Lou's Clues

The Shadow Knows…

2011-06-14T16:02:00.002-07:00

Linden Lab has been boasting for at least a year and a half that they were on the verge of bringing "best of class" graphics to Second Life and today they rather unexpectedly took a major step in that direction. As of Viewer 2.7.1, released today, Second Life residents can optionally enable a number of real-time lighting, focus, and shadow effects aimed at making the virtual world more photogenic.

Lou at home, seen through the new tricks in Viewer 2.7.1—
shadows, occlusion, and depth of field.
(Unedited screenshot direct from SL.)

One of my peeves with Second Life is that while it offered up to eight lighting sources in a particular "scene"—that's a limit imposed by OpenGL, if a video card can support them—the lighting is horribly fake. The sun and moon count as light sources, so users can encounter (or make!) up to six other light sources. Lots of people wear invisible prim "facelights" to highlight their faces—fires, video screens, lamps, vehicles, and all sorts of other things can emit light.

But it's tremendously fake light. It illuminates nearby surfaces, but it also has this amazing nuke-yoo-lar ability to penetrate solid objects: it you set a strong light on the solid roof of a building, the roof isn't going to block the light from coming inside: stand under the roof, and you will be strongly illuminated by a light that shouldn't be able to reach you. You can see this effect all the time in Second Life: lights that magically shine through walls, through stone, through avatars, through…well, everything.

Another thing that makes Second Life lighting fake is the lack of shadows. Years ago Linden Lab apparently implemented some sort of client-side "foot shadows" that can appear around the feet of avatars in the morning or evening—basically, the only time you notice them is when they're hanging in midair where they shouldn't be, because an avatar is sitting, using a pose, or something. Linden Lab apparently implemented more realistic shadowing in their official Viewer but never enabled it because it so seriously degraded the viewer's performance. Some third party viewers—most notably Kirsten's Viewer—took the idea and ran with it, but Kirsten's viewer has always been described as "bleeding edge madness"—it's for folks with high-end graphics hardware, and the few times I tried to use it, the viewer crashed on launch. (Kirsten has actually added 3D support recently, which gives me a headache just to think about.)

So. With Viewer 2.7.1, Linden Lab has finally rolled out shadows and lighting effects in its official viewer. Although the new capabilities aren't available for every graphics system that can run SL—it looks like you need something supporting OpenGL 3.0 with at least 512 MB of video RAM—users can choose to enable them and take a look. When users look in their custom graphics options (Preferences > Graphics > Advanced) there are three new checkboxes and a pop-up menu—if they're available, then Linden Lab thinks your video hardware can support it. Lighting and Shadows is the basic setting for enabling shadows—Linden Lab calls these "high quality" shadows and they seem to be sort-of right: they move dynamically with the sun and moon, respond in real time to moving objects and avatars, and deal with moving "flexi" prims just fine. They also seem to deal with alpha layers in textures pretty well: if you see a tree with swathes of leaves done using a semi-transparent texture on a prim, the shadows will enable light to shine "through" the leaves. Neat!

The performance hit seems substantial. On my admittedly-aging computer with video hardware gamers would sneer at derisively, enabling shadows essentially cuts my frame rate in half: where I would normally get 20-22 frames per second in a typical scene, I'll be around 10 or 11 with shadows enabled. (That 20-22 fps is already substantially lower than the performance I got under Viewer 1.x and SnowGlobe, so I don't really believe the Linden's claims that Viewer 2 performs so much better than Viewer 1. That might be true, but if so it's being bogged down by a bunch of other things that I probably don't particularly want it doing.)

Ambient Occulsion seems to make for more contrast in parts of objects that aren't illuminated, and produces much smoother and fuzzier shadows from the sun and moon. Depth of Field seems to be a huge performance hit, and basically, blurs out things in Second Life that you're not looking at. If you move your camera to a point, that object will shift into a sharper focus, but other things (including stuff close to you—like your avatar) will shift out of focus. The effect is similar to focus effects seen in many console and PC games, and while it feels out of place in Second Life—it makes me feel like I have a vision problem—it may have uses for screenshots and other places effects can matter. The screenshot of me at the top of this post uses Depth of Field to blur out the background—although I will note it was remarkably difficult to get my avatar into focus for that screenshot.

The Shadows popup menu hints at what I think is the most intriguing details of the new lighting system. Users can choose that no objects produce shadows (counter-intuitive, but seems to produce slicker lighting overall then turning of Lighting and Shadows altogether), have the Sun and Moon produce shadows, or have the Sun, Moon, and Projectors (emphasis mine) produce shadows. Remember that superfake nuke-yoo-lar light Second Life has had for years? That's still there, and it's called Point lighting. A Projector is a new kind of light source that can point at things like a spotlight or flashlight would—and light from Projectors produces shadows. Like, real, honest to goodness, non-nuke-yoo-lar lighting. And it can be a textured light, creating enormous possibilities for ambient effects and even simple things like projected slide shows.

Suddenly, I think the Lindens might be on to something worthwhile.

The main problem, of course, is that all this is only available in Viewer 2 (third party Viewers will eventually pick up on it) and Viewer 2 is still absolutely atrocious. I happily concede Viewer 2's script editor is slightly improved and I actually like the location bar. But. I have so many usability, interface, design, functionality, privacy, and security issues with Viewer 2 that I don't even know where to start. Suffice to say: Viewer 2 is an absolute usability disaster—and I'm not holding up Viewer 1.x as any paragon of usability, either.

Viewer 2.7.1 also includes the Linden's latest attempt to "fix" in-world search—to me, it seems sluggish, inaccurate, and near-useless, but I'm sad to report that actually is an improvement over previous versions of Viewer 2 search I've seen. Viewer 2.7.1 is also a tits-and-ass enabled Viewer, so disable that feature or be prepared to see people made of jello.

Nonetheless, it is nice to see the Lindens spring a surprise like dynamic shadows and a new type of lighting effect. (And they've even—documented it. A little.) Please continue to surprise residents with things that overcome long-time limitations of the platform. Thanks.

Not That We're Keeping Track or Anything

2011-05-03T17:37:00.000-07:00

Some eight months ago former Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale laid out a set of concrete goals for the development and advancement of Second Life. Although Rosedale has once again stepped down as CEO—with former EA exec Rod Humble coming on board a few months ago—I thought it might be useful to take a look at what's happened with these goals. Despite perpetuating an open-and-accessible atmosphere, in my experience Linden Lab is consistently obtuse and non-committal about how it plans to manage and extend its virtual world platform. These concrete goals were a rare articulation of the Lab's goals and were made after the Lab went through a significant downsizing that saw many well-known and veteran employees exit. The goals bear revisiting.

Mesh imports will enter beta by the end of 2010

Status: accomplished. Mesh imports have been up and running on Linden Lab's beta grid (Aditi) for some time. However, Linden Lab has not released a timeframe for when they plan to bring mesh imports to the main grid, nor have they articulated the "costs" of mesh—since meshes can be very complex,unlike sculpts some single-object meshes are likely to cost more than one prim apiece. Also, since creators will want to use mesh to create elaborate vehicles and environments, Linden Lab may increase the maximum size of standard prims to accomodate large meshes. Standard SL prims are currently limited to 10m³; reports have Linden Lab considering a new limit of 64m³. Other reports have Linden Lab waiting until third party viewers like Phoenix have viewers available based on Linden Lab Viewer 2.x code—viewers need to be updated to support mesh, and that pretty much means no viewers based on the older 1.x codebase will be able to view mesh objects. But the bottom line: mesh is in beta and interested users can work with it.

Users will be to create and edit their own Display Names

Status: accomplished. Display Names have been out on the grid for some months, and as a result Linden Lab has limited all new avatar account to the last name "Resident." In my personal experience, user adoption of Display Names seems low; even people using viewers that support Display Names often turn off because it reduces the usability of their Friends List, means they have to put up with a variety of "clever" names that use Unicode characters and special symbols in an effort to stand out from the crowd. And, when the name system fails, folks with display names just see avatars named "??? ???". My viewer doesn't support Display Names, but I wrote a little script that will tell me someone's Display Name. I find it's quite common for SL users to address people by their usernames rather than their Display Names, implying they are not using the Display Name feature in their viewers.

Group chat and sim crossings will be "fixed" by the end of 2010

Status: not accomplished. In my experience, group chat is even worse now than it was at the time Philip Rosedale promised it would be fixed by the end of 2010. The last two Buccaneer Bowl games have been significantly impacted by group chat failures, and what little group chat I engage in is, ironically, mostly people apologizing and complaining that their comments are out of order or missing due to group chat failures. Linden Lab apparently has been experimenting with converting the group chat to XMPP technology; however, recently reports have those tests producing no significant improvements.

Similarly, sim crossings have not improved. Linden Lab has rolled out a change that, when users cross between sims or teleport to a new sim, the data associated with their avatar is compressed (using gzip) on the server they're leaving, then transfered to the new sim where it's unpacked, saving significant bandwidth. However, if I have that correct, the change doesn't seem to have produced a significant improvement to sim crossings—there is a minimum lag of several seconds walking between sims—and the new systems now seem to mean teleports are a crapshoot: you can teleport, but you might not get anywhere, or (worst case) you might find yourself logged out of Second Life instead of arriving at your destination. I'm basing these comments not just on my personal experience, but observing avatars near me. My home parcel is located on a sim boundary, above a Linden railroad that other SL users often "ride" across a multitude of sims for fun. I regularly see avatars get "stuck" at the sim boundary near me when they try to ride the railroad across it—and my sim is comparatively quiet and underutilized. Don't believe me? Hop one of the bizarro vehicles that roam the Linden Roads and see how far you get before crashing.

Linden Lab will be shutting down the Teen Grid

Status: accomplished. Linden Lab shut down the Teen Grid and moved 16 and 17 year-old avatars to the main grid, where they are permitted to visit regions rated "General," but not "Mature" or "Adult." So far as I can tell, the sky hasn't fallen as a result of letting teen users onto the Main Grid; however, as an avatar who has elected not to participate in Linden Lab's age verification procedure, I have noticed an increase in the number of locations I am unable to visit. Some SL users I know remain deeply concerned about the presence of minors on the main grid, and apparently land on Linden Lab's adult-only continent (Zindra) continues to command a premium compared to mainland.

Linden Lab's Viewer 2 will adopt a scrum development process

Status: accomplished. Linden Lab has been kicking out betas and "official" release of Viewer 2 with regularity, so much so that they're up to Viewer 2.6 in their official release channel—they ought to be considering the question of whether they're going to run with Viewer 2.10 after 2.9, or whether they're going to round up to Viewer 3.0. The frequency of Viewer 2 updates has enabled Linden Lab to bring new features into the Viewer quickly; however, some of those released have had significant stability issues, suggesting the Lab hasn't magically solved the traditional problem of scrum development: quality assurance.

Viewer updates updates will be background downloads

Status: accomplished. Updates to Linden Lab's Viewer 2.x now download in the background whether users want them to or not.

Assets (textures, inventory, etc.) will be fetched using HTTP

Status: accomplished, I think. Linden Lab's HTTP Assets project has apparently rolled out, however, I have not personally observed any improvement in texture or inventory loading, while I *have* observed an increase in frequency in which my viewer's local cache (of textures and other stuff I'm "using") becomes corrupted, resulting in a crash or causing the viewer to crash on launch.

Linden Lab will eliminate new user orientation

Status: plans changed. Linden Lab does seem to have eliminated new user orientation, but "Help Island" and the infohubs are still up and running. Instead, Linden Lab has implemented "Basic Mode" and "Advanced Mode" in Viewer 2.x—Basic Mode restricts users to a tiny handful of approved destinations in the virtual world; users can only select from canned avatars, and can't buy or create anything. To do any of that stuff, they can switch to "Advanced Modes" at any time.

Linden Lab plans to make an iPad client for Second Life.

Status: no update. I haven't heard a peep about this from anyone since the day it was "announced."

Not that I'm keeping track, but I count that as one failure (sim crossings and group chat) out of eight items that had measurable deliverables—and considering the new Viewer "Modes" as the equivalent of eliminating new user orientation. The iPad app was a pie-in-the-sky thing; it hasn't been done, but nothing specific was promised, either.

What else has come along?

OK, so Linden Lab has delivered on a lot of what it promised back in August. What else has Linden Lab done along the way?

Avatar "soft physics": The Linden Lab official viewer now supports butt, belly, and boob jiggle.
Web profiles: Linden Lab has converted avatars' in-world profiles to a Web-based platform, meaning avatars' profiles are now visible to the entire Internet (unless a user specifically makes their profile private). This change has not been without ramifications: for a while, Linden Lab was publishing all information in an avatar's profile to the whole Internet regardless of inworld privacy settings (including hidden groups); after that, setting a profile to private broke specific group management functions, making many common group management tasks impossible. (Here's the official bug; you have to have an SL login to view it. Linden Lab claims to have fixed it.)
Marketplace emphasis: Linden Lab is increasingly emphasizing its Web-based SL Marketplace as its preferred way to sell virtual goods, de-emphasizing the idea of shopping "in-world"—actually teleporting to an in-world store, finding the thing you want, and buying it directly. In some ways the Web-based store is a convenience move: many SL users apparently prefer shopping on the Web, and considering how frustrated I get shopping in-world, I can understand that. However, I also consider the Marketplace highly problematic: it seems to be consistently gamed by creators offering hundreds of versions of the same item—making it difficult to impossible to browse—search seems useless, and there's often not enough information available to make an informed decision. However, Linden Lab's stress on the Marketplace seems financial: they get a five percent cut on every sale.
Website revision: Linden Lab rolled out another major shift to its Web site—now dubbed a "Community platform"—that attempts to present SL's forus, Q&am;A, blogs, and knowledge base into a single unified presentation. (SL Wikis, the Marketplace, and user account management remain separate.) Among the new changes, users can get ranked based on "his or her contributions to the platform."
In-world search still deeply broken: I hate to flog a dead horse, but in-world search hasn't worked for me in either my antiquated Snowglobe viewer or Linden Lab's official viewers since October of 2010. Apparently it does work for other people, but remains deeply flawed, with complaints that people, parcels, businesses, and locations can't be found even when searching for their exact name. As a result, I have to rely on group notices (see group chat failures above) and out-of-band sources to learn when events I might be interested in attending are scheduled to happen. The only way I can find SL businesses by name is to use Google—and hope they have an out-of-band blog or other resource that includes a pointer to their in-world location.

So why did I run through all this? I'm sensing that the day Linden Lab blocks viewers based on the old 1.x codebase is coming sooner than later. At that point, I will be faced with a decision to use Linden Lab Viewer 2.x—which, in addition to a deeply problematic interface, is burdened with deep privacy concerns—use a third-party viewer based on Linden Lab's Viewer 2 code (same privacy concerns, plus a third party in the loop), or…leaving SL altogether.

Reign O'er Me

2011-04-15T14:01:00.000-07:00

Ye Dear Readers will know that I can't keep this blog away from Second Life trivia for very long. So I hope I'll be forgiven for offering a few quick updates since moving Lou's Clues to my own "home" parcel."

The Frivolous Corsairs finally win Buccaneer Bowl!

We Are The Champions!

Although it's almost month-old news now, at long last the Frivolous Corsairs walked away with a Buccaneer Bowl team trivia championship! The team last month was me, our erstwhile captain Rain Ninetails, with very able backup from Honey Potez and Billy2Times Krams. The title was a long-time coming: although the Corsairs have had a number of second-place finishes and are often pretty competitive, the top spot has eluded us since the Buccaneer Bowl got started way back in January 2009. Although I haven't been able to attend every game (and once, technically, was on a winning team as an honorary Triviator) the Corsairs have managed to field a team for nearly every Buccaneer Bowl, and it was great to finally come out on top!

And I suppose I just need to say this up-front: while it's nice to win, it absolutely isn't a requirement for me. What I find remarkable about the Buccaneer Bowl is that we're able to assemble so many people into the same place at the same time and conduct a rather complicated, two-hour event and have a bunch of fun while doing it. I know this is going to sound wrong, but I kind of think of the Buccaneer Bowl as a monthly party where many of my smartest and funniest friends turn up to be…well, funny and smart! Although I wouldn't wish it on my teammates, I could come in last place every month and still enjoy the Buccaneer Bowl games just as much. Although there are lots of fun events and things to go in Second Life, the Buccaneer Bowl has been one thing I always look forward to with kind of giddy anticipation.

TriviAid for Japan Relief

The Second Life trivia community is developing a bit of a tradition of trying to do events to benefit real-world causes and organizations. In November of 2009 folks pulled together to conduct a 24-hour Triviathon benefitting Relay for Life, and various hosts have put on games in support of various realworld causes. Although there's no lack of worthy causes in the world, the earthquake, tsunami, and ongoing nuclear crisis that have struck Japan have been on everyone's mind, so this month the Second Life trivia community put together TriviAid, a series of games over a nine-day span that encouraged users to support Japan relief. TriviAid dovetailed on a similar effort organized by the Phoenix Viewer project—which set up an account to pass donations along to Global Giving, although hosts were encouraged to support charities of their choice if they wanted. Honey Potez took the lead there, spearheading contributions to Japan Earthquake Animal Rescue and Support (JEARS), a group of three Japan-based no-kill animal rescue organizations—and Honey made it count by pledging to double all received contributions.

In a world where a Linden Dollar is worth less than half a penny, raising money even for a good cause can be difficult: many SL residents have no money at all, and many carry the equivalent of just a dollar or two—and then there are people like me whose only in-world money comes from what we can win or earn. Nonetheless, Honey's efforts to support animal rescue totalled US$200, total TriviAid donations came to $L39,784, or about US$330.

Yes, in the grand scheme, it may not seem like a tremendous amount of money, but bear in mind there's nothing about Second Life trivia that's a profit-making venture: as a group, we haven't done any significant work to monetize the activity because, frankly, that's not why we do it. If you want evidence that virtual worlds can offer significant support to real-world activities, check out Project FUR: they also worked to raise money for JEARS, and set out a whole sim filled with virtual goods being sold as a benefit. Last I checked, they had raised more than $6 million Linden dollars: that's over US$24,000.

Tits and Ass

2011-04-04T18:42:00.001-07:00

So I'll just put the bits up front: Linden Lab is going to be adding "avatar physics" to Viewer 2.x, giving users the ability to configure their avatars to have their butts, bellies, and (of course) breasts bounce around when they move. Here's a peek.

Click through for the full jiggle on YouTube.
No, that's not me. If you're wondering whether it's common for female Second Life avatars to dress and walk around like this, the sad answer is yes.

Avatar physics is already present in development builds of "SnowStorm," Linden Lab's main viewer development project, and should be reaching everyday avatars fairly soon. It will also (very likely) be adopted by third party viewers (like the Phoenix folks' "FireStorm" and Imprudence's Kokua) that are based on Linden Lab's Viewer 2 code base. They will essentially get the feature for free, and will likely come up with ways to "innovate" it beyond Linden Lab's default features.

The feature is being implemented as a wearable clothing layer for avatars, so avatars can put on "Physics" in much the same way they wear skins or tattoo layers. Presumably, users will be able to create multiple physics layers they can switch in and out to go along with different looks. Similarly, folks who have in-world businesses built around avatar accessories will probably be able to pack physics "layers" along with their skins, shapes, and other products. Unlike Viewer 2 alpha and tattoo layers that get "baked" into an avatar's overall appearance and are thus visible to users of older viewers, Linden Lab's avatar physics will only be visible to viewers that specifically support the technology. So if you stick with an older viewer, you're not in the game.

Do You Like to Watch?

Over a year ago I bemoaned Linden Lab's then-forthcoming Viewer 2, and tried to place it in the context of third party viewer development at the time. I primarily focused on privacy and security issues with Viewer 2, deigning not to comment on its design, interface, or usability. (Lou's take on viewer design: Viewer 1.x sucks, Viewer 2.x is worse.)

In the last year, major privacy and security issues have twice rocked Second Life's tiny little boat on the rough seas of the Internet. First, Linden Lab had little choice but to draw-and-quarter Emerald, the most widely-used third-party viewer application, for abuses and privacy violations. That fiasco gave birth to the Phoenix project, which has tried to pick up where Emerald left off, offering Second Life power users a more tweak-tastic viewer while at the same time trying to come up with a third-party viewer based on Linden Lab's Viewer 2.x code base. (That project is called FireStorm, and I gather it's in limited testing now.) Converting to a Viewer 2 code base is important for viewer developers because, slowly but surely, Linden Lab is breaking features in earlier 1.x viewers and, one day, those old viewers won't be able to connect to Second Life at all.

Linden Lab's second test on privacy and security came in the last two months from a product called RedZone, which purported to be a tool that enabled land owners to identify users of copybot viewers—illegal viewers that essentially exist only to steal content in SL. However, RedZone went several steps further than Skills Hak's Gemini CDS, which purports to do the same thing. RedZone used SL media streams and other tools to gather IP address info on Second Life users in areas "protected" by RedZone. That information was sent to an external site, where it was correlated and made accessible to RedZone customers: one of the features was an alt banner, which assumed that all connections to Second Life from a particular IP address must be the same person. RedZone would show its customers which avatars had connected to SL from a particular IP address, and offer to let users take action against them all en masse. In addition, RedZone logged failed logins to its Web site, and stored those failed passwords as "possible SL passwords" associated with a particular account—statements from its creator imply that the information would be used to try to log into SL using those credentials, and delete their accounts using Second Life's Web-based administration tools.

RedZone's creator was eventually identified as a convicted felon with convictions for fraud. Shortly after RedZone's servers were hacked (which is how some of these in-house details came to light), Linden Lab removed RedZone from the grid, along with nuking the creator's accounts, groups, and known alts.

OK, Why Did You Prattle On About That?

While it was operating, RedZone publicized bits of aggregate data about the Second Life avatars they scanned. One of those aggregate bits was the viewer versions in use by scanned avatars. There's no reason to suspect those numbers served any purpose other than pleasing RedZone's creators, but one of the figures was interesting:

Scanning more than 9 million avatars, RedZone found that about 40 percent were using Linden Lab's Viewer 2.x.

Yep, that's right: after more than a year of flogging Viewer 2.x, roughly two in five SL avatars are using it. A considerable majority of Second Life users are not using Linden Lab's primary viewer software.

If that percentage is accurate, it represents a significant challenge for Linden Lab. Linden Lab wants to advance their platform. They want to make Second Life more accessible and fun to everyday Internet users. They want to roll out new technologies that support inworld businesses and the content-creation community. They want to see concurrency and their user base grow, not stay comparatively stagnant. But they don't want to alienate the majority of their users in the process.

What's Linden Lab Going to Do About That?

Linden Lab has taken some steps to try to make Viewer 2 easier for new users. The biggest change, implemented under the watch of new CEO Rod Humble, is a Basic Mode for Viewer 2. Basic Mode is now the default when users start Second Life, and tries to sweep away a lot of the interface clutter and confusion in favor of a paradigm that lets people get inworld quickly, not look like a total dork, find something fun to do (via preset places to visit), and have happy positive thoughts about SL. If they want to go further—customize their avatar, use voice chat, buy virtual goods or Linden dollars, create their own objects, etc.—they can log back in using Advanced Mode via a toggle at the bottom of the screen and tap into all features.

However, Basic Mode is not going to convince any of the folks who are not currently using Viewer 2 to get on the bandwagon. What might?

Tits and ass.

Oh You're Kidding

No, I'm not. A year and a half ago, Emerald was already established as the dominant third-party viewer on the grid. But if there was one feature that pushed it over the edge to massive adoption by mainstream SL users, it wasn't client-side animation overriders, avatar keys in profiles, improved radar, or the ability to set draw distance on the chat line. It was "breast physics."

Breast physics in Emerald

The cynic in me is definitely talking, but I see Linden Lab's "avatar physics" as a similar "grope" to get users to embrace the Viewer 2.x platform, whether that be in Linden Lab's official viewers or in third-party viewers based on Linden Lab code.

To the Lab's credit, their implementation of "avatar physics" is more comprehensive than that originally incorporated into Emerald (and since propagated to third-party viewers like Phoenix and Imprudence). For one—erm, two—things, it also includes butt and belly waggle, so las chicas con culo can do all the jiggling they want and Santa avatars can have their own bowl full of jelly. And unlike the existing breast physics feature, which is client side and applies to all avatars equally whether they want it to or no, Linden Lab's physics layers will be opt-in. Don't want your bits jiggling? Don't wear the physics layer. It also means that, if users do choose to use physics layers, other avatars will see the effect they're intended to see: each avatar can have their own unique jiggles, including no jiggle at all.

Unfortunately, I also think avatar physics will have a negative effect on Second Life's image. SL already has a reputation as the red light district of virtual worlds—heck, Linden Lab has created a whole adults-only continent where users effectively need to show their ID to enter. Avatar physics caters almost purely to prurient interests…and that may not be the kind of "fast easy fun" with which Linden Lab wants to continue to be associated.

Home Is Where Your Trivia Is

2011-03-30T23:00:00.004-07:00

So, in case anyone was wondering what's happened with Lou's Clues, I've decided its new "permanent" home will be my own little flying island. It's not a big place, but we seem to be able to pack in the avatars, and—despite being mainland—lag has not been a serious impediment.

Lou's Clues at the flying island (Image by Cygnoir Blanc)

With the closing of [MonoChrome], my Lou's Clues trivia game faced a bit of a crisis. Do I continue doing the game? If so, do I shop around for a new place to host the game, or take things into my own hands and…open up my own trivia venue? Or maybe some other path would be better?

When Sinnamon Sands and Jez Oh formally announced [MonoChrome]'s pending closure, something extremely flattering happened: virtually all the major "trivia venues" in Second Life contacted me, offering their locations as a home for Lou's Clues if I needed it. Sure, there's a tiny bit of self-interest in offers like that—those venues would get "traffic" from anyone attending Lou's Clues, exposure and promotion for their venue and other events, and probably small amount of tip income from players to support the venue. However, those offers are more a reflection of the supportive nature of the trivia community in Second Life: we might not all get along all the time, but the consistent bottom line is that we always try to support each other where and when we can, and I was extremely touched by the support everyone offered me.

[MonoChrome]'s closure brought home to me the weakness of running an event at someone else's venue: it can literally disappear out from under your feet. Although Jez & Sinn handled MoChro's closure with class and plenty of warning, a number of Second Life trivia venues have come and gone—some with more warning than others. Places like Lilly's Pub and Trivy Isle (née Double Standards) used to be centers of my SL trivia universe; places like EyeQ came and went rather quickly, and I've watched hosts shift their games between a number of venues as opportunities and sponsors appear and dry up: one of my favorite games is, I think, on its fourth or fifth location. Even the venerable Marine Park is no more—and I'm sure its disappearance of its high payouts has had a trickle-down effect on the rest of the SL trivia community.

Thinking about possible futures for Lou's Clues, I bounced around a few ideas: maybe it would make sense to keep Lou's Clues "homeless" and move it between different venues every month or so? I pitched the idea around as "residencies," where I would run games at a venue until the monthly Buccaneer Bowl team-based trivia game happened, then use that "off week" to transition to a new location. However, talking with folks, it became clear the idea of a traveling game basically amounted to a complicated effort so I could avoid having to say "no" to anyone. Constantly coordinating moves to new venues (including negotiating SL's ever-more complicated group, rezzing, and event-posting permissions) would consume even more of my time and be complicated for venue operators—they would basically have to go to the same effort to support Lou's Clues as they would for a regular standing game, for a tiny fraction of the benefit. Plus, a traveling game would be problematic for players, who are used to particular games being at particular locations: many arrive at game by way of fixed landmarks that point to a particular location in SL's virtual landscape, not to a particular event. Plus, a moving game is far more likely to be scuttled by a snafu: can't get group permissions sorted out? A simple missed checkbox in a parcel or group settings would mean I couldn't rez the LouTron, post an event, or (in a worst-case scenario) even get to the venue!

So, I decided to emulate Lebn Bucyk's approach with Barefoot trivia—which is, probably not coincidentally, one of the longest-running trivia games in Second Life. Lebn & Preston have always hosted their own game on their own land. Barefoot hasn't always been on their park in Jeongam (lag drove them to a garden at their "home" in another sim for a while), but the principle is the same: they don't run a "venue"—they just invite friends over to their place to play trivia. As a result, they control their own destiny: no one is going to pull the pixels out from under their feet because…well, Lebn & Preston control the pixels.

I decided a similar approach made sense for Lou's Clues, and would have the added benefit of being simpler for me than working with a trivia venue. I wouldn't have to concern myself with coordinating schedules around other hosts or events, nor would I have to promote other events or deal with shifting designs, layouts, and decor. Doing things myself also meant I would have full control of things like music streams, nearby scripted objects, and…well, ambiance. And I hesitate to bring up aesthetics at all because I happen to like all the trivia venues where I currently play, and my own ability virtually decorate is pretty limited. But, at least, if other people find a location isn't to their taste, it falls on me.

So, for the last few weeks I've been holding Lou's Clues at my "home," a small 1024m² parcel on the mainland's northern continent. Since it's mainland, I was concerned lag would be a serious issue, but we've since packed a couple dozen people on the parcel with minimal lag, so I'm optimistic continuing to host there will be practical. And, honestly, it feels right to host Lou's Clue on my own parcel. I've been there over a year now! Although my homebrew flying island hasn't exactly been a secret, darn it, it's about time to invite people over!

Since some people have asked: yes, I briefly considered putting an end to Lou's Clues. Although it's common knowledge amongst trivia hosts, writing a decent trivia game takes quite a lot of time and effort, and these days we all fund them out of pocket: nobody is getting rich as a trivia host. It might only take me a leisurely hour and a half to roll through a couple dozen questions during a game, but those typically represent three to sometimes eight hours of work. (Sometimes it's easy to come up with good questions, but sometimes it's like wringing blood from a stone.) Plus there's time to post event notices, produce material for picture questions or any other special elements (I'm crap with graphics, so this takes me much longer than it ought), plus coordinate any extras or announcements that might go along with a particular game—maybe a game is themed, promoting a particular event or charity, or needs special props or tools.

However, Lou's Clues has always been my way to give something back to the Second Life trivia community. Although I build and script, go to music shows, and still do a bit of exploring and simple hanging out, it's no exaggeration to say that probably half my time in SL is focused on trivia and the friends I've made through playing and hosting. As long as I'm still playing, I'll keep hosting.

So. I hope you'll turn up at the flying island one weekend. Check events for "Lou's Clues."

No Colors Anymore

2011-02-28T21:32:00.000-08:00

It's the end of an era—at least for me. Second Life's [MonoChrome] has closed down.

Sitting with Jez at the cleared-out [MonoChrome]

Jez Oh conceived [MonoChrome] as a direct response to the typical SL "club." Most music and event venues in Second Life are tricked out with garish colors, animated doo-dads, things that shoot particles every which way, stuff that take forever to load, gizmos that chatter and nag at you in text or pops up dialogs on your screen…and everywhere bling bling bling. [MonoChrome] had none of that. [MonoChrome] was more of a warehouse basement that the local band used as a rehearsal space…but all the kids hung out and played music when the band wasn't around, then decided to "fix it up" as a real hangout. Posters up on the wall, games spread around, some lights, a plant or two, some nice furniture—but otherwise mostly brick, concrete, a metal-grate balcony.

