Tag: Second Life

Second Life Steals, Deals, and Freebies: Get a Full Bento Altamura Mesh Avatar Head and Body for Only L$300 at the 2018 Skin Fair

Are you still wandering around Second Life in an old system avatar? Wishing that the more aesthetically pleasing mesh avatar heads and bodies weren’t quite so expensive? Well, have I found a deal for you!

Altamura is offering the Valentina model, a fully-featured, fully-adjustable, Bento mesh avatar head and body package, for only L$300 during the annual Skin Fair! The skin comes with five different built-in skin tones. In these pictures, my alt is wearing the darkest skin tone:

Altamura Valentina 1 11 Mar 2018_001Altamura Valentina 2 11 Mar 2018_001Altamura Valentina 3 11 Mar 2018_001Altamura Valentina 4 11 Mar 2018_001Altamura Valentina 5 11 Mar 2018_001

To get this deal, you must:

The body comes with a number of HUDs. The body HUD has complete alpha, skin and layers controls. The head HUD allows you to change or remove any of the many makeup options. There’s a second makeup applier which allows you to easily change your eyebrows and hairbase to white, blonde, red, brown and black. There’s also a separate nails HUD for controlling the shape and colour of your nails. There’s an extra animation override just for the Bento hands so you can use it with your older, non-Bento AOs (a nice touch!). And finally there’s a facial expression HUD. You get the whole package!

If you wish, you can alpha out the head using the body HUD and remove all the makeup using the head HUD, and then use your own head with it. (I have tried this body with an Akeruka Bento mesh head and it works perfectly.) You can also purchase an Altamura Omega installer/relay so you can use any Omega products (skins, makeups, tattoos, etc.) with it.

Even better, everything that my alt is wearing in these photos is FREE! The dress and earrings are 7Seas fishing prizes from Sn@tch (all you need is a fishing rod and some patience). The hair is called Evolve, and is a free Gimme Gacha group gift from Analog Dog at the Imaginarium event going on right now! It comes in a full fatpack of colours. And the black high heels are a freebie from Marquesse, available at the excellent freebie store at Ajuda SL Brasil. They come in a pack with four basic colours: white, red, black, and nude. The Altamura bodies have Slink-compatible feet in three heights (flat, mid and high). I have also found that clothing created for Maitreya Lara mesh bodies fits the Altamura mesh bodies well. And of course, you’ve got full alpha control with this body!

And, if you don’t even have the L$300 to spare on an Altamura Valentina head and body, you can pick up a free version at Ajuda SL Brasil! The free version is fully adjustable, but only comes in one skin tone and one makeup version. Look for the big red sign across from some gift boxes lying on the floor of the freebie store at Ajuda SL Brasil.

This special Altamura offer ends when the Skin Fair does, on March 25th, so hurry!

Second Life Versus Sansar: Why Linden Lab Can’t Win, No Matter What They Do

Second Life Versus Sansar

Will Burns of the Andromeda Media Group has written a blogpost about a recent visit he paid to Linden Lab, which is pretty much required reading for anyone who’s interested in Second Life or Sansar (Wagner James Au of the New World Notes blog alerted me to this).

It’s very clear from reading his blog that Will thinks that Linden Lab, or at least Linden Lab’s CEO Ebbe Altberg, is focusing on Sansar at the expense of Second Life. Will says:

Why Linden Lab is so hellbent on pushing Sansar while effectively ignoring Second Life, or treating it like the wicked red-headed step-child internally, is anybody’s guess…

While I was at Linden Lab, I definitely got the feeling that Sansar was the main focus with a near total avoidance of discussing Second Life or its future. It’s technology evangelism at its peak.

As far as Ebbe is concerned, he’s all-in for Sansar while Second Life is … somewhere in the basement level with the engineers.

On one side of the equation I can see why Ebbe would be all-in for Sansar. I’d assume Linden Lab spent a stupid amount of money developing it and couldn’t afford to pull the plug, and so he was likely told to produce an ROI come hell or high water.

Welcome to the board of directors world.

In a way, I’d assess that [former Linden Lab CEO] Rodvik [Humble] made a mess and Ebbe is still trying to clean up and/or salvage things…

As a CEO, Ebbe has a choice to make – He is the captain of the Linden Lab ship, but he also decides what sort of captain he wants to be: Captain Picard or Captain Ahab.

Right at this moment, he’s showing qualities of Captain Ahab, in the blind pursuit of Sansar (Moby Dick). But I believe he’s intelligent and an overall great guy. Smart enough not to sabotage his own efforts and company.

After all, Second Life is still the goose that laid the golden egg. It didn’t die, it’s just being actively starved and strangled by the aforementioned organizational changes and CEOs.

Which is really unfortunate, because I also believe Linden Lab also has some brilliant and creative people there with their hands tied, and who absolutely love Second Life and want to make it better.

My opinion?

