December 5th. Another day in SL. My 2,922nd being a small part of Second Life; eight years. Blimey.

It’s been an interesting year – one I’ll doubtless delve into in some detail my end-of-year review; but in that time we’ve been through some interesting times. We’ve seen a change of hands at the the top of Linden Lab, the promise of a new, cutting edge virtual world platform in the near(ish) future. There’s been a huge amount of work improving, through things like the completion of Project Shining, the arrival of the CDN, HTTP pipelining, and a lot of viewer updates and added functionality such as the new photographic capabilities, group bans, better group chat, improvements to region crossings, and so on, all of which have largely helped improve things for most of us, even with the odd hiccup for so here and there.

Yes, there have been some disappointments. The ToS situation wasn’t sorted out in the way many of us were hoping to see; words were played with, but frankly, what we’ve been left with is still ambiguous in its interpretation. Then the changes to the Gaming Policy, although not something the Lab could have avoided, haven’t perhaps been as handled as clearly as might have been the case, lacking information on fees, etc. But, on the whole, it’s been a pretty positive year.

On a personal level, the last year has been fun. There’s been more than enough to keep me busy on the blogging front, I’ve been able to visit and write about some stunning regions, art installations, galleries and performances, as well as trying to keep astride of all the news. All of this has meant that this blog has grown by nigh-on another 1,000 posts over the course of twelve months, and hit the 1,000,000 page views mark. Admittedly, some of the articles have been on topics away from SL and virtual worlds; my love of astronomy and space exploration has played a part in pushing up the number of posts, and of course, there’s been VR and AR to watch as well.

I’m still enjoying flying and sailing in SL; if anything, I’m doing somewhat more of both – my Loonetta 31, Exotix 2 sees a fair amount of use and has carried me far and wide across Blake Sea and beyond. Equally, G-NARA, my PBY-6A Catalina has seen a lot of use, and has also drawn a lot of compliments thanks to its distinctive colour scheme courtesy of the marvellous Josh Noonan.

The Catalina was actually responsible for my biggest personal change for the year: moving back on to a private island of my own, just so I could have a place to leave it sitting out in the sunshine, as seen on the right in the picture at the top of this piece. Truth be told, I’m pretty comfortable in the house, and continue to tweak the island here and there.

I am perhaps a little disappointed that it’s another year and no cake from the Lab. But still, can’t have everything – even if NASA did delay the Orion launch by 24 hours so it would launch on my rezday! 😀 .

As to the future – there is the new VW platform from LL, there’s also High Fidelity, and we’ll doubtless hear of others. Oculus Rift will eventually appear in a consumer version, and it’ll be sitting there with the likes of Magic Leap and castAR, and probably other systems and clones as well, which will allow us to enjoy environments – and maybe express ourselves – in ways we’re not even aware of. All of these things do inevitably mean challenges for Second Life; but the Lab remains committed to the platform, supporting it, improving it, and providing tools and capabilities to those of us who enjoy it.

Which may well mean that in another 12 months, I’ll be writing about nine years of involvement in SL!