Orwar

Another Billie Eilish cover .. Same song, in fact. But by ska punks!

I just felt like it suited my current picture. It's from a song by Ghostfire:

Whilst that is true, Europe and Northern America have a long history of pollution whereas China's industrialisation is relatively late.

Happy 60's music covered by Finnish heavy / folk metal? Yes please.

Some very sneaky moderator changed my forum title a while back, and I don't know how long I had it on before I noticed. I wasn't in any way offended though, I found it hilarious.

Because the facts don't support her political agenda, of course. If it somehow contradicts her beliefs, it's . . .

Well, I've been working on figuring that out for myself for nearly a decade . . . That said, there's always something to do in SL, whether with others or by yourself. It's hard to give any real direction as, frankly, one will just have to figure out what works for oneself. If you can stand PMS-rock, a whole lot of brainless drivel and illiterate pickup lines, there's clubbing - not my cup of tea, but perhaps you'll have more luck with it? Personally I've found I make most of my friends through pursuing my own interests, primarily SL photography, and I hear there's a lot of communities for things like sailing / vehicles and such like.

How many species haven't come and gone, though. Evolution has taken many interesting paths to cope with the difficulties of life, the path of humanity is interesting and rather bizarre. Countless species has succumbed to climate change throughout the aeons past, we're just making the process of our own elimination quicker - at least, the destruction of life as we know it. The results of the climate change we're seeing is probably going to boil down to famine, disease, migration and warring for resources that will tear down society as we know it today; I'm fairly confident mankind may live on even in the most apocalyptic events, we're excellent at adapting and we're extremely versatile in both diet and climate compatibility (or rather making the climate compatible through the use of clothing and shelter). It's really hard to say how things will go, and what the full effects will be - we can run as many evaluations and simulations we want, we won't know for sure until we get there. Life will go on, with or without us, of that I'm certain. Well, for as long as we don't end up trying to nuke each other to steal each others' resources as our systems begin to collapse, anyway.

This. And it's not just Germany. Green parties all over Europe have a religious hatred for nuclear power - why 'religious'? Because it's irrational and ideological against all scientific evidence. The general public just don't know better, they expect any nuclear reactor to go Chernobyl or Fukushima on them at any given moment without warning and basically seem to think that nuclear power plants are little more than dirty bombs with a timer set to random. The way people spoke about nuclear power after the HBO series Chernobyl was, to say the least, alarming. People don't seem able to differentiate between fact and fiction. "So the emotional impact of the miniseries was spot-on while the scientific impact wasn’t much better than The Simpson’s. Too bad. Chernobyl appears to be the highest rated show of all time on IMdb and was the best opportunity we had yet to get this right for the public, to tamp down the fearmongering of radiation that has killed more people than radiation ever has." - Forbes And probably on the same hype wave, Netflix decided to tackle the issue of nuclear power in their 'History 101' series: "FALSE: HAVING NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS EQUALS HAVING NUCLEAR WEAPONS CAPABILITIES FACT: NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS ARE NOT USED TO MAKE NUCLEAR WEAPONS "Toward the end of the episode, the narrator states that “if you have a nuclear power plant, you also have the means to make a nuclear weapon.” This is not true. A commercial nuclear power plant is designed, constructed, and built to do one thing— produce heat and electricity." - US Energy Department, through energy.gov Article: https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-things-netflix-got-wrong-about-nuclear-power-its-history-101-series Furthermore, Germany's current anti-nuclear stance isn't an issue of the Merkel regime 'caring about the climate', it's just a political gambit; if they have as strict an anti-nuclear policy as the green party, they can level the playing field against a populist opponent to try stabilizing their rule (in Sweden the Social Democrats did basically the same, they made a deal with the green party to give them the minister posts relevant to climate - of course, with the green party now barely making it into government as they don't have that all-important one question to tackle anymore, the Social Democrats are hoping that people will make the shorter move to their party, than to go all the way over to the opposing conservative bloc). It's a shame, really - I really do believe that our species is causing a climate change that will have catastrophic effects both on ourselves and on multitudes of other species of life adapted to what the world is like today; but the governing politicians in Europe are a bunch of machiavellian swine. So, here's to facing the climate emergency.

First things first - why are you wearing a Catwa HUD and a Vista HUD? Make a habit of just equipping the necessary body / head HUDs whilst putting together your outfit, then taking them off; they contain a ton of texture memory that reduces your framerate, plus the scripts. Setting up an FS AO is easy as cake. That said, yes, Belli is laggy. The houses have a rather high draw weight for their size, and then people put a ton of junk on their lands that just add to it. Some regions are better than others, but it's entirely up to chance where you end up and what neighbours you get. If you end up next to someone who've decked out their entire place with Apple Fall junk, just cam on over and start derendering.

Well no, you need a valid identification still, whether it's an ID card or a driver's license - it's not like the French border guard will take your word for being who you claim to be when trying to enter the country. Think of all the Norwegians that could slip through!

What happens if a German is a bit like me and can't be bothered to renew their ID card or passport before they've both ran out? What are they in the meantime ..?

