Life is strange, isn’t it?
By now, all you regular blog readers know my secret: my favourite pastime over the past eleven years has been creating and outfitting Second Life avatars, and endlessly shopping the SL grid and Marketplace for steals, deals, and freebies for my collection of alts! (Hey, you didn’t think I actually spent a lot of money on this, did you? I did almost all of it for free!)
And it only took a cancer scare for me to come clean about my hobby, in an effort to find good homes for all my avatars after my death, via my will. (That work is ongoing. I have to start getting in touch with all the people who expressed an interest in inheriting one of my avatars.)
Hey, some people collect stamps; I just happen to collect avatars. Yes, I know, it’s a rather strange hobby. But I’m quite certain that I am not the only person who does this in Second Life. (Perhaps not to the same extent…)
I just decided to come out of the closet, just like I had earlier in my life about being gay and about being someone with chronic, clinical depression. Coming out of the closet is liberating. Like the Bible says, the truth will set you free.
All I know is that shopping for deals and freebies makes me happy, and I have also been happy to share my expertise and experience with those of you reading my blog. I hope by now that I have convinced you that you do not need to spend thousands of Linden dollars to look like a million bucks in Second Life!
And I find it so ironic that I am now a Second Life blogger! As I said recently on the VirtualVerse user forums:
You know, I started off on July 31st, 2017 as a blogger exclusively about Sansar. I never planned to blog about other virtual worlds at all, and I certainly never planned to become an SL blogger. There are already thousands of bloggers doing that, and doing it well, like Strawberry Singh and Inara Pey.
Then, after an incident in January 2018 where I was asked by Linden Lab to take down some pictures I had taken (with permission, mind you!) of one of their Ready Player One experiences after Warner Brothers objected to LL about my use of the apparently forbidden word “exclusive”, I got pissed off and I decided to rebrand and expand my blog to cover all the newer social VR platforms including High Fidelity, Sinespace, VRChat, and AltspaceVR.
You can follow the drama as it unfolded here:
Pick of the Day: Aech’s Garage, the Ready Player One Movie Experience in Sansar (The blogpost that started this whole mess, where I was asked to take down the pictures by LL’s legal. I eventually was allowed to repost the pictures, and I got a personal apology from Ebbe Altberg, which meant a lot to me.)
UPDATED: I’m Taking A Break
The Sansar Newsblog Is On Hiatus
The Sansar Newsblog Has Changed Its Name to RyanSchultz.comIn February 2018, I also started covering the ever-expanding and truly hyperbole-filled world of blockchain/cryptocurrency-based virtual worlds like Decentraland:
Blockchain-Based Virtual Worlds – Ryan SchultzBut what I find most amusing by far is that now, by far, the most traffic to my blog is generated by my many posts about the steals, deals, and freebies in Second Life!
Second Life Steals, Deals and Freebies – Ryan SchultzI’m actually in the first page of search results when you Google “second life freebies”. It just goes to show you that you never can predict what will happen…
In its short life, this blog has already had a couple of twists and turns! I’m sure there will be more to come in the future. But I have discovered my calling. I just love blogging about social VR, virtual worlds, and the metaverse! And I will continue to share news and views about Second Life and the dozens of newer virtual worlds and social VR spaces.
From the bottom of my heart, thank you all for joining me on this journey.
Like you Ryan I’m a closet avatar collector of sorts. I created my first alt in 2005. Over the years I’ve probably created somewhere between a dozen and 18. Most of them were to test out something new in SL that needed a plain simple avatar or to see what the experience for a new user was like. I never access most after a month or so. What is surprising is that I keep the user names and pass words so I signed on to an account from 2007 a few months ago and find it is still there. But it hadn’t been used for over a decade. One thing I usually did was get a free AO. I couldn’t stand walking around like I had a stick up my bum even though it was a throw away avatar. Today new avatars come with an AO.