Apparently, Resident reaction to Linden Lab™’s ham-fisted banning of the SL Kids from the Second Life® Fifth Birthday Celebration (previously, previously) had at least some positive effect: LL apparently called off the dogs, allowed the Kids to submit applications again, and expanded the celebration to two weeks (from the previous one week). For a time, all seemed to be well on the Grid (well, aside from the various technical glitches…but, at this point, SL without technical glitches is like ExxonMobil without a corporate acquisition policy).

Unfortunately, LL hasn’t finished butting into what was supposedly a Resident-run celebration. Jacek Antonelli reports that Trinity Coulter, who had taken over as primary organizer of SL5B from SignpostMarv Martin after the latter resigned in protest over LL’s initial meddlings, has been forced out of that position by Dusty Linden. Several other organizers are out as well, according to both Jacek and Shoshana Epsilon. Meanwhile, Dusty is also vetting all the images for the art exhibition, rejecting any that have a “child” avatar in the same frame with either an “adult” avatar, or with a bed of any sort. Never mind that absolutely nothing sexual may be going on in the pictures, or that all avatars therein may be dressed in outfits that wouldn’t so much as raise an eyebrow in church.

I’m willing to assume that Dusty is not the originator of these decisions, and is just passing on policy as dictated from a higher level. Ditto with people like Everett. So the question becomes: Who’s calling the shots on this policy, and why? Linden Lab’s own policy (”The Tao of Linden“) states:

There are many ways to emphasize responsibility, accountability, communication and trust. We believe that the one key principle that best supports all of these values is transparency. As much as possible, tell everyone what you are doing, all the time. This transparency makes us responsible to our peers, makes us accountable to our own statements, and replaces the need for management with individual responsibility. Over time, it creates and reinforces trust. Be willing to share ideas before you feel they are ‘baked’. Report on your own progress frequently and to everyone.

Yet LL can be notoriously UN-transparent about a great many things when it suits them. We have had these policies dictated to us, in a manner which has never happened before in the history of Second Life Birthday Celebrations. Yet, in terms of rationale for these policies, we have heard precisely bupkis.

Last time, I challenged M Linden, new CEO of LL, to come out and give us a statement as to the policies being laid down for this celebration. So, have we heard anything?

(sound of crickets chirping)

Look, M, Philip, all the rest of you Lindens, we’re all adults here, even those of us in avatars that look like children; your own age-verification systems encourage that. We know about that fundy bluenose shitbag Mark Kirk (Stupid Party-Peoples’ Republic of Illinois) and his moralizing crusade, and we also know he doesn’t really give a shit about child avatars in Second Life, because all politicians really care about is getting elected, then getting RE-elected. We know about Sky News and their little “gotcha!” exposes, and we know why they do it: because it translates into viewers, which translates into ratings, which translates into money. Is it these kind of dipshits that have you so scared, you feel the need to impose new, draconian restrictions on content at what’s supposed to be a celebration “by the Residents, for the Residents”? If so, why not simply TELL US? Sure, it would piss off a lot of people, but at least you’d be being honest with the people that, ultimately, are responsible for paying for your world…and, at least, we’d know WHO to hate.

With two weeks to go before SL5B starts, the whole affair looks to be coming apart at the seams. At this point, I’m glad I didn’t try to involve myself with this fiasco, and I predict the whole thing will turn into a shambles and a public-relations disaster for Linden Lab. The irony is, by making such a fuss over child avatars this time around, LL is playing right into the hands of the Mark Kirks, the Sky News people, and others who automatically equate any “child” avatar with kiddie porn, and start saying, “Icky! Icky! BAN! BAN!” Nice way to invoke the Law of Unintended Consequences, LL.

Meanwhile, I sit over on Lexxotica and continue to wonder…how soon before LL works their way down to me?

UPDATE: Prokofy Neva continues to take the Lindens’ side…a stance which I find somewhat puzzling, as he himself has been the recipient of arbitrary Linden Lab shaftings in the past. But this isn’t mere schadenfreude on his part.

