The Lost Castle

I think I have mentioned before that there are some excellent builders in SL, and the people behind Kasteel Verloren are some of the best. This snapshot just doesn't do it justice, but it is hard to photograph something so massive!

Put together by a group of Dutch guys, I was first shown Kasteel Verloren by Don, owner of the Basin. It looks like it should exist in RL, but is in fact a pastiche of elements from many real castles. It has kitchens, ballrooms, servants quarters and some lovely grounds. It even has a maze, where Melissa and I had some fun getting lost! In the end we gave up and flew over it, to be able to explore the rest of the castle properly. As a further example of how amazing Melissa is, she was the one who told me the castle's name in English. What a doll!

Help is at hand

Second Life is vast. With over three-quarters of a million residents in total, and a good few thousand on the Grid at anyone time, things can get a little overwhelming. Luckily, there are organisations in SL to help the newbie find their way around.

One such organisation is New Citizens Incorporated. This is a snap of their Welcome Area, New Citizens Plaza. It has a range of shops, and a good selection of free stuff as well. There are information boards on most aspects of life on the Grid, from etiquette to building to clothing design, to name a few. NCI also holds classes on these aspects, particularly the design and building of objects, which pretty much everyone will want to do after a while, whether it be for simple fun or to earn a living selling the things they make. I'm told the classes are very good, but as Linden Time is PDT, some eight hours behind GMT, I've yet to attend one!

New Citizens Plaza is somewhere all those new to SL should go, and is a great place to rendezvous with friends, however old you are in Grid days.

Fashion

Hair by !BooPerFunk!
Shades - LePhreak! by FKNY
Suit - FF Menswear
Satin Shirt - FF Menswear
Boots - Silver Snake Bikers by SF Design
Delusions of Style by Self

Melissa

I have mentioned my dear dear friend Melissa in a previous post, so I thought it only fair to share a picture of her with you. This is a snap of her in the gardens of Serenity Island, a wonderful place for two people to take a walk together. As with Riverwalk, this is somewhere she introduced me to.

I admit that I am rather - no, very - taken with Melissa Yeuxdoux. Supremely intelligent, devastatingly beautiful, incredibly charming, delightfully witty, possessed of a timeless elegance....it's not hard to see why I am sweet on her! Sometimes, in SL as in RL, you come across a person that has the potential to radically improve the quality of your life experience. For me in SL, Melissa is that person. As she quoted to me from Callahans Law, "shared pain is lessened; shared joy increased", and nothing holds more true of the time I spend in her presence. Doubtless there will be a few more pictures of Melissa in this blog! If you are interested in her own experiences on the Grid, her blog entitled Livin' La Vida Segunda can be found in my Links.

Sexy Basin Dweller!

Whilst the Edge is a great club, after a while I felt the need to listen to music that was more to my taste, namely dance music. I like a wide range of musical genres, but when I go to a club it is to dance, and I find I dance best to the thumping rhythms of hardcore techno and trance. Of course, in SL, there are plenty of dance machines that will animate your avatar in many styles of dancing, and all clubs provide their own, usually as a glitter ball hanging from the ceiling. I also have my own, which I can attach to my HUD, and which puts my avatar through quite a range of grooves, throwing in a special move now and then. It also allows me to invite other people to use it, so that we can dance in synch together.

So I went in search of other clubs, and wound up in the Basin. I was lucky enough to arrive when the owner, a dutchman named Don Duke, was redecorating, something that happens at the Basin every week. The theme you see in the picture is Fire & Ice, and has to be experienced properly to be believed! Don is an exceptional builder, and a great guy as well, as he took me on a tour of some of the sites of SL. The Basin is now the club I frequent, and so I am a member of the Sexy Basin Dwellers, as the club VIPs are known. Now there's a thing that I've never been on this side of the keyboard!

The Basin is a new venture, and so doesn't quite have the traffic that the Edge does, but with a superb host, a great atmosphere and incredible decor, it soon will! There are also Greedy Greedy tables, a SLingo board, and in common with other clubs in SL, retail areas are under development as well.

Riverwalk

One of my favourite places in SL is Riverwalk, a park with a cafe, art galleries and the like. As the name suggests, it is set next to a river, with plenty more water features placed throughout as well. It is a beautifully tranquil spot, to walk and talk with friends, or to sit in solitary contemplation. It is different for each of the four times of day available in SL (sunrise, noon, sunset and midnight) but always a jewel of landscaping.

