Want to Try Dad Dating?

This is sold as "A Dad Dating Simulator (...) a game where you play as a Dad and your goal is to meet and romance other hot Dads. You and your daughter have just moved into the sleepy seaside town of Maple Bay only to discover that everyone in your neighborhood is a single, dateable Dad! Will you go out with Teacher Dad? Goth Dad? Bad Dad? Or any of the other cool Dads in this game? With minigames, sidequests, and a variety of paths and endings, Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator is this year’s most anticipated Dad-based game."

For only (sic!) €14,99/US$17.62 the game features

• 7 dateable Dads
• Dad character creator - Create your Dadsona!
• Multiple endings per-Dad
• Voiced by the Game Grumps and friends
• Written by Vernon Shaw and Leighton Gray
• Artwork and pinups by Shanen Pae, J.N. Wiedle, Anna Pan, Tyson Hesse, Ellen Alsop, Evan Palmer, Ego Rodriguez, and many more!
• Original score by Jesse Cale
• Dad-themed mini and micro games throughout each date path
• So many Dad puns. Like, to the point where it made us all uncomfortable
• Secretssssssss.

Mergers & Acquisitions (Updated)

"Linden Lab, the makers of SecondLife, announced today that it is in discussions with High Fidelity over merging the two companies and thus consolidating in anticipation of a future collaboration with or takeover bid from Facebook", the Financial Times reports, citing sources.

As Philip Rosedale, a.k.a. "our creator", Philip Linden or "my beloved Philip", has a major interest in both companies it is assumed that the discussions will go smoothly and a deal will be made before the end of the week.

According to the article  it is probable that Philip Rosedale will become the Chairman of the Board of the new company, while Ebbe Altman, a.k.a. Ebbe Linden, will remain as CEO.

Read the full article Financial Times: Linden Lab & High Fidelity to merge?.

More updates on this will be posted here, as soon as I learn more.

UPDATE April 2, 2014
This entire post is of course a fabrication, it was my attempt at trying to fool you on April Fools Day.

Eddi: "SecondLife Is Now Relevant Again"

My buddy Eddi Haskell, SecondLife blogger, photographer and techguru extraordinaire, has some interesting thoughts today on what yesterdays sensational news, that Facebook will be purchasing Oculus VR will mean for SecondLife.

Oculus VR are the developers of consumer-ready Oculus Rift, a 3 D headset for virtual reality applications.

To quote Mark Zuckerberg: Mobile is the platform of today, and now we’re also getting ready for the platforms of tomorrow. Oculus has the chance to create the most social platform ever, and change the way we work, play and communicate.

Read Eddi's interesting and compelling thoughts on this development Eddi & Ryce's Second Life: "Second Life Is Now Relevant Again..."

As I am afflicted with an almost complete one-sided blindness since childhood, this development will mean nothing to me (I remember the many times spent I spent in movie theaters or in front of television sets with green and red glasses and listening to the others ohhhhhing, ahhhhhhing and wowing), but the more fortunate of you will certainly get a kick out of this.

I Signed Up With Philip

After reading about this on my bosom buddy Apmel Goosson's blog "My Avatar's Name is Apmel" I signed up to become an alpha tester on Philip Rosedale's new project High Fidelity.

The man, the myth, the legend Philip Rosedale (previously a.k.a. Philip Linden), as you all should know, is the original creator of SecondLife, who after leaving Linden Lab has now go on to create another wonderful new world.

Where my Philip goes, I follow! (This by no means implies that I will ever leave SecondLife before they pull the plug on it in San Francisco.)
____

The Idea
We're building a new virtual world enabling rich avatar interactions driven by sensor-equipped hardware, simulated and served by devices (phones, tablets and laptops/desktops) contributed by end-users.

The Matter
Voxels. We're making a strategic bet that rich computer rendering is heading there. Imagine an experience with cubes of many different sizes, with the ability to scale them down to a seamless molecular fabric. Now imagine these building blocks manifesting complex physical properties.

Finally, imagine that world extending visibly to vanishing points like our world does today, enabling you to see your house, your neighborhood, distant mountains, and other planets in the sky. We believe computing power and network transmission speeds are evolving to make such a world possible, represented by a sparse voxel octree data structure.

____

Read all about the new project here: High Fidelity
And when you visit that webpage, please, oh please, make sure to click the sound players under each of the team members, especially Philip!

