Okay, the saga so far...
In 2006 I got asked to be the COO for a
new startup here in Chicago, and with the first $5,000 I made I was
going to open an early version of my arts center, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, under a different plan than the plan
I use now; and this all eventually became known as 'The Great Fucking
Startup Disaster of 2006,' because it turned out the owner was a
charlatan who had never planned to pay any of his employees, and in
fact the company went out of business just a few weeks after I found
this out and quit, not getting a dime of the $5,000 in pay I had
already accrued at that point. And that meant I had to shut down the
plans to open CCLaP as well, and I was so dejected by all this that I
decided to put CCLaP's plans on hold for an entire year, just so I
could recharge my batteries and be able to get excited about it
again.
So instead I decided to throw all my
attention into this new "virtual world" software I had just
gotten persuaded to try, Second Life, which I was quickly becoming
obsessed with; and I ended up opening a blog just for SL called "In The Grid," which specialized in long-form journalism about all
the cutting-edge things that were being done there at the time in the
arts and sexuality, luckily right in that fabled year when the
virtual world went from a cult favorite to a legitimate mainstream
phenomenon. (You remember, when news magazines were all doing
articles about people making a million real dollars from virtual real
estate, and when companies all decided they needed "virtual
flagship stores" there, and musicians all decided to do a
virtual concert there.) And it was a fascinating year, and my blog
grew to what Google eventually ranked as the #7 most popular
publication on the planet about Second Life; but the evermore complex
software that Linden Labs was always updating was playing havoc on my
little Mac Mini and my puny Virgin Mobile internet connection, right
around the time that a year had finally elapsed and it was time for
me to get serious about CCLaP again; so I ended up quitting Second
Life in summer 2007, and concentrating full-time just on the center,
which I've been doing ever since.
But, in 2011 I ended up getting a new
laptop for the first time in a long time, and one of the reasons was
so I could get involved with Second Life again, this time while
leeching off fast internet connections at public places like cafes,
very specifically so I could get serious about the prefabrication
housing company I had been playing around with in 2006, Fabb, to see
whether I could actually start making a little decent money through
the virtual world. See, as I've talked about many times before, the
key to SL is that it's a blank slate; there's no prescribed reason
from the game's puppetmasters as to "why you're there," and
the act of creating things is kept an open activity that all
customers can do with the right set of tools and training, and a
"micro-economy" is maintained there that lets people around
the planet deposit and withdraw real cash and spend it as virtual
currency; so one of the biggest things that's developed there over
the years is a quite healthy market for things like clothes,
customized skin or tattoos, cars, boats, spaceships, all the way up
mansions. And while something that's not very challenging also
doesn't net you much money there -- a new style of t-shirt, for
example, which a designer can kick out in 20 minutes, can't be sold
for much more than five cents -- something that does require a lot of
labor and effort, like a mansion with scripted doors that open and
close, windows that can be tinted by touching them, an animated
fireplace, an animated waterfall, etc etc, actually can be sold for a
pretty decent chunk of cash all at once, say between five and twenty
bucks depending on the situation. And like ebooks, production costs
are literally zero once you get the first one finished; so the key to
making decent money there is the same key to a small publisher making
decent money at Amazon, by having a "long tail" of as many
digital items as possible, all just sitting there for no warehousing
costs and making you each a little money per month on their own. This
is not a crazy plan, despite what some of you undoubtedly think; with
more than a million daily players there, there are literally
thousands of creators who are making anywhere from a few hundred to a
few thousand dollars there a month, and that kind of scratch could really come in handy in my life.
And in fact I got so serious about it
that I went ahead and upgraded to a premium membership, and bought
some land both as a place to build and a place to eventually create a
retail store, which altogether was costing me $25 a month in
membership fees and "property tax." But after just a few
months, it became ridiculously clear that I was just not going to
have the spare time to sit and put all the insane amount of moving
parts together that needs to go into the kind of prefab home that can
actually sell for ten American dollars; or at least, I was never
going to find that time as long as I was restricted to the daytime
and early evening hours that were needed in order to log in at cafes.
When I had been in SL in 2006, frankly, it was usually right before
bed that I was doing most of my virtual living, a nice 90 minutes for
example between 10:30 and midnight and then rolling right over and
going to sleep; my daytime and early evening hours are now packed
full with CCLaP work, and so with great reluctance I ended up
eventually acknowledging this in 2012 and shutting down my SL account
for a second time.
