So, I’m hearing lots of very negative things about Second Life. Does anyone like it? Anyone at all? Please speak up!
In other news the Matildas are doing way better in the Women’s Soccer World Cup than anyone predicted. Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi! Or in their own words: NOICE!!!
Caitlin Kiernan blogs about second life a fair bit, and seems to like it a lot.
http://greygirlbeast.livejournal.com/
i tried it the other day, because people kept asking me if i knew about it. i was rather underwhelmed.
and not that i’ve ever played world of warcraft, but at least there are goals and objectives there. kill the monster, get a reward. this, i understand. second life just seemed to be wandering around lots of pretty-looking places.
My husband spends a lot of time on 2nd life. He’s an artist/techie and has found a great community of builders. they’re making buildings and streets, “paintings” that avatars can “step into,” a virtual globe theatre for an online performance of hamlet. there’s a lively interactive art community.
what’s great about 2nd life is being able to literally build off of one another’s work. it’s great as a collaborative modeling space. my husband doesn’t find most of 2nd life to be compelling (he compares it to geocities from the 90s), but the subgroup of artists and engineers is fantastic.
though I don’t root for the baggy green in cricket, one of my favorite things about aussie matches from recent years was gilchrist calling out “noice, shine!” after warne’s better deliveries.
I tried second life. First it crashed my computer a bunch of times, then it worked but I couldn’t get my avatar to look how I wanted. Then I wasn’t sure what to do with myself. Then I felt stupid and wondered why I wasn’t just reading a book instead.
Ah, I spent some time there. I went to Library Island and listened to Rob Sawyer give a talk about Rollback (guess listen is the wrong word, since it was all text communication). It was kind of spacy to be at the “reading” with folks from all across the world. Alas, I haven’t been back since.
Uh, I made money by dancing at a bar…should I admit that? It was in Second Life, not real life… got enough to buy a new shirt…
Lots of librarians are really excited about Second Life, but my experience has been like Sara Z’s – it crashes my MacBook every time I try to load it, and my several-years-old (and admittedly not too awesome anymore) desktop PC doesn’t do much better.
a friend who is married w/offspring and very heavy day job introduced me to SL when I came to visit. she runs an online gallery, using the engineering and artistic opportunities there as her primary stress reliever and loves it for that. her avatar has become a true alter ego where none of her quotidian obligations apply, and the designer software (think *Snowcrash* rather than warcraft)can make thoughtful users both beautiful and mystical in strangely unprecedented ways. I’ve only seen it once, on her high-speed PC. but what I saw was essentially what anindita said: the more craft and design-oriented the user, the more fun can be had.