One of the most popular posts I did in 2008 was my end of the year list of the 10 best places I visited during the year. Most of those 10 made the list due to the magnificent scenery that can be found. While this years list has a few outstanding scenery locales, I also picked out a few that are outstanding in other ways. If you want to see these in person, you might want to hurry, two of the places I considered for this list are gone.

On a web page I wrote about the history of computer animation, I charted how the industry went from cutting edge to mainstream in about a decade, wearing off the novelty, but still producing quality from time to time. I believe that is the present state of SL today.

I made an unusual change to the Date Simulator, it has been on the online version for a while, thought I’d release the changes to the offline version.

November is best known for Thanksgiving, but Veterans Day is celebrated on November 11th, the anniversary of the end of World War 1. Which is a good lead into one of the best educational sims I have ever seen The First World War Poetry Digital Archive (More Pictures – Link to website) built by a group from Oxford University.

I have played a few MMORPGs, but this is my first PC-RPG and it is quite the experience. There are advantages to desktop RPGs that you don’t get online.

I’ve been having some ongoing issues with godaddy hosting, I believe the server is falsely reporting too much traffic or too many connections. I’ve set up a mirror blog at http://arianeb.wordpress.com I have not decided if the move will be permanent, or if I should maintain two mirrors, or if I should just move to [...]

Three other blog posts generated a fair amount of feedback over at SL Universe this week. My response to all three was decidedly negative. Even though these three seperate issues have little to do with one another, they all deny the whole vision and purpose of Second Life as if they are a part of a concerted effort to turn SL into something it is not. Have we lost the vision of what SL is supposed to be?

What if you built an awesome 3D Virtual World and nobody came? That seems to be the question facing the makers of a 3D virtual world that I recently discovered.

With the popularity of IMVU now matching Second Life levels, I decided to check IMVU out again after a 4 year absence. I signed up after IMVU went open beta, and was the 814th person to do so. In those days IMVU was Instant Messenger Viewer Utility. It was a tool that you add to any [...]

The video above is not Google Earth, or Microsoft Virtual Earth. It is a creation of five guys in Britain led by Michael Fotoohi of Micazook.com. They have an ambitious plan of creating the entire planet in 3D navigable by avatars as seen in the video. They use freely available aerial photography and digital street maps to create their world. They are hoping to make a combination of Google Earth, Second Life, and Wikipedia.

IMVU is easily the highest populated, thanks to an aggressive advertising campaign. But, the Second Life economy is about 20 times bigger. Oddly the activity and peak traffic statistics are very similar, so there is no clear winner based on popularity.

Some strange things in SL news this week.

First up, Second Life has been interested in working with third party partners for a while now, that is no secret. This week it was discovered what they were doing with these partners.

I normally don’t do exploring posts so close together, but its been a slow news month, so why not another? For this one the theme is real life architecture from Europe recreated with care in Second Life. I found three dedicated reproductions both inside and out of famous buildings.

I like doing these themed exploration posts. Most of the time I have two similarly themed regions, then seek out a third to round out the post. Every now and then I find three regions that kind of go together, but not in a simple to explain way. These three are organic, semi fantasy, semi historical, mostly outdoors shopping regions. The term “Old World” is not literally accurate, but conveys the spirit of these three regions.

The fun part of staying ahead of the curve with music, is finding a song before it becomes a huge hit. Here are two songs that deserve to be huge hits, but have yet to really catch on.

There has been a fair amount of drama on the whole adult continent Zindra front. The move of all adult content to a new continent has brought land speculators, complaints, AR griefing, and other nonsense. Time to take a second look.

For the past year or so, I have been scouring the web for cool new music. Top 40 pop music bores me, especially American pop. It all sounds kind of the same.

Over a year ago, I went around the world in Second Life builds and noted the lack of builds based in Africa. I did find one decent one at the time, but felt annoyed that there were not more. It is the second biggest continent after all. Since then some new one have been built. I tracked them down and thought I’d share.

