By: Kelli Leitner

So the economy is bad and we are all hurting. What can you do. This is the time where creativity comes into play. You may have to try selling pies you make so well from home and hope it will catch on and pick up. Maybe you are great at graphics and you can sell out services to design web pages. If you have a college degree there are programs out there for you to cross over into teaching. If you are really good at programming then Second Life may be a great place to go. There your creative talents and programming skills can be put to good use. We will all face difficult times in our life times but it how we handle it and get through it to the next stage of life that will come that counts. Everyone deals with adversity at points in their life. It’s the ability to get past it that makes us who we are. Life is certainly not easy and in this day and age it may be tougher than ever. Today neighbors don’t ban together for a cause to help one another. People would soon turn their back on what they see in front of them but yet help when the media instructs them to do so. I believe there is something lost today in our neighborhoods that was once there. So in these difficult times if you see someone who needs help, why not do something to help however small it may be. Then if everyone did that we would have essentially done something to change our world for the better right here at home in our own communities. If you give someone a fish they will eat for a day, but teach them how to fish they will eat for a lifetime.

By: Kelli Leitner

Hi Again All ! I want to tell you about this electrifying artist. A not to be missed entertainer if you love great guitar.

Lighthouse Mixmaster – Plays a nice electric guitar. His fingers fill in the notes and allows you to feel each note in a way that woluld be described as primordial. It’s what music was meant to feel like when it had been created. Now eons later you can feel what I would term the vibe. I don’t believe he sings at his concerts but does he really have to with that guitar. All the sounds he needs are right there in his hands to woo women with. Ok so I was swept away by the magnanamous sound that not many are tantamout to. It was at a beautiful venue called Tantalus.

By: Kelli Leitner

Hi all,

It’s me Kelli Leitner at it again, fresh back from traveling around the country for work. This months issue of Vibrations will have the Follow on the cover. They are a real life band who play gigs in Second Life (SL) as well as in real life (RL). They really have a magnetic sound that flows through your body. I would even say their melodious sound is effervescent to the soul. The band are really down to earth people just like your next door neighbor and if you see them enough times you seriously begin to feel a sence of family almost. I would say thats rare and such a plus for any band to transcend feelings to the lisener is such a way. So search out the follow if you are in world. Go enjoy a show and tell them Vibrations sent you. They really love to hear feedback like that. I think you really will consider it a treat.

By: Kelli Leitner

Thank you for taking the time to read this. I am writing to tell you about a little girl named Claudia who could use your help. Claudia is darling 3 year old little girl, daughter of resident Daemon Quandry. In May of this year, she was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. The fact the she is a girl under 5 is very much in her favor, and the doctors have suggested as high as 90% survival rate if she tolerates/responds well to treatment. Some of the large venue owners, Vibrations Rock Magazine, a number of volunteers and over 70 artists at this point are giving of themselves to help raise funds for Claudia. Let’s make a real life difference in the real world from our SL world.

This concert is set for Sat August 29th, we are going grid wide. If you would like to donate your time singing or to simply donate to help please contact Kelli Leitner – Owner Vibrations Rock Magazine (VRM)

Tauri Tigerpaw and AMFORTE will be kicking it all off .

Schedules and info please contact Blink102 Magic.

As I was spiriting around SL one night on the search for the next round of singers for my venue I came across a group of artists who have banded together like a tribe. I was able to book one of them who then introduced me to the rest of these talented people. So I draw your attention to a fabulous guy and fantastic artist; Gary Jonstone. When Gary started to sing I was blown away by his depth and his sound melted me instantly. I couldn’t stop listening. I am a music lover and can sit for hours listening to artist after artist, but every now and again you hear one that just makes you go WOW. I had never met him previously and yet it was as if he was singing directly to me.

Well of course I booked him and had the pleasure of having him sing at my venue on a Sunday. He’s a quiet man who steals the spotlight only while on stage; preferring to let others make the noise while he simply enjoys their company. He has a sense of humor and wit about him that does not stop when you take the time to get to know him. His laid back personality coupled with his respectful and kind demeanor make him one of the most interesting people I’ve met thus far in SL.

