What Have We Lost?
This is a lengthy non-fashion related post. Philosophical and dealing with the current and future atmosphere of Phil's Place, it may or may not be of interest. Treat it accordingly :D.
Three holidays coincide tonight. Energies are strong and if you are one of the people who feel those energies, you already know that. Like most holidays, I celebrate this time of year in my own way. I turn out the lights, not willing to feed candy to already undernourished kids. I light some candles in remembrance and take a long bath. Other activities come into play and after a few hours I return to the the normalcy of life, see what's awaiting me at Hulu and continue with the familiarity of the typical.
This years "other" activity is a reflection of where we are in our virtual lives as citizens of our world. I'm almost two years old now. Not ancient by any means, but I have several RL friends who are over three. They arrived before that the moon sailed across the sky with that one million written across its face, when English was pretty much the only language spoken and when the grid evidently went down weekly for an update.
Some of you may be even older than that, and some of you may be very new. The time we were born -- both in RL and VL terms -- has much to do with how we see the world. I've been listening to people of late, most of them older than I. They aren't complaining about the state of things. In many ways SL(R) is working much better than it ever has. But there is an ennui that permeates their days. Something is missing. Something is lost.
It can't be the quality of goods. We have more exceptional and actively creating retailers than ever before. It can't be our interface. We have choices of viewers now with promises of even greater abilities in the future. What it seems to be, after long conversations and several glasses of wine, is our sense of community. It has pretty much left the building for many of us, and the people entering are having a difficult time finding it at all.
This is what my friends tell me. Feel free to comment about your perceptions of these earlier times.
In the "olden" days, there were no lucky boards, groups weren't all that active and quality give-away freebies didn't appear in at least a dozen stores each day. What there was, were freebie boxes filled with all sorts of (mostly old) full-perm items which the new kids on the block happy sorted through picking out the best of what was available. There were a couple of free shops like the Nubie Store and Free Dove, but picks camping, product camping, hunts and group gifts were not the big ticket give-aways they are now. There were stores to shop at certainly, but so many less than what we have now, no one was willing to estimate the percentage. A low number was the best answer they could give me.
Life was simpler then. With few skins to choose from (even purchased) people looked more alike than we do now. There were more furries and odd little cartoon avatars. I remember reading that on a blog lately, and my friends agree although they hadn't thought about it much. Men's appendages were huge, bright pink, long and curved (OK, I admit we had had quite a bit of wine at this point).
So what were the good things from that time that are gone?
There was free land (I think it cost $512 for a 512 piece -- the only size you could buy under that program). New folks with premium membership could buy plots of land. A sim or part of one would be opened and people flocked in and purchased. Everyone was relatively new. No one really knew how to build all that well and prefabs weren't what they are now so, yes, my friends admitted it was pretty ugly. BUT, they were all in it together. They lived in close quarters; they battled the lag and the downtime and sometimes nasty neighbors that threw fire balls from a neighboring sim. They made alliances. They made friends.
There was a lot of free education then. The Lab paid people to teach, schools had free land and classes abounded. The new folk met other new folk in classes. They learned to salsa together; they learned to build together. They helped each other after class and sometimes became friends. Later (I'm not sure of the timeline here) LL decided it wasn't their responsibility to educate the masses and took away teacher payment. Later they took away the free land for the schools. Now we have only a handful of education establishment and many have agendas attached.
I took a few classes when I was new. It was a time when there still were quite a few to choose from. The teachers worked for free with tips. I enjoyed those times; I'm guessing I would have enjoyed the earlier times even more.
I saw a notice the other day that The Lab was hiring folks to update and enlarge their "what to do" area of the website. The people would get a list of sims to visit, take a photo and write up 200 words about ths spot. This sounded like a great job to me, until I read the fine print about how many you needed to complete in an hour (for the hour of pay anyway). It worked out to 20 minutes a spot with photos and proofreading. HMMM. Not my thing. BUT, it does show that LL understands, like many of us, that something is amiss.
New folks have no clue what to do, where to go, how to learn. The world was much smaller when I joined and possibly much, much smaller when you joined. There were only so many places to go, EVENTS actually had events listed instead of the same ads day after day. Search might have worked better then -- or maybe it has never worked well *wink*.
There is a lot of talk and action (Nov 5th's shut down) about content theft lately. I listened to the podcast on Emerald (3rd party viewers) and content theft. I yawned a bit, but I listened to it all. I would never ever knowingly buy stolen goods, but I'm having a difficult time believing that theft is the biggest problem we face.
We can only buy (win, hunt or camp for) so many clothes. We only need one house at a time, one set of furniture. We need activities. We need communication. We need a sense of community. Maybe this is merely a sign of a greatly enlarged world, a mirror of how many real lives work, but I can't see us moving to a new level without regaining some of what we seemingly have lost.
Three holidays coincide tonight. Energies are strong and if you are one of the people who feel those energies, you already know that. Like most holidays, I celebrate this time of year in my own way. I turn out the lights, not willing to feed candy to already undernourished kids. I light some candles in remembrance and take a long bath. Other activities come into play and after a few hours I return to the the normalcy of life, see what's awaiting me at Hulu and continue with the familiarity of the typical.
