Vanity Fair

It *is* possible to set up a good-looking, fully mesh avatar for nothing or next to nothing, but it requires knowing where to look to find a free or inexpensive mesh head and/or body. On my blog I endeavour to provide a list of free and inexpensive mesh heads and bodies for both male avatars and female avatars, but the bargains (especially the heads) are usually time-limited.

Seriously, about one-quarter of the male avatars in SL are in need of a SERIOUS freebie fashionista makeover. You don't have to look like you stepped out of 2007 (or even worse, 2003!).

Avatars wearing 2003-era shoes with busted invisiprims and (shudder) jewelry with bling deserve the death penalty. I will die on that hill! (I will make exceptions for well-made flexi hair, but not many meet my standards.) Also: the Freebie Galaxy is a 15-story crime against humanity and should be incinerated into pixel-ash. I will die on that hill! (Now I gotta go back and read through what everybody else had to say...)

Happy New Year! I plan to be spending a lot more time in SL as the Omicron wave of the coronavirus pandemic hits over the next month. SL is my happy place to escape from messy, painful, chaotic reality...hope you all are doing well and holding up well under these unprecedented circumstances! I wanted to take some shots of my alts all together for posterity 😉(you know, in case COVID finally polishes me off) and I know that there are many places on the grid that offer backdrops/scenery for taking pictures. Does anybody know of a place like this, but where there are good group poses/poseballs which you could use for a picture of a group of avatars? What I am looking for is a place where there are natural-looking group poses/poseballs which indicate a bit of interaction (NON SEXUAL!) so I can arrange a group of avatars. The attached pictures give you an idea of what I am looking for; in the past, I have successfully been able to get up to ten avatars/alts loaded on my high-end gaming PC if I use the lowest possible display settings on all but one window, so if there are poses for 6-10 avatars that would be ideal. (.I know, I'm insane, but we've already established that on my blog.) 😜 Thanks in advance for any help, pointers, or tips. If I have to I will search on the Marketplace for group poses, so if you have any suggestions for great poses for sale for 6-10 avatars, please let me know! Appreciate it. Oh! I forgot to mention that I’d also be interested to learn more about tools which allow you to make adjustments to existing poses, e.g. making eyes look in a certain direction or moving a hand slightly. Much obliged! Please feel free to leave a comment with your suggestions of poses or tools, thanks!

Has anybody ever gotten one of these error messages when trying to teleport in SL? This is a new one for me! I have tried logging out and back in several times, and no matter what I do, I get the same error message. And I am nowhere NEAR making 6 teleport requests per minute! What's going on? Thanks! (I'm trying to teleport into the Holiday Shop and Hop, if that makes any difference.)

I was part of Sansar since I was invited into the closed beta in 2016/2017, and I was there for the whole crazy ride. Sansar is now on life support (the company that bought it from Linden Lab, called Wookey, furloughed all of its staff recently, and I believe that they could shut down at any moment without warning). Being there from beginning to end, I still marvel at how Linden Lab thought they could build a new virtual world/social VR platform and just put it out there, and expect it to sell itself in this competitive marketplace for metaverse platforms. "Build it and they will come" might have worked for SL in 2003 but it sure ain't gonna work nowadays. You have to PROMOTE yourself to get noticed. Also, Linden Lab could have done a lot of things to try and entice SL users to a) visit Sansar and b) make them want to stay, build worlds, create content, and form a new community. Instead, what happened is that Second Life folks (rightly or wrongly) saw Sansar as something which distracted LL from its work on SL, and as a result most SL folks hated Sansar and refused to have anything to do with it, hastening its downfall in my opinion. It also didn't help that Linden Lab made a bet that many people would be owning high-end VR headsets tethered to high-end PCs with good graphics cards, and instead the Oculus Quest wireless headset took off. I still shake my head and wonder "what if?". Say a prayer for Sansar, it needs it.

