July
Nalates Urriah informed us of a new informal user group, the content creation improvement user group. The user group still appears on the wiki, but is not listed under the official user groups. The meetings were chaired by Geenz Spadz, Siddean Munro and Oz Linden. More on some of the aims of this group would come with an August announcement.
AvaCon announced that due to changes in terms and conditions from Linden Lab they had declined to organise the Second Life Community Convention. Fleep Tuque posted a personal opinion on the matter in which she suggested the organisers had been chewed out for not producing an event like Blizzcon. There were similarities to this year’s Blizzcon, that didn’t take place either!
The Linden Endownment For Arts announced that they were going to commence round three of grants. These allow arts themed ventures to use twenty regions that have been donated by Linden Lab for five to six months.
Linden Lab announced that the first set of advanced creator tools had been launched, these were Teleport Agent and Temporary Attachment.
Relay For Life’s themed lap weekend was on Saturday July 14th with a host of participants and entertainers assisting. Overall this year’s relay for life in Second Life raised USD$375,385.
August
Tateru Nino brought us news that CFO Bob Kormin was leaving Linden Lab. Mr Kormin had at one time been temporary CEO, so this was a high profile departure.
Linden Lab brought us news of a new open source project to improve graphics rendering, the project is a collaboration with the people behind the Exodus viewer, results should be seen in 2013 and it looks like being an exciting development.
Linden Lab also told us that Second Life will be expanding to Steam. This has potential but we’re still awaiting the blog post telling us Second Life has expanded to Steam. Changes to the viewer, such as a create account option when you perform a new install suggest this will happen in early 2013.
Inara Pey reported on how third party viewers were starting to introduce pathfinding tools into their viewers, which was another leap forward for the tools.
September
Linden Lab announced changes to the Jira, which were quite frankly a bit cack. New bug reports would only be seen by the reporter, Lindens and select few residents. This was not a good move for users and remains a big annoyance for me.
Meanwhile in the forums, Lorca Linden had a big pathfinding update, informing us that pathfinding tools should be in the main viewer by the end of September.
Also in the forums, Commerce Team Linden announced that the migration date for magic boxes had been postponed indefinitely. Direct Delivery was still encountering some technical difficulties for some.
The Seanchai public library were continuing their excellent work this month with readings on Sherlock Holmes, New stories of Alice in Wonderland and getting into the spirit of talk like a pirate day. They were also taking their reading to other sims such as Raglan Shire, Magicland and Fruit Islands.
The HP Lovecraft community in Second Life opened a festival running from September 22nd – 30th to celebrate his works.
Hamlet Au over at New World Notes was reporting how Johnny Cash’s childhood home had been recreated by Arkansas State University in Second Life.