Ho-Hum, Another Birthday Come and Gone

Not mine - bite your tongues! I refer to Second Life's birthday celebration. By the time this posts, I strongly suspect that SL7B will be history. I don't really know the dates - certainly I could look them up, but the uncertainty reflects the casual attitude the Lab seems to have taken this year. I was around for the fifth and sixth year birthday bashes, and they seem to be getting steadily less bashier. I recall I was bombarded with notices about number five, and was made aware of the starting and ending dates of number six. This time? I wouldn't have known it was underway but for reports of yet another SL birthday controversy.

(For what it's worth: I fail to see the connection between a naked Barbie doll (add the TM if you like) and attracting the attention of the child-molesting Bad Element. And, as others have noted, the situation did not seem to be handled well. But I digress.)

Mr. Carl Metropolitan mentioned that Caledon's Oxbridge gateway was represented at SL7B, so I thought I should pay my respects. It's a small but stylish structure clearly modeled after Oxbridge's architecture, flying the flag, with some information about Oxbridge classes inside.


In looking around the Oxbridge build, however, all I found was a hodgepodge of...stuff. I can't recall if SL5B had a particular theme, but I do recall large, elaborate builds, including Caledon's. For SL6B, the theme had to do with the future, and the builds made some effort to fit within the theme. Now - well, look below.

There are birthday cakes. So far, so good. Is that a plywood roof behind it? Hard to tell, but why risk making your roof look like you can't apply a texture to a flat surface?


Dunno who the people in the foreground are, but they apparently like soccer. Or football, as everyone else says. All very confusing, really. If the inventors of American football could have just called it "American rugby," or "painful yard-by-yard gains" or something, we could have saved "football" for soccer and been on the same page with the rest of the world. Then again, would that mean we would have to have adopted the metric system? Because, frankly, it hurts my head when people elsewhere in the world say things like "Boy, is it hot today! It must be nearly 33 degrees." But I digress again. The large hotel-like structure to the right of the Oxbridge build looks impressive, but the view is marred by the Lego-looking building to its right, and the medieval tower to the right of that.


Moving a little further afield, there's the Time Capsule exhibit in the foreground - except that, as text floating in the air kept telling me, it's not really the Time Capsule, that I have to do something else to get there. And the swirly thing doesn't really scream time capsule at me. Behind it is a large emerald structure from the good folks at, naturally the Emerald viewer. It showed off the developers and probably had more to it than that, but by then the lag was starting to get to me and, let's face it, it's a big green thing - not terribly inspiring.

I slogged a little further. The guy below was pretty inspiring, in a cute Saturday morning cartoon character way. Not sure who he was, though. I did like the scaly texture on him.

I came away feeling uninspired, which I'm sure was not the intent. Maybe it's the event, maybe I was just in a bad mood that night. I dunno.