On Nov.5 15:44:09 2007 we bought 4096 sq.m. of land in Second Life to start a dumpster.
Because it was the best offer for that amount of land, the region we ended up in was called Fearzom.

visit the site here

looking down on the site (outlined in yellow) from the height of 100 m.

view of empty plot from the South-East corner

close up of the surface texture

According to Second Life's website, the 3D online world is structured into three main points of interest, which are:
The World (Create an Avatar, Explore, Meet People, Virtual Land, Have Fun)
The Creations (Create Anything, Building and Scripting)
The Marketplace (Economy, LindeX Market Data, Business Opportunities, IP Rights)

The concept sounds familiar: Become someone, make something, make money with it. It's just missing the last point. What happens if you made money with it? When it's over. When no one needs it anymore. Where does it go? Where do you go?
Nothing is directly deleted within Second Life, all useless stuff goes into the avatar's trash bin, in which it is temporarily stored. If at one point the avatar decides to permanently get rid of the contents of the trash bin there are now two options. One can either simply click: “empty trash bin” or teleport to our dumpster and drop the objects there. (Out of the 11.9 million “residents” that according to SL statistics currently inhabit this world, only two know about the second option yet.)

collected various objects on Freebie Islands,
dumped them on land,
took them apart

made a poster to inform others about the existence and function of the dumpster, but did not know where to post it

Does one have to buy advertisement space? Can one push it under people's door's like take out menu's? Do people have doors? If yes, would a poster fit through?

After arrival on our land we discovered that the big building that had bordered the complete East side of our parcel was gone. Fortunately we had visited it before and did a profile check, so we knew, what we were missing.
The building had been an Escort Union Department Store, its creation date was October 19, 2007. The owner's name had been listed as Saphir Sunset, who also appeared to be the creator of the building and its inventory. The group, Saphir Sunset belonged to, was the Escort Girls Union.
From the outside the store looked like a casino, from the inside it resembled a cheap discount store with very little merchandise. Most of the inner space was filled with floor and ceiling. The floor was covered with a dark grey flat texture which had a little bit of blue mixed in. The ceiling had a light grey texture that had a little bit of yellow and green mixed in. For the size of the room, and its emptiness, the ceiling was pretty low.
No one was there, everything was still. The only thing that moved was an escalator in the middle of the space. We jumped on it and escalatored one flight up. The second floor was an identical copy of the floor below. Grey floor, grey ceiling, around the outer walls were shelves, that displayed flat boards with low-res images of female heads, breasts, pants, and shoes. When we got closer the flat boards turned into boxes. You could buy them and have live sex, dancers, strippers, girls, parties with porn, night clubs, cinemas, camping, etc.

former site of Escort Union Department Store (on top of the brick wall)

uploaded more junk on the land

installed “Public Dumpster” sign above parcel

piled up trash

thought about the saying: “for every pile there is a pit”.

Had a hard time picturing the virtual “pit”.

kept thinking further: pit, pile, plot…quit while hot, or rot on the spot…(dot dot dot)

Teleported to different islands on a promotional dumpster tour.
Strategy: approach other avatars directly, one to one, invite them to do some dumping.
Approach1: “Hi, do you want to visit my dumpster?” Response: Turned around and walked away.
Approach2: “Where do you empty your trash bin?” Response: No response.
Approach3: “What do you do with that helmet, if you don’t like it anymore?” Response: No response.
Approach4: “Hi, how are you? Do you want to visit a really cool place?” Response: No response
Approach5: “Come with me!!!!” Response: Walked away.
Approach6: “Hi, I like your hairstyle.” Response: “Thanks”, “Do you want to visit my dumpster?” Response: Teleported away.

installed 24/7 camera man in NE corner of the parcel,
he takes one picture every minute and saves it to our server

Late at night, we discovered that the Escort Union Girls had built a complete new complex on their parcel. Unfortunately our surveillance camera man was pointing his camera in the opposite direction, so except in one frame, when one of the building parts was protruding into our land for a view seconds, he failed to record what happened right behind him.

Looking North towards our parcel, visible on the right side is the new building that was erected overnight.

