Something wicked good this way comes, and it is happening today

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

All those survey numbers and spreadsheets are beginning to register what most Residents of the bustling city that is our Second Life® already know firsthand: Virtual worlds for more than games are popping with potential for the serious stuff… business, education, science, and the arts. The naysayers are still out there, Twittering about how they don’t even have enough time for their first life, etc., etc., but they are off-world. They aren’t here to witness how this 3D world is getting stickier than molasses.

While the Real World is staggering in a recession economy, this virtual world is humming merrily to the tune of $120M in user-to-user transactions during the 1st Quarter of 2009, up 65% from the same quarter last year. Moreover, according to a recent in-world business study, 20% of Second Life’s businesses earn all their income in Second Life, with approximately 2,000 full time businesses in operation.

At the very heart of this bubbling stew is an organization called Metanomics that explores the serious uses of virtual worlds in the company of tout le monde: the executives, educators and artists that are making it all happen. It’s a virtual talk show. It’s a forum for hundreds of conversations going on simultaneously at a dizzying rate of speed, both in voice and in text chat. In fact, I defy you to attend any of these sessions without perceiving… without recognizing that something really important is going on: potential and yes, even success.


The new set and studio for Metanomics - Photo by Keystone Bouchard

Something wicked good this way comes today, and it’s big. For as long as I can recall (and I rezzed in January of 2007), the leadership of Linden Lab, the company that owns and operates the platform of Second Life - and governs it, too – has gone into hiding whenever the Residents of the world they created convene. But changes are afoot, and the citizens have been in agreement lately… dare I say it? Linden Lab is starting to step out. The Lindens are actually becoming involved with, and becoming a part of the Second Life community.

Oh, they still infuriate us with unsurprising regularity over one thing or another, but I can’t begin to tell you how welcome their participation is. The more we communicate, the better things get… and stickier… and more fun. And successful.

So it is with mild astonishment that I find myself typing the following words: Today, May 6th at 1:00pm SLT, a real first… M Linden (aka Mark Kingdon, CEO of Linden Lab), will join host Beyers Sellers (aka Robert Bloomfield) for the kick-off of Metanomics' new season at its sparkling new studio and set created by acclaimed award winner and architect Keystone Bouchard (much more on that structure soon).

Something wicked good this way comes, indeed.

Teleport to it directly from here.

The Gentrification of Second Life®

As most of us are these days, I too am much preoccupied with the recent developments regarding the new pricing of Openspaces. This is not something which directly affects me at the moment but I can see that it is seriously shaking up a world which I hate to see subjected to such tremors.

My contacts list: There are maybe 10, - 15 at the very most, that I can count on to be online more or less everyday - and every single one of them is someone engaged in creative activity of one kind or another. A good few are builders, some of whom are artists and others designers, while the rest is made up of writers and bloggers. So, what is so remarkable about that you might well ask. After all, I am myself a builder and birds of a feather do tend to flock together and hardly surprising that quite a few if not indeed all of my contacts in Second Life are engaged in creative activity. Right?

Wrong! My contacts list in Second Life® is enormous. I have hardly ever deleted anyone that I have befriended from my newbie days onwards. There are names in there that stem back to my days on Help Island, women I met in the changing rooms of NCI Plaza, people encountered in malls and at concerts, in the distant days when I had not even yet managed to purchase my first AO. I have kept them all. Avatars whose handlers came from every imaginable walk of life. None of them around anymore. Only the builder/writer folk seem to have stayed the course.

And now, every then and again, while logging in I get this little notice from Linden Labs calling out to the business world to use Second Life as a virtual platform for meetings, product simulation and so forth. Needless to say, I am talking totally out of my hat here: I have no data, no market analysis or stats to know whether any of my assumptions hold up in any way. But, I really wonder whether this strategy is paying off in a big enough way to get Second Life out of the red? Does it really work?

Can it really work even? It would seem to me that for Second Life to survive and to prosper Linden Labs would first need to deal with the colossal fall out rate, of which my friends list is but a humble example. Makes for a most unattractive sales pitch you know? Most of my "friends" are gone for ever. And as for the precious few others that do make the rare appearance: A person who logs in every 3 months or so to attend a virtual meeting doth not a true Resident make. Cultivating the involvement of a strata of society from which would emerge true hardcore Residents would seem to me the only way to salvage the situation here.

