Theresa Tennyson

This type of post shows up from time to time. I find the telling parts to be the ones I highlighted in red. You see, everyone can still build exactly the same things they could in the "good old days" right now. They can even build them with reduced land impact and new materials options using the same tools. What they can't do is start a shop to sell these objects and be considered a major player, because other people are out there with more advanced tools and skillsets. I have experience in real-world construction and I admit I'm somewhat baffled at the people wanting everything in SL to be done "in world." In the real world buildings aren't built from scratch in a field - some things, like concrete pouring and masonry, are, but other things are built to order in specialized shops and brought to the field for installation. Still others are mass-produced in factories and ordered out of catalogs. You don't want your finish carpenter standing in the middle of a muddy field with a miter box building your windows, and they don't want to be there either.

It's also a good summary of my premise. Note that he describes things being different from 1978. That's almost forty years ago. Mulling this over, I realized there was a technology that changed the world spectacularly and at comparatively blinding speed in the 19th century, and we don't even think about it today because the technology itself is basically obsolete, but we use its direct successors every day, especially with the Internet: The electric telegraph. In 1844 the idea that you could send a message from Washington DC to Baltimore almost instantaneously was so mind-blowing that the first message on that line was "WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT." By 1861 (just seventeen years) you could send the same message just as quickly from Washington to San Francisco. By 1866 (only five more years) it could go over the Atlantic Ocean to London and Europe. Also, the telegraph is the direct ancestor of the telephone, digital data transmission, and radio. Bear in mind that before the telegraph, it would take days or months for these messages to arrive, depending on distances. But today? We take all of this for granted.

Here's something to bear in mind - time always runs at the same pace, but our perception of it changes. Right now the iPhone is ten years old and really hasn't changed much. Now take a look at the twentieth century: Over the weekend I watched a movie made and set in the mid-1950's. One of the characters restored and drove old cars - old "brass" cars from the pre-World War I era. That would make the cars about 40 years old. The car he drove looked completely out of place and would have trouble coping with driving conditions at that time. Today, a forty-year-old car would be built in 1977. I'm a fan of animation. The original Toy Story movie was made in 1995, or 22 years ago. Computer animated movies now look a lot better but Toy Story still holds up fairly well. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs came out in 1937 - a feature length animated Technicolor musical. Ten years earlier, animation consisted of eight-minute silent black and white shorts of characters largely made up of circles and blobs connected by "rubber hoses." It doesn't seem that long ago that I was nonplussed by college students born in the 1990's. Very soon, they'll be born in the twenty-first century. Doing the math like this is interesting, although sometimes a bit depressing. I was watching students at a party dancing to Nirvana and old hair bands and realized that for them, those bands would be the equivalent of Chuck Berry for me.

Before the current incarnation of the Marketplace it was a third-party system called Xstreet. Xstreet listings allowed people to give "star" ratings without typing in a description or comments. The Marketplace no longer allows that but it brought over the Xstreet listings intact and those listings still reflect the old no-comment reviews. Those reviews aren't readable because there's nothing to read.

Your "money" is not money. It only becomes money when Linden Lab decides to make it so. It's just the same as an employer sending you your payroll check after deducting taxes, health insurance fees, etc. If that bothers you I hope you never work for a service business and see the difference between the billing rate your employer charges their clients for your work and what you actually get.

Especially because you've already fulfilled all the tax requirements to consider your un-cashed US dollar balance as income, including tracking where it all came from so you could correctly handle VAT from Europeans. Oh, wait...

There are no new bones in the feet, meaning there's no easy way of making the toes wiggle. In order to put in wiggling toes the maker would have to repurpose bones from elsewhere in the skeleton and it would be a compatibility nightmare.

Not only is it legal, it's required: https://www.forbes.com/sites/janetnovack/2014/05/15/european-vat-10-things-online-sellers-need-to-know-about-taxes-on-digital-goods-and-services/#4dca071dfa47

No, you did say that, in exactly those words, as I quoted.

Physique bodies don't include a "clear layer" function built in - you can only replace something added to that layer with something else. However, you can replace it with something completely blank. Several free third party HUD's are available that do just that - to find them, search for "clear physique layers" on the Marketplace.

This thread is getting muddled. You say no fitted mesh, but then you seem to give the impression that you mean no rigged mesh at all, and they're different things. The vast majority of mesh clothing before about 2015 is rigged but is not "fitted".

The listing of 78 million available was the amount people are requesting to buy at that exchange rate. If you put in a buy order at that amount it won't be filled until all the other orders are filled. If you need the LIndens quickly you'll need to accept a slightly worse exchange rate; otherwise you can wait. Right now the exchange rate indicates that the demand for Lindens is a bit higher than normal - good for sellers, not so good for buyers.

