Jump to content

Arduenn Schwartzman

Resident
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    2,277

  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Posts posted by Arduenn Schwartzman

    New Valentines Last Name....

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted

    I just now noticed that around 2006, people could sign up for SL and pick the last name Stawberry. Yes, without an r.

    It's impossible to find a relevant search result on the internet. Was this just a typo by a Linden Lab employee, or was it intentional? If so, what's the significance?

    • Like 1

    I’m scared are you?

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted · Edited by Arduenn Schwartzman

    1 hour ago, Benson Gravois said:

    I asked someone about this and they told me they knew how to take the “key”

    Fun fact, open anyone's profile in Firestorm and their "key" is right there, right above their profile picture, in your face. They will be able to find out where your house lives based on your SL key just as well as they can, based on your SL hair color. Consider anyone who makes such a claim a potential troll and take anything else they say with a big grain of salt.

    I had a conversation with someone once who claimed the knew how to spoof someone's key, thereby allowing them to use any scripted object that is set to "owner-only". I started to doubt their credibility then, but then they started talking about quantum-computing in relation to Second Life, I knew they were totally full of **** and the conversation ended there. Unfortunately, there are just people out there like that.

    • Like 3

    If You Divided the SL population into two groups

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted

    On 1/21/2024 at 3:03 PM, BilliJo Aldrin said:

    1) people that should never visit Belli, and

    2) people that should never leave Belli

    Lets do it in a fun, lighthearted manner.

    Maybe a fun, lighthearted yet very tall wall to keep those people out that should never visit Belli? Again, you know, just giving some very light-hearted and fun suggestions to divide people.

    • Like 1

    What is the split of SL users between RL Nations?

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted · Edited by Arduenn Schwartzman

    3 hours ago, SarahKB7 Koskinen said:

    https://www.similarweb.com/website/secondlife.com/#traffic

    This is the visitor count by country data to the website secondlife.com, not the traffic of AWS cloud servers that run the actual simulators. There may be a correlation, but then again, there may not be. Worse, the majority of secondlife.com visitors may be people who never have signed up for an account at all. In addition, there's many times more search engine bots and data harvesting bots (ironically, including ones used by similarweb.com), hacking scripts, etc. out there than actual people, and many of these bots use user-agent headers that are indistinguishable from those from actual people's browsers.

    Also...

    image.thumb.png.50816fae942259b92b5895e32a0556ba.png

    Were the bleep did these similarweb people get the data about gender and age distribution? (Possible answer: inferred from all of your spied upon browsing behaviors.)

    • Like 7
    • Thanks 2

    Bots

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted

    11 hours ago, Midnoot said:

    You know those sims you go to that were seemingly active according to their traffic results

    The (search) system has failed (since the early 2000s).

    Don't trust the machines. Make friends, ask people in fora or groups, find the interesting places in SL in other ways than using the failed the search system.

    • Like 2

    If You Divided the SL population into two groups

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted · Edited by Arduenn Schwartzman

    In the purely hypothetical case that I would become President of Second Life for Life, enjoying absolute immunity from justice and absolute ruling power (my credo would be: "SL, c'est moi"), I would have to face a lot of opposition from people who don't know what's best for them. Countering such opposition would take a lot of time and resources (an oppressive police apparatus, instilling fear with out of proportion punishments for small misdemeanors, etc, etc.). However, I could save a lot of energy by dividing the populus in two rivalling factions and let these factions quarrel with each other, diverting their attention from my absolute hegemony, to their own fabricated, and totally imaginary rivalling interests. This way, I could spend more time focussing on accumulating wealth from the masses, while those affected won't notice because they're too busy exchanging arguments with each other.

    Now, on what basis would I fabricate such a totally imaginary divide? I could go the easy route and simply divide the grid in the North and the South. The concept is nice and clean, and even the least educated* will be able to tell 'their own people' and 'those others'. Or I could send forth a few media minions (team A) who constantly repeat the notion that short people are good, and tall people are bad (and vice versa, as broadcast by team B). Or maybe people who wear underpants in SL versus those who don't.

    'Divide and conquer', such a great tool to help me stay in power.

    *  Note to self: undermine the educational system in SL, e.g., by taking away their books, so the generations to come can be spoon-fed propaganda without critical thinking standing in the way.

    • Like 1
    • Thanks 2

    If You Divided the SL population into two groups

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted · Edited by Arduenn Schwartzman

    There's one other significant divide I can think of: people who pretend to be wealthy in SL and people who don't. Not in a black and white manner, of course, but again, in a continuum and subject to change over time.

    When I came in SL for the first time I pretended to be poor but pretentious by squatting a big luxurious castle. In essence, I was pretending to be pretending I was wealthy, playing Third Life, as it were. (I was very poor and ugly in SL, so my only option to have friends in SL was to pretend I was very rich.)

    image.jpeg.9ee716c76b762c1a4fe9197cfc68026d.jpeg

    Me on day 2 of my Second (Third?) Life, in 2007 in someone else's bath tub

    • Like 5

    If You Divided the SL population into two groups

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted · Edited by Arduenn Schwartzman

    SL avatars can be divided in OBJECT_BODY_SHAPE_TYPE < x and OBJECT_BODY_SHAPE_TYPE >= x.

    The good people at Linden Lab decided in their wisdom that the SL avatar body type is not binary, but a continuum between 0 and 1, analogous to real-life human biology.

    For scripting purposes, I use the value 0.5 to distinguish between narrow-shouldered and broad-shouldered avatars in SL, to assign the appropriate animation (e.g. to let them hold something with two hands, like a steering wheel). In other words, in my lazydom, I made a divide in two because I only made animations for two different shoulder sizes/hand distances.

    Why I Don't Like PBR

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted · Edited by Arduenn Schwartzman

    11 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

    image.jpeg.983ef3346e63ab8395bd44e90f03b4da.jpeg

    Much respect for the way Qie visualized what the ambient float value does. And I'm sure it's not easy to translate a large set of parameters that define a complex 3D world of interacting objects, materials, light sources, environments and reflection probes into a control panel that dumb users like me can use. But to me, as a dumb user, even this single float value confuses me a lot and makes me wonder and fear what the next step in the evolution of virtual world settings is.:

    image.jpeg.7e8eb8275dbcc7871614ef4581f0da4d.jpeg

    • Like 1
    • Thanks 1
    • Haha 2

    Sounds for building and other stuff- Where to find them?

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted

    The best home-made sounds you'll get using a dedicated digital sound recorder device. You get good sound quality using an entry level device such as Tascam DR-05X, but it'll cost you about $90. There are cheaper ones (from $30 and up) on Chinese web stores, but make sure not  to pick a device that's specifically labeled 'voice recorder', but 'audio/sound recorder' instead. If you have a laptop, plugging in earbuds with a little microphone built-in into it can work surprisingly well too. You may have to use Audacity to remove some noise, though.

    Then, as mantioned above, use Audacity (it's free) to crop the sounds and edit pitch and tempo as needed, or mix the sounds with others. Then, make mono, set to 16-bit, 44100 Hz, export as .wav and you're ready to upload.

    Most sounds I recorded were those of game pieces being put down on a board, or bumping against each other. For most pieces, I recorded domino pieces made out of resin, put down on wooden or cloth surfaces. To avoid repetition (the human ear is pretty sensitive to that), I always record and use several instances of a sound event, with slight variations.

    • Like 3
×
×
  • Create New...