Second Life

Hard to believe - but true!

by Onder Skall

Linden Labs recently hosted a party at the GDC because, as we all know, Second Life is in dire need of new residents and just doesn’t get enough press. Drawn in by the offer of free food and booze, the press was notified that Linden Lab has licensed Philips’ amBX technology to produce a dedicated amBX-enabled environment. This would be used for integrating peripherals that emit light, jets of air, and vibration.

Now, let’s face facts: the grid is laggy, crash-tastic and overcrowded. This leaves us with two questions: 1) What possible application could devices like these have when, thus far, they have mostly been applied to action video games? 2) What is so compelling that would we want to toy with yet another feature nobody has requested when the ones we have (like flying and teleporting) barely work at all? A group named Computational Dildo Liberation Army (CDLA) has the answer!

Right after GDC came SXSW, and Linden Labs was there in a flash. Among panels held there involving… well… a bunch of things SL residents already know about, there were a few standouts. There were some typical corporate hugfests like ” Unleashing CSS: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Internet Explorer 7″, where we learned to create websites that can’t be viewed without the latest Microsoft browser, and “Why We Should Ignore Users” where we learned to give users things to do instead of tools to do what they want. Of course, what’s a virtual worlds fest without at least one discussion of teledildonics!

The Register reported yesterday on the Sex and Computational Technology lecture where the sad state of sex with machines was discussed in-depth by the CDLA:

“It’s like trying to fuck your printer driver,” said Kyle Machulis, a teledildonics expert, employee of Linden Lab, and editor of Slashdong.org, about the state of computerized dildos’ software interfaces.

Well, if Linden Labs is going to pursue yet another technology nobody is asking for instead of working on grid stability, it might as well be in the name of sex. Here’s hoping the peripherals developed don’t short out when the grid crashes.

The most important news: apparently Linden Labs employs a teledildonics expert. [only one? how are the batteries holding up? -the Editrix]

Onder Skall also writes for Second Life Games

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If all else fails, nothing says tough like playin’ in the buff

by Tenshi Vielle, Fabulous Fashionista

Okay, okay, guys. I finally understand your lament.

After playing about an hour as a male searching for good, cheap clothing… THERE ISN’T ANY. We’re working on a basically free budget here, since men’s clothing is either $1L or $200L a pop. Take your pick. I even went to Wrong since they advertised men’s clothing and… guess what? No men’s clothing! The designer could not be reached for comment. Go figure.

The best place I found to get things at was the Freedove. That was my fallback place of choice when I was a newbie and only $5L in my pocket. I scoured the Gnubie shop - same old stuff. I got my skin there, but I’d never tried those types of skins before… I was horrified when I put it on. It looks like someone took a picture of a black man’s face and blended it together with the smudge tool in photoshop into some semblance of an African Facial Quilt.

I’m sorry, but can’t we do better with the free men’s skins?

Nylon? Toast? I know you guys have some hiding in the back of your inventory you can donate to Gnubie… come on. Guys should be able to do better than this patchwork thing I’m wearing. Oh, did I mention it comes with built in undies? Yay! Now my prim dick can just poke out of my boxers while I’m fucking some little whore at the Boardwalk as if I don’t really mean it. (sigh.)

Boots: Afantasy (Freedove) These boots are really quite well made and remind me of my own personal Old Boots from Shiny Things.

Next up, we have:

The outfit’s a little feminine looking, but if you’re masculine enough you can pull it off. Jana’s Classic Designs (Freedove)

Same, from Jana’s Classic Designs. I’m starting to become fond of her stuff; it really isn’t bad at all! Nice and clean looking.

Also, found these prim shoes from Hansen.

They’re well made but include bling, so beware!!

Of course, should any of those other options fail, you could wander around like many newbie SL men do - naked. Nothing says tough like playin’ in the buff, right?

So why the lack of men’s clothing?
“Most designers don’t spend a lot of time making big lines of mens’ wear, and one can’t really blame them because it seems that men in SL spend less on clothing and change less often. Many are content to just wear jeans and a t-shirt for weeks on end.” Jonathan Sprawl says, giving me a pretty good insight into the desert of men’s clothing… however, it still just doesn’t explain it for me.

Barnesworth wasn’t much help on the matter either:

Tenshi Vielle: I’m doing my article for the Herald on freebie hunting for men, and … it all sucks. Honest to god.
Barnesworth Anubis: torrid has some nice shirts for men.

And that was all I got out of him. He must be building or something.

