AyelaNewLife

Also this:

I feel like I'm repeating myself here. No one offered a single counter to anything I said yesterday. Let's break this down for a moment, again. The same community standards apply to inworld, the marketplace and the forum. The forum is covered by the same guidelines as General-rated land. What you're effectively asking for here is a change to the General rating. The impact of that goes far, far beyond a few forum threads. The opinion that matters here is not mine or yours, but that of the law. Primarily, the common view of the legal system of California, as that is what has jurisdiction over Linden Lab. We don't matter. They may also have regard to other sets of laws in order to avoid alienating large parts of their userbase. If the view of the courts is that the pixelated boobies of a 16 year old girl is inappropriate, that view is the only one that matters. And consciously giving that the okay (rather than being slow to remove the content) would have massive legal ramifications for Linden Lab. If their legal team feel the risk of the court taking that view is likely, that opinion also matters more than yours and mine. This is also true with the scenario of a 16 year old seeing adult pixel boobies; we all know 16 year olds have seen far, far worse, but that's not the point. If it's a legal no-no, it's a no-no. And again, the PR damage of the company openly saying that this content is okay is damaging in a totally different way to simply being too slow to remove offending content. Apples and oranges. It is therefore entirely reasonable for Linden Lab to keep General ratings as they are, and play it safe with no female boobage allowed. If your argument is then to ban the male nipple - remember that you are asking for the General rating to be changed. Every marketplace listing that shows a male nipple would need removing. Every male avatar topless at a General beach or other region would need to be banned. That's a massive and arguably unjustifiable restriction that would drive thousands away from the platform. Not viable. I would love it if the above was not true. But it is true. Simply put, this is not the avenue to drive cultural and more importantly legislative change. Second Life cannot lead the way here.

I was unaware that clothing with built in posing existed. How awful.

My pet peeve is when you post a throwaway annoyance, get distracted by work, come back to find 5 pages of arguing and people disingenuously misreading what you've written. Life's too short to comb through all that noise.

Yeah, this isn't a paradox in the traditional sense, so don't worry about that exact word. It just sounds snappier than "the Fermi interesting-question-that-makes-you-go-hmmm". Also, the human race is 500,000 years old. The earliest permanent settlements were started around 5000 years ago. There are somewhere between 50 and 200 billion sun-like stars who's age is billions of years older than ours in our galaxy alone. That translates into hundreds of millions of Earth-like Goldilocks planets, billions of years older than ours. Within that head-start measuring billions of years, or roughly 10,000x the total history of the human race, they would only need to spend a few million years to fully explore the whole of the galaxy. Four orders of magnitude smaller than this 'head start'. The chances that they are yet to find us is... astronomically small.

