Maybe you’ve heard it as well, maybe from Daniel Voyager’s blog. There’s a new Linden project (60 sims) forming an all new mini-continent to the north of Zindra. This new development is called Horizons and features prefab houses in sci-fi style. You know Orca herself is a partime space princess, so this new continent made her curious and she just had to take a peek.
As soon as I was there it made poof in the vicinity and look who materialized from the thin air: Uccie Poultry, the famous ex-IOLer, bloggerista and Bay City luminary … and one of Orca’s rolemodels since her early childhood days in SL.
Of course the good Uccie had to have a look herself. Probably to see if the new development would be any competition to Bay City or sumfink. 😉
Then two of the most cuddly little moles arrived to check some of the buildings. Their sci-fi outfits are really too cute.
I couldn’t have timed my visit any better, because on top of the moles the charming Keira Linden showed her face as well. Orca retreated into silent mouse status in order not to upset the high and mighty and obviously rather busy moles and Lindens.
Well, not too silent, of course not. You know the cheeky reporter Orca can’t keep quiet for a second. So I asked the moles if this new continent will be like the old Linden Homes … meaning house comes for free with premium membership.
Unfortunately the moles didn’t know exactly what it will be, only that it’s not like Linden Homes. Methinks living here will be a bit more expensive than dwelling in a Linden home. Maybe because all the Horizons sims are rated Mature and have direct access to Zindra via a 2 sims wide ocean.
I already envision the biggest sex orgies, maybe Horizons delivering fresh innocent virgin avies from outer space to the sex-hungry rapists of Zindra. Anyhoo, I rather liked the architectural style of Horizons. The houses are rather small but roomy and light inside. I checked, there are privacy curtains, so no fear about living in a glass palace.
The purpose of this blimp? Don’t ask me, maybe a TP hub?
This is one of the less good houses available in Horizons. At least for my taste.
This 2-storey home is more like it. 😉
I like the litlte parks with “statues” in them and the nicely layed out road network. This reminds me indeed of Bay City.
Is this a temple or what? Looks freaky funky.
If you wanna visit Horizons yourself, please follow my TP to Shell Beach. Arrive flying, it’s an ocean sim. The Horizons sims are still closed to the public and you can’t TP into them. Once you’re there you can’t even explore into Horizons, you’ll be kicked home immediately and without warning or grace period. Orca was kicked twice before she learned to behave.
Deeper inside Horizons there seems to be still a lot of wilderness. That or my graphics card failed at 1024 meters DD and soooo far away from my avie.
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Shell%20Beach/122/235/31
THAR SHE BLOWS! 
[…] All New Horizons […]
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File this under hope springs eternal. During the last six weeks there seems to be a lot more activity by the lab in SL. Have they finally realized that Sansar is a s* show?
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“s*show”. Really, Willow? You know Orca’s blog is the last place where you’ve gotta self-censor yourself and cave in to the peer pressure of political correctness’ fascism. 😉
I guess the ppl working on Sansar are a different team from the guys working at SL. Of course I can understand they are showing heightened activity now. Probably to prove their worthyness to Emperor Ebbe, so he might lift them up to the Sansar team.
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Ppl working on Sansar are separate from the SL group. But my guess is that the Sansar people are trying to show the new CEO they can do something useful.
I’m not sure what Ebbe’s contract says but LL CEO’s used to get a 3 year contract. Since Ebbe joined LL in quarter 1 of 2014 it may be time to break out the party hats and streamers ! 😀 Another message to file in hope springs eternal.
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There’s probably a corollary of Gresham’s Law (“bad money drives out good money”) at work where CEOs are concerned.
Apple, for example, seems to be on a high-gain positive feedback loop of soulless profiteering where CEOs are concerned. While, by contrast, Linden Labs seems to be investing tons of the money we make for them pissing us off and scaring us into the Open Sim grids – not the intuitive move for a company. Usually you want to make your customers feel wanted, not like bastard step-children.
But lately, things are looking up. Extra prims for us (took me one afternoon of giving my Linden Home some warmth to use them all up, but that’s my fault, not Ebbe’s), and now some cool techno-kitsch in an Adult neighborhood for us Premium Members. However, I have a presence in my current Linden Home that I won’t walk away from for Horizons.
