Waialae

This whole thread is really surprising... it looks like the prevalent SL resident position on racism is something like "art imitates life, suck it up Buttercup." There are many things we can do in RL to address racism, but to have it simply shrugged off here is annoying. And enlightening. Looks like SL may not be for me, or for any POC, after all.

Kung hee fat choy everybody! I wish you a year of peace, health, love, and prosperity.

I have several alts, most of whom were created to represent characters I was writing. Creating a scene and seeing the alts together in it helps me to visualize random details that my imagination might miss. Once a WIP is finished I usually change the alt into a fun animal like a capybara or a giraffe, or change the appearance to more closely resemble friends and family. I've deleted a few of the alt accounts, but left most of them. Logging into them occasionally can be a nice trip down memory lane.

Guy Linden replied to my ticket yesterday "Thank you for the follow up. I was aware of some reports of issues, however, they have no affected me the times I have checked. I am sorry for any inconvenience, thank you for detailing the concern." That was it. Strange, I've never had LL tech support seem so dismissive of an issue impacting many residents. Sadly it sounds as though LL tech support may be treating the teleporter outages as little more than rumors. I replied "Guy, sorry you are unable to confirm that the teleporters have been down. Dyna Mole may be able to provide technical details to you that I as an end user cannot. Does LL keep minute-by-minute records of how many residents are in the Portal Park region? When the teleporters are down I often see residents "parked" at the teleporter waiting for it to work again. There are many reasons for people to gather in Portal Park, but records from recent days will likely show certain times with small crowds. Those times may be examples of teleporter outage." Fingers crossed that our friend Dyna Mole can help in ways that tech support is not willing or able.

Thanks for your work on this Dyna! Yes, a support ticket was started and I received a reply today from Guy Linden. Fingers crossed...

Thanks Alwin, had no idea.

Hi folks. The teleporters in Portal Parks 1 & 2 have been up and down for weeks. I enjoy the old skool game Linden Realms, and my first thought was that LL might be acclimating SL residents to the removal of a game that pays residents to play. But... then I tried all the teleporters in Portal Park and found that NONE were working. They were up briefly yesterday, but are down again today. Looks like the problem is more complex than it originally appeared. In any case, I submitted a ticket to SL Support yesterday about the transporters being broken. For updates look at ticket 1946734 on the support website: https://lindenlab.freshdesk.com/support/tickets/1946734

Nice! Beautiful home!

It's all in the name, isn't it. Abuse Report, not "disagreement" report, not even "being a jerk" report. Everyone has their own opinions, their own morals and ethics, their own cultures, and their own truths and realities... so I try to adopt a "live and let live" attitude towards most folks. UNTIL what they're saying becomes harassment, or what they're doing obviously breaks SL's rules. I have no problem submitting an AR on those folks, because their words or actions are negatively impacting everyone's SL experience.

Thanks Diamond, that explains a lot.

Thanks Rowan, great comparison chart! Looks like building a Homestead region is less expensive than building a Full region. But renting is still less expensive than building or buying. I can only guess that the big property developers may get some sort of financial incentive to build multiple regions at once, lowering the price of building to the point that renting becomes less expensive. .

Wow, Flower, you're so right! That was my first mistake: comparing rent (WEEKLY) to tier fee (MONTHLY). So yes, multiply rent by 4 (or to be most accurate, multiply by 52/12). But the mainland parcel still works out to be far more expensive. Rowan, thanks, good comparison. It looks like the difference in costs reflects the difference in prims / land capacity. I would expect that as the quantity of prims increases the price per unit would decrease - but instead it works out the opposite way: the more prims you buy, the higher the cost per prim becomes. Strange. I would love to jungle landscape my SL home, but not if the additional tier required means paying over USD2,400 per year!

Aloha Rowan. Thanks, yes, I've been renting 1/4 private homestead regions that allow 1250 prims. I know that a Full Region allows 20,000 prims rather than the 5,000 on a Homestead, so in theory land on a Full Region should cost 4 times as much. So 4 times the L2,000 rent is L8,000 - not L15,000. Added to that: the Monthly Maintenance fee is USD 109 (Homestead) or USD 229 (Full). 1/4 of these costs is USD 27.25 (Homestead) or USD57.25 (Full) monthly. A big difference for the number of prims / land capacity is included in the price, but the cost of buying a mainland parcel still defies my limited logic.

The difference between tier and rent makes it seem as though landlords must be losing a lot of cash every month, which I suspect is not the case at all. I'm missing something important here, but what?

I have rented 1/4 regions in the past, and wondered about the economics of buying a 1/4 region. My rent for most 1/4 regions was about L1,700 - L2,400 per month. But Dashboard > Land Manager > Land Use Fees explains that if I purchase a 1/4 region I will have to pay USD67 per month, which is roughly L15,000. This means that the same amount of land - 1/4 sim - can be enjoyed for either L2,000 or for L15,000 per month. Renting seems an obvious choice, especially given all the airports, military bases, GTFO Hubs, advertising boards, tall walls, low skyboxes, and police stations that plague Mainland regions. It can't be that obvious a choice, can it? What am I missing? Is it worth L13,000 per month simply to write your own land use covenant?

Looks good! Thanks for the recommendation.

Hi NardweBones. Everyone's favorite regions will depend on what type of stuff each resident enjoys. Here are a few favorites of mine: Kowloon's Gate Reborn. Based on a 1990s Japan-only video game. Looks something like Hong Kong's former Walled City, and there are apartments for rent. Las Islas. Imagine yourself in the middle of a stormy ocean, at sunset, somewhere tropical. Cann!bal. A set of beaches with a unique environment. Desert Ruins. This sim looks a lot like rural Arizona, so expect dry and dusty. SSOC - Rieri Town in Tokyo. This nicely built sim feels like another world. Freebie Galaxy. I don't visit here often now, but as a new resident the place was amazing to me. Builder's Brewery. A great community to help aspiring content creators. Enjoy teleporting!

