I have a blog now!

Yes, it is true. I have given in and started a blog. The person that leaves his devART journal untouched for months (just because there's nothing interesting to say) has a blog. Why?

(crossposted to my deviantART page)

Well, it goes back a long way really. As you may know, I became a Second Life Resident on December 12, 2006. I liked the building and scripting there, so I made my first careful steps in creating. I'm not sure how exactly one thing led to another, but it was something like this:

I had read about sim crashes and thought that's be the worst thing that could happen. So for my first scripting steps, I searched for an empty region and picked Aswan to do my scripting. I figured, then if I do something stupid and crash the region, nobody is harmed.

So I scripted there and when I was done, I went on exploring the areas around Aswan. I flew South and noticed a huge sculpture there. It turned out that sculpture was called The Maestro and it was on display at Oyster Bay. I checked the place out and liked it, the aquarium very much too.

I did see the owner Morris Vig there, but he was talking to somebody and I didn't want to disturb. So I visited the Aquarium and made a small donation (I believe it was L$5 or L$10) to Oyster Bay. Only a minute later or so I got an IM from Morris, thanking me for the donation. It must've been the only time in SL history I actually got a "Thank You" for a donation, and to think it was such a terribly small donation too! Morris then invited me to the Oyster Bay group, a title I from then on wore with pride! I felt now accepted in SL. I should note before this I only really had contact with anybody other than the people I already knew from a Dutch forum.

Because I now was member of the Oyster Bay group, I received a Notice of the Avatars Against The War party with DJ Doubledown Tandino. This party was on Sunday, January 28 2007.

There I also learned of the protests coming up at Second Life's virtual Capitol Hill. And being against the war myself, I also went there.

One and a half hour into the protest, an avatar named Spider Mycron joined us. Spider is an Iraqi, so he could tell us exactly how the war affected life in Iraq.
He talked for over an hour and already during this conversation, people suggested we needed to get his story out to the world. I figured it'd be a good idea for me to put it on a blog, because I had recently joined a project named "Scoopt Words".

Scoopt is a site where everybody can upload newsworthy photos, allowing journalists around the world to buy those photos. Scoopt Words was similar, but instead of photos the dealt with news posted on people's blogs. I must add the Scoopt Words project no longer exists now. It was an experiment, but apparently didn't quite work as expected. So it was only during that short time these events had to lead to me starting a blog!

So back at the end of January 2007, I posted the chatlog of Spider's conversation during the protest. And putting my blog on Scoopt Words, I actually got an e-mail from a Scoopt employee, telling me they'd try to get the story out. But unfortunately I've never heard anything of it since, and at this time, the Dutch tv already has a blog of an Iraqi man up, so I'm sure there's more info on that to be found there.

I had enormous problems posting on Blogger using Opera on my Mac, I'd posted the entries with the chatlog on a Windoze machine. Needless to say, once I had posted all about the protest, I didn't continue blogging.

However, I always kept it open in a tab, so I could never forget I had the possibility of posting things I'd like to tell the world. Early August 2007, exactly 6 months after my last Iraq post, I wanted to see if maybe it worked now. And yes! I was able to make a post, with some minor Blogger issues.

But seeing it worked, I started to like it some more. And soon I posted more, even though they're not all the best posts in the world. I was searching and waiting for inspiration and just today I found that.

Even though today's post is a bit silly, I think it takes practice to find inspiration. After all, I've just typed this whole, huge post too! Sorry about that, btw.
Thank you for your interest (if you are interested, of course)!