Massively^™

Linden Lab Chairman, Philip Rosedale and freshly-minted CEO Mark Kingdon gave an introductory speech at 10AM Pacific time to open Second Life's fifth anniversary for 23 June, 2008. While some have considered the speech to be somewhat bland and uninspired/uninspiring, it was pretty much what you'd expect, and you can still smell Rosedale's passion through his anecdotes.

Interestingly, Rosedale referred (with characteristic Linden Lab not-actually-mentioning-it-directly obliqueness) to the troubles that arose from Linden Lab's takeover of the anniverary event from resident-organizers.

Apparently employees of Linden Lab are easy targets, because there are not one, but two parodies on the menu today! The first machinima comes from Crap Mariner, and it introduces us to his version of M Linden, who recently signed on as the new CEO of LL. In Crap's Second Life, he's a sassy little M shape with wandering eyes.

The second spoof is another special episode of Bobby Lee Linden, everyone's favorite dimwitted, lovable redneck. This time, with the help of machinimator Code Tracer, he weighs in on the hiring of M Linden, as well as tips on using camera controls. Due to some adult content, we're just linking to the episode instead of embedding it.

If you haven't experienced the madness yet, don't forget to add Secondlie on Twitter. With an average of over 50 tweets per day, the workdays will seem much shorter when you're laughing the entire time. Parodies have never been so good!

If you have machinima or movie suggestions from any MMO, please send them to machinima AT massively DOT com, along with any information you might have about them.

In the last couple of years, Linden Lab has grown from around 50 people to (we are told) around 250 people. It is a growth stage of companies that most do not survive, as usually they do something lethally boneheaded in the process.

Another stage that many companies do not survive is their first change of CEO. It is a massive change for the company's table of organization, reporting chains and corporate culture. The first CEO change generally sees a large staff turnover.

That's what usually happens, anyway. While we're not predicting sudden death for Linden Lab, they're getting their first new CEO today.