What is Second Life? And what are we doing there?

So imagine a 3D internet. What does it look like to you? What does it do?

I bet you’re pretty much thinking of Second Life, only with wires for roads or something.

Second Life is a 3D design platform that you can live and work on. It’s a virtual world, a life simulator, but also, a place for high creativity and no limitations to adhere to the real world.

What I’m doing there is trying to create as realistic experience as possible for my blog readers and YouTube audience, but at first, I’ll have to make sure we all know what we want out of it.

In the beginning…

Second Life, the platform, started out with green land, a bit of water, and very, very basic avatars. Then, they (Linden Labs) invited people in to create a world in the green land, and basically everything on the platform is created by its users for the users. (Land owned by Governor Linden is again under Linden management and likely to go on sale, objects created by Linden Department of Public Works is a Linden location, and objects created by anyone with a Mole in their name is created by a Linden employee.)

The avatars, which can be anything from fantasy characters, flat paper-thin cartoons to hyper-realistic humans or animals, to the buildings, plants, scripts, and sex tools, are all created by the players. (Often, Linden employees are former players who just got really good and notorious at what they did on the platform and were hired as a real Linden. Not always tho. Someone once asked if I was secretly a “former Linden”. Ooooh! :)) No, but I appreciate the confusion.)

The locations you visit are, again, put together by another player, and the idea is to basically walk into another person’s fantasy, their idea of great sex, maybe, a beautiful place, a community club, or whatever they want to create.

Fully adult environment, but it’s not solely porn; it has all the elements of life, including the difficulty of deciding what and how to do things. 😀

Avatars evolution

The first Second Life avatars were very, very basic. You can still create one of these by adding a new shape, skin, hair, and eyes, and then new clothes from your inventory or outfit folder gear icon, and I find them hilarious. These avatars are fully customizable, and you can use them as a starter for whatever you might want to create and sell the results if you like.

The 2025 brought a new set of starter avatars, 3 races to start with Asian, Black, and Caucasian (ABC) male and female, of course, with three outfits to choose from. They can also be combined with other clothes and hairstyles from free starter avi packs from earlier years.

Eventually, you’ll create a highly customized avatar for yourself. On the far right is my avatar that is made to resemble my everyday self; it is saved as “the very ordinary me.” I think Dog Thinkers will want total freedom of… ehrm, fucking up their avatar any which way they want, Tasmanian Tiger Thinkers do what TTT’s do… And Cat Thinkers probably prefer uber-realism, warts and all… To the extent that we can.

Long History

Second Life has been around for 23 years, and in many ways, it’s only approaching full maturity. There’s a new update to the core functions every so often, I don’t know… Every 3 months, maybe? It is not a stagnant environment; if there’s a complaint to be made, it’s the rapid evolution, maybe. You log in now, get a newbie tour, you’re likely to need another one if you sit on it for a while.

With that evolution, one could also complain about the fact Second Life viewer is quite bloated. They must ensure all upgrades are backwards compatible with ages-old content the users have created and spent potentially months or years developing. What was created in 2009 still works, and all that. A traditional gaming company would have scrapped all that and ended support for a lot of ancient content, but Second Life wants to make sure everyone’s historic footprint remains on the grid… Linden Labs is nothing but romantic at heart. Romantic reasons have always trumped their practical decisions or need for monetary gain – but I fear the opinions on that matter vary drastically if you ask different people. Some people probably wished for support for their financial growth, which Linden Labs does not provide (and in my view has no need to provide, either, they are definitely not corporate baby sitters like some people seem to expect them to be).

Find out more about Second Life’s history in an earlier blog post… And the Prim museum.

What’s [Sebastyne.net] doing on Second Life?

Currently, as of writing this, I’ve got stuff stored in my virtual pockets but not rezzed out anywhere. However, the plan is to create a full city for each faction and sub groups (where needed, don’t worry Doggos, nobody is forcing you into different groups, you can all sleep in the same bed all we care) and relax a bit. This is MOST LIKELY a Cat Thinking thing, but we’ll see if the Doggos or Tasmanian Tigers want to join in. It’s totally up to you all, I’ll create you a place or you can do it yourself of course, any way you like. Just let me know.