UPDATE: Vint Falken has reopened her JIRA issue dealing with this, “MISC-1231: Missing Cultures and Communities from SL5B.”  Go vote for it if you haven’t already.

The blog firestorm over Linden Lab’s new policies for the Second Life® Birthday Celebration continues apace, and Vint Falken’s JIRA issue on the topic is up to 166 votes as of this writing.  So far, the only comment from the Lindens on this issue has been one comment by Everett Linden on Massively.com…which has done nothing to clear up the issue, and has, in fact, raised additional questions.  His statement that “the SL birthday on Linden land is PG” directly contradicts the draft policy for SL5B, which states “All sims will be Mature.”  Of course, he may have meant that people were to adhere to PG content and behavior despite the sims’ Mature rating (the kind of rules enforced at The Shelter), but who can say for sure?

And it’s clear that Everett doesn’t make policy, he’s just passing on “the word from higher up.”  Okay, then, let’s get this settled once and for all:  I call on M Linden to make an immediate statement to the community regarding Linden Labs’ policies for the Second Life Fifth Birthday Celebration.  In detail, and with footnotes. At least, if he tells us something’s no longer kosher, we won’t have to waste time going higher.  You took the job, M; now it’s time to show you can deliver.

Strangely enough, Prokofy Neva seems to be taking the Lindens’ side in this matter, saying that this just involves Linden Labs’ right to promote whatever it likes.  Well, Prok, you’re absolutely right; LL can promote whatever it likes at an event which it gives its imprimatur to.  However, there are two important issues which follow from that principle:

1. What’s with them changing the rules this time around, from the policies previously established for past birthday celebrations, and indeed from the draft policies they’d already established for SL5B?  And why can’t they communicate the rationale for these changes in a reasonable fashion?  Jacek points out that the Lindens had several options as to how to deal with the Second Life Children this year, and they took the option that was guaranteed to cause a firestorm.  Something is rotten in the state of Denmark…and it sure as hell ain’t Danish blue cheese.
2. Yes, the Lindens have the right to change the rules for birthday celebrations at any time, as they see fit.  We, however, as Residents, also have the right, in turn, to decide whether or not we choose to devote our time and effort to making such a celebration successful, under those revised rules.  Two principal organizers of SL5B, as well as any number of potential exhibitors and participants, have already made their choice known; how many more will walk away?  And will there even be a Fifth Birthday Celebration, under these circumstances?  It may turn into a sanitized, corporate affair, as Prok no doubt thinks it will, which may suit the Lindens just fine.  They will, however, have sent a powerful message, one that Jacek has picked up on:

But Linden Lab, it seems, doesn’t want its Residents anymore. It doesn’t want a free, open, creative world. It wants a sanitized, media-friendly world, that universities and big corps won’t think twice about making major investments in. LL’s message for Residents now is: Thanks for making us so popular, but go away now. You’re embarrassing us in front of the cool kids. Linden Lab has continually neglected and offended its user base, and thus turned a natural ally into a second enemy.

We are Linden Labs’ customers. We pay premium account fees (and I know of at least one Resident who has downgraded to Basic over this very issue); we pay tier for land; we buy sims and pay tier for them.  Yet LL seems to want to piss us off at every turn.  I’ve said it before: The only company I know of that has shown it can thrive while pissing off its customers over and over again is Microsoft…and even they aren’t having such an easy time of it anymore.

I don’t have a good Last Graf here; either LL will find their principles again, or they won’t.  Either SL5B will go on as it would have, or it won’t.  One thing’s for sure: the ball is now in LL’s court.

“…and so I close, realizing that perhaps the ending has not yet been written.” - Atrus, Myst

I’ve been saying for some time now that one of the things I’d like to do is DJ one or more sets at the Second Life® Fifth Birthday Celebration (known as “SL5B” to the sort of people that appreciate abbreviations). Unfortunately, events have transpired that are causing me to rethink this.

