Madelaine McMasters

Hello Professor, We're residents here, like you. So, we've no idea what LL is planning. The PM feature was ostensibly removed because of its vulnerability to spam. The forum has been inundated with spam for years. There's been no hint of a resolution. You might let that observation guide your expectations. ;-)

Hi Anne, It's hard to stop people from being inspired by art. That is art's loftiest goal, no? ;-) Copyright law allows "derivative works". Here's more about what that means... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work

Hippie Bowman wrote: Aww! I hope you feel better soon Val! Maddy! We need some chicken juice here! Peace! This may take a while. The chicken I tried to "juice" didn't take kindly to my efforts. Hang tight Val, I'm workin' on it... Happy Monday, Kids!!!

Hi Sherri, I'm going to guess that your avatar loaded correctly and that the triangle over your head is a mesh object you're wearing that refuses to rez. There are several possible causes for this problem, and I've no idea which is most likely in your situation, so I'll throw everything at you. First, I had something like this happen with my hat a few days ago. Right clicking on the triangle fixed the problem. Sometimes the viewer forgets to rez things that should be visibie in-scene. Right-clicking where the object should be, or where it's incompletely rezzed, fixes the problem. Some people have had problems with HTTP texture fetching. Here's a page dealing with that issue... http://wiki.phoenixviewer.com/http_fetching_issues If you are on a wireless connection, try going wired. This is one of many recomendations in Nalates Urriah's comprehensive article about improving your computer's connection to SL... http://blog.nalates.net/2011/10/26/troubleshoot-your-sl-connection/ In case I've misunderstood and your avatar is not visible - there is ONLY a triangle over where your head should be, you could be suffering from "bake fail". http://wiki.phoenixviewer.com/phoenix:bake_fail That's a lot of stuff I've thrown at you. Hopefully someone else has a better hunch than I and can offer up a more specific solution. Good luck!

Hi Thrawny, It sounds like one of your neighbors has something that emits sounds. You can find it by going to "World->Show->Beacons" and then checking: Beacons Highlights Sound Sources Increase "Width" to 5 or so. Now cam around. You might now see some yellow axis lines emanating from objects in your field of view. Increase the beacon "Width" if they're not easy to see. As you can towards/away from the various sound sources, the intensity of their emitted sounds will change. This should allow you to locate the cat. Then notify the owner, who may be able to silence it. Turn beacons off again when you're done. Meowwwwwwwwww!!! ;-)

Drake1 Nightfire wrote: A Boston original! Right next to MIT's campus... --||-

irihapeti wrote: is two kinds of neko is three... ;-)

Redwood, I'm saddened to hear of your loss, yet heartened to know SL afforded you two the opportunity to become soulmates. I suspect your time together produced some lovely stories. Tell them.

Hi DarkGuinevere, I'm a li'l confused, as Sansara is the name of an SL continent, which is comprised of over 900 sims. I'm sure there are sims on Sansara that do not allow guest rezzing, and I'm sure there are some that do. It may be that you visited a sim that does not allow the general public to rez objects. You may have to join a group and wear their tag, or get put on an access list manually by requesting access from the sim/parcel owner. You can see whether a sim allows you to rez by observing the little icons in the address bar at the top of the viewer window. A box inside a slashed red "No" circle means you can't rez there. There are numerous motorcycle groups in SL, I'm sure they can direct you to good roads on which to ride your motorcycle. Vroom!!!!

... ties your shoelaces together. ;-)

If you apply a sculpty map to a 256x256xH megaprim, I think you could reach as far as about 180 meters (sqrt2 x 128). A long facade couldn't be more than about 128 meters away. As Rolig explained, the center of the root prim must be on the sim and you'd be using only one prim in this case. It's been ages since I made a sculpt map, but it certainly can be done. ETA: Now that I think about it, you could hollow a mega cube or cylinder and paint your facade on the inside. That avoids a sculpt map. You'd be able to park that facade 95% of the way to 128 meters or 121.6 meters off-sim... I think.

Why do people play Solitaire? Why do people buy lottery tickets? Why do people punch holes in their bodies on which they hang stuff? Why do people constantly alter their forum badges? Why does my lactose intolerant Mom collect milk glass? Shall I go on? Tari's got the answer... Because it's fun!

Well, that was obvious, Obvious! I hadn't considered the texture wasn't already polar! Okay, Aluviel! Here's what I did. You decide if that's what you wanted. First, I pulled your image into Photoshop and cropped down to your flat texture. I didn't get it perfectly centered... Next I applied Filter->Distort->Polar Coordinates... and checked "Polar to Rectangular". This warps the texture, with the presumption that it's a polar image with the north pole in the center. If yours were a full spherical map, the south pole would be stretched around the circumference of the image. Since you're texturing a hemisphere, the circumference is the sphere's equator, or the bottom of your dome. Because I didn't get your texture perfectly centered, you see latitude wobble... Then I brought the texture into SL and applied it do a sphere with Dimple Begin = 0 and Dimple End = 0.5 The texture horizontal scale is one (your texture is for the entire circumference) and the vertical scale is 2.0 (your texture is for only half a sphere... a dome, so we must squish it in half to fit). The rotation is 90 degrees (because that's what worked ;-). And the vertical offset is 0.5 (again, because your texture is for half a sphere, we need to get it into the correct half). I took the liberty of turning myself into a floor lamp to demonstrate the result... I hope this fixes your problem!

