As of today I have been in Second
Life (SL) for, would you believe, 11 years and 6 months, a total of 4,202 days.
OMG! Surely that is madness. I’ve
actually been here since the 8th February 2008.
Quite honestly it’s too hard to get
my head around when I think of the time that’s past and what I’ve done in both
SL and RL, my real life, my first life. I sometimes wonder if I’m sane or not,
but rather than answer it and drive myself even crazier most probably going
around in circles I’ll put it in a small jar in the back of an old cupboard,
inside an even older wardrobe in a shadowy corner of a room I rarely go in at
the end of a corridor I even more rarely dare to walk down behind the kind of
door one meets and think, woah! No
way am I going to open that!
As SL time is so different to RL
time, something which those who have never used SL would fully understand, it
doesn’t at all feel like I’ve been there that long but at the same time I’ve
done so much there I’m surprised I’ve fitted all the experiences and changes
and ups and downs in the time I have.
Most of my time in SL has been spent
as a vampire, which is one of the few consistent things I taken with me
throughout this journey, along with my blue hair which strangely I’ve had from
the very start, and my shape and size and essential appearance which has
changed very little and in some cases like my height not at all. I’ve obviously updated myself as things got
more clever and available inworld,
like my skin though that has also, despite tiny changes, stayed the same. I think I was lucky I finding myself and who
I wanted to be inworld very quickly,
without weeks of joining in fact. Some people seem to take months and even
years going through constant morphing and changing with many giving up sooner
than later.
Because of this I’ve enjoyed myself
there extracurricularly as myself
without having to spend all of my time, apart from like I say occasional tweaks,
making who I am. I basically decided I wanted to be as close as possible to me,
happy in my own skin, more than I am in RL.
Through my years there I only now
see looking back how much has changed, some monumental, some very challenging,
some for the better for sure some most definitely for the worse, but one thing
that hasn’t changed is the market-economy culture. Although you can quite
happily live in SL without spending a penny, and I don’t mean needing a wee, as
there are loads of free stuff in everything, skins, body parts (sounds gruesome!), clothes, avatars of
all ilk, furniture, trinkets, toys, vehicles, building materials and even
roleplaying materials and stuff, you name it it’s there and as much for free as
there is at a price. It still remains though that a lot of the best things and
some games require money and unless you can pay from an RL account into your SL
account you have to think of ways of making money inworld which can be anything between fun to frustrating to
near-impossible. Hence, shopping is big inworld and it takes practice, cunning
and experience to sometimes tease out the best freebies.
Soon it will be 4,203 days and I
will be one day older, not just inworld
but here too, as me, the real me, older and probably a bit weirder.
© Anan Eebus
