Caerolle Llewellyn
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Posts posted by Caerolle Llewellyn
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On 8/2/2019 at 12:38 PM, Selene Gregoire said:
SL residents need to see that LL cares. Every. Single. Day.
Still waiting for this one, almost 12 years now.
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On 8/2/2019 at 3:02 AM, ChinRey said:
An upgraded system avatar would certainly make clothes creation a lot easier but would it increase the sales? Who knows? It seems to me that the amount of money a user spends in SL is fairly constant, if they spend less on one thing, they spend more on something else. But that's jsut my impression, I have no data to confirm it.
I cannot speak for anyone else, but I bought a LOT more clothes, shoes, skins, make-up, tattoos, everything, when I had my system body, because the selection was so much larger. A lot of the clothes and shoes were as expensive as mesh stuff. I buy far less now because I can't find the stuff I like, especially if I stick to my body (and it is Lara, which I guess is the most popular). Also, unless the clothes are specifically Lara, I have to deal with only having ten Alpha slots. I have spent lots of time slowly, painfully clicking body segments to hide. And in many (most?) cases, the segments don't line up with the clothes. On top of that, I have Slink feet, and many tall boots that fit the Slink feet don't fit the Lara legs, and again, the Alpha segments don't line up. And I stick with the same skin because of having to fight with appliers.
Perhaps a lot of my problem is ignorance, that would not surprise me. I know I spent a huge amount of time tracking down info on bodies and how to make everything work together. Maybe there is a guide out there that I didn't find, or that exists now but didn't when I got started with my mesh bodies (even something simple like adding instead of attaching can make a big difference). You had to know some stuff to use the old bodies and clothes, and it could be a nightmare making clothes fit, but it all seemed a lot more straight-forward.
Wrt money, I do somewhat limit my spending in SL. I tend to spend most of my money on tips, and balance clothes and accessories against that. I *will* throw money at a special project like upgrading my avi and skin, and sometimes go on a spending spree for clothes and accessories. I actually bought I think three different mesh bodies before I settled on the Lara. I hear the heads are extremely expensive, and tedious to customize, so I am not sure if I am going to take that step.
So, I don't know. SL would perhaps have made more money from me with a better standard avi that use prim clothes, or maybe not when you consider how expensive it is to buy a mesh body (though standard bodies from vendors were pricey, too). Most people love mesh bodies and clothes, though, so probably LL has made more money from the mesh route both through a more robust economy and also by having more people participating in SL.
FWIW
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On 7/23/2019 at 4:07 AM, Matty Luminos said:
2006:
2019:
Nope. Haven't changed a bit.
I am wondering if there is an interesting story here?
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I hope this is not too many pics. And I apologize for being such a bad SL photographer.~
Hopefully I embedded my photos correctly, my first try, lol.
I have deleted most of my pics, but managed to find one from the really old days:
I *think* this was my original avi, which was a heavily-modified Ruth (pic taken by a photographer in May 2008).
This one is only a few months later, but was the avi I bought, that I used for a long, long time. I by far had my most fun and fulfillment in SL in this avi.
This was my first place in SL.
Me and the love of my (Second) life at a club with me wearing something typical for me (2013):
I had a lot of different looks in the past; these are a couple of different examples, but by no means comprehensive; many probably would not get by the censors (which may be true for most of us, lol):
And is from just now:
I finally went to a mesh body but still have my standard head. It doesn't look bad with strong front-lighting like this (at least IMO, YMMV, lol), but pretty harsh in high-contrast or dark lighting. In the end, I think I have reached the end of how much effort I am willing to put into SL at this point, so I am unlikely to put the work in on finding a mesh head I like and customizing it. Same goes with outfits; I had a large range of clothes and hair and shoes and skins for my system avi, and used to change looks several times an evening. Now I only have a few outfits and wear the same one for days/weeks on end.
