Madelaine McMasters

Lillie Woodells wrote: I need a hug! The hugs are on the outside, Lillie. Let's make a run for it!

valerie Inshan wrote: Lia Abbot wrote: val! Maddy stole my fave blanket! Waaaaa! (This fake crying works real well) Tsstsst kids, if you start fighting over the blankets, Mummy's gonna get angry! :smileytongue: Hey! Dee gave me the blanket to wipe the milk off my glasses! Lia, when did you start drinking milk from a bottle? Okay, who's got the gin? I can't see a thing.

Mmmm, "Under the Sea" has me thinking of taking up the steel drum. Wonderful music, Dillon.

Here’s to the Crazy One. The misfit. The rebel. The troublemaker. The round peg in the square hole. The One Who Saw Things Differently. He wasn't fond of rules. And he had no respect for the status quo. You can quote him, disagree with him, glorify or vilify him. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore him. Because he changed things. He pushed the human race forward. And while some may have seen him as the crazy one, we saw genius. Because the man who was crazy enough to think he could change the world... ...was the one who did. Thank you, Mr. Jobs.

Oooh, one of my favorite tunes is Bobby's...

Wildcat Furse wrote: .... oh I love being a cat!!!! :smileyhappy: *meows* It shows! ;-)

DQ Darwin wrote: how are the Dave's:) They're doing well, Dave #9 got a part in a movie. Top billing went to the shark because she was willing to sleep with Lorenzo Llamas. Dave #11 has taken up residence in a Japanese city park where he's been eating hapless children. Dave #3 still lives in my basement, playing SL all day. He only comes up to empty the pantry and complain about my cooking. How are you, Dee?!

Hi, Kids! Paris and LadySue, welcome to the madhouse. Dillon, could it be you're not in the nursery because you're too hot to handle?

Hartwig Valerian wrote: Greetings fellow residents! I would be honoured if you would take a little time to complete a survey I am using for data in an article I'm writing on "multiracial indentity" in Second Life. The only pre-requisite is that you consider yourself of multiracial descent and (of course) participate in Second Life. The link follows (with addtional instructions and privacy information), and while I am not currently offering any perks for your participation (as the link has been active for quite some time now, and I am wrapping the survey since my article deadline is due at the end of November 2011), you will receive my heartfelt thanks and a copy of the survey results (if you wish): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?authkey=CM-XnL4M&hl=en_US&formkey=dGlqRGRVRjdqdVBRNG9RWk1mR3c1ZUE6MQ#gid=0 Thank you and regards. Hartwig Valerian As race has no biological meaning, I'm afraid I see your selection criteria as "The only pre-requisite is that you consider yourself of multi-meaningless descent". I'd never thought of myself this way before, but I kinda like it! Nevertheless, I don't think that's what you intended, so I'll leave it to those who consider themselves of multi-meaningful descent to participate. Good luck, Hartwig ;-)

Jo Yardley wrote: I may have overlooked it, but I couldn't find a topic about it yet. Yes, Humble has spoken! And I for one am very excited. Again it all sounds positive and he seems to know what he is talking about and what is happening. Especially this bit; Over the next few months (with testing most likely starting in December), we will be rolling out a series of more advanced features. These will make the creation of artificial life and artificial people much smoother. For starters, we'll unveil a new, robust pathfinding system that will allow objects to intelligently navigate around the world avoiding obstacles. Imagine being able to create advanced pets, creatures or even a living town where non-player characters are walking about. Combined with the experience tools I mentioned above, it should soon be possible to create more advanced MMORPG’s or interactive experiences which use AI right within Second Life. Of course I hear a voice in my head shout "Imagine the lag this will cause!" but I love the idea of being able to create a living, populated even busy sim with artificial people. Not to mention the orchestra, chorus line of pretty girls on stage, soldiers marching, etc, etc. Those things that are very difficult to find people for can now be performed all the time. Anyway, what do you think about his post? Jo, I don't understand enough about the sort of game play AI creatures allow to say if I'm impressed or not. As a person who comes to SL for the real people in it, I'm not excited about the prospect of artificial ones. We already have enough of them ;-) Otherwise, this sounds like Fiat announcing that they're adding a power glove box door when what I really want is for the car to start when I turn the key. I'm with Deltango here, I want to hear something that makes me think LL has vision. If I have a worry, it's that Rodvik's gaming background will work against what I love about SL, the absense of rules and goals.

Okay, now you're both being rude and obnoxious. Get a room, you two!

Josh Susanto wrote: Not that I don't think ralph isn't ultimately full of beans in the final analysis, but I think one of his main points has probably been roundly misunderstood by the lot of you. His complaint about the abundance of cheap stuff is not specifically about how much of it is sold, but about how much of it is rezzed and remains rezzed, including free copies. If I understand him correctly, what he seems to be trying to say is that the almost automatic proliferation of copymods, facilitated by the fact that everyone's first copy is cheap, fills in space that people don't bother to fill with something better because they already have something they perceive to be culturally sufficient, due to its ubiquity. Is this correct, ralph? If this is what he means, that too has been true been true from the start. I'd need to see some indication that the proliferation of cheap copymod stuff has somehow reached an inflection point. Does Ralph have anything other than "gut feel" so show this? I don't see it.

Medhue Simoni wrote: I would give all those corporate figures little value. I'm not talking the SL figures. It's the SL figures that refute the OP's contention, that's enough for me. We can wonder what IS causing the stagnation of SL, but cheap goods, if you believe the SL numbers, are NOT the cause.

Chelsea Malibu wrote: The statement SL is boring is not a fact, it's a opinion and as such, 'calling my bs' does not quite fit here. However, you can clearly disagree with my opinion. What has bee reported is that 85% of all new users will quit by the end of 12 months. They have a survey they used to ask when people deleted their account and among them where questions about what people wanted in SL. Many said they did not feel this was a game and that their was no "achievement based" systems. I have invited dozens to come play with me in WoW and of them, none have come back to SL (cept me). Ask any of them or my hundreds of friends I've met in SL who don't come here anymore and they all say pretty much the same thing, there wasn't much to keep their interest. I'm sure there are many who could have a blast with a toilet paper roll and some tape but not many. Some are just entertained easier than others. My point to be clearer is that SL just does not have the creative things to do anymore. Sims that where awesome go offline and are never seen again. Each time a well made activity sim goes offline, some of the game goes with it with little to no backfill. We now have a great place to shop, dance and create. If you don't fall into this category, then you will more than likely be part of the 85% who will leave within the first 12 months. My point is, which is the theme of this thread, that a 10L item is not what will destroy SL. Edit...btw Madeline, thanks for posting this. This is where I think our OP was confused. Chelsea, your observations match what I've read. Games like WoW are crafted to a specific vision designed to draw people in and keep them there. The production levels are very high, including beautiful scored music and high performance graphics resulting from careful scene design. There is no cohesive vision like that in SL, this place is a free for all. Some of us like it, apparently most dont.

It's zooming right along for me Chelsea. There was a forum glitch a few days ago that seemed to be related to the path from SL some of us, as not everybody reported seeing the problem. Hopefully someone will blow the lint out of whatever pipe connects you to the forum!

