Sim Deathwatch: SL's Whimsical Town of Drowsy Gone?

It appears that Drowsy, an utterly beautiful and whimsical storybook town that was also a shopping sim for several Japanese SL clothiers, is no longer in Second Life. (Above is what it looked like in 2009, when I first blogged about it.) I can't entirely confirm this, because the sim still seems to be on the grid, but is longer accessible (at least by me.) I suspected something was amiss when I tried to unsuccessfully teleport to it today, and fashionista Sasy Scarborough said she'd heard it closed last month. Iris Ophelia investigated further, and came up with this Flickr photo below, which seems to be a farewell pic from Drowsy:

Caption reads: "Drowsy was ended. Thank you very much, everyone!" Another pic suggests (with a poorly translated caption) that the creators wanted more spare time. (But again, the Japanese-English language barrier means I might be missing something.) In any case, Drowsy doesn't seem to be accessible now, and if it's permanently inaccessible, that would be a deep loss for great content in Second Life.

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Comments

[Graham Mills]

I see from gridsurvey that Primtings has gone again as well.

[Kandinsky Beaumont]

I agree it would be a great loss.
The first Drowsy I visited with the small town with the "Spirited Away"-ambience closed down long ago, maybe almost a year ago.
I tried to get there many times as i loved the place but i could not get any access to the sim.
I asked around a lot and spoke to others that missed them. I sent the makers im:s but I never got any contact.
Then suddenly, this winter it reopened. Totally changed but still with a very special ambience. The small town and the nearby ruins where gone, instead there was a dense, green wooden landscape all over. Landingplace was an old wreck and out in the woods there were many treasures in different buildings and in the nature.
It was lovely but in a way I still missed the real magic of the first Drowsy town.
Anyway, they kept the redesigned place open for a couple of months but announced in the group that they would close end of March.
So goodbye Drowsy, a real loss. I will check up the map very often to see if it maybe still is there and if maybe they changed their minds and plan for a new Drowsy again.

[Kara Trapdoor]

O wow.. how sad. That was an amazing sim and I wish we'd had more prior notice in order to get a few more pics and explores in for the last time. I met you for the first time there Hamlet, remember? I was pretty new. I'm even in the above pic. I have one of us on the sea serpent. Anyway.. sad to know it's gone. I tried to tp there and got nowhere. It used to really bother me when the great ones disappeared but I know there will always be something amazing around the corner for me to find.

[Breen Whitman]

Question: Whats the difference between a dying terminally ill person, and an ebbing-away SL region?

Answer: Nothing. It would be cruel to attempt to keep either alive. Let them go in peace. Keeping them alive with this new fad of crowd-sourced funding etc is merely extending a demeaning death for the Sim.

Drowsy chose a dignified exit. And they are remembered fondly.

[Sanny Yoshikawa]

Sad. Very sad. :(

[shockwave yareach]

@Breen - what is the difference between a man dying because someone else is draining too much of his blood, and a sim on deathwatch?

answer: Nothing. Both would be able to live were the drainage less.

Whether the sims are aimed at business or fun, they are too expensive to keep going. And disappear they will, along with the people who enjoyed them. As the people and sims poof, those remaining find less reason to continue and they disappear too. And on and on.

Even in perfect conditions, there would still be sims closing down. But there would also be new people opening new sims to replace them. That isn't happening. It's not happening because of the price tag and LL's volumous tomes of do's and don'ts, that need simplified. Those people with the deep wallets who were willing to pay big bucks to play here? They are the ones quitting and quit. And when gone, they and their money are gone. And the newbs coming in aren't willing to pay out as freely as all the people LL is currently driving out.

[Iggy]

I agree with Shockwave. This series of Hamlet's reminds us and, more importantly, his Linden readers of what gets lost as their world shrinks.

Some NWN readers think that to be good, and that a vital mainland would bring back SL's old free-for-all spirit.

Perhaps so. The loss of private regions will mean, over time, fewer servers to tend. It could be a smart move because private regions, unlike mainland parcels, do depend on a few folks with very deep pockets for a game-like service.

I'm not so sure. SL might end up as a boutique grid for 10,000 of us and still turn a tidy profit.

But it would never have changed the RL world. Pity. That promise drew many of us to it.

[shockwave yareach]

@Iggy - the loss of the free for all spirit is solely due to LL's heavy handed TOS. Even if every private sim disappeared tomorrow without a single person quitting, the current do's and don'ts list created by the law offices of Grinn and Barrett make SL as much fun as watching paint dry.

