In-world celebration includes live music, performance and shopping events, exhibitions and major sweepstakes.
SAN FRANCISCO & NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Second Life – the leader in virtual worlds, metaverse innovations, and pioneer of virtual economies – announced today its 20th birthday celebration, also known as “SL20B,” beginning on June 22, 2023.
“residents” the opportunity to enhance and augment their physical lives by connecting them to thousands of engaging and vibrant virtual environments and communities. Since inception, more than 73 million accounts have been created in Second Life, with around 750K monthly active users. ”
Created in 2003 by Linden Lab founder Philip Rosedale, Second Life has evolved into one of the largest and most successful 3D virtual worlds, providing “residents” the opportunity to enhance and augment their physical lives by connecting them to thousands of engaging and vibrant virtual environments and communities. Since inception, more than 73 million accounts have been created in Second Life, with around 750K monthly active users.
Today, Second Life provides a safe space for its residents to express their authentic selves. A thriving economy exists in Second Life: tens of thousands of creators around the world profit from selling millions of virtual items and services on Second Life’s marketplace, with more than 1.6M transactions within Second Life every day.
“When we first shared Second Life with the world in 2003, we had one mission in mind: to create a positive, enriching experience for its residents. While others continue to try, no other company has come close to building a world like Second Life,” said Philip Rosedale, Founder of Second Life. “This would not be possible without the talented and endlessly inventive residents of Second Life, who have built communities dedicated to every conceivable interest. We’re excited for what is to come over the next 20 years as we continue to evolve, and we’re excited to welcome new generations to the world.”
Other in-world activities and events include:
Over 500 live performances including music and discussions
“Shop & Hop” – Second Life’s largest shopping event of the year with nearly 500 merchants and creators
Community exhibition spaces with over 300 exhibits and staffed by more than 200 resident volunteers
Global and National sweepstakes including a Chevrolet Bolt EV, high-end computers and Second Life Premium membership subscriptions.
Commemorative eZine/Guide and other limited-time products
World premiere Documentary video on Second Year’s first 20 years
And More
“We’re proud and humbled by how our hundreds of thousands of residents have created positive, supportive, and accepting communities within Second Life,” said Brad Oberwager, CEO and Executive Chairman of Second Life. “Our commitment to rewarding freedom of expression, as well as protecting customer privacy, has helped establish Second Life as a successful pioneer in virtual economies, cultures, and communities over the past twenty years, and has allowed us to create a virtual world in which user identification and information is protected and not monetized for advertisers. We look forward to continuing to be a leader in virtual world and metaverse innovations.”
Second Life recently announced plans to launch its first mobile application. Second Life also recently announced a partnership with Motown Records, the legendary record label, part of the Capitol Music Group, and STYNGR, the first music integration platform for gaming and the metaverse, to bring Motown’s music to the metaverse.
About Second Life
Second Life, developed and operated by Linden Research, Inc. (“Linden Lab”), is the groundbreaking virtual world enjoyed by millions around the globe. First launched in 2003, Second Life has since gone on to boast nearly two billion user creations and a vibrant $650 million USD economy. Founded in 1999, Linden Lab creates social platforms that empower people to create, share, and benefit from virtual experiences. To learn more, visit secondlife.com.
Have A Happy 20B Celebration From All Of Us At Zoha Islands/ Fruit Islands
From June 22nd to the 24th, go on an interstellar journey through sound and emotions, as the crème de la crème of Second Life’s live musicians set the SL20B Mandala Stage ablaze with spellbinding performances!
In the middle of Music Fest will also be a movie premiere! “Made in SL: The Movie” is a special long-form documentary for Second Life’s 20th anniversary, produced by Draxtor Despres and premiering on Friday, June 23rd at 12pm PT at the SL20B Arboretum. Watch the trailer at this link.
But wait, there’s more! Hold on to your (virtual) hats because the euphoria doesn’t wind down after Music Fest. The SL20B celebrations are set to reach stratospheric heights with a staggering 500+ performers ready to take over four majestic stages! This is not just a party; it’s a festival of boundless energy and musical marvels that promises to engulf your senses.
Do you use Google Calendar? If so, you can also add the Birthday Calendar directly to your own calendar by clicking here.
