Telling: Like it Is

Floating (or suspended, as you will) above Teal, as well as above his Particle Lab, Jopsy Pendragon keeps an old workshop that displays a number of interesting things about Second Life, circa 2007.  One of them is the above map.  There's a couple of inaccuracies -- the region of Mauve didn't come online in 2003, and Gibson did -- but map historians know that the most beautiful are not always the most accurate.

In Da Boom, not far from the semi-legendary Zero Point, is another historical map display which lends a sense of perspective to the Grid That Was compared to Second Life today.


Because of the way that exhibit is laid out, it's not really possible to get a clear idea of its import by way of a single photograph.  So here is my own attempt, using my rudimentary Gimp skills, overlaid on screen-captures of the World Map as displayed on the SLurl website, recorded November 23, 2010:


In the above, each color shows a phase of expansion recorded by the maps that have been displayed with each post of the "Seconderth" series.  The Original Sixteen (October 2002) are outlined in red. In order after that are the closed-beta expansion of December 2002 (green), the additions made when beta "went open" on March 31, 2003 (orange), the expansion of late April-early May 2003 (yellow), and the final pre-Opening Day addition (blue).


Above, the full count of 47 regions (red outline) on what became known officially as the continent of Sansara, but which most people who think about it at all call "the Mainland".

And now... the big picture:


The white rectangle is the full area shown in the previous image, on a map of the entire Second Life Grid, which I assembled as a mosaic of 8 screen-captures*.  Zindra is to the far right (east); the three squarish landmasses away from the rest are covered in Linden Homes.  And yes, there is a reason for such a big margin at the bottom: there are two individual regions down there, hard to find even at full magnification.

If the maps don't do it for you... according to Tyche Shepherd's Second Life Grid Survey, as of today (November 27, 2010) there are 31,572 regions in "the world".


Acknowledgements

First of all, in spite of my frequent rants, I wish to sincerely thank Philip Rosedale and the original Lindens who conceived the world, brought it into being and -- for a time -- also contributed their own creations, many of which have found their way onto these pages as among the oldest relics of the Elder Days.

There are some individuals who -- whether they knew it or not -- have contributed significantly toward this project:  Oz Spade, whose written efforts are the foundation both of the SL Wikia and the notecards to be found at the History Museum inworld; Bino Arbuckle, who collected the world maps and made them available on the Web; Cristiano Midnight, whose Snapzilla preserves so much in images that has not been written; the anonymous founders of "2nd Look Image Gallery", for the same reason;  Ingrid Ingersoll, whose prolific contributions to Snapzilla filled in many blanks; Daniel Voyager and Wizard Gynoid for their Flickr streams; Marianne McCann, whose obsession with SL history quite possibly exceeds my own, and who has pointed me toward many resources; brinda Allen, whose active encouragement in the comments (and occasional informative notecards in-world) have been of great value... and Fmeh Tagore, whose question at SLUniverse was the snowball that became this avalanche.

Finally, and most importantly of all, I am deeply indebted -- as we all are -- to The Oldbies, the Residents of alpha and beta, whose land and builds and stories have been unearthed in the pages of "Seconderth"... and to whom, especially the Charter Members, these pages are dedicated.

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Quo vadis?

I've been asked by more than one person about what my next project might be.  The Avatarian webzine trial balloon I floated last month received a lot of initial enthusiasm... for about a week.   It has also received only three submissions, plus Pathfinder's permission to reprint his story.  I haven't approached Cubey about the story that started it all, but it's been reprinted once already since its first appearance on his blog.  At this juncture, I can't be sure what will happen with the 'zine... which is one reason why I was clear that nothing would happen until after January 1.  So, there's still plenty of time to get something written and submitted -- please do.

There are two other reasons why "Avatarian" is on hold until then.  One is: I'm currently in the review cycle at TQR: Total Quality Reading, up to my eyeballs in short stories until the deadline of December 15.  The other pertains to the offline part of my life, which is just about to undergo an enormous change.  Whether for good or ill is to be determined in the next week or so, but I'm not prepared to go public with it yet.  However, for my friends who wish to contribute "good vibes" toward a successful outcome, the mantra is Indianapolis.

