MegaRose

I'm from everywhere on the Neopets side of the internet. There's a whole cottage industry of browser-based virtual pet and avatar games, all of which are much smaller and more insular than SL. Imagine all the different SL breedable communities, but each of them is their own separate website and everything is 2d. Oh, and none of them let you cash out your in-game currency back into real world money. But on the other hand, they don't charge you for land, because land usually isn't a concept in those games. Most of those games also have a complex avatar system, but in 2d, so it's like layering pieces of paper onto a paper doll. SL's advantage over those is that you can be in the same game and just wander over to a different sim where the pets are different, or maybe there's no pets, and maybe there's an entirely different gaming experience, but your account and avatar are the same.

Me and one other person were having trouble getting to the Buy L$ page about 10 hours ago, which lines up with this thread starting. It's working fine now, but it made a KittyCatS auction kind of interesting yesterday!

My current motivation to organize is to do so as I fish. Sitting at a fishing area with a 5min auto return on rezzed objects, I'm unpacking boxes and sorting things as I free cast for an endless pile of fish. So my inventory is growing while I try to manage it, but it means I'm technically multitasking and that feels good. I'm not trying things on, which I usually like to do, because I don't want to accidentally remove my fishing rod from my hand. So unpacked junk is going in my temp folder for later. But at least it's unpacked!

I've started offering Glytches to random people I meet in world. I thought that since Glytches were made by LL everyone would know them, but so far a lot of people seem to have never heard of them! Which makes the gift of a random common look more interesting, lol.

Let me know when you do, I'll send you some spares!

When Glytches first came out they were buggy so I didn't bother, but now it works okay so I've gone in and caught some. I'm having fun. But now what? Having a huge collection of quirky avatar pets is appealing all on its own, but the abundance of common doubles got me wondering about Glytch value. I checked the marketplace and people ARE trying to sell them but I doubt there's a lot of buyers, since you can catch them for free. Has anyone made a project out of their Glytch collection? Do you have any outfits that prominently feature a Glytch companion, or maybe an area on your land where you've put a bunch of Glytches out on display? A Glytch zoo would be fun and cute. What makes Glytches worth collecting for you?

To help in the foot decision making process I suggest checking out Moonstar. They include classic avatar compatibility in their outfits whenever they can, but if you look at their mesh foot shoes vs. the classic alternatives, you'll notice the classic shoes are always much simpler. The toes are hidden, the heel isn't as high, and they're nowhere near as glamorous. Also they give out free stuff a lot so I go there a lot anyways. Just pop into the in-world store and look at any classic vs. mesh avatar shoe selections and you'll want mesh feet.

I have a long history of drifting from one virtual pet site to another in this weird quest to own fictional things. My Neopets, my Wajas, my Aywas, all of them eventually have to make room for new acquisitions that usually are weird fake animals but sometimes other stuff. I had heard that Second Life is a place where people acquire made up stuff and there were pets in it. So I made an account and put in an honest effort to understand how SL works. By which I mean, I customized my avatar shape and then made a single twisty prim. Then I got bored and wandered off to, I dunno, mostly Tumblr. Six years later me and some friends (who are NOT generally obsessed with virtual pets) were hanging out in Discord talking about weird internet stuff and one friend brought it to our attention that there was about to be a mass death of imaginary bunnies in Second Life and that sure was weird. He and I jumped in on old, abandoned SL accounts and did...not much of anything, but he had more experience with the old days of SL than I did and helped me figure out what I was doing. Somehow that led to me putting together incredibly ugly ironic furry avatars and then I learned about making not-ugly avatars and now I wander around picking up event gifts and marketplace freebies and being a gaudily decorated vagrant. We did not witness any dead rabbits, but I did pick up some KittyCatS and now I find myself doing quick financial planning in my head on how to acquire yet more fake animal things. I still have some other, non-SL fake animal websites in my tabs RIGHT NOW, so I can acquire more and more imaginary sparkledogs. But then sometimes I can go into SL and try on wigs, and that makes me happy.

Very small idea, maybe this is silly: a miniature 'marketplace' tab on the profile for premium members. Yes you can put your marketplace link or your store landmark in your profile, but I'm thinking of an easy, eye-catching sort of advertisement that could snag you an impulse buy. You'd have to pick which items show up in that tab, maybe even only one listing, but you'd have your featured product's photo and a buy button for easy use. Well this might be easier to illustrate in action: Having a quick buy thing in your profile has potential to be abused but that likelihood goes way down if that tab is a premium perk. Good idea or no?

