AyelaNewLife

At least I had the decency to find a practically useless patch of hillside/cliffside for my skybox flat No seriously it was like a 60 degree incline, no one is building anything worthwhile on that

Vanilla Bae has one, they have a gift board that changes each day rather than a full panel, so you guys will have missed the first half dozen, but they are often pretty great edit: oh and a ~200L join fee, but that's worth it just for the normal gifts I think

I think that's the key to "good" pickup lines. They're an attention-grabber, an icebreaker, an interesting introduction; but that's it. You can't pickup line your way into someone's pants, but you can get the ball rolling. I got a great opener on Tinder a while back: "Would you like me to start with an inappropriate compliment, an over-cheesed pickup line, or a pathetic attempt at negging?" It made me laugh, and kickstarted the pair of us mocking all the terrible tropes of people we'd met there. Great way to start off a conversation.

If the shop hasn't given you a manual redelivery in over three weeks, the chances of them giving you a manual refund is probably close to zero. So I'd be patient, and if you've not heard back by friday, then try speaking to the rep again and make it clear that the redelivery notecard got you no response twice in the past etc. It's the downside of LL's "hands off" policy towards the economy; all of the consumer rights and protections that you enjoy in any first world country don't exist here.

Yeah, I'd nope right out after reading that, that's waaaaaay too strong for an icebreaker. That's wedding vow material, not an opening line. At least buy me dinner first

Vista have a free AO that's a couple of years old, but is still top notch. It's also not that widely used, I don't think I've ever recognised anyone else using it. It's probably better than any cheap AO, you'd need to splash the cash to get a noticeable upgrade.

Yep. I made the pose and lighting with one hair, realised that the braid was defying gravity, and swapped to this one, missed the overlap issue until after I'd taken the shot. Luckily this was taken on my old land and I'd left all the stands and lighting up, so I can reshoot, but... ugh. Annoying.

Reason #389 why I can't wait for BoM:

Don't be afraid of having an arm length slider setting of 80 or so. There's a tendency among both male and female avatars to roleplay a T Rex, and that's partly because of the way most mesh avatars are built - 50 isn't really "average" for most. Just remember, if your arms look too short to comfortably wipe your ass standing up, they are too short

I don't know much about animesh, so leaving that to one side... I don't think BoM will have a noticeable impact on the overall health of the economy. It will have a noticeable effect on our quality of life, for sure! I can't wait to dump my freckles straight onto my skin layer rather than an onion skin, and finally being able to wear an effects layer with them without having to swap to Slink hands (insert rant out Maitreya's feature deficit here). System clothing isn't likely to be used by many, but there's so much more that can be done with cosmetics, effects and underwear/stockings. But does BoM let us do anything new? Not really. Anything that can be done with system layers under BoM can currently be done with appliers. We can just use more. Which is awesome; but where's the new market for creators? All current applier creators will just make system tattoos/layers too, not much different to adding a new body type to their existing range. So it will be great for us, but will it spark another gold rush of spending? Probably not. Which is also good for us, I already spend too much

At this point you have to be trolling. There's no way one person could be so wrong about so many things, and yet so utterly convinced that his delusions are accurate. Please, someone tell me that Prok is a long-running injoke that has gone way over my head, this can't be real.

First off, if a creator were to say "No customer support or manual redeliveries on Saturdays", I would have zero problem with that. That's totally fine, whether for religious reasons or just raw laziness. If a creator wants to shut down their automated vendors and marketplace because of a personal conviction that prevents them from "working" on a given day - stuff that requires no work or input from them to keep running - then... that's less ideal, but still okay I guess. That's logically coherent. But if a creator wants to keep their marketplace shop open (so they'll still be selling stuff and making money), keep the inworld vendors open (so they'll still be selling stuff and making money), yet claim that they're closing the store on the Sabbath and then banning anyone that buys anything from the shops that they left open, that's stupid. They're not actually closing the store and therefore not meeting their own definition of keeping the Sabbath, they're just causing problems for themselves and for their customers for no actual benefit. Now they're allowed to do stupid things, of course. That's part of the free economy of SL. But I'm allowed to say that their decisions are stupid, and that life's too short to deal with such nonsense, and to go shop elsewhere instead. My 2p, for what little it's worth.

