We have spies! And bitten by horse flies!

Well the title may be a little over dramatic, but it has become increasingly apparent that other venue owners are checking out The Moody Dragon. It's not known, at least yet if they are checking out the competition or simply looking for a home away from their venue. Either way they are not going unnoticed, and I am reading the profiles of new visitors. Am I worried? Surely not, they can not steal what makes The Moody Dragon what it is.

I had so thought of starting this paragraph off with a cheesy quote. On the other hand I have come to find horse back riding in Second Life quite enjoyable, seeing the sights from high atop my trusty steed. A Black Clyde from AKK Ranch I named Darkness with a saddle and bridle set from Swampbottoms Creations Barn. As fun as exploring is I am finding a lack of expansive areas for riding Aero Pines Park is perhaps one of the best I have found so far being spread across roughly 10 regions of roads and trails. My sweetie and I, she rides a smaller and older AKK Black Clydesdale, have also explored the trails of Wolf Mountain Ski Resort, though for the most part it is simply one large loop spread across a smaller area of only 4 regions. I would really like to see the likes of AKK, Swampbottem and Aero Pines in Inworldz soon.

Speaking of my sweetheart, we should think about planning our celebration soon. I think we are so happy just being together we forget. Some may find it strange how one can love so dearly over such a great distance, but when you present your true self to another and they to you, it is not so far fetched.

Of Struggles and Days of Joy.

Few things have happened in the last month, of course not all the details make it to my blog and it will stay that way. None the less it has been a very good month.

Just this last Sunday my dear friend Noxluna, had her grand opening of Isle of Darkmoon in InWorldz, sadly the region fought her to the bitter end crashing repeatedly and just generally carrying on cranky as it had since the preceding Friday. My heart goes out to ScarlettLa Roux who desperately tried to sing for the event but could not due to her own technical difficulties. The DJ sets went quite well despite frequent region crashes, and it did gain some attention so I do hope that helps.

Amongst the frustration of the grand opening event, something joyous happened! I asked my sweetest Effie if she would be my partner. She said yes and was in tears of joy as was I. I had been nervous as I was not sure she would want to or if those before me had left too deep of bad feelings about it, but I was being foolish and worrying more about her past than what I offer her. We are now happily partnered in both SecondLife and InWorldz, though we have not yet celebrated it with our friends formally. Course there were friends around us to share in the joy including a chance and timely appearance by our dear friend Wayne Babii, without whom Effie and I would never have met during the OheLl (OpenLife) misadventure. Who ever knew from that humble meeting that Effie and I would later fall so in love with each other.

From what has been discussed Effie and I will likely formally celebrate our partnership in January. We have no plans to start planning till the holidays start winding down. It will be so nice for those to missed the moment to be able to celebrate it with us though, and share the joy of our ever growing love.

Of Fortunious Dragons and Nice Surprises.

Well, arn't you glad you didn't have to wait 10 months? I may get better at this yet, but don't hold your breath, I have enough skeletons in my closet. At any rate...

Lightnin Lowtide performing live at The Moody Dragon

Yesterday was a good and busy day. After about a week of me and my sweet Effie wrangling and getting him set up in InWorldz, Lightnin Lowtide performed at The Moody Dragon. He belted out some Bob Dylan, Elvis and even his some of his own original works during his hour long performance. We had a nice sized crowd despite the fact that the crowd from my event preceding it had dissipated, and for the most part everything went without a hitch. It was a success, everyone had fun, and yet we learned some things we could do better. Indeed we shall do just that, my sweet heart and I have already tossed some ideas about having live performers more often. Keep an eye on The Moody Dragon website for details on such.

On that note, I also made some adjustments to the website, I decided to stretch the format as it seemed silly to me to use so little of the sites area to display what is actually on the sight. By now just about everyone should have a widescreen, and if they don't their old 4:3 almost certainly supports a resolution over of 1400x1200. So 1100 pixels seemed alot more reasonable than 950. If you venture over let me know there what you think.

Okay, onto the nice surprise. My sweet heart stayed home today as she was not feeling well when she woke up. She was feeling much better by the time I was up, and so as it was my day off she spent the day with me in InWorldz. We started off pretty mundanely cleaning up from the previous nights event and tinkering a bit, though it was happy time together to talk. Then we went and looked at some couples animations, picking up a nice dance and cuddle for us. Then, as I had recently finished a home I had been building there for some time we spent the rest of our day furnishing it. Did I mention she is a very talented furniture creator in Second Life and Inworldz? We are not finished with it yet, but it sure feels like home and I am sure we both feel the love of each other in it.

