The Halfway Mark in 2005 in SL

It has been a really good year for me in SL. Most recently things have been falling into place and I am really enjoying myself.

I have a nice peice of property. It's a quarter of sim in a sim with three other owners, which is nice. we are separated by high mountains.

I've got my ideal house/building built by Foolish Frost. It is large enough for me to live in, give living quarters to a friend, hold classes, have a bar and a place for my Wicca Meetings.

I found my ideal shape, 2 feet, and I am busy shrinking down all of my furniture. I owe this to the Tiny craze. I loved being a purple bunny but had to settle for short because I couldn't give up my clothes and all of my hair. Speaking of which I want to give a adoring shout to all the hair "stylist" out there. You all do such wnderful work. Oh and my new size looks great in Chip's skin, which is still my all time favorite.

Oh and I'm busy with Poser making poses and cool animations. I'm thinking of puting animations all around my build, like attached to the railings, for leaning on, on the floors for sitting crossed legged.

I went to see the latest ride at Dream Safari Owasco (50, 57). They are showing "The Myth of Persephone". It was very educational and well done.

I tried the book script that was posted to the forums by Issarlk Chatnoir /54/58/40369/1.html It was a cool open source, but I ended up going back to Toneless Tomba for his well done commercial one.

I've been fooling around with SnapzPro for capturing video on SL. It does a very good job. I'm going to work on making some kind of vidoe, don't know yet.

I spent some time down at the video feed. I don't know if I did any good or not. I would go and spend half an hour to an hour trying to help anyone watching make sense of the feed. Instead of just having people dancing and walking around in big AV's or whatever, I tried explaining what went into making the AV or the animation and tried to show some building things. But of course without feedback, it was hard to know if I was doing any good. Sometimes I wanted to give out an email address, maybe a gmail for just that purpose, but I didn't know if it would upset the Lindens. There were a couple of times when people setting off explosions or playing war would be upset with my running commentary.

I attended the Town Hall or rather listened to the Land changes question and answer via a repeater. Some people asked me where I got the repeater. Ben Linden posted an announcement saying all you had to do was ask for one. Just another fun use of the Message Boards.

I helped a noob use the media player on group land by answering a message board post.

I saw a cute picture of David Hasselhoff and puppies on the message board.

How have you been doing?

Ack, what happened? I read your post at about 3am last night right before bed and was going to reply to it today... so I'll do my best without your post. I'm glad you're enjoying your year in SL so far too.

2005 has been good to me so far in SL. 1.5 was a bit of a letdown, but 1.6 has been quite cool. Changes always bring upheaval, but there's still tons of great stuff going on in SL. I continue to try to take on projects to challenge me, and increase my overall geek skills in several areas, which is why I really love the platform. More and more cool resident creations are coming out, like Snapzilla and PoseCubes.

I do miss Torley a lot already. Its hard to imagine that she was only in SL for eight months! That was a bit of a downer, admittedly.

Your original post was very cool, April - consider reposting. Saturday night, late, into Sunday morning... is about as quiet as the forums get. I bet you'd get some nice replies if you leave it up for the day.

Regards,

-Flip

;0 I've seen Torley look alikes in SL since tors left ;0

BABA! How could you?! I only did that for our own private time. Because you asked me.

Nice post April My 2005 has been a bit quieter tha years past so far. I haven't had as much time to be in SL as I did the first half of last year, but that's not a bad thing. Keeps me from getting burned out, and SL is a place I can distance myself from now and then and always know I'll get bit with the bug and come back full force and love it all over again. Still so many projects I want to do and barely enough time to keep the ones I already have up and running (like getting some new people in the new designers store! hehe).

Hopefully I'll have time to work on new stuff and get some new products up before fall. Right now it's kinda nice to be spending some free time sitting out in the back yard with a good book. I always get in the mood to read scifi voraciously in the summer for some reason (and so far this year I've been tearing through David Brin's "Uplift" series. Love it!). I go through cycles with SL. Manic creativity in short bursts followed by periods of inactiviy, just keeping up with tattoo orders and customer service stuff. I look forward to my next manic swing. I'm never able to predict when it'll happen, but it always does sooner or later.

hehehehe, Jennyfur was considering doing a "Torley Line" for a while, but I think that's out of the question now that he's gone.

Chip, glad to hear things are going well - and April, thanks for restoring the post! Its often tough to find positives in these forums, so when I do, it makes Flip a happy panda.

-Flip

Yep, people go to the drama threads like moths to a flame fest. So much amazingly cool stuff happens in SL. It baffles me why people seem to focus so much on the negative. It's outweighed by the cool and creative stuff by orders of magnitude.

