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snarp1)
You can get a Princess Kraehe costume, or several different versions of Phedre's marque.
2)
Gor is mainstream, to the point that the officially-run commerce site for the Second Life microeconomy, XStreetSL, has a dedicated retail category for Gorean clothes. There's a fifty-fifty chance you'll find someone selling Gor-themed items even in a very tame fantasy-themed area. Businesses selling these things are only slightly less numerous than the ones selling Lord of the Rings stuff, and they outnumber Star Wars.
3)
Second Life is an very odd community, sort of an intersection of fandom, fashion designers, pornographers, Libertarians, and open-sourcers, all bound together by a simmering dislike for the people who make the platform they use. It's similar to Star Wars fans' relationship with George Lucas, except that George Lucas does not spend every day ruining Star Wars, but Linden Labs spends every day ruining Second Life.
Actually, maybe LiveJournal is the better parallel.
It's very difficult not to be snarky about Linden Labs. I am extremely tolerant of bad software! I dual-boot Vista and Xubuntu, and my website is built on WordPress! But Second Life really is in a class by itself. As an example, the rendering technology it uses is apparently years out-of-date and significantly slower than it needs to be. Second Life adoption rates have been terrible for years, because people would sign up, find that everything was slow and ugly, and leave.
Also, it doesn't inter-operate well with anything else - a house built using industry-standard tools like Autodesk Maya can't be imported into Second Life. You have to use SL's own built-in tools, which are extremely primitive by comparison. A couple years ago I actually explained Second Life to an architecture student who worked with AutoCAD, who was looking into ways to make an online showroom for his designs. If he'd been able to just upload some of his models, I think he might have gone for it and bought some server space, but he wasn't interested when I told him he'd have to learn a new toolset. There isn't much question that Linden Labs is losing money on this.
There was a project not too long ago to modernize the technology. Everyone was very excited. Linden Labs, needing to save some money, fired the guy in charge of the project and cancelled it. Apparently there's now only one person working there who even knows how the rendering engine works.
This is a somewhat short-sighted company, is I guess what I'm trying to say.
The latest twist in the Chronicles of Ruining Second Life is dependent upon the knowledge that Second Life released a new version of their client software, Viewer 2, a while back. Before Viewer 2, the Second Life viewer was basically unusable for new users. It was a massive wreck, full of obvious UI and stability problems that had lingered, un-addressed, since 2003.
Viewer 2 fixed a couple of the UI problems, but added several new ones. The stability was worse. There's an unintentionally hilarious post about Linden employees' feelings about Viewer 2 here, with such optimistic statements as, "This pattern of anger and acceptance repeated itself with the first rounds of private user testing." Viewer 2 is like the grieving process.
The original Second Life viewer was open-sourced a while back, though they didn't do the same to the server-side software, wisely fearing their own destruction. A third-party viewer built on it, Emerald, ended up much more stable than Viewer 2. It became the most popular Second Life viewer, beating out both Viewer 2 and the original viewer combined, and is what I was using up until three weeks ago.
Because three weeks ago, the Emerald devs used Emerald to launch a DDoS attack against a blogger they didn't like.
If Linden Labs were functional as a tech company, and able to release usable software, they would have kicked Emerald of the servers, at least as a temporary measure, the moment they realized this was happening. Condoning DDoS attacks is not good.
But, again, almost half of their user base are accessing their service using this piece of software. They'll lose short-term revenue if they do that! So they send out an email saying, "If you are using Emerald, you should probably know that they've been using you to launch DDoS attacks through our servers." And nothing else has really happened yet. They've made some demands, which the Emerald devs have, basically, mocked, but they're still only at the stage at which they're threatening to ban it.
You can get a Princess Kraehe costume, or several different versions of Phedre's marque.
2)
Gor is mainstream, to the point that the officially-run commerce site for the Second Life microeconomy, XStreetSL, has a dedicated retail category for Gorean clothes. There's a fifty-fifty chance you'll find someone selling Gor-themed items even in a very tame fantasy-themed area. Businesses selling these things are only slightly less numerous than the ones selling Lord of the Rings stuff, and they outnumber Star Wars.
3)
Second Life is an very odd community, sort of an intersection of fandom, fashion designers, pornographers, Libertarians, and open-sourcers, all bound together by a simmering dislike for the people who make the platform they use. It's similar to Star Wars fans' relationship with George Lucas, except that George Lucas does not spend every day ruining Star Wars, but Linden Labs spends every day ruining Second Life.
Actually, maybe LiveJournal is the better parallel.
It's very difficult not to be snarky about Linden Labs. I am extremely tolerant of bad software! I dual-boot Vista and Xubuntu, and my website is built on WordPress! But Second Life really is in a class by itself. As an example, the rendering technology it uses is apparently years out-of-date and significantly slower than it needs to be. Second Life adoption rates have been terrible for years, because people would sign up, find that everything was slow and ugly, and leave.
Also, it doesn't inter-operate well with anything else - a house built using industry-standard tools like Autodesk Maya can't be imported into Second Life. You have to use SL's own built-in tools, which are extremely primitive by comparison. A couple years ago I actually explained Second Life to an architecture student who worked with AutoCAD, who was looking into ways to make an online showroom for his designs. If he'd been able to just upload some of his models, I think he might have gone for it and bought some server space, but he wasn't interested when I told him he'd have to learn a new toolset. There isn't much question that Linden Labs is losing money on this.
There was a project not too long ago to modernize the technology. Everyone was very excited. Linden Labs, needing to save some money, fired the guy in charge of the project and cancelled it. Apparently there's now only one person working there who even knows how the rendering engine works.
This is a somewhat short-sighted company, is I guess what I'm trying to say.
The latest twist in the Chronicles of Ruining Second Life is dependent upon the knowledge that Second Life released a new version of their client software, Viewer 2, a while back. Before Viewer 2, the Second Life viewer was basically unusable for new users. It was a massive wreck, full of obvious UI and stability problems that had lingered, un-addressed, since 2003.
Viewer 2 fixed a couple of the UI problems, but added several new ones. The stability was worse. There's an unintentionally hilarious post about Linden employees' feelings about Viewer 2 here, with such optimistic statements as, "This pattern of anger and acceptance repeated itself with the first rounds of private user testing." Viewer 2 is like the grieving process.
The original Second Life viewer was open-sourced a while back, though they didn't do the same to the server-side software, wisely fearing their own destruction. A third-party viewer built on it, Emerald, ended up much more stable than Viewer 2. It became the most popular Second Life viewer, beating out both Viewer 2 and the original viewer combined, and is what I was using up until three weeks ago.
Because three weeks ago, the Emerald devs used Emerald to launch a DDoS attack against a blogger they didn't like.
If Linden Labs were functional as a tech company, and able to release usable software, they would have kicked Emerald of the servers, at least as a temporary measure, the moment they realized this was happening. Condoning DDoS attacks is not good.
But, again, almost half of their user base are accessing their service using this piece of software. They'll lose short-term revenue if they do that! So they send out an email saying, "If you are using Emerald, you should probably know that they've been using you to launch DDoS attacks through our servers." And nothing else has really happened yet. They've made some demands, which the Emerald devs have, basically, mocked, but they're still only at the stage at which they're threatening to ban it.
