Dorktastically Delicious

*cues Europe – The Final Countdown*

A little epic sounding, especially if you’re not actually closing. And it’s basically the first store-wide sale (there were some Christmas freebies, if I remember correctly). But that is what it’s called. I expect the feeds will be full of Armidi starting oh.. right about now… and the posts will be full of reminiscing and stories about how hard is to get into the sale sims.

So I’m going to talk about it from a slightly different viewpoint. When Armidi first opened, back in late 2007, it was after a good six months of teasing the public. Anyone remember the Poynter from Hair Fair 2007? The Armidi team stole the show. It was great hair, for the time, but everyone and their mother, father, ex, ex’s ex, and ex’s mother’s father’s dog had at least one style and wore it all the time. Once the sim opened, the same thing happened to all of their products, creating the Armidi stigma. Even if the designers create some of the highest quality products on the grid, the products are mainstream because “everyone” has them and thus they unfortunately become passe.

I, for one, avoided Armidi since I believed the prices were exorbitantly high. Why should I spend luxury prices on mainstream clothes? It didn’t help that new releases were few and far between, always “fashionably late.” It left a bad taste in the mouth.

Fast forward 3 years to the present. Armidi is still around, the sim is still laggy as ever and really hasn’t changed much for a good while. Certain sections of Armidi are horribly out of date while other sections are no longer fashionable. A handful of stores have achieved and surpassed the quality of Armidi wares and offer these newer clothes at much more reasonable prices.

At least for women.

I doubt there ever will be as much selection and variety in male clothing as there is for women, nor do I ever expect there to be. As a result, though, there are very few stores that can match the quality of the Armidi basics for guys. Even worse (for me at least), very little of the quality new items for men have been in my style, which I’ll readily admit is on the bland side.

So, as guilty as it makes me feel to admit it — I was pretty excited for the Armidi sale. With everything at nearly 50% off, the Armidi clothes that I’ve liked for years, which happen to fit my style, are now at a reasonable price point. It’s like having my cake and eating it too.

Admittedly, I do feel a bit guilty about spending as much as I did, especially on items “tainted” by the Armidi stigma. At the end of the day, though, you have to do what makes you happy. I’ve waited nearly three years for this. I know I’ll use the jackets, tees, and jeans I just bought. And while my outfits may be a bit repetitive (especially considering my last outfit featured an Armidi blazer), the bottom line is that I still feel pretty damn good wearing em.

Hair: [Uw.7R]
Skin: -Belleza- Thomas V2 Deep Tan 0 (Bald)
Eyes: Custom from L.Fauna

Jacket: Armidi – (m) Classic Pinstripe Blazer [Cream]
Shirt: Armidi Limited – Basic Deep V-Neck (Unisex) [Light Gray]
Pants: Armidi Limited – (M) Lowrise Jeans Original [Classic Fade]
Shoes: 2g – SOUBRESAUT_Brown

Glasses: ROLE OPTIC SG-56 Arcadi
Ears: AITUI – (Type 2) Stretched Ear – Human – 1/2″
Tattoo: AITUI Tatoo – Fool of Fowles /faded/ I
Belt: AOHARU_BT VintageDenim_Belt
Ring: RH Engel-La Jolla Wedding Band-His
Watch: *chronokit* watch no.34 *Comet* male

Poses: Diesel Works Baasha9 and cova8 Standing 2

“The eyes indicate the antiquity of the soul” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Oh wow I won! Will add pictures this weekend!

Read the rest of this entry »

I didn’t really intend to do much fashion blogging, but Luna thought I looked cute and said I should blog this outfit. It’s been a year since my last post, so I’m a bit rusty to say the least.

Hair: [Uw.7R] Rush-Hair Meteoric
Skin: -Belleza- Thomas V2 Deep Tan 0 (Bald)
Eyes: Custom from L.Fauna

Jacket: Armidi – (m) Classic Pinstripe Blazer [Navy]
Shirt: +KiiToS!! Sinilintu+ BIG collar RIB JACKET *DarkOlive* Border-Tshirt Top (modded)
Pants: *ARAI* Chino pants 02_Light Baige
Shoes: 2g – SOUBRESAUT_[indigo_vermilion]

Glasses: ROLE OPTIC SG-56 Arcadi
Ears: AITUI – (Type 2) Stretched Ear – Human – 1/2″
Necklace: Hematite Tooth & Black&White Necklaces (male) – TheGoldenFleece
Ring: RH Engel-La Jolla Wedding Band-His
Watch: *chronokit* watch no.34 *Comet* male

Poses: Diesel Works Alagan3 and [LAP] – M-Blogger2-Mirror

The main reason I didn’t work on this post yesterday was that I was too busy trying to savor what was left of my rezz day. Now I’ll try to make heads and tails of M’s blogpost from yesterday and the related press release.

