Second Style Magazine

The first gift of the Second Style Island Group Giveaway is out now! I know it’s a bit early, but we are too excited to wait! Below is a picture of the outfit you can get for free simply for being a group member!!

Ashoka Eales of Phoenix Rising released this gorgeous outfit in these special colors just for our group members! All you have to do is; join the Second Style Island Group, tp over to the Second Style Headquarters with your tag on and click the gift box. That’s it! Each item will be out until midnight of the next day when a different designer will add their gift! For how many days? I can’t say for sure but at least for the next 15 days!!

While you are picking up your gifts, make sure to hit the designers subscriber so you can stay on top of their news too!!

Have fun!

xo – Sophia Harlow

March 15, 2010 is the kickoff date for our Second Style Island Group Gift Giveaway!! All you have to do to get some very cool gifts is join the Second Style Island group in-world, wear your tag and tp to Second Style Island and buy the gift for 0L! Each day there will be a different designer setting out a gift for a 24 hour period which will give you plenty of time to tp in and grab it!

Watch this space for more details but..I will tell you that the first three days of designers setting out their gifts are: Phoenix Rising, Tiny Bird and Callie Cline!

Can’t wait to see you all there!

xo – Sophia Harlow

The new issue of Second Style is availible now!

This is our salute to Hollywood and all its glitter and glamour. In Second Life, anyone can be a star. We have so many red-carpet-ready looks that it’s hard to choose. For our August issue, I wanted to take a look the different facets of Hollywood: the history, the new and old and how they mix, and that indefinable essence that makes it all so exciting.

In this issue, Dancien Graves and Vivianne Draper bring us classic movie styles inspired by famous films, while Violet McGinnis shows us tabloid-crazed celebrity. James Schwarz tries his hand at looking villianous enough for the movies, and Leah McCullough shows you how to look like you’ve just stepped off a movie set for super-cheap! Darkley Aeon gives us SL-inspired movie posters and Surarin Piek shows us looks the paparazzi will drool over. Do you want to be in real movies? That’s great, because Lordfly Digeridoo tells us how to make killer machinima!

If that wasn’t enough, we’re also featuring an interview with Miko Omegamu, everyone’s favorite demure designer and Bayberry Lillihook: Style Icon, in addition to all of our amazing monthly features.

The 24th issue of Second Style magazine has hit the stands. It features a bridal theme, with featured articles from from your favorite Second Style writers like Ana Lutetia, Amika Jewell and James Schwarz. We introduce new writers, like Vivianne Draper, Dancien Graves, Lordfly Digeridoo, Brigitte Belgar and Violet McGinnis. We take a look at traditional Japanese and Indian weddings and homes for the new couple. Uma Ceawlin shows us some amazing mix and match wedding looks, and Surarin Piek explores honeymoon fashion. We also feature wedding gowns and bridal wear for some of the alternative walks of life in SL. It’s jam-packed full of goodness!

We’re also overhauling our website to bring you a fresh new look and even fresher content, so pardon our dust!

–Iris Seale

Managing Editor

From time to time, the topic of taxes in Second Life comes up. Many content creators I know who make “real” money in-world and cash it out on a regular basis are aware they’re liable to pay income taxes on it, but recently I came across this paper by Indiana tax law professor Leandra Lederman, suggesting pretty strongly that sales taxes ought to apply to in-world purchases made with Lindens whether or not you actually “cash them out” into US Dollars. Writing in the Yale Law Journal she states:

Millions of people participate in virtual worlds—immersive online forums such as Second Life and World of Warcraft (WoW). While some online activities lack significant economic implications, one of the attractions of Second Life, which is designed to be a commercial platform, is the prospect of making “real money.” This essay argues that profits received in the form of Lindens (Second Life’s currency) should be taxed in much the same way profits received via PayPal, a widely used electronic-payment system, are. Although Second Life profits could instead be taxed once the taxpayer sells for real money (“cashes out”), that would create a special exception for Second Life that does not exist for platforms such as eBay. It would facilitate abuse and distort economic activity.

