Dwell On It

I surrender...

2009-05-10T11:03:00.000-07:00

Okay. Yes. Thankyou everyone for mentioning it :) I surrender, yield, and generally give in. Congratulations :) Today, Dwell On It is now on Wordpress, on its own domain, partially thanks to the awesome folks at DreamHost. Every post and comment should be there. I did spend a couple hours rapidly learning style-sheets, PHP and wordpress getting everything installed, configured and migrated. I

Populous, the origin of

2009-05-10T00:38:00.001-07:00

"We couldn't sell it to anyone" -- Bullfrog's famous 1989 game, Populous was a huge hit, but it was a serendipitous one. A tiny business making a game without a clear target idea, Bullfrog hit on success with a combination of luck and plain-old hard work. "Our royalty cheques were due to be paid one quarter in arrears, and we didn’t expect to get any ... The next cheque was for a quarter of a

A public service announcement

2009-05-09T08:42:00.001-07:00

For the record, I'm Tateru Nino. I'm a professional writer and I write about all sorts of stuff, including Second Life and Linden Lab. Now, here's the important bit: No, I don't run Second Life. No, I don't run Linden Lab either. Nor do I work for them. No, I am not the right person to talk to insofar as demanding that I change a Second Life policy, or fixing a Second Life bug. No, I can't

Second Life data update

2009-05-08T10:35:00.001-07:00

Good news: Second Life total signups is back on the air. The feed lit up again on 4 May. The weekly signup chart will come back online as soon as there's enough data. The figure presently reads 15,348,641. Pre-purge that was 16,753,668. How many accounts were purged is unknown, but shouldn't be hard to estimate with some reasonable accuracy. Not so good news: Linden Lab is only providing

Meet the editor

2009-05-08T02:20:00.001-07:00

Yesterday, I got the chance to meet up AFK with my editor from The Metaverse Journal, Lowell Cremorne. Lowell was in town for a day for a conference. It was scary, fun, and awesome. There was also lasagne!

Twitter for Dollhouse season 2

2009-05-07T22:00:00.001-07:00

My partner and I have recently been watching Joss Whedon's Dollhouse. Firstly, we can see why a lot of Whedon fans might be disappointed in it. It doesn't carry the same sort of 'flavour' as previous works. Buffy and Firefly had a fairly strong sense of adventure. Dollhouse doesn't have that. But there's actually nothing really wrong with it. We started watching with no preconceptions as to

Impressions: Frenzoo

2009-05-07T07:16:00.001-07:00

I've done many things in my time. No, I'm not ancient (it just seems that way). I've just packed a lot of things in in the time I've had. I've been to school, I've had jobs, and I've had hobbies. It's kept me pretty busy. There's one hobby that I've never made enough time for: fashion design. Do you draw little sketches of ideas, and occasionally develop those into full-colour plates and flats?

Protecting your work

2009-05-07T00:05:00.001-07:00

Let's start by talking copyright for a few minutes. From your blog to your virtual-environment creations you, the creator, have rights. You have the right to profit from your work (or the right to choose not to profit from it, if you like). Those rights are nothing without protection. In almost every part of the world, while copyright laws disagree on some of the details, copyright is automatic

Scary stuff HR.1966

2009-05-06T06:25:00.001-07:00

Well, this is rather... interesting to say the least: Whoever transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication, with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person, using electronic means to support severe, repeated, and hostile behavior, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.... ["

Poll: Adult content - Both sides of the question

2009-05-05T09:00:00.000-07:00

Alright, as you're probably aware, there's a JIRA issue (MISC-2727) asking Linden Lab to halt all of the plans, policies and changes coming for Adult Content in the coming months. That's gotten a whole lot of votes.What I'm more interested in though is the spread of reactions from as many Second Life users as possible. Not just against the policy, but also for it and those who are simply uncaring

Worse.... or better?

2009-05-04T22:51:00.001-07:00

Online Surveys & Market ResearchI'm working on a far more interesting poll, but it occured to me to wonder how Second Life is for you this year so far, as opposed to last year. I've tried to include an option to cover everyone, so we'll see how that goes.

Concurrency feeds running again

2009-05-04T13:45:00.001-07:00

Second Life concurrency data has just flickered back to life. Looks like it was a bug after all. The Lab apparently set to fixing the problem just as soon as the issue was discovered. The charts should start updating within the next quarter hour or so.

Can an avatar sign a contract?

