Lewis Luminos

Second Life is as cheap or as expensive as you want it to be. You can spend tens/hundreds of thousands on private regions or Blake Sea land. Or you can rent a skybox for L$50 a week (about ten bucks a year). Or you can set home at an infohub and spend nothing at all. I have chosen how much I want to spend here, that allows me a certain amount of land and a certain amount of pocket money, and that's why I have the amount of land that I do, and why it isn't on Blake Sea.

It will be sad if Belleza goes too. There's not much demand left for the female bodies and my girls have already switched from Freya to Reborn, but it would leave male avatars with only the choice between Gianni and Legacy, both of which I feel aren't as good a choice as Jake. But even if they do, I'll carry on wearing Jake anyway. I haven't needed support from a CSR yet, and I don't imagine I ever will. Maybe all the new guys will just stick with NUX and not bother ever buying a commercial body at all.

Thats only L$3700. Most mesh heads cost more than that

With it being so long ago, I'd just suck it up. Neither I nor the seller will be able to find a transaction record from 2021 to back up the claim.

From 2009. I haven't actually changed that much. I think I still have that (system-layer) t-shirt.

I wonder what impact this will have on framerate and lag? I know my framerate takes a big hit when I raise the reflections on Linden water.

Definitely this. If they'd knocked off the price of an original body from the total, I'd have bought two. Instead, I bought two Reborns. No surprise why Reborn has taken off and Belleza X hasn't.

That IS clever, and I would never have even thought to check for it before. But I know how its done; The alpha layer is made in Photoshop with a feathered/fuzzy edge between solid and transparent. Once uploaded, it's used in 2-bit form so each picel is only "solid" or "transparent" - there's no fuzziness. But using the mask cuttoff, you can adjust where that edge will be. A lower cutoff will have more solid, a higher cutoff will have more transparent. It'll work on any modifyable body besides Slink - so, Belleza, Ebody Reborn, Kalhene Erika... and maybe some smaller niche bodies made for furries.

Probably not. Don't get me wrong; both my girl alts have Erika and it's absolutely my favourite female body on the grid. However, if you get it, you'll also need a second body to go with it, to wear all the clothes you want to wear that aren't made for Erika. Getting by with Erika alone will be near impossible (unless you spend your entire life either naked or in fetish-wear, or you're content with the dozen or so outfits that come included with the body and you don't ever want to wear anything else). That said, Legacy is an even worse choice; it's over-priced, it relies on a server-side service to use the HUD, it's complex and laggy, it "breaks apart" (gaps appear) when you're at altitude such as in a skybox, and its a steep learning curve. You'll need to delve into the technicalities of your firewall just to get the hud to work at all. There are whole threads on the forum about the issues with Legacy, if you're interested in hearing the whole story. Now, if you're happy for the Lucybody that you already own to be your "second body", then sure, go with Erika. But I have a feeling that you'll be disappointed. Given that Legacy is so bad, and you don't like ebody, that leaves Maitreya as the only recommendable alternative, as either your only body or as your second to go along with Erika. Everything else has either declining supply of clothing or never had any to begin with. On the plus side, if you do decide to go with Maitreya, as either your second or only body, there's no rush, because your Lucybody already fits Maitreya clothes. So you could get Erika now, and Maitreya in a couple more months when you've saved up enough.

They will be. They'll be modifiable, with body and head as separate attachments, and compatible with the neck fitting for other heads. This was all discussed in their presentation that Ceka posted above.

The biggest surprise for me there is that Jake hasn't overtaken Gianni yet... 🤔

The difference with NUX is that the creator kit will be freely available to everybody. You won;t even need to apply for it. It will be right there in your Library. This means that anyone can learn to rig cloting using NUX. You won't have to beg cap-in-hand to a mesh-body creator, demonstrate a store-full of products you've already made, and hope that they trust you enough. So yes, there will be people rigging for NUX. Not the big name established stores, but new creators in the process of learning their craft, making and selling clothing for the first time. Once they can demonstrate a store full of NUX products, then they'll be able to apply for other brands' dev kits. Sure, the results won't be the best quality but they will be something, enough for new users to get by for a few months until they decide which of the commercial mesh bodies is their preferred replacement.

So sad to hear this, Siddean was one of the pioneers of mesh bodies in SL, I don't think we'd be where we are now without her. I wish her all the best for the future. One of my alts has Hourglass and I picked up a couple of redelivery boxes, just in case.

In RL I stayed up to toast in the new year with my partner and a fine single malt Scotch. Normally I'd watch the London fireworks on TV but this year my partner was watching Star Wars (box-set for Christmas, lol) In SL I celebrated with Madison, and surprised her by DJing for the first time ever.

