ValKalAstra

There's one thing that I've picked up in therapy that has helped me throughout my troubles. It's the idea of emotional momentum, based on a simple rule for myself: Do one step a day. It doesn't matter how big or small that step was. Just do one step. There were days when I was bedridden with apathy as my head was trying to kind of not be my best friend - times when I thought even just getting up was impossible. And yet I did, then I opened a word document and typed out the first line of a letter. Nothing else. Just the first line. I closed it. Saved it. Went back to bed that day. But I had done one step. The next morning, I was still broken but I got up, added another line. Got back to bed. By the third day I knew I had it in me to do the one thing because I had just proven I could do it two days in a row, so I got up, finished the letter, hit save and it wasn't until I leaned back, that I realised I had let momentum carry me forward. That's why it doesn't matter how big or small that step is, because as long as you do one step per day, it's progress. Because with that one step, you're moving. I couldn't possibly understand what you go through but I try to empathise and seeing that Blog made me a smile. You made the first step and it's a lovely one too. The blog is cool and so are the pictures. You did well.

Instructions unclear. Put cat into bathtub. Was apparently not amused! (Thank you, love the hairstyle <3).

It's kind of funny that I still think of myself as a new player in Second Life despite being here since the end of 2020. Still, I feel like I can give some input into why people struggle with the inventory as I am still fighting it to this day. After a lot of starting woes, I think I'll break it down to three issues: I'm a dum dum. Inability to rename individual objects due to No Mod. Decades of now outdated systems. Obviously Second Life can't do anything about the first issue. To be precise, I've got enough knowledge about computer systems to know I barely know anything and I'm the gal that grew up toying with FTP servers, learned to code basic progams using libraries like NLTK or other ML stuff, I crashed computers with Gentoo and just overall messed with things in DOS back in the day. I should in theory be able to deal with it but something about the way it is structured makes it hard to bridge that knowledge. A big part of which is my chaotic scatterbrain. Another part is the inability to rename objects. I get it. No-Mod is the name of the game but the inability to rename an object is a killer for the way I would logically try to sort things. Let's say I've got this neat looking top: RNES Ample Flower Spring ML EXP I genuinely hope Random Non Existing Store (RNES for short) ain't a thing as I just made that stuff up but you get the idea. Point is, once that thing vanishes into the various subfolders, it's gone. I'm never going to find it again because I will never intuitively look for a top by typing out any combination of the words it is named. My instinct is to rename it to something I can make use of: RNES Fatpack, Top, Flower Pattern, Open back, Maitreya Only I can't do that. My options are to rename the folder or to create a notecard and drop it in that folder. Renaming the folder falls apart as I often buy outfits and dropping a notecard increases the already absurd amount of random junk in my inventory further. It can be done but very quickly reaches the point of "Nina can't be arsed to deal with this anymore". This then leads into the issue of decade old systems. It took me way too long to find out all the different ways people named their products over time. Take Maitreya. Lara Maitreya L-Exp Experimental M Then there are skins and suddenly it's Evo, Evox, SLUV, Bom, Applier, Omega. You get to hair and start fighting alphas and flexi nightmares and you get the drift. The super cool creativity that has grown over the years and is one of Second Life's greatest strengths is also abit it's weakness as there is a stupid big learning curve to even just learn all the various terms for the same thing and to understand which technologies are outdated. In short: There's a wild growth of different systems and divergent names for the same systems. I can neither name, tag or add proper indexable metadata to them properly without weird workarounds and character limits. Heck I might be able to and just never found out how and I looked! Is it impossible to learn, nah. However it needs a lot of instutional knowledge to get going and systems like no-mod applying to names as well kind of throw a spanner into things. If I were to wish for an update: I'd create an additional data field for every inventory object and split the name into: Internal, set by the creator and used for scripting purposes, External, user facing, can be set at will. To start off, the system would initially mirror the internal to the external name to cut down on work for creators during the implementation. And see, that's why I am not in charge of coding anything at LL because fuffing with an established database like that is a recipe for disaster and it might even break some legacy code somewhere that expects data to be returned a certain way. So obviously, not an easy solution. I just want the ability to properly add either metadata or rename objects without foldernames or notecards. And this is where someone goes "but you can already do that, here is how, you dum dum"

Would love to - going to try contacting you later in the day, when I'm back from some RL stuff. I promise, no clowns.

That hairstyle - woah. Do you remember where it is from? Just saw you answered it already, Mew from Dura. Yay! I love the shot!

That was a lot of fun and turned out to be rather insightful too. I've learned a lot about editing and several Firestorm functions I never knew about. @Orwar and I both took a shot of each other's avatar through our own individual lens. With that I present: Orwar as the shopkeeper of a tiny store that might or might not sell magic ingredients. I don't know, didn't dare ask!

