Coffee Pancake

So we just had a lab gab, blah blah blah ... the contents are not what this thread is about. Would they be better with a real human rather than an avatar ? Brad sounded pretty excited and animated .. and his avatar is a brick, the whole scene was stiff and unreal. Weird .. in a way that kinda makes sense to us, but, unwatchable to anyone else. SL is real people not puppets. Minecraft use real people with real names, so does everyone else.

The PC I sit at .. it's a Frankenstein, parts of my home / build server, parts of my gaming rig, all hodge podged together with the drives from my NAS after shuffling PC parts about to donate some upgrades .. that I then stuck a 4080 super in for blender reasons (and am now in limbo as I need a new mobo that has space for a second GPU, only this card is 3.5 slots and insanely big). I have no idea what it's cost or worth a this point. Gentoo Linux with an occasionally used PCI pass-though windows VM (mainly for steam VR->quest3 games) I'm probably just going to build it into a 19" rack and fill it with water cooling and unicorn vomit leds. I have spent thousands on PC's and hardware to test, debug and benchmark SL. including a number of original cheese-grater mac pros & M1 laptop, boxes of graphics cards (many of them picked specifically because they had terrible drivers). PC, hardware in general and restoring stuff is a major hobby and I have computers going back 40 years and all the tooling needed to work and repair them. It's been fun giving some of this junk of a little extra life while working on Catznip, especially when it's been to gain insight into issues that only really show up on actual ewaste.

Thanks for reporting my flickr !! I had totally forgotten about that site and wasn't actually using it, although next time .. try to be less of a coward if you disagree with something I've said.

I think this was the community meeting that we were all expecting to go over fall out from the recent allegations.

It never rains but it pours,

Isn't it time for a little honesty around here? We're not blind.

Thanks to SL's unique economy, for some, this isn't a novelty or escape. This is their place of work. Very few have hundreds of USD spare a month to drop on a region without that at least covering it's operating costs. No one has full time job hours to plug into making content year in year out without that paying the bills. Things are on a razors edge for much of the creator community, this is all a matter of survival. It's popular here to sneer about those who make a living in and from their activities in SL, but that has been the promise of this platform since the start. It's also one of the only selling points proven to drive growth.

If it can happen to huge brand platforms that will qualify for meetings ahead of time, we're a wave of a hand away from oblivion. My point isn't they will object to our antics and rain fire, they might not even notice and just keep pushing the usual 'no smut' policies. oops. Killed a weird game. *shrug* The 5 year post sale partnership has a Sword of Damocles aspect, what happens then.

Did you miss what happened to onlyfans. How about this ACLU petition to mastercard over sex work? https://action.aclu.org/petition/mastercard-sex-work-work-end-your-unjust-policy I'm not being alarmist here. This is not some imagined fantasy disaster, this keeps actually happening and is something I had hoped of all here, you would be a little more informed about. This message is not for us. Our people is employees of Tilia and Linden Lab. Our customers is Tilia's corporate customers. So VRChat, Upland, Avatus, Kidari Studio, LEVVE⅃S, Astra and the rest. We are not included, customers .. residents .. players of this game, Second Life. Linden Lab walked into this on purpose. Intent-fully. The sale is their profit .. or cutting their losses having failed to make Tilia into more than simply the company that processes our funds. We're not all that. We're not even at the table. We're the albatross. Welcome to sex Wendys, may I take your order?

This is not a partnership. This is an acquisition. https://venturebeat.com/games/thunes-acquires-tilia-payments-firm-from-second-life-owner-linden-research/ Any partnership post sale will exist between Linden Lab and Thunes to provide a payment processing for us to buy & sell L$ for 5 years (we have no details at this time, the devil as always will be in the fine print). LL have made a single line statement and made it clear (to Inara) they do not intend to add to the information that's been published on various news sites, and will not have further details for us till May 20th. It's hard to draw any conclusion at this point, least of concerning corporate mood. We have had the same 29 words posted here and on reddit with promise of more details in a little under a month's time. Concerning the single biggest platform change since LL itself was acquired, perhaps the single biggest shift in platform offering in SL's entire history that will impact everyone and everything we do. This is not how good news is delivered. Making it far easier for far flung corporate morality decisions to upend everything we do, as has been done to several other (far more valuable) internet properties over the years, and is currently getting our community booted from flickr. This is not some small policy change or drama. This is a fundamental part of the platform offering now under the complete and permanent control of an independent 3rd party (regulatory approval pending). They bought the asset they wanted. We are not that asset. Nothing we do is that asset. Nor is our existing business the reason they bought that asset. If we were all that, Linden Lab wouldn't have decided to sell the asset to begin with.

That isn't going to change though, there will likely be more intermediate options (L$ to some crypto or doordash wallet), but if you want L$ to cashy money .. that exchange fee has to be paid at some point.

"mainstreamness" has been the dream for this mess for two decades. The adult content rules and purge and zindra migration of 2009 was driven by that desire, there are new articles still online about how cleaning up SL was good for business. Flickr is doing it's own purge at the moment, and our communities are right in the firing line.

Tumblr went from a $1.1 billion purchase to $3 million junk.

If the payment processor says no smut. We're dead. This is not a reach. This has happened several times now, we have been immune as we owned the payment processor, now we don't.

Tumblr didn't wake up one day and decide it no longer needed feet. That change was imposed.