Rez day

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.

However the high points, you know it's hard to put a finger on them, that's the odd thing. Building, creating, socialising, running an inworld business have all been high points, despite the trials and tribulations. Building keeping me on my toes with my Maths has also been fun.

As I said earlier, there's no doubt that stability has improved and we are undoubtedly seeing progress with performance, the new beta viewer and HTML on a prim offer exciting opportunities for the future, there will be some pain as the new beta viewer really isn't quite fit for purpose just yet and currently on the beta grid there are some new LSL commands to play with that could again be interesting.

However there are also the issues of script limits and XStreetSL changes to come, script limits may or may not be good, the proof will be in the pudding, the XStreetSL changes, unless they are tweaked, are going to be a whole lot of pain, it's just plain wrong to charge people L$99 to list freebies and then bury their listing, if you're going to charge them, give them a service.

We also have the looming RL disclosure issues and they aren't going to go away but despite most of this sounding negative, I think the next year or two are going to be healthy, the inworld economy has not collapsed like RL economies have threatened to, we had our own banking crisis of course and in some ways it should have provided some pointers for what happened with the RL banking crisis, panic and mayhem are not good ingredients.

I don't own a crystall ball, despite being an almighty wizard, but I can see SL growing and expanding in the next three years, ten years from now, who knows, I doubt Second Life will be on the same scale, it will have branched off into many different avenues is more likely, but I'm pretty sure it will largely be fun!

I have no grand plans for today, but if I'm lucky I'll go and listen to tauri Tigerpaw singing at Bella's Cafe on my island. However that is at 5pm SLT and that's a bit late for me these days!