Over the fall and into the winter, I slowly and lovingly landscaped the exterior and decorated the interior, until I had a virtual space that I felt truly reflected me.
The Ranch Linden Home regions are richly landscaped and full of nice little touches. If you look closely at this picture, you can see the blue birds sitting on the telephone wires, in the foreground, above the house!
I have often strolled (or rode horseback!) through the new Ranch Linden Home regions, and I do have to hand it to Linden Lab—they did a superb job! And it is so interesting to see how other people have chosen to decorate their homes.
In between looting, pillaging, and ransacking the various Advent calendars and 12 Days of Christmas calendars in Second Life, I did find a bit of time this morning to decorate my new ranch home for the holiday season. I hung stockings by the fireplace, set up my favourite Christmas tree, and set out a nativity crèche which reminds me of one we used to have in my real-life childhood home.
I never bother decorating my real-life apartment for Christmas any more; instead I choose to decorate my Second Life home! (Makes cleanup in January a snap, too…a few clicks and we’re done! 😜)The Christmas cabinet on the left is a free Advent calendar gift from LouChara (Dec. 17th), and it includes the cards, candles, and lamp. Next to it, the holly accent chair is part of a lovely dining room set from the Advent calendar at Petrichor (Dec. 20th), and it only cost me L$1! The nativity crèche figurines I picked up for only L$35 at Celestina’s Weddings Advent calendar (Dec. 7th); they have little seasonal knicknacks and tchotchkes perched on top of their daily Advent calendar gift boxes, which you can purchase! Here’s an evening view of my ranch house living room, decorated for Christmas. Silent Night!
From today until Christmas Day, I will be (like most of you!) very busy in real life, so this will be my final blogpost for 2023.
Happy Holidays to all of you and best wishes for a Happy New Year!
This blogpost helps you figure out the best way to spend your pennies on a Second Life account!
It’s the hazy, lazy, crazy days of summer, and I must confess that I haven’t felt like blogging (or doing much of anything) these past few weeks. I’ve been watching lots of Netflix (Umbrella Academy season 3, yay!), testing out responses to various text prompts on DALL-E 2, and sending forth my small army of Second Life alts in a blitzkrieg campaign of pillaging all the fabulous freebies at the SL19B Shop and Hop event before it ends on July 10th. Trust Auntie Ryan; this is the single biggest haul of freebies you will ever see at any one shopping event in Second Life! 😉 So go now!!!
As part of the Second Life 19th Birthday celebrations, Linden Lab (the company who makes SL) has announced a brand new, second level of premium accounts for users, called Premium Plus. There’s been a lot of discussion in the official Second Life community forums (and elsewhere) about this, and so I thought it was time to take a bit of a deep dive and look at all three levels of SL accounts: Basic, Premium, and now the new Premium Plus, in an effort to help people figure out what’s best for them.
PLEASE NOTE: All prices in this blogpost are in U.S. dollars; you’ll have to do your own currency conversions if you use Canadian dollars, or whatever your local currency happens to be. In my case, the conversion between the stronger American dollar and the weaker Canadian dollar always makes me wince in pain!
Signup Bonus and Weekly Stipend
Basic accounts have no signup bonus or weekly stipend (i.e., an amount of Linden dollars which Linden Lab pays you). If you upgrade to Premium, you receive a L$1,000 signup bonus, plus a weekly stipend of L$300. If you choose to upgrade to Premium Plus, you get a L$3,000 signup bonus and a L$650 weekly stipend.
Please note that you must stay at your Premium (or Premium Plus) level for 45 days before you receive the signup bonus; this is prevent people from signing up for one month, collecting the bonus, then downgrading back to Basic!
Avatar Legacy Names
Basic accounts are what everybody gets when they first sign up for Second Life. You need to come up with a single-word name which is unique, and since Linden Lab dropped the first name-last name avatar naming system for new signups a decade ago, believe me, you are going to have to be very creative to come up with a good single-word name that isn’t already taken!
This name is known as your legacy name. You do need to understand the difference between your avatar’s legacy name (the name you chose for your avatar when you created your Second Life account) and your avatar’s display name (which you can change to pretty much anything you want, one change per week). Most Basic users are quite content to set up a display name and be done with it. If you want to create a first name and last name for your avatar, you will have to upgrade to either Premium or Premium Plus (for at least one month) in order to do so.
I did some quick calculations, and I discovered something surprising: if you have an avatar whose name you want to change, it’s actually cheaper to do if you upgrade your Basic account to Premium Plus, than it is if you upgrade to Premium!
Premium (1 month): $11.99 + Cost of Name Change $39.99 = $51.98
Premium Plus (1 month) $24.99* + Cost of Name Change via Concierge $15.00 = $39.99
*This is a time-limited promotional price. Afterwards, the price is $29.99 monthly.
So, if the only thing you are interested in is creating a first name and last name for your avatar, you could upgrade that account to Premium Plus for one month, submit a concierge request to pick a first name and last name, then downgrade your subscription back to Basic! (Yes, if you change your legacy avatar name, you do not lose it when you go from Premium or Premium Plus to Basic. You also don’t get the signup bonus, obviously.)
