Omega Point

Google Alerts are a wondrous thing — provided you remember to create them. For me, my “Second Life” + “Vancouver” alert resulted in this spam site masquerading as a blog:

Teenagers, in particular, increasingly keep in touch with friends and acquaintances every time they log on but they are also forging new casual sex dating vancouvers with people who may share an interest but live on the other side of the world.

A recent innovation is the creation of virtual worlds which promise an entire social life in cyberspace.

Second Life is an internet community with a population of more than 100,000 real people.

Each resident controls a adult dating free site uk puppet called an avatar which reflects their personality.

Seamless insertion into copy there, guys.

(http://thedatesex.com/2008/03/03/news-does-happiness-live-in-cyberspace) 

Yes, yes. Lots of people were complaining that I hadn’t blogged about my appearance last year on Lab with Leo. So yeah, I was on it. Looking like a dork.

YouTube

Flickr

This Wednesday, (March 21st, 2007) I and the rest of the Social Signal team will be at Social Tech Brewing Vancouver, for this month’s topic, “Learning in Virtual Worlds”.*

From the Social Signal blog:

If you work at the intersection of technology and community-building, we hope you’ll join us for the March gathering of Social Tech Brewing’s Vancouver chapter. Social Tech Brewing brings together folks from social media, nonprofit organizations, community service, social activism, social ventures and technology to share ideas — and beer!

Beer! Virtual worlds! Community-building! It’s got it all! If that sounds like your mug of beer, you should join us!

From 7-8 PM, we’ll be at WorkSpace at 21 Water St. (See Google Maps)
Afterwards, we’ll be moving across the street to Six Acres.

See the blog post at SocialSignal.com for more or RSVP here!

* You know, like that Second Life thing.

I found a fascinating* post about Second Life’s much-debated usage numbers over at Social Signal.

“That number will likely be over 4.6 million by the time you read this blog post. So what does that actually mean in practical usage terms? Are there 4.6 million regular Second Life users? Well, no.”

* Where “fascinating” may or may not mean “written by me”. Link!

After a couple months of fighting to retrieve data from my ISP, arguing about whether or not I had the right to transfer the LSLwiki.com domain name — and finally buying a new one — followed by a couple days’ worth of messing about with MySQL, I’m pleased to say the LSL Wiki has returned, in editable, “current” form. Your old logins and passwords work.

Everything is the way it was at the moment the wiki went down. Nothing’s changed, we just wanted to get an editable wiki back up, but we have some fixes and addons to be rolled out over the next couple of weeks.

One catch though: this time, it’s at LSLwiki.net. I’ve put up redirects at the old site at LSLwiki.com, but it remains to be seen whether or not I’ll ever be able to recover that domain and put it to more useful… use.

This announcement comes right on the heels of Milo Linden’s “ohhh yeahhhh…” forum post:

Currently on the aditi beta grid.

llSetLinkTexture(integer link_pos, string texture, integer face)
Sets the texture of face for link_pos

llSetLinkPrimitiveParams(integer linknumber, list rules)
Set primitive parameters for linknumber based on rules.

Yes! It’s about time! (By which I mean, “thank you for the continued steady fulfillment of the userbase’s most desired wishes, Linden Lab.”) These are two of the biggest “missing functions” in LSL. With their addition, scripters can update all prims in an object with one script instead of a hundred or more.

Now, let’s get to work updating this thing!

So I guess it’s probably about time I updated the look of this blog. It’s come to my attention that I may be the only published blogger not to have plugged their book on their site in every possible way. Maybe I should do something about that…

(more…)

The CBC’s Adrienne Arsenault reports on the crazy cyber-venturous lifestyle of Second Life — and actually does the best job yet.

Also look for Mistress Midnight arguing on the side of subjective reality! Take that, Arsenault!

Best title ever? Yeah, probably. The Ed Wood Machinima Festival is on! Entrants have two days to produce the worst SL machinima film possible, using the title “A Zombie Stole my Heart”, selected by the advanced computo-logical main-frames in the basement of the Alt-Zoom building in downtown San Francisco.

I, for one, eagerly await the screening on Halloween to see just what hideous dreck they come up with.

I noticed this morning on the Alt-Zoom Studios site that September’s Take5 shorts have been posted. September’s theme was “Unhealthy“. Yay, machinima!

It’s true, the LSL Wiki has returned, now hosted at LSLwiki.com. This is the complete database as it existed on SecondLife.com as of the moment it was taken down. Your logins are all the same. There’s still a couple redirect problems I haven’t cleaned out yet, but it works. I’ll finish fixing that stuff tomorrow. In the meantime, happy LSLing.

Edit: There will be changes and upgrades to the wiki in the near future. Some of this may include porting the database to a more modern wiki engine. I’m certainly not making this decision alone, but I haven’t decided what I want to do yet.