Lindal Kidd

I feel your pain, but if we are comparing stories, I've been trying to get my appliance repairman in RL to call me back for over two weeks now. And trying to get a contractor to make good on a shoddy tile installation job for three years.

There's not much you can do except to keep trying, sharma. Most people who have SL businesses run them on a part time basis, and may not log in world for several days, for any number of reasons. Keep trying, by both IM and notecard, and keep your tone polite and reasonable. If all, or a large part of your rental period expires before the landlord fixes the problem, you can (again politely) ask for a full or a partial refund, or that many days of free rent...but it is up to the landlord whether they will give that to you. Sadly, there are a few dishonest landlords in SL who make a practice of renting out places and never providing anyone with access or any kind of services at all. And there are also a few places where the landlord has left SL, but the land is still there, attracting (and disappointing) tenants. If your landlord NEVER responds, after oh, say, a couple of weeks, you could submit an Abuse Report. While this may result in the landlord getting banned, it almost certainly won't get you your money back.

I'm not familiar with your software, sorry. By "alpha channel" I mean the transparency channel of the image. Images with transparency have values at each pixel for Red, Green, Blue and transparency, or RGBa. Imaging programs like GIMP and Photoshop can show the individual channels. An alpha channel might look like this:

Hey, that's not very lice...er, I mean, nice. Yeah, nice.

Well, Scylla... If you want to do your part to break the male=aggressor stereotype, just start walking up to random guys and say, "I want you to f**k me now." Then teleport home, hop into bed, and send them a teleport offer. I bet you get a lot more acceptances than the poor fellows with their lame pickup lines do. Note: It's important to say that entire sentence. A lot of girls just say, "I want you" so as not to sound crude. The men are left scratching their heads and wondering, "what for?"

Too late. Anyway, I didn't mean to squick you out. This is a long running joke, or forum meme, associated with the lovely, hilariously random, and often deeply insightful Madelaine McMasters, who will probably put in an appearance here soon. She's always setting people on fire. Once you meet her, though, I predict you'll be standing in line with the rest of us, waiting for the gasoline and the blowtorch.

To get back to the OP's question... Hollie, I understand your confusion! The problem is, some people do engage in roleplay here. Sometimes, it's easy to determine; you could go to a formal roleplay region and engage in Star Trek or Star Wars roleplay, or inhabit a town in the Wild West. Such regions will have a big book of Rules and Backstory, and everyone knows that they are roleplaying. On the other end of the spectrum, you find people like me and Phorumities, who don't do roleplay. People of this sort are NOT roleplaying. If they say, "I love you", they really mean it. Or at least as much as they would mean it if they were talking to you in Real Life. Then there is a wide range of people in between, who are engaging in what I would call "informal roleplay". They aren't a character in a manufactured story world, but they ARE creating their own story or fantasy. If they say "I love you", they mean it only until they log off...and they may not mean it at all. Just as many people will lie to you, and often to themselves, in the real world. The only way to resolve the question is to ask.

...ties you up and sets you on fire. (I thought I would beat @Madelaine McMasters to it, just this once.)

Well, let's step through this again. Debit cards are not accepted as a payment method. SOME debit cards have worked in the past, but when you go to re-register them or update them, they will fail. Any time you try to register a new payment method, LL makes a trial charge-and-refund of $1.00 to the card. This may show up as a charge on your card, but it will be reversed in a day or two. You haven't lost any money. If there are any other charges that appear on the card besides these test transactions, you should call LL Billing.

What does the alpha channel of the file look like?

Speaking of viewer safety, there's a scam going on related to Firestorm. Messages are being sent encouraging people to download the "Pro" version of Firestorm and directing people to a malware site. THERE IS NO "FIRESTORM PRO". For more details, see Inara Pey's blog post: https://modemworld.me/2018/11/13/firestorm-fake-website-and-downloads-warning/

Aside from the issue of theft of intellectual property, the mere use of a viewer with copybot tools is a violation of the Terms of Service and can get the user banned.

The Teddy Roosevelt of cats!

SL has been broken for Intel 630 since the latest Windows 10 update. Speaking in general, SL needs a "real video card" to perform well. Even a crappy card won't "lock accounts up" though.

Duh.