Socially|Mundane

Cruising the web and looking at what news and blog posts are floating around out in the vast 'interwebs' about Second Life and Linden Lab, more or less because I'm bored out of my head today. And seeing as I hadn't plopped anything up here yesterday, I figured I'd scrape around to see if anything of interest jumps out at me.

There were the typical reports one always seems to find all over the place, nothing really spectacular or interesting until I ran across the first-hand experience description of someone jumping into Second Life for the first time.

I remember my first hour. I was fascinated and it wasn't very hard for me to decide quickly to stick around and explore all I could. So in reading this column, I found quickly it's the usual, negatively biased account of the virtual world and, of course, dissing anyone and everyone who actually enjoys time in-world on the grid.



But I found the writing awkward. The author was saying things that just didn't make much sense and I was having some serious deja-vu moments:

At this point, you are probably thinking to yourself that the very premise of Second Life is so unbelievable, so incredible, so downright ridiculous, I must have erred in my reporting. Surely, you say to yourself: surely, there is no way that so many people could be so sad, so strange, so pathetic that they would spend their hard-earned money to enhance their "second life" at the presumable expense of their first.But such people do exist, and they live on Second Life.

Indeed, what I'm attempting to prove is that the Second Life "metaverse" (they get dreadfully offended if you call it a game, incidentally, because apparently the convergence of furries and money legitimizes the former by virtue of the latter) is quite frightening. Not because people are making money off of it, but because there are people who are willing to fiscally forsake the occasionally harsh and unforgiving world we live in for these digital fantasies.

I believe I went at least a third through the article before I thought I'd better scroll back to the top and check the date.

I couldn't help but grin wide. It said Saturday, October 28, 2006.

I was in world then and still relatively new. About six-months and just beginning to work-up the gumption to learn the building tools in SL and their awkward nature (as I was considerably more used to other 'real world' 3D tools.)

So reading through this highly negative diatribe about how bad Second Life is and what losers all the residents are, I still couldn't help but smile wide, feeling seriously nostalgic. And it brings back what are now fond memories, but brutally disappointing experiences at the time.

Such as how the population concurrency was creeping toward the 10,000 mark and the huge fears we had that the grid would have an utter meltdown when that happened. Or how the grid would become so unstable that teleports would fail completely and you couldn't even walk across a sim border from one into another. There was an entire weekend with that issue. In fact there were about 20 or 30 mainland sims that went offline and stayed offline for 5 days straight.

Or the griefers. The greifers were out in force and when they did their thing, it was to bring the entire grid crashing down, not just annoying 10 people on some remote sim.

[Griefer attack in progress on the mainland pictured here.]

Remember the "grey goo" fiasco anyone? That whacked an entire weekend, too.

So, the "bad press" has been happening since the very beginning and continues onward through today. But the real reason I point back to this old archived article is this: those of you in SL now? Those of you whining and complaining about how 'bad' things are? Go take a look.

It's worth a good laugh.

Maybe then you might actually appreciate what you have now, how stable the grid is, and how powerful and feature-rich the viewer is these days.

And it will only get better.

Source:
The Safari Begins