People these days will go to any length to avoid really doing something. Plop my ass on the couch and pretend to be something I am not in a place I can’t really go to? I am sure that many Americans can’t wait to get completely inactive and live a lie, but there are still some of us who prefer to live our own lives.

Second Life = Get A Life

Second Life is more than a 3D Lie. People have plopped their ass on the couch and pretended to be something they are not in a place they can’t really go to since 1926 (when television was invented).

I enjoy Second Life and I have my imaginary nightclub (VooDoo Lounge) and Live Music venue I have run there for two years. My imagination supports 30 DJs, producers and RL performers from all over the world.
I’ll leave a V.I.P. pass at the door for you Feck:-)

have you tried it feck? don’t knock it until you try it.

I decided to check it out after I heard yearly kos will hold some events there.

i’m now using it as another medium for my satire (i write a satirical political called jesus’ general) I opened a disco club called club rudy to satirize the the support guliani receives from social conservatives. i’m reaching a whole new audience.

it’s all very experimental, but I think there some potential for involving people in political actions.

i’m opening a meeting place soon for activists and people interested in creating political theater. i’m calling it cafe wellstone.

there are also a lot of fascinating places to visit–crappy places too–but that’s the internet.

Hey RS, Fitzgerald or Fitzpatrick? Pick one and stick with it!

As to the relevance of Second Life, I just wish people would live their lives in the real world, though I can understand the appeal of being who you are completely with a sense of anonymity.

Feck | 4/26/2007, 5:59 pm EST
People these days will go to any length to avoid really doing something. Plop my ass on the couch and pretend to be something I am not in a place I can’t really go to? I am sure that many Americans can’t wait to get completely inactive and live a lie, but there are still some of us who prefer to live our own lives.

yet another who signed up, peeked around and judeged an entire system on his limited experience.

so, according to feck, those who do have some creative talent, who actually use those talents to thier own ends and to improve thier rl talents, are in your mind little more than couch potatos?

i beg to differ. see those who actually spend more than 15 minutes in SL will know, you are far from inactive. sounds like another case of im too full of dudeness to bother to find out about what really goes on here so ima put it down because my creativity onlyextends to which new starburst flavors i can create with the new berries and cream pack. :-/

Second Life is an amazing place.. The opportunities for learning and creating are limitless. The opportunity to meet people you would never be able to in rl are boundless.

call me (or IM me) in five years when this technology really takes off. Everything is too slow, too limiting, and the graphics are medicore. If I’m gonna choose a fake world over the real world, it’s gonna have to be one kickass fake world. Maybe soon we’ll get an advancement in cell phone technology that will allow us to essentially co-exist in both the real and fake world at the same time. People will be having a second identity that they can switch back and forth from effortlessly as they walked down the street…
Second Life is the Wolfenstein 3D of virtual worlds. I’m holding out for the Doom equilvalent (or maybe even Quake).

Thanks for showing my dome build in the background pic, really made my day

I think that like the internet, Secondlife will go through a few iterations before being broadly accepted.

Most residents do believe in the “Big Future”, how else can you explain the immense commitment of time and money?

I’m eagerly anticipating the day when SL (or a variant of it) is as common in daily speech as “I’ll email you.”

Maxx

maxxmonde(at)gmai l.com

We are still inventing it, but in my opinion something like SL is not an option but a necessity for the future. If we are to reduce car and plane travel to an extent that mitigates climate change, we need distance collaborative tools beyond what we settle for today. I’ll see you there!

This was such an awesome, rockstar article!

people have pretended to be in another place since the damn novel was invented, and probably even before that, gathering around cave fires and telling stories. SL is just the latest iteration of it.

I don’t know if anyone mentioned it, but the vandals weren’t specifically Republican. They’re just general vandals.

