I slept, but I'm awake again.

Once again, Beginning and I are kept apart by viewer trouble. There is a solution I hope to rig up soon, though.

What's left of the world now that I'm back in it?

This morning I teleported to Khanada.

I didn't think I'd ever be able to honestly type that sentence.

Access is currently limited to those who were invited as members of the Duran Duran Group (which still exists!) The doors apparently open one week from today. My thoughts (and screenshots) will be blogged here somewhere after that point. No fair in teasing about it.

But I will say . . . it's very, very strange that the original reason I signed up for Second Life is coming back to haunt me at a time like this.

Arya and Kavisha sent me an invite to a benefit gig they were playing for the victims of the Christchurch quake. I sussed out the commercial spots while I was there. $200/week for 100 prims. Promising.
posted by CyFishy Traveler on ConneXXion using a blogHUD : [permalink]

A slot on the Galaxy Cruise ship has opened up for potential vending. L$200 a week for 25 prims. This might be a good place to branch into bikiniwear.
posted by CyFishy Traveler on Galaxy AFT using a blogHUD : [permalink]

Miles and I looking at possible new spaces for Social Butterfly now that Quantum Fields has flickered out of existence. We may be looking a while. Stay tuned.
posted by CyFishy Traveler on Rue DAntibes using a blogHUD : [permalink]

What I saw when I left.



What I saw when I returned.

Miles showed up and used her powers to sculpt the land like sand castles, spiking the ground into mountain peaks where we sat and had tea.



It wasn't quite the same.

Quantum Acres, where Miles' house is, remains intact for now. We hope to find a new location for Social Butterfly :)i(: but for now our listings on SLMarketplace are still up and available.

I know this world to be an especially ephemeral one at times--castles vanish, avies stop logging in and entire landmasses can disappear. So I take it in stride when something like this happens. But Quantum Fields was one of the first places I'd come to when Miles was introducing me to the wonders of the grid, and I will miss it.

Every time a shiny new virtual world shows up and the geekosphere starts circling and rubbing their hands and predicting the doom of Second Life, I see the same thing happen.

I watched it happen to Lively, to There and now even Blue Mars is abandoning any further development of its PC client and shifting to a mobile platform.

They each have one flaw, a flaw that is to all appearances fatal.

I can't get in.

I'm a Mac user. I always have been. Our family's first computer was an Apple, we were probably the first on our block with a little beige box in 1984 and we've been Mac people ever since.

About twelve percent of American households have a Mac in them as of 2009. The majority of those have some kind of Windows-based PC lurking about somewhere, so it wouldn't seem necessary to go to all the trouble to make a virtual world client specifically for Mac users. There are so few of us, after all, in the larger scheme of things.

Except for the fact that it isn't just about numbers. It's about the kind of users you cut out by shutting the door on the Macintosh.

The affluent type. The college-educated type. The artsy, creative, I-make-my-living-conjuring-pretty-things-out-of-pixels type.

Photoshop, the program most commonly used for editing Second Life textures, started out on the Macintosh and didn't have a Windows version until after a few years of development. It's a pretty safe bet that a large number of Photoshop experts are Mac people, and if you don't have a way for them to get in, you cut yourself off from a deep pool of creative talent. Not all of them will go to the trouble to either obtain a Windows machine or force their Mac to mimic one just to access a program. Why on earth should they, when they already have Second Life if they need a world to play in?

In fact, I'll go out on a limb and firmly declare that any virtual world that cannot be readily accessed by a Macintosh computer will never successfully surpass Second Life.

I'm not sure where Blue Mars goes on that scale, to be honest, considering that the direction they're heading towards is . . . the iPhone and iPad.

Yeah.

I think that says it all, really.

Big changes at Quantum Fields . . . including a new shop design. Miles arranged to get the back wall opened up so we have a place to sit with a view of the sea. I've also set up some 7Seas Fishing at the dock nearby, with some bonus catches of SB merch to be caught. Many possibilities are unfurling in this new year. I hope to update a little more frequently here to chronicle them.
posted by CyFishy Traveler on Quantum Fields using a blogHUD : [permalink]

I've revised the Five Things To Do Before You Get Started in Second Life on my Newbie Guide to reflect the recent development of Display Names. I realize there's a lot that needs to be tweaked on the site to keep up with the constant changes in Viewer 2, and I hope in the new year to be able to devote some more time to them.

This is rather absurdly short notice, but I've decided to do the Second Annual Twelve Days of Christmas Sale at Social Butterfly!

Starting Christmas morning (December 25th) and running through the 12th day of Christmas (January 5th) one item in our store will be marked down to a mere L$12. It could be our Kaleidoscope Eyes. It could be one of our lovely shirts. (It probably won't be the L$5 shirts upstairs because, um, that would be kind of silly.) The only way to find out is to go and hover your little cursor over each item to find out the price.

Happy Christmas to all!

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Quantum%20Fields/223/83/23