Second Life's Endangered Spaces

Linden Lab's October announcement that they were planning to significantly raise prices on openspace islands sure caused a stir. Some rental estates evicted their tenants and shut down immediately. Others began deleting their openspaces as they became vacant. After a good week of listening to feedback (AKA "rage") from the community, the Lab came up with a plan to introduce a new land product called Homesteads, which are approved for residential use. These new homesteads will be priced higher than today's openspaces, but for the first six months of 2009, the price will be significantly lower than the outrageous amount they were asking in the October dramabomb.

Even though the new prices are being phased in, and the initial increase isn't that huge, at this time a number of great openspace builds have already been shut down as a result of last week's blog post, and I know of a number of other public builds which were scheduled to be shut down soon, last I heard. Over the weekend I was listening to a song by The Dears, and some of the sentiments it expressed really related to my feelings about the whole openspace controversy. I spent Sunday and Monday teaching myself how to use Sony Vegas Movie Studio, then I traveled around the grid looking for cool openspace sims to photograph. This was a bit of a hassle because Windlight blows my computer up. I crashed 9 or 10 times collecting the snapshots used in the film.

I posted at both the forums I frequent, requesting snaps of other folks' openspace sims, but hardly anyone responded. (Those who did are credited in the video.) Oh- I also want to thank the avatar Detect Surface for letting me use a couple pics of the gorgeous but now defunct Sector 66 build.

Anyway, here's the movie.