...and so it begins

I washed up upon the newbie shores of Second Life's Orientation Island on December 7th, 2006.

Eager to add to the already cacophonous voices of content within the Metaverse, I became a "sandbox rat", journeying out into the various free-to-build simulators (sims) and open lots to build, script, and laugh my time away.

After a couple weeks, I ran across the extremely accomplished builder, Tiridates. He introduced me to some people at Dogfight Atoll, and I was granted space to build my first home, Salvage. Salvage was a rusty military style quonset hut, attached to a long pier. She floated approximately 500 meters off the ground, aided by two steam filled tanks, a boiler, and a stripped down Heimbach power generator. I was adopted into the local pirate aviation group, and began to work on Vanships, a type of flying craft in the anime series "Last Exile".

Not content with only working on aircraft (and honestly, not exactly proficient at physical flying scripts), I began to spend time working on other items, basic prim clothing accessories, more and more involved scripting, and photography.

By default, I'm very detail oriented, at least when it comes to work I produce, and I was VERY unhappy with the quality of raw snapshots taken with the Second Life (SL) client. I began to post-produce my pictures, first just cleaning up obvious avatar mesh deformations or adding slight shadows. The more I worked at it, the more I began to tweak, until apparently I really polished up a style, and people began asking me what program using to render the images. HA! It's all SL, but with a heavy Photoshop hand.

I began posting my pictures on Flickr and began to get quite a bit of attention from my work. Because of the subject matter of some of my pictures, however, I was soon forced to make some pictures private. That defeated the purpose of making the pictures in the first place, so I began to search out for a bit of virtual land in SL to set up a personal gallery of sorts.

"Land" in SL is divided into 2 main categories: "PG" and "Mature". These categories are for the type of content that SL users can publicly show. Since my work DID involve nudes, I searched for Mature land, preferably non-covenant Mainland.

I eventually landed in Solbim, a sim on the second Mainland continent. A user by the name of Matashi was opening up his land to rental properties, and I was fortunate enough to be his first client. Not entirely awash in Lindens (the SL currency), but with payment info on file, I was allowed to start building a public gallery for my artwork on speculation; I would sell my work, and Matashi would get a small commission for rent.

My official gallery opening in mid-January was a huge success! Linden Lab employee John Lester ( a.k.a. "Pathfinder Linden" ) was in attendance, as well as models from my shoots, some of the best (in my opinion) SL photographers, and many supporters from Flickr.

I wasn't actually selling pictures at the time, and I was never actually asked to pay rent. Matashi was on the way out of SL, and after a while, I was granted ALL his land in Solbim. It was a hugely emotional time, as I was just so thankful and excited. Two months in SL, and I now had almost a quarter of a sim. After the initial glowy glowy, though, I realized my monthly fee in SL had also grown. Yeeeesh.

Well, this will have to be all for now. Next time, I'll introduce a couple very dear friends, and explain how a pretty little white concrete gallery turned into an urban wasteland called Pleasantville.