As to "Seconderth" itself... Its original purpose, the virtual archaeology of the oldest sims, is now complete.  Nevertheless, there may be some further posts of a less historical nature, but still fitting within the concept of deep map... so, watch this space (and my Twitter stream).

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*The map mosaic is 3040 x 3040 pixels and just over 1 Mbyte.  Anyone interested can obtain a blank one (without the white rectangle) by emailing lalo[dot]telling[at]gmail[dot]com.

Links to the resources acknowledged above, and others, can be found on the SL History page of this blog.

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Gibson is the last region to be reviewed in this series.  It is the first (but not the only) sim in Second Life to be named for a real, living person: William Gibson, who coined the word cyberspace in his 1982 short story "Burning Chrome" and who is a founding author of the cyberpunk movement in science fiction with such novels as Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive.

The original "Cyber Punk City" community project was located in Bonifacio's southwest corner, and its landmark icon on the World Map of early June was labeled Nexus Prime. It proved to be a very popular location in a world then comprised of 31 regions, so, along with Darkwood, it was granted an entire region for expansion (on the map above, its name had been changed to "NexCorp", but all of the references I've been able to find retain "Nexus Prime").

The SL Wikia has an uncharacteristically long and detailed entry on Nexus Prime (and none whatsoever on Gibson).  Reading it again in preparation for writing this blog, I was struck with an irony that can only be peculiar to virtual worlds:

It seems as though Nexus Prime has never been "finished", remaining forever in a state of constant change. Things have been constantly added or redone, never staying the same long enough to become boring. Nexus Prime is a good example of a project in Second Life - it's open for everyone to see, so you can see a project within it that you may think will be really cool just to see it gone the next day (but replaced with something equally interesting).

How often has this blog series echoed the common lament about lack of permanence in Second Life while celebrating the preservation, whether intentional or accidental?  [Rhetorical question; answer: very]  Yet, from that statement in the Wikia, part of the appeal of Nexus Prime seems to have been its very impermanence... and not just from the standpoint of its visitors.

I am more than a bit chagrined to confess that, when I joined SL in December 2007, I had no inkling of the existence of Nexus Prime, let alone that it was a mere two sims diagonally removed from where I spent most of my time... but such is the tunnel vision one quickly obtains when immersed in a community/"lifestyle" (and against which this blog is, in part, purposed).  Nevertheless, it was there, and whole... until the following month;

On January 17, 2008, Tyrell Corporation builder Ready Jack removed all of his objects from Nexus Prime from both of its regions, resulting in the decimation of all above-ground buildings. Ready Jack removed the objects and left the Tyrell Corporation group in protest of the lack of recent building in the city.

Two days later, Akela Talamasca posted an article at Massively, which includes a quote from Spider Mandala on behalf of the land group, which styled itself Tyrell Corporation:

Unfortunately Nexus Prime was left relatively stagnant for a great while. [ ... ] The city has stayed the same for so long because it was enjoyed quite a lot by our citizens and visitors as it was.

That article also has, appended to it, a collection of photos of the aftermath (here's a direct link).

Fast-forward to this year. I began surveying the neighboring regions in April, at which time the entire region of Gibson was encased in a 100-meter tall megaprim (the World Map excerpt at the top of this post preserves the aerial view from then).


A quick visit revealed that some kind of preliminary (re?)construction was taking place within the walls:


You can see a model (made by Penny Patton in January 2010) of what may have been planned, hovering just right of center.   The next time I visited, the region was bare above the waterline -- none of what can be seen in the above photos remained, except that grid below the water, and the model, which was sitting on the sea floor:


Incidentally, the reddish square represents the original Nexus Prime land in Bonifacio, which the group has retained... and which, in August 2010, looked like this from above:


Given Nexus Prime's stormy history of (sometimes intentional) impermanence, it should surprise no one that the build standing on that land today looks nothing like the model:


As of this date, the latest resurrection of Nexus Prime is still under construction, but there is enough detail in place to give tantalizing hints of the "backstory" and ambiance implied by its builder, General Yiyuan.


