InWorldz Disappears ..... poem

InWorldz Disappears

Jaqi Bluh


It was once a place of magic
where sprites and pixies played
but then the ship of InWorldz
struck an iceberg
and sank beneath the waves

Avatars in the water
swimming where they can
to find a safe island
or a lifeboat
or find new land

Worlds may sink
disappear from sight
but dreams live on
beneath the stars
and in Moonlight

And dreams like seeds
grow again
in places unexpected
sending down roots
soaking up rain

My InWorldz forest is gone
my tavern but a memory
with its cheery fire
and crystal cave
and river flowing merrily

With love and hope
dreams will shine again
rainbows will glisten
flowers will bloom
beyond this sudden pain

Jaqi
Bluh

Sunday
29
July
2018


NOTE ~   InWorldz was once the largest virtual world, where the user makes the content, after Second Life. When InWorldz suddenly vanished, due to loans going bad for the company, thousands of people suddenly lost all their invested effort in developing their dreams and second lives. I was not overly affected, as I was keeping a presence there as a kind of museum of past works. I was renting a delightful sky forest, a thousand metres up, with huge trees, and a river, and liked to dip in their, at least once a week. InWorldz had been an important step beyond Second Life in 2010, to explore ways to build large space structures, that could be used in the virtual world, as if in space. The cost of land in Second Life was a wall to progress, while in InWorldz we could afford a whole region (256 x 256 metres) to experiment with. Another brick wall in Second Life, is only being able to stretch a prim to 64 metres. In InWorldz a prim could be stretched to 256 metres. This enabled the larger builds, such as a torus space station shell, a large wheel 256 metres in diameter, made with one round prim. In Second Life this is only possible with many small parts. Lost now is my sprite avatar, which served as inspiration in making the space builds. Engineers love STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths), but I prefer STEAM, where the "A" stands for arts. Apple built a trillion dollar company, in part because they had an eye for the needs of art. Space development must also learn this lesson, to really fly and serve.