The Alphaville Herald

SL Phunnies #2

Sleeze! Sleezywood Contest Brings out Dregs of SL Society

by Trailer Park Prok Sleezywood, a highly-popular building contest for the trailer trash set, opened to wild applause yesterday at high noon game-time for judging. Clutching clipboards, hard-hatted Jamie Otis and mush Caldera, owners of the private island and sponsors of the contest, announced winners (see below) and started shopping car races by 3:00 p.m. [...]

Skin Review: Mistress Midnight

by Chipsen Queso Despite what Matthias announced last week about taking a bit of a break from the five skin designers who were interviewed last year by the Herald, I decided to go ahead and review this skin by Mistress Midnight. As a clothier, Mistress is a legend. Her texture work is superb, which has [...]

SL Land Heist! XLS Operatives wipe out Space Monkey Corporation

XLS Officers Sweet, Cyanide, and Xaphon Just a few days ago we reported a tale of betrayal on EVE online in which a corporation was infiltrated and its property (valued at about 16K US) was stolen. Just yesterday a similar heist went down in Second Life, when the Space Monkeys had 8K square meters of [...]

Post Six Grrrl: Cindy Claveau

The Herald is happy to bring you this week’s Post Six Grrrl, Cindy Claveau! Cindy is a person with very varied tastes in everything from music to literature, and has been “immersed” (in her own words) in the so-called “Metaverse” for many years. My thanks go out to Marilyn Murphy, the publisher of Players Magazine [...]

Lindens Seize Land in Internal GIGAS Dipute

photo by Hiro Pendragon by Prokofy Neva Browsers of www.secondlife.com today were startled to see a lone, furry protester bearing a sign in the Dore Welcome Area populated by newbies, greeters, and Lindens. Coming in world, a reporter found Hank Ramos, an SL resident since November 2003, sporting the title “protester” and carrying a sign, [...]

EVE EXTRA: $16.5k Heist/Assassination Breaks Ubiqua Seraph Corp

Read all about it! After a months-long infiltration operation, the Eve Online corporation Guiding Hand Social Club managed to work its agents high into the ranks of the Ubiqua Seraph corp (corps are Eve’s version of guilds), from whence they pulled off what is being called the biggest heist/coup/assassination in Eve history, making away with [...]

SL Overtakes TSO in “Subscribers”

As the Second Life homepage map reveals, the population of SL now exceeds 40K, which, according to the most recent figures, means it has probably passed the ever plunging TSO. Of course people don’t actually *pay* for their monthly accounts on SL, so it is not clear what this statistic really means — the only [...]

Must Read! SL, Escapism, Disneyland, Rubber

Ha, this essay By David Thomas in The Escapist is a must read for every denizen of Second Life. It’s the best writing on SL I’ve ever seen (outside of the Herald, of course). Sample passage: “Man, I never paid for any of my dicks. Girls buy them for me.” In Disneyland and on the [...]

Sheeeeit! 1.8 billion for online game development in China.

Terra Nova and several other sources are reporting on a story in the Shanghi Youth Daily the Chinese government is about to invest $1.8 billion in on-line game development. I’m not sure what kinds of virtual worlds those efforts will yield, but if the result are some robust online worlds, and we turn Anshe loose [...]