Yes, folks, "sculpties" will soon arrive on the preview grid. Torley Linden made a blog entry on the official Linden blog regarding this momentous occasion. SLI reader Tao Takashi was able to get some information out of Robin and Joe Linden, with the announcement that sculpties will be added to a beta client next week. I guess we'll have to wait just a bit longer to taste the forbidden fruit. *sigh*

What will sculptable prims mean for us? Watch this machinima and see for yourself. Imagine being able to bypass the 31 prim limit of a vehicle because you molded the shape. Imagine lower prim avatars and furniture. Hell, just imagine, in general! This is truly the biggest news that has come out of Second Life since flexi-prims!

The ARG ended on a positive note, with qDot explaining the reasoning behind Cubesque and CubeOverload. For those curious, Funk Schnook appears to be the "winner" for finding that old blog entry. What was your opinion of the mystery?

Wow! Information is coming in from everywhere this morning. With just a few minutes left until 9:46am PDT/SLT, it seems as if the puzzle has been solved!

CubeOverload was updated with another jumbled song, this time, to the tune of "The Devil Went Down to Georgia." The text says:

• THE CUBE WENT DOWN TO GEORGIA
  LOOKIN' FOR A SQUARE TO STEAL
  HE'D LOST HIS MIND 'CAUSE HE COULD NOT FIND
  THE SPHERE THAT MADE THE DEAL

According to Elle Pollack, qDot made a post on Twitter about being in Georgia for GDX. He's apparently presenting some slides there. The biggest piece of evidence, however, came from Tao Takashi in his blog entry.

Qarl Linden informed Tao that they would be introducing "sculpties", which are something like NURBS. Apparently the pictures from his blog entry won't be possible until revision two, but for now, he hinted that they might be on the preview grid today or tomorrow.

This will change Second Life as we know it!

[UPDATE: Some readers pointed out that there was still some block room on Cubesque. A quick look at the GDX schedule points out that calculations were off. qDot will be speaking from 12:30pm-1:45pm PDT/SLT.]

[UPDATE: Lordfly Digeridoo noted that there is a Second Life Wiki entry on sculpted prims that was created by Qarl Linden]

The SL Business Magazine held a contest for machinima promoting a product, service, or company that exists in SL. Submissions were initially to be judged by the first of December, but the judging had been extended, and finally completed yesterday, the 20th.

Tao Takashi (who was one of the judges) has the list of winners, and links to their videos, along with a couple of other submissions worthy of notice. And here's the shameful part: after decades of being marketed to, with no effect, I've finally been bitten by the Buy Me Bug: I want a Griffin Trentcycle!

The 2006 Plone Conference will be held this year in both Seattle, Washington, and Second Life. Plone itself is an open source Content Management System, employed by organizations all over the world, such as Marriott, eBay, NASA, and Oxfam. This will be the first year that the conference will also be broadcast within SL, allowing users who can't make it to the RL conference to participate.

The conference runs from October 25th to the 27th. For those who are interested, you may contact Tao Takashi, who many of you know as a producer of well-crafted video within SL. He's the architect behind bringing the conference into SL, and he has photos of the viewing rooms up on his site.

(Thanks, Tao!)

If there were things like this when I was a pup, perhaps I'd have paid more attention in class. The Harvard Law School, specifically the Harvard Extension School is presenting a class called 'CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion', portions of which are being taught in Second Life!

The main part of the class is only available to Harvard Law students, but students of the Extension School will be able to experience videos, discussions, and lectures in-world at Berkman Island. You don't have to be a current student of Harvard Law to attend the Extension class, however, as enrollment is open to the public. This course runs during the Fall semester of 2006.

We can thank Professor Charles Nesson, Rebecca Nesson, and Gene Koo for bringing this opportunity to SL. It's a remarkably forward-thinking move, sure to drum up some interest in both SL and Harvard. I'd be remiss if I didn't also mention the stellar work of Tao Takashi and his team (Mundy Harbinger, The Sojourner, SamBivalent Spork, falldeaf Weeks, Coos Yellowknife, and Candide LeMay) in putting together the fun video to be seen on the linked webpage. Nice work, everyone!

So, farewell then SLCC for another year. The full SLCC itinerary is here. I haven't seen any reports of Sunday's sessions yet, or any links to the video of the conference sessions on Saturday.

As I wasn't able to see Mitch Kapoor's speech, I didn't report on it, but there is a report on 3pointD here.

Tao Takashi has gathered some random bits about SLCC here.

Forseti Svarog gathered some random statistics here.

Katt Kongo blogs about going to Linden Lab here.

For those who read Cory's speech and wondered what Primitar looked like (the original avatar) you can see pictures here.

I should say that the conference seems to have been a social success based upon the lack of reporting lol. I am assuming that if it had been terrible, there would have been hundreds of blow-by-blow blogs about it from the