The Alphaville Herald

Mr. Linden’s Hong Kong Or Level 75

by prokofy on 21/01/07 at 4:32 pm

Mr. Ben Linden rides off into a YouTube sunset to his new franchulate.

By Prokofy Neva, Dept. of Kremlindenology

In keeping with its plan to open source and franchulate the popular online 3-D streaming video gangland game vicinity, whose tangled code had become “nearly organic,” Linden Lab has allowed a resident-turned-Linden and long-time loyal servant to spin off from the Mother Ship. As a Blingsider fanboi was quick to discover, Mr. Ben Linden announced via a sentimental YouTube creation that he was leaving the Lab to form his own business.

No other details were available other than than Mr. Ben’s statement to Blingsider that he would “use Second Life,” but since he rode off into the sunset on Pony Linden, we’re thinking Mr. Ben Linden’s Hong Kong may feature a wild-West theme.

Mr. Ben also revealed to the cognoscenti playing Strategic SL that he had reached Level 75 and become a Palinden (watch the Ben’s Big Beach Bush to the left of the screen; it has now reached epic proportions). Buhbuhcuh is the first resident to do so, blazing a trail for others to follow suit. Only 3 other Lindens, none of them Lindesidents, have reached Palinden status after years of skill-grinding in town hall meetings, thankless welcome area policing, witless IMing with fanboyz, and questing after bugs, exploits, and elusive Love Machine points.

The three are Hamlet nee Linden Au, author of Newspeak Notes; Reuben nee Linden Steiger founder of Minionsareus; and Haney nee Linden Armstrong, founder of the notorious “socialism-on-one-sim” SameoldSameold, who went to work for omidyar.net and keeps a blog.

Mr. Ben cuts an imposing figure in some screenshots (NSFW) below the fold.

Ben’s prototype for his business cards.

Upon reaching Palinden, a person is allowed to form their own franchulate, as long as they stay within the orbit of Philip, the Sun God Ra, and recite the Loyalty Oath of the Tao of Linden, which involves Never Harming the Company’s Interests:

No Politics! Never act to advance your own interests at the expense of the interests of the company. This is the one principle, outside of violations of law, for which violation willlikely result in immediate termination.

Several weeks before his departure from our Vale of Tears to kickstart his modeling career metaversal consulting gig, Mr. Linden appeared briefly at the Sutherland Dam, one of his many Civic Projects for the metaverse, and dropped the Dam Block of Doomitude, available only to SSL questers above Level 57, as a favour to a certain Infamous Antagonist. (Yes, all textures are permed up and no, you can’t have one unless you are nice to me).

Mr. Ben began his sojourn on the unseemly sims of Second Life as BuhBuhCuh, a name that evidently evolved from an early childhood playpen accident that permanently transferred the toddlerhood sentence “Give Me My Bottle, Not the Cup, Mom” into the endearing toothless name.

Swiftly leveling to liaison and then actual grid monkey, Ben watched over the sim farm when it was no more than a couple of egg cartons full. He was also kept busy making roads, trees, dams, walls, a famous river rapids for tubing, a pogo stick, barrel racing and even crashed airplanes, until the Lindens decided that organizing the world to make it look better was a hopeless cause, since people were going to pancake it and put out ugly McMansions and diving dolphins and laggy sex balls anyway. With the introduction of the brown-sugared southern continent, the Lindens gave up on Civic Works.

Seeing the handwriting on the wall, Mr. Ben speeded up his resume-polishing in the machinima department, working his Alt-Zoom festivals, advertising in General, before annoying busy-body residents outed his resident’s name and linked it to the person of Ben Linden, prompting at least one FIC boss to threaten Herald writers with permabans. Ben beat that boss and leveled up past 60 with the outing of his previous resident status and the linking to his Linden name.

With the departure of Ben, who gave the world a lot of its underpinnings of heft and public-works-like Civic Improvement, we can’t be sure that Second Life won’t turn into a garbage-strewn, grey-square-covered, laggy slag-heap. Oh, wait…

Speaking in an interview to U.S. News and World Distort,, Philip nee Rosedale Linden indicated that with open-source and host-your-own, lots more people making land will mean land will increase in value for everyone *cough*. “”It’s a way to bring in the broader community in helping us to develop this,” Rosedale told the weekly.

While Rosedale has not commented on the new expansion pack now available to play Strategic SL to the Palinden level, he did tell Fortune’s David Kirkpatrick in an exclusive interview that, “”We think that if we open source Second Life its product quality will move forward at a pace nobody’s ever seen.”

Given that only Lindesidents have lived the bugs and lag client-side and know where the bodies are buried in the code server-side, they’re in the best position to move at the quickest pace.

Clues to the next quest to reach the Palinden level are contained in the German writing visible in a flipped photo of Philip from the Fortune interview on CNN’s Money, which we provide here as a service to our readers, along with Philip’s weight-loss tips: