Intro
I was involved in ‘ownership’ of a couple land parcels in Second Life for a while. They’re related to projects that I cared about in some form or another. Here is a brief listing and description of the parcel list.
Numbakulla sim – The Pot Healers Adventure
An entire no-fly PG sim dedicated to an adventure game, in the spirit of the older games like Myst or the original games from Sierra On-Line.
I first learned of it on the forums when Caliandris had posted they’re going to close the project at the end of June ’05. It was completing the contracted six month run by the island owner (who started just as a host and ended up becoming a participant in the project). So the first weekend I had free I wandered in.
This was an amazing build. You basically start the game shipwrecked on an abandoned island. As you explore, you learn that you’re not the first survivor to make it here. Follow his writings to complete the adventure. There are lots of side-quests of a sort scattered about too, as well as many copyable or ‘buy for L$0’ items.
The game itself is played through a ‘notebook’ attachment that is available just outside the telehub; Wear it and go – I recommend a general walk around the island first to understand the layout and just to enjoy the amazing build. There’s no time limit (at this point) so there is no need to rush. In fact, most of the area does not require you to have the notebook running, and just casually exploring this detailed build is an experience all its own.
I was not quite ready to let it go away, and I was not the only one who felt that way. Enough people were interested in ‘saving’ the island that not only an impromptu event was staged to discuss how to do it, but a good chunk of the island cost was pledged by the end of the event! And that was before I came on-board added what I could to help take care of the initial costs as well (Interesting side story to that – GOM was still in existence at the time; I never thought I’d cash out of it in L$ to help with the buyout).
The rest of course is straightforward. As a group we were able to buy the sim from the original owner (Moopf Murray), and tier was supported for a time via donations of both L$ and US$. I ‘owned’ the island as a formality to Linden Lab’s billing system, where I acted merely as janitor, explorer, and an occasional greeter/helper to the adventure (since I played it through once).
I had found the new Linden Exchange a godsend in this respect. The Dev Team can continue to take care of the project – including the tracking of tier pledges – and I get the one L$ payment monthly from them which gets converted relatively quickly at market cost; that is immediately queued in to cover the sim’s (somewhat exorbitant) monthly tier bill.
As of around Jan ’06, I handed off the sim ownership to someone else. I still check in though from time to time regarding janitorial duties as well as seeing who’s been visiting lately. This was also my ‘home position’ sim for awhile, so if you happen to suddenly see a dot appear mid-sim, that’s me. ;-)
Tavarua Sim – The Memorial Gardens / IL Tavarua
NOTE: This parcel was returned to sim owner on 8/1/06. Leaving description here for posterity.
My island rental is the NE quadrant of Tavarua sim. I’ve been with this rental since its ‘existence’ (racking?) within LL’s colo and has gone through a couple of iterations.
The first one basically started as ‘What the hell am I going to do with 1/4 sim and about 3000 objects?’ I moved here basically for the privacy, and get the heck off the mainland (because even in Boardman it was problematic at times). I quickly staked out a few areas and fiddled with the land tools, such as the terraform: A podium area, A build area with private ‘workshop’ behind mountain walls, A link-in point overlooking the area, and a few days into it a space set aside for an associate (Racer Plisskin) who just joined up.
Later, post-1.6 (and parcel deeding, woo!), I re-did the area a bit, but not much. The big change was giving Racer P more space to work with, since he was gathering quite a collection of vehicles. :)
The last iteration occurred around April I believe. After a meeting with the InnerLife folks, I cut off half the land and had it re-deeded to a new group for them (InnerLife Tavarua) to help develop and demo their interface. I still rent the entire I’ve helped to test the interface, quite an experience but apparently the biofeedback device has issues reading the heartbeat from my finger. :(
I moved my workshop area about 250m up, above the car lot (again moved a bit after 1.7 so that you can see both), and fenced off a small area for my slowly growing memorial collection.