Second Life is nearing its official 10 year anniversary (even I can't believe it's been that long), and the SL10B team is running a photography contest to help celebrate. Theme is “Looking Forward, Looking Back”, which tempts me to go through my screenshots of 2003. Go here to read all the rules and submission guidelines.
Virtual currency legal analyst Alex Kadochnikov adds more context to Linden Lab's apparent move to comply with new US Treasury guidelines by forbidding the trading of Linden dollars (L$) on exchanges other than the official LindeX. As part of the guidelines, the company must register as a Money Services Business, and the penalties for not doing so are pretty steep:
Any company that issues or exchanges virtual currency must register with FinCEN, either by themselves or through their agent. Linden Lab will have to register. Linden Lab issues virtual currency. No surprises there... Once the statutory six month period for when virtual currency money transmitters must register, the government will be able to start prosecuting people who do not comply.
Here come the penalties, stated right in the regulations:
In some of her latest blog posts, the SL artist known as Whiskey Monday (who I profiled here), illustrates important real life events through her medium of finely crafted and choreographed Second Life screenshots elevated to pop art. I won't spoil her story by saying what those milestones are, but you can read the first here, and the second here.
Iris Ophelia's ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style
There's a new meme working its way around the blogging community right now that has writers answering the big questions about why they do what they do. Strawberry Singh brought it to the SL community last week after spotting it on a RL blog, and since then there has been an explosion of responses. Several so far stand out, including Anya Ohmai (easily one of my top 3 favorite SL bloggers), and Opal Lei (writer and photographer behind adorable snapshot blog "Where's Dim Sum?").
It's tempting to make this a post listing my favorite responses to this meme, but that would ignore the question altogether...
Continue reading "Why Do I Blog? SL Blogging Community Meme Asks The Big Questions" »
If you've ever wanted to know the difference between a pleat and a pintuck, there's a new project by a group of experienced SL fashion bloggers that might be worth your time. The A to Z of Fashion Writing, a blog spearheaded by Cajsa Lilliehook among others, aims to inform fellow fashionistas and bloggers alike with illustrated lessons on crucial fashion vocabulary. Why is a solid fashion vocab so vital even when all the items in question are virtual? Well...
Commenting on the latest report of dwindling virtual land ownership in Second Life, Daniel Voyager offers his opinion for why this is happening, and it's a common theory we read often:
The main reasons I think is due to the global financial crisis which i’m sure is having a huge effect on spending money etc and the other reason is that tier level in Second Life is still high from what I’ve been hearing from friends during the first part of 2013.
I've talked about tier prices before, but with respect to my colleague Mr. Voyager, the theory that the global financial crisis is a direct reason for Second Life's woes is simply not true. How do we know this? Because if you look at the broader economy for online interactive entertainment, virtual goods sales are at an all-time high.
Let's just take one example:
Daniel Voyager called it first: The official and highly active Second Life page on Facebook is by far Second Life's most popular social media presence, now with 300,000 members. (And it's been growing steadily over the last few years.) I have it on good authority that Second Life's actual active userbase is about 600,000, so that Facebook number constitutes up to half the userbase (give or take). Compare this to the Second Life presence on other social media sites (figures from Mr. Voyager) too:
Following up on his first impressions with the Oculus Rift dev kit, virtual world innovator Jon "Keystone" Brouchoud argues that Second Life is the killer app for the technology, but OpenSim will develop for it first. He offers ten reasons he thinks this will be so, though most of them are actually reasons why Second Life should be the killer app. While I agree with that hope, I respectfully think there's several reasons why it won't:
That said, Jon offers a very good reason for pushing Second Life as an alternative model for Rift content:
Aemeth Lysette has a good tutorial for using Sim-on-a-Stick, an offline version of OpenSim that you can run from a USB stick, as a creative landscaping platform. "SL tier costs a ton," she explains. "... sometimes I want an island I can decorate freely, and not pay anything for upkeep." Hence her tutorial. I've seen Sim-on-a-Stick used for impressive real world applications like this one, but it has as a lot of potential as a creative platform. Aemyth mentions the technical difficulty involved in allowing friends to visit your Sim-on-a-Stick island, Minecraft-server style, but I bet if someone made that more consumer friendly, that would become a popular use of SoaS too.
Continue reading "How to Use Sim-on-a-Stick for Creative Landscaping " »
Iris Ophelia's ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style
I love a good blogger challenge, not so much because I like participating but more because I like seeing everyone else's entries. Sometimes Second Life fashion can feel a little bit uninspired (and uninspiring) and it takes a few clever people to give me a fresh perspective. My latest inspiration obsession has been STYLEMINIONS' DisneyBound Blogger Challenge which started last month. Every week, blogger Natalee Oodles issues a challenge to the community to redesign a classic Disney character, like the above Ariel-inspired avatar by Sophia Harlow.
But the themes aren't limited to princesses. In fact...
