The Voices in My Head

yesterday I received official confirmation that I have been approved as a mentor for Second Life. This comes complete with membership in a special SL group for those such as me who have volunteered. I can’t remember exactly when I applied to be a mentor, but I think it was about 18 months ago. Certainly, the last time I applied for any kind of official or semi-official position sponsored by Linden Lab was back in January or February. I’m not entirely sure why it took them so long to approve of me.

Nonetheless, it pleases me no end to know that LL approves of me.

So on saturday there was a pseudo-secret party for LL’s FIC, better known as anyone who puts down enough money each month to pay for a private island or half a mainland sim (assuming LL’s billing division can figure out how to charge your account of course). (more…)

According to the latest blog post from Linden Lab, several residents reported a general slow-down in server performance shortly after the new version was released yesterday. I would be grateful if some kind sould could tell me how these residents reported these issues and received a response so fast, because I have yet to get a support ticket responded to in less than 3 days, let alone less than 12 hours, judging by the timestamps on their blog.

Over on the Linden Lab blog, they have finally made a public posting about a certain legal case.

While I probably have the details wrong somewhere, rumour and hearsay being what it is, as I understand it from those sources I have been able to find, Bragg (a lawyer in real life and representing himself in this case) discovered a method of locating the web address of auctions for servers before LL had formally opened the auctions.
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So SL is down for an upgrade today, and it seemed like a good time to post what’s on my mind.

The Second Ability is up and running, and getting far more traffic than most corporate sites. That’s the power of community, folks. You can’t just put up a pretty building, a banner, and an advertising logo, and then expect it all to fall into place. It won’t. of course, we aren’t resting on our laurels. Oh no - There is still much that is to be done. The Stevens centre still needs to be finished, which I would have done a few days ago, if only I hadn’t caught a bad case of cooties last weekend. Fortunately, the meds have cleared it all up.

Sculpties, Voice, and Skies. Those are the next big things to hit SL. And true to form, I’m in two minds about them.

Sculpties are an exciting concept, but I know I don’t have the graphical talent (yet) to make use of them to full effect. I am looking forward to seeing what others will do with them though.

I have no intention of using voice, which puts me in a decently large minority. For business purposes, Skype, MSN, and TeamSpeak work more than adequately, and there is no need for me to use SL’s voice feature for this. For role-playing, voice will absolutely kill the activity if used. For gender verification, Screaming Bee (and others) already make products that will mock any attempt to use this to verify that your SL lover is of the expected gender. I can see some potential for using voice as part of a presentation on disability, but since I won’t be presenting those, again, it’s not something I need to set up my microphone for.

Skies, though, is the exciting bit for me. The new WindLight technology has a lot of potential that I can see, and I intend playing with it as soon as i can get my paws on it. If nothing else, it means I can fix the sun size to something less likely to cause acute melanoma.

According to Linden Lab:

“We plan to implement features that will enable Residents to optionally confirm aspects of each other’s identity, including age and jurisdictions.”

The way I’d prefer the identity verification system (and the current “payment info on file”) is that this data should never leave the server.
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Perhaps one of the earliest computer toys, if not actually the earliest, was Sim City. Before that of course there were plenty of computer games, but not really any toys. For me, although both involve play, a toy does not have a preset goal; you can’t “win” with a toy, except by defining your own goals, independant of whoever made the toy. This, by the way, is why it is generally far better to give children toys to play with instead of games; defining their own goals is a key step in developing young minds.

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