The motto for [MonoChrome] was "you supply the color." The club itself was purely shades of grey. What was special about the place—what should get your attention—wasn't the build itself, but the people there and what they brought to it. Jez extended the idea past the look of the club to the way it was built: [MonoChrome] was designed to be low-lag, load as quickly as possible, and then stay out of your way.

As such, [MonoChrome] served as one of the touchstones for me and many of my friends and acquaintances in Second Life. It's where a bunch of us held rez-day parties or just turned up for a friendly game of Greedy Greedy (a kind of silly in-SL dice game)—it was our clubhouse, our hang-out, our music venue, and literally my home for quite a while: I had my "home point" in SL set inside one of the club's walls. If you page back through this blog, you'll see lots of screenshots taken at [MonoChrome].

Cygnoir Blanc celebrating her 7th(!) rezday at [MonoChrome] this month
(A winged Lou and Rain Ninetails in the background)

[MonoChrome] was also home to a myriad of other events: Name that Tune games have been running since [MonoChrome] opened its doors, innumerable trivias (hosted by the likes of proprietress Sinnamon Sands, Josh & Circe, and Mako & Honey), as well as a selection of live music shows. And, of course, [MonoChrome] hosted many a Buccaneer Bowl, the monthly team-based trivia event that's near and dear to my heart.

I did a few one-shot events elsewhere, but [MonoChrome] is where I launched my Lou's Clues trivia game and have since conducted 60-odd events. I'll keep Lou's Clues going, although I haven't really settled on how and where just yet. Keep your eyes peeled.

So, now [MonoChrome] lives only in our memories. But I hope it has a lasting influence on the design and vibe of in-world venues, especially amongst the many (many!) of us who spend time there. Jez, Sinn, Dree, Mandy, and everyone—ya done good. Thank you.

Mainlining Mainland

2011-01-31T19:42:00.005-08:00

One accepted truism of Second Life is that the SL Mainland is kind of the virtual equivalent of steerage compared to the posh upper- and first-class berths afforded by private sims and estates. To an extent, the perception is justified: Mainland is home to many builds that can generously be described as eyesores, many neighbors that can diplomatically be described as uncouth cretins, and sim performance that can sometimes be measured on a geologic scale.

But that doesn't mean Mainland is without its charms. When I'm not at my own little flying island parcel, attending some event, or off (gasp!) working on some project or other, I can often be found hanging around public Mainland areas. Although there are many high-quality, privately-owned areas of Mainland open to anyone, I often find myself going to places built by the Lindens (or, more properly, by the Moles—often resident contractors working on projects for Linden Lab) for the simple reason that they're intended to be public and open to all. Often I can be found in parts of the Blake Sea or the newly-emerging Sea of Fables, so when Linden Lab's efforts at infrastructure improvements made my home (and thousands of other sims) inaccessible for several hours:

Staring off into the empty space where my home sim ought to be…

…I thought I would go looking for a few new places.

One of the first I found—purely by visually scanning the in-world Map—is a Linden-build "Space Base" in a sim called Mos Ainsley. Although pretty obviously named for a lawless desert town in the first Star Wars movie, the whole sim is a crater with what appears to be some sort of sci-fi abandoned research station. The build features a selection of buildings, tunnels, pressure doors and elevators (about half of which don't work—whether that's deliberate or not I can't say) along with an underground shuttle hangar where you can rez your own craft and fly around.

The Lindens' Space Base, with the pod bay doors open, Hal

Exploring the build, you might find yourself a spacesuit to wear in case things go horribly wrong, and while the build as this weirdly hygienic quality to it, the not-working stuff and the sense that whoever was there just abandoned the place recently creates a bit of an Alien-ish atmosphere. And…if you can find your way through the right airlocks you'll eventually meet the aliens.

"Hey, S'nicklzyb'grr!zub, how's it goin'?"

At some point I noticed there's a spot on the Mainland called "Mare Segundus," and I believe someone told me it was one of the older Mainland "seas" where folks first took at stab at making sailing vessels and stuff for Second Life. I looked for it on the world Map and it's super easy to spot: it's got a bunch of islands shaped like the number "2." Two. Get it? Har har har. I figured with that level of subtlety I probably wasn't too interested in visiting, but at some point I found myself only a sim or two away and thought "what the heck"—and discovered it's actually kind of neat. A lot of Second Life's mainland seas have this vaguely Greek/Minoan/Atlantean vibe to them, like you're stumbling on variously-preserved bits of a long-crumbled civilization. (The new Sea of Fables has recently sprouted a Mount Olympus island, for example.) Anyway, there's a bit of that here, with a few domed structures and an orrery you can lay back and observe spinning. However, the star attraction is a kind of brass-punk rocketship on a landing pad right in the middle of that "2" on the map.

T minus three minutes and counting…

You can poke around the rocket, get a gangplank out to it, and get inside—and if you're not careful, it'll blast off! The takeoff seizes control of your avatar's camera so you're looking out the rocket porthole and see the horizon drop away beneath you—and then you land and you're on an alien world!

The atmosphere is breathable—do we dare go outside to look around?

Of course, you're not actually on an alien world, or even transported to another sim. (Sim crossings are pretty jarring events: you'd notice.) Instead the rocket transports you up about a kilometer into the sky, where there's a skybox carefully dressed up to simulate a bit of a classic scifi alien planet: you feel a bit like Robbie the Robot might appear in a moonbuggy at any moment. You can explore around and check out the weird plants and drippy things—careful, there is a monster and it will eat you if you let it. I was amused to find a flag planted by a previous exploring party—the Moles.

The Moles have claimed this planet as their own
LDPW stands for Linden Department of Public Works

If you bumble around a bit you will eventually find a strange altar—watch out for the tentacles, and be careful what you click!

To worship false gods, or not worship false gods?
Decisions, decisions…

As soon as I saw the altar on the "alien world," I knew it looked very familiar—it's a dead ringer for another strange altar that I found elsewhere on the Linden Mainland, not far from where my friends Lebn & Preston have their house. I don't think the Lindens have any overarching backstory to their builds, but it's kind of fun to notice when things recur and have little themes.

Hmm! This one doesn't have tentacles!

Anyway—the upshot here is that just because a location is Mainland and technically owned and operated by the Lindens doesn't necessarily mean it's boring and a no-fun place to hang out. I often pop to places like this when I'm just kicking around SL for a little bit, knee-deep in multiple IM conversations that need immediate attention, or maybe just looking for some no-script, no-rez areas to test some of my new scripts and toys. (There's actually a rez-enabled area right near that second altar intended for boats and whatnot that I abuse for other purposes.)

Of course, Mainland will always be Mainland, and not everything is going to be neato-keen, picturesque, or even polite. The same day I was galavanting between those altars, I got a message from a friend that it was raining penis-posters at her mainland house. I popped over there, and sure enough: spread across four mainland sims were at least two dozen invisible griefer objects, the sole purpose of which was to emit (literally) thousands of obscene images. Ah, the charms of Mainland.

Standing on a griefing cage 400m in the air, reporting penis-poster-spewing particle emitters—what fun.

Stepping into a Walled Garden

2011-01-21T14:51:00.002-08:00

Right before Christmas Linden Lab announced it was bringing in Rod Humble as its new CEO, taking over for the (second) departure of Second Life founder Philip Rosedale. Reaction in the SL user community was rather muted, in part due to the timing of the announcement, but the overall tone was generally hopeful: Humble comes to Second Life from a background in online gaming and virtual worlds with Electronic Arts, The Sims, and EverQuest, and many folks figured that experience might make him a better fit with the SL universe than a chief executive with primary experience in other fields—like marketing or financing.

To my surprise, Humble's first official statement to the Second Life community wasn't about a vision for the future, Linden Lab's business fundamentals, an announcement of new technology initiatives, or leadership shakeups. Instead, Humble has posted a surprisingly charming chronicle about getting his feet wet in Second Life. "One of my highest priorities, over the last few weeks, was spending as much time as possible exploring inworld […] to better understand the product experience, your needs, and the culture of Second Life."

The best thing about the short piece is that Humble clearly isn't intimidated to show that he's new to Second Life—for experienced SL users, Humble's little photolog brings back memories of their first days when everything was new and mysterious and filled with exciting possibilities. Humble doesn't put on airs: he doesn't try to present a sophisticated persona or avatar, and honestly seems to have had fun getting started. In the post, Humble says he popped around to some of SL's winter seasonal activities (I did something similar when I was new to SL), then started playing around with terraforming land and even tapping into SL's building tools (to create a "shack" and a raft) and scripting tools.

I have to admit this last bit delighted me: the head of the company is actually trying to create things of his own in world, and even add interactivity to them! (He made a prim that sends him email.) He's totally up-front that everything he did is very basic, but one consistent criticism of Linden Lab's leadership during my time in Second Life is that, while a few developers and other Lindens log actual time in-world, very few of the top execs spent any time at all in-world. I'm happy he is, I hope he enjoys it, and I hope he consistently spends time in-world.

But. Being a cynical creature, I immediately started reading between the lines. See that omission ellipsis in that quote from Humble, above? Here's the full sentence (emphasis mine):

One of my highest priorities, over the last few weeks, was spending as much time as possible exploring inworld (with an alt and now Rodvik Linden) to better understand the product experience, your needs, and the culture of Second Life.

It's not much of a secret that most (all?) Linden Lab people are hesitant to log into the world with a Linden account: it's like having a target painted on your back, so they use different accounts so they can get around without being harassed. But I am somewhat disappointed that the new CEO's first experience of Second Life is that managing a Second Life experience requires multiple accounts. I'm kind of interpreting that as an indication Linden Lab has no plans to improve account tools, role management capabilities, or other significant deficiencies in the platform that lead may people to use several alts—or, in some cases, entire troupes of them.

Humble segued from visiting a few locations and events to "playing around with the land tool […] on my island." This made me blink. Maybe Humble had a genuine newbie experience with first alt. He doesn't say. But his experience of Second Life, with his own private island won't provide much experience of the needs or culture of average SL users. Most SL users aren't land owners. Among landowners, most don't have a private island. I've been in Second Life over two years and have never used the terraform tool. (I've never been permitted to do so. I literally have no idea how it works.)

No. "Real" new residents get dumped into an infohub, somewhere like Waterhead or Ahern or Moose Beach, where a large gaggle of avatars usually stands around 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with the explicit purpose of getting lulz at the expense of any new resident who might get close to them, or (heaven forfend) ask a question. And let's not even get into the rude noises, flying penises, pixel bestiality, goatse particle fountains, or other common entertainments at those hubs.

Infohubs are also prime locations for scammers and spammers: I popped into an infohub to test a script last week and within a minute received this instant message:

[2011/01/16 22:28] [REDACTED] Resident: Hello, may you help to me with 100 Linden$ for loading avatar picture, please! I do not begging.

Popping back just now (weekday afternoon SLT at a "PG" infohub) I see seven brand-new "Resident" avatars with group tags like "QuickCash" and "Ask me how to Make L$$$," group tags promoting porn Web sites, outright solicitations for virtual sex, and a few older avatars with titlers saying things like "*Homes for rent, contact me*" and "*~*Wanna get lucky*~*" Although, in a ten-minute span, I am somewhat surprised to count only one nude female avatar, three penises, and one person shouting to the whole sim about how he loves Jesus. It's worse in the evenings.

This is the fast, easy, fun, "PG-rated" environment into which Linden Lab is dumping new residents and (now) 16- and 17 year-old residents: as of today, the Teen Grid is gone.

Let's remember: new residents typically have no money. They want to try SL before they commit to hooking up a PayPal account or anything—so they can't buy better clothes, tools, or land. New residents devote a lot of time learning to customize the shape of their avatar, asking people for pointers, seeking out newbie-friendly locations, and looking for freebies. If new residents are interested in building, they're basically limited to sandboxes—and sandboxes are where the gaggle of infohub troublemakers go when they find the more-controlled conditions of infohubs too dull.

By starting out on a private island, presumably with some Linden cash (he is the CEO, after all) Rod Humble is neatly bypassing the typical experience for new residents.

So, not that you're reading this, Mr. Humble, but:

Use your alt to check out the infohubs and see how new residents are treated.
Try to get by with no money. Search for freebies, maybe try some hunts. Keep track of your time.
Attend events—live music is a good choice (but I'd love for you to try a good trivia game!)
Continue building. See if you can turn that raft into a boat, and that shack into a house, and that mailpost into, I don't know, a suggestion box.
Have fun for diving into Second Life. Don't give up now.

…on a High Note

2010-12-31T15:15:00.003-08:00

Yes, I know I had a flurry of blog activity after my sojourn in the Real World and that trickled away to nothing. It wasn't that I wasn't spending time in Second Life—au contraire, I've actually been in world more than "usual" catching up with clients' scripting requests and updates, working on a commission or two, getting very frustrated building something that was just supposed to be a simple prank, and (don't ask) setting loose grubs and slugs on my floating island.

Out and about in the world…or just fleeing the grubs at home

But a few things have happened that I still think are worth mentioning, so here are some quick items:

Rod Humble Steps In as Linden Lab CEO

Following October's second departure of Second Life founder Philip Rosedale from the CEO position, Linden Lab announced they have brought Rod Humble on as the company's new chief executive. Humble comes to Linden Lab with a long career in the computer gaming and virtual world industry: he was one of the executives in charge of Sony's Everquest—arguably the first successful 3D virtual world, although it takes the form of a fantasy MMORPG with sword-swingers, monsters, and spells. More recently, Humble has been in charge of Electronic Arts' EA Play game label and its tentpole franchise The Sims.

Linden Lab announced the appointment right before the Christmas holiday, so overall reaction seems to have been rather muted since many folks are engrossed in end-of-year holiday madness. I'm not a gamer, so the name "Rod Humble" means exactly nothing to me: although I've heard of Everquest and The Sims, I've never thought they were all that interesting and never even considered playing them. I am somewhat heartened that Humble would seem to have a strong background in virtual worlds and how flesh-and-blood people interact with them; however, I have no idea how he'll adapt from top-down controlled businesses based subscription models to a world (and virtual economy) that's largely user-created. I hope Mr. Humble rises to the challenge and succeeds in lowering accessibility barriers to Second Life without making a bunch of us second-class citizens.

One thing that was interesting about the announcement of Humble moving into the CEO chair was that, excluding restructuring and "non-cash stock compensation" expense, Linden Lab has earned over $75 million each of the last three years. I don't know of that includes 2010 and the recent downsizing, but it is a sign the company may not be running on fumes.

Gracie has a blog!

Gracie Kendal's quest to get portraits of 1,000 Second Life avatars continues, and you can follow her progress on her blog dedicated to the project. And, yes, loading the blog is a metric whump of bandwidth from all the high-rez images on the pages. Just be patient!

It's not too late to participate in the project: last I heard, Gracie was getting near the 700-avatar mark.

Second Life in a Browser

While I was away from SL, Linden Lab apparently rolled out a proof-of-concept version of Second Life dubbed Project Skylight that works in modern Web browsers. Contrary to the course I thought the Lab would pursue with a browser-based gateway to SL (using still-baking WebGL technology as a lightweight way to handle OpenGL), Linden Lab's test involved using a cloud-based graphics rendering service to, essentially, access SL and generate graphics on a remote computer and send the results back to the user's browser. Its more like streaming video on the fly than accessing a 3D world—but if it's fast enough and responsive enough, there's no reason that couldn't work, right?

Well, maybe. Cloud-based rendering services are notorious for requiring substantial amounts of bandwidth, but a few businesses have taken off with the model, including the OnLive gaming service that purports to enable subscribers to play high-end PC games on low-end PC hardware…so long as they have the bandwidth to pull down the pixels in real time.

The Project Skylight beta appears to be closed now, and it was pretty limited: selected people could only get in using guest accounts (access was not open to all), rather than their existing Second Life accounts, and usage was limited to one hour (during which typical use seemed to consume about a gigabyte of bandwidth).

Linden Lab seemed pretty clear that Project Skylight was an experiment they may (or may not) pursue. I'm dubious cloud-rendering technology will be an effective way to bring Second Life into a browser—it seems to be Linden Lab should view a browser-based gateway as a means to lower barriers to entry to SL, rather than create new ones—but I'll be curious how (or if) the project sees the light of day.

Have a Good 2011

As I'm writing this, it's coming up on 3PM SLT on December 31st, 2010. In-world, some of SL's best live music performers are putting on New Year's Eve shows, the trivia peeps are doing trivia every hour on the hour as midnight swings around the globe, and the mood seems to be…upbeat? Hopeful? Fun? I suppose that's really all anyone can ask of a virtual world.

So: more of that in 2011, please. And a big thanks to everyone in SL who helped make 2010 worthwhile. You know who you are.

You, too, can be a Usual Suspect

2010-12-09T17:08:00.011-08:00

So earlier this week I'd been back in Second Life for all of a couple hours when the ever-vivacious Rach Borkotron IM's me out of the blue and asks, more or less, "So, you wanna pose and have your picture taken?" And, of course, being the sort of girl who's adverse to being identified in public and tends to get all wiggly and put her hands in front of her face (and her fingers up her nose) when someone points a camera at her, I replied "Um, kinda working on a monstrously important earth-saving scripting project right now!" Which had the benefit of being kinda sorta maybe related to the truth a little. Then Rach dropped a notecard on me and said "Read this and let me know what you think, I am posing for her right now."

And once I read the notecard, I kinda dropped everything and TP'd right over.

Gracie Kendal's avatar portrait studio

Gracie Kendal is up to something: she wants to take portraits of 1,000 avatars as part of an ongoing project examining the nature of online identity and anonymity in a virtual face-to-face environment like Second Life. The portraits started off as an illustration of online anonymity with an interesting twist—instead of face-on portraits, the images show the avatars turned away from the viewer, hiding their faces. Although Gracie is now shooting portraits from both the front and the back, it's the ones with the faces turned away that she seems most interested in—and when you see a giant virtual gallery of avatars turned away from you, the idea becomes very evocative.

Gracie writes:

Like many of my other projects, I started out with one idea: to take portraits of avatars facing away from me. That was it, pure and simple. I had the idea that I wanted them to be unrecognizable, their faces hidden, just another level of anonymity in SL vs. RL.

[..]

Each portrait represents a different personality, a singular life. Each person has a story to tell, a life to live. Does it matter if we know what these stories are? Does it matter if we know who is on the other side of the computer?

Last I heard, Gracie was up to almost 500 avatar portraits for the project—and you can be one of them! Send an instant message in-world to Gracie Kendal (or get her email address from her blog) if you'd like to participate. Although you can't rez at Gracie's studio—at least, I couldn't—Gracie does encourage you to use any clothing, attachments, poses, and animations you want. I imagine if you're using a dance or something Gracie will need to watch it a bit to get a feel for the movement and good angles, but she's up for that. And very patient!

Gracie plans to show the portraits in a real-life gallery show or in a book—so don't participate if you aren't comfortable with an image of your virtual self perhaps being shown in real life or being published. But at the very least check out the gallery to-date at Gracie's in-world studio—not only do you get a feel for some of the sheer creativity people put into their avatars, but you also get a sense for the humor, attitude, emotion, and expressiveness some people can wring from all these pixels in just a captured moment. And you might see someone (or several someones!) who look familiar.

I know at some level it's silly, but in my gut I feel a project like this can serve as a way to explore and break down barriers between folks who are comfortable with (or at least interested in) the idea of virtual worlds and maybe setting their creativity loose to create whole new identities and personas—which, of course, are ultimately ways of exploring our own real life selves. I know in Second Life terms I'm incredibly boring…but that's part of the dynamic, too.

And yes, if you're wondering, I did get my picture taken. Here's Gracie's front portrait of me: if you want to see the flipside, you'll have to go see for yourself.

Dismay Names

2010-12-07T17:25:00.007-08:00

So one thing that happened while I was away from SL: Linden Lab has rolled out support for Display Names.

With Display Names, every avatar on the Second Life grid can change their name to anything they like—although they need a viewer that supports Display Names to do it. Linden Lab first mentioned Display Names back in August, and the final version of the feature is largely what they described—although there are some gotchas. Users can set their name to anything they like—including names with UTF-8 and Unicode characters!—while at the same time having an immutable underlying "User Name"—mine would be lou.netizen. However, since Display Names lets folks choose any name they like, Linden Lab has now done away with last names for new accounts. There will apparently be no more "Netizens"—every account created since Display Names rolled out has the last name "Resident."

Linden Lab has taken some steps to make sure Display Names aren't easily abused to grief or confuse people. For one thing, users can only change their name once a week, which should prevent people from constantly spoofing each other in chat or appearance. Also, in Linden Lab's official Viewer, Display Names are almost always shown along with those immutable firstname-dot-lastname "User Names." So, if you see chat from "Lou Netizen (lou.netizen)" can you be sure it's me, but if you see it from "Lou Netizen (somerandom.resident)" you can be sure it's not me.

I think it's great that Display Names give people more flexibility about their identity in Second Life, and I see tons of valid reasons to take advantage of the feature. (My personal one might be that I've never really cared for "Netizen" as a last name.) However, I do have some issues with the way Linden Lab has implemented Display Names.

First, there's just the sheer clutter. Now, by default, if you enable Display Names everyone has two names instead of one. That's supposed to mean that nobody can pose as someone they're not, but the reality means that twice as much screen and window real estate gets devoted to names. It's bad enough that tags over every avatar's heads are now two or three lines instead of one or two, but messaging and chat windows are now completely overburdened with name data, since everyone is identified by Display Name and User Name. You can control whether Display names appear over avatar's heads, but can't control how they're identified in chat or IM. To cope, you have to make chat and IM windows wider, obscuring more of the world, making the whole SL experience that much more difficult. Can't say that's won me over.

Another upshot is that every avatar seems to have three names now: a Display Name, a User Name, and a Full Name. (Technically there's kind of a fourth: a key, a computer-friendly universally unique ID that you have to use to, say, have a script pay money to an avatar. But I'm digressing a bit.)

Display Name	Winston Churchill (or whatever you like)
User Name	`lou.netizen` (immutable, always in first-dot-last lowercase)
Full Name	Lou Netizen (immutable, for new accounts last name will always be "Resident")
Key	d8bc7acb-07e9-413c-8ee2-371d945d6233 (immutable, not people-friendly)

At the moment, all this discussion has been hypothetical. Because the reality right now is that Display Names and User Names only work sometimes. Apparently, Second Life's infrastructure just isn't able to say what someone's User Name or Display Name might be at any given moment! So if you have a viewer that supports Display Names, you see lots of people walking around with the name "??? (???)" Which, believe me, completely undermines the idea that Display Names won't cause havoc. I've been "back" in SL with Display Name support for about four hours, and already have chat transcripts like this:

??? (???): are display names working?
??? (???): nah I can't see your name lol
??? (???): u r just question marks
??? (???): i know!
??? (???): grrr arrgh
??? (???): how r we supposed to tell who is who
??? (???): dont know
??? (???): bummer my display name is cool
??? (???): what is it
??? (???): ??? ??? hahaha!

Wow, that's super cool Linden Lab. No potential for confusion or griefing at all there, nope. And that's not just how the names get displayed in chat and IM windows, that's how they get saved in your chat logs. (For the record, there are three people talking in that transcript.)

Another result is that scripts that utilize a Second Life user's names—say for labels, messaging, notecards, logs, chat, payments, and other purposes—may now have to be adjusted to account for Display Names. A simple example would be a greeter, the kind of script that says hello to people when they arrive at a location. Generally you want those kinds of things to be friendly: it's more pleasant to have one address you by first name ("Hi, Lou—welcome to my store!") than by full name ("Greetings, Lou Netizen"!) But even if you want to go the formal route, not many new SL users are going to be thinking of themselves with the last name "Resident." Admitedly, "Greetings TommyB123 Resident!" might be friendlier than a colonoscopy, but it's definitely off-putting when you've gone to the trouble of setting your username as "Kewl McKewlio III, Esq." You'd like to be called "Kewl" because, obviously, you are.

So, Linden Lab has introduced some new LSL functions to get user's Display Names and User Names, while Full Names are now accessed using functions script previously used to get avatar names. (These now carry a "legacy" label, implying they'll go away one day.)

However, these new functions suffer from the same Display Name and User Name ignorance as the rest of Second Life. If you're writing a script that needs to use someone's Display Name, you can call llGetDisplayName()…and hope. Furtively. According to Linden Lab: "Either of "???" or "" is returned if the region is unable to return display names. This can happen even if display names are enabled on the region, especially the first time a given key is checked. At least one retry may be advisable." In English, the official documentation of these functions is that they don't necessarily work and don't return errors if they fail, so you should just keep trying them madly over and over again until, maybe, they work. Maybe. Keep trying.

Wow, that's just super cool, Linden Lab.

It gets better. The two functions to get Display Names and User Names (llGetDisplayName() and llGetUsername()) only work if the person whose name you want is in the same region (e.g. sim) as the script. If your script needs to look up someone's preferred name who happens to be in any other of Second Life's tens of thousands of sims (say, you to previous customers about a sale at your store, or you need the name of someone who just logged off) you have to use llRequestDisplayName() or llRequestUsername(). These operate via the LSL data server, which is a way of getting certain bits of data asynchronously. Basically, you fire off your name request to the greater Second Life "cloud," and then your script sits around twiddling its thumbs while SL takes its own sweet time to consider your request, puts it in queue, files its nails, and deigns to get back to you. When the name comes back, your script has to catch it, store, it, then pick up where it left off. Hopefully nothing important happened in the meantime.

Now, you'd think, what with the dataserver lookup functions having all the time in the world to get around to answering a request, they might work. Nuh-uh. Linden Lab's official documentation for the functions says "If the request fails for any reason, there will be no error notice or dataserver event." In other words, if there's a problem, Second Life is just never going to get back to you with a name. Ever. Nor is it going to tell you there was ever a problem: your request goes into a black hole. Poof. It's like that email to human resources asking about your missing expense check.

Experienced scripters and folks with a moderate programming background can get around these issues without much difficulty—although, depending on their script, it might be really annoying. For the functions that work in the current sim, scripters can use loops, semaphores, and/or timer events to fire off repeated queries until Second Life delivers up a name. These techniques mean the scripts put a greater burden on the servers, but—as any sim owner will tell you—it's not like anyone writing scripts in SL gives one whit about contributing to lag, right? For the data server functions, scripters will probably need to use timers to determine whether their requests have not come back, and fire off another one if they feel they've waited around too long. The upshot of all this is that writing simple, straightforward scripts that do everyday things in Second Life—greet people by name, thank them for a tip, whatever—are now significantly more difficult to write so they can address users by their preferred names.

Oh, and there's one more thing: "It may take up to 72 hours for a display name change to take effect. During this time scripts may report the old display name and viewers may see the old display name." So, even if scripts get a name back from these functions, it might not be the right name.

Wow, that's just super cool, Linden Lab.

…and We're Back

2010-12-07T11:51:00.004-08:00

Just so everyone knows, no, this blog has not been abandoned. Lou's Clues is about Lou Netizen in Second Life—and Lou Netizen hasn't had anything to write about since she logged out of SL at the end of October and only logged back in a day or so ago. But I'm back!

The hiatus wasn't some form of virtual protest, an enforced break from Second Life, or some other Serious Thing That Requires Rumination and Thought-Provoking Pondering. I was just off wandering around in the real world, and since I travel light I didn't take a computer with me. I put my SL trivia game on hold, pre-paid a bunch of rent on my parcel of virtual land, grabbed my passport and went toodling off to where chance and opportunity took me.

The prodigal Lou returns

Coming back to Second Life after a hiatus (even one as brief as a month) is a little disconcerting. I suppose I now take it for granted that things change quickly in a virtual world…but I guess I hadn't expected much change in my personal experience of Second Life. My little flying island parcel was still rezzed and intact, a bunch of other stuff has shifted around. And I don't just mean that everyone took down Halloween decorations and seems to have gone in for snow and holly.

The venue where I host my trivia game—[MonoChrome]—has moved to a new location and combined forces with New Trivia Monkeys. Although I haven't been to an event at either venue's new location yet (hey, I've only been back a day!), I'm actually thrilled to see a bunch of my friends pooling together to land a spot in a high-performance private sim, and so long as we can keep our landmarks straight I think it'll work out well for everybody. Trivy Isle has shifted around too—I found myself teleporting into the middle of someone's store instead of near the normal trivia event venue—which I think marks the second or third major rebuild in the last few months. And my personal SL has seen some departures: for instance, one of my long-time scripting clients has announced they will be leaving Second Life by the end of the year. (It's actually kind of happy news: they've peddled their design work in Second Life and elsewhere into a real world job doing 3D modeling.) But there's good news too—I got TP'd into a really neat in-world project last night, more on that in a bit—and it's great to start catching up with people.

I'll be starting up my Lou's Clues trivia game again soon, I just have to coordinate with Jez Oh and Sinnamon Sands at MonoChrome and make sure I'm not conflicting with the Buccaneer Bowl team trivia event. And, for the record, I did not write one single trivia question during my entire time away from SL, so I'll still be scrambling to come up with quality material. See, everything is back to normal!

Exeunt Philip

2010-10-20T13:19:00.003-07:00

Roughly four months after stepping back into Linden Lab as its "interim" leader, Second Life founder Philip Rosedale has left the Lab's CEO position. Linden Lab's chief operating officer and chief financial officer Bob Komin will take over the day-to-day leadership of the company while Linden Lab launches a search for a new CEO. Philip Rosedale will retain his position as chairman of the Linden Lab board of directors and will be involved in the new CEO search, but will now focus most of his energies on LoveMachine, the startup company for which he originally left Linden Lab back in 2009.

Philip Linden mugshots: old and new

Ironically, the announcement comes immediately after Philip Rosedale unveiled the new "look" for his in-world avatar: instead of the spiky-haired, chaps-wearing 2003-era look Rosedale had been sporting for years, now Philip will apparently be seen in-world—if he's ever seen in-world—with a spiky-haired, chaps-wearing look from 2010. The new look wasn't something he created himself; instead, it was created by inworld designer Mars Absent, who won a contest to give Rosedale a makeover. (Some of the other entries are available on Flickr.)

Rosedale's brief return to the CEO position has been marked by the mantra "Fast, Easy, Fun"—improve Second Life's performance, make it easier for people to use, and—of course—make it fun. To his credit, Rosedale did outline a number of concrete goals, many of which he promised would be done by the end of 2010. The Lab has made progress on a number of those goals: Display Names and Mesh uploads are currently in open beta and available to residents on the beta grid, the Web-based SL Marketplace seems to be up and running (although I cannot personally access it), the HTTP Assets project has been rolling out, and Linden Lab has been converting Viewer development to its new sprint-based Project Snowstorm in order to bring new features into the viewer at a faster pace. Linden Lab has also accelerated the pace of server software deployment, marking off three segments of the main grid—codenamed Blue Steel, Le Tigre, and Magnum—to test new versions of the critical SL server software out in, well, the real world. "We all feel like we are in a better place now, with a clearer sense of direction and more focus, and are ready to bring someone new into the mix as a leader," Rosedale wrote.

Where Philip's return to the CEO position a few months was generally well-received by the Second Life user community, the reaction to his departure is considerably less positive—even though it was never touted as anything more than an "interim" gig. Although it's almost impossible to take the temperature of the vast number of sub-groups that comprise Second Life's pool of active user, from where I sit the mood seems to be downbeat. After the usability disaster of Viewer 2, substantial layoffs at the company, the black eye dealt to the platform by the now-deceased Emerald viewer, folks were hoping for some good news.

