ValKalAstra
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Posts posted by ValKalAstra
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1 minute ago, Luna Bliss said:
As was mentioned before, many RL therapists do not view relationships in a virtual world as legitimate. Many don't understand they are actually real even though different from RL relationships.
[Citation needed]
This is the kind of dangerous hogwash that's circulated to discourage people from seeking genuine professional help. They will take it serious by virtue of it affecting the patient.
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Pfew. I'm gonna be really unpopular for a moment. For the love of all that is holy or important to you, do not look for this in Second Life. If you feel like you are struggling with things, that's an important first step towards getting better. You did good realising that. Seriously. But please do not throw that away by engaging with uncertified people about your mental health. Just don't. You're just as likely going to be interacting with folks roleplaying as a professional while basing their knowledge on pop culture psychology tests, the stars, their celestial dogs and what their chakra aligned aura scamite stones told them that day.
Even if they're the genuine thing, if they're the type to give out medical advice online other than "consult with a local professional that can check your medical records and history" - do like Usain Bolt and get the hell out of there. Sorry for being a spoilsport but that stuff is beyond dangerous to your wellbeing. Especially if you're vulnerable. Just don't.
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Shopping HUDs are weird. In general, impulse buying is a powerful tool for commerce, right? It's why we keep barriers low, make it as quick and easy to buy something. Each extra step allows impulse control to kick in, foiling the purchase.
To me a HUD seems like an odd extra step. It's making me less likely to buy something because by the time I've added a cumbersome HUD my impulse has seen a squirrel and is in active pursuit.
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Man, election year in the US, eh?
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Okay this is complicated and not because of your english, mine is worse and people generally make sense of it or attribute it to "nina be a weird bunny".
No what's weird is how he keeps finding you. VPN, new computer, new account, new social circles - he shouldn't be able to link things that easily. One thing did set off serious warning signals and that's giving him Teamviewer remote privileges because at that point, he could have done just about anything to your computer.
I am sure you have revoked those permissions since then, right? Better yet, you didn't also install it on your new computer? When you switched machines, did you pay special attention to what you migrated? I don't own a Mac so I'm not that proficient in it but did you check which apps got privacy permissions?
Internet search says to: Choose Apple menu > System Settings, then click Privacy & Security in the sidebar. Check if there's any app in there having access it shouldn't have.
Does Apple have got a service point nearby or so? Maybe you can bring it there with the suspicion that someone got access to it and what you can do? Just spitballing but giving some remote access is... not just naive. It's dangerous.
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1 minute ago, Love Zhaoying said:
That's exactly what I tried to say in my response to her!
It is also how I COULD have responded to Paul's question, but..he asked it wrong. LOL.
I like to think I've got a well made avatar and I can somewhat corroborate the impression. Most of the people contacting me out of the blue these days somehow seem to think I want to be everyone's dommy mommy, partially because they appear rather scared.
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10 hours ago, Eddy Vortex said:
I could help you search. For a price.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/191119559@N02/53640532314/in/dateposted-public/
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To be fair, the Red Cross is famously antagonistic towards the use of their symbol in virtual worlds. Various games were forced to change the red cross to a different symbol and perhaps the funniest incident of that was Stardew Valley, a cozy farming game, having patch notes like this:
Funny enough, they DO argue it violates the Geneva Convention to use it and the Red Cross is famously... busybody about enforcing it too. I reckon SL just flew under their radar.
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5 minutes ago, ChanteyBabe said:
So what are you suggesting? How you think she could fake those pics? Just simply in photoshop? My focus is more on what can I do with it.
Frankly I am not seeing the fakes. It's a person with a slim blonde avatar. I could go to any popular place and within ten minutes take ten more shot examples of someone having such an avatar. Still if you think you are being harassed ->
And with that I'm ducking out of this thread.