I'm not much of a merch guy, I've never even bough a band T-shirt - but I don't know what LL would do for merch aside from mugs/T-shirts/hoodies with their logo on it. It's not really comparable to other 'video game' franchises; take Blizzard for example who've got everything from mugs, shirts, figurines, posters, socks, blankets, mouse pads, backpacks, plushies, cushions, towels, beer glasses, jackets, artbooks, caps, dog leashes, calendars, books, and even had a headset with the Horde/Alliance logos from the Warcraft franchise - and then there's the collector's editions which you laugh at when they're announced because 'who'd ever buy that tat for that kind of money?' and the next day you hear it's sold out. As much as I love SL and LL in extension of that, I don't think that SL is a very high merchandising potential product. Either you've got to be like Disney and just have an enormous audience and merchandisable franchises (the merch revenue for Mickey Mouse alone is beyond silly), or you've got to have a franchise with a lore/story that you can pull from to generate merch (such as the Warcraft franchise), or just such an iconic art style of the video game that it'll be recognized for what it is just through that (such as the Minecraft merch). SL doesn't really have any of that, seeing as the vast majority of the content is user created - and then there's the question of whether the audience at all would be interested in buying any of it; as has been mentioned, not everyone want to let their RL friends/families know that they're in SL. Then again .. If Discord can have a merch store (though it appears to have been down for 6 months), why not?

See, I have a great trick for when people bore me - I just phase out and think about something else, and if the person continues to be boring I just say "Might I introduce you to my wall, perhaps? It seems you have a lot in common, and that you're on roughly the same conversational wavelength. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got better things to do, like watching a bunch of Irish people getting drunk on weird Spanish liquors on YouTube."

I'd like to thank my agent, my co-actors, the director, my old geography teacher in fourth grade, my mother, my uncle's dog Ted, the King of Spain . . . I'm sorry, what were we doing again?

. . . "Who gives a damn"?

Cake is served!

Yeah, I never liked it when people do that. It's like people saying 'Hello E/everyone'. Like. What. I usually tell those who submit to me that calling other people 'Sir' or 'Master' is something that's going to get them to write lines until their wrists are sore.

I mean. What your avatar looks like in the end is the result of many different factors; body is important, skin is important, shape is important, and if you add things like ALM and some interesting lighting .. Well. Aside from the head, the price for putting the avatar together was less than L$5,000 for body + skin + body hair. Yes, it's great that there's free / cheap stuff for new users /alts, but pretending like it's 'just as good' as the market standard when it looks the way it does, that's just silly. If it's $20 between looking like this, or looking like a potato, I don't mind coughing up $20 - if others don't care or can't afford to do that, fine. But if you think that the reason why 'most guys' on the grid still use system avies, I can assure you that it's not because no one has the L$ to splurge. Sure, if you take all my current attachments (oi, I'm not wearing that!) it's probably something like L$12,500 - 15,000 (with that it's a little more!), but it's not like you have to buy everything in one go - I bought a mesh body probably about a year before I got around to getting a mesh head (remember back when we had to find appliers + system skins that worked together?!), and my shape has been a process of years of fiddling back and forth with things to figure out how I want them, and are still subject to change. Besides, I totally expect that sometime down the line, there'll be a new feature that'll make the current mesh avatars outdated (like Bento did to a whole lot of mesh stuff), and I don't expect all the big brand today to be around forever. Or just that someone release a new head or body that I'd prefer to what I already have. Besides, I hardly think I'd be a contender for 'Mr SL MMXX'. Shrugs. And I certainly wouldn't date my avi . . . Well, unless it was Neph . . .

Well, no. And how boring it would be if there only was one perfect body on the market .. Then what on earth would we get to complain about?! Seriously though. I do sympathise with people who absolutely couldn't scrape together L$3,000 (or half of that, Signature has sales every so often - I got my Geralt at half price!) to get a market standard body - and that there are people who don't care much about how they look, or outright want to look different. But let's be blunt, L$3,000 for something you'd probably wear pretty much all the time, that's not 'expensive'; when people whinge about how they don't want to pay $60 for a AAA video game title because it's too expensive, well, if you play that game for 300 hours you've paid $0.20 per hour. So if you pay $13.50 for a body that you wear 'all the time', and you're in SL for 2 hours per day, and you wear that body for 3 years . . . I mean. It's the whole cheap shoes vs. quality shoes thing all over again. Then again, most guys don't appear to be too bothered about looking like a potato. And if that leaves them with a little bit more L$ to throw at strippers and escorts, go them!

Peekaboo?

That's the beauty of it though - if you want nails or ears, all you need to is press Ctrl + B and make some. Better than BOM-compatible - you can use any texture you want, even put different textures on different faces - with whichever materials you want, too!

My new fave vehicle is . . . A row boat. Why? Well, it's slow, so moving across a sim takes a little while, so it's not like planting your face against a series of sim crossings, and it comes with a 'cruise control' so I can type whilst rowing. On a sim made to have to small islands in diagonally opposing corners, rowing around and between the two islands took a good 15 minutes or so! For traversing mainland, I've found that the most enjoyable means of transportation are trains. Just set a speed, keep an eye out for track changes and stuff, and watch the landscape go by - and chat with any friends that are along for the ride. Bikes and cars are fun, and I do have a car that's great fun to drive around Belli with, but I've had a couple incidents with it getting stuck and lagging out at sim crossings (and Grumpy said if I kept driving like I did he'd have to call the grid police! Still got a mole bear though!).

Look, I did a freebie avi. Ain't it nice?