Some Holiday Musings

It must be because another Christmas, and another year, is just around the corner. I’m feeling nostalgic.

I’m hardly the oldest of Residents…my third rezday doesn’t come up for another five months. Even so, I’ve lived through a lot of changes.

In the old days, SL was a different, wilder place. It wasn’t uncommon to arrive at a location and find the air filled with pictures of penises, falling like summer rain from the sky. Griefers routinely attacked sims, and often succeeded in crashing them. If someone didn’t like your face, you could find yourself receding into outer space at dizzying speed.

There were echoes of Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash”…Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong, with the genial Mr. Lee smiling down at the crowd from a huge billboard. Uncle Enzo’s Mafia (“You’ve Got a Friend in the Family”).

It was buggier. The grid was often down, as the Linden monkeys “banged on things”. You could teleport to a place and arrive with your hair and shoes attached to your ass. Or you might suddenly bend over and stick your head up there (looking for the missing hair, no doubt). Sometimes all your Friends would turn into Hippos.

Parts of SL scaled the heights of tackiness, with rotating ad towers braying about porn sites. Next door, you might find a casino to rival those of Vegas, with fascinated avs seated at the slot machines, trying to beat the house.

Porn was a fact of life. Escort clubs were everywhere, with beautiful girls eager to relieve the gamblers of their winnings. Several “red light districts” were around, and usually crowded with freelance streetwalkers and hopeful johns. A popular con was to sell newbies a “drug business”.

You could find banks and stock exchanges promising insane rates of return…and, for a while, they delivered on the promises, as long as new investors kept coming to their doors.

Money could be found on trees, and campers earned lindens while sitting around and chatting with each other.

Nowadays, SL is much more civilized. The campers and tree harvesters got replaced by bots, and now the bots too are fading away. The banks either successfully absconded with the suckers’ money, or were closed down by LL. The traditional escorts have largely been replaced by girls willing to use voice and have webcam sex…there are still escorts, but few clubs for them. It’s more usual to click on a girl’s adboard and arrange to meet her elsewhere on the web. The ad farms are gone, mostly…there is still tackiness in SL, but it’s more subtle. These days, “tacky” is something one does without meaning to; an accidental lack of taste or talent, rather than a deliberate slap in the face.

It’s more stable. The random bugs have been replaced by a growing, pervasive, invisible tar of lag, through which we all wade like people hunched against a downpour. The Hippos have gone extinct, despite a gallant effort to save them in the JIRA and a promise by LL.

Much of the raunchier porn has been banished to Zindra and other adult ghettos. Again, you can find it if you look, but it doesn’t pop up unexpectedly.

SL is much more beautiful. We have pretty water and skies now, and (if you care to experiment) shadows. We have sculpties, and the creators of plants and waves, hair and clothes and shoes, have continued to improve their creations. It’s all lovely…but has it been worth it?

Is it just me, or is anyone else sad to see the random zaniness diminish and fade away? Time was, someone would come up with an idea and before you knew it, twenty or fifty people were mobbed around all dressed as Ruth, the default avatar. Or a parade of giant chickens was marching through one sim after another.

Brenda looks ahead to what she (and many of us) think is LL’s ultimate vision for SL and snorts in disgust at the “More Predictable Experience ™”. But a lot of that has already happened. A lot of the spice and magic has been squeezed out (along with a lot of Bad Things, like con men and extortionists).

It’s not all LL’s fault. We did a lot of it to ourselves. The threat of content theft, and the growing numbers of residents unable to edit a prim, led to the widespread use of resizer scripts, which in turn contribute to the lag we see these days. The use of bots drove out the human campers. And so on. Whenever enough people took advantage of a loophole to raise a public outcry, LL stepped in and gave us what we wanted, or what we thought we wanted, or what they thought we wanted.

There’s still magic and wonder to be found here. Still spice and adventure. But it’s getting harder to find these days.

Here’s to the SL of yesteryear! And here’s to the changes that lie ahead…may they bring more good than harm, more joy than sorrow, more prosperity than penury.

Great post Lindal. Thank you and Merry Christmas.

