The Road Ahead and The Road Behind

I’ve been contemplating writing this blog post for awhile. I’ve made draft after draft and subsequently deleted them all. Even now I am not sure what I am going to write or how I want to say all that I have to say.

It is no secret that Flipper and myself are leaving the SLCC Team and Future United Board come August 27th. We’ve already put the wheels in motion to turn over the “keys” to those that will continue on with future SLCC endeavors. Some were easier to turn over ownership on than others. Blog ownership, e-mail passwords, Google groups and SL groups are easy. Bank accounts and the registration code are a bit trickier and will take time. I think it is important that we are 100% uninvolved with future conventions. Even the remotest bit of involvement can landslide into full blown organizer status.

Neither of us wanted to be involved this year as we publicly stated numerous times. We remained on board so that we could get all the new organizers up to speed and get the proverbial ball rolling for them. It just did not feel right leaving our friends and colleagues to start from scratch in figuring out how to organize the convention. Unfortunately, we both got more involved that we initially had planned on and as a consequence got sucked into the public drama vortex. Even though our involvement this year was much less by comparison with the first two conventions people still see us as the two people in charge running the helm regardless of how many other people are involved.

The SLCC has dominated two full years of our personal lives and I really have come to resent it in some ways. I always joke that between the two of us we’ve probably logged upwards of $100,000 USD in billable hours given the time we have donated to working on the conventions. It has been a thankless task. It has caused considerable stress in our personal lives. The pay off is having a place to connect with our friends from Second Life that we see once a year. The mantra of the past few months has been ” I want my life back” and I am happy to be on the road towards that end result.

Certain people think that I can’t handle criticism, which couldn’t be farther from the truth. Over the years, we have taken much of the criticism to heart and made changes with processes and decisions accordingly. We are human and we make mistakes from time to time. It happens and is part of life. We also have been realistic in what we have the ability to do versus the lofty grand ideals of what we want to do. No one has ever set out to screw over the community or bilk the SLCC for personal gain.

What I do have a problem with is when criticism and opinions are expressed in the form of personal attacks on our characters; and/or stated as a concrete indelible facts impervious to logic, reason and truth and/or used to fuel drama for the sake of drama. We are far from astoundingly evil, mullah, bolsheviks, cyberaristocracy and what not. We are Second Life residents just like everyone else and thats why we helped to create the Second Life Community Convention. We thought it was important to have a place for people to connect from the virtual world to the real world under the common interest of Second Life.

All this brings me back to the initial point I was going to make. I think simply put in a nutshell I am over Second Life. As a result of riding the run away drama train for the past few years I’ve grown apathetic towards Second Life and the community of Second Life. No this is not one of those zOMG I am leaving and never coming back posts. I realize that the process of leaving would probably be more annoying and time consuming than actually staying. I’m hoping that I can reinvent my Second Life experience in the coming months and learn to love this crazy world and its community once again.