Here's a snip from this week's installment, "Shipwrecked and Abandoned":
At a concurrency of 40,000 people, Second Life's gears begin to grind a bit. My inworld sojourn last night was truncated by the teleport system failing, which, admittedly, kind of prevents people from circulating around the grid. I was stuck in Toxian City, along with about twenty other people. That said, someone just told me that concurrency has cleared 42,000, and things are still working, if slowly.
And I'm tripping from place to place, and seeing nothing but abandoned buildings wherever I go.
I start jumping to clubs. The Velvet, in Iron Fist, is empty. I find three miserable naked men in a sex club looking for a mistress to savage their little avatars. A vast vampire-themed club with not even the undead laying around. A space station that feels like it's re-enacting the final days of Mir, all the service modules undocked and waiting to be deorbited. A massive replica of a STAR TREK Starfleet vessel with all hands missing, shipwrecked seven hundred meters up. A Zen temple chill-out zone with not a devotee to be seen. Again and again I teleport, like Gully Foyle in the last pages of THE STARS MY DESTINATION, and, for a while there I wish that I, like he, had bombs to scatter. But there's no one here to receive them.
