I always wondered about the claim that Linden Lab™ made that the “average” user of Second Life® was able to get 10 fps overall in the game.

I certainly did not! My humble Apple PowerBook G4 had an average of perhaps 3 or 4 fps - low, but enough for “not feeling lag”. It has more to do with a psychological feeling, but as soon as you get things below 4 fps, you start to “feel lag”. There is a reason for that. While your eyes are able to capture 24 frames per second, an average human reacts in about 250 msec (1/4 second). That’s the time it takes for a signal to get emitted from your brain and make your muscles consciently move. This is important for things like breaking distances in cars, for instance. It was also used in the early 90s as a measure for an “usable” Internet - real-time things (chatting, remotely logging in to another machine) used to “feel laggy” if you had ping times over 250 msec.

Anyway, I wondered how the “average SL user” managed to get 10 fps of the low-end machines. My roomie has an old PC and her fps rate was always the same order magnitude as my own as well, so this is not a Mac-related issue.

Of course, I have experienced much higher frame rates - like on empty sims! So it seemed that the problem was mainly in limiting the number of objects/textures I was feeding my graphics card to process. However, I do really like things like shiny objects and avatars with the full settings. And changing those things rarely affected much the fps rate, not more by 20% or so.

I needed a spectacular increase! Not slight tweakings.

Well, the trick seems to limit the drawing distance. I have read that in the forums, but I wasn’t very successfull in doing that. Now, the defaults - from the Preferences | Options menu - are 128 meters. That’s about 1/4 of a sim, and is an excellent trade-off - things beyond the 128 meter limit are rendered as “fog” and you get an overall pretty good realistic rendering of a sim. At ground level, it’s not easy to spot tiny details over 100 meters or so anyway.

However, by lowering this setting, you can get impressive results! I’m currently at its lowest setting - just 64 meters. Since the viewport is 3D, this means 8 times less objects/textures to render than with 128 meters drawing distance! Suddenly, my graphic card managed to cope with that! The fps rate increased to the “announced” average of 10 fps - 7 or 8 on very busy sims, perhaps 12-13 on more empty places!

Of course, this also means you’ll be surrounded in an “island of fog”. If you’re currently indoors - in a busy club or mall or so - or outdoors but really concentrated on the people surrounding you - like on Ahern’s Welcome Area - that’s ok! But not for admiring lovely views of prettily terraformed sims. Still, getting 7 or 8 fps on a busy club or on the Welcome Are instead of the more usual 1 (or less than 1) fps, makes for a completely new experience!

You can also tweak this further. Set the “Drop Draw Distance if FPS
This was certainly the best “change” in my configuration ever. Wow, 7 months online suffering from lag, and only now do I get a reasonable experience from SL I guess that I’ll “spread the news” to fellow residents that suffer so badly from lag that they don’t go to certain places at all. Some will probably see that, after all, SL’s graphic engine does live up to its promises!

An interesting side-effect is an utter reduction of the bandwidth consumption! Yes, since you’re rendering 8 times less textures/objects, this also means you’ll need to download only 1/8 of the textures, and that your SL client does only need to keep up with what goes on at a much smaller section of the grid! On a busy sim, it’s usual for me to “consume” around 100 kbps, which is the stated average for SL. However, an average sim will probably need only 35-70 kps, which is pretty acceptable. So, by reducing the drawing distance, the “bandwidth consumption levels” drop to… sometimes only 3 or 4 kbps! Wow! This would enable me to connect even via a low-end modem, no broadband required! Of course, when teleporting to a new region, or when moving around in a sim, the bandwidth consumption will certainly go much higher than that, so don’t dump your cable connection and revert back to an analogue phone line - yet

Speaking about cable connections, you may know that this is “shared medium”. That means that if all your neighbours are downloading MP3 and DVDs from the net, you will suffer from that. That’s not news to you, of course, but Internet bandwidth consumption is a tricky affair, too many things are interconnected, but one thing is for sure: the less you “consume” in a high bandwidth connection, the less latency you have (”latency” is technical term which corresponds to lag due only to communication problems). There is always a lower limit, but “less is better”. So, this side effect - less objects/textures to render, less bandwidth consumption - also means lower latency on a cable connection, less packet loss, and lower ping times!

