1920s Berlin at SL11B

The 1920s Berlin Project

Like the previous years The 1920s Berlin Project will have its own place at Second Life’s 11th anniversary celebrations, aka SL11B.

The theme of SL’s 11th birthday party is “The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.”.
A look at the future!

In our exhibit we do that in two ways.

First of all we’re looking forwards to the future of Virtual Reality and Second Life.
The 1920s Berlin project was build to a realistic scale, we took a prim, noticed its measurements of 50x50x50 centimeters and used that as our foundation to build with.
That means that our buildings are generally smaller than in many other places in Second Life but also that the perspective and scale is always based on reality.
This way you can get a real idea of what things looked like in reality, for instance we have a Zeppelin that is 244 meters…

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Ebbe answers your questions on SLUniverse forum

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SL 2.0

Ebbe has logged onto the SLUniverse forum and is answering some of the questions Second Life users are asking him there directly.

You can read the actual forum post by clicking HERE and of course add your own questions.

I’ll be sharing some of his answers here and will be adding more as they come, so check back later as well.

Making it easy for people to bring their identity and social connections along would obviously make a lot of sense to do.

Don’t wait on anything. It will take a long time and then you can choose where to spend your time and energy.

Beta next year sometime.

SL will be here for a long time until we see how people decide between these worlds. Nobody here has even thought of talking about some shut down plan. Too far out to know. But we obviously plan to make something so good ultimately that you will prefer to go there.

I wasn’t really planning to talk about it at the TPV meeting but I’ve been talking to press this week where I do mention next gen platform, so I figured they might as well hear it from me…

I’m for freedom. I don’t want to moderate or control it (beyond making sure things are legal). And we’ll probably have ratings (G, M, A) or something like that so one can be “safe” if one does not want some kind of content…again, we’re creating something in the spirit of SL, but just want to make it much better…

We’re early in our discussions about business models but I’m thinking lower land tax and higher sales tax and ultimately aim to make things up with volume…(charge less to many rather than a lot to a few). This is possible with better tech and making something more people want to be part of.

Ebbe says yes to Linden Dollars and land ownership and sub letting.

Please wait several months…it’s too early to really discuss details. I’m just trying to calm things down a bit. For now we’re more or less just saying that we will work really hard to make a great virtual world that’s even better than the best one (SL) that exist today.

Cross-platform/device chat…yes.

We never stole your content to then sell and profit from it for ourselves. And we won’t.

The 1920s Berlin Project celebrates its 5th anniversary!

The 1920s Berlin Project

On May the 30th 2009, the 1920s Berlin Project opened its doors to the public for the first time.
I was still a noob, only 3 months in Second Life, barely knew how to stick two prims together, yet somehow managed to create a tiny bit of my dream in a skybox on rented mainland.

I could have never imagined it to turn out to become such a huge success, a sim with a the most amazing community, a sim that in stead of being just a bit of fun turned into a huge part of my life.
And not just my life, I’m very proud to have tenants who have been living in this city for 2,3, 4 and even 5 years!
Many of whom I’d call close friends.
I’ve loved every minute of this time traveling adventure and it still is only the beginning.
If all goes well…

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I am in Second Life Meme

I’ve tried making another ‘meme’, as the young hip kids call it these days.

There are two versions, large and facebook header size, that one will fit perfectly as your FB header without your profile picture covering the text.

I completely stole the text from a meme about reading books 🙂

Feel free to use and share these everywhere.

Full version.

The facebook header size version.

Onlive wants to know your opinion on SLGo

I was part of the beta test group for SLGo, the service provided by Onlive that lets you enjoy Second Life in Ultra settings on mobile devices but also on your old no good computers that stopped being able to handle SL long time ago.
As I wrote here on my blog, I was quite impressed with it and so seem most of the people who actually give it a go.
We weren’t happy about the prizing but luckily the Onlive people listened to us and made some drastic changes there.

I’ve been sharing my experiences with the Onlive people directly and they’ve asked me if I could ask you, my blog readers, to share your ideas on their service.
So directly from them to you;

1) If you haven’t tried SL Go… why?
2) If you’ve tried it and were not compelled to continue… why?

And as this is my blog, I’d like to add my own request;

3) If you’ve tried it, share your experiences!

Were you impressed, how did it work, do you have any ideas and suggestions on improvement?

As for myself, I rather like the service, I’m not a very mobile person but am very happy to now be able to use SL it on my old laptop again.
I haven’t used it very much (yet) for three reasons;
-I don’t have a European power plug for the tablet I borrowed and haven’t had time to get one.
-The viewer is based on the official SL viewer and well, I’m just so very used to the Firestorm viewer.
-At home I have a super alienware laptop and fast internet so I can enjoy SL at ultra settings anytime but I’m very happy to know that if something goes wrong I can still get into SL now on my old laptop and I am considering leaving my heavy alienware at home next time I go visit my parents and use SLGo there full time on my much smaller and lighter Macbook.
-One issue I’ve found irritating is that when Onlive decides that my connection isn’t good enough, my only option is to exit the entire service.
I’d prefer it if Onlive just returned me to a menu or just allowed me to start anyway because my connection is good enough and may just have a temporary drop.

