I frequently want to know if some far-away region is up or not.  Say, for example,  I have a blamgate [...]

I'm totally lazy and wearing only layers that I intend to be visible. Of course depending on the situation, sometimes I intend the visible layers to...

---Quote (Originally by Misty Harley)--- But then again, I don't ask (which to me would be weird) and I don't get on lists because I can never...

The Storybricks Kickstarter which which I blogged recently has a new video better demonstrating how cool this build-a-story kit project for MMO/RPG players and developers really is -- watch: I've been e-mailing with Storybricks development lead and longtime veteran designer...

Didn't ENRON try something like this. Selling your power resources to someone else when your business was closed? Yeah that ended well :P

---Quote (Originally by Jonvic)--- Hmmmmmm, getting 2FPS and 0.5FPS Physics....anyone else having issues. *Anyway enough of RL*, back to SecondLife...

Oh - doh - a friend of mine was getting her degree in game design and they had classes in SL for assignments - involving game design.

Image: http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/6877/snapshot004qy.png

Iris Ophelia's ongoing review of virtual world and MMO fashion Damien Fate's latest release, FATEeyes [Marketplace page here], brings a pretty groundbreaking level of customization to our SL avatar's eyes, putting detailed control of their color and position right at...

Here on Island Oasis, we spent most of March developing and testing our own internal currency. This feature was implemented on [...]

Many know that one of my great concerns is the conservation and preservation of virtual art, and incredibly complex problem for this rather ephemeral medium. I’ve written about it a bit, and it is something I hope to work on with other like-minded denizens in the future. As it remains, however, the current best practice [...]

---Quote (Originally by eku Zhong)--- oh yay;... thanks for this.. i think i shall start making and selling eku-cola in RL.. made of course...

That was exactly what I did read in a german forum, some time ago. Thats why I was irritated and had to ask that question. Some people over there had...

“Beach Affair”

I rely on Nalates Urriah's blog for getting geek-heavy updates about Second Life code and features, so when she mentioned in a recent post that Linden Lab's new pathfinding features presented a possible "tsunami" of problems, I paid attention: When...

Sometimes things are not what they always appear: Image: http://www.sluniverse.com/imageserver/snapzilla/533896.jpg?height=600http:// Once you...

Armada Breakaway offers adventure and excitement to all citizens of Second Life – Come explore the floating city in search of treasure! Your adventure will begin at the Armada Welcome Center. You’ll be outfitted with what you need to begin your adventure. Along the way you will see amazing sights and stores all over (and [...]

If this were real, most of the lindens would die from injury induced shock within the first minute.

Our own amazon artist lady from Finland, ArtWolf, presents The Future Vision Art Gallery; GRANDOPENING WEEKEND 18-20 MAY 2012 SLurl: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Solace%20Island/146/212/21 18 MAY, FRIDAY We opens place from  10 .30 am sl time —————————————————— 11am to  12 noon DJ Bloody Leena (Finland) ————————————————— 1pm–to 2 pm  live singer and  piano artist  Prowess Rayna ,with stunning [...]

I've not lost interest in SL for a minute during the last 3 years. Perhaps because I've been too busy (building my dream city, managing a rp...

So often it is so good to be a nobody in SL.

the daughter was Lindsey Lohan in that movie.. that movie was made to look like it was from the 70's or something.. Quinten Tarantino has such a...

To-scale adult avatars will annoyingly be right smack in the middle of Oracul's "Child" and "Teen" sizes. "Child" itself fits the "minimum size...

With those mesh creators who provide different alphas with skirts and dresses, you'll usually find there is a crotchless and crotched version :) I...

The Home and Garden Expo starts on Saturday 19th May, and currently all your favourite Home and Garden designers are hard at working creating the most amazing and beautiful displays for you all to enjoy. Prim Perfect are sponsoring a region, and also hosting a series of talks with designers throughout the Expo, so we [...]

[Closed 10:42PM PDT, 16 May 2012] Maintenance has concluded. Our support case and live chat system is available again. Thank you for your patience! [Posted 9:55pm PDT, 16 May 2012] We are currently undergoing maintenance on our support case and live chat system. During this time, support case submissions or live chat may become unavailable. [...]

I love all sorts of photos and artworks created in Second Life, but the ones that stop me in my tracks most often are the simplest in composition, the closeup head shot. Usually there’s no set dressing, no complex background, nothing except a plain wall and an avatar.  What makes a good portrait?  The best [...]

