Real Life Health Worker Creates Stylish Second Life Avatar As Tribute to Colleagues Treating COVID-19 Patients
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Jang Sungyoung’s self-named blog is usually fun and cheeky. But as a healthcare worker in real life, she took the time to create this image to reflect on her occupation. In the description of “Reporting for Duty”, she reveals that people have been rude to her for being a healthcare worker. She does not ask us to call her a hero or glorify her work, but just to remember that healthcare workers are at risk and so are their families:
“While we are busy taking care of our patients, we are away from our families and we are putting our very own health at risk. A simple smile, gratitude and appreciation is all we need. Stay safe everyone!”
Here’s another, more lighthearted fashion pic by Jang:
“Keep the Sunny Side Up” is a bright and sunny post that drew my eye with color. Also, she gives her readers a portmanteau that is delightful–sassitude. I am stealing it.
I love her humor. For example, the comments box is prefaced with “I like pandas and unicorns, how about you?” The blog is very well-organized and simple to use. There is a panel on the right that begins with a short bio, links, archives, and social media. Across the top you can find her About Me, Contact page, and some basics about her blog. I love her little bio for her gravatar, “Mental health warrior. Self-proclaimed ambivert. Fierce gamer. Music lover. Photography enthusiast. Panda ambassador. Unicorn guardian. All around awesome.” I enjoy her blog and I think you will, too.
Have A Great Week from all of us at Zoha Islands and Fruit Islands
Tilia Pay to Power USD Transactions in Second Life Beginning
May 26
Entry posted by Linden Lab ·
To comply with financial regulations, we’re making an important change to how US Dollar transactions are processed in Second Life. Beginning May 26, 2020, when you make a US Dollar payment or add a new payment method in Second Life, your transaction will be handled through Tilia Inc.
What is Tilia Inc. and Tilia Pay?
Tilia Pay is a product of Tilia Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Linden Lab. Tilia Inc. is a licensed money transmitter in all U.S. states and territories that regulate such activity. Tilia was created to provide secure and compliant solutions for powering virtual economies including Second Life.
To stay compliant with regulations across a number of U.S. states, we are taking advantage of the additional safeguards built into Tilia Pay, leveraging the enhanced fraud and money laundering safeguards that Tilia Pay provides.
Stored-value accounts (your USD wallet, payouts, balance credits, etc.)are already handled by Tilia and now it will also handle all other USD transactions (including those involving conversion to other national currencies).
What does this change mean for you?
Because Tilia is the payment processor for Second Life, you will be consenting to the Tilia ToS and Privacy Policy when making a payment through one of your payment methods (such as a credit card, PayPal, or Skrill). This change does not require you to provide any additional information, nor will it result in any new fees.
What about L$ transactions inworld?
There is no change to L$ transactions conducted in the Viewer or in the Marketplace. This change only applies to transactions involving USD.
Are there any new fees associated with this change?
No new fees are associated with this change.
How do I learn more about Tilia Inc. and Tilia Pay?
Due to COVID-19 And the land shortage many estates have raised pricing to take advantage of controlling the market. Zoha Islands/Fruit Islands will NOT be taking the road to GREED and our pricing will not change to our Current Residents. We are Working hard to consolidate existing regions so we can accommodate those of you that Need Full 20k,30k and Homestead regions.. Please be patient as we work to adjust to all of this. We will be taking deposits for these regions on a first come first serve basis As regions become available. Please contact a sales agent for more info. We want to also remind our current residents to MAKE SURE they are ON TIME with tier payments to AVOID RECLAIM!
Due to the ongoing public health crisis, we’ve experienced an unprecedented surge in demand for new Second Life regions. While we are thrilled by the heightened interest, the increased demand has consumed our available inventory of full regions and homesteads (there are still many parcels available on existing regions, both on the mainland and from private estates).
We are committed to maintaining (and improving) the stability and performance of Second Life. So while we are very gratified that we can be of help to people in these trying times, unfortunately, our current server systems cannot accommodate unlimited growth without adversely impacting that stability and performance. This means that region inventory in Second Life will be extremely limited and may not be readily available until early fall.
WHY DID THIS HAPPEN?
