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Groan. There is now a new group on the block, calling themselfs the “Second Life Anarchists.” Their goals are somewhat similar to the SLLA.

Their main message to us all is something like that:

While we laud LL for their foresight, and technical achievement in bringing SL to be, and find it hard to fault their stewardship of this world to date, we would argue that their management and interference in the goings on here are no longer appropriate nor required.

Neat, hu? But well, what do they really want? It boils down to this point, it seems:

LL has declared land to be in restricted supply. We at SLanarchy despise this and can’t help but think that whatever they were taking when they made this decision was indeed some bad, bad shit indeed. As discussed a few sentences earlier, we see no need for this artificial lack of ‘supply’. SLanarchy would like to propose that SLitizens are smart enough to create and manage their own worlds now, and call for LL to set free the tools required to embark on this unprecedented opportunity to enable every man, woman and child on the planet, to create their own parcel on this, the next digital frontier. Open the source code for the servers LL. Let us, the Slitizens, take on the burden of responsibility for our own future and the creation there of.

[Mehr]

On my travels through my feedreader I’ve discovered an interesting blog: the MySQL Performance Blog. For sure interesting for all of us who are into databases and must work with them. Hey, even Second Life is in reality just a big, big database in MySQL, so it covers the most fundamental, underlying technic of Second Life at all.

For sure worth a read, if you’re into techie things.

There’s a nice beginner’s tutorial in Natalia’s Second Life Diary Blog about how to make clothes with The Gimp! It shows some of the underlying principles in a very convenient Howto manner and the Gimp is open source. So, if you ever wanted to give this a try, you should definitely check it out and give it a try!

Ok, more advanced topics like working with the alpha channel are not mentioned there, but that’s ok.

This little blog has moved over here! Changes include a different blog engine (Serendipity) which is more easily extendable than Wordpress, a new layout and other stuff, too. Well, I guess it was about time, so that I can now continue my sophisticated blogging in even more interesting kind of ways. Or something like that.

It’s been a while since the last town hall meeting has been held, it was back in January about opening the source code of the client and such.

Since the new addition of voice that is going to come to us all on the main grid very soon now is another milestone in the evolution of SL that is going to affect everybody I wonder if and when there is going to eb a townhall meeting about that kind of topic.

There’s an art exhibition right now in New York City with relevance to Second Life. They’re featuring the “13 most beautiful avatars” there on big, big prints.

They’re featuring only portrait shots of them, digitally printed out on 36x48 inch canvas (that’s 91,4 x 121,9 cm, folks). So the things are quite big, you could buy it and hang it over your fireplace, bed, whatever.

Frankly, I don’t know how they were chosen, it seems the taste of the photographers was the judge on it. Some of the avatars, like Aimee Weber, are really well known and I think it’s at least for her more about branding herself and her name than anything else. I also know more beautiful avatars than those on the exhibition, but that’s just my taste, of course and YMMV, like always.

Frankly said, I would not buy such a portrait and hang it anywhere; instead I would try to spot them and make a photo of them myself (haha, just kidding). Well, I spotted Aimee Weber a while ago in the Avastar building, in which she was evolved - whatever.

Pham Neutra is asking in one of his blog post what’s so outstanding about Second Life that so many people are criticizing it right now. He only knows one another thing where the discussion about it is equally emotionally heated - nuclear plants.

Well, so why are so many people criticizing it? Because it’s new, it’s hip to criticize it, they don’t have a clue. Just take a look at earlier things like Rock’n’Roll, Skateboards, whatever - when they first became mainstream, many criticized them, there’s a thick, red line of such debates in history. Period.

The Second Life Herald is running an article about Plastic Duck’s job inquiry at LL and how the CEO responded. Well, beside the obvious commentary from Prokofy Neva (gna… if he’s so horrible, just shut up and sue him!) it’s a rather heated debate.

Well, from the point of view of Lindenlabs Plastic Duck must be somewhat hard to come by. He’s caused much trouble all over, but also seems to be a very good programmer who knows, what he’s doing. But would it be wise to hire him from LLs point of view, if he really wanted to join LL? I guess not. Therefore it seems he’s done too much in the past to be accepted by the community. Period.

I’ve found by chance another terrain editor, this here works under Windows and its name is Bailiwick. It’s being used to postprocess terrains made with Photoshop or Terragen, you can define parcels, permissions and so on with it. Looks also very interesting to me.

I’ve found two tools which can help you in the respect of building things in SL:

• A terrain file editor for OS X only named Backhoe. Looks pretty good and snappy to me on the screenshots and if you ever get your own island it looks like a very good way to make a terrain file to give to the Lindens.
• A script to be able to rez objects made in Maya in Second Life called “Maya -> Second Life: Beta version.” Maya is one of the best professional 3d editors around there, for many in the industry the 1st choice actually. So how does itwork? It gives you in Maya a new tool box with the prims of SL and the same options. You basically built your shapes in Maya, when you’re finished with it, you export it to your clipboard. Then you login to SL, equip one object with the rezzing script, load the clipboard’s content on a notecard into that object and let it rez the imported structure for you. Then you can texture it and so on and on. That’s it, basically.