In Memory of SL's Vietnam Memorial, Which No Longer Exists

I was going to blog about Memorial Day-themed sites and events in Second Life, as I usually do every Memorial Day, but sad to say, all the ones I'm familiar with seem to be gone. Chief among is (or rather was) The Wall, a beautiful tribute to US service people who died fighting in the Vietnam War, which launched in 2007 and which I wrote about in 2008, and was still extant in 2011... but now, no longer seems to be. The sim is gone, as is the official website. But if Second Life land is tragically impermanent, as is usually the case, at least YouTube videos tend to last much longer.

This isn't to say there's no Memorial Day-themed sites or events in Second Life today, just that I'm not aware of any. If you know of some, please post details and links in Comments below. And happy Memorial Day all the same.

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Comments

[Saxon]

Of all the places in SL I've seen lost, this one I may miss the most.

The people who'd built it may indeed be the only ones who could possibly understand what benefits this sim brought to people, not the least of which were those who could not see The Wall in RL.

You all did a very great thing and so many of us are in your debt.

As to Hamlet's well-written tragedy of impermanence in SL, I can only recall the song that would play in my head every time I'd visited The Wall over the years.

"Now the sun's gone to hell
And the moon's riding high
Let me bid you farewell
Every man has to die"
-M. Knopfler

Sax

[Jo Yardley]

It is a shame someone let that disappear.
Why not post about not being able to look after it or pay for it on a public forum and offer to give or sell it?
Let it survive.

[Amanda Dallin]

A place in Second Life is like a play in a theater. It exist for a short time then disappears and only exist in the memory of those who were there and a few artifacts like pictures, videos and maybe a few props pieces of the set.

[zzpearlbottom]

A proof of advantages of open sim, where any could do a backup of the oar and uploaded it if needed, for another to host!
See Linda Kellie oars hosted now on Zetamex!
And Liden Lab could create a Oar data base, where for a fee, any could assure that their regions could be able to be uploaded by other!

[Arcadia Codesmith]

We used to talk about "bit rot", the corruption of data and programs caused by everything from the degradation of physical media to loss of archives to cosmic rays derailing the flow of electrons in semiconductors.

Want to see the very first web page ever created? You can't. It's gone forever.

It's not just digital media. We've lost hundreds of movies because the silver of the film stock was considered more valuable than the cinematic history it contained. But digital media is especially prone to losses.

Bit rot in Second Life is pernicious because of the astronomical cost of preserving spaces on this platform and the inability to easily archive or transfer them.

I don't have an easy solution. But as we create virtual spaces, we ought to have provisions to preserve and maintain them, the virtual equivalent of public trusts and historical registries. An ephemeral space intended as an artistic statement is one thing. A virtual space that vanishes due to lack of funding is a crying shame.

[Bixyl Shuftan]

I dropped by the place every Memorial Day and Venerans Day, until Nov 2011 when I noticed it was gone - http://slnewser.blogspot.com/2011/11/what-happened-to-wall.html

Why he didn't make a call for help, I don't know. Patriot Island (Now Veterans Isle) would have taken care of it.

[Bixyl Shuftan]

Okay, correction. It seems the man behind it, Evian Argus, had a sponsor whom suddenly decided to stop paying the tier.