Qie Niangao

I just want to say that the Lab Billing department was actually wonderfully helpful getting me through this mess. I never understood why I suddenly needed to pay from a bank in the country where SL knows I live, but it was Billing support who suggested the PayPal workaround, and I'm still grateful for their help with that.

You know, yeah, this change might help me. It's a long convoluted story that bores even me, but around the time the Lab formed this Tilia subsidiary, they could no longer handle payments from my US bank. The only way I could avoid eating double currency exchange fees (to the looney and back to the greenback) was through PayPal. Now that works fine but it's really silly and I'd love to cut them out of the loop in the name of parsimony if nothing else.

Yeah, one expects the "partnership" is just a contract specifying what each party is committed to do for the other and what contingencies can change those commitments. (Yeah, those will include what happens if either party is sold or is unable to perform on its commitments, etc.) It's just an agreement. Both parties need it, so they negotiated its terms, in this case with a five year interval (by which time they might negotiate different terms, extend, or cancel). Of course it exists—and it would be ever so interesting to read.

Yeah… until they need to find/build a replacement, or expend time and effort to minimize the Thunes Tax that will now skim from the SL economy without much flowing back to Linden coffers.

I just have to grab this from BlueSky because text search is a thing and Invision doesn't seem to embed bsky: To the extent they're about Tilia tomfoolery, we can't really be sure of that, can we? I mean, Marketplace being more b0rked than usual is challenging to detect, but Tilia delay is pretty objectively quantifiable. And conceivably someone could benefit from "special timing" of transactions until this deal closes. Or not. Hanlon's Razor, eh wot?

Thanks, yeah, that seems to seal off L$ sources. That being the case, I'm not sure there's much point in bypassing Tilia for sinks (such as the hypothetical L$-denominated tier payment). I guess we don't really know how much Tilia takes from the US$ subscription fee. (Do we? It's sorta none of our business but might matter to the Lab going forward.)

God help the moderator. The image is obviously ironic (I mean, "Aliens"?), poking fun at all the dopiest of conspiracy theories. But then there's Poe's Law.

Oh, I'd assume so, yeah. But that raises an interesting question: if the Lab sells L$s on the LindeX to maintain the exchange rate, do they use a Tilia account to receive the US$s, same as residents selling L$s? That seems insane but… hmm.

For those starting out with L$s, sure. But the idea is to find a way for those without L$s to get L$s without buying them through a TIlia account. If US$ payment for a Premium subscription doesn't go through Tilia (and I'm not sure it doesn't), then this way the Lab could bypass Tilia. And that all assumes it's in the Lab's interest to cut Tilia out of the loop. They created Tilia for a reason, so they wouldn't want to solve those problems again for subscription revenue unless that's already how it works.

Hmmm. LindeX buying and selling use the Tilia US$ account, so I'm not sure LL really "owns" the L$ Exchange. But I think stipends are a way to obtain L$s from the Lab without going through Tilia. Might this motivate the Lab to define other products/subscriptions that do the same? Every L$ source must have an offsetting sink, so if there are other stipend-like sources, might they consider L$-denominated tier payments as a sink?

I'd assume it's this page under discussion: https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LSL_Protocol/LockGuard (so a Second Life wiki page, not Wikipedia) [Edit: That's just what came up when I searched the wiki for "Lockguard", so I may well have misunderstood this thread.]

After Thunes' announcement, Inara Pey posted: This Linden Lab post on the Forum thread sets the May 20th date for an "open meeting" where they'll be prepared to discuss the Thunes sale in detail.

Oh certainly. But at Lab Gab they announced this Community Round Table thing with no initial topic or timeframe, at the very time they were concluding that Tilia sale. True, they may have spent the first Round Table on policy change fallout from the recent Medium-rare scandal. If so, I bet they're mighty glad to have another topic about which to engineer ambiguity.

I meant to mumble about this. What we're hearing now from the Lab must surely be communications carefully crafted by both (all?) parties to the sale. It's not only Lab's story to tell, and there may be ongoing obligations about how they tell it. The Lab Gab connection here is interesting, though. They announced the new "Community Round Table" communications medium, and lo and behold, the first one will address this Tilia sale—a topic surely in the works at the time that Lab Gab was scripted. Coincidence? (I can't claim that original thought. Credit where credit due, as usual Inara Pey with the scoop.)

