Orwar

I once tried to push a friend who'd gone AFK, they had an anchor script that made it futile. So I built a prim cage and slowly shoved them to the edge of the building platform, and when they got back and deleted the prim they'd slingshot back in place. ... I wonder if you could make a physical slingshot like that ... ...

Googles. ... ... Puts playback speed to x2.

I do edit most of my shots to some extent, but I'd rather spend 5 minutes extra in SL to set it up properly than sitting in Gimp for 2 hours trying to correct things by hand and getting a result which generally feels 'off'. I think that the whole 'no edits' elitist attitude is as detrimental to a person who's just getting into SL, as the 'five-filter-minimum' shenanigans a large portion of the SL bloggers do for no good reason. To say that only one or the other is art, and that everything else is trash, is just pointless and opinionated. Let people do whatever they want, if you don't like their stuff, fair do's - but what a bloody boring world we'd live in if everyone only did the same thing and had the same taste. If real life, professional photographers use touch-ups and cropping, why should we set the bar higher for happy amateurs? That said, hip-hop, rap and jazz still ain't music. 😡

💘

Chromakey images done by people who do not understand lighting, shadows or resolution, ugh. And besides, unless you're doing something very specific, there's rarely any actual point in doing an actual chromakey, especially if you can't actually be bothered to do it properly (i.e. leave a green halo around your cut-out because you're a sloppy editor). Much easier to just pose in front of a prim and upload a locally saved texture to it, but a 2D backdrop and shadows are seldom going to work. "Look at me posing in front of the Eiffel Tower - and casting a shadow on the whole thing, and the sky around it, and half of Paris!".

The brains do not 'do' anything, a certain brand (or possibly brands) of head(s) have them. They contain no specific scripts as far as I know, apart from those mesh heads' scripts in general. 'Extras' should never be worn when not in use, and obviously only be used in appropriate circumstances, but people are morons, for which there's unfortunately no easy fix.

😯

Yeah, I mean, if someone wants to hire my services for my RL profession, it's $100 per hour + 25% VAT + material costs (and 25% VAT on them, which I've usually already paid for). That'd be what, L$25,000 per hour, give or take? I charge a tenth of that for a profile shoot + editing which can easily take 1-2 hours (if not more because people show up unprepared and have to try on every hair and accessory in their wardrobe on the spot whilst I twiddle my thumbs). And most people think that I'm "too expensive". I'm guessing you're not going to hire me to spend 10-40 hours renovating an object out of your personal collection of antique books, then.

As you zoom out, and meshes are moved further away from your camera, they will begin to be drawn using their lower-poly models to improve your rendering performance (or 'deform'), how exactly this looks depends on whether the mesh actually has a lower poly mesh model or if SL draws one willy nilly when you upload the mesh (some creators just put their full poly version as the 'lower' level and call it 'HIGH LOD' mesh - this is generally bad for performance, especially if the mesh is too complex for SL to begin with; i.e. the creator either doesn't know how or care to actually create virtual assets). A way to increase the distance of which things begin to deform, you can increase your LOD factor, but this may have adverse effects on your performance overall (Firestorm has a LOD slider in the 'quick preferences' menu, allowing you to increase or decrease it whenever you like; 1-2 is usually what people have by default, but a lot of people tell you that you should always crank it up to 4, or even use debug settings to crank it up to 8). So in short, find new hair and ears that are actually made in a way that works in SL, rather than just looking good in the close-up advert to cash in on people's ignorance and vanity. Or always stand eerily close to people and hope that they don't zoom out.

🖤

For which you could get another, better body, sold by a business that isn't ran by crooks.

It's not really a question about how much 'creators' make, but rather how much you make, and where in the world you live. It doesn't matter how much big brands like Blueberry or FashionNatic make, or Dictatorshop - you can't really compare their income with your expected income for a business selling a completely different type of product. I'm not sure what the 'biggest' brands are for skins or makeup, but even if you made products as good as theirs, you'd have to build your brand name before expecting any consistent income from it. There have been a handful of 'SL-made millionaires' (Anshe Chung), but she made her first million around 2006 - and whether her SL income is still as high as back then we don't really know - but her company moved on to invest earnings made in Second Life in other games and Internet business. If you're serious about starting a business in SL, money shouldn't be the incentive, and absolutely not a reason to quit your job. Running your SL business should be something you're passionate about, and if it grows to the point that you can reduce your RL work time to spend more time on your SL business, then that may eventually lead to a full time SL 'job'. By then, you will be the one to know whether it's viable or not.

Flickr is fairly easy. Throw likes at everything and everyone you see, comment on everything you see, spam your Flickr links into every Discord and in-world group you can find, cram your images into as many groups as you can - and then after a few days, carpet bomb all groups and Discords again just in case someone missed it. As for the meaning of life ... I go by the 'Three T's'. Tea, Tobacco and Titillation.

Who do you think I am? Of course sourdough. Life is too short for inferior bread.

Raw shot, the lighting on the RP sim is a little bit wonky, but eh - Neph having at some potions class!

... ... But are you allowed to eat roasted marrow on toast?

'Missing'? You don't wear underwear with a kilt, that spoils the whole thing.

A bit rushed, so I didn't have time to find a shirt I'm afraid.

Ponders for a moment. Yeah, I'd say that description is fairly accurate.

... Yes, I do say that with some frequency, don't I?

Since I got into SML with Neph, I've seen a lot of people wearing bodies I'd never heard of, the Dev bodies and Sking ones mainly. There's a mall at one of their home sims which has like 2-3 creators' stores, and that seems to basically be 'it' for what clothing is available. ... Suffice to say there are a fair amount of nudists or semi-nudists.

The apocalypse happened. We're just forum ghosts, all in-world stuff we do is just dreaming. Please help us.

Yes, but the question is how one would go about that. The blogging scene is pretty cliquish, and I suspect most users don't know or care much about things like VRAM or script usage, or even BOM - a lot of people still use non-Bento mesh heads. I think that going out with the mindset that 'I'm going to create the new Maitreya-killer', you're setting yourself up for a whole lot of hard work and disappointment - it'd have to be a project of passion. And who knows, there may well be some bodies that are capable of most of the things we sit here dreaming about, but never heard of. Even as a Signature user, who's in their Discord channel, and allow notices from the group, I didn't find out there was an Alice until I accidentally spotted it when I browsed the update notes for my Gianni and scrolled a bit and saw 'Alice x update'. That's not to say that the body 'failed', it may well take off as time goes on. I'm certainly curious about it and will be playing around with shapes for the demo for a bit whenever I find the spare time to do so, and if I do get it and then go buy some of the clothes made for it, and start wearing it when out and about, perhaps someone else will get curious about what it is and go try it out for themselves, and tell a friend. *shrugs* I don't even have any solid suggestions for how Signature should go about advertising it. A Signature event, for creators catering to the Gianni, Geralt and Alice? Exclusivity deals? Ad boards around various clubs? Flickr competitions? Carpet-bombing populated regions with notecard leaflets? Just look at the things Legacy have been doing lately - competitions where they give away tons of free bodies and offer discounts, and make exclusivity deals with creators to try forcing attention and demand to their product. Still not as big as Maitreya. And just one more reason to hate TMP, because it again shows just what kind of greedy, double-crossing pieces of carp they are.