Second Life’s 22nd Birthday Celebrations: Important Stuff to Know

Last night, I heard my phone make that particular chime that signified there was an email from Linden Lab,or something Blogger Network related. Could there be another Zoom Call already? What might this one be about? Are they going to force reset everyone’s passwords yet?

Nay my dear readers, it’s an advanced list of all the SL Birthday celebrations info, dates and links all in one place.

Last year I was able to snag a Premium Plus Lifetime membership, (which I’d saved up for since the previous year) so not much can top that to be honest. Let’s see what they have for us, shall we? I am quite curious about what the new Last Names will be though, because an old friend has made a return to SL and is looking to ditch their old Resudent name, I suggested she wait until this list came out. I hope there’s some better than Myth on the list!

One thing I was disappointed to see however is that some of “Meet the Lindens” talks are going to be pre-recorded. How is that “meeting” the Lindens if the residents aren’t there? At least there is a live session with Philip on the Wednesday, but someone that’s conspicuous by their absence; Where’s Brad on that schedule?

Anyway, here’s your schedule:

SL22B Timeline:

  • Opens to the public on June 20th at 11am PT
  • Shop & Hop: June 20th to July 20th
  • Live Music Events: June 20th to June 29th
  • SL22B closes on July 20th

SL22B Key Info:

  • 76 regions total for the entire event
  • 500 exhibitors showcasing 244 exhibits across 19 regions
  • 532 performances across 4 performance stages
  • 480 merchants on 24 regions participating in the Shop & Hop

SL22B Shop & Hop Highlights:
Did you know you can get early access to the Shop & Hop if you join the Second Life Birthday Group inworld? Early access starts on Thursday, June 19th, at 9am PT!

  • 480 content creators participating across 24 regions (400 on moderate regions, 80 on adult regions)
  • 20% or more discount on all items, plus a free (non-group) gift at each shop
  • Early access for Second Life Birthday Group members: June 19th at 9am PT
  • Open to the public: June 20th at 11am PT through July 20th

Blogs & Links for SL22B:

More to Look Forward to on opening day:

  • SL22B Last Names: New Myths and Legends-themed last names like Myth, Dragonheart, and more!
  • Hunts & Premium Gifts: Dragon Eggs and Swaginator clues await adventurers at SL22B! Premium members can pick up exclusive swords and shields at premium gift vendors.
  • Physical Merch: Want SL22B gear for the real world? Check out our SL22B merch on Redbubble.

Herb & Fable: Strawberry Moon Quest

Julula is working hard to tweak and make things in preparation for taking Herb & Fable out of the Beta testing phase. In the meantime she’s produced a small side Quest to celebrate the recent full moon, which was a Strawberry Moon, due it occurring when wild strawberries normally come out.

You have to collect a number of strawberry patches, a ritual bowl and the ritual itself.

For more details you can read the  Announcement post.

The prize for completing this Quest is the lovely Strawberry Moon EEP environment that you can add to your land or personal lighting, that’s pictured in the header image.

If you’re not an existing Herb & Fable player yet, you can become so by doing the Lavendell Quest that has been preserved from Fantasy Faire or getting the Beta pack from the Mainstore. If you played the Lavendell Quest during the Faire you’re already set and you just need to add the Meter & HUDs you received then and start hunting for strawberry patches.

Your collected ingredients:

When you’ve taken them into your pouch they will change, previously the hovertext would vanish and the item would become nothing but nice decor. Now the leftover objects have become compostable waste to use with growing other things!

Get started on Centauria via the Mainstore or Lavendell linked below.

Herb & Fable links:

What am I trying to Achieve?

Earlier today I saw a post on Bluesky from a longtime Second Life resident and very empty club owner. I responded with a genuine query about what might encourage them to return more to SL, because non-returning residents and lack of new ones is a real problem for the platform. It was an interesting and enlightening conversation, until I messed up and mentioned something Brad had said (and the Lindens have been saying for years) about land prices vs fees. I just want to try to do my little bit to help, but here I was spouting a mantra that has annoyed myself and others for years, even decades.

As the exchange came to a close, they wished me luck in “whatever you’re trying to achieve”, which made me think.

