Tech -- Culture -- Humour
I heard an interview with Chris Barker today on the radio, promoting his latest book, The Hearts of Men. I’ve had the fortune of meeting Chris during a previous job role.
This is likely to be one hell of a worthwhile read, particularly if you’re a guy and want some reinforcement that you’re not alone in some of the struggles you may go through in your ‘interior life’.
I noticed a new aussie presence popped up on search this week: LeeLee Land. Owned by SL resident LeeLee Dagger, her aims for the island are:
“One island, sprinkled with beautiful houses, half a cup of romance and a pinch of that community feeling! This is the simple recipe I followed to cook up LeeLee Land.
Having been on SL for a while now, I noticed many aussies tend to stick together and I thought there might be a market for rental properties – aussie owned and aussie occupied. I will provide residents with a modern home that ensures them privacy and security while ensuring a romantic atmosphere for those quiet private moments. All houses surround a gorgeous shared area comprising of a water fall, lounges and a dance floor.”
Of course, Telstra have a similar rental offering but it’ll be interesting to see the level of take-up. Are you the sort of SL resident that likes close engagement with other RL countrymen?
It’s been fairly widely reported over the past week that there’s a new kid on the virtual world block. Metaplace has some significant backing and looks promising. Some key snippets from Metaplace’s company, Areae:
“We think there are all kinds of things on the Internet that would be improved if anyone could have a virtual place of their own”
“committed to an open markup standard for our network protocol – anyone can write a client for any platform they want. We decided to use Web standards for everything we could, which is why you can have a game world that is also a website, or use Web data to populate your world. The scripting language (we call it MetaScript, of course) is based on Lua. You get the idea – no ‘not invented here,’ no closed proprietary approaches”
“We knew it was all coming together when one of our team made a game in a day and a half. And then stuck that game on a private MySpace profile. You can inherit someone else’s world (if they let you) and use it as a starting point. You can slurp whole directories of art and use them as building blocks. Cut and paste a movement system or a health bar from one world to another. Use an RSS feed for your NPCs. We made puzzle games, RPGs, action games… and set up doorways from one to the other”
“We fully intend to be customers of our own product. We’ve already started work on our first big game – a ‘worldy MMORPG’ with what we hope will be a ton of fun game play. What’s more, we figure that some of you who have been looking for a game like that might want to help us build it.”
Metaplace is at alpha testing stage and if you’re keen, you can sign up for that testing.
I’d still argue that the Greenies Build by Rezzable is the most impressive SL presence I’ve seen. I’d read about some other Rezzable builds like The Cannery (SL Artwork from a number of artists) but hadn’t checked any out. When I TP’d to The Cannery I went to the Map View and noticed the enourmous array of sims that Rezzable own.
One that caught my eye was Toxic Garden. It’s very different to the Greenies build but contains its own fascinations. I won’t wreck the spontaneity of exploring Toxic Garden by giving too much away, but do ensure you pick up the anti-toxin armband at the entrance.
Toxic Garden is in beta and there are opportunities to give feedback to Rezzable.
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