I sympathise with LL here. It's not purely their decision. They not only have to follow the laws of where they are based - California, USA - but in many cases also have a duty to follow the relevant laws for other nations too, with respect to users from said nations. There's two relevant sets of regulations here; 1) rules regarding child pornography, and 2) rules regarding access by children to pornography. Regardless of what we might think, boobs are still viewed as sexual by many people - and many courts. Allowing topless women means allowing topless girls and teens - as consistency is key, and no one can argue that the adult female nipple is not sexual while also banning the teenage female nipple. Not only would that be uncomfortable for many, that would likely have legal consequences too. 16 and 17 year olds have access to SL. Regardless of what we might think in practice, they are legally still minors, and are crucially registered as such. Sure, teens lie about their age to see far worse than a few pixel boobies; but that's entirely different to when Linden Lab are on paper aware of their age. In both cases, Linden Lab also needs to consider the PR implications. Even if they get away with an "acktually" in court, who the hell wants to be known as the platform that caters for nonces? Especially given the long history Second Life has with a tiny yet stubborn minority of paedophiles. The only realistic option would be to keep female nipples out of the forum, marketplace and General areas, with perhaps allowing adult topless women in the adult sections. Remember, Linden Lab would need to be consistent across the entirety of Second Life, and would not have radically different rulesets for their various platforms. That leaves your second option, of banning male nipples to even things out. Putting aside my personal opinion on the delectability of the male chest, the cultural norm is that topless men are allowed. Being more puritanical than society as a whole would not only be kinda ridiculous, but would result in an avalanche of moderation issues. We're talking about a purge of most marketplace listings involving partially or fully topless men, a mass purge of any men in just shorts on a General-marked beach, etc... utterly unworkable. Not a chance of this working out. As much as I hate to admit it - the status quo is therefore the best option for Linden Lab. It sucks that this is the case... but it is. I sympathise with LL here. It's not purely their decision. They not only have to follow the laws of where they are based - California, USA - but in many cases also have a duty to follow the relevant laws for other nations too, with respect to users from said nations. There's two relevant sets of regulations here; 1) rules regarding child pornography, and 2) rules regarding access by children to pornography. Regardless of what we might think, boobs are still viewed as sexual by many people - and many courts. Allowing topless women means allowing topless girls and teens - as consistency is key, and no one can argue that the adult female nipple is not sexual while also banning the teenage female nipple. Not only would that be uncomfortable for many, that would likely have legal consequences too. 16 and 17 year olds have access to SL. Regardless of what we might think in practice, they are legally still minors, and are crucially registered as such. Sure, teens lie about their age to see far worse than a few pixel boobies; but that's entirely different to when Linden Lab are on paper aware of their age. In both cases, Linden Lab also needs to consider the PR implications. Even if they get away with an "acktually" in court, who the hell wants to be known as the platform that caters for nonces? Especially given the long history Second Life has with a tiny yet stubborn minority of paedophiles. The only realistic option would be to keep female nipples out of the forum, marketplace and General areas, with perhaps allowing adult topless women in the adult sections. Remember, Linden Lab would need to be consistent across the entirety of Second Life, and would not have radically different rulesets for their various platforms. That leaves your second option, of banning male nipples to even things out. Putting aside my personal opinion on the delectability of the male chest, the cultural norm is that topless men are allowed. Being more puritanical than society as a whole would not only be kinda ridiculous, but would result in an avalanche of moderation issues. We're talking about a purge of most marketplace listings involving partially or fully topless men, a mass purge of any men in just shorts on a General-marked beach, etc... utterly unworkable. Not a chance of this working out. As much as I hate to admit it - the status quo is therefore the best option for Linden Lab. It sucks that this is the case... but it is.

The version above is shortened too much. There are hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way similar to our sun. Statistically speaking, it is extremely likely that many of these stars are orbited by Earth-like planets. It is extremely likely that some of these planets will have life on them. Given enough time, it is extremely likely that some of this life will evolve into intelligent civilisations capable of space travel. The Milky Way could be completely explored in the space of millions of years, even at the slow speeds we can currently explain. Many stars are billions of years older than the Sun. It is therefore extremely likely that Earth has been visited by an extraterrestrial civilisation. We have no recorded evidence of such a visit. It's not so much a paradox in the traditional sense, as it is a conflict between probability and scale suggesting that we must have been visited by intelligent life, and the total lack of evidence of intelligent life anywhere but Earth.

Pet peeve: Americans that be like "I'm ethnically part Polish and part Italian" because that's where one set of ancestors (most likely traced through the male line only) came from seven entire generations ago. Like bish neither country actually existed back then, what on earth are you smoking?! Imagine being so ashamed of your own culture and nation that you refuse to acknowledge its existence, and instead clinging to a mythological fantasy version of your past that doesn't reflect the cultural melting pot that mainland Europe has always been. It's kinda sad. And it doesn't really happen anywhere else in the world.

Okay, so I'm gonna realtalk for a moment here. Yes, the US is large (and not just the people!) and culturally diverse. So are a great many other places. The idea that it's okay to mush the vast range of culture or even just food available in the UK, or in Scandinavia, into one lump and yet get defensive about the variety on offer in the states... it's kinda laughable. This cuts both ways or not at all. But we're all just joking around, so it's all gucci.