You can also watch the Second Life Public Calendar for all Linden Lab events and in the next few days, we’ll debut a dedicated Destination Guide category with many event highlights. Look out for entries that will start appearing in the SL20B Destination Guide category later this week and keep an eye on this blog for more information about SL20B coming soon!
Who needs the Metaverse? Meet the people still living on Second Life
Mark Zuckerberg’s grand vision for an online existence has been laughed off as a corporate folly. Meanwhile, those still existing happily on a virtual world launched 20 years ago may be wondering what all the fuss is about …
On 14 November 2006, 5,000 IBM employees assembled in a digital recreation of the 15th-century Chinese imperial palace known as the Forbidden City. They had come to hear IBM’s CEO, Sam Palmisano, deliver a speech. Palmisano’s physical body was in Beijing at the time, but he addressed most of his audience inside Second Life, the online social world that had launched three years earlier. Palmisano’s trim avatar wore tortoiseshell-frame glasses and a tailored pinstripe suit. He faced a crowd of digital, animated dolls dressed in the business attire of the day: black heels, pencil-line shirts, Windsor-knotted ties. Looming out of the throng at the back stood a 10ft IBM employee, his digital face plastered in Gene Simmons-style white makeup, with shoulder-length, Sonic-blue hair.
It was a historic moment, a journalist for Bloomberg reported at the time: Palmisano was “the first big-league CEO” to stage a company-wide meeting in Second Life – “the most popular of a handful of new-fangled 3D online virtual worlds”. IBM, just like any other denizen of Second Life, paid ground rent to own a “region” of the game, one region representing 6.5 hectares of digital turf, currently rented at $166 (£134) a month. Renters could build whatever they wanted on their turf.
The pitch proved attractive. While in cities like New York or London you might never own a flat, in Second Life you could design, build and inhabit a mansion. Institutions followed. Some used their space to stage art exhibitions and theatrical performances; others built kink palaces. The retail outlet American Apparel opened a virtual store on a private island called Lerappa – “Apparel” spelt backwards – selling costumes for avatars. The US universities MIT and Stanford established faculties in Second Life. Someone claiming to represent the far-right French National Front joined in (their HQ was the site of virtual clashes with anti-racism demonstrators in 2007). The world used its own currency – the Linden dollar, withdrawable into local currencies – to establish a global, user-to-user economy. Transactions and withdrawals were subject to a tiny fee, which contributed to the cost of server maintenance – a revolutionary, influential business model.
While Second Life’s world was viewed by many as rudimentary and its inhabitants eccentric, in hindsight it represented a bold, pioneering experiment, launched while Facebook was still a website for rating the attractiveness of Harvard students. It remains both the first and the most successful manifestation of a so-called metaverse, a compelling if somewhat imprecise term coined by American writer Neal Stephenson in his 1992 sci-fi novel Snow Crash. Definitions vary, but most experts agree the metaverse is, put simply, the internet made metropolis: an immersive, contiguous representation of data and the active user communities within. One might walk from, say, eBay marketplace to YouTube cineplex; or take a virtual Uber from the great library of Wikipedia to the twin towers of TikTok and Instagram. No need for a thousand logins and passwords: in this Internet World theme park, each of us could embody a single body and consistent identity.
An avatar of Mark Zuckerberg at a virtual Meta Connect event in 2022. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images
Second Life did not replace the internet in this way. And even at the height of its popularity in the late 2000s, it attracted only around a million monthly users – a fraction of the number enjoyed by some online video games (the makers of Fortnite claim a consistent 80 million) and far fewer than would be necessary to sustain a business such as, say, Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook. But the dream of a coordinated manifestation of websites and users, built on current technologies (VR headsets, blockchains, cryptocurrencies and all) and opening unprecedented opportunities to virtual landowners, marketers and advertisers, has persisted at the highest levels of corporate Silicon Valley, up to and including Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg first outlined his vision for the Metaverse, the “successor to the mobile internet”, in 2021. According to Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, the project would take a decade to revolutionise the way we browse the web. But less than two years and $36bn later, the project has stalled, with little to show for it. User numbers for Horizon Worlds – Meta’s first draft of an interconnected world entered via a VR headset – have steadily declined during the past year. According to internal documents, most visitors do not return after the first month and a feature to reward users who have created content within Horizon Worlds generated just $470 globally in revenue in its first year. Zuckerberg recently announced 21,000 redundancies and hinted that all Meta employees may soon be required to return to physical offices, a rather self-sabotaging policy at a company committed to erasing the distinction between the physical and digital. As it sheds employees and investor focus impatiently shifts to the get-richer-quicker possibilities of generative AI, the vision fades. Almost everynational newspaper has run a variation on the article: “Whatever happened to the metaverse?”
