Socially|Mundane

Tomorrow is the traditional day of "thanks" in the United States, and possibly other countries. Per the "wikipedia": Thanksgiving Day is a harvest festival. Traditionally, it is a time to give thanks for the harvest and express gratitude in general. It is a holiday celebrated primarily in Canada and the United States. While perhaps religious in origin, Thanksgiving is now primarily identified as a secular holiday.

Supposedly the first "thanks giving" celebration occurred in 1621 at the site of Plymouth Plantation - in the United States before it was was such. Nowadays most people simply look at it as an excuse to take a day-off from first life work and get fat on a "Thanksgiving Feast."

Additionally, the original giving of thanks for a bountiful harvest has become somewhat lost on the holiday as we are reminded to "give thanks" for whatever it is we might be thankful for.

Because the Thanksgiving holiday occurs tomorrow, and thus today is Thanksgiving's eve, I am going to cheat a bit: I want to give thanks to the people of Linden Research. (Okay, you readers may slap me now, but I assure you I still am in-charge of my faculties.)

No, not thanks to "Linden Research" or "Linden Lab"... thanks to the people who work there. All of them.

Why?

Because I am thankful for the enjoyment I get goofing around in Second Life. Seriously. I get to do it for free and yet, all those people work hard, for them the primary focus is to make a living, putting the food on the table, paying the mortgage and all that.

And I know for a fact a lot of them work hard. Especially when we, their customers and visitors (I am of the opinion you actually must have payment info on-file and owe Linden Lab legal tender in tier fees to be called a "customer") - get really stupid and shrill and vicious and slam-down on them verbally for trying to make the virtual world they have created and maintain a better place in the long-run for the most people.

I always have believed this, but it really hit "home" for me the last few days as I was sailing around in my Tall Ship (the Hades' Strumpet, woo-hoo!) through mainland areas on Linden-owned water sims. I find it a great way to go 'sight-seeing' through SL where "walking" all over the place is too slow and cumbersome and 'flying' just doesn't do it. Sailing along the coasts and inlet waterways through SL mainland is actually a fascinating experience.

And I came to realize something: as complicated as the grid is technologically, the high-cost of running and maintaining all these sims (simulators) - and Linden Lab actually provides a countless number of them at no charge to anyone, for everyone's free use. There is the complete Blake Sea - a massive "water continent" easily consisting of two-dozen or more (I haven't counted them) sims - all for public use. And the many other "destination" locations through-out the grid that practically no one even knows about.

I read a few months ago about the Linden Memorial Park, an area that Linden Lab has created from scratch for the sole purpose of SL users to place little memorials to people they miss. I have no reason to go there other than for sight-seeing purposes, so I never bothered going, but thought it a nice gesture on LL's part anyway.

So I plopped the "Stumpet" down on some rezzable area on the north coast of some mainland continent I didn't bother looking-up and started sailing away doing my sight-seeing, admiring (and frowning at) the many resident-built creations along the virtual coast. Peeking at the map every once in a while to be sure I don't get too close to the world's edge (in SL, everyone else besides Columbus was right.)

I can see a very large island, too small to be a sub-continent but too large to really be called an 'island' as geographic islands usually go, but by definition definitely an island just the same. A very large (full sim) expanse of water between the mainland proper and the southern shores of this large land-mass.

As first all I saw was flat land with nothing on it, not even a tree or two. My first thought that it is something new Linden Lab is building. As I got closer, some of the detail further-in started to appear. On the southern shore there was a tiny 'hump' in the terrain with a simple post on it so I furled sail and came to a halt just near it and cammed-in.

I found some kind of memorial pillar that had some virtual flowers and names posted upon it and I realized what I had found.

I have never done a "photo essay" on this blog, not because I don't want to, but rather because I am always forgetting to take snapshots in-world. However, in all the blog entries I have read about the Linden Memorial Park and all the snapshots I have seen of it simply do not do it an ounce of justice.

I was and am still stunned at the size (several sims) and scope and care and quality of build that is the Memorial Park 'complex'. It has to be among the more beautiful "Linden" builds I have seen in all my three years on the grid.

And so, as the SLogosphere will be plastered with "thanksgiving" posts all over the place tomorrow, a practice I try not to participate in (that being the 'follow the herd" in blog-post subjects) - I will be posting (along with the SL Selling Tip) my own "Thanksgiving" blog post.

But it won't be the usual "first life comes first so be thankful for the food on your RL table and all your RL things to be thankful for" and yadda-yadda-yadda.

But rather to accomplish two goals: "Thank you Lindens (the people) for what you do and give" and also " be thoughtful of those lost friends and be thankful for the joy (or not) thay had given" ... I guess.

Yeah, I apologize if you've made it this far as I guess this one was a wasted read, wasn't it?

art: Vidar Andersen; Crap Mariner