So this has been an idea I've sat on for a while. I frequently find myself feeling stuck, not making any progress. Sometimes it's a technical thing, other times it's just a feeling of not progressing enough and making the same picture again and again. Be that as it may, something I've always been interested in is to see and hear about how others work, to learn from how they are doing things. Thus the idea was born: Two photographers take a picture of the other avatar, while talking people through the process. This serves a variety of purposes: Frankly, to connect with others about a mutual hobby. To learn from seeing the process and being able to ask even "dumb" questions. To also see your own avatar from someone else's point of view. Would that be something any of you are interested in? I'll make the first step and offer up myself (selfish, I know :P). Who: Nina Kastra (valkalastra) https://flickr.com/photos/191119559@N02/ Timezone: CET, UTC+1 -> https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html?p1=1229 When: Mostly during the day. I'm flexible - but pushing late into the night or early morning will diminish my already limited brain capacity NSFW: Yes and no. I don't mind but I also don't have Flickr Pro so no upload in that case. Specialty/Niche: Urban, Fashion or Fantasy Additional notes: All skill levels welcome. If you are interested, I'd be willing to optionally stream the process via Discord Livestream. Either way, bring time. I work... slow.

I find capturing emotions in SL to be particularly difficult. It's a lot of very subtle muscle movement that's hard to catch with the limited amount of animation bones we've got. You may need to compensate by trying additional expressive aspects. For example, using cold (blue) light with stark shadows that hide the eyes. Body posture can do a lot of heavy lifting, as can do overall lighting and direction. Here's an unedited example of one of my recent pictures. Unedited because I would feel cheeky double posting the end result. Let me walk through my thought processes for it. First, a small cutout from the unedited shot: If you look at the face, it has got barely any expression on it. The head is inclined towards a shoulder and the gaze is cast down, both of which can convey a sense of inwardness or introspection. More or less, like I was in my own thoughts. Overall body language protects the chest with the arms, something we do when we feel vulnerable. Same reason we fold our arms when we get into an argument - we instinctively protect our most vulnerable body parts (read, organs). Sadness is a very vulnerable emotion and so I thought it would work well to cross the arms and then have the hands reach out to the shoulders as if I was trying to hug myself for comfort. Sadness is also often an emotion described as cold and we tend to wrap our arms around ourselves when cold too. Further on, the lighting. There's a contrast between warm light coming from the side and most of the body being cast in shadow. This was meant to create a dichotomy between the warmth outside and the cold inside, almost like these two things don't belong together. Last but not least, I'm turned away from the warmth of the light. Body language is showing a "cold" shoulder towards it. And perhaps in a lucky coincident, the sparkles I forgot to remove kind of added two little glitters on my cheek that might be tears. Happy little accidents, eh Bob Ross? Still what I want to get at: The face shows barely any emotion. It's the same type of boring model/mannequin stare we're all so familiar with. Bodypose, light, mood and scene composition do the heavy lifting to convey the sadness. I hope it worked but at least that was the intent! Hope this helped a bit. Oh, yah. I did use the Lelutka Axis Hud to move the head and eyes. I can't recommend it enough, it's part of every shot I take.

That's one possible way but you'd lose the advantages of a higher resolution. I think the preview window is accurate towards the actual end result but it's tiny. So in theory you could configure your depth of field to look right in the preview but honestly, I should probably shut up at this point and let others talk. Sorry, been too long since I used things in viewer. I do remember Orwar making a good tutorial about depth of field in editing, using editing and basically taking one picture normally and one of just the depth information.

It's been a while since I approach my pictures in a different way (using injected shaders and dynamic super resolution instead) but if memory serves, depth of field settings are tied to a specific resolution. Thus if you set it up to be just right with your screen resolution - but then go and set it to a higher resolution in the snapshot window, it will mess up the depth of field. Black Dragon at some point had a function (or still has? haven't used that in a while) to automatically approximate the settings, I'm not sure whether any of the other viewers do.

Slow day, eh? Yah, you can slam your FPS to 400 and waste energy doing so - quite figuratively burning money for no gain. I'm not getting into the human eye perception argument but I'll toss you this curveball: Monitor refresh rate puts a hard cap on which FPS you can actually make use of. Thus, sure - if you feel like you need max FPS in Second Life as you stutter lag around, turn off vsync, enjoy your screen tearing and then hard limit your FPS at your monitor's refresh rate. Anything more is just burning money.

Heck if I know - but if you ever figure it out, let me know. My instinct tells me that since I'm a shopping addict, my main is out there financing my lifestyle. Think about it, there's loot to be had. Wait is that they why ghosted me?!

Second Life - the only social deduction game where everyone is sus. But for all the wrong reasons.

The colors are sooooo pretty.

Personally, I've found it easier to meet people around shared interests than to go to meet up places. For example, I've found more acquiantances in the various photography groups, than I have in the Dark Butterfly. It just kind of naturally lends itself towards a shared interest and conversation - which might collide with the desire to be in predominantly female preseting communities. Clubs and such are... fleeting. Random people flowing in and out all the time but I've never managed to make one of these contacts stick, whether they were just really fun and engaging talks or something more adult oriented.