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Okay you're considerably muddling and confusing the waters with the AI shenanigans. Let me pull some FUD teeth before this spreads further. No. You can't convincingly fake Second Life pictures using AI at the moment. There are no public models trained on Second Life. You could create one based on existing checkpoints, maybe on a LORA base but that would still be affected by cross pollination with the dataset and the result would decidedly not look like Second Life.
Case in point:
Doing this needs technical knowledge and hardware to pull off. That's what you can more or less do on consumer hardware. In theory, one could make a foundational model based on Second Life, sure - that would cost thousands upon thousands of dollars in computational power and would frankly crash into a hard issue of Second Life just plain not having a coherent enough look for it. I doubt your stalker has got Elon Musk kind of money for this nonsense.
What you're probably confused by is the whole Deep Fake thing. Which, yeah. It already is illegal and courts are dropping the ball in following through with cases where it happens. These work because there are foundational models based on human faces. If you were to use it with Second Life, you'd get an absolutely uncanny, very obvious image since there are considerable differences between how real faces are structured and how second life faces look - especially the lighting.
They might be using AI to make images but they're not using AI to fake your avatar or become an imposter. If you think you can and know better, be my guest, just be forewarned that I'm the crazy gal that actually reads the research papers on this damn technology.
Now for the other stuff. You can report someone for abuse, if you feel like you've been wronged and stalked. Frankly - I did check the mentioned profile and saw no evidence of that but you do you. I am not sure someone also having a slim blonde avatar constitutes stalking and copybotting but - if you feel wronged, do make that report. If you're feeling very petty and wronged, you can report them for the obvious porn in their profile feed. https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Adult_Content_FAQ#What_about_profiles.3F
Although that might be a very double edged sword. Just saying.
Honestly, this looks a "wee" bit overblown.
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Someone asked me how I made an earlier image in the thread and truthfully, I can't remember the precise parameters I used last time as it has been a while. The second best thing I can do is walk through the general process of it. I am going to re-use the same base image like I used before and turn it into an Anime picture (cursed hands included, thank you Stable Diffusion :P).
I'm fully aware that there are now ready made solutions for this kind of deal but this is for the folks that want to do things by hand or understand what goes on behind the scenes and don't feel like forking over money. Base requirements: Either A1111 webui or SD.Forge webui. The latter recommended. The following extensions: ADetailer, SegmentAnything (optional, you can just do the masking by hand).
That last one is what I want to start with. With the grey background, we can easily use SegmentAnything to create a mask for us. Red spot = I want this gone. Segment Anything will create a mask based on positive and negative points.
No settings needed yet, just fire away, get your mask and put it into "Inpaint Upload". Now is when we start to configure things. To start with, doesn't matter whether you are using a 1.5 or SDXL checkpoint. What's important is the resolution. 1.5 was made for resolutions of 512x512 and SDXL for 1024x1024. You can stretch these somewhat but deviate too far and you'll get a lot of halucinations. Rule of thumb: Start low resolution, upscale finished picture. For my purposes, the image was already cropped to 823x1216 from the last time I did this.
Then I set the denoise to a value fo 1. Yes, 1. For the prompt I gave it something like the usual prompt vomit people use: "concept art forest . digital artwork, illustrative, painterly, matte painting, highly detailed" and a negative prompt of "photo, photorealistic, realism, ugly".
This gave me the following result:
Not very anime yet but we've transplanted my character into a painted anime background. There are visible artefacts around the hair and if I were to inclined, I could clean those up in photoshop. From there it was just a matter of running a fairly medium denoise on the whole picture. Thus I sent the result to Image 2 Image and used the deepbooru autotagging to give me a description, which I then further tweaked:
"1girl, freckles, against tree, bamboo, bamboo forest, bare tree, breasts, brown hair, cleavage, collarbone, crow, denim, earrings, foliage, forest, glasses, grass, green eyes, jewelry, jungle, lips, looking at viewer, medium breasts, nail polish, nature, outdoors, palm tree, park, plant, short hair, skirt, solo, standing, tree, concept art forest . digital artwork, illustrative, painterly, matte painting, highly detailed" with "photo, photorealistic, realism, ugly" as the negative prompt.