ralph Alderton wrote: @Madelaine, This problem, the SUPERABUNDANCE of dross, has existed for several years and now is reaching fantastic proportions. Perhaps, Madelaine, you should ask yourself why Secondlife is not growing ? Why retention rates of new users are so poor ? Why is the grid getting smaller ? 650 sims lost last year There are a number of reasons for this and one of them is the SUPERABUNDANCE of dross, 10L$ poor quality products at the marketplace. If Secondlife doesn't look good, how will it attract and retain new and existing users ? I see little evidence that anything in SL is reaching fantastic proportions. Where are the numbers to back your claim? I have wondered why Second Life is not growing and I don't believe it's your "cause" at all. Many immersive games are seeing declining hours in-game as people are drawn away by things like Facebook. I just read yet another article (don't have the link for it) that said console game manufacturers are scaling back the depth of their game designs to address the fact that a substantial part of their development effort goes unseen. Players are no longer sticking with games into the deeper levels. This is a recent development, thought to be brought on by the explosion in lightweight mobile games and social networking platforms with gentle learning curves. Zynga (founded 2007), the game developer responsible for Farmville (debuted 2009), is currently valued at north of $15 Billion. That's 30-50 times more than Linden Labs. Zynga's 2011 profits will be greater than Linden Lab's revenues. The Farmville game alone is worth several times Second Life. The world in which Second Life competes is shifting, regardless of whether anything inside SL itself is shifting. SL has a steep learning curve, intensive UI (by virtue of being immersive), heavy hardware/internet requirements (can't run on a phone) and no clearly marketable "hook". Couple this with management missteps along the way and you have more than enough large reasons for SL's current state. Two links in support of my numbers (I don't claim they are gospel, but the decimal points are in about the same places I've seen in other reports). http://www.launch.is/blog/report-second-life-making-100m-a-year.html http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20075199-93/ipo-values-zynga-at-$15-billion-to-$20-billion/ Now, having suggested some reasons for SL's current state, let me pull up some figures to refute your claims. I went to a website that tracks SL metrics and pulled five transaction plots spanning April 2006 to September 2010. They've segregated LL's transaction history into price ranges. I picked four ranges. If freebie/L$10 dollar sales were reaching fantastic proportions, you'd see it in the first two chats, no? You'll see that upscale purchases are growing faster than the L$10L stuff you rail against and L$1 purchase seem to be in decline. This last chart is total transaction volume, which is doing better than the cheap transactions and about as well as the mid/high dollar transactions. If anything, I see slight evidence that consumers are moving upscale. It took me only a few minutes to find all this evidence. Before you claim you know a cause, I suggest you find some evidence of your own. ETA: Charts came from here: http://gridsurvey.com/economy.php Anybody know what caused the spikes in April and August last year?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Second Life economy has been working more or less the same way since the start, with people making stuff of various quality at various prices, including free. Why is this a problem now?

JeanneAnne wrote: Cinnamon Mistwood wrote: I always seem to be just a bit blurry unless I constantly rebake. No one else sees me this way so I just ignore it unless I want to take a picture or something. Cinn This happens to me, too. My tattoos or the pattern on clothing is blurry, so i press Ctrl-Alt -r and everything instantly comes into sharp focus but then in a few seconds everything becomes blurry & I get this kinduv "planet of the apes" look, then everything comes back into focus except the stuff that was blurry to begin with. I was thinking it was because my tats & outfits are cheap freebies so have been just living with it. I use Firestorm & I'm not sure if others see me as blurry or not. I guess I can live with it but it is mildly annoying & I'd like to fix it if I could. Jeanne The fuzziness you see, which then comes into sharp focus, is caused by what's called "progressive downloading". To decrease the time it takes for your avatar to become at least somewhat visible, the SL servers send a subset of your skin/clothing pixels to your viewer right away, then keep filling in detail over time. So the initial painting of your avatar may be done with only 1/16th of the pixels in your avatar texture, with each pixel being displayed 16x larger. As the additional pixels are downloaded, the resolution of your avatar improves. The texture downloaded to the viewer is "baked" from all the skin, tattoo and clothing layers you are wearing, which are combined in the SL server to produce a single texture for application to your avatar. This is why you needn't worry about having your skin rezzed, but not your clothing, unless there's an error in SL's "wearing" mechanism. Your baked texture includes your clothing over your skin, so there's no naked body texture being sent down from the servers, with clothing to follow. It's all one texture. Now, I don't know why this mechanism sometimes breaks, but it seems that the viewer can think it has the full resolution texture in cache when it's actually got only one of the lower resolution parts of the full download. Rebaking textures should fix this, by sending the viewer a new avatar texture. When you see perpetually fuzzy textures on prims (which are not baked from layers like your avatar) that once looked fine, it's time to clear your cache. The viewer has gotten itself in a position where it thinks the texture in the cache for the fuzzy prim is full resolution when it's actually only one of the first steps of the progressive download. So long as that incompletely loaded texture is in cache, the viewer is not goinig to ask for a fresh copy. Clearing the cache eliminates all the downloaded textures, good and bad, and the viewer starts over, hopefully with fully downloaded copies of all the textures in your view. This doesn't solve your problem, but hopefully gives you some understanding of how the system works, or doesn't.