All in all a wondrous few days.

Another update a long time coming...

Okay, well those that follow this blog may have noticed I am terrible at keeping up with it. LOL I know an understatement. Anyway, I am not posting just to state the obvious.

So lets start with the down slide. Noxluna and I have have parted in our romantic partnership, but on excellent terms. We chose however with great difficulty to end it while we could still maintain the deep friendship that had started it. We needed to be free to find what we needed for ourselves, but I think what we had and will continue to have in our friendship has benefited us both.

On another note SecondLife seems to be slowly dieing, the deepest wound coming from a 30% cut to their already woeful customer service staff. Another potentially fatal wound is the termination of discounts for regions owned by educational and non-profit groups as of January 1st, many of whom are not just halving their land holdings to remain on budget but dramatically cutting back to well under half or abandoning the SecondLife platform entirely. This is not to mention the papercuts of Viewer 2.0 which proved to no have ALL residents in mind, or the revisions of the TOS stating that creators do not have rights to take their creations out of the SecondLife platform to any of the many compatable start up platforms now emerging and attracting alot of attention from disillusioned SecondLife platform users.

However I must apologize to the ladies thinking that I am available, another lady has already captured my heart. Sweetest Effie, a dear friend I have cared about for some time, recently expressed her mutual interest in our friendship becoming even more. Though there are challenges, I welcome facing them with her and hope for long lasting happiness between us.

Also as I spoke of SecondLife compatible platforms InWorldz is starting to come into it's own. Though still very much Beta and not yet having full functionality, it has developed quickly and is now growing by leaps and bounds.

In terms of development InWorldz now has it's own currency Exchange, not only can anyone purchase InWorldz currency (I'z) but they can redeem I'z to their PayPal account and not be charged any fees above that charged by PayPal. In short InWorldz has chosen NOT to profit from currency redemption to real currency, instead they have chosen to gain their capital though currency sales that stay in world (As I'z) and though very reasonable fees for region owners.

InWorldz is gaining roughly one thousand users a week. Not all of these are from the SecondLife platform, though this does seem to be the majority, some are completely new to Virtual Worlds, and ironically the founders of InWorldz have yet to make any attempt to promote and advertise to gain this growth. Some of the users from the SecondLife platform are well known content creators from the SecondLife platform, those of note to me anyway are Nightshade and Effie's Designs who have expanded to InWorldz among others, and Brain Circuit who has moved entirely to InWorldz and no longer maintains a presence on the SecondLife platform.

Now I am sure some are asking what about The Moody Dragon? Well I spoke before of cutting back land holdings on the SecondLife platform, and indeed this has happened. At first from a quarter mainland region to a modest plot to house an apartment building. Then due to a revision of the ToS that was for lack of a better word "Yet another slap in the face of SecondLife platform residents." regarding land tier fees, all holdings were abandoned on the SecondLife platform. I currently resided in a Linden Home as for all intents and purposes I am paying for it as a premium member.

As for The Moody Dragon, it is now located in InWorldz and we are starting small again. It is currently located on DarkMoon Rising a primarily residential region owned by my former partner, and is kitty-corner to Isle of DarkMoon her commercial region, and adjoining the Tesh regions owned by her new sweetheart and owner of Tesh Botanical Gardens. The Moody Dragon also has a website fully set up and including an events calendar, DJ Bio's and more, it can be found at http://themoodydragon.weebly.com.

I guess that is all. See you in about 10 months? LOL

A new start!

Well it has been a long time since I have posted. Honestly forgot I had a blog at all. Now lets see what has happened?

OpenLife was a bomb, none of there promises were met. Having our payments recognised were a hassle, and upon our leaving though told how to redeem our credits for USD they failed to follow through. The failure OpenLife was not a total loss as it helped us gain a friendship with Effie Emmons of Effie's Designs, who makes great Gothic and Castle furniture.

Now we have been back in SecondLife for some time working on things. My partner and I have now been partnered well over 2 years. This is practically a lifetime is seems in SecondLife but all is good. My partner Noxluna is working towards her own furniture line in Second Life. The Moody Dragon has be rebuilt from the ground up. It's bigger and better, and we are working on taking it to the next level. We are working on a web presence for The Moody Dragon as well and if it works out will likely have one for her furniture line when it finally launches.

