Author: Ciaran Laval

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Fairs Offer A Great Opportunity To Encourage Good Building Practices


Skin Fair 2014

2014’s Skin Fair is now open! That means lots of goodies from skin makers, makeup designers and more. Come see old favorites and find new discoveries in three sims of deliciousness. For more information, be sure to visit http://skinfair.wordpress.com/. At the Skin Fair, you’re sure to find something that tickles your fancy.

Visit in Second Life

The Skin Fair is in full swing and will be running until March 30th. Script limits will no longer be enforced as is oft the case with script limits, enforcement was causing upset. The usual reason for the upset is that people find themselves teleported home or find themselves booted out of Second Life because of teleport failure before they’ve even  realised they are being informed they have breached a limit. The really bad part of this is that in many cases, the combination of a scripted device scanning new arrivals and then the teleport process of booting them out is actually causing more load on the sim than the visitor who is deemed to be too heavily scripted.

Ideally there would be a better way of doing this, some sort of arrivals area where people were kept until such time they had reduced their scripts. However that’s not an easily achieved goal in Second Life. Fairs in Second Life are often busy events and the organisers rightly want to minimise causes of latency. The problem is that all too often scripts are seen as the be all and end all, when there are many other factors, especially in terms of textures.

Therefore fairs offer an ideal opportunity for Linden Lab to discuss the concepts outlined in their good building practices wiki guide, they could even point organisers in the direction of Penny Patton’s Building A Better Second Life guide. Penny has some brilliant suggestions around reducing texture sizes and using fewer and more efficient scripts.

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Raster Raster Exhibition Features Provocative Art Work From Second Life

The Aran Cravey gallery in Los Angeles is currently running an exhibition entitled Raster Raster, which features art apparently known as “Postinternet“. The press release informs us that the group exhibition curated by Marisa Olson features work from Conor Backman, Petra Cortright, Alexandra Gorczynski, Marc Horowitz, Christine Sun Kim, Mehreen Murtaza, Jayson Musson, Bunny Rogers, Travess Smalley, Jasper Spicero, Artie Vierkant.

Bunny Rogers is not a name familiar to me but the press release identifies her work as being based on images from Second Life, with rather strong themes:

Raster Raster includes variant work from painting, sculpture, and textiles to videoembedded digital prints, lenticular images of SecondLife self portraits, and a sitespecific installation by Jasper Spicero featuring the artist’s music and 3Dprinted sculpture. Subject matter ranges from Christine Sun Kim’s autobiographical images about the deaf experience, and Conor Backman’s visual puns of art world semiotics to sexual taboo and feminism in Bunny Rogers’ Second Life portraits.

Now I became aware of this because of another article, this one on Flavorwire entitled : The Provocative and Disturbing World of ‘Second Life’ Photography. Now I have seen a lot of Second Life photography, especially on sites like Flickr. Some of it is touched up, some of it is not. There are a lot of themes there and yes some are adult but in the main they are not.

The Flavorwire article says of Bunny’s work :

Bunny Rogers is one of the artists featured in Raster Raster, whose Second Life photography series reveals her provocative and often creepy exploration of digital selfhood, sexual taboo, feminism, and longing using the virtual world’s avatars. 

Creepy and sexual taboo are long time terms used in conjunction with Second Life and in many ways it’s disappointing that this is the subject matter getting attention and yet in other ways, this is positive news.

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Versu’s Emily Short Extends Gratitude To Rod Humble And Linden Lab

New World Notes has recently published a couple of articles about Linden Lab’s decision to end Versu. The first by Iris Ophelia entitled Versu’s Epilogue: How an Interactive Fiction Pioneer’s 15 Year Project Ended Up in Limbo at Linden Lab laments the loss of the title. This is a very good read and I agree with much of what Iris has to say.

The second deals with feedback to that article, Limbo Status of Emily Short’s Long-in-Development Interactive Fiction Project at Linden Lab Goes Viral and highlights a tweet from Gamastura’s Leigh Alexander:

 

From there we can go to Gamasutra itself and find an article by Chritsian Nutt : The end of Versu: Emily Short looks back. This article includes commentary from Emily Short and highlights points Emily has made on her own blog, Emily is extremely grateful to Rod Humble and Linden Lab for supporting Versu in the first place. I’ve seen Emily make this point more than once, if it wasn’t for Linden Lab’s support, Versu would not have reached the stage it did.

