Qie Niangao
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Posts posted by Qie Niangao
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2 hours ago, Persephone Emerald said:
Look again. That article is from January 2023, over a year before the Medium post.
Yeah, hence my earlier footnote edit. On that much longer timeline, it's possible the investors got impatient with progress and a decision became inevitable to focus on the new opportunity. Still, though, they're turning away from a pretty big cash cow here; one would think they could get somebody to at least keep it running even if their focus shifted. Roblox is big, but I'd be surprised if Blueberry is hauling in such mega-Robux as to already see all that SL revenue as a mere paltry distraction.
As to the cast of characters, I realize the Forums policy forbids naming names, but we're quoting from an article here so there's:
- "Founded in 2012 by Mishi McDuff", "… said McDuff, in a statement", and "excited to support Mishi and her team", and
- "Katherine Manuel, chief operating office", "Manuel will be speaking",
Then in another GamesBeat article from April 2023, more names:
- "Ashley Hopkins, chief creative officer at House of Blueberry"
- "Emily Eitches, head of business development at the House of Blueberry"
So... I've kinda lost track of why it matters and don't know any of these people, but I don't see why we'd need to skirt the known identities of company officers with titles and all.
That's a very long, detailed interview article. It's a subject I never cared about before this thread, but I found this quote interesting:
QuoteA lot of times in something like Roblox, they will advertise that they only keep 30 percent while the creator keeps 70. But one thing that was sort of shocking to me is that then there’s the currency conversion. Everything happens in the local currency, which is Robux in the case of Roblox. Then there’s a currency conversion on top of that, where they take a further cut. It ends up that the creator makes anywhere from 25 percent to just shy of 10 percent, with 10 percent being the most common. Roblox is doing very well.
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12 hours ago, AzureWaves said:
The departure might be related to Blueberry accepting $6 million in investors funding: https://venturebeat.com/games/house-of-blueberry-raises-6m-for-digital-fashion-in-the-metavese/
It's possible the investors decided to focus entirely on Roblox.
Interesting. That was public back in mid-January and it took them another quarter[*] to announce they were pulling back from SL. Their SL revenue stream must be pretty big, and the investment is US$ 6M, so the clock is now ticking for offsetting loss of that revenue as the operation shifts to the Next Big Thing.
I guess Roblox would be the safest bet but it seems a little boring to attract investment, unless it's just a first step towards something more exciting.
Something I wouldn't have expected:
QuoteThis latest round of funding will accelerate growth to new communities by expanding from a primarily
female design aesthetic into male and androgynous design, […]________________
[* Edit: Wrong! See Kylie Jaxxon's post below. Make that a year and a quarter.]-
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4 hours ago, SarahThe Wanderer said:
When I was new to second life and bought my first land, I bought a script from the market place for 10$L after I used it I noticed lots of bots coming to my parcel, […]
Yeah, it's absolutely possible for any script to report its location (and anything else it can detect) to a remote server, without any way for the script owner to know it's happening. This is usually mentioned in connection with attachments (that give the info to stalkers), but it's just as easy for unattached items rezzed on land.
And now that you mention it, I can imagine that especially something like a "security" script meant to appeal to landowners concerned with "privacy" would be the ideal delivery vehicle for a system that sends bots to investigate "private" areas. Fiendish.
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5 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:
But are you saying that merely being bounced a bit under an "eject" is the issue, so that they want not even ejecting (which can force you on to another parcel, sometimes farther away than just a mere bounce).
I fail to see why this "good" would override the senselessness of banning everyone who came on a parcel. The chief problem with this is that it bans a lot of your fellow tenants in a rental system -- where they, too, have ban powers and can merely reach into the parcel menu and unban themselves then.
That seems to have been the idea, with the bans taking effect before the potential intruder gets to the parcel. So it would deny access to the same avatars as would a regular whitelist banline, with which only the elect few can enter the parcel, the main difference being that being blacklist bans these go all the way to the sky. And yeah, that's the other analogue, the zero-second orb, that ejects or teleports home after intrusion. People hate zero-second orbs. Me included.
(I agree that teleport home is vastly more disruptive than ejection. As I've said many times, llTeleportHome should never have worked on the Governor's Estate; what private Estates do to terrorize visitors can be up to them. I'm told there's money in marketing to "special" tenants who long to ensnare and tear the wings off careless passersby.)
Anyway, operationally the device in that thread would be deeded to the land group, so in a rental situation the landlord could decide how avatars get exempted from the device's auto-ban. Maybe tenants wouldn't get direct land ban/unban powers but instead use a script or otherwise interact with the land-deeded script, and might themselves be added to the whitelist by the rental system. (I have no idea whether that thread's specific Marketplace item supports rental scenarios, though.)