This week, two of the more successful creators in Second Life filed a class action suit against Linden Labs due to lost business resulting from other players copying their items and selling them as their own.

Between WMC, and websites like Hulu and streaming video on network sites (cbs.com, abc.com, etc.), and pay for TV like iTunes, Amazon, and Netflix, I do not miss anything I want to see, despite the lack of cable or Satellite. The problem is, none of this can be seen on my TV, just my computer.

This is what Blue Mars really is: A gaming portal with common avatars. It is not a good place to start a designer business like Second Life is, it is not a good place to become a merchant or build your dream house or hold meetings. Blue Mars is designed to be a place to build 3D games and get other players to come check out your games.

I decided I have done enough tweaking and released Dating Sim 6.0 as a download. I was going to release it as 5.9 and then have 6.0 be the “bug free” version of 5.9, but being bug free is likely an impossibility anyways.

The makers of Blue Mars seem to have taken an off the shelf graphics engine, an off the shelf gaming engine, and off the shelf avatars, put them all together in hopes of being the next Second Life. What we get is incredible graphics, weak gaming, and nice but uninteresting avatars mashed together with little common purpose or interaction.

I recently stumbled on to a few stores that were far more interesting as places to explore than as places to shop, and being the 3D adventurer, it makes me want to shop at these places more.

Two of the games I spend a lot of time on both announced major upgrades.

Due to the nature of this blog and site, I just had to post this video, even though it has been posted all over the place.

Due to the nature of this blog and site, I just had to post this video, even though it has been posted all over the place.

Most people that play Second Life, run into this problem eventually: You want to build stuff, and cant afford a lot of land, so you go to a sand box region, and when you go, its laggy and overcrowded. Why is it even necessary to build stuff in world anyways? We can make our own textures [...]

Hate to be the person that disagrees with pretty much everybody on this issue, but maybe I’m the only one who sees the big picture. Builderbot is an awesome idea and a key component to expansion of the 3D web. It is probably the most important 3rd party SL utility ever, and if Rezzable doesn’t release theirs, someone out there should release something similar, including the ignoring copy permissions and ownership part. (click title to continue)

I try to do an exploring post at least once a month, and it has been a while. Checking my “in box” of places to blog about, I find a few incredible fantasy builds I have neglected to mention, so lets get exploring.

40 years ago this week, Apollo 11 blasted off from Cape Kennedy on its way to being the first manned space ship to land on the moon. In honor of this anniversary, I thought I’d find a way to recreate the mission in Second Life. Well the first stop in our voyage is of course the [...]

Just read an announcement that Doppelganger inc. is closing the teen oriented 3D virtual world vSide a week from today. (click title for more)

Just read an announcement that Doppelganger inc. is closing the teen oriented 3D virtual world vSide a week from today. Its sister 3DVW “Virtual Lower East Side” was still in beta when it was “temporarily closed for updating” about a year ago and never re-opened due to pulled sponsorship from MTV which also closed Virtual [...]

If you have an Nvidia card designed for DirectX 10 (8800 or better Windows Vista), and you update to the latest drivers released June 19,2009, you might find something new in the NVIDEA Command Center: Stereoscopic 3D glasses support. (click title to continue)

In the past 24 hours this blog post has been circulating throughout the Second Life blogosphere. As I am sometime inclined to do, I decided to do some investigation to determine how real this is or how much of it is bullshit. Yes there is some truth to this, but it may never happen either. (click title for more)

Second Life finally opened the “Adult” rated continent to public access. There is no privately owned land or building yet, but there is some new construction courtesy of Linden Labs. I decided to check it out before the place gets crowded with who knows what kind of places. (click title to continue)

Second Life finally opened the “Adult” rated continent to public access. There is no privately owned land or building yet, but there is some new construction courtesy of Linden Labs. I decided to check it out before the place gets crowded with who knows what kind of places. (click title to continue)

Various random notes from the Metaverse. (click title to continue.)

In lieu of a real original post (taking a short break), here are some other blog posts and form topics worth a look see.