As we’ve discussed previously, Second Life is in the process of migrating from our existing dedicated servers to a cloud hosting service. That migration has already moved a number of the most important services and databases, but we are not quite ready to host simulators in the cloud. We have a crack team working on that and are making lots of progress, but there are significant changes needed to make sure that we can provide the performance, stability, and security required. When that process is complete we will have a nearly unlimited region capacity, but until then we are constrained by the size of our existing server fleet.
While our migration project has been underway for some time, even our most optimistic business projections did not anticipate a surge of the magnitude we have seen in recent weeks for additional regions. While we planned for growth driven by improvements to Second Life and other factors, we didn’t expect demand to be created by a global pandemic.
As a result, we are in the unfortunate position of hitting the maximum capacity of our “old” servers until the “new” cloud servers are fully operational.
WHEN WILL REGIONS BE AVAILABLE AGAIN?
Regions may be intermittently available as existing regions are returned to us by their current owners. Due to the economic impact of the public health crisis, we do expect that some limited number of landholdings will be returned to the general inventory in the coming weeks. This means that there may be some regions available on-and-off, but it is more likely that normal region sales will not resume until our migration to the cloud is complete. While we do not have an exact date at this time, we anticipate it will be early fall.
WHAT IMMEDIATE OPTIONS ARE AVAILABLE IN THE MEANTIME?
So, what are your options if you are seeking land sooner?
Owning land on the Mainland is an alternative. We can offer abandoned Mainland directly for sale with a range of various parcel sizes from 512sqm per parcel to an entire full region (minus infrastructure). You can learn more about purchasing abandoned Mainland in our Knowledge Base.
Consider renting from an existing landholder. If you do not need an entire region, there are plenty of rental options available from established Second Life landholders right now. Learn more about how rentals work in our Knowledge Base.
You can also explore Land Auctions in Second Life. Much like an auction on the popular auction-based shopping site eBay, Second Life Land Auctions allows individuals to place their bids on open inventory for available parcels across the virtual world. You can learn more about how the auctions process works in our Knowledge Base.
There are also third-party sellers that offer both parcel and full land rentals and sales. For example, some of the better-known entities are listed on the Land & Estates category in the Destination Guide but you can also find many on the Forums or through the Land & Rentals tab in Second Life Search (on the web or in the Second Life Viewer).
We’ll update the community as soon as we can when normal region sales resume, but in the meantime, we recommend any of the above alternatives until things get back to normal.
Have a great week from all of us at Zoha Islands And Fruit Islands
News and opinion about video games, television, movies and the internet.
Fortnite
Epic
Last night I attended yet another concert in Fortnite’s Party Royale mode, the combat-free zone where everyone just hangs out and doesn’t kill each other. It’s a small island and an early experiment, and yet as I witnessed live sets performed by Dillon Francis, Steve Aoki and deadmau5, all world-famous DJs, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was yet again witnessing something pretty significant and incredible.
I’ve talked a lot about the Metaverse with Fortnite, the grand virtual world that may end up replacing the internet someday, and in fiction, often appears in immersive VR form, and is full of brands and companies vying for their place among users. And you can definitely feel a significant step in that direction from Fortnite, especially last night as I, controlling X-Men’s Psylocke as my Avatar, danced with John Wick and Harley Quinn and dozens of other player avatars during the hour-long show.
When I posted the clips online, many of my followers remarked that this looked like Second Life, and honestly, while the Metaverse is still ages away in its “true” form, it does feel like Fortnite is gearing up to start with something more akin to Second Life or PlayStation Home instead.
Second Life, though mostly thought of as an ancient internet relic at this point, does still exist today, albeit the peak of its popularity was likely in the mid-to-player 2000s. The concurrent player record was 88,000 in 2009.
Second Life operates as a virtual world where players are not killing each other, but rather building homes, trading goods and services with each other, and attending events (Second Life was doing concerts a decade before Fortnite).
Now, it seems like Fortnite is on that path, but in a more attractive package. These days screenshots of Second Life unintentionally make it look like some sort of porn sim (though plenty of naughty stuff can and does happen in Second Life), while Fortnite’s Pixar-like animation and brand deals with Marvel, DC, Star Wars and more are combining different IPs in one place in a way that no other game has before in a better-looking world.
Second Life looking a little…unsettling
Second Life
Fortnite has pretty much all the pieces it needs for its own version of Second Life.
With Party Royale, it has a combat-free hub where you can’t destroy anything and you just hang out playing minigames and attending events.
