Day: September 14, 2019

Sansar World Hopping: Episode 2

Spectators watching Battleship

Atlas Hopping (the regular Saturday morning group tour of four or five Sansar worlds, led by Draxtor Despres and Solas NaGealai) has now been renamed World Hopping (since we no longer have an in-world Atlas, just the one on the Sansar website).

As a result, I will be creating a new category on this blog, Sansar World Hopping, for blogposts reporting on our weekly adventures. (I will keep Sansar Atlas Hopping as a category for older blogposts.)

Drax’s livestream of this week’s tour should be posted shortly to his YouTube channel, but here’s a video of last week’s episode, which unfortunately I had to miss:

Today, we had an epic crowd of avatars who met up at our standard starting point, the basement of 114 Harvest, who then went on to visit the following worlds:

It was an adventure, especially trying to beat all five levels of Fire Goat’s Dungeon! Here are some more photos taken by Mijeka Munro (click on any picture to see it in full size; here is the full archive of photos):

The picture in the bottom left-hand corner of the photo mosaic is none other than the CEO of Linden Lab himself, Ebbe Altberg, who often joins us on Atlas/World Hopping events. He put together a very cool avatar look!

But the best part? Drax obviously bribed El Diablo to wear this signboard!

Linden Lab Needs to Promote Their Contests More Effectively

I am in a somewhat cranky mood this morning. (Yes, I am 55 years old, and in certain circumstances, I am already considered a senior citizen, so I assume that this comes with the territory.)

This morning, the target of my ire is Linden Lab. Fellow Sansar blogger Inara Pey appears to share my irritation:

Attack of the Clones: a series of running (I believe) challenges for users to create avatar likeness of famous people using Sansar’s facial morphing capabilities (not made outside of Sansar and then uploaded). The first selection of faces runs through until Monday September 16th, and features the faces of Ripley (aka Sigourney Weaver) from the Alien franchise, Lando Calrissian (a.k.a. Billy Dee Williams, not Donald Glover) from the Star Wars films or someone called Pow3r (no, I’ve no idea who this is either). I gather entries are to be posted to Flickr.

I’m unable to give further context to these challenges, as the details are buried somewhere in Sansar’s Discord pages (where contests and competitions apparently don’t even have their own channel).

I think that the idea for this contest is great. It helps promote the new facial deformation features of the new Avatar 2.0 avatars in Sansar (see image right). Where I have a problem is with the execution of this contest.

And I agree with Inara Pey: why is Linden Lab making it so hard for us bloggers to learn about these contests? I just did a search for “clones” on the official Sansar Discord, and I can’t find a damn thing! How am I supposed to write up something about a contest when I don’t have any of the details? I only learned about it today via Inara’s blog. Digging through my bloated Twitter feed, I finally found a tweet with an announcement:

So, now you know about it too. You have a couple of days left to submit your entries, by tagging them with @SansarOfficial and posting them to Instagram or Twitter by Sept. 16th, 2019 (not Flickr, as Inara said). I have no idea if this is a one-time contest, or a running contest, or if there are any prizes. Like I said, the lack of details is irritating to me.

Let me make a suggestion for Linden Lab: how about setting up some sort of mailing list just for promoting your contests to bloggers, influencers, and members of the news media? Put all the details in one email (deadlines, prizes, etc.) and send it out once to everybody, so we’re all in the loop.

Ryan takes another swig of Geritol, shakes his cane, and yells at those damn kids to get off his lawn.