Orwar

I used to do a lot of 'um'-ing and 'err'-ing, I'm a terrible orator and used to get really stressed out about it. Now when I speak I'm more likely to just take random pauses to compose my thoughts or find the word I'm looking for - which some people apparently find extremely annoying. Shrugs. I may have forgotten to put up the 'may contain traces of sarcasm and a weird sense of humour' sign. Sorry!

Flips you a quarter. Give me two dozen, and keep the change.

People continuously seem to misunderstand the purpose of this board; it's not about posting personal adverts, it's about sharing experiences and asking questions on the topic of how to make friends. The questions and answers are, however, spread thin across the multitude of threads that this board has, and continues, to spawn. So I thought, as an introverted, prejudiced misanthrope who, magically, has a contact list which in spite of regular grooming always has plenty of people on it, let's approach it from the other end and discuss how not to make friends. See it a bit as 'the pet peeve' thread, but focusing on socialising. Now I shouldn't have to point out that this thread, just as any other thread, is not the place for personal disputes and flaming as this is true for the entire forums - but I'll go ahead and say it anyway; if you're incapable of being in the same space as people with whom you may not fully agree with in all aspects of life, beat it. I'll start off with a peeve of mine which regards what I just mentioned, the 'personal adverts' that appear here. I have contacted quite a few people who made such threads over the years, but in the vast majority of the times I did, I found the person to be utterly unwilling to uphold even the most elementary essentials of social exchange, leaving conversational dead-ends at every response which mounts to more and more resistance to break through to connect with someone. For example: Hello there! I saw your thread on the 'Make Friends' section of the forums and thought I'd reach out. How are you doing? Hi. Everything going okay? Yeah, fine. What are you up to? Nothing much. This isn't even an exaggeration, this is how a fair amount of people actually respond to being contacted - usually even without the use of punctuation (which, to me, is a severe turn-off!). Could it be because I'm a scary man and a 'potential creep'? Perhaps in some cases, but I've tried it with Neph too and, granted, she may be scary as well, but then I don't tend to reach out to the sparkly unicorn fan club types either. Friendship, whether in Second Life or real life, isn't something you're entitled to; it's nothing people should have to serve you on a silver platter. For two people to get to know each other, there must be a mutual exchange of interest or curiosity. If you're unprepared to engage with people, advertising your wish to make friends is utterly pointless, and a waste of your time as well as that of all who respond to you. If you're feeling 'shy' when approached through a textual conversation, then I honestly couldn't tell you what's wrong with you - but rest assured, something needs looking into. P.S. This isn't a response to any recent event, thread, or any one person in particular - if you feel 'hit', don't worry; I've likely already forgotten all about you. So, what are some other ways not to make friends?

Same thing also applies the other way around, so if you want to hang a picture on the wall that's .5 x .5 meters in size and use a 1024 x 1024 image, that image will be severely compressed when viewed at a distance.

I never liked landmarks much, aside from being useful for different TP locations within my own properties, or to places I'd go regularly (such as my in-world workplaces). When you purchase a product off the MP, or sometimes even in-world, that isn't that creator's latest release, you often get outdated landmarks that lead nowhere or to somewhere you really didn't want to end up at. Much better to use the Search function to find places, in my opinion.

I don't see it happening, not in November, not within the next few elections. America has been digging themselves in a hole of foreign politics that's going to be very difficult to ascend from, it's going to take time and effort to regain the trust of the international community - Trump may be a symbol of that ignorant arrogance, but it's been going on for longer than that. And has the good really outweighed the bad? According to some estimates, the death toll of America's 'world policing' and warmongering since the end of the second world war has surpassed the Holocaust. The war on terror alone had a third of a million civilian casualties of war.

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerchwyrndrobwllllantsyiliogogogoch.

Oops.

Oh, don't worry. If the virus doesn't kill us, the environment will, and if the environment doesn't kill us, it'll be the fall of civilization and most likely death of at least most of us because of Y2K kicking in two decades too late, and if that doesn't kill us, it'll be the end of time as prophecised by some ancient super-civilization that probably got their smarts from aliens and carved a calendar into stone that only goes as far as MMXX X XX (that's year-month-day, by the by, which is how civilized people write dates!). Okay, so some of what I just mentioned was rather silly - but I only said it to point out that people are silly and have a tendency to-- cry apocalypse. I mean, people seriously have been saying those things and been genuinely afraid of it; Covid-19 is real (and still auto-corrects into 'oviduct'!), but should you listen to the usual doomsayers or to the men and women who are working on finding vaccines and solutions? It might also be less stressful an experience if people didn't constantly spread disinformation and rumours: https://www.livescience.com/new-coronavirus-compare-with-flu.html The flu has been around for a very long time and we have a pretty good idea of it, but to propose that Covid-19 is in any way insignificant 'because the flu is worse' is just ... Silly. As for comparing it to famine, that really is apples and oranges.

Blender has a pretty steep learning curve, and Avastar is expensive. A lot of people go for AnyPose which lets you make the poses directly in-world, but it's quite pricey and, at least last I tried it, a bit clunky and inaccurate. Personally I use Qavimator for as long as I don't need a bento pose (I tend to animate face and hands separate anyway), it's free and you don't even have to upload the pose (L$10) to use it for a single shot (just let the animation uploader keep running whilst you set up the shot).

