0xDECAFBAD

It's all spinning wheels and self-doubt until the first pot of coffee.

second lifeless

Update: By the way, I'm Les Ofarrel in Second Life. Drop me a note sometime. :)

A few times during my couchbound past couple of weeks, I've jumped into Second Life. The place both overwhelms and underwhelms me. I'm overwhelmed because it's so wide open, and I have no idea where to start or go. I'm underwhelmed because so much of it looks cruddy and is always in the process of loading. My assumption is that I've just not yet grokked the magic bits yet. The place is usually empty when I wander in, wherever I wander in - and I have no idea where I've been, really. A few times I've stumbled onto something smutty, which doesn't interest me in the slightest. I'm not interested in gambling either.

So, a request, if you please: Send me somewhere interesting. Give me coordinates, or a link, or whatnot. Thank you kindly!

Archived Comments

  • Steve Smith

    Harvard's Berkman school has a good island, slurl is here http://tinyurl.com/s6tv4 (forgive the lack of href, didn't know if your comment would support html). If you go when there is an event on, it is quite interesting -- some screen shots here and more info here http://www.ampersand.com/blog/2006/06/29/virtual-world-conferencing/ . Note Berkman I believe hold weekly lunch events and streams them out.

    Some people like Novartis and Telus are biulding private islands for a variety of purposes.

    MLB simulcast the home run derby in a simulated stadium. Google Electric Sheep to find some other interesting places -- they're a Second Life design firm.

    I'm kinda with you, the random walking around and flying up to a collection of people just to see that they are watching Pr0n or virtual strippers is kinda lame.

    The most fun I've had is to attend a scheduled event, but u gotta read the blogs etc to know where and when.

    (And hey, your WoW GM has a nice island, and for that matter I've got a house with some prototype voice tech. If I get some spare time maybe we could meet online)

  • Simon Willison

    Space Port Alpha is pretty cool - to-scale replicas of famous rockets and space craft. Last time I dropped by there they had a lecture going on about the future of the Space Shuttle. I don't know the coordinates but you can find it using the Search panel.

  • fluffy

    I used to hang out on SL a lot but ran into that same problem. I met some nifty people but then they all stopped showing up, and everyone else I met was a slutty idiot. I'll have to check out some of those landmarks too. :)

  • Doug Miller

    Let me know if you figure it out - my Second Life experience has been pretty similar to yours. Not many people there, nothing very interesting going on. I see blog posts about what seem like might be interesting events, but nothing like that ever seems to be going on when I'm online, nor have I found any way to get notified of interesting events. Second Life seems to have a lot of potential, but most of it is unrealized.

  • Mike Buckbee

    I'm a big SecondLife user and approach SL as a development platform, 3d web browser and business simulator.

    I've started two SecondLife companies, Second411 and Fabjectory. Second411 (http://www.second411.com) is an in-world search engine that lets people find objects of interest to them within the world. This is more of a problem than you might think as SecondLife has several orders of magnitude more items in it than a traditional MMORPG (admittedly a good portion of these items are horrible, but this is a tool to help you get around that). I extended the in-world side of it to let you search Amazon and Yahoo from within the world.

    My second project (Fabjectory - http://www.fabjectory.com) is adapting rapid prototyping techniques to the creation of real life objects from virtual worlds. SecondLife is an ideal testbed for this as it has a much more enlightened view towards intellectual property than other virtual worlds (you own your items, as radical as that sounds).

    If you're looking for interesting things to do, I'd recommend checking out the Sandboxes in world. They're just big open spaces where you can see people building huge crazy things.

    If you're looking for a community to hang out in, I'd recommend the Developers islands of Pi and Theta. To own land on them you need to be a developer of some kind and want to hang out with other developers, there are almost always people building cool things in the sandboxes on the islands.

    Something unexpectedly good about SecondLife is the Live music scene, where tons of artists stream live music into SecondLife and people hang out and chat and listen to it. What's suprising is how much the level of interaction goes up in this situation: the performer can see the audience of avatars on their computer screen, they can see them clap, make requests, boo, dance or whatever. Since it's a live stream, the performer can also do shout outs to the audience: "Thanks for coming out tonight green lizard guy in a Ween T-shirt!".

    Live music is also ridiculously easy to find by searching for events in-world or by checking out the page on the SecondLife website - http://secondlife.com/events/index.php?category=20

    Also did you know that people have created tools for posting to del.icio.us from within SL as well as blogging (http://www.bloghud.com).

    Thanks, feel free to IM me in-world: Hal9k Andalso.

  • brian cors

    Woo. I just started up an account on Second Life, too - to mess around with it a bit. However, I am still on "Help Island" - because I am a dumb, and cannot learn to build crap. Hehehee.. My name on there is "Igor Olbracht". Holla!

  • David A. Coffey

    You should check out Neufreistadt ... a self-governed sim.

    http://slurl.com/secondlife/Neufreistadt/128/128/1/

    http://neufreistadt.info/

    http://history.secondserver.net/index.php/Neufreistadt