In the video that she made about her book, Opal included a few frames taken at the ISM’s Spaceport Bravo workshop during a recent meeting, and she kindly gives the museum attribution in the credits. Thanks, Opal, and good luck with the success of your book!

It’s appropriate to mention here that the party at the ISM is being co-hosted by the National Space Society, with contributions from the Exploratorium. Special recognition is due to Emileigh Starbrook, who has done an incredible job building the new venue, making posters, enlisting musical talent, and scheduling the whole evening. Thanks, Emi!

Hope to see you at Yuri’s Night this Thursday!

Join us in a new venue high above Spaceport Bravo for a gala party filled with live and streaming music, party favors, exhibits, and conviviality among other spaceflight enthusiasts. See the ISM Wiki’s current events page for up-to-the-minute details, and watch this blog for a link to a permanent Wiki page with images from the event after it happens. The party is happening between 12 noon and 11 p.m. Pacific Time, in order to give people from around the world in every time zone an opportunity to attend.

Our plans for the wiki include eventually having a descriptive page about every exhibit in the museum, as well as information about the museum itself and the virtual world(s) it occupies.

Also, please notice the new ISM Calendar widget in the sidebar, showing the next five events in our public calendar. Clicking on an event will open the Google Calendar page for that event, where you can find more information about it.

Thanks are due to a number of people: Wagner James Au, of New World Notes, Inara Pey, of Modem World, Daniel Voyager and other bloggers who have brought this issue to the attention of the public; Linden Lab, who did return the sims with all their content, after all, and let us know we are in fact considered a valued part of SecondLife®; several significant financial donors (who are anonymous for now), including one particular donor who paid the overdue rent, allowing us to even consider trying to restore the museum; and everyone who commented on blogs about the disappearance of the sims, and how much they liked them and hoped they would come back. It would never have happened without all these things combined. Plus, we have heard from several individuals who have offered to help us make sure the ISM is never lost again.

Watch this space, or join the Spaceflight Museum Happenings group in SecondLife®, to find out when our “Grand Re-Opening” party will be! Cypress Rosewood (SL name) is planning a return concert on ISM in early March, which will be part of the festivities. Plus, Jenika Connolly, whose magnificent telescopes are featured in the ISM gift shop, had donated a new exhibit to be unveiled during the Grand Re-Opening. There are more plans in the works for improvements, so stay tuned! The ISM is Back!

I’m happy to report that thanks to encouragement from many, and a generous donation from an anonymous source, the ISM will return soon, probably in just a day or two. Then we will begin the work on that “way forward” I mentioned in the first paragraph.

In the meantime, rather than saying it all again, for the story of how we got here I’ll refer you to a couple of blogs where it has been written up in the past few days. Wagner James “Hamlet” Au deplored the loss in New World Notes, and Inara Pey has a story for her blog at Living in a Modem World blog.

So, watch for notices of our “Grand Re-Opening Party” soon! Then roll up your sleeves and join us as we dig into plans for making certain the ISM doesn’t go away again.

Don’t forget, you can help keep ISM alive by using our Donate page (newly updated), or by going directly to PayPal and sending funds to ismuseum@gmail.com or by “paying” L$ in SecondLife to AyeEss Emms, the avatar that is used to manage ISM’s land owning account.

Thank you for your support!

edited to update link to Modem World blog

Troy McLuhan [SL] announced on Nov 12th that “Bob Komin, the COO and CFO of Linden Lab (and acting CEO?) replied to our letter (the Letter from the SciLands Senate). You can find it
here:”

http://bit.ly/d7kuGE

The essence was “While I understand this coming change will have an impact on a portion of our community, we have chosen to not continue to provide a special discount based solely on type of organization because it does not reflect the underlying economics of developing and delivering our service. Instead, we will be moving forward with a single discounting approach that rewards and encourages higher volumes of business for all of those engaged in Second Life, regardless of their organization type. This approach allows us to share the benefits of lower costs from economies of scale with those who help generate them.”

In the half-year since then, a third of the SciLands organizations have reduced or ended renting regions …

Speaking for myself, not for any of the dozen organizations I volunteer or work for, I replied the following day on my Spindrift region blog.

The SciLands Senate, the governing body of the SciLands STEM continent in Second Life, has sent an open letter to LL early in November expressing our reactions to their ending the educational discount.

Kat LeMieux and I signed as ISM Directors and SciLands cofounders.

The latest performance is 8pm SLT (United States west coast time – PDT) Thursday October 28th.
Next concert is also 8pm SLT on Friday November 19th.
Both shows will be held at our ISS (International Space Station) exhibit high above Spaceport Alpha. Click this Second Life url to go directly to the ISS platform – http://slurl.com/secondlife/Spaceport%20Alpha/152/127/451.

Here are pictures from a previous docking of Captain Rosewood’s CyRos MusicianShip at the ISS platform at Spaceport Alpha. You can see Tony Gerber’s RL and SL concert dates at his website calendar.