Devin Heartsong

Found Patch working hard on new Belli regions today.

Nearly my entire 2-hour set (from noon to 2pm SLT) will be a blend of my personal favorite songs with LGBTQ+ themes or by LGBTQ+ artists. Quite a different set from anything you've heard from me before!

That said, IMO you'd be well-served to check out the new X-3 from The Shack. (And also its older sibling, the C-3 v2) http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/House/207/229/22

The Flow V-Surf boards are *very* hard to find. There are only two for sale now: The V-Surf Minimal, and the V-Surf PS2. I *think* this Slurl will take you to the current, one and only store: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Pleasures Paradise/228/224/30

Hey everyone, TL;DR - the flash mob event is cancelled. Not postponed; just cancelled. Read on for deets. Meanwhile, please let any furry or feathered Bellisserian friends know that the event is cancelled. So word is trickling in from various sources that doing a flash mob would go counter to some guidelines about the SL 16 event. Too many avatars congregating in one place (animals and observers) would potentially incur too much lag on the SL 16 sims involved. This is why they have only two designated stage areas and want the larger "congregating" activities to occur only at those designated stages. And since the stages are booked during prime times with acts and DJs, there's really no option to do the flash mob at the stages either. Sorry for the excitement and let-down! 😥

That would be most excellent!

I live in one of those houses in Graff and count myself very lucky for it. I can’t believe somebody abandoned that house right around the time I became aware of Belli and started rolling the dice. I guess what I’m trying to say is that just like with real estate in RL, it’s all down to luck and serendipitous timing. Maybe eventually someone abandons a great location (for a variety of possible reasons), and that makes room for some one else to get lucky and enjoy it for a while too.

I think some fairly universal time slot on Saturday (during the European/North American overlap around noonish SLT) would work well. Not on a Sunday, though, because Bellisseria’s own pirate dj Doc Rast has a DJ party at SB 16 somewhere in that time range on Sunday. So maybe coordinate some Saturday flash mob over in the Belli Discord, or in the Bellisseria Animals Group in SL?

I spent some time in a group that had a houseboat in Brodovima, where one of the Salty Pickles are. The Pickle would sometimes host a large dance party. So LOTS of people in the sim. And like 15 or so houseboats in that sim too? I remember running script checkers and sim lag checkers when The Pickle would have a huge party going on, and it really wasn't that bad. So even the sims with a fair number of house plots seem to be load-balanced pretty well, IMO. I've seen WAY worse performance in mainland plots, even when there was nobody else in the sim at all.

I don't think it's people leaving Bellisseria. Instead, I think it's mostly people deciding to play the lottery and fish for a new location in Belli that they think they might like better. One person's "excellent" location is another person's "meh" or "ick" location. I think you also get people who "catch and release". So some house (or houseboat) might become available, then get nabbed by someone, then quickly abandoned (or after several days) by the same person, and then it comes up again a few hours later for someone else. Musical chairs.

The foxes--although they insist that they're Kitsune--told us that they promise not to eat any of the animals that belong to the Bellisseria Animals group. Nor any of the typical housepets. They said they prefer human food. That's how they adopted us--they were sitting quietly on the beach one morning waiting for us to notice them, and then politely asked if we had any food we would share. They also seem to really like tea, lol.

Yes!

What goes with sailing and light watercraft? Surfing! Most of the water-adjacent sims in Bellisseria don't have enough water-to-land ratio for a wave generator or two, but there is ONE that I know of and it's Graff. There are only 5 house plots there (on the beach), and the rest is water. On the other side is the water channel between the NE coast of Belli and the new Squishy Pickle area. I've looked at this from the air and it has plenty of room for a couple wave generators running North to South along the entire length of beach there. Without blocking any sailing/boating access from the houseboat slips in the sim just North of Graff! Being one of the five residents there in Graff--and a surfer--and a resident who logs in frequently, I would happily volunteer to tend the wave generators and reset them (or configure them) as needed. LL could either put down a tiny rez square at the waterline along the beach for people to rez out their own boards, or perhaps work with one or two of the active surfboard makers to put out a public rezzer for one or two popular models of surfboard? I'm sure you could enlist a surf association like the SLSA to help with any design/config issues for the wave generators, or I could coordinate with them (since I'm a member). And if you don't want to affect any existing house plots in any way with additional script load and the occasional handful of surfers who might be on the sim from time to time, perhaps you'd be willing to factor in a dedicated surfing sim--or two--to the remaining area design around Bellisseria? What do you think? I'm open to helping (and getting help) to coordinate any type of design and config issues. @Patch Linden

