THE QUEENS HEAD

Hello KFH here, well i’ve had an amazing few weeks in SL.  I was kindly offered a free plot on a group owned island called Scion which is run by the Millions of Us organisation.  They were the people who hooked me up with Robbie Dingo, and as a result of this union, they offered me a place to build my ‘typical British Pub’.  I wanted to build a project based on ‘real life’ community as SL is about Community so thought it might be a nice touch.  The Queens Head is one of the best pubs I know, and occasionally I  drink there, as I would sit there over my glass of Merlot KFH would start coming out in me and i’d start thinking,  OOh that is a nice texture, and oooh, I wonder how I could re-build that virtually etc.. Then one day I asked John the barman if I could perhaps build his pub.  He looked at me as though I was completely insane but in a nice way of course, as he is a very nice and reputable Pub man.  Then a few days later he approached me saying ‘You know that idea you had, well perhaps you could try it out’.  I was a bit nervous at first approaching ‘Lisa’ his fiancee, as she is the ‘boss’ and keeps that pub ship shape, and it’s her pride and joy, so I wanted to make sure she was ok with it also. As the pub is owned by ‘Fullers’ which is a very posh and successful end of the business, Lisa said it was ok to try out, but to not make an exact replica as they are a bit funny about things like that.  I am hoping that Fullers will see what I have done and then give me an island to build some of their ‘finest’ pubs on.  My building has come on leaps and bounds, but I still need to correct a few things on it.  It’s taking me ages to do, and when I go to the pub now, I find myself sitting in different areas of it, and really memorising the layouts, textures, and trying to get it right.  It’s going to take quite a while to get right.  I’ve given it a Christmas theme, as it’s almost the holiday season, so there is snow outside and it has a cosy fire going. The other day Douglas Gayeton skyped me just as I was about to quit the machine, and I briefly saw a message’ Ringo is coming into SL’.. my computer quit before I had a chance to reply, so I quickly logged back in and said ‘Who is Ringo?, Ringo star or Robbie Dingo?  turns out it was Molotov Alva!  I FREAKED, I logged into SL, and added Douglases alias whose name I will not make public, and teleported MOLOTOV to the pub.  I was absolutely over the moon to have such a prestigious visitor and insisted we have our pics taken by the bar.   It’s funny to think that a while back I was on IM to Gayeton, saying I’m down the local pub as I had my laptop with me, and now he has visited the pub and knows what I was talking about.I hope to finish it soon and then present it to John and Lisa who run the real pub.   

Moving…!

Readers to my entries in SLF will note that I have been frequenting Caledon a lot lately, and in fact with the recent opening of new sims, I now live there, in Caledon Wellsian.

I have a journal describing my adventures in Caledon, “The New Observer” which you are welcome to read. My non-Caledon-related comments remain here.

second life conference!

words can’t express the amazing time I had.

Here is the video instead

love KFH

Live music faces its challenges

One of the most interesting sessions I attended at the recent SLCC (Second Life Community Convention) in Chicago concerned the economic viability of music in Second Life. Because, it seems, for many participants, music in SL is in something of a crisis.

The basic challenge stems from the fact that SL is in many ways a microcosm of the world at large, at least in some respects. In the case of music, there are definite parallels. For example, one attendee from the UK – who runs the Dublin sim, that’s well worth a visit – pointed out that this week, the #3 album in the UK album charts sold under 2,500 copies – just a decade or so ago you would have seen sales for that slot of over four times that figure. Of course the way the charts are calculated includes some severe anomalies when it comes to counting on-line and download sales (where, for example, people may download individual tracks instead of a complete album – what does that score in the charts?), but it is undeniably true that music sales are down. Much of this is due to a publicly perceived apparent desire on the part of the record companies to rip off their customers… but that’s quite another topic and we won’t go into it here.