We have also been watching another grid called InWorldz for the last 8 months, it is showing all the signs of being very promising. Everything they claim works does in fact work as they claim. What issues we have had were fixed in short order within 24hours. By and large our experiences have been very positive with InWorlds and so not long ago made the tentitive move to set down roots in their starter community, an idea borrowed from SecondLife and improved by the founders of InWorlds. If all things continue going well, we may just scale back our holdings in SecondLife and establish a larger presence in InWorldz. I may post some snapshots of our InWorldz home a later time.

I guess that is all for now. Will end with a couple of quick snapshots I have taken of the new Moody Dragon.

Saddle Up! Pioneering to other grids. New frontiers await.

New title, new grid, new experiences.

With the recent announcement of a 64% tier hike in there light use Sim product from Linden Lab the company that owns and runs Second Life, many residents have started looking to "Frontier Grids". Mostly looked at as developing Second Life clone, where granted these grids are currently based from open source code released by Linden Lab, some of these frontiers are looking to build on the technology pioneered by Linden Lab with eyes toward creating something better.

My partner and I along with a friend from SL also started looking at these frontier alternatives, we finally settled on OpenLife Grid, I am sure as it grows into its own it will get a new name, started a year ago by 3DX. This is a small development company started in Australia and now based out of Taiwan but with the recent boom, nearly 12,000 estimated new user in the few weeks since the Linden Lab announcement, it is growing. We had many reason for settling with OLG over others, it is still very much a beta, bugs are common though this is true for OpenLifes parrent grid Second Life.

Going in we were very impressed with the developement crew, the founder is often in world or on the website chat channel and rarely seems to sleep. Neither he or the viewer developer are shy about answering questions about the grid and even giving technical answers to the questions. We were also impressed with how quickly they responded to the population explosion and the strains it put on their fledgling grid as it saw 1000 to 3000 new registers a day, though at one point logins were near imposible in week 1 of the population explosion and have become progressively better since then. The land is cheap to and allows 4 times the prims (A prim being the basic building blocks of these grids that can be manipulated and linked to create objects.), $22o USD to set up a private cluster with 1 region to Second Lifes cost of $1000 USD for there equivilent, and $75 USD to maintain with Second Life charging 4 times that amount, making it more attractive to invest in virtual property. And a vision of a future that is not just becoming a clone of its parrent grid, but implimenting new and different technologies to make it work, this work is already started and ingrained in the developement teams thinking. On top of that the other users are very open and personable.

There are draw backs though, during the flood delivery of land orders were taking 5 to 6 times longers to complete and deliver, still on par with Second Life, however initial promises of quicker deliveries left some of us a little fustrated. The implimentation of the LSL scripting engine is only 75% complete, permissions (The method by whice inworld objects distributation and modification can be controlled.) are still being worked on. And till the developers are certain that users Intelectual Property is safe as it can be, they are holding back the implementation of inworld currency and economy. Permissions and an economy are what drive a large bulk of smaller scale content creation. It does not however seem to hurt building of environments and structures as much, the bulk of these creators build these themselves.

In the end the move from Second Life to OpenLife feels much like moving from a large developed expensive metropolis where everything is close at hand to a small boom town where everyone knows everyone and are very welcoming, cost of living is cheap, but one would have to be prepared to work a little harder get those comforts that were at your fingertips. Personally like RL I really enjoy the small town feel more than the urban metropolis feeling of everyone for themselves. Sadly to many seem to judge OpenLife by what it is, not by what it aims to be. Time will tell if 3DX can pull it off, but they seem very promising.

I turn a year older! And recieve a surprise party in SL.

The last weekend July I turned yet another year older, RL it passed without fanfare or with token words but this was different in my Second Life. My partner Noxluna arranged a surprise party for me at our little club, she DJed the party and our best friend Tya hosted for her and profided some of the decorations. I had lots of fun and it was the best birthday I have had in a very long time, it was nice to feel that my birthday was more that a token commercial event to some one. A fair group of friends, Daevina and Azrael who I have known way back to my GuildWars days, Katieh, Nawlins, Ise, Quin, and Joy a young woman who Nox and I have adopted as our SL daughter. It was great and I do hope to have many more special birthdays.