So anyway, share your ideas, opinions, suggestions and experiences with SLGo in the comments, they will reach the Onlive folks.

Check your SL support history NOW

On the 9th of April Linden Lab send a lot (if not all) of SL users who frequently transfer Linden Dollars into real money, a message requesting information about your RL identity.

This has to do with current US “applicable laws” where Linden Lab is forced to obtain information identifying you as their customer.

I had heard about this before but assumed it was only something big users were confronted with, people who made thousands of RL dollars with SL every month.

But it seems also people who really don’t make that much money have to now fill in a form and send RL identity proof.

I am sure a lot of people will be upset about this but even worse is that this request may have escaped your attention.

When I received it I assumed it was spam and even after I had read it, I still thought it was a phishing attempt.

Some people don’t get the notification at all and it ends up in their spam folder or gets drowned out in other emails.

This happens because LL thought that the best way to get this rather important message to us was by creating a case, aka a ticket, in the support section of the SL website.

So the first thing you would have heard about this is an email telling you ‘a new case has been created’.

I immediately thought; “I didn’t create a support case, this is weird, I don’t trust it.”

I had no idea Linden Lab could create support cases for me!

So that is why it is probably a good idea to check your email for an email from ‘support@secondlife.com’ with as a title ‘case has been created’.

And just to be sure, also visit your support history page by clicking here.

Especially if you have recently made a Process Credit request to Linden Lab and you haven’t received your money yet.

If you don’t do this, if you’ve missed this, they may put an hold on your account and you can wait on your payment for ever.

I don’t know what the exact amount is that triggers this whole issue and if you never ever make any money with Second Life, this is probably not something for you to be worried about.
But it seems that the amount is not very high, after all I’m not making a lot of money myself.

Luckily the Support people were very friendly, patient and quick to respond to my questions.

So, if it takes longer than usual (about 5 days) for your Linden Dollars to be transferred to your RL wallet, go look into this.

show #13: terms, terms, terms….

Our latest Drax files radio hour episode, about ToS, Oculus, copyrights and much much more.

the drax files radio hour

show #13 [art by richard a.goldberg]

we are tackling two big challenging things this week: recording the show with our oculi on while trying not to bump into physical objects AND we are discussing the linden lab terms of service.

brace yourself and listen to the full hour before commenting, deal?

and additional reading material as per usual below:

– sl go [sl beauty for mobile & low-end machines] now unlimited use for 9.95 US$ per month

pro tools, google docs & sl go by onlive [on an oooold mac pro!]

– jo and her rift review [+ maria korolov says: “the race is on!”]

– should fb buy ll? [according to april 1st & gwyn llewellyn they already have]

linden lab is focused on cutting edge dev!

– vitriol against oculus team!

– the guardian on vr

– philip rosedale on identity in the metaverse of the…

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Facebook buys Linden Lab

I told you so.

A day to remember!

Mark this date.

To read the full press release, click HERE.

The reputation of Second Life

Continuing on the subject of Second Life’s reputation amongst people who haven’t used it and in the media, I wanted to ask my readers a few questions.

I base my ideas on this topic on my own personal interaction with friends, family and strangers on the internet and on what I read in articles and stories written by journalists.

People seem to have several opinions on Second Life that are not true or that at least could be a bit more balanced.

First I’d like to collect a few of these opinions and then I want to hear from you what you have experienced.

Opinions people have about Second Life;

• Strange place where perverts hang out and do weird things.
• No longer exists.
• Shallow game where people dress up avatars and just chat.
• Virtual world but with 2007 quality graphics.
• Flying penises everywhere.

I am sure there are more, feel free to let me know.

As far as I am concerned these are misrepresentations, although partly true, they are not completely valid.

Some are easy to disprove, sure SL CAN look pretty bad and does look horrendous if you’re exploring a badly build sim with an old computer, but there are plenty of stunning pictures available that show SL can also look pretty stunning.

Most people probably don’t have an opinion about Second Life at all, it was something big a decade ago and has very rarely popped up in the media since.

There isn’t a lot of advertising for it and you don’t bump into it very much unless you look for it.

So it is quite understandable that some people will say respond with “What is Second Life?” when asked about it.

But when I started using Second Life and publically mentioning it amongst friends on facebook and in personal chats and even last night during a party, I generally get some of the comments above.

Everyone seems to at least remember it and with generally some negative connotations.

The media does not help of course, when SL turned ten so many articles brought up the negative stories without mentioning that some of them were really old, and as a cherry on top, many used 2009 screenshots without mentioning the date.

So, my question to you is, how do people respond when Second Life is mentioned?

Does SL still have a bad reputation, or after all these years, does it have no reputation at all?

Is this something LL should fix, something we should help fix or something that will eventually just sort itself out?

I see a big problem with SL’s reputation, but perhaps I’m the only one?

Linden Lab speeds up Marketplace

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marketplace

It seems that the terrible slowness, or lets call it lag, Marketplace has been suffering has been fixed or at least improved.

Go and try it and let me know if it has been speed up for you.