The outcome, however, is that there is an expectation on the part of many music consumers that music should be at least cheap, if not free – and in SL the latter is pretty much a given, at least at the level of the average club employing the average singer-songwriter or DJ. It may be possible to charge for an event with a major RL band playing live (or whatever) in SL, but in most cases where the artist is generally a singer-songwriter without much or any of a real-life track record, the audience expects to attend a venue for free. This means that the only money coming from the audience is paid via tip jars – either the venue’s or the musician’s. And tipping is falling off, so despite innovations like scripts for tip jars that split the income between venue and artist according to a preset ratio, there are costs on the venue and the musician’s sides of the equation that are simply not being met by the audience that attends.

The venue’s issues are the most obvious. A club owner has a range of expenses that have a fair degree of equivalence to those in the real world – and then some. There may be staff to pay, for example, such as hosts and security, and although that may not be a lot in real-world terms, it adds to a burden that becomes much more significant when you consider the major costs: land expenses (tier for example) and the cost of renting a stream.

And then you have to pay the artist – not only live musicians but DJs too. They also have an investment in hardware, software and other costs. They may be a musician in RL and cannot afford to play for nothing – unless they can justify it as promotion for their RL career or album/download sales. And while artists can attempt to sell downloads of their songs at SL gigs, this approach, according to a member of the band Keltish on the SLCC panel who set up a ‘downloads table’ in the same way as in RL you would sell CDs at the back of the room, is not at all popular with audiences, even at a small amount of money in real terms per song. He sold nothing at all.

The problem is that audiences expect music to be free, and as a result, each gig often costs a club owner several thousand $L more than the income it generates.

This situation is clearly unsustainable. If venues are not covering their costs, they will ultimately be forced to close, one way or another, or to try and make up the money by offering other features that may heavily impact the ambience of the venue (including, for example, not offering live music). Musicians, similarly, will no doubt (and should) resist ‘pay for play’ deals; they may also have trouble with the idea and expense of having to provide their own stream instead of one being provided by the venue (although this does, in fact, offer the musician some quantifiable benefits).

What, then, is the solution? Well, there are, potentially, several. One that was proposed was the idea of asking the Lindens to consider making it easier to run ticketed events. At present the standard technique is to set up a special group for the gig and charge a fee to join it. For the concert you ban access to the venue except for members of the group. Then afterwards you disband it. In practice this is messy and difficult to manage, particularly with quite a few residents running multiple alts (additional accounts/avatars) simply to circumvent the current 25-group maximum. One possibility might be to make it possible to create temporary groups beyond the 25 ‘permanent’ ones, that would disband themselves automatically at a specified time and date, ie after the gig.

But the trouble with ticketed events is that while they are no doubt practical on a large scale with well-known artists, possibly requiring full-sim or larger venues, this does not help the average club owner and the singer/songwriter on the club circuit in-world. Few if any of those artists would draw much of an audience if the event was tickets-only, especially if the process was as messy as it is now, and with public perception of the monetary value of live music being so low.

There were suggestions from the floor that included offering discounts to paying residents, but this hardly addresses the problem and neglects the fact that non-premium residents are still consumers of goods and services, so why a discount just because you’re a landowner? And how does that help a venue?

It seems to me that the solution to supporting the arts in general, and music in particular, in SL is, again, the same as it is in real life: sponsorship and, perhaps, subsidy. Corporate sponsorship makes a great deal of sense, especially with major corporations eager to target SL residents. In particular, I can see musical instrument industry companies as being potentially extremely interested in sponsoring SL concerts, multi-venue/multi-event festivals, and the like, with on-stage signage, banners and other advertising. There are also possibilities for product placement (an artist using a modelled Marshall amp on stage for example) and even the traditional artist endorsement approach where a company supports a particular musician in return for their prominent use, or public support in-world, of a company’s products.

Corporate sponsorship was mentioned in the discussion in Chicago: subsidy was only touched on. However it could be a viable approach. One suggestion was that on joining SL you could choose to agree that a certain amount of your money was to be donated to music in-world, rather as a US tax return allows you to earmark a donation to a political party. This could be a flat amount as suggested at the SLCC session, or perhaps, a percentage of your transactions for a stated period. Or Linden Labs could simply institute such a ‘tax’ themselves and charge everyone – but this would have problems too (apart from the fact that they are very much laissez-faire in their approach, preferring to leave things to residents where possible). It could further depress the average resident’s impression of the value of music in-world, because, they might argue, they have already paid for it. In addition there are several very thorny questions, like ‘why just music and/or the arts?’, how you would distribute this income, to whom and why.