What most people don’t realize is that this will BE the internet in less than a decade.
Why is that? Human beings are three-dimensional creatures by default. It is instinctive within us to respond to 3D environments rather than 2D ones. Go to a shop rather than browse a website, for instance.
A 3D place makes it much easier for non-techies to relate to the Internet, to social communication, to information gathering.
Second Life will continue. That I am sure of. The thing is, there are about 50 other virtual worlds out there, more coming in daily. What I see happening is a common platform for interconnectivity between these worlds, to form what is now commonly called the ‘Metaverse’- a vast 3-D world which comprises every known form of communication. Beautiful thought.
And full marks to Philip for helping make it that much more of a reality. I am a regular Second Lifer, am on sometimes 8-10 hours a day. I am a designer in RL, so spend most of my time building stuff. I make 3D models of houses within which I can give my clients real-time walkthroughs, wherever in teh world they are. I teach, I learn, there is so much to do!
One aspect of SL you don’t seem to have covered much is education. Riddle me this- how many forms of distance education exist today which allow multiple users from anywhere in the world to attend a class concurrently? Around 400 colleges also share this view, and have set up virtual campuses in SL.
Like it or not, virtual worlds are here to stay. Because they offer a paradigm shift in communication technology, and for many other reasons.
Awesome article, btw. Very comprehensive.

It’s nice to see that Philip is guaranteeing our future, even though he missed the entire “Man v. Machine” problem inherent in The Matrix. But then he is God, so we should all just not worry.
And I wonder, when he says everyone is just going to have to adapt to him and his vision, how far will he push it?
I wonder if he hates that film the way, say, the Soviet Union hated Orwell?

I’ve been in Second Life for 2 years and it’s a fascinating environment. Though it’s far from being a perfect place people can, and do, create places that really make you stop and be glad you found them. Sure, there’s a lot of dross too, but that’s to be expected. Not everyone’s a creative genius and things like that are highlighted in SL where you find the pedestrian and downright mind-numbingly dull rubbing shoulders with awe-inspiring flights of fantasy. It is the metaverse as Neal Stephenson imagined it and more.

I’ve got a great game.

It’s called real life.

It’s the only one there is.

Get out there and breath the air.

Yes the one and only Rickenbacker. Many times noobie avatars ask me how I do it. I have gone from a 512 plot owner figuring out how I’ll get my next 512 plot to owning over 1,000,000 meters of land in less than 6 months, all paid for with money made inside SL. Add that up and we are talking about roughly $30,000 USD in assets. SO what is the secret? Why tell you? You have to carve your own path, but a few pointers along the way would be to quit your real life job, dedicate yourself to 12-16 hours a day to building your empire and always, ALWAYS look for new ways to increase your L$ account.
One time early on I was excited to earn enough to pay my membership fee, then it got to wher making a few thousand L$ was boring, my only real excitement came from making 10’s of thousands L$, then of course it got boring again, then my thrills wher to make 100’s of thousands, guess what its got boring too. whats next millions of L$? SURE!, but dont let anyone tell you how to do it. becuase if thety truely are successful, they arent going to tell you how to do it, and if they are giving advice on how to do it, but arent doing it themselves, then you should question the merit of thier advice
TO Philip: Thank you and much love to you for letting me create my own world, despite the shortfalls and problems you have made a better world that we can more directly effect than what the real world offers us.

Forever hail the Philip

Not everybody who joins SL makes money. Some get ripped off by those who are making money. SL is just like RL, it can be glorious one minute and totally suck the next. I think Prok should be on the cover of the RollingStone! The truth CAN get you banned!

One thing Second Life can offer, to artists at least, is the means to use media that are literally impossible in RL. It’s a new means of expression, so new artforms are inevitable.I can’t wait to see what comes from it next. I see a day when digital art will join the ranks of fine art and museum level display.

I first appeared in Second Life near the end of “open beta” (many critics believe beta never ended). I’ve watched Second Life evolve from a small virtual Mayberry to an constantly growing virtual nation. After almost four years of this I keep coming back, because it just gets more and more weird. It has not always been a smooth ride (version 1.7), but its still fun.

Feck

What are you doing, posting here instead of being somewhere real leading a real life?
Turn off your computer. Go outside. Talk to real people in real places. This is what you seem to want others to do. Why not do it yourself?

This forum is just as unreal as is SL.

It’s true what Phil says about his favourite place in Second Life, it’s Svarga. I’ve met him there often.

I use some of the birds and flowers from there on my own island. What Phil doesn’t know is that a few weeks ago they started acting up. I contacted the person who made them, asking for help.

She told me to contact Linden Lab, because they were breaking her products by changing the system in ways that introduced bugs which they don’t fix, and she can’t do anything about it… Ironic, huh?

That’s the reality of Second Life lately.

I are a reel-life feller who somehow or t’other got hissef stranded insider a cornputin’ mersheen afrter one tarribul drunk on sum bad shine. Now I are one of them Secund-life avamaters.

