HV Community Roads Removed Due To Remodeling

 

Among the latest developments in the Sunweaver lands following the passing of it's leader Rita Mariner, there's been a change at HV Community. At the one sim in the land that's not in any danger (while Purfecction is owned by one resident, it hasn't usually been counted as Sunny land), the roads and rail track have been removed. This includes the length in front of the Newser office. 

 Cynthia Farshore, whom had laid down the roads and track, told me due to people moving to HV Community because of the uncertainty of the future of the sims, the roads had been removed so Nydia Tungsten and Ranchan Weidman can remodel and move things around as needed. 

 

Stay tuned for further updates.

 

Bixyl Shuftan 

 

LEA Announcing 19 of 29 Sims To Close Temporarily For Restructuring

Yesterday on the blog for the Linden Endowment for the Arts, it was announced that on January 1, there would be a "hiatus for restructuring." LEA sims 11 to 29 would be temporarily shut down "to allow for a major restructuring."

Come January 1st 2019, the Linden Endowment for the Arts, known as the LEA, will be temporarily closing its Artists in Residence regions (LEA 10 - 29) to allow for a major restructuring.                                           
                                           
Over the last seven years, these regions have been open for artists who apply to build their dreams, each for a six month grant. We have seen many great installations here - and some that have attracted controversy.                                           
                                           
The nine Core regions (which include the Theatre, the Sandbox and Photohunt) will remain for the present, and short-term grants will still be available in these regions for community-inspired arts projects.                                           

Applications for Core regions can be made here:
https://sites.google.com/view/linden-endowment-for-the-arts-/home

Discussions between the present Committee and Linden Lab about the future form of the LEA are ongoing, but it is anticipated that there will be a new organising committee when the AiR regions re-open.

The Linden Endowment for the Arts (LEA) was established to help create a center of arts activity in Second Life. It is a collaborative venture between Linden Lab and the arts community. Guided by a dedicated board of renowned Second Life artists, the LEA is committed to providing access to engaging experiences in the arts for the Second Life community. Through its exhibitions, programs, and events, the LEA fosters awareness of artists’ contributions to our virtual world and encourages others to get involved and be inspired.
See more at: http://lea-sl.org/

How long the sims will remain closed is unknown.

Source: LEA blog

Hat Tip: Daniel Voyager, Saffia Widdershins

The Linden Memorial

One year ago, Second Life's residents were shocked to find out a third of the Lindens had been dismissed from the Lab, their avatars deleted. Residents expressed their thoughts in many ways. Codebastard Redgrave expressed them by building a memorial. A year later, she has a more lasting memorial to the laid-off Lindens up.

Read more in Places.

Blue Mars “Restructuring” from PC Viewer to iPhone/iPad App, Company to Shrink

In a post on their community blog, Avatar Reality, the company behind the Blue Mars virtual world, announced that the company would be “restructuring in order to concentrate on bringing Blue Mars to portable touch screen devices like the iPhone and iPad.” Blue Mars Mobile will concentrate on “avatar style and rankings” with plans for Facebook connection, and a clothing store “in the next few months.”

As for their PC viewer, the company stated bug fixes aside, there were no plans for further updates.


With our focus now clearly on mobile, updates to the PC version of the software will likely be restricted to bug fixes for the foreseeable future. With that in mind, we will no longer charge our current City Developers for the monthly city hosting service. The servers will remain online, city updates and uploads will continue, and shop and residence rentals will still function but technical support for the user client will no longer be offered.


As with Linden Lab’s “Restructuring,” Avatar Reality stated that their staff would soon be getting smaller. CEO Jim Sink announced he was among those leaving.

Blue Mars is a fairly new virtual world, appearing in “open beta” in September 2009. Compared to Linden Labs’ grid, Avatar Reality designed the place with more restrictions on content creation. Unlike some virtual worlds, there was no viewer for Macintosh computers. When it was new, it was seen as being a potential serious competitor for Second Life, showing pictures of cities with crisp graphics. It got the attention of some residents of the Metaverse, including the people of Caledonia whom set up a place there. Hamlet Au, the editor of New World Notes, was part of Avatar Reality for a time, and regularly did articles of goings-on in Blue Mars in both his main online newspaper and the Blue Mars official blog (called Blue World Notes for a time).

