What are some of your earliest memories from Second Life?

[GoSpeed Racer]

My oldest memories, let's see. Well, I had an account before this one so I'll go with that. I recall finding a Star Trek Museum with a Klingon starship floating nearby. Seeing a Black Widow avatar at the Ahern welcome area. Landing on the Caledon sim the very first night it arrived. Attending a live concert at a venue that had a pond/frog motif.

[LittleMe Jewell]

On 5/28/2019 at 2:05 PM, LittleMe Jewell said:

On 5/28/2019 at 11:43 AM, Mollymews said:

sculpts ??

double swoons

I think they are mesh, but will check when I log in next.

Full mesh

[Selene Gregoire]

On 5/28/2019 at 3:15 PM, Jerilynn Lemon said:

Bells flared out a bit wider than straight legged jeans. I believe these are elephant bells (yes, ELEPHANT bell bottoms).

Joe Walsh doesn't. He's on record saying such.

Somehow I missed that last line yesterday. It's true. He doesn't remember much. But you know who remembered even less? Jerry Garcia.

RIP Jerry.

[Rhonda Huntress]

I remember making a sweater as part of the starting tutorial.  And something about a torch. I think we just equipped it from inventory but all the newbies used to have the same sweater and carried a torch.

[suzyst]

My earliest memories are big grey blobs that seemed to take forever to rezz, movement keys that didn't respond until everything had rezzed and walking into walls/rivers. Afrer an hour I gave up and read rhe system requirements. I was lucky to get the blobs, SL isn't designed for users of low end machines with integrated graphics and ram measured in mb 

[MelodyMai Guardian]

week one at the official SL launch … i made a account, logged in and there was nothing … so i forgot SL for a few years, sadly i can't remember the name and pass of my "1st" account

[Jeny Howlett]

My earliest memory is from starting island when i took everything off and didn't know how to put it back on

[Selene Gregoire]

9 hours ago, MelodyMai Guardian said:

week one at the official SL launch … i made a account, logged in and there was nothing … so i forgot SL for a few years, sadly i can't remember the name and pass of my "1st" account

I can't remember mine either. lol But that was the trial period anyway. We made new accounts when we decided we were going to join SL so we would have the same last names. 

[Abby Heartsong]

I started SL in June 2007, i was looking for something like a 3D chat community, and somehow i came upon SL. 
On my first month of SL, i decided to get premium account and buy some mainland somewhere. I used to wander around and found some land for sale just in the middle of a "forest", so i thought, why not?
So i went to buy a house, put it on my land, and the next day i came back and saw half of my house was gone!
I thought maybe someone had messed with it. (like in RL where people would do damage to others, or steal things). And it took me a couple more months until i learned about things like parcel lines, autoreturn ect.
So later i learned my house was simply too big for that parcel, and half of it had been autoreturned.

Another experience was in a club called "Bad girls"... I decided to come in an "oriental" outfit, dressed like a belly dancer. And then someone messaged me in the club, asking me if i was "gorean". I had no idea what he meant, and i thought he meant "korean"... So i responded, "no i'm german". And then he started telling me about "planet Gor" which i never heard of. He told me he would show me planet Gor someday, but he asked me not to visit there by myself, because it's too dangerous. Well, i never saw him again after that, and he never got to show me... But he was nice. So i learned something about Gor, just because i was dressed like a belly dancer. 

[Michael Blackwood]

I can very vividly remember my first days in SL.
In RL I have always been interested in business and economics. Consequently, the moment I joined SL back in 2006, my first thoughts were "How can I make money to sustain myself in here? How can I found a business, trade, etc.?" I figured out quickly, that I had no clue how. So I acted like I would in RL and helped myself. In a veeeeery unique way. 😄

I used the build tool and somehow managed to build myself a simple signpost out of a stick block and a flat block. You know, like the plywood signs people often hold up during demonstrations. Around that time I was just fresh out of college in RL as a young Graphic Designer / Marketing & PR Manager and so I knew enough about Photoshop to make me an own gaphic. Somehow I managed to get it on the prim and successfully ended up with a demonstration sign, that I even managed for my avie to hold in his hands.

You can see on this image of me in my office today, what the graphic looked like! 😄

Yes, no kidding! I made my avie a sign saying "Jobless and Poor, I am jobless and poor, please give me some money or offer me a job!" 😄😄
But the best part: It actually worked! I sat myself on the floor with that sign in my hands, at random sims. I remember one was a city themed futuristic sim and I sat in front of a store on the sidewalk. Not long until the first people walked by, saw the sign and actually started giving me a few dollars. At the end of the first day, I had about 100L$! A fortune and enough to buy me a texture shirt! Yay!

