Donations
This is a kind of continuation post from my last blog post entitled The Greenies Problem. This entry is going to be about Donations.
If you ask me, it is entirely reasonable for any place in Second Life that offers an event to the public to have a donation / tip jar area for offering events or resources. When we look at something like the Greenies, they would likely make a lot more money from donations than charging an admission fee.
One example of an area in Second Life that offers free entertainment but gets donations is the Music scene. Every musician makes a good sum of money for doing the music and also the venues make money from it as well. The venues could easily say “You can’t get in without paying L$1000″ and in some cases they do when it is a big musician like Louis Volare.
Another place in Second Life that offers a service to residents is the Destination Station. Itazura recently added a tipjar for people to donate to. Again entirely acceptable because they make no money for promoting these places free of charge and is a hell of a lot better than any standard telehub.
Soon enough SLPN will be getting a donation jar as well and we have some cool stuff coming down the pipeline.
Harper Berseford made an interesting comment on my last blog post on the Greenies that I completely understand the point of view of.
“They have to insure the survival of their business so they can provide MORE content and pay the electric bill to keep the server running.”
Again, my argument has always been, If they people like it, they will be more than happy to donate. If I ever see a donation jar at a sim that is fun, helpful, informative, entertaining etc. then people will donate. Combine that with Merchandise (Greenies sells merchandise already!) then THEY will surely make money.
Whats your Second Life?
I am currently listening to SL Under the Radar’s part 2 of The Toilet Bowl and it got me thinking, what on earth is Second Life to people. What is it that they do?
Me?
I am an evil tyrant who wants to wage nuclear war on Nowhereville who is secretly an evil timelord.
Why?
I love Doctor Who and thats why I am an evil timelord. The nuclear war thing is because I am scared of Nuclear War. I used to have regular nightmares about Nuclear War but for some reason, since I started playing around with nukes in Second Life it sort of eased my fears and I haven’t had a nightmare about it in a long freaking time.
Thats a sort of insight to why Warf is Warf. What about you? Do you do anything wacky that you wouldn’t do in Real Life that you do in your Second Life? Is this post entirely pointless to you?
Not long now…
… I hope …
In case you aren’t aware, for about 10 weeks my main machine which could handle Windlight well went out of action. At first we thought it was the Motherboard that was bricked so we sent it off with the warranty and then found out that it was not the case. So then we discovered it was really the graphics card that was to blame for the problems. Assuming that everything else is fine I should have the machine back very soon and enjoying Second Life like I should have. It’s annoyed me to no end because I wanted to fully experience things like SL5B and the Relay for Life.
So while I was in the downtime I managed to get my old computer up and running again. During the downtime some things went wrong with the machine. But it gave me a chance to experience Second Life from the older hardwares perspective. It intrested me because I always hear people with low end machines complaining that their machines are unbearably slow and get 1fps. It makes me think, what exactly are they putting the Settings at with the viewer. Case and Point this screen capture of my settings, hardware and frames per second.
This machine right here is about 4 or 5 years old now. Yet I seem to be getting 17fps on this low hardware. The only problems I get sometimes is that the machine will hang for a few seconds. But that is down to the machine having 512 MB of memory. Now I understand that some people having laptops and they really do suck for Second Life if they are cheap laptops but the fact is if you buy one of those cheap laptops you are shooting yourself in the foot for any 3D application. I know because I got one for the laptop and yes it sucks big time. I wonder what other people with older hardware get when they are on Second Life. If you read this blog let me know in the comments.
Biography
Currently…
I am Stuart Warf. An avatar who was born on the 2nd of May 2006 in Second Life. My avatar is an evil timelord who’s TARDIS was left stranded in this world remaining in the current timeline until I can escape this virtual world (In case you don’t know, Heres a Doctor Who Wikipedia Page). My hobbies include Physical Prim tricks, building and podcasting. I currently live at Podcast Island where the SLPN Studios lie.
A Brief History of Stuart Warf
I originally joined Second Life in 2006 when alot of the podcasting community discovered Second Life and thought that it had amazing potential, which they were correct but failed to see it and left when the eighties has-been left. During 2006 I, along with Gomem Desoto, formed a group called The Podmafia (the actual group name is The Pod Mafia), which later in August - September had 5 episodes of a podcast called The Podmafia Podcast, which originally was aimed at going around places in Second Life and teaching the masses about podcasting.
