ValKalAstra

Aye, aye captain.

I'm currently somewhat stuck on a pretty hefty song. It's definitely not easy listening, even starts with very uncomfortable breathing and launches into heavy trauma, failing therapy and a whole bevy of dark themes, including some blood later in the song. Consider this a trigger warning. Still, the song resonates with me in a way. It's so full of intense emotions, vulnerability and this deep frustration. For context: The singer in the video went years without the proper diagnosis of Lyme Disease (caused by a tick bite). He was pushed from one mental health misdiagnosis to another and suffered from worsening side effects and desperation. There's another song where he verbalizes it, if you're curious, called "Hi Ren". Still, Sick Boi resonates with me. So, here it is:

Oh, good you bring this up because I thought it was just me. It has become part of my login procedure to go through my lelutka HUD and turn off and on all the face animations again and toggle the (body) AO off and on. Else my Avi just does the blank stare while starfish posing. Figured I had done something wrong in my setup but didn't have the time to check it out.

Thank you for giving it a try. It was a beautiful Sim and an interesting idea. I went and took a final picture this morning - sadly it seems the flickr group is already closed.

Waaaaaaaaaait a minute, that's no falcon (link)! /edit: *facepalm* Yes imgur, a fully clothed picture is NSFW. For reference: It's not.

Funny enough, to my knowledge* any game releasing on either of the consoles is actually obligated to have a certain amount of achievements as part of the certification process. No achievements? No release. Although you're right that some keep adding more over time to have people come back. * From residual knowledge and peeking through the docs for the process. I haven't found info for Nintendo so might be they allow you to release without them.

Generally, I am not that big a fan of angles but they quite work in your favour here, I feel. It adds to the dynamic pose and it balances out the - missing the english word for it, sorry, the part where the floor meets the wall. Wood border? Maybe? The frame too combines with the interesting shadow you've got in the background. You've also added some brushstrokes, I guess to simulate some lens or old picture effect? It works here. I wouldn't know what else to edit. I would need to get super, super nitpicky for that. Which might work as an exercise in perfectionism but goes way beyond what's reasonable, I feel? It's a good picture!

Gosh, I put a script reminder in mine that complains everytime I switch Sims and I still manage to forget they're attached. But yah, I've recently had a few run ins with bad facelights when I was trying to take shots of others. Took me way too long to figure out that I wasn't messing up but rather that their nuclear sun overpowered every little subtle tweak I was making. In general I don't mind facelights on others but in general, a lot of those are just configured badly. There's no real reason they need to be omni-suns going bright white in all directions.

Oh boy. Confession time: I need way too long for a picture. I'm talking upwards of several hours for one. It starts with setting up outfits, adjusting poses, tweaking the lighting, scripting some particle effects if the shot calls for them. Once I somehow magically find the right picture, I take several shots, switch up lighting, take more shots - then switch composition just to reset my view and take even more shots. I try to avoid clipping with my pose and if I can't do that, I take picture with and without the offending attachment. After all that, usually 3-4 hours, I head into post processing and work just as long there. Usually I further adjust lighting, contrast, paint over some parts. Sometimes I add little details if the shot calls for them. Maybe some hand painted hairstrands, perhaps a visual effect (I'm a sucker for shiny particle stuff), maybe a localized fake motion blur to suggest motion. Usually I'm adding some painted on lighting still. It takes way too long I think it's a pretty shot both before and after editing. However if I were to hazard a guess, I'd probably point at the blur being the culprit. It's not quite where I would expect to find it. For example: I would expect the body - as the main subject - to be in focus. However while parts of the face and bosom are in sharp focus, the belly has become blurred. The blur suggest depth or motion that is not otherwise conveyed, lending itself to a bit of a surreal result in my eyes. Just my guess - it's still a cool shot and I think overall the edits have added to the picture. But I can also relate to the feeling of "this edit made it worse" when I look at my graveyard of deleted pictures that I never uploaded, because I got so entrenched in the edit that I began hating the result.