The ubiquity of the logo, the unity of architectural style -- which I am tempted to characterize as "Future Deco", or "Albert Speer and Leni Riefenstahl meet Ridley Scott" -- and the inclusion of propaganda art from both American and Soviet history, all point to a hypothetical brand of state centralism that attempts a "third way", neither capitalist nor communist, but unmistakably totalitarian.


It remains to be seen if this is "merely" one person's project in monumental architecture -- an empty stage set waiting for machinimists -- or if something like active, ongoing roleplay will take place there.  If the latter, it should be fascinating.

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As noted before in the entry for Bonifacio and Dore, and shown on the "June 16, 2003" World Map (see, for example, here), one of the first five community projects was a fantasy/medievalist roleplay area called "Dark Wood".  When the Color Sims were added, just a few days before the official opening of Second Life, two other regions were created as well.  It's my assumption that was done for the sake of parity with the brand new, second wave of community projects, each of which were receiving their own full sim.  Since their establishment a couple of months prior, two of the original five had become relatively popular, earning the privilege to expand.  Hence, Darkwood became one of those "extra" two.

If any roleplay occurs there now (which I doubt), it's at a time of day I've missed.  Nevertheless, the sim's builds are almost all themed in a style meant to invoke references to Tolkienesque fantasy.  Most of the oldest ones tend to be on the eastern half... but here's an exception, a little bit west of the sim's center point:


It was built by Tweke Underhill, whose Hat Tree still stands in Welsh (and whose hardshell crab still occupies the beach under the Beanstalk), in October 2003.

The northeast corner of the sim (lower right in the overview) seems to have all been occupied and built upon during the same month: October, 2004.  Among that collection are the Cathedral, and the towers on the adjacent ridge, all by Bill Stirling:


In terms of antiquity, however, the real gems are to be found in Darkwood's southeast corner:


"Sauron's Tower" (September, 2003) and a watermill (July, 2003); both built by another member of the Underhill clan, Upshaw.

Saving oldest for last: in the extreme southwest corner is Smuggler's Den -- built by Merriman Brightwillow in May 2003 -- which is old enough to have originally stood on the Darkwood community's old land in Dore, and moved to its final location when Merriman claimed the land in January 2004.


As always, more can be found in the online collection.

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This may very well be the last post I write about the meta-issues of Second Life.  My reasons are probably clear (if not tediously repeated) to my regular readers -- all dozen of you -- but in case this is someone's first time here: I have disengaged from SL to the point that I no longer care how it is run, or by whom, or whether it continues to exist.

As a parting shot, however... let me tell you about an epiphany I had the other night.

Something (mere vanity, perhaps) compelled me to re-read all of my "Seconderth" posts.  Besides finding numerous places that need editing and updating -- to be expected when the research stays just barely ahead of the writing, and subsequent discoveries supersede older conclusions -- I was reminded again of the singular way the Second Life Wikia has of keeping SL's chronology.  In all of their older posts, to which I've naturally gravitated because of my subject, they count time not in days, months and years but in version numbers.  Thus you will find phrases like "...until 1.1..." and "...after 1.2, continuing through 1.7..."  Throughout it all, they do not use the phrase in terms of the viewer, but of Second Life itself.

Being merely 3 years "old" in SL, I have become habituated to thinking in a sort of two-track system about revisions to SL: viewer-side, and server-side.  I've been aided in this by Linden Lab's own numbering systems, and the fact that server upgrades have occurred, on average, quite a bit more often than changes to the viewer (we'll ignore the roll-backs and re-deployments after they repaired some "Oops! Shouldn't have released that one just yet...").  The upshot is: I -- and I suspect, many many others -- have come to think of Second Life as, somehow, an entity independent of the software required to bring it to the screen, and the upgrades to newer versions as nothing more than attempted improvements to the efficiency of the software.

