Slumming it

I'm over the sappy emo-drenched post of yesterday, although the sentiments remain. Let's chalk that one up to hormones and exhaustion and RL stress. Unlike other overly emotional posts in the past, I'm not going to delete that one, though. Moving off Bluebonnet is an SL milestone for me, albeit a sad one. It needed to be chronicled, angst and all.

Anyway, moving on now with an attempt at a sense of humor and all that:

For a few years, I've been seeing that "Your own private home in Second Life: A new benefit for Premium Members!" ad on the Second Life website.

I've been a premium member since I joined SL and have never really taken advantage of any of the premium member stuff (except the linden allowance). So all right, FREE LINDEN HOME! Let's do this! Gimme my 516 square meters and let's ... oh, LAWDY:

Can you guess which house is mine? BRINGING THE MOON TO YOUR JAM-PACKED SIM SINCE 2015, BITCHES! 

I wonder if they're going to let me keep that "Sitting on the Moon" prop up there? The land covenant says (loosely), "No building things in the sky," but what about, um, just throwing things up into the sky? I guess we'll see.

Anyway, wow. Just wow. LOOKIT THIS PLACE! I can't stop laughing. It's so ... like, I could reach a hand out my window and slap my next-door neighbor in the face. If there was a next-door neighbor, that is. The place seems deserted. I cammed into some nearby houses (don't tell anyone) and saw nothing. Hell, if that's the case, could I pleeeeeease have some breathing room around my house, Linden Lab? I give you all my monies. I barely ask for anything.

At least I'm up on a hill and not down amid all that squalor. Did that sound snobby? Sorry.

And I can see the ocean, if I climb up on my moon. As such, I put my "ocean sound effects" rock on my porch. We can always pretend the ocean is right there, as long as we don't look out the ... oh, actually those windows are fake. You can't look out them. Maybe that's a good thing.

I have soooo many things to say about these Linden homes, but I have actual work to do today, so let me just share some key observations:

1. Perhaps if this idea ever goes back to the drawing board, they could think of a more economical use of land impact and space? These houses take up the entire parcel and leave residents with a mere land capacity of 117 to play with. And oh, ZERO YARD SPACE.

Granted, if you're prone to fugging up your yard with bizarre sh*t, maybe the lack of a yard is an intentional blessing for the strangers around you.

But seriously, I don't need this much living space in a house. It looks like a scene from The Shining in here.

Redrum.

I did not adjust my camera lens, and I did not even back all the way up against the opposite wall. That is seriously what it looks like in there.

Couldn't they have a "tiny house" option for those of us solo-dwellers who are gardening enthusiasts and like to, you know, plant our own trees? As in, trees that don't look like sad 2010-era paper cutouts?

2. Choosing one of these houses is a dice roll. Fortunately, you can abandon and reclaim a new house up to five times in a 24-hour period. Then you have to wait 24 hours. Then you can try again.

You can choose your theme: fantasy dwellings, rustic cabins, modern suburbia or traditional Japanese homes. Each theme has a choice of several house styles. Unfortunately, you can't choose the location. And many of these locations are ... I'm sorry, Lindens, but I'm just going to say it ... sketchy.

Case in point: I started with one of the Elderglen fantasy-themed homes. (My friend Deoridhe managed to do some awesome stuff with hers: check her far-more-positive blog post here.) I chose the same one she did, actually, because it had several rooms.

Unfortunately, you don't get to see the actual houses you're choosing: You do it all from your SL dashboard and then you get a SLURL to your new home. But when I got there, my house was crammed up against a hill on one side, so much so that grass was sticking through one wall.

And then the rest of the sim: So many residents had put up those privacy barriers/no-fly-zone things around their homes that the whole place looked like a giant crime scene.

I've been around in SL long enough that I don't care who the hell walks in my house or sees me naked. I just don't. And it's not like they're going to steal my stuff. I did walk in on a couple SLexing in my skybox once when I was a noob. It traumatized me back then. Now I'd probably try to take a picture first before telling them to get out.

Anyway, this post could go on forever with the failed attempts at finding a house that wasn't in a weird position or hanging off a cliff or slammed up against someone else's crime scene tape that jutted through the window or flashed on and off like a disco nightmare.

3. In terms of pleasant-looking sims, I had better luck with the Japanese-themed homes. The one I finally picked, pictured up there at the top of this post, is on a sim called Daylily. (I can't seem to get away from the floral thing.) It's bearable. I don't spend a lot of time inworld anyway these days, so whatever.

That Japanese symbol on the front says, "You're too broke to own decent land."

I still have my eye on this fantasy-themed version:

(Photo stolen from Jack Linden on the SL Community Boards. Sorry, Jack. Let me know if it bugs you. I know you read this blog avidly.)

Mainly because it has GRASS on the roof to make up for the lack of a yard and OH WHAT FUN I could have with that. The dinosaur wants out of my inventory!

But those official SL pictures lie. No way is there that much space around these homes. They might as well name the sims SardineLand, CrowdedHouses, JapanCram and GetOffaMyLawn.

I don't have the time or energy to keep spinning the Linden Home roulette wheel right now. At least the house I have at the moment has open space on one side. That seems like kind of a rarity among these things.

I have to go. In real life, I'm writing an article on "How to Have Great Sex When You're Also a Cancer Patient" for a health magazine. It's having a rather bleak effect on my mood, to put it mildly. Can you tell?