Dedication

This is to all the hateful trolls in first life, in SecondLife, in all other virtual worlds and last but not least in the blogosphere, especially the one that lately - for unclear reasons - called me a misogynist.

I know I should not post two songs back-to-back but I stumbled across this and here you have it...

(I tried finding an uncensored version of this particular video but without success, if you know where I can find it please tell me!)

Kitchens & Bathrooms in SecondLife

Ever since I arrived in SecondLife I have been wondering about all the kitchens and bathrooms we see in-world, when we never really use them for much. Obviously we do not eat, drink, wash, crap or pee in our virtual homes, so why do we let these useless rooms take up space and prims to the extent that we do?

I was reminded about my early fascination on this subject, when I saw my son in-law and friend Ziggy's beautiful picture. The only valid excuses for having bathrooms that I can think of are the many wonderful "sex-in-the-shower/bathtub" animation scenes I have seen.

Photography by Ziggy Starsmith
Quoted from Ziggy and Guyke On The Edge Of Second Life

But what about the kitchens? As far as I can recall I have not seen any sex-animation scenes centered around that particular space in our SecondLife homes.

Considering the many wonderful moments I have spent in the kitchen in first life getting slammed against the kitchen cabinets, thrown on to or over a kitchen table, a sink or a kitchen counter or even rolling around the floor, it is rather amazing that it has not been resulted in any sex-animations. Surely I cannot be alone with these sweet memories, can I?

My old buddy Kip Ashbourne and his husband Chaz Longstaff over at Blue Balls Animations really should start working on this pretty darn soon, in my opinion they could make a fortune or two by catering to this forgotten room. But then again, it may just be that I haven't done a proper market research. There may very well be sex- animations for this room, I just haven't come across them yet.

Je Suis Là Aussi

My bosom buddy Apmel Goosson tipped me about this new virtual world in his post For this party you have to join a new world!

At the landing place

The new world is called "AIRE Mille Flux" (webpage url), and you are rezzed even uglier than you did in SecondLife in March of 2007. It seems to be a French artsy world and not that exciting yet... 8 sims and at least three are private.

Perhaps the artworld is hoping that they can convince the annoying Ms. SaveMe Oh to emigrate there so they don't have to bounce her off their sims and ban her all the time.

A Blogs Demise

It was not without some pleasure and great satisfaction that I late last night noticed that the Swedish virtual worlds blog Netlott, previously named Prim Team, declared that it was closing down after only 20 days (February 21 - March 11, 2012).

I have informed you about this blog earlier in my posts "Ich Bin Ein Prim Teamer" and Bukowski & Witches.

The blog started by declaring that the bloggers were a group of people with technical interests and that they together had amassed more than 25 years of experience in virtual worlds. They also declared that they were going to remain anonymous but gave no specific reason for this decision.

I am sure the blog would have been welcomed in the Swedish SecondLife community despite the fact that the bloggers wished to remain anonymous if the blog had settled for their proclaimed field of expertise, the technical aspects of virtual worlds. Such a blog written by people with keen insight and knowledge on the workings of the viewers and a willingness to share and educate the rest of us is sorely needed and would fill a vacuum.

However, the Prim Team and Netlott blog (Netlott is by the way a word play on the English word "net" and the Swedish word "nitlott" which means "drawing a blank"), instead chose to start delving in social issues and unearthing dirty linen and rusty battle axes from the close or distant past. This caused the Swedish community in SecondLife to erupt and the tentative armed peace that had been established over the past two-three months evaporated. Ghouls from the past that had relished in the previous unrest reappeared and the favorite object of hate was yet again reviled.

Once the blog started declaring who was not a member of the blogging team I declared myself to be one of them to see how they would handle that. This was never commented upon.

I am now completely certain that one of the team members is in fact "The avatar formerly known as Sven Idyll". I have come to this conclusion from the language used in some of the posts, some of the topics raised on the blog, a question directed at me by one of the anonymous bloggers which was exactly the same as one Sven Idyll previously had posed to me and now - finally - the way in which the blog was closed.

The blog was shutdown in exactly the same way as Sven Idyll´s previous three (3) blogs. with some choice words of recrimination, "no one understands me", "you have all misinterpreted me" and "you bore me" etc., and letting the blog stay online for a while after removing all the previous comments and assorted posts and not allowing any new comments.

I would be the first to welcome a new Swedish blog that focused on the technical aspects, but we do not need more trolls. We have enough of those already, thank you very much!

UPDATE (04:58 AM SLT): And now "The avatar formerly known as Sven Idyll" has read this post and has posted a not so subtle comeback at me. Hilarious! (No link to that waste of time will be supplied here, I am sure that others will be happy to help you.)

PROBABLY RELATED: My buddy NE0 Timeless over at Free Your Mind has found an interesting article from March 7, 2012, on a Swedish website that could have some connection to this matter. An IT-consultant of sorts is bashing SecondLife as a waste of time and claiming we now have drugs inworld, something called "Seclimine". 

Apparently it is something that messes with the shared inworld experience I gather, as he mentions something about a hazy viewer and sound distortions. I never heard about it though, but I am a sanctimonious prick so...

Sven Analyzes "the Threshold"

Swedish virtual worlds blogger Sven Idyll over at Svens(k) Idyll has been thinking over Philip Rosedale´s statement to the New York Times recently and come up with this interesting analysis (rough translation by me) in his post "It becomes impossible only when you know it is"

"Philip Rosedale made a statement recently about the threshold of Second Life being high, and to some extent it is true, but one thing is absolutely critical, the willingness to learn and explore. I have in the past month seen how quickly primary school pupils will take on such a thing as building in virtual worlds like Second Life and Open Sim. They do not think it is particularly difficult - if they have the interest they learn extremely fast. Learning how it works is not the hardest part for them but to learn to utilize the many options that are available is difficult. Children do not see so many obstacles, but they try - and often several times. Sometimes, the impossible happens.

Children have not acquired the limitations that we have as adults. We as adults mean something else with "impossible" than children do. Impossible for us older people is a pretty solid stop but for the young, it is a condition that exists until someone finds a way. A few adults manage to keep this desire to conquer the impossible and I would have liked to be one of those but I have put up too many stop signs and signs for both "one way traffic" and "forbidden passage" in my mind.

If you could make a wish for new feature or something else new in Second Life would it be something that has a counterpart in real world, or you could come up with something completely new - something that can only exist in the virtual world? Some children just spurt out such ideas. We are well accustomed to some of those things, being able to teleport, fly and change our avatar anyway we wish - or so we think.

We have a whole new world waiting for us where everything is possible, but we just copy things from real world into virtual reality. When will things start coming in the virtual worlds that we can copy over to the real world? Lack of imagination is in short supply in the virtual worlds!

We want to come to the virtual world because it is different but when we get there we immediately start converting it to a copy of the world we want to disconnect from.

In how many areas of your life are you free from rules and patterns and have a belief that there are no limitations? If you have that, can you describe that which has no borders and that cannot be captured by rules or exhibit patterns?

Second Life needs pure imagination to grow but to let go of the rational thoughts completely and let your imagination reign free is probably the hardest things to do."

---
I must say I agree with Sven, if a total gaming idiot like myself - and a few other fools I know all to well - could learn to enjoy SecondLife and develop our skills inworld by ourselves and with the eager help of our friends I do not really see where the huge threshold problem is. There is nothing "impossible" with SecondLife!

Sven is also correct in my mind when he calls for even more imagination in virtual worlds.

Challenges should not be easy, but they must be fun and interesting and allow us to develop in our own pace. Only then will the curiosity and childlike creativity be awakened that makes life so fun sometimes.

Model: Millimina Salamander

I am still waiting in vain for my fashion statement "The Jesters Hat - only for the boldest among fashionistas" to be copied into first life.

Complete List of Virtual World Blogs

Sven Idyll photographed by Sven Idyll

The Swedish blogger Sven Idyll has been working hard to make a complete list of links to blogs covering virtual worlds, although mostly SecondLife.

He has now collected a list with more than a hundred links to active blogs. The list is sorted with the latest updated on top. If a blog isn't updated in six months it will be removed.

Only a few of the links are for fashion or event blogs as Sven thinks these blogs - although they have great layouts are mainly for commercial reasons - and he wants to focus on the blogs covering living in virtual worlds or the technical aspects. He is however considering to maybe create a special collection of links to the fashion blogs in the future.

I have added a gadget in the right column with a direct link to the list, click the image "Virtual Links" and it will take you straight there.

Sven says he will gratefully accept any hints of blogs he may have missed, so if you don´t find your blog in the list tell him about it!

My own tips to Sven on missing links are
Gay-Worlds News (http://www.gay-worldsnews.com/),
The Bullring (http://torrospyker.blogspot.com/) and
Second Pride (http://www.secondpride.com/)