Camille Yorcliffe

Aiden Rives wrote: It seems to me that there are so many people who own sims. Sometimes I wander on to a sim and wonder why the owner made this place when there aren't any people that go there. Anyway, made me think of these questions and since it's hard to find sim owners in world, I'm asking in the forum... How many sim(s) do you own? What made you decide to buy your first sim? How long have you owned it/them? What do you do with your sim(s)/ What are they for? Do you pay for you sim(s) with RL money or you make enough on SL to pay for you sim(s)? What are your future plans for your sim(s)? Include pictures or landmarks if you like to make it interesting. You spent a lot on it so why not talk a little about it :matte-motes-big-grin-wink: Former sim owner here, but maybe I'll have interesting thoughts... 1. I originally bought two sims: Old Willowdale, and Willowdale Farms. I dropped Willowdale Farms after a bit due to open-space/homestead sim changes and limits (it was a homestead). Currently, the new owner has readded Willowdale Farms as a full sim, and added New Willowdale. 2. I bought these sims because at the time, in 2008, it seemed like practically all of the child avatar community in SL was into headache-inducing bright colors and wild and crazy wacky things and a bit hostile to adult avatars, and I wanted to recreate a more realistic experience of being a child in a town that looked like it was build by adults. 3. I owned the community for 2 years, after which I needed a break from it, and left some close friends and community members in charge. I came back after the break I needed, and still help out. 4. A town... part residential, part public buildings and activities. The goal was community-building. 5. I paid for them outright at first, and just told people if they came and actively participated in the town (as opposed to sitting in a house and never leaving) they could live there for free. After I blew a bit of my savings that way, reluctantly started charging. Ironically, it seems that selling parcels and charging toward tier has been a huge boost to the community, though I'm not sure I fully understand the reasons why. It was never self-sufficient with me in charge. It is now. I think I just suck at business! 6. My plans are to remain active in the community, help keeping things happening, and be glad that someone else has to deal with paying for it!

Just wanted to say this place is amazing. Definitely the best Christmas themed build I've seen in SL.

Just to give a different reply.... SL is full of furnished houses with no one in them. The first thing to do is meet some people; people are what makes it a real home! Search out groups and locations related to your interests, or your viewer has links to popular destinations. Talk to people, say hello, share your thoughts and experiences. Once you have people to hang out with there, then it's not too hard to figure out how to grab a couch from the marketplace and rez it! There are also plenty of places that offer furnished rentals, if you don't want to be bothered by that.

Exactly right, we certainly have a gazillion groups with the town name, "Friends of Exampleville", "Exampleville Town Council", and a good half dozen more for more specific activities. But having multiple groups named "Exampleville" something or other doesn't stop someone else from creating more with any number of variations: "Exampleville Library", "Exampleville Public Library", "Exampleville Town Library"... In this case, though, I did something stupider. When I passed on the sim a little over a year ago to take a break from SL, I removed myself as the group owner before adding the new owner... and the person who'd been running the activity had been made an owner at some point (we trusted her at the time), and refused to add the new sim owner to the group. Yeah, yeah, I know, dumb newbie mistake I guess. All I can say is, at the time we felt like we were a close community that could trust and rely on each other.

Just an update... we are still considering particularly outstanding applications for teachers at Hope Harbor School, but we would especially be interested in applications for the following positions: Sports coaches for soccer, fencing, and baton twirling, or other playable SL sports. No previous experience is required, but for the fencing coach, an understanding of the En Garde fencing pistes would be helpful. Lunch and recess monitor. The position requires strong off the cuff role-playing skills and a deep understanding of child avatars, and the main responsibility is to facilitate and monitor ad hoc social environments to make them as rewarding as possible.