Right! Something that captures the look and feel of small squares and plazas, with cafe tables and even indoor booths/tables. Even with food and drink items on the tables. But no actual commerce or items for sale. Just different places to sit and roleplay while chatting. Coffee shop with indoor and outdoor tables. A bar or two, with drinks and barstools. A cafe or two. Theme restaurants (Chinese, Italian, etc.) But all created as set pieces to congregate and interact. Imagine something like this with a small bandstand or gazebo in the center where a DJ or streaming acoustic singer/songwriter, or beat poet (lol) or standup comedian could set up for impromptu (and FREE—no tip jars!) “live entertainment” for the local diners and drinkers!

I feel this. The fact that only 12 (out of roughly 3300) homes in Belli were abandoned due to rage quit protest over the premium membership hike speaks voulumes about this. Established, longtime accounts are more likely to see the rate hike as “fair”, given that LL kept the premium price unchanged for 10 years prior. So the tiny 0.004% of rage-quit abandonments tells me that the vast majority of Belli homes are owned by long established accounts (regardless of whether they used a newer alt to stake a claim) who see Belli as a destination. Not a “starter”. I could be interpreting the numbers wrong—but that’s my considered hunch.

If true, this would be somewhat viable, at least for oneself. But this is true only for Firestorm and Catznip users. (Black Dragon, for example, does not allow permanent de-rendering, nor does the vanilla Linden browser.) Regardless, even for Firestorm/Catznip, it's still true *only* for ONE browser user, not for others who visit your parcel.

Y’all partied so hard with me and Kaos at our housewarming party in Bellasseria this afternoon that you broke the internet! But it’s okay, because you made it home and family. Love and gratitude to all! —Baphy (The internet went down for our entire area suddenly at just after 1:30 SLT. Sorry for the abrupt interruption to all the fun 😩)

Agree so much. A curated and detailed community landscape/layout like Bellasseria gives you a sense of true community. All respect to the iconoclasts who make interesting builds on their older mainland plots, but frankly most mainland sims/continents are just annoying and off-putting in their garishness and disjointedness. I used to spend most of my time INDOORS (or up in a skybox) because some realtor would put up huge ugly yellow tape ban lines on the empty plot right next to you, or you’d get some new neighbor that would build some garish jumble with no consideration for any of their neighbors. Continents like Bellasseria are the future of SL, IMO.

Great idea!

Thirteen-plus years of building and living in SL, and I've never seen anything so organic, inviting, warm, in a mass-residence configuration like this!

This is why my OP that you responded to specifically said "...So figure out how to constrain and guide the mesh makers so that you can effectively optimize for mesh..."

Please listen to Niran. Please do not foist this garbage DOWNGRADE onto us! I've been around for nearly 14 years. I use SL primarily for photography and machinima. The current rendering and windlights have their issues, sure, and the IDEA of being able to set a windlight on your parcels that others will see BY DEFAULT is a good idea! But this implementation? It's TERRIBLE. You really need to go back to the drawing board on this. If you foist this on us, you're seriously breaking what I still find valuable and fun about Second Life. (Because you're KILLING social interaction by not optimizing for mesh--when being around more than a handful of other avatars can blow up your client, you simply avoid all the old ways of socializing.) And you'll probably lose me for good. I maintain 6 premium alts, and to this day still buy a fair amount of stuff from creators. You want to lose that revenue? You want to kill off your economy for creators even more? Then push this on us when we're asking you NOT to. Go back to the drawing board. And yeah, about NOT optimizing for mesh... WTF? Forcing us to choose between looking like Ruth just so we can socialize is NOT a choice. People want to mesh. They want to look good. So figure out how to constrain and guide the mesh makers so that you can effectively optimize for mesh. Like I said above, the only thing SL still really offers me is photography and machinima. You're killing the club/music/social scenes by stubbornly refusing to optimize for mesh.

I have encountered both of the same problems that Kitten Kaos is describing so well above. It's very frustrating. I use an Nvidia Geforce 1080 graphics card with the latest up-to-date drivers, on Windows 10.