Monthly Archives: August 2008
SHADES OF GREY: An essay by Extropia DaSilva
INTRODUCTION. Question. What connects Alan Watts, Richard Dawkins and Henrik Bennetsen? The answer is, they have all written about the human need to make distinctions and separate things into classes. In ‘The Two Hands Of God’, Watts wrote, ‘from the standpoint of thought, the all-important question is ever, “is it this, or that?”. By answering such questions, we describe and explain the world’. Richard Dawkins pointed out that ‘many of…
Creative as a Furry!…
If there is, indeed, a stereotype that you can apply to furries, is that they are all immensely creative. At least, in my journeys across the grid, I never met one that wasn’t. I guess it’s just the way they’re wired in their brains Among the furry friends I’ve got, however, one is definitely masterclass-creative. Master Selkit Diller has created scenes for computer games, and he’s a genius at creating immersive environments…
BES: One Year in Second Life®
It’s common these days to see real life companies throwing a big party when they complete their anniversaries in the Second Life® virtual world. Banco Espírito Santo, one of the leading financial institutions in Second Life, is no exception. What might be, indeed, an exception is how they have managed their virtual presence in SL. Send article as PDF to
Hair Fair 2008
Second Life’s Annual Hair Fair has launched a few days ago, and naturally enough, I couldn’t resist to drop by and have a look at it. After all, it’s just once per year that Six Kennedy and my good friends Washu Zebrastripe, Paisley Poindexter, Mikayla Kohl, among many others, put up this amazing (and rather unique!) fair up and running, showing off the best of the best of what has been…
No More Limits!
Quite a few residents of the Second Life® virtual world tend to comment that a lot of restrictions in SL are, in fact, artificial, to create a false sense of limited resources. They are usually talking about things related to land, namely, how Linden Lab can artificially flood the market with more regions to drive the prices down (or do the reverse, when the prices are too low). There is…
Monomania starts!
So you’ve heard that Mono has arrived on the Main Grid and are eager to test it out, just to see how well it runs your scripts? Well, right now, you have two options: either test them out on the Preview Grid first, or wait for Linden Lab to bring out the next version of the SL client, which should be released in a few weeks as a “beta version”,…
The Atomic and The Digital World
Sophrosyne Stenvaag has recently written some of her thoughts on crossing the barrier between the atomic and the digital world, and as any good Extropian and Immersionist, her point is that we should not mix issues of the real (atomic) world with the virtual (digital) world. She argues that it doesn’t make any sense, for instance, to campaign for human rights in a RL country inside the virtual space of,…
A Touching Event
My friend bucky Barkley just told me yesterday about an incredibly cool feature, that the ever-amazing Qarl Linden has been silently developing: getting the coordinates of the exact spot where you touch on a prim. Why is this so cool? Well, it allows you to do very complex interfaces with just a handful of prims (or one single prim), and naturally enough, you can imagine how important this is to…
Linden Lab hires Frank Ambrose as Senior VP of Global Technology
Linden Lab’s latest hire, Frank Ambrose, is the Lab’s new Senior VP of Global Technology — he will be reporting to CEO Mark Kingdon, and will oversee the development of new processes, systems and tools to maximize the scalability of Second Life’s network architecture, leading initiatives to improve platform stability and user support. Ambrose is a former AOL VP in the same area, where he worked for nine years developing the…
Building Communities
Linden Lab announced a bold move, “back to the mainland” — finally recognising officially that they have been doing a rather poor job of maintaining it. On Linden Lab’s official blog, Jack Linden underlines some of the key issues that Linden Lab will tackle again: more control, more attention to urban planning, more enforcement (specially on the nasty ad farms that cover the nice views!), and zoning. Their recent experiments…
.sl Internet Domains Available For Registration!
While recovering from minor surgery (which sadly means several weeks of limited computer access…), I stumbled upon this very interesting bit of news: AFcom, the African Registrar, struck a deal with the old registrar for Sierra Leone to allow registration of .sl domain names! This is something that several residents (and Linden Lab itself) have been trying to work out with the .sl registrar since 2004 at least. The old…
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