Orwar

Are you sure?

Can't remember what made me feel like waring a toga today. But it led to some playing around, and, poof. Picture. And a little 'behind the scenes' pic of the pose making part, because why not.

Covering Bonnie is a bit of a fool's errand, even if you do a great job, her voice is just unbeatable.

It's much too early for me to think about retirement. I never open my orange letters, I'm not half-way there yet, I don't need to be told that my pension would be awful if I'd retire today.

I grabbed a bunch of demos. Then I went home and swore a lot. A few timed demos that were rejected. A few no-colour demos that were rejected (I'm not risking ending up with a black blob with 0 definition). Some that did come with colour HUDs where the black was literally like looking at dead space on your monitor, rejected. One particularly egregious offender which had such a tight triangle density in one single button that you could read the fricking 'subtitle' of the logotype in wireframe mode, rejected. .. I did find a cute top though!

All right, well, now I have a peeve. Apparently it's a thing that ads don't specify 'LaraX' (or 'MaitreyaX', which peeves me too). Saw an ad on Flickr, in the description it said 'LaraX'. So I'm at the event, find the stall, and here it just says 'Maitreya / Petite'. Strange, I though, but I guess I'll grab the demo? And yeah. There's LaraX in there. And by now I've found like, 4 stalls where it's the same thing. Buuut now I have to go back and run through again to reconsider peeking into the ads I skipped past because it just said 'Maitreya', because there might be LaraX in there? Gah.

Haven't tried it, but .. Two games that are totally immortal: Cooking Simulator (can't wait for the upcoming sequel with multiplayer!), and Viscera Cleanup Detail. Only tried BeYou. I went to the MyStory store, there was a display of something, I was curious about what the animations were like so I sat on it - got automatically permabanned from the system for 'cheating'. Oh well, saved me some money, I suppose!

Or, y'know, instead of first come first serve, a queue when the region is full. Also probably 'you got 30 minutes to browse' in addition. But then who doesn't love it when a shopping event is moving at the speed of pitch because of it being full meanwhile a small army of shopaholics are trying to TP hammer their way through!

Tries to stand in front of the hundreds of BeYou produce elements in the inventory. I have no idea what you are talking about.

Mmm .. Just a few more moments .. Still trying to decide whether or not I actually like the architecture around here ..

In a similar vein .. Someone recently released a lawn mower. Which cuts grass. That grows. And just the other day, someone was giving me a tour of their place, and she had to stop and clean the swimming pool because it had gotten leaves in it. .. SL is starting to get a bit too adult, it seems.

Not a limited supply of people. It's the bad onboarding experience's fault! Or the wages? Or what was it again. There's much too many obvious reasons the sky is falling down around here.

I fail to see how capitalism is somehow the 'issue' here (in fact, I've yet to see any actual issue at all). How much you can earn by doing things in SL is very much a question of supply and demand. Supply is entirely on your end; what are you trying to capitalise on? How is the competition? For demand, well, SL has a finite userbase (unless you do stuff so good it brings people in just to buy them, I guess?), and any given creation in SL will only appeal to so-or-such big a portion of that userbase (and then there's the whole 'getting seen' bit, but that's another question). For hosts and DJs it's just tough luck, everyone and their dog has had the idea to make some pocket money by torturing themselves for 2 hours every few days and hoping to get some tips out of it, it's usually the first 'professions' most people will try (particularly hosting, as it has absolutely zero prerequisites other than 'can u english?' at most venues, and maybe being 30+ days old). There's so much supply of doe-eyed 'I can make moneys?'-types, so many venues, and a lot of them thinking 'oh we'll become the new top place if only we can cram our schedule full to cater to people 24/7'. Trying to make it so everyone who chucks themselves into that ring earn a 'decent wage' for their time is just not feasible, nor do I think it's even something we should aspire to; SL DJs and hosts shouldn't be compared to service profession staff in the real world - if anything, maybe, they could be compared to the types who'll strum a guitar in a subway station or shopping mall. Live performers, same thing, really - but they're not 'entitled' to it just because they put time or effort into it. Especially not the 'local open mic club rejects'. Charge an entry fee and pay your staff if you want some fair distribution of income (of course it's quite likely it'll just kill your venue and send your patrons packing to a different one - unless your place is niche enough to still be interesting to a limited clientele; and, what, should LL monitor these venues' incomes and ensure the staff is being paid 'decently'? I've worked at such places, the distribution of wealth isn't exactly 'fair' - but my service wasn't indentured or anything, and it didn't take me that long to figure out it wasn't worth my time and that I wasn't enjoying it enough to consider it a 'fun pastime', and so I quit - not very complicated stuff, this). For creators, it becomes a question of supplying something unique (which often means it'll be niche, which reduces the potential customer base, because whilst most virtual barbies want to stand out, they don't want to actually stand out to stand out - but hey, at least you can raise the unit price a little bit without too many complaints?), or you can try to cater to everyone, and compete with thirty-eleven other stores creating the exact same 'generic jeans no 34 with the current trend-flavour of being unbuttoned', at which point people will ask 'which one did it best' or 'which one did it cheapest' - because no one needs thirty-eleven pairs of no.34 generic unbuttoned jeans. Glares at some of our resident shopping addicts. Right? Right. If income is your primary concern, then probably try to find a balancing point between the two. But also, if income is your primary concern, maybe don't look to SL for it. No one in SL is being exploited, everyone are here voluntarily. It's not like someone has monopolised some natural resources (well, maybe some land barons inflating prices of coastal/roadside land and holding it 'hostage' - but trying to fix that by changing the value of the L$ is a bit like going in with a bucket of paint and a paintbrush into a burning house; and LL doesn't 'really' have any incentive to fix it, because whoever owns the land pays tier anyway). There's of course very little regulation within SL's markets, so there absolutely are cartel-like structures and a whole lot of nepotism (which certainly isn't a concept unique to capitalism, though). Who gets to be in my super-cool event? Who gets a dev kit for my body? And I don't really see how LL would regulate that sort of thing without getting involved in some very deep resident-to-resident drama. I mean, sure, they've legally covered their backs so that they could just go in and say 'your creation is now ours and we control and distribute it as we please', but 28 days later there'd be 13 people left on the grid wondering where everyone went. Either which way, changing the value of the platform's currency wouldn't solve anything. But it would cause a whole lot of trouble for everyone, then it would mean people would just adjust their prices to the new levels, unless they left the platform completely because of the bother of it all.