"Real life" picture?!?? What is this "real life" of which you speak? 😜

I find it interesting that many mesh bodymakers are jumping onto the "curvy", "juicy", "thicc" shape lately. There's also Kalhene Erika, which has proven to be so popular that Kalhene has now created a new shopping mall sim to showcase fashion for it! And now we have this eBody Reborn, which looks very similar. I wish Strawberry were still able to do her body reviews! She was a master at it.

Hooray!

Facebook goes down: Throwing a schadenfreude party on Twitter, Reddit, and Clubhouse simultaneously Second Life goes down: Jonesing in the corner, catatonically rocking back and forth

I knew it...Second Life runs on Facebook servers!!! (just kidding, van you imagine how awful that would be??) Then again, SL now runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS), right?? Perhaps the strange error message is a problem there...

This evening, after heartily enjoying discussing Facebook's epic meltdown on Twitter, Reddit, and Clubhouse, I tried to sign into Second Life using Firestorm, only to receive the following error message, no matter what avatar/alt I use or what location I try: "Could not connect to the server. Could not load certificate. Please contact your Grid administrator." Anybody know what would cause this? Is it related to the Great Facebook Outage at all, or just a coincidence? Thanks in advance for any help or advice! I do know I was able to log in without problem this morning...

It's a shame; VirtualVerse never really seemed to catch on after the rename. I used to be on the old discussion board a LOT back in the day.

Burnt pixels.

I picked up a red bloodstained ballgown using the L$500 free store credit offer at LANA, perfect for my vampire alt (it ws only supposed to be for the weekend, but when I checked today it was still available, but I don't know for how long).

Well, I'm glad I asked! The next time I see this avatar at Frank's, I will let him know. 😉

Aha! The Firestorm wiki was most instructive: Note: Another factor plays into whether an avatar is rendered as a jelly doll: texture area. If the texture area on an avatar is above the default (1000 m^2), then the avatar will render as a jelly doll even if it has a complexity less than your limit. If this is the case, a small green square is displayed next to the complexity figure in the name tag. (Also note: Your own texture area figure–in YOUR view only–includes your HUDs. Other people will see your texture area figure without HUDs included.)

So, I was hanging out at Frank's Jazz Place (the upstart one, not the original one), listening to the music stream and dressed to kill in a fabulous ballgown (as one does 😉 ), when I spotted the following greyed-out fellow standing at the side of the dancefloor (see picture below). I automatically have ARC turned on, so I am familiar with the Complexity figure, but I have never, EVER seen a "Texture Area" on an avatar before! (It's in red, so I assume that 1,213 metres squared is BAD...) Has anyone come across this before?? What does this mean? And what would prompt such a warning?? Whatever it is, he refuses to rez in my Firestorm viewer.

Yeah, well that's just straight-up stupid.

Okay, thank you! There is no ear texture included in the POWER group gift, so I assume 7DS forgot it. I will send them a notecard in-world.

I picked up the September group gift from 7 Deadly S[k]ins (a fatpack of skins for LeLutka EVO X, called POWER), and I notice that when I wear the skins on my Lilly head (upgraded to EVO X), the ears are still grey! Is there a special setting in the HUD to turn on the texture for the ears? In the Glam Affair skin I had picked up for this head in the UBER 7th Anniversary Hunt, there was a separate texture for the ears, but there's none in the 7DS package. I'm stuck! Thanks for any help!

I am a big fan of the Kalhene Analexa body, and I bought the Kalhene Erika body for an alt, and I love it! As you can see from this thread, the creator is super responsive to user comments and updates the bodies frequently. Even at full price, I think it’s an attractive alternative to Inthium Kupra and Belleza Freya. And I’m thrilled to see some designer support for this body already! Really, you should check it out if you haven’t yet. Google “Ryan Schultz blog Kalhene Erika” for my review, which includes a feature-for-feature comparison with Kupra.

I just search for “premium” under Places in Search, and I always find one.

All major brands of mesh heads include mesh eyes, which you can change the colour of using the included HUD. Many vendors also sell eye textures for various brands of mesh heads (e.g. Catwa, Genus, LeLutka).