• To say you are excited to hear I was speaking
• To ask questions about why on earth I would speak at SL Pro!
• Expressing surprise that I have been in Second Life at all in the past 2 years
• Telling me I have no business speaking about anything
• Complaining about a video you saw of me
• Complaining about LSL
• Complaining about a script I wrote in 2004
• Asserting that women who use computers or are literate taint the purity of the Aryan race–yes, even women of colour–and that gays and lesbians should be arrested and sent to concentration camps.

So yeah, I just wanted to clear that up.

I just finished reading the interview and I’m happy to confirm that I didn’t sound insane or say anything terribly inappropriate this time. I find I do have something of a tendency to do this. If we’ve spoken in any capacity, you may have confirmed this for yourself.

Case in point: at the end of the interview, Stephen said, “We did a story last December on Second Life and Google Lively. I wish our writer had been able to get in touch with you for it.”

“Oh, am I not the top hit on Google for ‘Second Life Vancouver’ any longer?” I asked.

I really can’t believe the things that drift out of my mouth sometimes.

But more importantly, no, no I am not the top hit for ‘Second Life Vancouver’! In fact, I’m not even on the first page.

Currently, the top hit is an article about the Vancouver Police Department’s recruitment/awareness project undertaken by the Masters of Digital Media program, prior to my employment there at the Great Northern Way Campus.

That’s only peripherally related to me! Man.

Anyway. You should go read the Q&A at Straight.com!

YouTube

Flickr

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.

“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!

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!

1. Realizing that it’s at the main Point Grey campus of UBC, not Robson Square this year… about 10 minutes before I left.
2. This guy. Jeremy David runs “Choose my Adventure”, a blog where his readers get to tell him what to do. His poll asks, “Should I wear my Dragon Costume at the Blogging Conference?” The answer was clearly yes.
3. Meeting more people who had never used SL but who had heard of it than I ever had before in my life. There wasn’t any “so, it’s like Active Worlds/The Palace/The Sims, right?” And nobody seemed to be aware of it because “you can make money in Second Life”, they seemed to have heard about it because it’s an online community where you can do anything you want. That was… novel.

Tomorrow I’ll be doing a more formal talk on virtual worlds and communities along with Jeff Henshaw, executive producer for Xbox Digital Entertainment. I’m going to make it all up.

Commence plugging:

I wrote part of Second Life: The Official Guide — specifically, the chapter on building — with such prominent SL community fixtures as…

Wagner James Au (“Hamlet Au to you”) of New World Notes, and current spokesman for the California “Just Say No” campaign.

BuhBuhCuh Fairchild of Alt-Zoom Studios, where you would frequently be able to see my many, many machinima films if I was the sort of person who got around to doing things like bother to blog that I coauthored a book.

Cory (Linden) Ondrejka, Linden Lab CTO and mastermind behind the long-term Linden Scripting Language psychiatric stress tolerance study.

Mark Wallace of 3pointD.com, who I really must remember to tease about this post.

…And of course, the incredibly prolific strategy guide author Michael Rymaszewski, whose name I can totally spell.

And now, some vague and arbitrary numbers, the most important metric by which to judge a book! Yesterday, Second Life: The Official Guide was at #63 on Amazon’s Computers and Internet Bestsellers list, and #4,320 in Books.

As of this writing, it’s at #44 and #1,838 respectively. So yeah, I thought that was pretty cool.

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

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