It’s Deja Vu all over again

I’ve been a cartoon boy since 2006, when I first created an avatar in Second Life. During that time, a lot has changed and my opinions of SL have kind of gone all over the place. I let my rental on Corona Cay lapse for good as I just could not justify the use of my time and money on SL at the time. Well, now I’m back on Corona Cay. It’s a little experiment to see if I can still be involved without feeling the pain of knowing I was not making the best use of my time again.

I need to qualify the above by saying that it’s never a waste of time to talk to the friends I’ve made on Corona Cay. It’s not about that. But Second Life is the kind of thing that can waste a lot of time if you let it. You can also sink money into it on a monthly basis that you can’t justify when looking at your budget and trying to figure out things like school costs for kids and other normal life expenses. Frankly, SL is never going to trump those or even come close to the priority of anything family related. It’s not, and it shouldn’t.

But I want to support Corona Cay because I believe in it. I also want to try to hang out with my friends there when I can without it becoming too much again. Maybe I’ll log in a lot during a given timeframe, and then go without logging in again for awhile. That’s SL. That kind of thing has to be acceptable to people, or things don’t work. So I am sharing a parcel with Das Boots, formerly known as Keeme, and hopefully I can participate in some of the things we want to do on Corona Cay.

I’m also determined to finally learn some Blender skills once and for all. I like that SL has mesh now. Learning sculpties was confusing to me, too much to absorb all at once while trying to learn modeling and Blender in particular. With mesh it’s a lot more straightforward as regular modeling techniques apply more directly. I never succeeding in grasping more than the bare minimum with sculpties, and I had no clue how to optimize for SL sculpts, etc. This time I’m not in any race or have any real plan for it, other than to work on it a little here and there. That way I can do something that might help my enjoyment of SL without actually having to be in SL all the time.

I like the people on Corona Cay. I like that it’s about real friendships and real life, and SL is just a place to meet and talk and have fun. The immersive types and the whole thing that goes along with all that are one of the things that really burnt me out on SL, and this place doesn’t have that. It doesn’t have to be that way. So I’m glad about that, and glad to be talking with all the other people on Corona Cay more often again. But primarily these are friends first, and fellow SL and Corona Cay residents second, very much in that order.