All the talk about the Second Life TOS changes in the past few weeks have reminded me that there are some other worlds out there.  I have no intention of leaving Second Life until somebody shuts off the lights and we all have to go home, but in the meantime if I see something that’s new and different from SL I try to take a look at it. Or, in the case of Cloud Party, revisit it to see what’s been going on there lately.

Last year my husband/fellow virtual world explorer and I both signed up for Cloud Party with our Facebook accounts, at the time that was the only option and I recall it frustrated those who didn’t want to tie their RL accounts to virtual worlds. They do allow other methods of creating an account now, but fortunately the Facebook log in still works so I was able to hop back in. My profile was still there, untouched for the past sixteen months, and I was amused to find my snapshots from that day still sitting in my avatar profile photo album.

There I was, wearing my fabulous party hat.  There wasn’t really any way to customize your avatar beyond a few wardrobe changes, but I did my best. The hub and I both claimed our free houses, you can see his through my window, it’s the one sporting the spiffy funnel shaped roof. I puttered around for a while, grabbed some freebie furniture and set it around the house, uploaded one texture that I put on a poster on one of the walls, and that was it, really. There just wasn’t enough to keep me interested, and after playing with the building tools and mostly just moving things around in the house for a couple hours I never logged in again until this afternoon.

My house was just as I’d left it, without even a speck of pixel dust to blow away. So was hub’s little funnel head house. I had to choose a new avatar when I logged back in, so at least I got to fix myself up a bit, and I found a freebie hair pack that was an improvement over the default choices. I seem to have a bit of a slouchy posture problem, but I might have been tired, I guess. I did like that I could make myself a little plumper, although I wasn’t quite ready to get too close to realism there.

It was very quiet in the area, and I wonder if any of the people who claimed the other eight houses have continued to log in after the first few weeks?  After I fixed up my av there wasn’t much to do in the house except move plants around, so I looked over the list of builds. I know many of the people designing in Cloud Party are also creators in SL and I recognized a few names on the list, then just picked a couple spots to visit.

Hexterra by Phate Shepherd was a green, peaceful park area with rolling hills, nature sounds, and a gazebo to pause in.

Blue by Cherry Manga just looked cool from the destination screen. 😀

It seemed I was running no matter where I went, I’m not sure if there is a way to trigger the animation from a run to a walk or not.  Since I haven’t had any exercise since June of last year, all that jogging around wore me out really fast. I though it best to crash on the hub’s couch to rest up.

I had a nice time roaming around, even if I didn’t spend a lot of time logged in. I noticed you can go directly into any of the public builds as a guest if you just want to take a quick look around, so in the future I’d probably just do that if all I wanted to do was check out something new.  Moving around was pretty easy, but I was having trouble getting used to the camera controls, and I really missed having something like the windlight to change atmosphere settings. The av customization is a lot further along than last year, I’m sure it will probably continue to improve as well. Cloud Party still doesn’t capture my interest for more than the few minutes it takes to wander around and look at things, but I might start following it a little more to see what sort of changes they are making as they grow.

One of the questions in Strawberry Singh asked her readers in this weeks Monday Meme was what they’d do with their time/blogs if they ever did leave Second Life.  I have no intention of leaving regardless of TOS changes and little expedition off the grid reinforced  my appreciation for Second Life.  But what if it were to close, for whatever reason? What then? This is the only SL related blog I have so it might fade, but my other blogs and social media would still be there for me.  The time I spend in world would most likely transfer over to playing the Sims again.

But maybe once in a while I should make my Cloud Party avvie get off the couch and see if I can actually build something. It’s always nice to have another world to visit now and then.