I keep wanting to comment and then there's a new picture from you - you're on fire! But been meaning to say: They're all intriguing and I especially appreciated seeing a "normal" picture from you as well. The folding lines in the shot I quoted, I found a rather interesting addition - you even took care to change the light values a bit under the fold. Good attention to detail.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/191119559@N02/53581442683/in/dateposted-public/

Honestly, it's a good question. I'm a novice scripter myself and whenever I look at experiences, I find them oddly limiting and cumbersome. When I look at them as a user, I find them rather ominous with that popup. I want to teleport - why do you need that camera permission again?! (yah I get it, llRequestExperiencePermissions but... like why?). I do understand the desire for an attachment scope experience but at that point - and pardon my ignorance - why not roll the functions into the normal script corpus at that point? But again, might be my ignorance on why something like environment settings need to be on experiences in the first place and can't be a normal function behind a targeted permission request. /edit: Oh, totally forgot to answer your question: I probably would use them. Yah. Although it might bump into attachment limits for avatars.

There was a time when I used to think that too. I found that constantly reading anger and hate had an adverse effect on me. It changed how I engaged with people, turned me bitter and hostile too. I'm a natural hot head with a temper and it got me into a looooot of arguments. Well I got older and found myself a deeply ugly person for it. To this day, I still don't block most people even if some of them have me go "what the fudge is wrong with you?!". I try to engage with people but I have learned to block folks that are so hateful, their very presence poisons any discourse they touch beyond repair. Whatever they have to say, someone else quite likely can say it better.

Yah. I do get that accidents can happen but lately I've seen it happen so often, I wonder whether some stores are running themselves a bit too thin with too many events. Maybe or maybe not related: My own lack of deductional skill to figure out just what is on sale sometimes. Alright, it's a picture of a girl in a dress, wearing glasses that are out of focus, earrings, showing the lipstick prominently, in an interesting pose and it's called some fancy artful name. Okay. So... what are you selling? Like at some point I start this puzzle game of, okay I know this store usually sells poses so it's probably not the pretty dress. However the pose is just barely in focus and clips, surely that would not happen with the pose as the primary sale item? Maybe the fancy earrings, could be some sort of prop type of deal. Do they have a demo, of course not. So it's probably the skin. Or the pose. What's the sales board called, maybe the title gives it away? And it's "object" by creator xyz. Aye. Have a nice day, sorry. I am not smart enough. (it was the glasses - I saw them weeks later in their mainstore on a mannequin).

Just saying, you can dodge the horrible UI redesign (and thus the idiotic must be logged in pest) by using old.reddit.com. Just add "old." in front of the reddit address.

Isn't that what the whole gacha thing was about? Ohhhh, right, different kind of whale hunting. Me, personally, would make a shop to sell virtual bubble wrap sheets. You would attach them like a hud and pop the bubbles with a satisfying sound. I would allow folks to share (transfer) the bubble wrap sheet of course, so you and a friend can pop bubbles together! Oh yeah and you could link it with friends so all of them can hear the pop without annoying anyone else. And I'd sell it at 25L$ a sheet. Hm. Actually...

I think the dragons have got it all figured out. Once they setup the pretty princess protection service, their food is served in self-delivery cans. Just remove the *****ly parts and roast as desired. Done, one freshly barbecued knight. /edit: Oh for BLEEP sake just how BLEEP many BLEEP innocent words are BLEEP censored by now. Okay let me grab my thesaurus and see what else would fit. And Nina is back with this bit of wisdom: Thesaurus recommends: complicated, knotty, nettlesome, ticklish, tricky as synonyms. Ticklish? Theoretically, all the swords and pike might tickle a dragon? Okay, ticklish.

More or less, @PheebyKatz gave you the gist of it. Us photographers are usually a bit weird but overall friendly bunch. If you're looking to learn, there are a great many resources for that. A good first start is YouTube, if you're the type that learns well with Videos. I know I don't - but the resources are out there. I'll recommend two groups to you as well. The first is FOCUS: secondlife:///app/group/163f6c9c-7a1a-d3ea-e144-bc6ccfab61c6/about (if the forums don't link this properly, just copy/paste into your SL adress bar) This is in my opinion THE place to go to for professional connections and also to just stay connected. You'll probably find most of the popular names in it. They run the FOCUS magazine as well as the photography fair event and galleries. If memory serves they often do teaching events too, so if your timezone allows, do check them out. https://artfocused.com/ --- The other group is Naturally Naughty 2.0: secondlife:///app/group/203e4ae4-42ee-f66c-1b6b-3e4e35baee44/about If you don't mind occasionally seeing nudity and sexual content, this is a lovely and very welcoming place for photographers of all skill levels. They've also got a sim full of wonderful backdrops for you to use. Very active, very friendly. I'd say join, even if you do mind NSFW content - in which case just skip the posted images. Folks will still be welcoming and helpful. --- Last but not least, just as PheebyKatz mentioned, you may want to find artists with a style you want to develop yourself. There are many different ways you can go about taking a picture. Say, some are adherents to the church of the raw shot - everything done must be SL only. Others are really intricate in building their own sets and working on dramatic artful lighting. Yet others love adding an element of editing, taking the pictures and turning them into something else entirely. Me, I wouldn't go as far as call myself experienced, but my joy is in finding technical solutions that are just a wee bit nutty. How nutty? This nutty.