Finally a home in Second Life

Tags

decorating, home, house

I’m celebrating my 6th rez day in a couple of days and in almost all that time I’ve never had a place to call home.

Of course I’ve been living in 1920s Berlin for all that time and I almost always had a little room or even apartment where I lived, but I never really decorated it.

Our sim is almost always running low on prims and whenever we’re organizing an event or something special is happening, we need more prims and I quickly sacrifice some of my own stuff so the city doesn’t go over its prim limit and implodes.

So I rarely used more than just a bed to decorate my place with, because after a long day of working for some odd reason it is very relaxing to see my avatar under the blankets of my wonderful low prim mesh bed with real working blankets.
Yes that was subtle advertising!

But today, for no special reason, I decided to finally decorate my little 2 room apartment above the gate.

Yes, in a virtual world where we can all live like movie stars, I choose to make a damp, leaky, drafty place in a dirty back street of a big noisy city my home.

Thanks to SL Go I managed to make a few pictures with ultra graphics settings, you can see the whole set by clicking here.

Just to help me sleep… legal in 1929!

Love to Decorate magazine features me!

Tags

love to decorate, ltd, media, press, The 1920s Berlin Project

The very impressive ‘Love to Decorate’ (A.K.A. LTD) Second Life design magazine has published a very nice article about me, my shop and the 1920s Berlin Project I started 5 years ago.

I hope you all go and read it, you can find it by clicking here.

Although design is not really a subject I usually get excited about, (unless its historical stuff of course), I have been very impressed with LTD because it is stunning.
The team behind it, led by Editorial Clarity, has done an amazing job.
It would not look out of place on the shelve of a RL magazine kiosk.
Not just the pictures but also the layout, the look, the ‘feel’, is spot on.

If you’re not a LTD reader yet, you’ve been missing out.

I’m not the only one who realised the amazing talent of the LTD crew.
Draxtor Despres made one of this wonderful Drax Files episodes all about Herr Clarity;

More about LTD on their website;
http://lovetodecoratesl.com/

So I’m very proud they asked me for their November/December issue.

What made it extra special were the wonderful pictures made by Absinthe (aka sinontherocks Resident) that I’ve uploaded (with her permission) onto Flickr for you to enjoy there.
Check them out by following this link.

Picture by Absinthe (aka sinontherocks Resident)

My 5th rez day

Exactly 5 years ago, on the 20th of February 2009, I logged into Second Life , my avatar was ‘rezzed’ for the first time.
Well to be honest, it was my second time.

I had first joined SL in 2007, but after looking around for a bit, being freaked out by how weird the avatars looked and were behaving and what they were doing and after thinking that there was nothing in SL for me, I left, not planning to ever return.

But in 2007 I bought a new computer and wanted to test it to the limit.
I remembered SL being VERY demanding and having forgotten my first avatars name and password, I created a new one, Jo Yardley was born.

And this time, only seconds before I decided to leave SL again, I decided to try the search option one more time.

As some of you may know already, I am obsessed with history.
I have a 1930s lifestyle in RL, yes everything is old in my home and besides this computer I have nothing modern, not even a tv, mobile phone or washing machine.
I listen to old music, watch old movies, etc.

So I searched for a 1930s themed place and was lucky enough to find Flashmans, a truly wonderful looking French sort of impressionist early 20th century cafe.
There was old music on the stream and there were avatars in vintage clothing there.
And to my enormous joy, they loved chatting about history with me.
There and then I decided not to uninstall SL and perhaps return another day.
I did and at Flashmans’s bad the idea for 1920s Berlin was born.
And the rest, as they say, is history.

After 5 years I now write a blog, record a podcast, have build a huge 1920s city, manage a very successful and busy roleplaying sim and have done something so many people claimed was impossible; my sims not only pay for themselves, they even allow me to turn some of those Lindens into RL money.
No where near enough to be an excuse for all the work I put in and all the hours I spend on this virtual world, but it has shown me that perhaps one day I can turn this virtual time traveling business into something that will pay for my stroopwafel addiction.

In short, it has been a great 5 years.
I still love SL, but also still see that it is only a tiny percentage of what it could be, it has not yet fulfilled its full potential, not by a long shot.
Maybe I am naive or a bit blind when it comes to virtual reality, but I still see SL becoming the next ‘OASIS’, especially now that VR technology is moving so fast.
But well, you know that, I bore people with my excited rants about VR enough.

