Wandering Yaffle 8 - Speculative Fiction
Ah well, it's a learning process, after all. There's no getting around the fact that the plot in Hibdon is too small for my grand design ideas. Better to sell-up and find a bigger area to develop.
Luckily, it seems I've paid under the odds for my Hibdon plot, a quick scan of other plots for sale in the area shows that, unbeknown to me, the plot had been put on the market at a very generous price, maybe for a quick sale. I'd paid $2600 Linden Dollars for 1024 sqare meters, but I priced it up for sale at $4500 and it was snapped up within the day leaving me with a healthy couple of grand profit.
Land speculation is a primary source of income for a certain segment of the Second Life population. Everywhere you go you see For Sale signs littering the landscape, huge co-operative groups use their combined buying power to snap up the bargains and sell on prime real estate.
And there's more to it than just racking up some play money. This here is the Gaming Open Market:
A currency market dealing in real-world money vs Linden dollars. At the time of writing this, the best price for selling Lindens is around $4 USD to $1,000 Lindens, which means I bought my plot for around $10 worth in real money and sold it for around $18. And that was just little old me screwing around with a small 1024sqm. There are reports of individuals making thousands of dollars a month speculating on acres and acres of Second Life land. Go figure.
So I need a big plot, or lots of contiguous small plots that I can buy up and merge together. Sorting the land sale list by price-per-square-metre quickly flags where the bargains are and there's a large collection of plots going fo a very good price in a zone called Furness.
It's then that I did a bad thing. Well, kinda bad, it depends on your outlook. Even with my nice little nest-egg of Lindens I don't have enough to buy all the land I want, if I'm going to snap up the bargain in Furness I need to get some more play-money and quickly. And the quickest way to do that is to buy Linden dollars with real cash.
What!?! I hear you cry. PAY MORE REAL MONEY?!? Am I some kind of freak?!? Well, yes, but that's not the point. The point is that I'm determined to cling to this 'Second Life website' paradigm like an agoraphobic octopus. If you were to set up a website out here on the real internet it would cost you money. Real money, not Lindens. There's domain name registration, decent editing software (yeah, if you're HONEST), hosting etc, etc. All small overheads, but overheads nontheless. Buying land in Second Life to set up a mirror of this here website is no different to paying a guy to host it for you, or buy Dreamweaver.
So I dropped $25 on GOM and swelled my Linden Dollar balance accordingly. With the new infusion of play-money I bought up all the land in Furness the seller had put on the market. I saw him there, actually, the seller. He was winding down his Second Life land-owning status and was looking to dump his holdings fast. I got the land for a steal. This is good because chances are, if this goes horribly wrong, I can sell the land at some future date and get my money back, maybe even make a profit. You can't really do that with a domain name registration.
So with bags more room and a 600 object prim limit, three times my previous allocation, it's time to build the new _blacklibrary.
