Hypergrid Adventurers Club meet #36+37: Visiting Help Island on ReactionGrid

The region Help Island on ReactionGrid is being developed by Tinsel Silvera.

It contains resources for new avatars including a freebie area, a Gallery of Prims for new builders, and Hypergates to various places to explore.

For today’s two meetings we visited Tinsel’s region and had a great discussion about best practices for helping new users in virtual worlds.

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Something is amiss on Pathlandia

Found on the region Pathlandia on jokaydiaGRID.

Hmmm.

I suspect it has something to do with this.

Hypergrid Adventurers Club meet #35: Giant robot junkyard on FrancoGrid

What’s cooler than robots?

Giant robots, of course.

For today’s meeting, we visited FrancoGrid to explore a junkyard complete with a derelict giant robot, a toxic lake, and a submarine.

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Short Story: Part 3: “Dust”

Previous parts:

Part 1: “Jetpack”

Part 2: “I am Anomaly”

Here’s Part 3.

“Dust.”

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My interview with Paisley Beebe on “Tonight Live”

On January 23rd 2011, I was an invited guest on Paisley Beebe’s “Tonight Live” show in Second Life.  Thank you again to everyone on the Tonight Live and Treet.tv team for working so hard to put on such a professional show and the opportunity for me to participate.   I had a fun time, and thank you to everyone who attended as well.

I shared some of my thoughts about my time working at Linden Lab, some simple advice for Linden Lab’s new CEO, my new gig with Reaction Grid, the state of education in virtual worlds, and the future of interconnected virtual worlds in general.

I hope I was entertaining.  If anyone would like me to expand on anything I said in the interview, please leave a blog comment and I’ll happily reply.

Here’s a recording of my interview.

-John “Pathfinder” Lester

Hypergrid Adventurers Club meet #33+34: Visiting “Romenna,” a Tolkien-themed 16-sim cityscape.

I’m often impressed by the things we discover in our club’s travels across the Hypergrid.

Opensim is a pioneering platform where everyone is building anew, and that pioneering spirit brings out an amazing level of creativity.

But on this particular tour, we discovered something that completely blew me away. We found a cityscape spanning 16 regions. A Tolkien-themed area called “Romenna,” created by a single artist named Nick Lassard.

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Hypergrid Adventurers Club meet #31+32: A Message in a Bottle for StaminaGrid

For this Sunday meeting, we made a couple very special excursions on the Hypergrid.

Instead of discovering strange new worlds and interesting new creations, we found an empty and vacant place.

So we left a message in a bottle.

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Hypergrid Adventurers Club meet #30: Exploring giant geometric models and mathematics

At this meeting visited the region Wizzy on ReactionGrid.  At this location, Wizard Gynoid has created a giant model of the E8 Polytope, one of the most complex and elegantly beautiful geometric objects known to mathematicians.

Read on for a full transcript and photos of our adventure.

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The next 4 meetings of the Hypergrid Adventurers Club will be hosted by Vanish Seriath

I’ll be offline for a week starting Jan 12.  So I won’t be around to host the next four meetings of the Hypergrid Adventurers Club.

But the show must go on!

Vanish Seriath frequently attends our club meetings, and he has graciously offered to lead the next three meetings.

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On Being “Part of the Product”

Dusan Writer thinks a lot about the business of virtual worlds and, specifically, Second Life.

He recently wrote a very thoughtful and interesting blog post titled “SECOND LIFE NEXT: 2011.

In my comment on his post, I said the following:

You also talked about how “user generated content is not a business model.” I’m not sure I fully agree with you on that. The bottom line is, if you’re using a service and not paying for it, you’re not a customer. You’re part of the product. At least that’s how all successful businesses see it.

I’d like to expand a bit on what I said in bold.  Because, if done right, I think it’s a very good thing both for businesses and customers.

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