Notes from a small field

Second Life is full of surprises, sometimes when you least expect them. I’ve just been in the IBM 6 sandbox experimenting with a little display to show scores when PatriciaAnne Daviau stopped by to say hello. It turns out she’s been working on building a whole town far above the ground, and she took me up for a tour. Here’s part of the town- a very nice garage:

The twist is that I couldn’t even see it when I arrived- the whole town is tiny. Really tiny! Here it is with avatars to give a bit of an idea of scale:

Even that doesn’t really convey quite how small this is. From the normal view in Second Life the whole build looks more like a flat object with a picture on it. She should give out magnifying glasses to visitors! It has to be one of the most amazing things I’ve seen in Second Life.

So, to explain the title, this is what I really like about Second Life. It’s like bashing bits of wood together in a shed to build some hair-brained project when someone from halfway round the globe stops by for a chat, and to show you what they’re up to in a shed thousands of miles away. That’s some shed. And there aren’t any spiders… unless you build some!

Update: there’s now a tiny JCB to help out with the building!

Update: just found a great video of some more of the insanely small builds via the eightbar blog; still my favourite thing in Second Life. (8 Jan 2009)