I think that Ebbe Altberg and his team at Linden Lab can’t win no matter what they do. If they continue to throw too much time and money at Second Life, Sansar will suffer and they’re betting the future on Sansar. (I’ll bet you anything that none of the dozen people LL recently laid off were working on Sansar.) Yet if they try to promote Sansar, as Ebbe clearly did with Will on his visit, folks who are wedded to Second Life get upset. Or people will say that SL is “being actively starved and strangled”.

Face it: Second Life’s glory days are now behind it. Its heyday was approximately from 2006 to 2008, a decade ago. Its fervent fans absolutely hate to hear people say it, but SL is now merely coasting along, not growing but slowly declining over time, the recent Bento-inspired mesh avatar renaissance notwithstanding. You can see vast tracts of abandoned land when you fly over the continents. It’s still profitable—very profitable—to Linden Lab, but it’s having trouble attracting new users, and the now-dated technology of the platform can only be extended so far. In the general news media, SL is being portrayed as quaint but outdated, and attractive only to those somehow lacking in their real lives, as this painfully-titled recent article from The Atlantic makes clear. (Ouch.)

I can also predict pretty confidently that Sansar’s glory days will lie ahead. I think it’s off to a good start. It only makes sense for Linden Lab to put the focus, the time, and the money on a product which (hopefully) will become the next successful virtual world, the next Second Life.

Virtual reality will only gain greater consumer market share over the next decade (it’s definitely arrived now with the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, and it’s not going to go away), and Sansar is being built from the ground up to support VR. Ebbe’s right when he says that he needs to design Sansar for VR first because that’s the hardest bit to get right. That doesn’t mean that desktop users (still the majority of Sansar users) are going to be ignored. It just means that LL has to work that much harder to try and provide feature parity between desktop and VR headset users.

Maybe it’s inevitable that Second Life adherents feel hard done by. Their world is starting to shrink. People are starting to move on. It’s only natural to feel that Linden Lab should be pouring all their resources into keeping SL going forever. But, for better or worse (and I believe it’s for the better), Ebbe Altberg and his team from Linden Lab have made their decision to move boldly ahead with a new, VR-capable platform that will hopefully have a much longer lifespan.

Everybody cross your fingers. We’re in for some interesting times ahead. And no matter what Linden Lab does from this point onwards, somebody’s going to be upset.

Second Life Pick of the Day: Der Keller in 1920s Berlin

I don’t blog about Second Life very often, but today I am making an exception. Vanity Fair paid a visit to Der Keller, a seedy bar in the basement of a building located in the ever-popular 1920s Berlin Project sim (here’s their blog). Proprietress Frau Jo Yardley tends bar, as usual, serving drinks to whoever comes in the door. Radio Desmuke is playing 1920s music.

Der Keller 1920s Berlin 4_001.png
Frau Jo Yardley

Der Keller 1920s Berlin_001.png

Der Keller 1920s Berlin 2_001.png

Der Keller 1920s Berlin 5_001.png

As you can see, all of us are dressed in period 1920s costume (it’s required). Vanity is having a coffee instead of a beer:

Der Keller 1920s Berlin 3_001.png
Vanity Fair in Der Keller

Vanity is wearing:

  • A beige floral casual day dress by Eloise Baker
  • Brown Betty ballet flats by FATEstep (not seen)
  • Meadow hair by Magika
  • Kimberly Catwa head and lipstick
  • Maitreya Lara body and nails
  • Daria skin by The Skinnery
  • and my favourite forest green Darcey eyes by Suicidal Unborn

I’ll leave you with a nostalgic machinima of the 1920s Berlin Project, by Pepa Cometa, set to a song by Marlene Dietrich, Ich hab’ noch einen Koffer in Berlin:

Auf wiedersehen!

Sex and Gender Issues in Virtual Worlds: “The male/female dichotomy was viewed as binary and the technology (literally) codified that concept.”

turn-on-2933003_1920

Photo: by geralt from Pixabay

WARNING! This is a rather meandering blogpost. Please stick with me until you get to the end, thanks!

—

I had posted my popular blogpost about the idea of the Universal Avatar to the Second Life discussion group SLUniverse (where I still participate in after all these years!) and it sparked a lively discussion, which went off on an interesting tangent, which I want to share with you.

One poster, a long-time member of SLUniverse called Beebo Brink, whose Second Life avatar could be described as a “butch” lesbian, said:

My own standard is the Beebo Queer test. Can you put any kind of clothes on your avatar? If you’re limited to wearing only the clothes assigned to a female avatar or only the clothes assigned to a male avatar, then I’m not interested in your virtual world.

When someone else noted, “It’s apparently common for the male and female avatars to have completely different mappings so putting the ‘wrong’ clothes on, even if the game allowed for it, would just break horribly”, she replied:

That’s the stark technical explanation, but underlying that limitation is the original concept of how you create avatars, how you gender them, and how you accessorize. The male/female dichotomy was viewed as binary and the technology (literally) codified that concept.

