Why did you start Second Life?

I came because I thought it was an opportunity to speak to people who are at least semi-fluent in English.

I heard about SL roughly a year before I joined up but didn't have a computer capable of running the viewer or enough disposable income to take the plunge. Prior to joining SL I'd been heavily into chat forums such as Guardian Talk, had burnt myself out on the heavy politics slamming and needed a break so SL seemed to fit the bill.

I came into SL with no preconceptions or expectations, merely curiosity as to what this 3D virtual world might be and soon became totally hooked. Within a week I went premium and soon after got my parcel of first land. Since then I've met all sorts of people.. good, bad and all stations in between. I've learnt a bit about 3D modelling / building, had a go at community building and do live music performances.

Whenever I become jaded about life in SL I stumble across something new that reinvents SL for me. It's been one helluva trip so far and I feel as if I've barely started out.

Lol and now she hogs the covers

I have been on the net since 1992, first BBS then IRC (so many people here dont know what that is, its Internet Relay Chat). A guy i was in a relationship with on irc said he had been coming here. He turned out to be a rat, and one day just didnt come back, so I thought i would check it out, figuring he had given up on irc because SL was good.

I had run a successful channel on irc for two years, in a server called Bondage.com, so the sex side of SL didnt bother me one way or the other. I used to be on Virtual Words, which was pretty deadly boring at the time, dont know if its changed.

I arrived as Ruth, did the usual fumbling around and crashing into people and messing up my avatar on orientation island. Then I met another newbie girl who dragged me along to FreeDove (thanks Dusti) and started to fill up my inventory... yummmm... freebie goodies.

Changed clothes behind a bush in NCI for a while. I met a really nice guy who gave me a shape and skin (i had no idea what a great gift that was at the time but i am still wearing the same shape and skin today, thanks Bohkka, i cant wear anything else now).

Then rented a little cottage for 250 linden a week, then moved up to a penthouse, then rented my own bit of beach... got a job, and the rest is history to those that know me.

I havent been back to irc, and doubt i will now. At least one of the people i knew there is here, including, presumably, the rat. I hope i never run into him!!

I work, build, take classes, socialise, have a shop, help to run a club. Everything that appeals to me

If i had to give one piece of advice to a newbie it would be "Never avoid a conversation... your network is your treasure here, you can learn so much from others, and your friends will support you and help you when you need it, and you get great joy and satisfaction from helping them when you can"

I have seen many changes, but i still love SL, and i will weather this current storm one way or the other, I would hate to have to leave (but i wont be giving my Passport to Aristotle)

Just another resident.. SL Rocks
Imogen

Building, mostly.

I came after reading an article in Popular Science (really a couple of months after when I was on vacation) Being a computer junkie that I am I had to keep up on the latest, greatest.
I first experiment with building and scripting. Later I made friends and glad that I did.

A few years ago I devised a game for the teen poetry members of a forum I belong to…had one of them check it out and give me some feedback…well..the streets where there..the houses were there but there was no interaction…so I gave up.

Then one day a couple of months a go I read about SL in a forum..the girls were discussing how they went dancing and had sex (for laughs). A light went on …this was what I had wanted to create but didn’t have the know how to do…

So I came in…all Ruthie’d and jerky I blundered around until I decided I wanted to make a contribution here.

I opened a premium account – bought some land and slowly made a circle of friends. I am in the process of putting together my first book of poetry for SL and will print and publish it myself. I’m also scouting out an area for my bookstore.

SL has the most creative minds in the world…I have never experienced such diversity in people and places before! I can sit on a flower and live in a shoe and talk to a Raptor named Logan! I can tease a Furry and make my own gift boxes and dance though I have 2 left feet in RL! I can fly and swim and get naked!

There are those who only come here for the sex (yea, I meet them all the time so I tell them I’m 103 in RL and this is my way of passing time in the nursing home).

There are some wonderful people here – from every country – and they are the reason I stick around. And someday, I will buy an island and name all the streets after poets and invite all my poetry buddies to live and write with me.

First time I heard about SL and joined was when I was playing There. A group of friends dragged me over to check it out (funny enough, they never stayed) and I wandered around aimlessly for a day or so until I got stuck in a gay porn art store. I couldnt find a door, had no clue about teleporting, none of the friends that brought me here had stuck with the game, so I logged out and gave up. We stayed on There for quite a while after.

