Ticee Nansen

If you want easy browsing of freebie things, you should click over to the marketplace on the SL page and search for freebie, that currently gives 1460 pages of stuff, the majority of it costing 0-1L$ so plenty of things to go through there if you feel bored ^^ And welcome back too! I'm also trying to get into building stuff, so I often go to a place called College of Scripting, Music and Science.. It's a pretty nice place with the very basics of building, and scripting too, as well as more advanced stuff - so might see you there sometime, hm? (:

I'd just like to add that while it is nice to be able to tell whether someone is typing or just staring in awkward silence, the default animation paired with the sound it makes gets old and annoying quickly.. So I can fully understand why someone would want it gone It is possible to find AO's with a nice and subtle typing animation though if you look around, you could consider that - but yeh get rid of that evil default animation ^.^

I use the marketplace quite a lot, in fact I almost always use it seeing as it's much faster than running around in mislabled stores in SL trying to locate that particular item.. And I've never really had any serious issues. Worst being items that aren't delivered, but judging by my purchase history, you get refunded for items that go undelivered.. So no big deal, just annoying. There are some things you should be aware of though. Prim attachments (objects and not clothing layers) never fit you right, so you want to make sure it's either modifiable or has some kind of resizing script, otherwise it's pretty much money wasted. Obviously buying animations on the marketplace is a pretty bad idea too, as you'd probably want to try those out live before buying. Lastly just make sure to read the description, especially if it's a complex package of more items (like an outfit or so), because it may tell you some details you didn't really make out from the picture. Oh and look for reviews too

Just kinda keep in mind that you can't really be sure people are teens, unless you go about webcaming with them or something. There are people faking these things.. but of course there isn't necessarily a problem with that, if they feel like a teen or something.. just saying

I often have issues like this as well, sometimes it's just a shirt that doesn't want to load or my face, sometimes my whole body, despite relogging and dancing around in circles under the moon. The solutions tend to be pretty random too.. Lately I'm having issues where I sometimes have to take my tattoo layer or jacket off and on in order to make my avatar render properly - so you could try taking off some clothes and see what happens. And yes it's really tiresome having to deal with these obvious and obnoxious issues time and time again, I'm still struggling with the exact same bugs I did four years ago it really feels like nothing is happening, apart from new viewers coming out that doesn't really fix anything.

I basically agree that we could use an updated avatar, but also that using custom meshes is pretty unoptimal, especially on the point that you cant wear standard clothes on them.. But I was thinking maybe they could just add some more sliders in the shape customization window, for instance regarding the shoulders would something like that be completely impossible I wonder?

What you say is sensible enough, but however the advantage of SL is that if people get nerfarious enough to be unpleasant, you can always just block them and discard them as a friend.. If they're just mildy awkward, then maybe it'd be good for them to meet someone nice who's got time for them, to put them on the right track ^^ I mean you'd have to be more than lonely to willingly be a victim of the really twisted people here.

Basically that sounds like something you'd want to forget about

I know right! freak flags are obviously the nicest and interestingliest kind of flags ^-^

Fun fact, the main reason for being on SL is to be a freak.. being blandly normal is more suited for RL

Yeh in cases like this, there's not much you can really do.. Except finding some relief in the fact that most of us have done similar stupid mistakes My general advice is that when dealing with purchases/transactions of smaller amounts like 100L$ or so you can afford to take a chance if it looks like it's something good, but in the credit amounts you've been working with, I'd personally want to check if it's an established "company" or trusted person.. whatever, just try to make sure you aren't the only customer they've dealt with, and don't be afraid to bail out if things seem weird, you can always block the person and leave if you don't want to hear them whine.. and there's probably a lot of other places where you can get similar products.

Basically a lot of people go through hell and back in order to look unique and stand out from the "dumb" crowd in every MMO, World of Warcraft, Everquest, Star Wars, whatever.. the major difference is just that in the mentioned games you have a preset amount of clothing and avatar choices available, and you roughly pay the same prices when it comes to it, and you always know it's possible to meet others looking like yourself.. but it doesn't necessarily matter that much if one or two look like you, since it's not really the main focus of the game, you probably play better than them. On SL everything is player made, there's a endlessly huge amounts of different combinations, so you expect to be unique, and eventually you end up paying massively to achieve that. Furthermore there's no other primary gameplay to put character customization a bit as a second hobby.. No, it's the main point of SL, to stand out, to be special and attract attention in whatever form you want. Basically all this means that people copying your avatar is really a spear through your soul - I can't speak for all, but I know my avatars looks is a result of years of experience, items and ideas of how to combine it all.. I wouldn't expect anyone on this entire overpopulated globe to come up with the same looks, so if some noob just walks up and copies it completely, I'd be willing to catch a plane and go strangulate the offender, litterally. It's basically identity theft, which in my mind is one of the most nasty crimes you can commit.

Now I don't know how much you know about making stuff in SL, but basically a texture can be any image or picture, could even be a picture of yourself.. You just need to upload it. You do that ingame with one of the top menus, but unfortunately it costs 10L$ to upload a picture permanently. With that said there's people selling textures ingame, yes, but you'd probably want to get something outside the game so you can write your poems on them.. and then save the texture/image with your poem on it as .jpg or something and upload it ^^ If you want to you could check this out http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Texture_Tools there's some tutorials and a bunch of free texture packs if you scroll down!

Yeah notecards would be the most obvious choice, would be pretty convenient too. The biggest problem would be that it'd be extremely easy to copy and possibly resell, if anyone wanted to do that.. Alternatively if you're a bit of a "visual" artist too, you could write the poem in a program like Photoshop or Gimp (just by using the text tool) and maybe put some kind of suiting background image on it - or not. Point is that you could use that as a texture on a flat prim in SL so it would be possible to hang it on walls and such. Would be more difficult to copy too!

On forced behalf of Ceera Murakami, Jaaa, Jennifer Boyle and of course myself, I say you're welcome.. oh wait

Yeah it is basically impossible to seem perfectly offline.. Clicking that eye symbol in the contact list will work for the most part, it'll make it seem like you're offline on people's contact list, but yes they'll still see a green "ONLINE" tag in your profile if they look that up.. Worse yet is that some 3rd party viewers (Phoenix viewer) actually let's you see if someone is hiding their online status from you, and in my experience that does strain relationships quite much, so make sure they aren't using that viewer if you intend to hide.