Jessica Pixel’s public notion

Before I had completely lost faith in the security of my metaverse space hosted within Linden Lab’s Second Life, I had a dream of a Metaverse Restaurant where the consumables were created using other scripted consumables so the staff could ‘make’ food to order and the patrons could ‘eat’ it.

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While researching how to make it happen, I found Dynamic Farm System (DFS), an expanding network of plants and animals that grow, die, are harvested, processed into food, and eaten to facilitate role play and entertain farming simulator folks. DFS had within it everything I needed to ‘grow my own burgers’ and I got to work. After several weeks of farming, I had an inventory of ready to eat burgers and fries and I set up shop in the Onatopp professional tower.

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The original Burger Joint was a one stop shop for burgers, fries, drinks, and every cannabis product I could get my hands on. It was to become a museum of weed history in Second Life displaying the oldest giant bling blunts and selling joints of the most current script-enhanced joints. There was plenty of room to expand and it was a nice spot for the locals to hang out. While a bulk of my farming was done across the highway in The Wilds, I did keep small example grows of several different plant brands at the store.

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<aside> 😖 The tense? time? conjugation? of this piece is all over and I’m not going to comb over it that hard, so bear with me. There are things that happened in the past and there are things that are still happening. Whenever ‘the Lab’ stamps out a community, it’s never quite enough to keep that community from eventually realizing that using the platform is worth the fight with the ‘powers that be’. But I want to focus on Burger Joint...

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From any NorPhone, one could call 1-800-BUR-GERS to order burgers, and more, to go. Of course, you could eat-in and enjoy unlimited refills, with room to sit at the counter, comfortable booths, and a smoking lounge with premium and free cannabis products available. I purchased full-perm burger pieces set, collected some hold and eat animations, and started making custom burgers for the people that would come by.

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While I have some photos, I didn’t ‘catalog’ the journey of Burger Joint as hard as I should have. This is my fault for assuming Linden Lab has humans at the helm. I won’t make the mistake again. When the Onatopp build was destroyed, I left the Second Life grid for a while and helped with a new city build in OpenSim on OSGrid. While OpenSimulator can be better than Second Life in a few ways, Second Life will always have the people and content. New Onatopp is generally online, but it’s mostly an empty shell of the city it used to be. Another post about the formation of New Onatopp is also in order.

My initial plan of selling burgers didn’t pan out either. DFS is a closed system that takes an investment to get started and outside of that, the food has no use other than decorative (at least at the time, the system is always adding more) and to restore your energy so you can farm more. Because of that, most of the food I made wouldn’t be logical for a random passerby to purchase. Thankfully, it’s all virtual, so every burger is ‘safely’ stored in my inventory. Another post could be made about the concept of reselling a ‘retro’ unique Second Life item how the crypto world is trying to do with randomly generated content. I paid $30 USD in Linden Dollars for a DFS plant that was part of their monthly subscription box before I even knew the system was in place. Another post about the economics of SL Farming could also happen.

Although I know at some point it’s going to end in heartbreak, I’ve opened two new Burger Joint franchises. One of our group members is still doing their part to build ‘your world’ even after having their work and rent money stolen by the company we pay to develop their game. We’ve developed a mainland parcel based on lore generated by AI, and if you’re not careful, you will die.

Another group member is renting a parcel in a private region. The construction there only started this week and it’s already looking great. Building inside the metaverse, I now realize I can’t put as much soul into it. Like real life, if you don’t pay the rent you’re out. But the metaverse is worth it and I’m honored to help my friend cultivate their spaces.

Here we go again...