The Ghosts I Borrowed » Second Life

In our second tour across the SL mainland (this time calling it “across the grid”) we are discussing the Simplified Inventory, how things were for us when we were newbies in SL, how things are when you’re a fashion blogger and El’s fingernails.

We plan on making more tours like this in the future, not just across the SL mainland, but also through the hypergrid to many OpenSim Grids. If you want to be visited or interviewed, feel free to send us a message. If you just want to come along, follow our twitter or status for the dates to the next tour.

Credits

Music by:

JT Bruce – Ruined Subjects (cc-by-nc-sa)
Pornophonique – 8 bit lagerfeuer (cc-by-nc-sa)

V is wearing:

El is wearing:

Boat by

AM Radio

Uncanny Vanny

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 18:43:28 +0000

Credits:

Music

Brigan Ensamble – “star of the country down” (cc-by)
Roger Subirana Mata – “El secret del mar” (cc-by-nc-sa)
ТЕЛЬНЮК: Сестри – “Не женися на багатій” (cc-by-nc-sa)

V is wearing:

El is wearing:

Animations by

Sweet Lovely Cute

Meshes and The Loom

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 16:11:33 +0000

In the 4 months since I last posted an update on the Loom, nothing much has happened. Recently, though, I finally got around to do a little more work on our metaverse home, so that finally the towers are back in place and connected again. Current snapshot:

And while I was at it, I finally played a little more with Viewer 3 and took a look at what all that fuzz with Mesh is about, and fell down a rabbit hole and haven’t found my way back yet. I knew before that mesh would be a game changer. That is, I knew it conceptually, like you know that a federated network of interconnected grids (the hypergrid) will be a game changer. But after I uploaded my first mesh, it already changed the game for me:

Not only are meshes much more detailed and diverse than anything you could do with sculpts and prims, they are also much more ubiquitous, since we can start drawing from the non-SL 3D-community as well. There’s tons of resources of free 3D meshes on the web, which can easily converted to collada for use in OpenSim, and in addition to that, meshes can also be created more easily once you get the hang of some basic 3D software. So really, the metaverse of the coming years will look very different from the metaverse we know today.

TGIB Rant: Thirza and the Lost Sims

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 20:08:06 +0000

The nicest blogs never get any comments, which is rather sad, if you think about it, so I don’t think about it too much. It’s silly, anyway. Thinking about comments, that is. But it’s 3:23 AM here, and I’m sleepy, so I’ll rant a little.

I love Thirza’s blogs. Not because I’ve been featured on them at times, but because I really enjoy reading them. You don’t subscribe to someone’s RSS feed just because you’re curious if you’ll get featured, after all. Well, I don’t; maybe you do. Have a video.

The Justice League Unhinged

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 01:08:07 +0000

Germany has, state-legally, an interesting history. After WW II, both the Federal Republic of Germany, and the German Democratic Republic were formed, but legally, the German Reich, which was the name of the state before the war, continued to exist (and does, to this day), which led to some confusion on how germany was to be treated. The final conclusion was that the Federal Republic was indeed identical with the German Reich, yet was unable to govern parts of it due to the simple fact that it had no political power there.

This situation is pretty irrelevant for most of the world, including most germans. A small group, however, interpret this confusion about the German Reich in their favour and declare the Federal Republic de-facto as non existent, and illegal. They form a pretty ridiculous group, giving themselves titles and ministeries, while being ignored by everyone else. The only reason I know this is because the agencies I worked for receive regular letters from members of this group, which are usually full of insane babble and try to discredit any action of said agencies on the sole basis that the Federal Republic allegedly does not exist, and henceforth all its agencies are without jurisdiction.

Why is this relevant? Well, following the, now almost 130 pages long, thread about the Justice League Unlimited of Second Life reminds me just of that. There’s a very small group of residents (around 40 or so) proclaiming themselves to be persecutors of law and order, and taking their job so serious that they start collecting vast amounts of data – both in-world and real life – about a large number of residents. From the documents that have been leaked so far, there’s a prevailing sense of entitlement, self-gratification and ruthlessness apparent among the members, which not only categorize people according to their own wicked view as “griefers” or “supporters”, but also devise strategies and best-practices on how to get “griefers” banned, or get more information from “supporters”.

The creepy thing is, they seem to be rather successful at that. The fact that this group has been active for long years now, that their wiki has already been leaked more than 1.5 years ago, and had, at the time, already shown a disturbing amount of information, that there were many reports about their actions, which allegedly got innocent people unjustly banned from Second Life, the fact that after all this, the group is still active and alive in Second Life is creepy as hell.

So, in order to get word about this out there: Don’t be creepy.

[Edit August 25th 2011: After following the debate on SLU, I get more and more the feeling that the side leaking the wiki information is not completely unbiased and a little more self-gratifying than they should be. There's especially an angle that aims to make a particular Linden Lab employee look bad without having any solid grounds to do so. So, long story short: It's a somewhat stupid debate, on both sides. While I do feel that JLU and its members have despicable manners, I won't bother much with this issue anymore. I'm sorry if anyone's time was wasted with this post.]

SpotOn3D panel discussion about patents

Sat, 20 Aug 2011 08:15:55 +0000

For now, this is just the recording of yesterday’s event. All in all, I was happy to hear that SpotOn is indeed committed not to use its patents in an anti-competitive manner, and we have a few more information about what the patents are there for. I don’t know if I’ll write any further follow-up about this issue, or the grid again; I’m rather inclined to say it got enough coverage, and I don’t want to give it more exposure than it deserves, but would rather interview / feature some pleasant grids and aspects of OpenSim in the future. For now, have a video, everyone. The cake is a lie, btw.