Ciaran Laval

January 28, 2013

I Haven’t Yet Arrived At The Arrival But It Looks Awesome

I haven’t yet managed to find the time to visit Rose Borchovski’s The Arrival art installation, but I really should because I’ve seen videos and blog posts about it that make the place look well worth a visit. Unfortunately as I haven’t been there and utlised my amateur photography I don’t have any images to share with you, but I do know a couple of people who do! Hurrah!

Inara Pey has an excellent review, complete with excellent imagery, which you can read here.

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January 27, 2013January 27, 2013

Do Adult Parcel Descriptions, Images And Event Listings Need To Be So Graphic?

There has been a lot of chatter recently on forums and blogs regarding adult content, the type of adult content that appears in Second Life and the very graphic imagery and descriptions of said content. The issue really manifests itself when you open up the viewer and have adult preferences ticked or you open search.

Events, hot places etc. appear and some of the imagery is extremely graphic, so are some of the names of parcels. Does this really need to be the case? I do feel people need to take some responsibility for having adult preferences selected, although in the case of the viewer showing these images before you login, that might need addressing, especially if you’re in a household where the computer is shared.

The thing is though, that even with adult preferences selected, do parcel owners and sim owners really need to have such graphic imagery in the first place? The Adult section of The Destination Guide manages to tastefully list adult destinations, why can’t everyone else?

I don’t really see the need for pornographic images to be in the parcel settings, risque imagery would portray the content equally as well. I also don’t see the need for graphic descriptions, brothel, bordello, escorts can all work without the need for vulgarity in listings. People who want to find such content, will find it equally as well without parcel and sim owners resorting to four letter words to reach their audience.

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January 27, 2013

Jira Requires Some Changes

I’ve just reluctantly filed a Jira issue on something fairly trivial, but something that’s not working correctly for me. I say reluctantly because I still find the changes to the Jira in September, extremely disappointing. I actually pondered whether to both filing a report because the whole process is now so disappointing. The only real improvement I see is that it’s now easier to report an issue because they’re mostly filed under the Bug report project but beyond that, it’s an unsatisfactory experience.

One area where it is partcularly disappointing is that you no longer even get feedback on your report that the issue has been fixed, to quote the September blog post:

“Once a Bug reaches the “Accepted” or “Closed” status, it will not be updated. You can watch the Release Notes to see when and if a fix has been released for your issue.”

I’m sorry, but that’s a really poor approach to something which is a two way street, people take time out to report an issue, they should certainly be alerted that a fix has been released from their initial report, to not do so is really poor form and is one of the issues that caused me to ponder whether or not I should bother reporting the current issue I’ve observed.

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January 25, 2013January 25, 2013

The Tier Discussions Need To Cut Out The Blame Game

Over at New World Notes Hamlet Au has made a series of posts about lost revenue regarding sim losses and a couple of posts on how to introduce revenue streams to try and help the situation. The discussions have been somewhat heated, but I welcome Hamlet’s ongoing discussions on the tier issue. I can recall (although unfortunately can’t find any old posts) Hamlet quite some time ago posting that the tier model was too large a plank of Linden Lab’s revenue and that long term it’s unsustainable, so Hamlet is not a Johnny come lately to these discussions. He also posts the awful sim deathwatch series, of which I’m not a fan, but hey, these sims are disappearing.

Now two recent posts were on ideas for new revenue streams:

How to Stop SL Land Loss: Require Land Ownership to Sell Lots of Items in the SL Marketplace (Comment of the Week)

Should Linden Lab Charge SL Users to Keep Excess Inventory? It’s a Hidden Subsidy Hurting SL’s Economy

Now I personally disagree with both premises, in the first case with The Marketplace, the horse has bolted. This is the sort of thing that needed to be there from the start, introducing it now would be chaotic and bad PR. However I’m still not convinced that people should be able to list items via Direct Delivery to infinity and beyond, people should need to relist, but you don’t need to charge fees for that, although maybe a fee could be introduced if people want to list to infinity and beyond, but that wouldn’t be a long lasting fee.

The latter post I disagree with because the horse has bolted on inventory limits, they needed to be introduced from the start and how on earth would this be introduced. People would not want landmarks or group notice notecards, they wouldn’t want textures advertising new content, they wouldn’t want free gifts in case they went over limit and most of all, people would be miffed that their purchases were in peril, this would hit the economy.

However, although I don’t agree with the ideas, I do welcome the widening of the discussion. Unfortunately the comments tell a pretty sorry tale of blame games.

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January 25, 2013January 25, 2013

Can The Blocksworld Team Create A 100% Honest Second Life Trailer?

Draxtor Despres over on Twitter pointed me in the direction of the highly amusing Blocksworld 100% Honest Trailer, which I’ll embed at the end of the post. These guys sure know how to make a video and with a bit of prompting from Torley, we could be cooking on gas with a Second Life trailer on similar lines.

The video tells us that Blocksworld is : “From the country that gave you Minecraft and the country next to the country that invented Lego” now this doesn’t work for Second Life, well except for Lady Sakai who was telling me the other day that she was fed up with people thinking Scandanavia is a country and that we should appreciate they’re different countries out that way, so Lady Sakai will be happy that the creators of Blocksworld differentiate, but there’s a lot in that 100% honest trailer that fits perfectly with Second Life.

“It’s the ultimate building game, but it isn’t really a game, but you build stuff.” Now come on, that works great for Second Life too! We often see people berated for calling Second Life a game, because it’s not really a game of course, but you can build stuff. They also describe Blocksworld as “The game that isn’t really a game … or is it?”

“You can build motorcycles, with awful cornering.” Again, this is a good fit! Vehicles in Second Life are problematic, yes they can be built, yes they can travel nicely along some roads but at some point you hit issues with sim crossings, rubber banding and fall off your seat.

“Blocksworld is a world full of green grass, blue skies and sharp edges” This works too, unless you’re somewhere like Insilico, where there isn’t much in the way of green grass or blue skies! However even Insilico has sharp edges.

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