To be continued...

This blog will now be hosted at Wordpress with a new name. Please update your blog readers and blogrolls if you wish to follow.

http://truediaryofasecondlifenobody.wordpress.com/

See ya over there!

Everybody needs a friend

I’m not sure about the logistics of keeping two separate blogs, both of them being personal ones. It’s funny because I have this compulsion to write, hence the two active blogs, yet I also have this strange fear of running out of words to say. I suppose that as long as I still enjoy SL I will always have something to say about it, yes?

Now that I have moved back into my SL home, I have no idea what to blog about. My SLife is pretty boring. Well, I shouldn’t say it is boring. I enjoy it, but how often do you want to read about me chatting with my friends about current events, favourite books, movies and sharing links to youtube videos? If you were to drop by my place, you would most often find me hanging out with a friend doing just that.

On the occasions when I do leave my parcel, it is to go to a Max Kleene performance or a few favourite spots on the grid. I can do almost all of my shopping on the Marketplace. I'm a virtual world homebody. I like my routine. Nothing to crow about at all.

But hey that’s okay. Peace and quiet with my dearest friends are welcome in my world any time.

My virtual life may not be filled with social events or big excitement, but I think what I have is better. It turns out that I happened to find exactly what I didn’t know I was looking for, and I can't say that I have any complaints about that.

Going on four years, and counting

Out of the blue...

I surprised myself this week when I logged in Second Life and spent more than a few minutes standing around, wondering what to do with my pixel self. Lately, I either log out a few minutes later, or get to doing something else in my web browser and completely forget that I was even logged in. Or, I don't bother coming around at all. But this week, I logged in and actually like changed my av’s clothes, bought her some new things and left the safety of my lag free sky platform.

Motivation to spend more time in-world knocked on my door when my long time friend Chuk, asked me to help him with a makeover. It was great fun searching out items for his new and improved look which has inspired me to not only makeover myself, but my virtual world home too. FYI, Belleza still has the best male skins in SL, in my opinion.

I almost forgot about how easy it is to lose track of time when you’re immersed in the virtual world. This week I got a big reminder of that and today I am fighting off yawns in the office. Side note, I say immersed but I don’t expect that I will ever experience that in the same way as I did when I was a young avatar with Second Life wanderlust. Those were the good old days.

This month marks four years for Carrie in Second Life. In internet years, which is just like dog years, that's ages. So by that logic, I’m a SL oldbie. Don’t be fooled by my youthful appearance. It’s all smoke and pixels.

Another thing that is old is my graphics card. I can no longer take pictures (that meet my unreasonably high standards) of places to explore and share here. But I also can’t think of one good reason for me to not dust off this blog once in awhile and share some thoughts about virtual living. Can you?

After four years of an immersive and sometimes intense virtual life, I have come to realize that it is necessary to step back and take a nice long breather sometimes. The great part about this is coming back for a visit every now and again to catch up with friends and “family” who will always welcome me, as long as they are around. 

It’s just like going home.

 Home in Piper Point

Expiry Date

So yesterday was my birthday. I’m mentioning that because my email inbox is always very interesting on that day. I got all the usual Happy Birthday emails, cheesy animated gift cards, Facebook notifications and the annual birthday spam from all the various online forums and communities I have joined over the years.

I’ve had an online life for quite some time now. Before I was married with children I was involved in some political activist communities, and then after my first born I was all about the Mommy forums and online chat groups because I was a bumbling new mother who didn’t know what the hell to do with her baby. Going through my emails yesterday was like a quick history of my online activity over the years. It was kind of cool, but what really struck me is that it seems that my online engagement seems to have a lifespan of about three years. With each of those places I was heavily involved in, around the three year mark, I eventually started to step back and quietly faded away before finding other interests to keep me busy. I’ve kept a few friends and contacts from each of those communities along the way.

I have been thinking about Second Life and this blog. I have not felt at all inspired to explore or blog anything SL related. I still log in, mainly to visit with a couple of friends but my engagement in the virtual world has been getting less and less. At this point, SL feels to me like just another social media platform where I keep in touch with friends, as opposed to the immersive parallel reality that I once escaped to. There are still cool things going on and people continue to do and create amazing things. Second Life has not changed in that regard, but my life is different now and I have changed. It’s time for me to move on.

Second Life did a lot for me. It helped me find my creative spirit, experiment with it and try out some new things. The walled garden of the virtual world was a safe place for me to do that. There was a time when the thing I loved most about SL was the endless possibilities it had to offer. I never thought I would ever feel limited in that world, but that’s exactly how I feel today. I’m not an artist and I’m not creating anything really profound in the world. I’m just a person who enjoys taking pictures of the world around me and expressing how I relate to it and how it makes me feel.

In pursuing my new found passion for photography, I have discovered that the “escape” I once craved so much and was searching for in the past 3.5 years in Second Life, is just as easily attainable when I go down to Lake Ontario every weekend to capture the sunrise with my iPhone camera, or when I'm exploring the beauty of the world around me. One day I will get myself one of them "real cameras".

All this is to say that I will not be updating this blog anymore. I still plan on participating in Single Frame Stories and maybe some other events in-world. Any images I create in SL will be posted to my Flickr feed or perhaps my other blog. I invite you to follow me on my RL blog, if you like. I have no guarantees of where that blog will lead me, but it would be great to have some company from familiar faces along the way.

Cheers, it’s been a blast.

Armed for Peace

My entry for Single Frame Stories this week. The challenge prompt is "Surrender".

Armed for Peace. I surrender.

http://singleframestories.wordpress.com/