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Volume 4No.24Second Life
TheMetaverseMessenger
Sim of the Week - Page 10
SL News . . . . . . . . . .Page 3Perspectives . . . . . . .Page 5The Line . . . . . . . . . . Page 6ROTW . . . . . . . . . . . .Page 8Comics .. . . . . . . . . . .Page 8Entertainment. . . . . . Page 8Photo Contest . . . . . .Page 9Community . . . . . . Page 16Sports . . . . . . . . . . .Page 18
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About Us
Inside
Resi of the Week - Page 8
Tuesday, June 30, 2009 A Publication of Rose from Ash Media Free
Metaverse Messenger
The
A real newspaper for a virtual world
The 2009 Second Life Com-munity Convention is sched-uled for August 13-16 in SanFrancisco, Ca. A variety of registration packages areavailable according to date of registration, and more infor-mation on pricing and thehotel is available at www.slconvention.com.
By SHARON KEATS
Staff writer
So the curtain falls on thesixth anniversary of Second Life,an anniversary celebrated bylooking into the crystal ball and predicting where SL might be infive years.The party opened with akeynote speech from Linden LabChairman and Founder PhilipLinden. Unfortunately Tweet.tv,despite apparently trying to havesome form of scalability withtheir feed,found their bandwidthswamped.It seemed strange to makethe speech a video only feed,andthis might have been part of the problem. Video implicitly usesmore bandwidth than Audio.Perhaps a mix would be agood idea for next year. Audio tothe birthday sims, as they canwatch live, and video to peopleunable to attend.Unlike previous years,thisyear’s party was themed. Ex-hibitors were asked to do twothings. First,look into the future,what would Second Life be likein Five years time? Second,theexhibits were asked to consider the surroundings.Plants had to go into bios- pheres, glow and light was verymuch in evidence,and the buildsreally had to stand out from a black canvas.Some builds failedto do this and a black/dark unlit build really was hard to spot.Other exhibits such as Tweet’s,the M2’s or the exhibit created by Mia Linden were very brightand easy to spot from a distance.One surprise was the cake. In previous years,it was very cen-tral to the whole exhibit area andvisible from anywhere on the birthday sims. This year, how-ever, it was quite a low build,about half the height of last year,and was tucked away in a corner sim.Many residents,when asked,didn’t even know there was acake. Others found it by mistakeor only after being told of its ex-istence.Kat Montpark said,“I wasactually surprised how hiddenaway the cake was. I actuallyfound it by accident while chas-ing down the aliens in the Para-dox sim. The cake itself was amasterpiece, though.”Slim War-rior was not aware that there wasa cake until the subject came upduring an interview. She said,“Cake should ALWAYS be in themiddle.”She also added a problemthis year was lag. The birthdaywas pretty popular, according toPhilip Linden, who noted that17712 residents had visited for 23662 hours at the time of hisclosing speech.This has meant full sims witha fair amount of lag. This alsomight not have been helped byexhibits maybe being a littlemore cramped than previousyears. Navigation around the simshas also been an issue as the pathways where all ‘sculptress’and didn’t appear to have a‘shadow’ alpha prim. This madeit impossible to walk from theland onto the pathways.While the birthday would ap- pear to have been a success, thetheme had mixed reaction,and itcertainly challenged the builders.There was the issue, however,that the theme didn’t always fitin with a sim’s theme. For exam- ple, a medieval roleplay simwould have a hard time with afutistic theme.Montpark said,“I like some people’s interpretations of thetheme, but I can see how itwouldn’t work with some sims.If the Lindens continue withthemed birthdays, I think thetheme should be something all-inclusive and birthday-ish like“What do you want to cele- brate?” or “Second Life NewYear!” “This year,an effort was made by a dedicated publicity team touse as many avenues as possibleto publicise the event (thoughnone was sent to the M2). Thereefforts were hampered by a num- ber of things including time,butsome innovative ideas sprang up,including a poster that eventuallywas placed in 800 or more placesaround the grid.These ideas ought to be ableto be used again in the future,and it would hopefully d improvecommunication to residents whorarely look at the blog.Trinity Coulter did, how-
SL 6th birthday winds down
By KATT KONGO
Staff writer
Many Second Life residents wereaghast as Duncan Riley of The Inquisitr, anAustralian based news’ source, wrote thatthe Australian government would ban Sec-ond Life. [In a June 25 post, Riley wrote, TheAustralian Minister for Censorship hastoday confirmed what I’ve been reportingfor nearly two years: online adult games in-cluding Second Life will be banned in Aus-tralia.”To be clear here, the Australian gov-ernment has not signed into law anythingthat bans Second Life or similar games, nor has Stephen Conroy, Minister for Broad- band, Communications and the DigitalEconomy (BCDE) stated any intention of doing so.Riley’s “Chicken Little” writings comein the wake of an announcement that theAustralian government will block websiteshosting and selling video games that are notsuitable for 15 year olds, including down-loadable games, flash-based web games andsites which sell physical copies of gameswhich do not meet certain age standards.In the United States, games that aresuitable for teen-agers are marked with a“T”. Other countries have similar ratingsystems. However, Australia is currentlywithout an R18+ classification for games,meaning any titles that do not meet theMA15+ standard - such as those with ex-cessive violence or sexual content - are sim- ply banned from sale by the ClassificationBoard, unless they are modified to removethe offending content.
THE UNIVERSITY OF NEWCASTLE
is just one of many Australian-basedentities found on the Second Life grid.
- Photo by
KATT KONGO.
WTF, Mate?
HappyFourthof July!
Will the Australiangovernment ban SL?
THE SL BIRTHDAY CAKE
, seen here, was not a central at-traction this year, as it was set up on a sim adjacent to themain stage.
- Photo by
KATT KONGO.
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