High Level

The blog post states the following main goals:

* to improve our focus as a company on the projects that matter most to Residents
* to simplify our organizational structure and operate more efficiently
* to achieve cost savings so that we can invest in platform improvements, new products, and new lines of business.

The latter two goals make a decent amount of business sense — audit and assess the company, trim the fat, and stretch the money available. Something like what the Bob’s did at Initech. While not always fun for employees, if done correctly this kind of move is generally better for the long terms goals for any company.

The press release goes into more detail:

The company’s product and engineering divisions will be combined. The software development teams will be consolidated in North America and customer support will be reconfigured to provide more scalable services.

Support restructuring should hopefully be a welcome improvement. I’ve heard quite a few complaints and horror stories about dealing with support since the last time they reconfigured. While the original support team was great, it just coulnd’t handle the necessary volume of tickets. Apparently the original reworking wasn’t great and couldn’t handle the volume either. Let’s hope this third try is a charm.

As for the software team consolidation, that also makes decent sense. Having all your devs within 3 time zones of each other definitely helps with interoffice communication. As for merging enigeering and product teams — I’m guessing that means IT infrastructure and software (server and client) are now the same team. Which means a lot of sense considering:

First, the company aims to create a browser-based virtual world experience, eliminating the need to download software. Secondly, Linden Lab will look to extend the Second Life experience into popular social networks.

When your client is in the browser being served from the hardware and interacting with the server software — being in the same team makes decent sense.

Those Laid Off

The unfortunate part, though, is the “trimming of fat”. The press release claims30% of the company got laid off yesterday. This is supposedly the list of Lindens who were laid off yesterday.

I’m not 100% sure of the list’s accuracy, since it’s originally from March 30, 2009, but it looks like at least 40 Lindens were let go yesterday. Being laid off is almost never a happy event, and I hope everyone that last their job yesterday will find be able to find new employment soon.

My question, though, is why were those Lindens laid off.

According to Massively, the enterprise team, the Singapore office, and German country/community manager Katrin Linden were part of yesterday’s cut. That all falls in line with M’s plans. SL Enterprise solutions have generally been a failed venture and aren’t necessary if focus is returning to improving resident experience. Singapore isn’t North America, unfortunately, so the team there was let go. Losing the German manager doesn’t fit very cleanly, but I’m guessing that for some reason the European HQ in Amsterdam (which for some reason isn’t listed on their employment page) somehow made her redundant.

But not all of the names make much sense. I didn’t know of the Lindens personally and most of my knowledge of their work comes from official blog posts and JIRA. The following names (in alphabetical order) make me ask questions:

• Babbage – Babbage was supposed to fix a handful of Mono-related bugs, including an upgrade to later Mono that would fix SVC-3895. Without him on the team, what will happen to LSL-Mono, and LSL in general. Will he be replaced by devs who will work on Unity3D (basically Mono in a browser)?
• Blue – Blue, along with other Lindens who worked with the Teen Grid (Claudia, Teagan, and Mia come to mind — others probably as well) were on the list. Does this mean that the Teen Grid is going soon as well? Maybe their positions will be replaced in the upcoming support restructuring?
• Pink – the new SL Beta Marketplace was supposed to launch last night. I’m guessing that’ll come soon, but it’d seem that Pink was hired only as a freelancer/consultant then?
• Pastrami – One of the original Windlight devs, Pastrami was supposedly working on mesh import lately. Does that mean mesh import is done or on the blocks for now? Mesh import was among the list of upcoming features for this year.
• Whump – Since Whump was the OpenSimulator interoperability dev, I guess inter-grid movement is no longer even a distant goal.

What Now?

I’m on the fence about the new Linden Lab goals. Running SL in a browser as opposed to as a downloadable program is a laudable goal. Sure, AjaxLife has been around for a few years, but i’m guessing this is a full 3D viewer in the browser. If it’s possible, it would make it a lot easier to get in world from anywhere. Maybe even from an iPad or netbook. But browsers implement plugin APIs slightly different, leading to hacks and strange limitations. Which browsers will LL decide to support, and on which platforms? On the plus side though, the new Version 2.0 interface now make a lot of sense — it looks like a browser because it will eventually be in a browser.

