A Farewell to Second Life
Posted onOver five years ago, in autumn of 2010, I discovered the amazing new world of breedable pets in Second Life. Now, I’ve had several Second Life accounts since July of 2004, including my main account Aywren Sojourner. While I’d been using “Aywren” as a screen name before that, I ended up adopting the “Sojourner” SL last name for other things, including blogging here.
Of course, when I’m really into something, I make a blog about it. And that’s where My Second Life (With Pets) was born. I originally created the blog as a subdomain within Sygnus.org. It became a semi-popular go-to blog on breedable news since I kept up with all the various different pet developers and pulled together all the news I could find in one spot.
The blog was rewarding. I often connected with pet developers, got sneak peeks at fun breedables, sometimes got free plushies and accessories to blog about, and things like that.
I even once got a legal cease and desist letter from “Wild Kingdom” because I was blogging about a breedable pet line that decided to use the same name… and Wild Kingdom wasn’t happy about that. Despite the fact I had a disclaimer on my blog that noted I am not a developer, and they sent me printed pages of my blog (that included said disclaimer at the bottom), they somehow mistook me for someone I was not. That was quite an experience!
Anyhow, just as with some games, time passed and I found myself spending less time in Second Life. While my blog and profits I made from my own breedables maintained the cost of the hobby, I saw my time winding down back in 2013-2014.
Last year, SL caught my attention again when they offered a really great deal on the premium account, especially considering I am grandfathered in under the old 2004 stipend. So, I came back to SL during Halloween and recreated my SL Blog as a subsection of Sygnus.org (which was a little odd to people following my RSS feed – sorry!). This worked for a few months, and I was back to breeding (though on a smaller scale) and blogging for a bit.
But then, I started getting more involved in FFXIV back in January 2015. Building up a FC and trying to complete end game content on two characters was enough to pull me away from most other games, including Second Life. My membership expired and I didn’t log in to SL for many months.
This year, I joined the Halloween festivities in SL and enjoyed my romp in the Corn Field. But when I got the email offering me that same great deal on premium membership, I struggled with it a bit, then decided to pass. That’s when I kinda knew that I’d probably never be going back… not in the way I used to.
I knew it was coming. I set up the old SL Pets Twitter account for deletion and unpublished the Facebook page. It was only when Facebook emailed me today to tell me that they’d removed the URL name I chose for the page, due to it being unpublished for so long, that I decided to have some closure.
So I deleted that Facebook page, edited the main page of what used to be the blog with a goodbye post, cleared out all the old blog posts, cleared out all the SL-related categories, and pretty much put the blog to rest for good.
Ironically, the one thing that remains, and seems to be still going strong, is the My Second Life (With Pets) Flicker. With 1.2K photos, I couldn’t bear to pull it down. (That and the fact that I don’t remember my yahoo login anyhow). So, this one final thing remains, for as long as folks enjoy it.