Massively^™

• The Garden of NPIRL Delights -- (pictured above) Visit and be delighted.
• Molotov Alva -- Have you seen this man? If you watch Cinemax, you probably have.
• Scam alert -- Instead of giving your account details to strangers, why not send us all your cash instead? That's got to make at least as much sense.

Remember this website? Well, apparently they've given up on trying to scam people through assorted survey fakery. They've stepped up to straightforward theft, and want your account credentials -- in exchange for L$25,000 (which, quite obviously, you would never actually receive).

You'd have to be unspeakably naive, or somehow functionally retarded to actually provide them with your account details. Right now, they're spamming across the grid with a domain name that redirects to this site.

Virtual world build/art fan-group, NPIRL (Not Possible In Real Life) are opening a huge Second Life art show today (Friday, 16 May) in conjunction with metaverse development group Rezzable Productions. More than a hundred content-creators, artists, architects and scripters are involved

The show runs all the way until 22 June (the day before Second Life's fifth anniversary) and will be holding numerous events (including live-music and tutorials) through the four sims allocated(Rezzable Create, Rezzable Design, Rezzable Discover, and Rezzable Explore) in which are depicted Paradise, Earth and the Underworld.

Spectacular, surreal, varied, complex, crowded, disturbing and delicious. It all starts here.

Buoyed by their success against Bladezz, the guild takes on the awesome might of the boss; but this is a six-man raid! How can our heroes possibly hope to triumph with only five?

Who gets pwned? Who gets pudding? Who has the Notary feat? And where the heck are Clara's kids? All (but one) of these questions will be answered in this, the season-final episode of The Guild's first storming season!

The Guild is the very funny creation of the exceedingly talented Felicia Day - though, honestly, The Guild is pure gold through and through (and that ain't just Warcraft gold, honey). The Guild is all about the adventures (and misadventures) of the people behind the characters in an MMO guild. The Guild is totally supported by donations, so lend your support where you can!

This episode is below the fold, courtesy of YouTube's special twinkly magic.

• Give us your feedback -- Tell us what we're doing right, doing wrong, or not doing enough of.
• Augmentation vs Immersion -- You know what? It's not about that.
• Real recessions, virtual economies -- Does one impact the other?
• ION'08: User-generated content -- Second Life and Pirates.
• Half a grid restart -- When in doubt, add a backup asset system.
• Mono very soon -- Could arrive on the main grid in less than a month.
• Official response on megaprims -- Well, finally.
• MacBook SL -- MMOSX takes a look at MacBook Second Life performance.
• Aimee's sandbox for sale -- We're not sure of the bat and ball are included.

The finalization of the this week's Second Life server update Thursday morning reinstated the prim-creation size-constraints that prevent larger than normal prims (megaprims) from being created by users. Linden Lab officially confirmed today that it was a bug and not an intentional feature (While Andrew Linden had suggested this at his in-world office-hours earlier in the week, we've been repeatedly advised that statements by individual staff at such meetings do not necessarily constitute or reflect official policy or positions of Linden Lab).

Furthermore, Linden Lab confirmed that account sanctions still apply to users who are using megaprims in mainland simulators, though they are permitted for use in simulators within private estates, except where disallowed by the land covenants or owner.

Depending on how the new code travels through the QA process, Mono could come to the main Second Life grid within the next four weeks, says Linden Lab.

Mono (an open source implementation of Microsoft's .NET) is to be deployed as an additional, faster script runtime engine that should greatly speed many common scripting operations, increase stability and reduce load. Linden Lab says that it is unlikely that we'll see Mono deployed within two weeks, but within four is certainly not out of the ballpark.

Currently Mono is available for testing on the Beta grid, and scripters should take the opportunity to test their scripts there and get bug-reports filed sooner, rather than later.

The new script runtime engine does not add (and is not presently intended to add) support for any languages other than the already existing LSL.

Between 5AM and 10AM SLT (US Pacific time) on Friday, 16 May, Linden Lab is planning to restart approximately half of the Second Life grid simulators, in order to connect those simulators to a backup asset system. Why only half? Well, the other half got the treatment in this-morning's rolling restart.

The asset system, as you may have noticed, has been plagued with issues since November 2007, and the recent vendor-provided fixes have not improved matters. In fact, there's indications that there may be increased instability as a result.

Since around the middle of 2006 a debate has swirled back and forth, over Immersion vs Augmentation, sparked by Henrik Bennetsen. Discussion groups in Second Life have wrangled over it, blogs have argued the point in no less than three directions, papers have been presented on the topic. We've been a part of that ourselves, in the past.

The curious thing about the debate, though, was just how spectacularly varied the positions were, and how none of them seemed to form divisional boundaries-- a very curious thing in what you'd expect to be such a polarized topic.

And then, just recently, we finally realized ourselves that the reason was that the terms of reference were essentially flawed and as a result, more than half the material written on the topic is invalid for all practical purposes.

• ION'08 Redefining virtual worlds for the mass market -- Are you a mass market or are you a mass?
• NASA CoLab -- Collaborating for space and technology.
• Flap your lips with the upcoming RC7 -- Lip-synching didn't work so well for all those pop-stars. Better for you?

Bridie Linden has updated the development roadmap (actually, it's not a roadmap so much, as a set of directions, but bear with us) for upcoming releases. The release cycle for the 1.20 viewer is going to be longer than usual, expecting to end in June.

The map is a bit tangled, with a commingling of server-side and viewer-side changes kind of munged together, but there's a new feature in the long, long list of bugfixes and bughunting tweaks: New feature: VWR-4794: Basic voice lipsync for voice visualization. Now that's going to be interesting.

Viewer 1.20RC7 and Simulator 1.22 are both expected to see the light next week.

Nothing much new in SLS1.22, except work to further ease load on the asset servers (if some of you are winding up at infohubs and welcome-areas instead of at home, or getting teleport routing failure messages, those are a part of this work), and code to help identify possible failure points in other systems.

We've wanted to visit NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) for years, but haven't previously had the opportunity. Some of us live on the wrong continent to do so, for one thing. We've visited NASA now however, and you can too. NASA has a presence in Second Life.

NASA created the CoLab Island to enable 'co-working and project incubation ... for NASA staff and the entrepreneurial technology community'. There's a bunch more marketer-speak on their 'NASA CoLab SL Project Overview' notecard, but the English form of it is that they want to talk to us, and want us all to talk to them.

Gallery: Second Life Places - NASA CoLab

• Linden Lab moves to block megaprim creation -- Bug, not feature.

It is not presently clear as to whether the disabling of the megaprim constraints are intentional or not. We've got some third-hand information that Andrew Linden said that the change was not an intentional one, but Linden Lab have remained silent on the topic, so we've got no official answer on the matter.

A rolling update is starting at 7:30PM SLT (US Pacific time) today (Tuesday 13 May), which is rumored to reinstate the constraints among other 'crucial security fixes'. If so, the next couple days could represent your last chance to fabricate custom megaprims for a while.