For previous birthday celebrations (including the Third Birthday celebration that Tateru, Mera, Torley, and a cast of dozens put together so well, and which impressed me so much when I was still a n00b), Linden Lab maintained a relatively light hand on the content of the celebrations. That has now changed; the “Second Life Children” community has been told that, not only may they not exhibit at the event, they might not even be able to attend the event.

The Second Life Children are a group of people, all adults in RL, who use child avatars in SL for the purpose of engaging in activities appropriate to children (playing on playgrounds and the like). I’ve come down hard against the idea of sexual ageplay with child avatars in the past, but clearly, this isn’t it. There’s absolutely no pedophilia–real or simulated–involved, the claims of certain Congressional bluenoses and some Scheisse-für-Gehirne German prosecutors to the contrary. I’m hard-pressed to figure out just what they’re doing that’s in violation of the TOS or Community Standards.

Oh, and, according to an update at the Massively.com article I linked above, the Goreans and BDSM’ers have been given the official ixnay for SL5B from LL as well. Is this what they call “celebrating the cultural diversity of Second Life”? As usual, there has been absolutely no clarification of this new policy offered whatsoever from the Lindens, who may be dedicated to spreading the love amongst themselves, but clearly practice “mushroom management” with Residents. (”Put ‘em in the dark, feed ‘em shit, and watch ‘em grow.”)

Now, some of you are no doubt saying, “But, Erbo, you’re not a child avatar, or a Gorean or BDSM’er either. What are you so honked off for?” I’ll tell you: Every time I hear about some new restriction LL is applying to certain people or things on the Grid, I wonder how long it’ll be before they work their way down to me. Let’s say I do land a gig DJ’ing for part of SL5B; would LL suddenly find it necessary to tell me which songs I could or could not play? I can imagine that someone might take offense to, say, “Bilingual” or “Crazy Bitch,” or most songs by Children of Bodom. Would they have to pre-vet my playlist, and maybe forbid me from taking requests because someone might ask to hear an “unacceptable” song? Don’t laugh; yesterday, you might have thought it was inconceivable that the highly-popular SL Kids builds would be banned from the celebration. As far as I’m concerned, LL has now thrown everything up in the air as regards SL5B, and I question whether I’d want to be involved at all under those circumstances. (In this, I am joined by SignpostMarv Martin and Ariel Otafuku, two of the main organizers of the event. Hey, M, Philip, are you getting a message yet?)

We can only speculate on LL’s motives in this case. Maybe they’ve been threatened with a major lawsuit, and are circling the wagons to either quell the suit before it starts or to make their potential defense airtight. Maybe LL really is planning an IPO, or shopping itself to some large Internet company, and wants to keep the folks on Wall Street from getting any whiff of controversy. (Remember, Controversy = No Money = Bad.) In any event, the Lindens seem to suddenly be living out their (Second) lives in fear…and for that, I have just one piece of advice, which I will be using as the epigraph to this post.

More on the story from the esteemed Ms. Malaprop.

“A life lived in fear is a life half-lived.” - From the movie Strictly Ballroom

UPDATE: Vint Falken is doing the best job tracking blog comments on this issue, and she has also filed a “bug report” with LL’s JIRA on this issue.  I have voted that particular issue up, and I recommend you do likewise.

When I’m not in the Second Life® virtual world, or EVE Online, or indeed in front of my computer at all, I can often be found curled up with a good book. I try to consume several each week as part of a staple diet. So, when I got a message from Selina Greene, co-owner of Book Island and Publishing Island and a real-life publisher, letting me know about the 2008 SL Book Fair, I figured, hey, it’s worth my time to mention. I’ll see if I’m able to show up for any of it, though my schedule this weekend involves, not only events at Lexxistential Deviances, but a RL event I’m driving down south for on Saturday.

