Mr Amore

For the first time in my SL I was tweaking the nipple aesthetics. With 12 styles and 3 swell levels, it's a mind boggling 36 nipples by default. The highest swell setting is a borderline lactation experience. I know, I can feel the envy from female body users already.

My fashionista days are behind me, so these are the few commonly used skins I recognize: Stray Dog, excellent faces but bland body skins. The improved bodies have yet to be released. Session Skins, marginally improved body, but limited range of faces. Not Found, a good range of faces and their defined, muscular bodies have made them the default choice. When I was picking up the Inithium demo, there was talk of alternative skins being available from the upcoming event. If these skins can be worn on Legacy/Jake/Gianni, then it'll make for an interesting combination with Stray Dog's faces. My thoughts on Kario is it's a sidegrade from Legacy Athletic, unless going full nuclear with Flex's muscle mass, my shapes end up fairly similar. The Not Found body skin works well on Kario too(an option for a less defined look), the only anomaly I caught was a horizontal seam just above the ankles. For all the heat male bodies take on being overly muscular, there're actually few options for muscular skins. With Kario's upcoming selection of skins, 2022 will be the year of buff avatars.

Even if SL's PBR only adds displacement maps, I'm stoked.

It's worth noting, failures of moderation in Facebook, Whatsapp and Twitter are leading to real world violence and riots. These platforms are enabling a rise in extremist views across the boards. When SL fails to moderate the consequences are far less severe than angry mobs storming government buildings.

Just don't become that person who's waiting alone for years, for some chance meeting that blossoms into a lifelong friendship. There are people like this, in life and in SL, some day they will be older, and wiser, and looking back on all those years wasted in waiting. Find your niche in SL, occupy those places and get to know people. Friendships are easily made on roleplaying sims, those are people you'll continue communicating with years after the sim has closed. Outside of roleplaying sims it can be difficult to make connections, I only see a couple of non-roleplayers on my FL.

It surprised me The Sinner is on its 4th season, I've been catching up. For an old fashioned detective mystery with Bill Pullman, season one is worth a watch.

The demo for Kario is available instore now. Interestingly it's one body, the HUD switches between Flex and Fit mode. The bulk of the body remains the same, 'Flex' just makes the muscles pop.

At any social venue most avatars are standing AFK, silently people watching or in IMs picking up their next ERP. The few clubs I've visited are a constant spam of "Hi xxxxx", "Hello xxxx", "Hey xxxx" then random gestures of "Weeeeeee" and "Wooooooo". And this is why there are fewer clubs than you'd expect from a game with 40k+ concurrent users. In saying that, SL does have superior social features compared to other games. The one draw keeping residents returning are their SL friends and communities. Sansar was the right direction to take, it just needed a few more years of development. Its social features were lacking, the focus on VR was off-putting and the restriction on adult content was as good as inscribing its own epitaph. The question is how you envision a future metaverse and whether today's SL is capable of delivering? To have the freedom to create worlds we need vastly larger sims. This alone may never happen.

What is the number one activity in SL? I don't have the answer but I'm going to speculate it's shopping for those spanking new mesh heads, bodies and homes. SL is a dress up and dollhouse simulator - If this is all SL wants to be, it needn't change anything. Microtransactions, gachas and collectibles have been injected into PC games too, but they're still eclipsed by mobile gaming. New MMOs are being developed exclusively for mobile because they're very capable little machines now. Roblox, Fortnite, PUBG, Black Desert, CoD, ARK, and many others have made the transition from PC to mobile. PUBG mobile has games of 100 players on an 8km x 8km map, almost the equivalent area of 1024 sims. SL was designed before mobile gaming was a factor. It's now 20 years later, and I'm of the opinion LL needs to begin anew with modern technologies in mind. Yes, SL has modernized under the hood, but it's the equivalent of upgrading a lame donkey to a mule. It's still pulling the same cart with cramped conditions inside, new passengers hop on, look around aghast and drop out. Old passengers are creaking along reminiscing over the good old times when it was the shiniest new cart in town. What you call advancements, are what I'd call fixes which shouldn't have ever existed. Maybe LL can add a working search and fix teleport disconnects as new features? PBR would be great, but as you say it doesn't revolutionize the end user experience. Which has been largely the same since the 2000's. If SL wants to be a model for the modern metaverse, it needs a complete redesign from the way avatars dress, from how sims are created and hosted and how the world is rendered. And that's just a bare minimum to begin with.

Does LL have a product worth selling? SL is aging technology, at this stage it's like promoting adoption of 3G, when then world is transitioning to 5G. AAA game developers are turning to the mobile market, it's where consumers are gaming/socializing today and consequently it's more profitable than desktop. Meanwhile LL have pulled the plug on their mobile viewer. Trying to sell a non-Mobile, non-VR metaverse is a proposition from the 1990s. Then there's the SL viewer, another relic from a bygone era. Efforts by @animats are showing it's possible to build a modern viewer for existing content. Even if LL were to step up today and begin work on a modern viewer, it'll take until 2025 to replace the existing client. The real winners of SL are the content creators, the residents who learned to build and profited from their stores. I know a fair few who had this latent, creative talent they hadn't tapped into until SL. And now they make incredible things. I myself learned to script and mesh from SL, the content I'd like to release is drastically limited by the dimensions and features we're given. At one time I questioned why certain gaming systems didn't exist in SL, and now I can list every obstacle I've personally encountered. I like SL, I really do, but the stagnation in development leaves me bitter. Until LL make a substantial commitment to invest and upgrade the platform, it's going nowhere.

