Right, so you're hungry and you want to make something for dinner. Yeah, you could head out to McChoke-n-Puke's and pick up a quarter pound of crap. But you already blew a pile of cash on what's in the cupboards and the fridge. Time to put your building skills to the test -- it's time to make some soup.

Alright here's what you need.

- A pile of potatoes.
- A litre of chicken broth (or mushroom broth if you're a wuss and don't eat animals).
- A pile of veggies. Whatever's around.
- Condensed milk or sour cream.
- Salt, pepper, whatever spices you want. Real men add Tobasco.

Now. Don't wimp out. Get to work.

1. Find a big fuckin' knife. The bigger the better. Grab the potatoes and whack 'em into quarters. Avoid your fingers, or you'll have a hard time finishing the job.

2. Find a gigantic pot and boil the fuck out of the potatoes.

3. Boil them more. They're done when you can stab 'em with a fork and they're soft.

4. Grab one of those big strainer things and dump the potatoes into it. Now, if you've done this part right, you should have a strainer full of boiled potato chunks and the water went down the drain. If you have potato water all over the floor, you forgot to put the strainer in the sink first. Don't worry about it. You can clean that up when you do your monthly cleaning.

5. Now put the potatoes back into the pot and use a potato masher and crush the fuck outta those potatoes. Don't wuss out. You need the exercise. Pulp those fuckers.

6. Whack open the broth container and pour the whole damn thing into the potatoes. Stir 'em up.

7. Grab that big knife and chop the veggies until they're good and dead. Dump 'em into the mashed potatoes.

You can use almost any vegetable, but if you know more about beef than broccoli, you should take a sec to learn. First rule: cole slaw is not a vegetable, no matter what Colonel Sanders says. Next: pick a vegetable that you've seen cooked before. Cucumber or lettuce would be a bad idea. Carrots and celery are better. Boring, but better.

Try something like asperagus or leeks. Not many people know about leeks these days, but they're an ancient vegetable, eaten by the pharaohs of Egypt. I think. It was either that or they served it at the Luxor in Las Vegas. Can't remember which. I was pretty out of it at the time.

Anyway, let's say you get some leeks. Leeks will try to fool you. You can't eat three quarters of them. All of that nice-looking green bit is so stringy after it's cooked that it's only good for making rope. I'll cover how to make leek rope in the next entry.

The best part about leeks is that they're great for jokes. Just imagine the looks when you say, "Hey, I gotta take a leek" then you go to the fridge. Well, maybe it's more funny when you actually see it.

8. Boil the fuck outta the veggies.

9. Add seasoning until it doesn't taste boring. Turn down the heat so it's not boiling anymore.

10. You might have noticed that your soup is really low on oil and fat. That's why it tastes like dishwater. Whack open the condensed milk or the sour cream and dump it all in. There's your fat content.

Done. Eat it. Fuckin' awesome. Goes good with a glass of chablis. I mean beer. Goes good with beer. And a burger. Hoo, that was close.

How long have I been a part of Second Life? Almost 17 months now? Sometimes I read derisive posts about unfair advantages enjoyed by older players and the imaginary close-knit clique that a certain SLer calles the "feted inner core". It saddens me that someone would have such hostility towards fellow SLers -- that someone would actually believe that all older players are a certain way. According to this person, all older players know each other, and:

• Hate new players
  
• Actively collaborate to repress new players
  
• Are greedy
  
• Get everything for free
  
• "Party" with the Lindens
  
• Are "techno-geeks"

So is it true? How about this... I'll write about my own experiences in Second Life, where I started, and how I got to where I am, and you tell me if I hate anyone or got a free ride.

The biggest misconception is that before version 1.2, everyone got everything for free, without land tiers, with tons of public land, and massive stipends. Certainly, most of the oppresively restrictive rules we live by now weren't in effect then. Instead, we lived under an entirely different set of oppressively restrictive rules.

The cost of playing? Fifteen dollars per month. Land was payed for in weekly Linden-dollar taxes, which meant that most players could afford very little land. When I started, I grabbed a small patch of land inside a swath of public land in Perry. It was probably about 512 sqare meters, which cost me L$1/sq meter to claim -- most of my savings. I quickly realized that, even though public land abounded, I couldn't claim more because the taxes would outstrip my weekly stipend. I had to stay small, without hope of growing.

For the first couple of months, I mostly hung out at events and fiddled around with building things, which I did very badly. I didn't arrive in the game understanding building or scripting -- I'm a writer, not a programmer -- so my first attempts were typical "n00b" builds.