In other words bring in the artsy crowd...

And no, I am not talking about the "full-time-acknowledged-in-Real Life-professional-artist" here. I know a few of those, and they seem to me to be even worse than the business types. With them it is all about running in, rezzing a "project", shooting a quickie machinima or two, to be shown on an LCD display at some "important" Real Life art event or other, and then rushing back out again. And all of this faster than you can chat the word "biennial" at that!

I am not talking about going to art educational enterprises either. I happen to be smack in the middle of all of that particular malarkey and trust me - again, it would be a huge big waste of your time. For my idea to really work, the artistic individuals in question would need to be motivated enough to stick around, to become part of the social, which would mean the metanomic fabric of a virtual life. And those would be the ones that are doing so already - only elsewhere.

What I am talking about is Web 2.0 creative activity. Web communities that gather around portals such as Deviant Art. How many subscribers does Deviant Art have? Millions for sure, but exactly how many millions? And how many more of these communities are there the world over? Hundreds? Thousands? That, I think, is precisely where your potential client base resides oh ye good Lindens! And maybe you have already made outreach efforts and I am just babbling on about the obvious here? But then again maybe you haven't?

Now, this is of course a long-term strategy: Small budget Residents, as these persons will in all likelihood be, may or may not be in a position to buy land. Or those that do may only manage to be modest small parcel holders - initially. So, in terms of land purchase activity, obviously getting some wonder corporation to sign up and buy 20 islands straight off the bat has a glamorous ring to it that my little plan here could in no way match - initially. And what's more, you may even have to provide quite a few more sandbox islands - initially...

However, my guess would be that a good portion of this new blood would very quickly start designing stuff to be sold in-world. (Just take a look at the 3D modeling pages on Deviant Art and you will see evidence of what I am talking about right there). So, maybe not straight away but in due course they would seriously be bolstering up metaverse economy, which would necessitate the purchase of land for shops and entertainment venues where the purchased goodies could be flaunted; which would brighten up the real estate market, and so on and so forth... And who would be purchasing all of these nice new products, you want to know? Well, that is the beauty of the whole thing: They themselves would, of course. Isn't that precisely how all of these portals survive? Members sell things - prints, posters, skins, widgets, gadgets - which other members - who in their turn sell things also - buy! Teeeeee heeeeee...

And then secondly, artists also do this wonderful thing called the gentrification of decayed city spaces in Real Life. You turn loose a sizable group of artists in a totally run down inner city area: They fix up, they renovate and of course - indeed most importantly - they also bring style and coolness to the place. Next thing the realtors step in, the artists get ousted out - the neat little cafes and things stay (of course) and the fat wallet types move in. The earliest example I guess would be SoHo, NYC but there are literally thousands of examples of this the world over.

Thus, once bitten twice shy, all of these communities would be wise to demand some serious reassurance (preferably in writing) that land prices would be guaranteed and that policies would remain stable. In other words, that what happened to their counterparts in Real Life would not also end up happening to them in a virtual world.

So, Dear Lindens, this was my two cents worth of input to your, to me fairly obvious, conundrum. If you promise to not to throw us all out on our virtual ears once we have gentrified the place, please do take advantage of what our ilk has to offer! Anything we can do to help - really and truly...

Hello OpenLife®?

I have been away from Second Life® for one week. My mother died and my sorrow as well as all the things that needed to be taken care of after her demise kept me in Real Life.

The support and the affection that I received throughout this week from my RL friends and relatives (and especially that of my students who came out in full force to be with their nasty old school marm) has made me wonder as to how wise of a thing it is from an emotional standpoint to be spending such extended periods of time in a second life, to which I am after all only connected to through this ephemeral thing called technology. One power outage, one satellite failure - and I am pretty much on my own here, aren't I?

The trouble with all of these good intentions of cutting down on my virtual life and giving my real life more of a priority is that at this point Second Life has become the place in which the very concept of creativity excites me in a way that I have not felt excited about creativity in a very long time indeed.

