My Apartment

While I have few memories of what was happening in my daily real life last December, I can tell you minute details about my Mafia City apartment. The ceilings were high– perhaps twenty feet! The walls and floor were white marble. It was an old building. A red carpet ran along the middle of the floor. The walls were glass. When the moon was full it was right outside my walls. Down below in the empty square, the silence was startling. So different from Hanja Square, and even my land, where I had a handful of neighbors who appeared occaisonally. Also, no one popped in. I liked that. The only entry into the apartment was through the ground level. Since I had rented it, no one else was allowed in. People could only arrive via teleport.

Because I was only allowed 100 prims at a time, I became obsessed with low prim objects. I found low prim couches, lamps, chairs, vases, flowerpots and went wild. I realized while decorating my apartment that I was experiencing what a twenty two year old young woman would experience fresh out of college. As I had dropped out of college by the time my daughter was born ten days past my twenty first birthday, I had missed this coming of age experience. I had, in fact, missed my twenties and now was reliving them in Second Life.

My Apartment

Italian Underground Mafia City

When I did a search on apartments, the top hit was Italian Underground Mafia City. I teleported there and found myself in an underground train station. I had to find myself out of there and make it up to street level. It was a role play sim but hardly anyone was there. I wandered the streets, past overflowing trash barrels, junk cars, an abandoned bus, looking for apartments. It was here in the Mafia City that I learned how to identify apartments. Apartments which are vacant have green box signs above doors of buildings. Usually if you go up to the door and click on it you can enter right away. Usually inside the apartment is a rent box which if you right click, you have the option to pay rent to this box for one week at a time. I looked at a few ground floor two room apartments which were dank and musty before finding this tremendous glass box up on the third floor overlooking the vacant square below. There were two or three of these apartments in the same warehouse style building. When you clicked on street level ground floor, you had the option to teleport up to the apartment. The only way to leave the apartment was to teleport out. By clicking on the rental box inside I discovered that the apartment cost $300 for one week. I was so excited to find something so reasonable and spacious, the ceilings in real life values would have been twenty feet high! I rented it at once. After you pay a rent box, the terms of the rental will appear in the local chat box. I learned that my prim limit in the apartment was 100, and that I would have to be added to the group before I could create objects and rez furniture in my apartment. Within a few hours I received an invitation to the join the IUMC Group. I accepted , and began furnishing my apartment. Almost immediately I realized that I would need to purchase low prim furniture. I went out and began shopping.

Land, land, more land!

Tired of running out of prims with my 512m, I became a land zealot! I purchased another 900m of land not far from my own, further up the mountain and found that my total prim allowance between the two plots was connected, probably because the prim allowance is set for the entire sim, not by each individual plot. Finally I was able to get creative. I bought several low cost houses and played house for a while. I put in gardens, fountains, hot tubs, pools. In “real life” it was Christmas time, and so it also was in SL. Christmas decorations were everywhere! I bought a whole bunch and put lights up on the mountain and so did my neighbors. It looked really great when you flew up from above and looked down. My neighbors were great at that time. One lady moved in and set up a castle and landscaped her yard. Another neighbor had a stone cottage and winter pine trees. I played with castles too. At one point I changed houses once or twice a day. I would get home from work, log on to SL, change my SL hair, change my SL outfit, change my house, tinker with my Christmas lights, and chat with my SL friends. My former sister in law Lisa got into Second Life after I told her about it and she bought land near mine and we were neighbors and trekked back and forth to see each others’ home improvements on a daily basis. It was the best way she and I ever found to stay in touch!

In my real life winter was closing in, I was avoiding all thoughts of my poor Aunt Mary, and procrastinating on my Web Design homework. I was spending four or more hours a day on SL. This (right around Christmas) was when I peaked out. It was right around this time that I decided to rent an apartment in a city and see what that felt like.

Hydrathan

As I tired of teleporting between Hanja, the Botanical Gardens & Mystic Academy, my thoughts turned increasingly to establishing a space of my own. I spent several days looking at land, upgraded my membership, familliarized myself with land fees and finally purchased a small parcel (512 m) in Hydrathan overlooking a body of water. The Hydrathan land was hilly. (I discovered while searching land sales that I had a strong aversion to flat land and sought only hilly parcels for ownership. )

Two things changed my world after I bought my land which I named “Rubicon.” First, I discovered the joys of creating trees. I spent hours “making” trees and deleting the ones I didn’t like. At this point, I had no clue how to move objects so I did my best to position them where I wanted them. Second, I discovered that if I put more than a small amount of objects on my land, the object wouldn’t rez because I had exceeded my “prim allowance.” Then I understood why everyone wanted larger plots of land.

I put up mostly winter pine trees on the land, found a groovy rug, a marble bench, bird bath and throne. I scoured free stores for cool stuff. I arranged and rearranged constantly, still without knowing how to edit objects or turn them around. I invited friends to my land. It was at Rubcion in Hydrathan that I taught Manchester how to make trees! But mostly I hung out by myself enjoying my solitude and watching the sunrise and set a thousand times over the mystery river. I was at peace.