I know I am by far the outlier, but honestly in looking through people's pics I mostly prefer the older looks. The mesh bodies and heads and clothes are more realistic, for sure, but there was just something more fun and lively about the standard avis and prim stuff. Perhaps it is just that I am very emotionally attached to the way things were way before the mesh days, I dunno. But honestly, if they would have just fixed the damn chest groove and perhaps where the arm connects to the body, I would have been pretty much satisfied by the old-school bodies.
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2 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:
That exact model is probably not sustainable in SL, because LL is not a government but a for-profit organization, so, as a sort of elaboration on your plan, what if, instead of making this model of 5 sims/1-for-art (or whatever combination is financially feasible) generally available, LL offered, say, between two and five of these proposed models per half year (I'm making up the numbers as I go along), and asked those interested to submit a brief proposal. LL would need to make this sufficiently financially attractive that people were interested, and it would need to keep the number of slots available reasonably low, so that the financial hit that they are taking is manageable.
Yes, totally different model. In the RL examples, the developer is pushing to build something, in SL they already don't have enough people buying sims. Like most of my ideas, totally impractical, lol.
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19 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:
Despite the attractiveness of this as a model to encourage the development of more community-oriented estates (and I think that is valuable), this would be my concern. I wonder whether "public spiritedness" or even the belief that art is likely to attract more renters (and I suspect that may be an arguable assumption) is enough to actually motivate landowners to seek out and host "art." I am sure a few would, but functioning as a patron is hard work, especially if you want to change up the art every few months or so. It would be much easier to simply turn the non-profit region into a more conventional parkland sim.
So, this may be a really good idea, but as you concede, I'm not sure that, without some sort of additional inducement or rules, it's going to do much to support "art" (if by that we mean something separate and distinct from the more usual "really attractively laid out region").
I don't know if they still do this or not, but at one France (the one IRL, lol) had a requirement that all public works have an art aspect. A city here in Indiana (Columbus) used to do something similar, they had a very evolved development plan.
So, I don't know if they would fly in SL, or if LL would even be interested in the '5 sims/1-for-Art' plan anyhow, perhaps this would be an option? Maybe the LEA (which I didn't even know about before this thread, lol) could provide guidance with the sim owner putting up the money, with perhaps say some percent of what the free sim would have cost (20%?) as development funds?
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1 minute ago, ChinRey said:
No, I believe they genuinely want that bird to fly.
Then I wish them luck, they are going to need it. OTOH, I resent Sansar and LL for bleeding SL of resources (even though I may be wrong in that assumption).
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14 minutes ago, ChinRey said:
The question, however, is what is the target? Most of the initial goals have already been abandoned for various reasons and there doesn't seem to be any new ones.
Not admitting they effed up, maybe?
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Sadly, evil is being quite well rewarded these days. Though I guess it always is.
I wonder is something more prescriptive than the well-meaning New-Agey statement is in order:
'Be nice or leave.'
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20 hours ago, Selene Gregoire said:
I've been hanging out in virtual worlds for about 25 years now. They've never been very heavily populated. They are a niche market. The longest running one, Active Worlds, has had a concurrency of about 300 for the past 2 decades and it is still alive and kicking.
Ryan Schultz did a short piece on it here https://ryanschultz.com/2018/05/11/active-worlds-a-brief-introduction/
I left AW for good when I decided to stay in SL. That was 15 years ago.
Interesting. I had never heard of AW before a few weeks ago, when someone mentioned it in these forums. I did some research on it, and pulled up something weird from 2016 where some guy who livestreamed exploring games or something (Vinesauce) went there and had a weird experience, lol. Someone else had written an article the same year like 'Who was the last person in AW?" SL is dead enough for me, I don't need to explore something even more poorly developed and dead.
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19 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:
And, honestly, the "proof of concept" for this whole idea is SL itself. Sadly, I don't think SL is ever going to get a lot bigger than it is now, and it's more likely to continue to die a slow death by atrophy in the long run. We tried education, art, museums, R&D, RL commercial uses, and business meets here, and they have had, at best, a limited appeal. I honestly thought Sansar was dead in the water when they suggested it, and was sincerely surprised that it was the best idea that they could come up with.