Yet Second Life – and its more modest vision of an Internet World – persists. This month it celebrates its 20th anniversary; a mobile version is set for release this year and its developer, Linden Lab, estimates the virtual world’s GDP to be $650m. According to the company, around 185m items are sold each year in the Second Life marketplace, with an average cost of $2 each, and 1.6m transactions – also including tipping, services, currency trades – occur every day. During the pandemic, new registrations soared, with close to a million visitors logging in each month and some building viable businesses trading in virtual goods and services. This is nothing close to the world-conquering figures Zuckerberg would need to justify his sunk costs, but Second Life has nonetheless endured as a profitable and, crucially, populated metaverse.
And while the world’s largest tech companies continue to seek ways to more intrusively monitor and monetise our online lives, the metaverse idea is unlikely ever to disappear.
Second Life’s creator, Philip Rosedale, claims his vision of an accessible digital utopia long predates Stephenson’s invention of the word “metaverse”. As a child, Rosedale – who, having left Linden Lab in 2010, returned in January 2022 as a strategic adviser – built go-karts and gadgets. He installed a parabolic antenna on the roof of his parents’ house which he could angle to eavesdrop on friends’ conversations down the street.
Rosedale – who, at 54, still has the appearance of a boy-genius inventor, with colourful glasses and a cartoonish floppy shock of grey hair – was also a dreamer. “I had dreams in which I imagined myself building in space, wearing a spacesuit, using tools I had on my belt to make walls appear and move surfaces around,” he recalls, speaking over Zoom from Linden Lab’s office in San Francisco. “I could build great architectural structures in space. But the idea in my mind was always that was something you could do inside the computer.”
‘I figured everybody would want one’: an avatar of Second Life creator Philip Rosedale …
… and the real thing at SXSW 2022. Photographs: Getty Images for SXSW; Second Life/Linden Lab
Rosedale read both science and science fiction: Stephen Wolfram’s work on cellular automata in Scientific American, Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End, William Gibson’s Neuromancer. “I became fascinated by this idea of creating a world that had some simple, low-level rules, but that would become alive from these elemental basics, you know, like a real world does.” When, in 1992, his wife bought him a copy of Snow Crash, she told him: “You’re going to love this: a science fiction book about that thing you’re always working on.”
Two years later Rosedale moved to San Francisco. “The first thing I wanted to do, of course, was use the internet to create a giant pool of server machines to simulate an immense world,” he says. “But even I was not crazy enough to try to do that in the early 90s, when the internet was still incredibly slow and computers were unable to properly render worlds in 3D.” By the time Rosedale founded Linden Lab at the turn of the century, he felt the technology was nearly ready.
Persistent online video game worlds were becoming commonplace (World of Warcraft, the most famous, launched a year after Second Life). While he wanted visitors to stake plots of virtual land and build virtual homes, Rosedale was determined Second Life would not become a video game filled with quests and errands. He wanted the creativity to be user generated, not prescribed – a place, perhaps, where people might try out new identities, proclivities and modes of escapism.
Still, Rosedale kept a close eye on video games, which provided the inspiration for Second Life’s burgeoning economy. “EverQuest, which was a well-known online game before World of Warcraft, had an economy,” he says. “There was a common meeting area people used as a marketplace, where they would cry their wares in text. That was one reason I was convinced we’d need to use an open economy, because it would allow for very complex outcomes.” A marketplace, he reasoned, would provide incentive for users to “build weird things”, then sell them to each other. “I tried to not get in the way of people being their own creators of narrative and content.”