But it got even better and I guess that is where my inner "business me" really came out! After a day or so, other new people also started asking where to get this cool sign for themselves. So I said "I can give you a copy of mine for 100 L$!" and that way I made my very first 1000L$ in a few days in SL. 😄

Seeing where I stand today, as a multi-business entrepreneur, this is a memory very special to me. So special, that I kept this texture of the sign and framed it. It always moves with me to any new office, to remind me of my financial and economical roots.

---------------------------------------------

Another funny story from my first days:
Someome tried to explain me the first steps in SL and tried to teach me, that you could build on multiple levels on a sim. I argued with him for over an hour because I failed to understand how the heck it would be possible to build in the air on top of one another. I wouldn't understand how you would reach the other "levels" without a ladder or the like. I just couldn't visualize several "layers" built on top of each other on a sim. 😄 Took me a while to understand. 😄

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EDIT: Here is something else from my first days - careful, cringeworthy! I recently found out and remembered that apparently I used flickr many years back and had made an account for my avatar. Was funny to see the old images, still there. This here is me October 2007, so about one year into my SL "life".

And believe it or not, back then I was a super good looking avatar! 😄 Oh good lord, SL HAS improved! 😛

Edited June 1, 2019 by Mikey Shu

[ChinRey]

I don't know when I first joined SL but I think it was somewhere between 2005 and 2007. It was at the time newcomers were just dropped at random all over the grid with no welcome center or such, maybe somebody remember when that was?

I found myself in a HUGE store with the walls covered from floor to sky high ceiling with vendors for outfits I had to buy. A few people walking around, never saying a word. I couldn't find a way out of the store and I didn't have any Lindens to my name so I couldn't buy anything. The only thing I could do was look at vendors. I've never ever felt as unwelcome at a place as I did there and then. So I logged off.

The Second time I logged on to SL was in 2013.

Edited June 1, 2019 by ChinRey

[Branduff Bisnovat]

This is going to run a bit long, sorry!  In a few months I'll have been a resident for half of my life, and I guess I didn't expect to get emotional about that, but then I did!

I made my first account, Branduff Kojima, in 2004, probably during the Summer.  I was one of the secret underage users who, in retrospect, were totally obvious the entire time.  I was completely enamored with the Ahern welcome center, and remember spending a ridiculous amount of time taking hot-air balloon tours, hanging out at the shooting range, and eventually turning the freebie Linden weapons into a crappy spray-can, which I promptly used to vandalize signs around the sandbox with graffiti objects/bullets that I'd made.  I still remember the Linden who messaged me being exceedingly polite and saying something like, "Please don't use objects to cover up Linden-owned signs :|"

After that I eventually made it all the way 75m SouthWest, (Meters were much longer back then,) to Nexus Prime, which is where my friend from There, who originally told me about SL, would often hang out.  Nexus Prime is what really won me over with SL.  The vertical design blew my mind, and the people were such good sports considering how obnoxious I was.  That's something I'm still trying to pay forward.

A few months later SLPics / Snapzilla appeared, and apparently I was not shy about using that.  Let's have a good cringe, shall we?


3/13/2005 This gas mask is something I made for myself, and then put on the Marketplace for a laugh, (which at the time was called the SLExchange and was a totally different user-run thing.)  It was the first thing I ever tried selling and it ended up selling really well, which I took for granted at the time.  The second version sold even better, I took that like, even more for granted.  After my cyberpunk phase, I went into a bit of a mime period.


6/7/2005 at Osprey's place in Grignano
It was actually a lot of a mime period.


6/7/2005 at Osprey's place in Grignano #2
Then I bumped into an old friend from The Sims Online and started making houses with her.  That went surprisingly well too.  A few weeks later RL struck in the way that it often does and I had to disappear for a couple years.  That was the end of Branduff Kojima.


8/3/2005  "So yeah.... Finished for now, I guess. Though I'm not entirely happy with how the yard turned out, I'm really proud of the house itself. "

Edited June 1, 2019 by Branduff Bisnovat

[Erwin Solo]

The first woman I "dated" in SL broke up with me and then came back to grief me on an Alt.  The Alt claimed to have powers that no avatar has, and even then I found the claims preposterous, but nevertheless I was worried that part of it might be true.   I remember being denied access to a party because I was under 30 days old.  I remember someone helping me.  I remember a lot of people trying to exploit L$ from me.  

In short, its kind of like my SL now.  I love creating, but you have to watch out for the people. 

[Nextio]

I actually started with OS Grid around 2013 (found it after i tried IMVU), then Inworldz, then eventually SL.  It wasn't until later on that i found out that OS Grid and Opensim were basically opensource versions of SL.

My first SL experience was confusing.  I was thrown onto a path to learn movement, jumping, and flying.  I heard a lot of people on voice chat trolling and being obnoxious so i turned it off immediately.  After the tutorial i reached a circular platform with all these people and portals around me and thought it was cool.

