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| Amandia |
Tuesday, February 28, 2017
I'm not a photographer but I play one in Second Life.
I know nothing about shadow and light or composition or any of the other technical aspects of photography. I don't even know how to use Photoshop. I bought it and looked at the menus and whatnots and for all its alien words and options it might as well have been an academic journal on nuclear physics. One of the reasons I love Second Life is that none of that matters. I can entertain my seemingly constant need to snap what I see and it doesn't matter what people think because this isn't real life. There's also the fact that I can control the weather...
Tuesday, February 7, 2017
Noob follies - the first two months
(rez day: Aug 15, 2016) I was lucky to have a very patient friend bring me into Second Life and
show me the basics. Before I even logged on, she had me download Firestorm (one of the things I'm most grateful to her for). After I rezzed and took a few minutes to figure out how to move around, I promptly fell through a gap in the floor and landed in a small room with no doors or stairs. I would have given up right then and there (or Googled how to get out of the basement) but my friend teleported me to a freebie mall. She showed me how to "buy" freebie clothes and shoes and how to open boxes, maneuver my inventory, put on clothing and use alphas. She taught me about sandboxes and explained how I couldn't open boxes just anywhere. She explained how to set my graphics for minimum lag and how to search for places and teleport there. She warned me not to accept any invites or gifts from anyone I didn't know (which was everyone), especially vampires. And of course, she took me to a nude beach.
A few days later, her computer got fried and I didn't see her in world for two months. I kept bugging her through facebook to help me each time I got stuck with something but after a while I felt like it was all we ever talked about and I didn't want to bother her so much. Being new in Second Life is a constant shit show. So within a couple weeks, I began the stumbling joy of discovering the fundamental elements of the virtual world, which are so numerous and unforeseen that they continue cropping up six months later.
I was about a week in, wandering around Freebie Galaxy (shudder) when I got a message from a nice lady who commented on my "duck walk" and bought me my first AO - that 1L basic girl AO you see a lot of newbs using - and yeah, I let her. And she was a vampire too. I almost expected a computer virus when she sent it to me but instead, she instructed me on how to use it. I was surprisingly very excited to see my avi walking like a real woman with a sexy swing in her hips. Before I knew it, she was taking me to the Maitreya store. She walked me to the display, dumped 2700 lindens on me and told me to buy the body (and how to buy it). She also told me I should wear and use nothing but mesh. I had no idea what that meant and she was in a rush so I thanked her kindly and we went our separate ways. The body sat in my inventory for the next several weeks because I was afraid to mess with it. I was afraid to mess with anything for fear of breaking it.
I continued grabbing up freebies for a couple more weeks, attempting to build a decent wardrobe and started to notice the vast range of quality in the clothes. I didn't realize it at the time but I was already only keeping the mesh stuff and deleting everything else. I only wanted things that looked "real". Someone showed me the marketplace and I spent a good hour one day buying all the most beautiful clothes and shoes and accessories I could find, only to discover they weren't in fact free, but DEMOS! One of the demos I had put on was the Amalia dress from Blueberry and I loved it so much I couldn't bear to delete it.
Meanwhile, I had already found plenty of places to listen to great music and dance and made several new friends. I added "I'm just here to dance" to my profile but couldn't figure out how to take or add a picture yet. One of my new friends introduced me to Linden Realms and gem hunting and before I knew it, I was making lindens. After a while I was able to afford the Blueberry dress. I spent most of my time exploring and dancing and chatting with people from all over the world. I found out I liked to help other newbs figure out the things that had been shown to me and so I would message people I could tell were new and offer to explain things to them. I made even more friends that way. One of them showed me Strawberry Singh's blog, which had prompted her to join Second Life in the first place and I was blown away by how beautiful Strawberry's avi was and how much she knew about fashion and how to maneuver Second Life. I didn't understand much of what she was talking about but I loved watching her unboxing vids and I would sometimes teleport to the stores she talked about to find cool stuff. Unfortunately, that's when I realized that chasing gems was not going to suffice for my level of impatience and it was cutting into my dancing time.....enter, the credit card!
early memorable moments include:
-finding myself hairless, running in place on a stage in the middle of a live show, thinking I had to wait it out instead of relogging
-getting stuck in walls and thinking I broke the world
-while exploring a sim, flying into someone's private home and walking around to find them having sex in the hot tub...then that frozen running in place thing again
-accidentally clicking the "sit anywhere" option on my AO HUD and thinking my avi was permanently broken
-thinking my avi stayed around after I logged out and worrying about her being messed with or worse, killed by trolls
-not understanding that everyone could read local chat and having a very private conversation with a friend in a crowded club.