I think you're running into the polygon nature of prim spheres. Your texture is made with the presumption it'll be draped on a sphere, but the SL sphere prim is actually a fairly low poly mesh. Can you post a pic, just in case I'm misunderstanding?

LoriLexa wrote: I'm curious to know if a shape can be set back to default but as far as I know, it can't. However, maybe someone else on here knows a way to do that. There is no default shape(ETA: except Ruth?;-). That's why we can't revert to it. Though now I am curious what an avatar would look like with every slider set to 50. @Mandy LoriLexa gave excellent advice. Welcome to the world of shape and skin interaction. I've never been able to make myself look like the skin or shape adverts in most places. It's only when a vendor sells them together that you get what you see. And I've never seen a pair that I liked. If you don't like the shape you mangled, get one from the library. There are plenty of shapes in the starter avatars and I've based mine off one of them. And editing a shape can be VERY time consuming. As you've discovered, many of the sliders interact with each other. So it's rare that you can nudge a slider and be done, particularly on the face. Be patient, look at other avatars, ask questions, it'll come. Oh, before I forget... Welcome to Second Life! If the title of your post is any indication, we're lucky to have you here. ;-)

Hi BlazeFire, I'm saddened to hear Second Life didn't work out for you. I hope that First Life is ample consolation. Good luck!

LaskyaClaren wrote: ObviousAltIsObvious wrote: http://emshort.wordpress.com/2014/02/20/post-linden/ if she gets it back, it will reappear. if she doesn't get it back, we can guess that LL has some other plans for the versu technology. I hope it does reappear -- the more I read about it, the more intrigued I am. Maybe, if the IP is released to her, or becomes open source, it could be a crowdfunded project? Or, from the sound of it, there might be university educational IT developers who might want to take it on (if they can get R&D funding for it). (ETA: But I'd also like to see it freed from the stranglehold of iOS and the Evil Apple Empire.) There was nothing stopping LL from releasing Versu on Android, other than perhaps an unattractive ROI.

LaskyaClaren wrote: She/he is probably looking a lot worse by her/his action than the information disclosed is making you look. You'll never get me to believe this!

Okay MgRoD! I am almost certain I don't understand your question, so I'm going to answer it! If you are asking for a BINary for iPhone or Android or such that will allow you to log-in to Second Life on a mobile device so you can sing... that can't be done. The only place you can get an application for iPhone (unless it's jailbroken) is from the App Store. The only SL compatible app there is Pocket Metaverse, which is a text only interface that certainly won't support audio streaming, and appears to be giving everybody grief at the moment. It's not much better for Android, where you can find Lumiya, which has only the most rudimenary graphics support... for maps. Streaming live audio into SL requires more than even a full fledged PC/Mac/Linux based viewer can provide. You'll need either a dedicated IP address on your device and some sort of streaming software, or an account with a streaming service like Shoutcast (does that still exist?). If I have inadvertently understood your question, I assure you it was... inadvertent. Good luck?

A year already? Oh well, it's too late to yell "Run away, run away!" Heaven help you if you're still here in five years. ;-)

Hi MysticRivers, Rolig's answer isn't the one you wanted to hear, but it's correct. If it makes you feel any better, this is one of things I miss most in SL. I don't know of anything specifically designed for a petite/standard avatar pairing, but I did use a couples animator as Rolig described many years ago. It wasn't perfect, but it did put smiles on two people's faces. You might ask about couples animators out in the General Discussion forum, where people are allowed to give recommendations.

