Trimming My Inventory-- Now a Compulsion!

Written 16 March, 2010

Trimming My Inventory-- Now a Compulsion!
By the time I was in Second Life a month, I had more than 20,000 items, mostly freebies. I eventually got rid of most of them. Still, I seemed to have 20k items. In fact, my inventory has hovered around 20k since.

Whenever my inventory has risen much above 20,000, I've taken steps to bring its count down-- and I've documented the various ways I did so in this blog.

The first thing I did was to delete all my many freebies (all but the textures). Then I went on a hunt for duplicates. When I was new I didn't understand that you didn't need multiple copies of copyable items. I would have four or five copies of various things I had rezzed and then taken.

Then I used Search to get rid of unwanted scripts and notecards that had come with various purchases. Because I was buying a lot of stuff, that accounted for hundreds of items.

Next, I purchased K&R Engineering's great texture organizers. Back in early 2007 they were the best on the grid, and I suspect they still may be. I put all my textures in them, reducing my inventory count by some thousands. By now, I expect, there must be 20,000+ textures in the various organizers.

About a year after that my inventory had again grown to the point of needing a diet. I made a little sky platform and put a grid texture on it, with squares just a little larger than .5 x .5 x .5 boxes. I put little descriptive boxes Sweetie had made, named them for various categories, and put backups of all my copyable items in them. I also stuffed them with things I didn't need but couldn't quite bring myself to throw away. I now have about 50 prim storage boxes with everything from Christmas stuff I don't need eleven months of the year to gadgets I have retired to plants that don't fit Whimsy's theme to no-copy outfits that never quite worked.

I've done other things to cut down inventory count. I made a notecard and, as I deleted cards, wrote the names of people who ended up in my Calling Cards folder but with whom I had fallen out of touch. I included notes to identify them.

Long ago I deleted my duplicate and no-longer-working landmarks and put the rest into notecards, by category. I keep no more than 50 landmarks in history. When I need to jump, I use my Mystitool's teleport history, or teleport via the map, or use search or picks of creators. If that fails, I open a notecard-- and you know what? I rarely need to open a notecard.

Over the past several weeks I have boxed up stuff with lots of components. When I want to wear my big dragon avi, I just open its box. When I want to lay track for Kitto Flora's little steam train, I unbox it. When I want to wear that outfit with 50 parts, I unpack it first. And when I want one of Lilith Heart's plants, I pull it out of a box.

All of this makes me perhaps more than a bit compulsive, and it does cause a bit of inconvenience, but being three years and four months in world with an inventory of 16,600 items makes it all worthwhile.