But none of this makes any sense for a public-facing parcel.
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1. Happy Birthday!
2. "Different" is such a relative term. I grew up in a patch of Midwest US so homogeneous that the Norwegian immigrants thought the Swedish immigrants too alien to qualify as fully human, and vice versa. And the local town kids were a different species from the local country kids, and everyone knew and respected those distinctions.
But facing Godzilla, even Kong is close enough.
3. Identities in SL are always at some level performative, or constructed at least. Some profiles, for example, are aggressively individualistic. Like "anybody who got the vaccine will be muted on contact" individualistic. While it might be amusing to try to bridge those differences, there's nothing generous in doing that, so I'm inclined to give them the wide berth they seek. At least until Godzilla blurs some lines for them.
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Oh yeah, now I remember that thread. I remember trying very hard to behave myself even though I'd hate for such a system to become commonplace. It's really a way to use a "blacklist" named-ban script to get around the height limit of "whitelist" access control, but it's gussied-up as a way for orbs to avoid ejecting people from parcels by pre-banning them.
So that script would indeed ban everybody upon entering the region unless they were excepted, perhaps in an owner-supplied list, or by having an owner-favored Group active, or whatever. That all would be working as designed, though, so the "scripting error" here would be… something else?
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It's a good question why a public venue would ever resort to scripted access control at all. An explanation for that might be pretty hilarious.
But program bugs can be arbitrarily nonsensical. It's perfectly possible to keep a list of special accounts intended to populate the land access list and instead a bug adds them all to the land ban list. That's not to suggest anything like that is happening here, just an example of nonsense a buggy script can get up to. It's essentially unprovable that a particular outcome wasn't a bug but was how the script was intended to work. So I don't think any technical analysis of this situation could have a definitive result.
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There are a few different things this could be, but because they only stay a few seconds, it's quite likely they really are just bots ("scripted agents") that are visiting many different regions to collect data. Most of these are harmlessly collecting and aggregating data about fashion trends, or the popularity of other products, or Mainland for sale, or other boring stuff. Some, however, are looking for specific avatars to keep track of where they go, when, and with whom—those aren't so harmless.
All such accounts are required to be registered as scripted agents, but if they're doing something naughty, they probably did not register. And the fact their profiles are blank suggests these aren't the "friendly" bots. Either way, it would be interesting to know if they're registered as scripted agents, which a script can determine while they're in the region by checking the AGENT_AUTOMATED bit of their llGetAgentInfo; that's a common feature of up-to-date parcel security scripts. On private Estates, it's possible to ban them from entering the region at all, but again, that's just the ones that are registered as bots.
Thing is, if you set the land options on your parcel to only allow group access, there should be no way for a bot to get on the parcel. (I mean the "About Land" access settings, not a security orb which can't be very useful against agents that only spend a few seconds in the region anyway.)
It is possible for an avatar to appear on a different parcel than where they are actually located. They'll be located correctly on the mini-map and by scripts, but simple animations can offset the visual appearance of the avatar quite far from that actual location. I don't know why anybody would bother to do that with a bot account, but people are weird so we can't rule out the possibility.
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2 minutes ago, Liaa Nova said:
it should be banned but never is
And it can never be banned unless somebody identifies it in an Abuse Report—and then, if true, it'll be gone grid-wide.
And that's pretty good evidence that it's not true: it would not exist if anybody could actually identify it.
Given the bugs in some of the third-party libraries used for SL (viewers and server-side), I'd never say it's exactlky impossible, but it's definitely not possible within SL's designed architecture… but anything goes if victims are using media or a third party viewer, either of which may operate outside that designed architecture.
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On 4/12/2024 at 4:37 PM, Hucasys Jacobus said:
at least for me, changing from FS to Alchemy made a HUGE difference
Coincidentally I too recently found Alchemy making a huge difference, discovering that it somehow cured a problem that has plagued me for months: very frequent system dialogs that "SLPlugin.exe has stopped working" that make both Firestorm and the Linden viewer unusable. (I reported it ages ago. No change through generations of updates including Friday's 7.1.6.8632452945.)
I realize it's not exactly the point of the thread (and nothing to do with framerate either); just another case of Alchemy unexpectedly coming to the rescue.
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Wow, that's weird. That forum has 171.8 K posts and I've never opened it directly before. It works for me now that I try, which is irrelevant, although FWIW I have a moderately beefy machine with some aggressive memory management settings in Chrome. But anyway:
2 hours ago, WildHeart Calamity said:i might have found help there with my issue.
maybe try the Avatar section of Answers? This is a desperate suggestion coming from me, because I hate the way Answers works, but it might be useful here despite all that.
