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Madelaine McMasters

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Everything posted by Madelaine McMasters

  1. Madelaine McMasters
    I might remember one dream every five years. I don’t recall ever dreaming about SL. I do sometimes recall SL experiences as RL, though.
  2. Madelaine McMasters
    I knew I couldn’t stay long, but I didn’t anticipate crashing out. Better luck next time?
  3. Madelaine McMasters
    Personal anecdote != Statistical significance
  4. Madelaine McMasters
    Tease!
  5. Madelaine McMasters
    Are you saying that this is really a protest against the law itself? Civil disobedience? It's a real protest against an imagined law. Maybe that's Civil disingenuousness?
  6. Madelaine McMasters
    I have long wondered why Marcie never gets the message. She's a sweetheart, smart, and a voice of reason. Peppermint Patty is her best friend. When I wonder why Charles Schulz did this, I invariably hear my father saying... "That's to make little girls like you ask questions". It worked.
  7. Madelaine McMasters
  8. Madelaine McMasters
    Because we're here?
  9. Madelaine McMasters
  10. Madelaine McMasters
    I tried various transition effects for a photo gallery frame long ago. I quickly gave up on viewer side animations. In addition to being unable to sync server and viewer, a single texture solution invariably ends up showing grey/rezzing textures during texture updates. It was clear that I needed to obscure the prim that's being updated, and that requires a two prim (double buffered) approach. I accomplished this by placing one flat prim in front of another, as shown in Arton's example. I tried Arton's slicing method, but ultimately settled on the blending approach he mentioned. I placed one flat prim in front of another, and transitioned the front prim from transparent to opaque to reveal the image on the back prim. While the back prim is hidden, I load the next image onto it, then transition the front prim from opaque back to transparent. While the front prim is transparent, I bring in its next texture. This avoids ever showing a gray or rezzing texture. You can also change the amount of hollowing of the front prim to produce a sort of iris transition. You can't hollow to 100%, so you'll need a third prim to act as a frame to obscure the part you can't hollow out.
  11. Madelaine McMasters
    Though I haven't had this particular problem, I've had similar weirdness over the last 14 years. I've had objects fail to texture until I've deleted and re-rezzed them. I've had target omega and particle emitters fail until doing the same. Unless the problem persists though take/delete across time and regions , I just chalk it up to SL being SL.
  12. Madelaine McMasters
    Long ago, probably around the time their album "Cow Imagination" was released, we hosted a summer barn party featuring the Berrymans. Here's one of my favorite songs from that album (they're all wonderful). It encapsulates how wisdom is passed from generation to generation...
  13. Madelaine McMasters
    Dad was 50 when I was born. Mom was 42. Most of my friends thought they were my grandparents.
  14. Madelaine McMasters
    I knew two elders who sometimes wished they'd never taught their kid to ask questions.
  15. Madelaine McMasters
    My patio looks a little like that, though the lake is 80 feet below the top of the bluff, and hidden by hundreds of feet of trees. I wanted my path lighting to be virtually invisible to neighbors, and to not contribute to light pollution. So, the lights are 18" tall, only 22 lumens, and cast light only downward, illuminating just enough path to allow you to get from light to light without tripping. The deer have also destroyed a considerable portion of the landscape trees and shrubs I've installed over the last decade. My arborist has never seen deer pressure like I've been experiencing. It's not uncommon to see a dozen of them from my dinette window. I've also had two newly planted spruce trees killed by voracious rabbits that ate all the needles up to about four feet off the ground. I don't think we had more than one foot of snow cover at the time, so those bastards must have jumped for the highest branches they ate.
  16. Madelaine McMasters
    ...peers over her glasses at you.
  17. Madelaine McMasters
    That might work if they were chewing. They're head butting the damned things, either snapping the lamps off the top of the post, or snapping the posts off where they enter the ground. The result is that my purposely discrete down-lights end up looking like runway markers to passing aircraft.
