I got interested in text chat rooms  years ago and went totally bonkers about it, spending way to much time in them, staying up till all hours of the night to the point where I was barely able to stay awake at work.   I've been a science fiction reader for most of my life, though I seem to have lost the will to read books anymore, possibly as a result of the deterioration my vision resulting from failing stay eternally young and thus falling victim to presbyopia.  I suggest to the youngsters out there to do all the stuff that takes close up vision before you reach age forty.  You can wear reading glasses but it's just not the same.  Sigh.

 

One of the virtual worlds I got interested in at first was Cybertown and the other worlds that could be reached using the Blaxxun Contact world viewer.  

 

I found a free version of the Blaxxun Avatar Studio, a French version, and my kids and I had a lot of fun making the avatar move around like a broken puppet.

 

I spent a fair amount of time in Cybertown, although I was not very sociable.  I enjoyed seeing the sites, and running around the slanted walls in the market place.  If you ever saw someone named Susanne running repeatedly around the walls in the marketplace - the flea market, I think they called it - that was probaby me.

 

At some point Cybertown switched from free membership to paid membership, and they've also put in some limitations on the size of objects you can import into their virtual world,  and thus it was not as intersting to see the stuff there because it had to fit the constraints, and you had to pay to be something other than a guest with a default avatar.

 

I looked around in Active Worlds,  Adobe Atmosphere, World Traveller, Worlds.com,  and other similar older virtual worlds.

 

At some point I found out about Second Life; I don't recall how exactly any more.

 

I've now managed to get in the Hipihi beta.

 

 

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