Too Close To Home

Buzzards Bay, from space... OK, from about 50 yards up...

SL isn't really like RL geographically. There isn't, say, a big SL Texas that, if you keep going east, borders SL Louisiana. I hang out at places like Grant and Biche, not the Bostons and Quebecs of SL.

However, people do get to build in this game, and they can call it whatever they want to after the building is done. While SL is a big venture (big enough that there are SL Tokyos and SL Londons, it's not big enough to have the little suburban nowheres that you or I grew up in.

I did manage to find a SL New England. I've been there several times in this column, to places like Plymouth and Marblehead. Plymouth was actually fairly well done, and I'd know this because I grew up in Duxbury, 2 towns over.

I always wanted to build a Duxbury, but I also don't want to start sinking money into a video game. It's a small town, and I doubt that SL- even if it is big enough member-wise (that sounded funny, sorry) to have a few Duxbury kids- is big enough to have someone actually get around to building a small town with no great features or history. Aside from a shipbuilding period right before we started using Ironclad ships instead of wooden ones, Duxbury's chief claim to fame is that it was the town that Myles Standish founded when 1620s Plimoth had gotten a little too crowded for his tastes.

I eventually acquired a second house in nearby Buzzards Bay, a small fishing village on the Massachusetts coast. It's pretty much where Cape Cod starts, if you aren't local. It has 3500 people in the summer, maybe a third of that in the winter. It's actually a fairly good SL target, because Buzzards Bay is nautical, has a cool canal, and is home to the Massachusetts Maritime Academy. Beyond that, however...we're talikng clam shacks and antique dealers. Not a lot goes on on Buzzards Bay.

You can imagine how shocked I was to stumble upon Buzzards Bay in SL. I was sailing off the Nantucket sim, and was far from wherever I should be (never been much of a navigator). I suddenly started seeing names I recognized: Plum Island, Ogunquit, Gloucester, etc...

I took a wrong turn (well, they had all been wrong up to that point), and sailed into Buzzards Bay. It's a small island, with three structures on it... and one of them is a dock, in case you were wondering how big the structures were. There's a home, a dock, and a lighthouse. It does lookvery much like individual parts of RL Buzzards Bay, especially the beach grass.

I met the owner (TaliDon Grigorovich), and offered myself to his island as a maid. It seemed like the thing to do, in a feudal sense... and with only two structures needing to be cleaned, it would free me up to lay on the beach most of the day. However, he's engaged, and rightfully felt that his girl may not appreciate a comely French maid being added to the equation.

Still, it was a hoot to find my hometown on SL, even if it's smaller than RL and I can't live there. I suppose i should get cracking and start building SL Duxbury.