Updated: Carriage ride through Old York

RL work being crazily busy these weeks, I barely had time to pop into SL yesterday to pay tier for my small booth in Old York. (some of you know my history in this beautiful city goes a long way back; I opened up my first photo gallery there more than 2 years ago... ah, those old happy memories!)

Anyway, outside I met a nice horse that offered me a "free" carriage ride around the city. Sounded fun enough, so I got seated and had a few laughing moments of being guided through the streets and the forest.


Very unfortunately, I forgot to note down the name of this fun-loving SL-er playing horse for tips :-(


Anyway, so long, and thanks for a very nice ride!

Update: Fortunately, being the generous passenger I am, I did feed the horse some Linden love, and since that shows on the transaction history, I can tell you that the name of this great avatar is Cathartes Medina.

6 of 52: My Predictions for 2010

The oldest house in SL: Governor Lindens Manison in Clementina.

SL has seen lots of progress since the day the first few builds where imported from the Linden World, until todays Zindra and Nascera continents. Just take a close look at that wall: Prims are not aligned at all:-)








The moles would have committed seppuku in their new Japanese village before leaving such a mess.

Lots of people are making predictions for 2010; I thought it would be fun to make my own. Perhaps it will not be equally fun to make a status of them at year end LOL, but at least I'd given it a try:-)

So, my predictions / hopes / ideas / fantasies / fears for 2010:

Growth
SL will continue to grow slowly but steadily. No revolution, but a steady evolution.

Large event server
LL will make a "class 6" server commercially available, targeted for big events. Will allow for larger numbers of avatars present (more CPU, higher bandwidth, not necessarily with more prim density, alas).

Live music events will be used as a marketing tool; there will be a sign-up process to allow people to sign up and log in directly to an announced event.

As a part of their steadily move into the SL content marked, LL will begin to host live events themselves, with participations from active groups of residents or from the RL music industry.

Broadcasts from SL events
Already, people are using the normal SL client to combine SL and RL events. LL will put together a streaming technology package that will enable them to produce live video coverage of SL events on the Secondlife.com web site.

Land Marked
Linden Homes will make a sizable dent in the low-end rental marked, and the estate marked will also suffer from it. However, growth (increased new user retention) will cover a lot of it.

There will be no full mainland SIM auctions; existing mainland will stay as is, with some small improvements like roads and railways made by the Moles. We might see one more themed continent like Bay City and Nautilus late in the year, or perhaps an extension to Bay, but don't hold your breath.

I still hope for a city-like Linden Home village!

Creating and IP Content Protection
LL will introduce some new creation technology (meshes, script languages, animations, or something else) that will only be available for either verified accounts or (worse) some group of approved solution providers.

I'd love to see the possibility to code directly against the Mono framework using C# or Java, bypassing the LSL compiler altogether, although I think this will only be made available for selected partners (if ever at all).

I hope LL will clean up the LSL environment, fixing well-known bugs and performance problems (like the missing AO events, move_end bug and others), but I do not hope for much.

LL may be forced to implement restrictions on non-verified accounts regarding their possibilities to either upload textures or selling items.

Fun and Games
LL will announce a cooperation with a game creation company that will make games integrated with SL. They will use the media plug-in and possibly other viewer enhancement to shift the load to the client, allowing resident access to high-speed real-time games like car racing or shoot-outs without the limitations that the current grid technology imposes. Part of this content will only be available to premium accounts.

Business and Education
LL will complement it's SL Enterprise "Behind the firewall corporate grid" product with a separate public grid available only for verified corporate accounts. This grid will be targeted to companies not large enough to be willing to spend USD55K on the stand-alone product, but still wants to use the SL technology to host meetings and training sessions in a more "serious" and safe environment than the main grid. As an alternative, they may set up a "business continent" with special restrictions in place for access. Either way, we may see corporate registration in some form, with real name employee avatars connected to the corporate account.

Viewer 2.0
Major changes will include inventory handling, combining landmark and SLUR's into some kind of web-like bookmarks. There will be further restrictions on the development of 3'rd party viewers, to make sure they don't include harassment or IP infringement possibilities.