2009-05-04T06:56:00.000-07:00

Short version: no. Slightly longer version: Don't be silly, of course not. Let's start with what signing a contract actually means. Signing a contract means that you, in your capacity as a legal entity, are capable of understanding the contract, are making an intentional choice and have agreed to abide by the terms of the contract and any obligations or protections that it specifies. In

Concurrency stats offline

2009-05-03T21:44:00.000-07:00

The live data feed for Second Life concurrency is off the air. It went dark on the afternoon of Thursday, 30 April, and hasn't been updated since. Normally, I'd think of this as just another glitch in the statistical feeds. Heaven knows, there have been plenty of those -- having some missing data is not uncommon. The timing got me thinking, though. You see, Linden Lab purged a whole bunch of

So very wrong...

2009-05-03T12:20:00.001-07:00

Encountered this while grocery shopping. This is so very, very, very, deeply wrong. Tentacle porn. It's what's for breakfast! The side of the bowl says "OOH!" (click it for a larger image)

Play it now: Project Eden

2009-05-03T05:32:00.001-07:00

The Earth has become overpopulated. Cities just grow up and up and ground-level is something that most people -- the lucky ones -- never get near. Even the rundown and decrepit levels just below the clean, shiny, and urbane upper-city are the turf of the homeless, the hopeless, the diseased and the gangers. And things get just get worse further down. But there's something brewing. Something

Board-game culture, video-game culture, branding and quality

2009-05-02T09:03:00.000-07:00

I confess to being rather fond of Greg Costikyan. I've been quite the admirer of his work for more than two decades now. He's smart, witty, deliciously untrustworthy, and (I think) rather strikingly handsome. In a recent column at Play This Thing, Costikyan talks about board games. He's got some darn fine points and comparisons, though I don't necessarily completely agree with every single

Classic customer service

2009-05-02T01:55:00.000-07:00

So, there's this guy in World of Warcraft who'd had his account hacked and some characters swiped. Eventually (after a very very long time) Blizzard gets around to restoring the characters. Of course the characters' original items and gear were long gone, but Blizaard tends to put a sort of randomish sort of loot on restored characters, so you've at least got something to go on with. One of

I may not know much about socmedia, but I know what I like

2009-05-01T22:08:00.000-07:00

A gold star goes to Domino's Australia (the pizza chain) for their twitter account. You see, most companies who get on to social media basically think of it as yet another one-way medium to broadcast hopeful messages to the already-faithful. Domino's Pizza Enterprises (and a few others) do something that I actually appreciate: They actually communicate and converse. Sure, some of the tweets

The fascination of decay

2009-05-01T07:35:00.001-07:00

What's the fascination with decay, crumbling dystopias and abandoned or ruined urban landscapes? The answer, dear readers, is mystery. "Unspoiled" nature and everyday-use urban settings are what they are. Something abandoned or in ruins, however was something, and it may not be immediately apparent as to quite what. What is this place? What was it? Why was it left? How did it get to be

Valve suing Activision. Obligation shouldn't be that difficult a concept

2009-05-01T05:56:00.000-07:00

Back in 2002, Valve had a bit of a dustup with Sierra over royalties. The original lawsuit went to arbitration, and after reviewing the case the arbitrator decided that Sierra should pay Valve US$2,391,932. It was less than Valve wanted to get, and more than Sierra wanted to pay, but everyone signed off on it anyway. Fast-forward. Sierra was a part of Vivendi, and as a part of the merger last

New comic: Age-verification

2009-04-30T23:55:00.000-07:00

A new comic is live for your enjoyment. This time, the topic is age-verification.

Security vs everyone

2009-04-30T22:55:00.000-07:00

Security and ease-of-use tend to be mutually exclusive, it's said. Security is stuck in a two-front war, not only are there Bad Guys to keep out, but the authorized users will usually do almost everything possible to defeat the security measures that are intended to keep the Bad Guys out. In a sense, IT-security is generally fighting bigger battles with its customers than they are with the

Where has all the advertising gone? The failure of sudden success

2009-04-30T01:26:00.000-07:00

You may have noticed that around the middle of April, after a bit of a stretch of inactivity, I worked things over, created the comic archive, updated all my Google AdSense advertising blocks. After quite a while with no revenue from AdSense, the new adblocks seemed to be targeting very well on the whole, and with some general reworking daily ad revenue was really starting to be very good.

Play it now: Four free Big Fish games

2009-04-29T21:06:00.000-07:00

Big Fish Games have several titles available for free download for a limited time. Azada, Hidden Expedition: Everest, Fairway Solitaire, and Spa Mania. All four titles are available for both Windows and Mac. You'll need to create a free account at Big Fish Games in order to take advantage of the special coupon codes, but it is all fairly smooth sailing other than that. Azada is a puzzle