I’m sick of this crap. I’m off to work on some good men’s freebies. I don’t care about profit. The men in SL have some kind of desperation going on, and it isn’t good.

xoxo
Signing off,
Tenshi Vielle

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At the mall in Kaneva, this is about as risque as the public content gets in the WA.

By Prokofy Neva, Dept. of Worlds, Planets, Universes, Metaverses, and Virtual Estate Galaxies with NPC Land Barons

So I finally get an invite to this much-anticipated Kaneva beta virtual world, even though I had only like a 32 in ratings. I spent perhaps an hour farming raves, which is something like what we used to do 2 years ago in SL, go to clubs and plus each other up to raise our stipend rating deltas and get Lindens for free. That didn’t last. And you wonder what it means to lay the groundwork of a world and permeate it with rave-farming and gaming up of points — except many of the people doing the raving are carrying on with such enthusiastic bonhomie that it doesn’t seem fake — the way people in malls down South come up to you and say “Hi, how are you, have a nice day” even if a stranger.

Firefox didn’t seem to work with Kaneva, and finally on IE I waited for the game download to upload for ages — but hey, I was in the mood after having the absolute worst week I’ve ever had in SL. I could literally not move, fly, teleport, see Linden dollars in my box, even click on myself for 3 days. Something in a patch or something somewhere suddenly made it not work. I tried EVERYTHING and finally hit on the combination of my secret weapon (update your mouse drivers!) plus disabling my keylog finder (after finding 2, you know who you are!). Just as I finally could see green earth and fly again WHOOPs about 100 regions or more went down and “teleport issues” were rampant with colo outages and whatnot. So here I was hoping that this flatter, leaner, web-based world would at least spare me all that crap.

Queuing up to try to buy something from Soviet clerk Veronika Prokofievna. Devochka! Devochka!

Like the early days after immigrating from TSO, in Kaneva the SL habits die hard. You keep clicking and clicking on stuff — it just isn’t clickable. At least, not in any way they explain. They must have borrowed a page from the Lindens’ manual because clicking on HELP tugs you out of the game into a webpage where a very sprightly girl gives you a tutorial that explains exactly nothing, i.e. not how to click and buy, but from which you helpfully learn that Kaneva is pronounced something like “cannabis” — Ka-NE-va.

That’s the single most frustrating thing — no instructions or signs or stuff — but we should be hardened for that from SL, no? There isn’t “room chat” that I could find, only a big IM chat channel with the usual sludge of mindless drivel and people showing off, and a strange saying in yellow every once in awhile: THERE IS NOTHING OF INTEREST HERE (huh?).

In vain, I tried to get somebody to help me figure out how you just *buy stuff* here. I had it in mind to buy a lamp. Clicking, right- and left-, dragging, touching, opening inventory, etc. etc. — all in vain. I saw a line queueing up Soviet-style to what turned out to be an NPC clerk — and thought, oh, we have to like role-play? But clicking on her led nowhere, exactly like the old GUM experience.

I decided to go see what my “Home” would like like — the Kaneva people promise you “your own home” to decorate with media — and sure enough, it’s free, and “right there on the game panel” without any evil land barons or finicky first-land experiences. But just as they warned in the instructions, the place was as dark as a pocket (without that lamp from the mall) and I walked into a corner — like Project Entropia, it’s just hard to get used to using the W etc keys instead of the num pad to move.

There is no flying.

Did I mention that there is no flying? There’s not even any jumping!

You can access a bunch of rote movements for fun like “head banger’s dance” something like TSO, but not as smooth as TSO, and not as interactive. See, all these people making games now, they look down on TSO, but you know, TSO had a lot of things it did really well, including making people be nicer to each other because it had them dance smooth jitterbugs together to up their points!

I had $50,000 in my stash here in Kaneva, and all I could do was stare at my faux-Manhattan skyline in my empty dark pad, which I already have in RL, so I was ready to go find some elf forest or garage grunge or whatever there was to be had.

I pushed on an icon of the world to travel (SL should have something like that; the icons here at least do stuff and they *are there for you at the top of the screen* unlike certain clunky UI’s we know *cough*).

I landed at some sort of sports bar where I picked up on the fact that Kaneva would mean having one channel on the parcel…and no way to change it. Well, “parcel” isn’t the right term to use. Venue? Place? I looked around at the other silent avatars who weren’t talking anywhere that I could see, poked a bit to see if it would let me upload anything anywhere, which it didn’t, then went forging ahead to other places — the game lets you buy larger spaces for more game money, which I guess you’ll buy with a credit card.