Denoise was at... honestly I forgot already. It was likely somewhat around 0.45 or 0.35, depending on how much I wanted the image to change. I then turned on Adetailer. In the default configuration, it will make a second pass on the face, fixing most of the issues in one go. From there, I ran a few generations until I got one that was good enough.
If I wanted to, I could then use inpainting to fix the hands, maybe with the meshgraphformer model as that creates 3d replica of hands to use as a basis. It's all a bit fiddly and time consuming and with a pose like this, Stable Diffusion gets veeeery thirsty. After a few attempts that resulted in dangerously airborne skirts, I figured it's good enough. Usually I'm much more likely to just throw it into photoshop and do it by hand quick. Which I didn't do here to demonstrate the result. Cursed fingers included.
And that's it. In short:
Mask out the background. Generate background with prompts. Run an Img2Img pass on the result with prompts for background AND character as well as a mid level denoise. Hope this was helpful. The earlier picture from me using the same base was made much in a similar way.
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54 minutes ago, xDancingStarx said:
An IP match is no 100% proof but what is it? 99%? Close enough.
I admit that I always get a chuckle out of seeing statements like this. At no time throughout all my life, having lived in various countries throughout western Europe, have I ever had an ISP with static IPs.
It's funny to see people proclaim the accuracy of IP matches when a lot of folks can just press a button and get a completely different IP address within seconds.
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Talking about Jobs, maybe XING Swiss should be careful about their headlines. Received a mail yesterday: "*ex at the office - is your jo..." the rest got truncated*. Received a mail today: "Shortcut to your new job". Okay honeybuns, are you trying to tell me something and can I get your HR department please?
* They meant is your job at risk but I still had a good chuckle seeing those two mails back to back.
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Does the sheer ungodly amount of research papers written on it qualify? Sheesh, I get cold shivers just from thinking back to my university time, long before I ever set foot into SL. It's like whenever you would mention virtual spaces, virtual interactions or virtual bloody ANYTHING, someone would pipe up and go "did somebody say Second Life? I wrote thirty papers on it!".
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1 hour ago, Cristiano Midnight said:
I guess I am used to it. I set up most of the shot in Firestorm, and then I switch over to BD and adjust the pose and lighting as needed. I can do it very quickly, but I know that pose editor inside and out.
Honestly, after using inverse kinematics to pose, I just can't go back anymore. But I think we're derailing the picture thread
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4 minutes ago, Sprout Evergarden said:
Woaaah - that's a cool look!
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49 minutes ago, Kathlen Onyx said:
I need to know how to do this!
Oh snap, I probably should have been more clear when I wrote that. I assume you refer to the pose? The pose was sadly made in Blender/Avastar, although I hear that Qavimator works well too but someone else could probably write more about that. Either way, I made the pose in Blender, then exported it into BVH format.
The preview allows me to essentially "demo" the pose on my end, without a need to upload it. Basically Upload -> Animation -> select BVH and you get the preview window. Set to loop, increase priority if needed and iterate away. That way I can tweak and iterate quickly, simply hitting reload in Firestorm with every change and almost getting a live preview in Firestorm. All without a need to actually upload. Saves time and money and yah, allows quick modifications.
It's a bit of pain to setup Blender but once done, having tools like inverse kinematics greatly eases the difficulty of posing. Kind of cuts my posing efforts down from hours to fiddling and playing around to 30 minutes or so. I can't say much about qavimator but I am sure others here can chime in.
Now if you were asking about the background, that's just some basic masking done in any image editing tool and using a CC0 stock image for the galaxy background. If you're lazy like me, you can use a Segment Anything AI model to automate the task of seperating the avatar from the background, so you don't have to mask things manually, or you use a flat background and let the depth picture version of your scene do the work for you.