Third party viewer developer Tonya Souther recently pointed out a very important March interview on Treet TV with Linden Lab's Open Development director Scott "Oz Linden" Lawrence, which includes a crucial passage I initially missed. It's so important, it needs...

[Posted 2:55 PM PDT, 16 May 2012] On Thursday, May 17 6:00AM - 7:00AM PDT we will be conducting inventory database maintenance that may cause some residents to be unable to login and some residents already inworld may be logged out. It may also prevent inventory from loading. Please keep [...]

World Realms is a very new cool Kickstarter game project with a great premise: MMO questing combined with word games matched to the uniquely wacky humor that made Kingdom of Loathing such a successful indie MMO. Think WoW meets Words...

On Monday I wrote about Lumiya, the app that runs SL on Android phones and tablets, and now here's Wolden Avro taking it for a test drive on a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1: Frame rate and display ain't super great,...

This exciting episode of Metaverse Arts is now on the web, as MVA Host, Gwen Carillon, interviews the renowned steampunk musicians of Steam Powered Giraffe and talented steampunk artist Destany Laval of UnZipped. Not only that, but Steam Powered Giraffe play live in the studio. You can learn more about this amazing steamppunk band here- [...]

The server where your Hosting currently resides requires a reboot for maintenance. The following maintenance window has been scheduled: Friday, May 25th, 2012 @ 22:00 – 01:00 (10PM – 1AM) EDT (Saturday, May 26th, 2012 @ 02:00 – 05:00 UTC/GMT) During this window your server will be gracefully shut down and rebooted. Downtime should be [...]

Last night at our taping of Designing Worlds, we had a studio filled with medievalists and tinies for our taping – for the reason for such a combination, see here.  The tinies were very good – they didn’t start Riverdancing until the end of the show … but there were a lot of calls of [...]

[POSTED 6:56am PDT, 16 May 2012] We will be performing rolling restarts for regions on the Magnum, BlueSteel, and LeTigre RC server channels shortly. Please save all builds and refrain from rezzing no copy objects or making inworld L$ transactions. For more information about the specific RC server channels, please refer to the links below. http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Beta/BlueSteel http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Beta/LeTigre http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Beta/Magnum

  The Keep Calm and Keep Shopping event is a two week event featuring some of the most fantastic stores in Second Life!  We’ll have a wide range of stores including furniture, apparel, animations, houses etc All participating stores will have one (or more) brand new, exclusive, never to be sold again item(s) placed in [...]

At many peoples request, here is these awesomesauze Swedish and FREE clogs created by Trinity I was wearing in mondays blogposting; SLurl: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Saena/207/179/42 (BTW the hair is a freebie from AMACCI, another great Swedish creator and the riding pants is to be found in the shop beside the food shop on ABCs sim for only [...]

Last week, our post about SL templates -- pre-made kits/pieces that fashion designers can use to easily create their own sellable content -- caused a fair amount of controversy and conversation; clearly there's a lot of questions out there that...

There was a lot of turmoil on the hypergrid this past month, as many smaller grids disappeared, and OSGrid did [...]

Blizzard's Diablo III is launching today, and with it, the Auction House, where players can trade game items for real money. (Check out Blizzard's FAQ on it here.) The latest installment in a best-selling franchise (Diablo II sold 4 million...

Interesting: The official site for the Phoenix 3rd party SL viewer gets about 47,000 unique monthly visitors, according to Google Ad Planner. Traffic to the site has remained constant over the last year (with occasional spikes, presumably for important updates),...

Storybricks Alpha launched in Unity for the web recently -- check it out, though remember it's Alpha and rough around the edges (and elsewhere). As I blogged recently, Storybricks is an innovative, build-a-story kit project for MMO/RPG players and developers...

Blacklace Lingerie has been around for ages and ages. I think my first lingerie in SL was from Blacklace in a newbie bag filled with goodies. Mariska is still going strong churning out pretty high quality lingerie in an environment where many old school store owners are finding it difficult to keep a foot hold [...]

Today, Tuesday 15th May, we shall be recording a special edition of Designing Worlds at our studio in Garden of Dreams. The show will be broadcast on May 28th, but you can watch the taping, and participate by putting questions to our guests. The theme of the show is looking at two Second Life businesses [...]

Yesterday’s jigsaw puzzle, taken from the virtual world of Inworldz, was a beautiful study in monochrome.  But least you think that’s the totality of Inworldz, here is another aspect of art created there. This is a part, a very small part, of one of the geometrical sculptures created by Wizard Gynoid. These huge geometric constructions [...]