All at the touch of a button. Wow. I must say I’m impressed, and, unless I really, really want to take a landscape picture of SL, I don’t think I’ll change my drawing distance back to 128… unless, of course, I buy a new computer, something which will not happen soon, heh.

Chip Midnight is often in the forums telling people how to design perfectly-matched clothes. His “secret” is developing wonderful new templates, based both on Linden Lab’s™ own, and on images he has captured in-world to understand where the many avatar polygons join together.

This uppr body template is an attempt of using both Chip Midnight’s templates (his layers are marked CMFF) with the rest of the “standard” templates. I also added one layer for designing female underwear.

Notice that these templates are high-resolution - ie. 1024 x 1024 instead of the SL standard 512 x 512. This means that you should do your work using the higher resolution - which gives much better results when skewing and rotating your textures - and save them back to a 512 x 512 TARGA file when you’re ready to upload. That’s a nifty trick from the master clothiers!

Enjoy the template, and thank Chip for all his work with the templates and the kindness of giving it away!

Upper Body Template (revised)

Second Life® is quite unlike a MMORPG in the sense that you need skills to get a job - or rather, make a living in SL - but, unlike MMORPGs, the skills you need - are your own!

So, there are no buttons to press on dialog boxes that make you “instantly” upgrade an artificial skill which will bump your character into the world of professional services. Instead, you have to apply your own RL skills in SL in order to succeed. During this session, we will try to cover the following types of jobs:

1) Unskilled jobs
2) Classical Skilled jobs
3) Free-lancers and business owners

Unskilled jobs are those that do not require any “outside” skill (ie. RL-related) to be hired. Not surprisingly, there are not many around, and they don’t pay very well. The first type of unskilled job is the night club “dancer”. Since club owners earn some money by attracting crowds - through a complex formula that converts the time and number of people that are inside their club for a period of time into a weekly L$ stipend - it’s natural for them to hire people to attract these crowds and make sure they stay there as long as possible. Dancers are one way to do that.

To become a dancer, you have three alternatives. Sometimes, jobs are offered on the Classified section of the forums, in http://forums.secondlife.com. You can browse the forum groups to see if someone is hiring. The second way is, some clubs sometimes announce special events just to hire dancers. This has become slightly more rare in later months, so perhaps you should try the third way: go to a club you like, try to get in touch with a club owner, and ask him if a job is available.

Some club owners pay a fixed salary, but expect you to be at their club for a certain amount of hours per week (including mostly all announced events at the club, to get a “full house”). Others rely on tips - either paid directly to the dancers, or through tip boxes.

There is a “career progression” in the dancing business. You can later become a stripper - they usually earn more, but club owners also expect you to have appropriate clothes and a nicely designed avatar, or, in some case, some stripping animations. The last step in this business is “escorting”. There are tales of a male escort having been auctioned for L$ 30,000 for 2 hours, so, this can be a very lucrative job! Like in RL, beginners will probably offer their services at a much lower price.

Another very glamorous unskilled job is becoming a model. Hiring is done in similar way as dancers, but the truth is, there are not many job offerings in these areas. There are a few modelling agencies around, and clothes designers usually contact them to organize big fashion events, like in RL. These attract very large crowds and are certainly one of the best and more fun way to present your clothes lines to the SL public.

To become a professional model, you’ll have to do a serious investment in yourself. To earn a large amount of L$, you not only need a gorgeous avatar, but highly priced items like a special skin, hair (often prim hair, which is expensive), good make-up techniques, and catwalking animations, preferable unique (thus, often you have to pay someone to do them for you). To become a famous model, expect a recurring investment in more animations. Still, the job usually pays well. And you get the glamour and fame that comes with this job

Lately, shop attendants have become fashionable again, as a counter-point to the automated vendors. Humans always sell much better than machines, so, some brands have been hiring people to do the sales for them. Sales reps have the advantage of not being tied to a specific location. An agreement is made upon sales comissions, and, if the shop owner expects you to stay at the same place for a few hours per week, they usually pay you a small salary as well.

