Bitter-sweet birthday bash and other sheds

This week, Linden Lab is celebrating Second Life’s 8th anniversary. Eight years, in technological terms, is an era. I’ve been around SL for half that time, and I can assure you, it still feels like 2007. Personally, I think that “shortage” of accomplishments, other than keeping the world going “round” and people logging in, is certainly not enough cause for celebration. For a company that once had offices around the RL world, that generated some decent millions of  US dollars in revenue, and that used to have a small army of employees, very little has been done to improve the user-base experience. At least I would have expected, by 2011, to have a “crash-proof” viewer, yet every time I try the official SL viewer (now version 2) the virtual world collapses as much as 4 years ago. Even the experimental releases of third party viewers tend to be more stable than the LL one.

For the last 4 years (and probably since the beginning), most, if not all, of the visual improvements seen around are the result of user generated content. Two of the most immediate examples are avatar skins and fashion. A quick search inworld or in the SL marketplace will show that all those amazing and quite realistic skins and tailorings responsible for today’s avatars’ glamorous looks are produced by residents, while the so called avatar mesh, which is LL’s part of the “deal”, has never (if ever) seen an update.

Exactly the day the SL8B party began, I started to experience a series of server and database issues reminiscent of 2007. I guess it’s because every time you go through a birthday cycle, you tend to look back to analyse where you are now. So maybe it’s LL’s way of acting “human”. As a result, I still have no idea if my inventory has lost more than a few objects. One I did witnessed to turn to virtual dust is the shed opening this post.

During the 4th Annual Home & Garden Expo in mid-May, I bought two nice buildings created by Ulaa Coronet, owner of Funky Junk. One was the Primrose Weathered Greenhouse (not shown) and the other one was the Lil Country Shed (pictured above). Until now, I didn’t have the time to do anything with any of them, but a couple of days ago I decided to rez the little shed in my plot. I was bored and wanted to have fun landscaping something out of an otherwise empty lot. So I dragged the Lil Country Shed box out of my inventory and dropped it on the ground. Immediately I got one of those error messages that say something like “Cannot rez, object not in database”, and puff: the box was gone. I waited a few minutes to see if it returned to my Lost and Found folder, used the relog trick, and even cleaned up the cache, but the shed was definitely gone.

It wasn’t the first time something like that happened to me of course; in 4 years it has been quite common, and usually when using the SL official viewer (damn you, piece of sh…). Thus, I proceeded to contact Ulaa Coronet to verify if she had deleted the shed out of SL (how naive of me, trying to deny it was LL’s fault). She replied almost instantly, said she had it in her store, and TPed me to the place. I told her what had happened, and logged in Second Life’s website to check my transaction history to give her my proof of purchase. As if eating my shed wasn’t enough, I found out LL only keeps transaction records for 30 days (or they don’t give you access to older data, as they used to do in the past). Thirty days, can you believe it? Thirty days (rolls eyes). Gone was my little shed, gone was my transaction history, and gone was my chance to get back my purchase, sighs.

Fortunately, Ms. Coronet was more than kind enough to send me a new copy of the Lil Country Shed, even when I couldn’t show her proper proof of my original purchase. I guess that’s another evidence that, even at customers service, independent content creators are better than the Lab at taking care of their clientele.

So, to finish this post, again this pretty Lil Country Shed is from Funky Junk [slurl]. There are a lot of other nice buildings, from barns, to greenhouses, to skyboxes in the store, all of them at more than reasonable prices.

Trees are the Ferox Faber I already blogged, while the Sunsent climbing roses are from Creative Fantasies [slurl]. The rowboat, mailbox and street lamp are from Dirty Rat [slurl], while the logs are from Napoliy [slurl]. Stepping stones and lotuses are from Organica [slurl], and finally the wild loosestrife (not very obvious in the background) are from Heart Gardens [slurl].

A honorable mention goes to this pretty Outhouse Potting Shed by Tatty Soup [slurl]. I acquired it some time ago, but didn’t had the chance to blog before. It’s so nice looking that it deserves its own picture, don’t you think? (winks).

If there is something we should celebrate in this 8th SL birthday, it’s all the users that have spent who knows how many hours of their real lives to make what Second Life is today.

Not water lilies, please

The SL waterways are full of water lilies, as if the Nymphaeaceae were the only nice looking water plants in the world. Yeah, yeah, I know: they are very similar, the Nymphaeaceae (the water lily family) and the Nelumbonaceae (the lotus kind). Don’t look at me that way, I didn’t give them those names.

So for a long time I’ve been searching  for good quality lotus plants to no avail. Recently, though, I found some lotus leaves by Aariss Innovators, that I’ve been using in the Asian plot as a temporary solution. Actually, they look quite nice after going through a modding session, but at 1 prim per leaf, they do take a moderate toll on prim quota. I’m keeping most of them anyway.

I knew that with today’s sculpts, a few more leaves per prim could be possible, so there’s where Aki Shichiroji, the mastermind from Organica Specialty Trees, comes to the rescue. Today, she released the Lotus 1 pack, a pretty nice group of lotus leaves and flowers that everyone tired of the flat and common water lilies should get (asap, move, now). Of course, you can see them in these pictures, along with some other vegetable elements.

To get these lotuses, just visit Organica main store inworld [slurl] or the SL Marketplace [url]. For more information on Organica releases, including the gorgeous Mugo Pine and fan-style Palm Trees, also released today, head to Organica’s blog [url].

FF Trees

Hardly you come along trees as sexy as these in SL. At 8 to 15 prims each, sure they aren’t the ultra low prim kind very common today. Yet, the particular details and overall appeal of Ferox Faber (FF) new tree set make them outstanding.

One or two years ago, FF had a set of four trees (set #1) that were equally good, but at 21 prims each they demanded a prim allowance I wasn’t able to part with easily, so I never got them. They are still available in store if you are interested. This new set refreshes the original line and adds some extra twists for a more pleasant, alluring and even bewitching look.

In addition to the set of four copy/mod trees, you can also buy single units (you pick the one you like the most), or even choose this neat Camping set for some extra features (the camping set doesn’t include all the tree variations).

Visit Ferox Faber inworld [slurl] and try the demo before buying or you could get them from the SL Marketplace [url].