There's an interesting cultural dynamic at work. Swipe Culture (Tindr and such) has given some awful people, more precisely - some women, the power to be absolute jackasses on the internet. Friends have shown me the kind of replies they sometimes get and they're just plain abusive. There's no denying that it happens. That perception, along with cherry-picked screenshots, in turn feeds into a culture that has got some very... peculiar views on women. They ain't exactly new. When I was a wee lass, I've heard grumbling from some men about how we only want the bad boys. The reality of the situation was that once teenage hormones had run their course, it wasn't the bad boys that walked away the winners. With none of my friends. However, looping back to Tindr and Social Media in general, you've now got people that get stuck in that idea from their teenage years. Heck, I'm willing to bet a lot of them still are teenagers. They start building their prejudice, "women want this, women want that, that's unrealistic and unreasonable!" and then along comes some despicable goblin like Tate and feeds into it, along come social media echo chambers and keep feeding cherrypicked screenshots from Tindr, showing precisely how awful some people can be. This makes isolated incidents out to be a global societal problem instead of the isolated angst bull***** it is. Thus, when I see these talking points brought up, they become a red flag. The deeper and more vehemently they are argued and presented as fact, the deeper the crimson of the flag. There is a very simple dating advice wrapped up in this - my seemingly unreasonable and unrealistic expectation as a woman brought down to a simple summary: Treat me like an individual - not a prescribed identity. That's the funny thing, all that's needed is to do less. Don't assume what the expectations are! Talk and figure them out. If some girl gives you hell for that, be thankful they self-flagged early. If they play some hard to get game, tell them "thanks, no thanks" and walk away. Saves time, saves you trouble and skips the teenage angst spiel. No seriously, they're doing you a service by showing their colors early. Also if they feel the need to put you down, block and move on. Likewise, holding certain very strong opinions on women works like a self-flag too - just the other way around. I don't find many incels - I try to give everyone a fair chance. I don't think my standards are unreasonable: Don't be an ass. Don't put others down. Don't tell me how I am. /edit: Obviously this is still linked to SL for me since the same applies to dating and flirting in SL. To translate: Don't be an ass (insult me in the third sentence) Don't put others down (if your opener is abuot some other girl using Kupra and your distaste for it - thanks for the self-flag!) Don't tell me how I am (if you tell me that as a woman I have got this or that expectation, I'm out)

Okay. I always like to see where someone is coming from. Seeing your quotes there, I decided to have a look at your source because they're common talking points among certain... places. First: The target audience of the article are lonely men. It plays on their emotions, incites them with dressed up talking points from Andrew Tate - just with less virulent rhetoric. Second: The sell is a dubious dating website that is presented as the solution for their loneliness. It's a product they're selling, not some sort of qualified statement on the nature of women and their expectations. While we're on the topic of expectations, a quick glimpse through the related articles is rather enlightening in itself. Can a Relationship Go Back to Normal After Cheating? How Couples Therapy Can Help After Infidelity 15 Proven Signs Your Partner Has Changed After Cheating 35 Proven Signs Your Wife or Girlfriend Slept With Someone And then on page three it went full mask off with essentially conversion therapy. Sorry for not taking those claims about women's expectations at face value. They're oft cited, yet never proven when I go looking for the source. The website then is a full on grift praying on insecurities and political hot button topics, then peddling some funky affiliate link.

It's been a hot minute since I last encountered a professional athlete from the bagholder olympics. Let me check my notes, did I get my memo right? NFT and Crypto are going to take off any minute now and Elon Musky is going to send it to the moon, you only need to send him one bitcoin so he can send you back five - to an anonymous wallet of course. Don't say rug-pull, call it a fast moving market and the amount of high profile "hacked" wallets is purely a coincidence and besides, what happened to Sam Fried-Bankman was a deep state conspiracy by evil elites. Something like that? At this point, any project involved with NFT and Crypto is poisoned by design. Those that bought into the grift have long lost their money and the remaining territories of people still willing to shift money into it has got to be abysmal at this point. NFT were a solution in search of a problem and the pipe-dream promises made about transferring assets between unaffiliated software never moved past the stage of "How in the bloody hell would you untangle the myriad copyrights all interwoven in this lawyer nightmare?". With SL in particular, you can already export shapes and you can already sell shapes on the SL marketplace. All built-in and even there, you don't see people trying to shuffle shapes as some sort of investment strategy. I mean, some might but I don't think anyone is getting magically rich of it. In closing, NFT - No F****ing Thanks.

