Ciaran Laval's blog

To all the Mothers out there, for working so hard, cooking Sunday lunch for your son after he comes home from the pub, putting up with Dad, looking after your daughter, looking after the grandchildren.

Happy Mother's Day to you all, Mothering Sunday marks the fourth Sunday in lent, so we're nearly at the stage where whatever we gave up for lent can be replenished.

Mothers of Second life, I salute you. My Mom isn't in Second Life, which is just as well as she'd seriously tell me to tidy my room!

Fresh from the rumour mill comes the rumour that something is happening to Azure Islands. Over at SL Universe in a thread about Pathfinder leaving, Nika Talaj says:

"But this brings up the question of Azure:

We’ve got some fairly big news for the residents of the Azure Islands, as of March 16th, the Azure Islands will be transferring from us, over to a new management team run by Metaverse Services Limited."

This doesn't half bring up the question of Azure Islands, who are Metaverse Services Limited for a start, is it Anshe? Is Adam Zaius getting out of Second Life completely or is he just taking a different direction? I know he's been busy with OpenSim and maybe that's taking up too much of his time now but this is a rather shocking rumour to be going around. Maybe some Azure Islands tenants will be able to shed some light on it, as I said this is fresh from the rumour mill so maybe everything is fine and the wrong end of a stick is being grasped.

First of all - MOTD = Match of The Day, a very popular and long running football show on the BBC. However in Second Life terms, MOTD = Message of the day, I'm explaining this because I will call it message of the day and I don't care about the extra pixels, Match of The Day is always going to be MOTD to me. Moving on to second base.

Can small and medium sized landlords have an apology please? A month's free tier would be nice but I won't push it, a bloody apology is due. A huge apology, in massive letters saying "we're sorry" will suffice. Let's take a trip back to last summer, when there was a huge issue from small and medium sized landlords about large estates receiving an advertising boost.

Let's just remind ourselves of what happened, this sort of thing appeared on our screens:



Do you remember that? Do you remember thinking that those of us who complained were being whiney, that it wasn't much of a boost? That it didn't really matter?
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A message to the SLED mailing list from Pathfinder confirms that he will be leaving the lab at the end of the week:
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Today is my third rez day, which is rather scary in some ways as it doesn't feel like it has been anywhere near three years since I first landed. This is partially due to the American date format being arse about face and me thinking I joined in June when I read my profile and partially because time flies when you're having fun.

There's also the issue that when I first landed I drove around the block in a car for a while as I couldn't figure out how to teleport off the island, so it was a bit of a false start, I came back a couple of days later and got the hang of it.

In those three years quite a lot has happened and there has been progress with the platform, when I first joined there were still hours of downtime once a week or so, but I was used to this from City of Heroes and WoW. Some of the progress is hard to point to, but undoubtedly stability has improved and as far as I can see, continues to improve, the Lindens have been good to their word.

There have of course been low points, the homestead fiasco has to rate as the lowest, I don't know what they were thinking of all the way through that and I don't think I'll ever forgive LL for how they handled that, but time moves on. Zindra and the adult content moves have been another low point, good idea, awful execution and we continue to see the problems with this move. People should only want to sell adult content and services to adult, that's the ethical thing to do, I'm not quite sure how LL managed to make such a mess of this so that those who did the honourable thing felt themselves penalised for doing so.

Robin leaving has been another low point, but that was something completely in Robin's hands and she did what she did for her own reasons and I respect that. she's just such a massive loss.
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....Money for God's sake. I've long encouraged people to tip a couple of bob here and there for sims they believe in, recently Linden Lab blogged enthusiastically about the arts and I don't mind admitting that this has me concerned. I am really in a dilemna here because I completely and utterly believe in the arts, who doesn't want Grace McDunnough, Paisley Beebe, Tauri Tigerpaw and many others whom I've missed singing for them?

Grace sang at Robin Linden's leaving party, it was a superb performance, Grace has a fantastic voice and live events like this make Second Life a vibrant community. Crap Mariner, may be a rather outspoken proponent of the arts but Crap has long been beating the drum for better support of the arts and music in particular.

So this all seems positive, but, and it's a big but (and as I said earlier I don't like big buts) what about those of us already supporting the arts? On one sim I have two art galleries and a small live music venue. On another sim my residents do readings, they attract people to hear them talk, we're already supporting the arts.

My concern is that those of us who already support the arts will be trampled upon when Linden Lab roll their new Arts program out and that will be grossly unfair, we're already promoting these causes, we don't deserve to be swept aside, we don't deserve to be Gom'd.
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Glitteractica Cookie doesn't concern me that much, the name is familiar due to a congress hearing and a skit on some American talk show where they poked fun at her, unfairly but still, the name doesn't bother me. Susan T community manager however, linked to Second Life promos, this does concern me.

In his blog post, We're looking for a few good avatars, Slaton Linden looks for people to appeal to the facebook generation and I'm finding this all so painful. The name "Second Life" screams out that it should not be about Real Life, but the relentless pursuit of Facebook consumers means we are now finding more and more peer pressure to share our RL details and it's simply wrong.

This all started with Wallace's infamous blog post, then came the Valentine's hunt where to win the main prize you had to out yourself on Facebook and now we have this.

Look I have no problem with Linden Lab promoting their product on Facebook, it's a sensible advertising option, however let's not try and turn SL into Facebook 3D because that would be so incredibly boring, people feel the value of free expression and exploring avenues in Second Life because it doesn't tie their activities to their RL name, that's why it's called Second Life.

If everything gets tied to our RL selves then we will lose some of the awesome expression and end up being a sanitised world of boring. People need to be able to express themselves, that's what makes it exciting. Viewer 2.0 puts RL right in your face and this is not a happy improvement.
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