Thanks to everyone on clarification. I think I've got a good clear picture of my options now! On April 30th I'm going to either abandon my Linden Home and cancel my Premium, OR switch from the monthly membership to a year. Which one I do might be influenced over the next six days, but even if I go back to basic membership I know that LL plans to add more premium benefits so I'm paying attention. When we get a clearer picture of what it means I might take the yearly.

Okay, so I know that if you're a premium member you get that 1024sq of free tier. But then if you're NOT premium you can still have 512sq for $4/month. I'm aware that premium also comes with the weekly stipend and a handful of other perks. I also know the thing where you get a bunch of alts into a group and give them all premium and turn their free tier into one big land. And you can cash out the stipend to pay a significant portion of the next year's premium and all that. I've been researching my options. But you can't buy mainland if you're not premium, right? Am I getting that part right? Or is it that you can't buy mainland direct from LL if I'm not premium? Can I buy directly from another user? And then I can just pay the $4/month for 512sq and not do the commitment of a yearly premium. If I'm doing my figuring right, a month-by-month premium is $9, and the L$300 per week stipend costs just under $5, so the $4/month 512sq mainland tier boils down to basically the cost of a Linden Home without any of the premium perks. If I'm not ready to commit to a year (I could get bored of, banned from, or burned out on Second Life, for whatever reason) then that seems to be the best way to do a low-commitment land ownership. If I decide I want 1024sq or find myself buying L$ a lot I can make the jump to premium, but I might end up not needing that. I bought a month of premium when it went on sale on April 1st. So I have until the end of this month to buy land, if only premium members can buy land. If that's how it works. If any basic member can buy land from some other user then I don't have to decide within a week. So basically what I'm asking is, 'can a basic user buy mainland,' but if anyone has some advice or clarification on my current planning it would also be greatly appreciated!

It occurred to me that when I try Maitreya/Belleza/Slink clothes on, I don't actually need to see a body. With a full body alpha it doesn't matter what fits, I'm just looking at a mesh object so I know how to tag its folder. So I started doing that, and somehow ended up with an avatar. She's not quite how I'd actually do an invisible girl. I enjoy the idea of a greyscale ghostly lady whose body is unseen, but there are big areas of invisible limb that should have at least a little decoration on them, to help track where the limbs actually are. Or, it'd be nice if I could have a glowing, misty body underneath. So I drew that: The ideal ghost girl avatar, I suppose. ALSO look what happens when messing with very old, primmy avatars: Neeeeigh

Oof. My SL existence is spent organizing my folders. I'm glad to hear a lot of the stuff I'm doing is also stuff other people do. I organize by item type (dresses, hats, jewelry, etc) and then do subfolders for specific brands if I have enough things of that type for one brand (clothes -> jewelry -> chop zuey, for example). I also add descriptive tags to items or the folders they're in, whenever possible. I pretty much never have enough room to use all the descriptors i want, so I prioritize color. I desperately wish for a separate input field for each item where I can just load up on tags. As it is, I try to set it up so if I want to find a purple strapless dress I can search 'purple,' close every folder but the dresses folder, then skim the results for 'strapless' (or search 'strapless' then find 'purple'). Things that haven't been unpacked, categorized, and tagged go into an ever-growing Temp folder. My goal is to someday clean out the Temp folder, which is impossible because new events with free gifts pop up every week... I also have a folder labeled 'Fitted for meshes I don't own.' Anything that doesn't come with classic sizes nor sizes for the meshes I do own just gets dumped straight into there, but eventually I'll try to sort it out by body type. And then if I ever get a new body then I can drag those folders straight down into the folder for that body. But for now it's just another dumping ground folder. I save landmarks, but I delete ad textures. I'm considering taking my own screencaps for certain things so that I can more easily remember what they look like without having the store ad in the folder. Makeup appliers especially need this, even if I tagged all their folders the subtle difference in color/shape between lipsticks can be very hard to describe.

HUDs of any kind tend to lag a lot and get broken if I click too fast, and I like the experience of exploring. If I'm gonna sit around and wait for something to load, it's more fun if that thing turns out to be someone's shop decorations, and not the changing textures of a HUD. In theory you could simulate the HUD experience with a web page with slurls to take you direct to the product you want. You could even get fancy with HTML5 and make catalogues with turning pages and stuff.

Going through and sketching out some interesting avatars...

Akeruka does a few Asian heads.

