Few places in SL have shaped my inworld life as much as
sLiterary, so it was with great sadness that I read this weekend of the closure of this and its neighbouring sims. sLiterary has been the home of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) - due to kick off next week - for the past four years and it was my first SL NaNo -
AFK - which kick-started my identity as 'writer' in the metaverse. I wrote AFK in November 2007, checking in at the NaNo Cafe in sLiterary each day to update my word count, and the other writers I would talk to there became my first real experience of literary community. Of course, there are so many other projects based there, such as the amazing Globe theatre, but the NaNo Cafe and shrine have always had that special place in my memories; one of those places that feels like 'going back home' whenever you drop by for a visit.
I made my last such visit today and took a series of pictures of the shrine and Globe. The reasons for the closure are outlined by Ina Centaur in
this blog post, so I won't go into them here. Suffice to say, it's a great loss to SL - part of the worrying trend of private sims shutting down (850 so far this year, according to
this report) - and a reminder that the metaverse is no more permanent than the real world.
3 comments:
Sad to see when good things disappear in Second Life, there are so few of them left.
Sliterary was one of the first places I really felt at home in the metaverse. I attended NaNoWriMo there for several years and saw plays at the Globe, which were always amazing. I even had an office in one of the neighbouring sims, where I used to write my novels.
I am really sad to see it go just because of what turns out, in the end, to be a bit of an administrative mistake. It's a sad time indeed.
Very sad to see the shrine go as well. By finding the Shrine searching for NaNoWriMo stuff when I got dragged into sl, I ended up finding the rest of the literary community and staying these almost three years. Thanks for the nice write up, I went and looked when it looked like it wouldn't be there, but was waiting until the 29th to really believe it was true.
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