I came back after I took a break from being online and another group of friends said they had moved to SL and to come try it. Oddly enough, when I got SL to send me my username and password again (I had forgotten lol) I logged in in the same gay porn shop. At least this time I had people that could tell me how to get out!

I actually had no clue about what SL really was either time I got brought here, just that you could build and create content and dance at clubs. Which may be why I was so surprised by the porn shop that my perverted lil av apparently spent 2 years sitting in

I got hooked because of my former roommate's son. He visited and showed us stuff he was doing in the teen grid and told us that there was a "grown-ups" version. I checked it out, flew around a bit in a haze and ended up with cybernetic parts and a sword sitting in a post-apocolyptic sim with my roommate (on another computer) and some cool cats.

I usually go for broke for a few months then lose interest for a few months...I generally cancel my premium account in the summertime, but now I have a shop so I can't!

I go from building sprees to DJing small clubs I built to RP to combat in Carnage Island and combinations thereof.

I checked out the whole sex thing for a little...mostly out of humor because I'd wear robot parts or be a dinosaur while getting it on. It got old quick. It DEFINITELY didn't keep me here!

Unfortunately with all the press the SL sex industry has been getting I fear people might be coming primarily for that feature nowadays. Maybe the requirement to give LL your extremely personal information will deter that and it can go back to being a creative place.

It is becoming a self fufilling prophecy, ironically.

For me personally ..... ,

I have been a chatter since 1995 with things like Bravochat ... Alamak etc. I met my RL misses in 1997 yes ONLINE.... we been married for 10 years now.

We dabbled in various different chats but essentially they all got boring after time with the normal lies and "look at me" attention seekers. Pretty much we had knocked the chatting on the head ........then one day

I watched a program on the fiture of the internet with Alan Yentob on the BBC. On it Alan had an avatar so I thought I would go and have a looky.

So signed up an account and logged myself in. Needless to say the misses wanted to know what it was all about. ... so she joined up.

I went over to premium about a week later and the misses about 2 weeks after that ...... now been on 5 months ..... and we are thinking of an island ....

Its bette than TV and socially ... anklebiters put pay to that .... we do it for fun ..
Enjoy the creativity ... and look forward to many more months


Mart

Perverted little avie Funny.

--
Another website I visit mentioned a group meeting in SL and so I decided to see what SL was like (had heard about it for years, but never gave it a chance). Went directly to the group meeting, though, without stopping at help island, or orientation, or anything like that

My friend was taking a college course on graphic design or something. His teacher told him about SL so he tried it. He told me there was this "game" on the internet where people are paying thousands of dollars to buy land and houses and stuff. I said no friggin way. What kind of people would buy land and stuff in a game? So I checked it out. I'm not much of a builder or chatter or scripter but I love playing GTA just cuz it's like a world you could mess around in without having a real purpose. This was incredibly more interesting in SL where each person in the game was actually a real life person. And I could fly! My friend and I had lots of fun trying to blow each other up and stuff like that. We walked around as bananna phones and collected free stuff. I eventually learned not everyone likes to be blown up or caged. I played slingo and tringo to earn money (to buy weapons) and started making friends. Got a cool zombie AV for cheap, got a tiny shape from a friend, mixed and matched and became what I am today.

I told my wife about SL and got her to join. She was immediately whisked away from the WA and led to some person's sex den. He told her to take off her clothes but we couldn't figure out how to do that. I found him later and gave him some good griefing and told him to stay away from my wife LOL.

These days my wife says it's boring and my friend is always playing WOW. I keep trying to convince him to give me his L$. I have made a bunch of good friends. I was saving my L$ to get a wand from Starax but was about 1000 away when he left. I have been inspired by the awesome builds. So much that I am going to go back to college in about a month and learn more about graphics and stuff. Who knows? Maybe a new career for me.

I was part of the TSO refugee wave. TSO was dying and had gotten boring to me personally. I heard about SL and tried it. Went premium within 2 days of joining. Got my assigned my first land day 3. Got cheated out of it day 5. Brought my first family member to join me in SL day 7.

As far as the sex goes. When I joined it didn't exist as a huge thing yet. We didn't have animations till the first major update AFTER I joined. Years later I did get involved in the sex business as an animator and over the last month or so have solwly been phasing out that business. Thats right kiddies by next week Cheap Sex animations and PL Gay love animations wont exist at all even on SLExchange. Why? Paul and I stopped having any interest in making them well over ayear ago. Haven't done any new work on them in months. No point in keeping it alive any longer.

