Fauve Aeon

After 8am, did someone make the coffee? Oh right, that needs to be me, the cats have no thumbs. I’m really just ok with ‘feelings on hold’ today, this holiday is fraught and I’m just not down with that anymore. I’m in the fortunate position of being able to ‘nope’ Holiday stuff all together when I want to, so I’m playing SL and I volunteered to do one holiday thing for my community there. I’m on hiatus from my SL dance company, I’m burnt and taking meds so I’m kind of a sludge-head slowpoke in movement and reaction time. Last night I said goodbye to my old style Meadowbrook Linden Home that I had not touched in a long time. A Victorian Linden Home popped up for me...but I didn’t have my tier allocated correctly, I donate part of it to a community and I want to keep doing so in 2020. After waits and refreshes and a few aquisitions and abandonments, another Victorian popped...and I had mis-counted and need to wait 24 hrs. This process kind of feels like a capsule of my 2019. Grateful for the plenty and lack of want..but things just not happening correctly in the right areas, with the right outcomes. People have given my posts ‘sad likes’ but I don’t really feel sad, I just felt like sharing some of what I’m feeling. For the first time this year, I looked ahead in my life and thought to myself, “You’d better kick into higher gear on some of your longest-term goals if you expect to see them come to pass in your lifetime, Chickie. Reassess, ditch some things that don’t matter as much and pull your focus tighter!” As I popped about on Bellisseria, I kind of get why people might like to have Victorians in places where the older traditional styles are in the north. I hate to say it but my misgivings in looking at the southern parts of the map proved true, the Victorian community isn’t as detailed and more areas are cloned. Which is something I was not alone in disliking about the pre-Bellisseria communities. All in all I’m not complaining or thinking it should be different, just keeping in mind what Patch said about outgrowing them...but I still want to try the commune group idea and for that I need one of the largest homes.

It depends what you want your end result to be. I like both and for different reasons. I love the unedited snaps, the real capture the amazing moment photos. I enjoy the in the viewer challenge and testing BD is on my 2020 SL Bucket List. I also love to alter and filter the crap out of my shots sometimes, though Lightroom 😉. I never feel the need to pass off photoshopped pix as non, and it does also frustrate me (and here come the peeves) that people will be so snobby about their ‘art photography’ or the ones who even flat out lie about photoshopping. Why? For most of my shots, what I like best for posting or sharing is a crop, levels corrected, stray hair, neck seam or odd thing corrected. So technically photoshopped, but at a level that is commonly accepted as correction, not overly enhanced. Lately some actions do a bit more, but as subtle enhancement, not changes. But again, raw shot is not altered, altered is altered, why pretend it isn’t. I agree that the level of photoshopping is too high for many of the photos used for official SL photos. On the other hand, it shows what resident photographers are capable of in the medium so featuring them as photo of the day is good.

boring reply, skip if you already knew I wasn’t in any way suggesting ‘isms’ are OK. Of course not, none of those are ever acceptable. Nor was I suggesting people *need* to ‘change’ anything that they don’t want to change about themselves (or their avatars). But I do actually know people who very much enjoy leaving some of their burdens of RL limitations or yes, bias against them behind when they come into the virtual so that’s what I was thinking of. The ‘whole other conversation’ I referred to is about what people choose when we have choices in our avatars about some things that we have no choice about in our RL human selves, and our experiences...not that any kind of ‘ism’ is ok anywhere, ever. We are who we are as the human drivers of these avatars in the end always, after all! My avatar is me but it’s also somewhat ’not me’ sometimes, especially visually...by my own choice. I see her as the sum of my choices. But ‘who I am’ and what I do while driving her makes an impact, on myself and on the others I encounter and that is (to me) also a real experience. I have a different experience sometimes depending on the choices I make about the appearance of my avatar. I have a very different experience in an 11 yo (SL years) avatar than I do in a much newer one. I have a different experience in a chibi noodle avatar than I do in a doll avatar or as a human (adult or kid avatar). No one talks to me when I’m a tiny Totoro, so for me it is the perfect ‘don’t bug me’ low render weight avatar for shopping or hopping about without much commentary. When I’m human adult female, many more people PM me. When I’m a chibi noodle, the conversations are much less centered on the dating game, when I’m a kid avatar (I’m a member of the New Babbage urchin community in my alt), I’m very careful where else on the grid I go and even who I talk to, a completely different awareness. I always have a fairly current ‘adult human me’ outfit made because there are places that don’t welcome non-human avatars and sometimes I just happen to be a tap-dancing velociraptor 5 minutes before I want to go there. I enjoy it a lot that human is just one choice of many others and my skin/eye/hair color is a click, and that my age, sex and other characteristics can also be choices.

