ephemerology - n. - the study of the unreal

Hamlet Au asks (paraphrased): “How can a virutal world with 75k online [at once] world seem so lonely?”

This feeling struck me when I first started in SL as well. It all seemed so empty and barren. Like the person in the Slashdot article he references mentions, as I wandered, I hardly ran into a person. I found some really terrific builds. I checked out the NOAA sim, and no one was there. Vassar’s SL campus was bare. In one region, I actually saw a green dot on my mini-map and zoomed over to find the owner of the sim working on something (an industrius-looking fox-furry in grungy cyberpunk gear). He was completely surprised to see me and was shocked that I’d taken the time to look around the build. It felt like some science fiction novel where a great civilization had been wiped out in an instance, removing all inhabitants and leaving the artifacts of their civilization unscathed.

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