Was tagged by the lovely and awesome Laleeta, so I’m answering. This is a good topic too isn’t it? Theres so little retention of new people it’s interesting to see what the people who have stuck around did when they were brand new and shiny.
Probably will be long, I tend to run off at the mouth
Well…. you see, I actually had signed up for SL awhile ago, maybe in 06? but I was at work (no broadband at home at the time) and it was confusing and I looked awful, so I deleted the program & closed that account. My friend got into SL because he tried it and found out about DJ’ing. He already knew how to do all of that stuff and honestly thought he could supplement his RL income XD he’s good but not that good lol. He has already left SL, might have stayed longer if gambling was still ok. But he’s the one who convinced me to try it again and this time I stayed. Actually, I think he could have helped me a bit more than he did, but then he was only a month-old at the time himself.
I’ve been a blog reader for awhile, blogs of all kinds, so I decided it would be good to maybe do some research. So I like to think I was a fairly educated noob. I read a lot of Natalia’s tutorials and such, but looking back I know I was still kinda dumb. My friend told me to visit freebie island (see he didn’t even know the good free places) and he loaned (!) me 200L and with that I bought hair, Sirena, because I had read her tutorials. It didn’t take me too long to find blogs like Fab Free & Free Style and start picking up better things. I ended up buying L right away though, I’d say within a couple of days. For awhile I wanted to call L, Lira, because it took like 500 of them to do anything.
I started reading Ali’s blog because it was linked off one of the free ones, and found Primtionary through that, started going & learning to build that way. I was probably 3-4 months in or more before I went to the ivory tower XD. I admired Ali because she was only using earned money to play, and I had caved and bought rounds of L every couple weeks or so.
And I got fed up with changing & organizing in sandboxes pretty early on. I found the Otherland group and decided to become a landowner when I was only a month old or so. Again, kind of backwards, because thats private estate, and now I own a parcel of the mainland but didn’t get that until just recently.
When I was new I only had the one friend, and he left pretty early on. So I was mostly quiet. I only had about a half dozen on my friend’s list for months. I shopped, did a little building & working on my house, and some exploring. It’s really only in the past few months of being in the Ch’know group that I’ve started being social in SL. I’ve been around long enough now that I’m known around the EGL community too and can be social there as well.
Some of the dumb things I’ve done:
I thought (and still kinda do! XD) particles were pretty and sparkly, so I spent like 200L on this pink particle explosion that would go off when I teleported in to places. I haven’t worn that annoyance in so long. FYI I always thought bling looked kinda stupid and it annoyed me that a lot of free jewelry came with it.
I was never a gesture tard because I can barely figure the damn things out. even the built in ones I was kinda clueless about for the longest time and I can only just get new ones to work, but I have no clues how to make them myself.
I’ve always used premade AO’s because the instructions for the custom ones are so long and confusing that it just made me feel dumb and I stopped trying. I graduated Magna cum laude, why am I so stupid now?
I’m a SLex virgin and I’m not even sure how that would work. ? animation balls I guess, but he’s got bits that go off? and everyone has bits that talk? O_o I’m not sure I’ll ever be ready for that. XD
I find roleplay to be kind of intimidating and maybe confusing. I cant’ get in the moment like that at all, and the whole situation seems absurd and I’d rather just laugh. I tend to stay far far away from where roleplaying goes on. I went to Doomed Ship one time because I heard it was really worth exploring. I read the instructions like 4 times, changed my tag to read Visitor and figured no one would disturb me but there were like 2 robot dudes just following me around trying to get me to be part of their story. I guess I was supposed to say something in parenthesis but I didn’t know that and they wouldn’t shut up in IM’s…. so I went home and didn’t try to visit cool places with roleplayers again. (that was just a few weeks ago so I’m still a stupid noob I guess)
maybe because I was solitary and quiet (and found the deaddest sandbox I could) I didn’t see any actual griefing for months. I thought people might be exaggerating a little. But they’re not, I know now.
long post. that’s how I started SL. ^_^