Although some previous discussions around taxation in and around Second Life (and other commerce based virtual worlds like IMVU) haven’t amounted to much, having an article like this published in a prestigious law journal makes it a lot more likely that the U.S. Congress will take some action on this issue in the near future.

Thinking about the nightmare of trying to figure out how to collect and remit taxes in a global micropayment environment where the buyer and seller have no idea of the legal jusidiction of either party boggles my mind. To paraphrase President Obama that’s way above my pay grade.

(Tip: TaxProf Blog)

Wow, didn’t see that one coming. I woke up to find an email in my inbox, like many readers I suspect.

I must say I knew that OnRez was probably not long for this world. Strategically, the Electric Sheep Company pulled pretty far back from Second Life through most of 2008 and it was increasingly apparent that the OnRez portal just wasn’t going to get the developer time and attention it required. I figured that ESC was just going to quietly wind operations down and move on to whatever it is that they do now.

But I was genuinely surprised that the Lab showed up to buy both OnRez and Xstreet, putting the former out of its misery and the anointing the latter as the web shopping experience for Second Life. I had to tilt my head here and think, “Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot?”

For all the charm of Xstreet’s late 90s layout and design, I always recommended people buy things from my OnRez store, whether they wanted to do it in world from our headquarters location or via the Web. I also had put a number of free (hopefully useful) items in my OnRez store so that I could easily distribute them to others. I guess what’s really disappointing is that a ton of content creators are going to have to spend hours and hours and hours transferring information, objects and graphics from OnRez to Xstreet.

I’m debating what to do myself. All Second Style back issues and magazine kiosks are already on Xstreet – but I’m not really sure I want to go to the trouble to move all of the free items over. Based on the feedback I’ve read at SLUniverse, I don’t think this is an extremely popular acquisition, although I can tell it has the potential to be a great thing.

Given previous track records though, I’m not really expecting much, or on any reasonable timeframe.

What do you think?

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Google publically launched “Lively” which everyone and her grandmother is comparing to Second Life. This is not the right comparision – Lively is actually far more similar to IMVU than Second Life.

There’s no user generated content. There’s no economy. And while embedding a 3D space on your website is kind of fun and novel, how would you actually use it productively? Mike Elgan at Computerworld thinks it’s a great tool for remote access telecommuters. But I’m not really sure what Lively would buy a telecommuter over, say, Skype.

What do you all think? Have you tried it? Do you want to develop content for it? I changed the sidebar poll to track your opinions. Leave some comments if you have more feedback.

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A few weeks ago a bunch of blogs swarmed the Second Life issue tracker “JIRA” to help pump up the request for more than 25 groups. I’ve been following the traffic on the Second Life developer’s email list, and I thought you might want to read about some of the planned changes to group functionality forthcoming in 1.19.0 of the viewer. (Although based on followup developer traffic, 1.19.0 may be delayed by several weeks because the engineering team is reverting away from the web-based login some of you may have played with in the release candidate and/or Windlight client.)

According to an email made by Joshua Linden here’s some of what you can expect:

* 61 bug fixes
* “Voice 1.1″
** Introduces moderated to (formal) group voice and group text conversations
** Moderation ability applies to group owner and group officer roles
** Moderation will NOT apply to one-to-one text or voice chat, ad-hoc group conversation, or to spatial voice chat.
* Auto-joining group chat sessions has been removed
** Group members must explicitly choose to actively “join” their SL Group’s chat sessions after they log in.
** Starting a new SL group chat only adds the requester to the chat session much like an IRC channel.

In other words, it appears you’ll have to actively opt-in to group chat sessions instead of now where you can only “semi” opt-out by closing the chat tab when it pops up.

I am unsure exactly how group (text) chat moderation will work, but that also seems like a positive feature change from the current functionality.