Don't forget "I'm going to go try elegant, refined, delicious cuisine, and I'm going to start in the nation that gave us Guy Fieri!" said no foodie ever.

For the benefit of the Americans: It's pronounced "Lea & Perrins". You're welcome.

I've now blocked all the clueless colonials who have DEFILED the sacred sauce with their mislabelled abomination. We need a new crusade.

My home is on a skybox platform over some utterly unremarkable cliffside land. There's nothing at ground level that clearly marks out where my parcel begins and ends. If someone where to find their way onto my platform, they'd be doing so intentionally. Which means visitors are extremely rare, and without exception have been unwelcome.

Okies, 30 second tutorial time with Ayela! (I lied; it's more than 30 seconds.) This is one of those things that takes practice, as it's more of a "feel" for what would work in editing when selecting windlights. So the best thing to do is start simple. And by simple, I mean just using the one snap. This is a bit of a "for dummies" tutorial, so soz if I'm stating the obvious. Load a photo into your editing suite of choice; I use GIMP, but The Forbidden Software has a near-identical feature for this. Here's one I prepared earlier: Now duplicate this layer. By right clicking the layer in the layer window, and hitting duplicate layer. Select the top layer to make sure you're editing the top copy, then change the mode from Normal to Overlay. For me, this window looks like this: (Please ignore the file name - I don't often take photos in Firestorm :P) The overlay mode does, well, just that. It overlays the pixels of the two layers, combining them into something more vibrant - like this: Okay that's more vibrant for sure. Too virbrant. Ew. We don't like this. But we like vibrancy; just not this much. We therefore will change the Opacity slider. Layers are applied top to bottom. Opacity refers to how 'translucent' each layer is; 100 opacity means the layer is fully opaque and you cannot see any of the layers below, while 0 opacity means the layer is fully transparent and does not impact the layers beneath. In this case, we are going to set the slider to 20, as we want just a touch of the vibrant top layer, but mostly want the tones of the base shot. That's better! We've just added a little more kick to the colours of the base shot, without doing anything fancy. (Two things to note: using filters etc will generally only affect the selected layer. I therefore get my layers in order, save a separate copy of the photo at that moment, then merge the layers into one and continue editing. Secondly; most layer modes aren't that useful for what we're doing. Normal is just... normal. Overlay is this. Lighten/Darken to just that; the two layers are compared, and the lighter pixel is used. Addition, uh, 'adds' the brightness/vibrancy of the two layers together, can be useful at low opacities. I don't personally use any other mode.) But let's go deeper. Let's introduce a second windlight layer into the mix. The camera position has not moved, nor has my avatar. The sun angle of this windlight was manually set to match the previous windlight; 8:25am, and 0.388. Because of that, the shadows match up perfectly with the original, and thus the two can easily be layered. Please note that viewers do not like changing existing windlight times to anything other than the nearest 5 minutes - so always make sure your initial windlight is a multiple of 5 minutes. This new layer is warm and vibrant, but doesn't look too natural in it's raw form. We want to include a portion of this vibrancy and warmth, thus will be layering. Let's turn off the duplicated original layer, by toggling visibility of the layer. Then, let's add this new layer at the top, and keeping the mode at Normal, set the opacity to 30. Okay, so we've got the warmth and a little vibrancy now. It's not quite as vibrant as the shot two photos above, however. So let's duplicate this new layer, set the mode to overlay, and set the opacity to 10 this time. We don't want to go overboard and drown out the base shot. And there we have it - our finished shot! ...or at least, we've finished layering, and can now tweak further with editing if needed. The white background was actually a poor choice for this; a conventional background would demonstrate this better, I feel. But that's an Ayela Layering 101. That's the basic building blocks of technique, and with practice you can get more and more convoluted layering setups done, to taste. I hope this helps! Probably not.

