It was recently pointed out to me that my rants page did not in fact contain any rants what so ever. Therefore I am hereby adding a few rants.

My first rant has to do with the various activities that have consumed my money and time and led me absolutely nowhere.

I have spent thousands of hours playing computer games.  Yes, these games have lead me to meet some very interesting people and also learned very wise things indeed. But at the end of the day, I have mostly lost time and money I will never recover.  These time wasting activities were first PC games. I would often stay up all night playing them in the 80s and early 90s.  In the early 2000s these graduated to multi player games. My first game was Earth and Beyond. I loved that game. I made friends there whom I am still in touch with.  Then I moved on to Eve-Online. You cannot imagine how many thousands of hours I spent on this particular game.

I then moved to World of Warcraft.  After a couple of years playing this game for several hours a day, I realised it was boring. I realised all the games I was playing were boring.  The reason was that they all involved killing things to improve levels and abilities.

Someone told me that the reason these games are so addictive is because it gives the person a sense of evolution.  We get better, evolve, raise in ability and category. Something which is lacking in our society.  This, they argued, was the same reason why people get sucked into cults.

 The above were games and wasting time on games has something very negative about it. It is like wasting 2 hours watching a movie on television. There is nothing at the end of the day to show for it.

 Another activity in which I immersed myself and had nothing to show for it was learning how to program websites using the CMS (Content Management System) Joomla.

This site is a Joomla site, as are my other numerous sites.

The purpose of going into CMS was  to be able to set up a home based business which I could work at profitably.  It has been an abysmal failure.  I can honestly say that I have the working of the system down to expert level.  I can set up a fantastic and professional site in a matter of days, including custom templates and features.  However, the only company that contracted me to do a page for them, failed to pay me for it and my other customers are charities to whom I give the services for free.  I have spent thousands of hours learning a skill that is absolutely useless in the business market.

 My latest time wasting effort has been in the world of Second Life.  I was lured into it by a well known motivational speaker and coach.  I researched the game on the internet first, just to make sure I was getting into something that would finally pay off. There are many articles about people making real life money out of Second Life.  People can get jobs, they can invest in real estate, they can make and sell products, and much more.  It is free to join the game and easy to start making money... or so they say.

I have found Second Life to be yet another activity where I spend a lot of time at and have made less than $2 in several weeks.   I do not have the inkling nor the money to invest in real estate, which is where I am now told the real money is.  One land broker told me he was making upward of $1000 per month and it was the way he feed his family in real life.  I don't believe him. 

I saw another group investing a lot of time and money into an activity which I knew after a couple of days was going to be a complete loss. It was a nightclub.  To make it more profitable, the owner decided to add sex into the mixture. Yes, people do make money having virtual sex in Second Life.  In one particular club the "whore" would charge L20 (20 Linden dollars, the Second Life money) for ten minutes of virtual sex. In real life, this would amount to 8 cents.

Getting back to the group investing time and money on a club. They set up a room where their nude dancers could have sex with customers for L150 per 10 minutes - about 60 cents per 10 minutes. The club had a theme, nude dancers, live DJ and other goodies. I am not entirely sure how they were planning on making money, but since it's opening two weeks ago I have checked in on them and have found the place to be completely empty at all times.

At another sex establishment, the nude dancers get paid L10 per 16 minutes dancing and chatting to customers, plus tips, of which the establishments takes 20%.  That is the person who plays the nude dancer would have to spend 10 minutes chatting for the grand compensation of 4 cents.

There was one brothel in SL that charged a maximum of $33 per hour for voice cyber sex. Slightly more with the person using a webcam.  Do these men and women make money? The owner told me one girl made about $200 a week. She spends a lot of time in the brothel, more than 40 hours a week. True, she likes having virtual sex and it is something she can do from home, but she could probably get more working less hours at a local fast food restaurant.

 Another business I saw was that of giving new age lectures.  Everything from meditation to Mediumship is covered. The majority of lecturers will give their lectures for free and will place a donation box next to themselves. They will make about L300 - L2000 in an hour. This is about $1.2 to $8 per hour.  As they hold roughly 2 lectures per week, that gives a grand total of $16 per week at best, nothing at worst.

 There is one person who is charging $80 for his complete course online, which includes about 8 lectures and total support for life.  The minimum number of people he needs to get together before he runs the lectures is 14. This means he will make $1120 per group, minus the commission he is paying his Second Life agent, who is having a lot of trouble finding people to join the lectures. I will be paying this man for his lectures, both because I think he is onto something and because for what he is teaching, the price is a complete steal!  In real life these lectures go for hundreds of dollars a shot, plus travel expenses.

 Still, for me the Second Life experience has been one of creative expression within the virtual world, being able to shop ‘till I drop for free and also gives me the sense of evolution due to the new age lectures I attend every week and new meditation and healing methods I have learned.  But it has taken hundreds of hours of my time already and not a penny to show for it.  Plus I have plans to spend more money on it which will give me skills which I am not sure will serve me in any way or form.

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