Virtual world tours of several kinds. TED talks about machine learning.

Granted but it’s the one you like the least of all you’ve ever demo’d. I wish my inventory was better organized. I’m gonna tackle it more but I don’t like doing it.

Houses Sold

Slightly tame is fine, friendo! FERAL

Subscription Box extra points for Gudetama expressing my feels today!

I should have been more clear. I don’t mind that LL will be charging for event listings because I think it will result in a clearing of the calendar of a lot of the spam posting because if even half of the spammers and people who double and triple repeat posts can’t just spam the calendar like this for free anymore, it will ‘clear out’ a lot of those listings. Then using filters, I think the calendar will become useable again.

Another peeve I have that’s dumb as dirt but it still gets my back up, especially when it’s in a so called ‘news’ blog. No one said the peeves were all reasonable. 😑

Xenomorphs enter, naming outsiders nonsense NAMES.

Soap Box

The first part is way more true than I’m wanting it to be and it gets more true every year, the last part made me laugh my a** off because it’s so visibly obvious in SL everywhere I look. edit: SLoomers? Maybe...

I really try not to judge all books by their cover in any situation (even though we all make some judgements based on what we initially see, it’s human nature and first instinct) but in SL we have huge amounts of choice in very easily changing so much about how we look, so for me, there’s not really a fair comparison between this kind of judgement RL and SL. It’s a whole other conversation about bias in a world where things like sex/gender/age/race/skin color and so many other things are completely changeable with the click of a mouse.

I’m in charge of the community holiday calendar for New Babbage this year so my office is pretty cheer-ily messy. Donner Square is a tiny tabletop village I have set out for the past few years a world within a world...also, Steam Santa and the Boiler Elf stopped in via steam sleigh after they discharged their traditional annual holiday party duties. Santa changed to his Hawaiian gear and started his vacay (photos carefully safe from prying eyes) but I’m sure the Boiler Elf won’t go until all the fruitcake has been eaten, ‘nog drained and the daily gifts done (around Epiphinay, our calendar is a real multi-holiday inclusive mashup, as it should be). New Babbage is merry at winter holiday time.

I’m really worn out, I just retain zero energy or zest. I’m going to make an appointment with a new doctor and get a physical and bloodwork to see if there’s something physically wrong. I’m a bit overdue for a pap and exam anyway plus just a general physical. Maybe my hormones or thyroid is out of whack. Meantime I think I’ll dig out my mat and just do some slow Hatha yoga every day. Can’t hurt, might help. I’m also always cold. That’s usual when it IS a little cold inside, I’m not a person who gets too warm easily... but lately I am still cold when I crank the room heat and wear a sweater. That can’t be right.

I like to think of a lot of things as social psychology experiments. In the length of human history, virtual worlds, AR and VR (and the way people interact with virtuality) are still in infancy, even in SL...if you can consider a 16yo platform a ‘baby’ still, so if AR and VR are really as game-changing as some futurists seem to think they will be even more than universal, metaversal, and are still striving towards it, then this is a very long game, which still needs much study and also studies of the users. Just seeing how people deal with stuff (with say no, little, some, lots or all info available) is valuable too. I think some things are deliberately not widely broadcast, just to study how we go about finding them out, how frustrated we get in the process, how far we will go to learn, at what point do people give up, etc. Linden Research, Linden Lab. 😉 just some Sunday brunch thoughts....mmmm General Tso’s Chicken.