It's my third rezday tomorrow and I haven't noticed that much significant change in SL since I started . . .

Pep ( . . . except the players are getting even more stupid.)

Nice bit of context and perspective, Lindal.

(But then what do I know? I'm stupid . . . )

I partook in many of the things Lindel mentioned so the changes I noticed are significant.


Nice trip down memory lane.

The people of the forum have changed over time also. There are quite a few that were frequent posters when I arrived here and now they no longer come around, if they come to SL at all anymore.

And a whole new batch of folks have found the forums and become part of the family here.

It's a percentage thing, with the percentages inflated by consumerism.
*sigh*

I have to admit, I liked the old Wild, Wild, West version of SL that was here when I came along. It was wacky, unpredictabkle, amusing and entertaining. Yes it was more unstable than today, sometimes infuriatingly so, but as I will admit some of what the Lab is doing is probably necssary for SL's growth and survival, I see so much of the charm and whimsey of thoe days , where I couldn't wait for time to log in being sucked out to where SL has become one of many things I might choose to do for an evening's entertainment. I really do see the SL of a year from now as one that will hold little interest for me.

Yes, the grid has changed and I do miss the old wilder SL. But there is one thing LL can't take from us or change. The thing that keeps me here, that brought me back when I had left last year. The friends we have made. So many different people, such different stories all coming together as a large dysfunctional family. People the likes of which I would never meet in "real" life. But here we have met, talked, laughed, and cried. Getting to know the people sometimes they are mirror images of their avatars, sometimes wildly different, but still friends.

Lindal, thanks for posting. It was interesting to read your reflections. Based on the date under your name, we joined in the same month, yet my experiences in SL have been very different from what you describe. I always believed that I joined after most of the early "wildness" of Sl was already a thing of the past; certainly I didn't see much of it. I suppose that illustrates what a big place the grid is and how individual our our second lives are.

Thanks, Lindal. What a nice trip down memory lane. I really enjoyed those times, but I can't say I dislike all the changes. You didn't say that either of course. Some of the changes are quite nice.

Pre-WindLight SL was a little predictable in the way it looked. I remember we screamed and carried on about WindLight and how it would ruin everyone's looks and the look of all the painstaking builds. That was because some of the presets were a little crummy or just too wild. (Sorry to whomever created those presets.) Now with a little tweaking of my own and some great settings from other residents, my SL looks greater than ever. No more boring predictable skies.

I don't miss ad farms, or griefers (well, we still have those). I don't even miss all the porn or the escorts - though I was never against any of that and never will be. I certainly don't miss the camping or even the gambling.

I think I just miss the novelty.

I think whenever we join SL (or any other subculture, SF fandom, skinny jeaned emo kids, the Red Hat Society -- or whatever), there is a wild wonder-filled honeymoon period, and like everything else these groups must change. We wind up missing that sense of wonder from when we are first smitten. It's like the feeling when you first fall in love with someone. It's the most fantastic high you can experience. Then it gradually calms down to a more reasonable level of togetherness, and eventually over years to a level of comfort with occasional spikes of joy in which you recall that heady first rush. It doesn't mean you love that person less. The chemistry of love changes over time.

SL is like that. The honeymoon period is over, but it is comfortable and still fills me with wonder now and then. I would really hate to live without it now. No mere game has that effect. Chris is right. In the end, it's the people and really always was. Even as reclusive as I am, SL would be a fairly dull place without its people.



.

I miss the "old" and un-predictable days terribly. Pretty soon it seems that we will all be part of a new version of Sims On-Line.

Your post made my day cowboy.

I'm glad I joined in late 2006, and it would have been great to be in SL earlier, too. Yes, 2006 felt more magical and spontaneous than SL does now, but it was even more different before that, when SL residents really did feel like they were creating a New World. You can see that expressed in the early Starax sculptures, the huge classical Greco-Roman human statues. *That* feeling was gone by 2006; SL, like the real world, is constantly changing.

Did anyone other than me notice when the Linden trees stopped waving in the wind recently? (1.23.4, I believe, and therefore in both Snowglobe and Emerald.). It was one of many performance optimizations that LL is doing, trying to fight the lag.

