Real life’s not working out so well? Well you can have another. You can even look like this if you want, even if you’re a guy, which is a little weird, but you can.
All you need is a computer and a high-speed Internet connection, and an account with Second Life, and then you can build another life.
Of course, a lot of people go there and then…then they don’t know what to do. They wander around aimlessly for awhile, or they fly around aimlessly for awhile, and then leave for good. There are tons of inactive Second Life accounts.
But there are other people who actually make a living there. There’s a local currency, and it converts to real dollars, big dollars even, according to the Washington Post.
Last year, as the physical economy withered, Second Life’s economy blossomed, with user-to-user transactions topping $567 million in actual U.S. currency, a 65 percent jump over 2008. About 770,000 unique users made repeat visits to Second Life in December, and the users, known as residents, cashed out $55 million of their Second Life earnings last year, transferring that money to PayPal accounts.
The real estate market’s dried up in the real world, but in Second Life it’s possible to become a land baron. Or well, thin and beautiful with wings, skipping from place to place, anonymously observing the weirdness. Or you could even sell rain and other unusual things.
Dana Moore sells rain. He sells a lot of it, for about a buck per reusable storm.
“I don’t know why people love buying rainstorms,” he said, watching his product drizzle last week, “but they do seem to like them a lot.”
The attraction isn’t rain, per se, but Moore’s rain, which can deluge swaths of land on command. The rain falls not in Bowie, where he lives with his wife of 37 years, but in the virtual world of Second Life, the Web portal where he also markets snow, clocks, University of Maryland basketball T-shirts, Duke basketball T-shirts (grudgingly), two-story Tudor-style homes, pinup posters from the 1930s and the sounds of barking dogs.
But beware, things can be mighty slow as reality creates itself before your eyes. And sometimes you can’t fly when you think you should. And sometimes your legs disappear or you find yourself flopping on your side like a dying fish. It’s a second life in progress.
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