With the recent increase of griefers in-world - people whose sole purpose is destroying events by disrupting them - there has also been some offerings as bouncers or security agents. When someone is concentrating all of his/her efforts in running an event, it’s always handy to have a few people around that target the griefers and make them leave the place, instead of having to deal with them as well.

In any case - and perhaps excepting models and escorts - unskilled jobs do not really pay well, so lets take a look at skilled jobs.

“Skilled jobs” are of two types - “classical skilled jobs”, where you employ one of your RL skills directly towards an activity in SL, and free-lancers/business owners, where you bring in other skills, that do not relate directly to SL, but which can be employed successfully to give you a steady income.

Let’s see the first type of skilled jobs. The classical skilled jobs in SL can be broadly divided in two different types as well - the first type, you just require Second Life’s client application to do your job. The second type requires external tools.

The first job is building - using SL’s 3D modelling interface to create unique objects that you can sell. This is probably one area of SL that everybody has tried at least once - sticking prims together to build new objects. There are several sorts of “builders” - architects, who specialize in building homes; furniture designers; weapons; vehicles; miscellaneous objects. In the latter you may include artists, who use the 3D modelling tools of SL to create sculptures or similar artistical objects.

While everybody is able to learn the 3D modelling interface of SL - and there are classes teachning both beginner and advanced levels - the truth is, to become successful in this business, you need an aesthethical sense much more than a thorough knowledge of the tools. It’s not surprising that the best architects/designers in SL are actually architects in RL, or 3D graphical designers, 3D modellers, or even people from the FX effects industry. For them, SL is just another tool to be learned - like a different word processor for a talented writer. As soon as they grasp the way SL’s modelling tool works, they can easily create fantastic pieces of art that they can sell very well - much faster than someone who has no talent but has been in-world for a year or two and really knows all the tricks of the modelling interface. Technique is not a substitute for imagination, creativity, and a well-developed aesthetical sense.

Lately, as SL’s society complexifies, we have seen a specialization of builders. A talented architect will probably not design vehicles or furniture, and the reverse is also true. Some people concentrate their efforts in building tiny objects - like jewelry or gadgets - and would probably do a bad job of creating a large building. If you’re talented, pick up a niche in SL, and focus your efforts in producing objects for that niche. Trying to compete with the well-established masters, with a solid reputation, is very, very hard - unless you wish to work for them instead of competing. Teams of builders work often together to meet deadlines (and also have more fun together!).

Associated with builders we often see texturizers. Due to the nature of 3D worlds, you cannot really have good builds if you don’t have wonderful textures, and these are much harder to do properly - it’s not a question of simply uploading one freebie texture, apply it to a building, and expect it to work! Textures are done with “external programs”, like Adobe Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, or the open-source GIMP - you’ll need to be proficient with those tools in order to do good textures. Professional graphical designers or artists will have a much easier entry in the texturing market - colleges really teach semester courses on texturing. Some of the best examples in SL go even a step ahead - you create 3D models outside SL, apply the proper lighting to make your 3D model realistic, and grab the textures to upload them into SL. These types of builds achive a higher level of outstanding realism.

A slightly different type of specialized texturing is clothes design. Clothes in SL are designed using special templates - which you can get for free at the SL web site - over which you apply your skills and creativity, again using an external tool like the ones mentioned before. Clothes are perhaps easier to do than textures, but to do them *well*, takes a lot of time and patience. Simply grabbing a picture from a Web site and tweaking it on Photoshop, expecting to make a lot of money, will not work - the highly acclaimed top clothiers in SL do their own designs from scratch, and they make money for being unique, and for the high quality of their finished work - it’s very, very hard to do the seams properly (that is, aligning the front, back and sleeves properly), and people will expect to pay premium for “perfect” clothes, but next to nothing for crude attempts.