What do you think?

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I promise I won’t make a regular habit of posting articles like these, but I felt like this is serious enough to break away from our regular programming.

You probably saw the alert the Lindens put up about the QuickTime security flaw if you’ve logged into Second Life recently, but on Fashion Emergency and some other groups I’m in I’ve been seeing questions about what this issue means to the average Second Life user.

The answer? Be careful! It may be possible to use this flaw — for example — to steal Lindens from your avatar’s account in Second Life!

Protect yourself by going into Edit->Preferences, choosing the “Audio/Visual” tab on the left, and unchecking the “Play Streaming Video” box there. Hopefully Apple will release a patch for this problem soon — but until then, it’s not safe to wander the grid with the video setting enabled.

Incidentally, it’s worthwhile noting that this same flaw impacts Internet Explorer, Firefox, and iTunes as well — so be careful browsing the internet. An attacker won’t be able to steal your Lindens by exploiting this flaw via a web browser, but they can do things like install adware and spyware on your computer (which is a major pain to remove and clean up.)

You can read all the gory technical details at the US CERT website.

Linden Lab widened the voice beta yesterday, making it official with this post on the Second Life blog. I downloaded the beta voice enabled viewer last night and after some really annoying problems getting my various hardware components to work correctly — especially the microphone — I finally got all of the issues worked out and could to listen to and speak with my fellow Second Lifers. I found that “push-to-talk” actually worked the best for our little group last night — especially for people with a lot of background noise or heavy breathers (ohmy! Adjust that mic, you perv!). As of right now, it seems that only “parcel enabled public chat” works. But LL will be adding the ability to “IM voice chat” and “group conference voice chat” in the near future.

There’s only a handful of voice enabled sims on the preview grid (and actually, the stability of these sims seems to be a bit dodgy.) Preview grid Lusk, for example, died while a group of about 10 of us were talking (well, I was listening because my microphone didn’t work!) I’m now hiding out on Pulveria which seems to be a bit more stable. Other voice enabled sims on the preview grid are: Abbotts, Spaceport Alpha, Morris, Da Boom, Tehama and Balance.

I know some residents might feel a bit ambivalent or opposed to voice chat, but my sense is once you start using voice chat, you won’t want to be without it. Several of my fellow residents made comments to the effect that they were just going to stay in the preview grid until voice was unleashed on the main grid. Plus? L$50,000 free shopping money — ok, you can’t bring your purchases back to the main grid, but it’s fun to spend someone else’s money anyway!

I definitely recommend downloading the voice beta viewer — it’s synced with the 1.14.0 release — and checking it out. If you see me on the voice preview grid, make sure to come say “Hi!”

Another week, another release. I must admit that I’m actually looking forward to this one, despite the inevitable hiccups, because of the significantly improved in world group functionality. (Seriously, that last link is “Everything you ever wanted to know about groups post 1.12 release.”)

I can now — finally — belong to up to 25 groups, and each group can have up to 10 user defined roles with abilities for each role controlled with very fine granularity. I am also really looking forward to designer notification groups being able to send out a notecard with embedded texture “ads” for the new items as part of the notification.

I heard on Sunday night that Naughty Designs had been ripped off again by texture thieves. Top left is a photo of Lost’s male skin found in “Renegadez Mall.” The vendor is owned by bad Plasma, who also apparently owns the mall itself. Bottom left is Lost’s original skin texture.

It was a two-fer theft, because below bad Plasma’s store was another store run by MeShell Jezebel where Ambyance2 Anubis found rips of her Haley skin for sale. You can see more conclusive photographs comparing the demos vs. the originals by clicking on the previous link. Although Lost and Ambyance have left signs next to the vendors informing customers about the texture thefts, it is unclear what repercussions will be handed out by Linden Labs. I know that Ambyance and Lost plan to file DMCA claims, but as of last night, at least, the vendors are still in world.