He comes to us from New Hampshire which really surprised me because as you listen to him sing you can hear a sort of southern accent and you’re instantly transported to the music scene you’d find around Nashville, TN. His father was a musician and Gary has been around music all his life. He tells me he sings in Second Life for the joy of singing. At 25 years old this man has already made his presence known in second life and it will undoubtedly continue to be felt as he shakes the foundations of the country music scene here and around the world.

By: Kelli Leitner
So my friend Kitzie Lane, a musician herself put me on to a singer by the name of Lovesmiley Gumshoe. He was like a jamming man at “The Parking Lot”. It’s a sim dedicated to the Grateful Dead, but then I wasn’t there for that. I wanted to hear what Lovesmiley had that could kick it. Well it turns out that he had a great voice and a very snappy sound. When I heard Love I jumped immediately and shouted Keith Partridge in SL? Ok so I watched a lot of rerun tv growing up. So forget Penny I took the Kitzie Lane down the yellow brick road to trip the light fantastic and have my ear jingled by the sensational acoustic sound personally crafted by Love for your listening pleasure. He has an exciting riveting sound. I would definitely go see this artist over and over. For me that’s rare in SL. Go check him out. He only appears on one sim only in SL. I could tell you but time for me to have some fun, so go seach his name and ask him He gets 2 thumbs up but because I only have 2. Look out for the top 10 musicians list coming in Vibrations Rock Magazine.

By: Kelli Leitner

Madmax Huet –Has a lot of electric sounds and he is a talent. I have not yet gone to see him specifically but he has been at several shows and I love his sound and talent. It’s a rock sound, but he also has that southern twang the likes of Led Zeppelin. I am dubbing him my Led Zeppelin man. For Max to get that says nothing but the best. What finger movement on the strings. What pure clean sound. He is very well practiced and exceptionally talented. I saw him at the Home of the Saints of Hell, SLC and Body shots… He does guitar and harmonica. It makes me want to order a rum and coke, have a few and then just let the music take you away to wherever with whomever (wink, wink). Seriously go give him a listen. You will enjoy his sound, his British humor and you will have a fun time out. 

By General Yiyuan,

A lot of us have had unpleasant experiences with landlords in the real world. When they’re out to make a buck and you’re out to save one, conflicts inevitably arise. We play SL to get away from bills, rent, work, and our other daily stresses. It is supposed to be, as much as possible, free from the demands of reality.

And yet, devious little chap that he is, Landlord has followed us to Second Life, keen to extend his business just as far as you extend your recreation and maybe a bit further, just to stay prepared. We admire his spirit and appreciate his work – without land, we’d be floating in a void between worlds, and the land needs to make money in order to stay where it is. A hardy salute to those landowning folk who do their jobs honestly and with a culture of friendship and closeness, but then there are those that get a little carried away with the inherent privileges of their position. We all know the kind. I myself worked as a subordinate under the main character in a particularly damning anecdote about the excesses of our digital landlords: 

This boss of mine had a crush on one of his tenants, and she used this often to obtain small favors. In one case, her neighbor had a scraggly, deadened sort of tree in their yard which the woman found unattractive. Unattractive it was, but also not on her property, and disrupting her life it was not. Despite this, the landlord interceded on his lady’s behalf to get the tree removed. The tree-bearing tenant, knowing he could get the same deal anywhere else, protested. Wouldn’t you? The landlord could not wrap his head around his tenant’s impudence and became quite upset. Laughing, the tenant packed up, and now lives on a plot of land for the same size with the same amount of prims for the same price, but with any sort of tree in his yard that he likes. Moreover, his friends followed him out of solidarity, leaving the landlord with one happy tenant and not an ugly tree in sight.

This sort of thing is repeated in different ways thousands of times, all over the grid. What can be done about it, asks John Q. Avatar? You’re certainly not just going to persuade a mean-spirited landlord to change his sinful ways. Better to look the grid over for a gentler spirit? Perhaps, but there are only so many such people, with only so much space. Room needs to be made for the thousands who at present have no choice but to buckle down under the depredations of their distant corporate landlords and their petty local representatives. A larger institution to accommodate these people is needed – and how could we ensure that such an organization would do right by the people who sustain it through their hard-earned tier?

