“Well, I’m not a vampire, but I feel like one
Sometimes I sleep all day ’cause I hate the sunlight
My hands are always shaking
Body’s always aching, and the dark is when I feed”
Falling In Reverse – I’m Not A Vampire (Revamped)
There are photos buried in my old Second Life folders that almost don’t feel like they belong to the same life anymore. The avatars are different, the world around them looks different, and photography was a completely different animal than what it is for me today. Then I look a little closer and there I am, Lucky Spiritor in 2011, still figuring out what the hell Second Life was going to be for me and having absolutely no idea that I’d still be here writing about any of it fifteen years later. It’s weird seeing that version of myself again because I remember him immediately, even if almost everything surrounding him has disappeared or changed beyond recognition.
There was no LuckySpiritor.Com yet, no sponsors, events to cover, credits to build or giant photos coming out of Black Dragon that I’d stare at for entirely too long looking for something else to fix. Photography wasn’t something I was taking seriously yet, and I definitely wasn’t thinking about whether something would make a good blog post because there wasn’t a blog post coming. I logged into Second Life because I wanted to see what was going on, where I’d end up and what ridiculous thing I’d get myself into next, and for a pretty good stretch of those early days, the answer was Bloodlines.
If you were around Second Life in that era, there’s a decent chance you remember Bloodlines even if you wanted absolutely nothing to do with it. Vampires were everywhere, somebody always seemed to be looking for somebody to bite, and there were entire clans and families built around this game that existed on top of Second Life. Bloodlines had only been around for a few years when I got involved, but by 2011 it had already grown well beyond simply being a vampire game. There was the vampire side, the lycan side and even Bloodlines War, which took the supernatural systems and added combat to the mix. Bloodlines had its own official groups for The Thirst, The Rage and Bloodlines War, while residents took all of that and built clans, packs, families and communities of their own around it.
I went pretty far down that rabbit hole myself, starting with the vampire side through The Thirst. Becoming a vampire was considerably more involved than buying some fangs and deciding that was what you were going to be for the night, because there was an actual persistent game underneath the roleplay. Humanity, Vital Blood, souls and generations all mattered, and the people you became connected to mattered right along with them. Your Bloodlines identity didn’t disappear when you took the HUD off or logged out for the night, which gave the whole thing this feeling that you were building something over time instead of simply playing vampire whenever the mood struck.
Vital Blood was at the center of the vampire side, and it was something you actually had to manage. Feeding wasn’t there just because vampires are supposed to bite people, your blood supply was part of the game and could be stored outside your body so you could build reserves. Bloodlines even counted stored blood toward Blood Wealth, so somehow this vampire game inside Second Life had managed to turn blood into a resource and its own little economy. Looking at these old photos where I’ve got blood running down my face and chest is a little funnier knowing that I wasn’t just wearing it because I thought it looked cool, although let’s be honest, I definitely thought it looked cool too.
The bite itself had a lot more going on behind it than somebody randomly walking up to you and asking if they could sink their teeth into your neck. Bloodlines connected residents through lieges, minions, souls and generations, and those connections could keep branching outward as more people became part of the system. Someone brought you in, you could eventually bring somebody else in, and before long these enormous family trees had formed out of actual Second Life residents. The hierarchy wasn’t populated by NPCs sitting around waiting for you to complete a quest, it was made out of real people, and that made the social side of Bloodlines every bit as important as whatever numbers were sitting on the HUD.
Souls were probably one of the stranger parts of Bloodlines when you really think about it, because the game took the idea of a vampire claiming somebody’s soul and turned it into something you could actually own, collect and transfer. Souls contributed to your standing within the system, so growing a family could mean more than simply having more people around you. There were blood supplies to maintain, souls to collect, generations to move through and families trying to grow, all happening inside the same Second Life where somebody a few regions away was probably shopping for a couch or standing around a club wondering why another vampire had just asked to bite them.
That last part became a pretty big piece of Bloodlines’ reputation around Second Life. The game gave people reasons to find new residents, and some vampires were incredibly enthusiastic about doing exactly that. Bloodlines became widespread enough that places started using vampire bite detectors, and a 2009 Bloodlines update actually included an option to disable bite animations so vampires could get around detectors watching for them. That is such a perfectly old Second Life arms race that I can’t help but love it. People were building systems to detect vampires, so the vampire game basically gave its players stealth.
Of course, I couldn’t leave well enough alone and stay a vampire. Bloodlines also had The Rage, its lycan side, and that gave me an entirely different part of the system to get wrapped up in. Instead of Vital Blood, lycans had Lumens, and instead of being embraced as a vampire you could become enraged as a lycan. Fangs gave way to claws, there were lycan-specific abilities like the howl and jump, and transformations could become part of actually playing the character instead of simply swapping avatars and pretending something had happened.
