In the days of my newbiehood, I heard tell of the legend of Gridnor and the coming of Lagnarok. But even in those days, the old stories were all but forgotten, and only the elders spoke of them.

In those days, the Linden gods stopped walking freely among us. The most ungrateful Residents would spurn the Linden gods and curse their names, just as they do today. Only the stalwart Liasons — who were half god, half mortal — mingled among us.

But those days were the days of legend, of the rise of new heroes and villains!

Starax the magician and his wand of infinite wonder, who left our world but was reborn. Anshe the merchant-queen, shrewd and cunning, with an unquenchable thirst for riches. Tateru the goddess and overseer, who even now walks among us, bestowing her wisdom on all who will listen. Gene Replacement the trickster, who stole from the gods the gift of megaprims, but paid for his sins with eternal banishment. Ordinal the inventor, who then, as now, crafted marvels for the delight of young and old.

There are many, many others legends; too many to recall every one. IYan refers you to the book of Hamlet for more stories of the old days. (Hamlet himself being one of the legends of those and earlier days.)

But, just as with the legends of Gridnor and Lagnarok, these stories now fade into history. The elders move on to other worlds without ceremony, and the young remain ignorant of our heritage. The old heroes are no longer revered, and the new heroes are too often missed, being but tiny gemstones in a vast desert of sand.

Or perhaps I have merely become one of the elders, who speak in longful whispers of the legends of their youth, being set in our ways and unable to see the next generation of legends unfolding beneath our very noses.

If you missed the presentation, you can check out a great write-up by Kippie Friedkin, or plow your way through the transcript on the SL Wiki. If you’re following along with the transcript, you’ll want to have the mock-ups that I showed at hand for reference:

1. Main UI Overlay
2. Inventory Quick Filter
3. Inventory Right-Click Menu

Here are a some of the really interesting ideas (some new, others old favorites) that came out of the discussion:

• Making the “Chat/IM” and “Voice” buttons separately resizable in the UI overlay.
• Optional UI animation for the “Chat/IM” button (e.g. a little bounce) when you get a new message.
• Functionality to find items by date range.
• Functionality to find duplicate items, so you could remove them to reduce clutter.
• Gmail-like labels for items, allowing items to belong to multiple “sets”. Related: symlinks for items, allowing you to put “clones”/”shortcuts” of items (especially no-copy items) into multiple folders/outfits.
• Functionality to create custom tabs that show the contents of a folder: Right click folder, “Show as Tab”.
• A “Custom” option on the Quick Filter menu, to pop up the window for more advanced filter management.

By the way, if you like discussing and thinking about ways to make SL’s interface easier, more useful, or just generally better, you should subscribe and post to the Second Life User Experience (SL-UX) mailing list!

It’s a little bit slow right now because it’s new and not many people are aware of it, but there have already been some very cool discussions about improving notifications, reorganizing the menus, annoyances in the building UI, and more. New topics and discussions welcome!

Grant Linden has invited me to present my UI design at the SL User Experience Office Hour (SLUXOH) this Thursday at 3PM SLT. Not being one to turn down an invitation from a Linden to show off my goods to the world, I’ll be explaining the design rationale, answering questions from the audience, and waving a laser pointer around and making spaceship sounds with my mouth while we wait for my slide images to rez. I can guarantee it will be a hoot and/or holler. BYOF (bring your own feedback).

By the way, if you’re into this sort of SLUXy stuff, I recommend subscribing to the SL-UX mailing list. There are a bunch of neat people who put forward interesting UI ideas and feedback at sporadic intervals… lots of good times to be had!

P.S. Does this make my butt look FIC?

I’ve posted a photo journal of my sister-alt’s visit to Loco Poco’s Island. It was crazy fun!

