How did you find SL?

[fhlurs]

Happy Birthday! 🥰

My friend introduced me to SL back around 2010, I was on the teen grid but then stopped coming on after. I’m a huge Sims fan and  was playing Sims 3 at the time and there’s a popular website where you can get custom content, and ads of SL popped up with stunning mesh avi’s and I was so intrigued by it so decided to come back and here I am now! 😝

[Reese Wicken]

Thanks for the birthday wishes everyone! ( Only disappointments I suffered were two places I looked forward to still being closed down, I hope they reopen soon before the next wave hits.)

All of your responses have been both enlightening to me and also funny (Looking at you, @Lindal Kidd , Wouldn't be a thread without you.) 

If anyone would care to keep posting, please! I'd love to hear more stories on how y'all came here!  It's been a very stressful month for me and this thread has been fun for me.

[Kimmi Zehetbauer]

As I mentioned in another thread awhile back, it was one of their employees who was a regular at our former night club south of San Francisco. One night he was talking about this great new virtual world platform and should check it out. Should've kicked him out of the club for getting us addicted! 🤣

He did IT work on the servers and stuff and even helped us at the club a couple times when the music server crashed and burned. I used to tease him "Did you break SL the other night again?" He would reply the hamsters fell off the wheel!

[Reese Wicken]

6 minutes ago, Kimmi Zehetbauer said:

As I mentioned in another thread awhile back, it was one of their employees who was a regular at our former night club south of San Francisco. One night he was talking about this great new virtual world platform and should check it out. Should've kicked him out of the club for getting us addicted! 🤣

He did IT work on the servers and stuff and even helped us at the club a couple times when the music server crashed and burned. I used to tease him "Did you break SL the other night again?" He would reply the hamsters fell off the wheel!

Really?! That damned employee, how could he do such a thing to an innocent bystander! Absolutely tragic.

Joking aside, That's actually really cool though and a hell of a way to promote a community too.

[Kimmi Zehetbauer]

3 minutes ago, Eseme Nova said:

Really?! That damned employee, how could he do such a thing to an innocent bystander! Absolutely tragic.

Joking aside, That's actually really cool though and a hell of a way to promote a community too.

He was very excited about it. He worked for them for about 7 years until he moved out of state to help his family.

[Reese Wicken]

30 minutes ago, Kimmi Zehetbauer said:

He was very excited about it. He worked for them for about 7 years until he moved out of state to help his family.

Ahh.  That's good.  Hope he's doing alright to this day!

[Bree Giffen]

It was in Everquest 2 that I experienced ‘building’ something not simply given to me by the game. I turned tables on their side to make walls and stacked torches to make fences. I played on a heavily modded first person shooter game where all the guns were removed and everything was made by an amateur developer. This was way before any games had building style gameplay like Minecraft. I searched for similar games and found SL which seemed like it was exactly what I wanted. And here I am fourteen years later. 

[Maitimo]

One of my friends signed up for it first, shortly after it went free-to-join in 2006. So I signed up not long after that, with my first account. Made my second account 2 years later when I was newly-single and discovered why it's a bad idea to choose a SL last name based on your boyfriend's name. 

[Tick Marville]

It was the "Down the Rabbit Hole" episode on CSI that I first became aware of SL.  I thought man, that is cool not knowing it actually existed until I did a quick Google search.  Been here ever since with a few breaks along the way.  I'm online almost every day now with the Covid thing going on.  Occasionally I just need to log on to make sure my avi is behaving himself while I'm offline.

 

[Chassie Rowley]

Driving back to work during a dinner break. Picked up a #3 order from Taco Bell (Three Taco Supreme and a Mountain Dew), the radio had the local talker station on and they were discussing this place on the internet where one could be poor in RL but have hundreds of dollars in L$. It was named SECOND LIFE. They mentioned how people would create these avatars and walk around meeting others. Even went as far as saying some would be willing to pay someone else to create an avatar in the exact likeness of the participant.

