Second Life – Page 76

March 13, 2015

Jordan Reyne’s Fantastic Sound Rocks The Mango Yacht Club In Second Life

Jordan Reyne this evening rocked the Mango Yacht Club in Second Life with her unique sound. The good news is that Jordan is scheduled to rock Second Life even further this weekend with more gigs before going on a real world music tour in Europe.

Jordan belted out several tunes to an eager audience and allowed them to vote on which cover song she should perform, there was only one cover song in her set, the rest of the set was original material from Jordan herself.

Jordan doesn’t just stand there and play music either, she interacts with her audience, which was very well exemplified by the above vote on which cover song she should perform.

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March 12, 2015March 12, 2015

Second Life Residents Start To Pay Their Respects To Sir Terry Pratchett

One of the first things I did when I joined Second Life was to look up a group for Discworld, thinking that Second Life would be an ideal venue for such a group. Alas that didn’t go very far, despite there being many fans and surnames of Weatherwax and Morpork not being uncommon.

In October 2008 Terry Pratchett visited Second Life. The visit was to promote his book of Nation, but many people wanted to talk about Discworld. A couple of Lindens sneaked in to listen to him, he arrived on stage :

TerryPratchett Morpork: Hello everybody! Sorry, I’m new at all of this kind of stuff and so can anyone tell me how to get the rocket launcher? …and I’m not really into all of this YourTube into MyFace kind of stuff!

Michaelx Beerbaum: Question is if Second life will appear in one of the books?

TerryPratchett Morpork: As far as I am concerned, my books are Second Life.

Having thought long and hard, a quiet voice piped up :

Ciaran Laval: Do you think Moist Von Lipwig would have managed the banking system better than those currently in charge?

TerryPratchett Morpork: It seems that, primitive as it is, the Discworld economy is considerably more stable than the one here. And, come to think about it, Moist’s solution to the problem was not a long way from what has been done over here…

He was talking about real world economies not Second Life. Upon hearing of Sir Terry’s death today I decided to visit a location where fans do gather, the Time and Space sim and already they have start to erect a tribute to Sir Terry Pratchett.

They are also getting plenty of visitors, whom like me, want to visit locations whereby fellow fans may be around.

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March 11, 2015

The Mystery Of The Secret Interview With Xiola Linden

I was exploring the glorious streets of Meauxle Bureaux, home of The Linden Department of Public Works. I was strolling along, minding my own business, when a horse drawn carriage pulled up alongside me, the door opened and a voice ordered “Get in, your presence has been requested“. Cautiously, I entered the carriage, only to find myself immediately blindfolded.

After a journey of not inconsiderable time, I was bundled from the carriage, taken through a door and sat in a chair, “Gray of The Lab from San Francisco sends his regards“, a voice whispered in my ear and then the blindfold was removed. The room was in darkness but slowly illuminated with light. I heard footsteps, a woman’s footsteps by the sound of it. My hunch was correct as shortly a woman stood before me.

“Xiola Linden, Second Life Lead Community manager, pleased to meet you. The word on the street is that you want to ask questions,” she said.

Somewhat taken aback, I wondered where I was. Had I been taken to the top secret location that the Lindens deny exists, Area 51 style, was I in LindenWorld? I asked the woman claiming to be Xiola if she had ever been to the top secret LindenWorld HQ that us mere mortals can’t visit?

“If I told you, I’d have to ban you. 🙂” she replied.

This told me two things, one was that I was not in LindenWorld and two that this really was Xiola Linden, only a lead community manager would talk of the ban hammer in such a fashion. The further fact that I’d met Xiola before confirmed the truth, I had been smuggled into a secret location, to conduct a secret interview with Xiola Linden, which I am now at liberty to be able to share with you all.

Xiola Linden has been at the forefront of Linden Lab’s renewed vigour for good community relations, she can be found on Twitter, Flickr, the official Second Life blog, at inworld events and more. Whereas it would be grossly unfair to give Xiola all the credit for these renewed good community relations, she is certainly a star attraction. However what of the team itself, I asked Xiola how many people are in the community team?

“We have a small dedicated community team whose job is to focus 100% on our communities, but there are many people outside of our team whose jobs of course include caring about about the community, interacting with users, and keeping their eyes peeled for community-related issues. It’s good to know too that many Lindens spend time inworld on alts (I know I do!) so you may be interacting with a Linden and not even know it.”

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March 11, 2015

Using Open Broadcast Software & SL Go To Record Videos In Second Life

Open Broadcast Software is free and Open Source software for recording or streaming video. The software is available for Windows, OSX or Linux. I’ve tried to use it before to record video in Second Life and my creaking PC couldn’t handle it. The results were crashtastic.

However I decided to give it a go using SL Go from OnLive and found, well it works, to a degree at least. Now I should point out here that I have pretty much no experience whatsoever in recording video footage from Second Life, so the results are not spectacular by any stretch of the imagination.

I was taking a look around A Tattered Page, from Cursed Events, when I decided to give it a whirl. By the way A Tattered Page is an interesting event, currently on round three with a theme of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, it combines literature with Second Life events and is therefore very worthy.

Now what I did here is pretty raw, I’ve engaged in no editing and just dumped the footage to a file.

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March 10, 2015March 10, 2015

SL Go Linden Dollar Payments Option Starts To Generate Interest

OnLive

First of all, for the purposes of full disclosure, I am a paying customer of SL Go from OnLive. I pay a monthly fee of £6.95 for unlimited access, other than the times when there’s server maintenance going on, which will be happening around now on the server I was logged into.

I also like OnLive because they provide a press pack with icons! I like this a lot and wish more companies provided such icons for stories on their products. Now that being said, let’s move on to the big news, the news that new customers of SL Go can now pay with Linden Dollars : SL Go – Now, Pay with L$ :

For a limited time, if you sign up for SL Go with a NEW USER account you can buy weekly subscriptions in-world using Linden Dollars (L$). There is a private sign up booth where you can create your free SL Go account, and then pay for subscriptions using L$. Each week is only L$650, and you can buy up to 4 weeks at a time. Also, you can return and renew or extend your subscription in-world at any time.

This is a very interesting development. Inara Pey covered this yesterday : OnLive announce pilot L$ payment programme for new SL Go users. Inara’s post is worth reading because Dennis Harper of OnLive contacted Inara to provide some extra information.

An important point to note is that the option to pay for the service using Linden Dollars is only available to new users. This means I can’t use that option :

Sorry, but existing users with monthly subscriptions will need to wait for this feature. It is much more complex to transition an account from US Dollars to Linden Dollars. We will be bringing this feature to you soon.

Paying for SL Go with L$ has been one of the most common requests we have received in our forums and chat rooms. We are very excited to offer this now to new users. We hope this makes it much easier for you to be a part of our growing SL Go community.

However if you’ve never used SL Go before then this is an option that may appeal to you because this is far from the only time that Second Life customers have requested the option to pay for services in Linden Dollars, rather than cold hard cash.

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