I built a couple of horrendously ugly airplane models, but without any scripting skills, I found myself begging for a script. I had no contacts, except Lola Bombay, who started at the same time as me, and a couple of others who I met in the sandbox while building. Eventually, someone relented and gave me a flight script. Remember, this was before SL had vehicle physics. With this primitive script, I could make my plane move, but not like a plane or any other vehicle as we think of them now. It was kind of jerky and odd.

I moved around a bit, but always had to stay small because of oppressive weekly taxes: tax on land, tax on tall builds, tax on any rezzed prim, and even tax on light. And then there were the other expenses: uploading fees (which we still have), cost of claiming land, and L$10 per-prim rezzing cost. While a small number of players had a steady income and could afford large amounts of land, most couldn't afford more than a patch of land.

What did I do with my land? It must have been wonderful to not have any prim limit on our land parcels, right? Wrong. Without parcel prim limits, the only limit was determined by the server: 10,000 prims per sim. The poor avatar who tried to rez the ten-thousand-and-first prim was out of luck, because his neighbours had already rezzed hundreds (sometimes thousands) of prims just to "reserve" them for their own future use. This was a time of "prim hoarding", when neighbours would greedily eye each other's builds to see if they were hogging the server resources.

So with fees, taxes, and prim hoarding, SL was a pretty miserable place to be if you liked to rez things. All the same, I stuck with it because there was always the sandbox in Olive, and I enjoyed building.

I moved around a bit, still not knowing many other players, and not really having an income. I released my Perry land, and set up a shop in Minna, where I sold one or two poorly-made planes (apologies to whoever bought those). After a while, I got bored with Minna and put up a theatre in Clyde, where I earned a bit of cash by hosting "bad poetry improv" events.

My real breakthrough came when Beryl Greenacre kindly offered me shelf space in her shop (thank you, Beryl!). I didn't even really know her, but she had a few shelves reserved for me. By this time, LL brought in vehicle physics, and I snagged the hoverboard script. I could now stock the shelves at Beryl's with a half-dozen "hoverpods", and opened my own shop in Mocha, on the hillside next to the Olive sandbox. Slowly, but surely, and with endless hours of designing and learning LSL, I was increasing my income to the point where I could buy a larger chunk of land.

I then grabbed a bit of public land in Natoma, built a new theatre and continued to host my "bad poetry" events to eke out a virtual living. I still owned a very small amount of land, even by today's standards, but I was well and truly addicted to SL and worked hard at it.

Eventually, though, I got tired of the theatre in Natoma, wiped it out, and released the land there and in Mocha. Although a few people tried to earn money by selling land, ironically, very few felt that it could ever be profitable. As the population grew, public land grew more scarce, but still L$1/sq meter land was available. When the big casino vanished from Zoe, I flew over to see who was moving in. I ran into a newbie who had snagged several squares of land in the middle of a swath of fresh public land, and was in the middle of building a runway. I asked him -- Apotheus -- if he'd mind if I put up a hangar next to his runway. Two months later, we had a booming airfield, and I was cranking out new planes weekly.

Then the changes hit. Suddenly, we had to pay real money to hold land in something called a "land tier". Some of the more successful players, who I knew only vaguely, suddenly faced a choice: pay hundreds of US dollars to keep the land or release it and scale back drastically. IT WAS THE END OF THE WORLD!!!

Well, of course it wasn't the end of the world, but after every major rule change in SL, people spew "end is nigh" messages into the forum, ad nauseum. For Apotheus and me, we chose to cut back. I took the plunge and bought one of the very last of the lifetime accounts, not knowing if SL would even last long enough for it to pay off. It was a real gamble. To those who say that with a lifetime account, you get free land, I disagree. Sure, it was an amazing one-time deal! But it wasn't free -- I paid a hefty chunk of money for the privilege and the risk.

By the time Apotheus and I moved the airport to Abbotts in January 2004, I suppose my incessant marketing was paying off. Other players seemed to recognize my name, and I was selling vehicles regularly, but not without endless work: marketing, designing, and scripting. I don't "party" with oldbies (nor with the Lindens either) -- I tend to stay in Abbotts and do what I enjoy the most, which is to build things. I don't seem to get any special deals, other than continuing to get the lifetime account that I bought. As a vehicle designer, my corner of SL is here for newbies and non-techy players -- after all, many oldbies could go ahead and build their own flying toys. The best reward for me, still, is the thrill of seeing someone else enjoying something that I made. That keeps me coming back day after day.

