The CCS Network has grown huge over the years. A lot of the people that enjoy the game we created back in 2006 are very substantial parts of what CCS has become and what they bring to the experience with their own additions and interpretations of the game has been fresh and humbles me with every sim that does something new and interesting with the game.

But CoLA itself, its my special baby. Its a game idea I've been dreaming of since 1999 or so so well over a decade and over five years before I found a place to plant the seed of that idea where it would grow. Second Life helped me to make the game that I wanted to play, and to share that game with everyone else at a level that I may not have ever had the opportunity for if the Second Life environment was never made available to the public.

With that in mind though the plans for CoLA continue to burn along and grow in proportion to the development of CCS itself. And with that in mind I'm looking at various situations over the next year to draw in enough finances to start finally building the CoLA project as its own game, with no dependence on Second Life at all, and to fully visualize the City of Lost Angels™ as I've always intended it, its own experience.

CCS2 will still be for SL, but CoLA Project 3, is meant for the true expansion of the concepts of this game that I've been drawing up now since 1999 to finally be committed to their own world, their own environment.

And with all that in focus, I spent last night working on the games logo, it has become CoLA's logo in SL, but this is my first visualization and artistic expression of what CoLA "is" in a single visual statement.

For those of you that have been here from the beginning, thank you for everything you've done. But there are many miles to go before we sleep, as the poem says. CoLA will always be in SL, but its going to spread its wings and fly from the nest, as well, very soon.

All I can say is I consider myself very lucky to have these coming opportunities to make my lifes goal a reality. Thank you everyone for helping me as I reached for it.

Back when the rating system was introduced the Lindens and I had a discussion on the content of CoLA and determined that the content of CoLA and other role play sims like it was most generally Mature and not Adult this was largely because the sims presented content was not sexual in nature by design. And that it was more akin to an R-rated movie than an adult themed sim.

Unfortunately now with the integration of the Teen Grid with the main grid. The TOS and rating system was updated to adjust for this and with the changes what was once Mature is now rated as Moderate and the Moderate rating actually due to some very suspicious policies on the Linden side will only block out underage users if they have bothered to register as an underage user.

Now CoLA isn't a sex sim, its a role play environment, but the role play in the CoLA environment is fairly dark and individual role play activities or even group role plays can spawn incidents that are of a mature nature that I feel are legally inappropriate for under age users.

Now let me first qualify my statements here by saying that I'm well aware that the average 14 year old on the internet in the 21st century has seen more porn than I probably did at the same age, but regardless of that as a legal business entity and a responsible adult, it my decision at this time that because flimsy Linden content control policy which only methodically blocks under age users from Moderate if the user is honest enough to register as an underage user, it puts me and the staff of CoLA and every sim owner in the CCS network in the position of having to force our users to age verify to responsibly ensure we are not exposing minors to inappropriate content and to protect ourselves from the gaping wide hole in the Linden verification policy which has essentially hung all estate owners out to dry if they host any content at all which could be considered inappropriate that isn't shunted off into an Adult rated sim that keeps minors out of the region.

I've wanted to avoid this as I believe everyone has a right to privacy in regards to their Second Lives' but unfortunately with the integration of the teen grid and the situation as it stands I have no choice but to at this time set all the CoLA chain sims to Adult rating, and to also recommend the entire CCS network do so as well for their own protection to ensure that no one can be legally held culpable for the gigantic loophole the Lindens left in the TOS policy which effectively defers all legal responsibility for content exposure to minors to the estate owners while somehow believing in their own blowing rainbow smoke rings up their own ass that the kids on the Teen Grid, in total, are honest enough to register as underage users when if they don't do so they can go where ever they want.

I would like to close this post by saying that I personally don't have a gigantic problem with people under the age of 18 and I'm sure there are many mature under age users that are better behaved than some 30+ year old users in Second Life, but the simple facts of the matter is the Linden TOS changes and rating changes and the huge flaw in their logic that assumes all under age users will register as such leaves us no choice but to force all our users to age verify simply to ensure that we as a community cannot be legally held responsible for exposing minors to content that may be inappropriate.