I picked a coffee shop that had me land in water. Landing point needs adjusting! Erm…there isn’t one. Clicking around on stuff, I finally got a menu with prices and descriptions on an object — a rug as it happened where the water in the fountain was — and almost expected that chirpy 1950s ad music to kick up like in offline Sims. Interestingly, the fountain seemed to be made up of building blocks of other inventory objects — perhaps you can make “user-made content” in this piled-up way — just as we took the inventory objects in TSO and recombined them in various ways, sometimes naughty (combine two people one with “pee” and the other with “vomit” or inspiring (remember my orchid garden?)

Screenshots were a bear — each one has to be individually print-screened, saved, labeled.

The “teleport” experience is probably one of the ones that the beta people really should review. It just has an ugly screen saying KANEVA LOADING and no whoosh sound or black tunnel like our favourite metaversal intersticer.

Bored and trying to figure out whether to land in another fountain or go back and listen to the same channel at the sports bar, and not having a lamp for my dark-as-a-pocket home, I TP’d — er “loaded” back to the storesl, and strolled down the mall.

Suddenly, I espied a sign dear to my heart: REAL ESTATE! I scurried forward in this sideways, run, walk slide motion that W-keying does to you, and talked to the guy I saw standing in there. And talked…and…then I realized he was an NPC. Bleh. Words appeared in the air, which I think probably were sent to me by some game-god watching and having a good laugh. USE TAB TO INTERACT it said, and I tried tabbing, tabbing…and suddenly lost the connection — but not before turning over $1000 to the real estate dude for a big loft apartment, which I’m happy to rent corners of to anybody who wants to hang at my house and not buy their own big house yet : ) I’m thinking $50 for my introductory offer?

Erm…but maybe you won’t be able to put down prims. Never mind! Send me your photos and whatnot, I’ll upload it for you in your little corners that you’ll be renting, mkay?

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Second Life not Scalable?

Image stolen from Lombardi’s blog.
Julian Lombardi, one of the six original architects of Croquet and executive director of the Croquet Consortium AND the original designer of ViOS (Visual internet Operating System) has posted a rather sobering assessment of the scalability prospects for Second Life. Lombardi observes that ViOS went though similar scalability problems back in the day. His description sounds scarily like the current situation in SL:

Our strategy back at ViOS, Inc. was to simply re-tune the system and put up more servers as the loads increased - hoping for the best. That approach would work well for Intranet applications that serviced relatively small numbers of clients. It even worked well for ViOS’ initial user base of around 15,000 unique users. Problem was that once we had several thousand simultaneous Viosians tooling about in the landscape, they began to overload our interactivity servers, resulting in performance problems and service interruptions.

The prospects for Second Life?

Second Life … has a very similar technical architecture to that of ViOS - a vintage twentieth century client-server architecture with with single points of failure, inertia, and control. It’s been interesting to watch Linden Lab’s struggle with the inevitable technical problems faced by Second Life as a result of its recent popularity, constrained architecture, and non-scaling technical approach.

Yeah, it’s been interesting all right. Damned fascinating.

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Prokofy Neva, Community Affairs

Prominent Second Life designer Simone Stern reported to the Herald today that her work account had been hacked this morning and L$400,000 stolen (an estimated $1500 US) from the account.

In a heist similar to another large theft two weeks ago at DarkLife, the hacker first transferred funds from Simone’s work account, an avatar named Rica Wolfe, then to another day-old alt, Rica Beck, and then evidently on to a third day-old account MandyLynn Bailey. The day-old avatars were not online available for comment.

Simone contacted the only Linden she could find online, Hermia Linden, a liaison on duty, who was not able to do much other than to tell her to change her password and call the Lab Monday morning, and apparently was unable to authorize freezing of the account. Simone has pleaded with the Lindens to freeze the accounts pending investigation. LL takes 5-7 business days or more to cash out Lindens.

Not even her long-time RL partner knew the password on the Simone and Rica accounts, says Simone, because she had recently changed them, and no employees had the information. The money on the account included proceeds from her successful fashion lines, which have put her at the top of the list of SL avatars with profitable businesses, as well as proceeds from charitable activities.

Simone has been active in raising money for Ayshe’s Angels, helping a young woman with brain tumours, Ayshe Millions, obtain medical treatment for acoustic neuroma. She had just completed a yard sale yesterday to add to the more than $15,000 US already raised in the past year to help Ayshe.

Simone was alerted to the heist when she saw a notice on her email account that someone had logged in and “received inventory” on an account that she herself was not logged on to. She then saw that not only was $400,000 missing, but that the thief also sent a $5000 “gift” back to the Simone account, either to taunt her or to help cover their tracks and confuse any investigation.

