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Making A Living In Second Life
Wired has an article looking at folks who have dropped out of the whole 'meatspace moneymaking' thing, and are now making their living in Second Life. From the article: "Within a month, Grinnell was making more in Second Life than in her real-world job as a dispatcher. And after three months she realized she could quit her day job altogether. Now Second Life is her primary source of income, and Grinnell, whose avatar answers to the name Janie Marlowe, claims she earns more than four times her previous salary. Grinnell isn't alone. Artists and designers, landowners and currency speculators, are turning the virtual environment of Second Life into a real-world profit center." Interesting, and with a respectability lacking in gold farming.
Second Life released an Linux native alpha client. Some hard rough edges but very usable.
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# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
This should still be reported as income, this is not anything new.
Warning - The link in the parent is totally NSFW.
Knight37 - Once a Gamer, Always a Gamer
Opening up a new market does not create wealth, it redistributes it. For every content person making money off of second life there are probably two or three people who are spending a significant portion of their income there. Thats where the wealth is coming from, not the invisible anus of the market.
You can make stuff in SL anywhere that the land owner hasn't set 'no building'. You can play with scripts anywhere that hasn't been set 'no scripts'.
This accounts for something like, oh, 80% of the world, I'd guess.
There are specific sandbox areas; some are small chunks of heavily-loaded sims*, some are entire sims given over to the task. Sandboxes are build-enabled, usually script-enabled, and have very lenient auto-sweep times, so you can just plop yourself down and start Making Stuff.
Popular sandboxes are an attraction in and of themselves; you'll see lots of builders who don't bother shelling out to own land working on their projects. People whose projects involve scripting will often hand out beta versions of their toys, just for testing, or just to watch someone have fun with their work.
You need to have land to put a vending machine for your stuff. But you can rent space in a mall, or perhaps a friend who has land would like to offer a little space for a vendor, or perhaps you might join a group to share some land. There's a lot of options. I make my own avatars, and I've gotten several offers of vendor space, including one in some very prime space in one of the oldest sims in the game, near the newbie area!
If you want to run a club or be a land baron, yeah, that requires money for paying for land. But you can do a lot of stuff with potential financial return in SL without ever paying for more than the initial account, and that's free nowadays.
*a 'sim' in SL is the fundamental division; each one is handled by a different server. So a very populated sim is on a pretty overloaded computer.
egypt urnash minimal art.
Be careful about using that plan to get a dedicated Second Life box running. SL is CPU-limited rather than GPU-limited in terms of graphics candy. More memory on the graphics card is a great thing, but if what I've read is correct (which it may not be, of course) the CPU is a big determining factor in the SL experience.
There are groups of residents petitioning to get the game's transform and lighting functions onto the GPU rather than the CPU.
There are 3 differences between the premium account that you can't do or are limited with a free account.
1. Land ownership. Free accounts can't own land. But anybody can rent land if they have the money for it. So if you figure out a way to make enough money, you can rent with a free account.
2. Weekly stipend is minute for free accounts. For the basic premium account, it comes out to about a month's fees.
3. L$ to US$ exchange is limited for free (And even low level premium) accounts. But you can get around this by going to websites like slexchange.
None of that prevents you from making and selling items. Or really prevents you from doing anything inside SL.