If LL simplified the TOS and made some common sensical rules to follow instead of volumes of canonical laws, mainland (where I have to be more concerned about the TOS than I do in my own island chain) would be much more fun to hang out in. Not that the tech problems which make walking in Mainland so difficult would be fixed. But at least I'd be less concerned about being banned simply for walking around in the fur. (Apparently having no buttons visible is the same as naked to some people)

[Roger]

In fact that doesn't astonish me at all. Drowsy had a dark dark side. Kawaii and hentai have a very close relationship in SL. Seu Ahn's legendary momoiro sex sim, Bettypage's first shop next to the kabuki strip club, probably the best strip club ever in SL in the even more legendary Kabuki sim. And you would be astonished who pops up as creator if you inspect some clothing in japanese sex sims. If you fail to reach Drowsy you BETTER END UP AT A ADULT HUB.

I miss the good old times.
And why is this comment so bad it has to be deleted? I didn't even tell the story of the uber-legendary S-shop.

[Roger]

Maybe because i forgot to add the in SL usual:
wink wink irony lol :D ?

[Pussycat Catnap]

What's the point of a sim deathwatch article for all of these random sims nobody has ever heard of?

Wait, what's that? Some folks have heard of them?

Well, not I, nor anyone else using search or the destination guide or the other modern means of finding a place.

Why are these unknown places dying? Maybe not just because SL revenue streams for land are -DEAD-, but also because they've fallen into obscurity by not keeping up with current SEO.

[Roger]

@Pussycat "Well, not I, nor anyone else using search or the destination guide or the other modern means of finding a place."

A lot of communities deliberately stay under the radar. Large parts of the Japanese community only communicate via slmame.com, the Taiwanese community only via well hidden inworld groups and mouth-to-mouth, the Korean community for a long time only via their local social media. And all three created some of the most breathtaking experiences in SL, which only got known in the 'western' parts via accidental find and subsequent blog or flickr coverage.
You miss out a lot in SL if you only rely on search. Like in rl if you only rely on google you will miss some of the most amazing stuff.

And especially if you are interested in the neko culture i would highly recommend to you to join some Japanese neko group and run their group-notices through a translation program. Else you can just cross the Pussy out of your name because you will never see the really good content.

[foneco zuzu]

Well, some just move on in diff directions, others found that they can do the same on other grids (Seems Kitely and Open sims regions are growing really fast these days!)
To bad, cause if one thing I still believe Second Life was pretty innovative and safe, was on making sure that Adults where really adult real life persons behind and that
is hard to enforce if any chooses to create a private and that is really easy nowadays!

[foneco zuzu]

Private grid i mean!

[Iyoba]

Roger, I found my way on to a lot of Japanese sims by searching for either chat camping or else running Japanese place names into the map search engine and then zooming the map out. Where there is one Japanese sim there are others.

Hamlet, actually this is a very old story. The recession has decimated Japanese sims. About half the MagSL archipleago has disappeared. Mirai is still there and worth a visit, but the north and west sides of what was once a ring of islands with Mirai and Halcha in the middle are gone.

Big pieces of Utopia Portugal (an archipleago of 27 islands including two educational ones) vanished. I had land there so it was news to me. There were great builds there. Nothing written here.

Actually, I'm curious, how do you pick sims for deathwatch? I could mourn any number of sims that have vanished. I either find others or people start others. Though the numbers don't bear this out, that is what it feels like on the ground.

[Iyoba]

I think the biggest and saddest sim Deathwatch story is what happened to the UT archipelago. Texas state budgets which fund higher education and which means the grant for this archipelago run on a two year cycle, so the effects are taking a while to manifest, but take a look at http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/UTMB%20Island%20Alpha/135/120/33 and zoom out the maps. All those islands at used to have islands between them that touched at the corners. Most of what disappeared never got developed, but it's a big story.

[zig]

@Iyoba:

what it feels like on the ground.

I'm afraid that's a feeling Hamlet is unable to share.

[Iyoba]

I think some of my view is clouded by the fact that I maintain a list of educational, library, and museum sims: Explore SL. Among educational projects, sims either develop or die. The losses on the U Texas archipelago hardly effected the list because they were mostly undeveloped land.

It's very rare for a well developed and maintained educational sim to go under. Mainly it takes a kind of financial discipline. My alma mater is very good at battening down the hatches in this way. Their computer club had a sim where I did a lot of building in their huge and very orderly (It would be no other way!) sandbox.

Later the government department in the College of Arts and Sciences set up a sim called South Hill. I recognized the name of the Ithaca neighborhood immediately and feeling perpetually homesick, headed there and took wonderful photographs. It had been a year since the department taught any class there and the sim went poof accordingly.

Elihu Island which has a pretty good paper mill simulation is on my personal sim deathwatch list. Its parent institution does not have the same battening down instincts as my alma mater.