That’s me in 2008, hanging out at a bar near
the Hemingway House on New Key West sim.

Ok, not exactly. The blog that became Being Yordie Sands started out as My Moveable Feast. You see, I lived near the Hemingway House on New Key West at the time. And I had a romantic notion that I was writing in the presence of Hemingway’s virtual spirit. It was my a little routine to get me started, sitting in the cafe and looking at the house. But our second lives change. I moved from that region and this led to that. Along the way, the old title just didn’t work so I came up with the current title.

1,160 Posts

The original blog remains on Google Blogger, all 975 posts and thousands of pictures. And when I’m not buried in other things, I’m going to move all those posts over there. It will be soon, I promise. Some of those posts, the ones about my Zen gardens, remain popular to this day. So I want to bring them here for the WordPress readers, where I have 185 posts.

About The Blog

When I began my blog, it was to act as a journal of my second life. I believed and still do that it is harder to remember events in Second Life than real life. The reason for this is, in a virtual world we don’t remember things with all our senses. We see things and that’s important. We hear things and read text, and that’s important too. But there’s no sense of smell or feeling of human touch or just the temperature of the air. In Second Life, we may have a strong memory of place and where we were, but we don’t have all those other senses that our memories are made of.  I noticed this early on and this was one of the reasons for starting this blog. And in many ways, this blog is still a journal I use for reference often.

About The Readers

When I started I had knowledge that the blog was open to the public, but didn’t have a sense of writing for more than a few close friends. It’s pretty clear when I started to gain readers from outside my circle of close friends. It happened one night at Junkyard Blues when co-owner and Chief Dreamgirl Dina Petty mentioned that she enjoyed my blog in open chat during a show. After that night, I began writing a little differently. I began writing for people who might not know me personally.  Today, according to WordPress, this blog has 1,279 Followers, although there are less active readers when you add up Subscribers and Followers. And regardless of how many of you there are, thank you.

Celebrating Five Years!

I want to say that I’m proud to have made it this far along as a blogger. I have to add my usual disclaimer, I don’t consider myself to be a great writer or anything. But I’ve created something tangible, and I’m very happy that some of my works have endured.

Envisioning the Future

I mulled the future of my blogging (part 1, part 2) a couple of months ago but I think I have one more installment to make in that series.  Several things are clear to me though.

I am happy with my virtual identity. I smile when my best friend, Leanna, looks at something I’m wearing and says, “That’s so you.” I’m happy with my home in SL New England. It was Sommer who first said the Painter home is very me, and it is and that means people have a sense of who I am. And I’m very happy with the idea of my store, Yordie’s Excellent Adventures. I expect it will take months for me to find a way to blend all of my ideas about adventure, but this will be my path forward. And I want the future of this blog to be, the story of adventures in Second Life and my virtual fantasy life.

This is the image I have of my future in Second Life.
I’m at my store, mulling ideas for adventure.
I’m planning to write an Adventurer’s Handbook.
And I’ll be planning adventures with friends, old and new.