[Mesh Update: Part Deux]

I love working with mesh, and was able to bring a nice little mask inworld, with low prim equivalency (texturing/UVW may take me a bit longer, lol) and at a reasonable price.  It's so much easier than sculpty maps; can do more and looks better too.  But Viewer 3 is so buggy it's nearly unusable.  I never could get Talk (which works perfectly for me with Imprudence and Phoenix) working right.  Search forced me to enable cookies and Java on my browser, then broke completely as soon as I tried to make a payment to someone not yet on my Friends list.  Land transactions failed completely.  And I can't import or export via xml, which I prefer to do, ironing out problems off grid, then bringing the finished av shape & layers or linked set back in, maybe tweaking inworld after testing it, then saving back to my hard drive.  So I'm back in Phoenix and Imprudence, holding off on mesh until there's a better way to work, and until V3 is improved so that enough people are using it to make it worthwhile. 

[Second Life Film on Oprah’s TV Network: Thursday, Aug. 25]

meh. gack on production values and depressingly negative viewpoint besides.  All that stuff about SL sex relationships not working out in RL, DUH, and it's been done, stop beating the dead horse already.  A film needs to be done about it, yes - maybe a thoughtful treatment of new kinds of erotic and emotional experience that VR has helped create. 

I was really interested in new information on the IP lawsuit, appalled at the filmmaker's attitude toward it.  More emphasis on the value-destroying thieves, and calling them what they are, and more on the creative process of this fine graphics artist, would have made a more interesting story.  One shot of her actual day online, which has to be spent far more in graphics software than logged into SL, would have been far more plausible.  I did like the Vegas segment - two people whose online friendship also finds joy iRL. 

Shoddy research and depiction of the use of child avatars to help adult victims of early childhood abuse. There are several reputable people working in this area in VR.  Minimal research and mention of them would have been nice.  

And ONE positive bio, would that have been too difficult?  I know dozens of people whose lives have been transformed, for the better, by virtual creative and performing arts; charitable and educational projects.

BORING alert: this filmmaker is obsessed with cigarettes and unmade beds.  It makes him look like a recent film grad who watched a wee bit too much noir in his sophomore year.