Before I read Gardner's recent comment, I took the plunge into the basics of scripting and animating in Second Life. I had feared that animations would be a tremendous pain for many reasons. Fortunately, I think they would be a pain for a relatively small set of reasons--the reasons inherent to any kind of animation, the painstaking frame-by-frame positioning of each element. Avimator is really nice application for the details. It gives a basic SL avatar and the controls to define an animation of 30 frames with a really nifty user interface. The only hard part is the frame-by-frame positioning of each part. I have a newfound respect for the California Raisons.

Scripting with LSL is fairly pleasant. The tutorials and references online are pretty helpful, and I suspect will be more and more helpful as/if I develop a sense of what is available (i.e., discovering the SL equivalent of the Document Object Model). But I have at least one object with a script attached--if you say 'hello' near it, it writes "Hello, (your name)" on itself. It's a start!