Excerpt from Gweneth Llewelyn's Blog About Second Life

'People with disabilities - social, mental, physical - or severe illnesses come here to enjoy "normal life". For them, it's much more than an "escape" from RL. It's the only way they have to enjoy absolutely normal human interaction without any prejudice at all!

Therapists have actually encouraged some of these people to join an online 3D game for that reason. Since it's unpolite to ask people what they do or what they are in RL, they can enjoy hours, days, months of a completely normal and healthy "life". Even if it is a virtual one!

This amazing characteristic has begun to attract the attention of psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists and many types of mental healers - several even setup their own offices in SL! People are writing their college thesis on human interaction in a world without barriers or prejudice. All this is absolutely amazing and probably a completely unexpected "side-effect".

It will be interesting to see it evolve... '


Today is My Mum's Birthday...
Years and years ago, before I knew A$ in the way I do now, I remember her saying to me, "Today is my mother's birthday. She's 101* today!" I said, "WOW! How is she?" A$ said, "She died in 19--." Me, lapsing into confusion, "Uh... "
Now, however, it's MY mother's birthday.

*I don't remember the number

Second Life map -- the red circle is my gallery.


Map close-up showing the location of my gallery. Second Life is a flat world, unlike There, which is round. [In There you can drive (if you have a long time to spare -- but some people HAVE done it) to the poles, or around the world. Because it's on many servers, if one place is laggy it's best to move to another server. Lag is the bane of our virtual existences.] In Second Life each square is a "sim" -- a simulation -- and each sim is on a separate computer. There are edges of the sims -- like north of me you can look out over the water but you can't fly over it. There's no sim to the north of me. The Second Life world is a patchwork of places you can go and places which don't exist. That is fine, mostly -- I like having an empty vista in front of my house. Anyway, the danger-zone sim of Jessie is NNW of me and every time I sidle up to their border I get killed, so the more space the better! Once I was driving around in the snow sims (lower right-hand part of map) when I went off the edge into the gaping hole left by a sim that'd crashed. (I see I named the screenshot "no-sim-snow-sim.)


That's just fascinating to me. Even better than NOT ever seeing what happens -- especially since I got my car back eventually. It disappeared but I went back to look when the sim was up and there she was -- the little black Futura.