Nigel Paravane

After doing a lot of Second Life during the first half of the year, I took a few months off. As I previously mentioned, I needed a break from what I was doing in that virtual environment because I felt I had gotten into a rut. For a social environment, I was being rather anti-social.

When I started up again a few months ago, I bought some water land. That is, no “dry” land could be raised above the water line. Now this is not that big a deal because the laws of physics generally do not apply in Second Life. Therefore, you can easily build something that is suspended several meters above the water level and it won’t fall down. Moreover, you can build underwater if you wish because avatars do not breathe.

I built a dock and purchased a big slide. It worked well and was fun. After a while, I got bored with this and put the land up for sale. Surprisingly, I made a bit of profit, probably about 10%.

Several weeks ago I went land shopping again. I eventually settled on 8192 square meters in Railrider. It wasn’t on the beach but was near it. Because I wanted to get back into building, I did my usual thing and built a stone estate house surrounded by a wall. I then added a “guest house” and a keep, then connected them all with cloisters. It was fun, but I never did much landscaping or furnishing. Indeed, I don’t really need a place to live in Second Life, but having a home base of some sort is useful. It helps with the psychology of virtual existence in Second Life in that you don’t feel like a wandering hobo.

So this was fine and fun. I like building and Second Life is like Legos for grownups. Just as I was settling down, I got an IM from someone who was buying up land in the area, asking me to let her know if I ever wanted to sell the land. I marked up the land a bit, put it up for sale, and let her know. Within a day she bought it, and I got a 45% profit.

Now when I talk about profit here, I mean the difference between sale and purchase price. I’m not factoring in the monthly land fees. If you have 4096 sm on the Second Life mainland, you’ll be paying Linden Labs US$25 a month. The current Linden-to-US$ exchange rate is about 265 to 1, so that US$25 is L$6625 per month. It’s more if you have more land. So you really should factor this cost into your calculations. If you are using the land for some business, then it might make up for your land expenditures.

Incidentally, the buyer of my land did not purchase it for the wonderful buildings I placed on it. Within 48 hours she had deleted my construction. The moral is that when you want to sell land you may see land and everything on it, while potential buyers probably just see the land.

A few days ago I bought some more property after shopping on and off for a few hours. I wanted 8192 sm but there weren’t many lots available at that size. Here’s where my deep mathematical background came in handy: I bought two adjoining 4096 sm lots and then joined them. I’m not building a home on this land, but rather a large design and construction space for some projects I have in mind. I’m negotiating with a very nice neighbor on the height of the build, since the basic building is 52m tall. I’m tempted to buy some of the adjoining lots, but I’m at my tier limit. Ah, restraint.

My biggest problem with Second Life these days is just getting on it when I am away from home. I works flawlessly on my Mac and the nice wide screen makes it much easier to work. On my Windows XP-based Lenovo desktop, Second Life locks up probably 80% of the time with an infinite loop in the ATI graphics adapter code. I have the latest driver and I’ve turned off most of the more advanced graphics options, but it still happens a lot. I’m not sure why it works sometimes and not others, maybe just cosmic radiation.