Real Life art and design had been leaving me thoroughly cold for quite some considerable time before I had even heard of Second Life: Real Life art I gave for the reasons here, and Real Life design for the deplorable symbol of status and income that it is. The remarkable thing that metanomics has brought about is a world in which neither the production nor the consumption of creative output is an indicator of financial resources. After all, the poorest of poor avatars can create the most stunning of outputs in a sandbox. And kitting yourself out through the acquisition of the creative output of others is not an indicator of your financial status but only of your ingenuity, your imagination and your resourcefulness. After all, in a world where the equivalent of a few real life dollars will buy you the fanciest of cars how can what your Rolex watch tells us about your wallet be of any possible consequence?

There is no doubt whatsoever in my mind that at this stage the Residents of Second Life are in the process of creating a social structure unique to the metaverse. But unlike the one in Real Life, what seems to me to be happening here is that (maybe even for the very first time in human history?) we may have the emergence of a true meritocracy. A meritocracy in which nothing but your imagination, your creativity and ultimately your hard work will determine your social status. Wow!

I returned to my second life this morning to find out that in the meantime all hell has broken loose. The Openspace pricing and policy changes announced earlier this week by Linden Labs are very hard to forgive indeed. Surely, Openspace abusers can be held under check through different means? How about charging such Residents based on the calculation of additional prim usage on an Openspace? And not only is this hard to forgive it is also hard to understand: Second Life is no longer a sole option. The competition is already here and it is hard core. Bett has already signed up at OpenLife®, I shall be doing so the very minute after I have posted this, especially now that I have read that OpenLife is also expected to have a working economy by the end of this year. And surely Linden Labs must be aware of the colossal resources that are spent at IBM for the development of a fully three dimensional world wide web which, as we are given to understand, will operate very much along the model of today's virtual worlds.

I am hoping that Second Life will revise this decision. Although it does not personally affect me, it bothers me: My island is an educational island and who is to say that tomorrow there will not be policy changes related to educational islands also? That what we have here today is only the thin end of a truly nasty wedge yet to come? But beyond that it bothers me since it tells me something about the governance of Second Life that makes me very uncomfortable indeed: Shortsightedness.

Reacting to Rosedale on LL press strategies and more

Thank you, Robert Bloomfield (aka Beyers Sellers) of Metanomics for creating an opportunity for me and my fellow bloggers Wagner James Au, Christian Renaud, Tish Shute, Ben Duranske, Nic Mitham and Dusan Writer to address key points made by Philip Rosedale, Linden Lab’s founder, former CEO and current Chairman of the Board, during your recent interview with him.

I’ve never met or spoken with Philip, but I look at photographs of his luminous face, radiant with an almost transcendent beatitude, and think about the immersive world he championed - and that I have such an insatiable appetite for - and I just want to thank him from the bottom of my pixilated heart. Moving forward though, I have a personal stake in Second Life®’s success, so I’m not going to pull any punches.

At Robert’s suggestion, I will speak to Philip’s responses regarding Linden Lab’s strategy for balancing the needs of all its communities and how it deals with the press, which you can read in context here.

Philip, I know that you were caught up in the conversation about security features and controls that folks from enterprise and education are asking of Linden Lab, and I realize that you had no way of knowing that your words would be scrutinized under the lens of public and community relations.

A little about myself: I’ve held senior positions in domestic and global marketing, public relations and community relations on both the agency side and in-house, representing companies and organizations in many different fields, including but not limited to high tech and entertainment. I’ve also managed accounts that became media darlings for whatever reason, to the extent that the coverage and the demand for information and interviews far exceeded our ability to manage it all, so I can well understand what it must have been like during that period between spring 2006 and summer of 2007. It’s a little like trying to stay dry when it’s raining sideways.

I’ve been vocal about my criticisms of some of Linden Lab’s marketing, media relations and community outreach tactics in the past and my feelings remain unchanged in some areas but are happily much improved in others.

* My biggest beef with Linden Lab is the way it lets loose some eye-brow-raising dictums to the community and then acts like it didn’t. Case in point:

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: But you do have some control over the perception. I know, for example, there were controversies over the Second Life fifth birthday celebration where certain groups were in, and then they were out, and then they were in, and they were out. It appeared at least to be Linden Lab attempting to manage then and reduce the perception of not safe for work behavior.
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Inevitably, this is such an exciting new space that there is a lot of media hype, so I think we do sometimes try to tone things down a little bit. I think we need to do more of that as time goes by, to just say, “Hey. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.” Reasonably speaking, here’s what the picture looks like. It’s not all one type of content. It’s not all business use. It’s not all marketing. It’s not all any one particular type of thing. It’s funny, mostly our PR strategy has simply been to help connect and embellish the stories that kind of come from the community anyway. I mean, for every stressed-out story about people’s love lives or infidelities or whatever in Second Life, there’s a story that’s equally good about people meeting in Second Life, or some people learning in Second Life, or whatever.