On Second Life’s launch in 2003, Rosedale’s plans to pay for the project were unsophisticated. Initially, Linden Lab charged visitors a “basic access” fee of $9.95, with monthly premium subscriptions of $9.95 thereafter (or $6 if paid annually). After a year, the company switched to a real-estate model. Anyone could visit for free, but those who wanted to own and shape pieces of the world had to pay. Land renters could do anything they wanted with their patch: erect a billboard, build a skyscraper, dig a mine, even run a company. “That turned out to be a great business model,” Rosedale says. “The people buying land were happy to pay for it because they were hosting other things on it, often to make money.” Some opened stores filled with digital outfits; others became estate agents, selling or renting land in desirable locations. In 2006, BusinessWeek featured the first Second Life millionaire on its cover.
Linden Lab won’t provide a breakdown of its current revenue, but Second Life generates income from several sources in its virtual economy: land sales, maintenance, fees on certain transactions, premium subscriptions. The remainder comes from tiny fees added to every transaction made or by any user attempting to cash out. “These are typically single-digit percentages,” says Rosedale, who points out that Second Life has higher revenues-per-user than YouTube or Facebook, yet does not rely on advertising driven by behavioural targeting and surveillance, which he describes as deeply unethical practices the public would never accept in the physical world.
It’s unclear, Rosedale says, which corporate interest first acquired land in Second Life: “People just use their credit cards, you know. It’s direct-to-consumer.” He remembers the first noteworthy acquisition, however. “We auctioned off an island.” A London-based marketing and content development company, Rivers Run Red, bought it for an estimated $1,600. “At the time it seemed like a lot,” Rosedale recalls. “And I remember when people found out it was a real company, they were, like, super pissed. Everyone was up in arms.” (In 2008 Rivers Run Red partnered with Linden Lab to launch Immersive Workspaces 2.0, virtual meeting rooms in Second Life that could be tailored to the specific needs of a client – an idea that now seems eerily prescient, and another key area of interest for Zuckerberg’s Meta.)
The idea of encouraging real-world businesses to set up in the metaverse, turning their webstores into polygonal buildings, seems key to Zuckerburg’s vision today, too. Meta’s ecstatic 2022 Super Bowl ad featured a mascot dog, forced into redundancy by a restaurant closure, suddenly able to reunite with former colleagues in the Metaverse, a virtual high street on which his former place of work had been miraculously reopened. The message seemed to be that, as the real world becomes ever bleaker and more disconnected, a new digital world, accessed via VR headsets, offers a place to reconnect with old friends and restore bankrupt businesses.
Yet for every true believer there are 50 detractors for whom every metaverse is a joke, or at least a solution looking for a problem.
To people of my age – “digital natives” who grew up at the same time as the internet – Second Life was a punchline: World of Warcraft but with terrible graphics and no purpose. Why would you want to hang out there, laying white picket fences with bald men pretending to be furries (there are 18,000 items for sale in Second Life stores under the tag “Furry”), when you could be rampaging across the hills of Azeroth, broadsword held aloft, on a mission to take down a giant cave troll?
Unlike the vast, interconnected video games of the time, with their arcane rules and Dungeons & Dragons-esque aromas, Second Life was beloved by mainstream journalists who could more easily communicate its appeal – and report human, sometimes salacious stories – to a non-game-playing audience. Even completely offline people could understand the Daily Mail headline: “Mom-of-four dumps husband for pole dancer she met in online game Second Life”. Nobody at the time referred to Second Life as a metaverse; it was just another online space in which slightly nerdy misfits found community – albeit one that, via its crude graphical representations, made the usual sexual frisson found in online spaces manifest via explicit digital representations.
Second Life has never quite shrugged off that slightly seedy, tragic association. Yet during lockdown, when many people craved social connection, visitor numbers began to grow again. Wagner James Au worked for three years as a journalist embedded in the virtual world and has written a book, Making a Metaverse That Matters, charting Second Life’s rise and fall and rise. According to him, today the population skews middle-aged and around 20% of users have a disability that makes real-world interaction difficult.
Furry wrestlers …
… shoppers …
… and friends hanging out. Photographs: Second Life/Linden Lab
While other projects have shrunk and closed, Au believes Second Life has endured because of its capacity to facilitate human creativity. “The power and freedom of its creation tools encourages sub-communities to grow, thrive and adhere in the virtual world,” he says. Neither is it seen as a rip-off: “Strong and fair creator economies are rare among metaverse platforms. But Second Life creators earn roughly as much as Linden Lab.”