My design proposes:

• Reworking the bottom toolbar to be collapsible and customizable, and to feature chat, IM, voice, and friends list more prominently.
• Reorganizing the main menus to be less intimidating and more logically-grouped.
• Several enhancements to the Inventory floater:
  • “Favorites” and “Worn” item tabs.
  • Quick filter selection box to easily filter items by type.
  • Various enhancements to the right click menu.

The design document is available online, with purty pictures for your enjoyment.

Feedback and critique about the design are welcome!

I commissioned this sketch from Jun Kuroda (SL name), aka rotemu on Plurk, starving artist extraordinaire. She also made a semi-nude of CodeBastard Redgrave and other cool commisioned sketches!

If you want to commission a sketch to call your own, check out her Livejournal page or IM her (Jun Kuroda) in-world. They’re awesome, not at all expensive, and you’ll be helping out a really cool artist! ^_^

Check out the full set, and check out the Kids5B event!

Thankfully, he said that further reading had improved his impression, and I explained to him that the reason many of my posts are critical of LL, is because the things that get me riled up enough to write about are often things LL has done which I strongly disagree with. So, my blog only reflects the extremes; the other stuff doesn’t get blogged.

In an interesting and related occurance, my friend Goldie Katsu tweeted a link to an article by Louis Gray, The Five Stages of Early Adopter Behavior. (You might want to go read it now, or at least skim the bold headings.)

Gray’s description doesn’t fit me well at all, I think. I never did any promotion to outsiders. I never built up a “following” (I don’t have the personality to be a cult leader). While I’ve had numerous ideas on how to improve things, I only really interacted with the Lindens after the open source client was released and the JIRA set up. All in all, I’m not an attention whore like Gray describes. I just love Second Life with a passion.

Nevertheless, I paused when reading about the fourth stage, “Sense of Entitlement, Nitpicking and Reduced Use”. Reduced use certainly rings a bell. But do I feel entitled, feeling that SL must be the way I say it should be? Is my complaining just the sign of a disgruntled early adopter who feels neglected?

Well, maybe, but I don’t think so. The stuff I criticise tends to fall in a specific category: bad (or at least controversial) policy decisions by LL.

Service outages and such I can deal with. The Grid is a friggin’ huge, complex system, and the Grid Monkeys (an affectionate term) who bang on it, and the Code Monkeys who write it, are but mere mortals. It’s gotta be a tough job, and shit happens.

I have far less forgiveness of deliberate policy moves which, in my opinion, are harmful to Second Life. I may be a bit disgruntled, but only because I perceive Second Life as being sullied by unwise decisions by the government, LL. What I feel is the same thing that one feels while watching her country decay under incompetent, corrupt, or oppressive rule.

I’m not an early adopter desperate for attention. I’m not a pessimist who claims at every turn of events that the world is ending. I’m a patriot, and Second Life is my country, my home and native land. [Update: See my comment below about what I mean by “patriot”]

I’m loyal to it because it’s the best damn idea I’ve seen in a long time, and damned if I’m going to hold my tongue while it’s strengths are cut out one by one in the name of political correctness and corporate relations.

So you see, my loyalty lies with Second Life, not with Linden Lab. Where I perceive the actions of Linden Lab to be in conflict with the best interests of Second Life, I side with Second Life.

Turmoil’s Beginnings

SLB5 was already on somewhat shakey ground back in May, due to some “suboptimal” planning by the Resident organizers. The call for entries was barely advertised, and the applications were only scheduled to be approved a month prior to the opening. So there was a bit of a time crunch, but nothing the SL5B people couldn’t handle. (Heck, the SL3B volunteers, myself included, put that together in less time, and it was awesome!)

But then Linden Lab stepped in with a heavy eye-in-hand: the eye watching everything and the hand squashing whatever they didn’t like. Linden Lab is providing the land for the event, so they decided to step in and dictate how the ostensibly Resident-run event will be run.