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It may be more practical to stop trying to fight this with escalating technical responses unless this crosses the line into real life stalking. Instead, to repeat my earlier suggestion, let him think he won in the least satisfying way: bore him past the point of interest. This does not mean to abandon whichever account(s) he's already stalking. You need that stalked account more than ever, because you'll use it to make him go away. Keep using it, but make it less and less interesting to stalk. Just mute him or pretend to mute him and do stupider and stupider things with that avatar, make them tedious and incoherent, as if the avatar is being operated by a defective Artificial Intelligence, but a really boring one.
Of course if that were your only account, it would make SL boring for you, too, so make a completely different new account. Don't worry about using the same machine because this new account will be completely different. It's not going to share anything about your previous Second Life experience, nothing your stalker would encounter and nothing they'd be interested in if they did.
There are many different ways to experience Second Life. Your goal is to start this new account doing stuff you'd never consider doing before, with an avatar completely different from any you've used before. Think about what attracted you to your previous avatar: did you like its hair? If so, your new account should have no hair at all. Was your skin a good feature? Fine, switch to scales, or mech hardware. Did it move well with good animations? Nope, the new one should have whatever you can scavenge from old Library avatars. In fact, some weird old Library robot avatar might be a good place to start.
Not the SL you want? Yeah, of course not, but it's a way to investigate parts of SL you'd never experience otherwise, broaden your SL horizons and make some discoveries you can use later, after you've lost this creep. And anyway, meanwhile, you'll need to spend some of your time actively boring him with the stalked account.
(Incidentally, Myrthe, I knew you'd be back because you sound like a grown up, after all this, not easily intimidated by a little Forums skepticism. In fact, you might be especially situated to accept those who are so worried they might be getting tricked, as if that were the worst thing in the world.)
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1 hour ago, steeljane42 said:
Big events are more than just hype and long lines over one product, like in your iPhone example. In a way they have some form of a symbiosis. They are popular because a number of high-profile creators join, a few mid-tier ones as well. People check galleries and booths at the event and see it all together. Put singular listings on such shopping HUD and you get what... a slow and likely badly designed version of MP? Well, it already exists, the badly designed MP by LL, that many creators don't even bother with.
Yes, an event is ultimately an outlet for creators, in service of the creators' revenue, so all that really matters is where those creators think they can do the best business. There's no denying there are huge drawbacks to the current location-based event model. There are advantages, too, but the question is which of those advantages might be complemented or enhanced by another medium.
This HUD doesn't do that really at all, and my point was that it cannot do that as long as it serves multiple events at the same time (then it really is just an even clunkier version of disastrously primitive Marketplace), but I wouldn't rule out an enterprising event organizer breaking away from the increasingly crowded pack of barely distinguishable events with something that better serves the shopper's access to the creator's vision, while leaving a more durable event brand impression.
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Also, here's a grim practical consideration. We're about to see 2K texture uploads. They'll cost more, but top-tier brands will gladly pay to use them. Shoppers at top-tier events will wear them, lots of them, on every material layer surface of every attachment. It will soon take four times as long to download textures on arrival at a crowded event. Now imagine an event that distributes a pre-arrival HUD that downloads each creator's main product image and brand logo textures as part of a preview shopping experience. A marketing expert fills in the blanks here with what extra features and offers motivate shoppers to preview their shopping trip. Now the creator's imagery appears upon arrival at the event venue, while all the other shoppers' outfits very slowly fill in. At least the shopper can see what they came to see, which is what the creators care that they see.
While we're at it, the HUD can offer cam positions for each booth, no need for texture-blind navigation through the crowds to put the shopper in direct reach of a creator's booth.
At least for a while many shoppers would still value the ritual gathering of mandatory "anniversary" "gifts" and other familiar event promotions. Those may persist with or without a HUD, but they may not be adequate to preserve viability of events that don't precache creator-supplied textures when multiple layers of 4 megapixel images cover every surface.
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6 minutes ago, Janet Voxel said:
say I want to go to top tier event and I can’t get in because the sim is full like for the first couple days. It would be nice to be able to get a hud and shop anyway
That's an interesting use case. Honestly, a lot of busy opening events I'd rather shop by HUD than wait for booths and all those avatars to compete for texture download bandwidth. If they could deliver clothing demos to my own dressing room, I'd be a lot more efficient shopper. It would also be better to visit a build demo location away from the main event, without needing to teleport back into the event to continue shopping.
