Blog Interviewer

Written 30 June, 2010

Blog Interviewer

Here's the link to an interview done with me by Blog Interviewer.

Oops! Link is broken. I discovered this when I revisited this post on 18 May, 2020.

Happily, I kept a copy of my e-mail answering the interviewer's questions. It appears below.t. The interviewer was Ana Luteetia.

Re: Your Request for Interview

Sunday, August 2, 2009 8:31 PM

From: Cheyenne Palisades

To: Ana Lutetia

1 – How did you discover Second Life and what made you create an account?

  

My real life friends Bill and Pam Havercamp told me about Second Life while we were vacationing at Cape Cod in 2006. I was like "You can?" "It IS?" I was SOOO there! As soon as I got home I made an account. I didn't eat for three days.

2 – How did you come up with your Second Life name?

My first name on Earth is a place name, so I used place names for both my first and second Second Life names. Cheyenne is also the name of a people, and I liked that.

3 – Lots of people only stay in SL for a week or a month after creating an account. What made you stay and what motivates you to log back in?

I was fascinated from the first. My god, I could FLY! I could TELEPORT! My imagination was engaged from my moment of rezzing. The question wasn't so much why did I log back in, but how did I manage to ever log out to go to work or get some sleep?

4 – What have you been doing in SL? Tell us your story: what have you been up to or what have you created.

I stayed with Bill and Pam for my first few weeks. I could have lived in their beautiful home indefinitely, but I had the nesting bug.

On my first solo trip looking for land I met my amazing Sweetie, who would become my Second Life and first life partner. She was building a beautiful fountain on a hillside. She wound up building a house for me, and a month or so later... :) We're in our third year together. I'm flying next month to spend the fall with her.

I bought a 4096 lot in Dreamland, on the no-longer-in-existence Forsaken sim. The entire lot was taken up by a volcano, all up and down. It made landscaping and terraforming difficult, but it helped both of us gain skills more quickly than we would have otherwise.

I kept buying parcels until, a year or so later,we owned more than half the sim. Eventually buying, a sim made sense.

We bought our Sim, Whimsy, in March 2008. Not two weeks later Linden Lab dropped the setup price of sims from $1695 USD to $1000 USD. To compensate, they gave us the homestead sim Whimsy Kaboom.

Over the past 17 or so months we've made Whimsy into a beautiful and dangerous place and created on Whimsy Kaboom a home for the mentally malfunctioning mechanoids of the Metaverse-- the robot sanatorium. Whimsy is stunning, and the sanatorium is one of the most interactive places on Second Life. We welcome visitors.

5 – Have you found, developed or improved any skills because of SL?

Oh, yes, absolutely! I always told people I had trouble visualizing things in three dimensons. Second Life put a lie to that! I can built just about anything now, up to and including an entire robot sanatorium, robots and all. I also learned to script. That wasn't easy, but I can now make prims do almost anything I need them to do, in a quick and dirty way. I also learned something I'd been telling myself I needed to learn for more than a decade-- operate PhotoShop. Actually, I learned GIMP, which is free. I learned lots of ancillary things, as well.

6 – Could you share a funny or awkward story that happened to you in SL?

Well, everybody has a story about losing their clothes. I certainly do. But I think the most embarassing thing was jumping on my first sex poseball. I was four or five days old and I was friends with this female furry rabbit who was a guy in real life. I had been on the kiss anim Devotion with her, so I knew SOMETHING was about to happen, but I didn't expect to be violated in every orifice.

I could have jumped off, of course, but I figured in for a penny, in for a pound. I just lay there and thought of England.

7 – What would you change or improve in Second Life?

Oh, there are so many things! Some are purely technological. I wish the Lindens wouldn't break ten new things and ten previously broken things every time they upgrade the viewer. I wish they would redo the viewer from the ground up, hopefully in collaboration with the Opensim folks. I wish land was cheaper and the sim prim limit was more reasonable-- you get 40,000 with a sim on other grids. I wish the lag monster could be sent into outer space.

But I also would like to see SL taken more seriously by people who don't have a clue about what it is and what it can be.

8 – Can you share your current and/or future projects for SL?

Well, we're busy making what we will call Freedom Freebies-- boxes that will run, walk, hop, swim, fly, or teleport away as soon as they're rezzed. People will have to chase them down to get what's inside. And then I suppose I should make a store to support my expensive land habit.

9 – Have you ever had any issues whatsoever within Second Life? If so, how did you reported and was the feedback positive?

I've run into a few griefers and, when I lived in Dreamland, had my share of annoying neighbors, but SL has been mostly smooth sailing. I found my love early on and we spent as much time as together as possible, both in SL and on Earth. Life is good. Both of them.

I'd like to say the Lindens have in general been great, although they have made some decisions I'll never forgive them for-- like the openspace fiasco.

10 – Is Second Life merely an online game or do you consider it more of a metaverse or a virtual world?

Oh, definitely the latter. It's a world of its own with its own rules of physics and behavior. Games have goals. SL exists for its own sake. We're not SUPPOSED to take the king, score a touchdown, win the hand, or hit a home run. We're free to make our own space and our own persona. Within broad limits, we can do just about anything we feel like doing. It's boring only for those who can't engage their imaginations.

11 – Imagine a new resident asks for your help. What would do? What would you tell him/her?

I've developed a notecard with embedded objects and notecards specifically for new citizens. I give that out, and I imagine other people now do too. But the main thing I tell new people is not to be stupid about making money. Don't camp, and don't take doofus jobs for 3L an hour. Explore, gain skills, engage your imagination, find your passion, and THEN worry about the money.

12 – How would you describe yourself in one word?

ONE word? OMG! Uh, is this a trick question? Let's see..

I have it! Or, rather, my partner does.

Amazing.

No, no, now she's saying lovable.

Scratch that. Interesting.

Oh, crap! I accidentally clicked on a friend and HE said that (we're at a crowded performance of Ballet Pixelle).

Sweetie says I'm an iconoclast.

No, no, an adventurer.

No, no, individualist.

Let's just say I'm different.

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Your urls

Blog: http://cheyennepal.blogspot.com

Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cheyennepal/

SLurls: 

Whimsy, Beautiful and Dangerous

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Whimsy/2/109/37

Robot Sanatorum

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Whimsy%20Kaboom/213/197/3490

Chey's Flights of Fancy Store

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Whimsy/79/91/701

Mentions

Sometimes screaming funny, sometimes deadly serious, and occasionally informative, Chey's Second Life Blog features more than 1100 posts and has reached more than 40,000 readers from 142 countries.

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(Now well more than 2000 posts and a half million views since I put in a counter).