Rolig Loon

I was afraid of that. Under the circumstances, it might be wise for everyone to take a few days off and let the dust settle. As I said earlier, these sorts of events are annoying -- OK, really annoying -- but can do no real harm. The Lab's cleanup crew will be back on Monday.

Not to worry. SL is almost as hard to figure out as RL, and it changes just as fast. The basics of managing land and personal security/sanity are important in both worlds -- not to obsess about, but just so that you have the semblance of street smarts. Most things like the ones you are experiencing, can be annoying as hell, but they do you no real harm. The trick is to keep your cool and deal with them methodically. And if you can't, call for help.

It sounds like you have a rogue rezzer, maybe a replicator. If you're in the Mainland estate, submit an AR. Name Governor Linden as the perpetrator if you don;t know who owns the griefing objects. Unfortunately, this is the weekend, when there are fewer Lindens around to do anything, but they should get to it fairly quickly.

That's not quite the lesson here. You just need to be a bit more persistent and patient than you expected. Linden Lab has been releasing more than one new region a day, so there are always new homes. If you scroll up and look at other threads here, you will also see that they are about to release a rather large chunk of regions full of houses in the next theme -- probably sometime within the next few weeks. If you add to that the fact that people are continually abandoning and trading in one house for another, your chances of getting a home on Bellisseria are actually pretty good. You just can't necessarily expect to get one the first few times you click through the signup page.

Or you do the ugly cheat ...... you make the vehicle non-physical for an instant, rotate it a bit, and make it physical again. If you're lucky, that instant is hardly perceptible. Probably more acceptable if you are scripting a drone than if you are making something to ride in.

You almost have the Local Images part right. Local images are not only visible to you alone, they only persist as long as you are logged in. So, if you log out and then come back later, you'll have to apply the local textures all over again. The point is that local textures are on your own computer, not in the SL sevrers. Textures only become permanent and visible to everyone after you have paid the L$10 and uploaded them to the servers. The Aditi (beta) grid is Linden Lab's own test grid. They make it available to us as a practice area for our own testing, with the understanding that it may not always be open for use and that nothing you create there can be brought to the main grid (Agni). For your testing purposes, you receive "play money" on Aditi so that you can upload textures and mesh there, but that play money, also,. can never leave Aditi.

See http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/User:Rolig_Loon/Local_Textures

^ | | HEY!

How I do enjoy solitude! CABIN

The water may have started to cool by then, but schools had not yet started a mass exodus by late 2007. That winter, I prepared a report (later shared with Claudia Linden) that summarized the activities of 52 colleges and universities that had a presence in SL. Roughly half owned property, often a region or more, and about the same percentage offered some sort of regular programs (rather few actual classes, but many orientation and extension programs and tutorials, and quite a few demonstrations). I concluded that SL was potentially a good platform for adult education and extension programs, but was not well-suited for traditional undergraduate classes except as an occasional supplement. Schools were just figuring that out for themselves, too, which is what you may have been seeing. They didn't actually start leaving in droves until (1) the great recession cut into their discretionary funding and (2) Linden Lab removed the academic discount for land fees. Those two events ended the education experiment in SL for all but a few large schools like the University of Hawaii, and schools that have maintained a presence in Library Science (like San Jose State University and Stanford) or have other specialized programs.

WooHoo! I'm an Oldbie! I came in March 2007. I'm not truly wedded to a generational identity. As sirhc and Selene said, those labels are rather arbitrary and often serve to divide us rather than shed much light on who we are. I can't be as vehement about it as either of them, but I share their sense that the labels are fairly pointless. It does make sense, though, to think of SL's history in the framework of eras. Months before I arrived, flexi was introduced. Months after I arrived, Voice came to SL. Technological innovations like those have become mileposts that say something about how our in-world experience has changed over time. Flexi was an important step toward making objects (and clothing!) that move organically. Voice suddenly made communication much easier (and arguably more natural) for many residents. Those innovations changed us and our communities irreversibly, so they are useful markers to remind us of where we see ourselves in the evolutionary development of SL.

This is one of the things that fascinates me about Bellisseria. The new continent, with its quantum leap in landscape design and architectural style, is inspiring, but what intrigues me is the renewed interest in community. A good deal of that is here in the forums, of course. Still, there's a massive in-world revival in group activity, spontaneous events, public decoration ... all things that were new and exciting when they happened in Bay City an SL generation or two in the past but have been dormant until this year. I sense a nostalgia for the wave of growth during the SLoomer years. The old Linden Homes were "starter homes" for the first big wave of new SL residents. The new Linden Homes are being bought largely by SLoomers who seem to be discovering new roots.

Sometimes it is. Some times it really really isn't. It all depends on the day. There are a few days -- like my birthday -- when I am particularly conscious of my age. Others, not so much. When I am in SL, though, I am quite a bit younger and more spry than I feel in RL, regardless of what day it is. I'm a Boomer/SLoomer in both worlds, which makes me one of the crowd and an old fogey at the same time. Old enough to know better, in both senses of the phrase. Like RL, SL presents us with an implicit tug of war between our need to do new exciting things with new toys and our desire to make the world stand still so that we can enjoy things that are familiar. The older we get, the more familiar things are in our toolboxes and the less time we have to take in new ones, so the harder it gets to resolve the tug of war gracefully. Some of us learn to reinvent ourselves and keep pace with the mesh bodies and Bento attachments of the day, and some retire into timeless enclaves or leave SL. Very much like RL but on a shorter time scale. There are days when I am invigorated by new discoveries in SL. I explore the unfolding wonders of Bellisseria and spend hours fiddling with BOM, acting like a teenager. And there are the "Get off my lawn!" days when I resent people messing with "my" SL. Just like RL.