I am pretty unclear on what you just said here. Do you mean to say that Linden Lab needs to restrict participation from events like SLB5 more or that you need to tell the media that it’s a diverse community and to get over it?

Many Resident groups labored an entire year to make SLB5 the best that it could be only to be informed that their participation was not welcome, and then that it was, and then that it was but only in certain ways… Again, Second Life is as diverse as the Real World. How hard is it to make both PG and mature sims available for an event of this nature? Linden Lab’s management and communications in this regard were disappointing, polarizing, and unnecessarily hurtful. As Chairman of the Board, I would have liked to see you step up to the plate here and address this situation more fully. An apology would have been in order, too.

• We're different, diverse and we like it that way.

You say:

PHILIP ROSEDALE: I think that you’ve got to let people broadly create content in as open a way as possible. There’s a meeting in the middle. I think enterprises will recognize that the utility gains that they can get from taking advantage of virtual worlds are very high, and they’ll be willing to tolerate the fact that, yeah, if they wanted to kind of brand approve their neighborhood, the fact that they’re in a virtual world, and, yeah, there’s content they don’t like in a virtual world, they’re just going to have to live with that.

What are you doing to communicate this? Taking a pro-active stance would save you a lot of trouble, time and money.

* Since you are making a big push to attract corporate participation and monies, I think it would be beneficial to develop ways to better inform incoming companies and organizations that are just getting started in Second Life about best practices.

For example, you might show them the difference between an in-world facility that has ongoing avatar representation and events, and one that simply builds out a sim and then expects people to come running. Tateru Nino over at Massively just wrote a good blog post on the topic of unstaffed versus staffed virtual presences. Two excellent examples of companies that are succeeding in this regard are Warner Brothers’ Gossip Girl and Languagelab.com. In fact, why not build out a tutorial for companies and educational orgs to show them what works?

Must your website depict everything in such a bland state? Why not occasionally offer corporations some alternatives and ways to rethink their virtual environments, like images of Syncretia by Alpha Auer? Or meeting areas like Sugar Seville’s incredible auditorium seating at the Odyssey? Help prospective clients to see what the future of education, architecture and business looks like. Ravenelle Zugzwang just addressed one aspect of this in an excellent blog post about alternative seating.

* Regarding press management, Rob asked and you replied…

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: [T]he Wall Street Journal had that big article about the guy cheating on his wife in Second …. Is that something you guys are trying to manage so that it doesn’t stigmatize Second Life for the enterprise community?
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Well, again, I mean I think the answer there is yes. Certainly, when I talked about security being a requirement for the enterprise community. And I think that content restriction and separation and insulation is a part of, is kind of a close cousin to that part of the problem. So I think that we’re doing the right things, thinking about how to better support the enterprise in looking at how to move Second Life more behind the firewall if we can, add security features, add controls for those users. That said, http, the web protocol, moves around a lot of different types of data, some of it certainly objectionable to enterprise users, and enterprises still use it. So I think that there is a future where, again, there’s a single standard; maybe the branding is a little different, but there’s still a single standard for how you use virtual worlds and how you interconnect them. I think that’s going to work out because, again, I remember the early days of the web. There was, of course, a real concern that corporations were being stigmatized by building websites because there were so many other websites that they thought were objectionable or adult content or whatever. So I guess I’m not kind of giving you a clear answer because I don’t think there is one.

People take up new technologies as a means to a way that will stimulate and nurture their own varied interests. You stand to benefit if you pro-actively demonstrate and pitch stories to the media to show them what’s cool in the way of user and 3rd party content and concept development. In this regard, your media relations strategy appears to be reactive in the extreme. There is no way you will be able to stifle all the empty sim and sex stories, and yet an ongoing proactive campaign about cool content and in-world initiatives will make the bad press much less visible and important. It isn’t hard to identify great content and stories if you just follow the blogs, and I know your staff does monitor them. Maybe your new PR person will be able to help with that.

