Meta News Xtra!

Coming this Saturday at 4PM SLT is the first ever, XTRA special edition of MetaNews Daily, SLPN’s daily news show all about virtual worlds and the issues relating to this.

This Thursday news broke from Australia that new legislation relating to online games that have a rating of 15+ would be blocked from Australia. (which Second Life would fall under due to a technicality)

There are a bunch of Australians that have a significant impact on virtual worlds, including Second Life. Need a few examples. Well for one there’s Treet.TV (formerly SLCN), Second Life’s biggest virtual television network and one of the big businesses to come from Second Life.

So I have decided to hold a special edition of our MetaNews show to specificially discuss the issues and have an open roundtable to discuss this issue. By open, i mean open.

I will be specifically inviting various Australians who reside in virtual worlds to talk about this over the next  day to take part in this discussion.

This special edition of Meta News will take place at SL6B on our plot over on SL6B  Cryo at http://slurl.com/secondlife/SL6B%20Cryo/150/223/23

The episode recording will be done in voice and takes place on Saturday at 4PM SLT. I encourage you to spread the word on this discussion and if your an Aussie, I HIGHLY encourage you to turn up for this discussion.

After Several Years of Delays…

The Edloe/Nowhereville bridge has finally made progress in construction. The bridge which has been under construction since 2007 has finally made progress and it usuable.

The bridge has been named “The Gomem Desoto Memorial Bridge”

Corona Cay, A Wonderful Community

Nika Dreamscape, Awesome Neighbour, Awesome Friend and someone who needs to get help for her chicken addiction, wrote a blog post on the faboulus community where I happen to live, Corona Cay. So I asked if I could cross post it on my blog, which she said I could.

Before you read this, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND YOU VISIT NIKA’s BLOG.

Read more

Music Academy onLIVE

For those people who watch the Treet.TV show, Music Academy onLIVE you probably have already watched the latest

edition of the show. But if you haven’t you will not have realised that I am now contributing machinima for the show.

It’s been a lot of fun to work with Benton Wunderlich (he hosts Music Academy onLIVE) on these videos and i’m looking foward to doing many more.

For those of you who don’t know what Music Academy onLIVE is about. It’s a show that covers musicians in Second Life and has a specific focus of classical music.

3 Years Ago…

On May the 2^nd 2006 I decided to ahead and create an account for Second Life and join in the fun of podcast scene entering Second Life. While a lot of people from the early days have now left the virtual worlds and some joke about the world, probably because they just didn’t get it (which sadly seems to be the case even in some shows I listen to) the core community from the early days are still around and I think it just shows the strength of the podcasting community. Why I am talking about this is because a couple of weeks ago at the ninetieth episode of The Podmafia Podcast we were reminiscing about how we came into the world.

Some of the people came in via TWiT when Leo “Pruneface Spatula” Laporte came in after discovering the world and promptly left and never came back, he seems to do that alot with communities.

Others came after Adam Curry of Podshow (then Mevio) was touting about his castle in the world and talking about all his ideas to integrate podcasting into Second Life and the sense of excitement about this virtual world and the endless possibilities. I was one of those people, Now while I do think he is an ass now, listening to all the stuff happening in this virtual world inspired me and made me want to be a part of that world. I also think that i wasn’t the only one who got inspired.

Looking at other people in the podcasting scene, some went off and became not only builders, but successful builders who are able to earn enough money to work just doing builds in Second Life or at least be able to help pay for their time and effort in the world. Others have successful stores selling gadgets and devices to help improve their second lives.

Looking back at everything that has happened in this virtual world it makes me smile to see how far we’ve come in just 3 years. I can’t think of anything that has changed so drastically in just three years. I can remember the number of accounts when I joined, it was 200,000. I think the highest concurrency was like 15,000 maybe a little more or less. I can remember the days when we couldn’t log in to SL for a day due to SL going broke at 20,000 concurrency.

Actually, another thing that used to be a regular occurrence was that EVERY Wednesday SL would shut down and the podcasters would get together and we would have a die-in. AKA we would be booted off SL and not be able to return for 5 hours. Now people get annoyed not being able to log in for an hour. Granted its unscheduled and therefore a pain, but in retrospect, it’s not as bad as it used to be.

SL is far better and far more stable than it was a year ago.

