Tag: SL18B

Second Life 18th Birthday: The Lost Refuge

The Lost Refuge is partly a puzzle to solve, and partly a tribute to Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg, who passed away recently. It’s a collaboration between Silas Merlin and Solas Enchantment (a.k.a Solas NaGealai), built for the Second Life 18th birthday celebrations, which you can find on the sprawling virtual fairgrounds here.

You start off in a rocky glen, on a central space with four rushing rivers flowing in all four directions:

There is a magic spell book lying open on the ground, giving you instructions you must follow and items you must collect to obtain prizes.

According to a notecard provided by Solas and Silas:

Step within the looming rock walls, amongst the statues upon the 5 giant pillars that guard the elements. Your first task will be to find the book to learn the lore of the land.  It will help guide you to find the 5 stones that house the gifts and a  hidden world beneath you. 

The lore within the book: “The fairy, the mole the phoenix and the fish were pouring elements into the magic pool in hope of opening the way to the lost refuge for so, so very long that in the end they turned into statues. They were missing a fifth element for the spell to operate. Spirit was missing.

On the eve of the birthday of the world that shelters us all, the overseer crossed over to the other side. In the beyond, he remembered his flock, and visited this land to infuse spirit into the magic waters, to open the way to new wonders to come. Find the elemental rune stones to find your gifts. Hint: always follow the way.

The overseer is a tribute to Ebbe Altberg:

Here are a couple more shots of the Lost Refuge, to entice you to pay a visit!

You can start your exploration of the Lost Refuge here.

Second Life 18th Birthday: Draxtor Despres Interviews Philip Rosedale and Dr. Tom Boellstorff

As one of the dozens of events celebrating the 18th birthday of Second Life, the irrepressible host of The Second Life Book Club, Bernhard Drax (better known by his SL name, Draxtor Despres) interviewed a couple of special guests:

  • Philip Rosedale, the founding CEO of Linden Lab (the makers of Second Life) and CEO of High Fidelity; and
  • Dr. Tom Boellstorff, a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine who has written extensively about the culture of Second Life (previous blogposts about Tom here).

This is a must-watch one-hour video, if you are at all interested in social VR, virtual worlds, and the metaverse! Both Tom and Philip are excellent, articulate speakers on the topic, Drax deftly steers the conversation in many directions, and there are so many great quotes in here! This video is a gem, and the fact that it only has a little over 400 views so far is criminal, people. So go watch it!

Don’t forget that Philip is also speaking today in Breakroom at noon PST...he seems to be on a continuous speaking tour lately! He’s always a great listen, so be sure to register for the Breakroom event and attend (you’ll receive instructions via email).

P.S. Have you seen the latest one-minute promotional video for Second Life? Second Life’s new owners spent some serious coin on this! The future looks bright, indeed! (Fun fact: did you know that the same Waterfield investment group that now owns Second Life also owns Goldman Sachs? Check out the “Waterfield Network” listing of companies at the bottom of that last link.)

UPDATED! Second Life Steals, Deals, and Freebies: A Quick and Dirty Guide to Gifts from the Second Life 18th Birthday Shop and Hop

The Second Life 18th Birthday Shop and Hop event is bigger than ever before—a whole sixteen sims of shopping! The event runs from June 17th to July 6th, 2021, and each store has a free gift for you.

Now, you could spend hours and hours fighting the crowds and lag, visit every shop, pick up every gift, then spend even more time unpacking it all. Or, you can save yourself some time and effort, and check out the bounty of SL18B gifts in two other, easier ways! This year, I am taking the lazier approach to plan my attack 😉

First, Naria Panthar has gone to all the trouble of picking up all the SL18B gifts, in the following two-and-three-quarter hour YouTube video, complete with her trademark hilariously snarky commentary as she unpacks and tries on everything! Just fast forward through the boring bits, and take copious notes on which sims and stores you want to hit, using this handy list of store SLURLs sorted by store name:

If a 2-3/4 hour video seems too onerous, Cat Pink gives you the highlights from all 16 sims in just fifteen minutes! Just remember to take notes and use the list of SLURLs sorted by store name:

Even quicker, bookmark this link, which contains brief descriptions plus pictures of each of the gifts, broken down by sim name. If you click on the date-and-timestamp of each of the 16 posts, you can see the images in a larger version. This listing is from the little-known-about SL Free and Inexpensive Items Russian-language group on Vkontakte, the Russian version of Facebook, which often lists items I don’t see on other freebie blogs; use the Russian-to-English translator in your Chrome web browser.

See? Easy peasy! Much less wear and tear on those virtual feet 🙂

I don’t have time this year to cover all the gifts available to you, so I picked just a few to show you. (They are all from stores on the Snapdragon sim.)

From the TO.KISKI booth comes this Leah metallic party dress/top, which comes in either white or silver, plus the optional Leah pants in either red or gold. You’re all set for a night at the disco!

The Leah set from TO.KISKI

Next up we have two gifts: this lovely fawn-adorned crop top from Entice, paired with the patent leather pants, a generous present from ISON (which come in a complete fatpack of colours!):

Top by Entice and pants by ISON

Store Credit and Gift Cards

The following stores are offering gifts of free store credit or gift cards:

Happy freebie shopping!

UPDATE June 22nd, 2021: I added three more stores to the store credit section (thank you, MizCarol!). In addition to the L$500 gift card, Monomania offers up this lovely pants and sweater set called Affection as a free gift:

The gift from Monomania

UPDATE June 24th, 2021: I forgot to mention that there is also a special area on the sprawling SL18B fairgrounds where you can pick up a whole bunch of free gifts from various vendors at one time (here’s the SLURL). Happy freebie shopping!!