But! Just last week I got a random
email from Second Life, inviting me to come back and try things out
again; and now of course I'm in my new apartment, which has free
high-speed WiFi all throughout the building that works fantastically,
and now with me being the owner of a huge and insanely fast 30-inch
iMac that was designed specifically to render video graphics well,
one of the several "life upgrades" I was able to give
myself with the settlement money I got for the bad bicycle accident I
was in in 2009 (along with the new apartment, the small loan needed
to start CCLaP's paper publishing program, working vacations to New
York and Los Angeles, and a few other really nice things). So sure,
why not at least boot things up again and see how it goes? And wow,
what a difference a screaming fast machine and screaming fast WiFi
makes at a place like Second Life; now I'm experiencing the virtual
world exactly like it's supposed to be experienced, plus I can go
back to squeezing in random hours late at night right before bed. So
yeah, I think I'm going to try to start visiting the Grid on a
regular basis for the third time again, and see now if this time I
can't finally get serious about getting some actual fucking houses
finished and making a little fucking money!
There will be differences this time --
I'm staying at the free basic level this time, for example, so that I
don't have to feel guilty about going long periods without logging
in. And frankly, the one and only difference between basic and
premium members is whether or not you're allowed to own land; so as
long as you don't mind being homeless (which is not really that bad
in a virtual world -- your suitcase is invisible and infinitely
large, you can't be mugged, and you can instantly teleport to
anywhere on the planet you want to be), otherwise there's not really
any difference to your Second Life experience as a free basic member,
a holdover from Linden's futurist-optimist early days when
tech-hippie and legitimate genius Philip Rosedale was running things.
Of course, this doesn't give me a private space in which to work; but
I can always go to one of the numerous "public sandboxes"
that dot the world, where I can build and then keep a copy of
anything I want, as long as I don't mind other people milling around
me; and this also doesn't give me a place for a retail store within
the virtual world itself, but that's okay because Second Life also
runs its own Amazon on the web, and so it's incredibly easy to just
sell things there catalog-style and have them "delivered"
to customers once they log back into the Grid itself. So, you know,
no more fucking around this third time -- no more spending even a
cent of money until I'm actually starting to make some money, which I
plan on doing first by completing a series of simpler, smaller
"starter homes" for just four or five dollars, stuff I can
actually complete and kick out and start to have some literal actual
money flowing in right away. I have the skills to build these
structures (it's not much more than simplified in-game CAD/CAM
software, an app type I've been using literally since I was in junior
high and logging into McDonnell Douglas's mainframes in the early
'80s), and I now have maybe half the individual components needed to
bring a sophisticated home together (unless you're a guru, you need
to buy from others things like Photoshopped textures to apply to your
walls and floors, little Javascripts that automate animations like
doors opening and water falling, etc), so now it's mostly a matter of
actually sitting down and completing a few houses, and learning for
the first time how to use the "derezzer" software that lets
these homes be opened by the customer. (Since these homes consist of
a lot of small parts, you put them all together in basically a
compressor file, like you would put a bunch of MP3s into a ZIP file;
then the customer gets that looking like a wrapped present, and they
click the box while on their property to have the house "pop
out" and build itself in front of their eyes.)
Anyway, so here's how I looked when I
logged in the other night for the first time in almost two years;
just the same as I did before, the pixie-girl avatar I play most of
the time while there (I'm technically an "omnisexual" in
Second Life, which means I exist in both male and female forms there,
and can morph between one and the other at a moment's notice;
although they're both biologically dedicated to their particular
gender, both of them are bisexual in orientation, and they tend to do
things like wear the same collective set of androgynous clothing.)
Back in 2006, I confess that I was a bit of a clothes horse, in a way
that I've never been in the real world (there's just something about
all those fancy outfits that only cost a quarter or whatever); but as
you see in these photos, for both my second and third incarnations,
for now I'm sticking to just one basic outfit until I start making
some money from what I'm doing there, and only then will I be able to
justify becoming a fashion maven again. (I mean, sure, I ended up
paying something like ten bucks for the one full outfit you see here,
including the specialized hair, skin and tattoos; you've got to at
least look decent while you're in the Grid, or otherwise you
literally look like a newbie who no one else takes seriously.) And
interestingly enough, after logging in again for the first time in
two years, I ended up getting ported straight into the land parcel
that I used to own in 2011 as a premium member, although now of
course I don't, although luckily for me no one else does either. That
should be interesting, to see what the owner/abandoned ratio now is
for land within the Grid here in 2014; that turned out to be a huge
bubble in 2006 when I was first visiting, a "virtual scarcity"
because of too many new players that a few smart entrepreneurs
literally made millions from, but a market whose bottom immediately
fell out once the amount of new land (new servers) caught up with the
post-trendy slowdown of customer demand.
