Otenth Paderborn's virtual existence
Jay Lake (author of Mainspring) has proposed creating a steampunk abecedary:
Let’s play a bloggy game. Per the above, put your suggestions for a steampunk abecedary in comments — next week I’ll distill them out, and we’ll have a poll for the coolest/funniest, with hardback copies of Escapement [ Powell’s | Amazon ] as prizes.
Only two suggestions up as of this evening, but hurry on over, I’m not sure how long he’ll be waiting.
Virtual worlds have the potential to create real and deep connections across many boundaries. Please consider voting to add Arabic language to SL.
Torley Linden rides to the defense of potential shadows in Linden Research, Inc.’s virtual world: Debunking mindjunk about the cost of [Linden Research’s virtual world]’s visual quality
Mindjunk is exactly what it sounds like: mental clutter that sits in your head and makes you more anxious and fearful, taking up space without doing anything effective for your life
The only trouble is that his post is mostly, well, junk.
A computer that exceeds [Linden Research’s virtual world]’s System Recommendations can be bought for under US$500.
Torley provides a link, but it goes to a forum that gives you leads on pieces of computers. FAIL. Computer pieces do not equal a computer.
“Balkanization” is also grossly inaccurate. Even though I appreciate colorful analogies, it isn’t as easy to unite countries involved in political bloodshed as it is to click your mouse and toggle graphics options.
Torley, never dis someone else for overdoing it. Pot, meet kettle? And while you have a point about toggling off graphics options, people can barely handle doing that right now, and you just recommended that they buy the pieces of a computer? Get out of the hothouse. Seriously. 3D web? It better be plug and play. And it better work on a year-old consumer computer. If it doesn’t, Linden Research’s vision will be stuck off in the corner for all time.
And as an active user—and a customer—I don’t want that. I’ll return to this point later.
“Frustrating builders” is entirely speculative at this point
Yes, like nearly everything about virtual worlds. And your point? Sadly, it’s this:
If you’ve got an opportunity to speak up and make a difference about ongoing issues, no matter how controversial — or protroversial they may be: don’t be a community bleeder, be a community leader.
Excuse me while I throw up a little in the back of my mouth.
I’m active in several communities, as a leader. And as a community leader, let me say that Linden Research’s product shortcomings are wearing a bit thin. Linden Research doesn’t need its users to bleed away enthusiasm; it seems to be doing it all on its own.
I also pay Linden Research, Inc., several hundred dollars a month. And I get a product that doesn’t work right. How many days now of asset server problems? Don’t give me any shit about being cheerful about the next glittery gewgaw to appear on the horizon.
And to my readers (all three of you): be sure to go to Torley’s post and check out the comments, as well as the New World Notes post he is responding to, and its comments.
Our central database is sad, which leads to disruptions in several inworld services, such as teleports, search and profiles not working, logins and transactions failing.
Please do not attempt any transactions with non-copy items at this time.
Excuse me? “Our central database is sad”?
How often have Google’s databases failed under their load, hmm?
If Google’s databases did underperform, how do you think Google would describe it? As “sad”?
I don’t have any interest in being a virtual child, and I sometimes find child roleplay in virtual worlds even more annoying than how real children can act. I similarly don’t have any personal interest in BDSM (in either the virtual or the real worlds). And I actively disapprove of Gorean roleplay of slavery. But nonetheless, all three of these groups should have the right to be involved in any event that purports to be “Celebrating the cultural diversity of Second Life.”
In this instance, however, they cannot, except as spectators. Everett Linden, in comment 103, says “I’ll be working over the weekend with a few other Lindens on a blog post for Monday to help explain and expand on the SLBirthday.”
In the meantime, I’ll join my voice to that of Ordinal Malaprop, Marianne McCann and Loki Eliot, Dusan Writer, Daniel Regenbogen, Erbo Evans and many, many others in saying how utterly disappointed I am in Linden Research, Inc.
As ever, we owe a debt of gratitude to Tateru Nino at Massively for first covering the story.
Update: There’s now a JIRA issue for “missing cultures and communities from SL5B.”
Resolution: Linden Research, Inc., is now taking an active role as organizer. The entire birthday celebration is now PG, and everyone is welcome to submit applications.
Over on the Official [our favorite virtual world] Blog, they have comments turned off on a post informing us of Group Chat Maintenance:
You may experience temporary disruption in group chat. The disruption will consist mainly of group chats ending and receiving errors when chatting within the group. Closing the group chat tab and reopening the chat should restore the group chat function.
And that would be different how?
[4/13/08 edit: removed link as well as name, because if they don’t want me using their name, they don’t deserve to get any search ranking from me, either.]
And I think virtual worlds should just pick a universally recognized time standard and stick to it. Let users adjust to their local time. Vote to change from Pacific Standard/Daylight Time to UTC (Greenwich or Zulu Time).
Two very nice responses to recent articles in [our favorite virtual world]’s most notorious rag on gasp! content theft and open-sourcing code.
First, Miss Ordinal Malaprop’s straightforward analysis of new “copybot” scares:
There is nothing at all new about any of this.
Be sure to read the comments to see Second Life’s notorious antagonist in action.
And today we have Mr Barney Boomslang’s ranting sarcasm on the dangers of open source:
Oh my, the doom is near, everyone off to the bomb shelters, man the lifeboats, the sky is falling!
(No comments to entertain the masses on Mr Boomslang’s blog.)
Gwyneth Llewelyn has posted Lag Myths Dispelled
While it’s undeniable that all highly attended events are laggy — it’s a limitation of the technology — I was surprised to see that almost all “rules” are based on very old limitations of the SL technology, which plagued us in 2003-2005, but that have since then be “fixed” by Linden [Research, Inc.], as both the client and the server software have dramatically improved.
Improved, yes, but the lag is still with us. And, in a desperate attempt to fight down lag, people are coming up with ancient “recipes” for fixing lag — unaware that they’re not really helping out, but just repeating old myths, that simply don’t reflect the state-of-the art of LL’s technology these days. Lag will remain with us for many more years, but not for the same reasons we had it in 2003-2005.
Gwyneth not only dispells three myths, she makes some suggestions about what you can do to reduce lag.
Dandellion at Living in the Metaverse has a great idea: » Let’s Make The Grid Performing A Bit Better, Please
Shall we? Stop whining about things are not smooth as we wish. We all know they are not. Let’s do something about that. Consider that an ecology action. If each of us spend ten minutes and delete all the trash that clutters our inventories…
The basic idea is that cleaning up our inventories will help ease the load on asset servers and improve our client performance. She suggests starting with
She is encouraging people to comment on her post with the number of items they’ve deleted.