This is a point that could easily be lost amidst all the disappointment over how things turned out but it remains a very important point. Emily is quoted in the gamasutra article as saying :

I want to stress this because some of the people I’ve talked to about the closure of Versu don’t seem to understand this point: I remain hugely grateful to Rod Humble and to Linden for picking us up when they did, and for giving us the run they gave us. There are so few opportunities to do this kind of research within existing companies, and if Richard Evans and I had taken venture capital, we would have had to spend a lot more of our time trying to learn to run a business and a lot less writing stories and code.

And that doesn’t begin to count the other resources besides financial support that Linden put at our disposal, such as a hugely devoted and enthusiastic QA team, or the opportunity to work with other experienced interactive-story authors like Deirdra Kiai and Jake Forbes. Both of them not only wrote content but contributed useful thinking about how to develop the system as a whole.

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Draxtor Despres – A Dish Best Served Independent

Botgirl Questi recently tweeted the above and whereas I wholeheartedly agree that Second Life’s public image could be revolutionised via such a campaign, I would hope it would be one done without Draxtor Despres and I say this for totally selfish reasons.

The Drax Files and The Drax Files Radio Hour are absolutely superb mediums of promoting Second Life. However one of the reasons Drax can reach the parts other mediums cannot reach is because he’s editorially independent. I doubt this would be the case were Draxtor working on behalf of Linden Lab, rather than working on behalf of his love of Second Life.

An example here is that Drax will soon be talking to Emily Short who was a lead developer of Versu. Linden Lab have of course, very disappointingly ditched Versu, but I would certainly fear that a Linden Lab sponsored Draxtor Despres would be unable to engage in an interview like that or with any other former Linden due to a conflict of interests.

This works in other ways too, for example on The Drax Files, Drax has interviewed content creators, would he be able to do this were he sponsored by Linden Lab? I ask this question because I feel a lot of content creators would cry foul about Linden Lab playing favourites by promoting certain content creators if Drax was endorsed by Linden Lab. However as Draxtor is independent, he can interview who he likes, when he likes and not be questioned over his choices. This allows for some superbly positive interviews and Draxtor delving into all sorts of areas.

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Second Life Grid Experiences Largest Week On Week Growth Since 17th June 2012

Over a fortnight ago Tyche “Statto” Shepherd reported that the Second Life grid had experienced net growth of 14 regions, 15 for private regions, with Linden Lab dropping a region. This was the first net growth on the grid since March 31st 2013.

A week later the grid returned to losses, although it wasn’t an awful decline with the grid experiencing a net loss of 10 regions, 11 private regions and a Linden region appearing, possibly the missing one from the week before. However this did buck a trend of sorts, the grid growth of 31/03/13 was followed by a net loss of 16 regions, meaning the grid was smaller than it had been before the growth.

Prior to that, the grid had last grown on 24th June 2012, this is an important date. That week the grid grew by 30 regions, which was the third consecutive week of growth. However the week after that, the grid shrunk by a whopping 237 regions, wiping out all of that three week growth, which in total stood at 149 regions. This is why people shouldn’t get too excited about signs of growth too quickly.

Last weekend, Tyche was busy, it should be remembered that Tyche is pretty much a one woman band, she does have assistance from her survey bot, but a survey bot can only do so much. Therefore there has been no report from Tyche on the scores on the doors last weekend. However there is a backup plan, it comes in the shape and form of Tyche’s fantastic website : http://gridsurvey.com/

There we can see the scores on the doors for last weekend. The total number of Main Grid regions on March 9th was 26,176 ( 19,193 private estates & 6,983 Linden owned). This meant a net rise of 41 regions, all of them amongst private regions, there was no change in Linden owned regions. This is the largest single week rise since the 17th June 2012, although it should be noted the grid has only showed week on week growth four times since then, with last week being the fourth.

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