometimes place and proximity matters in building community while it is also possible to have a network and community of friends scattered around the grid.  As I’ve moved around, I’ve made new friends in each new sim; often developing close friendships with new neighbors I wouldn’t have otherwise met.  Yet as I’ve moved to new locations, these relationships have often (but not always) grown and developed further.  Ultimately, I’ve found that my nomadic tendencies has built virtual community for me more than detracted from it.

I know my approach to homes in Second Life is far from universal.  I’ve got friends who have lived in the same sim during their entire Second Life experience; becoming rooted in place and declaring their property their homestead.  Conversely, there are also those opposed to having a virtual home at all.  They prefer squatting or popping from place to place without the additional expense of paying tier.  So, what about you, dear reader, how have you approached your home in Second Life?  Do you stay put or move about?  What does have a place you call home mean to you?