While I hev met sum loverly wimmin and ginerally nice folk in that-there wirld of mistopher Rosedale’s, I du wish tu add that I’d druther be back in my holler drinkin’ an suchlike.

Furst life are preferable, if onlery fur the pleashur of drinkin’ an’ kerlectin’ ol’ trucks fer my bizness. Which, incerdenterly, are kerlectin’ ol’ trucks.

Yu Secund Life peepuls cud pleeze Instant Massage me insider that-there wirld, tu let me no how to erscape it, I would be awful beholden.

All my best regords,

Pappy

I’m glad that many people are getting sucked into Second Life. Hoepfully soon, people will become so entranced in it that they will be virtually comatose… and you know what THAT means!

YES! TONNES OF ANONYMOUS REAL LIFE SEX WITH PLUGGED-IN ZOMBIES!! All I have to do is grope these motionless people as their brains are jacked into the Matrix. So hot! All these bodies, available for me to grope 24-7! Then I can cum on their heads.

Forget Voodoo Lounge, boring… Check out Studio 54. Its were the action is.

Umm – you’re kidding, right? You talk to Phil and you talk to Prok, and rehash something that has been so beaten that it is no longer identifiable as a horse?

So many residents, and you go to the one who is least consistent and who has carved a niche for herself by being rude and obnoxious to everyone, and who accidentally gets things right now and then?

There are much bigger issues than Prok or Phil, no matter how important they think that they are. Get with the program.

I sit on a train and everyone is listening to ipods. Where once I would enjoy listening in to others tales of their world and take away my thoughts on those matters to talk over with friends later, often with a laugh, that no longer happens. We sit in the real world in a drossful state, alone, isolated, intent on keeping our business to ourselves. Ironic then that my experience of Second LIfe is quite the opposite. I listen, I join in, I indulge in the wildest conversations on all manner of subjects and leave often with the feeling that I have discovered more than I can process. She was from Copenhagen, he from Madrid. She talked about Cant and Heifdegger, he grew up where i did, a place we both left years ago. My connectedness with the world is immense, satisfying and quite profound. I get hurt, I get annoyed, I get stimulated emotionally, physically, psychology. Hell, the train is full of people going to work so that some hours later they can go home again. More than any other life experience, I have discovered within the people I have met and my processing of their thoughts an extraordinary opportunity to truly feel a part of a global community, albeit one utterly restricted to the affluent and the time rich, the greatest Second life limitation. The real world is a brutal place; people die mean deaths. Is Phil a greedy sod, a greedy God. Is that all this is about? It’s not the issue. Collectively it is us who need to re-shape this forlorn planet before our gaia comes a tumbling down. Perhaps Second Life is the vehicle that can save any real capacity we may have to relate, converse, discuss – and be human.

Hahaha, I loved it. I always figured Phil was crazy but this proves it. And I loved the image of a cafe owner telling Prok to shut the hell up.

Oh by the way, Kushner, the Edwards prank wasn’t pulled by Republican vandals, nor 4chan. It was the same people who pulled the Anshe Chung thing. Not for any statement–just absurdism. When will the MSM stop taking Second Life seriously?

In SL, I met the man who became my boyfriend for 9 months and is now my best friend; I met a Parisian artist (seriously!) who gave me my first real life tour of the city; I’ve met people disabled and bedridden in real life who found a place they can do whatever they bloody well want; I finally got my study of buddhism kick-started and I’ve danced with two of my favourite mashup producers. SL can be a pain, but I think I’ll stick with it.

I spent hours just getting signed on, watching tutorials and finally arrived in my avatar and after wandering around for about 30 minutes, my avatar started running and ran into the sea. I never saw it again and multiple attempts to get help via email with “Linden Support” have been useless, with emails sending me back to the site where I can’t get help unless I pay more money. I can appreciate the opportunities available but am utterly annoyed at the obtuse limits I have encountered already. I still have SL on my desktop but every time I look at the icon, I feel pissed off and do other things. YOur article reflects the same holier-than-thou attitude in the emails I receive from Support, telling me I have asked for help in the wrong way, which I have not, and to go back to the site, which I cannot.

Not a Grateful Dead concert atmosphere, IMHO.

I recently passed my one year anniversary in second life. It, like my real life is FABULOUS!

I meet fantastic people from all over the world, have a fantastic night club, The Cheetah in Hazeldean (mini plug, hehehe) and see it or virtual reality as the future of the net.

If someone needs some help, send me an im!

Awaken Yoshikawa