I Can Quit My Second Life Any Time I Feel Like It

OK, I won't talk about this Second Life stuff much more, but I spent some time "in world" last night. That's what we Second Lifers say when we're walking through the Second Life 3-D online universe, and I had some thoughts about the experience.

My quest to aquire better hair continued as did my effort to generally modify my off-the-rack "Urban Chic" avatar. (Hey, best I could find, OK? The choices were: boy-next-door-in-a-tight tee-shirt-and-jeans or lounge-lizard-in-black-jumpsuit. Or a fox or something. I'm not ready to be a "Furry." Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

Modifying your appearances is not as easy as you'd think.

You can right-click on your computer self and modify your look a little by using sliders. Click on a slider and make hair longer or shorter, your nose bigger and more narrow, your beard thiner or bushier.

You can also modify your clothing. In the snapshot I took, I'm wearing a jacket I modified from a small white overshirt. It looks a little like a Nehru jacket with a longer tail. I like it. I'm wearing a red shirt under it and I got free jeans in a shop to replace my avatar's original knee-shorts.

So now I look roughly like a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn Society.

I got free hair in one shop but it was red and the original black hair stayed when I put it on so I walked around looking kind of goofy until I figured out how to fix that.

After a little Goo Diligence, I discovered there are volunteers on Help Island, one of the many places to which you can teleport to in SL. (It's kind of like web surfing only in a 3-D environment in which you jump to places on your search results.)

So on Help Island, for the first time in-world, I struck up a conversation with a girl sitting on a bridge railing near the landing pad. I think people sit around there because they're volunteers.

Don't worry about a job yet, she said. Look around for freebies. Go and talk to people. Talk to everyone.

"Everywhere I go seems to be empty," I typed, my avatar mimin the keystrokes.

"Click on the map and go where there are a lot of people."

About then my computer froze up and when I got back in-world she was talking to some other people and I couldn't seem to get back into the conversation. And, you know, my feelings were kinda hurt. ?! It's weird. It feels like the real world in that respect.

Another girl was sitting on the other side of the railing so I walked over and tried talking to her.

"Do you know much about SL?" I asked, figuring she was hanging out there as a volunteer also. That seems to be the protocol on Help Island.

She said something involving LOL and and I got the impression she was giggling at the stupid newbie. Evidently I'm socially awkward in-world too. (Psychological research on all this is going on, I'm sure, or to come. Perhaps it will give me a glimpse through a different pane of the Johari Window.)

So I clicked on the map and looked for spots with lots of green dots and teleported.

And I landed on some guy's virtual patio and set off a security alarm. Just like my feelings were hurt by the conversation issue, I started to panic when it started to warn me I had 10 seconds (or some SL equivalent of time) to get off the patio.

Only thing is the message box that popped up with the warning meant I couldn't click anything like the teleport options because it had choices that required clicking didn't seem contextually relevant.

So while I was trying to figure out how to make good my escape, the security system said in effect: "Time's up Dirtbag, you are being physically ejected."

And I went flying through the air. You can fly in SL, and crash landings do not seem to invoke any system of damage points. Fortunately.

I went to the search option and typed free hair. That got me to the place pictured above. They , heavy sigh, seemed to have women's hair only.

A few other map quests got me into a club or two including some rather interesting Goth places and a few other empty malls with no hair extentions.

No Linden bucks, bad hair and I was snubbed by a cartoon character. It may take me a while to get the hang of this.