There's a sense in some segments of the Second Life community—again, there's no real way to tell how widespread or well-informed they might be—that Linden Lab is paring itself down to be a more attractive takeover target. A few weeks ago, a bizarre rumour that tech giant Microsoft was looking to buy Linden Lab shot like wildfire through portions of the SL community—mostly the non-technical portions, since from the point of view of revenue and technology such an acquisition is highly unlikely. Linden Lab has also cut back its support offerings even for paid customers, which means the face with which it interacts with its most enthusiastic users, residents, and business operators is changing or disappearing entirely.

I'm not sure how much I buy the idea that Linden Lab is primping itself up for a sale. I'm not a technology investor, or even particularly keen on the whole virtual worlds marketplace, as it were, but I can only see two kinds of companies who would be interested in Second Life right now: video game developers, and social networking firms looking to literally add a new dimension to their work.

I don't think either scenario is particularly plausible. For game developers, the Second Life platform can't be particularly appealing: it doesn't support high levels of concurrency on a single sim (right now 50 people in the same place is a tremendous stressor), and—even with the addition of mesh imports—Second Life really struggles to have the highly curated look and feel of titles available for mainstream gaming platforms like the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Simply put, the idea of making the next hot MMORPG or multiplayer strategy game using Second Life is a hard sell, and most of the technology that gaming companies would be interested in—OpenGL in particular—is already available to them. Linden Lab's new marketplace for virtual goods might be interesting to someone, but adapting it to work with another gaming platform is probably about as difficult (or more difficult) than starting from scratch on a homegrown solution.

I also don't see an upside for social networking companies—and I include Google in that category. For as much as some people become completely enveloped in Facebook and YouTube, social networking is not about immersion: it's about making some of the diverse tendrils of interconnectedness in our real lives more accessible and immediate, and then getting out of the way. Although Google has in the past expressed some interest in 3D chatrooms—anyone remember Lively?—the company put the kibosh on that project and has moved on. Although I'm sure Google would love to have birthed Facebook and/or Twitter, let's remember that Google's primary business model is selling advertising. Second Life might have some 20 million user accounts at the moment, only 1.3 million have accessed the service in the last 60 days. (Check for yourself.) There are blogs that get more traffic than that, and they don't have a technology platform to deal with.

Would a company that develops games for social networking service—like Zynga—be interested in Second Life as a way to develop immersive games for sites like Facebook? I don't think so. Second Life doesn't run in a browser, and not a peep has been heard about the lightweight browser-based gateway to SL that Linden Lab talked about back in June. So a scenario like that puts all Linden Lab's value to a social network game company in a technology that, so far, the Lab probably hasn't developed and certainly hasn't deployed. And even if it does exist, it would still need those pesky data centers filled with sims.

Companies I don't think would have any interest in Second Life whatsoever? Big enterprises. The exception here might be IBM—which seems to believe the technology has potential for virtual meetings and user training—but I'd be willing to bet a lot of the fire is being taken out of those notions by things like high-definition multi-location teleconferencing solutions from the likes of Cisco. And Linden Lab did try to roll out a version of Second Life for enterprises, selling them their own sims so they could have their own little virtual worlds behind corporate firewalls. That seems to have gone over like a lead balloon, and was perhaps one of the reasons for the departure of former Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon.

I'm not a technology pundit, and even if I were inclined to read tea leaves I have no qualifications to try to use telepathic superpowers or ouija boards to try to figure out what Linden Lab plans to do with Second Life. What seems clear is that Second Life is nothing—absolutely nothing—without an invested, enthusiastic user community. And lately, they don't have much to be enthusiastic about except each other's resourcefulness and creativity.

Hunted Down

2010-09-28T16:13:00.005-07:00

One aspect of Second Life culture I haven't touched on in this blog is hunts, which so far as I can determine are one of the main activities in which many SL users engage—particularly if they're in the fashion-conscious set. Since dressing an avatar is something almost all SL residents do, almost everyone is fashion-conscious to one degree or another.

This store is participating in (at least) ten hunts. Which to choose?

The Game's Afoot

Hunts generally work like this: a group of folks who sell stuff in Second Life—which usually means they have stores and offer virtual goods—get together and decide to offer some items to visitors for free, just for turning up at the store. But here's the catch: the items aren't set out near the front door with a giant blinky sign pointing to them saying "FREE!" (Well, not usually.) Instead, they're hidden in a hunt item, typically a small virtual object secreted away somewhere on the premises of the store. When visitors turn up at the store, they typically have to wander around and cam through a bunch of nooks and crannies—thus taking a more-than-casual look at the store and its merchandise—in order to find the item. At that point, they can click it to receive their free item, along with a landmark to the next hunt location. Hunters can then teleport to another store to look for another hunt item hidden somewhere on the premises to get another freebie.

Hunts are many and varied, and there are usually several major hunts taking place on the Second Life grid at any given time—check out the SL Hunts blog for what may (or may not) be a reasonably comprehensive list. Some hunts are build around a particular theme, event, or season—for instance, someone who's not into scifi and robots might not want to spend time doing a cyberpunk hunt, but that same person might get into an all-shoes hunt or a holiday-themed hunt. Some hunts are short, involving maybe half-a-dozen stops, while others are huge and sprawling—I think I've seen descriptions of hunts with more than 200 stops.

You Can Be The Hunter…

Hunts bring together two things that drive the Second Life economy: residents' desire for freebies, and sellers' desires for promotion, sales, and traffic. Residents benefit because they can literally get something for nothing: just turn up, wander around for a bit, click a tiny object and presto! Free stuff!

From a hunter's perspective, hunts can be fun: you get to pop around to a bunch of locations in Second Life, pick up free stuff, then pop back to your virtual home or a sandbox to try things on and sort through all your goodies. If you don't want to follow a hunt from beginning to end, it's pretty easy to jump into most hunts at any point along the way. Almost every hunt has a blog or Web site showing who's participating and sometimes what sort of stuff has been set out. It's considered poor form to "cheat" on hunts—don't stand next to a hunt item shouting "It's here, people, right here! Behind the plant!"—but some blogs and sites often assemble lists of hints of where hunt items are hidden, which can sometimes make it easy to see if you're interested in a hunt, or, say, to visit only hunt sites in which you're particularly interested. Hunts can be a good way to see how different creators approach things in SL—invisiprims, hand-drawn versus photographic textures, animations, kookiness, realism, whether items can be modified, etc.—without having to spend money and potentially get burned. So free hunt items are an opportunity to learn about types of virtual goods.

For sellers, hunts are promotional tools. Businesses get exposure for their stores and merchandise—not just at their locations, but also in the myriad of blogs and Web sites that cover Second Life hunts and review hunt items—as well as traffic, a measure of how many residents visit a Second Life location. Traffic impacts how highly a location in Second Life is ranked in the in-world search feature: a place with lots of visitors is ranked more highly than a site with virtually no visitors, on the premise that if more people go there it must be good.

(The logic of this sort of primitive crowdsourcing to provide "search relevance" is specious—and things like hunts make it even more specious. I'll save the bulk of this rant for another time, but in some ways hunts are an example of in-world businesses gaming the Second Life search engine. Participating in a hunt is a way to increase traffic numbers and, therefore, be ranked more highly in search.)

It's not unusual for in-world businesses to participate in several hunts at the same time. Pop into any reasonably popular in-world store—they're easy to find because (amazingly!) they're ranked highly in search—and you're bound to see posters and placards and displays proclaiming the store's participation in this-that-and-the-other hunt. (Providing information about the hunt at every location is pretty common: promotion, promotion, promotion!) So sometimes you can pick up multiple freebies as a single stop.

The quality of items available in hunts varies widely: some aren't even good enough to merit the adjective "craptastic," while others truly are stunning pieces that, undoubtedly, the creators could be selling for hundreds (or even thousands) of Linden dollars. The vast majority tread a middle ground: they're neither bad nor particularly spectacular: some might tickle your fancy, while others will leave you non-plussed. It's pretty common to find a hunt item that has potential but has one or two major strikes against it: "Wow, this would be great if only it weren't fluorescent orange!" In cases like that, the creator probably makes a version of the item that's closer to what you (and probably lots of other people) want…but it's not available for free.

…or You Can Be The Prey

OK, so here's my thing (and you knew this was coming, this is Lou's blog after all): I pretty much hate hunts. It's not that I begrudge in-world businesses trying to get some exposure, or even mind picking up free items that, ninety-nine percent of the time, I have no use for and never wanted in the first place.

No. I hate hunts because of the way I feel when I try them: angry and stupid.

I actually got off to a positive start with hunts. Lette Ponnier (Buccaneer Bowl quartermaster and hunt goddess extraordinaire—catch her over at Virtual Fun & Brains) was kinda astonished at one point that I'd never tried a hunt. So one evening we set off for a few stops together in some hunt in…gosh, it must have been early 2009? We zipped from place to place, I was getting some free stuff, we were chatting, I was using a few explorer-Lou tricks to quickly scan through stores, and it was generally a good time. It must have been, because a few days later I went back to that hunt and did several stops on my own. I wasn't even terribly disappointed that none of the things I picked up were remotely interesting to me (I remember now: it was some Valentine-themed hunt I think: lots of hearts and lingerie and flowery crap mixed with the odd spiked leather bathrobe—mmmmmyeah). I was just goofing around, seeing what hunts were like.

But since then, I don't honestly think I've been able to complete more than a few stops on a hunt without cursing wanting to hit something—and, more often, I can't even get through a single stop.

First, it's the lag. One of the downsides when popping from place to place is that you have to download all the details—prims, textures, etc.—when you get there. And since lots of these places are stores that want to look supercool, they're festooned with prims and lots of high-resolution textures, scripted gimmicks, and masses of sculpts. Even on a high-bandwidth connection, popping into these places often entails several minutes of doing nothing but waiting for things to rez enough that I can step off the landing point, let alone start to look for a hunt item. (The way most hunt items work, you have to be relatively close by for them to render at all, so you have to wander around after arriving.) Adding to the lag are often a selection of hunters, dressed to the nines in their giant fake prim feet, blingy jewelry, talking pets (or talking tummys), multi-layered tattoos, tails, hugely laggy hair, and maybe a thong. Ironically, you can sometimes identify experienced hunters because their avatars are not over the top.

Second, it's the people. I don't intend to disparage "SL hunt culture"—whatever that may be—but, I've gotta say, outside of actual griefers, the people I routinely run into participating in hunts are easily among the rudest and crudest I've encountered in Second Life. Aside from scammers and predators hanging around popular hunt stops begging for money and/or virtual sex—I guess they got kicked out of infohubs and the you-sex-me-now clubs—I find hunt participants are routinely rude. I'm insulted for my height, the way I dress, for what I say (or for not saying anything at all), for pretending to be a kid, or for just existing. It's not just hunt participants: I've had a handful of store owners/managers get on my case, and one even banned me from her store and abuse-reported me to Linden Lab because I was taking "too long" at her stop. (In reality, I had been away from my computer for a few minutes while I waited for things to rez, but after that I legitimately could not find the hunt item. She assumed I was a griefer or copybot operator.) Considering how few hunt stops I visit—and how common these incidents are—I can't imagine wanting to be regular "hunter."

As a result, I've (repeatedly) sworn off participating in hunts. The sole exceptions I'll make are when someone I know recommends I check out a particular stop on a particular hunt, because he/she thinks I would particularly like the item. (For the record, I also go and check out for-sale items friends recommend to me.)

But I almost never get to see those items—which brings me to point three: sheer frustration. I'm not new to Second Life, and as a builder I have some pretty solid camera skills. But I gather "SL hunt culture" has found new and interesting ways to cheat at hunts—perhaps object searches built into third-party viewers, viewing things in wireframe mode (where you just see surfaces outlined without textures), or maybe other things entirely. So, it seems, many hunt stop proprietors try to be extra clever about where they hide hunt items—I've found them floating in mid-air 50m about a store, embedded in walls or other objects, shoved meters below the ground, and (once) carefully encased in a touch-enabled prim so the item couldn't be clicked. Others I never found at all. To be sure, plenty of hunt locations "play fair"—but some do not.

I love puzzles. I love figuring things out. But I deeply resent being gamed. Roughly 50 percent of the time I can go to a hunt location, spend half an hour legitimately trying to find the hunt item, and come up totally empty. If I can't crack a hunt location in the first ten minutes, my only prayer is usualy to wait at the location, hope other hunters show up, then pay attention to where they're standing before they vanish: that's sometimes an indicator of the hunt item's general area. Except, you know, when stores are in multiple hunts: then, it's inevitably the location of a hunt item I'm not trying to find. Or, you know, when the other hunters just give up too. The result is that not only do I feel like an idiot, but I feel like someone—the hunt organizers, or a store owner—is toying with me. And that makes me angry.

Maybe it's just me—maybe I'm the odd duck in the pond and everyone else loves hunts and everything to do with them. I have to assume that kind of profoundly negative experience isn't what Second Life businesses want their potential customers to have…but, then again, I suppose it doesn't matter to them. Second Life search doesn't care whether the time I spent at a location was positive or negative, only that I visited.

Lord, Keep My Memory Green

2010-09-07T21:21:00.004-07:00

As of 10 AM Pacific Daylight Time (which is also SLT) on September 8, 2010, Linden Lab will block all versions of the Emerald viewer from connecting to Second Life. Emerald users will need to either revert to an official Linden Lab viewer, or another third-party viewer that is still permitted to connect to the grid.

Linden Lab's move is the just the final nail in the coffin of the Emerald viewer—since I last wrote, the Emerald development team has abandoned its plans for a brand new fully transparent organization and scattered to the winds. Some of the former Emerald team have grouped together to launch new third-party viewers based on apparently-legit versions of Emerald itself—more on that below. Some other Emerald team members have apparently gone back to whatever they did in Second Life before they became players in the virtual world's biggest soap opera, and some of them—maybe, hopefully—have maybe gone away for good.

But don't bet on it.

How Did We Get Here?

Linden Lab removed Emerald from its Third-Party Viewer Directory for repeated violations of Linden Lab's third-party viewer policy, and also for violating the GPL, or GNU General Public License (v2).

I detailed Emerald's privacy violations earlier: the Emerald viewer baked personal information into user's avatar textures, and used its login page to hijack users' Internet connections to launch a distributed denial-of-service attack against a third party. It's not clear whether Linden Lab considers the infamous "datamine" database the Emerald development team constructed earlier this year to be a privacy violation, but certainly many Second Life users did.

Violating GPL means that the Emerald development team included proprietary, commercial software in the applications: the now-infamous emkdu image processing library. All third-party viewers are based on source code from Linden Lab released as open source under the GPL license, which requires all derivative software must, in turn, be licensed under the GPL. Since a commercial software component cannot be released legally as open source, it cannot be included in an open source GPL product.

Linden Lab acknowledges being "in communication" with the Emerald development team over these issues, and says it requested "several changes" to Emerald. According to Linden Lab, Emerald is being banned from the Second Life grid for not being able to meet those requests by September 3.

So what were those "requests?"

According to Jessica Lyons—a former member of the Emerald development team and coordinator of a follow-up viewer—Linden Lab demanded the following:

A fully transparent development process with open mailing list, online forums, and a publicly accessible source repository with public notices whenever code was committed to Emerald;
Publish a privacy policy that detailed all user data collected or stored by any version of Emerald that has ever been released;
Everyone with commit privileges to Emerald would have to be a Second Life user in good standing and a signatory to Linden Lab's third-party viewer policy, which means disclosing their real-life identities to Linden Lab;
Emerald would have to remove the commercial emkdu library; it also could not ship Linden Lab's own (similarly commercial) llkdu with Emerald;
Emerald developers Lonely Bluebird (aka Phox), Discrete Dreamscape, and Skills Hak must be severed from the project.

Ye Gentle Readers will notice that last request is not like the others.

Why Those Three

The Emerald development team has put out the notion that the denial of service attack embedded in the viewer's login screen was the work of one developer—the Emerald project lead, Fractured Crystal, aka JCool—and he resigned from the Emerald project as a result. So why was Linden Lab intent on getting three more Emerald developers off the project? In the world of anonymous avatar names—and where creating a new account and a new name is the matter of a few minutes' work—it's hard to be precise. But all three appear to be (or have been) involved in the creation of Second Life viewers capable of downloading and copying in-world content in violation of copyright, and which likely contained griefing tools and other exploits that could crash user's client, crash sims, and even getting users to connect to rogue sims.

Linden Lab's beef with the person behind Discrete Dreamscape is long-standing: Discrete posted copybot code to Linden Lab's own JIRA issue tracker system on multiple occasions—another Emerald developer, LordGregGreg Back, lauded it. Skills Hak is the mastermind behind the popular Second Life cyberpunk roleplaying community Insilico, but is also the main face beyond the Gemini CDS (Copybot Protection System), which purports to protect private sims from users with content-ripping viewers. And Lonely Bluebird—aka Phox—has reportedly been permabanned from Second Life on at least one occasion.

In addition to creating Emerald, several of the Emerald developers were also working on a viewer called Onyx, which Fractured Crystal positioned as a private viewer—not available to anybody!—that focussed on identifying vulnerabilities in Second Life so they could be reported to Linden Lab to be fixed…and, of course, detected for commercial purposes by Gemini CDS.

In May of this year, a snapshot of the Onyx code base from October 2009 leaked to the broader Internet. The code archive revealed two things:

Onyx was merely an elaboration of the content-ripping client Vlife.
Developers who had checked in code to Onyx at that time included Fractured Crystal, Lonely Bluebird, Luminous Luminos, Thomas Shikami, Tyken Hightower, Zwagoth Klaar, and Discrete Dreamscape. (At a later date, Skills Hak stated she was working on Onyx.)

By most (not all) accounts I've been able to gather—and, again, avatar names and online handles are slippery things—the VLife client was the child of JCool—aka Fractured Crystal, the former head of the Emerald development team. And VLife is apparently one thing that got his JCool persona permabanned from Second Life. (There is some evidence JCool was banned more than once, or at least commited multiple serious violations of Second Life terms of service, including accessing "god mode" administrative features reserved for Linden Lab employees.)

The list of programmers who checked code into Onyx is notable for three names: Lonely Bluebird, Discrete Dreamscape, and Skills Hak. Those are the only three (known) Onyx developers who were still on the Emerald team last month when Linden Lab removed Emerald from the third-party viewer directory. All the others had, by that time, apparently left the project. Maybe, anyway. Tyken Hightower was definitely hanging around with the Emerald development team at the time of the denial-of-service attack.

I could easily be missing something, but Linden Lab's "request" that Lonely, Discrete, and Skills leave the Emerald development team makes sense in this context: Linden Lab won't permit a third-party viewer in its directory that has developers who have worked/are working on content-ripping and griefing viewers.

According to Jessica Lyon, Discrete Dreamscape and Skills Hak withdrew from the Emerald project in response to Linden Lab's "request." Lonely Bluebird, however, refused, then singlehandly released a new version of the Emerald viewer (build 2600) with the ability to spoof its version and client ID. That version of the Emerald viewer was not vetted by whatever QA or release procedures the Emerald team had in place.

So what about those slippery avatar names—couldn't these just create new accounts and get back on board? Yes, they could. And that seems to be why Linden Lab is now requiring every developer who can contribute to a third-party viewer project be a signatory to Linden Lab's third-party viewer policy…and that includes handing over real-life identity information. This is a significant policy change for Linden Lab, which had previously permitted Emerald to be listed in the third-party viewer directory with only the project lead as a signatory to the policy.

Viewer Options

So what now? For all the variously illegal, copyright-infringing, and TOS-violating acts seemingly committed by substantial number of Emerald developers in the last year, there's not denying the Emerald viewer garnered broad support in the Second Life user community for its advanced features and capabilities.

For now, Emerald devotees aren't without options:

Imprudence: The most direct beneficiary of the Emerald debacle is probably Imprudence, which has been around for two years now. When Linden Lab initially announced its third-party viewer policy earlier this year, Imprudence announced it would cease supporting Second Life and continue on as an OpenSim-only viewer; however, they quickly reversed course and created a version that complied with the policy. Imprudence says they're still primarily focused on OpenSim, but the viewer does pack a lot of power-user features and, to my sniffing anyway, seems to have few or no ties to the Emerald development effort.
Phoenix: Phoenix: The Phoenix Viewer is currently the most direct inheritor of Emerald, and is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Phoenix is spearheaded by Jessica Lyon, the dev lead is Dimentox Travanti (the creator of the Dark Combat System (DCS) widely used in Second Life, and includes former Emerald developer LordGregGreg Back as the current Windows development lead. Former Linden Lab employee Vortex Saito is on board as well. The current builds of Phoenix are essentially the last "legitimate" version of Emerald, minus the emkdu library.
Emergence: Emergence is a Windows-only viewer, based on the final "legit" Emerald code base, released by LordGregGreg Back who initially characterized it as a stopgap measure to tide Emerald users over until the brouhaha resolved. It's not clear whether LordGregGreg intends to sustain Emergence now that Phoenix is available.
Ascent: Ascent aims to be a lighter client with features specifically aimed at content creators.

Of these viewers, Imprudence has the longest pedigree as a standalone project. I know almost nothing about Ascent; however, it—along with Emergence and Phoenix—only managed to get listed in the Third-Party Viewer Directory today.

Note that most of these third-party viewers swap code around—that's how open source works. For instance, Ascent contains features borrowed from Emerald, and features from Imprudence found their way into Linden Lab's SnowGlobe and from there to Emerald and other viewers—there are many other examples. Folks who want to be entirely free of code contributed by the Emerald development effort would be best advised to stick with Linden Lab's official viewers—and, even then, there's a possibility code contributed from Emerald via open source could make it in…particularly since Linden Lab is knuckling down on rapid viewer development with its new Project SnowStorm.

Who Do You Trust?

Some folks will shrug and think "Second Life is only a game, none of this really matters to me." And, for some portion of Second Life's user base, that's undoubtedly true.

However, let's remember that many people run real businesses in Second Life with real money. so the notion of who you trust with your Second Life account information—which, in turn might be connected to things like PayPal accounts, credit cards, and bank accounts—is less trivial.

And then there's identity. Just because you might around Second Life as a giant robot or a cartoon character of a 2m-tall vampire something doesn't mean there's no consequence if your privacy is compromised. Collecting IP addresses, associating accounts with particular computers and locations, and paying attention to how avatars behave and what they reveal about themselves, it's possible to track down many Second Life users in real life—and that creates a possibility for real harassment. How many Second Life users would be comfortable with their employers, co-workers, colleagues, family, or friends knowing everything they do in Second Life?

And, of course, if someone has your real life information, they might decide to break into your house. Or worse.

Green-eyed Monster

2010-08-24T17:48:00.002-07:00

If you have been using the Emerald viewer, for now we would encourage you to consider either one of the Linden Lab viewers, or an alternative third-party viewer.

—Philip Rosedale
Linden Lab (interim) CEO

Emerald is by far the most popular third party viewer in use in Second Life. Always the focus of some controversy, Emerald includes many power user features much-adored by its users, including a built-in radar, client-based animation overrider (which lets people set up their avatar's "body language" without using awkward in-world tools), performance improvements, and a large number of geeky and semi-geeky features that go well beyond the official SL viewer applications, or make things the standard SL viewers can do significantly easier. Oh, yes, and a preference to make female avatars' boobs bounce.

However, Emerald now finds itself at the sharp end of Linden Lab's pointy stick: earlier this month, Emerald was used to execute a denial of service attack against a rival's Web site, and it's not the first time the Emerald team—or a subset of the Emerald team—has shown a disregard for Emerald users and their privacy.

Linden Lab's introduction of Viewer 2.0—which has been poorly received by the Second Life user community—drove many of SL's power users to Emerald as an alternative. Many Emerald users are loyal and enthusiastic about the application, lauding its features and approving of the fact it's primarily developed by actual Second Life users rather than Linden Lab who, if Viewer 2.0 is any indiction, are significantly out of touch with how people use Second Life.

As an estimate of Emerald's popularity in the Second Life user community, Hamlet Au of New World Notes says "reliable sources" claim almost half of all users hours currently logged in Second Life are from users of the Emerald viewer. That's not the same as half of all SL users, but certainly, the more hours someone spends using SL, the more likely they are to appreciate and covet Emerald's feature set.

A disclaimer: I have never used Emerald. Like many Second Life users, I was interested in Emerald when I first heard about it, but decided to ask around before trying it out. One fine day in a sandbox, I happened to overhear one of Emerald's developers talking in open chat for a while…and decided I probably wasn't interested in anything with which that person was associated. Later I attempted to attend one of the Emerald teams open office hour events and was immediately barred from the Emerald Point sim. Watching Emerald's story unfold over the last few months has substantially reinforced my misgivings.

It is important to note that the Emerald viewer is not an enterprise that directly earns money for any members of the Emerald team. Although some Emerald developers and team members have in-world businesses and earn money in SL-related endeavors, they do not work on Emerald as employees of any company—Emerald is in essence a volunteer effort. Most of members of the Emerald development team are known only by their Second Life avatar names; it would seem they value their privacy.

EmeraldGate

Two weeks ago, users of the third-party Second Life viewer Emerald were unwittingly made accomplices in a distributed denial-of-service attack against a third party Web site. The apparent goal of the attack was to deluge the third party site with traffic, in hopes of taking the site offline or, potentially, racking up significant bandwidth charges for the site if the amount of material it served exceeded its hosting allotments. The attack was carried out using the Emerald Viewer's login screen—which every Emerald user loads by default when they start the application—and, of course, those user's Internet connection, whose bandwidth and Internet access was commandeered to perform the attack. Since thousands of people log into Second Life using Emerald every day—and account have each of those logins requesting over 4MB of data from the third party site—the amount of bandwidth involved was significant.

The attack was apparently engineered by Fractured Crystal, aka JCool, the "project leader" of the Emerald development team. The attack targeted the iheartanime.com site of Hazim Gazov, a admitted developer of copybot and ban-evading Second Life clients and reputed Second Life griefer.

The attack operated for about three days, and has since been removed from the Emerald login screen. Fractured Crystal has apparently fallen on his sword, issuing a contrite mea culpa and says he has turned over the Emerald project to other, unnamed, members of the Emerald team.

The Emerald viewer has not "yet" been barred from connecting to Second Life; however, the Emerald development team's use of the viewer (and its users) to launch a denial of service attack is in violation of Linden Lab's recently-implemented third-party viewer policy. Rosedale says Linden Lab will prevent Emerald from logging in to Second Life if the Emerald team can't live up to Linden Lab's standards. "We will not tolerate [..] development teams with a history of violating users' trust or disrupting their lives."

Emerald has precisely that kind of history.

Datamine

In May of this year, the Emerald development team endured its first significant privacy scare when someone—probably the same Hazim Gazov—managed to break into the ModularSystems Web site (until this week, ModularSystems was the entity responsible for the Emerald viewer) using a very poorly secured password. He obtained—and forwarded to Linden Lab—a database of information gathered from Emerald viewers, ModularSystems site visitors, folks who created Second Life accounts using Emerald, and in some cases visitors to Emerald's in-world base on the Second Life grid (Emerald Point) and a few other locations. This information was apparently collected for several months, and included users avatar names and keys (unique numbers) and IP addresses. Portions of that information have been made public.

For some Internet users, IP addresses aren't particularly sensitive: perhaps they get a different one every time they sign on, or they access the Internet from many locations. Folks concerned about their privacy go to some lengths to obscure their IP addresses. However, associating an IP address with a physical region (say, a metropolitan area) is very simple, and in some cases an IP address can be used to identify a user's physical location with a great deal of precision.

IP addresses are the cornerstone of Internet communications: if remote computers didn't have your IP address, they wouldn't be able to send you any information at all—email, Web pages, IMs, video. However, being able to associate IP addresses with Second Life avatar names and (potentially) in-world and real-life locations creates possibilities for all sorts of cross-checking, potentially being able to determine what avatars are likely to be "alts" of a single individual and perhaps determine where a particular Second Life user lives or works. This kind of correlative analysis has significant privacy implications.

The Emerald team defended collecting this information as a "prototype" of a system intended to identify alts of griefers on the Emerald Point sim. The Emerald team said the system was created and maintained by a single member of the team; opinion seems to be that person was Fractured Crystal/JCool.

The in-world techniques used to collect users' information are remarkably similar to some employed by Skills Hak's controversial Gemini Cybernetic CDS service, which purports to be able to block Second Life users employing copybot-enabled viewers. Skills Hak was—and continues to be—a member of the Emerald development team. Hak sells CDS independently of work with the Emerald project.

The emkdu Library

On July 14, Hazim Gazov—admitted developer of clients that violate Second Life terms of service—struck again, publishing substantial proof that the Emerald client was encoding details about user's computers into baked textures that comprise an avatar's visible base-layer clothing. The library behind emkdu is Kakadu, and it's commercial software: the idea behind the tagging was, apparently, to be able to identify "legitimate" copies of the Emerald viewer from third-party clients merely posing as Emerald, enabling Emerald to issue piracy complaints against any viewers that lifted the library for their own use. In some cases, the details used to make those tags included the viewer application's working directory on the user's computer. For some users, this information is innocuous, but for others it might include personal information about the user—for instance, their username or computer name. Gazov, of course, wound up building a tool to systematically scan for this information in-world.

Accounts vary regarding who on the Emerald team knew about this information being encoded in textures. Gazov claims the feature was implemented by Emerald developer Zwagoth Klaar, but other Emerald devs he contacted were unaware of the data being stored in baked textures. In his mea culpa, Fractured Crystal/JCool claimed the idea was suggested by "others" but had his support, and he still feels it is "harmless."

Fractured Crystal/JCool says the enkdu metadata has since been removed from Emerald, and will "never occur again."

Shenanigans

The emkdu metadata apparently generated a significant disruption in the Emerald development team. Two of Emerald's developers left the project during this time period, with LordGregGreg Back—now characterized as a "minor ex-dev"—specifically departing over the issue.

Some portion of the Emerald development team was distinctively annoyed at Hazim Gazov. Apparently during the second week of August—several weeks after Gazov's publishing information about the emkdu metadata—the Emerald dev team decided, "amid an atmosphere of pride and boasting," to target Gazov's Web site with a flood of traffic generated by Emerald users—and this effort to "show off" the size of Emerald's user base led to Fractured Crystal/JCool embedding iframes (in this case, kind of an non-displaying sub-window) within the Emerald login page that pointed to material in Gazov's blog. The embedded links were, in theory, loaded by any Emerald user to logged into Second Life; the items were intentionally selected to be the largest images in Gazov's blog, thereby maximizing the bandwidth that would be consumed every time an Emerald user logged in to Second Life.

The Emerald team described the actions as mere "shenanigans," and specifically denied it constituted a distributed denial of services (DDOS) attack. This description, apparently authored by Fractured Crystal/JCool himself, failed to hold water with the broader user community and, perhaps more importantly, with the Emerald development team.

Significantly, during this time the Emerald team announced picking up two former Linden Lab employees as members: the former Qarl Linden, who was one the Linden Lab render team and apparently responsible for implementing much of Second Life's beloved "sculpties," and the former Data Linden, who will apparently be helping out with Emerald support. It's not clear at this point if either of these former Linden Lab employees are still associated with Emerald in the wake of Fractured Crystal/JCool's "shenanigans."

Where Things Stand…Today

As of this moment, Linden Lab continues to permit the Emerald viewer to log into the Second Life grid.

The Emerald development team has announced they are reorganizing as a transparent, democratic operation that will have no single project leader. "All decisions, changes, and alterations to any code or anything at all, will be done transparently and democratically."