Hope this helps, even though I feel like that wasn't quite what you hoped to hear.
(The day Firestorm gets an integrated posing tool... one can dream! And I feel like a dream it shall remain most likely).
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3 hours ago, SlammedSam said:
So .. anyone ever get seriously obsessed with a song, like repeat at least 10 times in a row obsessed?
I get that way sometimes, and it influenced the mood of the pic. Cheers?
All the time. They get stuck on repeat until hours later I am suddenly fed up with it
Worth it for the picture though!
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https://www.flickr.com/photos/191119559@N02/53623756327/in/dateposted-public/
I blame @Orwar for showing me the Animation Preview in Firestorm. This started as an attempt to practice making poses by using a reference image of a falling girl. The pose came together decently enough and so I went for a backdrop. Set everything up and halfway through realised that *maybe* falling towards a backdrop might be a wee bit morbid.
What was it about the jurassic park quote? "If The Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don't eat the tourists."? No, not that one. "Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should." Yah that one.
So floating Galaxy Nina it is.
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Literally seconds before I misclicked and closed the viewer. Unfinished, half glitched but eh - until I get enough drive to start over, good enough.
But I learned either way. Been trying my hand at learning to pose with Blender/Avastar. Obviously I had to go for the Dark Souls of poses difficulty and use a fight pose
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Sometimes the weirdest accidents happen after a misclick kills a different shot. This came about by chance and in the wake of calamity. Without makeup too, for a change.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/191119559@N02/53617587787/in/dateposted-public/
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Awww I love the result though! The particle effects are a really cool touch and yah I may have been wearing a lot of red at the time. Technology definitely wasn't on our side today though. Not only was the usual (somewhat sleazy) sandbox unusually full and in use - the second I got a free spot, I had just enough time to rez the backdrop and then got smacked with rolling restarts. On my way home I got smacked with "this sim is offline" so I ended up on a random snowy runway in the middle of bloody hell nowhere all dolled up in a fantasy getup and I think I might have annoyed a pilot for all of the few seconds I was there.
It definitely was a lot of fun and also really interesting. @Momo Addams explained a lot of aspects from composition to me that I had never really thought about previously. Will be interesting to see when and how I can make use of it. One way or another, here's the image I took of her avatar:
I struggled a bit with lighting today but it was fun nonetheless. With that said...
Anyone else? Come on in, regardless of skill level. We can all learn from one another and it's fun to talk to all the creative minds.
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The closest equivalent to me would be loving someone's style and then either reaching out or using a HUD Attachment Scanner to go see if I can make it work for myself. Then again I'm not one do develop crushes in RL either. When I was a teen, when most girls that age could sing the names of every Backstreet Boy, I sat there going "I know it's not lore accurate but I'll be damned if I don't slap on a full compliment of clan tech ER-PPC on my Atlas and Alphastrike immediately into a shutdown".
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8 minutes ago, Anna Salyx said:
Unironically one of my favourite Shadowrun movies and it's even funnier because it's like they didn't realise until post production they never actually got the rights for it and then went with generic cyberpunk instead.
But it's so, so Shadowrun. Even weird cybered up preacher guy or the monofilament whip.
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Does asking for friends in world on the forum really work?
in Make Friends
Posted
Honestly, it probably wouldn't work for me. For me, one can't really start a conversation by stating the end result outright, without it becoming too awkward to continue. Every kind of contact or friendship I have made has started with a point of interest. Someone has got a cool outfit and we get talking about vendors and styles. Another person makes great pictures and we just get lost chatting about it for hours. Plenty of avenues to start talking.
And for every attempt made, there are dozens where you get left on read, where folks promise to reply and then they just never do. I'm guilty of that too. That's fine too, not a good match in that case. I think posts in this subsection would be more succesful if they went "Looking for someone to sail with!" or "I want to have a music 'book' club" or "I play boardgames and need more players" instead of "I am looking for a friend".
Maybe I took the question too literal.