To-do list, and Shirley Temple

So there my cabin sits, on my land. It's the cabin that comes in everyone's Library; a few days after I registered, I'd gone to a sandbox (picked at random from those that Search brought up) and looked at stuff in the Library. I turned the cabin teal and shortened its pilings so that it sits on flat ground pretty well.

Last night I took it from my Inventory (where it went after I messed with it, and clicked on it and chose 'Take'), and put it on the ground. Then I clicked on it and messed with Edit functions to move it where I wanted it. I clicked 'physical' on the Edit menu, which may have been a mistake...When I rezzed two Library chairs and tried to drag them into the cabin and position them---I'd made them Physical, too---the chairs and my poor avatar bounced around the cabin as if a poltergeist had gotten loose in there!

I finally ended up going to my Inventory and clicking on the landmark I'd made for my land (back before I bought it). So I escaped the experience of banging off the walls and ceilings and bouncing chairs....though now I kind of think I should do it again, but be in Mouselook. Hey, this could be a whole new favorite activity in Second Life!

Okay, so I need to figure out all that. That's on the to-do list. As is locating a free-or-cheap house that's lower-prim, and has an equally small footprint (my two plots together are 32m x 32 m, but I want a lot of free space for rezzing things and trying landscaping and so on). This house is 80 prims, and that's too much of the 234-prim 'budget' I have for this land.

I also need to organize my inventory. That's something no one needs land for---you just create a second window (from File) and make new subfolders in the second window, and drag stuff from the first window to the new subfolders.

I've done a LOT of reading about Second Life, and one thing that almost everyone says is, try to keep your Inventory down to small numbers. It's very easy to accumulate a lot of free stuff, and it can slow down your SL experience if you drag it around with you all the time. So even though getting organized didn't call for the purchase of land, getting some of my 'stuff' out of my Inventory did.

Well, that's not entirely true--another alternative would have been to create an alt account ($10 one-time charge) and transfer stuff into the alt's Inventory. Still a third choice would have been to rent storage space.

But since I wanted land for other purposes, I decided to go ahead and get it; one thing that I'll use it for is to create storage prims and put stuff in them. If I make simple ones, they count only the one prim against my land's budget of 234 prims. So making this useful item is also on my immediate to-do list.

A final item that I'll try to learn to do tonight is to make a Calling Card.

In my reading, I'd come across an account of how one of the Lindens deals with the many, many, many residents who offer them Friendship when they meet inworld. Since the Lindens are about as high-status as it's possible to be in SL, they would shortly have tens of thousands of Friends, if they were to accept every Offer....so, this article said, this Linden was in the habit of handing the person making the offer a calling card. This way the person didn't feel dissed, even though the offer of Friendship hadn't been accepted.

Anyone who's stood somewhere organizing their Inventory (say), or Searching, or looking at the World Map, will have had the experience of someone walking up, saying "Hi", and---upon getting a "Hi" back---instantly Offering Friendship.

Now, I'm not saying that I will never accept (or offer) Friendship. But I much prefer not to accept people who haven't even talked with me, other than the 'hi'.

I don't mean to sound judgmental about people who do this. Odds are, these are people who have accepted the MySpace/Facebook philosophy: quantity is EVERYTHING!!! My guess is that those who go around Offering Friendship to people they haven't really conversed with are operating on this 'gotta get a huge number of Friends' belief. And that's fine. I just don't happen to want to participate in that.

But at the same time, I hate declining someone. It just feels.....rude. I HAVE declined everyone who's asked, because I just haven't been making the attempt to interact with people yet (that will come). I've been saying things like 'thanks, but I'm still trying to get my bearings in Second Life, and I'm not really getting into the Friends experience yet'.

So, day before yesterday, the day that I went Premium (but couldn't yet buy Lindens and thus couldn't yet buy land, per LL policy), I was standing in a secluded corner of a sim I like, Searching properties. I'd been doing this for two or three days, as a prelude to making the decision on whether or not to go Premium.

Anyway, around the corners of the Map, I saw some...shoes and typing. The shoes of an avatar, and the typing of someone doing Local Chat to me. So I got into chat and said 'hi' to the person's 'hello'. (The avatar was female, so I'll refer to this person as 'she', though....who knows?)

As soon as I responded with that Hi, I got the blue box in the upper right corner of the screen: ________is Offering Friendship. I got that sinking feeling, because I knew it was likely I'd want to decline. But of course I stopped Searching and talked with the person.

Now, this person was perfectly courteous. I do not want to seem to be criticizing her. But it was clear to me from both her avatar's appearance, and her conversation, that we wouldn't really enjoy each other's company. I tried to mention things I thought would discourage her---that I had enjoyed touring one of the Sistine Chapels in SL, that I loved high-culture stuff in general, that I enjoy discussing books----in short, that I am a nerd.

But she still persisted, so I finally said 'gotta go, now, have a happy day'. And maybe 10 minutes after I'd teleported away, I finally clicked that "Decline".

NOTE TO LINDENS: I wish the Offer Friendship box had a Close option, that we could use instead of Decline, which seems so cold.......

Anyway.

Thinking about this later, I wondered if possibly there had been more to this than the MySpace/Facebook-rack-up-the-Friends factor. The avatar had been sort of short-adult height, but the hair, the dress, the shoes, had been VERY reminiscent of child star Shirley Temple. Had this been a person who was in search of.....people who'd be attracted to that? Not necessarily in a sexually transgressive sense; I gather there are a certain number of people in Second Life who role-play being parents or children. Had this person been looking for that?

Well, I may never know. Certainly there are more things in heaven and Second Life than are dreamt of in my philosophy....