When I look at supposedly cutting edge technology, such as Sansar, I look for some awareness of the cutting edge of culture. How does this technology fit the mores and values of the people who will use it? Linden Lab fails rather spectacularly in that regard, which is no surprise since user adoption has always been a weak point for the company.

Meanwhile, in mainstream gaming culture The Sims 4 has gender fluidity integrated into their avatar creation tools. They get it, while Linden Lab flounders in the past.

…

I specifically called out the CULTURE derived from a preponderance of men who code. Not every individual guy is going to have that set of values, just as not every woman who codes is going to be an exception. But the culture takes on a life of its own and individual developers can’t change the entire course of a product as large as a virtual world, which requires teams of developers and other support staff. And tech firms are notorious for being run by guys who used to be developers, so that mindset is cemented up and down the food chain.

I’m speaking from 20 years of experience working as a user interface developer. There were always one or two developers who could adopt the perspective of a user when writing code to vague specs. They could be trusted to deliver an interface that was intuitive for ordinary users, without wireframes that spelled out in detail how the program interface should flow. The rest of the developers, however, were completely, totally clueless. They were only interested in “making it work” and if you had to click a button with your left hand behind your back on Tuesdays and Thursdays and with your right hand on Monday’s and Wednesdays, but on Fridays you had to click with your big toe, they were perfectly fine with that. “But it works, right?” they would say, blinking in puzzlement when I started to scream.

So yes, there are male developers who love avatar customization and female developers who couldn’t care less, but in general, the male-dominated culture of programmers assigns lower priority to avatar customization. We can see that in LL, Blue Mars, Cloud Party, Sansar and apparently even EA…(but at least EA finally listened [for The Sims 4]). Meanwhile, in SL, it’s predominantly women who drive the fashion industry’s mesh avatar enhancements and accessories, working furiously to overcome the deficiencies of the platform.

Beebo has a very good point. Virtual world developers think that “as long as it works”, they don’t need to pay attention to things like perpetuating binary gender stereotypes.

The failed virtual world of Blue Mars was especially off-putting for the coquettish, sexist default animations of the female avatars (which could not be turned off). I remember how I and Beebo (who was also in Blue Mars at the time) tried and repeatedly failed to make the software developers understand just how inappropriate this was, or at least to give users a choice of what animations to use. But the software “bros” went ahead with their own projects and nothing changed.

Even worse, they created a set-up in one of the welcome areas where legions of NPC female characters would automatically mob any male avatar and flirt with him like lovesick groupies. Whose f***ed-up idea was this?!?? Obviously, this heterosexual-hormonal-teen-male fantasy absolutely failed to work for me:

imgay

Hmmm, maybe it’s a good thing Blue Mars died a nasty, horrible, lingering death.

But back to Beebo’s (and my) point: virtual world developers in general, and Linden Lab in particular, have so far failed to accommodate (or even acknowledge) the gender fluidity that occurs in real life, and instead have merely entrenched the classification of sex and gender into the two distinct, opposite and disconnected boxes of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’. They had a chance to fix things with their new virtual world, Sansar, and frankly, what we have again is two boxes: male and female. It’s so disappointing.

Let’s take a concrete example from Second Life, not from back in 2003 or 2007, but from late this year, 2017. Linden Lab released a new series of “starter” avatars, including two on horseback.

Avbatar Selection

Do you know that a female avatar cannot use the brown horse attachment that the male warrior uses? It is scripted to only work with male avatars! Yes, it actually checks! Of course, the white horse attachment for the female archer works on a female avatar….but it forces you to ride sidesaddle, “like a lady”!

I had a very frustrating half hour trying to get the “men’s” horse to work with a female avatar, only to give up in disgust. (And yes, I *know* that there are horses for sale in SL, from Water Horse and other vendors, that work properly, and allow females to sit properly astride the horse. But this was a Linden Lab-sanctioned product for new users!)

Look, I must confess that I am really no expert in this subject area. I’m just a cisgendered gay man who knows transgender people, both in virtual worlds and in real life. I often inhabit a female avatar in Second Life, something that I would not have predicted when I first started in SL over a decade ago! My “digital drag” has opened my eyes to how women are treated by some men in virtual worlds, and it’s been quite an education.

I often have to refer to the handy Genderbread Person chart to keep my terms straight: gender identity, gender expression, biological sex, sexual attraction, romantic attraction. The point is, I try to be respectful, and if I fail, I apologize, learn from my mistake and try again. We all need to learn how to do that, to make the “other” feel comfortable in our midst.

genderbread-person-3

The point is, any virtual world that forces binary sex, gender identity, and gender expression standards upon people who don’t fit into the standard “male” and “female” boxes, in this day and age, is doing all its users a disservice. Let’s hope that Linden Lab keeps the needs of all members of the LGBTQ community, including the gender fluid and the gender outlaws among us, in mind as they move forward in their product design.

And maybe someday, Beebo Brink will be able to pick any item of clothing she wants to wear in Sansar—”male” or “female”—and be able to wear it with pride.