Pickup lines can work as an icebreaker with me... sometimes. If they make me laugh. Mostly they don't. If you want to actually make an impact with me, I'd say just act like a normal human being. "Grug want sex, giv" won't work, neither will some pretentious rambling about how intriguing m'lady is, neither would anything involving third person roleplaying a paragraph for the word "hello". Just... be a person. I like people.

Okay so quick data point to add to the discussion: In between writing my last couple of posts, I asked four of my male friends/contacts to describe the gender balance of their friends list. I gave them a few options, and one of them picked "mostly women", the other two picked "almost entirely women". That would seem to support Scylla's theory, right? Eh. Sorta. All four of them are involved in the "adult flickr" community, three of them are photographers that do a lot of erotic work, and the other is pretty much just a model. That's a community that is overwhelmingly made up of women. The events there will usually have a 5:1 women:men ratio or higher, and talented male models and photographers are unfortunately quite rare. And, just like me, a large chunk of their friends list is made up of contacts in that community, almost like having your work colleagues' numbers in your phone. They are listed, but that doesn't mean that you're friends. So I asked them to repeat the question, but only consider the people they actually considered to be friends, rather than just contacts. Two said "mostly women", one said "half and half".... and the other had to leave for work before I asked him, whoops. Does that sample of 3/4 people tell us anything? Maybe. I do think there's a difference between "friends" and "contacts", and I do think the gender balance of your "contacts" will be swayed by sexual interest for most people. Less for some people and more for others, for sure, but surely there's an overall influence? But actual friends? Sexual interest might have an indirect connection, maybe; a guy contacts a girl (or vice versa) looking for the sexytimes, gets added to the friends list, yet an actual friendship ends up developing. If you are subconsciously gender-blind in your friendships, yet have many more interactions with women than men, surely you'd end up with more female friends than male, right? That's why one of the men I spoke to answered "mostly" to both questions; proportionally he has as many male contacts as he has male friends. Yet the other two are different, the other two men have a higher proportion of their actual friends as male than their contacts list. Which gives another potential explanation as to what Scylla is seeing; men still have a tendency to be friends with men (homosociality), but that is heavily diluted with the raw number of women they encounter. Whereas in real life most men will have more male acquaintances than female, in SL the population is not 50:50 but probably closer to 60:40 or 70:30 (not sure exact split), so most men will end up meeting more women than men. So even if they have a conscious or subconscious "friendship preference" for men over women, they still end up with more female friends than men. Probably. I think that's one factor among many, at least. Because there is no "one correct answer" for why we see certain trends in populations of people, it's always a whole bunch of factors (some of which counter the overall trend anyway) that average out across an entire population of people. And sometimes those trends even match up to the stereotypes we have... and other times, they do not. Sorry for the brain dump x

The OP based this on her personal anecdotes: "Anecdotally, this is something I've been told at one time or another by probably most of my male acquaintances in SL: their friends, they have told me, are nearly all women. (Two of my male friends have said this to me literally within the last three days.)" So you'd either support or counter her theory with anecdotes of your own, depending on whether this stereotype matched your reality or not. If most of the replies match what she's already been told, then that stereotype probably has some truth to it. If most of the replies talk of different experiences, then the reverse is true. In either case, she's learned something new rather than just assuming that the stereotype is true. I really do not think that Scylla is looking for validation alone, she's made it quite clear (in subsequent edits and posts) that correction would be equally great as validation. This thread can be boiled down to her saying "I've noticed this, has anyone else noticed this?", and to that question both no and yes are equally valid answers. "This offends me" is not an answer to that question.

If the OP had written "Ok, so, yes. That was a bit click-baity." as the first line, and had said "apparently this is the case, is this true, and if so why?" to make it clear that a) the title was not to be taken seriously, and b) they weren't preaching the gospel of the vapid stereotypes they had written about but instead was just after a discussion, open to being corrected, then yeah I'd be fine with that. I'd have taken the post in the spirit it was intended. And yes, some people would have been offended anyway. Probably more than were offended by this thread. I'd still be shouting at them

Cut it out. Look, written text isn't always the best way to communicate. It's easy for words to be written with one intention, but received as with another. That's fine, these misunderstandings happen. But Scylla has openly stated many times, including in the first post, that it was meant in jest. Stop harping on about it. We get it, you didn't think it was funny and you took it literally. It was still meant as a joke.

