Orwar

. . . Unlike every-- Nope. I'm going to behave, for once.

I mean. The days I actually go in-world, and you're also online, anyway. But twice! . . . I mean, what, who, me? I'd never.

Usually the kind of people who turn to the forums for friends are the people who fail to make friend in-world due to their abysmal social skills. Whilst that's not always the case, the majority of the people I've reached out to have been the sort who barely manage to uphold some sort of basic etiquette of communication, who with every line cause a conversational dead end and who show no interest whatsoever. . . . And occasionally, when you confront them about it and ask why it is they never even try to hold up their end of a conversation, they accuse you of 'constantly trying to get into their knickers'. Like, I'm terribly sorry you got that impression from 'Hello there! I saw your thread on the forum and thought I'd reach out. How are you today?'. Shrugs.

How do people even manage to find threads from 8 years ago . . .

Yeah, no, pass. People are already running around with their genitalia 'hidden' whilst wearing clothes which causes all sorts of lag. Don't need to give the lag hogs larger pastures.

I do find forced teleport points annoying, and I do hate the pushers, but that's a bit of a small thing to ditch a store for if you like their stuff - in my opinion, anyway. Besides, as much as I'd love to just blanket an embargo on any creator who ever made a gacha or who ever screwed up the materials on one of their products or set the alpha settings wrong in their mesh; sure I'd save money, but I'd lose out on so much that I'd probably just end up completely out of the game. Most people don't care, and most people are bad consumers anyway who don't know how to judge quality and go by how much skin something shows off, or think that 'the print on this T-shirt speaks to me' and that's all that matters to them. Creators in general aren't going to change because a small minority of people dislike the way they run their business, and depending on what else is on the land, forced TP points may just be necessary, and it may make your own landmarks still work if you rework the store but keep it on the same parcel, as anyone who uses an old LM will still land at the storefront.

I don't really mind timed demos, 5 minutes should be all you need to put it on, look at it, try it out with your AO a little, and get a sense of it. What I do mind is when I'm in a store, trying on a demo, not noticing it's timed, and suddenly I'm naked. I think that in a way, it's preferable to some of the other demo variants. Showering the product's textures with a weave of red text spamming 'demo' can make it really hard to tell what's actually behind it, same as some of the demo signs attached to your avi being extremely poorly placed (like, if you're demoing a hair with alphas in it, and you get a circular thing around your head with alphas for a floating 'demo' text so you can't actually see yourself wearing the hair). If you need another 5 minutes, you can usually just unpack it again to try it - but then the demo needs to come unpacked, some vendors just give you the folder already unpacked, which can be a little annoying. Sometimes, especially if it's an outfit with several pieces to it that you want to see by themselves and together, 10 minutes might be needed.

Give yourself over to absolute pleasure, swim the warm waters of sins of the flesh. Erotic nightmares beyond any measure, and sensual daydreams - to treasure forever . . .

Oh no, did you just disagree with me, and even call me 'uncivil' - how uncivil of you!

The forums have been more conflicted the past few months than it usually is, but I also think that comparing the forums to 'in-world' is a gross generalisation. If your in-world experiences have all been better than what you've seen on the forums, good for you - personally my experience is that people on the forums generally tend to behave somewhat, whilst people in-world can go entirely unhinged. I know there are times I've felt like saying something harsh or cruel on the forums but avoided it because of the moderator presence; in-world, most conflicts are regarded as personal disputes and you'll be advised to block each other (unless someone is being rampantly racist or sexist - and even then, there's no shortage of people with outrageous profile texts, or even wearing swastikas on their avies). Anyway, it's very much a matter of personal experience, I believe - my experience may be different from yours, and someone else may have a wholly different perspective. What can be said though, when it comes to feeling repeatedly spoken to in an uncivil manner - if you crave respect from others, it may be a good place to start, to show them some respect first. If you want polite conversation, that can absolutely be found on the forums. I have plenty of forumites I communicate with regularly, both on the forums, in-world, and through Discord, it's not difficult to befriend people if you get to know them and treat them appropriately. To both say that 'This is who I am, deal with it', and 'I want people to like me more and treat me nicely' is a contradiction; it's to want to have the cake and eat the cake. A person can't be obnoxious and expect that people will treat them nicely only because they feel entitled to act that way and also entitled to being treated nicely. That statement was general, but to you Bagnu - if you'd just take a moment to reflect over the feedback and responses you've received the past few days, the way you offended disabled people and then dismissed their objections, claiming ignorance and poor wording as an excuse; do you think that you deserve those people to cater to your wishes of being treated civil? Do you expect those of us who, whilst not disabled ourselves, but sympathetic to those people, being friends with some of them, should treat you nicely? Your attitude does not demand civility, and thus you find it in short supply. The issue certainly isn't 'the forums', most of us get along just fine - those who don't tend to avoid or block each other. Or set the occasional thread on fire, get smacked over the fingers by the moderators and sat on the naughty step for a bit. That's plain and simply an untrue statement, not to say prejudiced and ignorant. First of all, 'native American' culture spans thousands of years, and many, many separate cultures, including hunter-gatherer type communities and agricultural communities - 'law' was not universal and perpetual, nor formalised the same way it was in Europe (blame the Romans!). And whilst it's true that there's no evidence of prisons á la Europe in northern America before the arrival of the Europeans, but that's not to say there were no penal systems in place, and that punishments - including executions - occurred. Trying to apply modern law and modern philosophical sentiment on people from half a millennia ago is just silly. Did Columbus do anything unjust - well, justice is in the eye of the beholder, and his peers and especially his monarch he certainly didn't, to the papacy he certainly didn't, and to the rest of the European countries who went forth to exploit the discovery of a new continent inhabited by people unable to defend it against their soldiers, he certainly didn't. Mind, Europeans were quite happy slaughtering each other too at the time. If we were to be invaded by a technologically far advanced alien civilization today, do you think they'd care about how unfair you feel that is? Do you think that their descendants in half a millennia will care about how some grumpy earthlings feel that's unfair and that they want 'their' planet back? I bet your arse they'd still be using all those cool techy things the aliens brought though, a bit like the way you used the Internet to express your snide bitterness.

