I’ve decided I don’t want to be posting the same content on multiple sites, so the posts that are mainly just pictures will only be on my Flickr photostream from now on:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ava_glasgow/
I’m all about the pics lately, so most of the new content will be over there for a while. 
I’ve got my hangglider rezzer set out at the Cartel hangout for a few days, and decided to take one out for a spin tonight. The hangout is right next to several open ocean regions, which are a great place to fly around without fear of ban lines.
I’ve been trying to land a glider inside the Cartel hangout. I’m close, but not quite there yet.
Yes, another party! I dropped by the hangout Tuesday evening to do a little inventory sorting, but found an impromptu Mardi Gras going on. The decorations were great, and there were free party favors so everyone could have beads, masks, and Mardi Gras cake.
More pics on Flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ava_glasgow/sets/72157623333247353/
The Forum Cartel had a party to mark the death (or as LL calls it, “ugrading”) of the official SL forums. A lot of people showed up at various times, with the party going from Friday afternoon until well after midnight.
See more pics on Flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ava_glasgow/sets/72157623305102857/
I did some more sightseeing last month, this time in the fantasy-themed area of the new “planned development” continent Nascera.
My tour started in the forested park that separates the fantasy area from the other neighborhoods. I wandered over to the residential area where I visited each of the four house types available, after which I paid an extended visit to the Elderglen infohub. I finished off my trip by checking out an extension of the neighborhood on the western side of the river, followed by a quick dive into the river itself to check out the murky deep.
See the full tour over at Flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ava_glasgow/sets/72157623212982348/
It’s been almost two years since I gave up on Second Life, and I’ve decided to come back. I’ve finally got a computer that works reasonably well in SL. Even better, I can still go non-Windlight, thanks to numerous alternate SL viewers. The bright shiny world that I dreaded is now merely an option, not something forced on me. My underwater haven can still be as dark and cozy as before.
I won’t be as deeply involved this time around, and I certainly won’t be spending the kind of money I did before. It’s mainly just casual fun now… at least I hope it will be.
I don’t want to spend as much time maintaining my various Second Life web sites, so I’ve taken them all down and put the content on Flickr. Not that other people were ever that interested in my sites, but I still like to browse pics of my avs, stuff, and favorite places while away from SL.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ava_glasgow/
I will be leaving this blog up — the software behind it is much easier to maintain than what I used on the other sites — but I don’t know if I’ll be adding new posts very often. We’ll just have to see on that one.
I don’t have much in the way of clothes — that’s what the supermodel alt is for — but I definitely enjoy dressing for the season. In the summertime that means wearing shorts and a skimpier version of my tie-dye tank top. But winter… well, that was something I wasn’t prepared for!
After doing a lot of shopping, I settled on a nice cuddly winter sweater set with several colors for mixing and matching. And if I wanted to go to the snow, obviously I would have to break down and get some footwear, in this case a cute pair of Ugg-like boots.
Before selling off all my land, I let the winter weather settle in up on my work platform and added a few trees to complete the scene. I took some pictures during the day, but the pale violet glow of snow in the dark makes nighttime my favorite.
As I mentioned in the previous post, I’ve set new home locations for me and my alts at various Linden infohubs around the grid. Not surprisingly, most that I found were either unattractive, crowded, targets of griefing, or all of the above. Fortunately, though, I finally found the perfect place for me: quiet, beautiful, and best of all, it’s underwater!
It’s been a few months since I last wrote, and much has happened since then. In a nutshell, I have almost completely disengaged from Second Life.
Why? The simple fact is that Linden Lab (SL’s owner) has a few wonderful and helpful people working for them, but as a whole the company is a mess:
I started Second Life during an exponential population boom, which meant LL as a company had to grow quickly too. I know how difficult it can be to maintain good operations during rapid growth, so I gave LL the benefit of the doubt. I honestly believed that they would eventually get their act together.
But the population growth stopped. The size of the user base and the hours logged on to the system have been fairly stagnant for 6-7 months now. That is more than enough time for LL to catch up, and to be prepared to provide adequate service to its users now. But while some things have improved a little, overall things are still bad.
What does all this mean to me? It means that I don’t want to rely on a company that has proven themselves to be unreliable. I don’t want to stay invested financially and emotionally in a system that I know will let me down. And I sure as hell don’t want to continue rewarding an incompetent and uncaring company with hundreds of dollars a month in business.
So I made the decision: sell up, cash out, and don’t give another penny to Linden Lab.
It’s something easier said than done. The SL world has a sense of reality to it, and for someone like me it is very easy to become emotionally attached to parts of it. I loved my home in Gyeongju, a rare beauty of a mainland region with nice natural features and no adfarms or ugly builds. But owning part of it means paying LL for the privilege, so I had to give it up. I kept a last little 512 for a while since my premium was paid for the year, but I decided it was holding me back so I dumped it too.