Thus corporate sponsorship, coupled with easier group/ticketing strategies, seems to be the way to go so far… but no doubt there are many more ideas out there to consider. The SLCC panel only scratched the surface of what is an enormous issue. But the discussion is continuing via a ‘music development’ mailing list that is being set up specially for this topic. Residents can click here to subscribe.

Music in general, at the club level, and live music in particular, is an important part of Second Life. Many, if not most, of us like to go to a club, dance, meet new people, and have fun. We cannot allow this feature, central to many people’s Second Lives, to go into decline because audiences expect music at this level to be free.

It’s SLCC!

After great difficulty because of the weather, several of us are here in Chicago for the Second Life Community Convention 2007. That includes KFH, Jan and Lala… plus other friends I have yet to meet in person. More about it as the Convention progresses. Now… off to breakfast!

When worlds collide

During my explorations of Second Life, I am finding myself drawn ever more frequently to the Independent State of Caledon, which is a growing group of sims that have a broadly Victorian/steampunk theme – the image above shows a view of Caledon SteamSkyCity from a nearby airship mooring pylon, with me in the foreground, dressed appropriately. I recently had Citizenship of Caledon conferred upon me by ‘The Guvnah’, which I am very pleased about, especially as I am not (yet) a Caledon resident; and my name is on the list to qualify for a parcel in one of the new sims.

I’ve mentioned steampunk before – see this Wikipedia entry which describes it as ‘a subgenre of fantasy and speculative fiction which came into prominence in the 1980s and early 1990s. The term denotes works set in an era or world where steam power is still widely used—usually the 19th century, and often set in Victorian era England—but with prominent elements of either science fiction or fantasy, such as fictional technological inventions like those found in the works of H. G. Wells, or real technological developments like the computer occurring at an earlier date. Other examples of steampunk contain alternate history-style presentations of “the path not taken” of such technology as dirigibles or analog computers…’ Mmmm, lovely.

I’ve enjoyed books in this genre for years, notably Keith Roberts’ amazing Pavane and its related Chalk Giants, and others. More recently I devoured Philip Pullman’s remarkable trilogy, His Dark Materials, which was quite marvellous and unputdownable. Pullman is another one of these writers who, like Alan Garner (The Owl Service, Red Shift, Thursbitch etc) is officially supposed to be a children’s writer, but whose work has something for people of all ages.

His Dark Materials is definitely in the genre: much of the action takes place in an alternate world with plenty of steampunk features, and especially in and around a slightly altered version of Oxford.

The books have been turned into a movie, The Golden Compass, due for release in early December. And from the trailer it looks as if it has been done extremely well (see the screen grab from the trailer above).

One of the things about people in heroine Lyra’s world is that their souls are external entities that take the form of a creature of the opposite sex to their human counterpart, referred to as a Dæmon, and on the movie website you can answer a questionnaire and see what your Dæmon is. You can then put a bit of code in your blog entry to allow your friends to check it out and see if they think it’s appropriate for you or not – and just as a child’s Dæmon can change its form but settles on a fixed form in adulthood, so you and your friends have 12 days to decide whether or not the Daemon suits you. Mine is a female tiger by the name of Marchestra.

Changing house

No, it’s not the name of another tedious reality show… but one of the joys of Second Life.

When I first bought land in SL, a nice hillside facing the rising sun, I put a little house up, based on an 18th century Cornish pump-house. That area eventually became surrounded by noisy casinos and commercial establishments, so I bought some land I noticed was available one day on an island near my friend Lily’s place.

Once there, I put up a house rather like a big version of what I had before. It was very economical on prims, which is nice (especially as I used up such a lot of them on the Nautilus floating up above) but a touch boxy and it also had a bunch of space I didn’t really use very much. So I decided to look for something a bit more interesting.

