(I originally published this article on examiner.com on April 6, 2016) When friends die, it’s natural for us to praise them and remember all that was good about them, but when the man behind Lumiere Noir died last August, I discovered that he was far more amazing than I suspected. I knew him in two…
Category: report
From the archives: Preserving virtual worlds
(I originally published this article on examiner.com on February 26, 2013) A hundred years from now, when historians want to understand the ways we use Second Life®, how will they know? Computers won’t be anything we even recognize as a computer and won’t run current software or even be able to read installation disks. Questions…
RIP Examiner.com
I’ve been publishing articles about Second Life on examiner.com for seven years, since March 2009. It was a huge archive of events, history, tips and tricks, and photographs of Second Life that I expected to be around for a while, but sadly, it has now vanished. Examiner.com is no more, replaced by axs.com with entirely…
Tutsy Navarathna’s Double Award-Winning Machinima at SL12B
Tutsy Navarathna’s machinimas never fail to amaze me. The latest, MetaPhore, exceeds any I’ve seen before and received awards at both the University of Western Australia in Second Life’s MachinimUWA VII competition and on the same day, was winner of the SciFi Film Festival’s Screen my Short award. You can see it at SL12B by…
SL12B – first photos
Here are my first shots from SL12B. There are some great builds – the following photos are only four of them.
Second Life’s 12th birthday bash starts next weekend
In recent years my focus has been more on OpenSim than Second Life, but I’m looking forward to next week’s SL12B Community Celebration. It opens on Sunday June 21, 2015, and runs through Sunday June 28. You can see photos of SL12B on flickr. I spent the last year working mostly alone in an OpenSim virtual…
Reviving the blog
I started this blog six years ago, in February 2009, but in recent years I’ve let it languish and for the last year I’ve written no posts at all until today. I’ve had the avatarplanet.com website even longer, since about 2005, but although it once had a decent following, I’ve let it wither and…
A World That Never Happened
It’s been over a year since my last post. In that time, I built a 32 region OpenSim grid for a client, doing everything from creating the terrain in L3DT, building and obtaining content, and administering the server, including writing the PHP and Powershell scripts that ran the grid. Sadly, just when it was ready…
Builders and content creators needed
I’ve long felt that virtual worlds are an ideal technology for senior citizens. Virtual worlds allow seniors who are no longer as mobile or as agile as they once were to lead active lives as members of a community even if they find it difficult to leave their home in the physical world. Yet until…
Do you know any interesting opensim regions?
A recent post by Han Held on Google Plus reminded me of the fact that folks in SL often don’t know what OpenSim is all about, and that it can be hard to explain openSim’s attraction to people who’ve never spent time in OpenSim worlds or maybe just made a cursory visit. One way to educate…