Above all, SL has put me in contact with some amazing people and put me right in the heart of a wonderful community.
1920s Berlin has become more successful than I could ever thought it would be but it has also come alive in a way I couldn’t even imagine.
I just stuck some prims together but real life people from all over the globe have populated it and turned it into a real city.
The sim will be celebrating its 5th anniversary in about 3 months (yes I was a noob when I started it) and has had a lot of visitors over the years.
But it is still evolving and I hope to get started on my next project, 1940s London, this year, but don’t hold me to that.
Berlin comes first.

SL has turned out to be a great bit of entertainment for me.
In RL I run my own company and sometimes have to deal with the media and keep friends, family and fans happy.
It is great to relax after a long day of work by logging into the past and immersing myself into that wonderful historical place that vanished decades ago.
Escapism, sure, but a lot more social, interactive and educational than watching tv or staring at Facebook all evening.

So, onwards with my virtual life.
Thanks to all of you who have been part of it and thank you time travel companions for making it awesome.
I hope you stick with me on this adventure that has only just begun.

As the song goes; “You ain’t seen nothing yet”!

My avatar’s evolution

Mesh addiction

When mesh first came to Second Life, I got excited.

When I tried my hand at Blender and Zbrush, I got depressed.

I have build and managed a sim for over 3 years, I have been messing with computers since the 1980s, but mesh software makes my brain implode.

I knew I had to one day master mesh but I was not looking forward to it at all.

Then I found ‘Mesh Studio’, some SL gadget that allowed you to build mesh inworld, no need for crazy software.

I tried it and was blown away, it works perfectly and fast.

But now I am addicted.

I have been rebuilding everything, yes everything, into a mesh object.

As I have created an entire city neighbourhood, that is a lot.

I finally have the feeling I can build stuff to look the way I want it to look without it costing a trillion prims.

80 prim houses are turned into 14 prim palaces!

I am crazy about details, so I am excited that now I can add tiny architectural ‘sticky out bits’ to my houses, making them a little more realistic.

Loving it!

Mind you, I know I still don’t understand mesh completely and half the time I am guessing things and now and then I make big mistakes.

I might still have to redo everything at a later time, but that is just how I work, I am annoying and stubborn like that.

I don’t pay attention in class, I don’t understand instructions and won’t learn till I’ve tried it myself.

Not the most practical way of learning…

Anyway, mesh is awesome, it makes things look better, uses less prims and if I’m not mistaken it even makes the servers work less hard.

The only scary thing is that I use a pretty good computer for SL and I fear that those who visit Berlin with a less able computer may see things differently, so I have to keep checking if other people see the buildings the way I want them to?

Sometimes mesh doesn’t rezz at all, that is bad if your city is made with mesh!

And building a physic model can be a pain… not to mention that SL very very very often gets stuck while trying to upload mesh.

On the other hand, the good things outweigh the bad and it feels like we’re still at the pioneering phase.

And I am amazed that simply by getting this inworld mesh builder, I can now start making and selling mesh stuff that nobody else has made yet.
The most basic items that are easy to make with mesh are still unavailable .
So even some mesh noob like me can conquer marketplace by making something simple from mesh and still be one of the first to offer it.

I don’t know about everyone else, but every time I look for something on marketplace these days, I use mesh as part of the search and only buy sculpt if it is no longer available as mesh.

I guess I am now a real mesh addict.

3rd anniversary of 1920s Berlin sim

Tags

The 1920s Berlin Project

Next week it has been 3 years ago since this Dutch noob began the 1920s Berlin Project.

Time to look back.

I had fist visited SL in 2007, had a little look around and like many before and after me realised that SL was a place where weird people walked around dressed like tacky tarts or porn actors or not dressed at all, where they spend all their time chatting bout uninteresting things, pretending they were having virtual hanky panky or spending real money on virtual rubbish.

Most sims looked horrendous and you continuously ran the risk of being griefed or having odd objects following you around.

Needless to say, I did not stay long.

But when I was given a new laptop I wanted to test it to its limits and remembered Second Life and its demands on my computer.
I discovered to my surprise that Second Life was still around, downloaded it and ran around a bit.

Sadly SL had not changed much, it looked a little better but was still just a paradise for those interested in doing all the things I so did not want to be doing.