Just like real life, success in Second Life comes from finding something that other people need -- services, clubs, objects, clothing -- anything at all. If Second Life is a game, then like a game, you can "level up" by offering something in exchange for money. If it's not a game, but a new medium of communication, as some people say, then the rules of real life apply -- you have to offer something in exchange for money. Either way, the rules of Second Life are the same, with one advantage: in Second Life, you can easily enjoy the game without earning anything other than your weekly stipend. At the same time, you can't get everything handed to you for free -- TANSTAAFL (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch).

Am I part of some "feted inner elite core"? Is there a cartel of greedy, snobbish players who try to crush other players for their own self-aggrandizement, as a certain individual claims? If I ever see any players like that, I'll let you know. I wouldn't approve of such a group. So far, I haven't seen any sign of that, other than paranoid rantings in the forum.

My point, which I'll finally get to after this endless drivel, is that after seventeen months of working hard to create things that other people will enjoy, the worst thing is to be accused of trying to damage the very community that I've worked to contribute to, and accused of getting everything for free.

Even after yesterdays seemingly endless trek, my thrist for pointless trekking is not yet quenched. Today... Going Walkabout, Part Deux: Circumnavigating the World!



If anyone wants to join me in this completely insane venture, meet me on the south side of Abbotts at noon, SL time. We'll go clockwise and stop every 20 sims (as marked on the map).

To misquote Dickens, "It is a far, far stupider thing that I do, than I have ever done."

Update:

We set out in high spirits, heading west through the Cordova sandbox. It wasn't long before we found ourselves already at our first rest stop, at the Ahern/Dore border. At this rate, it wouldn't take long, would it? Well we were wrong.

We continued on through Indigo, our second rest stop, climbing cliffs and ploughing through the frigid depths of the coastal waters. Although we were making good progress, a quick glance at the clock revealed our foolishness. We estimated that we would reach the finish line in slightly over fifteen billion years!

At 4:00, I posted this in the forums:

Soooooo.... tiiiiired

Why am I doing this again? Well we're making good progress. Four hours into this thing and we're in Bowness now. We had a couple of problems with reall obnoxious ejection scripts. No warning or anything -- they just blast you across the sim for setting foot on their land. I really don't see how that should be allowed.

Anyway, we're on a break. Resuming in about 3 minutes, so I'm going to grab a snack.

At six hours, we had only reached Alviso, where I posted again in the forums:

Six hours! Count 'em! Six!!!
We're now taking a break underwater in Alviso before pressing on to our next waypoint -- the southernmost sim in SL: Hoodoo.

Eyes are bleary. Fingers hurt. Need more snacks to hold out.

From time to time, bystanders would fly overhead to tell us how crazy we were. And they were right. At one point, I shouted, "Whose stupid idea was this anyway?" To which Ice Brodie replied that it was my stupid idea. She then changed her group title to "Cubey's Fault".

Yes, it was my stupid idea, but we couldn't stop now. We had to see it to the end, in spite of hazards and mind-numbing boredom. And some hazards struck the unwary like a seagull striking a discarded bag of potato chips.

I was walking along a hillside, when I came upon a train track. Aha! It was exactly the barrier-free route I'd been hoping to find. But high spirits quickly turned to elation, which then turned to ennui with a helping of melancholie, which was suddenly supplanted by sheer panic when I was struck in the back by an unexpected rail car! A graffitti-bearing train of death attacked me from behind, and before I knew it, it was the end of the line for me.

Literally! I found myself pinned against the wall where the tracks ended with a train pounding me relentlessly into the concrete surface. After several moments of panic, I managed to extract myself. I was alive and even unscathed! Who knew such dangers existed!

Apart from the killer train and a sore finger from holding down the up-arrow key, by far the biggest hazard on our trip was obnoxious ejection scripts. What is it about certain landowners that makes them blast unwitting passers-by into the sim corner? Land ban bars are annoying enough, and we encountered our fair share of those, but there's a certain variety of ejection script that gives absolutely no warning.

The scripts mostly had a similar pop-up message, which makes me think that somewhere in SL, some complete so-and-so actually creates and sells these things. He's making money from this.

By seven hours into the trip, we'd run into literally dozens of these things. At best we'd be pushed a off-course. At worst, we'd be blasted into a sim corner and have to restart SL. Some ejection scripts pushed me into someone else's ban-lines, which pushed me into someone else's ejection script, and several sims away, I'd collect yourself, find my bearings, and swear hideous curses at the landowners as I tried to make my way back to the trail, trying to avoid the invisible ejection hazard.