The picture shows one of the many displays of artworks in the park, where some superb pictures are exhibited for public sale. I actually purchased the one on the left, 'Garden Path', as a gift for my dear friend Melissa, who introduced me to Riverwalk in the first place. For this reason alone, although there are many more, Riverwalk now holds a special place in my second life.

Clubbing it to death!

Nightclubs are great places to meet people, and SL has many of them. This is me getting on down in the Edge, possibly one of, if not the, most popular clubs in SL. It certainly has a lot of patrons at any time of day or night, which can lead to problems of lag and difficulties rezzing. They have themes, such as togas or green, and the owners use their considerable skills in building to make the club match the theme, at least in part. In common with a lot of other clubs, there are money chairs and dance pads where you can earn L$, a dance machine that allows everyone to dance in time with each other, dance balls that animate couples in various slow or sexy dances, and gambling machines and retail space to boot. If you want to see the range of forms that people take in SL, this is as good a place for skin watching as any! Some of the dancers are incredibly hot! Perhaps though, that is the reason why I am not as keen on the Edge as I could be. If a girl wants to dance with you, it's because that's how she earns money, as a dancer for tips. And more, I'm told. The Edge is the place to see and be seen, so it is inevitable that the patrons are obsessed with image and appearance. There is nothing wrong with looking as good as you conceivably can, but possibly not to the point where you disappear up your own arse! Sour grapes from someone who isn't very good at looking good? More likely, observations from someone who has never understood cliques, and there are plenty of these at the Edge! Yet it is a great place for a dance and to see/ be eye candy, so anyone passing through SL should give it a visit.

Appearance is everything!

In Second Life, you can look however you want to. And not just human either, there is a well-represented 'furry' community, where residents take on anthropomorphised animal form.

It all comes down to your 'skin', or the form you wish your avatar to take. Here is how I first appeared in SL, sitting at the Waterhead Reception area. For my basic shape I chose the Cybergoth Male, with a few tweaks added to height and muscle mass. The hair was made through the basic Appearance editor, which is in fact quite a powerful tool. The clothes were a freebie jacket and pair of cargo pants, subsequently edited for texture and colour through their own Edit facilities.

You can do a lot with the basic set of tools your avatar starts its second life with, but after a while I found myself looking like a weed in a herbaceous border. There are so many gaudy - and sexy! - skins out there, that one soon falls prey to the pervading sense of escapism that runs through SL, and I was no exception. I now own three different sets of flexi dreads (my favourite at the moment is the Spanish set, which I am wearing in my photo at the start of this blog) and am slowly aquiring a wardrobe of clothes that other people have built. Fashion in SL knows none of the boundaries that it does in RL, and some of the creations here make the Milan fashion houses look like children with blunt scissors and paper cutouts, but by SL standards my own collection of clothes remains pretty conservative. A case of SL mirroring RL - I have no fashion sense in either!

I still find myself looking a bit drab and ordinary here, but for now I am happy with the skin I am in, and the clothes I wear are colourful enough for now. Perhaps I am just happy as I am in RL, for I suspect that those in SL who choose to wear the skin of an animal, or another gender, are using SL to work out some of their issues around self-image or self esteem. Better this way than taking a sniper rifle to the top of a campus bell tower! Or perhaps they are finally able to give vent to their sense of fun, stifled as we all are by the boundaries of living in the 21st century. I am not a psychologist, so I cannot say. In the end, whatever skin or clothes you wear in SL, you are adding to the bright tapestry that we all weave as we make our way around this corner of cyberspace.

Greetings, stranger!

Hello there. My name is Mordecai Scaggs, or at least it is as far as this blog is concerned. You see, this will be a record of my experiences in the virtual reality known as Second Life. Apparently, this online community/video game/roleplay setting/insert inadequate simile here has been around for something over three years now, but I first heard about it on BBC Breakfast News a little over a fortnight ago. As I am off work through no fault of my own, and am likely to be for a few months yet whilst the NHS decide what to do with me, I have to fill my days somehow, and so I ventured across the threshold to see what I would see....

Why this blog? Why not? Actually I am a terrible one for poaching what seem like good ideas, and when a friend from SL told me about her blog, I thought "what a great idea" and so this is the result. I have never kept a diary before, so please forgive the style and content. This will be here as a reminder for me when I forget those important events that punctuate all our (second) lives, and when people ask me about SL, I can point them here to see for themselves my edited high (and low!) lights.

Perhaps you'll stick with me, and follow my misadventures in what must surely be one of the most exciting places in cyberspace. Perhaps you won't. Whichever, I trust both your lives go well, and thanks for stopping by.