Today we went to a couple cool places in class: a recreation of Rome, the Spaceflight center, and a beta-phase "real-life" hotel. Out of the three, Rome was my favorite, although I feel like if lag was less I would have enjoyed all three much more. Will have to check them out when I get home. Here's a picture of me as a boy, at the Spaceflight center sitting on a large molecule!I think it's very cool that people have built places like these in the game. I can't even imagine how complex it really is, or how much time it took to build. I'm guessing it was a team of people, not just one person? I have no real idea though, I sure there are some determined people on here.

For an online class, I think the hotel setting might be best. It was filled with chairs and tables. Although I guess in SL it doesn't matter if you stand four hours on end, hah. However, like I said above, it's really hard to completely enjoy these areas when all of us go to one place because even with only a third of us at a place at one time the lag was still crazy. Maybe if we were all at our own home computers it would be at least only one server being overloaded and not our own connection too.

As for playing a guy, I really don't see too much of a difference in how people treat me. I know I dislike it more, I personally prefer playing a character in my own image.

Another note: I've been hearing some dissidence in class about playing the game. I think it all boils down to access and lagging problems that are causing such a negative impression of the game. I think most people aren't trying too hard to play outside of class--although some certainly are. But that's what they need to do, because when I play at home connections speed is much faster, and sometimes a simple reboot of the game refreshes the connection well enough. But here, rebooting is not as feasible thanks to the school's computers.

Ok, class is ending. Hopefully I can play a lot more this week then I had been able to next week.