treehouse

[NanR]

what do premium members do with their treehouse?

[Rolig Loon]

Anything they want.   There are two version packaged in the gift box.  One is designed for a 32m x 32m parcel.  The other is narrower, so it fits on a 16m x 32 m parcel.  The house is the same, but the trees are different.  You can put it on any parcel you own or lease, anywhere in SL (convenant permitting, obviously).  Live in it, use it as a playhouse or a shop, or just make it a landscape decoration.  Or just keep it in inventory for a rainy day.

[Rolig Loon]

34 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

I think we owe poor NanR a reasonably serious answer and not only lame jokes.

Hmmm.. I thought my initial response was a reasonably good shot at a serious answer, assuming that the OP was asking a serious question. 

[Lindal Kidd]

I chopped mine up and burned it in my fireplace...made the house nice and cozy all winter!

[ChinRey]

14 hours ago, Rolig Loon said:

Or just keep it in inventory for a rainy day.

Why wait for a rainy day? Because the tree needs to be watered?

[Rolig Loon]

Because only then will you need to go indoors. 

[ChinRey]

I think we owe poor NanR a reasonably serious answer and not only lame jokes.

The premium gifts of the past used to be cool collectors' items and sometimes something you could enjoy playing around with for a short while.

However, for the last year or two some of Linden Lab's builders have become fairly decent mesh makers and as far as I know there are no fairly decent mesh tree houses on the market so although I haven't seen it myself, I would expect this to be useful if you want to live in a tree house.

You can't have it on a Linden Homes sim though, so if that's what you have, you want to abandon it and use your premium tier to buy a mainland parcel instead. If you do, please do yourself and your future neighbors a favor and find a parcel where a treehouse would actually fit in.

[ChinRey]

7 hours ago, Rolig Loon said:

Hmmm.. I thought my initial response was a reasonably good shot at a serious answer, assuming that the OP was asking a serious question. 

Woops, I didn't re-read the existing replies and forgot there was more in your first than the rainy day. Sorry, Rolig.

I'm sure it was a serious question. Linden Lab tries so hard to persuade us Premium members to move into the special Premium Member ghettos and then they give us a house that just won't fit there. That has to be confusing to people not fmailiar with how SL works.

Oh well, it isn't the first time a question here gets two serious answers and it won't be the last. Besides, I do think the point about finding not just any random spot on mainland but one where a treehouse actually fits in is important not only to me but to others too. Mainland is full of eyesores and something as unusual as a treehouse can easily become an eyesore in the wrong environment and I have to point out that an eyesore is not necessarily something that looks bad in itself, it's something that makes the whole place look bad. Of course, we can discuss what is good and what is bad and what fits in and what doesn't until the cows come home but there is one rule I think we all should try our best to follow: respect what is already there. It's easy for somebody new to find another place - it's not as if we're short on space on mainland - much harder for somebody who has already spent time and effort building their little vistion of virtual reality. Now, what would have been seriously great, is a whole village of treehouses and similar. In the middle of Jeogeot perhaps, Lots of available space there and the ground texture, the one thing not easily changed, is far more suitable than anywhere else on mainland.

It should have been an official LL project - named ... how about "Bloom Village"? Find a group of completely empty sims in the middle of Jeogeot, rewrite the covenant to specify the area is dedicated to fantasy builds and put the parcel up for sale. That is not going to happen of course but I can dream, can't I? And even though LL isn't going to do anything liek that, a group of residents can.

[Rolig Loon]

5 hours ago, ChinRey said:

Linden Lab tries so hard to persuade us Premium members to move into the special Premium Member ghettos and then they give us a house that just won't fit there. That has to be confusing to people not fmailiar with how SL works.

I think that's a bit unfair, ChinRey.  Over the years, Linden Lab has offered residents a range of housing options that appeal to different sorts of tastes.  The Linden Homes "starter" concept offers "free" homes within the limited selection of styles, arranged in thematic communities.  Bay City offers a community with a thematic infrastructure but freedom to build your own home. Horizons blends the Linden Homes "starter" model with the Bay City model, giving residents an infrastructure and some prebuilt homes, but offers them the option of building their own homes if they wish.  The Lab has also always made it possible for residents to own or lease land wherever they want, create or ignore community infrastructure and themes, and build whatever homes they want. 

The various models mimic common systems in RL, with all of their advantages and downsides.  Themed communities are not for everyone, and unzoned free-for-all living annoys the hell out of others.  For every resident who simply wants a roof over her head or who looks actively for places where her house will not stand out from others around it there's another who decries the disadvantages of tract housing (soviet cities, 1950s GI housing, urban ghettos ...). The premium treehouse is no different.  There will be residents who accept a gift house and look for land where it fits aesthetically.  There will be those who just plop it down anywhere without a care about a community theme. There will be those who like the treehouse itself but don't want to move from a familiar region to find a new place where it fits.  And there will be many who don't care for treehouses and ignore it altogether. 

Wherever you fit in that spectrum, the bottom line is that the treehouse is free and it adds to your housing options in SL.  As for whether a whole village of treehouses would be superior to individual ones planted randomly on the landscape, that too is a personal aesthetic decision that residents can make.  In that regard, I will be interested in seeing how the Horizons concept plays out in the years ahead, to see whether it maintains a thematic structure and develops Bay City-type communities, or whether it grows to be a chaotic mix of housing types, including a few treehouses.  Sort of like our housing experiments in RL.

[ChinRey]

6 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

I think that's a bit unfair, ChinRey.

