Taking Inventory

Artist Turns SL Inventory Into Performance Art, Deleting Every Virtual Item She’s Owned Over The Last 7 Years – from New World Notes. full story here: http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2013/08/sl-art-installation.html#more

That link goes to a New World Notes story about Gracie Kendal of Second Life who is doing an installation called “Binge and Purge.”

The exhibit sounds like fun. I may go over to take a look. I imagine a giant virtual yard sale or junkyard. I’m sure it’ll be interesting to see.

As for my own more mundane approach to Inventory in Second Life…

I’ve been in SL for six years and my Inventory items total a little over 12,000. Maybe somebody thinks that’s a lot but my impression is that it isn’t. Many friends laugh at that number because it is so much smaller than theirs.

Once it got up over 13,000 and I made a concerted effort to get it back to 12,000. Did it make any difference in my Second Life? No.

I have thought about going through my Inventory item by item and getting rid of things that are three or four years old under the assumption that I will never have use for them again or that they would look dated and are therefore useless…but I stop myself because I don’t see any payoff. If I were to get it down under 10,000 items, do I win something?

I have subfolders and do a good job keeping up with that just so I’m able to find things when I need them. Sure, my Inventory gets messy once in awhile, especially when I end a  project or close a parcel. Then I’ve taken a bunch of stuff into Inventory and it can make it annoying to find stuff. It usually takes me awhile to get around to going through the list to delete some and put the rest into subfolders. And then I can find things again. So why delete other stuff? Just for the sake of deleting? Isn’t that kind of anal?

I suppose I could purge for the good of the grid overall but I think I’ll let the people with 50,000-plus items go first.