So I can definitely see a HUD (or a good shopping website) reducing some commercial "friction" inherent in SL events.
I wonder if high-end events could ever get onboard with the idea, or if they want to maintain the opening hype of "long lines" at opening, like iPhone new model release days used to be.
My hunch is there's a top-tier event team out there that realizes they could really differentiate their event by adding an online shopping experience done right, beyond what other events can do, and branding the hell out of it.
This HUD is definitely not that, and as long as it's a front-end to multiple events it can never become that. Instead, it's Seraphim in direct competition with the whole event business model. Maybe in some possible future Seraphim poaches enough high-end creators to participate in high-end events at dedicated locations with dedicated HUDs that extend the experience in ways shoppers find useful and meaningful. Maybe this thing gives them experience they need to make that happen. Maybe.
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Also Villareal.
For all I know, there may be more; if there's an "official" list of these, I don't know about it.
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Ah okay so it really is only conditional on the presence of one avatar in range. Unfortunately, as the wiki says of llGetAgentList, "There is no guaranteed understandable order or randomness to the list returned" so the timer() logic will need to loop through that list, terminating when it finds one in range, and if it exhausts the list without finding any, de_rezz as in the current no_sensor() event. And if it does find one in range, that corresponds to whatever is done in the current sensor() event.
The periodic_clean variable is currently set by the timer() event which triggers the next de_rezz to send an extra "Clean" message. What might work instead is a global timestamp of when the last such cleaning happened, and let de_rezz check if llGetTime() has gone longer than that 60-second periodic cleaning interval, and if so, send the extra message and update the global timestamp.
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I don't understand what problem(s) it's supposed to solve. It would make sense, maybe, if you're in-world, can't teleport, and either
- desperately want to shop a brand, but can't handle Marketplace, or
- want to shop products at an event known to the HUD.
The HUD's product pages do offer demos, so that's a step beyond the website, but the galleries aren't organized in any way I recognize, so scrolling through them is just bewildering. Search works, but event shopping starts with browsing not search. Or maybe they intend to compete head-to-head with Marketplace for product-search shopping, which seems unlikely. And yet, a few merchants have spent tremendous effort to populate brands on this thing, so they must be afraid of missing out on something. I just can't figure out who's buying stuff with this and why.
Technically, it seems about as well made as currently possible. Maybe they're anticipating more feature-full scripted UI, come viewer-side scripting.
This all adds to a puzzle I'm facing with the concept of "Events". Consider the Friday L$50 event vs the L$77 event vs the L$99 event: who cares? more specifically, who cares enough to know which one(s) to shop next week? Not all events are so indistinguishable, some are helpfully male-avatar-only, some have vague themes like "decor" or "seXXXy", but interchangeable "events" proliferate. Maybe organizers impose different terms of participation to filter-out different calibers of merchant, but if so, the effects are mighty subtle to shoppers. Maybe the event logo is a little distinctive, or the name, or the gallery page (or, god forbid, the Facebook page), but there's rarely enough there to hold an impression, and whatever there is, it's overwhelmed by individual creator signifiers on product listings.
Now suppose those "events" are hosted in a HUD. Is anybody going to be able to distinguish one event from another when they lack in-world location or even a distinct webpage address, and instead share the whole HUD apparatus in common to all such events?
(The same semiotic dilution applies to slotting brands in the HUD, but that's already a problem on Marketplace, and it sorta doesn't matter: I don't see brand shopping in the HUD has any advantage at all over Marketplace unless they slash commissions and/or really innovate with unifying in-store, in-HUD, and on-web shopping experiences—which the Lab+CasperVend is uniquely positioned to do, but too hamstrung by supporting and extending the current mess to ever do anything new. It's all so dismal that any day now they'll scatter AI pixie dust over Marketplace in hopes magic ensues.)
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If there's not already a timer() event handler, one might simply replace the call to llSensorRepeat with a llSetTimerEvent with the same interval, and then move the logic in the existing sensor() and no_sensor() events into a new timer() event, stepping through the list returned by llGetAgentList() the way the sensor events stepped through llDetected* agents.
Here the existing timer() event is pretty simple and apparently driven by a global counter on the same interval, so could probably stay there with a little tweaking, but…
… problem is, I can't figure out how this existing code steps through the agents detected by the sensor. The llDetected* function calls only use the zero-th detection (so the one sensed agent nearest the sensor), so… I guess I'm stumped. Are we sure this sensor code is actually doing the thing that instead would be done with llGetAgentList ? If we really only care about the nearest agent, I guess we could step through that list hunting for it by llVecDist between each agent's OBJECT_POS and the scripted object's position, but is that really what this script is trying to do?