Not so.  What I have, up to now, smiled upon as a peculiarity of the Oldbies -- some sort of in-crowd jargon, now antiquated; a linguistic campaign ribbon recognizable to veterans of a certain age but deliberately somewhat obscure to the rest of us -- was significant to them and should be to us:

The original conception might well predate Mark Kingdon's appointment as CEO (announced April 22, 2008).  It includes, as preparation, all of the incremental changes which came to a head with version 1.23 and the establishment of Zindra.  It includes such adjustments to the profitability of the land market as the Open Space/Homestead change (oft called a "debacle"), Linden Homes, and the recent withdrawal of price supports for non-profit and educational private sims.  It includes the closure of Teen Second Life and the assimilation, for good or ill, of the ToS-abiding 16- and 17-year-olds who were there (as opposed to the ToS-breaking ones registered incognito on the Main Grid).  It includes two substantial enlargements and revisions to the Terms of Service in just the last 8 months.

It most especially includes -- but is not limited to -- the redesigned viewer itself.  A more recent inclusion -- which Mark Kingdon harped upon numerous times while still employed by the Lab -- is a voluntary way to associate one's official identity with one's avatarian name while remaining back-compatible with older accounts; i.e., Display Names. Now we have this switch to "Username Resident" format (also back-compatible), coupled with the beta release of a web-browser access to Second Life that does not require a separate viewer at all.

So, Wagner James "Hamlet" Au finally gets his wish, after he's already flipped his loyalty (or, at least, his source of revenue) from Second Life to Blue Mars: SL is doing, and will to continue to do, everything it can to "go mainstream".

We were warned.

It took me a couple of hours to find it, but find it I did:  Philip Rosedale's keynote speech to SLCC 2009. Prefaced by a brief mention of the same "chasm" Grace McDunnough blogged about in March, the warning begins at 4:15 in this recording:

Try and recognize that we're at the very beginning, and together, you guys and us, are going to have to make -- and weather -- tremendous change as we move from where we are today to where this thing is... this as-yet-imaginary, global kind of new digital world. And the changes that you're going to have to weather in going from A to B, you are not always going to like. In fact, everybody here is certainly going to dislike some of them some of the time -- and so are all the Lindens, and so am I, sometimes. Those changes are inevitable because this is a revolutionary change.

(my transcription; emphasis added)

There is, as usual, some speculation as to who is truly leading the revolution, and upon whose manifesto it's based (Avril Korman's "Tinfoil Hat Theory" is an excellent example). I have always maintained that Kingdon (and certain others, like Tom Hale) were forced to "step down" because they didn't deliver on the agenda quickly enough to satisfy its authors. I also suspect that Rosedale is not the author; rather, the Board of Directors, who even if they are not all the investors, logically must be the most invested... and they want their ROI.

Grace followed up her post on the chasm seven months later with "The Creative Destruction of Second Life", in which she said this:

Having failed to cross the chasm ala Moore, Second Life has to find a new life. The Lab started with a focus on the markets that presented the highest revenue opportunities, but it has to continue to destroy vestiges of the "old" business to create the new. Perhaps this is why Linden Lab initiated a restructuring and 30% staff reduction in June and is continuing to shed people throughout the year as their tenure is complete.

The purpose of the agenda, whoever its author(s), is to increase revenue by driving up user numbers.  Retention be damned, as long as its lack is overwhelmed by the influx... which may be why Linden Lab ceased publishing the data for users logged in over the last 30 days (their former definition of "active" accounts): those numbers, when compared to signups and concurrency, can imply retention.

We tend to embrace complacency easily in any situation over which we have no control. We also, when we move into an environment, take for granted that the way things are is the way things always have been, secula seculorum, l'dor v'dor.

I've suggested this before as a matter of idle curiosity, and I do so again with rather more emphasis: Take a few minutes to read some early Release Notes. I recommend Versions 0.5.0, 1.1.0, and 1.2.0 which record in nearly impenetrable style the most important changes in the economy of land and prims the Grid has ever undergone - then realize that it changed in such comprehensive fashion twice in no more than seven months, and in the wake of each the face of the world and its population changed as a result.

What we are seeing unfold now, the few Oldbies who still log in at all have seen before. The lesson is the same: The Lab Owns The Grid. Whatever they set their collective single-mindedness to is inexorable and inevitable. No amount of protest stops it, or even slows it down very much. Oh, they may seem to concede a point here or there when it suits the suits, but -- once embarked upon, the course is never altered.

...And the changes that you're going to have to weather in going from A to B, you are not always going to like. In fact, everybody here is certainly going to dislike some of them some of the time [...] Those changes are inevitable...

