HOPE STREAMS ETERNAL

Avatars dash thousands of miles and raise thousands of dollars to fight cancer...

Even after everyone else had given up for the day, an angel kept running. As of about an hour and a half ago, 4pm Second Life Time, Jade Lily's Second Life Relay for Life had raised the Linden Dollar equivalent of at least $4600 for the American Cancer Society, with more to surely come.

"It's going directly into a Gaming Open Market account, but [GOM's owners have] a script set up to send me the current total every five minutes or so. We have US$4,267.79 in GOM right now. It officially ended at Noon, but some others are holding events tonight and donating." (Skyllar Skidoo has an advance report from the scene at Terra Nova.)

"It's not including US$ donations made directly through Kintera," Jade adds. "We know there are some of those. Touch this sign." Clicking on the sign behind the slender brunette opens up a dialog box that lets you launch a web browser and go directly to a donation site. "And we had someone donate US$360 this morning on that site," Ms. Lily continues. "That's not been included in the total I gave."

Jamie Brokken scripted a lap tracker to keep tabs on the 315 avatars who ran on the pathway shaped into the word "Hope", sending the data via XML to an external website. "Karandas Banjo ran 100 [laps]," Jade tells me. "That's about 200 kilometers." (One full lap, according to Brokken, is two kilometers in relative SL distance.)

"Kornation appears to be running still," Jade observers, "but we're not tracking the laps anymore."

As if on cue, an angel in a cream-colored suit named Kornation Bommerang jogs past us, slowing down only long enough to pose for pictures, then continues in his quest to go the distance.

Update, 8/29, 10:47pm SLT: According to Second Life Future Salon, SL Relay for Life has raised the astounding and excellent Linden Dollar equivalent of $5,411.00 for the American Cancer Society.