Madelaine McMasters wrote: Charolotte Caxton wrote: I cry at least once a day for the sheer wonder that is life. I am not certain how short life is, I believe mine will be as long as it lasts. Once Zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was Zhuangzi. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuangzi. But he didn't know if he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi. http://www.ted.com/talks/louie_schwartzberg_the_hidden_beauty_of_pollination.html I posted this from bed, more later... Charolotte, I share your wonder at life and, when I don't get too wrapped up in myself, I feel... /me pushes away from the keyboard and walks outside to watch the sky (Randall, that's my tip).

Charolotte Caxton wrote: I cry at least once a day for the sheer wonder that is life. I am not certain how short life is, I believe mine will be as long as it lasts. Once Zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was Zhuangzi. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuangzi. But he didn't know if he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi. http://www.ted.com/talks/louie_schwartzberg_the_hidden_beauty_of_pollination.html I posted this from bed, more later...

Charolotte Caxton wrote: I haven't had her meeroo, but I have had the hummingbird, charred to perfection and with just a hint of nectar, superb, mmm Thank you Charolotte, but credit for the meeroo goes to Sylvia and Tem. They cooked one up and sent some home with me. It's a little gamey but tobasco takes care of that.

Ishtara Rothschild wrote: Btw, a report released by the Brown University estimates the total costs of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan to reach $3.7 trillion by the time these wars are over. See http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/29/cost-of-war-iraq-afghanistan_n_887084.html Several years ago, the Congressional Budget Office pegged the total (by the time the wars end) at three trillion, so this seems in the ball-park.

Ishtara Rothschild wrote: Be glad that she didn't eat all of it! My cats just ate my veal steak I only meant to give them a few pieces, but one of them has figured out that if she touches my food, it's hers. So I had no choice but be content with my ten french fries and a little cucumber salad. Awww, Ishy. I have a li'l leftover meeroo if you'd like.

Cinnamon Mistwood wrote: I am a true American mutt. When I tried to go back and do a little family history investigation, I could not find one culture that was represented more than another. Apparently the line I come from loved who they loved regardless of what nation that other person came from. I have nearly every European country, native American (I know they wandered over a land bridge long ago), African, Middle Eastern, Russian represented in my past. I have not found Asian or Indian yet, but it is probably there. A celebration of just one of those doesn't make any sense. I am a child of the world and will celebrate the similarities and differences of being 1 of 6 billion humans. Besides, I am sure history is written by whoever won the war whether they were right or wrong. Of course, none of this mixed heritage means I would deprive myself of having a German in October, an Irish beer in March or enjoying a Margarita in May. The good thing about being a mutt is I can celebrate with anyone. As far as your original question... You have no reason except political correctness to deny yourself your history. If you are interested in European cultures and history, there are many history books to choose from. Celebrate who you are and don't worry about how others see it, you can invite anyone you want to celebrate with you including those who are not of European heritage. It is harder and harder to find "pure blood" anyone these days. Most of us are mixed breeds. ETA - okay, it is pretty obvious I work in an animal hospital. I laugh when people come in with designer dogs - cockapoos, labradoodles, puggles. All they are is a pure bred dog and a sneaky neighbor dog. So, sorry about all the mutt and mixed breed analogies, but people pay top dollar for these mixes - lol. Cinn, during the time it took you to type that lovely post, you became one of 7 billion. Which month is for root-beer? ;-)

PeterCanessa Oh wrote: The Scots will have to make their own excuses for golf (a game I've never played for fear of its legendary adictive powers) I rarely play golf. A friend claims a sport isn't "true" unless it has both offense and defense. That striking him with a golf ball signaled my acceptance of his theory went unappreciated. Since then I've defoliated a fair number of trees and driven a toad into the hereafter. The potential for addiction is obvious to me.