GooseBad

This looks really neat! I'll have to make sure I make the next tour. Thank you for putting up notes from previous tours for solo-exploring!

Wanted some pastels, so made this decora-inspired outfit!

Love the outfit, and those great floofy tails! Wanted to go for a kind of punky street style.

Love the fancy gothic look, and the shot has wonderful atmosphere! On the opposite spectrum, I really like this and think you nailed a fun, casual look!

Ooh, I went there a little while back. Place was certainly memorable, haha. I loved how grungy it was and all the little details on the signage and such that gave it a real sense of place. Neat captures! I've never posted here before (pls be gentle), but I ended up liking this outfit I made for the Fantasy Faire. Lil' unicorn-satyr. The cute little wandering fawn that posed next to me was a nice bonus

Thanks for this topic. I've been recommended Black Dragon for photos before, but I wasn't sure if I'd be able to navigate its quirks. This is a nice collection of tips and useful info and makes me want to actually give BD a try

Like others have said, I get the feeling a lot of people doing family RP in SL are in some way trying to fill something missing IRL. And I get that. Just like a lot of us decorate the SL homes we will never have IRL. It's more than just for fun, I think, when you've had a broken family IRL or are staring at a lifetime of apartment rental. Even if you don't consciously think about it that way. I won't lie, family RP does not appeal to me at all, and sometimes I am inclined to think of it as, well: But someone like me who is not a part of that scene is likely to only hear the really scandalous kind of rumors that break through the bubble. I do think it's the sort of thing that deserves a bit of scrutiny, as for obvious reasons it seems ripe for really creepy stuff. Though, again, I'm sure most people are into it for reasons not really more sad/crazy than most of us getting wish-fulfillment through SL. 😛

I feel the same about my avi! Her appearance reflects my own tastes and style, but I kinda feel like Goose has her own character too, so to speak. Even when I want to experiment with styles and bodies, I end up tweaking things with a result that I feel reflects "her" as well as "me". Though perhaps that means nothing to anyone but myself in the end. 😛 Same here. I don't know, I just like the aesthetic I guess. If not white hair I usually go for blond or pastel colors. It feels like there's been a lot written and discussed in regards to the relationship between Second Life users and there avatars, and this thread shows why- it's such a fascinating topic! I'm really enjoying reading the different perspectives here.

Psychological Horror

I try to keep it on the lower side when I'm out and about. If I'm puttering around my home by myself I might put on a cute outfit with higher complexity, just for funs. I do wish users and creators cared more about these things. People watching is the best part of SL for me, I want to see people's cool avatars, not jellydolls! But the 300k+ rendering monstrosities can make it harder to enjoy being in crowded places. The rendering cost calculations may be imperfect, but you don't need to be an expert to know that you really shouldn't need 100k triangles to make a handbag. I see bodies and even individual parts and clothing pieces that have more polygons than the average AAA game character, for no visible increase in quality. LL should try to incentivise better mesh practices, sure, but boy would it be nice to see more creators focus on optimizing their models even a little.

I just moved escaped from Cali, and just in time I guess. Good luck, y'all.

I brought a friend in who was experienced with 3D games and sandbox environments, and knew at least the basics of 3D modeling and the like. They still found SL's interface rather odd and unintuitive, and had a hard time navigating the world and interacting with objects. The viewer sort of works out to a mishmash of a mmo interface, a 3D modelling suite, and a web browser all in one, and it can be hard to gel all that together at first even if you have used these things individually.

I think it's a testament to Second Life's strength as a community and platform that it's stuck around for 15 years. Plenty of other games and sites have come and gone since then, or are essentially abandoned. A slow decline is probably the best one can hope for in such cases. I doubt there's some way to dramatically reverse the trend (though of course that doesn't mean new user acquisition and retention should be neglected). As others have posted, SL will never be the hot new thing on the internet ever again. But I think it still has a niche it can fill. As a relic of an older internet, maybe, but that appeals to some people. At least it does to me. Sansar, HiFi, Sinespace and the like offer a rather different experience, which may be more in line with the general trend of the internet- smaller spaces, siloed off communities. But I prefer the big, weird, semi-contiguous world of SL. In the end, as long as it's profitable, SL will probably stick around for a long while yet. If the data provided by LL is accurate, that seems to be the case.

The law was passed to stop sites like Backpage.com that hid behind the first amendment to profit from the sex traffickers using their service. Censorship sucks, but too many children were being hurt- something had to give. SL isn't the same as Backpage or Craigslist- you're not advertising for IRL sex. I can't imagine pixel prostitutes will be affected. I wouldn't be surprised if Craigslist's personals came back after the initial legal kerfluffle dies down. Backpage was the biggest target, here.