This Halloween you get to scare us! We’re teaming up with Project Sansar to showcase awesome user generated content that is in the VR horror world. Built in the spirit of social VR worlds like Second Life (?) and VRChat, here you can construct your very own land of terror. Winners will be on the ground floor of the hotel and we’ll be playing them! Now it says VR, but don’t worry, you don’t need VR in order to do any of this. Download Sansar for free, join the Scary Game Squad hub, and get to creating!
Now, I do not consider Second Life “social VR” (since you can’t experience it in a VR headset), but that’s a minor quibble with the announcement.
The contest runs between now and Oct. 31st. The 10 winners will get 1,000 Sansar dollars and will have their experiences directly linked to this scary hotel experience. You must include the hashtag #SGS in the Sansar experience title, so that the Scary Game Squad knows it’s a contest entry.
The Scary Game Squad (founded by gamer and comedian Jesse Cox, who has almost a million YouTube subscribers to his videos) is a group that exists to play scary games. It makes perfect sense for them to team up with Sansar to promote a scary experience contest! Hopefully, we will get a lot of creative—and scary!—entries.
To celebrate 12 years of being in Second Life I have rezzed my items from the past, all for the sum of L$1. It is my very first sale! A whole floor of the castle, dozens of items, some not seen for over a decade! Poseballs and Prims and Hover Text!
To celebrate, he is going to issue an updated mesh version of his first and most popular product, a sofa he originally built with prims, also for sale for L$1. (There is a model of the updated version in-store, but it doesn’t seem to be set for sale yet, though.)
I’m still waiting for the results of the biopsy to see if I have cancer. I keep telling myself:
I might have cancer.
People die from cancer.
I could die from cancer.
I could die…
I am trying to focus on work and the rest of my life, but it’s been hard. Today is my first day back at work since the surgery on Oct. 3rd (the post-surgery course of antibiotics was almost as difficult as the surgery itself).
The urologist’s office said they will call me to come in when they get the biopsy results (obviously, they don’t give that sort of information over the telephone).
Being an academic librarian, who knows a lot of medical librarians, I’ve been tempted to exhaustively research everything I can about bladder cancer, search the bibliographic databases for citations to the literature, read through all the materials on the Bladder Cancer Canada website and other reputable, authoritative websites, and take copious notes. But there’s no sense doing any of this until I know for sure that I actually do have cancer, and what kind.
Second Life has been my lifeline during this time of stress, uncertainty, and worry; it’s been my fantasy escape from painful reality after work in the evenings and on weekends. I’ve kept myself busy in my off-work hours by designing new avatar creations (here’s a recent example) and trying to match up avatars from my Second Life collection with online and offline acquaintances, friends and family, hoping to find someone—anyone—who can take one or more of them over from me when I’m no longer there to operate them.
I’m not wanting to lose what I have spent so many happy hours over the past eleven years creating, styling, tweaking, outfitting, and unleashing upon the grid. And I’m not willing to leave my artistic creations behind, just to be thoughtlessly erased from some file server after I’m gone, all my wonderfully rewarding creative work just evaporating into thin air…I know, it’s a silly thing to be obsessed about when you might have cancer.
This blog is one of the few places I can actually write about all this, in hopes that you, my fellow virtual world citizens and metaverse explorers, will understand and commiserate. Maybe you do. Maybe you don’t. Maybe you think I’m crazy. At some moments, I feel as if I am going crazy. Maybe this is all part of the coming-to-grips-with-it process. I don’t know. I don’t have any answers. I’ve never gone through anything like this before.
…I also had a nice long chat with my psychiatrist today, and she made me realize that what I am doing here is simply trying to assert some control in a situation where I am not in control. This is apparently a very normal, human response to a situation like a health crisis.
And that’s what it comes down to, doesn’t it? Control.
The need for control, and the effort to maintain the illusion that you are in control of your own life, master of your own destiny. Things like cancer teach you that you don’t really have control. Shit happens. Things get f***ed up. You get hurt, physically and emotionally. Eventually, you die. After all, everybody does.
I want to scream at the universe, shake my fist at God, rail at the unfairness of it all.
But instead, I breathe.
You just breathe. You keep breathing. You live through each moment into the next, breathe through each moment into the next, aware that life is a precious gift. You move forward, come what may.
Thanks for letting me vent. There will probably be more of this (a LOTmore of this) over the next couple of weeks as I wait and worry and breathe. Thank you for listening. I’m off to see my psychiatrist this afternoon, and she might have some more good advice for me on how to cope.
UPDATE 4:00 p.m.: I had another very useful chat with my psychiatrist today, who did have some good advice. She suggested that I might want to start doing some preliminary research on bladder cancer to better prepare for that upcoming meeting with the urologist. It’s one way to keep my mind purposefully occupied, and it’s also a way to prepare myself better for any medical discussions with the doctor. So I guess I’d better start reading through all the information on that Bladder Cancer Canada website after all…I also decided to post an introductory message to their discussion forums:
Avatars in VR can now utilise the full range of hand gestures that the Oculus Touch hand controllers provide — thumbs up, okay signs, and finger guns. Avatars in VR can also now bend at their torsos and crouch. More information is in this article. (Apparently, HTC Vive users are going to have to wait a little while for feature parity with Oculus Rift/Touch users.) Please note that you will only be able to see your own hand gestures when in third-person mode in VR (you have to click down once on the right-hand Oculus Touch thumbstick to switch between first-person mode and third-person mode when in VR). Here’s a short video demonstrating this very cool new feature, created by Linden Lab employee Aleks:
The long-awaited and frequently requested permissions system is finally here! This enables a broad range of capabilities for content creators, especially those interested in selling items in the Sansar Store. See the new Linden Lab articles Allowing resale of store items and Buyer’s Permissions for more information. When editing a listing for one of your items in the Sansar Store, you can now choose to allow buyers to resell your item, either on its own or as part of one of their creations. When you choose to allow this, you must set a minimum resale price. Then, whenever someone resells your creation, you receive the resale price as a commission! (Note that legacy Store items default to no resale, since the option wasn’t there for the creators to choose from. If you made the item, you should be able to change it to resellable. If you didn’t make it, the creator will have to relist the item on the Sansar Store.)
And to make that even easier to sell all of your items, the Sansar Store is now fully integrated into Sansar! You can do all your shopping in Sansar without having to open the web store. (It’s still not the same as having in-world stores like Second Life, High Fidelity, and Sinespace do, though.)
When working with an object in a scene, you can now add grab points, which define the position and orientation of the object in an avatar’s hand when they pick it up in VR or desktop mode. This is helpful for ensuring that handheld objects such as weapons, tools, and other handheld accessories snap into the correct orientation as soon as they’re held. For more information, see this article.
There’s a new voice indicator which makes it easier for you to tell who’s speaking (this can be turned on or off as you wish):
The in-client chat app has a new look as well as a few new features, including supporting SHIFT+ENTER to make a new line, and CTRL+A to select all text (Yay!).
Voice broadcast: You can now enable voice broadcasting in your scene by streaming it through the scene background sound or audio emitters. This is a significant upgrade for live events in Sansar!
And these are just the highlights! There’s much more! Here’s the complete list of new features. Congratulations to Ebbe Altberg and his team for the impressive amount of work they put into this new release!
