Second Life Blogs | Pixel Scoop | Virtual Worlds News

As many of you know, I don’t get in world as much as I would like anymore. As a full time Father and a whole load of hours to put in running my business each week, it’s a long, long week.

But tonight I got the chance to get back in world. There are just a few people in world who I keep in touch with regularly and a couple who I really wish I was more in touch with. Tonight, I got the chance to hang out with one of those friends and I’m feeling pretty refreshed for it.

I hung out at her skybox for a bit, before we both threw our webcams on so I could show her my new apartment in Manchester (and so my son could show off lol) and she could show me her place. After an hour or so, we turned them off and got back in world to explore some.

It’s amazing really, just how much it feels like really hanging out with old friends to catch up with people you know in world.

Virtual worlds are an incredible platform for meeting really interesting people from the other side of the world, who you might otherwise never have gotten to meet. And as much as I don’t get in much these days, I really do appreciate the hours that I can.

Anyway, this post was the least entertaining and amusing post ever, wasn’t it? Next time I get in world, you have my promise that I will spend the time productively, taking pictures of blingtards who I will then mercilessly take the piss out of on the blog.

Ok, so maybe I’m a bit late in noticing this but my SL time is somewhat limited these days, but I read the Linden Prize Shortlist and noticed Sion Chicken was on it.

WTF?

Sion Chicken? As in those laggy arsed irritating, pecking virtual pissing hens? What?! The Linden $10,000 Prize? Huh?

Ok, so excuse my outburst. But honestly, that’s the most ludicrous thing I have ever heard. Almost.

The Linden Prize claims will be rewarded, according to the Linden Lab website, to “one Second Life Resident or team with $10,000 USD for an innovative inworld project that improves the way people work, learn and communicate in their daily lives outside of the virtual world.”

SO maybe I sound cynical, but has anyone’s real life actually been positively impacted by their virtual chickens? Really? Does anyone wake up in a morning thinking, “My God, the world is good and it’s all thanks to my pixel chickens?”

I know people will say it’s because others were able to create a business by selling accessories etc, but if that qualifies for the short list, what about Loco Pocos, which are incredibly cool avatars that people can sell accessories for!? They’re less laggy too, by the way….

It’s actually fairly infuriating, particularly when you consider the typesof projects it’s up against. How on Earth are Sion Chickens in the same league as Open University? Really?

It’s madness, I tell you.

[UPDATE: All my freebies, this included, are available in world now here.]

As many of you know, I’m not really in world so much these days (sniff). However, when I had more time to spend in Second Life I did create a few freebies that I distributed mod/copy and free on XStreet.

However, when XStreet tried to start charging for freebies, I pulled them down from the site. I am now in the process of going through them and changing the permissions (on the ones where I have not used licensed animations etc) to distribute them full perms.

Just completed the first one – a loft skybox.

Want one? Drop me an IM in world (Josue Habana) or leave a comment here with your full avie name and I’ll drop one on you next time I get chance to login!

Linden Lab proudly announced an impressive growth during Q1 of 2010 yesterday, a growth that bucks an ever prevalent trend of decline in usage of virtual worlds. You can read all about that here.

There were a few things cited as helping the economic growth including the release of the movie Avatar, which not only drove users into virtual worlds in their droves but also increased the sales of virtual goods, as Na’Vi inspired avatars and merchandise hit pixel shelves.

However, I was a little surprised to see that Valentines Day was also cited as being a big drivers of virtual goods sales. In fact, Valentines was a record breaking day for XStreet, which saw its highest ever single day sales (28% higher than the previous) on 14th Feb.

Erm…

WHY?!

So call me cynical but I hate Valentines Day. I hate it when I’m single and I hate it when I’m seeing someone. Why on Earth do we supposedly ‘intelligent’ humans need Hallmark to tell us when to go all out with a romantic gesture? If Hallmark said that April 30th was to become International Yay-For-Faces Day and that we should all go out and buy expensive gifts and cards for anyone who has a face, would we do it? Worryingly, I think some people might!

But the thing that pisses me off the most about Valentines day is the immense potential for it to all go wrong. No offence, ladies, but some of you ain’t that easy to please. I was seeing someone a few years ago who insisted that she HATES materialism and expensive gifts and that romance was ruined by it. So come Valentine’s Day I was panicking for ideas. Obviously buying her something expensive and taking her to a swanky restaurant wasn’t going to impress. So I went to see a friend I knew who worked the concierge for one of the city centre’s apartment blocks. I asked him what the chances of being able to use the roof that night were.

“Absolutely no problem. I’m working so I can open it up for you.”

So I packed a picnic and a bottle of wine, advised her to wrap up warm and I took her into Manchester to watch stars from a 24 storey building roof.

Now, bear in mind she was a self proclaimed “city lover,” not one who particularly liked the countryside. For some reason I always found that odd given her stance on non-materialism. But I thought I had it nailed with that idea – the perfect Valentine’s night, surely?

She certainly seemed impressed and we had an amazing night.

And then I bumped into her friend a couple of days later who informed me that the girl thought I was “non-caring,” to not even bother buying a gift.

