they hear the phantom drummers and the nonexistent pipes

I've been suffering a lot of oddity with Emerald of late.



Usually it's much less visually stunning. Though this is rather impressive. More, it's been a steady stream of log in/crash/log in/nothing loads/quit/log in again. Over. And over. And over.

I'd accuse Emerald of having another bad patch, but...the same thing happens with Snowglobe. I think we've hit another bad-grid moment.

Blue Mars announces city price packages, according to Massively. They're competitive with Second Life in terms of cost; but they completely overpower SL for the amount of concurrent avatars allowed per region. SL not only won't match those figures, they technologically can't.

The down side of Blue Mars is still the technology of the end user required to get in. So that's still a drawback for most.

Concurrently, there's an entry on Dusan Writer's blog that decodes the Blue Mars terms of service. It all seems to boil down to no avatar "Bill of Rights", but the ability to identify who's made DMCA claims against you, if you get on that approved list of content creators in the game. Seems like two steps forward, one step back, so there's some gain at least.

MMORPG has released their holiday gift-giving guide for gamers (say that three times fast). It's a bit late for some celebrations, sort-of on time for others, but it'll all work out.

Tipped by Mr. Allen, who adores all things Disney, these images of an abandoned attraction. I don't know why these photographs haunt me so...maybe it's because Disney still retains that patch of land, but hasn't bothered to do anything with it, instead choosing to deliberately let it fall into ruin and disrepair.

The Artofblog fellow has challenged everyone to use his tips and take their blogs from zero to profitable in one week. And I considered it, I did, for three and a half seconds. And then I thought...no.

If anything's going to make me money via blogging, it's going to be taking the tips and tricks I've learned on writing to deadline, and writing constantly, and apply them back to fiction writing. Which I've been not doing since the move, and which I really should get back to, as in rightdamnnow.

After Yule, I'm going back to writing for at least one hour a day. Mandatory.

(We'll see how long that lasts.)

The Pixels and Policy blog covered several reasons behind business and Second Life just not quite meshing as a functional unit. One of the examples they used was IBM; they even have a picture, whose caption reads IBM's ambitious island: Now a ghost town.

Apparently they ignored the IBM-only landscape on the grid: the places where virtual meetings are held, the sandboxen where IBM employees try out virtual versions of their products, the companies that deal exclusively with high-level IBM corporate officers to design avatars for virtual boardrooms. They completely ignored the co-developed venture between IBM and Second Life that allows employees of IBM to train for RL jobs in SL.

Yeah. Some ghost town. What a tragic tale of failure...save for it's not. IBM still owns several sims, is involved deeply with the Lindens to ensure they understand what everything means, and encourages their employees to use the IBM-only SL spaces to converse, ask questions, meet, form focus groups, answer R&D difficulties, and stay in touch. How is this a failure? More to the point, if several islands--and it is several islands--are still held, bought and paid for, by IBM--where's the 'ghost town' aspect?

I guess you never see how active IBM is...unless you work for IBM. So much for researching their stories.