2012 – Not So Dark
SL Bloggers usually publish their 2012 wishlist (and an analysis of 2011) around this time of the year. Well, I’ll skip it for 2012. Doomsayers might claim that if even Gwyn cannot make predictions, then SL is truly and utterly doomed… I prefer to see it from the reverse perspective. When something is way too difficult to predict, it usually means that so many things are happening at the same time, with…
Tackling the Self
In my country, there is still bullfighting. Unlike our neighbours in Spain, bulls are not chased to death; even though there are some similarities, and obviously some things were clearly inspired, there is one thing that is quite different: at some point during the fight, a group of a few forcados will tackle the bull, head on, without any weapons except for their arms and hands — and the skill. Now picture…
Democracy in Action: Protest March “I Want To Vote NOW!”
When Government does some measures that the citizens dislike, and appealing to other branches of Government is faced with indifference, what do citizens do? They protest. First, in public forums. And then they come to the streets. What could be most important to protest for in a democracy? Well, most people in the West are currently worried about the financial crisis and its effects. But much more serious — as…
Mesh quality using up a single prim? Nah!
When I read Inara Pey’s article covering Ample Clarity‘s PrimPossible shop, I was a bit skeptic: top-of-the-line furniture design in Second Life® with just a single prim? No way! As meshes have been introduced, residents have noticed that they are almost worthless for furnishing small parcels — except for some well-designed furniture, the result will end “eating up” way more of your Land Impact allocation (or, for you on older or…
Google Translator becomes a paid service
Inara Pey reported that in a little less than a month, Google Translator would stop being a free service, and what this would mean for SL residents who regularly use this built-in feature on most (not all) viewers, both from LL and from third-party viewers. Inara explains how LL is going to deal with this issue: by allowing users who pay for the service to be able to add their…
New model for software development for Second Life?
When Linden Lab released SL Viewer 3.0.3, I was dreading the worst. During the 3.0.0 “final release” cycle, I spent uncountable hours sending debugging reports for the crash-on-login bug which plagued certain hardware configurations. Linden Lab correctly tracked down the bug and fixed it; one developer mumbled something about “fast timers” and promised it would be released on the next development cycle. But after seven years of dealing with Linden…
Harper Beresford “Your SL Evolution” Challenge
I have to admit it — I love anything to do with Second Life®’s history. Putting into perspective how far we’ve progressed in the past eight years should give us pause to thought. So I enthusiastically joined Harper Beresford’s “Your SL Evolution” challenge. It’s very simple to join: just grab a few pictures of your avatar and show how your look changed over the years; then upload the picture to…
Shooting LL’s own foot: why meshes will not be a huge immediate success
So now you’ve bought your first meshed dress and/or avatar and are generally excited about the bright new future that meshes will bring. Well, after you persuade your friends to switch to a mesh-enabled viewer, of course; thankfully, even the non-LL viewers are all starting to include meshes (yes, even the ones based on SL 1 , so I guess soon everybody will be seeing meshes in all their glory….
Humble Governance
Early this year, my good friend Hiro Pendragon pointed out that I’m no good at predictions any longer, because I happen to be so disconnected from Second Life® these days that I “lost touch” with it. At the time he wrote that, I was actually shocked. I have one job which is about development content and applications for Second Life exclusively, and, unlike many Metaverse Development Companies (who have dropped…
Federation! (Goodbye, Google Plus)
After much careful thinking, I’ve decided to abandon Google Plus. The Nymwars have another victim! This was not a light decision to make. When I was kicked out of Facebook, I was naturally furious enough to grumble and complain, specially because I had used Facebook IDs to log in to some sites and games, and lost access to all of them. This was annoying, as well as losing contact to…
Innovation, yes, but wrong turn
These days, I have to humbly admit that I cannot keep up with the whole of Second Life. So I just read what others, who still can, write about SL, while remaining at my little corner of the virtual world and do my own things which nobody cares about But there is something I have noticed in the past few months. Like a crescendo finishing at SLCC, Linden Lab has been…
The Feeling of Self-Accomplishment in Second Life
In the past couple of years or so, I have to admit that I haven’t been as regular on Second Life as I wished. There are a lot of reasons for that, most of which work-related, and I have to include my own academic studies on that category as well. As a result, that also means less blogging, less socialisation, more isolation, and sticking to answering more boring emails from…
Open Letter to Google’s Larry Page
Video courtesy of Botgirl Questi Dear Larry, I don’t remember your handle in the days you were an active participant of the USENET, over a decade ago, when “web crawlers” and “search engines” were interesting mathematical problems to be tackled. To be honest, I don’t even remember my own handle those days. But what I remember very clearly is RFC 1855. Those days, we all abided by the Netiquette —…
Loading ...