* Please don’t limit yourselves to just pitching the business press! Diversify and share the cool and positive stories more!

Why isn’t this dress by Eshi Otawara being written up in W magazine or Vogue or Elle? It is certainly oozing in style and it is definitely newsworthy enough.



Or how about this hairstyle by Sinnocent Mirabeau?



Look at how AM Radio is using Second Life to restore Real Life photography… and while we are on the topic of AM, his wheat fields have raised enough money for a herd of Real Life cows to benefit third world communities.

I think many publications would be fascinated to learn that they have not one but two choices if they wish to visit and experience Escher’s Relativity House in-world.

In fact, why not aggressively look for ways to encourage crossover and show them how Second Life is beginning to have a genuine impact on the way people live their Real Lives? Other virtual worlds and digerati are often sailing past Second Life in this regard nowadays.

* What is Second Life? I was shocked to read the boilerplate (descriptor) in your press release dated September 3, 2008. So this is what Second Life is to you now? I wonder, fellow residents (corporate, educational or otherwise)… does this description mirror your experience in Second Life and express the advantages and opportunities you see in it?:

About The Second Life Grid and Linden Lab
Consisting of a series of sophisticated content creation, land management and transactional tools, the Second Life Grid is the technology platform used to power the Second Life virtual world. Provided by Linden Lab, the Second Life Grid platform enables businesses of all sizes to develop their own virtual world environments. Whether connected to the Second Life mainland or secured and blocked off from public access, custom virtual environments increase internal collaboration, enhance customer engagement and reduce overall business costs.

Linden Lab is the company that created The Second Life Grid platform and hosts the Second Life virtual world. Founded in 1999 and headquartered in San Francisco, Linden Lab was created by former CEO and current Chairman of the Board Philip Rosedale. The company is led by CEO Mark Kingdon, former CEO of Organic, Inc. and counts noted software pioneer Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Development Corporation, among its board members.

* It’s clear that you already think of your Residents as stakeholders, and Torley does, indeed, amplify our awesome, but so much of the intense goodness in Second Life never sees the Real light of day because Residents don’t know how or when to promote themselves to Real Life media. Linden Lab might be the greatest beneficiary of all if it empowered Resident groups with the tools and basic know-how to do their own pitching. Your PR agency might conduct regular seminars with and for in-world groups to help them implement their own media outreach to the Real World rather than keeping all this positive news inside the garden walls.

* Hype is overrated and trust and credibility are paramount. How can the media – and the Residents! - trust you if you make this claim?

“Second Life® is …inhabited by millions of Residents from around the globe.”

Not only is this published in numerous places on your website, but your press office has been quoted as saying as much. Your Residents know the truth. Daniel Tierdeman over at CNET knows the truth. Tateru Nino at Massively has published the truth. Anyone who spends a little time in-world can easily see that the vast majority of the registered members never made it in-world (probably held back by technical difficulties as I was initially), and several millions more simply never came back. So why oh why do you persist with this fallacy? How or why should we ever believe another word from Linden Lab again?

* I don’t see enough messaging about the fact that it is a fantastic platform to unite and help educate people all over the globe in an economically sustainable and an environmentally friendly space with distance learning, cross-cultural programs, collaborative experimenting and communicating prototypes for nearly every field including agriculture, space and medicine research. Please stimulate research and showcase your own and third-party stories about the cost differences of having a brick and mortar storefront or school, or the savings in time and money (and to the environment!) when it comes to using Second Life as a meeting ground. This press release by IBM about its Virtual Green Data Center tells a timely and positive story.

* Not long ago and on Metanomics, I mentioned that I’d reached out to your press office on behalf of Burning Life 2007, seeking assistance with Real Life media outreach and in-world promotion. That help never came. I’m glad to see that this year you’ve promised to make an effort to secure Real Life media coverage for the juried artists. Still, one week is not enough time for all that other quality content (twenty two sims brimming with creative goodness! Thank you for that) to be celebrated and reported on. Let bloggers in early and encourage their writing this up to maximize exposure.


Philip, all my thanks to you for shepherding this brave new world into existence, and thanks, too, to the many incredibly talented people at Linden Lab. Together, you've dramatically changed my life and made it infinitely better and more interesting. I look forward to the coming years and to looking for ways to spread the word about its transformative powers.