The Emerald team is in the process of setting up a new domain—emeraldviewer.net—to separate themselves from Fractured Crystal/JCool's ModularSystems entity. This probably means that most of the links I have made to the Emerald team's statements will break.

The Emerald team intends to re-apply to be included in Linden Lab's third-party viewer directory.

What To Make Of This?

Although I'm a mere human, I've tried to present the events and information above plainly. I can't claim to have an eagle's eye view, and, to my knowledge, I don't know any of the people involved personally. However, the Internet being the way it is, it's possible that scruffy-looking guy with the big-ass Dell notebook over at the other end of the coffee shop is one of the Emerald developers. He sure is scowling a lot.

But here's my take: Linden Lab is between a rock and a hard place. If a significant portion (half?) of Second Life's logged hours are from the Emerald viewer, banning Emerald from the Second Life grid will alienate a substantial number of Second Life's most ardent users—and, undoubtedly, that includes many content creators, power users, builders, and folks who run in-world businesses, successful or not.

On the other hand, if Linden Lab lets Emerald back into its directory of viewers that self-certify they conform to the Lab's third party viewer policy, then, clearly, the third party viewer policy—the subject of much drama and gnashing of teeth—is utterly meaningless. Emerald claimed it conformed to the terms of Linden Lab's third party viewer policy, and has now repeatedly and willfully violated that policy.

My guess is that Linden Lab and the re-constituting-itself Emerald development team will try to strike some sort of compromise, perhaps a "probationary" period wherein Emerald will still be permitted to connect to the main grid but will not be listed as conforming to the third party viewer policy until the viewer has a clean record for, say, a year, and the development team proves it can keep its new glass house in order. If I were Linden Lab—and I didn't want the entire third party viewer program thrown out the window—I would set conditions to any such probation. One of those conditions would be that Emerald must inform every user on every login that the viewer has violated Linden Lab's third party viewer policy, with a link with complete disclosure of the violations and what the Emerald team is doing to rectify the problems.

No matter what, I'm not going to be touching Emerald anytime soon.

25-Aug-2010

The Emerald development team says Linden Lab has issued a set of undisclosed requirements Emerald has to fulfill before it may re-apply to the third-party viewer directory.
I've made some minor tweaks to my text above to clean up some sloppy grammar, add a few links, and correct some production issues. I was working quickly, and Blogger isn't my idea of a proper editing environment.

Lines in the Sand

2010-08-17T22:23:00.012-07:00

Philip Rosedale has been back in the Linden Lab CEO seat for a few weeks now, after saying it was going to take an (understandable) few weeks to get his head back into the day-to-day of running Second Life. This past week, at the 6th annual Second Life Community Conference, Rosedale actually outlined a set of concrete goals for Second Life. You can watch a video of it; so far, Linden Lab has yet to publish much of this material on their site, although they seem to be getting around to it. Bottom line, Rosedale's remarks are the first time he's gotten specific about how Linden Lab plans to get real about its new "Fast, Easy, Fun!" mantra…you know, now that they have one-third less people.

How SL has been feeling lately
(Image from the maze under Silent Sparrow)

Some of Rosedale's goals are a bit technical and dweeby; others seem likely to have a significant impact on Second Life. Here are the ones I believe will have major, visible impact:

Mesh imports will enter public beta by the end of 2010: Like Second Life's existing sculpts, meshes are a way to model 3D objects in a more-organic way than using SL's geometric prims; it's the technology used in high-end 3D rendering programs and modeling systems. Like sculpts, however, creating meshes won't be possible in Second Life: folks will have to use external tools like Maya and Blender.
Users will be able to edit and make their own "display" names for their avatars, although underlying usernames will still be unalterable.: Right now, avatar names are fixed at sign up and unchangeable; users can only select from a small set of available surnames. Linden Lab apparently plans to get rid of fixed surnames and let users create a small number of personalized display names for their avatars.
Group chat failures and the huge performance hits when crossing between regions will be fixed by the end of 2010: So far as I can determine, group chat has never worked reliably in Second Life: attempting to talk privately to a group is as likely to pop up an error dialog that locks you out of the viewer application as it is to actually work. Lag crossing sims is a huge problem for many users, particularly, if they use vehicles like boats, planes, trains, cars, UFOs, or merely walk.
Linden Lab will be shutting down the Teen Grid: Right now, Second Life is ostensibly limited to people age 18 of over (although, of course, there's no real way to enforce that). Linden Lab now plans to let 16- and 17-year-olds onto the Main Grid.

Here are some geekier but still-important promises:

Linden Lab will be adopting a Scrum development process for its official viewer application.: Scrum is an iterative code development practice that's all kinds of hip these days. The upside of scrum processes is that they can adapt and implement changes fast, and pump out lots of incremental updates rather than big monolithic releases. The downside is that it's very hard for Scrum projects to see beyond the end of their own noses (e.g., the current "sprint") and they often suffer from poor quality testing and documentation.
Viewer updates updates will be background downloads: Right now every time Linden Lab wants to issue a patch, they force users to download a completely new (ginormous) viewer application. This ties in with Linden Lab's idea to release updates to the viewer more often.
Textures and other assets will be sent to clients directly from database servers, using TCP and HTTP: A long time coming, these changes should both reduce loads on individual sims and improve rezzing. It's already rolling out.
Linden Lab will eliminate new user orientation: After a substantial effort last year to revamp the "first hour" experience of new residents, Linden Lab apparently plans to drop new users directly onto the Main Grid at events and places they indicate they might be interested in.
Linden Lab plans to make an iPad client for Second Life.: Of course, once you make an iOS viewer for an iPad, the iPhone and iPod touch won't be far behind. And there's no reason something similar couldn't be done for Android and similar smartphone/mobile operating systems (webOS? MeeGo?) No timetable has been announced.

As with so many things in Second Life, Rosedale's remarks weren't without a misfire. Rosedale was initially going to phone in a keynote address from some summer vacation location, but that went over like a lead balloon and at the last minute Rosedale decided to address the convention in person.

So, why does any of this matter?

Meshes

Meshes are a more-sophisticated way to represent 3D objects than Second Life's built-in geometric primitives. Instead of geometrically "pure" cubes and spheres and tori, you can think of meshes as a bit like chickenwire: you can bend and twist it and flop it around, pinch it narrow or stretch it out, and paint textures (e.g., graphics) on it in fairly complicated ways. Where cubes and spheres are useful for some sorts of things, meshes are useful for more-organic shapes and forms—and, depending on the implementation, may finally enable virtual clothing that can move semi-realistically with an avatar—a mesh could stretch and bend with an avatar's motion, similar to the way SL's painted-on system cloths do now. Second Life's existing "sculpt" primitives are kind of simple meshes, with a maximum of 64 vertices. True meshes promise to offer a lot more capability.

Mesh technology is what gets used in high-end 3D rendering applications, and Second Life's professional content creators—mainly virtual fashion people, but plenty of others—have been demanding that Second Life support mesh for years. It looks like they're finally going to get their wish.

Meshes are a much-demanded feature from SL's content creation community, and promise to turn the content market on its ear, much the same way sculpts and flexies did before it—suddenly anything that doesn't use mesh will be old and tired. Meshes also promise to make content creation for Second Life even less accessible to everyday users, and an even more expensive and exclusionary proposition. This is nothing new: while Second Life does let people create basic primitives, nothing else can be made in-world. Want to make textures? You've got to use something like Gimp or PhotoShop and import them. Want to make animations? You need something like Poser. Want to make sculpts? You need something like Blender. Want to make mesh? Blender, Maya, Strata 3D, Lightwave 3D, 3ds Max. These applications are just examples, but they all have a few things in common, including requiring substantial investments of time, effort, and (often) money to use effectively. Once you've imported a mesh you'll be able to scale and position it in-world, but—just like sculpts—you won't be able to edit or change it.

Second Life's viewer software will have to be updated to support mesh; it's highly unlikely Linden Lab will support meshes in anything but Viewer 2 and its revisions.

Display Names

Although it wasn't mentioned in Rosedale's speech, Linden Lab is going to let avatars set and change their "display names," which they're heralding as a great new thing to improve "self-expression" in Second Life.

At this point, all avatar names are fixed and unchangeable: once you create your account, you can't change your avatar's name. (Although there are persistent reports if you pay Linden Lab an ungodly sum, they will change it for you.) Users also don't get to choose their last names: they're presented a short list of available names when they sign up, and that's all they get. (I wound up with "Netizen" because it was merely the least hideous of the bunch I was offered.)

Avatars will still have unique usernames that will be "easily discoverable" within SL, so ownership of land and items will still use the same mechanisms that are in place today, and anyone who, say, sets their display name to "Lou Netizen" can easily be ratted out as not really being me. If anyone bothers to look.

There are some huge plusses to this idea. First, it gives people full control over their names, which, speaking as someone with a lame last name, huzzah! The new system will also enable users to use Unicode characters in their names, so European and Asian scripts will all work—dunno about things like Hebrew and Arabic, but that would be neat. Folks who "partner"—the SL equivalent of marriage—can change their last names to match if they like, or hyphenate. And roleplayers will go nuts: those macho types in their wild west sim can all be "Quickdraw Aimes" and "Ace McGee" and other genre-appropriate things.

On the other hand, the potential for troublemaking is huge. It ought to be trivial to make chatlogs completely unreliable by changing your display name to someone you disagree with—or, even better, showing up somewhere with a "Linden" last name and wreaking a little havoc. The demonstration video Linden Lab has posted also shows other problems: when someone changes their display name, it changes system-wide, including other people's Friends Lists, radars, groups, you name it. That'll make finding people almost impossible: how are you to know that Lou Netizen is now Bumpersticker Foozlebrain?

Shutting Down the Teen Grid

Since 2005 Linden Lab has operated a separate Teen Grid, a smaller, separate Second Life for users aged 13 to 17. When a Teen Grid resident turns 18, their avatar (and their stuff, including any regions) gets transferred to the Main Grid. Under the new policy, 16- and 17-year-olds will be allowed to set up accounts on the Main Grid directly; existing Teen Grid account holders in that age range will be transferred to the Main Grid. Folks under 16 who want to use Second Life will be left out in the cold.

Rosedale expressed the opinion that the maturity rating system Second Life has rolled out in the last year or so—including the adult ghetto of Zindra (aka the Continent of Dildos and Bazooms)—is enough to protect minors from…inappropriate content and experiences in Second Life. Basically, there are three "ratings" for content in SL, as determined on a parcel-by-parcel basis. "General" is basically content appropriate for anyone, "Mature" is the vast majority of SL (most bars, malls, music venues, and other builds), while "Adult" areas of explicit adult and/or intensely violent content.

I'm of two minds about this. On one hand, I've kind of appreciated that a lot of the "adult" content has been sequestered out into the hinterland of Zindra: it's not my thing. It's not all gone by any means: there's plenty of explicitly adult content and intense violence still floating around on "Mature" and "General" portions of Second Life. It's not everywhere, but it's common enough that I'd be hesitant to turn a 16 year-old loose even in just "General" areas.

On the other hand, Second Life has tremendous potential for education. If someone had showed me SL when I was 13—you can make stuff! and script it! and run around like a freakazoid!—I'd have been all over it. The demise of the Teen Grid would seem to mean that educators can't bring students into Second Life as part of their classwork until they're 16. And then they'll be on the nowhere-near-as-sanitary-as-Rosedale-thinks Main Grid.

HTTP Assets

One thing I'm kind of psyched about it the HTTP Assets project, which is probably the geekiest thing here. When Second Life was being developed, a technical decision was made to use UDP to transfer things like animations and textures from sim servers to users' client software. UDP is a low-level Internet protocol that has several cool features: you don't need to do handshaking to setup communications with UDP: you can just start sending stuff. UDP has less communications overhead than the more-common TCP, but it also fails silently: UDP offers no guarantee that your data is going to get to its destination, get there in order, or get there intact. That's why some objects and avatars in SL always stay grey, some sculpts just appear as lumps, and some things never rez. The SL client literally doesn't know what it's missing.

Now, in some ways, using UDP was the right call in Second Life's early days: bandwidth was scarcer, and all the overhead of trying to confirm, resend, and reorder packets would just use a bigger chunk of what bandwidth was available for housekeeping. However, as the Internet has evolved damn near everything is using TCP, rather than UDP. TCP has all those housekeeping features UDP omits—data integrity, packet ordering, re-requesting bits that got lost, etc.—so switching to TCP means a bit more overhead but also fewer lump sculpts, grey textures, and, um, unfortunate ruthing.

Using HTTP on top of TCP to transfer texture and other assets is also a benefit. HTTP is the primarily high-level protocol used for the Web. ("High-level" here means that HTTP is actually built on top of TCP, which is a "low-level" protocol.) The Internet has kind of taken a mild interest in Web servers, which means there's a metric f*ckton of software out there designed to handle HTTP as efficiently as possible. Relying on HTTP means Linden Lab gets to benefit from all that optimization instead of having to write and implement (and optimize) their own system from scratch.

And it's not just servers: routers, firewalls, and traffic management systems—the kinds of things that actually make up the Second Life grid—have put a ton of effort into optimizing their performance for TCP and HTTP. So Linden Lab will benefit from all that work too.

Furthermore, letting viewers bypass the current sim and make requests directly to Linden Lab database servers for textures and other assets not only removes the local sim as a "middle man" for these transactions (hundreds of which are typically involved just TPing into somewhere), but also reduced overall load on the sim, making more cycles available to handle things like, or, say, CHAT! Bottom line: the HTTP Asset project promises to strike at the heart of lag, and I can get behind that.

And Viewer Too

A lot of these changes are going to require support in the Second Life Viewer…and, unfortunately, Linden Lab kinda laid a turd on the user community with Viewer 2.0. Sure, Viewer 2.0 has a few things going for it (I like the address bar) and a lot of under-the-hood get-ready-for-the-future things. The interface of the previous 1.x viewers was—well, I'll be polite, it was and remains deeply problematic. Viewer 2 improved on a few things but adopted a new interface model that is simultaneously more intrusive and less flexible than the previous model, with the result that many long-time residents refuse to use it. (I can think of many reasons not to use Viewer 2, but the chat interface—both new school and "plain text"—are dealbreakers for me, since I live in text.)

Linden Lab seems to have realized that response to Viewer 2 has been less than enthusiastic in many circles. "We've got a lot of improvements we want to make to the Viewer 2 user experience," Esbee Linden wrote in the company blog. "Some of the Viewer's workflows are cumbersome for some Residents and this has hurt Viewer adoption. We really can improve the Second Life user experience by rethinking the way our Viewer works and making it (and its features and functionality) faster, easier, and more fun for everyone."

So Linden Lab has announced Project Snowstorm, which will attempt to roll out updates to the official viewer on a regular basis—they're aiming for every other week—using a development methodology called Scrum. I make no secret that I am not a fan of Scrum, but I'll try to describe it: basically, developers work against a "backlog" of tasks in phases called "sprints." Items get cherrypicked out of the backlog and assigned to a particular sprint, then everyone goes whiteknuckle to get their sprint tasks compiling and checked in before deadline. Then the whole thing starts again.

The problem with Scrum as a management system is that it's very short-sighted: it has trouble dealing with issues that can't be neatly broken down into sprintable tasks. It also leads to what I call "trainwreck" development where everyone is pushing hard to get their work in under deadline—and that often means there's little or no testing of individual features (or interoperability), and nobody has time to document their work when the sprint wraps.

In the brave Internet world of perpetual betas and "we'll push an update," that's probably OK in Linden Lab's eyes: the bi-weekly sprints will be for early adopters and enthusiasts, not everyday users. But the large number of significant changes Linden Lab plans to roll out in the next 180 days, a larger number of people are going to have to be looking at those builds…and we might see why every Scrum project I've seen has been one of those aforementioned "trainwrecks."

Holy Moley

2010-06-30T16:38:00.009-07:00

Linden Lab likes to make much of the fact that the vast majority of Second Life is designed and built by its residents. A typical video game (like say the Halo or Modern Warfare franchises) or mainstream virtual world (like Lord of the Rings Online or World of Warcraft) provides all the content for the players: participants are essentially just consumers of content doled out by the games' developers. Sure, they can interact with the world and each other—and presumably have fun doing that—but for the most part, players don't get to create their own content, adventures, environments, or games, and have them exist in the virtual world for other people to find, interact with, or…uh, buy. Second Life is different: the vast majority of the "world" is created and built by residents. Some of these folks are stunningly creative and do phenomenal things with the tools at their disposal…but the reliance on resident content also goes a long way towards explaining why so much of Second Life is a boxy, garish, tacky, and amateurish.

However, not all of Second Life is built by residents: a surprising (and growing) amount is built by Linden Lab themselves and folks working for Linden Lab on contract. Some builds are purely to support the functioning of the virtual world, like in-world offices for Lindens along with welcome areas, infohubs, and tutorials for new residents. However, the Lindens also engage in some large-scale construction, including the prefabbed Bay City, the sentient-dolphin-themed continent of Nautilus, I guess some infrastructure on the adults-only continent of Zinda, and things like the all-new Linden Homes, which are essentially houses that residents can get as an option with a paid subscription to Second Life.

A lot of these things are built by contractors working for Linden Lab, known collectively as Moles. Any avatar with the last name Mole isn't a Linden employee, but they work on stuff for the Lindens and, often, public spaces in the virtual world. Some of these Moles do stuff for the Linden Department of Public Works, an inworld Linden-run group that's responsible for building roads, railroads, dams, and other bits of virtual infrastructure in Second Life's mainland areas. Until recently, the biggest Mole-constructed area I knew about was the Blake Sea, a large area of mostly ocean sims that represents a partnership between the Lindens and SL's inworld boating community. (I wrote a bit about it last year; the area sports a bunch of islands and above-and-below water builds.)

Now I've found the Moles hard at work, but it's not in some area of Linden land that's just appeared on the world map. Instead they're in the heart of very old mainland, including an area which has just been renamed the Sea of Fables.

The Sea of Fables on the Second Life world map
the island at the upper left is in the sims Celebes and Bohol.

The center of the area is a sim/island called Baffin, which is mainly notable for being the starting point/infohub for avatars transferring off Second Life's Teen Grid onto the main grid when they turn 18. However, to the northeast of Baffin is an island in the sims Bohol and Celebes. For as long as I've been in Second Life, the island has been empty of everything but trees: no buildings or other items around. But it hasn't exactly been empty: it allowed folks to rez things for a few minutes, which made it a frequent semi-private stopping point for folks trying out new items or just looking to play with a new vehicle or toy in an out-of-the-way place. (It's also the island a Zak Mohr's phantom horseman used to haunt for days on end.)

One day I popped into Celebes for a little bit of script experimenting…and the island had totally changed! The basic coastline is the same, but rezzing was no longer allowed, the terrain had been terraformed. and buildings and half-finished structures apparently based on the famous blue-and-white architecture of Paros were popping up everywhere!

The island in Celebes and Bohol getting a seemingly Grecian redo.

A quick glance revealed the Moles were responsible: the Lindens have apparently decided to turn an empty island into some sort of prefab Greek island. But then I thought: what if it's not just Celebes and Bohol? A quick fly over to Baffin revealed the Teen Grid transfer point was so far unchanged…but, wow, a ton of other things are changing. A new set of islands popped up in the ocean to the south in a sim called Mirtoon: not exactly Greek, but definitely tropical.

Taking in the sunset in a brand-new tropical island in Mirtoon

But just south of Celebes, I noticed a seemingly empty ocean sim called Baltic had an enormously high number of prims used. At first I thought maybe the moles were building something in the sky and would drop it down when it was read, but a quick look found the build was under the sea! Under the ocean floor, in fact! And it's not just any build: it's a genuine labyrinth under the sea floor that takes up the entire sim, and it's awesome! (Here's the entrance!) It's solvable (without cheating!), but you can grab a ball of twine at the entrance that'll help you out.

The center of the labyrinth under the sea floor in Baltic

Scouting around the neighboring sims, I found the Moles have been hard at work—although a lot of the work isn't done yet. I found an enormous treasure chest under the waves in the sim Ligurian:

Pandora's Box…quite possibly Second Life's most out-of-scale treasure chest.

Other new Mole-made discoveries in the Lindens' ocean sims appear to hark back to the Nautilus continent and Blake Sea, although the mythology might be a little different. Here are four undersea goddesses who are half human and half sea snake and, uh…may be muses? They seem to be carrying musical instruments, including—very weirdly—a banjo.

Four underwater goddesses in Sidra: one apparently carries a banjo.

Plenty of other things can be found: underwater coral caves, ship wrecks, bits of golden monuments, schools of fish, other scripted sea creatures akin to those in the Blake Sea, and more. Not all the new things are in the Sea of Fables tho: other Linden ocean sims seem to be getting attention. I found an amusing underwater Hippo monument elsewhere in mainland ocean.

Not in the Sea of Fables: the underwater hippo god.

I initially found all these in-progress builds before the recent turmoil in which the Lindens tossed 30 percent of their employees and brought Philip Rosedale back as "interim" CEO. The layoffs may not have impacted the Moles: I've seen work underway on the labyrinth in Baltic since the layoffs and the CEO changeover, so at least some Moles are still around.

I am puzzled what the Lindens plan to do with the island at Celebes and Bohol: it's littered with small apartment-like homes, which have (wrong-shaped) working doors and a few of which sport furniture. Are they just for show, or is Linden Lab planning to get into the rentals business with small units where people can set out a few bits of furniture and TP home to change clothes, without the commitment of paying for an actual Second Life premium account?

Another One Bites The Dust

2010-06-24T12:37:00.004-07:00

Barely two weeks after announcing Linden Lab was cutting 30 percent of its workforce and launching a new effort to create a Web browser-based entryway into Second Life, there's been another reduction in headcount: Linden Labs' CEO Mark Kingdon has stepped down, the Linden Lab founder Philip Rosedale coming back on board as "interim" CEO.

Perhaps this has something to do with the "emergency" that prevented Kingdon from making his scheduled address at the SL7B events yesterday, apparently forcing Rosedale to step in on short notice.

During Kingdon's tenure, Linden Lab launched a number of initiatives designed to bring Second Life to a wider audience and solidify the company's financial situation. Among these was a long effort to revamp the Second Life client software to make it more browser-like and friendlier to new residents: the result was Viewer 2.0, which—in addition to some serious faults and major privacy issues—seems to have rubbed most existing residents the wrong way. Linden Lab also corralled explicitly adult content off into its own continent in an effort to make the main grid more palatable to new residents and corporations, and reached out to enterprises with a costly and apparently ill-fated "behind the firewall" project designed to let corporations set up their own little virtual worlds for in-house purposes. Under Kingdon's direction Linden Lab also worked on improving the "first hour" experience to better retain people trying Second Life for the first time (it seems most people who try out SL never come back), and bought out an almost completely inscrutable Web-based virtual goods store, which it only now is getting around to integrating with Second Life proper.

Philip Rosedale originally stepped down as CEO in favor of Mark Kingdon back in April 2008, so my entire existence in Second Life has been under Kingdon's oversight. (I started back in August 2008.) I can't say what made him stand aside: maybe burnout played a role (as Philip noted this week, Second Life has effectively consumed over a decade of his life), maybe just a desire to do other thinks (like Love Machine?), maybe a sense from Second Life's investors that the virtual world had to grow up and move from being a world of glamazon barbies and virtual dildos to a place where people could Conduct Important Business. Kingdon came to Linden Lab as the CEO of digital advertising agency; before that, he spent over a decade with global auditing giant PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

Many long-time residents of Second Life seem to be welcoming Rosedale's return as a leader who fundamentally understands Second Life and will be able to steer it in the "right" direction…although there doesn't seem to be a ton of agreement on what "right" might be.

From my perspective, Rosedale's return to day-to-day management might be a technical boon for Second Life. Unlike a lot of CEOs, Rosedale has a coding background: way-back-when he developed the video compression technology that was originally at the heart of RealNetworks' RealVideo—Rosedale was Real's CTO before launching Linden Lab in 1999—and after stepping aside as CEO he was actively involved in Linden Lab's own open source Second Life viewer, SnowGlobe, focusing on the world map and (I think) HTTP texture loading. He's a geek. Second Life might be celebrating its seventh anniversary but the service and the platform still require heaps of technical know-how and tweaking once you get beyond the level of casual visits, and having a technically-savvy person in the top seat can't hurt.

I think it's important to note that while Mark Kingdon will likely now be pilloried and made a scapegoat for all that is wrong, awkward, and annoying about Second Life, the man cannot have worked in a vacuum. Rosedale may not have been CEO, but he remained chairman of Linden Lab's board and, until comparatively recently, was a regular in the Linden Lab offices. Linden Lab is privately held: although Kingdon did not have to answer to stockholder, he certainly had to answer to its investors…and Rosedale will have to do the same. I guess it's an open question whether those investors are content to continue to support, essentially, a giant virtual world inspired by Burning Man, or whether their desire to see Second Life finally go mainstream and become "the next big thing" will override other considerations.

Linden Lab has carefully not yet defined how long Rosedale's "interim" stint as CEO might last, or what steps the board is taking to find a permanent chief.

What If You Threw a Party and Locked People Out?

2010-06-23T13:25:00.009-07:00

This week marks the seventh anniversary of Second Life, which truly does serve to illustrate its place as a successful virtual world (rather than "online game")—seven years for anything like SL is pretty remarkable. To note the occasion, Linden Lab has rolled out a number of sims where residents can show off stuff and hold events on the theme "unexpected collaborations," which I guess is intended to highlight how SL can bring people together to create new things who otherwise might never have crossed paths.

Linden Lab Chairman Philip Linden aka Philip Rosedale
(not) speaking at Second Life's seventh birthday kickoff.

To start the festivities, Linden Lab held a kickoff event at a "four corners" amphitheater build they set up: sims are 256m&exp2; squares, so a four corners is an attempt to great a large meeting space with the center of the stage being at the corners where all the sims meet, with the hope of spreading the load of all the avatars across multiple sims. The featured speaker was to be Philip Rosedale, aka Philip Linden, the founder and former CEO of Linden Lab. He's still the chairman of the company's board and apparently still has a hand in how Linden Lab operates, but toodled off last year to work on a new project called Love Machine, kind of a whuffie application for businesses, I guess.

So. I've always shied away from Second Life's official events. I figure I'm not a paying customer so I have no business being there. But, dammit, I do rent virtual land, I am responsible for some small amount of virtual currency changing hands, and I've been mulling whether it would be irresponsible of me to consider taking on actual paying work in Second Life, so I figured—what the heck. The the timing for this event kinda works out, so I'll try to go. I was particularly curious what Philip might have to say in the wake of Linden Labs' recent announcement of a 30 percent cut in staff, the poor response to Viewer 2.0 from existing residents and power users, and persistent reports that Second Life was getting ready to move into 21st century 3D technology by enabling meshes, a more organic way of handling 3D rendering and object creation than the standard geometric prims that can be created in the Second Life client.

So, I got to the event site 25 minutes before the keynote was scheduled to start. Mind you, that was after repeatedly being unable to get into the four-corners area for some time because the sims were at capacity. Once I got in, it took me over 30 minutes to traverse about 40m to get into the amphitheater area, at which point Philip's presentation was already apparently underway. However, from comments of avatars around me, I picked up that he was attempting to give the talk using Second Life's in-world voice system, which is sort of a VoIP solution powered by Vivox. Or, at least, it would have been, if anybody had been able to connect to the voice system. I've almost never been able to get Second Life voice running even just to listen to things, but apparently other people around me weren't able to connect to the service at all. Since Philip's avatar was typing, I struggled to get within 20 meters of him, figuring maybe he was entering the text of prepared remarks as open chat. We trivia folks do that kind of multitasking all the time.

Philip wasn't. By the time I got within 20 meters, this is the chat I picked up:

[2010/06/21 11:21] Philip Linden: Thank you all!

Wow.

By this time, I had been there nearly an hour and the amphitheater hadn't rezzed. The screenshot above is taken from after Philip concluded his remarks; the "Away" avatar hover-sleeping in the background is the famous Torley Linden.

Linden Lab has posted a transcript of Philip's remarks for anyone who wasn't able to attend or hear them. And I'm guessing that's pretty much everybody.

Philip Linden did address the layoffs, essentially saying that jettisoning some 30 percent of the Lab's employees is cost containment that puts Linden Lab solidly in the black. According to Philip, the Lab's focus going forward will be one shoring up Second Life's usability and operational fundamentals: getting the core of the Second Life experience to operate smoothly and very well.

Philip made another seemingly impromptu speech at SL7B today, stepping in for Linden Lab CEO M Linden who was dealing with an "emergency" of some sort. I was not able to be in-world. A transcript can be found at the same page above, including an explanation of his avatar's technicolor crotch.

All I can say is that if the SL7B "celebration" is any indicator, Second Life has a long way to go to get its fundamentals in order. I was able to connect to SL for the event using a (very) high bandwidth Internet connection. (I didn't have "more bandwidth than God" but I for darn sure had more than most Internet users.) I used nearly every trick in the book to reduce lag on the client and my avatar's load on the server. I arrived early. I made every effort to attend and participate, and went to lengths that non-technical Second Life users would not be able to do.

And for all intents and purposes, I was completely shut out of the event. It was a waste of my time, and a glaring illustration of the failures and limitations of the Second Life platform.

Happy birthday.

Everything Ode is New Again

2010-06-19T21:00:00.011-07:00

One of the first truly impressive sims I found way back when I first started exploring in Second Life was a place called Ode. I'd seen some neat builds and found fun things to do, but Ode was the first sim that really impressed me as an attempt to push past the limits of what most people did with Second Life and truly make an environment. Gorgeous fields of flowers elegant trees, a few simple understated buildings…and a massive cliff that dropped precipitously off into a crashing sea.

Ode served as at the home and showroom for Second Life jeweler Random Calliope; his WorthWhile jewelry gallery was down at the base of the cliff, if you want to go look for it…but in the sim itself you didn't see glossy high-fashion photoshopped ads, models, exhortations to buy-buy-buy, join groups, get updates, participate in hunts, or any of that. Just a fields, trees, a simple house. If you wandered you'd find some stables, a gazebo, and a fountain.

Across the (new) fields of Ode

You could just to to Ode to chill out or cavort through the fields—plenty of people did, and the sim is a popular spot amongst SL photographers. If you looked around, though, there were lots of details like an in-world book detailing some of Random Calliope's jewelry pieces, commissions, and design approach. There are also free pieces to be had: butterflies around the sim sometimes give you bits of his "Ode" set if you catch them, and sometimes a shooting star also bears gifts.

Ode has recently received a substantial makeover, apparently at the hands of the very talented Saiyge Lotus. All the signature elements are still there—the poplar trees, the butterfly house, the fields, the stable, the cliff, the gazebo…the butterflies and shooting stars. Collaborators Elizabeth Tinsley and Saiyge (and others? I don't know) are apparently planning to keep Ode around: they've moved their sim Oubliette next door, so the stores Evie's Closet, Balderdash, Frippery, and No Strings Attached are now part of a coherent two-sim landscape. It's gorgeous, and deserves your attention.

But WorthWhile Jewelry is gone; if you look around, you'll find a note saying due to "changes in both life and the his ability to create his art within the Second Life environment," Random Calliope has moved on. Not left SL, apparently, but put the jewelry thing behind him.