  18. Madelaine McMasters
    I hope I made a little progress on this front a few years ago, while conversing with my podiatrist. He'd made some statements that got me thinking he was a gender binarist. I asked him if he'd had any experience with ambiguous genitalia in infants during his medical education. He actually had. I'd expected he'd have only read about it. I asked him if he thought such ambiguity was on a spectrum. He did. I asked him if he thought such ambiguity should be resolved. He did. I asked him who should determine the resolution. "The parents, in concert with the physician". I asked if he thought the resolutions were generally correct. "Yes, I think so." I then asked whether he thought that nature might produce gender ambiguity in the development of the human brain. He paused and said "I suppose so." I asked him if he'd ever seen a ambiguous brain in an infant. He gave me an odd look, then said "How could anyone tell?". Right, how could anyone tell. So who resolves that ambiguity, the parents in concert with the physician? At that point, the light bulb came on. I asked him if it might be prudent to wait for the brain of the person in question to determine if there is any ambiguity in need of resolution before taking a knife to the body. "I'd never thought about it that way before." I really don't know if I changed his mind, but the next time I saw him, he asked what other beliefs I was gonna challenge. I told him it was his turn.
  19. Madelaine McMasters
    Every year, I have to splice in new sections of landscape wiring because the jaskassrabbits chew it all up. They're nothing compared to the deer, though. Those hoodlums have taken to knocking over all my landscape lights. I spent hundreds of hours placing 200 of them down the quarter mile path to my beach, only to find more than 100 of them broken the following spring. I can't afford that much repair work every year, so I either have to spend 10x as much on industrial strength lights, or I'll have to fence off my property. I wish I could plant wolf seeds.
  20. Madelaine McMasters
    Some can and do, even while permabanned. If permabanning really only works for those who learn from the effort, is it pointless?
  21. Madelaine McMasters
    Hmmm, I've always thought of you as 100% mushroom.
  22. Madelaine McMasters
    Might people have the mistaken belief that permabanning actually prevents the return of banned individuals? I can change my IP and MAC addresses in under five minutes and return to SL that quickly, under a new identity, after a ban. I've seen people do that right here in the forum. I think you have, too. We know of those people because they quickly misbehave in recognizable fashion and get banned again. As someone else mentioned, their recidivism is our only way of detecting them. Anyone who learns their lesson from the punishment and returns, never to misbehave again, could escape our detection. So, we might have an unavoidably skewed understanding of the effect of banning. LL is no better equipped to detect wily return offenders than we are, as we (via AR) are their detectors. I'd not be surprised if one year bans were actually more beneficial to LL than permabans. I would be very surprised if there was any way to measure that.
  23. Madelaine McMasters
    LL can't truly ban anyone from SL. They can only deprive people of their existing SL investments (name, account balance, inventory, etc.) and make it a bit more difficult to return anew. IP, MAC, and E-mail addresses are easily changed. Even CC info can be spoofed by the motivated. Whether people return to their old accounts at the end of a ban or immediately via new accounts has no effect on LL's ability to detect recidivism. If holding out hope of regaining one's old identity and inventory encourages turning over a new leaf, then finite bans have value.
  24. Madelaine McMasters
    I’ve witnessed this sort of abuse multiple times in my 14 years here, sometimes in the forum. They were dreadful to witness. I can’t imagine what it was like to be the target. All I could do was offer support. In the worst examples, the abuser was someone close, within the victim’s circle of friends. Perhaps those who think block/mute is the complete answer have never witnessed this kind of withering attack on a victim and their relationships with others. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard people say “This is a pretend world, with no real investment, just start fresh on a new avatar to avoid your abuser.” I put people who say that on my 2D list (only 3D people make it to my inner circle). I’ve invested thousands of hours of my RL life in friendships with people here. Many others have invested more. Yes, block/mute/ignore will defuse most bullies, but there are nuclear powered abusers that will require either better tools or help from those of us with a little empathy. I do sometimes ultimately conclude that the victim bears some responsibility, but giving them the benefit of the doubt when they tell a tale of woe is a small price to pay for the potential to make this a happier place.
  25. Madelaine McMasters
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