You Never Hear About Anche Anymore

Photos, top to bottom: The late Forsaken Sim, Aerial view of Chey and Sweetie's Pele property, Pele, winter 2007.


Written 27 March, 2009

You Never Hear About Anche Anymore

When I first came to Second Life, the biggest celebravatar was land mogul Anche Chung. She was owner of Dreamland Estates and SL’s first real-life millionaire. She owned hundreds of private islands which housed thousands of residents, all of whom paid her tribute—er, I mean tier. She was interviewed and talked about everywhere, both in and out of world.

But you know, you never hear about Anche anymore.

A year ago, when the Lindens lowered the price of full sims and made 3750-prim openspace sims freely available, I wondered how Anche’s Dreamland Estates would be effected. Then, late last year, when Jack Linden announced Linden Labs’ (despicable) change in openspace policy, I wondered again about Anche and Dreamland.

I’m still wondering.

Last March, Sweetie and I and our legions of admirers (just kidding, it was only Sweetie and myself and the volcano goddess Pele) moved from our property on Dreamland’s Forsaken sim to our brand new sim of Whimsy. Whimsy is beautiful and, well, whimsical, and I dearly love it, but from time to time I’ve jumped back to Forsaken to see how the old place was doing. We did, after all, live there for more than a year.

Forsaken was, well, forsaken for a long time. Our old property was for sale, and so was the large property previously owned by Leaf Shermer (she bought her sim Eccentricity at the same time we bought Whimsy). Then ban lines went up as the Dreamland team prepared to rehab the land. The ban lines stayed up a long time. When they came down, someone bought the property on the northwest sim edge and promptly destroyed the volcano Pele. Northing like boring flat land, is there?

It was about that time— sometime during the summer or early fall of 2008— that Forsaken was turned into an openspace sim. It remained so until recently.

Several weeks ago, when I attempted to jump to Forsaken, I got a “no destination found” message. I doubled-checked on the map, and sure enough, Forsaken was no longer listed. Neither was The Cauldron, the sim directly to Forsaken’s east. Forsaken was just… gone.

I can’t be certain, and I’ve not even checked to see if there’s any news about Dreamland’s activities, but I suspect Anche made a deal with the Lindens last spring to turn a number of her full sims into openspaces. Perhaps she made another deal to roll her openspaces into full sims, or perhaps she abandoned some of her openspaces, perhaps even having to cede her stake in XstreetSL to the Lindens. I don’t know. All I know is Forsaken is no more. I’ll bet Pele is happy now she decided to move to Whimsy with us.

And you know, you never hear about Anche anymore.