Yes there is so much cool stuff. I was flying around SL yesterday and some of the buildings are just absolutely amazing. I am in awe of some of these builders.

Yep - the saga continues - and has nothing to do with making money!

Hi Merwan, so nice to see you in forum. So what did you do today in SL or recently? Please share any positive experiences. It would be so appreciated.

My first half of 2005 has actually involved more time out of SL working on SL related things than it has actually in SL. Snapzilla is the reason for that. When I started on the project in mid-February, I had no idea it would explode into what it has become. That has been gratifying beyond belief, far more than anything else I have done in SL (and a proud RL achievement of mine as well).

I love that my stores are successfu and I have a lot of fun with animationsl, but it doesn't fill me with the kind of pride and happiness that Snapzilla does. Second Life has become a true passion of mine, so being able to do something that has added something to SL has been wonderful.

I have found that lately, really simple things in SL make me happy. Buying gumballs from Moopf Murray's gumball machine and sharing them with friends, wearing my very cool Sesame Street slippers (my favorite are the Count and the Cookie Monster ones that actually give a cookie when you click on them) and flying around with the ROAM device provide me a lot of enjoyment. I go through phases with SL, and I'm currently playing World of Warcraft a lot as a diversion - but I never tire of SL and plan to be around for a very long time

April, you asked me yesterday to post in this thread. The reason I hadn't posted in it already is I felt I wasn't qualified to, lol. I haven't even BEEN here half a year, much less have any previous years to compare it to.

What I have done is first, prove that a person can survive and thrive on a basic membership, with a wonderful place to live, without buying money. I call that sort of thing "beating the game." I did the same thing in TSO when I got a size 8 lot all by myself, despite the whole game being rigged to make that almost impossible (eventually they made it so you could just go ahead and buy size 8's with real money).

So I reported on that on these forums and that experiment was over. I went to premium so I could focus more on building and less on desperately trying to win money at bingo, lol.

And of course, throughout all this I have been involved in trying to make the forums an open and welcoming place for all, and for all to be allowed to speak with dignity. Not my choice of thing to do, and it has ruined me quite a bit, but oh well.

I also made this and that thing and sold some of them. I finished my first house, which right now I'm trying to get in a box. (I won't even go into detail about the nightmare that has been.) I got a bit sidetracked from that once I saw the Tinies. How adorable they are! So I made a Tiny squirrel house to sell (see classifieds), and I am working on my next one.

The problem in SL, if you are a builder, is there is so much you want to do and not enough time to do all the ideas.

I've also enjoyed hanging out with my friends from TSO, and meeting new friends, like April, and seeing their houses and things. And I do like playing Bingo and Slingo, and going to Captions, and all that sort of thing - but the building has really taken so much of my time that my playtime has suffered. And for other reasons, I just don't get out much anymore.

I have no previous times to compare all this to.

coco

April,

Well, it's been a somewhat up-and-down year for me. I have moved three times out of necessity, and now have a lovely house (I didn't build it) on Umber on a small island. I have a nice big spa that I can float in, a loving companion and many friends whose company I enjoy.

So although there have been bad times recently I am still here, and am hoping that I will be able to remain in my home for some time and enjoy the scenery and generally relax. And what more can anybody ask for?

This is really the one year mark for me as I started in June of 2004. I have gone from struggling to assemble a newbie house on the side of a land for landless cliff to having a nice little chunk of land in Furu for my garden and animals.

My first significant build was an Anasazi ruin and Native American trading post, then I re-created my Canadian home from Kamloops, now I have a Florida Everglades, green house and gardens.

I don't know what will be next but there are still so many ideas lurking in the back of my mind. Most of them have to do with caves, under water and off planet builds.

I want to create more animals and unusual plants in SL. Right now I am looking into creating plants and animals that are becoming extinct in the rain forest, along with note cards that explain the plant or animal and the fact that it is becoming extinct.

I have met many wonderful people both in world and in the forums. I really miss Andi Apollo, Torley and Ethan Therian. Three very sweet and kind people that I met in SL and feel better for having met them.

A RL remodeling and move are taking a lot of the time that I would spend in SL, but like Chip said, it's the sort of thing that you can come back to.

I am a writer and a dreamer at heart and SL has given me a wonderful opportunity to illustrate my stories and my dreams.

.

"Right now I am looking into creating plants and animals that are becoming extinct in the rain forest, along with note cards that explain the plant or animal and the fact that it is becoming extinct."

Oooo - that sounds like a wonderful idea!

coco

Thank you for posting this, April.