However, Horizons and the extra prims don’t make me at ease with most of my cash going toward a VR SL that I won’t be able to afford to use (my hardware is increasingly obsolete in “SL classic”, as mesh bodies lag me out of more and more sims).
Alpha testing the new Firestorm Bento viewer, I get the sense that Phoenix/Firestorm has also decided to push those of us who have been faithfully supporting Second Life for years out of the game. That’s what happens if we can’t buy new hardware to run their latest gee-whiz features in new versions of Firestorm. Just alpha and beta-testing for them is getting to be frustrating… you find what are definitely version-dependent bugs in (say) the alpha version of Firestorm for Project Bento, and when you report them you’re told to file a JIRA; when you file the JIRA, it goes from being a bug report to being a “support request” – the implication being “it’s not our code, it’s you”.
Time marches on, sure, but not all of us can afford to do Moore’s Law hardware updates every three years.
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Quoting from Rowland Manthorpe’s Wired article, “Second Life was just the beginning. Philip Rosedale is back and he’s delving into VR”
“When Altberg, 52, arrived at Linden Lab in early 2014, Sansar consisted of “three or four people futzing with some low-level stuff out of frustration with Second Life”. The game still has a sizeable community and a GDP of “half a billion”. Using the proceeds from this “money-generating machine”, Altberg has invested heavily, building the team up to 75, more than a third of Linden Lab’s staff. The moment he committed completely to VR was when he heard that Facebook had bought Oculus. “As soon as that sold, we were just like, Sansar is going to be fricking awesome for VR. We knew that people were going to want to create content in massive quantities – right now it’s too damned difficult.””
What I took away from that is what I’ve been hearing for some time – that a third of SL’s coders and other team members went to Project Sansar when Ebbe Altberg took over. Since then, for reasons that aren’t all under Altberg’s control, the SL experience is being degraded for those of us who don’t have what used to be considered high-end PCs.
Part of that is under our direct control, because many of us are just too lazy to migrate from system-hoggish OSes like WIndows to Linux, which has less overhead and what overhead it has is more intelligently designed. And that’s on my to-do list. Microsoft made that decision easier for me by decreeing in their latest system update that i’m to load three Cortana executables in system memory whether I want to use Cortana (ever) or not.
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Pat, as much as I loved to read your promotion of Linux over Windows, and as much as it’s technically correct, I can’t say I experienced a great deal betterer SL experience than under Windows (Win7 in my case). Crashing went down from few to zero but that’s mostly it. Okay okayyy, it is a big deal if you’re a crash sufferer. =^.^=
And high end PCs, Pat, where would you draw the line? I built a middle-of-the-road computer (i5-4690, 8 GB RAM, Asus GTX 770) that runs SL without a problem. I would hardly call that a high end system, just a well-rounded allrounder. Of course it’s better than a 300 $ bargain basement laptop. But, and now please don’t laugh, I’m running SL also on my 300 $ Acer Netbook, which is a really nasty and crappy pos. For just standing around with the lowest graphics settings and 64 meters DD it’s ok. You know, chatting. That’s what most SLers are doing anyway, innit? They hardly move around or show any action besides from chatting while hanging around the same welcome center they were born into SL. So no need for hi specced computers for them.
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The line for me and other retirees (in RL) hovers around US$300. That’s what a quad-core (in my case, i3 Pentium, 2.16 GHz/core) laptop with 4-6Gb RAM, decent but not stellar integrated Intel graphics (which is getting better all the time, actually), and a terabyte or so HDD costs. I’ve given up on Moore’s Law knocking that price point down, there’s no price pressure. My laptop’s Acer, too.
Why a laptop? Because I spend too much time in hospitals and clinic waiting rooms to waste reading the magazines in the lobby. The novels it’s traditional to read when actually IN hospital are expensive enough my US$300 laptop’s already paid for itself that way.:-)
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Arrrgs! Are you serious? 300 US$ is what you’re using as your main SL machine? After a long life of productive labour I’d expect for myself a pension good enough to afford much better hardware. In fact my 300 € netbook has only one purpose: A travel ‘puter, nothing else. And I’m not even a pensioner yet.
