Bye bye Arabella

I read the news on "Tinas universum" that Arabella Steadham has been permabanned from Second Life, and am actually not upset or amazed at all but rather grateful to Linden Lab for looking out for my safety, protecting my privacy and generally covering my precious arse.

I don´t believe a word of Arabella´s rantings on her own blog "Arabella´s Amblings", that she has been permabanned for being an honest, upright and outspoken person against the dictatorial Linden Lab.

You should try "OutWorldz" now Arabella, I have read a lot of good stuff about the boring place. They really, really need some more excitement there (except for the often occuring shutdowns) have fun!

Emerald - The End

"This is the end, beautiful friend
This is the end, my only friend, the end
It hurts to set you free
But you’ll never follow me
The end of laughter and soft lies
The end of night we tried to die
This is the end

United we stand and divided we fall. Thus ends the final days of the Emerald Project.


Approximately 10 days ago I and a number of devs came together to reform the Emerald Team in the anxious hope of continuing the most popular TPV in Second Life. The incredible driving passion, flair for innovation, endless energy and camaraderie were all still there. Because of this, I was sure we could make this work.


Alas this was not  to be. Linden Lab has made demands of the team that are impossible to meet. Among the demands not listed publicly elsewhere was to publicly release an RC without any ability to load the emkdu or llkdu files. This was do-able. The final demand was to ‘delete’ 3 key members of our team. While making this demand, Linden Lab was quite aware that this was effectively the guillotine to the project.


This is the opportunity for a fork project to develop and create a TPV version of snowstorm, which is what Linden Lab really wants. I am aware of a number of small projects underway now, and I wish them the best, the very best in their endeavors.


For you, the user, what this  means is that there will not be any further releases of the Emerald Viewer after today. The existing releases will continue to operate until Linden Lab decides to terminate their access and end Emerald once and for all.


There will be one final version of the Emerald Viewer released here later today; that is, the viewer we’ve been working on for the past six months. It would be a shame to let the efforts of the developers who put so many unpaid hours into this project go to waste.


This virtual world is ever changing and must be, otherwise it will stagnate. This incredible environment will continue.

Arabella Steadham
Communications Manager"

Emeraldgate - some trust restored

I have just finished watching  "Tonight Live with Paisley Beebe".

About 34 minutes into the show there is a very good and long interview with Arabella Steadham and Jessica Lyon of the new and regrouped Emerald-team.

What I heard Arabella and Jessica say have restored some of my trust in the development team behind the Emerald-viewer, so I am now uninstalling and reinstalling the cleaned up version from the new Emerald Viewer site. I will be following future developments closely though.

Big thanks to my friend Suteruni for directing my attention to this show.