It would, of course, have been really nice had LL put those resources instead into SL 2.0, or even just improving what we've already got. But I think that we all know, at some level, that even really substantive improvements are never going to boost the user base a great deal beyond what it now is, or what it was at its peak. In that sense, maybe, LL has taken a sensible approach: continue to develop and improve SL so that it retains its existing users, while putting everything else into the next project.
I agree. I think SL already had its day. Back when I felt it was its best, I would actually see coverage. I was always looking for something new, and that is how I found it. Now, what little coverage I see tends to be sneering at SL. I don't it taking off at this point. I have even told people about it, and shown some of them what it is like, and noone I have known IRL was in the least interested.
As you say, improving SL might have helped, but all the other places that did things differently have failed, too. The online non-gaming stuff just doesn't seem to generate much interest. I can see why, really. If I came into SL any time much later than I did, I would not have stayed long. And these days, if I didn't have my experience with SL, I would not even take the trouble to get an account or learn enough to do anything, or try other similar experiences, which I do occasionally just because I know about SL and how these things sort of work.
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I have logged into Sansar a few times over the years, since you could get in without an invitation. I have no VR gear whatsoever, so perhaps my use of primitive tech is holding me back, but I have never found it compelling at all. Almost nothing seems to be clickable, I cannot figure out how to interact with things, there seem to be almost no places to go, and while I always do see a few people, they are mostly doing nothing interesting. Seems a huge misdirection of resources to me.
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On 7/20/2019 at 10:41 AM, Scylla Rhiadra said:
Am I wrong, @Inara Pey, in thinking that, intentionally or not, you are with these two posts setting up a kind of parallel between LL's situation now, and the way in which things unfolded in 2010?
I think SL itself is pretty strong right now. The same is perhaps not true of its owner, Linden Lab, which, so far from trying (as some rather ridiculously suggest) to push SL users onto the other platform, is probably trying to work out how best to unload Sansar, as part of dealing with the loss of more than 5 years of time, money, and resources devoted to it.
I think SL is entering into a period of what might be fairly dramatic contraction -- not because its user base is (yet) dropping dramatically, but simply because LL needs to consolidate and retrench as part of its recovery from the failure of Sansar. Fees increases and the raising of the cost of Premium are part of that. So is the fact, not that LEA is being dismantled, but that it is not being replaced by anything new. Similarly, people noted that SL16B, while certainly I think a "success," was also more restrained and modest effort (and more directly controlled by LL itself) than SLBs of the past.
I think we're likely going to see the dismantling of Sansar fairly soon (and attempts to sell it, or parts of it, off). Inara's description suggests that, somewhat as in 2010, the partitioning of Sansar from SL means that the former can probably be dismantled in such a way as not to impact too directly upon the latter. But the larger woes of LL are inevitably going to be reflected in the company's approach to Second Life.
What we are seeing right now, in the shifts that LL is making to its business model for SL, is I think an attempt to consolidate, retrench, and further monetize SL in ways that, hopefully, won't cause lasting damage to the platform or its economy. It's going to be a really tough balancing act.
It just makes me wonder what SL would be if LL had not done Sansar. I doubt Sansar pays for itself at all, and would expect that SL has supported all that work, and it has drained resources from SL. OTOH, I think I have seen a statement or two from a Linden or two that people are wrong about Sansar siphoning from SL or being the cause of poor development in SL. Maybe Sansar is being done with venture capital or something, I don't know. I do know that is seemed like a really bad idea at the time they started it, and seems to be an even worse venture now. Of course, I am only one person, but I have gone there every couple of years and tried it, including a couple of months ago, and I found absolutely nothing compelling about it. But the whole project fits with my perception of LL.
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7 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:
Well, it was a sort of open question, really. Rolig and a few others have opined on it above, but it was actually addressed to you. What happened to SL? What changed it?
