Iris Ophelia, Fashion Writer, Talented Photographer, and Sweetheart Extraordinaire, was recently interviewed live on in-world interview program Tonight Live with Paisley Beebe. In it, she's as adorable as I know her to be (full disclosure: she's a friend), and converses on a range of subjects including fashion, blogging, and her photography.
Don't mind the voice lag; the interview was done over Skype, with Iris in Canada and Paisley in Australia. It's an all-too-brief glimpse into the mind of someone I wish I could spend more time with. Enjoy!
I had the chance to meet Marshall Kirkpatrick, of Splashcast, back in March at SXSW. We had a long talk about the service that they offer and how it could possibly help Second Lifers. Hamlet Au, of New World Notes, actually created a Second Life Machinima channel back in January that was featured on the site. I see a lot of potential here as a way to show off our work without taking up a lot of space.
What is Splashcast? It's a different way to share media. You can display pictures from Flickr, audio, and even videos from YouTube. You can also upload your own media. It is then turned into a slideshow of sorts that you can widely distribute with the click of a button.
I've been meaning to re-upload the old Grid Review Machinimas that I made ages ago, so this was the perfect opportunity. After a grueling four hour upload process to YouTube, I was able to load all of the links into Splashcast to make a show. Now I'm able to bring them to you in all of their glory! Have you made a show or channel? Share the link in a comment!
The indefatigable Rik Riel has posted his latest 'RIk's Picks' over at New World Notes. While he always has the cream of the crop, this event in particular stood out to me: InWorld Cinemas' Grand Opening at the Bermuda sim, where this virtual movie theater will be showing the RL movie 'Loverboy' in its entirety over the weekend.
The Cinema belongs to development company InWorld Studios, which purports to make your company's stale, 2-D web offerings into shiny, exciting 3-D instead. My question is, how can they be offering this movie? Tickets cost 260L for a showing, which is cheap, but it's still a commercial transaction. Money is being made here, and it's unclear (though unlikely) if the movie studio is going to receive any kickbacks from receipts.
Regardless, it's a cool idea. I plan on checking it out this Saturday and will give you my first-hand report. Also, check out all the other picks RIk has posted!
The voice chat beta has been in effect long enough now for people to have tried it, and some of my fears have been realized. Peasan Kuu reports her experience:
In a group of 10 - 12 people, 2 or 3 dominated the conversation just like RL
If any one person had microphone issues, like feedback, it affected everybody
Voice chat effectively kills text chat
It was difficult to tell who was speaking at any one time
The spatial effect works well; nearer avatars were louder than those farther away
The most common comment by those voice chatting: "Whoa, this is so cool"
And it goes on: Hamlet brings up the idea of groups segregated by language, and how established residents' acceptance or rejection of voice might doom its inclusion. There's a lot of talk (no pun intended) over this latest development, and it seems fairly split, both yea and nay. Time will tell, of course, but will it say it in text or voice?
I hadn't been in-world all day today, so this completely escaped my notice, but sharp-eyed Sushi Bligh sends this image in, which I have darkened and sharpened to make evident.
What would the great man think of Second Life? I'm with Hamlet Au in today's New World Notes: it's true that racial issues seem to be a non-consideration, given that residents may choose to appear however they want to. However, is that true equality? Is submerging RL ethnicity behind an avatar the same thing as being open about one's color? I'm reminded of a past NWN article, and wonder if this is a new world we've made for ourselves, or just the same one we've always had.
For those of you living under a rock as far as Second Life news is concerned, there's a new media firestorm about Second Life: Resident numbers. The smoking gun starts a grass fire as journalists scramble to acquire credibility by jumping onto the bandwagon of questioning numbers. Everyone loves a good scandal.
This begs the real question, though. The media circus is obfuscating a more important issue with the numbers.
New World Notes was pointing to this video this morning and I practically jumped up out of my chair and started clapping. If you are uninitiated to the pop sensation "My $%&# in a Box" courtesy of Saturday Night Live, it has been the number one download on YouTube and is still building up steam. While juvenile and possibly just plain wrong, it is also hilarious. So, in the spirit of that video I present to you "Prim in a Box" starring Moo Money and an as yet unknown penguin, posted to YouTube by SLHamlet.
Oh yeah, this is not really work safe if you have your audio on. If you mute the audio you should be fine.
Internet analyst Clay Shirky recently wrote a piece on inflated press hype that caused some controversy, and New World Notes' Hamlet Au has responded with a mighty rebuff. For completeness' sake, here's Hamlet's post on the piece.
It's a lengthy piece that applauds Shirky's initial point (that the media needs to carefully check its facts and figures before running off with a sensational story about SL's resident retention rates and overall population numbers), while at the same time taking him to task for a number of supporting statements. The article is chock-full of links to past NWN articles (well worth reading in any case), and also features a graph by Our Tateru (who Hamlet calls his 'demographitrix') that supports his thesis: Clay is correct in the broad sense, yet diffuse in the details.
Although Shirky does make a comment after the piece, we've yet to see a full rebuttal of Hamlet's article. I hope it's forthcoming; this is something that needs to be talked about, and LL sure ain't doing too much of it.
[UPDATE: Added missing attribution] Judge Richard Posner, author of Not a Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency, will be discussing his thoughts on the Constitution and signing virtual copies of his book on December 7th, between 6 - 8 PM, SL Time at the Kula Center Auditorium. New World Notes scribe Hamlet Au will be doing his interview, which is hosted by the Creative Commons group. For more information, go check out the article at NWN.
This should be good, and I hope Prokofy attends this, as Judge Posner takes some fairly hard-line stances in his book about the expansion of goverment power in this new era of increased terrorism.
I'm also interested in who contacted him to request his presence in SL. Great idea, and bravo for him to agree to do it.
Bastion of free-thinking gamers everywhere, Joystiq has posted an article about racial harmony in MMOs, and it got me thinking. It's not just gender that residents play with in SL, is it? Unless there's a RL photo attached to someone's profile, we don't know who's driving that avatar. Sometimes not even then. It's a given that men sometimes play women and women men, but how often does someone play a different ethnicity than their own?
Hamlet Au on the inimitable New World Notes once wrote a piece peripherally about this. I've heard direct, racially derogatory comments toward others in the Shelter. Let's not forget the continuing remarks Furries receive regularly. Race is still an issue, even in a world where one can look like anything one can imagine. I'd have hoped that, as a society, we'd have grown beyond this by this time, or at least have put this behind us when creating our utopias, but I've been wrong about many things.
If anyone'd like to comment on their experiences with racism, consider this your forum to do so.
Iris Ophelia, Fashion Writer, Talented Photographer, and Sweetheart Extraordinaire, was recently interviewed live on in-world interview program Tonight Live with Paisley Beebe. In it, she's as adorable as I know her to be (full disclosure: she's a friend), and converses on a range of subjects including fashion, blogging, and her photography.
The voice chat beta has been in effect long enough now for people to have tried it, and some of my 
For those of you living under a rock as far as Second Life news is concerned, there's a new media firestorm about Second Life: Resident numbers. The smoking gun starts a grass fire as journalists scramble to acquire credibility by jumping onto the bandwagon of questioning numbers. Everyone loves a good scandal.
[UPDATE: Added missing attribution] Judge Richard Posner, author of 
