Second Life

Things about SL

Second Life: Community?

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I’ve been going through the VWBPE 2015 Keynote speeches and listening to them as I work. Pamela Broviak made one of the speeches. She has a civil engineering and planning background. The video is a 45 minute talk about community in Second Life™ (SL). Mal Burns recorded it and uploaded the video to YouTube.

StoryBrooke Gardens
StoryBrooke Gardens by Loverdag, on Flickr

I’m not at all sure the speech part of the video has any actionable ideas regarding or new insights into SL. If you have studied history, humans, and social development you’ll probably be scratching your head as you listen.

If you want the good information, jump to the question and answer section (TM: 30:00±). The value of this video is there.

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Second Life: Educational Community Update 2015 March

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Ebbe Linden (Altberg) has given his opening speech for the VWBPE  (Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education) meet up. Daniel Voyager has a summary of the speech with a number of quotes. See: Ebbe Linden talks about education. See it for a quick summary by bullet points.

I’m going to do a bit of analysis and express my thinking rather than try cove his speech point by point. I am going to arrange my writing by subject into different posts. I normally follow the delivery sequence in a speech. But, that doesn’t work for me in this case.

If you want the word-for-word, watch the video. 1 hour 9 minutes. Ebbe reviews what has been happening in Second Life and then changes to talking about the future at about the 23 minute mark. 

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Second Life Translator Broke?

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This translation thing is present for me now. I decided to try and get the Bing Free Translation API working in my viewer. That would save me using Discord’s Metanomics, that he really doesn’t seem to want out there.

The result of my effort is: BUG-8794 – The Bing API used by the viewer is depreciated.

Tameless Green With Envy Outfit - St. Patrick's Day
Tameless Green With Envy Outfit – St. Patrick’s Day by Nita Bracken, on Flickr

The Lab was making the change over to a viewer based translator in late 2011. That was in response to Bing, Google, Yahoo, and other players in the translate game deciding they would charge for their translation service.

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Second Life’s VWBPE Starts

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Seems we are hosting an in-world meeting for educators. The Lab published the information today about 10AM. See: Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education Starts March 18th with Keynote from Ebbe Linden. So, that starts off tomorrow. News leaked of this event in several places and it has been covered in the SL blogosphere.

@ work
=”@ work by Caitlin ‘Caity’ Tobias, on Flickr

It will be interesting to see what Ebbe has to say. 

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Firestorm Activism

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As I and several others have reported, the Lab is thinking about removing the Restore to Last Position (RTLP) feature at the server level. No one really knows how many people use the feature. The Lindens only heard about use of the feature when people showed up at support wanting things back which they lost by using the feature. So, the Lab has a bad taste for RTLP. No surprise there. And they don’t build IN Second Life the way users do. So, they see no use for the feature.

Jungle Ruins
Jungle Ruins by Carthalis Rossini, on Flickr

But, there are possibilities for keeping the feature and eliminating the problems. Firestorm has disabled the feature for No-Copy items in there viewer. If you screw up, at least you have a copy left. Other viewers have done similar things. This is a rather simple fix.

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Second Life: Skin Fair 2015 Review

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I finally made it in Sunday Morning about 4 AM. There are some pronounced changes since the 2014 fair. For one, Appliers are much more prominent.

Skin Fair 2015 - Appliers
Skin Fair 2015 – Appliers

Makeup is changing too. Brows, lipstick, eye shadow… they are all more likely to come separate, which I like.

Tattoos are changing. Better, more detailed, and more tats targeted at various body parts. Appliers let us target various parts of the body. They also let us vary how they display via HUD. It is a new world of tats. 

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