My interpretation of the item description was that if your friends wanted to play basketball with your hoop they'd click it and be sent a basketball, but the object maker decided to do this by having a vendor system send the basketball rather than having it be sent from the object's inventory. (This item looks to be old enough to be well before "temporary attachments/experiences" because the vendor system it mentions is all but obsolete now anyway.) I'm not saying it was a good idea by any means, mind you...

You seem to be missing something - Second Life doesn't need users, it needs users who spend money. Some time ago I saw an infographic that said that female hair was the largest component in the retail economy. Now fashionistas are buying things like Maitreya mesh bodies and Catwa Bento heads, resulting in the equivalent purchase of thirty-one Truth hairstyles at one sitting, and this doesn't take into account the new clothing and accessories they'll have to buy - and they're shelling out this money enthusiastically and willingly. Meanwhile, these products are supported and developed by people who not only aren't on Linden Lab's payroll, they pay fees to be in a position to do this support and development.

Unfortunately I don't think that's the case. As far as I can tell Second Life is only capable of recognizing one type of avatar as an avatar, and that's hard-coded into the viewers. I don't believe there's any sort of messaging system in place to give more specific information. The only difference between "male" and "female" avatars is a flag and some variable ranges in the shape files. You can change a shape from "female" to "male" by clicking a button, and many "young male" avatars typically used a female shape because the male shape behaves badly when scaled down. That's also why people were "Ruthed" in the past regardless of whether they were male or female. Nothing else, including system clothing, contains gender information.

Psst! If you try using forum recommendations to promote your own store, it might be less conspicuous if you don't name your store after yourself.

Neither of you are looking good in this. That particular merchant is well known for having... a... certain... type.... of customer service behavior, but the description of items similar to what you bought say clearly that they use a vendor system to give basketballs to your friends, which is why it requires debit permissions. It's similar to the many "freebie" vendors that require you to pay L$1 and which immediately return that L$1. Of course, the description might not have had that in it at the time, but it has nothing to do with "promoting gambling with small children."

WoW is another store that has constant bargain skin/applier promotions.

Don't worry too much about it, especially as you can't spend money right now. Think of new SL bodies as being like professional system cameras - you need to be aware of what "system" you bought into when you start shopping for them, but you don't actually need one at all to take snapshots. Eventually, yes; you might want to get one but there's no hurry. As has been said, the "classic" starter avatars have a lot of fairly useful things for now. Another place to look is The Free Dove. Avoid anyplace with "Freebie" in the name. Seriously, most of what you'll find in those places will be ten years old by now.

Our little lives get complicated - It's a simple thing. Simple as a flower, And that's a complicated thing. (From "No New Tale to Tell" by Love and Rockets (Kevin Haskins, Daniel Ash and Daniel J. Haskins.)

You'll get everything you need to have wearable feet, but they might not exactly match your skin. You can use what you get to have them close - probably close enough that most people won't notice (they come with the ability to set their tone to a wide range of skin tones and include a "blender" that will make the change less noticeable. If you want a better match you can get an "applier" that will texture the feet with the same texture that the skin-maker used and the match will be near-perfect, but you'll need to buy this applier from the maker of your skin. If your skin is several years old there may not be appliers made for it. Since it sounds like you're new to mesh body parts, you should know that you'll have to have your leg muscles and body fat within certain ranges to avoid the feet from looking smaller or larger than the bottom of your calves, and you'll need to set your slider for "knock-kneed/bow-legged" to 50. This means you may need a modifiable shape.

Soooo, people want to be unique so a whole bunch of them wrassle with each other to get into the same place? Interesting... (I'm not saying that what you're saying is incorrect, just the whole idea. One of my very first posts on this forum was to someone who said something that only needed to be paraphrased very slightly to say, "I like Apple computers and Harley Davidsons because I think differently and those are the things the people who think differently use.")

All right - tell me where does the money (REAL money) come the merchants cash out come from then?

Tier isn't always paid for with real life currency, it can be payed with "US dollar balance" - Lindens that are converted to a credit. Essentially it's saying, "We aren't going to collect real-life currency from you for the operation of your regions due to the amount of Lindens you've converted." Lindens are not money. If you can walk into a real-life store and buy something with them or pay your rent on your real-life apartment, I'll stand corrected. In fact, you can't even use your "US dollar balance" anywhere other than Second Life. Linden Lab does pay merchants, because their Second Life "income" isn't currency and they can't do anything with it outside of Second Life without it, so they need to request a payment in actual currency. The TOS that everyone signed states that Linden Lab doesn't have to give them anything though. They aren't skimming anything because there's nothing of real value to skim. The individual creator who withdraws currency from Second Life is an expense. The total financial traffic they're involved in represents a slight overall profit only because of fees.

So, just to confirm - you are my employee?