Via our lovely video editor Chris Person comes this absolutely baffling video of a 'birth' in Second Life, an MMO. I'm not sure if this is supposed to be beautiful, weird or funny. Maybe a bit of all three. Someone out there thought it was a good idea to record this, though.

No, you didn't just wake up from a bad dream of the future and find yourself safely back in 2006. It's still 2012, and an Australian man who still plays Second Life has seen it cost him his marriage.

Rod Humble makes video games. He knows a lot of people who wish they could, and he's made it his job to help them.

If someone sat me down and presented me with this gorgeous Technicolor dream of a world building-game called Patterns and then asked me what company was responsible for creating it, I could have guessed for hours and never gotten it right.

Newt Gingrich, who may very well become the next President of the United States, has a second life. No, I don't mean his second life as a lobbyist, I mean literally, a second life.

Second Life isn't simply a virtual realm where people starve horses, troll others having sex, and traffic in counterfeit groovie-goolies sex devices. No, it's also a network through which gangs discuss and plot their evil deeds, says none other than the Eff Bee Eye.

Iris Ophelia's ongoing review of virtual world and MMO fashion

Second Life's merits as an actual video game may be debatable but its impact on the economy is not. It has, for example, provided a huge boost to the new markets of virtual sex caskets and imaginary pet food. And ridiculous lawsuits, because America has been lagging other first-world nations in that important economic…

The Humvee drives down a crowded street in a foreign land. A child waves. Merchants display their wares. Suddenly soldiers raise their rifles as a suicide bomber runs into the street, detonating his lethal package. This is virtual PTSD therapy.

We've seen the Burning Man Festival, the World Trade Center, and a lot of weird sex stuff recreated in the virtual world Second Life. A recreation of the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott? That's new.