This blog is meant to be about the fun stuff I do and find in Second Life. I look at my previous three posts and they’re related to what Linden Lab has been up to. While these things do and will have an effect on everyone’s Second Lives, it feels maybe I’ve become too “Linden-adjacent”, whatever that may mean.

The fact that two bloggers have actually said they wouldn’t bother joining the Zoom calls and would wait for my summary writeups instead, supports that.

A final note on the conversation that made me almost laugh at the unlikelihood (but validity) of it was “LL should be paying you and others in the program handsomely to do outreach”. (“program” being a reference to the SL Blogger Network that I mentioned being part of.)

Time to play now.

Ava Bloodrose,MA Education in Virtual Worlds

Thunes Buys Tillia – Don’t Panic

Last night there was a meeting with a collection of bloggers,creators and Linden Lab employees to discuss the transition of Second Life payment processing from Tillia to Thunes.

The acquisition of Tillia was announced last year. Strawberry Linden put some of the most common questions back then to Brad Oberwager in an episode of Lab Gab, that you can watch HERE. It’s worth watching because it outlines most of what has now happened,as well as conveying Brad’s excitement and enthusiasm for the venture.

Last night’s Zoom call was to bring people up to date and share the latest, so we could pass that onto our audiences/readers.

What happened?

Tillia got sold and a company much more suited to operating it acquired it. Thunes is a global financial services provider, Tillia was simply created to allow Linden Lab to legally operate it’s own currency (Linden Dollars) and process credit cards.

What’s going to change?

Immediately for most residents, not a lot. On Wednesday (or the next time you visit after that) you will be asked to check a box on the website, acknowledging the change of the company name from Tillia to “Thunes Financial services LLC”. In the future it should lead to more options for buying Linden Dollars and cashing-out to your bank or other accounts.

An analogy Brad used was a local coffee shop, that I’m going to paraphrase.

If you pay with your card the receipt may have a reference to “Square” (a common card processing company in the US), if the coffee shop changes their card processing company to for example “SumUp” (a card handler common in the UK) your receipt may have a reference to that company, but the price of your coffee doesn’t change.

So the change to Thunes is like that. Tillia is being renamed but all your details and transactions are exactly where they always were, like the name on the coffee shop changing, it’s still in the same place. (If they’d tried moving any of it, that would have been the risky part for everyone, so they didn’t.)

It’s possible you may have to re-enter your credit card details, or check some boxes to reconfirm payment or payout methods and that’s it.

The LindeX exchange remains under the control of Linden Lab, Thunes cannot change the price you pay for Lindens.

Right now you may be thinking “what about fees?”, and rightly so. Linden Lab intends to make fees more transparent, by showing you the fee breakdown. Showing how much of that fee they have to pay to provide you that particular payout option. This then allows you to better choose what method you want to use.

What happened in the call?

I’ve now taken part in several of these calls, but this one was different. I’ve seen Brad excited, enthusiastic,angry and range in-between. This time,as someone pointed out in the call text chat, he looked a little scared. Don’t be mistaken though, this was not fear of things going wrong with the switch over to Thunes; they’ve been working hard for months to make sure it goes smoothly. What he’s worried about are the emails he receives.  Every time he puts himself on the line to change something for the better in Second Life he usually receives at least 50 “You’ve ruined SL!” type emails, some of which get very personal.

Given the internal and regulatory scale of this change (think lawyers in 48 US States all having to agree to it), I can understand his emotions.

The example of the “Potato1” support case was mentioned, which Bloggers heard about last week during the call about account security.

So if your password is something like “potato1” please change it, for everyone’s sake. We don’t really want a forced grid-wide password reset on account of you folks.

A final point that came up around fees that charities have to pay (just like everyone else) when cashing out the donations residents have made. Those fees can’t be waived, someone has to pay them somewhere, and Brad said he may well do that, out of his own personal pocket, not Linden Labs. With a slight caveat of “maybe not if it was a Million Dollar donation”.

