This is Catrina and the Creature, and together they are wyld stallyns! they fight crime they have made the transition into the weird and wonderful Metaverse of Second Life.

I was 14 [so that was...1998, check out the mental math skills] when we got the Internet at home, and in all the time we had it at home [we had it about a year before realising we didn't do anything to justify keeping it], I had no idea what to do on it.

It wasn’t like today, with your Facebooks and your Twitters; you had the AOL home page, and AOL chat rooms.  I would go into these for about ten minutes a day, chatting absolute random crap with someone about “how this works”.

The Internet has moved on significantly since then.  Now we have our social networking sites to get and keep in contact with just about anyone and everyone you have ever met or will ever meet in your lifetime.  The world seems smaller for this.  So where do you turn when the entire world is boring you?  Another world, of course!

So what is Second Life?  Well, it’s a few things; namely it’s odd, quite slow and graphically impaired in the beginning, and can be relatively disturbing depending on where you end up.

The basic principle is that it is a “metaverse”, a digitally rendered universe consisting of an avatar you control (Catrina and Co are both avatars), which you can move around different zones looking for, well, just about anything, really.

Anything you can find in the real world, you can probably find in Second Life.  There are full blown business conferences that go on in-world, shop for new clothes for your avatar, open up your own shop and sell absolutely anything you like to anyone willing to buy it, go to a club, take the hot-looking avatar back to your skybox apartment and show him/her a good time (I’m not kidding).

Yes, you can do anything you like.  You can also do the things the real world dares to stop you from doing.  Like flying.  Or teleporting to your location of choice.  You know, little things the world could only improve from.

And what do I use Second Life for?  Selling my book, of course!  I have my own little 512sq of virtual land, which I have set up to sell in-world editions of the book.  That’s right, you can read books in Second Life.

I also use it to screenshot rendered models of characters I create, to then tweak around with in Photoshop for hours, to end up with lovely little graphics to go onto my web sites.

Sometimes, the capacity for technology’s evolution fills my heart with dread.