As someone else has notoriously said: "Deal with it." How you deal with it is, of course, up to you. I have said here before that "Resistance is not futile", and that remains true -- in the short term -- for individuals and small groups who may choose to continue to enter SL without enabling its 2.0 features. Or, you may just find yourself able to embrace the change from a creative niche world to a lowest-common-denominator 3D chatroom that encourages you at every turn to buy stuff, rather than learn to make it yourself.

There's another choice, the one I've made: except for rare specific occasions, I'm outta there.


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The Second Life Wikia's entry on Slate has (in part) this to say about the region's earliest days:

The great thing about Slate in those days was the total lack of commercialism. Each person [who] had land in Slate was there just to have a house; not only that, but a "natural" looking house. Many folks had treehouses (Ananda Sandgrain, for one, as well as Ezhar Fairlight's perpetually unfinished megatree), log cabins (Bob Bunderfeld's amazing log cabin house that took up hundreds of prims), and other wood-and-stone constructions. As a newbie, Lordfly [Digeridoo] tried conforming to the unwritten "rules" of the sim by building a wooden home. The theme was bent a bit as he constructed a physical trebuchet on top of it (free rides for anyone who wanted it :)

Lordfly (whose tower we saw in Tan) wrote most of that entry, by the way... We have also seen Bob Bunderfeld's name come up before, in Kissling: he owned "Builders Choice", a texture store, which he closed and moved to InWorldz. I'm acquainted with him there, and solicited his reminiscences of early Slate; sadly, Bob's RL takes priority, as it should.

Eventually, most of the old folks moved out and a new bunch of people came in... the river valley is still there, though.

Slate, even more so than its southern neighbor Teal, is Jopsy Pendragon country now, and a big chunk of that river is covered over by a rectangular megaprim roof containing a cavern, through which protrudes Jopsy's tribute to the classic Henson film The Dark Crystal.


(I can think of a particular line of dragon avatars which resemble Skeksis well enough... they should use the place as a hangout.)

The oldest builds I could discover in Slate are all Jopsy's work.  These are oldest of all (March 1, 2004), and are in the cavern:


Second oldest (March 31, 2004) is this oil derrick, on a plateau outside the cavern:


A month later, Jopsy build this observatory on the cliff across the river from the cavern, near the northern edge of the sim (you may recognize the exterior texture from a photo above):


Unfortunately, it's only a shell. The tube of the "telescope" doesn't even continue into the space (no real telescope protrudes beyond its sheltering dome, anyway).

Jopsy seems to be quite fond of the Italian Renaissance.  Fourth oldest in the sim (June 2004) is this bridge to and from nowhere, on the eastern edge of the sim, in the style of Venice:


The sky above is home to Jopsy's Vehicle Laboratory, which is intended to complement the Particle Lab in Teal.  I cannot say if an older version has existed in years past, but the current one (in the upper left of the overview) is still under construction.  Most of it reveals creation dates in 2009, but there is some indication that is it not an abandoned project.  This, for example, was built in March of this year -- aficionados of M.C. Escher will immediately recognize the inspiration:


It is heartening to think that Jopsy will complete the Vehicle Lab.  As successful as he has been in bringing "particle physics" to a level that can be learned by anyone, the Vehicle Lab, when complete, will become another font of knowledge for aspiring creators.

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Two regions remain: Darkwood and Gibson. Their entries will be posted during the Thanksgiving holiday, and then "Seconderth" -- appropriately -- will be history.

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We have the distinct honor of being one of the invitees to occupy a store in the village of Equinox on the InWorldz region named "Dream e'Scapes".  They promise a different seasonal build each quarter of the year -- right now, it's a ski resort.

Owned by Talia and Jack Fournier, and built almost entirely by Saera Pfeffer.  I haven't asked Sae if she did the terraforming, too, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear "yes" as the answer.