I have only been here six months, and during that time I've had mixed results. While I've met some people and had a lot of fun just hanging out in-world, I've been extremely frustrated by the glitches that cause me to lose huge amounts of work.

Lately I've tiered back up a little and I've been experimenting with making things again, but constantly frustrated at things disappearing in the middle of my work. I have yet to get through a whole session doing any creative work without hitting a frustrating bug-related snag. (Making vehicles lately.)

I am impressed with the size of the world these days. You can travel far and wide, and there is a lot of cool stuff to see. We still have annoying security scripts and teleporting snafus, so exploring is frustrating when you get hit with those, but anyway it is hard to believe there are so many people building things. I think it is fun to explore and look at the things people have created -- some of it truly awful, and some of it wonderful.

I think there is a growing amount of craftsmanship, and over time I think we'll see more and more really well done building.

Buster

I hear ya on that bugs and building thing, Buster. It really wreaks havoc with the larger things one builds. It's added hours to my big build (finally finished). With the smaller ones, it doesn't make so much difference.

coco

Well this is a nice thread to stumble on! Think I'll give it a bump...

The past few months have been pretty light on in-world activity for me, owing to a move from Boston to the Bay Area. Little did I realize that this timezone changing would mean I'd always miss the Town Halls...

Hard to say which is better, building, exploring, or meeting people. I've been having a blast with all three. Scripting has been a lot of fun too, creating scripts that can cause things to happen with objects over a wide area. One of these days I'll get back to creating more clothing...

Why am I wasting my time on this job when I could be in-world, anyway?

So though my days are filled with work and house-hunting at the moment, there's no question I'll be in-world again in a big way. I have way too much fun creating things, even if nobody else sees them, to give it up.

Thank you Zippity, I just wish more people would feel the same way and post.

I'm having a good SL day. Something Cristianno posted in response to a newbie question about animation helped fix a problem I had been having, so I'm having fun making new aminations in Poser and exporting them into SL, woohoo!

Hmm 2005 started off with a bit of a downer - My computer quite literally blowing up.

I bummed around for several months before putting together 'Frankenputer' from spare parts lying around the place - and some donations from friends.

So now it's further down the line.. the new computer is nearly built, and I'm back in world.

I think I needed the break.. I think it solidified the bonds with the true friends I've made here and thinned the circle of aquaintences and 'fair weather friends'. When I left I was fairly aimless, now once again I'm focussed with new goals.

I'd have to say the singlemost thing I'm most proud of is my wifes success in SL. When she joined she wanted to 'go it alone' - and she has, on her own efforts and hard work.
From a 512 plot with a couple of vendors outside a home, to (what I beleive is) one the most extensive collections of clothes by a single person.

The other day someone refered to me as 'her husband' - and to tell the truth, I couldn't have been prouder.

Siggy.

Hi April... I just met you a couple days ago as my bunny self I bet you look great at 2 feet, what a great idea!

This year has been going great, as I finally built a real life computer than can handle SL !

And I just opened my t-shirts shops in Alleni and the tiny city at Neualtenburg

2005 has been an awesome, humbling year so far in SL for me. I finally broke down and got an el-cheapo copy of Poser 4 Artist and busily started hacking away at animations. First giant mecha, now tinies, and on to other wacky and nonstandard things. But the humbling part has come from several truly cool folks--

The Sojourner
Mark Codesmith
lilone Sandgrain and Wilde
Jase Byrne
and several others

They're the kinda folks that, when spending time with them, I am reminded of much that is good about being alive these days. SL is an incredible environment for exploring artistic, social, and technological passions, but in the end (for me) it boils down to some sweet folks. Thanks LL for introducing us all. =)

AND - I forgot to mention! I got my free 512 just the other day, and tonight! My neighbor remembered me and our agreement to sell to each other if we moved, and so she im'd me and sold me the land next to mine! Which I just now got on the website here and verified!

This - along with my lovely homeplace on Azure Islands - well, what more could a person ask for? YAYAYAYAYAYAY What fun.

Course it did put me under my bottom line rule for cash on hand, but hey - I'll make that cash back up eventually. It was worth breaking my rule for! I mean, that's why I KEEP that cash, right?

coco

Great topic April. 2005 so far has been great. In SL it has been more of a finding of myself. Promoting and building / scripting items of THiNC has been great. I thank all of you for your support. I have learned to take breaks in between and have more of a balance of fun & work. As you grow projects get bigger, more daunting, and can get overwelming to where it starts to become more like work than a game. In the beginning, what was that irressitable force that I had to play this game day or night? I believe passion is what should drive us all in SL and in life, a lot of good things can happen this way.