Even Years After Leaving Linden, Lindens are Still Lindens

So last Thursday, some robots, elves, kung fu masters, disco queens, a few furries and a rock god walked into a bar, but that's not the set-up for a joke, and since this happened in San Francisco, that's a fairly typical Thursday anyway -- it was the (now annual) Linden Lab alumni party, and several dozen Lindens were in attendance. Some Lindens in these photos are still active duty Lindens, but most have gone on to other things, such as work at Twitter, Google, and various tech/game companies, while some (by which I mean me) hover between many worlds (including the one that brought us all together in the first place). Many Lindens who came have been Lindens for nearly 10 years (if not longer), and any time I go to these reunions, it's striking to me how so many of us maintain this identity and social affiliation as part of who we are. (Seriously, how many people would still attend a reunion party based around another company, years after they left it?) For myself (and I suspect for many others at this party), the Linden title is a rare and special thing, one that can never be repeated elsewhere, and will stay with us for the rest of our careers.   

Anyway, more Lindens after the break. I'm curious if any readers can identify them all by name. (I actually can't.) 

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Comments

[Iggy]

How many laid-off Lindens from "The Day of the Long Knives" sat outside with signs reading "Will design utopias for food?"

[Hitomi Tiponi]

I think this is great - and does say something for the magic that is Second Life. With it they created something that was unique and has yet to be bettered. At a lower level I remember chatting with other Tiponis - of course just being called a 'resident' doesn't help that feeling.

It is great to see them celebrating that they created something special, and renewing old friendships - Linden Lab created more than a product with Second Life, they created an experience.

[shockwave yareach]

We had something similar here. A gathering of the engineers and techs who managed to build an impossible thing back in 1998. All we could do was lament how after building impossible things, doing regular jobs seemed boring and how unhappy we were with how the customer was mistreating our invention, treating it like a battering ram rather than a horribly expensive piece of custom machinery.