It's anchored by the Lodge, as impressive inside as out:


The rest of the buildings are shops, with two exceptions.  This is Jack and Talia's home (by Teal Freenote, who makes and sells a full line of these log homes under the name "Wind River"):


I forgot to grab the name of the creator of this gingerbread house:


There's a ski run -- "animations coming soon!" I'm told -- and a skating pond with this shelter on the bank, by Julia Hathor (who, in case you don't already recognize her work, also made all of the trees):


Oh, yes -- our store.  I knew there was a reason I was posting this...  ;)


Couldn't get the full line in there, but there's a wide selection... and yes, I made some hanukkiot (Hanukkah menorahs), which are free.


If any of my SL friends -- who aren't also InWorldz'ers -- would like one, let me know (my IM's go to email in both worlds), and I'll import it.

So... come to Equinox!  It's friendly, it's gorgeous, it has a great collection of shops, terrific owners, one of the best builders I know in InWorldz... and you could stop by the Falconvale store, too.



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Community

It's already a cliche to say that the best thing about InWorldz is the people in it... but you know, cliches get started because they're true.

Take the scene above: a bunch of friends kicking back, at the end of a very long day for each of them, in the brand new Equinox Lodge.  The cuddlers on the couch are the owners, Jack and Talia Fournier.  The other person on the couch is the builder, Saera Pfeffer.  Continuing widdershins: Southie Allen, Ayla Holt, Astra Thorne, Cryptic Quandry (the dragon), Tranquillity "Tranq" Dexler (one of InWorldz' Founders and 'mad skillz' coders), and Whiskey Day  -- whose challenge this blog post is intended to meet.

Except for Whiskey, I hadn't met any of them in the pixels until a couple of hours before that photo was taken... but none of them were strangers to me (nor was I to them), thanks to the InWorldz Forum, the growing number of blogs in and about the world, and the expanding network of Twitterers.


A few days ago, Prim Perfect made a couple of InWorldz-related posts on their blog.  The first, "Community After Second Life: The Case for Plan B" by Elrik Merlin, was a thoughtful musing on the topic that has entered a lot of minds lately: diaspora.  Specifically, "How do you keep an established community of avatars together if the virtual world they originally met in goes belly up?" His answer: plan ahead, and plan together. The second post was (at first) a simple announcement about Prim Perfect's virtual TV program "Designing Worlds" going to InWorldz and interviewing Tranq and Elenia Llewellyn (Ele's another Founder and, in some ways, also the main spokesperson).

As you will see in the comments to those two blogs, they were used by someone with a very large and very dull axe to grind. I, for one, cannot fathom what Troy McConaghy's problem is (with InWorldz, or otherwise)... In the end, neither it nor he matter at all.

Granted -- if you read through those comments, especially on the second post, you may find some behavior more resembling a high school lunchroom argument than a polite adult discussion. You will also find a heavy dose of pomposity, which in my case caused the removal of a blog from the roll to the right, and its author from those I follow on Twitter. That doesn't matter, either. What matters is that the InWorldz community, including its Founders, rose to the challenge, set the record straight, and a lot of similar phrases that mean solidarity.


In less than a month, the third anniversary of my joining Second Life will occur. The possibility of my logging into SL on December 5 to "celebrate my rezday" is vanishingly small. So, in fact, is the time I spend logged into SL for any reason at all.

In the months of research on Second Life's first years that accompanies the photographs in the "Seconderth" series, I have learned that Linden Lab has never had a coherent, let alone consistent, idea of what to do with or about the world they created. The events of the last couple of years (that is, since I became aware of "the man behind the curtain") are merely the continuation of a long story in which one hand grasps at straws while the other hand is busy sweeping mistakes -- and other issues they'd just rather not address -- under the megaprim rug.

In short, Second Life may not have failed -- yet -- but they also have never succeeded.

Meanwhile, there's InWorldz: Where the Founders walk among us, do what we do, go where we go, engage themselves daily with the world they also operate and continue to improve -- not as untouchable Grid Gods but as accessible, caring, responsible, supportive people for whom the needs and opinions of the populace are vastly more important than the next "shiny"... Where that populace is equally accessible, caring, responsible and supportive of each other... Where community isn't a buzzword but a living thing.

The best thing about InWorldz? That's easy: It's not Second Life, and it's not run by Linden Lab.