In all honesty, I thought it was very clear that she was talking about how subconscious driving forces manifest across the relationships of roughly 200,000 men (my best guess at the portion of the playerbase that's male; others will say that this number is closer to 300,000). And it's not exactly controversial to point out that we are still base animals driven by base needs; even if we develop ways to control those needs. The only way to talk about the behaviours of an entire demographic group of that size is with sweeping generalisations; which means there will be thousands and thousands of men that don't fit that pattern. That's how sweeping generalisations work; they are patterns of behaviour that only properly manifest when you average out huge samples.

I've seen the opposite. I know a guy who mostly uses female avatars (he has at least one male one too), and who openly "outs" himself in his female profiles. Most people are decent human beings and don't care, or if they do then they don't let it affect how they treat him/her (no idea which is appropriate here :P), but there's always that vocal minority on the fairly busy sim we both visit that take issue. And even a small vocal minority will add up to an unacceptable number of bad and abusive encounters. Pure guessing from me here, but I think that your clan environment was closer to a "traditional video game" that much of SL, and most action-oriented video games have a mostly male playerbase, a pretty large chunk of which will use a character of a different gender. It's an accepted norm, no one cares that much, everyone moves on with life. It's a different subculture to SL as a whole. I think; I could be completely wrong of course.

As with most bad stereotypes, there's a grain of truth that's heavily diluted with nonsense. As you and Maddie have said, it's extremely likely that there are significantly more men with female avatars than vice versa. I also think that the number of people whose primary avatar's gender does not correspond to their own is pretty tiny, probably a single digit percentage. The reason why there are more female avatars than male is because more women play SL than men. Is that really a surprise? A large chunk of SL is effectively Barbies Online with a side order of home decorator, of course more women are going to be interested in that than men. No one claims that the playerbase of the latest generic shooter is 50:50 male to female, despite the fact that it appeals to "male norms" much more than "female norms", so why must SL have a 50:50 playerbase? (Probably because the more fervent believers in the "90% of female avatars are men" garbage are those men that think SL is just 3D facebook, and who can't comprehend why women might have a legitimate reason for not voicing with them. Facebook has a 50:50 gender split (it doesn't actually), therefore SL must also, therefore the "gender imbalance" must be cause of men using female avatars, and that's the reason why they won't strip off on cam with me. Or that's my theory, anyway.) And before anyone starts to moan about me generalising - I'm talking about splitting ~600,000 people into two groups, of course I'm going to generalise and of course there will be thousands of exceptions to what I'm saying. That's how generalisations work.

I mean this reads to me like you're responding to the assumption that 'Callum is gay therefore he must hang out with women'... when the opposite was stated. If that's not how you meant it, then fair enough - but that's how I read your post. Forum posts aren't always the easiest way to communicate

When dealing with demographic-scale trends, stereotyping is often neither wrong nor incorrect. A stereotype can be true as an overall trend and yet there can still be vast numbers of people that do not fit that trend, and that's okay. eg: Most men have more female friends on their friends list than male vs You're a man so you must have more female friends on their friends list than male The first is okay, and almost certainly true. The second is where stereotyping becomes dangerous, misleading and potentially harmful.

Did you read anything that was actually posted? Phil said that his friends list was weighted towards women because of his sexual preferences, and that the reverse would be true for Callum; it's not really unfair to assume that an openly gay man is sexually attracted to men rather than women. Callum even said that his friends list is 100% male, why are you ranting about gay men preferring the company of women? You're just raving at a straw man.

Putting in another +1 for YS&YS

You've described none of the actual symptoms of the bake server outage, and your symptoms were present both before and after the outage, so yeah it's pretty much certain that this is not the cause for your recent issues. Also LL effectively self-DDOSing their own server has nothing to do with software problems or bugs, there isn't anything that can "remain for the rest of us". Don't get me wrong, the self-DDOS was hilarious (yet worrying), but it's not the culprit for you, sorry.