Bringing Back the Second Life Helpers, Officially

Location: Linden Lab Blog

I am not quite ready to break out the "happy dance," but good news deserves notice.

I never quite understood why Linden Lab abruptly ended its sanctioned mentor program. Now, in a different form, the company looks to be bringing it back and even acknowledging the volunteer work of several groups that attempted to ease the "first hour" problem new SL logins face.

In a blog post, CEO/Avatar Rodvik Linden noted of the Resident Help Network:

The program has been in a bit of a holding pattern on the Linden side, while each of these groups continued to do their good work. I’m happy to report that we’re officially bringing back the RHN network and look forward to partnering with these communities and integrating them more tightly into our new user experience.

This is welcome news from a company that has a reputation for not listening to residents. I continue to be impressed by Mr. Humble's efforts, since he took over as CEO. The newest viewer is not bad at all; I've used it in advanced mode with Roderick Reanimator for a while. Soon, of course, I'll have to switch for my main avatar as well.

Linden Lab has a lot to do to regain residents' trust. Helping mentor groups help new accounts is a good start.

Now fix search and we'll be talking. My other big wish, off-world backups such as I enjoy in OpenSim, are, for some well understood IP reasons, presently beyond the reach of the Lab.

The Mountains of Nevermore

Location: Doing Geomancy

"So I can move your island," Jokay Wollongong began.

"No, let it stay as-is," I replied.

It's not as though I dislike the idea of a giant Tesla coil visible from my land. Not at all. At the same time, that's not very 1847.  It also blunts the immersion I want on this space.

So I decided, from right behind the Usher family cemetery Poe briefly mentions in his tale, to raise some mountains. The Mountains of Nevermore: sounds like a lost Yes recording from 1972.

The OpenSim terrain-edit tools, just like those in Second Life, remind me of the good old days in Sim City 2000, right down to the bulldozer icon.  They lack subtlety at the strongest settings, hurling needles into the sky much like a Lovecraftian landscape where mad gods flop about to the discordant music of eldritch flutes held in nameless paws.

There. I got to use "eldritch" for the first time since college, when in my D&D game we had an artifact called "The Eldritch Cleaver."   My snark has a long history...

So to make the island of Nevermore more immersive and interesting, I massaged the land ever upward, then put a line of dark pines into the passes between the hills and at the shore's edge. Soon the sparkling coil could not be seen, even by an avatar who wanders into the water at the shoreline. When I'm done, there may be NO shoreline beyond a few rocky inlets. I want that Poesque feeling of claustrophobia and depression to haunt my visitors.  I've enough prims to make things difficult for them by providing no long vistas of the space.

With luck, I'll hide some clues on those eldritch slopes for my fall class that will use Nevermore.

Avination: This Calls for The Grip, Kungfu

Location: Avination Grid

In the June issue of Prim Perfect, I'll run a review of this fast-growing grid derived from OpenSim.  I am still working on the piece, so I will just note a few highlights now:

• There's an active user-base that recruits new residents by word of mouth in SL.
• Concurrency runs about 300 and active logins per month run over 4500.
• The grid offers gambling and adult content without age verification (ouch).
• Avination has a working currency and easy conversions from Linden Dollars or Paypal (I bought 1000 credits to kit out my avatar, freebies being very scarce, and uploaded some clothing textures).
• Many well known content creators from Second Life have added stores in Avination, as they have done in InWorldz. Reasons? No hypergrid, strong IP protection, very restrictive freebie policies.  Not a place for educators, but I can see the lure for RPers and social users.

I found the grid's residents eager to have me tour around, something that offset my disappointment that this grid is primarily for socializing, roleplay, shopping, and gambling. Perhaps all of these closed grids will trend that way, as we educators seek something different.

Given that the grid restricts name-choices in much the same way that SL has done, I picked a last name from a list. Seeing "Kungfu" and being reminded of my favorite GI Joe, the African-American Adventurer, I knew what I had to do: Grip Kungfu was born.

The default dark-skinned avatar was nice. I purchased some good hair with a long queue in back, bought an AO called "Danger Man," and I was ready for whatever Avination tossed my way. I can take it. Before I had avatars, a long time before, my bud Gary and I made up tons of stories with our GI Joes.

You can guess who the coolest GI Joe was.

Digital Story: Stop Cyberbullying

Maddie's story was the people's choice in last week's competition.

I'd not followed this story and, despite a lifetime of being jaded, am amazed at human cruelty. There's some cold comfort that the perpetrators could get prison time for doing what they did, though even there the penalty may be less if a proposed settlement of the case becomes reality.

Whatever happens, on a day when some very different justice was done in Pakistan, I'm reminded that most of the time, evil gets its comeuppance.