First Weekend of January

So Second Life put up some stuff for sale on Amazon, which included a special freebie offer for just this weekend -- a hoverboard, and 1,000 lindens.  It said in big letters "ONE PER CUSTOMER ONLY", but in point of fact it didn't prevent you from doing it more than once.  It may have been limited to one per Second Life account, I didn't test that, but it clearly wasn't limited to one per Amazon account.  Far from it:  Amazon seemed to encourage people to link more than one account, and to buy the item more than once:

I have to admit that I did buy it more than once to see if  this really worked.  But I've heard from others that some people went on an SL alt-creating spree and may have done the deal as many as 70 times.  That's 70,000 lindens, which translates into something like $280.00 if I'm doing my math correctly.

Needless to say, the whole thing got shut down pretty quick.  I got home Friday evening, heard about it, did it a couple of times and went to exercise.  When I got back from my exercise it was all over -- up for about five hours total, I heard.

Some people have said that they hope the offer abusers get charged for it on their credit card, but I don't see Amazon doing anything like that.  It's really Linden's problem.  I suppose they could take the freebies back or ban accounts for TOS violations (you're not supposed to have multiple accounts, I believe, but lots of people do).  But it would be hard to take money back from the people that worked hard to abuse the offer, because I'm sure they were transferring the money immediately from their temp account to some other account.  You'd have to track the trail of money, I guess.

Anyway, other than that interesting bit of drama, I haven't done very much this weekend.  I wandered around a bit on Mint Rainbow -- I have a new lemur avatar and I tried to set up my lola mesh breasts to match it, and bought a new outfit from DE specifically for lolas.  And I wandered around some petite shops and sims on my Apricot fairy avatar -- but I'm not sure I see the point of getting a petite avatar and then dressing like you normally would anyway.  There's a lot of very nice outfits and it's amazing what people are able to do, but if I'm going to be fairy sized, I'm going to be a fairy, not just a little human.  So I guess I don't feel compelled to buy a lot of new outfits for Apricot, which is good, that could get expensive quickly.

Meanwhile...

My newbie experiment continues... still all free stuff, not looking too bad.

Insert song "dancing with myself".  I have my laptop set up on an adjustable moving podium (hospital salvage) so that I can play SL while standing up... or dancing.  ^_^

What is Mint's Garage?

The easiest answer is that it's my new home in Second Life.  I'd just bought a motorcycle and wanted to be near the mainland road, so I made my new home a bike shop/garage.

First House:  Waaaay back when I first got into Second Life (on my original account, Jalia Oz, and then also with Miko Minogue), I had some mainland where I put up a hose and a store and a money tree.  I really didn't know what I was doing but like everyone I was hoping to make a little money and having fun learning things.

Second House and Magical Oz Store:  Later on when I created Mint Rainbow (third account, and the one that "stuck" and became my main one), I met some friends and decided to make a home with them in a different location.  At the time, I bought land for myself nearby and put up an actual store.  I was trying to be more serious about my clothing designs, and although I was never very good or very successful, I had my store up for a little while.

Talamasca Bay:  The shared land situation with my two friends fell apart, but soon my friend Wolf had land in a furry-theme sim called Prometheus.  I moved there, and eventually Alianna and Inara and I had a really beautiful house down by the water.  There was a store that Inara ran that she didn't actually pay any attention to so it was mostly neglected, but I had stuff there for a while.  I'd abandoned my main store and mainland.  We were at Talamasca Bay for a good long while, and it was really my favorite place in SL (and a favorite place for most of my friends).  I even had an underwater tiki dance club with more than one secret entrance.

But the sim fell apart due to poor management and not enough people willing or able to pay for it.  It was bought by another investor who struck a deal to allow us to remain on our corner of the sim. That lasted for about a year or so, but the new owner said that he wasn't making money and was going to let the sim close.  Instead, he tricked my friend into not paying rent (since the sim was supposedly closing) and with that as an excuse he took the land from us, kicked us out, and sold the entire sim to someone else.  It was a significant amount of money lost by my friend -- it was nearly 1/4 of a full sim that he'd been paying for, and he was so disillusioned by it that he eventually stopped logging into second life at all.

Shamalama Loli Lemur Society Dance Club:  In the meantime we had another place in another sim for a while, and I bought a mainland plot again near some land that another friend owned.  Here I build a small dance club and store that really served no purpose other than as a place for me to hang out and unpack things or try on new things.  It felt very remote -- on the top of a hill in the middle of nowhere.  My friend whose land was nearby wasn't usually around.

Mint's Garage and Fairy Haven:  And so we come to my new land.  After City of Heroes closed down I began to spend more time in Second Life, and decided I wanted to move.  By this point my club wasn't near anyone, it was on a barren hill with nothing around it.  I bought new land near the road in Donalbain, put up my new garage, and put my old land up for sale.

Since it's a garage I have decorated it with a beat-up cot and dumpster-diver couch and lots of pinups and old movie posters, and old tires and auto parts and things you might find in a garage.  I think I've done a pretty good job at that.  ^_^

At the back of the property I have a garden designed for petite "fairy-sized" people.  There's a small house (with nothing in it), a little campfire with toadstools to sit on, some random garbage (old cans, bricks) and a nifty pool to lounge around.  There's also a lot of grass and flowers and some butterflies.  I'm really pleased with what I was able to create on a limited amount of prim space!

Anyway, that's it -- my new home.