Adventures in nowhereland

            There are lots of nowherelands here, lurking at the end of a random teleport where you’ll land in the middle of nowhere, empty, sometimes jagged, sometimes rolling, sometimes dead flat and featureless.

            Then there’s where the land is no longer land at all but open water and you appear falling down and down and down into the however deep its watery depths are, which could be very or not at all. One just never knows when the ground may open up beneath your feet without warning.  This is especially so when you teleporting finds you in mid-air as high as a few metres to even thousands and you find yourself falling down and down and down.  Just as well we can fly here, or mostly as long as the land permissions allow you and when they don’t, well, brace yourself for impact.

            Nevertheless there are still adventures of a sort one to be had in nowherelands like seeing if is somewhere or something or someone in nowhere, signs of life, habitation or anything: a discarded prim, a pixel out of place, a breadcrumb or even something invisible that isn’t visible as invisible things tend to be, not visible.  Watch where you ‘tread’ though as you just never know what may be lurking, in a virtual world virtually anything is virtually possible.

            All land in Second Life has a name, some are brilliant, some baffling, some boring, some utterly bizarre and I’ll blog on some of these another time, but this land, this nowhereland is most often found to share one thing in common in being called ‘Abandoned’ which sounds most mysterious and sinister, if not a teeny bit apocalyptic.  Strangely sometimes these nowheres aren’t labelled ‘abandoned’ and yet have no obvious evidence of ownership or use one way or the other.  Yet more intrigue.

            Probably one of the biggest baffling mysteries in all this is why Second Life still charges huge amounts of money for land purchase and rental.  Not only that, whether you buy or merely rent, everyone pays a ‘tier’, the real fee behind the costs which even though charged in lindens, which is the currency here, this actually is done with real money in the real world.

            But if you are a landowner as opposed to a renter, you don’t really own it either, not really. Everyone pays a tier fee even though you might have bought the land for a bargain 1L, or linden, equivalent to pennies or cents in the real world.  Not only this but if you decide to give it up you have two choices: find someone to buy off you or simply hand it back to SL, in other words, ‘abandon’ it. 

            No one truly owns anything, not even anything you might ‘buy’.  It’s all smoke and mirrors.

            See, I said it was all very strange. I would think it’d be better if as much land and space as possible was being used, ‘owned’, and not how it is now with vast tracts of empty, or nowheres. Surely it makes sense to lower costs and fees, even have giveaways, which has to be better than lots of barren and abandoned nowheres.

© Anan Eebus/ Emma Calder

a sim’ple life

            Another somewhere, another space in time where I find myself again wandering, almost but not quite aimless among the silences, where echoes have not learned to be echoes yet. 
            Another land into which I’ve landed, or teleported, if only it was so easy in RL, or real life as we in the know call it, we on the other side. In the blink of a click the pixels rush in like fans to a stage when the band steps out. And so it resolves from not really there to still not really there and yet, really there, manifesting especially for me and not anyone else as I know for sure there’s no one else here. My radar tells me so, just another useful thing to add to my RL wishlist. 
            I wish I may I wish I might stay in here forever and a day... 
            Simulation, or simulacrum, could be either as both in their ways fit with this extradimensional landscape, digiscape, unfolding, unraveling with so much colour, form, even movement  all the way down to the sea, or a sea, a nameless body of water across which I can’t go.  I’m not allowed, no one is, not by sea or by air, only by magic unless… unless there’s a crossing place where two lands meet like tectonic plates having shifted and thrusted and crashed into each other at some point in this land of no time to merge as, almost, one. 
            I can see it, over there, another landscape but can’t scan it with my all-singing all-dancing radar, but I see it merely the tiniest of steps away. There might be a momentary lapse where it’s like being catapulted and no matter how hard you flail you’ve lost control and you find yourself walking through walls or in mid-air, or even burrowing into the earth, below which incidentally and a void and usually avoided. 
            I can see where I’ve been but to go back I’d have to experience yet again those waves of drunken lag.  But the temptation to press on into the unknown is far too tempting. 
           “Beware: Sim Crossing”, read the sign. I should’ve seen it coming, though not all sim-crossings have them. It’s a bit like saying “mind the gap” as you step over in the hope you don’t fall down it and disappear forever into some otherwhere maybe even on the other side of the planet! 
            So you brace yourself, like at the start of a fairground ride, the one you’re not entirely sure if it’s going to make you throw-up or not. Hopefully the worse that’ll happen is a crash, as in logged out. Simple, just log back in again, but this was more in the old days and not so much now. Of course it’s still wise to wear a harness, just in case. With any luck then once you’ve made in one piece, and hopefully still with your clothes on, as yes, embarrassingly in the olden days that used to happen, an entire new simscape (my word) opens up, or resolves prim by prim as in literally appears in rapid little increments until it’s all there spread out before you virtual and real eyes. 
            What’s a prim?  These are the building blocks basically that make up this world, even you, it’s weird I know, sort of like the atoms although they would probably be more accurately called a nanoprim, as opposed to megaprims which are obviously the opposite in scale and vast. Prim? It comes from the word ‘primitive’ although now there’s also sculpties and also mesh which is essentially the same thing or at least work along the same principles but being way more advanced, especially mesh, though like prims also have their limitations and preferred uses. 
            But beware and mind how you go because there are also off-sim hazards, although these are really hazards they are the spaces beyond which you, or your avatar, can’t ‘physically’ go and are duly stopped by like an invisible wall, or force-field even though you can see beyond it like the horizon and sun setting and such they are out of bound.  Most probably it’s where there be dragons. 
            But that’s enough for now, to have found a sim, seen a sim, crossed sim-to-sim and discovered the dangers lurking off-sim. Now it has to be tequila-time, a prim-tequila of course.

© 2018 Anan Eebus