Suggest a road trip

[animats]

I've been working on making vehicle sim crossings work better.   I can now drive fast around SL for two hours with few problems. So I'm looking for some good road trips. Any suggestions?

I've driven around the Circuit de Corse. That's great. I've driven around Heterocera, which has some good spots.  I've driven across parts of Sansara, most recently the region around the airport in Bradmoor. (In Sansara, I've enountered three bots, two AFKs, an abandoned hearse in the roadway, and no active users. The mainland is deader than I expected, even though 34,000 people are logged in right now.) I've explored Kama City. What am I missing?

 

Edited January 5, 2018 by animats
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[Klytyna]

16 minutes ago, animats said:

The mainland is deader than I expected, even though 34,000 people are logged in right now.) I've explored Kama City. What am I missing?

Pretty much everything... Breaking news, Most SL inhabitants don't spend all their time driving about abandoned ruins in the Madlands at high speeds.

Try climbing out of the car, and using search to find clubs with people who share your interests, join some groups maybe, get a SecondLife.
 

[animats]

I realize that. I've been to small, busy places, but I wanted a sense of the big world. It's amazing and sad that so many people built so much stuff, and then left.

Here's the end of the road trip

.

(Come on, LL, put something at the end of roads. A barrier. A MoleMart. A "Dead End" sign.)

[Klytyna]

You want big and dead... Use the map in world to find "Ahab's Haunt", take a boat, and your swimsuit.
 

[BilliJo Aldrin]

I have to wonder how many people are ever really logged in to SL. So often I search for active clubs to check out,  I get there and there are a dozen or 20 avatars parked in the sky at 3000 meters inflating the traffic numbers. I assume those are all logged in and counted in the total, but I really wonder if there are ever more than 10,000 real people logged in at any one time, and if SL is in fact largely dead.

[animats]

14 hours ago, BilliJo Aldrin said:

I have to wonder how many people are ever really logged in to SL. So often I search for active clubs to check out,  I get there and there are a dozen or 20 avatars parked in the sky at 3000 meters inflating the traffic numbers. I assume those are all logged in and counted in the total, but I really wonder if there are ever more than 10,000 real people logged in at any one time, and if SL is in fact largely dead.

Driving around the mainland, the number of non-bot active avatars is very small. Dunkin' Donuts still has an outlet in Bay City with a 'bot making donuts. I wonder if the company has forgotten about it.

Boating is strange. I have a fast boat, and started going to green dots on the world map to see what other people were doing with boats. They're avatars standing at the bottom of the ocean. Almost all of them. They don't respond to IMs.  Anyone know what they're doing? It takes resources to stay logged into SL. Why stay logged in and do nothing?

Sansar's design, of disconnected "experiences", may reflect the failure of Second Life continents. What action is left in Second Life is in contained areas - islands or skyboxes. For that, you don't need the big continents and their management problems.

Second Life has become feudal - each land baron has an iron grip on their own territory. Sansar is feudal by design. "Experiences" have single ownership. Some SL real estate operator just bought their own continent.

[Theresa Tennyson]

3 hours ago, animats said:

Driving around the mainland, the number of non-bot active avatars is very small. Dunkin' Donuts still has an outlet in Bay City with a 'bot making donuts. I wonder if the company has forgotten about it.

 

Some time ago there was a book called Motel of the Mysteries, which is set in a future time when an archaeologist digs up a 20th century motel that was buried by a cataclysm and comes up with spectacularly inaccurate explanations for what he finds.

Your posts remind me of that book sometimes... The Dunkin' Donuts store was almost certainly made by somebody who felt like making a Dunkin' Donuts store and has no connection to the real-world business.

Wandering around randomly looking for interesting things with a lot of people at them is just as ineffective in Second Life as it is in RL. You'll do much better joining groups associated with things you're interested in and reading notices. There are things going on, just not all the time or everywhere. There's a weekly vehicle rally in Bay City on Thursday evenings, for instance.

 

[Klytyna]

3 hours ago, animats said:

They're avatars standing at the bottom of the ocean. Almost all of them. They don't respond to IMs.  Anyone know what they're doing? It takes resources to stay logged into SL. Why stay logged in and do nothing?

Dark Gods of the Grid!

Not this weapons grade stupidity again... This comes up, and is answered SO often that we should put it in a note card and affix it to the heads of noobs as they arrive at welcome island... With a hammer and a six inch nail.

Reasons for standing on the bottom of the ocean...

