My commercial empire!

I mentioned last time that I won a spot in Busy Ben’s Vehicle Lot, in the Boats section.
Monday was the first day we could move in, and I’ve moved in!
Well, sort of:

Right now the only thing you can actually buy is the Preview Version of the Seaspray 1.1; a nice 1-prim 1-rider zipping-around boat with [...]

Imprudent Emerald Meerkats

So the recent Second Life weblog posting on third-party viewer policies has caused quite a stir in the comments, due in part to one particularly vocal and vehement and misinformed Resident, but due also to some quite understandable concern about the current and future role of third-party viewers in Second Life.
Ever since the Lab open-sourced [...]

Get Your Bling On!

I still feel a little guilty for having been so mean to Twinity. So on this latest newsletter announcement thing from Metaverse, I’ll let the big graphic speak for itself.

Yay “BLING“! :)
/me exits, stifling giggles.

Twinity achieves new heights of… something

I occasionally think about trying out Twinity again, but then I get an email newsletter from them, and that invariably dampens my enthusiasm.
The latest one announces a party at “Twinity’s first yoga & wellness lounge”, to mark “the launch of its new designer jewelry collection” (because every yoga and wellness lounge needs a designer jewelry [...]

Dale Visits Blue Mars

Finally all trace of the NDA was scrubbed from the website registration and the installer, and I was able to get into the Blue Mars Beta! I wasn’t able to get there for very long, because RL has been amazingly busy suddenly with work stuff, and college starting, and computers needing upgrade and replacement, [...]

Much Better!

I just did my daily check of the link that the Blue Mars folks sent me on the 5th, to see if the very restrictive Beta agreement was still there, and Lo and Behold, it wasn’t!
Instead it led to a much friendlier registration process, containing a ToS that (while still real real long) didn’t [...]

Now that’s odd…

Quick followup to the last post: I decided that since I wasn’t going to be in the beta due to the rather extreme agreement, I’d look around and see what there was to read on the Web in the way of second-hand Blue Mars stuff.
Well, from the Blue Mars Online Twitter feed, I got to [...]

Why I’m not in the Blue Mars beta-test

BLUE MARS™ BETA TEST AGREEMENT
PLEASE READ THIS BETA TEST AGREEMENT (THE “AGREEMENT”) CAREFULLY. BY CLICKING THE “ACCEPT” BUTTON BELOW OR BY PARTICIPATING IN THE CLOSED PRE-RELEASE BETA TEST (THE “BETA TEST”) FOR BLUE MARS™ (“BLUE MARS”), YOU (“YOU”) AGREE THAT THIS AGREEMENT IS ENFORCEABLE LIKE ANY WRITTEN CONTRACT SIGNED BY YOU. IF YOU [...]

Virtual Ability presents “Fashions for Everyone”

I want to share an intriguing class announcement that went out over “Hey Girlfriend!” (my shopping and general girltalk and silliness group) group IM. It’s a class at Insight Virtual College (a place I now want to find out more about!), given by Virtual Ability (one of the winners of the first Linden Prize [...]

Pointed Babble

We interrupt our regularly-scheduled stream of narcissistic pictures to comment on this story, because we keep saying this in comment threads and Plurks and mailing lists and stuff, and we are a Twitter user, so we thought we might as well say it here:
This “study” is silly.
Silly in, I kinda suspect, the “advertisement thinly disguised [...]

Hey you Lindens, get offa my lawn!

On the snazzy black-background Flash-driven page that Second Life dot com shows if you aren’t logged in, it says

Second Life is an online, 3D virtual world imagined and created by its Residents.

On the masthead of the pages that Second Life dot com shows to logged-in Residents, it says more succinctly

Your World. Your Imagination.

I like [...]

Our Man in Zindra

[11:33] You: So you were on dot-chasing last night?

[11:33] Dale Innis: That’s right, boss!

[11:33] You: and…?

[11:34] Dale Innis: okay, well. looking at the biggest bunches of dots, I found basically three places: Escort Island, the Lounge of Dreams, an’ House Nishi.

[11:34] You: kay; details?

[11:34] Dale Innis: I sat around at escort island, talking to [...]

Play DISCREETLY on your browser NOW!

o like everyone else I’ve been seeing these Evony ads on every third webpage that I visit (including various personal web pages that subscribe to whatever ad syndication network(s) the Evony folks are saturating), and my well-ingrained ad-ignoring filters had been leading me to ignore them, when suddenly yesterday I noticed one.
It was probably able [...]

Drama Dolls! Woot!

In the unlikely event that someone who reads this doesn’t also read Ahuva or Chestnut, you should go and follow those links and read the Official Scoop on today’s announcement of Honour McMillan’s new Drama Dolls product.
Having seen some of the early prototypes, I will attest that this is a Must See thing. [...]

Beyond Blogging: Dancing!

The other evening I held a session at an unconference put on by some virtual-world-savvy IBM types.
The (un)conference was called "Seeking business value from investment in virtual worlds on the 3D internet", aka "Beyond Blogging". My session (the last on the first day) was "Field Trip: Social Aspects of Virtual Worlds". [...]

R U Kidding?

So I tried Twinity the other month, and am still on their mailing lists, and I get the occasional email from them. The frequency isn’t often enough to be annoying, but the content pretty much invariably reminds me that I am not the person that their marketing folks have in mind. The latest:

Dear [...]

Fly, Teleport, AND save $320,000!

I thought that since this story was extremely interesting, and involves me if only tangentially, and hasn’t gotten much exposure except for two items on the obscure “official Second Life weblog”, I would mention it here. :)
You should read the case study for details, but in the last few months them wacky IBM folks [...]