What is your earliest memory of Second Life?

[Essence Lumin]

I may well still be the only Beathag in SL. (Beathag means "child of life" (feminine - a male would be Beathan) in Scots Gaelic. I'm still short, freckled, and have ginger hair.

Seems not.

 

[eighthdwarf Checchinato]

I read about SL in a "diary" series on spiegel.de - and got curious to try it out myself. Then in the night from Feb 8th to 9th 2008, I created this avatar. And only a half hour of sim-hopping later, I got my first good-quality outfit - given to me by a Mentor from The Shelter as a gift.

Months later I saw by chance that this outfit was sold for 600L$, by the same person.


I started to invest RL money I think early summer '08, in order to get a decent look - and eventually, I've been spending approximately EUR25 each month over all these years for SL. Mostly clothes, but also other stuff: Hair, shoes, texture packs, Houses, furniture, Land rent (from time to time), etc - oh, and clothes.

...
A few months ago, I dumped and boxed most of the older prim stuff, thus decreasing my inventory from ~120.800 items to more handy ~70.0000 items

 

[Bea McMahon]

Seems not.

Five of those are empty, and the other is a bot, according to the Profile. I have seen various empty profile accounts before. I don't count them - or bots.

 

[EmpressOfCommunism]

Playing Activeworlds with my mother, this was when SL was really starting to take off:

"I tried this new secondlife thing . It's like activeworlds except better, but I won't play until you can when you're older".

 

[PandoraB]

dressed up as the police, arresting people in rape alley.

 

[Mark]

In 2007, I read an article published in my local newspaper about a young kid on the teen grid, when it still existed, that made $2K usd/week selling digital furniture. I was about 18 years old and my dad said "this is something you could do" and I ended up joining the adult grid. Our family computer couldn't handle SL and that was that for a year.

I created my main account for SL shortly after in 2008 after purchasing my own laptop that was able to run it. Been on ever since.

 

[Free]

I actually have SL memories from the womb.

 

[Essence Lumin]

I actually have SL memories from the womb.

Could you see the SL landscape? Was it a womb with a view?

 

[Free]

Was it a womb with a view?

Boo! Hiss!

 

[Katheryne Helendale]

I was active in Sims Online when I heard about SL from some of the other sims I hung with. I looked into creating an account, but they wanted my credit card information, and I just couldn't afford a monthly SL subscription along with my TSO subscription, so that was the end of that. Until 2008, when EA announced the closure of TSO. A bunch of the people I was with talked about meeting up in SL, so I gave it another look, and was relieved that they allowed free accounts by then. So I created an account, created a (rather butt-ugly) avatar, and wandered around Newbie Island for a bit until one of my TSO mates teleported me to their home, a sandy island with a multi-story apartment building everyone lived in. We formed into a family and moved around together. Being part of a family in SL was a lot of fun and kept me logging in. With some of my sisters' help, I bought a nicer shape and skin, and got a job dancing at one of the clubs we all hung out at.

 

[Jopsy Pendragon]

First time I was on Second Life was from the Apple Store in the mall. A friend had been trying to get me to try it for a few weeks. I glanced previously but had such a terribly disappointing experience with VRML that, well, once bitten, twice shy, and all that.

Needless to say I was impressed with how quickly the client downloaded, installed and just worked without gobs of set-up and unpacking and building and compiling and blah blah blah...

I created Jopsy Pendragon that night, I think lifetime charter accounts were still available at the time, but I was still too cynical to grab one (huge mistake, considering one was about the cost of 2 months of tier at my current rate).

After that, it was building in sandboxes and hanging out on a beach in the northeast 'edge of the world' corner of Federal or Shipley, dabbling with utterly ridiculous looking avatars. Two weeks later I bought my first parcel from Stroker Serpentine in region Teal and I've been there ever since. =)

 

[Natsuki Morigi]

It was early 2007 listening to NPR's Science Friday and hearing about avatars sending in questions in real time.

 

[Willow Matthews]

Watched a show in Australia called Beyond 2000. I'd just got my first crap computer in 2004 and couldn't log in with it. I knew nothing about how that worked back then. But the idea never left my mind. Two years later in 2006 I got a new comp that could just handle logging in, looked about on the net, found it and Willow was born. (I crashed. A LOT!)

I've never been able to find that show again, well not that episode. But it featured a lady making furniture and selling it. But more than that, it focused on the social interest with people around her.
I logged in and spent some time alone in an info hub for a day or two getting my bearing somewhat, and then met a chick ( I forget her name now) and she showed me how things worked. Went off on my own and met a bunch of people and ended up on Phreak Island without them, and met you lot.

I miss it. But I can't get Willow to be more than a cloud, or couldn't the last time I tried. That was Mads memorial. (Edit to add, meeting him was so wild and wonderful. A quiet little chat on a park bench that lasted for about four hours.) Haven't tried to log in since. But I'm glad for the time I spent in SL. Magical times. Many of them.

<3

 

[Romana]

I heard about SL from a friend who had a Doctor Who podcast. Every so often he'd have meetups in SL. The idea of taking to fellow who fans around the world in SL appealed to me so I gave it a try. My first av was the goth girl one, and as soon as I saw someone with the same avatar I went looking for ways to individualize mine further, taking it as something of a challenge. It was 2010, I think, not long before last names disappeared. It was a useful distraction from RL which at the time was write useful.
So my first SL memory is a Podshock meetup.

 

[HEX]

JURO KOTHARI'S PREFABS IN A CNN ARTICLE.

 

[Beebo Brink]

Let's see, I think it started with a Xena Fan online discussion group that morphed into just general lesbian/feminism. Two of the members were a couple, and they were active enough in the Elf Circle to own two sims. I was fascinated by what they described but back in 2005, I didn't have a computer that could run SL. I had to wait another year, and got a taste of it on my wife's iMac. I went crazy, built a gaming rig specifically for SL, and never looked back.

That first time I logged in to SL with my new video card and large screen monitor was GLORIOUS! It was just like stepping from Kansa into Oz.

 

[Worthless Whore]

Going to Lestat and not knowing shit about what was going down. Listening to a guy in Iceland play the best goth music ever while trying dance balls in the club and chat'n with cool peeps. I remember getting on a dance pole in a giant martini glass. Then going upstairs and finding all the freaky sex pose balls and "dungeon" items. True to my name I found a random guy to try some of them with, an we became good friends for a long time.

 

[Worthless Whore]

I miss Lestat. Cool place. Cool peeps.

 

[Worthless Whore]

I kinda miss that guy too. He was the very first person I made friends with in SL. He was Catholic and damn did that mess him up. I like ta think that SL helped him loosen up.

 

[Marianne McCann]

A former boss of mine was Linden Lab's first marketing person way back when, and sent to all his acquaintances a note about this cool new thing he was a part of that was going into public beta "soon." I took a look at the information he shared, and it sounded interesting, but there was no mac client *and* it has a monthly fee. I saw no reason to check it out because of that.

(Oh, to go back and claim a beta account!)