Going to a club where there is no open chat is . . . well, I hate it. One of my favourite blues clubs from maybe 6 years ago or so, which used to be a really great place for social chatter, has just gone silent now: everything is in IM. And the problem, to some extent, is that the nature of chat in IM tends to be different. When you are in open chat, things can get a little wild or even flirtatious, but it's still public, and so there isn't that feeling I sometimes get when a guy I don't know IMs me, and I suddenly feel, for want of a better word, trapped. Without public chat, I tend to feel lost: for whatever reason, I almost never initiate IMs with someone I don't know (I'm not sure why: I'm not generally a wallflower), and as a result I rely for conversation on those who IM me. And they, almost invariably, are men who are chatting me up, which I am just totally not interested in. So, basically, the only kind of conversation I get offered in such places is of a nature that I frankly hate.
I've found two clubs where there is still a fair bit of public chat. The problem is that I'm not big on the kind of music they play there.
I'm not sure what kind of places you are specifically referring to, but I'd agree generally that SL was weirder, and more interesting, and just more fun. Has anyone ever produced anything as whimsical and strange and cool as Greenies was?
Even the really gorgeous sims that people produce now, and generously open up to the public, tend to fall into 4 or 5 recognizable categories. I swear, I don't need to ever see another charming and beautiful "rural setting with abandoned sheds and rusting vehicles" again. Or the beautiful Mediterranean fishing village. Or the dystopian post-apocalyptic urban setting. I've had my fill.
I wouldn't say I'm necessarily "saddened" by the way SL has changed: there are compensations. There is a lot more beauty here than there once was (a point pushed home by a recent scooter trip on the mainland that took me past a lot of vintage 2009 eyesores.) But I certainly do miss the spirit of experimentation and general weirdness that used to be a hallmark of this platform.
IMO, the people who were in SL changed. Maybe they changed due to some structural reasons caused by the evolution of the system, but I don't think so. SL had not evolved *that* much when the places I loved died, though mesh was starting to become a thing, It just seemed like the out-there people left SL and the people who stayed or who replaced them were more staid or something. People seemed to not spend more than a year or two in SL back then. Perhaps they don't now, either, but it is hard for me to tell, as I have no friends or acquaintances. It used to be extremely common to have people I cared about leave SL. People got more interested in something in RL and just moved on. I still really miss those people, and feel the loss.
Another thing, at many of the places, the owner got burnt out, and closed the place. Or the awesome DJ got burnt out and quit. Each of the clubs I loved only lasted a couple of years. A few places I loved (not clubs) are still around, but are tame and boring now, with smaller, less interesting spaces, far fewer people, and little conversation.
Yes, as you say, there are probably some clubs where there is conversation, but I don't like the music. Part of the problem is that the music I like isn't in vogue anymore. I *have* gone to clubs and just listened to my own music, but that isn't really what I want to do. Another part of the problem is that I want a certain atmosphere, which is also hard to find. Multiply the low odds of finding the music I want and the atmosphere I want and you get *really* small odds! I think the problem is that I found exactly what I loved in my first week in world, and want that again.
I also rarely initiate IMs. I can be very outgoing and tend to talk far too much in chat, but I don't like to bother people. I figure they are are already doing their thing, and if they want to talk to me, they will IM me. That used to happen *a lot,* a long time ago. But not for years now. I also agree that having conversation in open chat allows you to get to know the people and make connections, and *then* it is easier to go to IM. At least for me.
Other than clubs, I won't mention the places I used to go, as that might be something that people wouldn't discuss with elementary children and their grandmothers. Suffice it to say I have not led a vanilla life in SL, and have probably done things that would shock and disgust a lot of people.
I agree on the highly-produced sims. Yes, quite impressive, and beautiful! And I do still like to explore. OTOH, my interests in SL have less to do with wandering through stunning graphics and more about interactive experiences with people and music. I do admire and envy the people with the talents and skills to do those things, though.
