Lewis Luminos

I think everyone's seen my girls already. Indra and Tammi Indra is still mainly on Slink Hourglass with Catwa Queen head. She has Reborn but there's no Indian style clothing for that body yet, so not wearing that body full-time. Tammi is fully switched over to Reborn (previously Freya), with Lelutka Kaya head.

Maybe they should reduce their height and go ginger 🤣

I have fond memories of the old days when there were lists of surnames. Picking clever ones and making new alts with them was part of the fun. I've had a few of those, but the only ones I remember now were Rusty Raza (a fox furry), Dalia Digfoot (a hobbit) and Ryder Palfrey, the only such alt I still have, who started out as a medieval knight and is now an angel. Only one person ever got the joke with Ryder Palfrey.

Darn, I thought from the title of this thread it was about something else.

I'm in a fairly unusual position of having lived in both the male and female role in SL AND in RL So I have first hand experience of both sids of the fence in both worlds. First, I think the most unrealistic expectation of all is that SL is a useful dating experience. As a dating app, SL is terrible. There are (usually) no RL photos, you can't sort or filter people by any of the most useful factors like their geographical location or age-bracket. In fact, you can't sort or filter them at all. Add to that, the fact that a good proportion of avatars in SL represent fictional RP characters. Imagine a RL dating app where all you have to go on is a cartoon style image and a short profile which may or may not be fictional? It would go bust within weeks. Yes there are some exceptions - my own relationship with Madison being one of them. But an experience like mine is unusual enough to be noteworthy. You hear stories in the media of people finding true love in SL or in some other online game. But you see it because it's rare. If it wasn't, you'd not see the stories at all because it would be so common that no-one would care about yet another one. What you don't see, is media stories about how people find true love using RL dating apps. Maybe, just maybe, it's because RL dating apps work better than SL for this purpose? I agree. Madi and I met first on a forum (the other one), not in-world. On a dating app, that kinda doesn't surprise me. That's probably why they're resorting to dating apps in the first place. An unwilingness to lower expectations on physical appearance is what leads people to being perpetually single and perpetually dissatisfied. They're not even considering personality at all. And suppose they do manage to get someone who falls into the "top 20%" of appearance? Are they going to be happy together? Probbaly not. ❤️ That's a good one I've not heard before. I usually find that running hot water over the lid for a while, then tapping the edge of the lid on the counter is nearly always successful. Failing that; pierce the lid. But then you'll need to transfer the contents into another container, if you don't use it all up at once. Marriage dates back to around 2500BC in ancient Mesopotamia, and was picked up by the Hebrew people. It derived from the view that women were property that could be bought and sold, and was a way of ensuring the legitimacy of children in a society with patrilinear hereditary. Or at least, an attempt at it. It wasn't terribly successful. In 17 years of being in SL, I've had a woman come on to me inworld exactly once, and it wasn't aggressive at all. Once in 17 years - I guess short ginger dudes don't fall into that "top 20%". 🤣 My experience with using female avatars is the polar opposite of that. And it was/is exactly the same in RL too. Pre-transition, I couldn't go anywhere without some bloke hitting on me, or at least trying to engage me in unwanted conversation. Post transition.... it's crickets. Nada. This is rubbish. There are plenty of nice people, male and female, on this forum. There are also plenty, male and female, who aren't so nice. Just like there are in-world, and everywhere else.

My life in SL is very different from my life in RL. SL is perhaps how I would live in RL if I was very, very wealthy. A big house by a lake. Boats and horses. No need to work. My avatar looks nothing like the way I look in RL but everything else about me is just the same. I bring my own personality, my own beliefs and opinions, my own self. You talk to me (or any of my alts) in SL, you're talking to the RL me. Skills brought out: No real skills, but I've brought out some knowledge. For instance, sailing. Doing that in SL has taught me a lot about RL sailing but I still have near-zero experience in it, aside from one trial lesson I took years ago and abandoned the idea as far too expensive. The ability to dress my meat-avatar in a timeless, classic fashion without looking like a total slob. Skills brought in: Artistic skill. I've been artistically-inclined since childhood and that's been incredibly useful in SL in many ways, from making custom textures to decorating a house. Social skills: I've never had difficulty with this in RL, and it was most helpful when I was running my club and hosting. I also apparently have a knack for remembering, just from the name, whether I've met someone before. So I would always know instinctively know whether to say "Welcome to Club Noir" or "Welcome back". This skill doesn't work well in RL because no-one walks round with a giant name-tag hovering over their head. Other things brought in: Money. Lots and lots of money. 🤣

The best option is a coat with a built-in top. Usually only the front part of the top actually exists at all, and it's all part of the same mesh model with the coat.

Hmm... about a decade before Second Life was even a twinkle in Philip Rosedale's eye. My signature look (long-ish ginger hair and facial scruff) has been my look since the day I started, but it's been a thing for me since a dream I had way back in the 90s. I've updated for quality over time but I haven't changed a bit 😁 Below: 2008 and 2023

Not a fair comparison when you're adding stuff to one of them (hair, hat, beard, glasses etc) thas not included in either starter set.

Whilst its sad to say goodye, it's more important for you to look after your health and your real life. I wish you all the best for a happy retirement.

Those exaggerated proportions are user-choice though. You can affect those with the sliders. What I'm seeing in Senra is things like stupidly thin arms regardless of how high you raise the sliders (to be fair, Belleza Gen-X is guilty of this too). Lips and eyes that look dreadfully un-natural, regardless of what you do with the sliders. Eyebrows that are halfway up the forehead, regardless of what you do with the sliders. No high-heeled feet. Skins that are flat-toned and ashen with even less detail and realism than the ones made years ago for Bitsy et. al. New users are going to get incredibly frustrated when they try to improve their avatar with the sliders and find that they can't, no matter what they do. You can get better shapes with Ruth 2 than you can with Senra, and better skins at Freebie Galaxy. And Ruth has high heel feet that fit readily available shoes (I forget if it fits slink or maitreya - one of those). At this point, I think these decisions have been made on purpose, to stop the big-name body and head makers from throwing a hissy fit and quitting.

