Reading your comments under my rezday post was really fun - it's great to listen to other people talking about their early experiences in Second Life. So I decided to post one of my recollections of Ayumi's newbie days, hoping that you'd do the same :) Here's the task: share your first 'noob-scary' experience in SL ^^ Here goes mine.

During my first week in SL I mostly explored the world. One day (and it was very early, I think it could be my second day in SL or so) I arrived at a beautiful shop. It was furnished in Arabic style. The floors were covered with embroidered carpets and numerous pillows, heavy curtains were hanging on sandy walls and the place was full of decorative vases and other atmospheric accessories. Somewhere in the middle of the shop, there was a big mirror with a sign saying 'Touch me'. Now, what would you do? I already knew that touching objects in SL would start-up interaction. The place was really nice, so without much thinking I touched the mirror. And there I was... not graceful as a belly dancer... but walking around like a baboon :P A baboon! One hand on the hip, one hand scratching my head. At first I laughed and the joke seemed hilarious to me. Then I decided to stop the animation. I touched the mirror - nothing. I touched again, and I kept touching and touching and nothing happened. I was a baboon! When I started panicking, a girl teleported to the shop. Full of hope I asked her what I should do. She suggested trying "Stop all animations" option from the menu. I did... and still - I was a baboon. And that's the time I really started panicking ;) The previous day I spent a lot of time adjusting my avatar's appearance, and I thought I'll need to create a new one, adjust all the sliders again - and I wouldn't even have the name I wanted. Haha, how could I know that relog would help? :P

PS. I did relog - intuition I guess ;)

Yup, it's been 2 years since I've become a resident of Second Life. And SL changed so much since then. When I meet newbies I feel like saying "when I was your age..." ;) I've been reflecting on what actually has changed and came up with a pretty long list, which most likely is incomplete. So... When I was your age:

• Group limit had just been extended from 15 to 25 groups
• Flexi prims and local lights were relatively new features
• Profiles had a built-in rating system, to help residents build their reputation. There were three things you could rate: behavior, appearance and building skills, costing 25L$ each. Here's how it looked like.
• There was help through live chat for everyone, started from SL viewer
• The first land program (getting 512 sqm of land for free) was still on
• SL newsletter, Second Opinion, was still active. Here's the issue from the time my av was born ;)
• Meeting someone from my country was almost impossible. Now there's a huge amount of Polish residents, and more coming in, each time a TV show about SL is aired. There's a rumour that last time LL registration system crashed due to a huge number of Polish people trying to join SL.
• Banking and gambling were flourishing. In fact I camped for the first time at a casino :)
• There was no VAT for Europeans
• Shop OnRez was called SLBoutique at the time and took commisions
  
• SL hit 1 million Residents the previous month (sounds pretty small now, doesn't it?).
• Avatar's height wasn't so close to RL as it is now. If you look around, you'll see older avatars are taller (unless they adjusted their height to the new trend).
• There was no such thing as optional SL update :) All updates were mandatory and usually happened on so called 'Update Wednesdays'. At the time you never ever scheduled your important events on Wednesdays ('SL Update… Coming to a Wednesday Near You!') and T-shirts with 'I hate update Wednesdays' prints were selling like hot cakes.
• There were no sculpted prims! No, really. No sculpted clothing, no sculpted furniture, no sculpted trees :) I think more residents from that time know how to manipulate prims into unusual one-prim objects, like a leaf or a flower, while nowadays people don't, since they never really had to learn that (not that sculpties are easier to learn, they're not :P).
• No windlight (how beautiful SL is now!)
• No web tab in your profile
• SL was much more unstable and a lot of things would constantly break. Imagine that in-world search doesn't work, you can't buy land (not to mention that your Linden Dollars balance isn't showing up), the map is not loading, teleports and money transfers are failing, a lot of regions are unavailable, a lot of regions keep crashing, and most of all, inventory loss happens all the time. That was everyday life in SL. You'd constantly read on the official blog about 'database issues' and 'grid temporarily down'. It changed, a lot, for better. I see people complaining now that SL is unstable. Believe me - one stale transaction is nothing.
• At those times logins were often closed to all except Linden staff. If you were logged in and managed to stay in-world somehow, SL would become quiet and tranquil - quite an interesting experience.
• Oh, right, there was also that "shoe-in-your-bottom" bug, also known as "hair-down-there" bug ;) Who remembers that? If you often teleported, you'd notice all your attachments would be stuck in your... erm... pelvis attachment point :P So anyway, despite what you may think, there's been a huge increase in stability, and ocasional problems that might occur are nothing in comparison to what used to happen around the grid. Oh, those were the funny days.

So that's pretty much everything I recall at the moment. That's a bit of SL history, isn't it? :) Who remembers more?