Most people first join Second Life out of curiosity or boredom, but the reasons for staying are as numerous as the residents, as Fabrizio Laceiras (known as Aufwie) tells me. A musician based in Birmingham, Aufwie, 26, first visited Second Life aged 12. After experiencing bullying at school, he found it hard to make friends and socialise. “Second Life offered a safe environment in which I could be social on my own terms,” he says. Music was his chosen icebreaker. “I would just pop by some virtual land that allowed microphone usage and start playing guitar and singing until someone approached, and we’d start talking.” Often Aufwie’s performances drew a small crowd, so a friend encouraged him to play a proper concert, building a small stage on her land where he could perform. The pair chose a date and time, and distributed leaflets beforehand. When 50 people turned up, Aufwie’s PC struggled to render the throng on screen: “I was forced to log out momentarily, which gave me a bit of time to process what was happening.”
Then, during the pandemic lock downs, Aufwie attended a Second Life concert staged by another user, known as Skye Galaxy, that inspired him to professionalize. He has now played at least 300 concerts in Second Life, and continues to receive bookings from users all around the world to play at their virtual events.
While the rise in new Second Life users has tailed off since lock down, it remains the largest non-video game virtual space predominantly populated by adults. Still, it never quite grew to the scale Rosedale had once believed inevitable. In 2006, he said of Second Life, in a quote that became infamous: “We see it as a platform that is, in many ways, better than the real world.”
There are many long-term users of Second Life who, to one degree or another, agree with the statement. For over a decade, one YouTuber, Draxtor, has recorded the stories of Second Life creators who choose to spend much of their day inside the virtual world, where they can find social connection or physical freedoms unavailable to them in the physical realm. Others, such as Erik Mondrian, a former graduate student at CalArts, have found in Second Life a place for self-expression. Mondrian created a series of elegiac films of Second Life structures and locations accompanied by poetic readings, part of a long tradition of artworks created within and around the virtual world. He remembers the date he made an account: 23 March 2005. He picked his real first name and chose “Mondrian” after his favorite artist, from a drop-down list of options. (In 2017, he tells me, he had his name legally changed to Erik Mondrian.)
In the 18 years since he first made an account, he has drifted in and out of Second Life. “Two things kept me coming back, even after the occasional extended absence,” he says. “One was the people, the other the world; I have a strong fascination for place in all its forms, and I wanted to see more of the amazing virtual spaces people had made and continue to make here.”
Today, Rosedale admits he was naive to believe Second Life would become ubiquitous. “Of course, I shouted it from the rooftops, I was so youthfully excited with what was happening,” he says. “I figured everybody would want to have an avatar and that we would all spend a fraction of our lives in something like Second Life, or hopefully Second Life, for the purpose of doing an interview like this, or shopping, or hanging out with people or just having fun. We would wander and explore the world together. In retrospect, that didn’t happen.”
In part, this is because Rosedale overestimated the difficulty some people have with embodying an on-screen avatar. “I had a utopian belief that most people would be comfortable moving their objective selves into a digital reality,” he says. “That turned out to not be the case. Most choose to identify with only one embodied representation of themselves, and that is their physical body. The difficulty of sustaining a second identity is considerable and the number of people willing to do that is smaller than I thought in 2006. So I don’t think metaverses are going to be able to grow in a way that, for example, would sustain Facebook’s business enough for them to survive. They would need a good part of a billion people doing this.”
Second Life virtual events …
… include music and dance in Peak Lounge …
… and gigs like this, by Skye Galaxy. Photographs: Second Life/Linden Lab
More positively, Rosedale says he was heartened to see how Second Life users predominantly get along. “It’s not divisive, or polarising,” he says. “Obviously I’m biased, but there is a lot of independent research to back this up. Second Life delivers on the dream that a lot of us had about the internet at the beginning, which was that it would be this civil, interesting, thoughtful place where people would, if anything, overcome differences between themselves and find new ground.”
This is where, he argues, the idea of a virtual world built in 3D space offers non-gimmicky advantages over a traditional social network. “In a virtual world you actually have neighbors,” he says. “And they have different personalities and come from different backgrounds, so what happens is people are forced to frequently interact with people who are different from them.” Compared with a Facebook group, which gathers like-minded individuals and encourages self-polarizing, Second Life forces interaction with a variety of users.