Of Avatar Reality’s latest move, Hamlet Au responded only that he was “very interested to see how Blue Mars Mobile develops.” Most other comments observed were more pessimistic in tone. Aeonix Aeon concluded the virtual world was virtually broke, and was gambling what was left of its capital on mobile app software that he felt was a doomed venture, “Most PCs short of monster gaming rigs have a hard time using the Crytek Engine, and to assume that a mobile platform would be more capable than a high powered personal computer (whether an Apple or PC) is simply ridiculous. ... I’m not aware of a mobile provider that can or will support 1 GB of data transfer per hour on a data plan, and of those who may allow such a thing, the ‘unlimited’ plan would surely be brought to its knees fairly quickly, causing massive overage charges to the user in question.”

Tateru Nino was about as blunt. It had failed to lived up to the hype to begin with, she commented, with much worse lag and a confusing interface. And now, it was being reduced to “sort of like Google Lively on an iPhone” (A gigabyte an hour she thought would quickly be cut off by the mobile's service providers) that would be bleeding money. Gwyneth Llewelyn felt the hype over Apple’s products would keep investors “happy for a few years,” but still questioned about the idea of “a dumbed-down version of Blue Mars running on an iPhone” making more money than it’s PC business model.

The general consensus is that Blue Mars will soon go the way of There.com, much to the sadness of both it’s residents and fans of virtual worlds in general. At it’s beginning, it was a sign of new possibilities. It’s retreat from the realm of PCs is seen by some as a sign of trouble for the future of virtual worlds where the content is made by residents instead of the owners.

Sources: New World Notes, Blue Mars Blog, Andromeda Media Group, Gwyneth Llewelyn, Tateru Nino, The Metaverse Journal

(Picture by Aeonix Aeon)

Bixyl Shuftan

Reader Submitted

It's life Jim but not as we know it.

So Linden Labs have been clearing out their inventory. 30% of their global workforce have crashed never to return. As we all know it's never nice when it happens, and I am sure we all wish them and their families the very best for the future. It's definitely goodbye and not "brb." This time of course though the crashing is in real life, not SL. And the ones who have gone have real families to support, real mortgages to pay and real bills to face up to. It's not just a few minutes or hours of inconvenience, because you can't dance the night away with your mates.

So what are the ramifications? What does this mean for us toons? Have our gods deserted us??.. Linden Labs are certainly not shouting the news from the rooftops, and why would they? .... Shedding nearly a third of your workforce is bad news however you look at it. Hard facts about the state of Linden's affairs are hard to come by. Facts and figures about the Linden empire fall firmly into the category of "statistics" (as in lies, damn lies and statistics), so we can't know for certain. One thing is certain though ... companies do not relieve themselves of a third of their workforce lightly. Was it always the plan to sack one in three of the workforce or did Bigwig Linden just wake up one morning and think it seemed like a good idea? The fact is they, as a business are in trouble, and if they are in trouble ... we are in trouble!

Residents beware! If the Lindens decide that 1 in 3 isn't enough and that they may as well turn the lights (and the servers) off and go home. What are you going to do? Suddenly the killer shoes you just bought seem less sparkly as you may not be able to log on and wear them tomorrow. If you think that's bad ... have a thought for the poor old landowners. Not only have they previously endured price manipulation of their assets ... now it is looking more likely than not that they will loose everything. I am no land expert but a quick check of prices tells me that an island is $1,000 us dollars and $295 dollars a month for maintenance whatever that is. That equates to over $4,500 us dollars a year for a few pixels that will go "poof" at the flick of an administrators index finger.

If you want my advice fellow residents....save your money and sell your house while you still can.

Izzie Schism

What a Week

It’s been quite a time for us at Second Life Newser, dealing with not just one, but two major events on our hands. One mainly for us, the other felt by just about every resident I met.

The first was, well, the paper we used to work for closing, and Second Life Newser beginning as it folded. Starting up a new media company would be no easy task. Thankfully, people have again and again expressed their well wishes, as well as expressing their thanks there will be a new paper to read. Thank you very much for the kind words, and your support. It meant a lot.

And so, on with our mission, to bring you the readers the news across the grid big and small. From the mega-events such as SL7 and Burning Life to the personal experiences of various residents. We will soon be introducing new sections to the paper to keep the front page from becoming too cluttered, especially on busy days. The newspaper site will also be tweaked a bit to be easier to read.

We are also in the process of getting an office for a physical location in Second Life. Once everything is all set, the address will be posted online.