So here's a little backstory: The occasion of my second or third trip to Ode was also the instance in which I did one of the rudest things I've ever done in SL, albeit unintentionally: I busted into private areas of the sim, thinking it was some kind of puzzle or game. A brief account of my adventure appears in an old entry in this blog, along with some screenshots of a very young Lou Netizen.

What I never really told anybody about that excursion was that I found Random Calliope's workshop, kilometers above the "public" level of the sim. Random Calliope makes virtual jewelry, but he does it within some rather unusual parameters, perhaps inherited from very early days of Second Life—after all, his account dates to 2005. He uses pure prims. No textures, no sculpts: just the plain-and-simple Euclidian shapes, coloring, transparency, and prim properties you can create with Second Life's built-in creation tools. And the results are absolutely stunning: these aren't the block squared-off shapes slammed together that seems to make up so much of Second Life's architecture and prim-based builds: these pieces are organic, balanced, swirling, living, and elegant, and also seemingly simple while encompassing a heap of complexity and technique.

Most people, presented with a Random Calliope piece and told it's "just" pure prims that anyone in Second Life can make, will be intimidated and potentially put off even trying to build jewelry. (I know; I've done this very thing to many of my friends.) But being able to peer into Random Calliope's workshop that day back in 2008, see a piece in process and partially assembled…it inspired me. I knew it wouldn't be easy, but I thought "I could do that!" And so began my fascination with happy little tiny prims.

I visited Ode many times since then, often bringing friends to hang out or just to show them the big cliff (it eventually got a path you could walk down all the way to the sea). But I never went trespassing again. Maybe a year later, sometime last in the autumn or winter of 2009, Ode changed a bit. I was just sitting on the cliff, I think writing trivia questions for Lou's Clues, when I noticed something had changed at the bottom. I cammed down there…and nestled under a stream at the base of the cliff were a pair of hidden rooms. And one of them looked like it might be a workshop.

Of course, I immediately flew down there, and while there was no explicit security set up, I didn't go inside. Instead, I move my Second Life camera through the workspace and zoomed in on what I found. Although I'd since racked up a bit of experience with my own tiny prims, seeing bits of Random's work laid out, in process…well, it's humbling. Since he's apparently set SL jewelry behind him, here are a few glimpses of what I saw:

In-process pieces by Random Calliope

Check out the gem being built in the top right of that first image: most SL jewelers make gems by slapping a texture on a prim or a sculpt. In that gem, every facet is a precisely crafted prim with each face's shine, transparency, and color carefully set. I've tried building like that; trust me, it's not easy. Other pieces—and remember these are not finished—are distinguished not just by the elegance of the prim work but by the complexity of their design. Anyone who has used SL's built-in building tools knows that achieving curves and twists like that running through such a large group of objects is not simple.

I only met Random Calliope once, very briefly, well over a year ago one time when I teleported to Ode for a little quiet time. He was speaking with another avatar, apparently a long-time friend, but he was very gracious and welcoming to me…and I suppose had forgotten or didn't care that I'd inadvertently busted into his workshop not very long before. I mentioned his work had kind of inspired me to start building in Second Life, and he said that was perhaps the best compliment he could receive.

Older and maybe wiser, at the bench in Ode where I took my first profile pic

So, all my best, Random. I hope Ode continues to be a beautiful place for some time to come.

If you go to check out Ode, you owe it to yourself to check out Frippery and Balderdash—Elizabeth and Saiyge aren't slouches with the jewelry thing themselves, and some of Random's work is still available via Frippery.

"History is the Ship…"

2010-06-18T13:00:00.005-07:00

Buccaneer Bowl XVIII

In June, the monthly Buccaneer Bowl team based trivia contest followed only a few week's after May's event, but as always was fabulously run by Lillian Shippe, Lette Ponnier, and Thornton Writer, and had $10,000L up for grabs for Second Life's trivia all-stars. Although the Buccaneer Bowl has its own momentum in the SL trivia community and is well established, please excuse me a brief description: where most trivia events in Second Life are every-avatar-for-themselves, the Buccaneer Bowl is based on teams of three or four avatars working together to get the highest scores…and the biggest share of the $10,000L prize pot on the line every month.

Frivolous Corsairs in June: Lebn Bucyk, Rain Ninetails, and Your Humble Author

The Buccaneer Bowl is divided into five rounds of five questions each: these are free-for-alls: the host asks a question, and all players try to get their answers in ahead of everyone else…oh, and they also try to get those answers right. The first three correct respondents score points (and money!) for their teams, and the team with the highest accumulated score at the end of each round gets to compete alone in a tougher type of bonus question that can add even more money to their collective total. The total prize money onhand for the Bowls is $10,000L, and the way the rules work out a single team could lock down as much as $4,000L of that: on a four-person team, that's $1,000L each, which isn't bad for an hour-and-a-half's trivia-playing in Second Life! However, more important than the Lindens is the bragging rights: you win the Buccaneer Bowl, you've got some serious mojo in the SL trivia community for a month!

Since the inception of the Buccaneer Bowl, I've been playing with the Frivolous Corsairs as much as possible: we're one of the founding teams of the Bowl and are very pleased to continue supporting it. Our original members are me, Rain Ninetails, Nia Jinx—we can't always pull the whole original team together, but we have always been very pleased to have Special Guest Star Corsairs™ on our side on several occasions! And for June, we managed to field three of our four original players…and we did great! The Corsairs managed a second place finish (yow!), with the many-times Buccaneer Bowl champs Triviators earning another well-deserved victory overall. The Triviators aren't unstoppable—although they did manage to win even when I was there to hinder them from within—but they sure set a high standard, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Following up on last month's adorable shot of Rain and Shale Nightfire as...the most underfoot avatars at the Buccaneer Bowl, I offer another shot of Shale and Rain from this month:

Small is cute: Shale Nightfire and Rain Ninetails at Buccaneer Bowl XVIII

Shale and Rain can run around my ankles anytime. I wish I'd managed to get a screengrab of the now-rarely-seen Maelstrom Janus (an original member of the Trumpton Trivials) with them: he was running around as a bear for the Bowl, and was right next to Rain and Shale for a minute: I just didn't get my camera in gear.

Just Married

I gather folks have been forming online romantic relationships in Second Life since about 10 minutes after the grid first came online. Although it's not part of my personal Second Life, I think I can understand how it happens: SL is full of smart, interesting people, and there can be something strangly compelling about being in the same virtual space with other avatars: rather than just being names on a screen, the can express themselves through actions, dress, and their environments. So it's not surprising some folks make very personal connections in SL.

The happy couple: December MacIntyre and Piaget Hax

Last week I was pleased to be able to help celebrate the virtual wedding of my friend Piaget Hax to December MacIntyre. Pia is one of those folks I probably would never have met in real life, but who I've greatly enjoyed getting to know in SL. His experience of Second Life is almost entirely different than mine: he participates in an ongoing role-playing group with apparently very-elaborate stories and events, makes and exhibits fractal art (which—oddly enough—is narrative, rather than merely collections of pretty pixels), participates in other virtual worlds (like EVE), and shares music with me that I probably wouldn't stumble across on my own. I actually met Pia at a music event—an inworld performance duo called Alchemy Unplugged, if I remember—and we've talked and pal'd about a little bit: I recently TP'd him to see a sky-maze a friend is building for fun.

Although I've yet to make it to an actual Second Life wedding ceremony—either they happen when I can't be there or take place in areas I cannot go—I was thrilled to be able to share in a little of Pia and December's celebration. I know their relationship has extended beyond SL—Internet technologies let things like that happen!—and I've never seen Pia happier. It says an awful lot that Second Life can have that kind of positive impact on peoples' real lives.

…and Still With the Virtual Music

2010-06-15T16:10:00.002-07:00

Second Life (and real life) have been keeping my busy lately, so I haven't had a chance to catch as many in-world music events and performances as I would like. My list of acts and artists I'd like to mention is still long, and the list of performers and venues I'm still trying to get to seems to grow longer every week. But I thought I'd step back from sort of the singers, songwriters, and guitar-pickers I normally enjoy to highlight things that aren't normally on my radar: classical music and (yup) big band dancing.

Young Zeid and Izabela Jawrower

There are plenty of classically trained musicians in Second Life, but few try to bring a classical concert experience to the virtual world. A notable exception are violinists Young Zeid and Izabella Jawrower, who perform challenging and very high-quality live classical music in Second Life. In real life, the avatars are driven by Xi Yang and (I believe) Izabela Spiewak, who perform and teach in the real world. Izabella plays violin and sometimes accompanies Young Zeid on piano; Young primarily plays violin and viola, and sometimes accompanies Izabela on piano. I've seen two performances, and while I'm no expert on classical music, I do know a little about technique, tone, and musical performance and I gotta say both shows were exquisite.

Young Zeid and Izabela Jaworower at Music Island

The material Young and Izabela isn't quite the old saws of the classical repertoire: sure, there's some Beethoven and Bach and Mozart, but programs I've heard have included Gorecki, Kresler, Bartok, Elgar, and chinese folk tunes, and introduced me to Astor Piazzolla, a fabulous Argentinian composer who is the current man in my musical world that's the best thing since sliced bread. Aside from the audio quality—the duo have obviously put a lot of thought and equipement into creating a performance space, properly micing their instruments, and getting a good sound—the selection of material and the performances are just superb. Both Izabela and Young have wonderful tone and fluid control of their playing, and truly put their hearts into the music. I admit thinking one of the pieces they selected was going to be a tired old bit of repertoire, but they surprised with their interpretation—it wasn't jarring or unusual, but stunning in its simplicity and overall sincerity. They found the original beauty in it and set it out gorgeously. These two who aren't just phoning in a rehearsal session: they're top flight performers giving intimate recitals. Highly recommended.

The War May Be Over, But The Music Lives On

So how's this for unusual? I'm going to write up a dance club…but I don't dance. And the club is set in an era before my time, in fact in a time when my parents weren't even glints in their parents' eyes. And the club is dedicated to an organization in a country where I'm not a citizen.

And sadly, it isn't even around in Second Life anymore.

Last dance at Second Life's USO Club

One of the sad facts of the Second Life DJ'd music scene is that tons of DJs play current hits, classic rock, and dive into lots of electronica and blues and hiphop and house and party music and rock and metal and alternative and novelty and whatnot, very few people do jazz or big band any justice. The USO Club in Second Life was one of the few places where you could count on an era-appropriate set of tunes from the 30s and 40s plus an audience that knew the music. Set in a reproduction of a WWII aircraft hanger, the USO Club held regular events were folks would put on their 1940s duds and swing to the oldies. The USO Club recently shut down in SL—and I, for one, think the grid is poorer for it.

Fellow trivia fiend Starla Gurbux has given the USO Club a touching sendoff in her blog. I'm sad to say I only made it to a few events at the club, and, not being a dancer, a lot of the focus of the events was lost on me. But every time I went the music was fabulous, the people were great&mdashI never failed to have several fun conversations with music nuts—and the vibe unlike anything else in SL. (In fact, I don't think I was ever hit on at the USO Club, which is unusual for any dance event where I'm busily holding up a wall.)

I hope the 40s music fans who supported the USO Club can find a way to get a new venue going and some events happening—I'll definitely try to be there.

Changing Tone for a Moment…

I apologize that this is yet another in what seems to be an endless series of catch-up posts. I think I'm going to have to change course a little with the Lou's Clues blog, and try to write shorter, contained pieces rather than the more developed bits I seem to prefer. One of my pet peeves about the Internet is that so much of the content available online is so shallow. That's particularly true for Second Life: it's rare to get any real analysis, background, or depth to content: most of the time it's "Hey, look, here's a picture of my avatar, aren't I great! Whoot!"

I'll still try to do longer pieces when I can, but in the interests of keeping the blog active, I'll be trying to pepper in some shorter things too.

Heads Roll at Linden Lab

2010-06-09T22:15:00.001-07:00

Linden Lab, the company that develops and operates Second Life, has announced a significant restructuring that will see the firm jettisoning about 30 percent of its employees and shift focus towards making Second Life a browser-based, social-networking-aware experience that does not require dedicated client software. Here's the official statement.

A few Second Life watchers have begun collecting lists of Linden Lab employees known or believed to have been given their walking papers today. (Crap Mariner has a thread on Plurk; New World Notes also has a piece collecting information on the layoffs.) I'm not deeply familiar with Linden Lab's internal structure, nor am I on chatting terms with any Linden Lab employees; however, it appears the layoffs include several long-time employees well-known in the user community (though not necessarily well-loved) and some executive-level folks. Reports also have Linden Lab closing their Singapore office (this just a couple months after opening an office in Amsterdam to some horn-blowing).

Linden Lab reportedly has about 300 employees; a 30 percent reduction in force therefore translates to about 90 people. Some lists of layed off Lindens circulating at the moment have over 100 names.

Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon—aka M Linden—positions the restructuring as a way to "generate efficiencies:" focus the Lab on things Second Lifers care most about, cutting away distractions that crept in during a "two-year investment period" in which the Lab tried to solidify the platform and improve the "overall user experience."

Here are the things Kingdon believes the Second Life needs to be focusing on:

A Web browser-based interface with Second Life that will enable users to tap into the virtual world without dedicated client software;

Increased integration with social networking services (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, etc.);

Second Life Marketplace, it's virtual goods market that Linden Lab is set to roll out any day now (actually, I think the big inventory migration was today) from XstreetSL;

Mobile applications so users can interact with the virtual world.

That's all very buzzword-compliant. About the only things missing are "tablet" and "cloud."

Kingdon notes that these changes are being made while Linden Lab is making bank on Second Life: in his own words, the company has "a strong balance sheet, and our revenue will reach record levels this year." We're to believe this isn't about money, but about change, and the employee reductions will come from software development and customer support through consolidation.

SL in a Browser?

I think a browser-based gateway to Second Life is a great idea, and, honestly, when I signed into SL for the first time almost two years ago I was stunned there was not a Web-based interface to portions of the SL universe.

So far, the Lindens have said nothing about the scope of this new browser-based initiative: they might be viewing access to Second Life via a Web browser as a kind of "SL Lite" that lets people "see" the virtual world and perform basic tasks like, say, dressing their avatar, buying and spending Linden dollars, and getting to concerts and in-world events (like trivia games). Or (I doubt it) they might be looking at converting SL to a Web-only virtual world. We don't know yet.

Either way, a browser-based version of SL is almost certainly going to rely on WebGL, an emerging 3D technology based on OpenGL (upon which Second Life is based). In theory, WebGL—in conjunction with a n HTML5-savvy browser—could be used to put something like Second Life inside a Web page: avatars could appear, prims could be rendered, textured could be painted on the prims, and to a degree those items can be made to move and respond to events. However, the idea of replicating the entirety of a Second Life viewer application using WebGL and, say, JavaScript and Ajax is beyond daunting: I'm not a OpenGL developer, but my read of the specification and technical capabilities of the standard—which is still being birthed—is that it's quite a lot less sophisticated than SL's existing technology. I think it's safe to assume that a Web-based version of Second Life will not be as rich as the experience offered by current client software: I imagine it will be like taking Second Life back to 2007 on a slow computer.

Why would someone want to access SL from a browser? Because you don't always have a computer. Just this week I didn't have the bandwidth or computing resources to log into SL for a few days. Without the client software, I can't receive inventory items (folks were sending me messages in notecards), pay my rent (can't click a rental box or send Linden dollars to an avatar!), or communicate with folks I only know in-world. (Linden Lab used to make something called SLim, an instant messaging-only client developed reportedly developed by the company that provides SL's in-world voice service. I never tried and heard horrible things; Linden Lab killed it off in March.) Being able to use a modern Web browser (say, a guest account at a library or a friend's house or whatever) to attend a meeting or take care of a quick bit of business would be great.

A lightweight browser-based interface to Second Life already exists: Ajax Life. It's not an official viewer, and you get to decide if you trust it (or someone in the loop) not to steal your password. You can't move around or see the world in Ajaxlife, but you can talk to people, manage inventory, and spend money. Ajaxlife was originally written by Katherine Berry when she was 15; it was defunct for a while Berry is now 18 and Ajaxlife is back. Berry starts at MIT soon, and is also apparently an Emerald developer as well as the creator of the megaprim.sl Web service.

If I were to guess, I'd say we're at least 18 months away from an initial version of Second Life using WebGL.

Mobile? Social networking?

How does a virtual world extend to social networking and folks' mobile Internet experience? Through messages, updates, and transactions. These can go both ways: from Second Life to the rest of the world, or from mobile and social networking users to Second Life.

Folks who are comfortable having their avatars act as public ambassadors for the platform could link up their social networking profiles and pump their in-world activity to the world via social networks like Twitter, Plurk, Google Buzz, or (if they're OK with associating their real-life identity with their avatar) Facebook. Linden Lab would love to have tens of thousands of avatars out there posting public messages like "I just bought a dragon in Second Life!" or "Everyone come visit my Second Life flying island!"

The other way around, a Second Life application for (say) Facebook could let folks keep up with their in-world friends, and maybe engage in some actions that can only happen in-world at the moment: sending instant messages, managing inventory, making payments, or perhaps deciding to buy that dragon as a gift for your friend with the flying island.

Mobile applications could work the same way: it might be neat to use your Android phone to message with Second Life avatars, or participate in a virtual meeting via text or voice. Similarly, it might be fun you use your iPhone or iPad to shop for stuff for your avatar while you're riding the train home.

I think these are all fine ideas. However, services and applications like this must give residents total control over their privacy and how information is shared.

Linden Lab has been riffing on people hooking up their avatars with their real-life identities lately: Linden Lab's banner ads on the Internet feature side-by-side portraits of Second Life users and their avatars; these stem from "A Few Good Avatars" contest (on Facebook!) that invited residents to post portraits of themselves next to their avatars. A one-off marketing ploy, or a deeper sense of the RL/SL integration Linden Labs wants to focus on? After all, the main reason Facebook has a "no avatars" policy is because advertisers and "partners" don't want to track information about assumed identities: they want information about real people with credit cards. So does Linden Lab.

Some months ago Linden Lab redid the Second Life Web site to include a "dashboard" for residents. I've never understood this dashboard, but every Second Life resident has a Web-accessible profile—here's mine—and Linden Lab already has forums and a currency exchange system and an online marketplace (which, again, I've never been able to figure out). Linden Lab recently bought Avatars United, a social networking service supposedly designed explicitly for avatars rather than real people. (Not just SL avatars: avies from other systems were welcome too.) Nothing much seems to have happened with that; I know of no one actively using it, and a few who tried were griefed.

And How Is This Going to Happen?

So here's my take on the Great Linden Layoff of June 2010:

The idea of a browser-based "SL Lite," along with mobile and Web-based applications that let folks manage and keep track of their Second Lives without a full-blown client application seem like good ideas.

However. Linden Lab has rolled out a new Viewer with key features that have remained fundamentally broken for over two months and is widely reviled by its existing user base. Linden Lab bought XStreetSL almost a year and a half ago and is just now starting to launch its Second Life Marketplace. Linden Lab relaunched the Second Life Web site and has failed to address major usability issues. The Second Life grid has not been stable—in addition to, oh, let's call it a major meltdown back in April—public status reports are rife with outages and my own and admittedly non-representative experience of my friends is that getting into and around the world is getting more and more unreliable. Content theft remains a huge issue to many in-world businesses, and Linden Lab hasn't outlined any ways its planning to make the world a safer place for the folks who are, um, actually building it.

How is Linden Lab going to keep Second Life running, address all these issues, evangelize and advance their platform (mesh imports are supposedly coming any second now)—and take on these bold new initiatives—with 30 percent fewer hands on deck?

My bet? They aren't.

Bowler and Wiser

2010-05-22T11:53:00.007-07:00

Buccaneer Bowl XVII!

This past weekend was a biggy for Second Life's trivia mavens: it marked the 17th monthly Buccaneer Bowl! The team trivia event was as always marvelously captained by Lillian Shippe, Thornton Writer, and Lette Ponnier, $10,000L was still up for grabs, and a tremendously fun time was had by all. The often-champion Triviators managed to pull off another well-earned victory (congrats!), but the Trumpton Trivials—who let's not forget won the very first Buccaneer Bowl—gave them a serious run for the title, keeping up with them right to the very end of the tournament. We also had a bunch of new faces at the Buccaneer Bowl this month, which is great! I'm thrilled the contest continues to attract new players, and a lot of the newly-formed teams do very well!

Of course, there's also a lot of switching around within the established teams to account for players' availability. I almost always play for the Frivolous Corsairs—I sat in with the Triviators once, tho (which was a hoot!) and combined forces with half the BFSCs one time for a pretty solid game. And this month we got to add another BFSC member to the Corsairs' roster of ü supercool top-notch guest stars: we had the always-stunning Shale Nightfire along for the ride! One odd result was that we were (by far)) the, um, least vertically extended team at the Bowl! Everyone's seen enough pictures of me by now to know I'm no lumbering gigantasaurus. But here's our Captain Rain Ninetails and, even more dainty, Shale!

Shale Nightfire and Rain Ninetails at the May 2010 Buccaneer Bowl

We did pretty good! We won one of the five rounds and managed a fifth place finish overall, and with only three players on the team the prize money went a little further! But for more important than the money—to me anyway—is how the Buccaneer Bowl has become such a solid foundation for the SL trivia commumity. It really is an open, fairly run event that welcome all comers. Sure the competition is tough, but there's a lot of money at stake! And what's fabulous about it is how everyone gets along, works together to make the event a success, and has a great time. It's a great example of how a virtual community can come together and create something…well, more than the sum of its pixels.

Lillian's Second Rez Day!

Speaking of someone who is more than the sum of her pixels: yesterday was the ever-wonderful Lillian Shippe's second rez day! Rez days are like birthdays in Second Life—they're the anniversary of when someone's account was created. Some people let rez days pass by quietly, and sometimes there's a big bash (and sometimes people get surprised)…but Lill's was going to happen with style. So we all put together as hip an avatar as we could—this is more of a challenge for me than most—and…worlds collided! Dancing was done! Kungfu fighting commenced! Avatar attachments were repositioned! And everyone had a blast!

Folks reading this blog probably only know Lill as one of the quartermasters of the Buccaneer Bowl. You know, the one who might be dressed up like a Kabuki mime, a pig-headed dwarf, a (ahem) girafified version of herself. (Did I promise I wouldn't bring that up again? I can't remember. Too late now!) But Lillian is also one of the people who has truly embraced what it means to, well, I guess live in a virtual world. No: I don't mean Lill spends 24 hours a day in Second Life and never interacts with anyone who isn't an avatar. Quite the contrary. But Lillian has more than embraced the transformative and creative potential of Second Life—she's thrown herself headlong into it. Impossible fashion, impossible beings, impossible settings running the gamut from sheer beauty to the grotesque to the I-can't-look/I-can't-look-away. Check out Lillian's Flickr stream for a sense of what she's up to lately…it's kind of hard to believe, but even harder to describe.

And the turnout was fab! An hour into the event Lill ordered everyone against a wall. We were expecting to be mowed down in a flurry of bullets, but instead she took our picture! Not everyone who made it to the party is in the shot—some had to leave early, and some arrived later—but it gives you an idea of how many people were there at any given moment. I think I got all the names right—more images are available from both Lill's and Mako's photostreams…including some kungfu action.

Lillian Shippe's Second Rez Day (click to enlarge!)

Back row: Thornton Writer, Lucinda Dollinger, Honey Potez, Juke Badger, Circe Falta, JoshuaStephen Schism, Mako Kungfu, Leroy Horten, eleanora Scribe, Jackal Ennui, Achariya Maktoum, Blue Revolution, Billy2Times Krams, Jewels Carminucci, Rach Borkotron, Cinna Xaris, and Cygnoir Blanc
Front row: someone short, Lette Ponnier, Allana Robbiani, Thurina Susa, Lillian Shippe, and Metro Voom

Here's Looking at Lou, Kid

2010-05-12T13:25:00.009-07:00

Ye Deare Readers may recall that I like making tiny prims and kinda dabble in creating jewelry in Second Life. Most of my projects are custom one-off items, sometimes commissioned by people as gifts for their friends or groups or partners, and sometimes things I do on a whim as a rez-day gift or a spur-of-the-moment thing. ("Uh, what's this for?" "Happy Wednesday!") Most of the time when I turn over jewelry to someone, it is literally out of my inventory: those objects are unique in Second Life and only exist in one place. The original recipient can usually give one of my items to someone else, but they can't make copies or sell it; similarly, once I give an item away, it's gone: I don't have it anymore. I like to think that those objects have a little bit of virtual value for being unique.

Anyway: people are always asking me if I have a store or if I sell items, and for well over a year I've been saying "Nope!" or "I can't be arsed." But now that's starting to change.

Beginning this weekend, a Lou Netizen jewelry item will be on sale in Second Life to anyone who wants to buy it. However, the proceeds aren't going to me: the item is being sold to benefit the ALS Association. It's a swanky vaguely steampunky monocle festooned with happy little tiny prims:

Oooh tiny prims! See the little teeth on the gear?

Buyers will get four versions of the monocle: one with a flexi chain and one with a nifty (non-flexy) ribbon, both in silver and gold variations to complement outfits. They come with modify and copy permission, so buyers can change them around into unrecognizable disasters…or just make the chains/ribbons longer or shorter if they like. The red lens is in theme with the ALS event.

The monocles will be on sale for $100L at the ALS Vigil, an in-world event at Second Life's Nonprofit Commons on May 16 running from 5-7PM SLT. The vigil coincides with a real-life candlelight vigil in Washington D.C. the same day. Other exclusive items from other makers will be on sale to benefit the ALS Association; I believe the items will also be available for purchase after the event. The monocles are exclusive to the ALS: they won't be available from any other source. The ALS Association also has an inworld office in Heath Commons.

Update: for a limited time, the monocle and other items exclusive to the ALS event are available at the ALS Association office in Heath Commons. Look up on the second floor.

So why did I bite the bullet and decide to put stuff out for sale? Part of it was timing: this seemed like a manageable project and it landed in my lap in a gap between other major bits of work. But a significant part of the appeal is that any sales go to support a good cause. I don't personally suffer from ALS, but I know someone in real life who is living with the condition. Trust me when I say it's no fun.

What is ALS? Formally it's amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, but it's better known as Lou Gehrig's Disease. It attacks motor neurons: people with the condition lose voluntary control of their muscles, tend to develop uncontrolled movements, and eventually suffer from muscular atrophy. Famous folks with ALS include, of course, baseball's Lou Gehrig, but also physicist Stephen Hawking and musicians like jazz great Charles Mingus.

There is no cure for ALS, but research is ongoing, and the ALS Association is all about supporting research into treatments and cures as well as supporting folks with the disease. In the last ten years the ALS Association has put about US$50 million towards ALS research, and has developed an extensive care network for sufferers and their families. Of course, the ALS Association is an American organization, but the research benefits everyone.

I know the business of in-world charities in Second Life can be a dicey one: while the American Cancer Society's Relay for Life effort is very well-established in-world, the mostly-anonymous nature of Second Life means just about anyone can say they're collecting money for a charity, then just take the Linden dollars out to their own PayPal accounts. (This isn't a terribly uncommon tactic at infohubs to prey on new residents.) I'm satisfied the ALS Association presence in Second Life is legit, but feel free to do your own homework. Worst case, you're down $100L and up four extremely nifty monocles.

So now stuff I've made is for sale. Armageddon must be nigh.

Pack o’ Pastiche

2010-04-21T17:34:00.006-07:00

I know I just did a bit of an unthemed catching-up post, and while I don't intend to make a theme of assembling blog posts from unrelated bits of what I do in Second Life, I'm perfectly willing to run with it as a leitmotif. The way things are going lately, if I don't put things together this way, they may not get put together at all. Perhaps Ye Gentle Readers can forgive me.

Buccaneer Bowl XVI!

The sixteenth (yes, I can count this month!) Buccaneer Bowl was held this past weekend, as always hosted by Lillian Shippe, Thornton Writer, and Lette Ponnier. The bowl is so established at this point I'll just hit the highlights: open chat trivia with teams of three to four players competing for $10,000L in prize money. This month real life continued to play a little havoc with established team rosters, with several teams shifting their lineups and the many-times champion Triviators (hey! they even one won with me on board last month!) not fielding a team at all…even though it turned out at the last minute that three Triviators could make it. This month I was back with the Frivolous Corsars, with captain Rain Ninetails, our muscle Lebn Bucyk, and Special Guest Corsair AnaMaria Quintessa:

Frivolous Corsairs in April: Rain Ninetails, me, AnaMaria Quintessa, and Lebn Bucyk

This month the competition was relatively tight, although I am personally miffed that I crashed during a question in the first or second round where I probably would have scored some points for our team. The winner this month was a new team "Three Non-Blondes," with frequent Triviator captain Lotus Ceriano with Darren Belisamo and Jeanette Avedon. The Corsairs managed a sixth place finish—although we did win one of the five rounds!—but perhaps more importantly, Ana made us awesome personalized super-intimidating muscle shirts, so we had an actual team uniform! The shirts not only intimdate our enemies, the Buccaneer with Heaving Bazooms on the back distracts other teams whenever we move our shoulder blades.

Corsairs Muscle Shirts™ complete with Buxom Buccaneer!

Zoom Zoom

People don't come to this log to see weird tricks you can do with the Second Life viewer software…but…pfft, I think y'all can handle it.

On odd property of the Second Life client software—all recent versions, so far as I know, including third-party viewers—is that they have rather odd zoom capabilities. I normally use these features when I'm making jewelry or other tiny items, but they can also be used to good effect over relatively large distances. As some of you know, I recently started renting some virtual land and have been working on building my own personal flying island. (Why a flying island? Well, why not?). One afternoon I invited AnaMaria Quintessa to see the work-to-date, and she immediately asked "Do you own that box over there too?" And I was immediately befuddled because, in my default graphic settings, I can't see anything in the sky near my island. But Ana's settings were evidently somewhat more rigorous, because when I cranked up the "draw distance" in the Second Life viewer software—essentially, how far you can "see" in Second Life—there was a bubbly cube of some sort hovering off in the distance, undoubtedly a skybox belonging to some other landowner or renter. So…being totally normal Second Life residents, we flew over to check it out.

So, turning around to look back at my flying island, this is the "normal" view you would see in the Second Life viewer if your draw distance was large enough. It gives you a sense of how far away my island really is: that falling-apart dome on top is about 30m tall, with the entire island being about 60m from top to bottom:

AnaMaria and Lou, eyeballing Lou's distant construction project from a neighbor's rooftop.

Now, standing in the exact same spots, here's the same vista using a neat trick of the Second Life client's zoom capability:

AnaMaria and Lou standing in the same place, with
Second Life viewer's bizarro zoom kicked in.

Pretty cool, huh? So if people are wondering how I can watch what's happening around me and still pick out details of things far away from me…there's a glimpse into my process!

Oh, and no, Ana is not normally that short. She was getting ready for a "dress up like someone else" event.

Blink and You Miss It

Although it was before Lou Netizen ever rezzed on the grid, I gather that back in 2006 or 2007 Second Life was for a time a hip place for major companies—somehow, they got the idea it was important to have a "presence" for themselves and their brands in the virtual world. Reuters opened a virtual news bureau, movie studios would do themed sims to promote summer blockbustery releases, television shows had their own areas (you still see avatars with the last name "GossipGirl," and an L Word sim was big for a while), and big-ass companies like Siemens would buy a few sims and hire a virtual world consultancy to make them a cool build so they would have a "presence" in SL. I think I saw Armani and Nike in SL; for a while I think some real-world real estate companies were operating, too.