Here’s the schedule of events for the 2008 SL Book Fair (all times SLT, venue SLURLs™ attached):

Friday, April 25th

• 2pm - Opening Ceremony (Cartland Court)
• 3pm - Marylmagner Munz, reading from The Big Secret by Mary Magner (Beach Area)
• 3pm - Threik Wilkinson, reading from The Courage of Intimacy by Keith Ainsworth (Open Books)
• 3pm - Kabbalah Today - live Kabbalah concert and Q&A session (Publishing Island stage)
• 4pm - TBA
• 5pm - Madddyyy Schnook - “Building for Beginners” (SLGuides Virtual Learning Centre)
• 5pm-7pm - DJs Shannah Halberd and Rat Halberd from Simkast (Cartland Court)
• 7pm - Poetry and prose readings from INKsters and ANON magazine (Publishing Island stage)

Saturday, April 26th

• 6am - Discussion: “Death Penalty, Right or Wrong?” Selina Greene (Beach Area)
• 7am - TBA
• 8am - Nebbisk Oh - “Fictionary” game, where you make up definitions to fool your opponents. (Beach Area)
• 9am - Madddyyy Schnook, “Marketing and Sales in Virtual Worlds” (Book Island stage)
• 10am - Babu Writer - “Amazon and POD - What’s going on?” (Publishing Island stage)
• 10am - Selina Greene - “The RL Book Publishing Process” - talk and Q&A (Book Island stage)
• 11am - Cricket Gears - “How Art and Music Can Change the World” (Cartland Court stage)
• 12pm - Trinity Dechou, Voodoo Buwan - Rez Magazine debate on inworld Publishing (Cartland Court stage)
• 1pm - Noble Charron - “Characterization - the Soul of the Story” - Lecture and Q&A by bestselling author, Michael A. Stackpole (Beach Area)
• 2pm - Elan Neruda and Kit Jimenez - “Paying the Bills While Paying Your Dues: A Partially Practical Guide to Writing Genre Fiction for A Living” with Sharon Lee and Steve Miller (Publishing Island stage)
• 2pm-4pm - Miriam Antonelli DJ (Cartland Court)
• 3pm - Madddyyy Schnook - “Building for Beginners” (SLGuides)
• 4pm - Diana Allandale - “Promoting Yourself, From an Author’s POV,” workshop with author Diana Hunter (Beach Area)
• 5pm - Wilbur Rich - reading

Sunday, April 27th

• 6am - Discussion: “What’s SLove Got To Do With It? RL/SL Relationship Pleasures and Pitfalls,” Selina Greene (Beach Area)
• 7am - DJ Doubledown Tandino spins his signature blend of nujazz and house in a live turntable mix (Cartland Court)
• 8am - Discussion: “What Makes a Book a Cult Book, Rather Than Just a Good Book?” Selina Greene (Beach Area)
• 9am - Jilly Kidd hosts readings from writers in the Written Word group (Beach Area)
• 10am - Sean Voss - Author Sean Percival, The Second Life In-World Travel Guide talk, Q&A (Book Island stage)
• 10am - Madddyyy Schbook - “Building for Beginners” (SLGuides)
• 11am - Simeon Beresford - Literary quiz (Book Island stage)
• 12pm - Poetry and prose readings from INKsters and ANON magazine (Publishing Island stage)
• 1pm - Kitumscheid Writer - “The Publishing Process for Illustrated Books,” based on experiences from her book, Pirate’s Alphabet (Publishing Island stage)
• 1pm-3pm - DJ Ravishal Bentham from Kona Radio (Cartland Court)
• 3pm - Diana Allandale - “The Ins and Outs of Writing Erotica” workshop with author, Diana Hunter (Beach Area)
• 4pm - Arton Tripsa - “The Writing Life: The Creation Of A Novel,” a talk/Q&A with Jane Watson, author of The Hindustan Contessa (Book Island stage)
• 5pm - Closing ceremony and afterparty (Cartland Court)

