I have kept only one such channel, #nft-dumpster-fire, and renamed it to #crypt-nft-dumpster-fire, since many people seem to like sharing and bemoaning the latest outrages, rug pulls, and other shenanigans happening regularly in the crypto space. Enjoy the snark and schadenfreude 🙂
Oh, and I finally renamed the #2023-dumpster-fire channel to #2024-dumpster-fire. Have at it 😉
Pioneering virtual world Second Life will celebrate its 20th anniversary with events running from June 22nd to July 11th, 2023, spanning a mind-boggling sixty sims! The theme this year is Our Fantastic Future.
As in previous years, if you join the Second Life Birthday group for free, you will be able to access the 24 Shop and Hop sims starting at 9:00 a.m. SLT (i.e. Second Life Time/Pacific Time) on July 21st, 2023.
In addition to the 24 Shop and Hop sims, there are an additional 36 sims for the Second Life Festival, a sprawling and entirely community-built exposition of the best of SL from the past two decades.
Here’a brief overall schedule of what’s going on (thanks to Dreamer Pixelmaid for the information):
Early Shop and Hop Access (via the Second Life Birthday group): Wednesday, June 21st, 9:00 a.m. SLT
Early SL20B Festival Access (via the Second Life Birthday group): Thursday, June 22nd, 9:00 a.m. SLT
SL20B Official Opening: Thursday, June 22nd, 10:00 a.m. SLT
Opening Speech: Thursday, June 22nd, noon SLT
SL20B Music Festival: Thursday, June 22nd to Saturday, June 24th
Live Stage Performances (Over 425 performers on four stages): Sunday, June 25th to Sunday, July 2nd
From June 22nd to the 24th, go on an interstellar journey through sound and emotions, as the crème de la crème of Second Life’s live musicians set the SL20B Mandala Stage ablaze with spellbinding performances!
In the middle of Music Fest will also be a movie premiere! “Made in SL: The Movie” is a special long-form documentary for Second Life’s 20th anniversary, produced by Draxtor Despres and premiering on Friday, June 23rd at 12pm PT at the SL20B Arboretum. Watch the trailer at this link.
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But wait, there’s more! Hold on to your (virtual) hats because the euphoria doesn’t wind down after Music Fest. The SL20B celebrations are set to reach stratospheric heights with a staggering 425+ performers ready to take over four majestic stages! This is not just a party; it’s a festival of boundless energy and musical marvels that promises to engulf your senses.
You can also watch the Second Life Public Calendar for all Linden Lab events and in the next few days, we’ll debut a dedicated Destination Guide category with many event highlights. Look out for entries that will start appearing in the SL20B Destination Guide category later this week and keep an eye on this blog for more information about SL20B coming soon!
I will be keeping this blogpost updated as I receive ore information about SL20B, so stay tuned!
Thursday, June 22nd at 12pm PT – Watch a Lab Gab Special Live at SL20B starting with Patch Linden’s opening speech. Watch it live on the Second Life YouTube channel or live at the SL20B Mandala Stage.
Monday, June 26th at 1:30pm PT – Watch a Lab Gab Special Live at SL20B with VP of Product Operations, Patch Linden. Patch works to bring the best of product and support based decisions on a daily operational basis to the virtual world platform for Second Life, while maintaining oversight on how all of the various teams within Linden Lab can best work together for the highest good of the Residents and the business. Watch it on the Second Life YouTube channel or at the SL20B Arboretum.
Tuesday, June 27th at 1:30pm PT – Watch a pre-recorded Lab Gab Special at SL20B with VP of Product Grumpity Linden, and VP of Engineering Mojo Linden. Grumpity heads up Second Life Product, where she has overseen a shift to growth, a stronger, more balanced economy, a movement towards better community cohesion, and an overall forward-looking approach. With over twenty years of experience in the games industry, Mojo is an expert at building teams and launching groundbreaking games across genres that push the limits of their respective platforms. Watch it on the Second Life YouTube channel or at the SL20B Arboretum.
Wednesday, June 28th at 1:30pm PT – Watch a Lab Gab Special Live at SL20B with the Founder of Second Life Philip Linden, and Executive Chairman Oberwolf Linden. Philip rejoined Second Life in 2022, as Strategic Advisor, focused on helping to shape and build a better metaverse. Brad Oberwager has spent his entire career in technology and consumer focused companies as an entrepreneur and board member. Watch it on the Second Life YouTube channel or at the SL20B Arboretum.
Thursday, June 29th at 1:30pm PT – Watch a pre-recorded Lab Gab Special at SL20B with Chief Marketing Officer StyFy Linden and VP of Marketing Brett Linden. Together they focus on both the acquisition of new users and the retention of existing users for Second Life. Watch it on the Second Life YouTube channel or at the SL20B Arboretum.
SL residents are invited to submit questions to these events, to be answered by the speakers—but you’d better hurry, you only have two days left! 😉 And I assume that the recordings of these talk shows and presentations will remain up on YouTube after the events, so if you can’t be there live, tune in later on, when you do have time.
See you there! I have been told that there will be some special announcements made!
I have been tearing my hair out since last night, when I noticed that my blog, which normally looks like this:
Suddenly started looking like this, with all the fonts wrong:
Now, I am very picky about my blog, and this is the kind of thing that drives me crazy! I spent half an hour in live text chat with a WordPress support person early this morning, and it turns out that I had to turn off two plug-ins I regularly use with Firefox, Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin (which I use to block trackers on most websites as I surf the web).
Privacy Badger is a program from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). It’s a browser extension which stops advertisers and other third-party trackers from secretly tracking where you go and what pages you look at on the web. If an advertiser seems to be tracking you across multiple websites without your permission, Privacy Badger automatically blocks that advertiser from loading any more content in your browser. uBlock Origin is an excellent, free-and-open-source (FOSS) ad content blocker, available for several of the most widely used browsers, including: Chrome, Chromium, MS Edge, Opera, Firefox and all Safari releases prior to 13. I can recommend both programs highly, but I sometimes run in trouble (like I did yesterday evening and this morning), when something stops working or doesn’t work properly, and I forget to check to see if either Privacy Badger or uBlock Origin is the source of the problem.
So, if you are visiting my blog, and it looks like the second picture instead of the first, try turning off uBlock Origin or Privacy Badger (or both) if you have them installed. (There are other ad blocker plug-ins like Adblock Plus, which might cause the same problem. I no longer use Adblock Plus, because I find uBlock Origin to be superior in every way.)
You may have noticed that I haven’t been blogging as often as I used to. I’ve been on holidays from work these past two weeks, and I have been…percolating.
I’ve been feeling exhausted, and sleeping ten to twelve hours at a stretch, without feeling guilty or lazy. There’s been no shortage of things to blog about, but instead of leaping on top of them with a hot take, I have decided to just sit back and…percolate.
Hopefully, I’ll know when I am ready to jump back into things. But I think it’s good sometimes just to pause, take a deep breath, and relax. Recharge my batteries. Distance myself from the fray. Dream. Daydream.