Just wanted to mention that I wrote a set of scripts recently to read nested hierarchical llDialog menu structures from a notecard and display them with safe interaction with multiple users at a time. The resulting scripts are released into the public domain and are available for free at this marketplace page. Basic features include: Any number of simultaneous users (until you run out of memory... but that's hopefully not likely!)Define menus in a simple notecard syntaxAutomatically add scroll buttons for menus of more than 12 itemsBuilt-in feature to add menus built from inventory or nearby peopleDeclare and refer to other submenus by name from multiple placesYou trigger menus and receive selections via link messagesYou are free to share the scripts with others with no restrictions whatsoever (though if you sell them for money as is, whether or not it's legal, you are still a boogerhead), modify them, distribute your modifications, etc. I would appreciate hearing about any improvements or suggestions. I have used these scripts in multiple items that have been used in multiple locations. I am not aware of any problems. However, I don't guarantee the absence of bugs.

Thanks, that pretty much confirms my experience then; sad, but it is what it is. I definitely have explained this many times to people who have asked me, but I've always been hesitant to set up any kind of official explanation in a notecard giver or something because I'm not exactly keen to make this drama a centerpoint of the community. I'm apparently also not allowed to clarify the situation on SL Forums, as posts doing so are now being reported and deleted as "Interpersonal Disputes or Personal Negative Commentary" by moderators. One thing I will say for Linden Labs, they at least stepped in a while back, in response to an AR, and told the new establishment that they could not use (again with the fake names) "The Original Exampleville Community" as their slogan in advertising and such. So okay, on with the small battles and one-on-one communication to clear up the confusion.

Right, I wasn't asking for legal remedies... even if I had them available, I'm not interested in spending my life in court. I was asking if anyone had any advice for how to deal with this within SL. I highly doubt many people have trademarked their SL activity or parcel names. So for those of you who might have run into this, what strategies might you use to communicate with people, make the distinction clear, etc. without turning everything into a bunch of drama? So again, any lessons learned from anyone would be very welcome.

So just a general advice question... I'll keep names out of it to avoid drama. About three years ago I bought a couple sims in SL, and spent two years of my time building up a community there. The community has been fairly successful, and I passed along the sim ownership to some other community members a year and a half ago, but I'm still very involved there and helping to organize the community. This is a multi-sim community, and includes a number of smaller more, specific locations, many of which were named after the town (sort of like a town called Exampleville might have a building called Exampleville Public Library). These venues are all owned by the town, but we occasionally have people offer -- and very occasionally even pay people or allow them to charge money -- to run activities in these town buildings. About 9 months ago, when I was busy doing other things and not there much, one of the people who had been charging for an activity she conducted in a town building decided to set up her own business elsewhere to have the security of owning her own venue, charge a lot more money, hire paid staff, etc. That's happened a few times, and we wish people well when this happens; it's out of place anyway in our public community buildings, since we aren't trying to run our own event or activity businesses here (though a few people do *pay* for parcels and run business on them)! Problem: this person decided to take the building name (and therefore town name... remember Exampleville Public Library) with her when she went. We communicated pretty clearly that this wasn't okay with us. She also entered a partnership with another person, who has been working on creating more businesses in SL with our town name attached to them... This isn't a clear-cut trademark-ish issue... yes it's a pretty unique town name, but it *does* exist in a few places in RL and we've even had a couple unrelated businesses in the last three years that have just happened to use the same name as our town, and we generally contacted them so we were all aware of the situation and were fine as long as they didn't claim or imply affiliation with us. But this is the first time we've had someone deliberately claim to have "relocated" a building that still exists in our town, or try to create and spread new businesses with our town name attached to them aimed directly at taking over a popular community name for their own business. We originally chose to ignore the issue, hoping it would go away. We renamed that building in our town to avoid confusion. A few weeks ago, though, we talked to someone building a whole new community that was named the same as ours. Initially we thought it might be another coincidental name conflict, but it later turned out that they were encouraged to do so in an early partnership with the same people that had been using our community name deliberately. Fortunately for us, that partnership dissolved because one of those people tried to take over this business as well, and they went separate ways, and this new group renamed their community when it became clear what had happened. But this left us aware that this isn't stopping at just that one business. Now the building and activity in our own town (which we renamed) has started to become more active again, and it's getting difficult trying to answer all the questions and clear up all the confusion as to why the building and activity still exists here when people were under the false impression that this unrelated business was affiliated with our community. To top it all off, when we try to clarify that the new business is not related to our community, we're targeted with accusations of "slander" and various other threats. I' m left wondering how to deal with all this. Anyone handled something similar, or have any advice?