This new verification thing really is moot to the family and Dragon Isle. By the time its in place the island will effectively be PG. The only reason we particularly care is if they make it mandatory gridwide. Some of the family live in countries where providing the information asked for is illegal. If things went that way I would rather see unverifieds retricted to PG sims than my family leave SL.

I am so crazily busy in real life that I was told to "get a life" so I did and here I am in Secondlife.
I loved the free expression and the art. i love the people I meet. My lovers and my friends. I love being ME in another world.
But now ...
well it is starting to become a scene from "Cabaret" and I will NOT relinquish my privacy to play.

My niece mentioned in an off hand way that she was writing a paper on SL for a Social Studies class. Curious what on-line environment could have caught the attention of Academia, I signed up. I was too suspicious that day to give my payment details to LL, who I'd never heard of, LOL.

I was hooked from the first day. Explored and admired what people had built for a week or two, then couldn't resist becoming premium, buying land, and starting in with building. I keep telling myself that I'm spending money that could otherwise be spent at a movie theater or something.

The creative outlet is what's addictive for me. Unfortunately, I have left a promising budding interest in composing music in RL untouched since signing up. Must get back to that some day soon. But my head is full of virtual architecture ideas too, oh dear...

-Fo

It was either this or prison the judge said. I think I screwed up.

Stay here long enough. you'll probably wind up in prison for something or another.

/points at his start date.

They'll get to you..eventually.

I first heard about it in a chatroom where someone I simply cannot stand was mouthing off about how awful SL is. Of course, being ornery, I HAD to sign up and find out how great it was (Rule of thumb with this guy: If he says it's bad, it's good, if he says it's awful, it's amazing! Gah. Just thinking about him makes me mad! Pontificating about this and that. GRRRRR... smug ass. *ahem* Sorry... ).
So I joined, did the intro thing (Which, contrary to what many say, was more than sufficient to at least help me wander around and find stuff etc.) then found a friend who I had met elsewhere. They showed me around a little, coincidentally ending up at yet ANOTHER friend's house!
It took me about three days to decide to get land and another four for that plot of FirstLand to get bought out for twice the price, giving me a nice nest egg. I bought another plot a short time later, but I had started building by this point and found I needed more prims (which was my rallying cry for a while! *grin*). Pretty soon, I had a nice bit of land and a nice little business selling tshirts and stuff, which allowed me to not have to pay tier.

Basically, other than the fact that my computer seems to crash arbitrarily (one day I'm on for hours at a time, the next, the comp goes "Eeeeeyeah... Um... why don'tcha go ahead and restart me. That'd be greeeeat." in the exact same spot in the sim. I dunno. *grin* I know my comp is crappy, but it's SO odd how it does that.) with this newest update, and that sales are down quite a bit for no apparant reason, I'm still loving Second Life as much, if not more, than I did when I first got hooked.

Yeah, for all the complaining you hear on here there are 20x more people that love SL...they might be alts, though.

But seriously, there's nothing else like SL out now and I think I'd stay even if something else DID come along. There's just too much already built up for me to dismiss!

I guess I might leave for something else if my friends did, too, though. It's all about the quality of the community for me!

I remember some years back reading articles about SL, and how you could own items and buy land. I remember in particular an article about someone being the first to buy a private island, it was big news that someone paid several thousand dollars for their own piece of virtual real estate. I kept thinking I should go check into it, but at the time I was involved with many other things. Eventually everything wound down, and for the first time in awhile I found myself with some free time, Saw another article about SL, and finallly decided to try it. My first reaction was pretty negative. Stuff on Orientation Island was broken by something called a grey goo fence, i looked ugly and moved very stiff. (still to this day I don't understand why LL doesn't start AVs off looking and moving nice). I didn't know where to go or what to do. So after a few hours of flying around I logged off. But for whatever reason I kept coming back and the more I tried it, the more I liked it. I wish now I had tried it sooner but you know what they say about hindsight

I saw the same video, and started playing for just about the same reasons.

I've been online since EQ and WoW. Not to mention beta testing a lot of others that didn't make the cut.

I made some great friends, some really close ones who wandered from WoW and landed in SL. Next thing I knew I was invited over to be with them again so here I am. I've been having a blast.

CAeTe
Chevalier