For those people who prefer to get their news via social media, I have been maintaining two communities, one on Facebook and the other on Google+, where I’ve been cross-posting most blogposts I made to the Sansar Newsblog.
I have now shut down both of those groups, and in their place, I have created two new groups. Here are the links for the RyanSchultz.com Facebook group, and the RyanSchultz.com Google+ community. Please feel free to subscribe to either of these two groups.
Note: This is the first in a new category of blogposts about events in High Fidelity, which I have decided to call “High Fidelity Hijinks”. (I’m not sure I’ll keep the name, but it works for now. It’s sufficiently alliterative.)
Yesterday evening I visited the Rust domain in High Fidelity, where I joined about thirty other avatars who were dancing to music spun by DJ Phlash. Apparently, he performs every Friday from 4:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time.
The evening was notable for the presence of High Fidelity CEO Philip Rosedale (he’s on the far left in the picture above), the founder of Second Life. The avatars present were able to dance by clicking on the coloured square tiles beneath them (unfortunately, you could only do this in desktop mode; it didn’t work when in a VR headset).
I also was able to use HiFi’s new ability to directly pay another avatar in order to “tip” DJ Phlash 100 HFC (High Fidelity Coins, the in-world currency in HiFi). I really have no idea if that amount was too much or not enough; it’s kind of hard to judge what a currency is worth when it’s so brand-new, and there are so few things to buy!
High Fidelity has been very generous in giving out HFC to its users: I got 10,000 HFC when I first set up my wallet as part of the beta test, and I just got another 5,000 HFC when the person-to-person payment system was launched. (Note that only users with pre-existing High Fidelity accounts got these HFC grants. As far as I am aware, newly-created HiFi accounts don’t qualify for them.)
All in all, it was a fun evening!
UPDATE Feb. 13th: I have decided to rename this new category High Fidelity Highlights, rather than High Fidelity Hijinks.
Well, I haven’t done this kind of post for a long while! Today I joined Draxtor Despres, Strawberry Singh and a merry band of adventurers as we set off for S.L.A.R.P. (which stands for Sansar Live Action Role Play, I believe), Nya Alchemi’s medieval-themed experience. Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg once again joined us, which is becoming a regular thing.
I didn’t take any pictures this time (too busy having fun), but here are links to the YouTube livestreams of today’s event, the first by Strawberry Singh:
And the second by Drax himself:
I have decided that I’m not going to wait for Linden Lab to issue brand guidelines for Sansar. I am rebranding the Sansar Newsblog under my own name. (I’ve held the domain name for well over a decade, and this is the perfect place to finally use it!)
All of the old blogposts are still searchable and accessible, and almost all the Sansar-related blogposts have been tagged with the tag “Sansar” to make them easier to find. All the old URLs should still work as before.
Along with the new name comes a new focus. I will no longer be focusing near-exclusively on Sansar in this blog. Instead, I will be expanding my coverage to provide “News and Views on Social VR, Virtual Worlds, and the Metaverse”, as my new blog tagline now states. Platforms covered will include, but not be limited to:
Note that I do not plan to write much about Second Life and its many Opensim-based spin-offs; there are already over a thousand avid bloggers who do an excellent job of that! I plan to focus on the newer platforms, especially those that support virtual reality.
I will be closing the Facebook and Google+ groups I created for the Sansar Newsblog, and creating new groups for this rebranded blog.