Wow. Sad to hear that Author's Point is gone but amazed that Hazardous is still around after so long. I took this pic there in 2013.

This is by far the best approach. I wish you all the best.

I remember your name from the forum (either here or SLU) but I don't think we ever met inworld. Anyway, welcome back and happy New Year.

Madison and I do a card every year (except last year, for personal reasons).

I think I did pretty good. Still wearing my fave old classic skin from about 2012.

656 prims on a 2048m parcel is going to be awfully small. Most quality art installations use a whole region.

Having made a handful of items and put a few of them up for sale on the MP on my alt's account, I can safely say that making MP listings is a huge enormous royal pain in the derriere, and I am really not at all surprised that most creators would rather not put demos on the MP at all. Setting up an item for sale takes as long as making the original piece, and then for a demo you have to do it twice for each size, with a whole different set of testure uploads (at an extra L$10 a pop, thats a lot of money if you are doing multiple colours), then you have to make a new HUD as well, with different UUIDs and make a second MP listing, and go back to link the original listing to it and.... yeah that's why I only have half a dozen things in my store and haven't made anything new in over a year. It really doesnt surprise me that creators (a) want to charge for demos, (b) want to sell all their colours separately and (c) want to sell for only 2 or 3 bodies instead of the whole range. Honestly I'd rather skip doing demos altogether and sell everything for L$1 a piece, but the full perm template creators I want to use don't allow me to do that.

It's sometimes possible to get an empty inventory to repopulate. Step 1 - go to an empty region (and I mean literally empty- not just no people but no or very few objects either - somewhere in the bottom of the ocean is best) Step 2 - start Searching in your inventory - easiest way is to search using each vowel in turn, a, e, i, o, u and maybe throw in y as well for good measure. If it starts working, be patient- it may take an hour or more to repopulate fully, especially if your inventory is large. Step 3 - If the above doesn't work, raise a support ticket.

Following on from the discussion in October, apparently you can upload a new profile pic for free if you use the SL official viewer. Not in Firestorm. I didn't notice whether it updates on the web too or not. It's my understanding that the whole web-profile thing is intended to be scrapped soon anyway.

There are always threads in the forum about wanting things like the banning of bots, the ability to make yourself invisible to others, demands for the banning of landlors and store owners for perceived slights in customer service, and so on. I've been seeing this sort of thing since 2008 but I do think it's getting more frequent in the last few years. As for why, I think partly its due to new people not understanding what Secondlife is or what it can do. Whereas in the past, most new users were coming in from a gaming background and they were frustrated by a lack of visible objectives or quests, I think this has changed. Now, we are seeing more new users who are non-gamers, coming in from a background of moderated, instant-gratification social media like Tiktok, Instagram etc. People who are more accustomed to influencer-culture and cancel-culture, where fame is based on number of followers, and that doesn't fly here either. People don't get that SL is for the most part not strongly regulated and that's intentional. It's down to landowners to regulate and moderate their own spaces as they see fit. If you want a place where certain regulations apply, you need to buy a region and apply those regulations yourself. If you want a club where no-one goes AFK, by all means open your own club and set up a script that requires guests to respond to a captcha every 30 minutes. (I used to see these years ago on camping chairs, they are not a new thing). However, be aware that most guests are going to find such a thing intrusive and annoying, and they will likely leave rather than complete the captcha. And they won't come back. The main thing that regulates SL is consumers. If people don't like the way a business operates, they just stop using that business. If everyone thinks the same way, that business cannot survive and it closes down. If no-one else thinks that way, then the business loses one customer, who likely spent next-to-nothing there anyway, and the business carries on. The People have spoken. I think we do, as a community, have a great deal of control over what happens in SL. Some of it is related to developments made by Linden Lab. An example was when the Newbrook houses were released in Bellisseria and there were a number of problems and issues with them. People raised their voices in concern; enough of them that the launch was stalled, the faults rectified and the complaints addressed. As individuals, we don't have such power. Had there been only one person complaining about the faults with the Newbrook houses, the faults would not have been fixed. So if your demands are something that other SL users don't want or don't care enough about, nothing is going to happen and your options are down to either - pay for your own region with the rules you want, or swallow your pride and accept the rest of the grid as it is without that rule, or leave SL altogether. There are always choices; just not necessarily choices that include the option you want.

I sometimes log in, drop in at one of my fave clubs and go semi-AFK, browsing the web etc, switching over to look at local chat every so often (if there is any), usually waiting to see if Madison will log in or not. Yes I could just listen to my own music, but the advantage of listening to a DJ in SL is finding new music that I like and haven't heard of before. If I get an IM, I will know cos I get a ping. I don't typically receive IMs from newbies, so it appears that no, me being AFK doesn't impact them at all.