That didn't really work out so well for a lot of the companies—amazingly, most people don't willingly teleport themselves into boring 256m² 3D advertisements, even if they might be able to pick up a free virtual t-shirt. However, one of the corporations in Second Life did catch my attention: Gibson Guitar. They had their own private island kind of shaped like an electric guitar body, with buildings for pickups and knobs and whatnot. It was a decent build, and although they made some effort to engage with the virtual community—they were "endorsed" by a lot of in-world virtual performers—I never saw anyone else there when I visited, nor saw any in-world events put on there.

However, one thing Gibson Island did have going for it? Guitars. In a surprisingly astute move, Gibson apparently hired in-world luthier Myriam Beck to make virtual versions of many of its iconic guitars. Gibson probably could have deferred some of the cost of its sim by selling these guitars, but instead it gave them away for free. A lot of guitars in Second Life amount to little more than a photo plopped on a prim, but Myriam's builds are stunningly good, faithful to the design and proportions and scaling of the instruments—even down to details like internal bracing on acoustic instruments.

But now, like so many corporations that tried out Second Life, Gibson is gone. I'd kept popping back hoping Myriam had made them an ES-175, and a few weeks ago I materialized over an empty ocean sim labelled "The Former Home of Gibson Guitar." Now me and the red ES-135 Myriam made for them have the blues.

Outside Myriam Beck's shop, with the outstanding ES-135 guitar
she made for the now-departed Gibson Guitar in SL.

Radio Goo-Goo

Hot shades, hot sand, and a hot rod.

Somewhere in the process of getting all rockrr-chicked for those guitar photos I found some funky sunglasses I'd picked up in my wanderings, probably last summer when I had a brief desert island phase. I thought it might be fun to find a racecar somewhere and take a few pictures…and immediately thought of one of AM Radio's builds that consists of almost nothing but an immense, dry desert lake bed and a zoom-zoom automobile.

One fact of Second Life is that there really isn't very much space. Sure, there are tens of thousands of sims, mainland "continents," innumerable private islands, expansive "oceans" and more…but most of the time these things only seem expansive because of that "draw distance" thing I mentioned above. As I type this in the real world, I can look out a window and see a mountain peak that's easily 100km from where I sit; however, although there are a couple exceptons, in Second Life an avatar can at best see 512m away. And that's if they have a powerful computer with some significant graphics hardware: a typical Second Life user probably only sees 128 meters or less from their current position. Past that, things are invisible: you see a sky, horizon, and maybe distant water, but none of the intervening buildings, strip malls, badly textured foliage, and the inevitable plywood cubes. In terms of real-world scale, all the "real estate" of Second Life is pretty tiny: I think last I saw, all resident-owned land in Second Life (including mainland) totalled less than 2000km²—that's about the size of Mauritius.

So one of the reasons I like AM Radio's builds is that—through a little bit of megaprim trickery—manage to evoke a sense of space and distance. For instance, check out the hills in the AM Radio build "Into the Sky:"

AM Radio's "Into the Sky"—a lot of the action is underground.

You can't walk (or fly) to those hills: they're purely a scenic backdrop. But they're a backdrop that works within the context of Second Life: they seem like three-dimensional hills off in the distance. This isn't a trick you can use effectively on much smaller scales—although folks who make skyboxes like to drop images of landscapes or cityscapes outside "windows" to create a different feel—but I admire that the builds try to offer something besides the default client-generated horizon and sky…that even works for people without massive graphics cards.

Yes, I am tall enough to have spraypainted my name on a train, thank you very much.

Of course, AM Radio builds often have other neat features: for instance, in "Surface," you can paint anything you want on the side of a freight train.

Just a Little Scrapbooking...

2010-04-13T22:05:00.012-07:00

Ye Gentle Readers may have noticed I have been posting fewer snapshots taken as I meander about Second Life. In part that's because I haven't been wandering as much. Between running my Lou's Clues trivia game and trying to figure out what I'm doing with (gasp!) my own teeny parcel of virtual land and attempting to deal with the new realities of Second Life being created by Viewer 2.0 and Linden Labs' third-party viewer policy…I'm exhausted. Oh, and of course, getting regular doses of trivia. Have to keep the training regimen going if I wanna be a contender!

But I have been taking some snapshots, I just haven't had even a loose thread to weave them together into a coherent post. So…guess what? Not having that thread is my thread! I hope Ye Gentle Readers will forgive me if I sit down, set out some tea, pass around a few snapshots, and tell little stories around them.

Up on a stone wall, watching the snow fall…

Back in December I had an odd coincidence of requests from no fewer than five friends and clients: could I send them a picture for the end-of-year projects they were putting together? Some of these were Web pages, some were for one-shot in-world events or parties, and others were for things like virtual memory books. I'd been meaning to try to make a new profile image anyway—little did I know Viewer 2.0 was going to come along and make a mess of things by displaying everyone's profile photos as 1:1 squares rather than the 3:2-ish format they had been using for years—so I seized the opportunity and tried to do something vaguely winter-y. You know, since it was winter at the time. I wound up in an AM Radio build "The Quiet: Further Away and Further Apart" that features a cabin, a frozen pond, snow-covered hills, and some winter forest…along with a low New England-y stone wall. I set myself up on it and tried to get some pictures together. This is the picture I liked best—as Lillian Shippe might say, it has a little bit of "narrative" to it—but it's not one I wound up sending off for any of those projects, or using as a profile picture.

Lou and Them in the snowy wastes

This image of me standing on a giant ant is straight from Second Life—although I admit to tweaking Windlight settings to get something resembling shadows, I didn't convert this image to monochrome or do any image editing. I took this snapshot at a fashion store called Deetalez. The store is under the snow and trees and hills—in fact, when most people go there they probably never realize there's an above-ground setup. I believe I was there because I'd been directed to a nice coat or sweater, only to find it probably couldn't be modified to fit an avatar of my small size. I idly cammed around and noticed there was a ground level to the sim: I quickly figured out how to get there, and went exploring. Unlike the store, there was absolutely no one else around, which was kind of a shame because it was a nice winter build. With giant ants. And that was a plus.

Walking down the glowing path to…is it a molecule? Or a spaceship?

This year, Second Life had a winter festival of sort around the end-of-year holidays, but there didn't seem to be a sim like Wintermute that captured my imagination. But somehow I wound up at Pteron. I have no idea what Pteron is about. It's certainly not holiday themed. It's aways night. There's a half-sunken, green-glowing city. There are puzzles and clues and weird vehicles and collapsing rooms. And teleporters that take you to apparently different worlds—they're really just separate builds say 1000m up in the air, but they might as well be separate. Like Omega Point, Pteron is the creation of a Japanese designer—Kei514 Flow—and while Pteron has no store or overt purpose to the place that I've discovered, I still have much more to discover. And Pteron is gorgeous, stunning, abstract, challenging, and ever-changing.

Another view on Pteron

And now for something completely different. For the last several months, I've been "provisionally" using Plurk, a Web-based Twitter-like social networking service with a kinda unique horizontal-scrolling timeline. Unlike, say, Facebook, which doesn't want anything to do with "fake" account belonging to avatars, Plurk seems fine with the idea, and even has World of Warcraft and Second Life set up as "locations" from which folks may hail. Some folks in the SL trivia community have turned into heavy "plurkers," and it's an easy way to keep up on events and communicate amongst SL friends without having to log into Second Life.

It turns out Second Life's trivia crowd are not the only SL people using Plurk! Imagine that! Through Plurk I ran into Carter Denja, who with partner Stormy Aluveaux creates Pocket Gardens—low prim, small gardens that people can use in rentals or other space-constrained areas to bring a touch of nature to often-sterile Second Life builds. But that's not all! Carter DJ's, often offering up world music at the Bollywood-themed Madhu's Cafe. I kept hearing amazing things about these sets, and via Plurk I realized that these weren't the gesture-and-bling fests one normally encounters at Second Life clubs—these were smart, savvy people, a lot of them creators and designers, all of whom can hold up their end of a conversation, and all of whom obviously had smart tastes in music. Normally I'm about the last person to be into DJs an dancing, but…I gotta say, I was sold about ten seconds after I arrived.

Carter Denja and Stormy Aluveaux at the old Madhu's Cafe in February

The music is outstanding—Carter really knows her stuff—and I always seem to have having three or four conversations at once while I'm there…I've even picked up scripting jobs from folks I met at Madhu's. And part of the appeal for me is the gorgeous build: very Bollywood-themed, but (as appropriate for folks who make gardens!) with great use of space, sky, trees, animals and plants to create a wonderful environment. Now, since I took these pictures, Madhu's has moved to a new ground-level location in New Toulouse but the core elements of the place are still intact, and Carter is still spinning sets, often on Monday nights (SLT).

Watching the sun set on Madhu's old location

Now, don't get your panties bunched up. I don't actually dance at Madhu's. (Honestly, pssh! What kind of avatar do you think I am?) So I usually wind up parking my little pixellated self on a stool or somewhere out from underfoot. One evening Stormy confessed that the gorgeous canopied little bar I'd adopted as a people-watching spot was one of her favorite things in the old Madhu's location…but it never seemed to get much use. As she and I were talking, I fiddled around with Second Life's environment settings and managed to get the sun to line up nicely with the trees and the scene. It's nice to have a few good pictures of the old location—and I look forward to tuning up my ears many times at the new Madhu's!

Bowled Over

2010-03-31T17:18:00.007-07:00

The fourteenth (fourteenth!) [Um, no Lou can't count, it was the FIFTEENTH!] Buccaneer Bowl team trivia event was held March 27th at [MonoChrome], as always ably hosted by Lette Ponnier, Lillian Shippe, and Thornton Writer. As I've noted here (on several occasions!), the Buccaneer Bowl is Second Life's premiere trivia event, not only because so much money is up for grabs (well over $10,000L) but also because it gives players a chance to team up and see how they fare against the best of the best. And doing well in the Buccaneer Bowl does come with some bragging rights: winners have kinda gotten in the habit of wearing their "champ" tags between Bowls, and the well-intentioned trash talking continues more-or-less non-stop in the trivia community during the weeks intervening between the Bowls.

This month, real-life seemed to lay a particularly heavy hand on Buccaneer Bowlers: a number of regular players weren't able to attend, and the resulting vacancies led to a number of teams juggling for players and re-arranging their lineups. Sadly, this month also marked the first time my team, the Frivolous Corsairs, hasn't been able to field a team. Real life soaked up a good deal of my time, and we weren't able to coordinate a lineup before the Bowl. In fact, I didn't even know for sure if I'd be able to attend the Bowl at all until the night before…and then shifting commitments that morning almost kept me out of it entirely.

The result was that I turned up kind of at the last second before the "team building" segment before the Bowl ended, with no team in sight, and kind of said "Uh, is anyone looking for a player?"

To my surprise and honor, the Triviators offered by the fourth slot on their team. The Triviators have five regular members—Lotus Ceriano, Nelly Swindlehurst, Allana Robbiani, Starla Gurbux, and Mako Kungfu—and anybody who's played Second Life trivia knows that's a pretty stunning lineup. And the Triviators have been by far the most-dominant team at the Buccaneer Bowls, winning something like two thirds of them, sometimes by just a hair, and sometimes by a very wide margin—in February they had a near-perfect game, winning something like $3800L out of a possible $4000L. So I was pretty chuffed that they'd even consider taking me on—they could easily have gone on their own as a team of three players and given anyone serious competition.

The Triviators, with guest player Lou lurking in the background
(and apparently wearing the pants on the team!)

So for March I was an honorary Triviator…and I'm pleased to note that the Triviators won the March Buccaneer Bowl! After placing second a few times and trying to give the Trivs and other teams a serious run in…gosh I think I've been able to play in 12 of the 14 Bowls…it's great to finally have a Buccaneer Bowl championship under my belt! Lotus, Nelly, and Starla were very welcoming and a total class act, and—of course!—delivered a stunning performance! I was just thrilled to along for the ride.

The only thing that could have made the victory sweeter would be winning with my "home team" the Frivolous Corsairs. Here's to next month guys!

Viewer To A Kill

2010-03-18T21:00:00.005-07:00

Linden Lab has released a beta version of "Viewer 2.0," what's been touted as a huge ground-floor revamp of the Second Life client experience. The client has been in the works for some time, and reportedly represents the Lindens' best efforts to bringing the client interface into the current decade, more tightly integrate with the so-called "social Web," and add some major new features that try to bring a bit of the Internet in to the virtual world. Anyone with a Second Life account can download the beta and give it a whirl.

Linden Lab's Viewer 2.0 beauty shot

I'm not going to "review" Viewer 2.0, or even run through a bullet list of positives and negatives—plenty of other people are doing/have done that and, really, my opinion doesn't matter. Bottom line, Viewer 2.0 has remarkably few new features; however, one is a humdinger: "shared media" or what's commonly called "Web on a prim." With Viewer 2.0 just about any surface of any object in the virtual world can be turned into a completely functional Web page. This has mammoth implications for educators and content creators—for instance, almost anything on the Web can be brought into SL, Flash can be used instead of craptastic animated-GIF-style texture animations, etc. However, it also has profound privacy implications, a couple of which I'll detail below.

I dove in with Viewer 2.0 so quickly because the world of Second Life viewers is getting very complicated—more on that below—and I had hopes that perhaps Viewer 2.0 would represent a major re-conception of a Second Life client. I'll just say it right now: Viewer 2.0 does not represent a fundamental paradigm shift for Second Life clients. Viewer 2.0 does represent a substantial "reskinning" of the Second Life client, and that in itself says something about what the creators and operators of Second Life feel is important and what is not.

Rear Viewer Mirror

The Second Life client software situation is complicated, and I'm kind of talking out of my ass here because, apparently, no one who is in-the-loop can be bothered to write anything down for the rest of us. So some of my facts here may be jumbled because I can't seem to find any authoritative sources, and ones I've talked to who claimed to be kind of semi-authoritative on parts of it don't really agree on the details.

The Second Life client software started off as a proprietary application, albeit built using OpenGL, a cross-platform technology for handling 2D and 3D graphics. OpenGL is how everything gets put on screen in the SL client, from buildings and avatars to windows, menus, and buttons. (That's also why SL doesn't use proper windows or controls for your operating system.) Around 2006 some folks got the idea to reverse-engineer the way the Second Life client and server talk to each other in order to make different applications to connect to the Second Life grid: the result was libsecondlife.

Libsecondlife was seemingly well-intended and apparently received some unofficial(?) Linden support. The idea was to enable people to create things like text-only SL clients, to let computers do stuff only avatars can do (like receive IMs, act as in-world persons, etc.), and (perhaps most significantly) back up your creations. Second Life is kinda unique in that if you build something in-world, it's your intellectual property: you have copyright, you can sell it, and it's yours. When I make an original piece of jewelry in Second Life, I not only own the virtual prims that compose it, but the intellectual property for its design and functionality. The problem, of course, is that my property only exists in SL: if SL hiccups (or gets attacked by giant robots or goes bankrupt) my property goes with it. So being able to back up my own stuff—something the standard SL client won't let you do—seems like a nifty thing.

One problem: libsecondlife led directly (and pretty quickly) to the creation of CopyBot, software that connects to the Second Life grid, ignores Second Life's built-in permissions system, and enables users to make copies of…well, almost anything. Textures, prims, avatar skins, hair, shoes, eyes, clothes, houses, trees, plants, space stations…basically, if you can see it in SL, CopyBot could nab it. (And CopyBot was hardly a secret: it was apparently published in public SL forums for months.) Some CopyBot users immediately set up shop, ripping anything they liked, then re-uploaded it to Second Life as their own property. That's a good way to get stuff cheap. It's also a good way to make money, selling knockoffs of high-$L items for a fraction of the original price to unsuspecting residents. Barring security loopholes (and there have been a few), about the only thing safe from CopyBot are LSL scripts. LSL scripts execute on Second Life servers: they're never sent to the client, so they can't be copied by a client.

Of course, the existence of things like CopyBot kind of cuts Second Life content creators off at the knees. Make something cool? Sooner (not later) someone is going to copy it and start selling or giving away the ripped versions, often with full permissions so they can be passed around indefinitely. And because everything is digital, all the copiers have the same means of production and distribution as the original creators.

To be sure, CopyBot wasn't the only piracy tool used in Second Life at the time: it was just the center of a big furor. (Another common way of stealing textures was/is GLIntercept, which works with the normal SL client.) CopyBot hasn't really gone away, but it's now kind of a generic term for any software which can steal client from Second Life.

Open Wide and Say "Argh!"

Linden Lab's response to CopyBot was interesting. In late 2006, they declared (well, re-iterated) use of CopyBot and things like it as violations of Second Life's Terms of Service and promised support for Creative Commons licenses, improved ban lists and reputation management, etc. to help content creators cope. It's now 2010 and I don't see any of that last part, but I only started in SL about a year and a half ago so maybe I can't see the forest through all the trees.

Another action has had bigger ramifications. The Lindens seemed to the think legit uses of something like libsecondlife (like backing up your own property, creating new kinds of clients, etc.) were worth pursuing—more clients ought to spur broader adoption of the platform, after all. The Lindens could have broken libsecondlife (and with it, CopyBot) by modifying their client and server protocols so libsecondlife it no longer worked, but doing so would be to engage in an arms race: the Lindens would alter the protocol to defeat CopyBot, the CopyBot fans with their packet analyzers would work around the fix, and the whole cycle would start again. The result would be forcing users to constantly update their Second Life clients (and at 70 MB or so for each download, that's is a pain in the butt!) along with grid instability as Linden Lab continuously rolled out new server software (across thousands of sims!) to fight off CopyBot. That arms race would quickly deteriorate the Second Life platform.

So the Lindens chose to zig instead of zag: in early 2007, they made the Second Life client software open source. Anyone who wants to make their own Second Life client can start with the Lindens' own source code. Now, not every single line of the SL client is in the open source—there are some unpublished "third party" components Linden Lab says are proprietary (e.g., Vivox's VoIP voice technology)—but the principle is there: if you think you can make a better SL client, go for it. According to the Lindens, part of the goal of open-sourcing the viewer is to "accelerate the development of new features, the resolution of bugs, and enhance the security for all residents." [Sic on the parallelism problem there—I didn't write it I'm just quoting.]

And people have jumped into the code. At this point, more than two dozen alternative third-party viewers are listed on a maybe-official-can't-really-tell alternative viewers page. Some of these are text-only clients; some are lightweight clients aimed at iPhones and other mobile devices; some are full-fledged viewers with heaps of added and modified features; some are high-end viewers pushing SL graphics to the limit. Linden Lab even has its own open source viewer, dubbed Snowglobe, which aims to introduce features (and roll in bug fixes from the Open Source community) faster than the mainstream viewer.

So far, the most popular third-party viewer on the grid is Emerald. The Emerald viewer represents a kind of "power-user" version of the standard Second Life client that pulled together features from a number of other more-specialized third party viewers and heaped more on top. Popular features in Emerald include things like a built-in radar of nearby avatars, command-line-like capabilities in the chatbar, building enhancements, "clothing layer protection" against content thieves, along with a bunch of other enhancements, like the seemingly-wildly popular "breast physics" feature that makes female avatars' breasts…well, you know. Emerald has earned a strong in-world following owing to features appreciated by power users, along with regular updates and enhancements—of the third-party viewers, Emerald is the one that seems to be making the most effort to keep quality high and communicate with its user base.

Of course, as with libsecondlife, there are people taking the open-sourced code and using it to make their own viewers with nefarious custom tools. You won't see them listed on Linden Lab's list of third party viewers, but things like Chocolate, ThugLyfe, Cryolife (seems dead), ShoopedLife, HXO-Life, and NeilLife are out there if you know who to ask (or who to pay). They all offer tools oriented towards griefing, ban evasion, and outright content theft. Still other viewers—often claiming to be Emerald—are directly malicious to their users, acting as Trojans to infect users' computer with worms or viruses, and (quite probably) stealing users account names and passwords so their Second Life accounts—and Linden dollars—can be accessed. Some of these viewers are based off Linden Lab's own code base…but, of course, many use the Emerald code base as their starting point. (Under the GPL license on the official Second Life viewer, the Emerald team must also publish its source code.) And there appears to be no small irony here: although I haven't tried to fully untangle the threads of multiple avatar identities, forum handles, writing styles, and signoffs, it seems pretty clear that Emerald's development team includes (or has included) the creators of the original CopyBot and at least the content-theft-enabled Second Life viewer Vlife.

So, the net result is what I'll politely call a fetid cesspool of viewers that are capable of connecting to the Second Life grid. Some of them are well-maintained and well-intentioned, others are not, and there's no real way to for an average Second Life user without +5 Wand of Geekery to discern the differences between them. In an effort to alleviate that confusion, last month Linden Lab published a Policy on Third-Party Viewers. The actual text contains a lot of contractual language, but basically it requires third-party viewer developers assert their software conforms to a set of requirements like not stealing user's passwords, not including griefing or ban-evasion tools, not including content-theft tools, or putting undue burden the Second Life grid. As part of the self-certification process—the Lindens aren't going to actively verify the claims—at least one developer must apply from an account in good standing and that's been age-verified or has payment info on file with Linden Lab.

Linden Lab as also created a Third-Party Viewer Directory listing viewers that assert they conform to Linden Lab's third-party viewer policy. As of this writing, only two viewers have made those assertions—and neither of them is Emerald. And the clock is ticking: Linden Lab published the policy on third party viewers on February 23, 2010, and is providing a two-month grace period before some sections to into effect. However, the full policy will be in effect April 30, 2010. At that point, being listed in the Viewer Directory will not be a requirement for connecting to the Second Life grid, but in the Lindens' own words: "Beware of third-party viewers that are not in the Viewer Directory—they have either declined to self-certify or been refused for noncompliance with our policies."

Wait, I Thought You Were Talking About Viewer 2!

So into this mess, the Lindens have injected their beta of Viewer 2.0, which will (pretty quickly) also be available to open source developers to integrate with their own viewers. The "killer feature" for Viewer 2.0 is generally conceded to be "Web on a prim:" basically, almost any surface of any object in Second Life can show a fully functional Web page from the real live Internet, complete with scroll bars, forms, Flash content, JavaScript, and more.

Lou, looking at Lou's blog. The mindbends are just starting.

To do this, Linden Lab leveraged the open source WebKit Web browser framework, which is the same engine that underlies Apple's Safari browser and Google Chrome. (Actually, they're using QtWebKit, from a company just bought by BlackBerry maker RIM to put WebKit into Nokia's Qt framework. Layers like an onion. Confused yet?) The upshot is that by using expanded authoring tools, anyone in Second Life who can rez a prim (and that's everyone) and display any Web page on any surface of it just by plugging in the URL. You can even have different pages on the different faces of the same prim: a wall could have one page on the front and another on the back.

The implications of this expansion to Second Life are potentially enormous, and could represent another content revolution in SL akin to those previously (I guess) engendered by the introduction of flexible prims (flexies) and sculpted objects (sculpties). Although Flash content can't be embedded directly on a prim, Flash applications that work within Web pages pretty much work on prims too: users can click links, push buttons, fill out forms, stream media, play games, and much more. The ability to bring Web content into Second Life on a prim obviously has enormous implications for educators and corporations using Second Life as a virtual meeting space; it also unleashes heaps of new possibilities for in-world content creators who can Internet-enable their objects, environments, products, and builds.

The Web-enabling also has enormous implications for user privacy. When Viewer 2.0 users encounter a prim with shared media, Viewer 2.0's built-in WebKit browser goes out to the Internet to fetch its content automatically. That request for a Web page is issued directly from your computer. When you see a regular prim or texture in Second Life, that data is sent to your computer directly from Linden Lab. However, shared media on a prim is sent to you directly from whatever site hosts the Web resource on that prim. That means the remote site not only gets to see and log the IP address you're using to connect to Second Life. They also know you're using Second Life (rather than Safari or Chrome or whatever) and when you're using it, because the remote servers will log the time stamp of every connection.

This kind of connection information is well-known to be sent with every page request issued by a standard Web browser. For better or worse, Internet users either accept that fact or go to a little bit of trouble to protect their Web-browsing privacy. However, Second Life has now blurred the distinction between viewing an object on a grid in a proprietary virtual world and requesting some random Web page on the Internet. By default, Viewer 2.0 will fetch shared media on a prim automatically without requiring the user's consent, and—depending how a particular prim has been set up—there may be no indication at all that someone is seeing content served to them directly from outside Second Life.

Think that not much information can be gleaned from an IP address, a timestamp, and knowledge that someone has been using Second Life? You might be right. Depending. Or you might be wrong. You can get a quick, high-level, not-at-all-detailed idea where you sit.

Now, to be fair, these risks are not entirely new. Other forms of shared media in Second Life—most notably audio and video streams—have also been served directly to users' computers for years. When you listen to a live performer or a DJ in Second Life (or hear any streamed music at all) or watch a video, you're also disclosing your IP address (and a timestamp, and some other information). However, previously, those shared media types have been tied to particular parcels of virtual land—if you didn't enter the parcel, the Second Life client didn't try to connect to the audio or video source.

Now, however, shared media is associated with prims. And not only can your average avatar rez prims in a lot more locations than he or she can stream parcel media, avatars can wear prims as attachments. That means if I were a malicious person wanted to find out your IP address, all I have to do is create a Web page somewhere, link to it with a shared media prim, wear that prim, and get near you…and I have an instant bug that gives me information about your real life. Logging into Second Life from work? Not really where you say you are? Don't want me to know where you are? Don't use Viewer 2 and get near me: I might just find out. Using shared media and very simple LSL scripts, it would be trivia to collect mountain of data accurately associating IP addresses with SL avatar names. In many cases, that would be a great way to uncover alts. There are also ways to combine shared media with LSL scripts to collect IP and avatar information without using any services outside Second Life.

And I'm just touching the tip of the iceberg here: by incorporating support for technologies like JavaScript and Flash, shared media potentially exposed all Viewer 2.0 users to security and privacy vulnerabilities in those technologies—of which, history has shown, there have been a great many. Shared media is an all-or-nothing deal in Viewer 2.0: you can't separately disable JavaScript, Flash, or other plug-ins: heck, right now you can't even stop shared media from accepting cookies from remote sites.

Viewer 2.0 does include controls to enable users to selectively enable and disable shared media: just like you can turn video and audio on and off arbitrarily, Viewer 2.0 users can disable Web-on-a-prim on a URL-by-URL basis, or turn off shared media altogether in the Viewer 2.0 preferences. The URL-by-URL approach is better than no control at all, but a cube as six sides: I'm pretty sure it would be trivial to set up a few prims and overwhelm the shared media controller's tiny scrolling list with a bunch of long confusing URL strings so users can't easily discern where they might be connecting. (It appears Viewer 2.0 currently limits the number of shared media prim faces it will load at one time to eight, however.) And for many users it won't matter anyway: "playing" shared media is enabled by default, and many Second Life users will never bother to figure out how to turn it off.

Linden Lab introduced shared media without any public discussion, and has been touting the capability as the premiere feature of Viewer 2.0 without any mention of the potential privacy and security implications of the technology.

Right now, I can only recommend that users of Viewer 2.0 disable shared media until issues surrounding the technology are ironed out. It's not going to be an easy problem to solve: if Linden Lab addresses it at all, I expect they will have to settle on a solution that enables users to accept media from "trusted" sites and/or parcels. And the default will still be to have all shared media enabled all the time.

If shared media turned out to be the game-changer in Second Life that Lindens (and many Second Life users and content creators) think it will be, it's only a (short) matter of time before Web-on-a-prim turns up in third party viewers. Then Second Life users will face even more complicated decisions about who they trust.

Any Landing You Can Walk Away From…

2010-03-01T21:00:00.001-08:00

Well, after all that lamenting and gnashing of teeth, I finally pulled the trigger: I am now a renter of virtual land in Second Life. I am a week-by-week tenant of a 1024m² parcel on the northern mainland continent known as Heterocera Atoll, and I have been goofing with pushing around prims and trying to do, well, something with the space.

A floating island thingy starts to take shape

I didn't make the decision lightly, and I'm not sure I'll stick with it. I'm still in the early stages, I guess, and indecisive. Talking with many of my Second Life friends, many seemed to think it was important to have a place to call your own, just to be able to get away from the hubbub and drama of SL and go to somewhere you're in control. I don't quite understand the appeal of that; I've never really had problems finding empty spots to chill out, and aside from a sustained bout of griefing largely steer clear of SL's drama. But I understand the appeal of wanting to create a place of your own—I know how important my little automated customizable portable work platform has been to me. As a lot of my friends have graciously shown me what they've done with their land, I became very impressed with the effort and creativity they've put into their spaces. However, I kinda came to two conclusions:

I don't want a "house"

I'm not all that interested in trying to create a virtual version of a real world space

The first point is probably the weirdest. I don't begrudge anybody the houses they've set up for themselves—heck, there are several with which I am quite enamored and would walk away with in a heartbeat if I could just do that copy-and-paste thing. (Lebn & Preston should fear me!) But I mentioned earlier that getting land felt like it could be the next stage of "playing Barbies" in SL—first you play with hair and shoes and clothes, next they move on to the Dream House or the Pony Barn—and that feeling got stronger for me the more I considered what I would do with land. I don't need a "house." Second Life has no weather I need to be sheltered from, no heat I need to keep in or cold I need to keep out. I don't need a private place because, bottom line, there is no privacy in Second Life unless you buy yourself an entire private sim and restrict all access. I don't need anywhere to put my "stuff" because, first, I can carry around an inordinately huge amount of stuff anywhere I go in my avatar's inventory, and second, I don't really have a bunch of "stuff" that needs to be set out. I have a couple of neat things here and there—a death ray, a giant pocketwatch, a high-prim guitar or two—but I don't feel a need to be a virtual decorator. I have no in-world paintings to hang, no digital furniture to set out, no virtual animals to tend to, and I'm not particularly interested in buying them or making them. Other people are and that's great, but…I guess it doesn't appeal strongly to me.

And part of that probably comes from point number two (above). Second Life has always seemed very cartoony to me. I'm not referring to the quality of the graphics so much as the sense that literally everything is just a representation of something else in a super-sketchy fake stand-in way that just vaguely represents something you can kind of recognize if you squint and don't look carefully—or, really, at all. To me Second Life has never been an "immersive" environment: I cannot suspend disbelief and think that three or four flat pictures maybe waving a little bit in the virtual breeze is foliage. Mix in that Second Life is massively out of scale (pretty much everyone is seven feet tall and Conan-esque or supermodel leggy) and that there's no modeling of mass or materials (you can stack a castle on top of a prim one centimeter thick or in thin air) and the whole thing is…well, just cartoony.

And that is totally fine. Those very cartoony traits make Second Life a springboard for creativity and things that would be very difficult or completely impossible to do in real life. But, much as trying to make Second Life Lou a reasonable representation of Real Life Lou is an exercise in futility and frustration, trying to recreate a real world space in Second Life is a doomed endeavor.

So: what I do with land will not be a house, and it's not going to try to be real. And that's about all I know right now.