The Thirst and The Rage mirrored each other in places, but they weren’t simply the same game with vampire and werewolf graphics swapped around. They had their own resources and abilities, and they felt like different sides of the supernatural world Bloodlines had built. One gave me Vital Blood, fangs and the vampire side of things, while the other gave me Lumens, claws and this enormous lycan I could turn into whenever being the vampire wasn’t quite dramatic enough. Once I discovered that Second Life and Bloodlines were perfectly happy to let me have both, picking one seemed completely unnecessary.
That’s how I ended up as a vampire/lycan hybrid in 2011, what Bloodlines would eventually formally recognize as a Vaewolf. My old Bloodlines profile somehow still exists all these years later and has me listed as an 8th Generation Vaewolf, which is one of those little pieces of my Second Life history I didn’t expect to still be sitting there. I hadn’t actively thought about most of these numbers in years, but seeing them again immediately reminded me that I wasn’t screwing around with a vampire avatar for a couple of photos. I actually played this thing, and for a while it was a pretty big part of my Second Life.
What’s interesting about seeing Vaewolf on that profile today is that Bloodlines didn’t really have a proper place for hybrids when I was one. There wasn’t a dedicated hybrid HUD in 2011, and there weren’t even separate hybrid statistics. You could already be both vampire and lycan in-world, but Bloodlines statistically placed hybrids with one side or the other depending on whether Vital Blood or Lumens was dominant. I could be running around as both while the game itself was basically looking at me and deciding that was great and all, but which one was I more?
Players had already noticed that problem before I ever became a hybrid. In comments on a 2009 Thirst update, people were asking about a hybrid HUD and how souls and statistics were supposed to work for residents carrying both Vital Blood and Lumens. It wouldn’t be until the 2013 Stats and Website Updates that Bloodlines finally separated hybrids into their own statistics, recognizing people who had been both embraced as vampires and enraged as lycans instead of pushing them toward whichever resource happened to be dominant.
Even then, the HUD hadn’t completely caught up. Bloodlines wouldn’t release The Fury Hybrid HUD until 2017, finally putting Humanity, Vital Blood and Lumens together and combining the vampire and lycan functionality into something specifically designed for hybrids. When my old profile calls me an 8th Generation Vaewolf today, it’s using a system that became much better at recognizing what I was years after these photos were taken. Back in 2011, I wasn’t thinking about the future development of Bloodlines hybrid mechanics, I just knew I could be a vampire and a lycan at the same time and that sounded considerably more fun than choosing.
The photos show just how committed I was to the whole thing too. The vampire side has the glowing red eyes, blood running down my face and chest, tattoos covering nearly everything, claws wrapped around my arms and enough necklaces and bracelets to make sure I wasn’t wasting any attachment points. At one point I’m sitting in this hellish place surrounded by skulls and fire while casually holding another skull in my hand, because apparently that was just a normal evening for me. I wasn’t going for a subtle little hint that Lucky might be a vampire, I was going all the way with it, and everybody within draw distance was going to know exactly what the hell was happening.
Then there was the lycan, and subtle definitely wasn’t part of that plan either. Lucky suddenly became this absolutely massive werewolf with a giant red mane, glowing eyes, enormous hands and claws, wandering around dark ruins looking like something had gone very badly for whoever lived there before he showed up. Bloodlines gave me the mechanics behind being a lycan through The Rage, but Second Life gave me the freedom to decide what my lycan actually looked like, and apparently I decided that if I was going to turn into a werewolf I might as well make sure nobody could possibly miss him.
Being a hybrid meant those weren’t two completely unrelated characters I occasionally switched between either. They were two sides of the same Bloodlines identity, with Vital Blood on one side and Lumens on the other, fangs and claws, embraced and enraged, vampire and lycan. Bloodlines hadn’t built the nice little Vaewolf box around all of it yet, so I was basically living in both systems at once. I don’t remember thinking that was particularly unusual at the time, which is probably because early Second Life had a way of making the completely ridiculous feel perfectly reasonable after about five minutes.
There was even more sitting underneath all of this through Bloodlines War. The same fangs and claws used for The Thirst and The Rage could become weapons against other Bloodlines players, while War tracked its own kills, body count, experience, levels and lethality separately from the normal vampire and lycan statistics. The systems still crossed over because Vital Blood affected the strength of fang attacks and Lumens affected claw attacks, giving you another reason to care about those resources beyond simply keeping your supernatural side going. Bloodlines had managed to connect roleplay, resource management, social hierarchy and combat without forcing everybody to care about every piece of it.
That’s the part I think gets lost when Bloodlines gets remembered as that thing where random vampires bothered people for bites. There was a hell of a lot more game underneath that bite request. There were resources to manage, generations, souls, family structures, clans and packs, transformations, rankings and combat, and you could decide how far down any of those paths you wanted to go. Bloodlines provided the framework, but the residents playing it were what turned that framework into an actual world, because all those lieges, minions, families, clans and packs were made out of real people building their own stories around it.