It's been a promising beginning.

Even before the dust was beginning to settle, wham! The heavy hand of M Linden struck again as it never had before, with about a third of the staff up and dismissed. In a press release, even in an e-mail released to the residents, M Linden insisted Linden Labs was healthy and this was necessary streamlining. But as has been mentioned in various commentaries, such as here and here, this kind of cutback is not a sign of a company prospering.

There has been plenty of speculation about what this might mean, notably as it comes alongside the news of Linden Lab developing a browser-based client. Among them, that this was done to prepare Second Life for being sold. Others wonder if the Metaverse is going to be downscaled in graphics and flexibility, turned into a primitive version of itself, in order to become “Yoville2.” Somehow, the joke I made on April 1 in the old newspaper about the Lindens selling Second Life to China to concentrate on making a “Farmvile” sequel doesn’t seem so funny now.

One Columnist in Computerworld didn’t think Second Life was about to be sold or made into a graphical shadow of what it once was, but he did feel the best days of the Metaverse were behind it as Linden Labs takes it into “maintenance mode” to try and keep residents from slowly leaving. Goodbye to the hopes that it could find a mainstream audience, and heading for a slow decline.

In my opinion, Second Life can reverse this downward course and rise in numbers again. But as long as M Linden is in charge, Linden Labs’ history of bumbling and stumbling will continue.

Bixyl Shuftan

“Restructuring” of Linden Labs to Result in 30% Layoffs

In the Linden Blog, M Linden announced there would be “the undertaking of a significant restructuring of Linden Lab.”

Though the company remains in a solid financial position, it has become clear that we need to make some hard decisions in order to bring current and future Residents the kind of product and experience we feel they deserve. After three years of intensive hiring, we've come to a place where it's important that we reorganize our teams and find a renewed level of discipline and momentum as we move forward.

The press release linked to the blog mentioned “the company aims to create a browser-based virtual world experience, eliminating the need to download software.” And “Linden Lab will look to extend the Second Life experience into popular social networks.” Then there was this ominous statement: “The software development teams will be consolidated in North America and customer support will be reconfigured to provide more scalable services. As a result, Linden Lab anticipates staff reductions of approximately 30 percent.”

Almost a third of Linden Labs’ staff will be gone.

In the Linden Blog Discussion threads was “Bidding Farewell to Many Lindens, “ some of the Linden team being let go were disclosed and discussed. The popular Blue Linden was apparently on the list, as residents were unable to find him in search. People expressed sadness for the Lindens let go. As people usually complain about Linden doings, seeing people shedding tears for a group of Lindens was an unusual sight. More than one commented along the lines of “the nice ones were let go.” One resident apologized for her criticism of Pink Linden for not answering her as she was apparently among those let go.

Another posted the following:


I've been physically sick to my stomach all day. I've had the benefit of meeting a great many Lindens inworld - and in First Life - over the last four years. It started back in 2007, just trying to get a straight answer on some of the kid policies, and eventually turned into a number of friendships.

The three losses that hurt me the most are Blue, Mia, and Teagan.

Mia was the first I ever met, in RL. Always a sweetheart to me. She'd give me Linden Bears hot off the press. She worked with the mentors and volunteers, and would put together fun inworld events for the holidays. If you did the egg hunt, the valentines heart hunt in 2009, the halloween event, or some of the others - that was Mia.

Blue sent me and a handful of others to the cornfield once, for fun. Always listened, always cared. Did a mean pole dance in Rouge one night, which was one of the more hilarious things you'd ever want to see (consider the avatar he wore). Always was with us Residents, in many cases literally. He was the sort of guy who would attend Resident events.

Teagan took me to jail in RL one day, sightseeing in SF. In the wake of all the drama over child avatars at SL5B, she showed up as in a chibi kid avvie at SL5B *and* over at Kids5B. "Hired" me to shoot her pics for SL6B, and wore a shirt I created ("Philip Linden Has a Posse") as part of her usual inworld uniform.

All of them respected me as a Resident, and looked beyond the avatar choice.

It's a sad day. I'm not going to say "this is the end of SL," but it's certainly the end of the SL I've known.


How M Linden’s “restructuring” will affect the confidence of the general resident population, and their willingness to put their real-life money into the Metaverse, remains to be seen.

Sources: Second Life Blogs, PR Newswire,

Bixyl Shuftan