Why is Second Life support slow right now? #StopPotato1

Some very bad people did a Very good job at convincing some good people to hand over their passwords and totally crushed the support team

Brad Oberwager

A resident gives out their password (the example given by Brad Oberwager was “potato1”), Linden Lab support spend 3 hours helping this resident get their account back. The next day the resident changes the password BACK to the COMPRIMISED PASSWORD.

That’s the kind of thing (level of stupidity) that LL support is having to deal with right now.

They have a backlog from March of tickets, caused by trying to make things easier for residents by allowing real-time payments, which resulted in a deluge of account takeovers and subsequent support requests.

Obviously not all the tickets are for account takeovers, there’s regular stuff too, but a load of them that arrived at once seem to be and the lab are working through it all methodically.

Maybe if a person that did that happens to read this, would they even realise the amount of wasted time they caused?

Can you imagine the needless frustration of Lab staff at the sheer stupidity of that resident? (To clarify no-one at Linden Lab called anyone stupid, that’s simply my opinion of someone that would do that.

Of course the Elephant in the room is: Why did the system allow the resident to re-use the weak password?

This is why the Lab issued their blog post about account security last week.

I just wanted to get this out there, because it was stuck in my head, stopping me thinking about what I’m meant to be focussing on tonight; the transition from Tillia to Thunes for payment processing in Second Life. That’ll have to wait until tomorrow now.

The hashtag #StopPotato1 was typed in the text chat of a Zoom call with the Lab by someone else, I’m not taking credit for it I just thought it perfectly summed up things, I just had to use it.

Avatar Account Security – Stop Self Hacking

Today there was a Zoom meeting held between the Second Life Blogger Network and Linden Lab, to discuss “account safety and security”.

As you’re probably aware by now, these meetings get arranged when the Lab has something in particular it wants to share with the Community and they know that lots of Residents don’t see or read the announcement blog posts(me included).

When I received the invitation email and read the subject matter my first thought was “they’re going to ask us to push MFA” (Multi Factor Authentication).

Which was correct, but not the main focus as I’d expected. I was hoping that at this meeting they were going to announce the introduction of recovery keys when setting up MFA, but no.

The main cause of account takeovers are people sharing their passwords. So the accounts aren’t so much being hacked, but as Brad Oberwager said in the meeting, they’re “Self-hacking”.

This is because fraudsters have gotten so good at social engineering. Basically becoming your friend and duping you into sharing your login details.

So there’s some simple DO’s & DON’Ts that the Lab would like to reiterate:

DO:

  • STOP sharing your passwords
  • Change your password (Can you remember when you changed it last? No? Change it NOW.)
  • Enable Multi-Factor Authentication in your account Dashboard

DON’T:

  • Buy Linden Dollars outside of the Second Life platform. (It’s always a scam and Linden Lab can’t help you.)
  • Click on links in chats (yes they could disable them, but can you imagine the backlash?)

All seems quite obvious really doesn’t it? Well yes, but people still aren’t doing these things.

Remember that the Lab could force a grid-wide password reset at any time. The reason they don’t (it would make things easier for them) is that there are people that have been logging in for a decade or more with a saved password they may not even know anymore. So change your password and keep it safe.

You may be wondering why you’re hearing about more account takeovers than you used to, as always it comes down to money. Linden Lab wants to make financial transactions as smooth and timely as possible, everyone likes things to be easy, right? Well the downside of doing real-time transactions is that you become a very attractive target to bad people, that are very good at what they do.

There’s a lot of trust in Second Life, which is great for community spirit, but when it comes to your account password, treat it like your bank details; don’t share it.

Linden Lab Official Post

(Yes, I did practice what I preached and changed my password.)

Herb & Fable – Beyond Lavendell – The Public Beta Quest

On the 1st of March Herb and Fable (HnF) went into public Beta testing, and has had a steady signup of new players.

This was boosted by players joining the game to take part in the Lavendell Quest during Fantasy Faire. If you completed the Lavendell Quest, some of this will be familiar, some not, if you didn’t complete that quest, it is still available to play at the Lavendell Quest region (link below).

For the Beta launch Julula created a similar Quest to introduce players to the different elements of the game and how it all works.

As you progress through different tasks, you’ll receive a whole bunch of Badges, that appear on your profile on the website and an object inworld that you can display, or add multiple ones to a display board.

