What happens when a ratings system escalates into an arms race of cliques, witch hunts, accusations of witch hunts, and other bits of high drama? Ask Wynona, she should know.

Back on Monday...

The first thing you notice about Catherine Omega's house on a cliff top above the ocean (Shipley 242, 92): with a sign like that, she wants no doubt the place is hers. Homeowner's pride must have something to do with the sign. She's roofed the place with lattice-work arches lined with greenish glass, which gives the place a warm, airy feel. It's extravagant, but it does still feel like a real place; a real home.

And that might have something to do with where she built part of it: homeless in British Columbia.

"Couch surfing homeless," I ask her, "Or dumpster diving homeless?"

"Dumpster diving homeless," says Cat.

After a few months with a Second Life account, for reasons she doesn't go into (except to say she "found myself in a very annoying situation"), Catherine found herself without a permanent address. "I was only out on the streets for a couple weeks," she says, "But it was a while before I had a real place." She did find shelter of a kind, in the interim: an empty apartment building, which sat above an abandoned store, without running water, or electric current. Despite all that, she still managed to hack back into the world of Second Life.
By this point, as she tells me this, my skepticism meter is maxed out.

How'd she find an Internet connection to get back on, for starters?

"I had my laptop with me," says Cat, "and I was using it as a router, and I cracked WEP on a WLAN with a soup can YAGI antenna to get on the Net. Boosting electricity was easy enough, because I have my multimeter and I know enough to not touch live wires." (Her tech-heavy answer is sufficiently over my head to seem convincing enough.)

So she scrounged through the hollowed-out building she was squatting in, until she could find a live wire to tap as her power source. "If there was a MacOSX or Linux port [of Second Life]," she tells me, "I'd be able to run it directly on my laptop and it'd save me the trouble of having to build this computer -- it's really annoying because it's mostly broken." Wait, you built yourself another computer while you were homeless, too?

"It turns out that a computer capable of running Second Life is difficult to come by when you're homeless. It took me... like a WEEK." She adds an emoticon wink. "I found it in a dumpster behind a computer store...I replaced the fan. It works fine."

Once again, I get a little wary: I don't doubt obsolescent PCs often get tossed out back, but Second Life requires a fairly powerful, up-to-date 3D card to run -- did you just yank that out of the trash, too?

Well, um, exactly. "I figure they needed to RMA it [return merchandise authorization]," she suggests, "or a user just told them to keep it after they upgraded, something like that...but yes, the dumpster part is true." So there she is, with a jury-rigged PC, logged in from a squat, constructing this seaside mansion online. "And how'd that make you feel", I ask her, "Building a virtual home while not having an actual one?" (I apologize to her for sounding all Barbara Walters about it.)

"Oh, journalists." She emoticon winks again, but she takes a while to respond. "Well, Second Life is an effective escape for most people -- I was no different. It's just that while most people use Second Life to unwind, or hang out with friends, I did the same, but I had more to escape." To her, she says, the game "[w]as a means to keep busy and give me a means to working towards improving myself. I mean, obviously not as big a help as food banks and stuff, but it's been very helpful...in terms of [learning programming] skills, but also in terms of just getting OUT. [W]hen you don't have running water, or money, there aren't a lot of places you can go. Contrary to popular belief, homeless people aren't lazy, they just have a lot of spare time."

Over the weeks, friends did help her get social assistance, and a new living arrangement. "Fortunately," she says, "everything worked out QUITE nicely and I'm housed now." So she's thinking about going to college, perhaps, either as a programmer, or an artist, or both.

But as she stands there in her mansion, I can't help picturing her a few months ago, and where she was then, in the winter chill, surely freezing in her unheated squat, surely with drug addicts and other denizens roaming outside beneath her on the meanest streets. She's shivering, but still tapping away on a computer that's duct-taped together with peripherals grabbed out of a dumpster, plugged into an exposed power line, using a makeshift antenna to stowaway onto someone's wireless Internet portal-- all to get here, in this sunlit mansion above the blue-green sea. It's also a little too much to swallow. ("Once you get to know her better," insisted Lyra Muse, a slinky friend of hers who stood nearby, when I first spoke with her, "you'll believe [all] that. Cat's da smartz.") Her story makes her seem like some William Gibson heroine, a tech-savvy waif out there on the street, finding her own uses for things. But what is certain is that she's in here now, still working on her dream home. She's tinkering with its electric tram line, which you can ride from the nearby hill, right into the Omega estate. (She had to power it off, because the programming script she wrote to make it work somehow causes a bug which makes the surrounding world go a bit wacky.) And looking at her place, you wonder how much it matters, whether her travails happened as she said they did, or whether they're just another facet of her online persona.

In the end, does it matter? The home is here, it's hers to call her own, and like her, it's as real as we want it to be.

Where's the most unique place someone's logged into Second Life, by the coolest means? I think I have a killer candidate. More tomorrow...

It's a kind of force field elevator shaft in the heart of Cyberpunk City (Bonafacio 154,44), towering above all the other skyscrapers, so that the statue of a giant, smoke-belching bird can loom over them. To ascend into the belly of the bird, you have to enter the shaft from the very bottom, and float up through several levels, and here you see the level of detail the creator has put into this thing: As you keep rising through the shaft -- and you happen to be in first-person view -- you can just barely glimpse something inside its belly. And you keep rising, trying to make out just what it is…

Until you're right there, and you can:

But what's the meaning of the man in the secret ceiling fresco, left there by Casval Epoch, the bird's creator? I happen to pass Bel Muse, a tan blonde girl in a T-shirt, so I ask her. "Maybe it's a special inner symbol for the artist," she suggests, and floats away.

