I used to be the kind of person who lived out loud. Everything I said or did in real life pretty much went on some blog or another. Much of that time I lived basically alone – spending my days writing and housekeeping – sometimes about important things, but most of the time not writing about anything important.
But time has changed me, as it does most people. I realized that most people don’t involve themselves with me enough to read what I write on a daily basis. Those that do want to know, simply do not have the time. And the people I wanted to write about did not really want to be written about. But I’m a writer first and foremost. It’s my nature, so I simply /have/ to. Virtual life is more interesting and fun than the real one, so I’ve decided that is all I will write about from here on.
And now, I am *virtually* not alone. Part of the year we are together, part of it we are apart and living in the virtual and cam-based world. It’s not easy for us during the apart times, but we make the best of things and if things keep as they are going; soon I will be able to get to a much easier living space, and eventually we will not be apart.
So the Virtual World(s) is where I live. I am part of Second Life, but I also have a life on the Opengrid in several places. The largest virtual land mass I have is in Alternate Metaverse where I have the equivalent of 50 full regions, and share one region with my man. On that one region, we do farming.
The only animals we have on this farm (at the moment) are some goats. The oldest goat is named Cornholio (he came with the name) and he does not like to be threatened. Then we have Hermione who gets corn put in her feeder every other day or so. Then we have some animesh baby goats who we put there simply to bother Cornholio.
We are growing crops. Corn, Potatoes, Coconuts, apples and grapes are in the fields. Plus Cyclamen next to our patio area. We love the farm. There’s a leaderboard we don’t have enough profit to be on yet, but my Warrio keeps track of the gains every time we sell on the Vivosim hud. (Hud is usually a “Heads Up Display” for the non-virtual participant readers. It can refer to either a machine which has actions (like selling and buying in this case), or a visual which acts upon your avatar person. An example of the latter is a map of your body with the various parts you may want to hide under your avatar clothing.)
Not talking about real money here – just virtual coinage which can be used to buy concessions and etc. We both definitely spend more than we make in the virtual world.
I usually bring in the crops, while W does the selling. We have not figured out how to use the same selling hud on the same farm yet, and so I have a small farm on one of the five by five regions where I can sell if I want to. Not a lot there and I do not tend it regularly.
The farm we share is called “Whimsy Pastures”, and you can see it listed on the Vivosim farming website. I have always loved the word “Whimsy” so when we had to choose a name for the farm, that is where we went with it. The AMV community has it’s own farm, and though we check that one out every so often, we have been far too busy with our own things to participate. Someday we have that in mind for the future.
To that end, I have been trying to learn Linden Scripting Language (LSL) to be able to train Non-Player Characters (NPCs – Robots that look like Avatars) to do things for us on the farm. We have used them before but they tend to interfere with each other and with us. We would find abandoned buckets of water out and about on the farm. We would find our potato crop cooked into “slop” when we had intended to sell the crop. We would find them standing about doing nothing and sometimes we would find they had not been watering enough – leading to dead crops.
But they have their uses. If enclosed with a crop, a well and some other things; one NPC can keep a crop well watered. The ones we were given are supposed to cook slop as well. But there seems to be some difficulties. The “kitchens” (basically an outdoor stove) has changed and I don’t think they know how to use it anymore. And the watering routine goes on far past the necessary (especially as we now have automatic watering systems).
Now when I was in programming school, I was told to separate routines and explain what each was for so people could make modifications as necessary. Looking into the NPC’s programming – it is not clear where the routine begins: except that they say “Yay!” when they pick up the first bucket of water. Yet it seems there are routines in the middle of the scripting that have to do with their first creation and not with harvesting and watering at all. So following the flow of their routine is difficult and does not seem to proceed in a certain order. Yet these are not long scripts. It has me confused until I can learn more about LSL.
My hope is that I can train them to do something far more useful… To use the Distilleries to make Vodka from potatoes, Whisky from Corn; and other drinks as well which we could then sell in barrels. But first we have to figure out why they cannot seem to do the cooking the way they once did. I have tried changing the variables (the distillery instead of the kitchen), and the recipe for Vodka in Satyrfarming is the same as for Slop: potatoes plus water. We got as far as calling up the recipe and naming the ingredients. But “putting” the ingredients into the distillery (or even the kitchen at this point) seems to be beyond their skills. I am going to have to learn the language and use trial and error, I suppose.
(I am the main person on this project because I have a degree in programming and I have taught myself the language of web pages in the distant past). W looks on and makes suggestions of things to try, which is often helpful. But we have had no luck yet with the NPCs actually producing product other than harvesting.
There is certainly more to tell, however at the moment I need to get the blog actually designed and not just typing in an empty space. We love our virtual world as much as we do the real world when we are together. The virtual worlds are our idealized version of what we would have been if we had the chance to start life over. The difference is the one we spend the most time in costs a lot less for a lot more fun than Second Life, although we love it there as well. That is where we met.
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