Blogging Second Life in Numbers

Pleasant City, Post Apocalyptic Role Play (moderate)

What would life be without arithmetic? Sydney Smith

We count things. It’s a way of keeping track or maybe keeping score, but everything in our lives is counted. This blog for example. I’ve been thinking about numbers for weeks because WordPress kept showing me that the posts I’ve published were getting close to 1,000.

This blog occupies a very tiny portion of a small corner of teh interwebs that is the world we know as Second Life. It and my other outreaches to social networking are not significant (if you’re counting) in anything but the way they report on, augment, and reflect this Life that Honour lives – “an ill-favoured thing sir, but mine own” (Shakespeare). When I click on that button today the counter will display that big round group of digits. So my musings on this occasion will be about some of the numbers in my life.

Pleasant City, Post Apocalyptic Role Play (moderate)

I moved the idle ramblings over here to WordPress a little more than a year ago (but imported the old posts) so I haven’t published them all on this platform.

I try and write something everyday but don’t always succeed. I get up between 4 and 5 am (because I like mornings) and aim for a new post by 8 (that’s SLT). WordPress has a clock which, oddly enough, doesn’t believe in anything but Daylight Savings Time. For much of the year it’s off by one hour.

Doing this many posts, of course, means that there are a lot of images. There are 15,976 SL photos on this hard drive. I started to panic because I was reaching the limit on this blog’s storage quota – I didn’t want to move it again. It finally occurred to me to create a second blog just to act as a photo sink (I’m slow but the bulb lights up eventually).

Pleasant City, Post Apocalyptic Role Play (moderate)

I’m always astonished that people read this thing. I do actually pay attention to hits and subscriptions and follows. Those numbers go up when I say or do something controversial but that’s the nature of things. I appreciate every person who takes the time to look at what I’ve done (in my mind I’m certain that you all read every single word).

I limit the number of online social platforms I utilize – primarily because I can’t keep up. So Plurk and Twitter and Koinup are my three. I read somewhere that I’m supposed to worry about the ratio of people I follow to the number who follow me. Bullshit! I can tell you that the number of friends I’ve made is important because they are, but I’m totally uninterested in battling anybody in supremacy for anything.

Pleasant City, Post Apocalyptic Role Play (moderate)

In Second Life itself I’ve had homes in 7 locations, acquired a large number of friends and met too many fascinating people to count. My inventory (which really needs to be organized) is back up to 17, 645 – remember I don’t shop much. Most of the contents are a result of my texture/avatar/skin whoredom.

One last number I’ll consider here is age. Inworld I’m about 5 1/2 years old. My friend Ahuva↑ tells me it’s my fault that people think my physical world age is much older than it is. I do tend to exaggerate when referring to myself but that’s mostly intended as hyperbole.

Many of my friends are in their early twenties so, yes, I often feel ancient. But, if you’re imagining some little old lady hunched over a keyboard then I guess I should apologize. I’m not in my 90s, 80s, 70s, or even 60s (yet).

I have lots of time left to add to the numbers and maybe get things right. :)

Pleasant City, Post Apocalyptic Role Play (moderate)

Posted by honourmcmillan on November 25, 2012

https://honourmcmillan.wordpress.com/2012/11/25/blogging-second-life-in-numbers/