In previous years, the celebration had allowed both PG and mature exhibits. Not overt stuff that violated the terms of service, mind you, but exhibitions weren’t rejected based on an association with sex or violence. Not so this year, it seems — allusion to such disgustingly human impulses are now verboten. So speaketh the Lab.

Likewise in previous years, the SL Kids community was heavily involved in the planning and construction of the event and grounds, and their exhibits were always amazing and wonderful. (I’m not surprised there; many of SL’s most talented Residents choose to appear as child avatars. Maybe the avatar frees them from the oppressive boringness associated with adulthood?)

But this year, the SL Kids’ contributions were respectfully declined. Everybody knows Linden Lab is probably just scared of rabid “investigative journalists” inventing exaggerated stories of sexual ageplay and pedophilia in Second Life, but LL is too proud to admit having their head on the chopping block.

Residents rise up

It was only after SL Residents rose up en masse to protest LL’s move that Linden Lab backed down somewhat (while acting like they hadn’t changed position, as always). They even approved 2 exhibits by SL kids, as a sort of “See? We’re not being bigots, we swear!” gesture.

Alas, even with LL’s placating move, SL5B was in trouble. As the controversy had been unfolding, a number of volunteer organizers stepped down from the SL5B commitee. SignpostMarv, who was heading the effort, had resigned just prior to the news breaking; others resigned after they heard the news.

A number of other volunteers stepped up to fill in the vacant roles. Trinity Coulter stepped into SignpostMarv’s old shoes, heading the effort and trying to keep the whole thing from falling apart in the wake of LL’s meddling. Slim though it was, SL5B still had a chance of pulling through in the few weeks left.

The Meddling Continues

Last night, Trinity came by Tateru Nino’s office hours to ask for some tips (Tateru being, in the words of Carl Metropolitan, the only person to have organized a successful SLB, in particular SL3B). Tateru’s biggest advice was to find some responsible, trustworthy people, and delegate the organization efforts to them; she also passed along some suggestions of people to ask. There was a brief spark of hope.

Then Linden Lab inserted itself again. This morning, Dusty Linden (purportedly in charge of “facilitating” events) ejected Trinity from the SL5B group; no one knew why. When I asked Trinity, she said that “it was determined” that it would be in the best interest of SL5B for Trinity to “step aside”. Trinity didn’t comment when I asked her who did the determining (she says she got distracted with other things; eventually I had to log off without an answer).

All other accounts indicate that Dusty actually ejected Trinity — that includes a transcript of the automated announcement sent on group chat at the time. So, I’m having a hard time believing that Trinity stepped down of her own volition.

Shoshana Epsilon’s latest post backs up this account, and further reveals that Dusty Linden is attempting to block any image with a child and adult in the same picture, or any image of a child on or near a bed — even completely nonsexual, family-oriented pictures. Shoshana describes it as a blanket policy (no pun intended), not a case-by-case review to screen out images which are or could be construed as erotic images of children (or child-like avatars).

Resident-run, Linden-ruined

So, as I said, SL5B is a bust. I honestly can’t see it recovering from all the meddling Linden Lab has done. The idea that this is a Resident run event is now patently false. Of course, Linden Lab has made no effort to organize it themselves; they have restricted their efforts to disrupting the work of the Residents.

The first head organizer resigned over disagreements with LL. The second was usurped by LL. A large number of other organizers have resigned or are thinking of resigning over LL’s disruptive involvement. And the event is less than two weeks away.

I think it’s safe to say that SL5B would have run smoother if LL had stuck to their usual non-involvement and minimal support, as they had done in previous years. Maybe next year (assuming there’s something to celebrate next year), we should “respectfully decline” LL’s involvement, and instead have our own event on our own land with our own rules.

It’s done! I am pleased to present to you, SL Animation for Blender Newbs. It’s 6 pages long, with pictures. It might take you maybe 30 minutes or so to follow along, I’m guessing. If you have any feedback (e.g. suggestions or praise), leave a comment on any of the pages.

Enjoy.