Madelaine McMasters

Orca Flotta wrote: Wow, sweetb, you must be the most beautiful top model in RL then. Congratz. Else, why would anyone wanna look like their RL self in SL. Imagine all the fat, flab, crooked noses, stompy short legs, wrinkles, bad haircuts, bad clothes ... oy vey. Also the avatar build system in SL is much too restricted to even coming close to something realistic. "Professional" avie creators are trying and failing time and time again. Have you seen the likenesses of Barack Obama, Michael Jackson and others? Terrible. And please stay away from the photosourcers and morphers. Creepy is too nice a word to describe the results. Orca, If you had taken a second or two to look at SweetB's forum badge, which shows her RL face, you'd have seen that she is indeed beautiful (and cute as a button ;-). That you were unable or unwilling to expend that modest effort to understand this situation before commenting sarcastically on it speaks volumes. I have vitiligo and have considered making my own custom skin to approximate the "Guernsey Cow" look I sport by the end of summer. Would it offend you to see uneven pigmentation on my arms, chest and face? SweetB (may I call you SweetB? ;-), Marianne Little (who is a walking encylopedia of SL fashion knowledge) has given you a Marketplace link to a creator who will attempt to map an RL photo of your face onto a SL mesh head. Temper your expectations, this is a difficult thing to do at all, much less do well. If you try it and are happy with the results, there are folks out here in the forum that would love to see a picture. Good luck! Maddy

Tex Monday wrote: Janelle Darkstone wrote: And the next question I was about to ask but then searched the forums and found the answer, was: how does a picture or post make it into "Trending", and that is with two (2) Loves (:heart:) from what I understand. ...and, as I'm absolutely positive would happen, since the Loves are anonymous except to the OP, it might be incredibly easy to use two alts to game the system. Hmmmmm..... *goes around and double likes with my alts, every stupid thing I've ever said....* I can't get Snugs to even understand the pictures I post, much less love them.

Randall Ahren wrote: People don't remember happiness because it doesn't leave scars. But pain and sorrow? That gets carved in stone. That's not at all what decades of clinical research and centuries of human history show. Humans are quite adept at forgetting pain and sorrow and remembering happiness. That is generally credited for our ability to co-exist with each other. It would be hard to explain the march of human progress if we were biased towards the negative. There are certainly exceptions, but the evidence doesn't support your statement in general.

Opinions seem to be falling into two camps... 1) RenderVolumeLODFactor, which should be set to four or so for proper rendering of small sculpties or those at great distances. 2) Prims not being shown because they're not on the interest list. Right clicking where the prim should be places it on the interest list and makes it visible. I've had experience with both issues and from what I'm seeing here, it looks like #1. I see sculptie distortions in the patio handrail and in the decorations at the bottoms of the posts in the lawn. Every prim I see in the "ok" image appears to be visible in the "not ok" images, so I'm not seeing evidence of an interest list issue. I believe this is a LOD issue. ETA: I have noticed that LOD sometimes resets to 2 after I've set it to 4. I'm so accustomed to opening the little Firestorm tools window to jam it back to 4 that I forgot about it.

Perrie Juran wrote: Anjelikka wrote: Well...you can't enter a singing contest unless you can sing.... Hollywood uses many special effects....but most of all: Why give up before you got started? Would you really want to listen to someone sing who sounds like a cross between Bob Dylan and a dieing dog? Please noooooooo! Just let me listen to the dying dog.

Spring is in the air!...

Hi Penelope, Val has suggested some alternative viewers you might try. OS X 1.5 (Leopard) is getting a little old, but it was working for you a few days ago. If Firestorm just stopped working, and other viewers give the same result, I wonder if something in the OS broke. Have you done the usual stuff like run Disk Utility to verify your disk? I don't recall how far back in MacOS history it was that fixing disk permissions sometimes helped, but you might also try that from within Disk Utiility. If that doesn't work, perhaps a clean install of Firestorm? Go to Library/Application Support and move the Firestorm folder to the trash (or to your Desktop or somewhere else if you wish to preserve chat logs and the like), then try re-installing Firestorm. Good luck!

Good morning Hippie and Val! Now, if you don't mind, I'm going back to sleep. ;-)

I stopped looking for eyes when I saw those from Fashism (now called IKON). I haven't had the time to compare carefully to see what makes them so darned appealing to me, but for the first time since I'd been in SL (five years), I finally thought there was actually something behind the eyes of my avatar. Eyes are damned important, so it's worth trying out several creators to see what works for you.

16 wrote: Madelaine McMasters wrote: 16 wrote: so i want a axe You're welcome to use my tomahawk. is it battery powered?? Battery powered? What's the matter with people these days?! No, it's not battery powered. You grab it by the handle and swing it with your muscles, whacking away at the bean stalk while swearing profusely. All this battery powered instant gratification annoys the heck out of me. I have a torch, too. You can burn it down and make soup from the beans. Gah, what am I thinking, you eat beans from a can, don't you? And you use an electric can-opener? I know your kind!!!

I want to not grow up to be this kind of scientist... I miss Gary Larson :-(

4-2-2012 ACME Rockets and Congressional Lobbying, LLC, quietly posts another recall notice for their problem plagued X-51 Solarian Interplanetary Battlecruiser in Orion's least read newspaper, "The Nebulizer". A wiring error in the left armrest of the Captain's chair has resulted in swapping of the "Obliterate" and "Tea" functions. The recall notice advises anyone being approached by an X-51 to avoid mentioning crumpets.

Your retreat is lovely, Anjelikka. I've done my best to repair the smoke damage that resulted from trying to cook a meeroo in your oven.

16 wrote: you have to jump 9 times Or once...

16 wrote: so i want a axe You're welcome to use my tomahawk.

Ooooh, so many places for me to set up house! #2 is mislabeled, this is actually the view from my RL bedroom... I'm a terrible housekeeper.

You are not imagining it. I think there are at least a couple reasons for this: 1) SL isn't growing, so one cannot use that as a rationalization for the time and effort expended on content creation for sale. You can only hope that SL's dwindling population increasingly consists of people who love to buy things (or that you can compete by growing your skills beyond those of other creators, which I'll address in #2). But I think that's not likely. I don't imagine SL will escape the demographic effects of reduced "immigration". If fewer new people enter SL (akin to declining birth/immigration rate in RL), the average age of SL residents will drift higher. If you back out health care costs for RL people, spending declines with age. I don't know if the same holds true for SL residents, but it's certainly true for me. The items in my inventory do not wear out, so I've no reason to replace them. So, we have a declining base of customers who are perhaps less likely to buy. That's hardly fertile soil for growing creators. 2) LL forgot Philip Rosedale's vision of SL as a virtual tinker-toy set that anyone could use to build. While we still have basic prims and library textures which allow residents to build in-world with a set of tools and materials common to everyone, the best looking and most resource efficient constructions now require the use of sophisticated out-of-this-world creation tools. I think that discourages widespread creation because additional steep learning curves are added to a would-be creator's journey and because creation becomes a largely solo effort. While I'm quite happy to work by myself in quiet, I've also had great fun building in-world in collaboration with others, or teaching them. SL was never easy, but imagine how much more difficult it becomes to teach students when the best tools can't be used (or demonstrated) in-world. It's ironic to watch the RL excitement over the arrival of affordable 3D printing. Although it's largely hype (as was SL in the early days), not a week goes by without some story in the news about how we'll all soon be able to build amazing things for ourselves, right in our own homes. Meanwhile, as mesh encroaches, it becomes harder (external tools) or more expensive (land impact of prim builds) to make amazing things in SL. On absolute terms, creation in SL is still simpler than in RL, but amazement is a relative thing. How odd that "Your world, your imagination" might be easier to obtain from a MakerBot than from Second Life. ETA: new creators are also in competition with the generosity of older ones who free their creations into the wild when they leave.

Tira Moonwing wrote: I have been using SL on the same old laptop since I joined. With the major updates LL has been doing I have been unable to view mesh (I am sure some of you have experienced this) and when I downloaded and tried all the mesh-compatable viewers no luck in starting; all I get is a black screen where the log-in screen should be. So I have been stuck using an old viewer with mesh mess all over the place. I have been just staying local and trying to avoid mesh wherever I go. And the lag has gotten worse but I know computers cannot last forever and technology must keep moving forward. Now I have decided it is time for a new system but I am totally lost as to where to begin. I thought if i drop by here someone might have some advice to give. My friend told me I will need a 3k (USD) system but that is a bit out of my price range. I appreciate any suggestions you might have. Thanks Hi Tira, Hopefully others will chime in here as well, but it seems that the best SL experience comes from having a computer with a speedy graphics chip, and that nVIDIA chips run better than others. The nVIDIA website lists laptop computers that use their various chipsets. Their most recent high end chip family, which gets good reviews from SL users, ranges from the GeForce 660M through the GeForce 680MX. One step down from that starts with the GeForce 620M and goes through the GeForce 750M. There is a table of devices on this page... http://www.nvidia.in/object/geforce_family_in.html If you click on a chip in that family under "Notebooks", you'll be taken to a page that lists, near the bottom of the page, laptop computers containing it. Some of the chips are too new to be in a laptop yet, so you'll not see anything listed. Good luck!

Janelle Darkstone wrote (to Sephina Frostbite): You look great! :smileytongue: Hey, what about me? I'm showing some serious finger in my badge!

Sephina Frostbite wrote: Thanks Madeline!!! It worked!! /me bows to your awesomeness! You're welcome! Now that I can see all of your badge, I can say it was worth the effort... for both of us. ;-)

I'm watching you! I'll be the second or so to know if you get it to work. ;-) ETA: I just went through the process myself and see I missed some steps! You have to go to the "Avatars" tab, then select "From Uploaded Images" then click on "My Images page" (which is a bolded link in the paragraph of instructions on that tab), then click "Add Images" and locate the PNG you saved on your PC. Then go back to the "From Uploaded Images" page and locate and select the empty image you just uploaded. ETA2: I saw that!

Sephina Frostbite wrote: Thanks wont work.. maybe I am messing up.. but its okay thank you for the help. Hmm, let's keep at this. We'll get you there! Were you able to save the image I posted to your PC? Describe what's not working and we'll work through it.

Your forum badge constists of two images, the little "Avatar" over your bowling pin and the larger "Badge" image that you select in the "Social Connect" tab of your profile. I've attached a transparent image you should be able to use as your "Avatar" so that only your badge image will show. Click in the empty white space above this line and "Save as..." to your computer. Hopefully it'll be saved as a PNG file, retaining the transparency. Give it a sensible name, like "transparent", and keep the .PNG extension, which your browser has hopefully gleaned from the image. Then go to the "Avatar" tab of your profile and upload that image.