I do know it will not be on the ground. Calling my land a parcel is a little bit generous: it's rented out as a sky platform, with a suggested living space around 1600m up in the air. Yes, that's right, I have a 32×32 wedge of land, and I'm more than a kilometer and a half above the ground. Technically I can build down at "ground level" but the folks from whom I am renting the land are trying to keep the ground level as a relatively open space with unspoiled views. Having seen a lot of ugly mainland views, I completely understand that. Under the Havoc 4 physics engine, Second Life residents can build up to 4098 meters above the ground. (I guess earlier versions of the SL software were limited to 768m.) So I'm looking at my parcel not as a flat 32m×32m surface, but as a hugely tall column, 32m×32m×oh-say-3096m. That's a lot of volume to work with—too bad it doesn't come with more prims!

And, you know what? If I can't think of anything to do with it, I can just walk away and stop paying rent. Happy landings, indeed.

A Little (More) Virtual Music

2010-02-13T02:26:00.004-08:00

Way back when I said I hoped to post occasional little items on some of Second Life's music performers—this is another installment in what I hope will become a series. (OK, I guess with this post it is a series. I hope to make it bigger. Later. Well, it's getting bigger now. Gah! You know what I mean!)

My intention remains the same as with my first outing: I'm just highlighting some performers in SL that I happen to enjoy, and there's precious little method to how I choose them or the order in which they appear. These posts will never be a comprehensive guide to Second Life's music scene, nor am I attempting to review performers or hold forth that one act is better than another because of some post-structuralist aesthetic theory and a shared virtual cigarette behinds some barely-rendered pixellated dive in a laggy sim in the middle of the night. I'm just writing up people I like, based largely on the availability of halfway decent screenshots. Folks looking for a musical conspiracy should Google "Paul is Dead" and leave this little blog alone.

Frets Nirvana
I have a soft spot in my heart for reckless guitar players, and Frets Nirvana fits the bill: I knew when I rezzed into an odd little elfin-themed bar in some random sim and heard him launch into an all-acoustic Andress-funky version of Stevie Wonder's "Superstition" I was in for a treat. Hailing from Tennessee, Frets plays steel-string fingerstyle in a way that owes a lot to to the likes of Tommy Emmanuel and "Certified Guitar Players" Chet Atkins and Jerry Reed, but also to Phil Keaggy, jazz guitar great Django Reinhardt, and bluesman Mike Dowling…plus a whole lot of rock and rollers. Frets does a few stunt pieces kinda just to establish his credentials, but also takes on some classic traditional tunes, forges some odd medlies, and rolls out an original or two. I don't know much about Frets' setup, but it's pretty obvious he's playing real guitars into real mics in a real room, and he just sounds fabulous: he'll switch back and forth between a kinda snappy more-or-less traditional acoustic and a resonator or two (I think two: they're tuned different), occasionally drops in a looper or some percussion, and generally just seems to take a flying leap into tunes. Add solid stage banter to the mix, and you have a winning combination. I gather Frets is kinda new to the SL music scene, but he's sure hitting it aggressively: he plays a ton of shows (here's his calendar) and seems to be on about every virtual world music sharing and networking site (I guess MySpace is his "home") and has an album for sale.

Noma Falta
Noma Falta often billed as the "Queen of the Blues" in Second Life, but that's not particularly fair: although she's perfectly capable of dominating the blues, her repertoire encompasses a broad range of pop, classic rock, R&B, and a few off-the-beaten path rootsy gems that make me grin. Noma is a powerful singer with a terrific smokey tone, superb control, and a delivery that only comes from years at the microphone; however, in a slightly unusual vein, Noma is also a bassist and plays a bunch of live bass during her shows. Like a lot of solo performers in SL, Noma Falta sings and plays on top of backing tracks; however, unlike a lot of solo performers in SL, a lot of Noma's backing tracks seem home-grown, unique recordings offering original takes on well-known material. Regardless of their origin, a lot of those tracks feature some kick-ass guitar work, and are arranged to showcase Noma's range while giving her the opportunity to talk to the crowd and keep things moving along. Noma's performances are both very polished and very informal at the same time: she moves between songs with a careful, relaxed style that puts people at ease, and isn't afraid to take on very well-known rock, pop, and R&B standards and put her stamp on them. However, some of my favorite moments at Noma Falta shows aren't the crowd-pleasing tunes long-time fans seem to call for: it's quieter moments when she sometimes does a tune (or part of a tune) with just her voice and the bass.

Noma Falta is one of SL's top-drawing live music acts, and you can expect a world of lag almost anywhere she plays. (It took me weeks to attend a gig where she rezzed well enough to take a screenshot!) But her shows are worth the effort…plus they make for some great half-rezzed people-watching.

Moshang Zhao

Moshang Zhao characterizes himself as a "sound jeweler," and while I'm not sure exactly what that means, it appears to translate as a purveyor of live chill-out danceable-if-you-want electronica. Mochang Zhao comes to Second Life by way of Taiwan where he apparently teaches and works as both a musician and producer, although I gather he originally started out in South Africa. A typical Moshang set is about an hour of continuous, shifting music that relaxes and sets a mood, but almost always rewards close listening. I gather Moshang gets some material, libraries, and loops loaded up into software applications like Abelton Live and/or Reason—giving him a very large number of simultaneous instruments, tracks, and effects to play with—then just kind of sees what develops as he plays. Some of the bits are pre-composed while others seem to happen on the fly, and rather than noodle over them on a synthesizer or keyboard controller, Moshang uses an electronic wind controller, essentially a saxophone- or clarinet-like device that has keys and valves and responds to a player's breath, but generates MIDI data so it can be used to control a software instrument—that means he might sound like a flute on second, a sarod the next, and a visiting UFO after that. A lot of Moshang's material is deliberately harmonically sparse, relying on tone of (to an extent) effects to set a stage and still leave room for improvisation. But sometimes a few corners of the pieces will surprise you, and Moshang weaves disparate genre and world elements into his music with a subtle ease that sometimes you don't realize quite what he did until long after he did it—and by then it's utterly woven into whatever fabric he's spinning. Moshang posts a lot (all?) his performances as podcasts that are downloadable; he also has albums and individual downloads available.

Eponymous Drake

One of of the things that's bugged me about the Second Life music scene is that there really isn't much jazz. (OK, that's something that bugs me about the real life music scene too.) Most performers who claim to be doing jazz are singers of varying calibers essentially performing karaoke standards to pre-recorded backing tracks of varying quality. Don't get me wrong: some of those singers are quite good and unquestionably entertain a lot of folks, but many are at best earnest wanna-be Sintras or Dinah Shores with a USB headset and Winamp. Sometimes I want, um, the real deal. So I was pleased to run into pianist (and sometime horn/harmonica/guitar) player Eponymous Drake on some mountaintop venue almost (gah!) a year ago now. Eponymous delves deep into jazz's golden age and does solid service to material from the likes of Billy Strayhorn, Berlin, Gershwin, and rolls up through folks like Wayne Shorter, Art Blakey, and Herbie Hancock. But it's not so much the material Eponymous picks as as it is his willingness to wander off into the wilderness with it: Eponymous stretches tunes' harmonic context, sometimes into some unexpected "outside" areas, and lets melody go where it wants. Lately Eponymous has been playing more tunes with a bit of pre-recorded rhythm section accompaniment, and also introducing original compositions into his shows. Of the performers I've highlighted here so far, Eponymous is the least self-promoting: he doesn't play incredibly regular gigs, he isn't pimping an album or downloads or a Web site, and doesn't have a whoogirl manager out in the audience telling everyone how lovely she thinks the last tune was and shilling for tips. He turns ups, plays some jazz, makes it count, and says thanks. And when it works, it's like nothing else I've heard so far in SL…and wow do I wish that wasn't true.

That Tipping Thing

I'm not going to beat a dead horse, but if you check out Second Life's music scene, please bear in mind that while folks are putting up venues, renting streams, and performing out of a sheer love for music, there are real costs involved. Speaking as a real-life musician, when I perform a tune it might produce three or four minutes of music, but (depending on the tune) folks are hearing twenty to a hundred times (or more) that amount of time into learning, arranging, and getting that tune together—you know, on top of all the endless hours of practicing, learning the craft, blah blah blah. It's the same with Second Life performers, and the have the added overhead of all the technical gobbledegook of capturing a good sound, converting it to a stream, and pushing it out to the Internet for everyone—plus managing the notoriously flaky Second Life client software at the same time. No one is going to be offended if you don't tip, but when you do, be as generous as you can—audience support really does keep live music and other worthwhile performers able to keep doing what they do in Second Life.

So…that's it for now. Until next time!

Land of the Lost

2010-01-31T23:34:00.006-08:00

My latest Second Life crisis centers not around clothing or trivia or griefing or even the utterly infuriating process of scripting. Nope: instead my current dilemma centers around one of SL's oldest and most basic questions: whether to get some land of my own.

I've been in Second Life for about a year and a half, and I've always characterized myself as one of SL's "vast homeless population." When I started out, I was assigned to an infohub (Memory Bazaar in the sim Ross): infohubs are kind of public fora where people can materialize inworld, get their bearings, then go on about their business. Since they're also the first glimpse most people get of the main SL grid, infohubs tend to collect together resources, helpful information, and tutorials for new avatars, and try to serve as a launching point to get people exploring SL.

Some people spend a lot of their SL time hanging out at infohubs, including folks who genuinely want to help new people. Infohubs also tend to gather pranksters and bona fide griefers—I was griefed within 30 seconds of starting in SL, and if you want to see some of SL's reigning experts on potty humor check out the infohubs at Ahern/Morris/Dore/Bonifacio or Waterhead sometime. Despite these "regulars," however, infohubs aren't anybody's home. Infohubs are public places, but not places people can build: you can't rez that free Linden home you picked up on Help Island, build your own club, or perhaps realize your dream of a Pokémon museum. You can hang out at an infohub, but you can't exactly move in and make the environment your own.

A typical gaggle of gigglers at Waterhead

Pixel Rush

To do that sort of thing in Second Life, you need some virtual land—and, yes, that concept is as weird as it sounds. In the real world, the value of real estate is based upon two things; LocationLocationLocation, and the fact land is a limited resource. In the real world travel isn't necessarily quick or cheap—so location matters—and comparatively little new land is bring created nowadays, so the land that exists is valuable. In comparison, the idea of buying virtual land in a world where new land can be generated at any time—and where avatars can teleport anywhere in the "world" at will—seems a little daft.

Second Life is owned by Linden Lab, which operates all the servers that comprise the Second Life "grid." But, if you're willing to pay Linden Lab some money, they will happily rent out some of that land to you. There are two catches: first, to be eligible to rent land from Linden Lab at all, you have to be a premium account holder, which translates to paying Linden Lab about $10 USD a month. Next, you have to be willing to put down money both to purchase the land, then (if you want more than 512m² of land) toss more money to the Lindens every month for "tier"—essentially, a hosting cost for keeping all your land up and running more-or-less 24/7. The more land you want, the more it costs, and the greater the monthly tier to keep that land.

Despite every resident's ability to teleport, LocationLocationLocation still seems to be a driving force in the Second Life land market: some spots are clearly more desirable than others. A lot of the land in Second Life is in a large series of interconnected sims (thousands of them) collectively referred to as "mainland." The mainland sports several "continents"—which, when compared to real life geography would be not-particularly-large islands—and a few areas of open ocean around and between them. Most of the mainland is owned and developed by SL residents; some areas (like Bay City, Nautilus, and forthcoming Linden Homes) are owned by the Lindens directly. One recently-opened continent—Zindra, aka The Continent of Dildos and Heaving Bazooms—is now Second Life's adults-only red light district.

Mainland might be the bulk of SL, but it's also widely considered some of the least appealing real estate. Mainland used to be widely festered with "ad-farms," tiny plots that folks used to put up garish and annoying in-world advertisements: the ad farms are mostly gone now, but for the most part SL mainland is still pretty ugly. For every resident who can put together a nice home, park, or store, there are about 20 more who (at best) plop down something pre-fabbed, park their spaceship outside, and think they're cool. Also, having a mainland parcel means you're effectively competing with other landowners on the same sim for resources: if they have a bunch of enormous, bandwidth-sucking textures on their property, are running a club packed with avatars at every hour, have heaps of heavily scripted virtual pets running around, a siren or farting noises blaring non-stop from their property, or run a store selling off-color merchandise right next door…you've just got to deal with it.

Lou on a randonly chosen mainland road, stuck between a pink store, a tacky apartment block, and a stargate. And check out the adfarm column.

Hence, the primo real estate in Second Life is on private sims—aka islands—that are managed lock-stock-and-barrel by their owners and are only accessible by direct teleport—and sometimes they're locked down to just a handful of avatars. Most of the cool places I've photographed for this blog are on private islands.

So: if you're thinking about getting something less than an entire sim of your own, your options are buying or renting some Mainland, or renting a parcel on someone's private island. Prices for mainland parcels can vary widely: right now, a 512m² parcel in the middle of nowhere with few redeeming features might be available for as little as $650 Lindens, but one near a well-trafficked store, road, or infohub might be asking ten or twenty times as much. Most people expect Mainland land prices to fall considerably when Linden Homes launch.

Primonition

Confused yet? Just wait. Remember that you can only buy land if you're already sending money to Linden Lab every month, and if you want more than 512m² you'll be sending even more money, called "tier." Linden Labs' tier fees are kinda straightforward in a confusing sort of way…and not exactly welcoming. A 2048m² parcel runs $15 USD a month on top of that $10 USD/month premium membership and whatever you have to spend to buy that land in the first place. With that 2048 square meters you'd get 468 prims to play with (assuming you aren't on some prized amped-up land that can support more than the usual number of prims). One U.S. dollar buys about $260 Linden dollars at the moment; leaving aside the cost of a premium account, that means buying the capability to have prims that stay around 24/7 cost about $2L per week per prim.

So what's all this about prims—you thought we were talking about land? Sure, land is an area where you can put stuff, but that stuff is all made of prims—and the number of prims you can set out is tied to the size of your parcel.

Prims are the basic building blocks of Second Life—one of the phrases you'll hear in-world is "it all starts with a cube," and a cube is one of the most basic prims. Of course, there are other types (cylinders and tori being useful, as well as "sculpts," prims that can have relatively arbitrary geometry defined by programs outside SL). Pretty much everything in SL is made up of prims, piled and linked together in assemblages that may (or may not!) resemble things in RL. Even things like shafts of light and shadows are often prims, just textured and edited in clever ways. A basic room might use squished cubes for a floor, four walls, and a ceiling: that room would take up six prims…and it might not have a door. A clever builder could do a small room with three prims: a hollowed-out cube for the walls, then flat ones for the floor and ceiling.

Different types of objects require different numbers of prims. For instance, a simple table lamp I made on a whim (it has a three-way switch) uses nine prims. My little temporary sky platform uses a minimum of two prims, but can take up about 50 by the time I set out a little furniture and my building tools.

So, by these measures, the 468 prims granted with a 2048m² parcel of land might seem like a lot—heck even the 117 prims that come with a 512m² parcel might seem like a bonanza if you're just putting up four walls! But consider: the hair that typically adorns an SL avatar's head is a prim attachment, and "a head of hair" can run from maybe 50 to 250 prims. (The hair I'm wearing as I write this is 119 prims; my "good" hair is 127 prims.) Now, avatar attachments like hair don't count against a parcel's prim limits (or most people wouldn't be able to walk onto the land they own!) but it does mean that if you're building something, you need to have enough prims available on your land while you're putting it together. (You can do some editing on things attached to you, but you generally have to create things "loose.")

By way of example, a lot of the jewelry items I've built in Second Life clock in between 150 and 200 prims each. If I were going to get some land of my own for building, I couldn't even get started with a 512m² and if I were working on a major piece (that involved multiple attachments) even a 2048m² parcel wouldn't be enough to rez the things, let alone work on them.

Extraordinary Rentition

So, everyone in Second Life who has land is renting from the Lindens, since Linden Labs runs all the servers on the grid, mainland or private. But if you don't have a premium account, the only way to have land is to rent it from someone who is already renting from the Lindens. The basic idea is that non-premium account holders pay money to the real "owners" of the land, who ostensibly pass the money along to the Lindens to pay tier fees and probably keep a little for themselves. Some of these arrangements are just-between-friends affairs that are low-stress and easy to manage; however, some of the most successful "businesses" in Second Life are so-called "land barons" who do their best to buy low, sell high, and rent out as much of their land as they can for as high a price as they can command. Most land barons own a mix of mainland and private sims, and often own a mix of land intended for residential, social, and commercial spots. Supposedly the first "virtual millionaire" Anshe Chung—someone who cleared $1 million USD in income from selling virtual goods—did it as a Second Life land baron.

So, basically, if you're looking to rent land in Second Life, there are no shortage of avatars willing to try to get one over on you. Second Life has an in-world classified ad system where land owners can post adverts about their land and try to lure customers in. The variety of rental possibilities is kind of astonishing: some are just bare plots advertised as blank canvases for your imagination, while others come with amenities like pre-fabbed "homes" and common areas, while others are part of themed communities (beach, forest, Arctic, Japanese, medieval, steampunk, desert, western, post-apocalyptic, vampires, cyberpunk, tinies, furries, Star Trek, you-name-it). And prices are all over the map: some seem to fall right in line with that $2L-per-prim-per-week baseline; some are way over that, while others are suspiciously under that threshold, implying the owners are losing money on the rentals.

A typical rental parcel on a private island: 1024m²; nearby parcels are rented out and set up in a variety of styles.

Of course, one advantage of "owning" land is that you're dealing with Linden Lab directly: so long as they're still afloat, presumably you'll have your virtual real estate. Not so when you're dealing with private parties: for every person I know who's a happy renter in Second Life, I probably know another who has had a landlord go belly-up, resulting in the Lindens shutting down the sim or kicking renters off the parcel with little or no notice. (Fellow trivia-ite Becki Verne recently had a similar experience.) So most renters are not only probably paying extra money for their land, they're also assuming greater risk.

No Particular Place to Go

And so my quandry. I've been fortunate enough to make many friends in Second Life, many of whom own or rent land and have graciously allowed me to use it, whether to host my Lou's Clues trivia game or just have a quiet place to work on projects. And to be sure, some of my projects are not at all prim-intensive: one of the more complicated things I've worked on is just two prims (all the blood, sweat, and tears are in the scripts). But, with the exception of two lonely prims hovering a few kilometers above a private island, I don't leave anything "permanent" in Second Life. Barring a crash, I clean up and pack everything away when I log off. I don't have a spot of my own, I don't have a house or a workshop or a trivia venue or a store or a music hangout. I got nothin.'

Part of my quandary is the building problem: even if I rented land, I'd have trouble justifying the expense of land that supported enough prims to work on my typical projects. So, if I set up a workshop, I'd still wind up doing most of my work in public sandboxes—to be sure, those usually have enough prims available, but—at least now that Hyperborea is gone—also subject me to a lot of griefing and interruptions. And if I'm going to wind up spending so much time in sandboxes anyway, why do I need land?

If I don't use land to build, what would I use it for? I have no idea. A lot of people make homes in Second Life: they set up places that may (or may not!) resemble real-world homes and spend a lot of time decorating and designing with pictures, furniture, and landscaping. And some of these places are astonishing—I've been repeatedly impressed with what my friends have accomplished with their inworld homes.

But whenever I think of making an Second Life home, a part of me hesitates and wonders if I wouldn't just be taking the "playing Barbie" aspect of Second Life to another level. Everyone in Second Life has an avatar, and almost everyone spends an inordinate amount of time obsessing over their avatar's shape, appearance, clothing, and persona—it's no wonder that avatar add-ons are the center of Second Life's in-world economy. (OMG I have to have those boots!) I call this "playing Barbie," because we all expend enormous effort dressing up our little dolls and playin with them—and I'm just as guilty as anybody else, if not moreso because I have this silly idea that Lou is Lou is Lou is Lou and Lou is short.

Anyway—whenever I think about land, I worry it's just taking playing Barbies from avatars out to the level of walls and trees and furniture and buildings. I don't begrudge anyone else having fun constructing spaces and building out their land—I love what a lot of my friends have done—and almost all of them have repeatedly noted how it's nice to have a place of your own to log into, log out from, and try out clothes or new things in private on your own. But I'm not an architect; I'm not a designer; I have no real graphics skills—I don't even know how I'd begin to make a place of my own. And I've been "living" all this time in SL without one…so do I really need one?

And yet…part of me is still looking.

Lou consults with the Wise Old Owl at the New Trivia Monkeys about virtual real estate

A Whole Bucc'ing Year

2010-01-17T17:12:00.003-08:00

This weekend marked the thirteenth Buccaneer Bowl, Second Life's monthly team-based trivia event. It's astonishing to me that the Bowl has been going on for a year now: it still seems so new, and I remember clearly when it was just a vague idea kicking around in the trivia crowd, until Thornton Writer, Lillian Shippe, and Lette Ponnier decided to go for the gusto and make it happen. And now the Buccaneer Bowl is as much a Second Life trivia institution as any of the long-running games. Even though I'm just a player, it's kind neat to have been a teeny part of helping create such a successful event.

Trivia fans assemble for the January 2010 Buccaneer Bowl

For January's game, teams assembled on the floating pirate ship 2000m above [MonoChrome]: Rain Ninetails and I teamed up with trivia stalwarts Circe Falta and JoshuaStephen Schism to form up the impromptu team "Frivolous CirceSchism" team. Josh and Circe usually team up with Chaddington Boomhauer and Shale Nightfire on a team "BoomFire CirceSchism"—see the theme to the naming?—but Chadd and Shale couldn't make it to the January game. Rain and I only had two people for the Frivolous Corsairs too, so we combined forces. And after a disheartening first round, we did OK, managing to win two out of five rounds and rolling into a fourth place finish overall—which is no small feat considering the level of competition at the Buccaneer Bowl.

Josh Schism, Circe Falta, Rain Ninetails, and me (atop the barrels) at the Buccaneer Bowl; the JOB Squad is to our left: Juke, Jewels, Hilda, and Sal.

This month, the champion team was the JOB Squad, consisting of Juke Badger, Hilda Static, Sal Zulaman, and Jewels Carminucci. They not only played great, but were solid performers in all five rounds—and their victory also means that the gallery of teams that have won the Buccaneer Bowl is still expanding. The many-time-champion Triviators are mighty, to be sure, but they aren't unbeatable…because plenty of people have beaten them!

As always, a mad round of applause to Lette, Lillian, and Thorn for putting on the Buccaneer Bowl—the game is still evolving and changing, but the three of them have got things down to a solid system that runs smoothly. It's also great to see new players trying out the Buccaneer Bowl each month—although the so-called "trivia regulars" form a lot of the regular teams, new teams are putting on remarkably good showings!

On a personal note, I would just like to say that my perch atop the barrels once again put me head and shoulders above everyone else at the game. It wasn't intentional, but back a the November Buccaneer Bowl I was also the most-elevated player, and maybe I've got a theme going.

Congrats to JOB Squad, and all the Buccaneer Bowl teams!

Lost to the Sandboxes of Time

2009-12-22T16:41:00.003-08:00

Shortly after starting in Second Life—very shortly, if I recall—my friend Geoff Novi showed me a sandbox in a sim called Hyperborea. For folks who aren't familiar, sandboxes are essentially empty spaces in Second Life where most (or, preferably, all) of SL's building capabilities are enabled. Although a lot of people use sandboxes as a quick place to unpack and sort through items they might have accumulated in stores or giveaways, most sandboxes are intended as a place where people can experiment with building and scripting and creating their own things, even if they don't own or rent any land of their own. Although nothing is permanent in a sandbox—they return any objects left in them to their owners after a fixed period, usually 2 to 12 hours, so you can't set up a house and "live" there—but sandboxes are extremely useful for learning how SL works, creating and editing objects, using textures, working on scripts, and much more.

Now, because sandboxes let people create anything they want—and have most of SL's capabilities enabled—they tend to be a little out of control. One minute you might be working on an exquisite little wire brooch you want to wear to an event next week, the next minute some overgrown Conan-type is driving tank over you while shooting you with a teddy bear-flinging bazooka and looping "I'm Too Sexy for My Shirt" in an endless loop. Stuff like that is usually reportable as abuse, but it's not an environment conducive to working or learning how SL works.

When I was first introduced to Hyperborea, I was kind of non-plussed about how quiet it was: there didn't seem to be much happening in the sandbox or in the surrounding sim. Nothing exciting. But, over time, I came to realize that tranquility was a tremendous virtue. Hyperborea was a quiet sandbox where people could actually work and get stuff done! Sure, the occasional miscreant would wander through and wreak a little havoc, but for the most part Hyperborea offered a quiet, reliable environment where I could puzzle through the odds and ends of creating and programming in Second Life. Hyperborea was also blessed with a small but savvy community of regular users, plus admins who actually cared what was happening in the sandbox and ran a surprisingly tidy and responsive operation. Hyperborea was a kind-of-old sim—going back to at least 2006—and several of the regulars had been there since its early days.

Now, Hyperborea is no more: the sim has been sold and is now an adjunct to an unrelated operation called Bliss Gardens. The sandbox, all the builds, even the office of the Alphaville née Second Life Herald are gone. Rumors of Hyperborea's imminent demise had been circulating since at least October—when Geoff and I were visited by one of the Woodbury University folks, who seemed to be scouting the sim whilst angling for a new home.

But now there's no longer a Hyperborea on the grid, and with it goes the closest thing I had to a "home" in Second Life. I don't know how many hours I spent on my little sky platform in Hyperborea, wrangling prims, fighting LSL scripts, and trying to get the things to work together in ways I actually intended. And that time would have been after I built my sky platform tools: those were all conceived, built, and tested in Hyperborea. So were all the scripts and props I use to host my Lou's Clues trivia game, all the commission jewelry work I've done, all the little scripting odds and ends and projects, all my experimenting, and all my little pranks and gewgaws like the immortal teacups and my silly little titler. They're all products of Hyperborea.

But probably more importantly, I learned an incredible amount from Hyperborea's regular users, especially the admins Tali Rosca (who made the fabulous mad scientist Victorian death ray I show off sometimes!) and Harpo Jedburgh, who were all very generous with their time and helping me wrap my head around how Second Life works. It's fair to say that without them I never would have stuck with building and trying to create my own stuff in Second Life…and if I couldn't do that, I probably wouldn't stick with Second Life itself.

Sadly, I seem to have no screenshots of Hyperborea. Many of the screenshots that have appeared in this blog (particularly jewelry stuff or things that use my avatar as an example) were taken there, but I don't seem to have any images of the basic ground level of the sim, or of many of the sandbox's regular users. I don't know why I didn't think to take any.

I have no idea where the Hyperborea diaspora will end up: I imagine most of us will wander off to other sandboxes in hopes of finding a comparable environment. Others will probably rent or buy land of their own so they can build in peace.

As for me…I'm kind of kicking the tires on a few other sandboxes, seeing if I can find somewhere quiet to work on my own without being bothered and without bothering anyone else. But in the back of my head, I know nothing's going to stack up to the sandbox where I grew up.

A Little Virtual Music

2009-12-07T17:02:00.019-08:00

I've been promising I would get around to writing about Second Life's music scene—and it's been hard to do. When forced to choose between writing about good music or listening to good music, I tend to pick the latter. The quality and variety of acts in Second Life makes things even more difficult: in-world venues are indeed peppered with some not-so-stellar performers and earnest amateurs just barely dipping their feet into the world of live music, but there are a number of seriously talented people playing music in-world. Although I have seen many solid musicians, I'm quite sure I've only scratched the surface, and I can't really put myself forward as any kind of authority on the in-world music scene.

Nonetheless, I'm still hoping this will be the first in an ongoing set of posts spotlighting some in-world music acts. I'm not going to feature artists in any particular order or with much rime or reason: for instance, the performers highlighted in this post were selected on the basic of my having usable screen shots! These aren't the only in-world artists I enjoy and whose work I've supported—there are many more, and I hope to mention them all. But I need to take small steps or I won't get started at all.

A quick primer on SL music

Performing live music in Second Life might seem simple…but the reality can be a little more complicated. Live musicians typically perform at their real-world location with a computer—which is often the same computer logged in to Second Life—using a digital audio interface to capture their voices and/or instruments, process the audio a bit, convert it to an MP3 stream, and send it out to the Internet. Although it's technically possible for Second Life users to tap into that stream directly, more often performers send that stream to a third party service outside Second Life (usually running ShoutCast or Icecast) that can handle a large number of users. These servers essentially rent out streaming services: sometimes performers rent their own, and sometimes in-world music venues have streaming servers performers can use. Either way, when you teleport your avatar to a music venue, you turn on that parcel's media stream to hear the live performance.

The types of performances vary a bit. In-world DJs essentially queue up playlists of pre-recorded songs in iTunes or WinAmp or similar programs, push them out to a streaming server so everyone can listen. Some in-world DJs have a live mic so they can speak in real time on the stream to introduce songs and talk to the crowd. Some live music performers use a very similar setup: they get pre-recorded backing tracks together (sometimes they're canned, sometimes the musicians create the tracks themselves) and sing or play along to the recordings karaoke-style. Some musicians are all-live, all-the-time, with every sound you hear being produced by the performer in real time.

The complicated mechanics of streaming live music to the Internet means the in-world music scene in Second Life is dominated by solo performers. Part of the reason is logistics: if you wanted to stream a band performance into Second Life, you've basically got to have the entire band in the same room. If you want the band to sound good, you've also got to have some decent audio gear and (hopefully) someone to keep an eye on things during the set. All that gets complicated and expensive. While a solo performer can essentially plug into their computer and get up and running for under a few hundred dollars, audio setups that handle 8 or 16 or 24 live channels at the same time are (considerably) more expensive: you can get a traditional mixer and push everything down to a stereo mix and push that into a computer, or use a studio-quality digital audio interface and take everyone digital. By the time you've done either—and set up everyone's mics, baffles, effects, feeds, mixes, and worked out all the buzzes and kinks—you've essentially set up your own recording space.

Since Second Life is a virtual world, some people wonder if virtual bands are possible: you know, a drummer in Brazil, a fiddler in Scotland, a guitarist in Australia, a singer in Tokyo, all collaborating in real time and streaming into Second Life. Second Life does feature a few virtual bands, but the answer is "kind of but not really." The most common way of doing this sort of things is "streamcatching:" one person (usually the drummer or rhythm section) starts playing, sending their MP3 stream to (say) a guitarist. The guitarist receives the stream then plays along with it, sending the combined stream to (say) a singer. The singer receives the stream, sings along to it, then sends the combined stream to a Shoutcast or Icecast server, which then sends it to Second Life audience members. That works, right? Well, not really. The downside of all this is that the drummer or rhythm section can't hear what anyone else is doing: they're just playing to themselves; similarly, in this scenario the guitarist can't hear the singer. You might think each of them could tap back into the final stream to hear what was going on, but it's just not practical: after all those hops and transitions, the "live" music stream is running many (many!) seconds behind what the performers are actually playing, so musicians can't hear what's happening in real time. The result with streamcatching is that most of the interaction between live performers is eliminated, and unless a show is tightly rehearsed, it mostly sounds like a bunch of half-deaf zombies. (Which, funny enough, is how many tightly rehearsed shows sound anyway!)

So, the best way to bring live group performance into Second Life is to have all the musicians in one place with a bunch of gear. Although that's feasible for some group performers, it does mean that most live music performers in Second Life are just one person.

