I’m discovering that I liked the works of Neil Gaiman when I was younger, and didn’t know it. Here’s a quote from a comic I took out from the library once:

John Constantine, issue 2 of “The Books of Magic”

You know, when I was a kid, I thought America was a magic land. It’s so big… and you’d hear all that stuff about superheroes, and you’d believe it, because it was America.

I mean, when I was a kid, it was somewhere that anything could happen. They had all this incredible stuff, you know, pizzas, and fire hydrants, and Hollywood, and the Empire State building.

And they had superheroes, and magic, and aliens, and, I dunno, all we had was Supercar.

Anyway. Then I came out to America, and I discovered that it was just like every movie or TV show or cliché about America you’ve ever heard or imagined.

It’s all here, somewhere. If you can imagine it…

Now me, I prefer England.

I prefer to live in a country that’s small, and old and where no one would ever have the nerve to wear a cape in public, whether they could leap tall buildings in a single bound or not.

I’ve re-discovered things I enjoyed when I was younger. For years I passively searched for a film I enjoyed when staying at my gran’s place on a friday night- passively because I couldn’t remember much about the film (only that I enjoyed it, some characters and a few scenes), and didn’t know where or how to start looking. By the time I was in Second Life, I could only remember a few frames of the intro sequence. Though by this time, I owned a couple Studio Ghibli DVDs- I found myself becomnig quite a fan of Hayao Miyazaki’s work.

On one of the rare occasions where my sense of capitalism rears its ugly head, I went and bought the (then) entire Studio Ghibli DVD collection (minus the DVDs I already owned). Over the course of a few weeks, I watched the entire collection (seriously, don’t watch Grave of the Fireflies unless you’re prepared to watch a depressing, albeit profound film). When I came to watch Laputa: Castle in the Sky, the moment that aforementioned intro sequence began to play, I had this sense of anticipation strike me as the remnants of what memories I had of the film came flooding back, the DVD filling in the blanks as it played.

I found that one of the first films I remember watching was by one of my favourite directors.

I wonder if, 20, 30, even 40 years down the line, I’ll be able to experience a similar sense of rediscovery. Of finding that a fleeting experience long since past is intimately connected to something I find myself being quite fond of.

Since I can’t tell if this blog will be around when I’m in my 60s (assuming I reach that age), let me put you all in a more convenient frame of mind. Since it’s safe to say that the majority of the people who read this blog are involved in Second Life in some way, I’ll pose all you midbies and oldbies a challenge.

Those of you who started off in Second Life out of curiosity, exploration (not those who immediately got an economic jump-start through employment)- how many of you have explored the grid recently, to come across a familiar stretch of prims- finding a location you visited during your first weeks in this virtual world of ours ? I myself discovered that when Gwyn and I moved SLOpenID into Lanercost, that the new office was just a few hundered meters away from a build I briefly visited during my first week of Second Life.

Go out. Explore. Try and rediscover something, perhaps some insignificant detail in times past, but now seemingly closely related to who you are now.