Ayeshe Millions of South Africa also had access to Simone’s work account, Rica Wolfe, as she was the recipient of the funds raised for treatment, but the passwords had just been changed, as they are routinely, said Simone.

In the drama-saturated, back-stabbing fashion world, know for its jealousy and vindictiveness in Second Life, Simone says she has been getting some criticism for her efforts to raise money for one individual and demands for accountability from one particularly persistent critic. Simone says the expenses for trips to New York for treatment are documented. A supportive community of people familiar with the case and the activities have been very active in sustaining the SL-based effort to turn virtual dollars into concrete help, and following regular reports of amounts raised on the Ayshe Angels blog.

Simone says she has no idea whom to suspect, but that the Lindens could stop the damage from being done by freezing the accounts and preventing any cashouts to PayPal or checks. “The Lindens have the audit trail,” she said.

“Obviously this is an alt of someone who knew this was my work alt, knew there was money on the account and knew to hack it,” she said. But that could be anyone logging on to Second Life, as her work alt is listed as the owner or creator of objects in her high-traffic store, and her charitable events are heavily publicized.

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Low-voltage shocks help internet addicts sleep better - Lindens prefer herbal tea

by Onder Skall

Kids: when your parents tell you to get off the damned computer and get some fresh air, you’d better. If not, they might send you to China for treatment.

When you arrive at the ‘treatment clinic’ you’ll be locked in a cell, exposed to freezing temperatures, yelled at, and tazered. Oh I’m sorry, it’s a clinic, so “tazer” is the wrong word. In a clinic we call it “electro-shock therapy” which, even though it’s been discredited by every clinical study ever done as simply a good way to damage a person’s brain, seems to be the cure for “Internet addiction”.

In addition you’re given therapy and lots of drugs. These are compulsory, of course, as the clinics all seem to be on military bases where your rights are temporarily suspended.

From the Washington Post article:

“Earlier this month, four teens fled their dorm rooms and jumped in a taxi. They made it to a train station before soldiers caught them, according to Li Jiali, a military guard. They were isolated and asked to write reports about why their actions were wrong. “

It’s all for your own good, of course. Parents send their kids, and government officials (who all know what’s best for you) may decide that you were just a bit too expressive in that chat room.

By the way, on a completely unrelated note: how many hours did you spend in-world yesterday? More than one?

Sources:
TG Daily - China electrocutes the WoW out of Internet Addicts
MSNBC/Washington Post - China treats Internet ‘addicts’ sternly (removed)
Washington Post - In China, Stern Treatment For Young Internet ‘Addicts’

Onder Skall also writes for Second Life Games

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Low-voltage shocks help internet addicts sleep better - Lindens prefer herbal tea

by Onder Skall

Kids: when your parents tell you to get off the damned computer and get some fresh air, you’d better. If not, they might send you to China for treatment.

When you arrive at the ‘treatment clinic’ you’ll be locked in a cell, exposed to freezing temperatures, yelled at, and tazered. Oh I’m sorry, it’s a clinic, so “tazer” is the wrong word. In a clinic we call it “electro-shock therapy” which, even though it’s been discredited by every clinical study ever done as simply a good way to damage a person’s brain, seems to be the cure for “Internet addiction”.

In addition you’re given therapy and lots of drugs. These are compulsory, of course, as the clinics all seem to be on military bases where your rights are temporarily suspended.

From the Washington Post article:

“Earlier this month, four teens fled their dorm rooms and jumped in a taxi. They made it to a train station before soldiers caught them, according to Li Jiali, a military guard. They were isolated and asked to write reports about why their actions were wrong. “

It’s all for your own good, of course. Parents send their kids, and government officials (who all know what’s best for you) may decide that you were just a bit too expressive in that chat room.

By the way, on a completely unrelated note: how many hours did you spend in-world yesterday? More than one?

Sources:
TG Daily - China electrocutes the WoW out of Internet Addicts
MSNBC/Washington Post - China treats Internet ‘addicts’ sternly (removed)
Washington Post - In China, Stern Treatment For Young Internet ‘Addicts’

Onder Skall also writes for Second Life Games

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In a shocking new twist to a story that already has more kinks than a pubic hair, reliable Herald sources inform us that despite their bragging on sites like 10 Zen Monkeys, the Patriotic Nigras did not initiate the attack on the John Edwards Headquarters in Second Life. According to our sources, the attack was in point of fact a generic Something Awful goon operation and Mudkips Acronym merely took credit for the action, scoring an extended interview with Lou Cabron in the process. As our source so eloquently put it:

[It] wasn’t “Patriotic Nigras”, it was mostly [Something Awful] goons. A few hours later
some 4chan retards came by and claimed responsibility. Patriotic Nigras = 4chan.