That doesn't mean they sound like just one person, however. Most (perhaps all) in-world singers are essentially performing karaoke: they have pre-recorded backing tracks (usually without vocals, but sometimes with harmony backing vocals) to which they sing along, often applying a modicum of digital reverb and/or echo to their voices. So they sound a bit like they have a full band. Some of these folks are legitimately talented singers who know how to use a microphone, understand their material, and do a good job entertaining an in-world audience. Others…not so much. And it's not that someone needs a degree in vocal performance to be a good online entertainer this way: one of the funnest half hours I spent in SL was listening to an amateur singer do absolutely hysterical impressions of famous singers; another time a friend did what amounted to a house concert for a few friends and acquaintences, and while she won't be winning a Grammy anytime soon the entire event had a sweetness even some of the most polished SL performers can lack.

Other performers—and some of the most successful ones—approach Second Life shows as if they were real life performances: it's just their voice, their instrument, and sound they can make in real time. The most common example in this group is what I call a "singer-songwriter" show, usually just one person singing with a guitar or piano; a handful of real-life duos and trios also perform in Second Life this way. Again, the talent level varies widely, but there are folks in performing in Second Life who could easily hold their own at a music festival.

Still other performers use hybrids of these approaches: some play along with real instruments to pre-recorded backing tracks (sometimes ones they made themselves), while other perform "live" using samplers, loopers, and "live" automated tools and software to fill out their sound. Some of these folks are software and synthesizer people, using software instruments, drum machines, sequencers, and tools like Reason and Ableton to produce everything from ambient electronica to hip-hop and house; some are guitar shredmeisters playing their latest Yngvie-inspired magnum opus over their own backing tracks; some play jazz, some play blues, some play Latin…the variety can be tremendous.

So, the bottom line: if there's a way to make digitized sound, whether by playing an MP3, using a microphone, firing up some software, or turning on a whole heap of cranky, buzzy, cantankerous gear, someone in Second Life is doing it. And if you look around, odds are someone (or several someones) is doing it well.

Komuso Tokugawa

Second Life electric blues cyborg Komuso Tokugawa

First up, Komuso Tokugawa. I'm not quite sure how to describe Komuso: electric blues, for sure, but somewhat re-interpreted for the digital age. Appearing as a tall cyborg-ish bluesman with varying skins (some rusted, some hygenic, none particularly human) Komuso takes a bunch of well-worn blues tunes and couples them with sometimes-snarling vocals and often-growling slide guitar. One of the most interesting things about Komuso's shows is how much he varies his guitar tone: sometimes silky smooth, sometimes biting and jarring, sometimes rocking, sometimes so far behind the beat you wonder if he's still awake. And Komuso usually sounds like a full band thanks to Beato-san and Basso-san, his virtual rhythm section—instantiated in-world as animated devil-and-angel attachments that float around Komuso's head. Beato-san handles drums and Basso-san handles bass: I gather they're a software based rhythm section that Komuso cues and triggers while he's playing: the rhyhm section isn't a simple loop that backs him up, but shifts and changes as he's playing—and Komuso varies the rhythm instrumentation a bunch between songs.

But all that is technical stuff: Komuso brings straight-up electric blues to Second Life with considerable authority, taking on both classics and some unusual song choices with unique style. Most of the time the results are stunning, and while sometimes Komuso crawls out onto a branch that can't quite hold him, his playing is free and almost fearless—not being afraid to take chances is one of the only ways to make magic happen. Some of his renditions would be at home in a whiskey-and-beer-soaked dive bar; others venture into Middle Eastern and Asian tonal territory, while others can be almost be described as pop. And most of the time they're surprising.

The downside of a Komuso show is that he does draw a crowd—and with it, he draws lag. I've seen Komuso pack more than 80 people into a sim, and the load has brought down venues more than once. But don't use that as an excuse: if you like blues and can make it to a show, just find a seat, endure the lag, and enjoy it.

Von Johin

Von Johin brings home the acoustic blues

Speaking of blues, one of the champions of Second Life blues is Von Johin, who's reasonably "out" as Nashville musician and music industry writer Mike Lawson in real life, although Von Johin has a strong identity of his own—Von is generally credited as being the first Second Life avatar to land a record deal, although I have no idea what's up with that. Von is just his guitar and his voice, mainly doing acoustic and country blues along the lines of Willie Dixon, Sun House, and Sonny Boy Williamson…but also sometimes segue off into show tunes or even material that would fit right in at a Grateful Dead show—unsurprising since there are a few real life connections there. Von typically performs with just his acoustic guitar and voice, although he stomps some percussion and isn't above firing up a wah-wah pedal on that acoustic. Lately Von's discovered the dubious magic of vocal harmonizers–electronic gizmos that take a copy of a live vocal line and create electronically-generated harmony lines around it—so it sometimes sounds like three or four people are singing. In live music harmonizers are best used sparingly for effect rather than as a crutch, and after briefly over-using the gizmo to get a feel for it Von seems to have settled into a nice technique with it, using it to accent moments in a tune and showcase his voice, rather than using it as a cheap trick to great a bigger sound.

Von's shows are relaxed and pretty open-ended: songs flow into each other without any premeditated plan—sometimes taking amusing and amazing tangents—and if no one is going on after Von his sets often wander past their scheduled conclusions: I've popped into a venue nearly an hour after Von was supposed to wrap up and still found him going strong. As a musician, the vocabulary Von displays at most shows isn't terribly wide, but he plays it with the kind of conviction and confidence that only comes with years of performing experience, and he truly understands how to leverage his technique and sonic palette to serve his material. And as a player, Von is no slouch: when you perform solo you don't really get to take big extended guitar solos, but Von can manage to keep a tune rolicking all by himself while still throwing in a ton of hopping fretwork. The man has studied his Doc Watson and Chet Atkins.

Like Komuso, Von Johin can also be a sim-packer, but because his shows typically go on for a while, it's usually possible to catch part of almost any show he plays. Highly recommended.

Joaquin Gustav

Joaquin Gustav brings a touch of tango to Second Life

Another musician with a strong presence in the Second Life music scene is Joaquin Gustav, an Argentinian guitarist who eschews the tick-tackery of electric guitars for the elegance and romance of the nylon-string…and a hint of tango. Joaquin's setup is pretty simple: it's just a mic and his guitar, and he often plays to simple, single-take accompaniment tracks that afford him the opportunity to play heads and take a solo or two if he likes. Most of Joaquin's repertoire is jazz and pop standards—you'll hear Jobim, Gershwin, and Bill Evans alongside and The Beatles and maybe even a Cyndi Lauper tune. Joaquin plays many of his tunes instrumentally, hinting at a bit of tango in the arrangements, usually stating the head pretty clearly then rolling through a few verses of solo. The show is aimed at couples and dancing: it's about setting a mood rather than showing off. His guitar technique is oddly both flashy and understated: he's not afraid to simply outline bits of a melody and let the music speak for itself, but he also indulges in some flourishes that mainly serve to highlight the material. Since his backing tracks are pre-recorded, a few tunes sometimes feel a little canned, and I tend to prefer songs that are just Joaquin on his own—he'll take requests, sometimes with amusing results. Joaquin will occasionally sing a tune or two, but half the charm of Joaquin's performances can be his interaction with the crowd and his regular audience members…and, personally, his speaking accent is just delightful.

Joaquin is one of the hardest-working performers in Second Life: seems like he plays a dozen or more shows a week, often at consistent times in regular venues, so catching Joa is usually pretty easy. He also played my friend Lebn & Preston's third anniversary celebration, so you know he's a great guy!

The Odd Ball

Shava Suntzu and Tuna Oddfellow boogie down at The Odd Ball

So this isn't really a live music act so much as an experience: if you haven't done it, you've got to get yourself to an Odd Ball. They happen almost every week on Mondays at 7 PM SLT and Sundays at 11 AM SLT, with occasional irregular events happening at, well, odd times.

What is the Odd Ball? I really have no idea. It's a dance party, it's a rave, it's a psychedelic extravaganza, it's a visual feast, it's people-watching, it's the ultimate in lag. The Odd Ball seems to have been going on in Second Life for quite some time: the average age of avatars attending the events verges on the ancient and you'll even see some of Second Life's bigname glitterati in attendance. The Odd Balls aren't a concert: they're a virtual experience that I can only compare to standing inside a kaleidoscope. The shows take place in a custom build—give it several minutes to rez—that feature ever-shifting textures, particles, and images splattered on whirling and spinning megaprims and all controlled in real time by Tuna Oddfellow…who apparently won a million-Linden prize from NBC for being Second Life's "most talented avatar" at some point. In real life Tuna Oddfellow is a real-life magician named Matthew Fishman.

The Odd Balls are a visual spectacle: the only thing constant about the Odd Balls is a giant inverted top hat: most attendees stand or dance on apparent thin air (some of us park our virtual asses on a dance ring beneath the hat): from there, you turn up the music—usually some intelligent instrumental electronica—and just watch what Tuna rolls out, reveals, conceals, and explodes. It's like a 3D music visualizer…except it's not lame, and in my experience it is never, ever the same twice. Tuna runs the show while his partner Shava Suntzu handles the meet-and-greet and explanations and detailing what the Odd Ball is up to next in real life and Second Life—apparently they've put on live Odd Balls at SLCC (Second Life Community Convention) events in real life.

An overhead view of a moment of the Odd Ball—
the ever-shifting venue is immense; avatars are barely pixels in this image

Odd Balls typically run two hours—you don't have to attend the entire thing, but set aside at least half an hour for everything to rez and to get into the vibe of the event. The Odd Balls aren't for everyone—they don't demand a tremendous amount of interactivity, but they aren't the kind of thing that lets you multitask. You don't want to be trying to manage email, tap into Plurk, or write a blog entry at an Odd Ball. You might IM a bit with in-world friends, perhaps chat with other attendees. But mostly you'll want to soak in it. The Odd Balls have been one of the most relaxing things I've found in Second Life…and the only place in-world I've experienced anything akin to vertigo.

A word about tipping

I've written a bit about how I handle tipping at trivia events I attend—basically, I tip back a lot of what I win to trivia hosts and venues. Live music is diferent: I'm not earning anything from attending a live music event, so there's no way to realistically tip back a percentage of what I earn. Moreover, performing live music in Second Life has real costs. First, there's the cost of running the venue itself, in terms of paying rent to landlords or tier to Linden Labs for the land. Then there's the Shoutcast or Icecast server: depending on the number of people those need to support simultaneously, costs seem to run about $10–20 CAD per month. Finally, musicians have real costs too: getting music into SL isn't as simple as plugging into a computer's mic jack: musicians typically need a digital audio interface (which can run from a couple hundred to a few thousand dollars), plus any amount of other gear in order to make the music itself: that includes microphones, pre-amps, amplifiers, headphones, stands, strings, cables, direct boxes, effects, and more—plus, in all probability, software for managing your sound and outputting an MP3 stream in real time.

Point being: none of this is free. Musicians probably are leveraging gear they use to play or perform in real life, but very few are going to be able to step into Second Life performing at no cost…and then there's the time they have to put into creating and producing, well, a show.

So: if you enjoy an inworld performer, please tip both the performer and (if appropriate) the venue supporting them as generously as you can. Very few people are earning any sort of money performing music in Second Life: supportive audiences are the only things that will keep live music happening in the virtual world.

This Bowl Goes to Eleven

2009-11-23T15:00:00.000-08:00

Second Life's monthly team trivia event, the Buccaneer Bowl, normally takes place towards the end of each month, but owing to a major U.S. holiday at the end of November, the eleventh Buccaneer Bowl took place in the middle of the month. And this time around, instead of cramming everyone on a ship somewhere, the fantabulous Jez Oh built a special purpose "marooned" venue for the event: picture Stonehenge coupled with a pirate camp and you get the idea. I loved the setting, in part because it provided opportunities for the teams to kinda gather in three dimensions instead of two: me and the rest of the Trivial Corsairs camped out on top on of the "henges" for the Bowl. After all, in SL everyone can fly! And if you can fly, wouldn't you park your butt on top of Stonehenge?

Trivia players assembled at the Buccaneer Bowl 11 venue by Jez Oh; photo by Lillian Shippe.

This also had the nifty effect of making me the tallest player at the entire game! See the super cool black spec standing on top of one of the henges? That's me!

Once again, the Bowl was ably conducted by Thornton Writer, Lillian Shippe, and Lette Ponnier. The last few months they've conducted a team-building session the hour before the game to get everyone matched up, and that seems to have paid off great dividends: the games start smoothly, run smoothly, and everyone seems to have a great time. The Bucky Crew have also introduced new bonus question formats, one modeled on Outburst( where an entire team has to come up with a certain number of correct answers within a time frame) and another called a "Lightning Bonus" where the team has to answer a series of eight rapidfire questions spaced 15 seconds apart—if the team gets five correct, they win the bonus.

Trivial Corsairs in November: Nia Jinx, me, Lebn Bucyk, and Captain Rain Ninetails

Sadly, the altitude of the "henge" probably got to my head: some days answers to trivia questions seem to fall into my lap, but during the Buccaneer Bowl they pretty much landed to the left and right of me: the Corsairs managed an eighth place finish this time around. I'd had high hopes for the game, since seasonal disruptions meant several of the teams were operating at reduced or altered capacity, and the Corsairs (for once!) had all our original crew: Rain, Nia, Lebn, and me. It didn't work out that we walked away with the game, but it was still a fun time and it was great to hang with the "original crew" for a while.

It's hard for me to believe the Buccaneer Bowl has been running for nearly a year; I'm pleased to have played even a very minor role by participating in the events, and I hope it becomes—continues to be—a long-running SL tradition.

The Omega and the Alpha

2009-11-19T12:13:00.006-08:00

I have occasionally lamented that vast swathes of Second Life seem to be little more than the virtual equivalent of stripmalls—often complete with strippers. But while the grid might be replete with oversized, boxy buildings painted with garish over-saturated textures and (seemingly) no thoughts for aesthetics, there are many places in Second Life that demonstrate tremendous imagination, creativity, and…well, vision. I'm pleased to report that one of my favorite builds in SL, Omega Point, has just completed a period of reconstruction—and it's seriously cooler than ever.

Clouds and mist and mystery at Omega Point

Omega Point is the work of the Japanese creator Sweetlemon Jewell; the sim was originally billed as a "dark cyberworld," and wow did it live up to that description with tentacles and monsters and robed hooded figures and even a chapel where lucky avatars could preach and (if I remember) dance in blood—all taking place in an environment where scifi technology has been grafted to edifices that seem to be millennia old. The new Omega Point is less dark, more baroque, perhaps more overtly digital, but an even more elegantly organic place than its ever been.

But but but! Hold off on all that. What immediately impresses about Omega Point isn't the theming of the build but the sheer scale of the place. Where most builders do a little terraforming and splat some prims around in the shapes of buildings or rocks or trees, Omega Point is massive like you've never seen. To appreciate the scale and design many visitors will probably have to increase the draw distance on their Second Life client software to see what's happening. The whole build seems to live in a massive crater, with elegant arcades and towers and walkways and staircases suspended over it like gothic lace…and over that, massive stone arches like the ribs of some long-dead leviathan. Like the old Omega Point there's a brand ballroom where, I imagine, exceedingly cool avatars shall engage in a little dancing. And below it all, a kind of sub-basement that's half church, half store, half digital, and half mystical. (Yes, that's four halves. I can add.)

Underneath it all…

Shadow of the valley of death?

Where the previous Omega Point was dark, broody, and vaguely menacing, the new Omega Point is golden and arcane and glorious. Sweetlemon embraces megaprims and sculpts and rich textures in ways unlike anything I've seen elsewhere in Second Life—and she's fast: speaking with her (via a machine translator; my Japanese is non-existant) the entire rebuild took her only a couple months. (For more gorgeous images of what she's been up to, check out her Japanese-language blog.) I've been working on one of my little tiny scripting projects almost as long, in calendar terms.

I did most of my reconnoitering of the new Omega Point while it was still under construction, so my images don't quite match up to the completed build. But Sweetlemon graciously left the sim open during the construction, relocating the sim's two stores into the stratosphere while she worked on the lower levels. I've been meaning to get back to the upper echelons of the sim to see if the temporary stores are still there—if you flew up into the balconies of one of them, there was quite a display.

In the rafters of one of Omega Point's temporary stores

Omega Point features two stores, one of clothes and cyber-goodies from Sweetlemon, and another of almost cyber-steam-baroque-abstract clothing and accessories by Kariwanz Felisimo. Both are highly recommended, but Omega Point is worth the full tour (check out the little pod crafts!) regardless of whether any of the virtual goods hold any appeal. There are also a few tip jars scattered about the sim…if you like it, drop a few Lindens in one.

Kariwanz Felisimo & Sweetlemon Jewell

I expect the story of Omega Point to continue evolving. For one thing—and I'll just drop a hint—there's something brand new developing in a sim next door: Alpha Point.

Triviathon

2009-11-11T21:22:00.005-08:00

Another blog post where Lou is late to the party, but I would be seriously remiss if I didn't mention this last weekend featured Triviathon, a 24-hour all-trivia-all-the-time event benefiting Relay for Life. The brainchild of trivia hosts Cully Andel and Triain Kandr, the idea was to run 24 hours of continuous in-world trivia to benefit charity. Of course, the best time to throw an event like that is on the weekend, and that means running up against a lot of popular Second Life trivia games like (ahem!) Lou's Clues. So Cully and Triain had a great idea—invite the hosts of those games to be part of Triviathon. Thus, on Saturday instead of setting up my little chair and cheat sheet at [MonoChrome], I rezzed into Trivy Isle and followed Trivia Grandmaster Thornton Writer up on stage in an effort to raise some money to fight cancer—a very worthy cause that, in one way or another, I'm sure impacts everyone RL and SL.

I didn't get any screenshots of my set—I was too busy trying to cram my questions into a one-hour time slot!—but Lette Ponnier managed to get a picture of me and "my little friend" the Victorian Mad Science Death Ray Mk II (made by Tali Rosca)—pummeling trivia fans with questions and excess protons. I was also randomly giving away some Jez's Oh's fabulously cute small avatars (available at [Oblique]!) and I didn't completely fall on my face or have massive script glitches, so I'm going to count the gig a raging success!

Although not all of SL's trivia hosts were represented, aside from myself the event featured a bunch of SL's best and brightest showrunners, including AnaMaria Quintessa, Triain and Cully, Chadd & Shale (I got to do Zoo Bar trivia again!), Josh and Circe, Nelly & Lotus, Maggie, Billy2Times, Devin, and even event host Hummingbird Forster took at turn at the stage, along with former Armada host Mako Kungfu and Chaos mistress Lette Ponnier.

I wasn't able to attend all 24 hours of the event, but I popped in whenever I could and five folks managed to hold out for the entire event for special prizes! I don't know how they did it, but Rain Ninetails, Lette Ponnier, Juke Badger, Devin Velinov, and FlutterBye Skytower where there for the whole darn thing—and they were reasonably coherent at the end. I tried to get a shot of the winners, but Second Life wasn't cooperating—not everybody rendered fully. Perhaps they hadn't been changing their pixels often enough.

Left to right: Juke Badger, Cully Andel, Devin Velinov,
Lette Ponnier, Rain Ninetails, and Flutterbye Skytower

The conservative goal of the Triviathon was to raise $20,000L—and I'm pleased to report that the event raised far more than that. Last I heard, the total donated to Relay for Life was $65,056L. Yes, that amounts to about $260 CAN, which isn't a terribly huge amount in the grand scheme, but for a trial run in an online community that's never tried to put together an event on this scale, I think it represents a solid success.

Plus, as part of the deal, Juke Badger's avatar got a haircut. That may not benefit cancer research, but, wow, it's sure a tremendous social good.

(If you need me, I'll be in some remote sim hiding from Juke.)

Of Corn and Cabals

2009-11-04T17:30:00.002-08:00

Halloween is a huge deal in Second Life, in part I think due to the holiday having become a month-long heavily-commercialized celebration of weirdness and debauchery in America over the last umpteen years. All October Second Life was replete with zombies, axe murderers, blood-splattered avatars and walking corpses…in addition to a number of very creative seasonal builds with jack o' lanterns, ghosts, leaves, spiderwebs, and other creepy things. As with real-life Halloween, some of it was horribly tacky, some of it was magical, and some of it was weird. At least in SL none of it smelled funny.

Ghost-ish Lou climbs a dead tree in The Corn Field:
no signs of civilization.

In celebration of Halloween, Linden Lab briefly opened up The Corn Field, a near-mythical area that's normally off limits to Second Life residents. Apparently, back in the early days of SL, the Lindens would send misbehaving avatars to The Corn Field, a region where it was always night and which was completely isolated from the rest of the grid. The Corn Field had a one-way teleporter that went nowhere, a tractor, a couple of dead televisions…and nothing else but rows of corn. Residents banished to the Corn Field couldn't go anywhere, talk to anyone, or do anything. I guess The Corn Field was supposed to be the equivalent of sending a misbehaving child to their room without supper—a harsh disciplinary measure, but short of an outright ban. The idea is based on the original Twilight Zone episode "It's a Good Life," where a mind-reading six-year-old demands everyone think happy thoughts or he will wish unhappy people away into an infinite cornfield. Or turn them into misshapen ghouls.

Lou staring at Philip Linden's glowing underwear-in-effigy

For Halloween the Lindens set up four creepily identical Corn Field sims, and dressed them up for the holiday with a sinister scarecrow, creepy things hidden in the rows of corn, along with graves, skulls, and the obligatory dead tree. At times, Linden Lab employees were wondering the fields, scaring people and occasionally handing out Linden teddy bears. There were also some mannequins of avatars "banished" to the Corn Field, including an all-black shadow of Linden Lab founder Philip Linden, for some reason wearing glowing briefs. I don't know what the point of the effigy was; it seemed to bear on the edge of tasteless given that Philip Rosedale—the typist behind Philip Linden—recently announced he was ending his day-to-day involvement with Linden Lab, having stepped down from the CEO role in April 2008.

The vertically-enabled: I pose in front of Juke Badger and Devin Velinov.
Bear in mind the camera angle makes me looks taller than I am!

But not everything has been creepiness and glowing underwear—some parts of Second Life are reassuringly normal. For instance, although my avatar is a bit taller than Real Life Lou, I continue to be abnormally short by SL standards, where anyone under about 2m is considered a bit petite. Here I am standing in front of friends Juke Badger and Devin Velinov, two of the tallest avatars I see regularly. The contrast makes me laugh—I barely come up to their hips, and Juke's hair is almost as long as I am tall!

The Not-At-All-Secret Secret Trivia Cabal meeting in Secret Primhenge:
Prim-mistress Jez Oh, me, Lette Ponnier, and Lillian Shippe.

And I'm happy that stepping back a little from some of my in-world work means I'm spending a little more time with friends: for instance, this was an impromptu gathering of [MonoChrome] (and [Oblique]!) creator and prim-mistress Jez Oh along with Buccaneer Bowl crew captains Lette Ponnier and Lillian Shippe…in Primhenge. Kinda sorta. Maybe more about that later. It might just turn out to be wicked cool.

Two Bucc Chuck

2009-10-29T18:00:00.002-07:00

I've been remiss in keeping up with the Second Life trivia scene—partly because I'm spending less time in-world, but mostly because I'm spending that time wrapping up projects and "doing work" rather than hanging out with friends and having fun. But I definitely want to highlight the most recent Buccaneer Bowls, the team-based trivia events that are the highlight of the Second Life trivia scene every month.

For folks who don't know, the Buccaneer Bowls are played by up to ten teams of three to four players each, rather than being a free-for-all like most open-chat trivia games. There are five rounds of five questions each, with the first three correct answers scoring points for their teams. At the end of each round, the team that scored the most points is eligible for a bonus question: if they get the bonus, the team gets more money, but if they lose the money is distributed to other teams that placed in the round. And the money is pretty substantial in Second Life terms: $10,000L is up for grabs in the game. That's only about $40 CAN, but it's enough to ensure the top trivia players all show up if they can. (Plus, as teams, they can gang up on each other! Rumble!) But even with the fierce competition, no one has to go home empty-handed: in an effort to keep lag down, avatars with an Avatar Rendering Cost (ARC) under 500 get $100L just for showing up (ARCs under 1000 get $50L).

The Buccaneer Bowls have been running since January 2009, with Lette Ponnier, Lillian Shippe, and Thornton Writer ably running the ship, herding the cats, doing all the logistics, writing the questions, plus conducting and scoring the games. The ninth and tenth Bowls took place in September and October, respectively—and they took place at a location near and dear to my heart, Jez+Sinn+Mandy's club [MonoChrome], where I host my Lou's Clues trivia game most weeks. The September Bowl was held in the Club proper because of a last-minute snafu with the planned venue: Jez volunteered the club when the planned location turned out not to be available. And it worked out pretty well–lag didn't seem to be much of a problem, so the Bowl came back to [MonoChrome] in October…although for October there was time to roll out a schooner (supplied by Karmel Kips, I believe) for the Bowl's nautical theme.

The Frivolous Corsairs in September:
me, Olmstead Fanshaw, and Rain Ninetails

During October, the Frivolous Corsairs fielded a team of three: me, captain Rain Ninetails, and special guest star trivia giant Olmstead Fanshaw. Unfortunately, Olms wound up carrying the weight (I was almost useless with a migraine) but we still managed to tie for a fourth place finish out of eight teams. The almost-unstoppable (but very deserving) Triviators strode away with the month's crown.

Frivolous Corsairs in October:
me, Rain Ninetails, Glimmer Mattercaster, and Lebn Bucyk

In October, the Frivolous Corsairs fielded a team of four: me, captain Rain Ninetails, trivia titan (and original Corsair!) Lebn Bucyk, and rising star Glimmer Mattercaster. And we did pretty well, managing third place out of (I think) nine teams again—BoomFireCirceSchism managed to come out on top as the champions for the month. It sort of seems to be the Corsairs' fate to be second fiddle when we do well: I think we've landed in second place three or four times, and we actually had a real shot at coming in first this month…at least, until I biffed a tie-breaker for the last bonus question.

Nonetheless, a fabulous time was had by all, and I'm already looking forward the next (the 11th!) Buccaneer Bowl! What's sort of amazing about these things is now everyone is on their best behavior, and while there are lots of japes and jibes and snarky comments, they're all made in good humor and everyone works to make the events a success. And of course, a tremendous thank-you to Thorn, Lette, and Lillian for putting these events on every month, and keeping the bar for quality and fun so high. Huzzah!

Woodbury Stops By For Tea

2009-10-20T15:30:00.002-07:00

So after Lebn Bucyk's Barefoot trivia on Sunday—sadly interrupted by a sim crash—my friend Geoff Novi (in-world! whoo!) popped to my favorite sandbox to talk scripting and maybe about handing off a couple of those jobs I mentioned earlier. He got there first so he spun out his totally antique work box 2000m up in the air, and we chatted about some script libraries and Perl code and I was threatening to pull out a weird prim I'd come across to see if Geoff could make any sense of it—typical, normal, minding-our-own-business stuff. Geoff noticed an avatar fly up to check us out and immediately commented it was someone's alt: the account was a week old and flying up to 2000m, and that's not something a new Second Life user is likely to do—or, if they do, they probably wouldn't leave immediately after all that flying.

A short while later we were joined by another avatar. EstaEs Sparta—"This Is Sparta," get it?—carrying a shield and outsized sword, and wearing a facemask. Above EstaEs's name was a group tag bearing an interesting word: Woodbury.

Right to left: Geoff Novi, me, and Woodbury sword-bearer EstaEs Sparta

Woodbury University is one of Second Life's more controversial groups: to some they're a bunch of kids out to have fun, to others the Woodies are marauders dedicated to griefing other users and disrupting Second Life to get their "lulz." Woodbury seriously predates my involvement in SL: far as I can tell, it was originally associated with the Media, Culture, & Design department at a real Woodbury University in California; no one seems to know if that's still true, but it's doubtful. What is well-known is that Woodbury attracted students of 4chan and /b/ (if you don't know what that means, trust me, don't go looking), and Woodbury regulars are widely known for just being out to push people's buttons: sometimes that means disrupting events with chat spam, scripted objects, obscene animations and images, etc.—the virtual equivalent of five-year-olds running around saying "poop!" and making farting noises—and sometimes it's flat-out attacks, as much as anyone can be attacked in SL.

Although Woodbury seems mostly about pranking, hate speech, and bumptious arrogance, there is some overlap with Second Life's genuine thugs and content thieves: Woodbury "students" have been involved in organized disruptions of inworld events, harassing residents, and crashing sims, and I've had Woodies literally steal the shirt off my back—well, copy it—and give it back to me for a laugh. Woodbury was enough of a problem that Linden Lab apparently pulled the plug on it about two years ago, deleting their region. But the Woodies came back, inking a deal with BNT Holdings—a laissez-faire inworld virtual real estate outfit—for three sims. By leasing from a tolerant landlord, the Woodies were basically free to do whatever they wanted until they stepped out into the rest of Second Life and started violating terms of service.

And that, in my experience, is basically the only time you see a Woodie—when they're out and about for "lulz." They particularly dislike "furries"—folks who use animal or anthropomorphic animal avatars—and anyone who they can goad into a response. (One of SL's most vocal and longest-standing land barons is a good example.) Several Woodbury alumni have apparently been "permabanned," which means having their accounts shut down and, in some cases, having their computers blocked from Second Life. However, these bans represent mere inconveniences: at a basic level, you can get around them just by creating a new account and maybe using a different computer. Lots of Woodies keep the noses on their primary accounts relatively clean, and create brand-new throwaway accounts for any activity that's likely to draw the Linden's ire.

I've filed my share of abuse reports against Woodies—undoubtedly more than a typical SL user—and maybe contributed to a few of their accounts being suspended. I've mentioned I've been targeted by a sustained bout of griefing the last month, and while a few Woodies are on my short list of possible perpetrators, there's no real way to know if they're behind it. I'd begun discounting Woodies because the grief is not their style—there's nothing to point at to get their lulz, and the effort involved exceeds my perceptions of their attention span. But there's no denying some folks associated with Woodbury are both clever and smart, so I can't rule them out either. I felt my hackles rise when EstaEs popped in for a chat.

So to what did we owe the pleasure? Turns out the Woodies' benefactor, BNT Holdings, has managed to run itself into the ground, and those three sims the Woodies occupied are now gone—along with dozens of other sims run by the outfit. So Woodbury is looking for new places to call home, and the sim with my favorite sandbox is on the short list. Apparently there's some sentimental value owing to the presence of an in-world "office" of the Alphaville Herald, née Second Life Herald—an office I've never seen used for anything but, hey, it's there. The Herald itself is a ridiculous-vapid-snarky site that purports to cover Second Life in a "fairly unbalanced" way. Their self-description seems accurate; I'm not a fan, but the site seems widely read and it has gleefully followed the antics of the Woodies and others.

To my surprise, EstaEs was civil—despite somehow disrupting all the prims on Geoff's seriously antique work cube to sit at the same origin, something that seemed to amuse Geoff but which struck me as damn odd. (Although Geoff did call in some reinforcements…something else that was damn odd.) Nonetheless, it's possibly the only time I've had direct contact with someone from Woodbury that didn't result in filing multiple abuse reports.

I have no stake in the sim that hosts my fave sandbox. Talking with some of the regulars, it seems more likely that the sim will go away altogether than be taken over by the Woodbury folks. Either way, I'll have to look for a new workshop: can't go somewhere that no longer exists, and I doubt I'd be welcome in the midst of New Soviet Woodburyland or whatever materialized—even if I wanted to be associated with the kinds of grief, disruption, and intolerace that orbits Woodbury. Even just for lulz.

So, EstaEs, thanks for the heads up.