SERIOUSLY? WTF?

Needless to say I asked the girl in question who confirmed that she was a little upset by it and I told her I thought she and I should probably stop seeing one another. I can’t be doing with contradictory girls!

But I’m going off on a tangent here.

Virtual Valentines is WORSE than the real thing. Ok, so the gifts are better priced. But it basically means that Hallmark is now dictating that we should carry out romantic gestures in a virtual world too? WTF? And in Second Life, as I talked about yesterday, there are more adventurous and exciting dating places so the pressure is on. If you take her to a ballroom in the clouds on a regular Friday night, how do you step that up a gear for an occasion like Valentines?? I can see it now:

GIRL 1: Omg my boyfriend took me to a ballroom in space for Valentines.

GIRL 2: Really? Wow… that’s umm… Sweet. My boyfriend took me on a private rocket and we travelled around three solar systems before arriving back at a beautiful Pacific beach for some dancing.

GIRL 3: Well my boyfriend took me back in time to a medieval forest. He became a knight and swept me up on his stallion (no pun intended) before whisking me off to the foot of a magic tree where we ballroom danced into the next century.

GIRLS 1 + 2: Awwww!

GIRL 3: And then his wife shouted something in the background so he logged.

Anyway… given the sheer level of annoyance that RL Valentines causes me, you can imagine that virtual Valentines irritates me more.

ROMANCE should be SPONTANEOUS, surely? There’s nothing romantic about a bunch of flowers and a card picked up last minute because your boyfriend is scared to death of missing Valentines.

However, waking up on any old Sunday morning and taking a stroll somewhere or sitting in front of a fire and reading a novel together… isn’t that what it’s all supposed to be about?

Anyway, ahem… grr. I nearly went sappy there. Excuse me while I go drink beer and watch football.

Whenever people have told me about prim boobs, I’ve always disqualified them as mythology… like Santa, or the tooth fairy. Falklore designed for discussion and campfire debate… nothing more.

But ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, nekos and furries, robots and toons…. PRIM BOOBIES DO EXIST.

I have proof [insert suspense driving music and maybe even a drumroll].

Erm….

What the f**k are they? The freakin’ Godzillas of the breast world? Do you girls really even need those? You have like all the breast control in the world from you appearance panel, don’t you?

Bet those don’t look good on the Emerald bouncy viewer…

Guess what? More bullshit press

The Daily Mail is reporting today upon the fact that a couple in Korea, who were convicted of allowing their three month old child to starve to death, were avid gamers raising a pixel baby in an apparently ‘Second Life type’ platform called PRIUS.

The Daily Mail Article of course places more emphasis on the fact that they were gaming addicts than anything else… of course there are no mention of all the children suffering at the hands of heroin addicts, or alcoholics.

Anyway… the fact these people even had a virtual daughter should have instantly said “crack pots,” surely?? )

I downloaded the beta of Second Life’s viewer with a little bit of uncertainy. After all, at least half of the viewer upgrades I do result in something that pisses me off. I figured a massive jump from 1.whatever to 2 was bound to leave me frustrated with something.

Now there’s already a ton of posts out there about the shared media malarky and all that jazz. This one isn’t about that.Instead it’s more a summary of the stuff I like, and the stuff I don’t. I’m not expecting you all to care what I like and there is a good chance that after more usage, I might change my mind about the stuff I don’t like. But anyway…

I like…

• The fact the the CTRL P shortcut still brings the preferences box up because I sure as Hell wouldn’t have a chance of finding it otherwise.
• It didn’t break my graphics. When I first upgraded from 1.22 to 1.23, anything with particles turned into a blob reminiscent of something out of a bad horror movie. This is the point at which I started using Emerald.
• The in world dashboard access… fantastic!! This is so, so long overdue.
• The ability to just access exactly what you’re wearing now in it’s own panel rather than having to type “worn” into your inventory window whatsit. It’s just… convenient.
• The colour scheme. Yes, it’s plain. And it probably won’t change the world or bring about world peace. But I like it.
• The fact that avatar profile pics show up as thumbnails at the side of the person’s name in your buddy list. Again, it won’t change the world, but I like it.
• Teleport history for the current session is readily available.

I don’t like…

• The way that people’s profiles display. It’s just…. annoying.
• The chat bar being so much smaller. I don’t  know why, but it irritates me.
• The fact that I can’t find where to change my bloody voice on shortcut thingie. The previous viewer allowed me to access voice setting via preferences and from there I was able to set it so that mic was open whenever I held ctrl down (when not on hands free anyway). I cannot figure out for the life of me how to do this in viewer 2. I am going to do Linden Lab the justice of offering benefit of the doubt and assuming that this is just because I am having a retard moment. If anyone does know how to do this, your assistance would be appreciated.

What I am trying to do is to comment less on “how different it is,” because at this stage, as I am still getting used to it, that’s something I could probably complain all day about. But I do agree with what LL are saying – it is going to be far more ‘familiar’ feeling to newer residents. And I think that newer residents will also begin to feel as though it’s more familiar after a while too. It’s certainly a positive change.

