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Spiffy Voxel

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Everything posted by Spiffy Voxel

  1. Spiffy Voxel
    First off, happy burpday Love! 🎂 I have a fairly thick skin when it comes to dealing with others online, partly because I've been doing it for a long time, going back to the early 1990s, online services like CompuServe, and the pre-Web Internet including IRC and Usenet. 👴 Most of the folks I've encountered over the years have been pleasant to deal with, and the few exceptions were easy to avoid or block from view. Sadly, politics has always been an area of potential conflict — I started running into people who took against me simply for not sharing their worldview back in the 2000s on Slashdot. 🤷‍♂️ Social media, and virtual worlds like Second Life, have just multiplied the ways in which people can express and propagate their tribal loyalties (and get in the face of those they perceive as the 'enemy'). 😒 That is one reason why I came off all the major social media platforms completely back in 2019, along with fatigue from trying to keep the flow of the Firehose at a manageable rate. (I've tried Mastodon a few times, but it suffers from the same issue of Too Much Stuff.) As a rule, I don't block people in Second Life — that is reserved solely for spammers. There are a few people who I no longer deal with in-world, for various reasons around trust, but I simply avoid them rather than block. Thankfully, I rarely encounter anyone who wants to try and rile me up, and I respond by ignoring them and not giving them the attention they crave. I don't judge people on their in-world appearance — as someone who uses their avatar as a canvas, I totally get others using theirs as dress-up dolls, and more power to them. Their chat or their profile will usually tip me off early if they're liable to rub me up the wrong way, so I just sail on by.
  2. Spiffy Voxel
  3. Spiffy Voxel
    It wasn't me! 😆
  4. Spiffy Voxel
    You are correct that Meta could do that — but I suspect that AI model generation would make the current performance issues that Second Life has with unoptimised or poorly optimised mesh content look positively minor by comparison.
  5. Spiffy Voxel
    From experience of hearing the output of current AI tools for commercials, they still struggle with conveying emotion or even conversational intonation. Much like text-to-speech, the result can easily slide into the robotic or the Uncanny Valley unless it's manually tweaked or refined. But yes, that is probably the future trajectory. Which sucks, especially for those doing that kind of work.
  6. Spiffy Voxel
    Talking about movies reminds me that I started watching "Idiocracy" last year, but had to stop after the first 40 minutes because it was reminding me too much of the state of the world now, never mind in 2050. 🤦‍♂️
  7. Spiffy Voxel
    PBR IS AWESOME! (Ducks incoming projectiles)
  8. Spiffy Voxel
    Not a Peeve, but a Celebration because this topic has reached its 900th page! 🎉 That's a LOT of Peeving! Well done, guys & gals (& others)! 🥳
  9. Spiffy Voxel
    Minor Peeve: Having store credit but only being able to use it if there's enough to cover the price of the item you want to purchase — no partial funding allowed.
  10. Spiffy Voxel
    I feel ya. Time zone differences mean that lots of RP areas are empty when I do visit them. And many of those places don't really cater for or seem to want non-humans. This is why I don't do any RP these days.
  11. Spiffy Voxel
    I'm tempted to say, based on a sample of the various avatars I see at shopping events, that the majority are either 'freak-show' or 'uncanny valley'. 🤣 Yes, they might pass as 'human' if you squint, but I think that's being generous. has been proudly non-human since 2017.
  12. Spiffy Voxel
    Peeve: the iPhone XS is considered 'old' now.
  13. Spiffy Voxel
    Wow! I've not touched a floppy disk in a long time! Fun fact: there are a few stockpiles of them out there, because some machines still need floppy disks for updates. And when I left my former full-time employer in 2012 they were still doing diskette duplication orders occasionally. I recall finding some old ZIP disks many years ago, and managing to get hold of both a ZIP drive and the software to retrieve the data I'd backed up to them in the early 2000s. Those were neat, except for the dreaded Click Of Death. 😱 I keep a portable CD/DVD writer around for the occasional music CD that I'll purchase second-hand from time to time, so I can rip them into my music library. (Yes, I still have one of those. Streaming music services are great for convenience, but lousy for actually holding onto stuff you like.)
  14. Spiffy Voxel
    From what I can tell, AMD don't appear to have much input (pun intended) into the display driver system on macOS — it's mostly Apple's stuff, so any performance issues are most likely on them.
  15. Spiffy Voxel
    Correct — Radeon Pro 575 with 4GB of VRAM. As far as performance on my setup goes, yes it wasn't great until a few years ago when the Linden Lab and Firestorm graphics improvements got released, but since then I've been able to use Advanced Lighting — and now PBR — and still have a usable FPS in even the most graphically intensive places like Second Pride, BURN2 or the various Shop & Hops. I don't run around on Ultra graphics settings all the time, however, and have trimmed my settings to balance appearance and performance as much as possible.
  16. Spiffy Voxel
    Peeve: shopping event areas that are not designed with lag in mind. (Won't name names, but it's a lot of them...)
  17. Spiffy Voxel
    I'm still on a 2017 iMac 27-inch, but Second Life is very usable on it, with Firestorm, Alchemy Viewer (my current daily driver) and even the latest official viewer. A few years ago, it's true that performance was middling, but the viewers have improved massively since then. 🤷
  18. Spiffy Voxel
    Peeve: The display on my 2017 iMac keeps going to max brightness in the evening, despite my turning off 'Auto Brightness' in System Settings. I'm starting to suspect that it's being triggered, ironically, by the Night Shift mode which is supposed to dim the screen outside of daylight hours. Perhaps I'd be better off turning that off and reinstalling good ol' f.lux and using that instead. 🤷‍♂️ (Suspects this is either Apple software 'quality' at work or an attempt to get this machine to wear out faster so I have to buy another Mac.)
  19. Spiffy Voxel
    OMG I remember the Facelight 3000! Yeah, that's hella bright! 💡
  20. Spiffy Voxel
    Since my default cut-off point for ARC is 350,000 (and could probably go lower without much impact on most other avatars around me), I suspect I wouldn't even see those folks with ARC pushing 800,000+! On the odd occasion where I do see someone appear as a Jellydoll, I'll temporarily render them just to see what they might have done to push their ARC that high, then turn that exception off again. Thankfully, most of my friends dress sensibly so I keep Always Render Friends enabled. 😌
  21. Spiffy Voxel
    Ye Ghod! I remember those from when I first joined Second Life in 2015. An avatar would walk into the club where I worked, and their jewellery would light up most of the room! 💡
  22. Spiffy Voxel
    I saw notice about that last night — so sorry to hear I hope those particles get nuked soon, and yes some folks apparently will sink that low to get their jollies.
  23. Spiffy Voxel
    I've seen that film — it is totally bonkers, but it has Sean Connery and Charlotte Rampling in it. 😋
  24. Spiffy Voxel
    I've come across demos like that, it's a head-scratcher — yes, I'd like to make sure the item fits me, but it would even better if I can find out what version of 'pink' the creator has gone with. Similarly, non-working HUDs are a tell-tale sign that perhaps this item isn't for me.
  25. Spiffy Voxel
    Peeve: Evri (the courier delivery firm formerly known as Hermes) apparently don't bother letting you know when they're going to call to collect a package. Good thing I was in when they did ring the doorbell. Related Peeve: the tracking page on their website is even more useless than it was the last time I used their services.
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