But… literally minutes before I decide to leave Second Life for good… I decided to try the search option and see if I could find something I did like.
As someone who is obsessed with history and especially the 20th century, I of course started looking for sims with that theme.
I found Flashmans.

Not much later I was sitting at a bar, listening to vintage tunes, talking to like minded people.
No avatars looking like Barbie or Ken, no huge fancy flashy nightclub with loud music, no griefers, no hanky panky, it was great!

That single moment kept me from leaving and it also made me return.
I had long chats with people there about historical sims and decided there were not enough.
In my head the seed was planted, my imagination started working and I discovered the real secret formula of Second Life; If you can’t find it, make it. 

So there I was, a total noob (not even 2 months old) talking to the good people around me about building my own club, something else, something I could not find in SL but something I badly wanted to visit; Berlin in the 1920s.

I rented a tiny parcel of land and started building… before I had even properly figured out how to walk.
I was messing around with prims, learning as I went along.
Discovering what happens when you drag one texture onto a pile of prims and suddenly see your buildings windows turn to brick.
Learning building the hard way as I had no patience to follow classes or read instructions.

I got lucky, before the sim even opened people started flocking to the sim.
The theme attracted people, they would come and look at plywood buildings and get all excited just because they too wanted to see Berlin in the 1920s.
Still, I had doubts and was really worried about spending real money in SL, so I literally had to be talked into building shops and apartments for people to rent.
I just  could not imagine people spending real money living in tiny damp smelly dirty apartments with almost no prims.
But they did and more than that, they helped me figure stuff out and supported the project in many ways.

On may 30th 2009 we opened our club.
It cost me blood sweat and tears to figure out how to get a music stream, how to host a live singer, how to eject people, etc.
I had not even understood the basics of SL when I started running a sim.
But we had a lot of fun and it seemed like people were really excited about the place, even if it was build by a noob who couldn’t even rotate a prim.

There was one final obstacle that almost killed the project.
One day the landlord of my sim said she was quitting and I had to vacate within 24 hours.
My sim was not that big but I had no idea how to link prims, made a big mess of putting everything in my inventory, lost some of the items I had and that I spend real money on and ended up without a sim, not knowing what to do.

I was thinking about giving up but the friends I had made and the people who loved the project wouldn’t let me.
Friends like Sonatta Morales, Klopstick Sandalwood and Fraulein Edelmann kept pushing me to start over.
To avoid being kicked off my land again I had to actually buy land, get a premium account, two things I did not want to do.
But I did anyway and started work all over again.

And now the 1920s Berlin Project really took off, slowly my building skills improved (I’m still learning), the sim got bigger and bigger (till we eventually got our own region) and most importantly; the community grew.

I had no idea how amazing our project was doing till I started looking at other sims and learned that it was not very common for a historical roleplay sim to have all its apartments almost permanently occupied, have people in your sim eager to organise events, maintain security, manage shops, run clubs.
It is not common to be able to pay your tier without problems almost every month for years.
It is not common for people in such sims to love the place so much that they consider it like a real home.
And it seems to become even rarer these days, so many sims fall apart, disappear, just can’t manage.

But we are doing well, very well.
I often blush and sometimes get a tiny bit emotional when I hear and see how much people care about this pile of prims I stuck together, because yes, I now know how to link prims.

People do want to live in tiny dirty apartments with lots of lags and almost no prims.
They love the 1920s Berlin theme or, even better, they don’t know much about it but learn a lot about it and fall in love with it because of the sim.

That to me is why I do all this, to share my passion for history, to educate.

And here we are, 3 years later.
Berlin is a full region, we have several events every week, a vibrant community, great people, superb shops, best clubs in the world 🙂
Life is good.

Getting ready to organise 5 days of fun in our sim to celebrate this, looking at the thousands of snapshots made over the years, laughing at how it all used to look, smiling at the snapshots other people made in ‘their city’.

And the future?
Well as long as there is a Second Life, there will be a 1920s Berlin.
We have set up a structure that will make sure the city remains even if I die or find a RL time machine and can’t resist using it.

But my imagination is also looking into other dreams.
There are so many things from the early 20th century I want to share with the people in the virtual world.
This year will be the year when I pick one of the 3473289475693 ideas I have for other sims and start thinking about how I can realise that.
Time to create another historical roleplaying sim!

See you at the 3rd anniversary!