Farewell Superflufee

Superflufee, your cuddly megastar made of mesh, roaming the virtual world & possibly in love with a prim lady, is moving on to pastures new in what appears to have been an intellectual property faux pas. I say faux pas because it’s ten to midnight here and I didn’t want to say au revoir….. yeah that was cheesy.

Anyway, I say faux pas because here was good brand promotion, Draxtor Despres, Pooky Amsterdam and many others have been exemplifying their excellent machinima of Superflufee over at meshinima.com for quite a while now. This promoted machinima really well, it also promoted the mesh avatar flufee very well, that’s what I mean by brand awareness.

Alas all good things come to an end and it seems as if the people who own the intellectual property rights of the avatar, don’t see the value in the machinima and want to move in a different direction. I don’t know the full ins and outs, I haven’t spoken to Draxtor Despres, Pooky Amsterdam or the IP owners of flufee the avatar, although you will find many flufee items being sold on the marketplace, which brings us back to the brand awareness issue because I wouldn’t know about that if I hadn’t seen the machinima!

Continue reading “Farewell Superflufee”

Kansas State Researcher Studies Religion In Virtual Reality

Phys.ORG has an article on a Kansas State University researcher who is studying religion in virtual reality, in particular it seems Buddhism in Second Life. The article: Buddhism in second life: Anthropologist studies spirituality in virtual reality describes how Jessica Falcone of Kansas State University has been taking a look at religious practices in virtual reality and exemplifies why Second Life is a good place for such practices in certain circumstances.

The article is not earth shattering and it’s not really telling us anything new. However when we’re mostly talking about tier, marketplace, Flufee being no more, as revealed on this week’s Metareality Podcast, it’s sometimes nice to read an article about some of the core strengths of Second Life, namely user generated content and connecting people who are physically a great distance from each other.

One of the issues is that Jessica Falcone is interested in, is why are Buddhists building temples and meeting in Second Life, one of her quoted reasons:

“For some Buddhists, they may be living in an area without a Buddhist community and this may be the only place where they can practice their religion with other people. It is a way for them to come together and listen to teachings or to do group meditation sessions, even though it may not be possible in real life.”

Continue reading “Kansas State Researcher Studies Religion In Virtual Reality”

Suspicious Activity Detected On Twitter, Security Breach For Anshe Chung?

Two unrelated reports of possible security breaches, one at Twitter which is confirmed in a blog post and one for Anshe Chung which is uconfirmed but seems to be true, as reported by Shiloh Lyric over at SLUniverse.

I saw in my Twitter feed last night that people were reporting they’d received an email from Twitter informing them that their passwords had been reset, then others pointing to that Twitter blog post to confirm that this might not be a phishing attack. However even the existence of a blog post doesn’t mean it’s not a phishing email, so if you receive one, tread with caution. The Twitter blog post actually has some good tips on password securit, such as trying to make your password at least ten characters, use a mixture of upper and lower cases letters, numbers and symbols and don’t use the same password on multiple sites.

Twitter are also  advising people to follow the advice of the US Department of Homeland security and disable Java on their computer.. and then rewinding a little to tell people to disable in their browser.

The email on the Anshe Chung issue is interesting in some ways, because it was sent by Linden Lab and relates to Second Life passwords. However it should be noted that this is not due to a security breach at Linden Lab.

Continue reading “Suspicious Activity Detected On Twitter, Security Breach For Anshe Chung?”

Making More Plans For dio

Ok so I’m enjoying playing around with dio and The Search For Hod Rumble (see previous post for details) is well under way, whether it ever goes from private to public is another matter. My intention with this project is largely to play around with the features and get a good understanding of the platform whilst having fun at the expense of Rod Humble. However, even though I’m only at the start of my project, I have picked up some tips.

Plan your project

There are some really decent and very short tutorials on dio and they are well worth watching, this should help you with get started. However, whatever your project is, it’s worth planning and if you’re plan is interactive fiction, then you definitely need a plan. I advise using tools outside of dio to plan your project, a pen and paper will do along with some good old fashioned flow charts but planning works well, as I’ve discovered when I get into my project and realise I should have done things differently!

You’ll want a plot, then you’ll want a diagram of sorts, really, this is important, although you may have a photographic memory and not need plans and diagrams, for most of us, they are important. After a brief start you will soon realise you are losing track of your characters, rooms and paths if you don’t take notes. Do not be put off by this, taking notes is in the long term a good habit to get into anyway, as I discover the older I get and look back at my VBS and Powershell scripts at work or my LSL scripts in Second Life, where I thought I was too clever to need to comment on what I was doing! Bad move!

Continue reading “Making More Plans For dio”

Making Plans For Dio

Laval Industries today announced plans for dio. “We’re only making plans for dio, we only want what’s best for them, we’re only making plans for dio, dio just needs this helping hand” Laval Industires chief development officer told me in a top secret meeting today. Three interactive fiction titles are already in the works.

The Search For Hod Rumble

Hod Rumble, CEO of technology company Lendin Laboratories, has gone missing. Customers of Lendin Laboratories main product, Alternative Existence, haven’t seen hide or hair of Hod Rumble for months. In this compelling story you will get to choose a companion to help you in your search for Hod Rumble and this will determine which storyline you follow.  Companions include:

  • Former CEO and technology pioneer Philip Eladesor.
  • Blogger and author James Amadeus Oh
  • Industry superstar Harper Robins
  • Ace developer and producer Little Bo Bargrass
  • The Lord of Dee … this guy is like Hitchcock, he appears in all his own productions!

As well as different storylines determined by the character, plans are afoot for different storylines within the storylines “This is confusing us too” a developer at Laval Industries confided in me.

Continue reading “Making Plans For Dio”

Follow

Get the latest posts delivered to your mailbox: