Eris

Volunteering at SLB is a lot of work. It's basically 10 days of non-stop events. I put in about 23 hours of actual logged "volunteer" time, not counting the time spent helping out before and after my shifts. With that over, though, I've been able to spend some time really exploring SLB.

Ima be real, there's a ton of ugly-ass AI slop at SLB. But here's a few gems I've found. These aren't the only gems, just a few I've decided to bring awareness to because they deserve it.

Second Life Topography, by Erik Mondrian

Those of you who explored SLB last year might remember Erik's 3D models of Sansara and Heterocera. Well, this year, he's done a 3D terrain map of all of mainland. It's seriously impressive. The pic in the header of this post is a closeup of the snowy mountains of Sansara, but it's all there in all its 3D glory.

And he's got bigger models too! He could fill a region with these on a much larger scale and more detail. Maybe one day the Lindens can give him space for it, because he's done incredible work with these. Collecting the terrain data alone must have been a huge effort, for each and every region.

He's been talking about it at the User Groups, but seeing it in-person is a whole different story. And if you click on a continent, it'll tell you which continent it is, in case you haven't been attending SL geography classes. He's even mapped out where each Linden Home theme is on Belli, which is neat.

I'll be sad to see this go at the end of SLB. I hope Erik finds a permanent home for it! It belongs in a museum!

Also, if you go down the stairs, there's a neat little underwater reef, with some prim coral and plants, provided by the maker of the next parcel!

Primstar, by Snowlord

This thing is so fucking trippy. Go watch it for a while. It's weird. Love it! SO MANY PRIMS! I haven't met Snowlord in person yet, apparently they're friends with Erik. But this shit is nuts. Erik also showed me some of their previous builds and the stuff people can do with prims never ceases to amaze me.

Hope, by Raven Anton

This exhibit by Raven Anton of Morph Productions had the biggest emotional impact on me. Raven has actually done a few of my favorite builds, like the Kaleidoscope Monarch Education Project (which I fell in love with before I ever met her), and I'm always excited to see what she's got up her sleeves.

But this... Fuck. To be real, I'm transgender, and I've lost a lot of friends to suicide. Hell, I've been there myself. It's rough out there. Seeing this build brought me to tears.

Like real, ugly crying tears.

This is just three screenshots. They don't do it justice. Walk through it. Keep your music on. Read the signs, listen to the music, and just take it in. 💚

Over the Rainbow - Munchies Land, by Saucey Sinister

Alright, so it wouldn't be SLB without a cake build. And there are like, several dozen of them. A lot of them are kinda sloppy. Like the giant Philip cake for example, or a certain alice-in-wonderland themed cake that's just like... omg so confusing. This cute lil cupcake icecream kingdom on the other hand, is a breath of fresh air.

It's very very very cute. Makes sense since I guess the builder/mesher also owns Kawaii Couture. Check her primfeed!

A Small Measure of Peace, by Mitsuko Kytori and Akiko Kinoshi

I was actually done writing this post, then my good friend Dreamsphere invited me to an event at this parcel. Somehow, I had missed it in previous visits. It's such a cute little tranquil location, and very well-landscaped. Makes sense, since Mitsuko also works on Hayabusa Design, where she makes really cool animesh trees, and Akiko owns the Akipelago islands.

I'll warn you, there's a lot of alpha-blended grasses and leaves, so the frame rate isn't great. But, it's fucking gorgeous and worth a visit and some pics.

They held a lil event here today, with Nuvolino and TaccaExotic DJing, which was a good time. Some great tunes in a beautiful environment.

Anyway, there's so much cool stuff to see at SLB. People have put in a ton of effort, and I'd highly recommend roaming the regions, not just hitting the shop and hop and bailing. This thing goes til July 19, so you've only got a few more weeks, then all this stuff goes poof!

For the past week, my time in SL has been consumed by Second Life's 23rd Birthday. This is my second year volunteering on the Stage Crew team, which has just been a blast. I've met so many insanely talented live performers, DJs, tribute bands, and coming together with the rest of the team has been a nice little reunion.

The music portion of the festivities continues til Sunday night, with Rapa and DINO closing out the Salty Saddle Saloon stage. The full calendar is here.

I've also had some time to explore the grounds, and attend some of the Linden Talks, including with Philip Linden on Monday, and the Product Team today. These happen at 1PM SLT, at the Orpheum Theater. Tomorrow's the Engineering team (with Jerome), Thursday is Marketing, and Friday is SL Studios (The moles, I think?).

The talks have been alright overall so far. Philip was... Philip, but during the Product Q&A, I got two of my questions answered! You can see the full questions and responses in Pantera Północy's recording of the session (linked to my questions).

The first was if Grumpity Linden and the gang have considered moving away from the powers of two tier pricing, to simplify mainland pricing and make it more accessible. She said (paraphrasing) that of course they have considered it, and would love to make that change because the existing tier pricing scheme gives her migraines to think about. But, of course there's a lot of history there and she didn't give any indication of this changing anytime soon.

The second was trickier:

Talking with some of my creator friends, I'm seeing a growing sentiment of "is it even worth it to keep creating for this platform" specifically triggered by the growth of AI-generated meshes, textures, etc. And as a consumer, among the flood of low-quality AI mesh and AI-generated advertisements, it's getting harder to find well-made human-created stuff. Is this issue on your radar? What's your plan to keep existing creators and artists on this platform instead of jumping ship to other, growing platforms?

Grumpity's response (mostly verbatim, edited to remove fillers):

This is a great and complex question. If I were just to be facetious, I could say this is a problem that is faced by every platform. And the faster they grow, the more they're facing this problem. It's a problem I face in my daily life, outside of Second Life as well, and I think, you know, our little company alone can't solve it.

But we're definitely looking at what tools are available and more importantly effective outside of our ecosystem so we can learn from them and improve our ecosystem.

At the same time, the things that we do differently are honestly how much earnings you get to keep. We constantly try to make sure that the creators get to keep as much of their earnings as possible. And this is true yesterday and today, right?

Even with any changing of the Lindex fees that has happened over time, the amount that a creator gets to keep of their earnings is incomparable. You know something like Roblox gives you 40%.

But the other thing we're trying to do is obviously grow the customer base, right? So that there are more people coming into Second Life, engaging with Second Life, and engaging with your creations, right? And to be able to take advantage of them.

Part of that is discoverability. So yeah, we do want to find ways to help people find good, fun, interesting Second Life content without putting our foot on the scales too much to decide what that is.

And lastly, we are also looking to build out the toolset with LUA scripting being the most recent addition but not the only one. That is one I will gladly hand over to Jerome in the next session as well.

Looking back at this response now, in text after hearing it live, it's a lot better than I initially thought. Initially, I was like, "did she even answer my question?" but in a roundabout way, she did:

• They are aware of the flood of slop, and recognize it as a problem affecting other platforms.
• They are looking at ways to improve discoverability to help separate the good shit from the slop. But, they don't want to be the arbiter of "what is good".
• They recognize SL's strengths as the toolset available to make content (which is expanding) and the percentage of earnings creators get to keep.
• They're looking for more ways to grow SL (duh).

So that's all good? I think? That said, no concrete promises were made here, and I'd love to see more. I'm hoping the marketplace will at least get some filtering if you want to see AI-generated content or not, but that's been a request for ages and I'd encourage you to upvote it if you haven't already.

Last, I just want to say something important. There's been a lot of talk about AI Slop at SLB, and yes, it's highly discouraging. I've seen so much of it. My friend posted a brief overview over on Reddit, which sparked an excellent discussion. But there are so many amazing creations at the exhibition that didn't use AI, or hardly used it. There a ton of incredibly talented musicians and performers going all week. Even with the slop, there's still plenty of humans putting their hearts and souls into making this celebration special!

Don't let the generic slop overshadow their hard work.
Support human creators and artists.