Second Life Moles – These are people that are paid staff working for Linden Lab. I suppose from home or wherever. We know them as the people that build the Public Works of Second Life™. At the moment they are building Bellisseria and SL16B.

The SL News Extra has an account by Bixyl Shuftan of a sort of interview-encounter with Abnor Mole, who’s name you’ll find is a take on the word Abnormal.  Interesting article.

summer picnic

SL Complication – I follow Penny Patton’s blog The Digital Pasture. She mostly writes about the shortcomings of SL, what users are doing wrong, and how to circumvent the challenges or how the Lab could improve the situation. Not a frequent blogger. Her previous article was 9 months ago. The average, I think high, is one article per month.

She has another article in her series that focuses on creating NPC’s (Non-Player-Characters or bots). I hadn’t thought about it, but she makes a good point. See: Why Anticipated Second Life Features Go Unused Once Released.

I’ll offer a counterpoint that may not occur to you and you’ll have to read her article for this to make sense. Whatever… Penny is pointing out UIs (think panel or dialog) for various features are used in other platforms to make things easier. I agree, good idea. But creating a UI that allows people to do things the programmer never thought of is near impossible. In those other platforms if it isn’t in the UI then generally you don’t do it.

Providing low-level access to the features allows the technically creative to come up with new ways of using features. That isn’t always a good thing. But in general, it has allowed users to do things and get more of what they want than I think otherwise possible. Fitted mesh immediately comes to mind as an example going from rigged (the plan) to liquid (user hack) to fitted (a Linden improved version).

I think the most productive process for SL is to provide the low-level script control of features and then maybe later come back and build a panel to do the basic things. OR as is often the case now, some enterprising scripter comes up with a tool that provides the controls. Think of Jopsy’s Porgan, the fancy particle script builder found at the Particle Laboratory (URL).

Magika Sale – You may know Magika is a hair store. What is news is the 50% Refund Sale running from June 19 to 25. Destination Map (URL)