7 hours
It's just short of 7 hours into the walk, and we can almost see the light at the end of the tunnel. More mishaps with ejection scripts along the way, which makes it virtually impossible to navigate through a sim without getting booted way off course. Also, I got killed by a train. Well, nearly killed anyway.

We're in Hoodoo, now. Only a couple more hours, I'd guess.

At last we reached the final rest stop:

Last rest stop, 7 hrs 45 minutes
Well here we are at the last stop before we rush onward to the finish line at Abbotts Aerodrome! We met up with a bizarre number of banishers and ban lines in the snow sims. It was so bad, it was like walking through a minefield -- you never knew when one of us would get blasted into the corner of the sim and get stuck. Again.

So... five minute break, then onward!

At this stop, we stopped for snapshots on some octagonal steps (I'll post it later), before continuing.

It was just after 8:00, when we reached the finish lines and handed around the celebratory sporks. We'd made it! In eight hours, by walking around the outside edges of every coastal sim, we'd travelled the distance of approximately 230 sim-lengths, which equates to about 58 virtual kilometers of walking.

Well done, everyone!! Now rest your walking fingers for about a week before logging on again!

Links:

• Ardith Mifflin's photo gallery (login is Ardith.Mifflin@gmail.com, pword is spork)
  
• Jillian Callahan's blog
  
• Second Life forum

For lack of anything better to do, I've decided to walk across the world today. No flying. No running.



The walk will start at the end of the highway in Coniston and follow the roads west to the end of the walk in Luna. Come and walk with me if you like. Or just stand at the side and heckle. Whatever.

Update:

An hour and 45 minutes later, we arrived in Luna, safe and sound, although we met a few dangers along the way. Gigantic holes in the road, phantom bridge surfaces, sudden gravity failures, lag, and killer trolleys stood in our way. But we prevailed in the end.





Thanks, everyone who joined me on this trek. It was the best pointless thing I've done in SL! :)

A couple of years ago, I picked some Microsoft "screen beans" clip art at random and tried to string them together into a story. The result is a children's cautionary tale called "Timmy Plans His Future" (PDF, 85KB).

Yet another story fragment...

The professor's rocket taxi descended on a plume of light and settled delicately on its three landing fins. As the atomic engine faded slowly into silence, its impressive bulk towered over the waiting press corps who rushed from the nearby bunker to the foot of the now-extended gangway. At last, with a chuff of air, a crack of light appeared around the curved door in the rocket's side, and it swung open majestically to reveal the professor himself.

"Gentlemen," he declared grandly. "Today is the dawn of a new day in science. Today I, Professor Falkensteinbrautsengen, will take mankind to the moon!"



"I tell you it can't be done," Carter exclaimed, slamming his open palm against the side of the travel pod. "And not only can't it be done, it not also can't be not done!"

Inside the lab, away from the thronging mobs outside, Carter looked from face to face, looking for support, but found none. All of Professor Falkensteinbrautsengen's assitants were loyal and, moreover, knew which side their bread was buttered. At present, it was buttered on the top side, with a nice layer of strawberry jam.

"Unghkna ngh dmph?" the youngest assistant observed.

"For god's sake, Smythe, don't speak with your mouth full of bread," Carter chided.

The youth swallowed and started again. "How can you say that? Professor Falkensbrau... Falkensteiber... Professor F is the most brilliant scientist on earth!"

Carter nodded. "Is he? Is he really the most brilliant scientist on earth? Or do we simply believe that because he has the press eating out of the palm of his hand?" Carter gestured at the silent travel pod. "Look at this thing. It barely runs longer than five minutes without blowing several tubes. And the atomic pile leaks!"

"Sure it leaks," Danforth interjected, "but since we painted it with lead-based paint, the mutation rate has dropped dramatically." He waved his tentacles pointedly at Carter.

...

I couldn't stay away. I'm hopelessly addicted to building aircraft. Somebody help me! :)

In the last couple of days, I've spent a few hours working on the Orca, which should be ready for general release sometime later this week. I have to say, this one has been a challenge.

And because I can't work on the same thing for more than a day or so without being sidetracked, I helped Chage McCoy set up his Red Baron Fokker for dogfights. You can now visit the east end of the runway at Abbotts Aerodrome and try dogfighting in a bright red Fokker triplane... FREE!

Not to be outdone, this morning I set up a similar system to let people dogfight in my Royal Flying Corps biplane. Also entirely free and gratis too. You can hop into this WWI era flying machine at my shop at Abbotts Aerodrome (click here to teleport to the nearest hub).



If anyone needs an opponent, I'll be around. Just drop me an IM.