As with building, clothiers are starting to specialize on certain styles. The very big brands usually have all sorts of clothes, but smaller designers concentrate on a specific niche - say, lingerie, vampire clothing, T-shirts, or shoes. There are thousands of clothes designers in SL and it’s quite hard to build your reputation quickly (but there certainly are a few that succeeded). You will also need to own several shops to advertise your products - unlike architects which often are hired for the hour - and sponsor some events where you can show off your new clothes lines. There are even a very few “real world” brands designing clothes for SL avatars, so the competition is really increasing…

Another type of job which does not require any external tool is scripting. SL has a built-in language, called Linden Scripting Language (LSL), which is used to “program” all objects to make them react to and interact with avatars. Scripting is not hard for a professional programmer - it’s just another language to be learned, and it’s relatively easy to learn and master. However, unlike other jobs, traditionally, you cannot sell scripts directly - you sell mostly scripted objects. This means that many scripters partner up either with architects or object builders, and split the profit from scripted objects. Experienced scripters will also be very proficient in doing scripts that reduce lag (which is not obvious for a beginning scripter). If you can make a reputation from selling a few good scripted objects, it’s not unusual that you may get hired as a free-lancer in a large-scale project. Remember, a large part of SL’s population are professional programmers in RL, so this is a field with lots of competition from professionals. As usual, creativity and imagination are the key to success!

A different job type - which pays well and has almost no competition - is the animator. Animations are done on an external program, usually Poser from Curious Labs - an expensive, semi-professional tool which LL has favoured (you can use some open-source or free tools like Blender, but you probably need to tweak the final animation in Poser to import it properly into SL). Poser is fun to learn and relatively easy to use for simple animations. Complex, realistic animations like walking or dancing are another matter entirely - to get good results, you need to use a very expensive technology called “motion capturing”, envolving complex devices and harnesses and several video cameras. Not unsurprisingly, there are just a handful of good animators in Second Life, and they can almost get a RL living from the animations they do (one of the leading dance animators has over 10,000 happy customers, and each of his animations sells for L$ 350 - and many buy several!). This is a very specialized job and one that certainly has lots of room for new players!

Event hosters are a type of job that has lately suffered from a big change in SL’s economic model. To attract people to your place, the best way is to announce events in the Events list, where everybody in-world can see the announcements. Event hosting rely upon your own RL communication skills, your ability to entertain other people and make them have fun by attending your events, and the degree of imagination in coming up with new ideas. Events can be simple things like discussions - no need for much preparation! - or highly complex, like a fashion show, a boxing or chess competition, or a medieval tournament. In the latter cases, it means to coordinate a team of builders and scripters to create lots of objects that will interact with the people attending your event. Classes are also a type of event that need some preparation and some experience in teaching.

A different type of event hoster enriches a certain environment. The typical example is a DJ - streaming life music into a night club. While almost anybody with a large music collection, a tool like WinAmp and access to a streaming server like Shoutcast is able to DJ, good DJs have a talent to entertain people for a few hours by reacting to the audience’s moods and being able to adjust the musical selection accordingly. Some DJs have their own clubs, other roam SL offering their talents. Other similar jobs are stand-up comediants or trivia event hosters.

We come now to other types of jobs that use skills which are not directly related to things in-world but which can be surprisingly employed to making a living. The first and more obvious one is the real estate agent - also nicknamed Land Baron by the residents of SL. Land Barons buy land wholesale, either from the auctions or directly, parcel it out, and announce it for resale - or they act merely as intermediaries between buyers and sellers, charging a fee. It needs good taste to pick up good spots, an understanding of how the market works and which plots will sell well, and a capacity to establish an unblemished reputation, in order to make continued sales.

Some Land Barons rent land instead of selling. Renting is a good choice if you don’t want to pay tier, just have a Basic account, or just need a temporary piece of land for some particular reason. There are basically three types of renting. You can rent un-terraformed land free of buildings, and set up your place just like you want. Or you can rent some land with the buildings already set up for your use - like prefab houses. The third type is the mall, where you rent very small places to set up your shops, and expect that the mall owner sets up events and advertising to attract people to the mall.

You also have people making a living off GOM - the Gaming Open Market, an external company (http://www.gamingopenmarket.com) which exchanges L$ for US$, and vice-versa. Making a profit by buying cheap and selling high is not for the faint of heart - you’re dealing with “real money” and need to have a very good understanding on how a stock exchange works. Other “external” jobs include Web sited which sell SL items and charge a comission on sales - the best examples being SL Exchange (http://www.slexchange.com) and Second Server (http://www.secondserver.net) from the Gigas group. In this case, the “job” is completely out of SL, and is just plain e-Commerce, using Second Life as the marketplace, but using RL tools, RL programming, and RL advertising (or discussions on the SL forums) to promote their business.