LaskyaClaren wrote: Madelaine McMasters wrote: What I see here is dogmatism. I don't beliieve Leia imagines that every person roleplaying a child has sex on their mind. I don't believe she imagines... anything at all. That's what dogmatism is all about no? You draw the line and you don't think past it. I do that all the time, I just don't know when or where. Yes, she certainly is dogmatic. What that doesn't really tell us, however is why she is so. You "believe" that this is an unthinking attitude, and insofar as she seems to be emotionally, intellectually, or imaginatively incapable of grasping the possibility of a rationally valid alternative, you are right. But that doesn't imply that the origin of her dogmatism is unthinking. "Thinking" need not mean "correct" or "logical" after all. To some degree, though, this is leading us away from the constructive question at hand -- is there a rational reason for disliking non-sexual age play -- and towards the much murkier and less creditable territory of psychoanalyzing Leia. I've always thought of dogma in an unfavorable, unthinking light. I'm a skeptic, ya know. The more I think, the less dogmatic I become (I think ;-). So it makes sense that I'd equate Leia's dogmatism with unthinking here. That's how I understand it in myself. And I also believe I do a lot of thinking that just ain't correct or logical. For what it's worth, I think Leia's as normal as you or me, so I'll save the time and embarassment of pyschoanalyzing her by looking inward and keeping my mouth (mostly) shut. Why is she dogmatic? For the same reason I'm dogmatic. It feels good. Is there a rational reason for disliking non-sexual age play? This is a pretty soft subject. Where's the objective database from which to draw a rational conclusion? If you were raised to "act like an adult" and had no childhood role models like mine, "acting like a child" might generate disdain. Even if you had my childhood role models, the sexualization of children in the media (as Leia correctly alludes) could certainly be a influence. I'm pop culture deprived. It may be difficult to imagine non-sexual age play if the only examples of age play that make the news are sexual. My refusal to patently reject age-play might stem from a dogmatic view that almost everything is more complex and nuanced than it appears. I've been accused of being "wishy-washy" because I rarely draw hard lines, anywhere. I draw them when I have confidence I know where they belong. I think I might want to argue that all "roleplay" is a bit like this: if it appeals to us at all, it is because it expresses a part of ourself that we feel needs expression. What distinguishes "roleplay" from "being" in the larger sense is that the former is a conscious act of artifice: you are deliberately assuming a role that may speak to part of who you are, but that you are also declaring is not identical with yourself. So, you are roleplaying, maybe, when you become Lucy, not in the sense that you are departing from "who you are," but because you are using artifice -- a particular avatar -- to declare and highlight that expression. You know, it may be too early in the morning for this conversation . . . My use of Lucy may not have been particularly helpful. She's not really a child. She's ageless, as you'd expect of a character written for young and old alike. She's also a pain in the ass. I don't think I'm knowledgeable enough to do justice to an explanation of "roleplay". I won't disagree with yours, but it might not be the only one. I'm in my early days of community theater. I've rehearsed with my playmates (we do plays!), dressed with them before the shows and dined with them after. We've discussed our approaches, if we have them. Some try to understand the character, some mimic behavior, some just do it. I think I'm just doing it, but I've yet to have a part that requires more of me. I've watched quite a few "Actors Studio" interviews, expecting to see some underlying truth emerge about acting. I'm still waiting. I recently watched an interview with Jennifer Lawrence (who I think is terrific) in which she said (paraphrased) "I know there are actors who inhabit their roles to understand their character's motivations. I'm very impressed by that, but don't think I could get anything done if I worked that way. I just hear "action" and I get to work." This bothers me, because I want to believe I understand what I'm doing. Another dogma? Is this why I can't draw a line? What a strange word, anyway. I could understand "catma".

Years ago there had been some issues with NVIDIA GPU chips that were improperly manufactured, and so failed after some time in use. The idea that overworking a CPU/GPU can cause it to "fry" is an urban myth, perhaps born in the days prior to good system design. Modern computers, and Macs are no exception, monitor their internal temperatures. They'll control fan speed to make the least possible noise during operation, and when there's a heavy computational load and the fans can't handle it at full speed, the operating system will start throttling the GPU and/or CPU to keep temperatures within the safe zone. I have an old MacBook Pro (2007) that would crash SL whenever I increased the draw distance. I opened it up and discovered that the GPU fan was blocked with dust pillbugs (there's no room in a laptop for bunnies). SL is highly intolerant of the GPU throttling the Mac does to keep everything safe. I cleaned the fan and everything was back to normal. If computer software can damage computer hardware, how do hardware manufacturers avoid warranty nightmares? Surely if this were true, computers manufacturers would have issued disclaimers by now stating that running SL voids your warranty, no?

LaskyaClaren wrote: Qie Niangao wrote: Possibly. Literature, however, is not just reading, but also writing. As is roleplay. Certainly. There is a large area of overlap between all three categories: reading, writing, and roleplay, and RP of course partakes of both the others. But, while all three are "immersive" to some degree, the immersiveness of RP is different in some important ways. For instance, there is a logic to the unfolding of a narrative in both reading and writing that need not necessarily apply to RP. How that difference applies here, though, is the question. Qie Niangao wrote: I mean, it's fine if some people think their SL is all about teh sexors. That they'd presume to impose that view on others -- and impugn others' motives on that basis -- well, that's where it's wrong, sick, or both. Yes, agreed, when that is what is occurring. But I can imagine scenarios -- say, a man or woman who was abused as a child in RL -- where other motivations and factors might come into play. And I suppose it's possible that Leia's objections to age play do not assume that it is always sexual; she may have other objections to it. But we won't know until or if she clarifies. What I see here is dogmatism. I don't beliieve Leia imagines that every person roleplaying a child has sex on their mind. I don't believe she imagines... anything at all. That's what dogmatism is all about no? You draw the line and you don't think past it. I do that all the time, I just don't know when or where. The person who had the most profound influence on me loved to roleplay a child, though "roleplay" isn't really the right word. He was being. He taught me never to let go of those aspects of childhood he cherished, curiosity, playfulness, the ability to feel wonder all day long. And I hope my friends see some of that in me, for I am Daddy's Girl though and through. So, when I put on my Lucy Van Pelt avatar, I can feel the mischievous presence of Charles Schulz and my father, and hope I do them proud. I'm not roleplaying.

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