Happy New Year!

Just gone midnight SLT in Steelhead, and I'm watching a fireworks display on one of the sim's many wood-panelled rooftops. The owner of the building promises that eventually this clock tower will have fully working innards running like... clockwork. This the kind of painstaking labour-of-love Steelhead is built on. And, for that matter, built of.

I'm already planning a piece on steampunk in SL. For the uninitiated, steampunk is 'a subgenre of speculative fiction set in the past, or a world resembling the past, in which modern technological paradigms occurred earlier in history, but were accomplished via the science already present in that time period.' Think LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN, meaning Alan Moore's original - make that highly original - comic book series rather than the (reportedly woeful) film adaptation.


There are two SL sims best known for celebrating the kind of esoteric Victoriana steampunk feeds on. Steelhead is one, home to Le Jardin, surely the finest bordello in all the metaverse. The other is Caledon, a larger, fast-growing sim that recently became home to a new bureau of your favourite news network and mine, SLNN. Does this have any bearing on the decision to let a piece of gratuitous advertorial dominate the homepage for the best part of a festive fortnight? Probably, but no more so than the fact that Christmas is when the metacorps go quiet and stop issuing press releases just because a CEO thinks about tying his virtual shoelaces.

On which note, I'm also planning a piece on The Avastar, SL's 'first' tabloid newspaper. I've checked out the first couple of copies, as well as the grilling they got on the 'always fairly unbalanced' Second Life Herald for ripping off photos in the first issue and subsequently banning a handful of unhelpful residents from entering an Aimee Weber designed sim that sounds like it needs all the visitors it can get. From what I've seen so far a lot of hard work has gone into it, but that's no guarantee of anything, and what I'd really like to see is some figures for their circulation.

So, like I said, Happy New Year! My resolutions? Keep on blogging, look after my wife and kid better, and GET MORE SLEEP...