All the rest of the jobs are not so clearly defined. For instance, you have all sorts of people organizing companies, groups, associations, even cartels. They have skills organizing people together. There are people using their marketing or advertising skills in-world. There even are lawyers and economists! All carve their niches in their Second Lifes, using all sorts of skills they have IRL, and putting them into use.

Every one of us is talented in a special way. Some of us discover new talents while in-world. The trick for having fun in SL, and even earn some money while having fun, is learning about our own talents and skills, apply our imagination and creativity, and make the most of it!

Recent changes announced by Linden Lab™ have shattered the whole of the community. Unexpectedly, in a maneuver claimed to reduce inflation (ie. the amount of money in circulation), LL has decreed that it will not support contest events any more. Ratings will go up to L$ 25 apiece, instead of the “token” L$ 1. And the extra weekly stipends will be cut in half.

One thing is the economic side of it. Any good economics technocrat would say: “Good! Finally LL had the guts to stop the ever-increasing inflation! It was about time!”. And the short-term results were favourable: take a look at GOM, and you see the L$ stabilising at around US$4 for each L$1000 block. There hasn’t been big fluctuations since then.

A measure which has also been almost overlooked was the end of any LL-funded projects. The announced Incubator Program - a new model where LL would support finantially with US$ high-quality content - was abandoned. All projects that had LL support (there weren’t many, so there were not many people affected) stopped suddenly. The “New Order” states: all projects should be financed by the community. Not by Linden Lab.

The immediate reaction was a serious drop in “sexy avatar contests” and trivia events, which were perhaps 90% of all events. Residents voiced their complaints with bitterness - in the forums, in the blogs, even in-world. People dropped out of SL, threatening never to return. New projects, which relied on a steady flow of free L$ for events, both to attract visitors and to enable the project leaders to cover their initial costs, were abandoned overnight. At the same time, the residents relying upon the ratings system to survive, gave up on SL - who is going to rate other residents, now that the cost (L$25) far outnumbers the benefits? (much less L$ received from ratings) The rating system grinded to a halt as well - no more “rate parties”!

Suddenly, there wasn’t a “free lunch” anymore. A group of residents panicked, or “abandoned ship”. What would they do now that LL wasn’t willing to support them?

This was perhaps the first “wave” of shock, but a second wave soon followed. With no events - or just a very few, and not contest-related - many residents, who relied upon those events to have fun, also went away. They were the unhappy consumers - a large group of party-going residents, whose only contribution to SL was essentially dwell (now named traffic) and, in a limited way, some “entertainment” by appearing at parties and contests. For them, with an eventless SL, this was not entertaining any more. They “abandoned ship” as well.

The third wave was more impressive. These were the many low-quality creators - builders, clothiers, scripters - who relied upon a “rich” society to sell them useless items and low-grade products. Having no free L$ from events to support their standards of living, and no extra L$ from the extra stipends, a large group of residents suddenly understood that living on L$50/week (basic account) is impossible, and even L$500/week is not enough. So, people started to be more careful when spending. Low-quality items suddenly did not find customers in-world, as the now poor residents started to concentrate their money on high-quality products (and entertainment) instead.

The fourth wave was astonishing. Clubs and malls suddenly found themselves without their major source of revenue - events to attract people. Let’s face it, when all clubs use the same radio streamers, what’s the point to “be there”, if no free L$ are to be earned by standing there and going “woot” every minute or so? After all, anybody is able to set up the URL to the very self-same streaming radio at their homes and invite their friends over. What’s the point in going to somebody else’s club?

Also, low-end malls relied on the low-quality merchants to end low-cost shops. Since those were thrown overboard by the “third wave”, this also meant that suddenly malls found out that nobody wanted to rent their space any more! First, nobody started to build new malls to accomodate for the increase in population; then, the small malls started to disappear; finally, the larger malls began to struggle to keep their customers.

