Fantasy Faire 2012
It has been my great honor and pleasure to be part of Friends Fighting Cancer's Relay for Life fundraising event, the Fantasy Faire, for a second year. For anyone unfamiliar with the event, Fantasy Faire is a week long annual event in Second Life, where a number of simulators are designed by some of the grid's most skilled and imaginative creators, each with its own unique and fantastic theme. Creators are then selected for invitation to the event and given the opportunity to purchase a space in one of the sims and present their own merchandise. Each merchant designates particular items to donate one hundred percent of profits towards Relay for Life and the American Cancer Society.
At this time, nearly seventeen thousand U.S. dollars have been raised in the five days of the event so far. This number is impressive in itself, but when one considers that the items being sold mostly range between 25 cents to two or three dollars, it brings even more significance. This number, which will undoubtedly continue to grow in the closing days of the Faire, represents thousands and thousands of moments when the residents of Second Life, virtual embodiments of people from every corner of the world, took an action to help fight a disease that still impacts millions of people every day. An action to show our compassion and conviction, carried out by our avatars. In a place where nearly any reality we choose can be ours, we choose not to escape but to experience, and rather than cut those ties to the painful realities of life, we instead tether them to our place of dreams and wishes, so that in our efforts together they will one day come true.
There are two days left before Fantasy Faire ends for another year. Soon, these remarkable sims, having completed a long journey from that first spark of inspiration to the wondrous visions they are today, will be lifted away into the dark, leaving many memories, and even more hope. But today the breeze still gently persuades the butterfly windmills of Meanderville into motion; the sea still rolls its foamy waves at the massive stone atlases of the Tides, the sun still casts its phantom jewels over the shifting sands and the flora of Nu Orne continue their patient conquest, conjuring rainbows in the heavy mist with their iridescent flowers.