After some technical sputtering which may have frustrated some who wanted to talk with me (sorry!), my Second Life e-mail address is fully operational: hamlet@secondlife.com.

If you're in Second Life already, please ping me, and tell me about things going on in-world you think I should know about. If you're just a visitor to the website, and there's things about the game (or my journal) you'd like to comment or question me on, by all means go for it. At the moment, in particular, I'm trying to put together an oral history on the beginnings of Second Life, as a community, and an experience. So if you were in here from the very moment Linden Lab began letting in testers, please drop me a line, and introduce your old-timer self...

So, any Second Life optometrists in there?

I want to wear a pair of glasses in there, similar to the kind I wear out here, but the pair I picked up in the in-game clothing shop are, um, not happening.

My real glasses are more like these. (What I call "hipster geek horn rims".)

So I'm looking for a contractor, and I'll pay props and large Linden Dollars for the artisan who can fit me with a pair.

This is what an energetic conversation in Second Life typically looks like. (Well, discounting the dude in his tightie whities -- this particular chat happened to go down in a Mature-rated area.) Every avatar pretty much imitates what their player is doing at the moment, at home -- hunched over, hands clickety-click typing into a keyboard. You even get a sound effect of keys clattering away, the moment you begin to write a chat message.

This strikes me as a fairly elegant solution to a longtime annoyance in MMOGs, and online chat rooms, for that matter: overlapping conversation, with no cues to tell you when someone is talking, or preparing to talk. If you think about actual, face-to-face conversation, a lot of it comes across through body language and eye contact -- especially when it comes to figuring out when it's your turn to shut up, and let the other person say something.

Picture how we talk, in everyday speech. You'll be talking with someone, and in the middle of what you're saying, you can tell by the way she half opens her mouth, or raises her eyebrows, that she wants to respond. And judging by her expression, or which of your words she reacted to, you can anticipate what she's about to say. So before you finish your sentence, you quickly add something which tries to address what you suspect she's about to say. So when you've finally finished talking, her response has also changed. (If you, well, know what I'm talking about.)

That's the kind of dynamic, simultaneous give-and-take communication you get, with in-person conversation, part of the full-body context that simple chat still can't match. But this hands-pretending-to-type mime action, it might be the best way to getting us something like that, in a MMOG. So it'll be interesting to watch how online conversation evolves in Second Life. (Now that you can literally watch someone form their thoughts.)

(Thanks to Lyra Muse, Catherine Omega, and the regrettably unidentified tightie whitie aficionado, for the photo op.)

"I guess we are going in reverse," James Miller opines, as the car we're riding on shudders backward. They haven't entirely worked out the kinks in this ambitious municipal works project (Minna 222, 235) yet, but once they (James -- with Pat Murphy and Josh Starseeker, his collaborators on the impromptu public transportation gig) do, the final layout will be impressive.

"Our plan is to have the system going throughout the Second Life world," James says, "for easy access to the most popular of locations. We currently have started our Green Line, from here to Downtown Natoma. We will be extending that line shortly, to the boardwalk."

To get this far, they first had to grab up the land under which the rail would run. And that in turn required some heavy lobbying and palm greasing with city council (i.e., the game's development team). "We had Linden Lab release us a lot of land," says James, "so that we could build the line...we own all the land that the monorail goes over." In Second Life, eminent domain is legislated via code tweak.

The ride is smooth and leisurely, with vista views of suburban Minna. There's still a noticeable stutter, though, as the monorail passes from one server to the next. "Going through sim boundaries isn't so great," James acknowledges. I find another bug, when the ride is over, and I want to exit: my avatar squirms back and forth, but can't quite manage to stand. (It's a little like what happened when you used to take real monorail rides on summer vacations, and you find out your sweaty thighs have glued your butt to the seat.)

Not surprisingly, it was James' kid-time trips on Disneyland's monorail line, which inspired him to build his own -- just as Second Life's building tools became an outlet for the kind of creativity he was engaged in, then.

"I would always ask my parents to take me to the hardware store, to buy me wood. I was always gluing things and glittering the family dog." And now, he says, "Second Life finally gives me a way to do this in a shaved-dog-free way."

But he has bigger plans which extend way beyond monorails or even shaved dogs: "When I was growing up," says James, "I was always planning on building a city in my backyard. The thought of creating a running city was so unbelievable to me." A native New Yorker in real life, he says he'd love to participate in a Second Life project which recreated his hometown.

In conversation, it comes out that James lost a relative in the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. So I ask him if his desire to recreate New York City might be motivated in part by the loss and grief he felt, from that event. Did seeing the city wrecked in such a horrific way make him want to build a renewed version of it here?

James' avatar pauses at the question, before his answer comes: "Truthfully I don't think so. The nerves that 9/11 hit seem to be totally unrelated to those that Second Life appeals to."

We steer away from that tender subject, and talk about other MMOGs, and the potential he sees in this one. "I can't wait to see what Second Life is like one year from now." He shows me the automated voice that will greet boarding passengers, and a viewing screen which will play an animated movie clip, to entertain pre-boarding passengers. Through the windows of the monorail, you can see small new homes on the hillside, and closer by, a giant dome covered by an American flag. Past that, the skyline keeps emerging and rolling out beyond us, into the infinite horizon.

For the record, my latest article just posted on Salon was actually written almost two months ago. It's a review of the new book "Masters of Doom", a fairly excellent history of id Software. In it, I yearn (like the book's author) for "virtual worlds [which] would become so realistic and varied, they'd evolve into our play space for freeform imagination and social experiment". And when I typed those words, and sent them to my editor, I was pretty sure we hadn't reached the point yet, in which we'd be able to develop games like that. And in one of those odd moments of cosmological synchronicity, the folks at Linden Lab contacted me the very next day.