My First Month in SL What an Experience Part 1.

OK so I have run many BDSM websites and have written for the BDSM News for over 5 years.  I am a RL Dom in a 24/7 D/s relationship. I have founded and been a director of a RL BDSM group and still host RL events. So I have a good friend and partner, Charles Blitz, who's been talking to me for 6 months about this Second Life thing.  Yea I tell him sounds like fun, me I have no time for games, not a gamer man I say.  He keeps after me, dude, you have to check it out you can make real friends in SL and we can do the same thing we do in RL with the News in SL: “It will be fun.”

Ok so I go to the SL website to get signed up. Lucky I have a new system with a good amount of RAM and a good graphics card. First thing, I am sent to NOOB Island.  Dam people running all over bumping into each other all looking the same. I feel like I’m in a bad zombie movie from the 70’s; every one has sandals and they all look like, well, asexual “NOOBS”. I try to do the orientations but keep getting banged into. See, in RL I like my own space so this is getting me aggravated. Now the deal is I could have told my friend off the bat I was going to join and he would have had help meet me to get me started.  But hell, I am a Dom, I’ll do it myself. So off I go. I hit every free area in SL. I get clothes, an AO -- the first one made me a bad Kung Fu fighter -- and of course hair, now that was a hard find. OK, now I’m starting to get a handle on this SL stuff. I look OK and I can walk 50% of the time and not bang into walls. I can fly, but trees and buildings keep jumping out in front of me. I also sign up for the paid membership. Cool, now I can get land? Yea, that’s easy to find. But now I know how to get L’s and I fine tune my look a bit more.

So now it’s time, I bring my Lady in. She goes through most of what I did, but she has way more patience then I, so she comes out of NOOB Island knowing things I do not.  Great, she has some good information to pass on. We get her looking ok and now it’s off to meet my friend.  Well he is out of town for a bit, so he sends us to a friend he knows and someone I have never met but we have been promoting her radio station FemDom Radio for a few years now. Ok, she is going to show us some offices Charles has rented to put the BDSM News in. I’m thinking rent for a business in SL, ok, I don’t get it but hay let me look. So let me say, up to this point my experience in SL was just a pain in my ass.  Sure, cool things to look, at a few nice people to talk to, but for the most part I just felt lost.

OK, to get back, I am going to meet this Fem Dom to look at rental offices for the BDSM News. Now in RL I get along well with most Fem Doms, even a few that don’t talk to Male Doms other then a polite 'Hi, how are you.' So I figure just be myself and see how things go. We get the LM and TP to the offices. We get there early and take a look around.  Wow, what a great area, a big Mall, great building design and a dungeon.  We head back to the offices for our meeting.

OK folks, here is where my SL experience took a 180. And it became a fun experience, and I found out you can make great friends in SL.  Look for more on the story next issue.

Batista Bardasch