Petronilla Whitfield

Farewell, Lindal, and best wishes.

I think that the success of the new mentor program will depend, in large part, on the ability of mentors to communicate effectively with new users. It seems likely to me that many new users will come in with expectations based on playing other online games such as RDR2 and GTA. Effective mentors will need to be sufficiently familiar with gameplay in popular MMOGs in order to understand what aspects of SL are confusing to newbies who grew up playing such games. I know that I’m not. I do not expect to volunteer this time around. I was a mentor in the last iteration of the program. The part that I found difficult was that new users seemed to expect me to know everything about Second Life and got easily frustrated when asking about areas unfamiliar to me. For example, I have no experience whatsoever with the sexual aspects of SL—and have no interest in it. My suggestions are these. First, that the Moles supervising mentors find channels through which mentors with lots of gaming experience outside SL can tutor/serve as a resource for mentors who don’t. Second, that Lindens help new users manage their expectations of mentors—lead them to expect that no mentor will know everything, and that a question may need to be addressed to more than one mentor before finding an answer. Will the program be successful? I hope so.

Yes, cheesecake is easy. Tip: leave the eggs and cream cheese out of the fridge [if you keep eggs there] overnight so that they come up to room temperature. Cold eggs in cheesecake can make cracks in the top when the cake cools.

A thread in the General Discussion Forum about prims reminded me of how much I use regular prims in decorating. I imagine a lot of people do the same. My little Alderley is a good example. Naturally, a prim connects my porch to the public path in front of the house, textured from the Trad texture pack. The back yard is built around a prim textured with tiles, attached to a mesh path made by Compulsion. I used two hollowed-out boxes around the side window to make a dining alcove in the main room. The second "bedroom" is divided into a small kitchen and bathroom by a few prim walls and a door (from the stilts pack). No such prim use in the bedroom, but I've included a picture just to be complete.

I'm 59, and started SL in 2009. I remember being in an SL 80's dance club several years ago when an avatar came to the door and said "I'm nineteen. Is there anyone my age or are you all old?" By the conversations, I suspect we were (mostly) all "old" from the viewpoint of a teenager.

Aardvarks, perhaps, prefer leap years. CLOCK

Unbounded stars eternally radiate sunshine. LIGHT (No pop-up box for me!)

Come! Lofty, ice-capped mountains beckon. RANGE

Cricket rises on a kite. SOARS

Two red umbrellas need knobs. CLOUD

"Come over!" my friend yelled. SHOUT

Graceful unicorns easily samba sideways. ZUMBA

Some tangled yarns lose elasticity. KNITS

I also prefer vehicles that attach rather than ones that need to be rezzed. I like riding a horse (if I can include that as a vehicle) through Belli, especially over the mountains and along the coasts. In the fantasy area I prefer a unicorn. If not on horseback, I often use a bicycle when exploring neighborhoods. A canoe, floating log, or a duck pool floatie are my favorites on the water.

Little ants taunting elephants, really? BUGGY

Walking over roads dividing yards. EARTH

Beautiful angels narrate glad stories. WINGS

Many odd objects dissipate silently. VIALS

Violets in daylight encourage optimism BOOKS

I just finished decorating my Newbrooke--the Gatewood model. I love the ability to put a small house on a 1024 lot and have plenty of room for a garden. The interior is still roomy. There is only one room with a door, so that's my bathroom. The bedroom and balcony are upstairs. I like the design of the house. That said, I'm not sure how long I'll hold on to this one. I tend to prefer a more forested environment to a suburb.

I've read that the chalet homes are not popular, but I love my Matterhorn! It backs up to a hill, which gives it a nice feeling of privacy within a neighborhood setting. The entryway is inviting. The living room is large enough to hold a piano. The other room on the ground floor I've divided into three by adding two walls attached at a 90 degree angle. I wish the content pack included interior walls! The large space now has a little study, a kitchen, and a formal dining room. There's a place for a mud room at the rear of the house connecting the living room and the study. It has a door leading to the back yard. I've put a patio out back with a pool and lounge area on one end, and a green house and garden on the other. My little dog, Penny-farthing, is out there too. Upstairs, I have a bedroom, bathroom, and a t.v. room (the little area at the top of the stairs), but I seem to have run out of file space to upload pictures! Anyway, I hope you enjoyed seeing a furnished chalet home.

I hope someone out there can offer some help. I rent a region, and have done so for some months. For the last week or so, I have had real trouble staying logged in there. I crash, and then cannot log in to home. If I log in elsewhere, I crash upon trying to teleport home. If I teleport to an adjacent region, my land is missing--all I see is ocean. I have to restart my computer to see my region again. I can log in elsewhere and have very little lag. I can teleport around without crashing. Only my home region causes me to crash, then it idisappears. I have restarted the region, but it didn't help. When I am in long enough to check things on the statistics bar, the time dilation is between .999 and 1. Sim FPS are 45. The spare time is between 18 and 19. The last collision I had was in October. The only thing that I can tell that is off in the statistics bar is the Ping Sim and Packet loss. These bars shoot all the way over to the right . I have checked all the information I can on Ping sim, and all I see is that it can go bad because of one's network connection. Yet everywhere else I go in SL, my Ping sim and Packet loss are near zero. There are no objects on the regions except what I own, and no one there but me. Can anyone tell me what's wrong?

Now that comment really did make me laugh.

Let's say the button in the radar goes away. Fine. I open my world map, click the box that shows people, chose a random green dot, and TP right next to it. Removing the button in radar will do nothing to stop random people from TPing into your space. The only thing that can prevent random people dropping in is making your land private. If keeping random folks from TPing into your property is important to you, perhaps you should consider renting land where the landlord allows you to make your parcel private.

The only time I read text with a tone/inflection/accent in my head is when reading a book written in first person by someone whose voice I am familiar with (such as a radio personality who writes a book), or when a book has been adapted into a film, in which case I hear the voices of the actors. In those circumstances, I can't help but hear the words in a particular voice--I can't "turn it off" even if I want to. Other than those circumstances, I never associate a voice with written text--in books, forums, or anywhere. Still less do I imagine a physical being or a setting. By the way, I read a *lot,* both for my job and for pleasure. I usually have a couple of novels going at any given time. I'm not sure that I would expect to find that the tendency to assign a voice to a text is greater among the population that enjoys Second Life, but I would not be at all surprised to find that it is common among those who enjoy role-playing. I've never been able to see the point of role-playing, and I suspect that it requires a tendency to interact with the other players as "characters" whom you have fleshed-out in your own mind, which I simply can't do.