By Kain Scalia (Maus Merryjest)
Coming back to your hold hunting grounds after a prolonged absence
always brings with a certain feeling of nostalgia. There are
inevitable changes, places and people gone. If you've been absent long
enough, the landscape that greets you might convince you that you've
arrived at your haunting grounds, instead.
But
then there are also the welcome surprises, new vistas that, although not
able to replace the longing for the old, certainly have new and
wonderful innovations. New faces and old friends step forth to greet
you, and recently the Lindens seem to be plunging their hands into the
depths of oblivion itself to pluck echoes of the primmy past and bring
them into our midst.
In a way, like the Gardens
of Apollo, I am a vestige of the antediluvian days of Second Life,
freshly plucked. Though I assure you, gentle reader, that the plucking
was done by my own hand- I would hate for any Linden to have to be held
accountable for my existence.
Between all of my
accounts, I have been Second Life now twelve years, prim and
dance-ball, and I have seen a lot. I've seen things you wouldn't
believe. Ships on fire off the prow of the SS Galaxy (this was shortly
before they reconsidered having those 'ornamental' antique cannons on
board. And before they considered not allowing me any matches while on
deck.) I watched floating objects in obscene shapes glitter in the
studio lights as they interrupted Anshe Chung's press conferences. All
those moments will be lost in time, like that latest new outfit you
bought for the most recent social shindig and which has now been
forgotten in the depths of an inventory so vast that entire sims go
offline every time you connect.
Well, they
will be lost in time, unless we talk about them, of course, and I can't
think of a better way to introduce myself (anew) than to share one such
moment of my Second Life past with you. After all, I have returned and
intend to stay for the duration (knock on wood, right?)
I
am sure we all have one of those stories from our salad days in Second
Life, when we were bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, so full of innocence
and faith in humanity before that accidental teleport landed you in
Midian City. You know what I'm talking about: the first time you
accidentally wore a whole house on your heads because you didn’t
understand how to rez things in-world, or the time I broke my hair by
fiddling around with it so that I ended up looking like something right
out of a Buggles video, or that time you accidentally ran over a Linden
with a flying genital…
This story hearkens
back to the days when I was trying to learn how to script the hard way-
by tinkering around with the code, and may god have mercy on your
soul...
You see, one of the things I wanted,
more than anything in the world back in 2006, was a little virtual pet.
Something that would follow me around, like a little drone or an
obsessed stalker.
I always made the best of choices.
So
I created this little computer monitor with a goofy smile. A pixelated,
green-glowing tiny maniacal grin the likes one is likely to see shining
at you from the darkness of an opium den. To this magistral idea, I
added a bit of floating text. This text proclaimed in yellow capital
letters, "WILL YOU BE MY FRIEND?"
I want to
remind you, reader, that I found absolutely nothing wrong with this at
the time. What's more, I decided that I wanted the damned thing to not
just follow me, but to follow anyone that got close. I guess I was going
after the impression of a lost puppy which would follow you if it had
lost sight of its owner, lost and alone.
Being,
as I told you, new at all of this, and only having the slightest idea of
what I was doing, I ended up miscalculating how fast the screen from
Hades would go.
The moment I released this
homunculus of chaos, my screen froze. Once the client got its bearings,
I suddenly found myself halfway across the next sim, without a clue
about what had happened.
Let me remind you,
this was back in the day before Linden Labs added some safeguards
against what would happen when an object traveling at high speed would
impact you.
On my map, could see
this little light-blue blip on the map moving here, then there, then
there, then here. It was moving awfully fast.
You see, there had been a wedding going on not too far away from me.
Just
as the beautiful, veiled bride was making her way down the aisle, or
so was reported to me, my most terrible Frankenstein's monster comes
speeding in, psychotic grin on full display. "DO YOU WANT TO BE MY
FRIEND?"
And then it twanged the bride into, and through, a tree.
To
this day, songs are still being sung of how my makeshift scud stalker
bounced off the gathered guests who were unlucky enough to be standing.
Several of them made it into the stratosphere. I hastily made my way to
the commotion only to find a scene straight out of a George R. R. Martin
wedding, if the good people of Westeros had invested more in catapults
than in daggers.
Once the intervention of a
Linden had been secured in order to tame the tiny prim Antichrist, the
guests and the bride were free to gather anew. The groom, however, had
not yet come back online after being propelled across the sim and
crashing. I hastily apologized, gathered up my electronic enfant
terrible, and performed a retreat worthy of Napoleon attacking Moscow.
I didn't log back to Second Life for a week, and it would be a full year before I would try coding again.
But
if you, dear reader, think that was the end of my misadventures, then
you clearly don't know Second Life. I could tell you, for example, of
the time that a most unfortunate sim crash led me to being teleported to
another location and, to my great surprise, materializing hovering on
top of an altar, completely naked before a congregation that was, at the
time, celebrating the sacraments (to THEIR great surprise.)
But
that would be overstaying my welcome in an almost Baron Munchausian
way. I look forward to our future and frequent rendez-vous, because
surely I will have more stories and items of interest to share with you.
Second Life being what it is, hardly a day passes where something out
of the ordinary doesn't come to pass.
-Kain
