Oh Lord -- I tripled my real-estate holdings in Second Life tonight.
The extremely short recap, for those who need it...
I've been a citizen of virtual community Second Life (SL) for, what, coming up on two years now, believe it or not; in fact, for awhile I used to do a blog about SL called In The Grid, which at its height was the 13th most popular blog about Second Life on the planet. And as part of running that blog, I ended up becoming a paid member of SL; this allowed me for the first time to own land in the Grid, about the only difference between free members and paid ones. And thus for about a year now have I owned what's known as a "beginners" plot of 512 square meters, which is the maximum amount of land you're allowed to own before Linden Lab (owners of SL) starts charging you a monthly "property tax" to cover the amount of bandwidth on that server your property uses up, relative to the other landowners on that "sim." It's a pretty fair and democratic way to do it, because landowners end up paying an exact percentage of that server's operating costs based on how much land they own, a fee that remains stable from month to month and can be calculated in advance; adding another 512 square meters, for example, to the 512 you already own (for a total of 1,024 m2) costs you only $5 a month, while owning an entire server's worth of land (64,000 m2) will cost you $200 a month in property tax. Anyway, so I've just owned the basic 512 m2 this entire time, so that I'd never have to worry about covering that month's property tax, a piece of land that I used as the blog's in-world headquarters back when "In The Grid" was running, and that I had been planning since then to use as a virtual photography gallery for my arts center CCLaP.
I no longer do the blog, because of the client software being too powerful for my home computer now, plus all my time being taken up these days trying to maintain (and God forbid grow) CCLaP; one of the things, though, that I've been spending a lot of time recently thinking about trying to get going again, is an idea for a prefabricated housing company in SL I've had for a long time called "Fabb," combining the sleekness of '50s and '60s Modernism with the space-age physics-defying stuff you can do within a virtual world. It's been months and months, after all, since I've actually worked on the idea, and I still get emails from strangers in SL on a weekly basis, asking if I ever finished my first house and if it's for sale (no and no). If I could just fucking sit down and actually get four or five houses finished and ready to sell, I keep thinking, get a nice retail spot opened up in the Grid, a number of model homes actually installed on plots around the mainland, and a nice website to promote it all including a fair amount of cool little machinima videos and shit, I could literally count on this as a regular revenue stream throughout 2008 and beyond; certainly not something to live off of, but definitely several hundred dollars a month at the least, and hopefully enough to actually cover my RL rent here in Chicago each month. That'd be great, to tell you the truth; that'd be fantastic, to tell you the truth, if I could actually cover my rent each month doing nothing but building and selling virtual homes for a virtual world.
Besides the stuff I already own, I basically need two things for the above to happen; more land within the Grid, so to open up my retail store, and a better computer so that I can finally have a normal SL experience, which since I already have a monitor at home I could realistically take care of through a souped-up used Windows computer for a couple of hundred dollars, like you find all the time here in a place like Chicago. And believe it or not, in just the last couple of days, two of my next-door neighbors have ended up getting sick of their 512 m2 plots that are right next to mine, and putting them up for sale. And I had enough money saved up in SL to afford them both...so I bought them both! Yeehaw! Oh no! I suddenly now own 1,536 square meters of land within the Grid, even though it's almost impossible for me to have a normal daily experience there right now! Eek, what have I done?
Oh, but I couldn't in good conscience pass up the opportunity, could I? Not after being in "Linden's Vineyard" (as I call it) for over a year now, an amazingly stable upper-class residential area of the South Continent, and having become resigned a long time ago to the idea that I would have to leave the neighborhood once I expanded, in that I never thought any of my neighbors would end up selling in such a convenient (and inexpensive) way. So I went ahead and bought the land, and now basically have a strong burden on myself; a burden now to get Fabb up and running as fast as possible, so that it can be making at least $8 a month on its own, thus covering what my monthly property tax now is and thus justifying the land purchase in the first place. But to do that, I need a new/used Windows gaming computer; and to get that, I need a couple of hundred extra dollars; and to get that, I need a temp job again and quick; and to get that I need an updated resume, visits again to all my old agencies, more testimonials at my LinkedIn account, etc. And that's what I'm working on these days, which is pretty much the explanation behind any days I don't get entries done at CCLaP. So hopefully that will all become fruitful soon, and I'll have my souped-up used Windows computer soon, and I can get to work on Fabb on a serious basis soon. Sigh.
Here's how things are looking to the left of my old property boundaries these days; I added the yellow lines in Photoshop afterwards, to give you an idea of where the new property lines of my estate now are. As you can see, it's basically a 512 m2 plot I picked up on either side of my original plot, doubling my real estate on either side and tripling the entire size of the plot altogether.
One of the cool things with the new west parcel, as you can see, is that it finally gives me direct access to the mainland for the first time; these pictures above show the tasteful neighbors I have all around me, now finally accessible for me from a simple bridge off my main building (or eventually, once I finally build it all).
And then here's a shot from the new parcel looking north, towards the mouth of Linden's Vineyard, shown both under daylight settings and nighttime.
And now here's some shots from the east side of the new parcel; the same story as the west side, basically, except this time with the parcel's orientation being perpendicular to my original parcel. All in all, a pretty nice mid-sized parcel indeed, one that now gives me a combined prim total of 351, well enough for a Fabb retail store, CCLaP virtual center, and related underwater landscaping/hangout lounge. Ugh, I've got some work ahead of me this spring.
And then finally, here's the view from what's now the extreme east edge of my property; nothing but clear water all the way to the ocean, that is, something that will make sailing much easier for me once I finally get this new computer that can handle all the rendering. Sailing is one of my favorite activities within Second Life, to tell you the truth; I can't wait to finally get me a souped-up gamer computer and be able to get back into the habit again, especially now that I'll be able to build a legitimate tie-off pier to my water-based complex. More later, as always!
