172: Back in the blogosphere

In the last while I've been meeting people and discovering things within Second Life, and I keep thinking, "Gee, I should be blogging about this stuff." I seem to be in a better mood, and much less stressed, than I was six months ago; although I don't intend to pressure myself unduly to post every couple of days, as once I did, I think I'll try my hand at the occasional post.

To that end, I've had to consider exactly what it is I want to do with the functions of a blog. I've renamed my blog to reflect my focus more precisely; what I'm interested in is creative things and creative people within virtual worlds.

With my very first post, I speculated upon what sort of topics I hoped to cover; in retrospect I was fairly completely wrong.  Not surprising. I've given it a little more thought this time and I expect in a few years I shall look back at this effort also as short-sighted.  Nevertheless, here's what I think you can expect, at least in the near future.

• Interviews with interesting people doing interesting things. This seems to have been the most popular feature of my former blog, but I intend to be a bit more freeform in my questions from now on. 
• Photography. I think I'm getting better at it, and I like to tell a story with photographs.  I also have a very cooperative model on tap (thank you Alex Thaub!). 
• Mini-tours of places that interest me that I think you might like to visit. 
• Clothes, furniture, clubs, and other commercial products that I think are above the average and may interest you. I'll reiterate that I have a firm policy of not entering into any agreements with designers, etc., to promote anything. By and large, if I talk about it here, I've paid cash for it; if that's not the case, I'll let you know.
• Tricks and tips about how to use various aspects of Second Life. I've noticed that this is something upon which few people focus. I have to add that I am not claiming any great mastery of Firestorm, which is my preferred program, or anything else; on the contrary, it's precisely because I am such a doofus about technical things sometimes that I hope to save others my embarrassment. If I learn something useful, I'll try to share it with you here.
• Discussions about trends and current events in Second Life and virtual worlds. I'm interested in Sansar and will be trying to stay ahead of the news on it and other such endeavours. 

Things I rather doubt you'll see here in the future:

• Photographs of who was at what club when I went out dancing, unless there's a good reason. Other people cover those things quite thoroughly and well.
• Unfavourable reviews of anyone or anything. Honestly, I don't see the point. 
• News about upcoming events. This will almost certainly include some very good causes like charitable fund-raising events ... you will not find those things here not because I am a hard-hearted bastard but because, again, other people cover those things quite thoroughly and well. More to the point, you are used to finding that information elsewhere. I'll probably make exceptions for people whom I know personally; c'est la vie.
• Anything much about real life. That's why we have news portals. 
• Anything much about who is marrying, scrapping with, or screwing whom. Not my circus, not my monkeys.  

What I hope to accomplish is to find things to do that I will enjoy doing, and that you will enjoy doing too. You'll be seeing a lot of my husband Alex Thaub in these pages because he's a part of everything I do here.

So please return for a look over the next few weeks and we'll see how it goes. If you have comments or questions or suggestions, I'd be pleased to hear them below.  I hope you'll all be tolerant of me at the outset; after such a long vacation, I'll be a little ... rusty. ;-)