I’m not so sure I like the focus on social networks though. It doesn’t matter to me that SL interacts with social networking tools. I can already plurk and tweet inworld. I already have a profile on secondlife.com. Facebook doesn’t want avatars, while I’m not sure I want Avatars United. So why this emphasis on integrating with social networks? It doesn’t make sense that doing so would make SL more mainstream. While the social networking space is volatile (anyone like Friendster or Myspace anymore?), what does SL bring to the table that would make the mainstream user want it? Is the new Second Life really just a Facebook clone with a 3D world on the side? That doesn’t seem right.

And what about all the goals that were on the books and seemingly aren’t anymore? Marketplace beta was due today, Server 1.40 and Havok 7 were due this summer, and mesh import was due for end of year. Are those deadlines slipping? Will they actually be completed? Viewer 2.1 alpha was relelased today, so it’d seem that project is still on track, but doesn’t say much about all of the other projects.

In the meanwhile, though, Second Life is still about the people. Linden Lab provides the glue that allows me to keep in touch with those people, but there are other mechanisms too. Day to day SL shouldn’t change that much. And if it does change enough that people find it unusable, they’ll either move to another platform or give up. Sure the next platform might not be as good as Second Life, but people will adjust in order to hang out with their friends.

I created Express Zenovka, my first account, around 6:30 pm on June 9, 2007.

Has it really been only three years? Somehow it feels like a lot longer. I don’t think I ever expected Second Life to become such a large part of my life, though I’m pretty sure most folks in SL don’t went they first download the client.

I downloaded Second Life because I was bored and lonely, and generally unhappy with my life. The last two years of school had taught me that I really wasn’t as smart as I thought I was, that I didn’t really like the subject I though I wanted to do for my life, and that growing up as a sheltered, only child had not prepared me socially for “the real world.” I had a lot of trouble connecting with others at school. On top of that, my small circle of friends from high school had managed to stick together during freshman year of college, but by sophomore year our respective interests, commitments, and time zones had caused us to drift apart.

So I turned to the place that had been my refuge and comfort for so many years — the web. Unfortunately, many of my “interests” from high school were just that — interests from high school — and I found it very difficult to reconnect with those respective communities. Many of the other “old timers” had disappeared or moved on and I just didn’t fit anymore.

And that’s why I downloaded Second Life. I justified the escapist fantasy by saying I wanted to make a quick buck, so my first few days were mostly spent camping. At night, I did what (in my head) was what normal, lonely, depressed men did — visited SL strip clubs and tried to chat it up with the dancers. Kinda depressing in retrospect. Eventually I realized camping wasn’t enough return on investment, and decided to get a job at one of the clubs. That was the first in a long list  of professions including but not limited to: club manager,store model, furniture designer, mall manager, fashion blogger, runway model, bartender, magazine writer, pro surfer, web admin, chicken farmer, scripter, advertiser, and bunny farmer.

While making money has always been an admirable goal (and a good way to keep busy in SL), I also have grown a lot as a person during my time in SL. Fumbling through online relationships of all sorts — professional, romantic, friendships — helped me slowly but surely change parts of my life that I didn’t like. Sure, you might say, why didn’t you just go out and do that in real life. Why didn’t you go out and interact with “real people”? Well, life is all about comfort zones, and the web is where I felt comfortable. You could say that Second Life provided the training wheels I needed to figure out aspects of real life. Lessons I learned in Second Life have helped me out a lot in various ways: I leveraged my connections in SL to create an art project for an art class and analyzed the experience in another humanities class. Hey, even fashion blogging came in handy as it influenced the way I dressed and presented myself to potential employers.

But the real reason I’ve stuck in Second Life is the friends I’ve made.  The friends and connections I’ve made over the years have made SL worth it. Especially, of course, my wonderful partner Luna. I really don’t think I’d have stayed in Second Life this past year without her, and this past year my Second Life accomplishments (off the top of my head the feeds, my various scripts for virtual animals, SLDD) are some of the ones I’m most proud of.

So, despite all the recent changes at LL, and uncertain future of SL, here’s to another year.

Again.

Last time I wrote up this whole long post about why I wanted to blog at OneMoreSL. Problem is, I didn’t follow through. Life was busy cuz of school, I was started to get tired of SL fashion, and I just found myself with less and less motivation every day. While Juushie was around the site had new posts, so it sorta worked until she got bored with SL.

So, once again, as I wait to end one SL venture I’m starting another new one. I’m standing on my own two blogging feet, and it’s solely my responsibility to keep this place updated. But I won’t make an guarantees or commitments. I’ll just write when I feel like it, and y’all will have to deal.

Cuz, you know, I’m dorktastically delicious or something like that.