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Maplewood: an Old School Nature Area

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My landmark for Maplewood North is dated May 17, 2009. Located in Muralis on Heterocera, next to Route 3A, this nature area has changed very little since it was founded. There are none of the integrated forest systems (such as provided by Studio Skye, for example). Nearly everything is vintage 2009 Second Life, though a "Black Lives Matter" sign shows that the parcel is still being tended. I visit Maplewood once or twice a year, just to renew my memories of the first time I ran across it. At the time, I was very excited to see a large natural region in SL. Then, I didn't understand why there weren't vast areas of wild (of course, cost would be an issue). I do love the more current wild areas in SL, but I am happy to see Maplewood preserved as is for so long. The creator, Almadi Masala, has created several small biomes — forest, wetlands, lakes, as well as a prairie restoration project. There is a vertiginous climb up the spine of one of the Heterocera highlands, wher
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The Ephemerality of Second Life

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I have a little bit of a formal training in the (Western) Classics, and a longer self-training as an amateur. This means I regularly deal with texts that look like this: This is West's Iliad (Teubner). The top of the page is the text of the poem itself. All the stuff on the bottom is called a "critical apparatus," and gives other evidence about what the text could look like — alternate readings found in other manuscripts, how other authors quote lines from the poem, etc. The apparatus represents the entire history of the survival of the Iliad as a text. The transmission isn't perfect — as the size of the apparatus attests — but in general we have a decent handle on the history of the text over time, even if there are always gaps. We have nothing remotely like this for the web, which rots away at an amazing pace, even with things like Archive.org valiantly trying to fight off the entropy. Our entirely digital ecosystem is insanely fragile, far more than paper and par
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Start of the Blog

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I've had a SecondLife account for many years (paid account, on and off, since 2005), and from time to time I have thought of documenting my wanders, but I was never inworld enough for me to keep up with it. But in the Time of the Covidities, as more people are dropping in to be social, I find myself spending more time inworld, too. Some time is social, some time is wandering. There is so much marvelous and creative work going on in SL, and I want to be able to remember some of that. It's all so ephemeral. Getting back into my account in the Summer of 2020, I tried to hit all my old landmarks. So much is missing. I have stored images going back to 2011. I wasn't always good about keeping track of locations at first, but I may still upload some of those from time to time. Back then I had a yurt: Not sure why I took this picture at night. I have no idea where this was (also 2011): But it was a clever way to use the steep landscape effectively. That can still be a challenge in
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