I think the answer is more or less: Hurt people hurt people. It takes conscious effort to break the cycle, easier to just keep going. This is especially true in times when we're all more or less running at more than full capacity.

Peeve: This weird dependency of the Second Life business side on Facebook of all things. Want to see what's on sale at an event? Facebook. Want to contact an organizer about a booth and inquire about fees? Facebook. Contacting a blogger for a flickr ad campaign? Somehow... believe it or not, Facebook. Argh!

I'm a creature of comfort so my hopes are that it will be a neat way to kick back and relax away from my computer. Over the years I've tried a few solutions like streaming but it always stumbles at one point or another. On the flip-side, my biggest fear is that they will mark mobile users in some way. It's not like SL needs yet another reason for people to discriminate.

Shhh! You can't just go and unmask me! https://www.flickr.com/photos/191119559@N02/53152053326/in/dateposted-public/

We're only here to make you... GO. *bounce, bounce*

Oh for sure, for me it's a very notable upgrade. Some of the details look much better to me (such as Hair) and it's also a lot more responsive now that it uses more of my VRAM. It's just I've got my usual tools (shaders) on the non PBR client so I was missing things like composition lines, fake raytracing, etc.

This is beautiful! The colour, the shadows, the mood!

https://www.flickr.com/photos/191119559@N02/53144480642/in/dateposted-public/ An experiment in particle effects (and being a numbskull and forgetting to switch back from the PBR Client).

Maybe like Orwell but with a whole lot more waarrrghhhh at the end? Das war mein Gedanke. See I'm offering you a chance to indulge in your favourite hobby. As for me, why do I show up here. Don't know. Mostly I'm in the forums to learn and to get inspired by what others do with their images. Well and post my own images. I try to help where I can but always also get the feeling I mostly drop images and just dropping images would be a net negative. Just Spam, aye? So I try and make an effort of engaging with people. Reaching out. That's how I usually end up in the general forums. Even if nothing ever comes of it, if it gives someone the feeling hey, someone interacted with you and thus the world is maybe a small amount less lonely? That's worth it. I don't think I've ever gotten into a fight here with someone. I usually bow out when I notice someone really biting into a topic. Took me a few years to learn that skill though.

Making use of the weekend purchases! Obviously it had to end up as another picture. Sometimes I feel like that's all I do in SL. https://www.flickr.com/photos/191119559@N02/53134514825/in/dateposted-public/

This is unexpected to me. The whole Genus Update thing had become a bit of a sour meme and I wrote the brand off, honestly. Good to see some motion again and while I've switched to Lelutka at this point, a bit of competition can't hurt. I'll check it out once I'm at my computer. Doubt I'll really use it at this point but you never know.

Well if the trash takes itself out, I'd call that a feature. Okay that was a bit blunt but the point stands. Women have got any number of reasons to not want their gender revealed or even be a topic. Not least of all: Creepy dudes creeping. Sexist jokes. Harassment. Stalking. Etc. Sometimes it's just more comfy to not deal with any of that. Thus if someone is such a pro epic level dude detector as to be triggered by a woman setting boundaries, well, I'll say good bye, have a good time, thank you for flagging yourself. Good luck in your endeavors.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/191119559@N02/53123795937/in/dateposted-public/ I feel like my miscalibrated monitors strike again. It's a bit maddening. I've got a dual screen setup and I've calibrated them both but... they're both on the cheaper side and so I've now got the funny situation of never knowing what color to settle for, which of these is closer to the average. Such as - I feel like this is too dark. Then I drag it on the other screen and holy... no it's not. Then I look at it on the tablet for good measure and just flop down.