First of all, that's not how to Latin. It's 'Cogito, ergo sum'. And only because it was the first word in your post should the C be capitalised. Secondly, how is that 'all we can ever be sure about'? That may well be the most ignorant summary of our species' history of philosophy that I've ever seen on these forums.

Whether something is moral or immoral is a matter of perspective. The aforementioned 'no harming others and no harming oneself' for example is a rather broad and not entirely irrefutable moral. There are many things one might do to justify hurting them, and whether I choose to harm myself is none others' business. As for whether things that are immoral in RL are moral in SL? No, not unless your morals are so vague and weak, that all you need to do to step away from them is to plant yourself in front of a keyboard. You can't physically hurt anyone in SL, role playing doing so is just acting and is no different from role playing hurting someone in RL. Deceiving people or stealing from them in SL is, out of a moral perspective, as right or wrong as you think it is doing so in RL; if you think that 'people on the Internet' are less human than your neighbors you're either an idiot or a psychopath. There's a difference though. Often, things that we consider immoral are also illegal, as law is usually built on the foundation of generally accepted morals. In SL, laws don't always apply as they would in RL, and also with it being a platform with international users and everything being scaled down to a currency that generally speaking wouldn't warrant a criminal investigation (no, Interpol aren't going to launch an international cybercrime investigation because of some Dutch guy putting an invisible prim in front of a vendor to trick you into paying them L$299 when you meant to click the vendor - heck I don't even know if LL would care too much; after all you willingly clicked 'pay' to the person whose name popped up when you did it). We're a rather interesting species like that. We're quick to declare what moral people we are, because we care about how others perceive us - we're socially vain by nature, after all; but we're also opportunistic. The OP hasn't made a new, enlightened philosophical discovery - she just yet again found a new way to advertise that she's promiscuous and sexually active on the grid.

Some people spend as much on clothes on a weekly basis, that they'll wear once, if at all, or double that on a gacha machine to get that elusive rare. How much or little one puts into SL is up to oneself, but to me it doesn't feel like L$5,000 for a head you're probable to get at least a year or two out of is too bad. But it's up to how much you're willing to pay and what feels important to you. There's nothing wrong with the system avatars, either. I've seen more than a few system avies that looked much better than the average mesh potato - and then not everyone wants to look like a 'realistically' rendered super-model, either. But the idea of 'give me a free bento big brand head or I'll make my own' is just silly and completely ignorant of the skill and work that goes into making those heads.

If you right-click the notecard in your inventory and select 'properties' (I think it is? I'm not in-world to check at the moment), you'll see the original creator's name in the pop-up box, with a link to their profile.

I'm just picky when it comes to people at all. I assume the majority of people I come across aren't worthwhile, and just cherry-pick my way through it, judging people by various factors such as how they talk, how they look, what they say, what's in their profile, whether we have any common interests, etc. I'm an introvert, so what little social energy I have I'd rather spend with people who don't make me want to slap some sense into their heads, or send them back to grammar school. If I see someone who appears interesting, I'll give them a nudge and see what happens - if there's nothing interesting about an avatar or the contents of their profile, I'll just move along. I don't think I ever really went looking for friends in SL though, I just pursue my own interests and bump into people along the way. I abhor clubbing and 'social hangouts', they reek of desperation and are almost always crawling with degenerate creeps, like maggots in roadkill.

Considering the amount of work that goes into making them, and how much you'll be using them (like, actually all the time you're in SL), I don't think L$5,000 for a head is at all bad, and I also don't think that the price difference from brand to brand should be the deciding factor for which head you choose; it's a hefty investment to some, so get the head you want rather than the head you can afford right now. Save up for it if you have to. You can't expect to be given a free head that's full bento - that some creators (Genus who're currently down due to a DMCA, and Catwa who had a limited release a while back) do that anyway is astoundingly generous of them, but to expect it as a consumer who doesn't even own a previous product of theirs comes off as a little entitled.

There are several brands to pick from. Catwa, Genus and Lelutka are probably the largest brands for mesh heads, though Genus are currently unavailable. The 'average' price for all of them if I recall correctly is at around L$5,000.

No 'sane' or 'normal' people allowed! Shoo!

How is that 'interesting' though? It's just more of the same bollocks painted in a different colour. In my mind, the meaning of that greeting is that whoever utters it somehow should give random dominants/dommes a honorific by capitalizing the E for them. I've got no obligation to rub someone else's ego, period. If someone's such a juvenile snowflake that they get offended because random people around them won't refer to them as their superiors, they absolutely have nothing to do in any A-rated sim, or even civilized society. Yes, there are cases where a higher code may be required, if it's a formal event for a community where people know their places and respect each other, for example. But when some newb crawls into a random club going 'hi E/everyone' it appears to me that they've somehow received information but failed to process it, or have been misinformed, or just have that weird perspective that 'all doms are superior to all subs' (probably along with 'all men are tops and all women are bottoms' mentality - the amount of people who call me 'Sir' just because I'm a man is stupid). Anyway, today's pet peeve: logging in at home, getting changed, fixing myself up, and TP'ing to work-- And crashing. Coming back in, finding my alphas and appliers didn't save.

Aww, fine ... ... I know of an urban legend brought up in the Darwin Awards community involving a constipated elephant ..?