Personally, I am very saddened by the ways things have changed. Sure, I understand things always change, especially electronic things. And I do love looks that can be achieved now; I keep my graphics one step below the highest setting! But to me, far more has been lost than gained. I actually kind of liked the old graphics, and standard bodies and prim clothes were far easier than mesh stuff, to me. I used to change several times a night, and could find a lot of clothes that gave me the look I wanted. Now, not so much. The bodies do look far, far better, though. The real loss to me is the places and people I knew that are gone forever. I have spent a lot of time over the last few years trying to find something to replace all that with really no lasting success. I fully admit that problem is me, plenty of other people find lots of compelling things to do in SL, and I am glad they do. But honestly it is a hollow, depressing place for me.
Caerolle
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1 minute ago, TDD123 said:
Just a tip : disable your camera constraints and you can easily pan your camera in any direction or angle you prefer.
Thanks! I keep Preferences set that way already, though.
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Just now, kali Wylder said:
The secret is save them to your hard drive instead of inventory. Then just take tons of them and only upload the good ones.
It's more getting the shot I want than anything else. I have taken a lot of pics in RL, and Sl just has sooooo much less control, IMO.
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16 minutes ago, Selene Gregoire said:
Nah... just a little nitrous oxide.
Just a little.
Wow...
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Not a card game, but Greedy. Quite addictive and fun. Wrt card games, Cards Against Humanity is a lot of fun in SL, IMO.
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2 minutes ago, Selene Gregoire said:
Here. You need this.
You're welcome.
I think I take pretty good pics in RL, but really really suck at it in SL. I think there must be something to learn, but have never been motivated enough to do. I do have a few pics of people (including selfies taken for various reasons) from the old days, but architectural photography in SL is definitely beyond my skills.
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6 minutes ago, Selene Gregoire said:
Cra...wha?
Oh!
You mean the nitro.
Always check under the hood.
You have Aliens in your car motor????
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1 minute ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:
I think you need to post a picture. We need more pictures here.
Words all the time are boooooooring.
(Ok, not really boring, but still pics are nice.)
OMG, I suck at that stuff. I only learn how to do stuff in SL if it presents a big obstacle to me doing something I want to do, lol. How about this, I will send you an LM in-world, and you can go have a look if you like. No banlines or ejectors there.
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I have been in SL ~12 years, but only found the forums recently. Just after I bought Premium for the first time ever because I wanted a houseboat in Bellewhatever, and had the silly uninformed notion I could just claim one. I was looking for a place to complain about LL luring people into buying Premium with a perk they couldn't deliver, and not bothering to put a disclaimer in the notice that demand might far outstrip supply, at least. Turns out I was supposed to have been participating in the forums for years, and known the same thing happened when they released the original Linden Homes, even though I had no interest in those and didn't know the forum existed.
It all turned out for the best in the end though, as things tend to do. I used my tier to buy a piece of land I love and had a lot of fun trying out houses and furnishing and decorating it, never have to pay rent, just up my Premium once a year (and bought the extension so is almost two years before I have to pay anything again, WOOHOO!), and get some spending money on top of all that. Plus after poking about Belliwhatever, I am not that interested in living there anyhow, love my house in the ocean far better. And now I read some stuff in the forum and occasionally even post there, so glad I found it.
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10 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:
Ok, so . . . what has changed? Because something certainly has.
I've been thinking about this. When I joined almost exactly 11 years ago (I hope someone has the rez day cake on order!), the problem wasn't finding social places: it was choosing from among the wide variety available. To people like me (and, I think, you) for whom the social element of SL was most important, the "late 2000-aughts" were a kind of Golden Age, I think. I eventually settled into three -- a really popular "coffee shop," the activist/NGO/educational community, and the forums (with their in-world component, the Forum Cartel). But the coffee shop went offline in 2009, the activist community (although still present) began to fade substantially as the SL hype died down, and the forum community has evolved and become less in-world oriented than it once was.
