As of today, in Second life, I am ten years old.
Ten years doesn't put me anywhere near the club for oldest avatars, but it's pretty old. I have noticed that I am often the oldest avatar in in the area. This doesn't really mean anything of course, I've come and gone a bit and I doubt I spend anywhere near as much time in world as a lot of other people. Not to mention that many who have been around for a long time will be on their second or third new account, generally due to one drama or another.
My avatar hasn't really changed a lot. Hell i may even be using a modified version of that old old shape still. Sure I've augmented it over the years with Lolas boobs for a while and more recently with the Lara Mesh body, but under the hood I've always been pretty much the same.
I figure I would just reminisce a bit, kind of flow of thought.
Back when I started of, there was no mesh or sculpts. It was all prims. This feels like of insane today, if anything, the world needs to be all mesh.
I spent many many years surviving on the free 50L$ Stipend that accounts used to receive. Real early on, traffic was an important measurement for showing up in search, and locations would pad this with camping chairs that would pay out tiny amounts of L$ for every 20-30 minutes or so you sat. I never did this a lot but I did it some. That dried up when traffic stopped being important.
I still am not a very good builder or scripter, but i still like to create things. Considering I was always pretty decent at using CAD software back in college, you would think I would be a natural at learning to make MESH objects, but I'm still working with Full Perm templates. Fin Fact, the glasses in the above picture on the left were one of the first things I made, because I really wanted to give myself glasses, and they were hard to find. The ear pencils were also one of my earliest creations.
I used to hang around Waterhead Welcome area a lot, it was the first real sim that SL put me in after the tutorial island. It was my home for many years.
A couple of years ago I took the leap into owning land. I won't ever go back, I love having a home of my own. I do sometimes reduce down to just living in a Linden Home though.
Somewhat tangential to owning land, I also have been using OpenSIM for ages. I'm talking literally since the early early prototype version, I want to say Kotaku or something posted about it and i jumped all over the opportunity to run my own SL. I sometimes feel like I should look into doing some sort of real contribution to OS, but like a lot of things, I'm an amateur at coding at best.
I remember finding a free prim hair at a freebie house and finally ditching the system hair I had been using. System hair is sooo nasty. I've gone through a ridiculous number of hairs over the years. I don't like to change my shape too much because it feels off but I'll change my hair constantly, both style and color.
Speaking of unchanging, I've used the same skin (L.Fauna Lapine)(something like that), for a very very long time. I even made appliers so I could continue using it on my MESH body. Like my shape, my skin is just part of what makes my avatar feel like me.
Don't tell anyone but that image on the right is actually from around one year in on my SL adventures. I couldn't find any decent older images.
Anyway, just a little self indulgence for my Tenth Rez Day...