What's it like spending Easter in Second Life? Well…

First, you try your hand at building on a friend's piece of land. But you get lazy and decide to take a dip in said friend's lake…but of course continue to build about 40 meters away.

Second, enjoy the Easter sunset…

Third, enjoy the Easter moon…

Provide proof that you were still working up in the air 40 meters away…

Then host an Easter edition of Building Shelter to be crashed by the Linden Bunny.  Or rather, Bunny Linden in this case…

After only a few hours of sleep, I was up again. I had to check to see if there was any progress made in getting new people onto Help Island from Orientation Island. I found kai performing the ferry duty, so it was apparent that nothing had yet happened. After a quick chat, I flew off to find Coal, who was already online and on Help Island. She was apparently unaware of the problems from last night. How word of that didn't get passed around is beyond me. After filling her in a bit, I took a little break. When I returned I found Coal on Orientation Island helping to ferry the new folks over to Help Island. kai was still there as well, but had apparently just returned. I took the time to hang out and rant a bit on things. I'm trying not to be much of a ranter, but I was tired and feeling a bit snippy.

I came in again later in the evening to see that the Mentors had rigged up a hot air balloon to ferry the new people across. An interesting technique to be sure. I wouldn't have expected this to work as new people couldn't cross the sim boundary on their own. Apparently sitting on something that moves across solved that little technicality. Good thinking guys.

I next popped into the Shelter to hang out a bit. Not long after my arrival did not only the Shelter, but the entire grid get attacked by some interesting little self-replicating virii objects. The had liked to screw with gravity and push people up 4000ish meters. Since I was sitting on a dance ball, I and the rest of us were unaffected. We hung out a bit hoping it would get fixed and trying to get anyone that popped in to quick sit down. FireEyes rezzed us a copy of his audience stands so we could have a sit without dancing. The time dilation was sitting at 0 or .01 and the sim FPS got knocked down to 0. Wow. I eventually lost my connection and the Lindens had shut off new logins while they tried to fix the world.

 
Wonder what tomorrow will bring.

Last night was my first teaching class as an actual Instructor. So it's only to be expected that nobody showed up. Well, 15 minutes into the class we had a few people show up. I had almost taken off at that point since there was a GOV that I typically try to attend. Once class got going, though, we ended up with a fairly large turnout. By the end, only three people that were there from the start had managed to last the entire class (about 90 minutes), but they seemed happy with it. This happened to also be the class where I followed my outline and not a script. I don't think I did all that bad, but I was rushing a bit since we had started late.

Later in the night I took some time to hang out in the Shelter. A call came into the Mentor group announcing that new citizens could no longer make it onto Help Island. The Lindens were quick on the case. Teeple Linden started a shuttle service where he would fly to Orientation Island, get a name for a resident ready to go to Help Island, fly back to HI, and teleport the citizen there.

That quickly changed to having a Mentor hang out on OI to IM him when new people were ready to move on. I took the second shift on the island and managed to move a few residents along to the island before I had to run off to bed. I'd just like to say thanks to Teeple and Nicole, a couple of great Lindens who did what they could to get through the situation. It was a nice, quiet time to relax and offer some real help. Aside from it being rather inefficient, I think it was nice to have a person waiting at the end of OI to welcome the new person into the next stage.

A couple of months ago I entered this nifty little virtual world called Second Life. For once in my life I found a place where I belonged. It felt as if everything I'd done prior was in preparation for my virtual life here. Build my own stuff? Great, I can do that. Script it to give it some advanced features? Not a problem. In fact, I ended up opening up and actually becoming, dare we say, outgoing.

I have this fear that one day it will all come crashing down, but I'm determined to enjoy it while it lasts. At risk of sounding full of myself (something I would feel endlessly guilty about saying in the "real" world), I excel in Second Life. And it's a good feeling.

I've already made quite a slew of wonderful friends. I think that's what has appealed to me the most so far. I've managed to find myself in a place where the people are not only friendly, but completely non-competitive and self-sacrificing. We all simply join together to make the place a little better for everyone. Where can you find that in real life anymore?