I’m really looking forward to the calendar being cleared out, I think it will be a big improvement and I’ll be glad to maybe be able to more easily discover a greater number of quality live events of all kinds. I also don’t really follow any dj’s who don’t live-mix and I really prefer those who compose some music too so a huge chunk of the current calendar listings for 24/7 dj stuff aren’t appealing at all. regarding what @Qie Niangao said, I think this is a very important point for some of us. As much as people like to complain about LL, I haven’t found anything else that offers near enough of what I like SL for. Do we also have a Kitely subscription? Yep, and I enjoy it a lot too, but for different reasons. In 2020 I’m going to check out more VR places too but for me, SL still offers many unique features that I really like. I’m not saying I love everything about SL, there are some really annoying and frustrating things for sure...but to me, the benefits of participating still far outweigh the downsides.

Venus Rising. (with apologies for not previously reading the rules completely and posting incorrect order)

Back Up

I think some of the SL shopping events do already look like bad malls with no Corn Dog 7. They could use an ice rink. And yes, Its because I am among the tribe that thinks the shopping events should have entertainment and activities in addition to shopping. Most of them send blogger packs and have blogger/press early access anyway so the fashion bloggers, writers, and hardcore fashionistas are long gone by opening day anyway.

☠️ Grape Nuts are mini tooth-killing nuggets of desiccated woe! I’m not entirely convinced they are even a food anymore. 🤣 I’m feeling better today in what feels like an actual uptake trend not just an isolated day here and there of ‘less flat’. I’m going inworld to see to setting up the final steps of a holiday thing for a community I ‘live’ in and I think I’ll also dismantle my old Linden Home and roll the dice on a new one. I still like the idea of the biggest Victorian made into a communal house of some kind, and blog the experience together in words and photos. I think it would be a fun experiment, just not sure how to go about it, exactly other than to get the house first. Still baby steps. One of the best yet most simple things I’ve heard this year in the motivational department was something I think I’ll frame and put in the wall of the new empty house as a talisman:

Yes, I would be assuming that someone who wanted to sell me things did take care to put them in the correct and most targeted category available. 😉 I have enough native wit to buy a combat system and add-ons from a merchant that offered 3 systems provided everything is clearly labeled with the compatibility, so think what you are asking is something that would be very useful to you but perhaps not useful enough to the majority of the residents that use the MP for LL to justify spend time developing and implementing it. That’s just my thoughts. To address the thread topic, I pretty much also think this about most of the suggestions of ‘this but make it more x’, or ‘yes but only if y’ conditions people would like to attach to name (and any other given feature)changes. But anyone can always open a JIRA for any feature requests. Aside: And no, I’m not at all implying that people shouldn’t discuss, disagree, make suggestions, everything...just that each of our suggestions at any given time probably don’t represent enough of a majority of the user base to be viable, and all of them together can maybe sometimes make a very long thread with not much usable info. I wish LL polled the users more, even if they didn’t actually release the results.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding but I can already drill down using the left hand subcategories in the ‘search this store’ tab, without even using any keywords?

I think it would be fun to compare my most ‘basic’ modern everyday kind of look (yes it’s pretty ‘mall rat’) to my most fantastical/unusual. Ok on my 2020 photo list. 😉 I’m doing KonMari on my inventory anyway so why not? For some people, it won’t be that different, for some it will be night/day. Both are fine, different people have different goals in SL. Sometimes people want to buy reasonable, realistic everyday clothes of the current popular style, sometimes really dressy things, sometimes fantastical costumes or RP. But posts worded like this pretty much guarantee ruffled feather and trollish replies so they might be considered at minimum, playfully trollish to start. Especially when there’s a pattern of them.