I just have to get used to it…..

Can anyone solve my voice riddle?!

PC Pro is a website I slated a while back…largely because they wrote a bullshit report with few facts and just basically declared Second Life to be a virtual world built on sex and otherwise empty spaces.

Anyhow, it seems Mark Kingdon (AKA M Linden) also decided to speak to PC Pro. You can read that interview here.

One or two points jumped out at me. Firstly, his comments on the adult grid:

“About 6% of the regions in Second Life are zoned ‘adult’ and we’ve looked at adult very extensively over the last year, through many different lenses… and we’ve found it a very average in terms of the prevalence of adult content.”

Now, it’s great that they’ve done all that and zoned it and whatever (actually, I’m not sure that’s great… it’s, well pointless) but there is still adult material on the mainland. Still. Still people having pixel sex on virtual beaches and whatever else. And, as with the “no traffic bots,” rule this is another case of bringing in a regulation for the benefit of most of the residents and then doing f**k all to enforce it.

The other thing that made me chuckle was Kingdon trying to refute claims that parts of Second Life are empty. He blamed it instead on “poor search tools,” and the fact that most places are on their own islands.

Erm… no Mark. It’s just that there are a alof of empty places. Open the map. Take a look!!

Anyway, regardless of that, I think it’s a great thing that Mark Kingdon has taken the time to speak to PC Pro following their article… at least it shows he gives a shit. Bravo on the proactive approach M! And while you’re being proactive, could you change your Linden name to something that’s searchable? One character names aren’t. No particular reason… it just annoys me a touch.

/me wanders off for some toast.

I hereby declare these commandments to be law. Ok, so I have f**k all power to enforce them. But Police Departments in world have bollock all power and people still seem to pay attention… so I am stamping my foot and demanding these be followed.

1. Thou shalt quit with the “No Drama Zone,” signs. It’s not funny. Everyone has them. And in my experience, those with the ‘no drama’ signs and profile messages tend to be the ones at the root of most of the drama. If you are the kind of person who had a need to stipulate that you don’t like drama, I’m thinking it must follow you around

2. Thou shalt not partner more than one person in a month. What is with people partnering like seventeen people a month. Really? I don’t get it. Is it a game? Is there a lotto I’m not aware of where the person who partners the most avies in Second Life gets something good? Please, enlighten me.

3. Thou shalt stop blinging. It gives me a headache and it stopped being cool 3 seconds after its creation.

4. Thou shalt stop wearing heels with the clicking sound. Girls, please! They never work. Lag. Lag stops everything like this from being as smooth as it should be. You stopped walking five minutes ago but your heels are still clicking. It makes me have to turn my sounds down.

5. Thou shalt quit with the spammy chain note cards. I get enough spam to my email, thanks. The note cards that are like the same as the emails… some random horror story and then “pass this to fifteen more avatars or else you’ll die a horrible death and your remains will be eaten by feral cats.’ Really? Bollocks to it. Trash. I will take my chance on the cats.

6. Thou shalt not play your freakin’ music over your microphone and through voice. It’s annoying. Really, really ennoying.

7. Thou shalt not beg me for Lindens. Seriously, if you are in such dire straits that you can’t afford to buy yourself a couple of dollars worth of Lindens, I suggest you log out and go find a job.

8. Thou shalt not leave your kids screaming in the background while you play on here. It makes everyone around you uncomfortable. Log out and feed them!

9. Thou shalt not create alts just to stalk people. It’s weird. And if you really feel the need to stalk people across the grid, you should probably question your sanity.

10. Thou shalt never, never, ever under any circumstances wear floaty text with your name on. WE HAVE NAME TAGS! I know your name because it’s on your tag. Why would you wear it again on floaty text above your head? You’re so good they named you twice. I don’t understand it…

Anyhow, rant over. I feel like ice cream.

Second Life profiles are the cause of more bloody drama and bullshit than I care to even waste my breath writing about. And people rarely mean what they say in their profiles. Here are some common profile lines and their translations from bullshit to English.

I DON’T DO DRAMA!!! This is actually bullshit for, “omg, omg, omg, omg I love a good fight. But only when I’m not involved!!!!!”

RL AND SL ARE SEPARATE COMPLETELY BUT I AM SINGLE. This is bullshit for, “My wife is deaf and so she can’t hear me sitting in the next room jerking off while cybring with a Neko who has a picture of a 22 year old blonde model in her profile, though in actual fact is probably a 59 year old obese man who grunts when he breathes.

I SPEAK TYPONESE!! This is bullshit for, “I have no originality or imagination and I re-use the same lines that I stole from someone else over and over and over and over again.”

MY IMS CAP ALL THE TIME, SEND ME A NOTE CARD. ‘This is bullshit for, “I once left a spammy object rezzed and it sent me loads of those green IM things and when I logged in it said my IMs are capped.”

CUSTOMER SERVICE BY NOTE CARD ONLY. This is bullshit for, ‘I’ve already got your money. Now f**k off.’

Et voila. Did I miss any?