With Fortnite Creative, you have an infinite hub of user-generated content that could be used to populate expansions to that initial world.
Combine those two together, and what do you have? Really all the building blocks you need for a virtual world in the Unreal engine. How long until Epic starts letting players build their own houses in an expanding Party Royale zone? How long until creators can sell their custom works to other players, creating an in-game economy? My guess for both, not long.
Fortnite
Epic
Yes, the battle royale will likely remain the core of Fortnite for a long while to come, but we are treading familiar ground with these kinds of combat-free live events in the game, and between Second Life, The Sims Online, PlayStation Home, there is a market for this kind of thing that is going unfilled. Perhaps the Metaverse is too grand an idea to come to fruition within Fortnite in the next few years. But something more like Second Life? Now that I could see getting here sooner rather than later, especially the more of these Party Royale events I attend.
My opinion from the second life view is that as much as Fortnite is catching on The people of Second Life are happy with how things are and are most likely never going to want change as they are settled with how things are and fear change within Second Life most of the time. So will this be the NEXT platform for all of us to run to? We will see… I highly doubt it will ever replace Second Life. But maybe run alongside????
January 14 2020 is the ‘end of support’ date for Windows 7. The last ‘official’ day to get a free upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10 was July 29, 2016. Many of us chose to let that opportunity pass, for a variety of reasons. Maybe you saw no need to upgrade, maybe it was reports of bugs in the new OS, or perhaps you just got busy and missed the deadline. Or did you? Now, over three years later, there is still a path to upgrade your Windows 7 computer to Windows 10 for free. I tried it, and successfully upgraded a Windows 7 computer. Here’s the scoop…
Free Windows 10 Upgrades From Windows 7 or 8.1
You’ve probably heard that Windows 7 reaches “end of life” on 01/14/2020. That does NOT mean that your Windows 7 computer will stop working on January 15, 2020. It does mean that you won’t receive any further Windows security updates, and that’s a very good to say goodbye to this 10-year-old operating system.
So can you still get Windows 10 for free? Why yes, you can. Microsoft, by design or accident, has left open a path to a free, legitimate license of Windows 10 for users moving from Windows 7 or 8.1. (This assumes you have a legal, activated version of Windows now.) We’ll go over the steps, but there are a few preparations to make.
First, make a backup. It’s not likely, but when doing a major system upgrade, things can go wrong. Or you might not like the brave new world of Windows 10. A full image backup will give you the option to “turn back the clock” and restore your computer to the exact state it was in before the upgrade.
Next, temporarily disconnect any external storage devices, such as external hard drives or USB flash drives. You can plug them back in after the upgrade, but in some scenarios, having them connected can cause problems.
You can initiate the upgrade at the Download Windows 10 page on the Microsoft website. On that page is the Media Creation Tool, which you can use to install Windows 10 using a DVD or USB flash drive. Click the blue “Download tool now” button. When the download is complete, run the Windows 10 setup program and select the “Upgrade this PC now” option. Follow the instructions, and you’ll end up with Windows 10.
There’s no need to dig up your Windows license key, or pull out your credit card. After the upgrade, you can confirm that you have a valid digital license for Windows 10 by going to Settings > Update & Security > Activation.
As I mentioned earlier, I tried this method on a computer of mine that was still running Windows 7, and it worked fine. I did notice one minor glitch. One of my third-party programs didn’t work, but after installing the latest version of Bitvise SSH Client, all was well. I found that the Windows 10 interface was quite similar to Windows 7, and didn’t require much of a learning curve. And Windows 10 does have a boatload of security improvements, including ransomware protection.
This method of upgrading to Windows 10 for free does not seem to be an oversight by Microsoft, because it’s been available for three and a half years. However, it may stop working without notice. My belief is that Microsoft would be pleased if you paid $119 for your Windows 10 license, but they’ll be content to have you continue as a Windows user. That gives them the opportunity to sell you other services, such as Microsoft Office 365 or One Drive cloud storage.
Environment objects that you can keep in your inventory and share with others
Parcel-level control of environments
Up to four different, independently controlled sky layers
More options for customization
So for instance, you could use EEP to turn a sim into an entire space flight simulation, with daylight on the ground, and different looking layers of atmosphere (and then finally, deep space) the higher you go up. However, I’m not sure if many developers are still around to take on a project as ambitious as that. (Hope I’m wrong there.)
