Second Life hijacked several hours from yesterday and the day before. Before I knew it, I'd spent five hours online just chatting with other visitors.

My plan to post a review of Patrick White's The Solid Mandala were dashed and I ended up conversing with various avatars at the Nantucket Barn Casino. How did I arrive at such a place? You can search using keywords. Once you find a likely spot, you just teleport there.

Nantucket Barn Casino satisfied me because, unlike many locations in Second Life, it is fairly heavily populated. It seems that Second Lifers can sign themselves up to be 'greeters' there. What that means is that they are paid (in Lindens, which is the currency used in the virtual community) an amount that depends on how long they hang around.

So you've got a captive community right there. They're captive to their avarice. What people do with the money they earn in SL is a mystery to me. I find it hard to conceive of anything you could produce there, that I'd want to own. I guess there's no accounting for taste.

The spur to my involvement in SL was a message posted on a bulletin board at LibraryThing. Someone with the tag of marfita had posted about the BookMooch 'property' (the language is clearly geared to the avaricious). So, my interest piqued, I visited it.

"I'm usually finding people in the Magnatune area (Magnatune is Mrs. Bookmooch, by the way), but not in the Bookmooch corner," writes marfita. Magnatune 'owns' the BookMooch 'property'. Like marfita, I've met nobody there. Alas.

So I went to the 'find' tool and typed in 'library'. One 'property' caught my eye and I teleported there. Walking around, I saw other avatars, so I explored further, eventually ending up at Nantucket Barn Casino.