Your viewer crashed, your boat derezzed and you relogged, and are waiting for your inventry to load and your avi to rez

You decided to log in someplace quiet and low lag, while your inventory reloads after a bad crash

You decided to log in someplace quiet and low lag, while you sort your inventory, or edit outfits, or script, or engage in group chat, or play Tiny Empires, or open a browser window and surf the SL MP, or go afk while you vanish into the rl kitchen to make lunch, or any one of thousands of typical everyday reasons connected with RL or SL.

They don't respond to your IM's? What on earth makes you think that they SHOULD?

"Hi, I R Dum Noob, I wanna nowe, r u a bot?"

If, and I stress the *IF*, I even bothered to reply to such an IM arriving in my inbox from some total stranger with a SL age of less than 3 months, my reply would almost certainly be unprintable in this Forum, and would contain instructions for the noob to do something to themselves of an anatomically impossible nature, or possible to inset a chainsaw into one of their bodily orifices.

I've had cretins insist I must be a bot, even on dry land because... I was using a pose stand while editing my appearance, instead of "moving around and using voicespam", and when I told them not to be stupid and to fornicate off and leave me alone, accused of "being well programmed in my auto responses".

 

[animats]

7 hours ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

Some time ago there was a book called Motel of the Mysteries, which is set in a future time when an archaeologist digs up a 20th century motel that was buried by a cataclysm and comes up with spectacularly inaccurate explanations for what he finds.

Your posts remind me of that book sometimes... The Dunkin' Donuts store was almost certainly made by somebody who felt like making a Dunkin' Donuts store and has no connection to the real-world business.

I read Motel of the Mysteries. And yes, SL does feel like that. You look at something built by a user long gone, and admire, or wonder why. Many thousands of hours went into building those abandoned places. It's like touring roadside America. Or Cars, the original movie. I do go to busy places and belong to groups, but I also like to check out the scenery of the big world.

The Dunkin' Donuts shop is clearly a fan project when examined close up. At one time, there were big companies with a presence in SL. It was going to be the next World Wide Web, the next Myspace, the next Facebook. Most bailed long ago. This might have been a remnant of that era, but it's not.

Aldrin, above, commented that "I have to wonder how many people are ever really logged in to SL. ... I really wonder if there are ever more than 10,000 real people logged in at any one time, and if SL is in fact largely dead." That's what prompted my response. He may be right.

[Klytyna]

18 hours ago, animats said:

Aldrin, above, commented that "I have to wonder how many people are ever really logged in to SL. ... I really wonder if there are ever more than 10,000 real people logged in at any one time, and if SL is in fact largely dead." That's what prompted my response. He may be right.

She said there are 30,000 accounts loged in, and that in HER opinion only 10,000 of those were 'real people'.

Unfortunately, figures like that are worthless, its a pure guestimate, and a somewhat flawed one.

See, in reality, the "currently logged in figures" are NOT 30,000, they vary from 30,000 to 50,000, depending on time of day, day of week, and time of year. Bot's don't log out at bed time, in their local timezones. That's a "real people" thing.

So, starting with that worthless, 10,000 people/20,000 bot guestimate, you then have another 20,000 people logging in in different timezones on top of that.

You go to "Club Dutch", the club for Dutch people in SL, at 6 pm SLT, and *gasp* it's empty! This proves that NO Dutch people use SL any more, right?

Oh... Wait... 6pm SLT is 3 am CET, and all the Dutch people are offline and in bed, asleep, boy don't you look foolish for claiming there's no Dutch People in SL!

Billie often repeats that announcement that if she wanders onto a "club parcel", at ground level and all the green dots are a couple of km up, she assumes "all bots" and leaves.

Problem is... A lot of clubs are run by old old accounts who STILL believe the old old myth that "anything over 100 m up cannot cause any lag" and deliberately built their clubs at height. I kn ow of one club thats been going for years, with a strong fan base, the owner built it a couple of km up over their sim, so the crowd wont lag the retail stores she owns at ground level, that pay the tier.

Generally, I find the people most likely to complain that SL must be empty are the people living on SLT, who log in after most of SL has logged out and gone to bed. 
 

[Hunter Stern]

I wish I had pictures, but my friends and I years ago took an RV caravan trip around and across mainland on the old roads (nude mind you) , didn't get too many takers on rides we offered to people hanging out along side the roads or in their front yards gawking at us trying to make the next hill or sim crossing lol. Best trip ever though, so many hole in the wall and 'ma and pa' style businesses to find along the way (great way to find gadgets in SL really).