Sliding toward summer

A lot of things seem to be changing around me in Second Life. Just had a very slow night DJing at the Velvet. Now, a bad night at the Velvet is better than a good night most anywhere else, but it's still disappointing. It's not even the tips. I just want to get a good crowd into that room. I wonder if I need to do something with my set, get more music (of course, I do), change things up. Or maybe it's the club that needs a kick. Or maybe it's just getting too nice out and no one is sitting in front of their computers.

I'm still a month and a half shy of my first rezday, and I was in a daze for the first month or two, so I have not yet seen a full year of SL. I don't know if there are seasons and cycles. And SL changes so rapidly, maybe this time last year was nothing like now, and this time two years ago might as well have been a thousand years ago. Maybe.

Activ8 seems to be going through a few changes as well. Not long ago, I danced at an event that had so many people on the two sims that they crashed. The last time I DJed, the night never really even got going. I haven't been around there enough to know whether that's a trend or not. Even though I hit the forum at least a couple of times a day, I've never felt all that connected to Activ8. It's been a perfectly good place to work, and I've met nice people there, but I don't really fit in.

SL itself is in an even more changeable period than usual. It's this stuff about age-play and SL's sudden rush toward trying to control content, encouraging residents to narc on each other. That's such a mess. I just hope that some sense is injected soon, because right now things are looking rather grim.

PixelPulse has been a bright spot for me. We've been through changes as well, but good ones. We have some new writers and a lot of energy, always from Cheri but from the rest of the staff as well. PixelPulse has been right at the forefront of all this SL censorship brouhaha, and I'm really proud of Cheri and others for getting the scoops and posting informed opinion pieces. And maybe the story I did on the Gendar Rating Radar is actually more timely than I thought, since that kind of plays into the whole idea of poking your nose into other people's business rather than taking a more live-and-let-live attitude. Although I always see places I need to improve the writing, I'm proud of that story, and I'm glad Cheri was enthusiastic about it.

Patrice and I have been going through changes as well. Every relationship does, in SL or otherwise. She has been flat out working on her terraform projects. We've had to deal with this and with some personal things. But we have not given up. We have continued to talk. And we have continued to love. I think things are getting better, both for her and for us together. I hope so.

I have friends who are doing well. I have friends who are having a rough time. I have friends who were having a rough time but are doing better. That's SL, just like first life, only often more concentrated. I have a good friend who is hurting right now. She's staying away from SL. I hope she finds healing and comes back, because I miss her.