I love my Second Life; my friends, my music streams, my favorite places. I love going to events in Steelhead and virtual church on Epiphany Island, and dancing at Cafe Wellstone on the mainland. I actually love the “old” Mainland areas where water, roads, rail, and quality builds make for a nice experience exploring or hanging out.

I don’t love blingtards, or boobtards (pix!), or abandoned parcels littered with crashed police cars and random doors and bullets hanging 30m up in midair. I don’t love drama; I do love comedy.

I don’t love Bug’s last name, as she used to get horrifically abusive random IMs from strangers (sometimes weeks after her last login, so it WASN’T viewer related). I do love her new display name.

I would love it if there was a virtual redevelopment/renewal movement, maybe with Linden homes set on large swaths of abandoned land to encourage neo-pioneers to come in and do some rehab/refurb work. It’d encourage existing parcel owners to straighten up a little, too.

More roads and rail would encourage development, but it probably would be impossible to route around existing parcels and content. On my continent I’m nowhere near any Linden infrastructure, and the incoherence shows.

I love the creativity of Second Life residents; I don’t love my own lack of same.

Both Dhughan and I have been slack lately about creating, but Bug made herself an impressively tall shako for her Jaegermonstress persona. We’re all taking steps to overcome the things that get in the way of creativity; lack of time mostly, and wasting that time comparing our stuffs unfavorably to the work of other merchants and creators.

Anyway, onward. I love the way my little project turned out, may actually do something with it.

I don’t love Blender, but do love the way a really skilled creator can use it to make beautiful things. Second Life may be going down the Internets tubes, but parts of it are lookin’ good.

I don’t love the cost, although currently it’s affordable at my low level of play – I have several paid alts and group land, so tier is affordable, but not at the next price point, as I also rent in Steelhead. I don’t love wondering if my favorite sims can continue to clear costs, and don’t love seeing YASDW posts (“yet another sim deathwatch”) either.

I’ve been watching posts about OpenSim and Kitely and so on for a while now, and based on this I might give it a whirl, or keep it in mind if I need a lifeboat or a bolt-hole.

Running OpenSim on your home computer in, in theory, a great way to have as much virtual land as you want — for free.

In practice, it can take quite a bit of time and effort to set it up. I normally have my teenage daughter do it, but with each passing year, she gets more and more sullen and resentful.

The Diva Distro is a big improvement, but you have to download the right files from github and then follow a complex configuration procedure.

Ener Hax’s Sim-on-a-Stick makes the process easier by packaging everything up nicely, but it’s still not a no-brainer.

Today, I tried out New World Grid’s New World Studio, available in English, French and Italian versions. Wow, what an improvement!

Link: Free OpenSim in a snap – Hypergrid Business

Hmm! Well, it would be faster, easier, and funner (sic) to try it now than it has been. With Linda Kellie’s free OAR files (she’s got a mountain retreat, an islands theme, and others), I’d always have a private sandbox to test stuff in.

I wasted a lot of time last night setting up in a public sandbox to build and texture something. It took a while; the place I USED to go to build necklaces (too prim and script intensive for home or work regions) was gone. Oops, an unwatched sim death. Finally found somewhere to set up my Morigi Steam skybox that I modified as a movable workshop and got things done. And photographed!

I didn’t do it on my own land or in my Steelhead workshop, because I didn’t want to lag out my neighbors. Would it be easier to create my own new new new frontier to play in? I dunno, but it would be lonelier if I couldn’t solve the router issues Maria mentions.

Still, as a possible “lifeboat” for virtual refugees in the future, it’s worth a look.