Er… Make That “My Top Sixteen Sansar Experiences”

Ten days ago, I made a popular blogpost titled My Top Fifteen Sansar Experiences, where I assembled an unordered list of what I considered to be the best experiences on Sansar. It even got reblogged by New World Notes (thanks, Wagner!).

Well, something has been bothering me over the past few days, and I want to amend that list to add another extraordinary experience to that original list.

Number sixteen on my list is Drax and Ria’s 114 Harvest. I honestly don’t know how it slipped my mind when I was drawing up my original list! Maybe because I visit it so often, I just got so used to being there, that it stopped being a “special” place. That’s a mistake, and I am rectifying it today.

Ria, who did almost all of the design work on the experience, did a marvelous job, and furthermore, she has gone out of her way to redecorate for Hallowe’en and other events like Drax’s birthday. The level of detail, right down to the Mensch Ärgere Dich Nicht board game and the coffee cups to the covers on the books lying around, is astounding. Drax’s basement is inviting, comfortable, and has become a sort of central gathering spot for avatars in these early days of Sansar. (I understand that Drax is also planning to host a show there, once avatars can actually sit down!)

114 Harvest 29 Nov 2017

So, Drax and Ria, please accept my apologies for overlooking your experience. (I have updated my original blogpost content to add your experience to the list.)

A Behind-The-Scenes Look at Sansar

Ebbe Altberg (CEO of Linden Lab) was kind enough to share this YouTube video of Tara Hernandez, Director of Systems Engineering for Linden Lab, speaking about some of the backend development of Sansar at the AWS re:INVENT conference currently taking place in Las Vegas:

The title of the talk was How Linden Lab Built a Virtual World on the AWS (Amazon Web Services) Cloud. She goes into quite a bit of technical detail on what goes on behind-the-scenes with the Sansar Project. It’s a look at something that we don’t often hear about, even at the weekly in-world Product Meetups that Jenn, Lead Community Manager of Sansar, hosts.

Of particular note, near the end of this talk, Tara briefly discusses the plan to retrofit Second Life (which currently runs on a data centre in Arizona) to run on the AWS Cloud.