First I set my land, Rubicon, as public so that it would be viewed in the search bar.  I wrote a description of it. But then, I discovered that strangers were teleporting there based on my description and I felt as if my privacy had been invaded so I removed the public listing and went so far as to only allow my friends access to the parcel. I enjoyed the aspect of being able to ban everyone but a chosen few to my refuge from the (second) world.

Manchester

Of all the people I met in Hanja Square, the only avatar who became a true friend, the only one I still occasionally chat with is Manchester. Manchester approached me one night in Hanja dressed in a white suit/hat, black tie with a large bottle of Jack Daniels from which he alternately swigged and then swooned. Still a newbie, I was wearing marijuana leaf wings. Manchester stumbled up to me and handed me a joint. Since he was a Hanja regular as well, after a couple weeks of acquaintanceship we struck up a conversation. Like myself, Manchester was in Hanja to observe, only he was getting paid for it. In his late twenties, Manchester had not finished his masters degree but worked in the research department of a large university. His supervisor believed that Second Life was cutting edge educational technology and so assigned Manch to be on Second Life eight hours a day, five days a week and just hang out. He could do whatever he wanted. He hung out in Hanja, wound up with a SL girlfriend (although when I met he was clear that he didn’t want one,) made friends with anyone who wanted to friend him and went everywhere he was invited. Bravely, he even tried sex dungeons. (“Bad places,” he warned me, “Avoid them at all cost.”) He bought land and then a house where he lived with his girlfriend, Tammy. As I had ventured into home/land ownership around the same time and we visited each others houses. I taught him how to create trees. We im’d more than we visited. He told me the update about Tammy, and warned me about SL relationships (for a brief time I was courted by a self proclaimed monk from Alaska who turned out to be a rather questionable character) “They don’t last long. They seem so intense but they burn out quick.” Manchester was a valuable resource to me in SL and I treasure his friendship. At this point when we check in we briefly discuss our real lives before discussing SL, which makes the friendship seem genuine. Manchester is the only meaningful contact I have made in SL who I did not meet through an educational sim.

Mystic Academy

I don’t remember how I got there but early into my SL experiences I wandered into Mystic Academy. I remember the night well. It was Halloween and I wandered uninvited into a seance! I still didn’t have my SL skills down and walked over people, tripped, and was a total goofball in the midst of all these serious avatars! They kindly ignored me and I sat down, spellbound! An online seance taking place via avatars! Wow! Spirits were speaking through one or two of the mediums and it was really quite amazing! The setting was something else with candles and tapestries, fireplaces, etc. It was the first time that I’d ever seen avatars spending time in a place which had been specifically designed for a certain use. The mystic avatars invited me to return and I did many times. Mystic has a calendar of classes in the lobby. If you are interested in any of the topics then you simply teleport to MA at the appointed time and take a seat. I’ve attended tarot reading, astrology & dream interpretation classes there and the avatars at Mystic are so welcoming! It turns out that many of them do online tarot readings and I was shocked to discover that many avatars consider themselves unique and completely separate from their human selves and that avatar readings are done for the Second Life experiences of the avatar!

My first day on SL was October 27. My favorite Aunt Mary died suddenly on October 29 after a short illness. I did my grieving and soul searching about her death on Second Life and especially at Mystic Academy. As I am deeply spiritual but don’t attend church (just love being at home on Sunday mornings too much to force everyone to shower and dress and go anywhere…) Mystic Academy became my spiritual community to help me process my Aunt’s death and my feelings around it. My mother had died four years before and Mary’s only child had died the year before- bringing Mary and I together into a surrogate mother/child relationship. I had believed, Mary being vibrant and full of energy at 75, that she and I would have at least another decade together. Her passing has caused me to reevaluate my own life and to focus on the importance of every single day while I am living it rather than putting off my happiness to some uncertain future.

http://mystic.terapad.com/

Hanja Square

From Help Island, I stumbled into Hanja Square, which I’ve written about quite a bit both in this class and in PED I last fall. Hanja was a melting pot of humanity. Avatars from all around the world hung out in Hanja. It reminded me of the smoking area at high school. The key word was cool. At Hanja you were either cool or you were just not part of the crowd. I hung back and played with my wings. I set my home to Hanja and materialized every night around 8:30pm EST to see what was going on and began ferrying newbies safely to the Botanical Gardens.

I spent time at the Botanical Gardens as well. I learned to fly there. I think islands are the best places to learn to fly on SL because you can learn to control your movement by using the shoreline as a guide. I wandered around the back of BG and found all sorts of places without any traces of avatar habitation.

I’d fly back and forth between Hanja and BG and just talk to whomever came up and spoke to me in Hanja Square. Usually they were male avatars trying to pick me up. They were surprised and even a bit offended that I wasn’t interested in their advances. “I’m just hear to learn about it.” I told them over and over again. “Really, I’m taking a class for graduate school. ” I was surprised at how prevalent the SL dating/sex scene was. I was confused. What in the world was so interesting about SL sex? Wasn’t it just like cartoon characters? Were people really that desperate? Lonely?

When I was born…

When I first came to Second Life, I thought the whole idea was stupid. I was required to log on and create an avatar for my Legal & Ethical Issues class. My first day was October 27, 2007. Within an hour at Orientation Island, I was hooked. I remember running over my first rat! When I finally grasped the torch I was triumphant and giddy. Right away I knew that SL would change my life.