In the space of a few weeks, all that we thought was “normal business practice” in SL started to be questioned. For many, this was the “end of the world as we know it”.

However, SL not only has survived, but the population keeps growing. How?

The point is, the side-effects were startling, and let’s focus on the most positive ones.

Firstly, the events. Since educational events were still supported by LL, many prophesized that now everybody would start to do classes. Alas, that was not to be. The truth is, not everybody is talented or qualified to run classes. So, the number of classes in-world (about 3-4 per day maximum) has stabilized instead of growing.

What about the other events? Well, since contests were Linden-sponsored, these disappeared. Instead, we started to see a few tentative experiments in resident-sponsored events. Many failed miserably. In some cases, sponsors (or advertisers) wanted to pay event hosters to attract people to buy their wares, but explicitly announcing that is forbidden by the rules, so there wasn’t a big increase in sponsored events.

Trivia almost disappeared from the event list, as well as “sexy avatar contests”. What we got instead was - Tringo, an amazing new in-world game, where people can participate by paying a little bit, and the winner “takes it all”. This was an easy way to get around the problem of how to run events without Linden sponsorship. The success was so great that Tringo’s license was sold as a RL game.

What can we learn from this? One thing is clear: too much subsidizing, and people get lazy. Remove the subsidies, and people get creative - sometimes, so creative, that they are able to sell their ideas to attract venture capital! Tough lesson for the ones criticizing capitalism…

What is the New World Order, a few months after the “big changes”? Well, the event list is fat as ever. The current trend is Tringo, of course, and probably will be so for some more months. But at least we’re getting as many events as before the stipend cut. As said, educational events are about at the same level. There are perhaps a few more discussion events, targetted to in-world discussions of RL and SL. But the truth is, those living on socialization, can’t complain any more.

Of course, the increase of ratings seems to have stopped people from profiting with “rate parties”. That meant for many, leaving the game. The “rating barons” were usually event hosters - and they’re back with Tringo, so they get their ratings that way. Sure, it means that they get much less ratings in the New World Order - but even a few per week are usually enough to make it into the “top residents having been rated”. As a side-effect, abuse of negative rating has diminished drastically, now that it’s not so easy (or so cheap) as before. Better still, after 6 months, your “rating status” gets “cleared”. This means that, unlike before, you cannot go to a few “rating parties”, get into the Leader Boards, and live off the once-earned ratings. No, you need now a regular supply of ratings, and if you’re not into socializing - you simply won’t get them. As I write this, the Lindens have promised us a revamped rating system. The current one has an advantage - it costs more to give a rating than to get a finantial return on a rating received. Thus, “rating parties” will always be held at a loss for everybody involved.

Quality has increased overall. A simple rule tells us that over 90% of all stuff sold (RL or SL) is simply rubbish. Only 10% have quality. The New World Order makes “rubbish” not economically viable. This means that only the top 10% items will “survive”. Nowadays, instead of buying any kind of clothes or cars or items, because money was easily available, you’re more careful in what you pick. Yes, this means that the good content creators are going to get richer, while the mediocre content creators will lose interest and give up creating - or, alternatively, concentrate all their offers into a niche market. I can certainly talk about my own experience - between clothes, furniture, animations, and scripted objects (around 50 items offered for sale) only a single one is deemed to be “good enough” for me to make a profit. I simply gave up the other items - they’re too “low quality” as perceived by the community. So, naturally, they become freebies sooner or later, and this also means that some will benefit from them I expect this to be an universal trend…

The real estate business is flourishing, but the land barons have to become much more creative in their offerings as well. People are much more choosy - you won’t spend your easily-earned thousands of L$ on worthless plots anymore. L$ are not so easily earned, so you want a return for your money. This mostly means choosing carefully and buy from land barons with a good reputation and adding value. Anshe Chung has been a leader at implementing those two concepts, and it’s no wonder she still fares well - both on selling or renting land. Others, like Prokofy Neva/Random Unsung, concentrate on offering land for sale integrated in a peaceful community, where top architects will provide you a home with quality building and a nice blending into the surrounding landscape. People pay more, but they also get much higher standards of living. These are not the only two ideas - several new approaches of dealing with “value-added land baroning” have been introduced. The initial reports talk about success at all fronts. Somehow, this doesn’t surprise me.