(I have no idea what Primsave is, but it sorta doesn't matter until I understand how the sensor results work.)
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From a browser logged-in to your SL account, you can start at https://search.secondlife.com/?search_type=land&land_type=mainland&method=buy&maturity=gma&query_term= , filter by size and maybe sort by price.
But that's very general. I think most people eventually decide on whereabouts they'd like to buy and open the map with For Sale turned on and look for yellow of about the right size.
You can also snoop around for abandoned land in areas of interest and file a support ticket requesting it (or part of it) be set for sale to you. If they agree, it'll be L$1/m². If instead they need to bring it to auction, that's another way of shopping for land. The daily selection is pretty limited but over a few days there's quite a lot of variety that comes up. But buying at auction can be frustrating until one internalizes the blind bidding process. Still, sloping around the "Recently Closed Auctions" can be an education in what sells and for what price—sometimes to flippers, and sometimes to neighbors in a bidding war.
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1 minute ago, Love Zhaoying said:
So, this is all a lie? If so, good job!
At least you didn't accuse me of being a lawyer!
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12 hours ago, Lillani Lowell said:
A random stranger.
Well, I remember you! I remember you being pathologically patient with me, a newbie, stepwise approximating a working rotation script. So welcome back!
Stories? The best storytellers are liars. … Or lawyers.
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1 hour ago, ValKalAstra said:
No what's weird is how he keeps finding you. VPN, new computer, new account, new social circles - he shouldn't be able to link things that easily. One thing did set off serious warning signals and that's giving him Teamviewer remote privileges because at that point, he could have done just about anything to your computer.
Yeah, Teamviewer can be safe or very dangerous. If he was given control (not only viewing) he could have "diagnosed the network" to download and install a backdoor quickly enough it wouldn't be obvious what he was doing, then used it later to install something more permanent and cover his tracks. Could he get something into a web app or some program that would follow you onto a new machine? I guess, theoretically, but it seems a stretch. The only reason to consider anything like this is the extent of steps already taken to defeat more typical stalker behavior.
57 minutes ago, InnerCity Elf said:Things you could try might be being online when they probably aren't if possible, being very careful with your profiles, go to REALLY "out-of-character places", think about things you could say in conversations with new or "new" people that would either make them think "oh, that can't be her, next!", or might reveal their identity to you early on, before you've invested time in your new "bff".
All that won't help if they really have a way to technically identify you despite your technical measures, though.
That suggests a test for whether the technical threat is real here: Continue to use an already stalked account as close to "normally" as possible, despite being stalked, but also create a completely out-of-character alt. Make them something totally unlike your past accounts and explore like a newbie role-playing an opposite sex furry or whatever it takes to be utterly unlike anything you've been before. Tell yourself you're taking a "holiday" on a completely different game for a while. Gradually stop using the stalked character (you'll need to replace it eventually anyway, right?) to see if the stalker follows you to the new account. If so, it's a pretty big clue that some tech tracking is going on—and that this stalker is obsessing over RL, not any SL feature absent from this new account.
2 hours ago, Myrthe Mysterious said:SL is no fun like this
Indeed, and it's a miracle you've stuck with it through all this, so it would be too sad not to find a way to fix it.
Responses to these situations usually focus on how to just ignore the annoying parts, but I wonder if anybody knows the kind of specific records that could be used in Abuse Reports to actually get him (and future alts) banned.
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On 4/9/2024 at 2:57 AM, Conifer Dada said:
There were ad farms all over the place and they had become an eyesore. LL made some new rules that saw off most ad farms. I wonder if any have been preserved as part of SL's heritage. 😁
Don't know of any proper museums, but I took pictures.
I also made a "Temple of Adfarming" to celebrate a nest of virulent adfarmers in Dallows, in view of the Forums Cartel Hangout, but I lost track of all contemporaneous pictures, so here's one from a copy I just now rezzed in a sandbox:
The conspicuous holes aren't bit-rot, they're 4m x 4m microparcels where the ad towers rose through the structure—and god forbid anybody encroach on an adfarm! This was long before we could return encroaching prims ourselves, but never fear: Governance was uniquely diligent in their protection of adfarmers… right up until Jack finally made policy.
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Items gone after Moving Home
in General Discussion Forum
Posted
No-copy items make everything so much more complicated. It's possible the ticket can help get them back, but the fact there are no-copy items involved makes it especially tricky because anybody working the ticket should first establish for sure that the items weren't returned, so as not to create unauthorized copies by "returning" them from region history.
Most of the no-copy items I ever acquired have vanished one way or another over the years—and good riddance. They were all more aggravation than they were worth.