Business is the art of the impossible

I spent a very pleasant and somewhat embarrassing hour (good grief, did I really say those things?!) yesterday as the guest of Beyers Sellers (aka Robert Bloomfield) on his seminal show Metanomics, which usually focuses on topics revolving around business and economics in virtual worlds. You can see the interview here. Robert is a Professor of Accounting at Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management. He wears a lot of other hats, too. He just stepped down as the Director of Graduate Studies in Management (the doctoral program), which he held for a long time. He is the Director of the Financial Accounting Standards Research Institute, an effort of the Financial Accounting Standards Board , and Director of the Business Simulation Laboratory for the Johnson School. Of course, he also hosts Metanomics. Robert closed the show with a weekly segment he calls "Connecting the Dots," and it gives me great pleasure to share what he had to say yesterday with you here.


by Robert Bloomfield

I have had a number of people wonder why my business-oriented talk show would host Bettina Tizzy, leader of NPIRL. One straightforward answer is “art is business, too.” But let me go a little further….

A few weeks ago, I had the good fortune to attend a talk by then Linden Lab President and still Chairman Philip Rosedale, who was speaking at San Jose’s Tech Museum. Naturally, I was in my office here in Ithaca, participating virtually from Second Life®. During the Q&A, I asked Mr. Rosedale why so much of the content in Second Life looked just like real life. He responded by saying “people covet what they know.” He then pointed out that everyone knows Malibu from TV and wants to live there, and that’s why so much of Second Life looks like Malibu. Well, let’s leave aside the humor value of a top executive channeling Hannibal Lector from Silence of the Lambs. Or that Second Life looks to me a lot more like Ithaca, New York than California.

Instead, I want to emphasize that the real reason we see so much of real life in Second Life is that it’s easier to remake the familiar than to come up with something new. And that is going to pose a real problem for the virtual world industry, because doing something new is what successful industries do. Doing what didn’t seem possible before. Call it the art of the impossible.

Doing the impossible requires technological innovation, and we are seeing lots of that in the virtual world industry. Every day, on websites like Virtual Worlds News, we see stories of jawdropping success stories, like the ability to move your avatar with your mind—my favorite story of the week, courtesy of Drexel University. The rate of innovation convinces me that it won’t be long before we can use virtual worlds for education, for the distributed workplace, for entertainment, for online shopping. Frankly, I’m not too worried about the technology.

I’m more worried that we won’t be able to do the impossible with that technology. We have to learn how to use virtual worlds to compete against more traditional ways of doing the same thing.

As Christian Renaud has said to me several times, why make virtual collaboration just as effective as face-to-face when we can make it so much better? What is the best way to conduct a virtual meeting? How can we use 3D visualization tools to communicate information in ways that flat screens can’t? How do we teach a class, or reach out to customers, better than with a classroom or a web survey?

If we are going to do something better than real life, we are going to need people who are trying to do the impossible with the tools they have today. That is what successful industries do. And that is why I am so glad to be celebrating the first birthday of NPIRL by having its leader, Bettina Tizzy, on Metanomics.

NPIRL gets its Metanomics Monday

Not Possible IRL (NPIRL - that's pronounced "N-Pearl") just celebrated its first anniversary on July 4th, so I was especially delighted to accept Beyers Sellers' (aka Robert Bloomfield) invitation to appear on his show, Metanomics, tomorrow at noon SLT, to speak up, out and about the Not Possible in Real Life concept and our two groups: Not Possible IRL and Impossible IRL.

In its short but stellar life, Metanomics has already been host to an extraordinary number of outstanding leaders of virtual worlds and, as such, is critical to shaping the way we think. Since they generally focus on business and economics, I hope to put some virtual roses in their cheeks and share our excitement over the fact that content creation tools and the physics that govern the online world of Second Life® provide an unprecedented palette for artistic and intellectual expression of things that are... well... not possible in Real Life.

Metanomics has its own venue on Muse Isle (teleport directly from here) and simulcasts all its events live on www.slcn.tv. It also posts video, audio, and audio transcripts and chat discussion archives on the Metanomics website, after the fact.

I also want to thank Metanomics' producers Bjorlyn Loon and JenzZa Misfit, for letting me play around with the set a little bit. That was fun. See you there!