Perks up at the newfound means to tick off Jordy and sneaks off with a maniacal giggle.

So I had this thing with a looped sound, and I went and just deleted the script and the sound thing in it. But it's still noisy. I know the same thing has happened with hover text on occasion and someone gave me a 'kill script' for those - anyone know where I might find something similar for getting rid of the sound? I've blacklisted it in my viewer, but it's just annoying to know it's still there.

As a former carpenter .. Yes. Although I do enjoy the whole production process, the only thing I felt got monotonous was when we were making batches of coffins (very plain ones) or that one time I had to sand wheels for a few hundred wooden toy elephants. But it would certainly let us push the prices down. Who knows, might even get comparable to IKEA's prices - couldn't buy the timber to make a table for the money it costs to buy a finished table there.

.. Throws some belated page-901-confetti on the PPs.

I don't disagree at all, I think BDW has some amazing features. But the time it takes me to set up a shot in it is a lot longer than it would be for me to just throw together a pose, do a shoot in Firestorm, and run it through Gimp to tinker with it (having post-process things like noise in-viewer is nifty, but it's also a 5 second process in Gimp, so, eh, lol). If I were wanting to do Machinima, however, I'd probably force myself to wrap my head around BDW. I'm curious to see what those QoL changes might bring though.

I've known a lot of people who ran pirate radios on the Internet before SL was a thing, they had no means to take any kind of tips from their listeners most of the time; they did it because they had a passion for music that you wouldn't hear on 'real' radio stations, some of them made forums so that people could then discuss the music or make requests for certain bands or songs to be played. Some of them also made fake commercials for the whole 'radio' feel and just had fun with it. Most DJs in SL wouldn't know what music is if it bit their face off. Most of them seem to take their playlists straight off of mainstream radio stations. Now they're supposed to earn a decent wage off of it? Hosts are largely pointless. They can easily be replaced with a group joiner and a greeter (although personally I think the whole greeting thing is overrated). I'm not going to tip someone for saying 'hi' and gesturbating/info-spamming local chat away. Creators, as in, people who actually make assets that we use in SL, is a little tricky. If a video game development cycle takes a team of 20 people 18 months, does the price tag of the game then represent a fair wage for all the people involved and all their work hours? No, of course not - it's a digital product, you pay maybe $20, they're banking of selling enough copies. So saying that a mesh top priced at L$250 is 'not representative of the amount of time the creator put into it' makes no darned sense; their goal is obviously to sell more than one of them, not for each individual customer to compensate them for their work. If they don't sell enough copies for their operation to be 'worthwhile', then raising the price of their product isn't going to help. It's better to sell 100 tops for L$250 a pop than to sell 10 for L$500.

Aside from that there's no option to get your avatar's individual shape, it's extremely simple to use. Particularly by 'demoing' the animation, it's easy enough to tab back and forth to adjust it until it looks right in-world. Also the bento version not being finished is too bad, the bento beta has worked fine the times I've tried it, but it also only has a male model in it and I more often find myself posing female avis. Yes, but I also immediately feel like gauging my own eyes out when I see the UI. Switching from FS to BDW is almost as bad as switching from FS to Blender. I think it's a huge miss on LL's part that they haven't given us more in-world creation tools over the years, and that their efforts to tell people what third party software works for making SL assets are pretty minimal. Animating your avi through the viewer and uploading poses/animations directly should have been a thing 16 years ago, at least.

Nah, that'd be a bit like taking a sledgehammer to a SUV to reshape it into a hatchback. Deformers affect the skeleton, the differences in Lara and LaraX are in the geometry. Particularly the shoulders need something more than deformers.

Hm, never tried those deformers, looking at the MP listing's instructions I get the impression the experience is for .. Installing it and setting it up (kind of sounds like, once you've set the deformer values the way you want them, you export them into an attachment that then contain those values that you wear to deform). What deformers generally do is to shift the position and/or rotation of a bone, forcing a shape which might otherwise be unattainable. For example: This deformer flattens the rear via pushing it in - but as you can see, it also affects the hair and shifts the entire pelvic bone forward, as the skeleton kind of crumples along with it, and causing a lump on the tummy as it's pushed out (it's a fairly strong deformer though, they can be less subtle - or more extreme).

Hm. Well, I'm not sure about 'the others', I never really saw the point of congregating with other vampires specifically - more competition for the food, and all that. Right now I'm just sitting in a train car at Caletta to enjoy a glass of wine and .. Window shop for some dinner.

Lurking in the shadows, of course!