In the Beginning....

    i came nosing around secondlife.com after reading about it in the user friendly comic. i thought it might be something fun to mess around with.... until it dawned on me that this was a world created for and by the users, and that you could sell your creations in-world, AND that linden funny-money turned into real US dollars.
    at this point in time, i had been suffering from artistic burnout, and had just begun to work on a new poser project. very slowly -- and it went pretty well, until i did some joint tests and the results were terrible. but this new "golden opportunity" refired my neurons like a shot of nitro. and off i went, dragged by my brain to do nothing but work in and on second life for 8-10 hours a day.
    i joined second life on January 21, 2007.

    now, i am the most skeptical person about one's ability to make a living on this thing. especially when the person is me. i have no capital to become a huge land baron. i have absolutely NO interest in fashion or hairstyles or human skins. i have no talent for architecture. the stuff i have interest in is very low on the income totem pole: animals, pets, weird avatars and such. (other people don't share my opinion on my chances, but in any case, it would take a couple of years to get up to speed.)
    and so, i joined up on this thing as a new free account. the lowest of the low. the trailer trash -- heck not even up to trailer trash, because i couldn't own land. as a matter of fact, i started out FLAT broke. oh, i wanted the 250 starter ells, but it wouldn't let me enter my payment information, and so i had absolutely ZERO.
    and from this, i worked my way up to 20 thousand ells. oh, i camped ten whole minutes to earn my first two ells. i went to every free trivia and building game, contest, or show & tell i could find. i built stuff. i got a vendor. i got free mall space at NCI.
    now i was coming up on turning 120 days old (the cutoff for free NCI mall space), and i had to figure out if i was going to put more effort into this second life thing, or if i should quit and go to poser. (well, my brain knew what IT was going to do, but me....) so i figured out that 72 dollars was about 19K in ells. so if i earned 20K by the time i was 120, i could get a 1-year membership paid from the work i had done. to do this, i had to earn 2,000 ells per week for about four weeks.
    and, i did. rather easily, actually. (especially since i started teaching -- free classes, but oh the tips!)

    so here i am, for another year at least. and we will see what that will bring.