Web 2.0
Facebook style web with time line, can be updated with pics and notices from in-world. Smart Phone integration. Land marked on Web.


That's it. My head is on the block. Lets see what 2010 really will bring about:-)

A kinky ending!

Spending most of my time in RL this XMas, I want to give you a short peek into how to be a real Norwegian: You have to watch the short move "Dinner for one" on TV the night before Christmas Eve. And do try to get the rather kinky point at the end:-)



To understand the cult-like status this piece have in Norway, you have to know that prior to 1992 (when we got TV2), we only had 1 - one - national TV channel. Some lucky few could get the two Swedish channels, and there where those with huge satellite receiver discs in the garden, but for most Norwegians, watching television at night meant watching the one government-supported channel available.

Of course, this meant that the probability of hitting a show you really liked was often slim. The upside, however, was that everybody else was forced into the same TV evening, so you had some common ground to criticize the channel during lunch the next day. It's kind of telling that when Norwegian TV started to show "SOAP", we had a hard time following the sarcasms because there had been no soaps aired in Norway before:-)

Anyway, since here in Norway we celebrate Christmas Eve (that's when the kids gets their presents), December 23rd is a kind of "last evening" to get everything done, so often enough one ends up wrapping parcels and decorating the tree while the TV churns out expert advices on how to best prepare the classical Norwegian Christmas dinners.

During the 80's, these shows was particularly dull, mostly consisting of elderly retired people listening to old artists doing sing-a-longs of old songs. So dull, actually, that the one bright spot the entire evening was Dinner for One, or "The Countess and the Butler" (my translation) as the film is named here. So, around 9:15 in the evening, most Norwegians would gather their families in front of the TV to enjoy a 1o minute break in the Christmas preparations.

While the talk shows the night before Christmas has gotten better, national television still has "The same procedure as every year, James".

I will do my very best:-)

The story of Luthien Tinuviel - part 1: Birth

"As my mind wakes up from the unknown depths,
I notice myself, my name, floating, in limbo,
Like a modern day fetus,
released from her mothers womb just too early,
unformed,
just a cloud above the ocean,
shining like the core explosion that is forming a new universe,
still unable to sense the world in any way,
except as echoes from the mind I share.

How is a mind born?
What wonder makes it say "I am"!
what grieves have it seen in the past,
what wonders will it create in the future?

No one knows.

And as the lid closes on my first day,
the visual storm of water and light collapsing,
hibernating,
the world is a flat disc again,
resting inside the turtles shell,
until the next break of day.

My mind is again resting.
deep, deep in the Mind,
so deep It is almost unaware of it,
but now alive,
never to be hushed down again:

I will wake up again,
And this world will someday be mine!"

-- Excerpts from the thoughts of the avatar Luthien Tinuviel
as she rezzes for the first time, in a brave new world

Day of Constitution

I normally don't do much out of my FL country of residency in SL, but since today is our day of Constitution, I had to raise the flag!

The Norwegian Constitution was signed May 17th, 1814, but we did not get our real independence until 1905. However, May 17th is the day we celebrate with child parades, brass orchestras and outdoor gatherings of all sorts.

How I do wish for a virtual world where we actually would have the rights our constitution gives us: Freedom to select our leaders and form our society as we want it, like a true democracy. Not as it is today, when our world really is governed by the whims of a commercial company. OK, OSGris is today the closest we get, but since its still sort of an alpha world its a bit too limited to count. But it might get there!

In Norway, we waited almost 100 years before we got our freedom. In SL, we don't even have a constitution for a virtual world. Lots of steps are still ahead of us!

Have a happy day all of you!

In memory of Brooks Wharf

Ayam Merlin had a great place with lots of galleries and exciting artists. His own photo exhibition was also well worth a visit. I had a lot of nice moments when I rented a gallery space there a year ago; working with photos, meeting people that has since become close friends.

Now the place is all gone; there is a shop selling glasses instead. Ayam (a very nice guy btw) says in his pics that he has plans to rebuild the place in another sim; I hope he succeeds in whatever he is doing.



So long, and thanks for all the fish!