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On the June 19, 2003 World Map of Second Life, Olive is denoted as a sandbox region.  In fact, it was the first entire sim devoted to that purpose, as compared to Morris and Plum (and later, Natoma), which have smaller public sandbox areas within their borders.  Thus, you might not expect anything to remain from its first days on the Grid... and you'd be right.

On the other hand, the SL Wikia is more than usually detailed on the subject -- no surprise, as there was controversy, what we have become habituated to call "drama":

Olive was the original sandbox sim, released in SL 1.0. It sparked a lot of debate among residents who lived next to it because of the noise and junk from physics experiments, some of which included the creation and collapse of massive physical towers with some of the pieces landing into nearby residential sims. It was, then, by popular demand, reterraformed as a giant hole similar to the current sandbox Cordova in order to keep physical prims from leaving the simulator and spilling onto residential areas.

Hamlet Au (when he was still Hamlet Linden) recorded one such spectacular collapse for New World Notes in August 2003. By November, Sandbox Cordova was added to the grid, and

Olive was reterraformed yet again in SL 1.1 to cover the hole, marked mature, and divided up. Plots were put into a lottery which residents entered to win the chance to buy these plots. It was an early experiment in restricting primitive allocation by land size.

... which is the system we're all used to now. The Second Life Forum Archives even preserves the announcement of the change, as well as the names drawn for the lottery, posted by the then-ubiquitous Haney Linden.

It would not be fair, however, to end with that and completely ignore Olive as it is today; plus, there is a pair of landmarks which deserve mention for their relative "antiquity".


Not all of Luskwood, I discovered, is in Lusk, Perry, Clara and Tehama.  The group owns a good-sized piece of the mesa on Olive's western edge, and Liam Roark built this microwave tower there in February 2004.  It's the other end of the "Linden Bell Long Lines" project -- two of the horns point toward the tower in Lusk (though I wonder if the Kissling plateau interferes with reception).

Up in the northeast corner, FlipperPA Peregrine and Jennyfur Peregrine have had a store called "Peregrine Salon" since 2008.  Its roof is adorned by an arch which clashes architecturally with the rest of the build.  Nevertheless, having been re-used from another, older site elsewhere, it stands as the oldest in Olive:


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[Yes, mocha is also a color, not just a flavor at Star*ucks]

A sufficiently enlarged copy of the June 19, 2003 World Map shows a pushpin icon stuck into Mocha and labeled "WizWorld".  According to the SL Wikia, its fate among the themed community experiments was similar to "Native American Village" (which never even got a map icon):

Mocha was supposed to be a themed sim, but it failed rather quickly. WizGamer LeFay was trying to gather a group to set up what would have been the first large-scale theme park in SL with working rides but he was unable to get enough people to buy the land and the project fell apart.

The article goes on to list four significant sites, of which two still exist:


"Happy Mocha", which is properly the name of the group who own the land... the parcel is named "The Valley of Autumn".  The house was built in December 2003 by Francis Chung as a home for herself and her partner, Damien Fate.


Nephilaine Protagonist is another member of Happy Mocha; she built that cathedral in April 2004.  The following year, she built this garden called "Ideal World" next to the cathedral:


It's owned by a group called "Ideal World: The Documentary" -- their group charter simply reads "Coming Soon"... since 2005.

The roof you can see part of in the lower right belongs to Primcrafters:


Built in March 2004 by Cienna Rand, who also made the eyeglasses that are sold inside.

Across the creek from there is Aurican Sunchaser's pyramid (February 2004), which contains references to at least three science fiction movies (2001, Stargate, and The Last Starfighter):


It also contains this, in a level below ground, made by Arito Cotton of Luskwood, in March 2004:


And speaking of Lindens -- the employees of the Lab, that is, not the "tokens" (oh, wait... maybe the Labbies are tokens, too; seems that way sometimes)...  Once again, the distinction of Oldest Build goes to one of Bill Linden's cabins (you can see it in the photo of the pyramid just above).  However, there's also this, up on a cliff at Mocha's eastern border:


Also built by Bill Linden, in January 2003.  Not the oldest, by either creation date or when it was first rezzed, but rare -- I haven't seen another like it, even though it must have been a freebie at some time before 2005, which is when the owner of this one claimed the land.

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