I didn't think it was possible, in 2023, to find avatars this bad. They actualy look worse than the classic ones they're supposed to be replacing. The hair and skins are also worse than the classic ones. Even Ruth and Roth are better than these. (Why are the shaved hair styles done as a mesh shell instead of a textured hairbase? Is that to stop people wearing them with other heads? It's just bizarre.) The clothes are okay though, and I do like the new avatar creation system for new residents. Thats just about the only thing they got right here. On the plus side, the commercial body creators have nothing to be worried about. It'll be a miracle if anyone makes clothes for these. SUX for sure.

One of my alts, Casidy, is pretty much non-binary these days. He's an elf, based on one of my long-standing RPG/fiction OCs (I've been writing and roleplaying this character since 1993 - and just about to start a new D&D campaign with him). The tattoo is a newer thing; in SL he has the same one I do but in his canon he is not tattooed.

Sure is! Here's one of me, along with the original pic it was generated from. I had to cheat slightly; the original AI render omitted the tattoo, which I added back in from the original SL pic.

I don't have or use many apps on my phone, not because of privacy concerns but because my silly ADHD brain forgets I even have a phone, until I leave the house (which isn't daily, since I work from home). I check my phone less than once a day, and only when someone calls or texts me, or when I need to call/text them.

Oh, it doesn't guess, at all. Back before I quit facebook, and before I used adblock, there was one time I was researching places in New Zealand for some fanfic I was writing. And the very next day, every ad I saw was for holidays in New Zealand.

It wouldnt surprise me if the takeup is slower/smaller this time. While previously, nearly everyone was on Twitter, with its implosion, peole are migrating in lots of different directions and probably not to all alternatives at once. Some went to Mastodon, some to Bluesky, some to Threads and some to other less twitter-like alternatives like Discord. Mastodon and Discord have the advantage that they've already been around for years so theres a userbase already there, but for the newer startups it's going to be slower. And yes I think that 10,000,000 subscribers in 8 hours can only mean that they are counting everyone with an Instragram account.

I noticed that Threads is not launching in the EU, because the data collection/privacy policy is illegal there.

There won't be any Threads users visible on mastodon yet; they have launched before the federating part of their service actually goes live, so it isnt working yet. And when it does, many Mastodon instances have already blocked them, for the safety of their own users (i.e avoiding having the data of mastodon users on other instances scraped by Threads).

I don't pay attention to either the local or the global feed on mastodon. I follow people, and I find those people by following hashtags of things I'm interested in. This also helps my feed stay clear of politics, which, for the sake of my sanity, I prefer to not engage with. Hashtags are the key, at least for now (searchable posts is coming, I believe).

Centralised isn't really better though. If a centralised network jumps the shark or disappears altogether, you're basically screwed. But if you join a federated one and it does the same, you can simply hop over to a new instance, take your followers with you and you can just carry on where you left off. People make a big fuss about not knowing what instance to pick but it really doesn't matter in the long run. No matter which one you pick, you'll see the same stuff (only your "local" feed will be differnet but all that content is still visible everywhere else on the fediverse too). And you can switch or make duplicate accounts at any time. Think of it like picking an email provider. I choose Hotmail, but I can still send and receive emails from people on Gmail or Yahoo or any small self-hosted email address. And thats not even taking into consideration no ads, no algorithms and no taking yor data hostage. Another complaint levied against Federated social media is that it's "not scalable". And that's true for one individual instance. There isn't one individual instance that can do it. But thousands, or tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of small ones, can. Because if you run out of space... just host a new one. If one goes under due to insufficient funds, it doesn't matter. The rest of the network can still keep going without it, and its users will move to a new one. The other complaint is "it's too difficult". Well, I'm a 56-year-old non-technical person and I found it no more complicated than signing up for anything else (and its WAAYY less confusing than Discord). Theres only one extra step involved and that's picking an instance. A quick google search solves that.

I won't be using Threads. I jumped ship from Twitter to Mastodon about 6 months ago; there's a presence from Second Life there too. I like it a LOT better than Twitter, its much more engaging and doesnt have any stupid algorithms that stop me seeing the posts I really want to see. Threads is just another corporate money/data-grab. I'll pass.

Is the purchased item showing at all in your regular inventory as a folder at the bottom? There's a setting (at least in Firestorm, not sure about the official viewer) where you can choose whether to have Marketplace purchases sent to the Received Items folder or just into your general inventory, so it may be that this one alt has the setting different and you're just not noticing it? Otherwise, its not something I've ever heard of before, so may be that something is broken/corrupted in the back-end with that particular account. Unfortunately there isn't much you can do to get tech help if you're not Premium, so you may just need to live with it, or ditch that particular alt and try again with another. Also... there's no shame in having alts. Many users have a few. Some have a lot.

Historically, religions (especially but not exclusively the Judaeo-Christian ones) frequently demonised the deities of the religions that existed before them. Demons in Christian mythology have horns because Pan had horns, and so did Cernunnos, and many others. And even this depiction of demons within Christian mythology is a relatively new one, starting some 800-odd years after the birth of Christianity.

I've had at least one other precognitive dream before, and with the increasingly disturbing situation in the US right now, I have the uncomfortable feeling that you may be right, and that it may not be too far into the future when US citizens can find safety only by fleeing their country. 😔