No

I'm not sure that I would agree that SL is a "bargain", but I agree that SL is not necessarily expensive. Or at least, looking at it another way, SL is no more expensive than you want it to be. Certainly, you can spend lots of money on land, clothing, mesh objects, and various entertainments, but you can also choose not to spend it. Most of us are supporting our SL indulgences with discretionary money, the same way that we would pay to go to a movie, buy a new hat, or go to Disney World. Put your own word on it, but this is a "vacation," "hobby", "recreation", "getaway" that we can enjoy because we have set aside money that we don't need for meeting basic responsibilities in RL and are committing it instead to be kind to ourselves. Our vacation here can be as lavish or as frugal as we choose, as long as we stay within budget. As John Lennon almost said, "[Second] Life is what happens when you're not too busy doing other things."

I spent Christmas and the month of January, 1973 in Uppsala and remember julbord fondly. It's a fine, warm tradition and a proper way to celebrate the season.

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I was in the mood for a short, easy trip this morning -- no climbing over rocks or fording streams. So, there I was, daydreaming at the lookout rail at the Light of Aurelia, when I realized that I had never wandered down the coast. If you've never been up on the light, I recommend it. The view is spectacular. From the lighthouse south, the coastline is a favorite for people with houseboats. The coastline is studded with them as far as the eye can see. This is by far my favorite lighthouse in Bellisseria, so I'm embarrassed to say that I hadn't taken time to get a closer look. These are quiet roads in this part of the world, ideal for a nice sedate scooter like mine that moves along at a leisurely pace. If I am going to enjoy the scenery, I don't want to wrestle with some overpowered piece of machinery that is designed to zip from one destination to the next. I took a left turn at the end of the bridge from the lighthouse and headed into Everett, which is a friendly-looking community. The road winds along the coast, flanked by well-kept suburban homes on one side and houseboat slips on the other. As always in Bellisseria, I am impressed by how many mature trees there are here. They provide shade and add to the comfortable neighborhood feel. Not much farther along, in Gangway, there are several small stretches of rocky shoreline where the houseboat piers stand off a little farther from the land. These are pretty places to visit -- plenty of grassy areas where you can sit and smell the flowers and some other spots like this one where you can sit and admire the houseboats. At Beluga Sound, the coastline turns westward and the houseboats are moored farther from shore. Not too far off are the marinas on Pickle Island at Lillipop and Bennetts Cove. This is a great area for boating. It's the gateway to the waters of southern Bellisseria and, not much farther south, to one of the two great rivers that flow out from the inland sea at Berknear Bay and Plafil Waters. It's also a well-known favorite spot for mermaids, who enjoy the grotto where the coastal shelf drops off into the deeper waters of the Great Sea. As much as I love hiking and horseback riding in the hills and vales of Bellisseria, I am drawn to the open vistas and fresh air in places like this. And by the seagulls. I realize that they can be loud, pesky birds at times, but they are wonderfully confident and the clear masters of the shore. If you are a fisherman, you know that they are also a sign of abundant sea life. I hadn't planned to travel much farther than this and, in fact, found that the small road in Walrus Beach dead-ends into the easternmost end of the houseboat piers just about where they reach the mouth of the river. The main road to the south from here heads across the bridge to Porthole, Campwich Forest, and beyond. For today, though, I was satisfied to stop here. Here's the view back up the coast, with the Light of Aurelia in the distance. These are public piers, like all of them in Bellisseria, so you can wander among them wherever your fancy -- or your little scooter -- takes you.

Yes, that's pretty much what was in my own mind too. It's awkward no matter which way you do it, and especially if the end user is not on the same region as the server you have created as your rezzer. As I said, it would be somewhat less clumsy if you could pass the customization information through KVP, but that would require using a grid-wide Experience, which is not an option in SL yet.

Judge Judy

I can think of a few ways to do this, but each is clumsy in its own way. At the core, each involves rezzing the object, temp attaching it to yourself (the buyer), modifying it with dialog-driven menu options, and then sending all of the information about those options to yourself as a chat message. You then copy out that information and send it to the intended gift recipient, separate from the object itself. The gift recipient then feeds your saved configuration information into her own copy to apply the customization. It's awkward, no matter how you do it, although you could script at least some of it to make the business of saving and reapplying the options less prone to user error. You could really make it friendlier if you and the recipient had access to an Experience, so you could pass the configuration information in KVP. All in all, it's a heck of a lot of work.

That would explain why I never heard from them. As a follow-up, a note on the Mentors web site indicates that it was last modified on 8 December 2008, at 17:35. So, even farther back than I recalled. The site is now marked as

Old hats

Did you by any chance set your account to accept all objects directly to inventory? If so, some friend or secret admirer could have been sending you gifts all this time and your account would just be squirreling them away without needing your permission. If you got them more than 32 days ago, they wouldn't even show up in your Transaction History.

Like stiletto heels. 🙄