There has been a major shift in the culture of Second Life over the past seven or so years: it is no longer nearly as sociable as it once was, and I don't know the reason. Part, of course, is maybe simply that concurrency has dropped, and maybe that has taken the platform below a sort of "critical mass" required to sustain in-world communities -- but the community-driven culture I am pretty sure predates the rapid expansion of SL in 2007-2009.
Voice hasn't impacted social relations the way I once feared it might: I actually can't remember the last time I ran into someone in-world using it.
The advent of mesh has made creation a much more specialized thing than it once was: people build in-world much less than they used to, and the community of creators has shrunk drastically, and that may be a contributing factor for some communities?
And when I go to many popular places now, the chat and interactions aren't happening in open chat: they are happening in IM. So, where clubs used to be great places to meet people and participate in a larger community, they are now frequently unnervingly silent, despite still being jam-packed with avatars. Maybe the shift from open chat to IM parallels the social media shift from relatively open community-oriented apps like Facebook, to closed chat apps such as WhatsApp?
And finally, most of the "communities" that I am still a part of are no longer so anchored in an in-world locale, with the result that interactions within larger groups tend to happen in group chat, with most of the participants not actually being physically in proximity to each other. Why?
I'd love to know what happened. I still enjoy the social aspects of SL: I have a pretty large circle of friends (a surprising number of whom remain from the "old days"), and I'm almost never without someone to talk to when I'm in-world, but I do very much miss community. And the "wildness" and "fun" that you speak of was a function of those communities: the really crazy, exciting stuff was seldom one-on-one, but was almost always generated by a larger group of friends.
When I read this earlier today (I cannot get on the Second Life site at work, and of course LL does not support mobile), I thought there was a question in there for me, but now I am not so sure, lol. If there was a question and I missed it please let me know, and I will have a go at answering you.
Really, though, some parts of what you say are exactly my point: the difficulties of finding communities around my interests, partly caused by the move to IM instead of using local chat (except for chat spam, which still seems to thrive). If you don't already know the people at a club somehow, you are not going to get to know them. In the past, though, I had a lot of people IMing me when I went to clubs. For the last few years it's only occasional random guys when I happen to go to coed places (guys who did not bother to even read the first word in my profile, which would save us both a lot of annoyance). My personality did not change, and I only got better looking, so I think it was SL that changed, and not me.
It isn't just that, though, it is that places like I loved just don't exist anymore. A lot of what I found exciting was stuff that I feel pretty sure would not interest you, but there was that wild anything goes atmosphere back in the day, and places for it to exist and even thrive, and all that is gone, or at least I personally cannot find it anymore. To me, SL kind of gentrified a long time ago, maybe when they started applying ratings to regions, I don't know. But I miss the old days and get very sad when I think of them.
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8 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:
Quite a few, actually. Some of the first people I met in 2007 remain my closest friends in SL to this day. Our cadre has changed over the years through newcomers and through normal attrition (and a few untimely deaths, sadly), but we the faithful persevere. I am presently surprised by the number of "old timers" that I get to know through these forums and in chance encounters in world. We're not over the hill. We are the hill. ⛰️
That is great, I am very happy for you!
(Really, not sarcasm, have to clarify that online, lol)
Unfortunately, noone I knew in my first two years in SL, which were my happiest times, is in SL anymore, and only two that I met in my third, and last, club 'home,' are still in SL. One of them I still talk to a bit, but the other only rarely. And neither of them has been able to find any clubs that come close to replacing the club where we met, and that we saw as home, either in terms of music or atmosphere. I guess I was just lucky to get in SL when I did, and to have 2-3 wonderful years. But that SL has long been dead and gone, and I guess I am too picky and narrow (and rigid?) to find anything that really engages me anymore. I *have* tried, though, and continue to try, but with no success.
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A New LEA? How Can LL Best Support the Arts in Second Life?
in General Discussion Forum
Posted
I think you may need to adjust your medication, Clive.
Take care of yourself.