Perhaps the overall lesson that we can extract from these changes is that “faulty” systems of dealing with the economy create a distorted economical system, and it’s very hard to “do things right”. Like a true Government, LL pokes here and there at the economy, to stimulate what they’re keen to see: good entertainment, and high quality content. If this was all part of the Master Plan, I’m certain that LL is on the rigth track. If it was just “some more social experimentation” (ie., in other terms, mere luck), well, then we must give praise to the creativity of our fellow residents, who make the best with what they’ve got. I believe that the truth is somewhere in between - LL had a rough idea of what would happen, and the residents, as usual, rose up to the occasion, and made the best of it. Surely these changes did not appeal to everybody. Friction occured between the “barons of the Old World Order”, the survivors, and the “new barons” (the ones who grabbed an opportunity before the rest was able to adapt) - many left, or threatened to leave, but also many more joined, free from any preconceptions. These are currently the ones to watch closely - they’re not “encumbered” by nostalgia, they have come into a world whose rules they have quickly grasped, and don’t need to deal with the “old baggage”. “Oh, so you got free L$ just for holding events? How weird. Well, I don’t need that, I make enough from my own events anyway…”

The more particular lesson we should learn is about the meaning of change. SL is due to change a lot, and quite quickly. The ones who adapt to change will be survivors - no matter how radical those changes are. The few still clinging to the past will just become “old maids” mumbling all the time “oh, we did all of that in Beta… those were the days…”. Failing to recognize the nature of change is fatal.

Talking about change, how many of you creative content providers have logged in to the 1.6 Preview to make sure that all your fabulous, high quality content, is working properly…? Better make sure that you log in and do some testing. Again, there are big changes ahead, and it’s safer to make the tests first, instead of complaining later. Already some residents are designing objects and scripts that will only work in 1.6 - weeks before 1.6 is launched! They’ll have an enormous advantage over the rest of the content creators - who will painstakingly come to the forums and yell, sob, and tear hairs, complaining that LL broke the scripting again, or something, and feeling “left out” when some are already selling 1.6-compatible items. Well, learn to adapt to change. As the old saying says - it’s so much better to be safe than sorry!

We are all shocked by the images we get from the TV news and online sites, on how millions of people have lost their homes (or even their cities…), and over a hundred thousand are dead or nearly dead after the rage of the tsunami waves who hit the coast in Asia, after the earthquake early on the 26th of December.

All charities in the world quickly started to raise some funds, sometimes with impressive results in such a short time, and DEC, an organization of all major British charities, is no exception. They managed to raise £70 million by the time I’m writing this.

Encouraged by the success, Thinker’s founder Jinny Fonzarelli has tried to raise as much L$ as was humanely possible, by sponsoring a 24-hour event (rather a 24-hour series of events ) from noon PST on December, 31st to noon PST on January, 1st. She managed to get a group of people to donate items for raffles and sales, as well as a spot in Tupi to host events and attract people for more donations (and more dwell which also will be donated). Besides her, Fau Ferdinand and Toast Bard also stayed “awake” for those 24 hours, encouraging people to come over and donate L$.

Of course, through GOM and private deals, all these L$ will be converted into “real money”, which will be presented to the DEC as a donation.

Since it was organized in such a short time span, and, unfortunately, during SL’s heavy unstability in the latest days due to faulty hardware with the user server, it’s truly amazing that, after 24 hours - and excluding hosting fees and dwell - she managed to reach the utterly amazing figure of L$ 105,000!

This turned up to be such a big success, that the “party goes on”… this time, with another 24 hours hosted at Willow Caldera’s Brimstone Bar, one of the icons in SL- Let’s see if we can double those figures!

Congratulations, Jinny, and thanks to all who contributed with their time and donations to make all of this possible!

Update: The 24 hours at the Brimstone’s have raised an additional L$ 150,000 or thereabouts. And due to the success of these two events, there will be additional ones online for the next week or so. Take a good look at the Events list!