I am now completely landless. I have downgraded my accounts to the free basic membership and cashed out all funds except for about $20. I set new home locations for me and my alts at various infohubs around the grid and bookmarked all the best sandboxes so I can look at my stuff and do a little building. I’ve also started experimenting with some of the new open source SL-type grids… they are definitely rudimentary, but it’s exciting to see how quickly they are moving forward.
I don’t plan to leave Second Life completely, but it will definitely be a much smaller part of my life from now on. I’m a little sad because I had such great hopes and plans, but at the same time I’m relieved to not be completely dependent on Linden Lab anymore. And I’m definitely glad to have more time to devote to real life, something I’m sure my family will be happy to hear!
I’ve sold off most of my land holdings, which recently included nearly my whole home region of Gyeongju. I love it dearly, but I know it’s time to let most of it go. There is a nice part of this, though… new neighbors. After my old neighbors sold and left, I found the place had become very lonely, but now it’s been rejuvenated. The people I’ve spoken to are wonderfully nice, and they have really embraced the beauty of the natural environment in Gyeongju. You know, like many things, home is just so much better when you share it.
One of my new neighbors bought the waterfall left behind by a previous landowner, and within a few hours has built a gorgeous custom house right into the falls themselves. He graciously allowed me to tour it, and I must say I am very impressed. It looks great from the outside, but it’s even better from the inside with glass floors looking down into the rushing water and a wall of windows looking out across the lake. I can’t wait for him to finish it so I can take lots of pretty pictures.
And it looks like the beauty has overflowed down to my place, which was showing a fine view of its own today.
My world is dying.
I’ve had a vision of what’s to come. A world made bright and new for the greater good, but with little room for one like me.
How long do I have? A few months? Maybe less. All I know is the end will come, and with little warning.
Building, planning for the future, it seems futile now. When the world is finally torn from my grasp, the memories will be all I can keep. It’s time to breathe in the life I have left, to enjoy the simple pleasures that soon will be gone.
Tonight is spent sitting by the lake that is my beloved home. The waves lap gently against the shore as I watch the smoke rise from the embers of the dying fire.
Just a quick post to clear something up. A few days ago I spoke to a guy who has been been hanging out on my land. I wanted to introduce myself as the landowner, but he was rude and uncooperative, so I ejected and banned him. I admit it was a bitchy thing to do, but I don’t have to let someone be a jerk to me on my own land.
Tonight I discovered that this person has put our conversation in his Second Life profile, but he edited it to make me say I banned him because he is gay. I also discovered that this information is not only available inside Second Life, but also on the web where anyone can see it. This false transcript comes up when people search for me in the new SL online search, so I feel the need to address it.
I banned this person because he was a jerk. I did not know he is gay, nor did I make any comment about sexual preference. I consider sexual preference totally irrelevant when judging a person, and would never discriminate against someone because of it.
Okay, I guess that’s it. Back to building the garden that never gets built.
I finally finished building and packaging my freebie sky platform. Now that I’ve got two whole items to give away, I’ve decided it’s time to make a formal distribution center… my store, the Waves Crashing Free Zone.
It’s not much so far, but as time goes by and I make more stuff, I’ll have a place to share it with people.
I took a break from working on my platforms to try my hand at some tableware. My first attempt was a simple white china plate, which in my opinion came out rather nice. I worked late into the SL evening, and ended up getting a nice picture of me concentrating on the plate (seen from below) with the sunset in the background.
Sorry about the laxness when it comes to posting. Aside from the mass amounts of time I’ve been frittering away on the SL forums, I have been hard at work on a building project.
I’ve been using my Gyeongju Gardens land as a sandbox and photo backdrop, but I can’t keep doing that if I want to start actual work creating the gardens themselves someday. I’ve decided to stay on the parcel, but to do my building and inventory photography on a sky platform 500 meters up. Doing so significantly improves the performance of my client (from 2-4 fps on the ground to 20-30 fps at altitude), plus it gives me much better control over the background in my pictures.
Being the picky person that I am, of course I want my work platform to be just right. I want nice rounded corners, some kind of border, with the textures all lined up just perfectly AND easily changeable. So I made what I want, looked around, and realized it’s pretty nice and maybe others might like it too.
So of course that means I must make multiple versions to suit a variety of needs, because it just seems a nice thing to do. I’ve got bordered and no-border versions in 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50 meter squares (well, the 10 meter one is a circle), plus a kit of the parts so people can easily build them in custom-sized rectangles. I’m going to make an inside rounded corner to allow more elaborate shapes, and then I have to write up instructions to help people fit them all together (it’s set up to assemble quite easily for people with building skills, but I like to include help for the less experienced folks).
Then I’ll package them up and my new freebie will be available for distribution. And of course I’ll put nice pictures of it over on my Creations site.