I make my own most of the time these days. Buying a pose, you'll rarely get it to look the way it does in the ad - different shapes and bodies means that positioning of things can change quite radically, especially when most pose-makers cater to the T-rex people. Whilst you can edit the poses with the Black Dragon poser, it's almost just as easy to just make your own pose from scratch and fitting it to your personal shape.

Always look forwards. Unless Marianne's suggested methods lead to a solution.

I don't refer to just this thread, but the discourse on the topic in society in general. For the past several years, wherever you go whether online or in the real world, there are women who do their very utmost to bring attention to how you're 'emotionally deficit' because you don't act like a girly-girl, and I'm sick and tired of it. Yes, the feminist community is obsessed with men's emotions.

Yes, and the Devil tempts good men to do bad things. The concept of 'the patriarchy' is the religious lunacy of this generation. Perhaps if people focused just a little bit more on being better people themselves, than expecting the world to change around them to fit their ideals, the world would actually strive to become a better place.

Men in Second Life appears to be a minority, and personally don't care much about the gender of a person when I'm making friends - there are few men on my contact list, but some of them are good, close friends indeed. But I'm no, as Sirhc put it, '12 year old schoolgirl', I feel no need to advertise that I have friends as that's probably even more pathetic than whinging about not having any friends. I used to have picks with my partners and my family, but took those down to protect them when toxic women began targeting them because they were incapable of breaking me head-on. Having one of my SL daughters tell me that some strange woman had sent her a long, confusing IM about how I was 'an evil person' struck a weird chord (although no harm in that instance, she's about as twisted as I am and found it humorous). And to the self-proclaimed expert panel in gender studies trying to analyze men by projecting your feminine perspective onto them and perceive us as misfits - perhaps if you'd take one moment to consider the possibility that the universe doesn't turn around you, that you aren't the archetype and mould for what a person should be, you could open your minds to some actual reality and see the world for what it is rather than what you want it to be. There are men I can turn to if I need a shoulder to cry on, why are you so obsessed with us showing it? It's none of your damned business.

By inspecting an object or attachment, you can see how many faces and how much texture data is used (along with polygon and vertice count, and the resulting TMem and VRAM total). In Firestorm there is an option to not allow texture sizes over 512 x 512, which I imagine would make things run smoother in general - but then, there are cases where larger resolutions are called for.

IDKWUMN?? AATB!

I like to play a little game I call 'inventing new nightmares for @Scylla Rhiadra' . . . It's been a while since I played. 😈

Pet peeve:

. . . Ugh, this thread, too?

Designers being popular doesn't mean that they create good stuff. Most of the 'popular' brands these days, for both apparel, decor and accessories, use much too complex meshes and, almost worse, have several faces each with their own 1024 x 1024 textures, even if it's just to pick the colour of the eyelets or lacing on a pair of boots. That, along with people being much too attached to their 'special bits' and HUDs, are the main reasons that avatars have such a impact on performance. BOM itself does not have any impact on lag, if you're just using a skin - the difference between Maitreya pre- and post-BOM is that they moved the 'onion layers' to a different attachment; before then, you effectively wore 4 body meshes (one for the body, one for the underwear layer, one for the tattoo layer and one for the apparel layer), each being ever so slightly outside of the next. So right there, you had a theoretical slash of 75% of the polygons (although as the hands and feet were attached, and you got more foot options, and tweaks were made, the actual slash wasn't fully that high - but a severe improvement nonetheless). What BOM does help with (if I've understood it correctly) is the server-side baking of the textures into a single texture for the viewer, i.e. you take the layers (skin, tattoos, body hair, etc) and merge them into one layer, meaning you download fewer textures (and it also fixes the issue with rendering alphas when using several tattoos). I never had a close-up look at dinkie avatars (I reckon I scare them away!), but in the end it's not an issue of whether you're a dinkie or a human or a butterfly, what matters is how many scripted attachmens you have, how they are scripted, how many textures your avatar has on it, and the polygon count. Trust me, even if by some twisted miracle the entire SL community went dinkie overnight, there'd be equally lag-inducing attachments for dinkies in no time. The issue is in a poorly informed playerbase, and creators that either don't know or don't care (because why put any more work into your mesh when you're already on top of the market and making buckets 'o bucks off it?).

How scientific were these tests though? When I do photoshoots, I don't care about my avatar's lag since I can slap on a near endless amount of accessories (until I run out of attachment points, anyway), run with full Ultra graphics, with DOF, with custom lighting, with way too high resolution textures on the backdrops I put together, and render the images I take in 28 megapixels - and stay above 100 FPS throughout the process. Lag is seldom caused by one single avatar, unless it's someone who has an absolute ton of scripts (I was this close to just screaming at a guy with 208 scripts the other day for being a tw@ - and there are people even worse!). It's usually a combination of poorly optimised sim builds, using too much clutter and disregarding mesh complexity and texture memory, and there being several avatars around, most of which don't have a clue what scripts, VRAM or TMem even are.

Because whilst Neph was dollying herself up and posing in front of the camera, the beardy guy was out back trying to get her furniture in through the door!