Welcome to the sixteenth episode of On the Inside, Second Life Insider's Official Podcast!

This episode features our interview with Frogg Marlowe and Jaycatt Nico, popular in-world musicians. We talk about being (or not) Furry, Sean Connery and Michael Jackson, and nuns on fire. As always, feel free to leave your questions and comments!

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It makes sense, really. Run it through, you'll see. The fantabulous Jacek Antonelli on her blog Jacek Lives has put together a well-thought-out post regarding the recent back-and-forth between Hamlet Au and Frank Rose regarding this article. Go read it for yourself, it's thorough and substantial. So much so that it prompted this response from Our Tateru:

Rose does hit a lot of truths, but seems to be very selective about which ones, and uses phrasing and terms with negative or disparaging loadings. "Created by an underfunded startup using a physics engine that's now years out of date, Second Life is made up of thousands of disconnected "regions"" - might be the stark truth. But it makes it sound far worse than it is. It's certainly not the whole truth. Maybe Rose's facts are more solid than Au suggests, but the selectivity of them borders on a bashing.

So what we have here is a comment on a post in a post about a post about other posts. I love it when things get hopelessly Meta.

(Thanks, Jace!)

Cory Linden held the Technical Town Hall at 2:30 on the 20th of December. While I couldn't make it, it's just as well; reading the transcript had me muttering to myself and shaking my head in confusion. Therefore, when I see a blog post like Jacek Antonelli's in her personal blog, I tend to give it extra attention. I like my technical data pre-chewed, thank you.

One of the more interesting things about her post is her emphasis of 'interest list calculation' as it relates to 'texture prioritization'. It's one of the subtle things that LL gets right: when you hover your cursor over a texture, it rezzes more quickly. Textures you look at more often rez faster than others do.

The post has several bits of value in it, and it's worth checking out!

This is the twenty-eighth in a series of mini-interviews with the residents of Second Life. For the most part, I'll try to leave the responses unedited, except where editing will grant greater clarity.

Salvador Dalgiesh is THE coolest elephant I know, and one of the coolest avatar's I've seen. His color scheme responds to outside input! If you see him around, start saying colors to him and watch the fun! I'm dying to make an 'Elephant in the room' joke here, but ehnh, it'd be beside the point.

Your SL name: Salvador Dalgleish

How did you first come to SL?: I was bored with the MMOs I had been playing for the past 5 years or so ... DAoC, WoW, CoH/CoV. I got tired of their repetitive nature and was looking for something new. I found SL by searching on "virtual worlds".

How did you choose your name?: The description I read said SL was a very surreal place, and I've always been a fan of Salvador Dali. I chose the name (and made my first AV) as an homage to him. I suppose my elephant AV is an homage to him too, in a way.

What's your favorite thing about SL?: The only limits are my own creativity. There is no treadmill, no preset goal, so there are no "powergamers" ... folks are free to socialize and invent at will.

What do you like least about SL?: Griefers. But the new landowner controls have largely limited their abuses, so I guess I'll have to find something new to dislike.

Favorite hangout/store?: The Shelter

Name one new feature you'd like to see added to SL: A more powerful scripting language.

Shout outs: Travis Lambert, Onionpencil Musashi, Jacek Antonelli, Reina Quine, and the whole Shelter crew!

Earlier today I saw someone drop in whom I hadn't seen in months. He was wearing the same sort of short, squat body, but a different head completely. He wasn't speaking, so I didn't know it was him. The overall silhouette tugged at my memory, and when he made with a sarcastic quip, I saw that it was him after all.

It's funny how, in the accelerated world of SL, we can develop friendships and enmities in such a short span of time. It only takes a week of seeing the same people everyday to cement their personas in your mind. I realized that I'd missed seeing Postmark Jensen around, with his lately gorilla-esque avatar, loping along and being generally hilariously irascible. I actually went around saying "Hey, Post is back!" to everyone, who'd apparently already seen him, so I was just being Excitable Akela, overloaded with exclamation points.

But I was genuinely excited to see him back. Rumors of his death being greatly exaggerated, etc. Earlier today the same thing happened. Cerealistic Noland, absent for months because of a laptop accident, was right there in the Shelter, dancing away with Jacek Antonelli, as though she'd never been away. I was overjoyed to see her, and spent the rest of my time in-world talking with her in IM.

These people that we share this world with aren't just people to me anymore; they're representations of moments. Times past when I spent a half hour bantering and laughing. Having serious conversations on mortality and identity. Enjoying the sweet camaraderie of shared experience. That's what keeps me coming back to SL. I miss the moments. I miss the people.