Tag: second life

Virtual poetry reading

Last night, my sister, my mum and I went to a virtual poetry reading. The guy that was reading, his and works of others, is the multi talented Russell Taylor Ashby – Russell Eponym in Second Life and other virtual worlds. He’s a poet, artist and musician with a beautiful voice. Perhaps I wasn’t as happy about his selection of poetry as I am with his music, but it was still a very nice experience.

Can your avatar enter into an agreement with someone?

Some time ago, when I was still unemployed, I tried to keep busy taking small assignments like creating websites. One time I got a bigger job to make some templates for an organization. Some of the templates were for Word. Being an Apple fangirl, I don’t care much for Microsoft. I love Pages and when I need a simple word processor I have a couple of free office suites I can use.

I wasn’t going to pay for the whole Office package so I downloaded the trial version. It was for 30 days and that would be enough for the job. I finished the job and got paid for it. A while after I started to get strange withdrawals from my PayPal account. The company that took my money was Microsoft. I tried to contact PayPal, but they just told me to contact Microsoft. It was out of their hands since I had “signed an agreement” with the company.

I didn’t have any contact information with this branch of Microsoft, since I had never signed anything. I had even stopped using the trial after I had finished the job. Still the withdrawals from my account continued. One day, a VAT invoice came in my mail. Not in my email inbox, but in paper form. The name of the one that had entered into the agreement with Microsoft was one of my Second Life avatars. This avatar, no matter how real I sometime feel that she is, is not a real person. Microsoft obviously thinks she is, but I’m sure no law would support that belief.

With that paper, scanned and emailed, to PayPal, I thought I would have a chance to stop the payments. They got back to me pretty fast. Their reply was strange. Although, they still claimed that everything was right and that we had an agreement, they would be kind enough to pay back the money that was withdrawn from my account. They did, not all, but some of it, so I stopped arguing with them.

I am just wondering what will happen next time my avatar wants to buy something, perhaps something even more expensive, will I be able to stop it? It’s obviously legal to enter inte agreements with digital personas without the owner’s knowledge about it. Or perhaps it’s just Microsoft that claims that right.

Bye bye XstreetSL

I’ve just removed all the products I’ve had for sale at XstreetSL. Since they’re about to change their policy, I’ve decided it’s time to stop using their services. It’s been fun while it lasted but now it’s over. I won’t have any reason to log in there anymore now. No more browsing for products, not more impulse items. I wonder if I’m the only one thinking like that. Only time will tell.

Changing the view

I’ve decided to stop doing everything I hate about SL and go back to doing everything I love. All the things connected to having a business are actually things I hate:

Having to decide what the best way is to advertise. Deciding where to rent a store or if I should own land. Agonizing over how much is cost for me to have land, when I’m having financial difficulties in RL. Deciding what rights the products should have and how the sales posters should look.

What I do love to do in SL is to meet nice people. I love to create things. Take snapshots of nice environments and to explore. I love the live music scene and to go to events. And I also love it when people like what I create. And it’s because of that I’ve decided to give away my products for free. I’ll stop selling them on Xstreetsl too. I’m still not certain of how I’ll do this because I don’t have a store in worlds and the freebies section in Xstreet is quite over crowded.

I have some ideas about how to do it. I thought I would give one thing away once a week. All free, not even for one linden. I could advertise them on the blog and then deliver them in worlds for those who contacts me. And you can “pay” me in pics of you using the product. Wearing the clothes or having the artwork or furniture in your house. That would make me so much happier than a few lindens.

I’ll give this some thought and I’m happy to get input from my readers about how to do this.

Apart from giving my things away, I’ll get back to exploring SL. I used to do that a lot, but I seem to have stopped doing it along the way somewhere. I’ll write about my “trips” here in the blog and post the Slurl so you all can go visit if you want. And I’ll start finding new and interesting artists too to go and listen to. Any suggestions?

Another ‘What people search for’

“lila mill”,  second life prim cleavage,  thatotherlife ann otoole,  “second life”

Of course, in SL, the sex related topics are always popular. Naked, nude etc would make the top ten, but when the search terms are Naked Ruth, you start to wonder. Especially since it is a sexual context. How anyone could find the child like basic avatar of SL sexy is beyond me, but to each their own of course.

Now back to the latest search terms. ‘Prim cleavage’ What is that anyway? Can you put an extra cleavage on top of the one you have. Seems strange. What if it’s a laggy place? The sculpty boobs suddenly turning into  huge balloons until the sculpty prim adjust itself ot the intended shape and size. Probably not the sexy look the wearer intended for it. Isn’t the size of the built in boobs enough for any taste anymore? *shrugs*

Moving on. It happens a lot that people have arrived to my SL blog when searching for my SL name. I always wonder if they have been here before and forgot to bookmark it or they know me from somewhere else and want to learn more about me. Another explanation might be that they don’t like me and want to keep track of me. Knowing some of my readers, that might be a reason. Why don’t you guys send me a message. Give me a comment just to say hi and tell me you’ve been here.

thatotherlife ann otoole Both Ann’s name and the otherlife forum would probably have made trending topics if this had been twitter. A lot of SL people these days are heading there since they closed down the xstreet community. Maybe the new blog/forum at the official site will prove a acceptable replacement, but so far I don’t think so. Not for me anyway. I like where I am now, at that Other Life

I think Second Life made an error closing down the forums at xstreet, but it won’t be irreparable. People forget and soon there will be just as flowering community at the new blog/forum as it was at xstreet. It might not be the same mixture of people, but probably just as many. Only time will tell.