I’ve been tinkering around with the dating simulator again, making some improvements to the backyard activities, especially the swimming activity, which has not been changed much since version 1.0. I’ve had the idea for some time of doing some underwater stuff, and experimented a little with that while making version 5.5. In that instance I created a corner of the pool in Second Life, taking advantage of SL’s full camera control and water effects. (click title to continue…)

One of the first posts on this blog was about the future of the internet, and the likely decline of the “Golden Age of the Internet” to quote John Dvorak. My older post was about government and lawsuits causing a decline in online freedoms.  The freedom of the Internet seems to be on the decline [...]

This past week NCSoft celebrated the 5th anniversary of City of Heroes/Villains, Lineage II, and Guild Wars by holding some events and allowing old players to come back for a whirl. I have played all three at one time or another, I decided to focus the free time on City of Heroes. (click title to read more)

The new 3D virtual world Free Realms by Sony, launches today! So I thought I’d post a review.

Free Realms is sort of a hybrid program. It is kind of like a virtual world, kind of like an MMORPG, and kind of like an online game portal. “Kind of like” gets used a lot in explaining Free Realms. (Click title for more)

Time to do another exploring post. Today’s theme is “Visions of the Future”. Lets start with the dark dystopian future. This is a very popular theme in Second Life including all the “Cyberpunk” role play sims. (Click title to continue)

Generally speaking I do not do movie or TV reviews on this blog, but Caprica is a sci-fi story that hits many themes I tend to hit on this blog.

For Battlestar Galactica fans, it is the story about the creation of the first Cylons. For Virtual World fans there is a deep plot involving virtual reality, its nature and practical uses. (click title for more)

This is a detailed follow up to my earlier “comic” post about Open Sim. The Paradigm:  The Open Grid For those who do not know, Open Sim is an open source clone of Second Life. The Second Life download client, itself an open source program, can connect to an Open Sim almost as easy as it can [...]

This month I celebrate my 5th year in Second Life. My friend Torment Thorn is also celebrating her 5th this yearand was throwing a party so I decided to attend and have it count as mine too. Didn’t feel like organizing my own party. (click title for more)

There is a lot to say about the Open Sim paradigm, and I’ll be covering it in future posts. For now, I’ll just say it is very early and there is a lot of work still to be done. Right now all it is is a poor substitute for Second Life, but I think it [...]

I want to discuss the truly silly but strangely popular idea that if we could access a 3DVW from a web browser it would be a huge hit, and finally bring 3DVW programs to the masses. (click title for more)

Recently the New York Times did a fascinating article on new mediums of art on the web that included Second Life. Most of us have known for some time that Second Life is a great medium for art, and it is nice to see some outside recognition of that fact. (click title for more)

The Kaaos Effect is a cool in world time travel adventure game built in Second Life. The starting point is here, there is a players guide here, and a way to track players progress here. (click title for more)

Second Life is falling off the mainstream radar, ironically Linden Labs is making a potentially hazardous move to try to become more mainstream. I have to ask: Is the party over in SL? (click title for more)

Last year I mentioned the Dublin build at least 3 times. With St. Patrick’s Day coming up, I thought I’d see what other Irish builds I could find. (click title to continue)

Back with a much anticipated Dating Sim update. I released version 5.0 of the dating simulator a year ago, and thought it would be fun to do an update release. (click title for more)

I recently launched Google Earth only to be told I need to upgrade to version 5, so I did. I reported in December that the southern half of Manhattan was converted to 3D. Well playing with version 5 a ton of other cities have been converted to 3D as well. Check out the above Washington DC. Still a lot of missing texture maps, but a lot of buildings appear in exquisite detail. The columns of the Capital building are 3D columns. (click title for more)

It is very rare that I get to be the first to blog about a new region build in Second Life, expecially one as nice as Armada Breakaway a new Role Play region based loosely on the novel The Scar by China Melville. For those not familiar with the novel, it and the region may be broadly categorized as “Pirate” or “Steampunk” or more broadly 19th Century Victorian with a seafaring theme. (click title for more info)