The answer is democracy. If countries which fall somewhere short of Hell, countries like Sweden and Norway, can trust their citizens to control national policy concerning the life and death of real people, through social services, maintenance of the law, and the waging of wars – we should be able to trust these same human beings, albeit in a much smaller, simpler group, to handle the comparatively petty affairs of local conflict resolution, community development, and the banning of griefers.

SL is dynamic, but not as dynamic as reality. Much less can go wrong and many fewer people would be involved in any act of democracy. It is good for the people who may choose their local administrators on the basis of honesty and competence and who may conduct their own affairs collectively inasmuch as is possible. It is good for the Company, too – profit is not derived directly from banning people or returning objects. It is derived from rent; if everything but the collection of rent and transference of necessary dues to the Lindens can be handled by people and their own delegates, why not? It saves the company a fortune in money that would otherwise have to be spent hiring legions of estate managers, and it saves any CEO a massive headache when worrying about what community events to plan – tenants may split the cost of a parcel in the center of their sim and use their democracy as a means to plan how to develop their shared plot and what to do on it.

It also saves the Company untold hours that would have otherwise been spent frantically collecting hazy and inevitably incomplete reports about what direction company analysts think consumer demand might be taking, so that the company might feebly attempt to catch up with that demand and serve it however it believes it can, long after demand has already moved on. This is the process of marketing – to always be a few steps behind, choking on the dust of their consumers, hoping only to second-guess them or to shove them from behind onto a pre-arranged path. For the few companies that succeed out of the thousands that fail, this works – there is no alternative. But a company could free itself from so much toil if it let the people whose minds they were trying to unlock do the planning themselves. With a large enough tenant body that is properly encouraged and directed to think criticially about what it wants, a thousand minds thinking at once, all putting their ideas forward into a public forum will come up with “the next big thing” before a squad of planners packed into a smoke-filled room ever could. This is the essence of the indictment of a centrally planned economy by the advocates of a “free market”. But under corporate power, we simply divide the market into a few centrally-planned minimarkets. There is diversity of brand name, not substance. Through democracy, we can at least approximate the needs of a people better than relying on the ouiji board.

But who would do this? I would, my associates would, and we have – through our company, the Collective Tenant’s Union. In order to serve the purpose outlined in this document, that is, creating a sustainable and rewarding community for the masses, we will need to hold land on a scale to rival the corporate giants – in comparison with them, our lone sim at Thibedeau is a gnat. But then, this idea struck us only a month ago and we have only had the sim since then. However, promising only democratic community governance, we were easily able to fill the sim to capacity in only a week, with no turnover since then. Our tenants, sponteneously, have done surprisingly well at making their land a beautiful place – much preferable to the mass produced “tropical islands” of our competitors. Though their public forum, they even managed to agree on an overreaching theme – and they have by no means driven us into the dirt financially through “flightiness” or “indescision” the way some might suggest. Yes, given the opportunity, nay, when put in a situation that demands it – people can be expected to treat each other with a modicum of decency. On a larger scale there will be a few who cannot deal kindly with others – better that that small minority does not have the complete power of home or homelessness over everyone else, no?

Some people will always remain politically unenthusiastic, and we cannot force socialization down on them. If one does not want to vote, they do not have to – but the opportunity to vote if they want to is more than they would get anywhere else. For such people, in fact, for everyone, we have drawn upon our hard-working population and their friends to develop other incentives. For instance, we wish to address the needs of business owners – our research agents have shown that many shop-keepers in the corporate territories are not doing so well as you might think such a heavily corporate environment would have them be. As part of our overall pledge to keep everyone in society connected and engaged efficiently and instanteneously, we are designing various information technologies to aid our future business owners. For instance, the website where all federal-level voting will take place(with popular proposals bumped to the top through “signatures” which are then voted on officially at a proposer-specified time) will also contain a detailed list of all businesses in our territory, their location, their products, and a direct SLURL link to them. On the in-world side, we are developing product interfaces, to be displayed prominently inside each 5-sim grouping’s central “Community Hall”, which will show items recently posted to the website by our constitient businesses, paid advertisement slots, as well as a slot showing the most popular item, to encourage competition for excellence between builders. These are just a few examples; the rest would get tedious after a while to the average reader.