I stopped using double-click to teleport long ago. Double-click to walk works out nicely.

LeLutka is easy to use if you're only applying BoM layers. From the HUD, set the eye color, clear the eyeliner (because ofc male heads have this on by default), and uncheck the eye animation (it interferes with other facial anims). And you're good to go. Those are the steps for a BoM build. The HUD has a whole lot of other options I haven't touched because it looks like an alien spaceship control panel.

Carmack touched on VR streaming in his recent talk, there's a timestamp a couple of comments down with some topics of interest.

That's interesting, it's basically a rebranding of Microsoft Mesh. MS first showcased this tech in 2015, they have a solid lead over Meta. For anyone interested, just search youtube for Microsoft Hololens or Microsoft Mesh. If the ZuckerVerse is a success the real losers would be Amazon and Microsoft. The question now is how soon we'll see the PrimeVerse unveiled.

I'd never looked into Roblox before, but it's clear now Project Sansar was LL's answer to Roblox. Complete with instanced Experiences and the creation phase occurring out of the world. As opposed to inworld like SL. And I did think a part of Sansar's ambition was to be picked up by Facebook or Google, earning LL's investors a tidy sum in the process. If Sansar was developed further with content creators in mind, it can join the metaverse race. And for something entirely different.

Sansar's movement was somehow frustrating, now they can jump though. The default Sansar avatars are an improvement on SL's default, their clothing system has an actual interface, along with options to tweak the fit. With a few more years of development Sansar's a stronger foundation to build upon and take into the future. Meanwhile, SL hasn't announced a roadmap for the 2020s because nothing substantial is coming.

That Facebook presentation is largely describing everything Sansar already has, a VR ready metaverse with instanced content. Rather than hammering away at Second Life, it's far more practical for LL to bring Sansar back into their fold, add adult content, add inworld creation tools and improve its social features. Sansar itself is taking a direction towards live events. And here's another recent upload showcasing some experiences, it's nothing fascinating yet the potential is there. I never gave Sansar's building much of a test, like many I was waiting for the game to mature.

When the 'ZuckerVerse' takes off, then virtual world addiction and escapism will be hot topics in the media. The real metaverse may even arrive from the least expected source, the TeslaVerse. With Elon Musk's Neuralink and Starlink combining to connect humans around the globe, through a Brain-Computer Interface. I know, this is really out there, but once the technology can simulate a dream-like state, it's going to be the next leap in VR. [Edit] This depth of virtual interaction was described in Use of Weapons, published in 1990. An excellent piece of sci-fi.

As with other distinguished physicists, I make copies of one outfit. To the untrained eye it may appear my avatar is wearing the same clothes all year round, but he's changing between copies of the same outfit. I have friends who tweak/change their avatars weekly, in those situations you'd want to arrange your clothing into categories for quick access. In my case, an avatar will have a 2-3 year lifespan. And I will make him lots of outfits(casual, roleplaying, nude) to change quickly. Since mesh bodies happened I don't wear/remove individual items, I change Outfits. Even if the only variation is a white, or black shirt, it's a unique outfit. But, my Outfits make use of links, so they all refer back to the same pair of boots/pants/accessories/body parts. Which are arranged into folders by Store Name or item type. Accessories have their own folder, because I pick up so many trinkets I''ll forget what I have otherwise. Clothing are listed by Store. Here's a fun fact, so few women play male avatars when they realize men have a selection of a dozen shoes across the entire grid, it's a complete culture shock.

There's no Easy Mode to SL. TPVs = Veteran Difficulty Official Viewer = Legendary Difficulty The viewer is highly customizable, but at the expense of having a lengthy menu options along the top, + hidden menus, + debug settings, +Toolbar buttons along the bottom. This is all before you reach the actual Settings/Preferences panel with hundreds of other options. Add to this an archaic inventory system, a broken SL Search and you'd wonder how anyone still plays this game. The SL viewer is basically a debug client which only developers should have access too. A standard user needs a simplified experience with fewer options and screen clutter.

Adding to that, in the Edit panel you can click on the texture and set it to transparent. Then that floaty clump of hair inside the head will disappear too.

Obviously if it came up in a discussion, I would be among those few 'who give a blank look - but probably has a secret SL account.' Otherwise SL is rarely mentioned in media any longer, it's seen as a niche product absent the mass appeal.

@Cinnamon Mistwood MM isn't really horror. The Haunting of Hill House is a 'spooky binge', by the same writer.

I accidentally discovered Firestorm has a limit of 250 chicklets. The old system was convenient, when you logged in the notices were given a prominent position and you clicked through them all.