If it seems as though Rosedale has essentially invented the revolutionary concept of “a village”, he is quick to point out the virtue of virtuality is that there is no threat of physical altercation in disputes; this can encourage a bottom-up civility, easing the burden on traditional top-down moderation techniques deployed by the social media giants. “If somebody’s having an extremist gathering in Second Life, other people are going to wander by and challenge that, because it is occurring in the same physical space. That is a lot healthier than what we’ve seen with the echo chambers and hard boundaries of social media.”
Second Life, to Rosedale, affirms the essential virtues of humanity. “The fact is, most of us almost all of the time are good,” he says. “We’re social, we’re collaborative. Our primary reason for interacting with each other, even with strangers, is to help them. So it’s appalling to me that, via business motivation, we’ve actually managed to create these social media terrariums which manipulate people into being bad to each other, when it’s not their instinct.”
Rosedale believes a ubiquitous metaverse, whether it’s made by Zuckerberg or someone else, has the chance to be a kinder, less invasive online environment. But he fears that most of the companies working on such a project have missed one essential component of lasting success: the fact that people are as much creators as they are consumers. “There isn’t as yet any evidence that people want to have a purely consumptive entertainment experience in social virtual worlds,” he says. “I don’t think there’s any evidence in human history that you can get a billion people to just kind of sit there and veg out, watch stuff. You can’t get to the kind of usage levels that metaverse brands want to get to with a consumer non-participatory experience.”
In Snow Crash, the allure of the metaverse is inextricably linked to the climate crisis. As the real world inside the novel becomes less habitable, human beings retreat further into virtual spaces that allow for increased shelter from heatwaves and biblical floods, combined with greater degrees of exploratory freedom that do not rely on air travel. Yet a valid criticism of virtual worlds is that they draw human focus away from the social and environmental issues that threaten the planet. These comforting playpens are not, critics say, so much a solution as a contributing factor.
Here, Rosedale appears to endorse Meta’s vision for a world of VR meetings. “One of the largest problems around our impact on the environment is travel. When metaverse technology gets to the point where you and I could have had this meeting as avatars, there is a tremendous positive impact on that.” Likewise, if we begin to express our tastes in the digital realm more than the physical one, the cost of creating and “shipping” virtual goods would be negligible. “If you just stay in your room from now on and only use your computer, your carbon footprint is enormously lower than what it would be if you got up out of your chair,” Rosedale says. “I get really mad when people complain and say Second Life avatars take up energy. Sure they do. But they take up, like, 1% of the energy that you do.”
Rosedale’s suggestion that it is, by some metrics at least, preferable for human beings to predominantly live in a digital realm is an idea shared by investors eager to extract capital from digital real estate (which is, for now, far cheaper to buy than real real estate). Whatever the motivation, the quest to build a ubiquitous virtual world with rentable plots and a functioning economy will remain a persistent goal, even if Facebook’s failed efforts demonstrate its expense and elusiveness.
Second Life’s endurance demonstrates that, whatever the configuration, a metaverse’s success can only be founded on human qualities of social interaction and self-expression. “I obviously don’t feel as excited now as when I started roaming around Second Life,” Aufwie says. “But I still feel gratitude towards this apparently everlasting pioneering metaverse that allowed me to express myself, make friends, learn and share thoughts and all the good things humanity has within it.”
Have The Best Week From All Of Us At Zoha Islands / Fruit Islands
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Teal Aurelia offers a powerful reminder of why Pride month exists. On Monday, Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni signed an anti-gay law that makes it a capital crime. Before anyone thinks Uganda is particularly backwards, this is the work of American evangelist Scott Lively. There is a new moral panic overtaking the real world, filled with fear of gay and trans people. Moral panics do not last forever, but they do incalculable harm while they hold sway.
The publisher, Linden Lab, promotes LGBT friendly communities in their Destination Guide. This is a corporate signal that the community is welcome and integral to Second Life, not an underground culture, but community embraced by the company. In search there are 694 places that identify themselves with trans in their keywords. There are also over 500 results for groups. (Though a few of those are unrelated to gender, such as one called the Trans-Siberian Orchestra.) This indicates a lively, vibrant trans community in Second Life.
One of the groups is for the Transgender Resource Center which has a in-world gathering place where they have discussions on topics in the news and have call-boards telling visitors who is online at the moment to offer help. Their Facebook page is accessible whether you use Facebook or not. They also have a secure Discord group where there are always people to talk to.