That fit early Second Life incredibly well for me because I was still discovering that there wasn’t one answer to what you were supposed to do here. I could log in and go exploring, hang out with people, find something completely ridiculous to wear or disappear into this supernatural game where there were things to chase and numbers that mattered. Bloodlines gave me this smaller world inside the much bigger one I was still learning, and for a while it became a pretty significant part of what logging into Second Life meant for me. I wasn’t thinking about preserving any of it for fifteen years later, I was just having fun with whatever Second Life threw at me.
What gets me about the photos now is how little any of this had to do with photography. I wasn’t creating content or building a scene because I needed something for the blog, and there wasn’t an audience sitting somewhere in the back of my head wondering how something would look once I posted it. If I was doing something I thought was cool, I took a snapshot, and that was pretty much the entire creative process. If I was sitting on a throne covered in blood holding a skull, I took a photo. If I’d transformed into a giant lycan and found some creepy ruins, I took a photo. There wasn’t much more thought required than that, and I certainly wasn’t going to spend the next three hours staring at it looking for something else to fix.
I’m really fucking glad I took them because by anything resembling the standards I have for my photography today, these things are rough. They’re dark, the textures have aged, the hair is very much from its time and there are probably fifty things in every one of them that present-day me would want to mess with. I don’t want to change any of it, though, because cleaning them up and trying to make them look like they were taken in 2026 would completely miss the point. This is what my Second Life looked like in 2011, right down to every questionable attachment, ancient texture and shadow that swallowed half the photo, and I think they’re better memories because of it.
There is something about that version of Second Life that I miss too, not because I think everything was better back then, but because I didn’t know enough yet to overthink any of it. I was still discovering the place instead of having fifteen years of habits and expectations built around it. I could stumble into something like Bloodlines, discover there was an entire persistent vampire game hiding inside the world I’d recently joined, find out there were lycans too and decide the obvious answer was to become both. It didn’t need to turn into anything bigger than whatever fun I was having that night, and nobody was waiting for me to turn it into anything either.
The guy in these photos certainly didn’t know there would eventually be a LuckySpiritor.Com, that photography would become one of the biggest parts of his Second Life or that he’d spend years writing about this place. He didn’t know he’d eventually have enough history here to dig backward through old folders and find completely different versions of himself, and he definitely didn’t know that fifteen years later an old Bloodlines profile would still be sitting online telling him he’d made it to an 8th Generation Vaewolf. He was just Lucky, having fun in Second Life and seeing what kind of trouble he could find next.
That’s why I wanted these photos back out in the world instead of leaving them forgotten on a hard drive. They’re not examples of where my photography is now and they aren’t supposed to be, they’re pieces of the life that existed before all of that. Bloodlines was one of the first things that really showed me how many worlds could exist inside Second Life itself. Someone had built this whole supernatural system with blood, Lumens, souls, generations, vampires, lycans and combat, then actual residents took those mechanics and built families, clans, packs and their own stories around them. I happened to wander into that world when I was still figuring out Second Life itself, and for a while I got completely wrapped up in it.
The wildest part might be that Bloodlines is still here after all this time. The system has grown far beyond the version I knew, hybrids eventually got the recognition and tools they didn’t have when I was playing one, and years of new systems have been layered on top of The Thirst and The Rage. Somewhere on that website is still my old profile carrying numbers from a life I was living in Second Life in 2011, while somewhere on my computer are these photos showing what that life actually looked like.
There’s another little piece of 2011 that fits this whole thing almost too well. Falling in Reverse released I’m Not a Vampire that year, and while I’m using the much later I’m Not a Vampire (Revamped) here, there’s something about that connection I really like. The original belongs to the same year as these photos, while the version I’m listening to now came back years later much bigger, darker and completely rebuilt without losing the thing underneath that made it recognizable in the first place. I’m sitting here in 2026 doing something pretty similar, going back to this old version of my Second Life and seeing it through everything that’s happened since.
I can look at Lucky covered in blood, holding a skull with glowing eyes staring back at the camera, then flip to this enormous red-maned lycan wandering through the ruins and remember exactly why all of this was so much fun. I wasn’t documenting a career, building a blog archive or trying to make the next photo better than the last one, I was taking snapshots of a life because I was having fun living it. Fifteen years later, those random snapshots managed to survive long enough to bring an entire piece of that life back with them.
For a post about the years when I actually was a vampire, there really wasn’t another song I could use. Although, technically, even that isn’t completely accurate because I couldn’t just leave well enough alone and be one supernatural creature. I was half vampire and half giant fucking werewolf. No credits cause we weren’t crediting in 2011. No credits because I wasn’t doing credits in 2011 and I’m not going to pretend like I did.
“So I sharpen my teeth ’cause I love the way it feels
When I sink into your skin and draw the only thing that’s real
You don’t believe me, should I write it in blood?
You better drive that fucking stake right down my heart and try to run
Motherfucker, I’m a vampire”
Falling In Reverse – I’m Not A Vampire (Revamped)
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