The picture is taken from one of the many nameless, identical looking plots in the area, that all belong to the same group: “CP Realty”. All of their plots are up for sale, current price: L$9995. Two of the realtor's parcels border our land to the south. Each is the size of 1024 sq. m. Located on every sales item is a tree, a box advertising detailed home décor and a billboard that lays flat on the ground and sports a portrait of a serious looking young man with a naked upper body.
Right next to the grounded billboard pointed at flying avatars, sits a fern plant that is slowly moving back and forth.
Looking at the identical plots motivates the same thought process that starts, when looking at identical twins. After being stunned by their sameness one has to make sure that there still is a difference. If there is nothing detectable externally we wonder: “Who was born first?”
The tree-box-billboard-fern parcel that borders our lot in the South East corner was purchased Sep. 5, 2007 at 11:02:49. The one right next to it in the South West corner of our land, was purchased on the same day at 11:03:29. One is 40 seconds older than the other.

In the evening we found two objects that had been left at the dump site by other avatars.

The little yellow 3D triangle object (foreground towards the right) was left there by Whooter Walwort. Who is Whooter Walwort?

The Black House Mini Kit AV (the box in the foreground) was left there by Glo Kanto. Who is Glo Kanto?

If you bring your junk to the dump, check the following items in the EDIT window of each object you leave. This way dumpster divers are able to recycle your trash.

We arrived at the site and ran into Pomer Pau. He wore a blue tie, a white, stiff lab coat with a name tag, a stethoscope, tight green pants, yellow gloves and grey flip-flops. His head was a big, red, fluffy ball, which he described as a pompon. He told us that he is a virtual flaneur, and that he works on Emerson Island in a clinic, where he and his partner JC Freemont develop drugs and pills.


While he dropped two green and one blue pompons on the land, his white doctor's coat disappeared. We looked for it, but could not find it, so when Pomer Pau left, he left without wearing one. A minute or two later, while we were taking apart his pompons to rescale the individual parts, we received an invitation to teleport to his clinic.

The clinic looked like a doctor's waiting room. There were a couple of chairs in front of a glass brick wall, the floor was tiled in grey. A green plant in a pot that helped the corner of the room to hide a bit, was modeled after a fake ficus tree. Positioned in front of this waiting situation was a counter covered in fake wood venier. On top of the counter was a bowl filled with red and white striped pills. A few pills had been spilled over. Even though they were half red, half white, the pills reminded us of orange and yellow leftover candy corn from Halloween 4 years ago.
Pomer Pau encouraged us to take one. He said they were hallucination pills. We saved one pill into our inventory, double clicked on the folder and from then on, a big, slick, red, 2D, clock wise turning swirl was in front of everything we looked at. Even when we turned around quickly, it was there to intensify our visual experience. Pomer Pau said that this was an experiment. We were interested, so he continued by teleporting us and him into a tunnel, where, walking through the wild rotations of animated textures gave us a happy headache. The end of the tunnel came as a relief. The exit dropped us automatically onto the bottom of a calmingly, grey ocean.

We arrived in the evening at what already felt like “our usual spot” (in the middle of that red mattress looking thing) and walked around a bit. It looked like someone had been there, cleaning up a bit. There seemed to be less objects on the ground. Then something stuck out…it was a beach ball. Red, white, yellow, blue. There were actually two of them. Someone called Adbeezy Kidd had left them there. Once moved, they rolled around by themselves for a little while. And then they stopped. The air in that ball looked really heavy.

The next new object that stuck out was a rainbow rock in the NW corner. Whooter Walworth. He had been back.

And then, a pink die with black dots from Adbeezy Kidd. We tried to throw it, but could not move it.

We walked around the die to find an even better angle to take a picture of it, and while we backed up, we bumped into something. We backed up a little farther, until we got stopped. Then we figured that we could not move forward anymore either, so we turned around about 90 degrees and tried to walk again. We took a step and got stuck again, turned around the other way, got stuck again, turned around again, found it funny, took pictures, turned around again until we realized that it was time to fly out of that spot. But flying did not work either, when we tried to lift off the ground we bumped our head.

Not much going at the dumpster, so we flew through the back wall into Yenna Jewell's new palace. It looks like a mix between a night club, an arcade and a spa and seems to reference the taste traditions of the countries, whose languages Yenna speaks: “English, Russian, understand some in Ukraian, Polish, Checz, Bulgarian”. We hope one day, we'll meet Yenna, so we could suggest that she build a balcony on the back side of her building. When people feel like throwing up after too much drinking, they could do it there.

keep reading → December 2007