Cartoon of The Day: Handy Chair

 

 Taken at the Caledon Anniversary celebrations. When people were watching a movie, there were only a few seats around. But this lady found a solution in hand.

 

By Bixyl Shuftan

 

 

 

Gemma Cleanslate Temporary Out With Hand Injury

 

If you're wondering where intrepid reporter Gemma Cleanslate has been, this weekend she contacted the Newser saying she'd hurt her hand, and it'll be a short while at least until she's writing again.

 

Looking forward to your return, Gemma. 

 

Cartoon of the Day: Grabby Hands

 

Taken at the Happy Vixen St. Patrick's Party.

By Bixyl Shuftan

 

Cartoon of the Day

By Bixyl Shuftan

News and Commentary: Linden Lab Offers Apology to Strawberry Singh Following Takedown Demand

By Bixyl Shuftan

Protecting what they consider trademarked images and names has been an issue for companies for decades. For instance, for years the Lego corporation has asked people to call it's building toys "Lego bricks" and not "legos." Some have gotten a reputation for going overboard, such as when Disney once demanded a preschool paint over images of Mickey Mouse and other characters. For Linden Lab, the issue of trademarks usually comes up when one of it's residents makes an item inworld that is trademarked by someone else. But it's own trademarks haven't been an issue for many years, until now.

Strawberry Singh is a noted and award-winning blogger of Second Life, one whom has been doing so for years. On December 13, she announced she was removing one of her tutorial videos, "Introduction to Second Life." The reason, one of the Lindens, Tia Linden, complained to Youtube about it, and Youtube gave Strawberry 48 hours to resolve the issue before taking action on her account. Wondering what was wrong, Strawberry emailed Tia asking what was the issue. Tia soon answered, saying while they appreciated her continued support of Second Life, "we have not given you permission to use Linden Lab's intellectual property in the manner of which you have done." She emailed her again, but did not get an answer by the time the 48 hours was almost up and deleted the video, saying in her blog post, "in the future, I probably won’t be doing any other tutorials like this where I show how to use Second Life because their logos might pop up in the videos." She would tell Hamlet Au when he asked shortly afterwards that she didn't think the Lab cared she was promoting the virtual world.

As Strawberry's blog has a lot of readers, it didn't take long for word to get around, to New World Notes, Modem World, Living Virtually, and presumably other blogs. Hamlet Au would write, "Linden Lab's actions are contrary in spirit if not in letter to its stated policies around medua use of its trademarks." Inara Pey wrote, "the statement that certain images and logos now cannot be use in any capacity. If this is now the case, it is worrying for many of us who routinely blog about Second Life and have used such images and logos. ... Where do we now stand if we are now seeing a shift in position from Linden Lab? Are we now in violation of a new prohibition on image use?" Mona Eberhardt's title of her commentary was more blunt, "Yet Another Stupid D**k Move by Linden Lab." Daniel Voyager has yet to write about the incident, as of the writing of this article, but did end up retweeting a statement from Ebbe Linden (left).

Eventually, the Lab began to realize it had a public relations mess on it's hands. Ebbe Linden ended up defending Tia Linden from an angry Tweet by Mona Eberhardt, "I'm willing to take all kinds of heat, but suggesting that Tia is anything but an incredible team player and professional crosses the line for me. ... We will review policies that make things better and easier for us all though."On Thursday, they issued a public apology on the official Second Life blog.

Recently, the Linden Lab IP team sent a takedown request regarding a YouTube video created by the great Strawberry Singh. She and many others have pointed out that this seems like a mistake, and we agree. We have reversed that takedown request and have reached out directly to Strawberry, but would also like to take this opportunity to publicly apologize to her. 

 

Strawberry, we feel fortunate to have you as a member of our Second Life community (and Sansar as well!), and we are grateful for the public support that your blog, YouTube channel, and other social media activity provides. We’re fans of your work, we are sorry for this misstep, and we hope you will continue sharing your awesome videos.