Was on and off for a while trying to figure how everything worked until I found a home at a prison (became an inmate). made friends and they assisted in how to get the most out of the experience. SL can have a sharp learning curve for beginners. Stayed after that for years.

I recently took a five month break but finally went premium and, well, that's my story. Sticking to it too.

[LyricalBookworm]

It was the year that I stopped being able to walk on a regular basis. Everything just stopped all of a sudden that year and I found myself unable to live the somewhat active life I had always been able to lead up until that point. My dad actually heard about the SL platform from one of his coworkers (he was a nurse), and she thought it would be a therapeutic outlet for me. From the beginning I was hooked and I've been here ever since 2009. It really has added to my quality of life and I'm really thankful for that.

Happy Birthday @Eseme Nova

Edited June 24, 2020 by LyricalBookworm

[Maryanne Solo]

Having played with clothing mods for Morrowind, (2002) and subsequent ES and a host of other titles, (mainly file replacements & hex code modifying),
around early 2009, a friend was telling me about a virtual world where you could MAKE clothes. and I'm like omg!, 😲 are you serious? 🤩

and here we are in 2020. 🥰

I dont even make stuff for SL anymore - lol
It's all for Real Life. 8^)

Ps: 🎂 @Eseme Nova\0/ ☺️

Edited June 24, 2020 by Maryanne Solo

[Lewis Luminos]

I saw something on the BBC website about it, in 2006; apparently U2 were playing a virtual gig live in SL and being a big fan of U2, I wanted to see it, because I sure couldn't afford to see them live in RL in 2006. I missed them, apparently, but I got hooked anyway, and music is still a huge part of why I am still in SL. 

[Istelathis]

I'm relatively new, I started my main in 2017.  I've been aware of second life for years, and found it interesting but was more interesting in quests and adventures, along with character progression .  In the earlier days of Second Life, I'm almost positive I did make an account for a short period of time, found it interesting but not enough to stick around.   Back then, I was more interested in EverQuest, and World of Warcraft.

At some point, the years of adventures and questing started to get boring to me, and I wanted something that allowed more freedom.  One of my favorite things to do in an MMO, was just to go around exploring, finding a nice scenic area setting up a campfire and staring off at the sky while fishing.  I started to yearn for my own house, a place to retire to.  None of he MMOs I played really satisfied that, RIFT did do a pretty good job though.  Even so, there were limitations with what you can do, and what is available for you. EverQuest Next looked really promising, but that never came to be.  I started searching for an MMO that would give me more freedom, and while there were some good ones out there, they did not provide what I wanted, so eventually I gave second life a try and loved it.

I think the thing that appealed to me, was simply having the ability to fashion my own home, go exploring, all of the creativity bursting from the seams in SL.  It offers a lot that MMOs just can't.   I've never been a social person so, it had nothing to do with chatting with people or being part of a larger community, I just wanted to be able to build my own little worlds that I can sit around in, relax, and allow my imagination to flourish.  I haven't found anything better than SL to do that with, it is easy has a lot of people who offer free stuffs to help you out, it is perfect.  Plus there is always so much to explore here.

[Maryanne Solo]

On 6/24/2020 at 6:10 AM, Maitimo said:

 and discovered why it's a bad idea to choose a SL last name based on your boyfriend's name. 

or soon to be Ex *cough 🤭

[KittyKaty96]

I did a lot of text based roleplaying on various chat rooms and instant messenger services and I met someone that said "you'd probably like SecondLife." 

I had heard bad things about it before via real life friends but I gave it a go. Signed up with said person from roleplaying, he walked me through it, got me my first avatar and let me hang out at his place so I wasn't labelled homeless. Lol. I couldn't get the hang of the controls but once I started using firestorm, it got easier and now, 5 years later and 2 accounts later... I'm hooked. 

I've met loads of lovely people and even made friends off SL with some. I don't think I could ever leave now.