What do I want to do tomorrow?

For years now I have run my own businesses although for a time, I ventured out in to the real world.

Ever since I started out working for myself, I have enjoyed that flexibility that comes with being your own boss. However during the time I moved in to the corporate world, shortly before I joined Second Life, I found one of the greatest horrors.

As I got up every morning, I was presented with a question for myself.

“What do I have to do today?”

Its a very simple question with such dark undertones and for me, it represents a question that can be soul destroying.

We all wake up and plan our days, however one of the most subtle undertones that you never understand is you actually never plan your day, the day plans you.

Working for myself, I understood that question from a different angle – its not “What do I have to do today”, but “What do I want to do today”.

Many of us live our lives with those two questions, but even in the vagueness of your “days off” the need to do things often intrudes in our desires to do things we really want to.

Each day I went to work in my Corporate day, I learnt the real meaning of what I had to do on those days, not what I wanted to do.

When that side of my life came to a close, I came to Second Life, it has to be said not in the best state of mind. The question I had asked each day had demoralised me, pushed me down and left me feeling like a horrible person. Thats the world of business – it turns nice people in to monsters.

But Second Life offered me a salvation because, I changed the question.

“What do I want to do today?”

What did I want to build, what did I want to design – I could choose, pour out my creativity, be slightly insane, and enjoy what I was doing.

For two years just about, I had the pleasure of living that question each day but the strangeness of SL started to slip in the door.

It started quietly really. Script Limits. Linden Labs answer to annoying every creator on the grid who built things with scripts in them.

And then, slowly, during 2010, I started asking the dreaded question every so often... What do I have to do today?

With the Arrival of Mesh, the continuing war on scripting, and my products growing more and more technical, there came in day at some point in 2011 when I stopped asking “What do I want to do today?” and started project managing, looking at update programs, searching for solutions, investigating what the new technologies could do.

And sadly, that is where all hell broke loose really... the beginning of three years worth of that kind of stuff.

By the time it hit 2012, I realised all of what I have said above, and needless to say it depressed me. I knew I wasn’t building new stuff, I knew that SL was becoming tiresome and I had to find a way to break out of this cycle.

This is where the origin of “Project Chase your Tail” came from as I started to realise that since 2011, I had been chasing my tail.

It has taken an insane amount of time, effort and thought to create a way to solve all the problems that came from Chasing my tail, but today, I can finally draw a line under it all.

For VSX, the major problems over scripting were solved last year with the release of VSX5 and VSXM – both product lines have radically streamlined scripting thats extremely low cost.

The Unlimited Saga came to an end with Unlimited 3, a system that means I no longer have to update products, but rather the huds cutting down on time, effort and production time.

Finally, the whole Mesh issue. For many years I had an ongoing confusion over mesh. On one side was my desire to make rigged mesh, but the whole series of flaws in mesh threw me in to a tizzy, and at the same time, the issues over how rigged mesh works with skins and clothes left me with a headache. Although unrelated my hands are now untied with the arrival of Fitted Mesh, a product that can do more, and works how I wanted it to in the first place, and although a massive slog, the ADV skins are the final piece of the puzzle so I can now apply skins and even clothes using ADV.

There are dozens of other irritational elements that cropped up over the years, however, as of today, that it. They are all solved, they are all fixed and if I need to do updates to anything, I have already been proactive, rather than constantly being reactive.

Tomorrow is Monday and I think I will sleep well tonight and the first thing that will cross my mind tomorrow is this

What do I want to do today?