This may have been possible, if extremely difficult, if there had been a sudden switch from system avatars to modern mesh avatars. But there wasn't; the slow and organic transition makes what you're describing implausible. For example, we had a fairly extensive period in which mesh bodies with system heads was the status quo. Naturally, those bodies ended at this border between head and body on the skin; and the mesh heads that followed carried on that burden. It's the equivalent of why the rail network in the UK is single-decker. There is nothing inherently wrong with having taller, two-level trains such as those found in mainland Europe, America, Asia... basically everywhere else. However, in part as we largely pioneered steam rail travel and so built most of our infrastructure at an earlier date than most, we have a huge amount of tunnels and bridges that cannot easily be extended to accept the taller vehicles available today. There's no reason why we can't change all that up, of course - it's just effort, so we let that legacy physical debt constrain what we do today.

Because the system avatar skin is broken up into three sections; upper body, lower body and head. The head section includes the neck. The gradual and organic transition to the mesh bodies of today continued that tradition; thus mesh bodies covered the upper and lower body sections, and the seam with mesh heads falls neatly on the seam between the body sections and the head section. I have no idea why the furry community broke the mold with their setup. Most likely someone saying "wait that's dumb, lemme fix".

It's justifiable frustration at work here. I think it's human nature to want to do something, anything to stop a problem like this. It's counter-intuitive to accept that the current flawed setup is probably about as good as it can get (or would be if enforced properly), and sometimes people need to talk through the alternatives and why they won't work or are counter-productive.

A volunteer moderator system can work. It requires staff time to monitor and administer of course, and with hindsight, this forum does not have anywhere near the traffic needed to justify that staff time. With the scaling that can happen with far busier forums this might be an avenue worth considering, but not here. What's needed is a hardware identifier ban. It's not foolproof, but considerably stronger than an IP or MAC ban. However, I'm not even sure if LL have tried anything more than an account ban. Adding in a delay just means a determined griefer will queue up accounts in advance, while turning away legitimate new players.

Not even a day later, and this is relevant once more. If you're not willing to have non-US working day coverage of the report queue, then set up a system of volunteer moderators to do that for you.

I usually assume that if someone is complaining about a ban, yet either doesn't explain the situation or does so only in the vaguest of terms, the ban was probably justified. Especially if said person says some variation of "all I did was defend myself!".

I'm glad - as that's precisely what I'm trying to do! The viewer is just so powerful by itself, I just try to give it a little nudge to make things slightly better and more refined. Incidentally, this is why I try and get a near-publishable base shot to start with. My own skills and technique work far better when trying to enhance something good than create something good. About every half dozen photos or so, I'll try to cut corners and take a bunch of snaps, not one of which I'm happy with, in the hope that I can combine them to create something new (ie, significantly different lighting to any one base shot), and those ones almost always sucks. One day I'll get the hint.

A vague acquaintance of mine had a stalker go crazy on her again today. They rolled a new account with a similar name and identical display name, joined several high-traffic groups and started to spout large volumes of allegedly personal information, starting from their SL romantic life and then on to contact details and other RL information. This has supposedly happened half a dozen times before. As with the recent forum pest, they're left unbanned for hours at a time to spread their damage. When they are finally banned, they are left free to simply roll another account, without any measures put in place to prevent such a thing. In this particular case, the main account of the stalker is known, proof of the link has been provided to LL, and yet the main account has not been touched. Without any meaningful consequences for their actions, this psycho is free to keep up their campaign of hate on LL's own platform. So I guess my pet peeve is LL's morally unjustifiable approach to moderation of both the forums and the world itself. "Just block lol" is not an acceptable response when someone is conducting a campaign of mass doxxing.

I think browsing the marketplace could be actually useful if there was a way to filter by listing date, similar to the existing filter by price. Just being able to cut out anything that predates my body would make clothing searching at least vaguely tolerable, for example.