I have listed on my website something like 25 active 3D virtual worlds. Of these 25, how many have really great avatars? The answer is zero. I’ll tell you what a really great avatar is. Its an avatar that looks like PS3 Home’s avatars, behave like There.com’s avatars, and is as versatile and adaptable as Second Life’s avatars. Not one 3D Virtual world fits all 3 bills, especially Home, There, and SL. (click title for more)

There.com’s sister 3DVW Virtual MTV is closing its doors. Here’s a portion of the note posted at There: (click title to read more)

So in my last post, I visited some Japan regions, this time I thought I’d cross the sea into China, which I did not really do very well in my around the world adventures last year. China is all over the place in Second Life, here are some great Chinese builds. (click title to continue)

After circling the globe last year I occasionally ran into new “mirror worlds” worth blogging about. I thought I’d save them up and blog about specific regions and countries as they come up. Today is Japan. (Click Title for More)

This is the third “opinion” essay on the imminent shake up of 3D Virtual Worlds, separating myth from reality. Today’s focus: Infrastructure realities and their effect on marketing.

Why are amusement park rides in Second Life just not that interesting? My friend Rebecca has a theory, “Second Life rides are not that interesting, because Second Life is itself just an amusement park ride.  In the game, you are in full control of what you see and where you go. In-game rides take that control [...]

Two things are certain today: Virtual worlds are growing in popularity, and the economy is shrinking. I think it is a safe bet to say that virtual worlds will not save the economy, but unfortunately a bad economy might be very destructive to virtual worlds. (click title for more)

Abstract: The creation of a scale map of Second Life, There, World of Warcraft, and Oahu (Click Title for More)

So one of the oldest but least successful MMO providers Worlds.com filed for patents of their 3D online technology back in 1995 and were awarded the patent finally in 2007. During those intervening 12 years a multi billion dollar MMO industry has grown. They filed suit against NCSoft, one of the most successful MMO providers, for patent infringement. (Click Title to Read More)

In the not too distant future (five years tops) web apps will be available to scan the internet and create a custom video newscast just for you. Anyways, I thought I’d illustrate the idea web comic style. (click title for more)

So here is the final five. In case you have not noticed, I had a little fun in taking new screenshots for each place, coming up with a different wardrobe, hairstyle and animation pose for each location. (Click title for more)

This past year, I have been busy checking out as much of the whole SL scene as I could, exploring mirror worlds from around the world, and fantasy worlds from many genre’s. I have blogged about over 100 different places in the past year. I thought it would be fun to revisit many of these and force myself to choose 10 I liked the most.

Just when I thought Google was getting out of the 3D business, they go and do this. They have basically digitized all of Manhattan for Google Earth. (click title for more)

Time for another visit from activities expert Rebecca, who after reading my Winter Places post below decided to educate me some other winter sports activities in SL. (click title to read more)

So the voters have spoken and have elected my friend Bone Mosten as the sexiest male avatar in SL. (click title for more…)

I recently set up a modest home theater system consisting of the following components: An Apple TV and an HDTV. Going through the offerings on Apple TV, it occurred to me that this is the future of entertainment! (Click title for more)

It’s December (in case you don’t know) and that means winter fun. I thought it would be a good time to explore the best wintery places in SL. Here are four of my favorites. (click title for more)

So I’m back with SL activities expert Rebecca, who last time taught me how to surf. We are meeting on the SL region of Nantucket located in the middle of a group of islands collectively known as New England. (click title for more)

So I decided to follow up the kind of negative post about Lively with something more positive. There have been a few small positive news stories on the 3D Virtual World front: (click title for more)

So last night, the Google blog announced the end of Google Lively. This may rank as the shortest lived 3D virtual world ever, less than 6 months. (click title for more)

When I first joined Second Life, one of the first “WTF?” moments was encountering a large dragon made of round prims that was scripted to turn its head and eyes toward you. (more)

Congratulations, if you are seeing this, you are seeing the new blog. I moved from Serendipity blog software to Wordpress. Still have not settled on a theme, but this generic one will do for now.