Moreover, for those who would like to see beauty and creativity become the norm, rather than the exception, or those who spend loads of money each month on high-quality items anyway, our team of full-time workers as well as volunteers from among our population are hard at work on producing a whole range of items for functional use on land – homes of all sizes and shapes, office buildings, furnishings, decorations, furniture, accessories, and so on. The products will come in tiers according to quality, with the lower tier being free to any tenant that joins us; not just a single toaster or a pair of shoes, but a whole variable range of necessities that are as high-quality and diverse as anything they could buy on the market and as practical as anything they could get for free. (Sculpties are a big help in this) The higher tiers will be easily avaliable through our website and are avaliable on the cheap – though any tenant which does a meritorious service, such as referring a number of new tenants, may gain access to higher tiers for free – again, not just a puny, one-time thank-you-note, but a whole new world opened to them. Volunteers will handle the lower-tiers, since anything nicer than that they could not help but want to sell, professionals paid for their work are in charge of the higher tiers, which will include things beyond the home, such as clothing, vehicles, and weaponry. Through the organized mass creation of high-quality content and it’s ability to be distributed to far greater numbers of people than would be able to access it were it expensive, our plan is to visibly improve the aesthetic appeal of all our territory; we will augument this further by providing custom landscaping and development services for a reasonable price wherever something totally unique is needed, and by encouraging creative and high-quality independent development by our citizens.

The key, now, is more space. We can augument word-of-mouth campaigns, we can build support among pro-democracy groups by nature of being democratic and partner with them to spread the word quicker than if we were a clone of Anshe Chung, and we can naturally employ all the standard advertising practices. Our sim at Thibedeau proves we can market ourselves effectively; but even at capacity, it’s profits are only so high and it takes months to be able to afford another sim, without even accounting for unexpected costs. We call on all those enlightened citizens, both wealthy and proletarian, to make an investment in the future of SL, even if only an investment of their attention. Whatever the end result, it is always worth paying attention when something new and exciting is going down.

If you would like to pre-order space for priority placement when space is avaliable, or are looking for job, volunteering, or just general information, contact General Yiyuan or Eln Alter.

By: Kelli Leitner
 OK so I’m at the Old Barn’s Music venue. I am there in this rustic old relic of a barn reminiscent of stories you heard from days of old in the 1960’s when Rock was new and expressions of self were untattered with any sort of political correctness or censorship. It was as pure as the water in those days before the corporations destroyed it as much as they did self worth and individuality. I had the pleasure to hear Zorch Boomhauer. He very much reminded me of an Irish folk singer with a good tune and lyrics with a message. His jingling on the stings was very melodic and harmonious. From Zorch’s sound I’d have to simply say he has style. He definitely does his own thing and it works. He will make you snap your fingers, sway in place maybe even get up and dance. He had a quick finger jam. He made me want to be a kid again as I was reminded of my days growing up and some of the tunes my father listened to being Irish and a musician at home playing the piano. So break out the smores and light up those campfires, bring your sleeping bags and get your self nestled in for the pure joys of simplicity with a superb melody.

Read more in-depth with interviews from the artists in Second Life only in Vibrations Rock Magazine.

Hi for those of you who follow Vibrations Rock Magazine (VRM )… I’m Gwenlynn Applewite, the newest writer to become a part of this fantastic experience. I want to say thanks to the magazine and thank you to all of you, our readers for supporting the magazine and making us all feel very comfortable during our many excursions to find SL magic. I hope to bring you my perspective of the music, gossip, fashion and whatever’s out there.

So, my first interview on SL was not expected, I just popped into an Iggy Kings concert one weekend. IggyKings Solo’s eclectic lyrical style ranges from sonorous and soulful to intensely passionate. His smooth and engaging presence seduces the listener with an energetic style that leaves you filled with a passion for more.  Iggy presents a raw style with a playful twist that seduces the audience while captivating them with his unique vocal quality and range.

Check out Vibrations Rock Magazine for the full article.