Remember this?


It's the full map of Second Life as it was on November 23, 2010, which I posted at the end of the first part of "Seconderth". There have been some changes since -- such as, the addition of yet another continent full of Linden Homes, about half the size of the squarish landforms you see there, south and east of the original continents (and which all, curiously, have the same name: Nascera).

Back when I began "Seconderth" and covered the region of Da Boom, I inadvertently fell into the perpetuation of a myth, while trying to debunk another. That is, while noting that all of the Original 16 sims came online together, and that Da Boom was therefore not the "first", I took for granted the appellation of Da Boom's southwest corner as "the Zero Point".

Much more recently, I began looking into an idea to find, photograph, and blog about the "ends of the world": the farthest you can go in each direction. I happened to recall that Tyche Shepherd's excellent Second Life Grid Survey includes the map coordinates of each region found, and thought it would be a relatively simple matter to verify my reading of the World Map by checking coordinates... thinking that everything south and west of Da Boom would have negative numbers.

I was wrong, and here's why:


Da Boom is not the (0,0) point!  It may still be considered the Anchor of the Grid at (1000,1000), but there are no negative coordinates on Second Life's map.

As you can see, there was once a sim at (0,0), serendipitously named so that it immediately follows Da Boom on Tyche's list... but it no longer exists. (The X in the last column indicates a deletion from the grid).  It was the farthest southwest possible to be on the map -- and if you recall that each sim is 256 meters square, the lost region of Da Motor City was 362 virtual kilometers (256 * SQRT 2) from Da Boom.  That's about 217 miles for all of us non-metric types; 3 to 4 hours drive on an average Interstate.

Which brings me to the other reason for this post: Dale Innes has written a full-perm script which he's offering through his blog, which you should read. Put it into a wearable prim, and it will tell you which continent you're on, or which ocean the island is located in, wherever you rez. Dale calls it "Another blow struck for Geographical Awareness!"

(quoting my own comment there):

And might I say, another blow struck against the perception that sims are like websites, SLurls are nothing more than URLs, and there is no distance traversed from sim to sim when teleporting. That all happens to be true, in a literal sense, but perception is what matters in immersive virtuality…

I.e., it just feels more like a World when you relate to the map of it.

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