Event Venues

• Book Island Stage, Book Island (190, 217, 35) (sponsored by SLGuides Virtual Learning Centre)
• Cartland Court, Book Island (125, 145, 36) (sponsored by Rez Magazine)
• Beach Discussion Area, Book Island (195, 32, 24) (sponsored by Third Life Books)
• Publishing Island Stage, Publishing Island (18, 83, 35) (sponsored by sl-newspaper.com)
• SLGuides Virtual Learning Centre, Publishing Island (183, 122, 36)

Information provided by Selina Greene, SL Book Fair 2008. Additional information supplied by Shawna Montgomery, Commander, Science Fiction Rangers.

Or, as Lexx would put it…“Blow me.”

Linden Lab®©™ announced yesterday a big break in the price of private island sims…now regular islands will be going for US$1000, down from US$1675, and “open space” (low prim) sims will drop in price to US$250. (Tier, of course, will stay the same…the cost of power, cooling, and bandwidth isn’t getting any lower, nor is the need to amortize the development costs of the server software getting any less.)

Those of you planning to buy sims in the near future are probably dancing with glee right now. Those of you who just bought sims, on the other hand, are most likely as livid as Lexx is, or as Nobody Fugazi is. True, LL did throw a sop to some of the more recent sim buyers, offering them a free low-prim sim to go alongside their suddenly-devalued purchase. Of course, Lexx took delivery of Lexxotica a little too late to take advantage of that bonus…which just doubles the piss-off, as far as she’s concerned.

Of course, as Nobody points out, “I’m really glad I’m not someone with a lot of land holdings. Sarah Nerd must be feeling this - and I just know Anshe Chung is.” You can add a bunch of other names to that list, like Sirux Mahoney, Desmond Shang, and Doeko Cassidy, to name a few. All of them have large numbers of sims–Fantasyland, in fact, just doubled its sim count not long ago through strategic acquisitions–and the value of those assets just took a 41% nosedive.

And, if Prokofy is right, the sim market is set to keep going down like the stock market on Black Whit-Monday…in fact, all the way to zero when the Grid finally goes totally open-source and I could set up a spare machine here to run a sim. (No doubt I’d have to pay a tier fee to LL still, though, to connect to the “official” Grid and its asset servers and user pool.) Harbingers of that are already appearing, in the form of grids running the OpenSim software (which I really ought to check out, by the way…I could easily see running a small Grid on one of our test clusters at the office); they’re charging, in some cases, less than US$100 for a sim, with tier of US$75 a month. (Though, with the dollar going the way it is, I’m betting some of those outfits will want to start quoting their prices in euros…but that’s another story.)

This strikes me as somewhat unfair to LL’s existing customers…you know, the ones that are responsible for so much of what makes Second Life®©™, Second Life®©™. And not just the land barons; most of the good fashion retailers have their own sims, too, as do many other unique groups. As far as I know, the only company that seems to be able to get away with pissing off its own customers on a regular basis is Microsoft…and even for them, that strategy is starting to fall apart. LL really, really, really might want to think hard before they do this again. They might be able to get away with this once. But after that, all bets are off.

“The consumer is not a moron; she is your wife.” - David Ogilvy

UPDATE: Tateru over at Massively.com has a post up about the price drop, where she advances some theories about reasons for the price drop, namely, drops in the price of Class 5-type server hardware and greater automation in the island-buying process due to the new Land Store. Which is all well and good, but the steep drop in price hurts existing customers as much as it helps new ones. LL could easily have kept the sim prices the same and pocketed the extra profits, or scheduled a more gradual price drop curve, say, US$100-150 a quarter over the next year, which wouldn’t have been such a big “ouch” to existing customers.

This evening, Lexx handed me a small object made by a fellow named Petr Brandenburg, that alternately flashed yellow and cyan. She couldn’t read the script inside it, so she didn’t know how it worked. She asked if I could figure it out.