Once I got everything reviewed and my
avatar's details a little tweaked out the other night, I didn't
really have much time left before bedtime, but I did decide to at
least go visit a nightclub for a short visit while I was there, which
is the paradigm off which almost all social interaction takes place
within Second Life; or not just danceclubs specifically, but virtual
versions of any kind of public gathering place, whether that's a
coffeehouse, sex club, live-music venue, corporate conference center
or whathaveyou, which you can basically think of as really fancy chat
rooms. (Players gather at these spaces mostly to talk back and forth
to each other, either through text or via live microphones on all
their home computers, sometimes with a live DJ or musician somewhere
in the real world who is literally doing a live real-time set of
music at the time, which everyone there is hearing in real time; and
so this makes it freaky when that person might make a real-time
reference on their mic to something an avatar in the virtual club
might be doing at that moment, and adds to the sometimes overwhelming
sense of "immersion" that one is always trying to go for
when hanging out in a virtual world [that is, the sense that you are
literally there in that cartoon room, not sitting in your pajamas in
front of your computer screen].)
So in this case, for example, I went to
a privately owned commercial complex simply called "Metropolis
City," which as you can see here is the kind of visually
gorgeous experience I'm now FINALLY experiencing in Second Life
because of my screaming fast computer and internet connection, the
kind of overwhelming sense of real space and flabbergasting graphics
that are always touted as the best thing about being there. Although
this is kind of a cheat, to be truthful -- the vast majority of
buildings you're seeing in these photos are just big empty boxes that
you can't actually go inside of, with in reality only a handful of
smaller buildings on ground level that actually have stuff on their
insides that you can go and explore. And this nicely shows off what
is far and away the most common means of conducting a business within
the Grid when an entrepreneur gets serious about making decent money;
namely, for a thousand-dollar setup fee and $200 a month you can rent out an
entire server from Linden, which gives you a "private island"
that is 64,000 square meters in virtual size, but because of
bandwidth restrictions only lets you build a certain amount of
"prims" upon it (a "prim" being any basic shape
that exists in Second Life, which can only be 10 meters cubed at its
absolute largest -- so a 10-meter-high wall is one prim, and an
ashtray is one prim, and a tabletop is one prim, and a car tire is
one prim, etc etc etc). I forget what the specific number is, but
it's certainly not enough to create detailed interior hallways and
rooms in all these giant skyscrapers you're seeing here; so what a
business owner will typically do with a private island is create a
series of more detailed commercial buildings in the center of the
space (a danceclub for hanging out, a store for selling stuff, maybe
a casino, etc), then will decorate the rest of the island with a
series of basic but pretty-looking things that are there just for
show, just for ambiance. (I mean, obviously I can walk through this
entire structure, as you're seeing in the photos; it's just that this
is more like a movie set than a real place. And of course this ratio
between decoration and useable space changes from one island to the
next, depending on the attitude of the owner and what that space is
being used for.)
And then one final surprise before
logging out; it turns out that I'm not homeless after all, but that I
still own the crappy suburban ranch house that Second Life now gives
all basic members, whether or not they ever end up upgrading to
premium. (This is a new development since I was originally there in
2006, and basically consists of these entire continents there
containing nothing but endless fields of generic suburban houses,
which basic members are able to decorate but not to alter in any
fundamental way.) It's a strange experience to be in SuburbiaWorld,
kind of like Kafka-meets-Douglas-Coupland; but it'll do for now, as
at least a space for me to chill when going through other things like
my inventory or scanning the map, so I'll take it.
So anyway, so long for now from the
newly reactivated Grid, and here's hoping that things finally start
becoming financially worthwhile soon from my time being spent there.
Just IM "Zad Cornell" if you're a virtual citizen too, and
ever want to hang out there!
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