The community of Second Life®, along with the operators of the grid Linden Lab®, will be celebrating 5 years of metaverse existence. This years event starts June 23 and goes for two weeks.

Two weeks?!?

I remember year 3 when it was a weekend. And it was hard to get into the popular events and I met my first prim nazi; “take off your hair,” “take off your shoes!” “take off your penis”

My penis?!? How did they know I was wearing one? I don’t want to be a Ken doll!

FYI - That is how I learned about “Highlight Transparent” option under the view toolbar

As noted by the Lindens:

Since last year, the SL birthday event has grown from one week to two, and some exhibitors are confused about how long they will be allowed to exhibit. If you are part of the arts and culture sections, you should be ready to exhibit and start doing your fine tuning on the 20th. The gates open on the 23rd. You are welcome to exhibit for the whole two weeks of the event, and we hope you will!

Beginning on week 2, (June 30) we will begin to shift focus and add more events and exhibits in the Education, Business Solutions and Nonprofit categories. If you are part of these categories, you have an extra week to prepare, and you will be located on the regions called Edit, Linked, Rotate and Stretched. However, if you can complete their exhibits on time for the opening on the 23rd, we welcome it!

Yet not is all well with the plans, with many in the community feeling left out and excluded. I am not going to recap all of the issues, and believe me there are many. I instead will refer you to the smartest person in SL blog entry The SL5B Drama: Crowdsourcing Fiasco Or Devious Plan? Gwyn has done a remarkable job of documenting the issues here, including:

Allegedly, Linden Lab went from the “No Nipples” policy in the last year towards a “No mature communities in SL5B” this year. The claim is made by several communities that had their own exhibits rejected. People talk to each other, and soon a pattern emerged: any community that could be vaguely associated to “mature content” (which mostly means: content of a sexual nature) was excluded from SL5B.

It is clear that as this platform grows, these type of events will become more difficult to manage. And it is very clear that the lawyers of corporation Linden Lab are starting to run things. Freakin lawyers kill everything.

So I encourage all of my fellow SL residents to stop by the festivities and give the Linden’s their props and try to avoid the lawyers. Most likely, this will be the last one that they will give for all us.