I loved the Linden trees, though I rarely used them. But when as a noob I first noticed one moving, I spent a lot of time trying to poke at it. * smiles *

Yes, I think Weston and Chris are right. For me, now, the magic is in the people. And, no matter how shiny SL gets from now on, it of course can never be NEW, and therefore truly magical, to me again. So I will treasure my early SL photos and memories, as I do of my own childhood -- another great time that, inevitably, just cannot occur again!

Glad it did.

I joined in May, a couple of months before my Forum join date. A lot of the wildness was already on the wane...I just caught some of the tail end of it. I'm sure the people who joined up late this summer and experienced the adult content moves will have similar memories.

@Lil, and Chris...you are so right about the people. Both about how they matter, and how they, too, come and go with time.

SL is a world of beauty, and a world of rapid change...and that goes for its inhabitants, too.

Shudder. I hated the ugly chaos of SL when I first joined Oct 06. I hated having to see how ugly and greedy people got when they had a world of freedom. That people chose to grief, to work as escorts, to cheat people with casinos, to force land sales with spinning ads. As for the forum, I am really glad that some of the posters are gone...especially the ones who saw age play as harmless. I know this stuff is now just all gone underground, I know it still exists...but my day to day SL experience is much better now.

Since then SL had gotten better for me. Windlight increased my toolbox of creative tools, voice increased my ability to deepen my relationships with the intelligent, unique people I met, and the stability of the grid got rid of my angst in a big way.

Saw a great quote the other day that suits my current SL experience really well.

"Jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down" Ray Bradbury.

For me, SL is still that ...and so still very exciting.

P.S. I always enjoy your posts Lindal, you are such a fine writer.

Mmmmm - I still love SL. I don't miss Wednesdays when the grid was down and we would all be holding our breath and checking the website wondering if it would come back again.

When RL goes belly-up, having a stable and more predictable SL is nice. (I know!)...and, yes, it is the people here that matter. How could I ever forget Laurin, Jig and Scylla - they are my SL "family" now! ...and Des - what a good sport he is! Oh what laughs! May we all have many more.

All the posters here now seem like old friends - Lindal, Lil, Chris, Brenda, Weston...all of you (apologies for not typing all the names; I think of you all)...

to all of you - including Pep - I wish a most happy Christmas/Holiday Season and all good fortune in 2010.

April, 2007; I didn't 'hate' it, was bemused, but fascinated. Never thought I'd be much involved and saw myself kind of outside of it all, an observer. Never immersed. Found my niche though, and everything changed.

Laughing is amazing.

Had an old friend appear out of the blue this week. We met around the same exact time 3 years ago, just before Christmas, and we were both having a rough time with the holidays. We're from entirely different worlds, but the same things effect us all in the heart. We spent a few hours way back then having a blast exploring SL.....and laughing. Constant laughing. We had left laughing off our daily roster in RL.

Even 3 years later, I don't think that either of us have fine-tuned that storybook holiday scene to fit into our very different worlds. I think that you tend to look at other people's worlds and think that they are experiencing something "better" than you.....when in fact....the trials are all relative and all very similar, regardless of the trappings. SL certainly allows us to get a grasp on that, if we leave our judgments at the log in screen.

Got to "hear" the laughing this time. Awesome. But it doesn't take away at all from the treasure of seeing it in type 3 years ago. You know it's there. This will be a holiday treasure between us for years to come. Can't beat that. I hope that everyone who logs in more than twice here, gets to experience that, and what you describe, Chris....in some form.

Memories are great, and this is the season to look back.
Treasure those memories, but don't forget to make new memories now.

The true magic of SL lies inside all of us.

Merry Christmas to all, and best wishes for the new year, another year to make memories, may we all look back next year with more memories to treasure.

Awwwwwwwww . . .

QFT !!

Interesting post & nice writing.

I see it as a culture that goes through the same growing pains as any other new culture...for a while it was the 'wild west' and now it's becoming civilised.

I hate to say it but, that's...predictable.