A conversation about birthdays in the #secondlife IRC channel reminded me… as of next week, the avatar “Cubey Terra” is two years old.
Few people know, however, that I didn’t start in SL as “Cubey”. I started as “Tillman Terra” two years ago this week.
Tillman Terra as of September 5, 2003: my first SL account
I didn’t really like the name Tillman — I borrowed it from a character in a story that I was writing at the time — so I cancelled Tillman Terra and created a new one. “Cubey” was a nickname that I’d previously picked up on another blog. And so “Cubey Terra” was born.
Sniff. Ah memories. Seriously, it hardly feels like I’ve been part of Second Life this long. Time seems to zip past. If you asked me what I did in the last two years in SL… well, my mind would go completely blank. It’s all a blur. Then when I get past that initial confusion, I’ll think of Abbotts Aerodrome, of course. That’s been the single biggest project I’ve worked on.
There are other things in SL that stand out — sometimes just details — some significant, some not. I remember things like in my first week of SL, when I was actually afraid to go into Jessie because I thought dying might wipe my inventory and reset me back to the start, like a game. I also remember my first experiments with building in Morris. I took the Linden flamingo, stretched it really huge and put it on a pedestal with a lantern in its beak. I also remember hanging out with the michievous Lola Bombay and being so very impressed that she could make Trent Hedges’ Harley not only drive but fly!
Back then, Show and Tell was a well-attended, regular event at Stage 4 (where the Welcome Area is now). All of the top designers were there to show off their latest creations. In fact, there were so few people in SL that it was possible to meet almost everyone just by going to events at Stage 4.
I also remember the thrill I got from contructing my first theatre in Natoma, on Delerium Island. I couldn’t, at that point, script my way out of a wet paper bag, so my main interest was running events at “Theatre Terra”. The world was a swath of “Public” land with patches of private land scattered across it, so finding a patch was as easy as picking your favourite sim and moving in. Crushing taxes, of course, made actually keeping any amount of land a difficult, if not impossible, proposition. Without GOM to buy L$ from, we had to earn everything through events and sales.
This blog entry is turning into the clip show episode, isn’t it?
Why, remember when… [insert wobbly flashback transition]…
- Public land was everywhere.
- Any objects left on Public land “decayed” over a period of time until they too were public and anyone could claim them.
- The welcome area was a grassy hilltop with a wide, grassy road down to Stage 4.
- Events were listed not in a window, but on a billboard near Stage 4.
- The Linden Liasons (well, mostly Jeff Linden) hosted weekly Avatar of the Week contests at the Linden-owned amphitheatre in Clara.
- Bingo at the Boardwalk
- The Linden-owned Avatar Central shops in Natoma and Aqua.
- Bhodi Silverman’s art gallery in the northwest corner of Jessie.
- A green — not blue — interface on SL.
- Objects cost L$10 per prim to rez, so if you spent all your money on a 50-prim pair of wings, you’d have to save up another L$500 just to be able to wear them. Shooting a gun meant your L$ balance went down L$10 per bullet. If you lost your bullets onto no-script land (no temporary prims, remember), you’d be out a whole whack of money.
- There was a weekly tax on pretty much everything: land, light objects, and objects in the air, just to mention a few. “Born free, taxed to death” signs abounded.
- The drama of 1.2, where land would be payed for with real cash, and you could buy L$ from something called GOM. I was adamant that bringing US dollars into the game would ruin it.
- Tan was the centre of the world, and Public land was very expensive there… L$2 per sqare meter!
- Federal was the eastern edge of the world and was a pain to get to because you had to either pay for point-to-point teleport (if you had a landmark already) or fly there!
- Flight scripts were rare and extremely difficult to write because LL hadn’t introduced vehicle physics yet. Most planes didn’t move anything like planes.
- There was only one island sim — Cayman.
- Americana.
- LindenWorld amusement park.
- Poetry events hosted by Garth and Pituca (before their SL wedding) at their posh seaside home in Clyde.
- My weekly bad poetry improvs.
- Market events hosted by Lynn Lippman in Immaculate.
- The arrival of those mysterious hat-shaped things all over SL called “telehubs”.
- When Linden Lab brought new sims online, it was HUGE NEWS and everyone flocked to see them.
- Snow sims! Wow!
- The world getting so big that even longtime SLers could get lost without looking at the map.
[wobbly flashback transition]
And stuff like that. It’s been a fun and horribly addictive two years. Here’s to year three!