-forgetting to stop a dance hud before teleporting out and thinking I had to relog in order to fix it
-walking around with 3 outfits on
-doing a sexy leg-kicking, floor-rolling dance for several minutes facing a line of dancing guys, only to discover my new mesh body had a vagina and it was now necessary for me to wear underwear (or an alpha!)
More later.
A few days later, her computer got fried and I didn't see her in world for two months. I kept bugging her through facebook to help me each time I got stuck with something but after a while I felt like it was all we ever talked about and I didn't want to bother her so much. Being new in Second Life is a constant shit show. So within a couple weeks, I began the stumbling joy of discovering the fundamental elements of the virtual world, which are so numerous and unforeseen that they continue cropping up six months later.
I was about a week in, wandering around Freebie Galaxy (shudder) when I got a message from a nice lady who commented on my "duck walk" and bought me my first AO - that 1L basic girl AO you see a lot of newbs using - and yeah, I let her. And she was a vampire too. I almost expected a computer virus when she sent it to me but instead, she instructed me on how to use it. I was surprisingly very excited to see my avi walking like a real woman with a sexy swing in her hips. Before I knew it, she was taking me to the Maitreya store. She walked me to the display, dumped 2700 lindens on me and told me to buy the body (and how to buy it). She also told me I should wear and use nothing but mesh. I had no idea what that meant and she was in a rush so I thanked her kindly and we went our separate ways. The body sat in my inventory for the next several weeks because I was afraid to mess with it. I was afraid to mess with anything for fear of breaking it.
I continued grabbing up freebies for a couple more weeks, attempting to build a decent wardrobe and started to notice the vast range of quality in the clothes. I didn't realize it at the time but I was already only keeping the mesh stuff and deleting everything else. I only wanted things that looked "real". Someone showed me the marketplace and I spent a good hour one day buying all the most beautiful clothes and shoes and accessories I could find, only to discover they weren't in fact free, but DEMOS! One of the demos I had put on was the Amalia dress from Blueberry and I loved it so much I couldn't bear to delete it.
Meanwhile, I had already found plenty of places to listen to great music and dance and made several new friends. I added "I'm just here to dance" to my profile but couldn't figure out how to take or add a picture yet. One of my new friends introduced me to Linden Realms and gem hunting and before I knew it, I was making lindens. After a while I was able to afford the Blueberry dress. I spent most of my time exploring and dancing and chatting with people from all over the world. I found out I liked to help other newbs figure out the things that had been shown to me and so I would message people I could tell were new and offer to explain things to them. I made even more friends that way. One of them showed me Strawberry Singh's blog, which had prompted her to join Second Life in the first place and I was blown away by how beautiful Strawberry's avi was and how much she knew about fashion and how to maneuver Second Life. I didn't understand much of what she was talking about but I loved watching her unboxing vids and I would sometimes teleport to the stores she talked about to find cool stuff. Unfortunately, that's when I realized that chasing gems was not going to suffice for my level of impatience and it was cutting into my dancing time.....enter, the credit card!
early memorable moments include:
-finding myself hairless, running in place on a stage in the middle of a live show, thinking I had to wait it out instead of relogging
-getting stuck in walls and thinking I broke the world
-while exploring a sim, flying into someone's private home and walking around to find them having sex in the hot tub...then that frozen running in place thing again
-accidentally clicking the "sit anywhere" option on my AO HUD and thinking my avi was permanently broken
-thinking my avi stayed around after I logged out and worrying about her being messed with or worse, killed by trolls
-not understanding that everyone could read local chat and having a very private conversation with a friend in a crowded club.
-forgetting to stop a dance hud before teleporting out and thinking I had to relog in order to fix it
-walking around with 3 outfits on
-doing a sexy leg-kicking, floor-rolling dance for several minutes facing a line of dancing guys, only to discover my new mesh body had a vagina and it was now necessary for me to wear underwear (or an alpha!)
More later.
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| Yay for freebies! |
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| More freebies - with flexi hair |
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