Balancing Act: Philip's Back

Location: "Capricious" Build at SL7B Celebration

I really want there to be an 8th birthday party worth attending. With Philip Rosedale's return to the throne as "interim" CEO, will the magic I felt in 2007 return? I'm no "oldbie" but one of the "midbies" who came into SL during the "hype" years. I don't know that I want those sorts of expectations back, at least until the world can scale up to host hundreds of thousands concurrently. I want Rosedale to pull off the sort of balancing act needed to make SL vital again, to fix its problems. It will be a hard balance to maintain in economic times like ours.

With those thoughts in mind, I went to the celebration just to see what is up.

Here are a few standouts I saw on my random wanderings. SLURL links follow. It was a fun event for me, but it had more of a county-fair feeling, perhaps mandated by the closeness of many contrasting builds, than Burning Life's expansive Playa.

1) "Capricious" by windyy Lane, shown at the top of this post. This would be a build worthy of Burning Life. I think the metaphor is very apt for these times in Second Life.



2) Philip Linden's Keyboard and the animated Philip Linden made by dileoo Kirax. I'd just read about the keyboard being one of the older objects in SL, via Lalo Telling's blog. I sure hope the love Philip Rosedale is feeling from SL residents does not cause his head to swell up as big as the one here.



3) Primtionary. This was just pure old fun. As the host, Hotten Haller (I'd kill for that name) said in chat: " Primtionary is a game in which I (your host) secretly IM a word to the builder on stage. The builder has 10 minutes to build this word by illustrating it's meaning or its sound! The rest of you say your one-word guesses and try to be first to get the word!"



4) I like to end a visit to a fair with something quiet, even wistful. Thus I stopped at "Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts." To quote from Linden Lab's page, "This exhibit from Sand Castle Studios demonstrates how the different communities in SL are not just amazing on their own, but are improved and enhanced by existing within the Second Life metaverse."

How true. I want our hosts to keep this maxim in mind as we move forward. Here's to the chance of there being a Burning Life in 2010!