Also note that the last name you can choose for your avatar is limited to whatever choices are on the list of available last names at the time you make your request.
Number of SL Groups You Can Belong To
A big difference between the three levels of Second Life accounts is the number of groups you can be subscribed to at any one time. Many Basic users already are well familiar with the dance of unsubscribing from one store group in order to join another, once they hit the limit! In worst case scenarios, you might have to unsubscribe from a group with a group join fee, and then have to repay that fee to rejoin that group later. It’s obviously not ideal, and so both Premium and Premium Plus do offer you more group slots.
Basic accounts: limit of 42 groups
Premium accounts: 70 groups
Premium Plus accounts: 140 groups
So a freebie fashionista like Vanity Fair, who keeps bumping up against the 70-group limit because of all the store groups she belongs to, is a good condidate for an upgrade to Premium Plus! (And I am considering it.)
An interesting fact is that, if you have a Premium account subscribed to more than 42 groups, and then downgrade to Basic, you can still stay subscribed to all the groups! You will not be forced out of any groups. However, you will not be allowed to join any new groups until you bring your subscriptions down below 42! I assume the same applies to Premium Plus.
Priority Entrance into Full Sims
A nice perk (and one that comes in quite handy at times!) is that Premium and Premium Plus users get priority access to jam-packed, full sims, while Basic users have to wait until the number of avatars on a sim goes below a certain level before they can teleport in. (There are automated tools like the free Teleporter Hammer you can use, but if the sim is full, you still might be waiting for hours or even days to get into some overcrowded, popular sims!)
True story: there was once a time-limited 10th anniversary sale at Junbug, a wonderful vintage, historical, and fantasy womenswear store, where everything was priced at only L$10 each! The Teleporter Hammer was not working for me at all, despite days of trying, and I was so absolutely desperate to get a certain avatar (with a Basic account) into that store sim to so some bargain shopping, that I upgraded her from Basic to Premium for one month, just to get her into the sale!
Free Land Allowance and Linden Homes
Basic accounts get no free land allowance. If you want to get a free Linden Home, or want to purchase a parcel of land on the SL mainland, you must upgrade from Basic to Premium or Premium Plus. (Note that most Basic users simply rent land from estates created by landlords on private sims in Second Life. The downside of this is that, if your landlord suddenly closes shop, you lost your carefully decorated home—although you will probably get all your home decor returned in one big lump!)
Premium: 1,024 m² free land (which can be used for a Linden Home if you wish)
For example, if you upgraded from Basic to Premium Plus, you could use half of your 2,048 m² free land allowance to pick up a lovely Linden Home, and use the other half to “buy” (actually, lease) a 1,024 m² plot of Second Life mainland for a second home or a store.
Also, Linden Lab has announced a new concierge service, called Choose Your Linden Home, where you can submit a support ticket instead of trying your luck with the Second Life website, hoping to find the type of Linden Home you want, in the location you want!
Note that, unlike legacy names, you do not get to keep your free land when you downgrade from Premium or Premium Plus back to a Basic account!
Various Fees
In order to prevent abuse of resources, there are fees associated with various actions in Second Life. For example, Basic and Premium accounts have to pay L$100 to create a new group, while Premium Plus users can create groups for only L$10 each.
Uploading images, sounds, and animations costs L$10 each if you are a Basic or Premium member, but are free if you are a Premium Plus member. For example, if you are a content creator, or you use a wardrobe system which allows you to save a picture of each outfit, it might be worth it to splurge on a Premium Plus account!
If you wish to create a single event listing in the SL calendar, it costs L$50 for Basic users, L$10 for Premium users, and free for Premium Plus users. Basic users cannot create recurring (i.e., weekly or monthly) events, but Premium users can do so for L$50, and Premium Plus users can do it for free, so if you run a club or store and create a lot of events, it’s likely worth the upgrade to Premium Plus!
This is just a summary of the comparative benefits of the three levels of Second Life accounts. For more information about Premium Plus, you can read the official announcement from Linden Lab, from which the following comparison table comes:
(“We now return you to our regularly scheduled programming…” If you are looking for my blogposts about the Wuhan coronavirus/2019-nCoV/SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19, please click here. Thanks!)
In today’s episode of the Lab Gab talk show in Second Life, host Strawberry Linden interviewed Patch Linden (Vice President of Product Operations at Linden Lab) and several members of his team of Moles (contract employees) about the upcoming plans for the 17th Birthday Celebrations in Second Life, as well as various other topics.
The American Cancer Society is excited to host the 5th Linden Home Reveal as part of the 2020 SL Home & Garden Expo. Residents are welcome to take a tour of the new Linden Home theme that will become available at 10am SLT on Friday, February 28, 2020. Residents can land on the American Cancer Society Island and walk to the Reveal region following the directional signs from there.
Here’s the SLURL; just follow the signs to the display of new homes.
A first look at the various styles of log cabin Linden Homes
Here’s the complete episode of Lab Gab if you want to watch the whole thing:
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.
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!