Within a few minutes, I had handed her this:

// Neon Flasher Script
// Erbo Evans - 3/23/2008
/////////////////////////////////

// List of colors to cycle through, specified as  tuples.
list colors = [<0.0,1.0,1.0>, <1.0,1.0,0.0>];
float delay = 0.5;  // how long to wait between color changes
integer index;  // counter used to keep track of color state

default
{
    state_entry()
    { // initialize the color index and display the first color
        index = 0;
        llSetColor(llList2Vector(colors,0),ALL_SIDES);

        // set up the timer to flash colors
        llSetTimerEvent(delay);
    } // end state_entry

    timer()
    { // advance to next color and display it
        if (++index>=llGetListLength(colors))
            index = 0;  // wrap around back to beginning if we run off the end
        llSetColor(llList2Vector(colors,index),ALL_SIDES);
    } // end timer
} // end state default

Simple enough to understand. The script itself is basically a timer-driven state machine, using a table (the colors list) to specify the colors to be displayed on the prim (which uses a blank texture on all faces to better show the effect).

As an exercise, I asked her, “How would you extend the script to flash more than two colors?” Because of the way I wrote the code, it’s very easy (just extend the colors list). However, she stared at it and felt her brain begin to melt. I think it was mostly due to the fact that she was running on only four hours sleep, though.

I don’t know if it’s really true that “every 3rd person in Second Life is a DJ,” according to one wag I read recently. Still, there are plenty of decent DJs out there, and Lexx and I ran across one quite by chance this evening.

StormShadow Maertens DJs for three different clubs; his home club is Ignite, but he also spins at Restless Souls and The Night Owl (where Lexx and I encountered him). He seems to specialize in modern rock, but he had no problem playing either Muse (Lexx’s request) or Nightwish (my request!). He also did something interesting when we entered the club; in his next voiceover, he mentioned us by name. I may steal that trick. In RL, he’s a network professional…which makes him not unlike myself in a number of respects.

And he is also among the ranks of SL bloggers, as you can see…so I’m pleased to add him to the Elite Evans Avenue Exit Blogroll. Check him out. And, Storm, you’re welcome to come by Lexxistential Deviances or Cowboy Country when I’m spinning, so you can compare styles.

I’ve never had the honor to meet Philip Linden/Rosedale, either in his real or virtual forms. (Though I have had the privilege of “running against” him in the 2007 SL Gubernatorial Elections.) Yet I’ve been a Resident for nearly two years now, and in that time, I’ve been very much aware that I’m “living” in his dream world, which can be sometimes banal, sometimes awe-inspiring, and sometimes just flat-out weird. The one thing I can’t deny is the essential brilliance of the underlying concept.

Now, he’s stepping back from his day-to-day role as CEO of the company he created, moving into the board chairman’s slot as well as working more on “product strategy and vision,” as well as evangelism. There are obvious parallels here to Bill Gates and his transition away from the CEO role at Microsoft, but I also get the impression that Philip isn’t as much of a “genetic entrepreneur” as, say, Andre Durand is. Philip strikes me as more of the techno-geek sort, who loves to get down and dirty with the details. Keeping him in the role he’s comfortable with will be good for both Linden Labs and the Second Life platform as a whole.

The question now becomes, who’s likely to replace him? LL appears at a loss, as the esteemed Ms. Malaprop remarked over on Twitter: “No successor being named says that there is going to be a bit of a mess for a bit, though. Otherwise it would have been ‘philip down, X up!’” And, well, that’s obvious; replacing someone like Philip is not exactly a cookie-cutter kind of deal, if you know what I mean. Prokofy seems to think that LL is most likely to promote someone from within, and that strikes me as both the easiest course for LL to take and the one that’s best for SL, as someone who’s already involved with SL is likely to disrupt it the least over the short and long terms. We won’t, however, know anything about what they plan on doing until they make up their minds. My best advice at this point would be to remain cautious, yet optimistic.

