February 2014 – Page 2

February 23, 2014

Greyville – A Writer’s Colony In OpenSim Part Of The Hypergrid Stories Project

With many thanks to Talla Adam who is a member of the Opensim Virtual Community on Google+ I have discovered a writer’s colony in OpenSim. I had never been to OpenSim before so the first thing I had to do was to figure out how to get there.

Fortunately for the purposes of this visit, Nara Malone has an excellent blog post on the matter : An Author’s Guide to the Metaverse & How to visit Greyville Colony. After following those instructions I found myself at the Writers and Readers Colony at Greyville. Those who know how to use OpenSim will need to create an account for Naras Nook or go to world.narasnook.com:8900. I’m not sure how this works with Hypergrid.

The welcome centre has a very useful notecard, which is so useful that it basically writes this blog for me! Now the first thing to note is that this is a work in progress. Nara Malone is the brains behind this, she’s the lady whose blog post I linked to above. The notecard includes details of the mission:

My mission here is to introduce authors to the power of the metaverse and all the ways it can inspire stories and assist in creating and promoting their work. I welcome suggestions and content from authors and readers. I expect to see lots of characters interacting with avatars and roaming all the regions here at Nara’s Nook. I have 16 regions for experimenting, exploring and inspiration. I don’t imagine I’ll ever be finished adding to them.

Inside the welcome centre I noticed notice boards for the following authors : Marilyn Campbell, Tracey Livesay, Nara Malone, Shannon Emmel, Leah St. James, Shara Lanel, Sofie Couch, Alexa Day, Siobhan Muir, Elvie Howard, Tina Glasneck, Kelly Jamieson, Denise Golonowski and Brandi Evans.

There are a number of buildings around and again I’ll use the notecard to describe some of the buildings there.

Writer’s Resource Center: The big brick building is the writer’s resource area. There is a classrooom for workshops, a self-guided tutorial area, and a library. I’m adding content as fast as I can. On the right, as soon as you walk through the main door, you will find information on all the authors currently a part of this grand experiment. There a few freebie objects in the library you might find useful.

Internet Cafe: Directly across the street from the landing area is the Dungeon Gourmet’s Internet Cafe. There are laptops there with internet access. Drop in and work on your novel, the page is set to yarn.me, a cloud wordprocessor that works here inworld. It will also allow you to save work to your computer. Try your hand at Yatze. Have a nice couple chat by the fire.

Continue reading “Greyville – A Writer’s Colony In OpenSim Part Of The Hypergrid Stories Project”

February 22, 2014

Ebbe Linden Needs To ….

One of the things about being a blogger is finding something to write. A lot of the time a blogger finds the material to base their post on elsewhere, … actually this happens a lot. This post will unashamedly use material from someone else. The reasons for this are because the material is cutting, funny and relevant. I’m heading off to Twitter for this.

There’s a lot of advice going around on what Ebbe Linden needs to do to make Second Life awesome. Both SLUniverse and the official Second Life forums have threads full of advice. However one brave soul has been collecting this advice from Twitter users, adding their own, putting their tongue firmly in their cheek and creating a Twitter account of @EbbeNeedsTo.

Now some of these are funny, some of them may not tickle your fancy, you may found the whole thing a bit silly. The first thing to say is that you should ensure that you have your sense of humour turned on if you read that Twitter feed because some of the posts may be about one of your important issues or pet favourites.

For example:

Bring back Versu! Because… um… okay, you got me on this one. (What the hell is Versu, anyway?)

— Ebbe Linden Needs To (@EbbeNeedsTo) February 21, 2014

I mean come on, Versu is a brilliant project … that Linden Lab decided to ditch because they don’t think it’s so brilliant and they have a lot more information about it than me! Pah, but hey I can take it, healthy disagreement is good. I mean it could be worse, the account could be poking fun at SLUniverse, which is a site I think has a lot of good information on … oh wait …

Join SL Universe! Because nothing works better than following the advice of hundreds of jaded ex-customers who will never come back!

— Ebbe Linden Needs To (@EbbeNeedsTo) February 21, 2014

Noooooo! However this poking fun at suggestions and ideas is actually quite brilliant in so much as it brings issues to light and also brings to light the fact that we don’t all agree. Healthy disagreement is good. There are many more issues raised, far too many for me to post about here, but I will cover some more.

Continue reading “Ebbe Linden Needs To ….”

February 21, 2014

Ex Linden Praises Versu Engine, Linden Lab Really Should Allow This To Live

The disappointment over the loss of Versu continues, with several people bemoaning the loss of what they consider to be a concept full of excellent potential. Now at this point it should be pointed out that excellent potential does not mean excellent delivery, but Versu certainly hit some right buttons. Here is a quote from an ex Linden :

The Versu underpinnings are genuinely revolutionary; my jaw dropped in the meeting where you explained how the engine works.

Inara Pey’s blog post : Could Versu live on links to an excellent article in the New Scientist : AI makes social game characters all too human.

The thing with Versu is that it wasn’t just about its functionality as an interactive fiction tool, people were very impressed with the artificial intelligence in the project, to quote that New Scientist article:

Claudio Pedica of the Icelandic Institute for Intelligent Machines at Reykjavik University is impressed by the way Versu models social practices. “Social rules create constraints on what actions an agent can do,” he says. “That’s a very powerful metaphor for human interaction.”

I can’t help feeling that Linden Lab have missed a trick here, because whether Versu was ultimately a success or a failure in the interactive fiction stakes, the artificial intelligence angle is something that would greatly benefit Linden Lab’s products as a whole, they would certainly benefit Second Life.

Continue reading “Ex Linden Praises Versu Engine, Linden Lab Really Should Allow This To Live”

February 21, 2014February 22, 2014

The Drax Files Radio Hour Episode 7 – Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before!

Episode 7 of the excellent Drax Files Radio hour opens with an introduction from Karl Stiefvater, aka Qarl Fizz, aka Qarl Linden. This week’s episode is unashamedly Linden Lab centric, with the Ebbe Altberg meet and greet being the central attraction.

However they do cover other issues, for example Draxtor wants to see sim cams, like web cams, covering selected sims 24/7 …. this won’t end well! I seem to remember someone going around recording in sims and it wasn’t popular.

They talk of Ebbe discussing the TOS in the forums, the thing there is that the TOS changes remain poorly implemented. The language really is not the problem, the old TOS should have been suffice, I have no idea what these strange edge cases were.

Then they have a recording of the meeting between Ebbe and the officially sanctioned SL media, however if you’ve already heard this via Inara Pey’s post then you may want to skip this part, although really it’s worth listening to again. as this has been covered and discussed so very well in Inara’s blog, I’m not going to discuss that, I may have to whistle for a while though.

You may need to play some music, watch some youTube videos, login to Second Life if you don’t want to listen to the recording again. Maybe we could hangout here and talk about getting the Versu project going again … oh wait Versu is my next post!

When that’s finished they get into a really interesting discussion with Harvey Crabsticks. I don’t agree with everything Harvey says, but he has some really interesting views. Draxtor gets into a discussion with Harvey on whether Second Life could have a marketing campain along the lines of the Chuck Norris campaign for World Of Warcraft….. actually who would be a good celebrity to advertise Second Life? I know Kim Stanley Robinson was once active in Second Life. Ok, he’s not Chuck Norris of course.

Continue reading “The Drax Files Radio Hour Episode 7 – Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before!”