I'd say you definitely want to work this out before the work starts. Creative vision is very, very hard to communicate... and creating anything in SL necessarily requires some simplifications from the RL version, so when you contact a builder, animator, artist, etc., it's very important to (a) be very explicit about the level of detail you expect, and (b) come to an agreement on whether you are paying for time, or for the acceptable completed product. You can pay either for time or completed product, as long as you agree in advance. If you want to pay only for a satisfactory completed product, you'll likely need to provide a lot more details, photos, very good drawings, etc. in advance, and accept that some creators won't work on those terms.

Hope Harbor School is now hiring staff positions for our school starting January 16th. Hope Harbor School is a role-play K-12 school with child and teen avatars, and serves as the official school system for the Willowdale and Willows Cove family-oriented communities in SL, a combined four sims of active SL families and children living together in a neighborhood setting. We want: teachers, lunch ladies, recess monitors, sports coaches, or more... your imagination is the limit! We are looking for people to facilitate role-playing settings and experiences in the school environment, whether that's in class, after school activities or clubs, recess, lunch, counseling, or anything other school related environment you would like to organize, help promote, and plan. We offer a variety of different experiences ranging from pure role-playing to classes that incorporate SL skills like building, scripting, etc. as well. Helpful skills include: - Role-playing experience, and especially family role-playing with child avatars. - Experience as a manager or coordinator for SL events or venues. - Teaching experience either inside or outside of SL. Pay depends on the interest you generate in your role-playing setting, and ranges up to 500 L$ / week. The time commitment is one to three 45-minute sessions per week, on your own schedule. To allow you to present yourself as on your own terms, we don't have an application. If interested, please write a notecard explaining why you are interested, what you bring to the table, and your vision for a class or other school experience, and send copies to Kethry Triellis, CeCe Briner, and Camille Yorcliffe. (Note: Hope Harbor is located in Willowdale, and is the one and only school system for both the Willowdale and Willows Cove communities, a combined four sims of active families and child and teen avatars. Neither the three year old Willowdale community nor Hope Harbor School are associated in any way with the schools that began this year calling themselves "Willowdale Elementary" and "Willowdale High School".)

This is pretty straight-forward script with llEmail, and no, as long as you're okay with leaving the master prim rezzed and updating the child objects when the master prim changes, it wouldn't require any external database. If you like, contact me in-world and I'd be happy to write it for you. Or ask a friend, or someone else... it's maybe an hour of work if you include testing. If you want to do something involving an external database (e.g., MySQL), the project becomes easily an order of magnitude more complex, but would be more resilient against possible changes; for example, you wouldn't need a master prim to worry about being returned and rerezzed. Unless you have a reason to expect the master prim might get picked up frequently, I'd recommend against making things that complex.

Hey! We're looking for a manager for Lilyweather's Tavern in Turtle Falls. Lilyweather's is an authentic bar and entertainment venue, focusing on realism and social fun. Beyond that? It's up to your imagination. We're looking for someone who wants to make this their project. We'll give you artistic license, funding, and freedom to manage your dream entertainment venue. We'll pay you a salary of L$2000 / week to do it! Think you've got a great idea for a creative new approach to entertainment in SL? Talk to us! Want a job where you can work closely with SL performers, whether new or old, and develop talent? That's great! Whatever you want this job to be, that's what it can be. The small print: We want someone with experience. You don't have to have managed a club for years, but if you've never hired performers or hosts before... sorry, this isn't for you.Turtle Falls is 60% residential, and focused on creating an atmosphere of realism and authenticity. We want a venue that will work at fitting into the community.Turtle Falls is not an adult-rated sim, and Lilyweather's is not going to turn into a strip club or escort service. That's not within the realm of your creative license.Interested? Contact RaeLynn Finesmith in-world for an application.