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A New Home - but all is not well
A New Home - but all is not well
Once again I threw myself into building a gorgeous house - A Spanish Villa. It was tiled throughout in authentic porcelain tiles. It had a stunning kitchen-diner, a large brick fireplace, antique rugs and flamenco paintings, carved wooden furniture and chairs, leaded windows and gardens back and front.
The patio and kitchen door led to a covered swimming pool where trailing plants hung and potted palms swayed in the warm breeze.
But what and who was it all for?? We had to ask ourselves what was the real point of having a home on SL that was costing us money in real life, paying tier every month, when we had no visitors?
The Spanish Villa - a Big Project
The house was wonderful, true, but it was essentially pointless. And wasn't SL equally pointless?
Quo Vaids?
We spent all our time on SL, but to what end? I had set out with a vision for Christian fellowship, and now - alongside our visits to Truth - we were spending more time shopping, dancing, frequenting some seedy establishments and talking with people we would once never have befriended, all for the sake of unity and respect.
Like so many others, we were being seduced by the hedonism and freedom of SL, when in our real lives we would do nothing of the sort.
Thinking The Unthinkable
The financial burden of paying for our Second Life home was getting to me. Was it worth it? I had thought I'd made friends on SL, but now they were indifferent - if they were online at all.
The situation on Truth - the ALM church sim - was getting unbearable (that story is told on the pages covering the Truth story) and increasingly I felt that I was disliked, misunderstood and not wanted.
The little contribution I felt we'd made on " Truth" was either dismissed or irrelevant, or it was seen as opposition to the Pastor's vision.
Free For All
Second Life itself was going further down the sinkhole of immorality and licentiousness.
Linden Labs had decided to waive the sign-up fees and allow users to create unlimited FREE accounts. Millions signed up as a result and you could hardly move in some places.
(That is now universally recognised as the day the rot really started to set in, as Second Life was no longer a worthy attempt to create 3D communities, but a money-making commercial exercise designed to get as many people as possible downloading the program in the hopes they would spend money, which they did, in their millions! Come one, come all, and alongside the technology experts and those interested in building, came hoards of casual users looking merely for pleasure.)
Thus, at around the same time, various documentaries about Second Life hit the international airwaves, exposing the scandals of unsavoury sexual practises, BDSM dungeons and human slavery, even with child avatars being used for sex. (We had seen nothing of that and it was probably exaggerated for effect, but even so...)
Gambling was becoming another big problem.
Then there was the potential for some to earn huge sums of real-life money by trading in land and property. Unfortunately, human nature being what it is, this didn't persuade people to avoid Second Life at all - it had the opposite effect, and suddenly we were stumbling over gross new avatars of the Dutch, German and Asian variety hawking their sexual services or asking every female avatar if they "want some fun".
Second Life was being spoiled and dragged into the gutter. Increasingly it seemed to me like an enormous waste of time and money.
The End of the Beginning
The End of the Beginning
One morning I woke up, and I knew. Second Life was taking all my time and money for no reason, and I had to call a halt.
I decided to sell the land, the houses and all my possessions and leave SL.
Towards the end of 2006, things were taking a downward turn in all our SL activities.
We had fallen out with the community on "Shivar", and even though it was no great loss in terms of friendship, it still left a sour taste in our mouths. What should we do? It is a testimony to our addiction that the answer took so long to come to mind!
So it was that in November 2006, I set up a Yard Sale on our land at Fredericks, and cashed in my Lindens for ever (as I thought). My husband decided life on SL wouldn't be the same without me there, so he left as well, and suddenly we felt free.
Here's the "blog" I wrote at the time: Date: 1/20/2007 2:49:07 PM [Edit]
Title: Sad Farewells
We just took the radical step of leaving SL for good. I sold my houses and land, and all my lovely clothes. It was a wrench in some ways - SL has so much potential, yet it's squandered on worthless empty shallowness; and added to that the program itself is growing ever more unstable.
It became a pain to build anything, and the amount of sexual innuendo and personal attacks grew to the extent that almost everything was spoiled there for us. We couldn't go anywhere without being bombed, bumped, insulted, shot at, hit on and/or misunderstood.
I woke up one morning knowing that spending most of my day on a computer was bad news. And for what? What IS Second Life? In the scheme of things, it's just a pixellated avatar pretending to have a pixellated existence with non-existent possessions. Sad. So I decided to leave; and not before time.
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