After all that, someone sent me a folder for freebies and landmarks, so i TP'd to London's freebie megastore and saw all the cool things i could get for free.  

[Sylvia Tamalyn]

The oldest memory I have is from my first week in SL in 2010. A woman who had been in SL a while had friended me on my first day and taken me around shopping and stuff (yeah, sounds a bit fishy now, doesn't it? lol). Anyway.... not too many days after that, I logged in and she was in my IM box immediately with a load of drama about "DID YOU HIDE YOUR ONLINE STATUS FROM ME????" and I had no idea what she was even talking about (first week in SL!) but I didn't need to reply because she'd already unfriended me as she was shouting.

I think she is using a child avatar now. I hope the other kids like crazy!

[Kerryth Tarantal]

I came to SL in 2008 with a large number of friends from another online world that was closing. Some of them had been in SL for a while and gave all us newbies very generous assistance, including orientation tours, which were extremely helpful, and notecards about essentials like where to get a free AO. We kind of stuck together in our own hangouts for a long time. There were lots of parties - it was wonderful! We went on exploration field trips - Black Swan, Da Vinci Gardens, Ivory Tower of Prims, Starry Night, Numbakulla. Someone took me to Bare Rose, which became my favorite store for years. I was completely hooked by the creativity of it all.

My few early attempts to venture out on my own led to some encounters that are funny in retrospect but terrified me at the time. I even started over with a new avatar because I was afraid of being stalked.

The community provided a changing room refuge for us new immigrants, and that was my first home. I did nothing the first two weeks (outside of group activities) but hide out there, working on my avatar. I would dash out to the freebie stores, scuttle back home and try on all my spoils. I didn't want to spend money on a skin - they were dreadfully expensive then and mostly disappointing - so I did some research and found the Eloh Eliot files and made my own skin, which I wore for months.  It was the only thing I made for a long time.

My most vivid memory of that original newbie tour is seeing this small red arrow on my screen that moved around and would not go away. I kept asking people what the red arrow was and nobody knew what i was talking about. In later days the red arrow would be there sometimes and other times not.  I am embarrassed to recall how long it took me to figure out that red arrow came from opening the World Map.

Edited June 2, 2019 by Kerryth Tarantal
clarify small inaccuracy in final sentence.

[GreatBigHippy]

This was the first thing I built in SL - on my old account (long story, lost details, started new account, years later remembered the details, now she is my alt)

When I rezzed in, all the years later, the hole I made for this to sit in was still landscaped.

From August 2005 I give you the Good Ship Bobbysocks!

 

[Stephanie Calavera]

Joined on the 31st of January 2008 on this avi, a month later on my alt. It was with my RL (now ex) partner at the time. Figuring out how to escape the clutches of Orientation Island, and Help Island, wasn't that hard. I've been a gamer since childhood, and almost every game on PC has its world map keymapped to either "Ctrl + M" or simply "M"--it was a logical assumption that SL did the same. Then we discovered the search. 

So some of the earliest memories involved searching places like Freebies Dungeon (is that still around?), and I think another was called Neva Naughty or something. Also going around clubs such as Bad Girls and The Galaxy, along with one or two Neko clubs that I forget the names of now, and other random rock/metal clubs. Entering contests--and that's basically how I earned my L$'s for several years, to fund "better" skins, hair, clothing, naughty bits, and such. I was raking in L$2-4K a day just from that, depending on my mood. Eventually "retired" from doing that around 2012. 

There are far more memories, but I'll save them for another time. 

Sidenote:
I sometimes go back to the Help Islands. It's somewhat fascinating to see people go there, still with system avis--and I'm talking 2004-2006 style system avis. Even though said residents may be a lot younger. I almost feel like a paleontologist when I do visit. 

[Eric Castanea]

The original Old Lar's Place. Seedy, sleazy, degenerate. I loved how dingy it was. Good times.

[Janet Voxel]

42 minutes ago, Eric Castanea said:

The original Old Lar's Place. Seedy, sleazy, degenerate. I loved how dingy it was. Good times.

A friend recommended I check out Old Lars a few years ago, right before they upgraded. It was like a blast from the past, a time warp and all the awesomeness of SL rolled into one.

People we’re chatting in local and friendly! Gooood times!

[Kyrah Abattoir]

First of all, I had an account before this one that survived a grand total or a single play session.

Why? Because I did not realise that last names changed over time and I forgot what I used. I do remember making myself a makeshift "dress" thing from library textures and system clothe cuts. And there also was some kind of mess of prims where I was.

Oh yeah also water had waves back then, which annoyed a lot of people with waterfront properties.

I also remember that my first plot of land was a glorious 128sqm piece of sand in Minna (I had a 512 sqm land allowance but back then there was almost no land available.)