Day: December 16, 2019

Home Sweet Victorian Home in Second Life: 1,600 New Victorian Linden Homes Become Available This Week in South Bellisseria

Avatars gathered at the edge of the new land this morning, eagerly awaiting
their chance to get a new Victorian home in south Bellisseria.

Well, today was the day! The newest batch of 1,600 Victorian Linden Homes in southern Bellisseria is being made available to Premium members, starting this afternoon and running throughout the day today. Apparently the servers are overloaded, so you will probably get a few error messages like I did, before your transaction is finally accepted.

Patch Linden just posted:

The team has been hard at work over the past several months putting together what we think is our most stunning release to date.

The Victorian homes have some brand new features such as: 

• A choice of 4 stylish Victorian houses.
• The ability to change the interior walls to whatever color you want, via an in-built color picker HUD.
• Multiple rooms with interior doors.
• Front, back and/or wrap around porches.
• Stunning, vast Victorian landscaping.
• A warm and vibrant community.
• Railway accessible

Nearly 1,600 Victorian homes will launch this week, the majority of them happening today (Monday, 16 December, 2019).  Plus another 500 coming before the end of the year!

In addition to that, over 1,600 Traditional Homes, Houseboats and Campers will be released later this week!

The green arrow shows where I landed up in south Bellisseria. I am quite happy with my location!

Here are a few shots of my new Victorian home, located above a railway line, next to a lovely bridge, and with a scenic porch view of the river below, and a second bridge! The landscaping is really very well done!

Earlier in the day, a group of eager wannabe landowners (and various hangers-on) gathered at the edge of the new land:

At one point, Patch Linden and a couple of Moles came out and chatted with us (Patch is at the centre bottom in this picture):

One funny lady had a sign with a PhotoShopped mock-up of what she wanted so badly!

Other virtual worlds would kill for the kind of raving fans that Second Life has! Where else would you find people camped out, eagerly waiting for their chance to snag a brand new home? Sinespace and all the other metaverse-building companies should be taking copious notes 😉

Congratulations to Linden Lab (ans especially Patch Linden and his team) on a successful roll-out of the new Linden Homes!

Editorial: Do You Feel Like I Am Neglecting Your Social VR/Virtual World on This Blog? Well, Here’s What You Can Do About It!

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

I am feeling very irritated this morning. Let me tell you why.

When I write this blog, I choose topics that interest me and engage me, whatever is topmost in my mind, and what I think my readers would be interested in. This is (mostly) a labour of love; I do this because I love social VR and virtual worlds, and I love writing about them. And because I now write about so many platforms, it is inevitable that some will get less coverage. I can’t treat everybody equally; it’s impossible.

But lately, I am getting feedback from certain metaverse-building companies that somehow feel that they have been slighted, if I do not mention them in my blog, even in more general blogposts. (And no, I am not naming names. You can guess who you are.) At which point, makes what I do less a labour of love, and more of a chore, an obligation—in short, a job.

Let me make this perfectly clear: your company has ZERO right to complain to me if I am writing about your social VR/ virtual world (and thereby promoting it) FOR FREE, WHEN and IF I feel like writing about your product. If you are so unhappy with how often I do (or don’t) mention your company on my blog, and you expect me to provide more coverage of your platform, then that becomes a job, for which I expect to be paid. My current rate is US$50 per sponsored blogpost. I do not have an exclusive sponsorship deal with Sinespace, and I would gladly welcome more sponsors.

And if you really want to see your brand name appear on my blog more often, then please consider purchasing advertising space. You’ll find that I have quite reasonable rates, which I will be increasing in the new year, as I now have approximately twice as many viewers (according to my WordPress blog statistics) as I did when I first posted those rates a year ago. So if you want the best advertising rates, I suggest that you lock them in now.

If you are not a sponsor of my blog, or an advertiser on my blog, then I suggest you think carefully before you criticize me for what you see as a lack of coverage of your platform on my blog. If you want me to write about your product regularly (instead of when I feel like it), then you should consider paying me for my work.

Thank you for your time and attention.