Greetings, traveler! I am your humble host on this side, please let me introduce myself, my name is Bartholomew Gallacher.

I am a male avatar in the game called Second Life and exploring this player made universe day by day. I was born on the 25th of September in 2006, although I really began to play in the middle of November. Since then I’ve been online more or less from day to day, explored many different locations, found some favorite spots for myself and made some wonderful friends through my journeys. They know who they are, a big thanks for your wonderful friendship!

Why this blog? Because I want to say something about this game in the WWW and it is always nice to have some feedback, more or less. I don’t know who is going to read this blog, perhaps many, perhaps only some, but that doesn’t matter to me really. This blog is going to be my main diary about my journeys, adventures and experiences in SL.

Since I, the player behind the avatar, live in Europe (GMT+1), but the majority of the SL player originates from North America, it is not always easy to get to know some people from the other continents or keep in touch. Well, at least I try and somehow I managed to be able to keep in touch with some, though. To keep things simple, I’ve enabled PST (which in fact is also SLT) for all blog entries and comments. Just bear in your mind, when you see very strange times for your taste, that 8 hours are quite a difference!

What I am surely not going to do in this blog is to post anything about my real life. I am a firm believer that SL is not RL and RL should not be mixed quickly or at all with SL – in most cases it only brings trouble to you. I may reveal parts about my real life to some people I trust, but surely not on a blog, since I believe that this is very important to keep my privacy intact. This also means no RL pics of me in the game or this blog. Sorry.

I’ve been a well known wizard in a big MUD for about five years and have enough knowledge and experience to judge on this and act accordingly. Believe me, it is very important to keep your privacy intact and not to treat this lightly. Just remember, SL is not only a game, for many it also means a very hard business, and if you want to hire in a real life company somewhere your game play could backfire on yourself! This also means, that I dislike many so called Web 2.0 sites, since many people tend to disclose too much about their real life there, too. For further reading about the pitfalls of disclosing too much about your RL I recommend the article  „Social network users have ruined their privacy, forever.“

I am also in the lucky position to have my own root server somewhere else, but using it would also reveal too much about my real life persona, so it is now wordpress.com for me, which is a very good free hoster of blogs!

Having said this, what do I do mostly in SL? I hang out with my friends, play a part time greeter for Intimate Moments, like to dance in Phat Cat’s or explore new locations. I still don’t own land or have a place of my own, since I simply have no need for this at the moment. Period.

I am also a firm believer in good conversation, manners and intelligence in SL. There is no fun for me in running around naked everywhere or use speech such as „lol“, „rofl“, „wanna fuck“, „i like u“ and so on. You have the words, you have a keyboard, so better type it in accordingly. It may be a little more work, but it is worth it! Believe me. And if you are not a fast typer, well, better take some typing lessons. It is also much better to talk English in populated places, since it is the lingua franca in SL and rude if other people cannot understand your native tongue.

So, welcome, and I hope you are going to have fun in reading about my experiences!