Yesterday, Draxtor Despres’ livestreamed Sansar Atlas Hopping show hit a major milestone: its 100th episode! You can see all the episodes here.
Congratulations to Drax on his achievement, and congratulations also to his co-hosts over the past two years, first Strawberry Singh and now Solas NaGealai. Mijeka Munro has been the regular photographer for these weekly adventures, creating an Atlas Hopping Photo Gallery, and here I share with you some pictures he has taken over the first 100 episodes!
Ryan in Drax’s basement, telling the story of how he got banned (and then unbanned) from Second Life. I really like this picture that Drax took and posted to Twitter.
True confession time: I still feel like an idiot for throwing such a diva hissy fit when I was served with a 3-day ban from Second Life just before the Tilia Town Hall. It was not my proudest moment and I am deeply ashamed of myself, and I would once again like to apologize to the staff at Linden Lab. (You can read all about it here.)
But it also happens to be a good story, and who can resist telling a good story? I was telling people about it in Drax’s basement before we went Atlas Hopping on Saturday morning when Drax took this picture. You can actually watch the whole conversation here (starting at the 1:20 mark):
I haven’t been to Atlas Hopping in several months. In fact, I have been so busy covering other social VR platforms and virtual worlds, and playing with my new Oculus Quest, that I haven’t spent a lot of time in Sansar like I used to! In fact, I had been away so long that I had even forgotten how to use some of the control buttons in Sansar’s VR mode! That’s what happens when you try to cover too many virtual worlds in your blog.
I can’t believe that we are almost at 100 episodes of Atlas Hopping! (Yesterday’s was episode 98.) I want to congratulate Draxtor Despres (the hardest-working man in the metaverse!) for being the driving force to get this regular event started and to keep this going. I met many new people yesterday and I had so much fun!
And I have noticed something significant: more and more newcomers are checking out Sansar. Later that same day, I encountered a group of newbies sitting in a circle on the ground in Nya Alchemi’s medieval roleplay experience The Faire, having an intense philosophical discussion about avatars versus the people operating them, how avatars present themselves, and sexual harassment in virtual worlds (I’m the one wearing the angel wings in the photo below):
For over an hour I chatted with people from around the world (including Iraq and Syria), and again, I had a wonderful time! They were all people I had never seen in Sansar before.
There’s been a lot of discussion and debate on the official Sansar Discord server about the user concurrency statistics collected by Galen and Gindipple and how accurate they are. And the Sansar community manager, Galileo, told us that while he can’t share the internal figures from Linden Lab with us, he said they are definitely higher than Gindipple’s and Galen’s stats. And my observations in-world would agree with Galileo.
The Monstercat launch event was a massive success for Sansar. I don’t know how many people attended in total (I wasn’t paying much attention at the time, because that was the exact same day I was having my diva hissy fit), but I do not doubt that it was an significant milestone for Sansar, and it brought a lot of new people in.
And I have popped into the Sansar Social Hub regularly over the weekend, and it is always busy, even at 3:00 a.m.! Groups of avatars are chatting about technology, virtual worlds and many other topics.
More and more people are coming into Sansar and discovering it for themselves, and I couldn’t be happier. I think the future looks promising. And I want to congratulate Ebbe Altberg and his team at Linden Lab for making this happen. It’s been a fascinating journey for me to blog about Sansar from its opening day through to today, and I very much look forward to blogging about it in the future.
(And, according to my calculations, I have had one diva hissy fit per year, so I should be good now for another twelve months or so. I’ve been assured by Galileo and Lacie Linden that they have prepared puppy and penguin GIFs for immediate application the next time it happens!)
Every blogger has his or her biases. My bias is that I have an abiding love of Linden Lab and their products, both Second Life and Sansar. It’s the reason I get so upset sometimes, because I care passionately about the company and its products. I’ll admit it, I am a raving fan. And Sansar was the whole reason I started this blog in the first place!
Things are most definitely looking promising for Sansar.
Scorpion has created a wonderfully evocative sci-fi experience in Sansar called Scorpion’s Lair. We visited it today on episode 85 (already?!) of Atlas Hopping with Drax and Solas, and it is so wonderful that I decided to make it my Sansar Pick of the Day. The major build is a dimly-lit cathedral-like space with a huge wind turbine where the altar would be found, all located in a fantasy landscape sharply lit from the horizon by a distant sun. Scorpion did a fantastic job creating this space!
