Yes, yes, I know, I've been terrible this summer at keeping up with my Second Life promises; I keep sporadically jumping on here to announce that things are back in swing, just to never update again for another month or two, just to announce yet again that things are back in swing. But seriously, things are back in swing again! For real this time! And that's because, unfortunately, my other Mac here at home finally fatally crashed; not my main Mini I use every day, but my old G3, which unfortunately was the only computer I had with Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop, InDesign, Flash Professional, etc), so losing all that software means me having to shut down my arts center's proposed new publishing program and virtual photography gallery, for now at least, which were the projects mainly stealing my time away from Fabb here, my proposed Second Life prefabricated housing company. So anyway, my promise to myself this week is to get enough work done in SL each day to at least justify a new blog entry here, so I can start building up an audience again here, i.e. a potential customer base, and start heavily promoting the upcoming line of Fabb homes that will soon (I promise!) be for sale.
I've been spending the year so far futzing around on various housing designs and ideas, but never getting any finally finished and ready to sell; so recently I decided screw it, that pointedly for the purpose of finally starting to generate some revenue, I'd tackle the very most basic, simple, cheap idea for a prefab home I have, something designed specifically for tiny starter plots that owners wish to heavily landscape. It's called the "Ion," and you're seeing just the roughest beginning version of it in the photos above and below; as you can see, it's not much more than a gazebo with walls and a roof, its footprint the same 10 by 10 meters that is the largest a single prim can be stretched within the Grid, so that I can save on as many prims as possible when actually constructing it.
After all, if you're just some individual beginning player of Second Life, not a business owner or club manager or anything even close to the sort, the only thing you need on your land to be truly happy is at least one central meeting space with the option to provide total privacy if you want (to lock the doors and dim the windows to black, that is, as well as have a roof and four walls). In fact, you can very much think of owning a beginner's 512-square-meter plot of land in the Grid just like owning a profile page at Facebook or MySpace; how it is a central gathering place for yourself of course, while you're actually there doing work, as well as a place where you and your friends can live-chat while you're all online, not to mention a place you can customize/decorate, to show to the world a little bit of yourself. The Ion provides exactly one central meeting space like I'm talking about, seen above, plus an ingenious second-story half-loft space that opens onto a grand outdoor vista (stairway coming); given that furniture is virtual and can be swapped at a moment's notice, that space you're currently looking at can be dolled up as a cozy living room, a dancefloor, an IKEA sex dungeon, an indoor/outdoor pool/spa, a one-person freelance office building, etc etc etc. That's exactly what the Ion is, nothing else and nothing more, offers no more than that, and will cost an inexpensive amount that reflects this (6 dollars/3 pounds/4 euros).
So why put up a tiny little half-house like this in the first place, you might be thinking (the Ion, for those who don't know, takes up only about half the space of a beginner's 512-m2 plot), when you could instead construct an entire house containing one separate room for each of the purposes just mentioned? Well, let's just take my long-owned space in the Grid, for example, seen here above, on the eastern side of the southern continent, inside a massive cove full of upper-class residences I like to call Linden's Vineyard. This is one of the massive temptations behind the Grid, and a big motivation behind owning land there, is to have your own permanent little slice of view like the above, to be able to build on that space and decorate it any way you want, to really feel like a "citizen" of that massive virtual world there. (In fact, if I can be digressive for a moment....All that water you see off in the distance? That's all part of a responsive, persistent environment; if I was on a decent home gaming computer, I could literally log in one night, rez up a sailboat, go sailing off into that nighttime water in the distance, sightsee and meander and hit rapids for two hours straight, and literally reach the north continent at the end, just like the persistent 3D "real" environment the Grid is. It's why Second Life is often called the "middle-ager's Grand Theft Auto," meant usually as an insult when said but I think quite reflective of what's so nice about a place like the Grid, and why so many people want to own permanent virtual land there. Okay, digression over!)
My point is -- if you happened to own a beginner's 512-m2 plot here in Linden's Vineyard, overlooking the scene we're seeing above, you might be tempted as many are to use as much of that small space as possible for maybe some underwater landscaping or merely some breathing room, and to use the extra prim allowance of a tiny building to be able to rez up a sailboat whenever you want (for example). A lot of people find this a much nicer idea than simply trying to enjoy the above view from essentially a big brick, taking up every square inch of their 512 plot and allowing only the roof for a sense of space. I'm willing to bet that for the price, there are a lot of beginning players of Second Life that will be interested in something like the Ion, especially once I have it constructed and for sale in the five different color/texture combos I've come up with (matching the various common environments within the Grid -- beach, sky, water, urban, and forest).
Anyway, so more and more each day on what you've just seen, with hopefully a daily new update here at the Fabb blog concerning the latest; and maybe in just a week from now, Ion actually finished and starting to be sold? That's the whole idea; try to actually start bringing in real revenue as soon as possible. Sheesh, I need a new computer! That's why I want to get on the ball finally about all this, so I can finally start bringing in some income and maybe finally get a decent gaming computer into my house.
Okay, see you tomorrow, hopefully!
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