Month: May 2021

A Love Letter to Second Life on the Eve of Its 18th Birthday

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Photo by Dilyara Garifullina on Unsplash

Manitoba has now entered its third lockdown due to COVID-19, and I must confess that I am spending more time than usual in my virtual haven of Second Life, avoiding messy, painful, chaotic reality. I hang out at Frank’s Jazz Place and Bray’s Blues club, and I go shopping, I put on my random teleporter backpack and go exploring. I style my small army of alts from head to toe as inexpensively as possible. I write blog posts about the freebies and bargains that I find. I endlessly feed Second Life selfies into WOMBO and Reface, and chortle at the results. It all helps keep me occupied and away from the worries and concerns of the real world. It soothes me.

In fact, I will go so far as to say that we have now entered the golden age of freebies in Second Life. It is now possible to outfit yourself with a completely mesh avatar and a wonderful wardrobe, tons of hair and footwear, all for nothing or next to nothing if you know where to look. And it has been my privilege to be your guide and share my knowledge with you. In fact, with the launch of my new SL group, I now proudly call myself a professional freebie fashionista! 😉

I find it interesting that when times get tough, I find myself going back to Second Life, especially when there are so many other social VR platforms and virtual worlds that I could explore instead. It really is a testament to the vision of founding CEO Philip Rosedale and his team, who have built a platform which is still vibrant and successful and enticing at the ripe old age of 18. Many of the newer platforms in the metaverse marketplace would kill to have the kind of success that SL has had.

So I would like to raise a toast to Second Life! May it last for many more years, and confound those who decry the platform and predict its imminent demise.

selective focus photography of several people cheering wine glasses
Photo by cottonbro on Pexels.com

Second Life Steals, Deals, and Freebies: L$900 in Free Store Credit from Addams and Scandalize!

Addams and Scandalize are probably two of the most popular clothing stores on the grid, and to celebrate Mother’s Day weekend, they are giving away free store credit!

Join the Scnadalize group for only L$20 and you can pick up L$500 in free store credit, which you can use to buy anything in the store. There’s also a special Mother’s Day gift for Scandalize shoppers!

Addams is also giving away L$400 in free store credit from May 7th to 9th, 2021, if you join the Addams group for only L$19. The credit can be used on yourself, or to buy a gift for a friend! In addition, when you click the board in-store, you are automatically entered in a giveaway for one of three Starbucks gift cards!

So head on down to Addams and Scandalize today! And don’t forget to scoop up all the womenswear freebies at the new Scandalize/Melody group gift skybox!

Happy freebie shopping!

UPDATED! Second Life Steals, Deals, and Freebies: BROX Is a New Bento, Bakes on Mesh Male Body for Only L$1!

There’s a new bargain out there for you men! It’s a very handsome, Bento, Bakes on Mesh-compatible male mesh avatar called BROX, which is available for only one Linden dollar at this location. Next to it is a free group gift for L’Homme Magazine group members, a set of 8 Bakes on Mesh skins, which you can use on this or any other BoM body (the L’Homme Magazine group is free to join; just pay the vendor L$1 and your Linden dollar will automatically be refunded).

Here is the BROX body, straight out of the box, using the included eyebrow and body shapes with zero adjustments to the head and body sliders, and using skin #6 from the L’Homme Readers Gift box of eight BROX skins. Looking good!

Instead of an alpha HUD, the BROX body comes with a unpackable box of alpha sections, which you can assemble to hide any part of the body under clothing:

So men, you really have no excuse when it comes to upgrading that old system body! Everything you might need is yours for a grand total of L$1! Happy freebie shopping!

UPDATE May 9th, 2021: Well, I have been playing around with the BROX body today, and while the folder of alpha sections is useful (in fact, you might want to pick up the BROX dollarbie body just for those, even if you have a female avatar), they aren’t as convenient as a HUD with alpha sections, in my opinion. Also, I wish that there were finer subsections on the alphas, because they don’t work with many mesh items of clothing.

In the picture below, I combined mesh pants and shoes with an older, system-layer plaid shirt with a separate prim collar and cuffs:

Not bad, but I had to resort to a system-layer shirt instead of a mesh one because the alpha sections for the upper arms were too broad to allow me to wear most mesh T-shirts I tried on this body (either the arms poked through the shirt sleeves, or the alpha section extended below the shirt cuffs). So you might want to keep this mind as a possible drawback to the BROX body.

Still, this is a handsome Bento, Bakes on Mesh body, one that you can simply wear and go! You could also add a head alpha and wear any head with it (although I did not test it out myself).

Cheerio: A Social VR Platform for Finding Your Friend or Match

Cheerio is a new social virtual reality app, free to download on Oculus Go, Rift, and Quest, which calls itself the first social VR matchmaking experience. The concept is prehaps best explained with the following one-minute video:

According to their official press release:

After first launching on Oculus Rift and Go in early 2020, and tens of thousands of users joining since, Cheerio today announces that the company closed a pre-seed fundraise and has launched on Oculus Quest App Lab and Sidequest. With this launch, Cheerio introduces features brand new to Social VR to help people build one-to-one relationships, expressing themselves as personalized 3D avatars.

• Leave the app but not the conversation by recording holograms (3D video avatar recordings)

• Meet many people quickly, browsing through profiles and having one-on-one speed chats

• Control who you meet with age and gender filters

…

Users personalize 3D avatars and can communicate with others by recording and sharing public and private holograms. Online users can randomly match, one-on-one, with each other and travel together to 170 billion 360-images via Google Street View. Users upvote and downvote others’ public holograms and can
friend each other.

The idea of 3D recording your avatar (called “holograms”) reminds me of that feature in ENGAGE. There’s not much you and your match/friend can do other than explore Google Street Maps together, however. Another drawback is that Cheerio does not appear to support VR headsets using Steam instead of Oculus.

I will add Cheerio to my ever-expanding comprehensive list of social VR platforms and virtual worlds (which I promise I will reorganize and recategorize soon!).