General Observation #2

It’s NOT FUCKING CENSORSHIP!

Seriously. I am currently watching the Linden Lab press conference via Mogulus and one thing I keep hearing is the word censorship.

Lets take a look at Censorship.

“an official who examines books, plays, news reports, motion pictures, radio and television programs, letters, cablegrams, etc., for the purpose of suppressing parts deemed objectionable on moral, political, military, or other grounds.”

Linden Lab is not suppressing the content, its just seperating it to make it easier for users to get to. Ever heard of a Red Light District? Same Thing.

Lets not forget that Linden Lab is a private company. The fact is, they do whatever is good for business. This move for the most part is GOOD for business.

I could go all day with this, but I just can’t be bothered. I’d rather just get back to do what I do.

General Observation #1

As much as I think the snapshots on the login screen on the SL viewer is cool. I really think it’s missing something important.

I know, a SLurl to the location that is being shown on the screen, that would be a very nice addition to the login screen. Actually I also think while i’m on this topic, I need to know, when the hell is Linden Lab going to return the old latest blog posts on the front of the view as well.

The obvious reason for having that RSS ticker on the login screen is because quite frankly, I think a lot of the residents just don’t understand RSS. Sure we’ve got a fair bit of the community that understand RSS, at least I think they do, but alot of them probably don’t know about the blog and won’t have the slightest clue as to when a change is about to happen in SL.

5 Questions…

If you follow the SLPN Video feed (and if you haven’t…why?) then you may have noticed a new series of videos called 5 Questions where I go around asking avatars 5 questions about their second lives. So far I have released 3 videos (with a fourth coming later today) and those who have watched it have been giving me good feedback.

Since I don’t talk on the videos I figured I’d talk about the recordings on here. So the avatars I’ve interviewed so far are Yxes Delacroix, ArminasX Saiman and Bob Bunderfeld.

Out of those three I’d say my favourite interview so far would probably have to be Bob. Just because he has a unique perspective on Second Life and has very opinionated views on SL which I like.

For those who don’t follow SLPN’s content, we tend to usually have light-hearted and fun shows; This show is different just because it is more of a serious show. Honestly it’s a breath of fresh air for me. That doesn’t mean to say I’m going to get all serious, I’m still going to be crazy old’ Stuart Warf on Podmafia.

If you want to get on this series and get interviewed feel free to IM me or leave a comment. Also tell your friends about this project as I’m after a variety of avatars.

The Switch of Vista.

A couple of weeks ago I (stupidly) let one of my RL friends who recently busted his PC to go on my machine and check his facebook. The next thing I know, my pc is getting random popups and I’m like…oh boy.

So I hit up Safe Mode and transferred my files to a safe area and make sure it was all clean and ready for my next job. My next job being either a fresh Windows XP install or do what I was going to do in December anyway, and move up to Vista.

I decided to go up to Windows Vista and let me be quite frankly honest. It is fantastic. It runs brilliantly on my machine, does everything I need to do and actually does it better in some areas.

Second Life’s performance has not really been hampered and my tool for recording SL video (FRAPs) actually seems to configure the audio levels better when I record video. An example of this is that under XP i’d have to configure the audio levels about for a few minutes in order to get it sounding right, which usually would mean i’d have to make the system sounds about half and made it harder for me to hear sometimes. Under Vista, it just works straight away with the levels seemingly set right.

It’s actually made Machinima easier to make, therefore making my life easier when doing videos such as my new 5 Questions series.

I’m also digging that Windows Media Center is integrating my PC and Xbox 360 better than it used to.

Now I have ran into some bugs here and there but they are so minor that it doesn’t bother me because I actually like it. My only question is, why did I take so long to switch

Playing around with TV’s

Lately I have been tweaking my home at Corona Cay around to try and fill it up. I’ve never really been known for my ability to decorate. One of the things that I have done however is made a Home Theater for playing videos in Second Life. I decided to take an entire wall for my TV and make that my home theater screen.

Now recently I purchased one of those TV sets by NHC as I’d seen them before and liked how they worked. But me being me decided to take it one step further and add some screes on….4 more to be precise.

I had a lot of fun coming up with this setup idea and liking how I got it to sort of integrate it with my house by tinting the video. I’m not sure i’ve seen anything like this before, so I class it as unique, and hopefully it doesn’t suck.

Next Page »