Then came 2007. In the early beginning I was partnered but that soon ended. So became my life of living. For a month I resided in SoHo, but for some reason I just didn’t like renting there. So I left but still hung out to see the crazy and wacky stuff going on there. It was around this time when I temporarily brought back The Podmafia Podcast for 3 episodes. Then came Life, Living in Nowhereville. From around March until August I rented land under Madison Carnot while hosting the Take it or Leave it at Nowhereville. This however stopped for me when Take it or Leave it ended. But that was short lived when Crap Mariner injected new life into Nowhereville shortly after the Second Life Woodstock event that took place in the Five Islands. During August Podmafia Podcast came back after troubled times and stayed strong with Yxes Delacroix as host. I re-rented at Nowhereville under Crap Mariner and continued to live there.
So in comes 2008, When I launched SLPN, a network dedicated to podcasts for the metaverse. During the year I continued to work on SLPN by bringing in new shows and new challenges such as live podcasting in Second Life. Up until July 2008 I had continued to live at Nowhereville. However after some thinking and a polite request I decided to leave Nowhereville and move to Podcast Island…
That’s the story so far…
Last Updated on the 18th of July 2008
SL on Xbox?
Earlier this week I came across this blog entry by Dusan Writer which talks about a placeholder found on the official Second Life website at the URL - http://search.secondlife.com/.
placeholder page for XBOX, PS3, and iPhone versions of client when they launch next real soon now
However if you visit the site now it says
placeholder for search
So, what’s the deal? Well here’s what I think what happened
- LL is working on an XBOX 360, PS3 and iPhone version of Second Life and someone in the departments placed the wrong placeholder at the URL instead of a placeholder for an offline search engine for Second Life
- A PR Stunt
- An employee who was bored and decided to have some fun without realising that it would be noticed
However if LL is working on a client for the Xbox, PS3 and iPhone then I will be happy for two reasons. I Have an Xbox AND an iPod touch. For those who don’t know the iPhone/iPod touch has the same operating system and hardware (minus the phone, camera and soon to be GPS) meaning it would work on the iPod as well.
On the Xbox and PS3 you can talk via a microphone or keyboard (at least on the 360 you can). Also the whole Flycam features that are coming soon could in theory work well with Second Life. Not to mention that they are dedicated systems for gaming making Second Life be smooth and free of system lag (sim lag will probably still occur).
Although this may never happen I think it would be awesome if it did. Here’s to hoping that the almighty lindens are working on it 
What the Plurk?
Since Yxes wrote a post about Plurk…I will too.
Plurk is a Twitter-like webapp that in my opinion is brilliant. Why do I like Plurk so much that I have mentioned it on Podmafia two times and blogging about it now? It’s because Plurk is simply better than Twitter.
To me Twitter is a chaotic mess that you can’t really catchup on without going through pages and pages of tweets and adding people more and more to see what was replied to and by who. Not to mention that it is intertwined with the Fail Whale.
Plurk makes it easier for me to catchup on what’s been happening with people and also to read the threads of conversations. It also seems to be a good way of getting traffic fast. Case and Point, Yesterday I was flying around Second Life when I got an IM asking if I wanted to try out the PlurkHUD. Since I am a sucker for BETA I tried it out and gave my location away with the tool. Then GoSpeed turned up and GoSpeed told people where she was. After a while a whole crowd of people came and was just having fun and while Plurk is currently small in size of community it is seemingly quicker to get traffic.
Am I a plurk fanboy? Yes. Do I think people should leave Twitter. Yes. Will it happen. I don’t know.
But if you want to add me…well add me!
More on the Dazzle
OK, so a previous post of mine about Dazzle got some traffic and I was informed that the idea of Dazzle is that it can indeed be skinned. Thats great. Infact Itazura Radio even linked me to some skins that are already being shown on the Second Life wiki.
After some prodding around on what it can do I’ve come to some conclusions and formed an opinion.
The current methodology of skinning is far too complicated for newbies and people who aren’t fans of editing code. I personally don’t mind getting around the code and copying & pasting stuff but some people just may not want to touch it.
Secondly, there appears to be no menu in the preferences that allows the changing of skins on the fly.
Also, there are no tools currently that could help people create and customise their own skins.
So here is my proposal on what I think needs to happen. Firstly, the Linden’s need to get their act together and bring in an easier system of importing GUI skins. They should do this by adding a new tab on the preferences called “Interface” or “Skins” (or anything else that describes it. Calling it just a Skin could confuse some people because of the avatar skins).
