Tag: Second Life

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New World Notes Approaching Tenth Birthday

Whereas Inara Pey , Daniel Voyager and Nalates Urriah are bringing us the skinny on the lowdown regarding Second Life’s tenth birthday (even though Philip Linden and Steller Sunshine hit eleven this month) I’m going to look forward to a Second Life related birthday of a different sort. On April 22nd Hamlet Au’s New World Notes will hit its tenth birthday. As far as I’m aware there will be no events, no booths, no sponsorships and the cake is a lie, but never the less, love him or loathe him, it’s an important milestone.

Thanks to the wayback machine, we can look back at some of Hamlet’s early musings, from a time when New World Notes was incorporated within the Second Life website and even had its own forum. Early Hamlet is rather interesting, because you can get a sense of being ready to expect the unexpected:

“Because what is happening now in the Beta test of Second Life is very much a social experiment in the making. Literally, “making”: thousands of volunteers are already in there now, buzzing around in Linden Lab’s servers, shaping their world out of thin air. From a default canvas of wide oceans and rolling hills, they’re cramming the place with coffee tables, exotic swords, sunglasses, ride-able rockets, electric guitars, readable books, soaring Japanese pagodas– pretty much anything you might imagine, and a lot more you wouldn’t dream of– to create a playspace as vast and varied as creativity and enthusiasm allows.”

Nobody knew what would happen, what would be formed, of course we have a better idea now, but that potential for creative space is nicely summed up there, so are the dangers of user created content because it’s certainly true that things you wouldn’t dream of, have been created, but that is part and parcel of the beauty and beast of Second Life.

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Is Lilith Heart A Secret Griefer?

I purchased some bushes once from Lilith Heart. They were nice bushes, helped to design the border for a park I once had in Bedos back in the days when I could afford to own a park. The sim where I purchased the bushes from was a nice sim, peaceful, the sort of place that could very well be a front for nefarious goings on.

These sort of suspicisons are confirmed by Lilith’s own hand, on Friday, Lilith Heart, part time plant maker became Lilith Heart, ban hammered, as explained in Lilith’s blog post: Lilith Heart Back From Ban-cation.

There’s no smoke without fire, as they say in the trade. One has to suspect that amongst the bushes, plants, flowers, Lilith may have been harvesting some sort of questionable weed and that Undercover Linden busted her in some sort of honey trap!

Lilith, whose marketplace store lists a rather large number of potentially nefarious plants is none the wiser as to why she was temporarily banned. Joking aside, this is probably the bigger issue here.

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Linden Lab Could Do More To Encourage Good Building Practices

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a fan of Linden Lab’s wiki page of Good Building Practices. However now I think it’s time to turn this up a notch with Linden Lab actively promoting said resource and part of the reason for this is my own stumblings with Mesh. The thing is, these tips are good for all of our Second Life experiences.

The thing with Mesh is that you can reduce the number of faces on a cube and still display all you need to, you can also reduce the number of textures that need to be loaded, which in turn reduces the amount of work our video cards need to do, which improves the Second Life experience as a whole.

The other thing with Mesh is encouraging people to build more efficiently full stop. User generated content is an important factor in Second Life, it’s what makes the world vibrant but it also has the potential to cause problems, often unintentionally because people don’t have the resources available to encourage them to build more efficiently. This leads to people feeling that all Mesh is bad for Second Life, it’s not, but the lack of promotion of available material can leave people with a bad impression.

There are good and bad practices with Mesh, high poly models are not ideal for Second Life, they may look beautiful in a static environment but in the more dynamic environment of Second Life they can be problematic to say the least.

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The Drax Files Episode 2 – 1920’s Berlin What A Good Place To Be

So what happens when someone from Amsterdam is a fan of the 1930’s to such an extent that they dress and decorate their home in the style of that era? That’s right, they come to Second Life and build a 1920’s Berlin roleplaying location with future plans to build a sim in the style of 1940’s London….. wait, what? Well all is revealed in The Drax Files episode 2: Jo Yardley  (embedded at bottom of post) which takes a look at 1920’s Berlin and the voice of the 1920’s Berlin Project, the very enthusiastic Frau (Jo) Yardley. The result is yet another stunning example of good promotion of Second Life by Draxtor Despres.


The 1920s Berlin Project

Travel back in time to this big city during an amazing era. Wander down Unter den Linden, explore the dirty old back streets, see a movie at the cinema, visit the museum, enjoy cabaret, dance the Charleston in a small Tanzlokal or at the gay Eldorado club in this role-play sim with a 1920s dress code (freebies provided).

Visit in Second Life

The epsiode is largely narrated by Jo Yardley, who doesn’t have a television or mobile phone in her own home, but does have a computer from where she brings her vision of 1920’s Berlin to life. Draxtor Despres and those involved in this production have done an excellent job of bringing 1920’s Berlin to video, to such an extent that initially I didn’t realise it was Second Life!

In this episode Draxtor once again uses inworld footage as well utilising already made outside footage of Jo in Amsterdam to show the person behind the wares in their real life environment, which brings home the message that the person behind the avatar is real. I’ve mentioned before how good a medium this is for promoting Second Life and how it would be good if Linden Lab got in on the act. I’ve also pointed out that there are issues such as editorial impartiality for Linden Lab that Draxtor and others don’t face, so it’s trickier for Linden Lab but I hope they are taking note of the positive nature of these videos. They are at least aiding the promotion by blogging about it.

In this episode Jo talks about her love of the era on which her sim is based, the style, the architecture as well as how she’s a fan of such dress sense outside of Second Life too! Jo also does look scarily like her avatar, no no no, stop right there, she’s not seven foot two with gravity defying double D boobs, neither is her Second Life avatar, which probably explains why her RL self looks so similar to her Second Life self.

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Incident Reports Almost Make A Comeback

For a brief, all too brief, period of time it looked as if the incident report/Police Blotter had made a stunning return to Second Life. There were reports on both the official forum as well as a thread over at SLUniverse. Indeed not only were incident reports back, they were back with names!

Now you may be wondering what the bloody hell the incident reports/Police Blotter is, well quite simply, it listed bad behaviours and punishment. Tyche Shepherd still has them available over at GridSurvey.com. Alarmingly the last report shows an incident in LindenWorld A, for: Harassment : Defaming individuals or groups This is regarding your picks page for: “EPITHET AND SYNONYM” Your local LUNATIC ASYLUM. A warning was issued for that! That’s most worrisome!

This got me delving into the wayback machine, where you can see the old Second Life site and get all nostalgic, it’s also interesting to see what got people in trouble back in the day, for  example if we go back to June 2006 we can see that the following would get you a warning:

  • Blocking acccess to another parcel on all four sides.
  • Quoting from chat logs in profile.
  • Posting mature classified thread in forums
  • Using registered trademarks on items in SL.
  • Nude avatar picture in profile.
  • Offensive and annoying remarks.
  • Providing fake casino script device for fraudulent use.

There are a few violations there that still come up today, but does anyone get a warning? Then there were the more serious issues

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