Show spoiler

The “First Altar” sequence, is similar to the other Rituals previously released by Jinx. If you previously purchased one of the other ritual sets, there will be an update to a Herb & Fable version when they become available, that will allow you to earn associated XP and related badges.

There’s quite a collection of items you need to collect for your Ritual:

Show spoiler
List of items required to perform the Ritual

Like the Lavendell Quest, tracking these items down will have you searching high and low for them all.

One of the steps in preparing for the Ritual is carving your First Wand!

In the ritual you will learn about setting up an Altar with your various Craft tools, where to place them and their significance. These steps are the same as the ones you may take if you set up a real-world Altar at home or other location.

I set out the Rirual items on the counter in my tavern, in the corresponding directional locations:

The Chalice, representing the aspect of Water:

Show spoiler of the Chalice

The Feather, representing the aspect of Air:

Show spoiler of the Feather

You can get your Herb & Fable Beta pack in the Herb & Fable store on Centauria.

However given a screenshot posted today by Julula in the #Teasers channel of the Discord server, we may be out of Beta very soon!

Image from Gyazo

(The hovertext says V.1.01, the Beta version says Beta 0.11)

Herb & Fable links:

Blogger Challenge: My New Shiny: Dark Star

I found a new store I love: Madame Noir. The Faire is mostly all about bright and shiny stuff, but you can have shiny Black too! The dress is called Lux, so why “Dark Star” in the title of the post? Simply because that’s what sprang into my mind when I saw the way the light reflected off it, it looked like a sparkling star in the darkness. Of course I needed an appropriate setting to show you it, so Nox Sanctum seemed appropriate as the Faire slowly begins to drift into the Mists for another year.

Upper closeup
The Boots!

To Know the Dark
by Wendell Berry

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

THE FAIRELANDS WILL CLOSE TUESDAY 6TH APRIL MIDNIGHT SLT

(Then you’ll have to track down all the creators mainstores yourself, so better go grab the stuff at the Faire?!)

Credits:

Lavendell’s Green Witch – Herb & Fable Faire Quest

If you somehow missed it (how ? See previous posts linked below) Jinx released a fun game called Herb & Fable. For a taster of how it works, there’s a fun Quest on Lavendell, which I’m currently working my way through.

Here I’m part way through, grinding up some Turkeytail mushrooms that I’ve first harvested and dried. It’s an ingredient in a tea that I’ll be making when I gather the remaining ingredients, hinted at in the message you get from the starter NPC:

[07:32:18] Ella the Wise Fox: Welcome Fairelander. The first step of your journey is about collecting some healing herbs for different purposes – harvest what the land offers. Turkey Tail mushroom with its potent healing powers, saffron from the crocus – a very valuable spice, honey from bees – the saviours of our planet and cinnamon with its powerful flavour and healing properties.

Sounds like there’s going to be a few more steps for me to complete before I can brew my tea. If you get stuck, there’s a very helpful and active group of players in the Herb & Fable Inworld Group and Discord Server if you need a hint or three.

Fortunately there’s some lovely spots on Lavendell where you can sit and take a break from Questing or shopping and admire the beauty of the place.

However don’t spend too long chilling, you’ve now only got a few days before the Fairelands vanish into the mists again.

THE FAIRELANDS WILL CLOSE TUESDAY 6TH APRIL MIDNIGHT SLT

If you enjoy the Lavendell Quest, you can continue playing Herb & Fable by clicking the big sign in the Herb & Fable Faire Store for how.

I obviously had to put together an outfit made of Faire merchant items to match my chosen game class of Green Witch, see below.

Outfit Credits:

Previous Herb & Fable posts:

Bench location: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Lavendell/145/201/92

Blogger Challenge: I Remember 2024: Party in the Library

I remember…there was a party as part of the Desert Foxes roleplay. It brought the storyline towards the end and raised several thousand Lindens throughout, pushing the annual Faire total so far for 2024 over the 9 Million L$ mark.

Lots of spectacular light and particle effects occurred in the Library as the story unfolded.

Sonya
“Boots” (Changed into White when a certain donation milestone was reached!)