Following the apology, the Lab explained that the incident came from it's policy of protecting it's trademarked images, and that it would be revised to allow people to write about and video to promote Second Life without worry of hassle, "While we still need policies in place to protect our trademarks, we will apply them as permissively as we can with the goal of encouraging and supporting our community."

Strawberry would tell the Newser, "Aside from a big thank you to all of my readers that gave me so much support yesterday I really don't know what else to say. I was so surprised at the response my post got as my reason for doing the post was just to inform others of what happened so they don't experience the same thing I did. I never expected that people would be so vocal and supportive and do all that they did for me yesterday. I was also pleasantly surprised with the Lab's response too. I was not expecting a response at all so all of it was so encouraging and uplifting and I'm so happy that the end result will be hopefully a better policy for all Second Life bloggers and bloggers in the future."

Linden Lab also mentioned what happened with a parody blog in January 2007 in which the blogger invited the Lab to issue a "cease and desist" letter. But instead Linden Lab's lawyer issued an "uncease and desist" letter, stating, "Linden Lab objects to any implication that it would employ lawyers incapable of distinguishing such obvious parody."

Also at the time, there was at least one instance of someone making modifications of the eye in hand symbol for the purposes of promoting Second Life. In early 2006, Yiffy Yaffle came up with a "Second Life Furry" logo as a way for sims to be identified as having a population of furs. The symbol is seldom seen today, though presumably from lack of interest.

Perhaps the incident was the result of one overzealous employee, but unfortunately Linden Lab has a history of making foul-ups such as this. While the Lab did apologize to Strawberry, that the incident happened in the first place is likely to be seen by many longtime residents as just the latest in a long series of blunders.

Sources: Strawberry Singh, Linden Lab, Washington Post,Twitter

Bixyl Shuftan

SL14B Sneak Peeks

It was Press Day at the SL14B today, and while we still can't show anything too revealing, yet, we can show you a few things with a small amount. One this is this flower held up by a metallic hand. A friendly greeting perhaps? You might want to see the whole thing before judging.

 Maybe chickens do fly, or in this case giant chickens.

Going into the light, so to speak. And what exactly is this road between two lines of building-like builds lit up by such bright light? You'll find out tomorrow June 18 at Noon when the SL14B finally opens.

Bixyl Shuftan

Addition: Later on in SLB chat, someone remarked, "Someone tell Bixyl that a phoenix is not a chicken." I had been wondering why it was so big.

Bryn Oh's "Hand"

Bryn Oh, a noted Second Life artist, recently opened a new exhibition to the public, "Hand." Like her best known works, she uses three-dimensional art to tell a story. Here she describes Flit, a robed figure carrying a mannequin's going about a ruined area. Gemma Cleanslate went to take a look for the Newser. Dark but very detailed, this is an exhibit art lovers, especially those whom are fans of Bryn's work, will find interesting.

Read Gemma's story in Design.

Cartoon of the Day

From Halloween Town

By Bixyl Shuftan

Cartoon of the Day

From Club Cutlass

By Bixyl Shuftan

Cartoon of the Day

By Bixyl Shuftan

Halloween Town

The Elizabeth Town sim, which changes every holiday, has brought back "Halloween Town," which offers chills and thrills, in the form of spooky shops, and scary displays.The town is set onto a hill with visitors arriving on top and the road winding down, with a haunted house at the bottom.

One thing new is the giant demon hand that will give anyone who hops aboard an overhead tour of the city, though exactly where it will drop you, I haven't seen.

There's also a pumpkin carving contest, with a list of rules and a sample pumpkin that can be picked up. There are 7000 Lindens in prizes to be given out, with 1600 going to the best overall, and 1000 each to the "Most Creative," "Most Scary," and "Most Artistic," with 550L and 250L to 2nd and 3rd.

Tanja Resident (Tina) is the one to send the pumpkins to, and those interested have until October 30 to send one. "Several of the creators who sell at Halloween Town will be judging. The votes will be collected and tallied by Laura Liberty. The winner's names will be posted at Halloween Town on October 31st.
You will be contacted by Laura Liberty if you are a winner."