Oh btw, what is it: i3 or Pentium, can’t be both. Make you mind up, girl. 🙂
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You’re right. Something about MicroCenter’s ad copy led me to believe I was getting an i3, when it says clearly on the sticker by the keyboard, “Pentium N3540”, so I figured… well, that’s too embarrassing to get into for someone who USED to be a nerd. What don’t we do? Trust ad copy. Anyway, quad-core Pentium laptop chip, 2.16 GHz/core. Used to run really nice till someone poured a quart of water on it, and now the keyboard that came with it only sort of works, while the hard drive controller hiccups occasionally and needs defragging pretty often.
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My nasty little Acer netbook sports one of those Haswell generation Pentiums as well. But mine is so fukn sloooow, really only runs spunky on certain Linuxes. Well, could always be worse, could’ve been a Celeron. 😮
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I think that the LL board is getting fed up with Ebbe and as on his contract it stated Sansar needs to be delivered till the end of 2016, the rest is already working for the next Ceo.
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Hopefully. Ebbe is gnawing on my nerves since his first day in office. A Swede who doesn’t sail, a SL CEO who dislikes the concept of a virtual world, WTF, Ebbe, WTF?
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But if Horizons is some like Bay city on a diff theme, that is pretty answome i have to say. Not the stupid experience gaming regions for sure but all the rest.
And finally some adult rated community:)
For me it will mean that will be able to sail from our parcel in Zindra all they way up to Horizons, so i do hope to visit them soon.
And i guess ill do the “fragata do tejo” to sail on them.
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I doubt the narrow channels of Horizons are any more sailable than their counterparts in BC. Maybe a powerboat is preferable … if you take it easy with the accelerator. And, yes, it should be easy to get at least up to Horizons, which has a 2 sims wide front pointing at Zindra. In 2013 we had a leg of the M24 World Tour in these waters. Was nice and unlaggy.
And … oh … what? You and Saphy have a parcel on Zindra? BTW, Horizons will be Mature, but not Adult rated. I know that’s insignificant for everybody except for US citizens but I will mention it just because.
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I thought from what i read on Inara’s blog, that it would be rated adult.
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Yes, but I published my post before Inara came up with her blog, sacrificing accuracy for speed. That’s what makes Thar She Blows! so much more sexy than all the other blogs. Huahahaahaaa!!!
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Quote:
A couple of further points to note is that the Horizons regions are all Adult rated
Unquote:)
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Adult, really? Ok. Didn’t Daniel write they were Mature? But then he also mis-named them “Horizon”, so we never know if he’s a credible source. LOL
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I’m here at Horizons so as of November 16th, they seem open to the public. They are adult rated.
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…feeling less like a yardkid already – SL not only doing new things for us Premium members. Just as long as they don’t go Red Light Center overboard on the adult-ness (Utherverse’s adult-themed “Red Light Center” being the other existing virtual world working on a VR port to the Oculus Rift).
The dirty minds of the SL Borg Collective are more than capable of cooking up our own naughty fun. By comparison, RLC is a North Korean wet dream – One Big Menu (controlled for your ennui by RLC itself) for toon sex, same poses, same animations, same toys. And your avi can’t get jiggy for less than US$20/month.
There’s a great big RLC diaspora in Second Life for a reason. SL’s not an “adult world”, but if your avi wakes up one day feeling.. “anxious” (as Betelgeuse might say), then SL will get your ya-yas out faster, harder, and for free.
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Oh, pardon me – I meant to say “Beetlejuice” when I typed its homophone “Betelgeuse”.
Now, does “if your avi wakes up one day feeling.. “anxious” (as Beetlejuice might say)” make more sense?
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That reminds me of the one Space Dandy episode:
Dandy (chasing what he thinks is an unregistered alien): “Hey, stop right there, you … cat …”
Meow: “I’m not a cat. I’m a Betelgeusian!”
Dandy: “What’s your name then, Betelgeusian?”
Meow (grudgingly): “Me#$%* (pronounced Merowmreowreow).”
Dandy: “Mhm … okayyyy. So, Meow, are you sure you’re not a cat?”
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