Good hair day

[Safety advisory: those of my readers who are faint of heart - especially the female ones - are advised to be safely seated before proceeding with this post. Please keep a telephone handy for emergency calls. If you need something to calm your nerves - like a glass of eggnog - please take it as a precautionary measure.]

I love my hair! My first hair ever after my newbie hair was "Spike Brown" by Adam'n'Eve, and it took me many weeks until I settled on "Luth" from Elikapeka Tiramisu Designs (ETD). My budget was tight back then, and I only bought a pack of 3 browns, but it was exactly the style I wanted. Short, a little bit messy, youthful. A great style - and it did not bother me that it was marketed for women. No, I actually enjoyed it that it set me apart a bit, being probably the only male avatar wearing it. ETD's "Luth" defined the way my avatar looked since I bought it, and with very few exceptions I wore it all the time since December 2007!

I'm sorry, Ladies, yes, I wear the same hairstyle for 27 months straight

Recently my friends Faerie Hax and Dunan Wilder suggested to me in a kind and subtle (cough) way that my hair is outdated, and as a consequence dragged me through countless hair stores, among others Find Ash, Zero Style, Sadistic Hacker, Truth, Exile, Little Heaven, Novocaine, Tiny Bird and Tukinowagima - I ended up with 27 demos that were considered as finalists! Alas, while there were many nice styles among them, none of them "clicked", and ruefully and under the disapproving gaze of Faerie I returned to ETD's "Luth".

And then, a few days ago, I saw the advert for Truth Hawks' new style "Peta". (As a sidenote, don't ever try to google for "peta truth" - it gets hundreds of results - none of which is relevant to SL hairstyles). "Peta" immediately clicked. I could immediately see me wearing it and got the demo. I wore the demo for two days, and asked my friends what they think of it. All of them loved it. All of them said it is the right successor for my old hair - similar in style, but more modern in appearance. So finally, after more than two years, I changed my hair.

Double Take by Cajsa Lilliehook

While I was in-world this morning to check out my SL6B parcel, respected fashion blogger and photographer Cajsa Lilliehook IMed me and asked for 10 minutes of my time. It turned out that Cajsa wanted to portray me for her "Double Take" set on Flickr:

This is a collection of head shots of my Second Life friends and acquaintances who enrich my Second Life experience with their friendship, art or their creativity.

I was very honored. Even though we had contact on and off in the past, I did not think I was prominently on her radar, and as a matter of fact we only recently "friended" in SL. So I was very surprised and pleased to be invited for a photosession.

You can see Cajsa's two portraits of me here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cajsa_lilliehook/tags/peterstindberg/

Vacation

After some months with my ex-partner, we realized that the daily routine was threatening to overwhelm our relationship (which was partially a business relationship as well). We had our little rituals, met every other day, but there was something missing. At this point the idea of a vacation was born. We had an event coming up, and after that event we wanted to take a week off, go explore, spend time with each other, set ourselves to "busy" and only enjoy SL together. It never happened though, we never made this vacation, and probably this was the turning point in our relationship.

Last night I made a mini vacation with a person close to my heart (who prefers to remain anonymous for the time being and is therefore blurred out in the photo). Following London Spenglers great advice on dating in SL we scheduled time together ahead. Yes, we do see each other almost daily, still we put a special time aside, planned it ahead, switched on busy mode and gifted each other with exclusive, non interrupted time.

We wanted to try sailing in SL, so I found us a boat that seemed not too simple and not too complex, and we had two leisurely hours cruising the New England sims, until we found a nice island for some cuddles. The most remarkable line of the evening was "It has been a long time since I had such an immersive experience" - what better compliment can there be?

Funny enough, we did not talk much. We talk more during our almost-daily encounters. We just enjoyed being together, being at peace, having a joint experience of pleasure and relaxation. Those three hours of exclusive recreation refueled my emotional batteries immensely.

Take a SL vacation! Break out of your routine! Set exclusive time aside, go into busy, use an alt if necessary! Spend quality time with your partner! It is worth it!

Peter SoNotALinden - Analysis of an April's Fool Joke

Yesterday I announced that I will be joining Linden Lab as Peter Linden, responsible for the multilingual efforts at Linden Lab. Of course this was an April's Fool joke. The joke occurred to me spontaneously - I did not plan it in advance. I tested it in the Ch'know groupchat where Nikki and Callaigh promptly fell for it, so I decided to beef it up a bit and post it to the blog. I expected a few people to fall for it - but I was surprised how many people actually bought the story, or at least saw it as rather probable.

Clues that the story was not true:

1. Resident accounts who become a Linden do neither get cancelled or frozen - the person is free to continue to use their account.
2. Usually Linden Lab employees are rather discreet about the name of their non-Linden-account, and there are also very few reports of publicly announced resident-to-Linden promotions.
   
3. As Katharine pointed out, someone going to work at the Lab would not disqualify the work done by using phrases like "proper localization of the viewer" - though it is an open secret that certain viewer translations are abysmal.
4. Also it is highly improbable that a person whose position is more marketing-related will work on any changes to the LSL language.
5. One of the deliberately included clues which - from my perspective made the joke quite obvious - was the bit about analyzing the language used in Instant Messages. Nobody commented on that part, everybody seemed to accept that the content of IM's is accessible to the Lab. And most likely it is - but in that case it will surely not get publicly announced.

So I'm not a Linden after all - you need to stick with Peter Stindberg for a while. But why did so many people believe it, or at least did not outright rule it out? I was surprised at that for a bit, until it occurred to me that the core of my joke is highly probable.

1. There are about 40% of native English speakers in SL. and while it is true that a lot of the other users (like myself) manage English fairly well, localized content for them might be appealing.
2. It is definitely a good idea to become less US-centric and focus on other countries too. The Lab has made many steps into that direction, has a European office, made a lot of multilingual activities already.
3. Appointing a person who is familiar with the languages in SL and with the communities is definitely a good idea. On occasion I wondered how few Linden Lab employees actually seem to have a second life of their own.

So basically my joke had a core believable enough for many. I hope nobody is annoyed or angry now, or feels deceived. Thank you for all the comments - I hope you can laugh with me. and remember: it's not laughing about you, but laughing with you about the joke!

One journey ends, the next journey begins

The journey of Peter Stindberg has come to an end. This morning's email brought the final confirmation - the account will be put on hold. My journey will continue though - as Peter Linden.

Based on my experience with translation work in Second Life, I will coordinate the multilingual efforts of Linden Lab. This includes proper localization of the viewer into the major SL languages, creating multilingual versions of the Linden Lab blogs, creating language specific portals for each country and working closely with the communities in-world for those languages, but it will also focus on adding multilingual capacities to the Linden Scripting Language. Part of this will include work with the metrics group to determine a resident's language more reliably through behavioral patterns (which sims get visited, what language gets used in open chat and IM's) than the simple viewer language detection.

I thank all my friends and readers for their support so far, and I hope they will extend their friendship to Peter Linden as well.

Good bye - and hello!