Nalates' Things & Stuff

Blood Letters – Letters 19 & 20

2014/11/21 by Nalates Urriah

Letter 19 was hard. The cookie was not bad. The hiding place for the clue was not surprising. The hint in the letter is right on. The problem was having to be supper zoomed in on the clue to see it. I looked at that the clue’s location a dozen times before I asked for a hint and a couple of times after. Then I finally opened up the Build Tool and started doing area selections and counting the items selected until I saw an anomaly. Then I started deselecting things until I had one item selected that I could not see. I finally got zoomed in close enough and it rezzed when my camera was in the right place. Frustrating.

The Mysterious Letter was hard to find. I spent a lot of time looking for it. It is well hidden. There is no problem with it not rendering, it is just very well hidden. But, as with most of the important clues, it is visible if you are looking in the right place.

Second Life in the Media

2014/11/20 by Nalates Urriah

Inara Pey has written a good rebuttal to a rather retarded article appearing on MoviePlot.com by Marlon McDonald. You’ll find that article here: These Strange Stories Prove Second Life Isn’t The Dreamworld You Believed…

Inara’s rebuttal appears on her blog and to MoviePlot.com’s credit they have posted a version of the article. See: A rebuttal to one-dimensional writing and The Strange Stories about Second Life that Totally Miss The Mark!

Main stream writers are producing less and less information that is accurate or connected to reality. Much of what is written and published is to serve one agenda or another. We are seeing more and more non-journalists correcting matters. I am not saying that Inara isn’t a journalist or reporter. I am saying that the majority of journalist/reporters are not doing the job we expect from them.

I congratulate Inara on an awesome rebuttal with supporting references. Please visit the her article on MoviePlot.com and leave a comment. This is a good page to save a link to for future reference and to hand out when some other lame article appears.

Rosedale Interview

2014/11/20 by Nalates Urriah

Philip Rosedale the current CEO of High Fidelity and former CEO and founder of Linden Lab/Second Life was interviewed. Ciaran Laval has an article up on the interview. See it here: Philip Rosedale At Gigaom Roadmap – Sci-Fi, Virtual Worlds And Beards. The original Gigaom interview video and article are here: The gap between virtual reality and sci-fi is shortening. This is mostly video, 30 minutes. At the beginning it comes across more as a setup promo than an interview, IMO. But, becomes apparent they are explaining HiFi to an audience that likely doesn’t understand virtual worlds or Second Life(TM).

Ciaran has done a good summary of the interview video. So, I’m not going to redo it here.

An interesting point to me is Philips take on people being able to self govern. In today’s world people are taught it takes a strong central authority to govern. About 240 years ago the American founding fathers thought people could self govern and built a structure to limit the power of government. Seeing similar thinking in this day and age is surprising.

Another interesting concept is the idea of creating a system that is open as possible. This means open source, open content format, and very much a free market.

Second Life: Group Chat Failures

2014/11/19 by Nalates Urriah

No one is sure what is going on in any detail. But, we have seen the group chat for the Mad Pea Blood Letters’ hints (Madpeas) go down a couple of times and the Firestorm Support group. Both groups have been able to send notices to their group’s users advising them of the problem.

The restarts for hardware updates may have been contributing to the problem. No changes are being rolled to the chat servers this week because of the hardware update restarts. Whatever changes are being made to day ARE affecting group chat.

The Madpeas group chat was down late yesterday (11/18). It is still down now (11/19) 3± PM SLT.The Firestorm group is back up now.

Grid Status has made note of the issue:

[Posted 12:10 PM PDT, 18 November 2014] We will be performing additional scheduled maintenance on 19 November at approximately 1:00 AM PST. During this time, some residents may experience login issues and residents in-world may be logged off or experience degraded performance. Additionally, during this time Group Chat may fail. Please refrain from rezzing no-copy objects and making L$ transactions during this maintenance. Please check back here for updates. (Reference)

Second Life: DMCA Abuse – Fight Back

2014/11/212014/11/19 by Nalates Urriah

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA is pretty well known and abused in Second Life™. In RL it is also commonly known and abused. The law should be over turned and I expect it would be if it ever made it to the Supreme Court. The law makes people prove their innocence, which is upside down in America and most free market economies. The the reason the law continues to stand is the it favors politicians, big business, and the wealthy. Individuals and small business can’t afford to fight at the Supreme Court level.

The WordPress organization is fighting the censorship that can be imposed by abuse of DMCA. They wrote about it here: Striking Back Against Censorship. Others are in the fight too. One of those is a company named Automattic. They gained fame when fighting Janet Jackson’s take down demand. (Reference)

Photo Shoot

2014/11/19 by Nalates Urriah

Every so often someone surprises me. Mr. S. did when he asked to photograph me. I agreed and it was painless… The results are interesting. I like them.

He got his poses from just the AO I was wearing. I think he did well with the images. You can find them here: Ink and Moon and Information Warrior. His entire stream is here: Mr S./ Bell or Balcony @ Flickr. It is an interesting collection. Check it out.