This years "other" activity is a reflection of where we are in our virtual lives as citizens of our world. I'm almost two years old now. Not ancient by any means, but I have several RL friends who are over three. They arrived before that the moon sailed across the sky with that one million written across its face, when English was pretty much the only language spoken and when the grid evidently went down weekly for an update.
Some of you may be even older than that, and some of you may be very new. The time we were born -- both in RL and VL terms -- has much to do with how we see the world. I've been listening to people of late, most of them older than I. They aren't complaining about the state of things. In many ways SL(R) is working much better than it ever has. But there is an ennui that permeates their days. Something is missing. Something is lost.
It can't be the quality of goods. We have more exceptional and actively creating retailers than ever before. It can't be our interface. We have choices of viewers now with promises of even greater abilities in the future. What it seems to be, after long conversations and several glasses of wine, is our sense of community. It has pretty much left the building for many of us, and the people entering are having a difficult time finding it at all.
This is what my friends tell me. Feel free to comment about your perceptions of these earlier times.
In the "olden" days, there were no lucky boards, groups weren't all that active and quality give-away freebies didn't appear in at least a dozen stores each day. What there was, were freebie boxes filled with all sorts of (mostly old) full-perm items which the new kids on the block happy sorted through picking out the best of what was available. There were a couple of free shops like the Nubie Store and Free Dove, but picks camping, product camping, hunts and group gifts were not the big ticket give-aways they are now. There were stores to shop at certainly, but so many less than what we have now, no one was willing to estimate the percentage. A low number was the best answer they could give me.
Life was simpler then. With few skins to choose from (even purchased) people looked more alike than we do now. There were more furries and odd little cartoon avatars. I remember reading that on a blog lately, and my friends agree although they hadn't thought about it much. Men's appendages were huge, bright pink, long and curved (OK, I admit we had had quite a bit of wine at this point).
So what were the good things from that time that are gone?
There was free land (I think it cost $512 for a 512 piece -- the only size you could buy under that program). New folks with premium membership could buy plots of land. A sim or part of one would be opened and people flocked in and purchased. Everyone was relatively new. No one really knew how to build all that well and prefabs weren't what they are now so, yes, my friends admitted it was pretty ugly. BUT, they were all in it together. They lived in close quarters; they battled the lag and the downtime and sometimes nasty neighbors that threw fire balls from a neighboring sim. They made alliances. They made friends.
There was a lot of free education then. The Lab paid people to teach, schools had free land and classes abounded. The new folk met other new folk in classes. They learned to salsa together; they learned to build together. They helped each other after class and sometimes became friends. Later (I'm not sure of the timeline here) LL decided it wasn't their responsibility to educate the masses and took away teacher payment. Later they took away the free land for the schools. Now we have only a handful of education establishment and many have agendas attached.
I took a few classes when I was new. It was a time when there still were quite a few to choose from. The teachers worked for free with tips. I enjoyed those times; I'm guessing I would have enjoyed the earlier times even more.
I saw a notice the other day that The Lab was hiring folks to update and enlarge their "what to do" area of the website. The people would get a list of sims to visit, take a photo and write up 200 words about ths spot. This sounded like a great job to me, until I read the fine print about how many you needed to complete in an hour (for the hour of pay anyway). It worked out to 20 minutes a spot with photos and proofreading. HMMM. Not my thing. BUT, it does show that LL understands, like many of us, that something is amiss.
New folks have no clue what to do, where to go, how to learn. The world was much smaller when I joined and possibly much, much smaller when you joined. There were only so many places to go, EVENTS actually had events listed instead of the same ads day after day. Search might have worked better then -- or maybe it has never worked well *wink*.
There is a lot of talk and action (Nov 5th's shut down) about content theft lately. I listened to the podcast on Emerald (3rd party viewers) and content theft. I yawned a bit, but I listened to it all. I would never ever knowingly buy stolen goods, but I'm having a difficult time believing that theft is the biggest problem we face.
We can only buy (win, hunt or camp for) so many clothes. We only need one house at a time, one set of furniture. We need activities. We need communication. We need a sense of community. Maybe this is merely a sign of a greatly enlarged world, a mirror of how many real lives work, but I can't see us moving to a new level without regaining some of what we seemingly have lost.
Comments
We've lost many/most of the talented and dedicated folks who embodied that sense of community, and we've beat down many of those remaining. My favorite creators have always been those whose creations somehow are/were more than a pile of textured prims; there is/was something "extra" to their work. That "extra" I believe is Heart - people doing what they do for the love of it, instead of fighting against the harsh social and economic pressures now so evident in our second lives.
Now is a wonderful time to reflect on where we've been and what we've lost. Thanks again for this opportunity.
Much has happened in my life since writing this post. And I have noted again and again that while some thing have been lost over the years (or decades in RL) some have been gained. Change is always with us; we can't stop it. We can take the best of the new and morn the loss of things that have fallen along the wayside. We gain and we lose and we go on.
I hope you find new excitement in world, a reason to stay and enjoy and celebrate. They are still here. The NEWNESS is gone of course, at least for those of us that are getting older. We need to find new paths and new ways of enjoying our virtual world.
I have been in those dark places a few times; pulling myself out has been tricky but so far I have found new and different and more challenging activities to make being here worthwhile.
I hope you do too.