Many if not most virtual worlds have similar communities. Hamlet recently shared a survey of the VRChat community, suggesting that nearly 1 in 5 VRChat users are Trans/non-binary, or otherwise outside traditional cis male/female categories.
For more virtual world pics celebrating the beginning of Pride month, click on:
Disa Asylum’s Happy Pride 2023 is an annual celebration for her. I love her Gay Agenda. I sometimes think the “gay agenda” is too simple so people need to invent conspiracies and complications. We can’t really believe that people simply want to be treated the same as everyone else. There has to be more. So people project what they might seek if they were seeking power.
Naraelina Ordinary also wishes all Happy Pride. Her tee says “Gay and Tired” which seems a perfect expression of LGBTIQA people who are sick and tired of the backlash and the moral panic over the gay agenda. If a scary gay agenda existed, the very successful gay rights organization Freedom to Marry would not have shut down after the gay marriage decision. They would have identified another demand. They didn’t because the only gay agenda is staying alive while living their authentic lives.
Pride is a month-long event, so I hope there will be even more Pride photos this month. If you do one you want me to see and possibly feature, tag me or give it the hashtag #SLPride
Suggest images and Flickr feeds to Cajsa: Cajsa’s Choices is devoted to unique, artistic, and innovative virtual world-based images and screenshots that showcase the medium as an art form and Second Life as a creative platform. (Generally not images that fit on this Bingo card.) To recommend the best in virtual world imagery, tag the picture with #CasjaNWN or tag Cajsa Lilliehook by adding her to the photo.
Cajsa Lilliehook is a sixteen year resident of Second Life, where she owned a photo studio, spent several years as a DJ at The Velvet, and for her first SL job, cleaned up prim trash. She co-founded and runs the It’s Only Fashion blog with her best friend Gidge Uriza. She also has a book review blog, Tonstant Weader Reviews and a cooking blog, Single Serving Recipes. She spends a lot of time researching and reporting on Republican sexual predators. In her first life, she is a retired grassroots leader who has worked for economic and social justice issues most of her life. She is also the minion of a cat named Nora.
Have A Great Week From All Of Us At Zoha Islands/Fruit Islands
Second Life: Win 32-bit support ending MacOS system requirements updating
via Linden Lab
In keeping with statements made in recent user group meetings, Linden Lab has announced changes to the the Second Life minimum system requirements for both Windows and Apple MacOS operating systems which are to take effect from Saturday, July 1st, 2023. Specifically, from that point onward, Linden Lab / Second Life will no longer support:
The 32-bit version of the Windows operating system.
Any version of MacOS below 10.13 High Sierra.
Available stats for Windows suggests that the percentage of users running the 32-bit version is in the low single-digit numbers by percentage – and many who are running it do so on hardware capable of supporting the 64-bit version. The stats for MacOS version below 1013 are less clear, but High Sierra has been generally available since 2017.
With these changes it is further noted that:
Users running the viewer on the 32-bit Windows will still be able to access Second Life after July 1st, 2023 – however, they will not be supported by the Lab’s support teams if they have viewer difficulties.
User on versions of the MacOS preceding 10.13 will need to upgrade their operating system to a newer version to access future Second Life viewer updates.
The steps are being taken to allow the Lab to focus on stability, performance and maintaining compatibility with the most up-to-date technologies, as well as viewer security considerations.
To help those users either running Windows 32-bit or an older version of MacOS maintain parity with the SL minimum system requirements from July 1st, 2023 onwards, the Lab provides the following advice:
Second Life 32-bit Windows Viewer Users:
Ensure your computer meets the system requirements for the 64-bit Viewer.
Back up your preferences and settings before making the transition.
Download and install the 64-bit version of the Second Life Viewer.
MacOS Users Older than 10.13:
Check the Apple support website for information on upgrading your operating system.
Upgrade to a supported version of MacOS that meets Second Life’s minimum requirements.
Before upgrading, backup your important files and make sure your system is compatible with the newer version of MacOS.
For full details on the changes, please refer to the official blog post. Concerns / feedback should directed to Linden Lab, as I am unable to address support issues.
Have A Great Week From All Of Us At Zoha Islands/Fruit Islands