Coming this September, my new book Game Design Secrets from Wiley will focus on games for iOS, Facebook, and the Web, and the key features to marketing and monetizating them. All three platforms have opened up huge opportunities for low...

[CLOSED 10:10 PM PDT, 14 MAY 2012] Maintenance has concluded, and Live Phone Support is available again. [POSTED 4:54 PDT, 14 MAY 2012] We will be performing maintenance on the Live Phone support system on Monday, 14 May 2012 from 8:00PM PST. During this time, Live Phone service may become unavailable for 30-60 minutes. [...]

The latest version of the Lumiya Second Life viewer for Android phones and tablets comes with a pretty cool feature: 3D display of the world itself. (Lumiya homepage here.) Unless I missed another one, this is now the only SL...

[Posted 2:26pm PDT, 14 May 2012] We have scheduled a data center reorganization for Wednesday, 16 May, between midnight and 4 a.m. PDT which may impact Community Web pages for up to two hours. Potentially affected systems include forums, blogs, the Knowledge Base, and the Answers sections of our Website. Our team will take precautions to [...]

Courtesy Louis Platini's Metaverse Business, a Second Life/OpenSim analytics company that gathers publicly accessible in-world data for its clients, here's April 2012's top 25 most popular Second Life sims including Adult-rated regions, which are generally porn, listed according to their...

"Skyrim: How Marketing Turned a Niche Product Into a Mass Market Hit" is my latest article for The CMO Site edited by Mitch Wagner, and as you might have guessed, it's about how Bethesda and advertising agency AKQA launched a...

It might be the worst kept secret on the grid but – do you know what? We don’t care! Second Life’s Ninth Birthday is going to be celebrated with a centralised event running from June 18th – June 24th, organised by residents for residents – and is looking for people to join in! The theme [...]

SL News, Culture, and Opinion Iris Rants: Why Templates (and the SL Designers Who Use Them) Get Under My Skin Second Life Users' Tolerance of SL's Technical Troubles Helps Stymie SL's Growth -- Here's Why SL's Latest Mesh-Based Style Craze:...

This post is a long time in coming.  Perhaps its an after thought really, for its been almost two years since I stopped research work on Second Life and virtual reality.

The main reason was with me: I got the answer I wanted about how people use the web.  I found out that there is a massive area of research about Identity and cyberspace based around the work of Lacan and Zizeck and there many people more read and better informed than me that build up a huge body of science and theory about how the self is constructed in 'cyberspace.'

But it was also to a large extent audience.  Though Lacan's framework is brilliant and widely used within Second Life the bias against Freudianism and even depth analysis was too great to make it a fruitful community.  There is a perfectly good Lacanian analysis of this, that the illusion of Seocnd Life which makes it a possible project for inner issues needs a level of 'innocent' denial.  If people start to think too much about what is going on in Second Life it would ruin their ability to use it.

This seperates Second Life from much of the work in Web 2.0 where people are actively engaged in trying to understand how the technology work.  Second Life is more of a dream, and a dream only works if it can, if only for a short time, fool the participants with illusion.

Join us today, Monday 14th May at 2pm SLT in our beautiful studio in Garden of Dreams as we take a trip to another grid – Inworldz – to explore a fascinating art installation by the artist Fuschia Nightfire – who is also well-known in Second Life. We’ll be exploring ‘Not Everything Is Plain Black [...]

This might be the toughest jigsaw we have presented so far – but we think it’s an exciting one! It shows an image from tonight’s Designing Worlds show – Saffia is interacting with Fuschia Nightfire’s Installation ‘Not Everything Is Plain Black & White’ in Inworldz – dancing with a range of sculptures frozen in the [...]

I met gr0g, who has amazing ABC horses, on Jody´s market the other day. We talked for a while and he had some great ideas about how to change the way the horses skills increase when we train our horses: gr0g: -Instead of 5 point per hr..they can use a more realistic and fairer method. [...]

Welcome to SLsecret, week 194. 1)  2)  3)  4)  5)  6)   7)   8 )  9)  Comments are open on this entry. Comments will be moderated if they break SLsecret posting rules. SLsecret is published every Sunday at Shopping Cart Disco. Upload your own secrets for next week here. Interested in advertising on the [...]

Leanna: not sure the horse groups here go with all my bdsm groups