UNDERHILL, NOT OVER THE HILL

When I last saw Upshaw Underhill, he was a hippy with a tie-dye T-shirt, who had just been, like me, abducted by aliens (June 28th entry). That was more than seven months ago, and it may say something about how much the world has grown, in the interim, that I haven't seen him since then. He was still wearing the tie-dye shirt, when we finally bumped into each other yesterday, but now he was sporting a pair of misty, translucent wings that can change color and character on command.

"How did you make those wings like that?"

"Invisible particle emitters," says Underhill. "My first real sell-able item. I've got it over in Luna-- L$300. They're a bit of a Swiss army knife: speed-enhance, hovermode, coordinate display, anti-push, and of course, the visible part." ("Anti-push" would make it resistant to a script that some residents like to attach to the weapons they create, in order to biff their victims around the place, like being swatted by a giant hand.) A user since last March-- the Beta days-- he's among the small handful of veterans to be in-world for so long. So I ask him how he's managed to sustain for so long.

"[I] used to just fly all over and enjoy everything being built (still do plenty of that)," he says. "But then I got into scripting-- just playing around with moving things, changing their colors... have made several little things for various folks."

"Do you find yourselves needing to set long term goals for yourself," I ask, "like big projects or acheiving certain levels [of income] or stuff like that?"

"Naw," says Upshaw, "I'm a very day-to-day person. Projects make it too much work... found that out with the Linden World ride." (He helped create a theme park ride featuring a volcano and a penguin.) "It was fun but it really became work. It was fun to learn the ins and outs of rezzing items but staying in one spot and working on finishing it took a little longer than I wanted."

Part of this may have to do with the fact that he often logs in to Second Life from work.
(He helps customers with software technical support calls.) "[It's a] very small operation," he says, "and if I dont have any other projects it's not really a problem for me to dink around while I help people on the phone... dink around here in SL that is," he adds, smiling.