In the meantime, we can all wish Philip the very best of good fortune as he transitions into his new role, and hope that this new role will allow him to continue to make Second Life everything it should be.

“We must have faith…that the universe will unfold as it should.” - Spock to Valeris, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

Recently, I was asked to DJ an event at another club, which I agreed to do and for which I was paid my standard rate. However, when I got to the site of the gig, I found that certain things hadn’t fallen into place…

• The club’s stream information had just been changed, which apparently they do on a monthly basis. (I do approve of this as a security measure, as it keeps rogue DJs from hijacking the stream.) I had received the correct login information, and it worked…but the club’s stream changer had not yet been updated with the new stream URL.
• Only one person had access to modify the settings notecard for the stream changer…and he was unavailable.
• I thought that perhaps the URL could just be set on the parcel manually, via the land settings dialog. Unfortunately, the club’s land had not been group-deeded, so only one person (the land owner) had the ability to change the parcel media settings…and he was unavailable as well.
• What’s more, the event had not been publicized (via a listing in SL Events or such), so it was likely that there would be little turnout, even if the stream issues could be resolved.

In the end, the event was postponed to a later date, and I agreed to come back at that date. But this particular event had required a lot of prep time on my part, so naturally I was somewhat miffed.

There are some lessons to take away from this experience. First, always have a backup plan in place for your business operations. First Life does take precedence, but if the absence of one or two critical people can throw your business into disarray, you need a better backup plan. In the case of Lexxistential Deviances, if Lexx is not present, I can perform her functions, as can Lilli. The businesses I’ve been involved in have a long history of having backup plans, to the extent that, when Danielle’s home in RL was burned in a fire, I was able to keep the Gin Rummy open despite her extended absence.

Second, group-deeding business land is good. If your land is group-deeded, you have a lot more options in controlling who can do what to the land, thanks to the group role and permission capabilities we’ve had for some time now. In our case, we allow people designated as “DJ” to change the parcel media settings, as, obviously, they may need to do that to broadcast. We do use a stream changer of our own, an Erbosoft Distributed Music Changer (of course!), and it does have a “manual override” mode where you can feed an arbitrary URL in via a chat command, if you have the right access; still, it’s good to have a backup capability (which relates back to my first point).

Third, have procedures in place for publicizing events. In our case, we determine the events for a weekly block (Friday through Monday) in advance, complete with staff assignments for each event, which Lexx distributes to the staff group via a notecard attachment to a Group Notice. Then I take her notecard and write the descriptions for the events, which I post to SL Events. Just before event time, our host for the evening grabs a copy of the event text and uses that to create a Group Notice for the VIP group.

N.B.: I am deliberately not identifying the club involved in the little snafu above, because I believe they can do better and I don’t want to embarrass them, just help them and others to keep from making those mistakes. Any comments which identify the club in question, even very generally, will be deleted with extreme prejudice.

The image I have linked here is Lexx’s wedding invitation. Yes, THAT thing that towers over my avatar, included here for scale. The object is 102 prims, the artwork inside uses sculpty prims, and, when clicked, it not only hands you a landmark, it plays Peter Cetera’s “The Glory of Love.” The whole song.

As wedding invitations go, this one takes the cake (no pun intended). It is the epitome of ostentatiousness. It’s like the last days of Pompeii, right here in SL. Take me home and put me to bed, Mama, I have seen enough to know that I have seen too much!

If you should desire a wedding invitation like this, make sure and stop by Kaa Sera Wedding Invitations, and Kaaden Carson will be happy to sell you one. Just don’t try to rez it on anything smaller than a 4096 sq.m. parcel.

Oh, that reminds me…we’re in the wedding business too, providing a venue for wedding ceremonies and receptions, along with an officiant, photographs, and professionally DJ’d wedding music (by Yours Truly). Stop by Dreams Weddings and talk to Lexx.

“All men should be married, but no woman should.” - E. Jean Carroll, A Dog In Heat Is a Hot Dog