I suppose it’s something to do with having that enormous airship overhead, but I’ve been going through a kind of Victorian period in SL, and spending a lot of time hanging out in Caledon, which is really good fun – Victorian with some excellent steam-driven and early electrical tech – the genre known as steampunk. I picked up a few Victorian outfits such as the one shown here (click on the thumbnail for a better view) and, dare I say, several neo-Goth ones from another part of the world too.

Thus I decided to look around and see what offerings were available on the housing front. I was sorely tempted by an enormous castle with towers on all four corners and an astronomical dome and telescope on top, all driven by various aetheric machinery, but I decided against it – the neighbours might have objected (see below).

Eventually I went for a rather elegant mansion on two and a bit storeys, Britannia House (and, because of its name as much as anything, I put a flag on top), shown at the top of the page from the front (ocean side). It’s actually quite a lot smaller than my old place in terms of footprint, but it is rather cosy. There are two big rooms on the South end of the house (to the left as you look from the front), where I have a living room downstairs and bedroom upstairs, while at the other end are two long rooms: the lower one I have set up as a recording studio with surround speakers, and upstairs I call the ballroom, with a Musical Alchemy piano and most of my dance poseball collection.

A friend of mine came over and said she thought I would have had a rather more Goth-inspired place than this. Hmmm. It had more than crossed my mind. I thought the majority of Gothic places I had seen, however, were a bit too big, and a bit too dark. (I mean, I’m into magick but only the nice kind.) However… I had seen a very impressive Sorceror’s Tower – 6 stories high and just 21 prims (rather important at this point), got one and put it on the property round the back of the house.

Hmmm. Impressive, all right, with incredible views and astonishingly detailed. But I wasn’t sure. I decided to sleep on it and came back the next day. Looking at it again, it was too much. It was evidently also too much for the neighbours, who had already put up a storey-high wall of pseudo-foliage to stop them seeing my previous house. Now the wall was three storeys high and ugly as hell. The tower had to go. I de-rezzed it and wrote to the owner of my neighbours’ place and apologised, hoping she’d take down the wall. A little later her friend IM’d me to ask about the tower and I told her that it had gone. And next morning not just the extra storeys but all the wall of foliage next door had gone. And I now have a nice relationship with next door (next door the other way is already a friend).

I have a lot more room around the house now – the house itself occupies more prims but has a smaller footprint than the last one, mainly I presume because of the staircases – so I hunted all over the place for a big, impressive, ancient tree to put in the back yard where the tower had been. I’d seen the one I wanted and it came from Relic – based on a remarkable island modelled in extraordinary detail – and after a great deal of hunting around found, and bought, one. Here is a view of the rear of the house showing it.

It had taken me a couple of days to get it all fixed up – taking the contents of the old house back into inventory, deleting the house and erecting a new one, and then re-rezzing and repositioning the contents… but it’s very nice as you can see, and will do for the time being – unless that astronomer’s castle keeps sticking in my mind…

LOVERUSH VIDEO

Here is the new radio edit for Loverush.

I made this using a MACBOOK PRO and it costs me 10’s of thousands and years and years to make. SL thousands and SL years

another two fingers up to the coorporates of this world who think they rule the school.

Talk to Me

Second Life Voice has arrived!

Yesterday morning KFH Pooraka and I sat down at her picnic table for a chat. Only this time we actually talked in Real Life. It was amazing! I’m not sure how I feel about have actual voice chat with complete strangers but for friends it takes Second Life to a new level.

The Voice feature is only available right now in the First Look Viewer, so go to www.secondlife.com and at the bottom of the page is “download” where you will find the First Look Viewer. Not every SIM has voice yet either but Kirsty’s land has it and Magnatune has it. My private islands don’t yet but I’m sure they will convert the servers to it soon.

I’m looking forward to “talking” to all of you soon!

New video for Loverush

Hey there,

Pooraka here

Just to say the new video for LOVERUSH is now finished – the extended version. I used SECOND LIFE to make the video and my Macbook pro. Thanks to all the extras who took part, especially Sir Herman Bingyi, and Janford Flax and Loverush Penell. special thanks to extra camera man Nimrod wayne.

You can see the video by going into world and typing ‘London Trance Club in search.

ty

KFH x