What is all of the hype about? If any....

I recently joined second life...man was that a mistake but its required so oh well. I have logged on a few times now and each time I am pushing myself to stay on. Here are some reasons why.

Downloading this took forever. This time intensive process was just annoying. Sorry…I don’t have much patience if you can tell. I am the person when doing searches, keeps hitting the refresh button thinking it will speed things up when I know it won’t.

The application is memory intensive...so it takes forever for buildings/objects to load. I could be walking to what looks like open ground and then boom, a building appears. I am sure I look like an idiot to other people on second life. My system has crashed three times so far and I am sure its not the end of it. Also, my avatar randomly starts slapping her upper back...I am not even touching the keyboard...I swear!!

No matter how hard I try, I keep ending up at adult sites. I have even been chased by hookers. Not sure why?? The last one was the only one that was someone normal. But even then, people were just standing around..not really chatting. I have tried to talk to some people and the responses ranges from silence to some actual normal conversations. Quite honestly though, I have no interest in talking to random strangers. I have enough going on in my real life and making small talk with some random avatar falls real far down my list. I have noticed though that if you are "away" from you computer, you avatars goes into away mode...but he/she basically looks like they are sleeping with their heads facing towards the ground. Looks kind of funny...see if you can find one.

I had heard that second life had some good places to go to try new view products. Not sure how that would work. Are there clothes you try on your avatar? Even if my avatar looks good with it, I doubt I would buy it. I also did a search on places to go such as art museums, school, and other “PG” related sites but there was not much going on. Kind of boring.

So my question is, who are these people that are logging on and spending hours everyday? And why? Just trying to figure out all of the hype around second life.