The World According to Jennyfur

Don’t forget to get the word out about Project Open Letter…. sign the letter, re-post to your blogs, forums etc.

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Please visit Project Open Letter to learn more and to sign the letter below:

In the past eighteen months, Second Life has expanded, growing from a small community of early adopters to a platform supporting millions of users. Linden Lab has created a world that inspires a deep level of passion in its users and provides unprecedented opportunities to share creatively, socially, and financially.

With explosive levels of growth often come unexpected problems. In keeping with your company’s policy and rich history of resident involvement, we the undersigned would like to take this opportunity to address some concerns that we feel have gone unanswered for too long.

There are some consistent, ongoing problems that are getting worse under heavy load, not better, and are not simply irritants but problems that are causing financial loss in some cases, which is unacceptable. Here is a brief list of the main concerns:

* Inventory loss – this is a devastating problem that is worsening. We have no ability to protect our own inventories through backups, and are trusting you to protect that data. This is the highest priority. Sensible inventory limits (on non-verified accounts only), combined with better management tools and ways to protect our inventory ourselves would help to mitigate the problem as well. Regardless, this cannot continue – we will not accept financial loss as a feature of Second Life. It is your responsibility as service provider to ensure our data is not lost, and you are failing us.

* Problems with Find and Friends List – we continue to see search outages on a far too regular basis. It is bad enough trying to get anywhere without being able to use search, but many users are also paying money for classified ads. Our friends lists just do not work reliably any longer, after years without an issue with them. If America Online/MSN/Yahoo can provide presence information for hundreds of millions of users, surely there is a way to make our friends lists work again.

* Grid stability and performance – teleports fail quite regularly, especially under heavy load. Attachments end up in places they did not start out in, and sim peformance varies wildly. None of this makes for a very pleasant experience for users. Long promised improvement to physics and scripting would help dramatically to reduce these problems, but there are a lot of other scalability issues as well. It often feels like the grid is coming apart at the seams. The promised use of limiting logins of non-verified accounts during peak load has been severely lacking. This would be an effective interim solution to load issues, but Linden Lab seems unwilling to use it.

* Build tool problems – the importance of build tools that actually work as promised cannot be overstated enough – we rely on them to create content.Prim drift, disappearing prims, imprecise placement, problems with linking and other issues with the tools need to be addressed. Too much time is being spent trying to work around the problems.

* Transaction problems – inventory deliveries are failing with an alarming (and annoying) frequency, leaving merchants with the burden of replacing missing content and having to try to confim the transaction in the first place. We trust that our L$ balances are accurate, but given recent problems, that is a cause for concern as well, and one we place our full trust in you to ensure its accuracy.

We remain fully supportive of Second Life and are more than willing to continue doing our part to help, but our confidence is steadily being eroded due to a general lack of communication and the apparent failure to successfully address the many issues detailed above. What we are asking for is that these problems are addressed immediately, ahead of new features, and that we are able to see tangible improvements. We accept that this will not happen overnight but it also cannot be allowed to continue indefinitely either.

Thank you for taking the time to read this letter.

I know that you have been waiting too long for this. Registration is now open. Please share the great news with everyone you know. We do have limited space and want to make sure you get a ticket so register today.http://www.SLConvention.org/register/

The hotel room block is now open as well. The Hotel phone number is 1-312-922-4400. The group code when you call is ‘Second Life Community Convention’. Brilliant huh? The rate is $159.00 for a single and $179.00 for a double room plus tax. They will charge a deposit of one night in advance. It will be returned if you cancel at least 3 days before the event … for any reason! There is also a designated number of hotel rooms blocked out so reserve now to secure the lower group rate.

I decided to give Eve Online a whirl this week. Out of all the online video games and virtual worlds that I have seen, Eve Online intrigued me the most. Lucifer Baphomet said “its like flying around in Babylon 5.” to which, I responded “you had me at Babylon 5″.

I am testing the waters with a two week free trial. I compiled my character an aptly named Jennyfur of the Gallente race and began the training program. You can’t really do much of anything until you complete the training. I wish they had a similar training thing in Second Life. I think it would make newbs a lil less ignorant to not let them leave Orientation Island until they could demonstrate the capacity to do everything in the training program.

I just needed a break from Second Life and its not like it works very well these days. My friends list almost never works so its kind of pointless, but woohoo to all the megacorps staking their virtual claim and the millions of droves of new users. Don’t get me started.

I made this gown a few weeks ago now and realized that I never officially announced its release. I decided to make a few limited edition gowns for the SL Relay for Life this year in memory of Feliciaa Feaver, who lost her battle with cancer earlier this week.

All proceeds from the sale of the Forever Feliciaa gown go directly to the SL Relay for Life campaign this year. Each gown can be purchased for a minimum donation of $1000L and is available at :

Deadly Nightshade Design Studio in Indigo

Deadly Nightshade @ Nomine

Transylvania Relay for Life Shop

Deadly Nightshade @ Transylvania

This afternoon Feliciaa lost her battle with cancer. She was surrounded by her family. There are no words to adequately express the great sadness we feel by this loss.

Rest in peace Fel.

Many of us had the pleasure of meeting Feliciaa in person last year at the SLCC. For those that didn’t know, Fel took a two-day train ride from her home to San Francisco to meet her friends from Second Life. Here are a few pictures of mine from the event last year.

Regards,

Jennyfur