Elizabeth Town (120, 103, 99)

Bixyl Shuftan

SL Video: "Draxtor Plays...Leap Motion! "

(Click here if video fails to load)

Draxtor Despress in this video gives the Leap Motion controller, which earlier this year Linden Lab was working on a code for using it for Second Life. While demonstrating it, he drops by Loki Eliot's "The Well."

"Finally found some time to try the Leap Motion gesture detection thingie. Pretty darn cool! I can now envision a glorious future where Second Life residents are not disturbed out of their immersion any longer by having to click mice and keys!!!

"Important note: the Leap is very powerful and you can configure GameWave to use BOTH hands and all sorts of movements and finger combos so this vid really just scratches the surface....

"[Gameplay shown is "THE WELL" designed and executed by Loki Eliot @ http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife... , other places shown are LEA and Escapades]"

Eye on the Blog: "Reaching into Second Life With Leap Motion"

Just after announcing it's purchase of Blocksworld and its release of dio, Linden Lab offered some news for those preferring to stick with Second Life. They had been working on a code for "Leap Motion," a controller that allows one to interact with one's computer using just hand gestures, for use in Second Life.

When our developers first saw the Leap Motion controller they couldn’t wait to get their hands on one. Thankfully, we were able to get a pre-production development kit and built demos to explore its capabilities in Second Life. The demos included tests of flight controls, object manipulation, and avatar gestures. 




 This work was strictly experimental, but it showed the power of Second Life as a platform for exploring gesture-based interactions with controllers like the Leap Motion, and we’re happy to be able to share the code with you as a starting point for your own explorations.

If you have a Leap Motion controller and would like to experiment with the Second Life Viewer, you can find the source code for these experiments at http://bitbucket.org/simon_linden/viewer-rabbit. The indra/newview/llleapmotioncontroller.cpp file contains most new functionality. The Viewer is built to work in several different modes. These modes can be used to control the avatar while flying, send data into Second Life for scripts to intercept, detect hand motions that trigger avatar gestures, or control the camera and avatar movement. To switch between these modes use the "LeapMotionTestMode" value in the Debug Settings, accessible from the Advanced menu.

To give our experiments a shot you will need get the source mentioned above and contact www.leapmotion.com to join their developer program and obtain the SDK. Currently only Windows Viewers are supported, but other platforms could be added by linking in the appropriate Leap Motion SDK.


There was a small thread on the official forums, where several residents expressed mixed opinions. A few liked it, others seemed to feel it was spending $70 for a buggy device. On the Second Life Universe forums, the posters seemed a little more interested about it. Inara Pey noted how due to a bug, one fired a gun sideways like an urban gangster. Hamlet Au thought it was too laggy to be of much use for building, but imagined some creative uses for it in adult areas with the device used for virtual spankings with just a flick of the wrist.

*Addition* Valkyrie Ice has a review of "Leap Motion"  on Aceler8or Magazine.

Cartoon of the Day

By Bixyl Shuftan

Cartoon of the Day

By Bixyl Shuftan

"And That's it for Extend a Helping Hand!"

Yay! I was able to go to the bank today and make the final donation. Here's a full post about it, complete with pictures of the receipts:

http://katjohnston.com/2011/02/25/eahh-and-the-donation-is-made/

The total amount donated was AU$8350, rounded up from the AU$8,337.03, which is what the money raised converted to once it was changed from US currency.

To have a look at the currency conversion process (and get transaction history/money coming out of SL/etc), you can check out this post:

http://katjohnston.com/2011/02/20/eahh-heres-the-final-figures/

Phew! And that's it for EaHH!

Thank you everyone, for making Extend a Helping Hand a memorable and incredibly helpful event in raising money for the Premier's Disaster Relief Appeal. From the people who took part as vendors, through to artists, musicians, independent event organizers, donors, participants and attendees, this amount could not have been raised if it were not for all of you.

With warmest regards and incredible thanks,

Sanura Sakai / Kat Johnston.