I don't disagree with you but I think you missed my point. The Linden Homes are what new premium members are presented with right away. We should not expect a relatively new user who signed up for premium right away to even be aware that there are other options, let alone have figured out how they work and the pros and cons of each alternative.

There are so many things an experienced SL user take for granted that hardly makes any sense at all for a newcomer and the way the (un)real estate market works is definitely one of them.

And if you don't believe me, I'm gonna give you a lecture in the differences between the music styles at the courts of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I that'll make everybody familiar with 16th century English music nod their heads in recognition and leave you in a state of total bewilderment.

Look at this sentence:

"During the mid 16th century the general trend in English music gradually evolved from a late medieval French/Flemish predominantly polyphonic style as represented by van Wilder to a more a more homophonic style influenced by the fashionable trend at the Medici court and we also see the beginning of a formalized basso continuo system replacing direct intabulations."

Any "insider" would wonder why I bother saying something as obvious as that. Would you?

Now, compare to this:

"Abandon your Linden home, buy a 512 m2 parcel on mainland (make sure it's mainland, not a private estate) and rez your treehouse there. Be careful to center the treehouse precisely on the plot so it doesn't encroach onto neghboring land."

You may wonder why I bother saying something as obvious as that...

[Rolig Loon]

12 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

You may wonder why I bother saying something as obvious as that...

Not truly, ChinRey  As you point out, a new arrival in SL can't expect to know all the ins and outs of housing and land ownership.  That's what makes Linden Homes and Horizons attractive.  They offer a simplified, starter home experience that shortcuts any of the more complicated aspects of land management that flummox even long-time residents.  After a while, new Premium members talk to other people and learn about other options.  Many read details in the Knowledge Base, others come here to Answers to ask about them, and others strike out on their own.

I'm not at all clear about the point you are trying to make.  Is it that you think new Premium members need more options?  Or that they need a manual that describes all of the options up front?  Or that property ownership and management are a Byzantine tangle of options, rules, and procedures?  All of those are true (although I should point out that they are much less true than the same things we could say about RL, where people seem to muddle through, making much more costly and embarrassing mistakes).  Or do you mean simply that the treehouse should have its own manual with some of those basics spelled out?  If so, that's a fair point.  From what I've seen, the instructions tell you how to set it up and how it works, but not how to find a place to put it.  It's focused on the treehouse, not the wide world beyond.  Maybe a future incarnation of the instructions could point to the Knowledge Base or other places where those concerns are addressed.

BTW, I do like that description of the historical transition from polyphonic medieval music to the late Renaissance styles.  It's overly laden with academic jargon and has a complex grammatical structure, but that's the way I tend to write myself, so I'm comfortable with it. 

[ChinRey]

57 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

I'm not at all clear about the point you are trying to make.  Is it that you think new Premium members need more options?  Or that they need a manual that describes all of the options up front?  Or that property ownership and management are a Byzantine tangle of options, rules, and procedures?

No, yes and yes.

But most of all, we have to always be very concious about how strange this little artificial world is to a newcomer. My two examples were a bit off of course since SL is a far more idiomatic topic than English renaissance music and probably with a smaller insider crowd too. But even so, to those extremely rare people who are familiar with neither, both my examples have more or less the same semantic meaning.

I'm actually criticizing myself at least as much as anybody else here. I really should have posted that joke but you gave me such a straight line!

 

57 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

BTW, I do like that description of the historical transition from polyphonic medieval music to the late Renaissance styles.  It's overly laden with academic jargon and has a complex grammatical structure,...

Academic??? I didn't even mention Corpus Hermeticum, let alone Thomas Morley's "Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall musick", the book with the most misleading title in recorded history!

Edited May 21, 2017 by ChinRey
Fixing a typo

[Rolig Loon]

5 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

But most of all, we have to always be very concious about how strange this little artificial world is to a newcomer.

Agreed.  Coming to SL is similar in many ways to vacationing far from home.  I travel quite a bit, but I never quite get over the feeling that every place I visit is strange.  I drove down a one-way street in Stockholm years ago and was startled to see a bus coming the other way -- until I spotted the little sign that said "Gäller ej till buss i linjetrafik", which was probably so obvious to everyone else that it hardly needed to be said. "Normal" rules are only normal if you live with them every day. 

[Madelaine McMasters]

2 hours ago, ChinRey said:

"During the mid 16th century the general trend in English music gradually evolved from a late medieval French/Flemish predominantly polyphonic style as represented by van Wilder to a more a more homophonic style influenced by the fashionable trend at the Medici court and we also see the beginning of a formalized basso continuo system replacing direct intabulations."

By 1550 amorous English musicians found it more "profitable" to play dance music familiar to amorous Italian women than to haughty French coquettes and cloistered Flemish maidens.

It could have happened!

Edited May 21, 2017 by Madelaine McMasters

[ChinRey]

15 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

By 1550 amorous English musicians found it more "profitable" to play music familiar to hot Italian women than to haughty French coquettes and cloistered Flemish maidens.

It could have happened!

I knew I couldn't fool you , Madelaine.

Of course the lyrics grew steadily more pornographic too. Henry VIII - who was a skilled musician himself - wrote about how he was true to his loved one (although he forgot the "until death do us apart" part). John Dowland wrote a song named "Come again" - and for once dirty minds will actually be fairly spot on. Maybe English renaissance music and SL aren't that different topics after all.

Edited May 21, 2017 by ChinRey
typo again