This raises several issues. First, it suggests that the SA goon’s Eddie Haskel routine of “gosh Philip, your hair looks lovely” may have successfully insulated the goons from being suspects in this case. Second it raises serious question about the integrity PN. Ninja Looters, are of course people who let someone else kill the monster and then run in and grab the loot. But in this case what did the PN grab? Taking credit for some racist scatalogical griefing, all they got was some paultry attention and an interview in a fancy “webzine”. As we said back in the day: Shame. Shame and ridicule.

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An Open Letter to Second Life Residents
Astrin Few, SL Musician
Posted on blog.slmusic.org , March 8, 2007
(reprinteded here at the request of Astrin Few)

As I approach my fourth year in Second Life, I’ve reached a decision point regarding my future participation in SL. After spending countless hours performing, helping organize RL events, helping new musicians get a start in world, and generally having a good time, I’ve become so deeply frustrated with the low performance and broken functionality of Second Life that it’s just not as much fun. Notices are broken on the Live Music Enthusiasts group, presumably because it is large and SL does not scale; this has led to the fragmentation of the live music community, as musicians form new, small groups on which they can announce their events with notices. Teleports from profiles are disabled, which makes it much more inconvenient to teleport an eager listener to your show between songs. Chat is horribly lagged pretty much everywhere, leading me to move to Yahoo Messenger to talk to my friends, so we can actually have a conversation and not just stare at our avatars typing away. Oh, and the typing noises still require that polite listeners at music events prefix everything with a slash to not pollute the audio stream with typing noise. The list goes on and on.

It’s been a long time since Linden Lab put anything really useful into SL that works (and that’s allowing that the addition of the FMOD stream player in version 1.2 “works”). For quite some time now, there has been more and more that is broken and degrades the experience.

I still love performing live shows in Second Life. But that’s about me and my listeners. I’m lucky if my stream works for them when they listen with the embedded stream player. I’m lucky if my event actually made it into the Events listing. I’m lucky if the sim doesn’t crash. I’m lucky if my listeners can chat without too much lag, and I’m even lucky if my guitar rezzes and they can see me holding my electric guitar, and not my acoustic.

So, in short, I have come to a decision. If Linden Lab does not, in a timely manner, fix the group notice bug; if sim performance doesn’t improve; if I can’t teleport folks to my shows off of an IM profile; if a sim crashes during my or another musician’s performance; if the introduction of the new avatar voice feature degrades performance even more; basically, if SL performance doesn’t return to the level we enjoyed back in, say, 2005, then I’m out. It’s back to 100% RL for me. But on my way out, I’ll send a letter to the editors of magazines that have shown an interest in Second Life entitled “Why I Left Second Life.” I want the readers of Technology Review, the magazine that made me aware of Second Life, to understand what happens when a beautiful idea is destroyed by incompetent technical management. It’s an important lesson, and I want to share it. I’ve devoted a large fraction of nearly three years to Second Life. I’ve performed well over two hundred concerts. I worked hard for the music program at SLCC06. And technical incompetency at Linden Lab will be what ended my contribution.

It’s quite simple. I’m OK with the fact that Linden Lab has done virtually nothing to support live music in SL. But I’m fed up with the performance of the Second Life platform. And downloading and viewing the viewer source code gave me no further confidence in Linden Lab’s ability to write code that really works. As an owner of, and senior developer at, an Internet application company, I have some expertise in this. I’ll wait for Google or someone else to create a new 3-D virtual community that is functional and not overcome by buggy, extraneous features. But I hope a miracle occurs and Second Life becomes adequately functional again. Soon.

Sincerely,
Astrin Few [Sam Hokin, sam@bsharp.org]
Joined SL in April, 2004
First musician to perform live concerts in SL

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Prokofy Neva, Dept. of Worlds, Planets, Universes, Metaverses, and Now Those Record People Have Copied Our Game, Geez

Sony has just gone and cloned Second Life!

OMGODZORZ even the welcome areas look like they were *lifted straight out of Ahern”.

I kid you not, kids. Go check it out.

I’m still absorbing the shock of this news out of GDC, but will have more for you soon. I hear PS3s cost about $600-700? But this game/world/interconnected user-content thingie is free, so far.

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