I'm nearing the end of week two of trying out premium. My breedables aren't at breeding age yet. The KittyCatS continue to thrive on the starter food they came with and are adorable. I have the SLB14 BioBreeds dogs eating up a chunk of my L$ just to keep them alive, so I'm hoping when I can breed them the puppy(ies) recoup the food cost. Either way when my month of premium is up they'll just get shoved in the inventory so whatever. I got some free Crystal Ponies from the Quest Fur Cover hunt, then went to get more info on them and they had a bunch of free starter ponies so I picked those up. The only real costs from those are from the food, which is cheap. But since that breedable type is new and doesn't have a bunch of fancy features, I probably won't be able to sell any foals for much. Also, I don't know where to go to actually sell stuff (I'm assuming the Marketplace doesn't get a lot of breedables traffic? idk). So, so far I'm not super convinced to keep premium after this one month. My Linden Home is nice but all I do in it is unpack stuff I find in more and more hunts. WELL ANYWAYS, that's not really important, and not related to bad drawings of worse avatars. I did this today: Meet my latest avatar, White Witch Demoria. I was trying on a bunch of Maitreya stuff I had unpacked, and some of it fits on my Altamura Valentina while others are just a little too off to fix with alpha cuts. I do have the Maitreya demo, so when I wanna see what these clothes are really supposed to look like, I wear that. And that got me to thinking that the 'demo' rings around the body actually kind of look cool. So I figured out an outfit that would match their colors and recontextualize them as magical runes. And then I went into a fancy forest sim, messed with the windlight, and took some photos. I made this picture in Krita, an art program I don't normally use, because I need to learn how to use it properly. Krita has a lot of neat brush presets that I need to familiarize myself with.

Since Altamura sells their own nails appliers I'm guessing they just want to make people buy those? But if they used Omega compatible nails they could sell Omega nail appliers even to people who don't use Altamura bodies. So I'm kinda confused. I guess that doesn't affect heads though, so maybe buying an Altamura head and using it with some other body is a better choice?

Slightly offtopic, but I went in and checked out these nails because the Valentina at least doesn't do Omega for the nails. Maybe my graphics settings are wrong (they were set to high for this) but they're less 'glitter' and more 'tv static.' I snooped around the event and most of the other $10L gifts gave no preview of what was in them, so I didn't pick up anything else. If I could get mesh nails rigged for Altamura hands that I can use all my existing Omega appliers on I'd be set.

So is it a completely new head, or the Altamura Jenny body's head...without the body?

I don't actually have a Maitreya but I'm going to recommend Glutz because they rig a lot of their clothes for both Maitreya AND Kemono. Nobody else ever includes Kemono amongst the standard human bodies to size for and I want to support that. They also give modify perms and provide uv maps for their clothes so you can retexture everything, which is rare among human clothing designers.

When I was still new to SL I had my tablet set up so that I was browsing all 0L$ items in the marketplace so that on my lunch breaks at work I could just go through and pick up as many freebies as possible, and I still have a ton of those to sort through. I'm certain I didn't get everything since the marketplace search isn't great. The MP is like an endless source of new stuff to sort through. Because of that I have a ton of Alaskametro sampler makeup, and they're so good that I'm more or less brand loyal now. If I ever have a specific look I want I'm going to Alaskametro first, all because they have so many marketplace freebies.

Inventory organization continues... I've spent a little time each day unpacking stuff from Christmas. I'm like...half done? And then there's the rest of my temp folder waiting to unpack. Still got some Easter hunts to check out. Having a Linden Home has made it cozier, since nobody can suddenly wander in and see me changing clothes. But I haven't really done much that uniquely needs my own land. I enjoy having my breedables walk around, although they're probably lagging the place out (it's hard to tell, my wireless adapter is also not great so my connection is frequently slow). It's great to be trying on new outfits and then some neon colored scuplty potato-looking cats come walking along at random. They're cute. I'm hoping that by the end of the month I have them breeding so I recoup some of the cost of feeding them. We'll see! Selling the babies would probably involve more in-world communication (or offsite on the KittyCatS and BioBreeds forums? maybe) and I might just want to keep them instead. I'm also noticing as I keep unpacking stuff that a few of the same mesh models keep showing up. I swear I have three or four of the same full perm dress, textured differently by different stores. The few things I've put up for sale have been textured full perm stuff, I wonder if the meshes I've used are recognizable? Most people probably don't check. (speaking of which...I put some of my avatar drawings onto shirts, so you can buy those if you want)

Well, I DO spend a lot of time on virtual petsites that use 2d art, it's actually always been kind of a dream to make my own... But it wouldn't be like Second Life, that's way beyond my scope. But if you've ever seen what Subeta or Flight Rising looks like, maybe someday I'll actually make one like that!

OKAY, I DID THE THING... I did the math on this 50% first month premium deal, and you basically get all that money back through the weekly stipend, so I'm going for it. Soooooo I have a Linden Home. For a month. After a month I'll see if I feel committed enough for a year of premium. PROBABLY NOT. But I now have a place to release these cats I got back in the SL14B freebies! They're cute. Normie is wearing some stuff I unpacked from an easter hunt.