No other pastime of mine requires that I pay $99pa to participate. It's already difficult to justify the $99pa cost of Premium, so can't imagine paying more. IMHO, the only benefit of Premium is the Linden Home, which is inexpensive compared to most private rentals. But Linden Homes are extremely frustrating because of the oddly low LI allowance. I regularly max out on the 1250 LI allowed on a residential quarter sim, so the LI allowance with a Linden Home is laughable. Bump the Linden Homes up to that same 1250 LI allowable impact and the $99pa starts to make sense. Maybe Linden Homes in Premium Plus could be a double lot, with the allowance that the Linden Homes could be removed and replaced with your own, and more finger-shaped regions would be built with all waterfront properties. And allow Linden Home buyers to select individual properties, not just a style of home. It's SO hit-or-miss whether you'll like the property they assign you to. My alts that went premium bounced from place to place until finally finding ones they liked.

This gives me hope that the resident known as Alyona Su is still here using an alt.

I think of my alts as ways to express other sides of my personality, so they're all a part of me. I suppose they could be friends of mine and of each other, though I don't really think of them that way. They're more like my proxies.

I've been quarantining for nearly two years, not leaving the house except for vaccinations and boosters. The isolation has made it clear to me that human beings are social animals - despite how much some of us would like to define ourselves as "lone wolves." 🙂 This same isolation has had a marked impact on my creativity, so I LOVE to see examples of other people being artistic and imaginative. On a smaller note, I loved to see the happy expression on my wife's face when I told her that I had ordered some more of her favorite coffee from Hawai'i.

I am enormously hopeful for humanity's long-term future, but worried about how we will react to unavoidable changes in the short-term. My belief is that we will inevitably build a better world right here on Earth as it becomes both more difficult and more expensive to continue our bad habits that are actively destroying it. Our inevitable transition to a world in which we use less energy will be painful for many, but will ultimately result in a more peaceful, sustainable, and just place. By "we" I'm guessing that you mean humanity collectively. But because all beings all have different desires, aspirations and appetites I suspect that as individuals we will always be driving humanity further and further apart from one another. We seem to be far more interested in our differences than our similarities, so the world we share is likely to continue to allow some to flourish at the expense of others, and this balance will continue to shift back and forth. What gives me hope is to see examples of people more concerned with our collective well-being than in personal wealth. As for colonizing the solar system and galaxy, it's important to recognize that each of us have already done this. Here we are sitting still in front of our computers, not realizing that in fact we are rotating at 1670 KPH (speed of Earth's rotation), or that the room we casually occupy in this moment is in fact traveling at a speed of 110,000 KPH as Earth rotates around the Sun. And then of course we are also constantly moving as a component of the Milky Way galaxy, that speed varying relative to other Milky Way components. Being in space is something like being in nature, in that we are never separate from these things. Space and nature aren't places "out there," that we need to travel to... they're right here, right now. I suspect that space travel as we commonly think of it will soon no longer be possible. Rockets are fueled by fossil fuels, which are quickly sunsetting. There is (currently) no other way to break free of our atmosphere... though we may be able to break free of our atmosphere by destroying it, which our actions make clear is a real possibility. Our task moving forward isn't to find new places to treat as exploitable and mine for resources - that's what viruses do - but instead to reverse such behaviors, and by doing so to become better partners to the planet we already call home.

When we report abuse to LL we get an auto-replay with a thanks and sorry. Yeah, we would all like to hear back from LL with something more concrete, like Avatar X has been banned from your region. But to protect resident privacy, LL is unlikely to let us know the outcome of whatever action they take or don't take. It's something like filing a complaint about a coworker with your employer's Human Resources dept. Your coworker may be put on notice or disciplined somehow, but you won't be told about it.

I'm clearly in the minority here, but I have no interest in weapons. Gun violence and divisiveness fill the headlines in RL, and one of the reasons I log into SL is to find a more peaceful and artistic world. Guns in RL are often a sign that people feel insecure or unsafe, and in SL these problems don't exist - or if they do to a far lesser degree. Guns in SL are a sign for me to leave a region, just as gun proponents hope they might work in RL. Having said that, fighting for your life gives an adrenaline boost to nearly all games on Playstation, X-Box, Switch, etc. so I understand the chemical excitement of danger. But just as I'm an explorer rather than a warrior on Playstation, I have no desire to invite violence into SL. As for numbers, it's difficult to say. I rarely see weapons in SL, and the ones I do see tend to be Samurai swords (I understand this may be more indicative of the places I visit than of all SL though). The few avatars I've seen with guns have looked out of place, like ones carrying guns as they walk down the street in a suburban homes region or wearing full combat gear as they stroll through a beach region. Weird. Though I don't find violence (or the threat of violence) entertaining or attractive, I get that many people do. Combat RP regions may be a hot spot for weapons. Have to admit though, seeing "combat" in a region description is a red flag to me, like regions that use "rape" or "slave" in their description.

When I see a fun item I right-click, select edit, open the profile of the creator, and then do a screen print of it all. That way I have a reminder of how the item looked, and the creator's profile often indicates a store name. The right-click is also handy because it shows the Land Impact, an important factor for the many of us whose property regularly bumps our LI ceiling 🙂 The screen print can easily be renamed after the item you like, then the screen prints kept in a folder on my desktop. Using screen prints is a big help for me, because I can open them all at once and scroll through them, and it reminds me of products that I might miss if a land owner / store moves either the object or their property.