Next they need to implement a new structure on how skins can be stored. IE. SecondLife\Skins\* (* being the name of the interface)
Then the lindens should make a program that makes it easy for people to create GUI’s as easily as possible. If the lindens don’t do this then it should be fairly easy for someone to make a GUI application in something like Visual Basic .NET or whatever the tools are for the Macintosh. Preferably an open source tool since then its free for all and people can contribute and improve the code and stuff.
Thats my opinions for the designing. I personally don’t mind editing code but I would trade it any day for a simple little tool that can help me easily make a GUI for the new Dazzle interface.
Strike Time?
OK, I am going to discuss this whole SL Blogger strike thing. I myself a blogger am blogging about a blogging strike. Yay Oxymoron’s!
So, Gwyneth is leading a protest about the whole copyright and licensing thing about the lack of a clarification. Even though there was a clarification.
Why didn’t the linden’s address the bloggers?
Pretty much because they aren’t going to go after the frickin bloggers. The bloggers help promote Second Life so why the hell would they go after the bloggers?
It’s like saying that Apple sues all the blogs for talking about the iPhone. It’s crazy. They didn’t even take down Fake Steve. So why the hell would Linden Lab even take them down.
The copyright thing goes after people who are profiting by infringing on the Second Life copyrights. SLPN was sorta affected in a sense because we may in the future recieve cash sponsorship to help out the costs of running the network. Hence why I did some changes like just branding it as SLPN, Podcasts for the Metaverse
My blog will not change UNLESS Linden Lab says, you gotta change this. Because lets be honest, they will only give you a written warning about the content if its deemed to violate in a way they don’t like it.
And just remember…theres only 49 days left if your super-paranoid that the Lab’s is out to get you
Somebody Dazzle Me?
OK so the next release candidate for SL was released featuring the new and amazing Dazzle UI. As much as the Linden Lab™ says that this is more than a colour change, it really just is a new lick of paint to an interface. and I personally do not like the interface..
It doesn’t seem to change the core way that it is laid out. That is a problem for me because I am a resident of nearly 2 years of age and I still to this day find things in the interface that I didn’t know about in the beginning days and it makes me wonder, what does the new Second Life resident think of this interface.
Not to mention…Dazzle is too…vista-like for me. Some argue that it is more Aqua like but I don’t think so. Its more of an Aero on spearmint flavoured steroids. The more I use the interface the more I want the old interface just because of the colour. Maybe if Linden Lab™ implemented a skinning scheme where users can create their own interface, sort of like Firefox does it, then I would be happier. Possibly people could sell their skinned SL themes but only as an option. Sort of like what they are planning with Windlight.
The only feature I like in the client so far is the in-built Anti-Aliasing. To those who do not play games and most likely will not of heard of this amazing technology. Anti-Aliasing is the art of pixel smoothing in 3D graphics which makes everything look a whole lot better. In some enviroments 2X is fine. Snapshot lovers will want to go as far up as possible to get the best photographs as possible.
Don’t think that going all the way to 16X Anti-Aliasing doesn’t affect performance. It puts a lot more pressure on a graphics card. Top that off with Windlight/Draw Distance and everything else and you have got to need a powerful rig to handle it all.
SLPN’s next phase!
OK. Live Podcasts. I have already talked about this on the SLPN’s blog about us moving to live podcasts. Well as of this week we shall move to the live podcasting aspect that I have been intrested in doing.
So how is this going to work?
Well certainly not with video, at least for now. My approach is to do it with audio in a radio enviroment because it is easier to stream for some people who have lower bandwith. Also it’s what I know best. And as much as I like a challenge I prefer doing it in audio for now. It’s live because we will record it in front a live audience and as we move on, we will get the video in the mix as well.
So the week begins most likely on Tuesday with a new show called “The Warf Show” which I will be doing on KONA radio which will replace the Podmafia Re-Broadcast. With Podmafia being a podcast, there isn’t much sense to rebroadcast it I think. It might be this week or next week though. But I will be recording it for podcast purposes.
Then there is MetaNews Weekly which WILL happen this Wednesday at Nowhereville at 9AM SLT. 9AM SLT is 5PM for all the UK folks so that will be a fun little challenge. The hosts of that show are Malburns Writer and Tara Yeats in-world.
There is a SLPN Live group that I have set up for people who want updates for when shows are happening and such like. The group is not the only solution. We also have a Subscribe-o-Matic board for all those updates as well so if you DON’T want to waste one of your precious groups, well your not left behind.
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