Agreed, re-investing some proceeds of sale into Second Life is up to whomever manages the Linden stake in Tilia. And without seeing numbers that I assume will never be public, we may be talking about pennies here. I've always thought Tilia rode the hype tide very well, but it's a tiny business and like any buyer, Thune didn't pay more than it had to for it. Thing is, without knowing more than I do about both the sale and the terms of JPMorgan's and dunamu,'s investments, it's not clear to me that they sold their equity stakes. I'm first to admit that may be obvious, just not to me.

Well yeah, Thune isn't a charity for wayward virtual worlds, but Tilia currently has only two customers, one of which matters to the business and holds a minority stake in the venture. Thune surely needs to keep that customer satisfied. It would be enormously enlightening to see the terms of that five year "partnership" agreement.

That's interesting. Are there employment terms contingent on Tilia not being sold? Or is this about the JPMorgan Chase stake, which presumably went along for the ride, right?

Since the Waterfield / Oberwager purchase, LL has poured quite a lot of investment in the Mobile viewer and other platform updates (notably, viewer-side, glTF compliant "PBR" materials, and server-side, the most expansion to the scripting library since it started). These may make SL more saleable, or to keep it viable as an operating asset, but they'd be money wasted if the plan was to just milk the cash cow for a few more years. (IIRC it started before the LL purchase, but they also invested a lot to migrate from data center hosting to AWS, necessary to keep the business viable, but also making it more saleable.) Or cause-and-effect might be reversed. Prospects of some Tilia acquisition would have been in the C-suite aether for a while. Unlikely that pushed the VP's out the door but might well have delayed exec hiring until it was clear what's to become of Tilia. (Tilia currently has separate engineering and marketing, right? If Oberwager couldn't sell it off, they'd be pretty much forced to streamline it to legal and operations only, so LL engineering and marketing would need to absorb it.) This is tragedy waiting to happen. Anybody with options to diversify should be exercising those options. Even in the best of times it's just crazy risky to stake one's livelihood on a single game. But now, never mind this Tilia kerfuffle, anybody in any kind of game development must be hunting for AI-immune niches—which will be few and far between in that industry. SL may remain fun for artisanal mesh hobbyists, for example, but what do you really think is going to be producing those fancy future glTF scenes? Will you be prepared to paint with those AI brushes? All about sex To organize some tunes for the paranoia bandwagon, yeah, LL's owners must surely be weighing the future of Adult content in SL because: Payment processing may get marginally messier with only a minority stake in Tilia, unspecified (to us) contractual obligations, and no readily available alternative. Mobile is a dead letter without listing in Apple Store and Google Play Store. I've heard rumors that Apple may admit pr0n, but it's another hurdle to clear. If it's Mobile or Adult, one or the other, that's a hard call. That absurd Medium piece got the gullible so riled up that the Lab is forced to concoct some policy response. What we've heard so far is sleight-of-hand about child avatars—the usual suspects and always a crowd pleaser—so response to any real issues is still vague. So yeah, if I were Oberwager, I'd be considering whether Adult is really worth it. In that position, wouldn't you? On the other hand, Adult content is important as an ongoing market differentiator for SL. It's not something an owner would just abandon without serious analysis.

I think "partnership" is what you call it when you become a customer of your former subsidiary (that you still hold a minority stake in). Honestly, I think they did well to find a buyer for this turkey. It's not worthless like Sansar was, but if Oberwager can dine out on this for a while, good for him.

The problem is what the service is willing to stream, not so much how nicely the script asks for it. That's why the easy but expensive solution for syncing is to take a single feed from the service and multiplex it out as a live stream to as many viewers as want to be in sync. For parcel media, the PARCEL_MEDIA_COMMAND_AGENT and PARCEL_MEDIA_COMMAND_TIME parameters are relevant here, but only for those rare services that expose compliant streams. But even before shared media, and even accessing video files, what you'd actually get would vary from file type to file type and even across different viewer OSs. One can append a time code to YouTube video URIs but that service is wildly variable about when it will deign to stream what's requested.

I don't think it's what you want, but one way to find things without using Area Search is Build / Pathfinding / Region Objects and select the column by which the table is sorted and otherwise adjust the settings, although this doesn't list all objects, only the ones you're able to move. So that's sometimes very useful (and often surprising) but unlikely to reveal a chat extender. But chat from an object should come labeled by the chatting object's name at the time it did the chatting. For a chat extender, it probably changed its name to that of the person doing the chatting, but unless they're doing something clever, you should still be able to right-click that label and get object-profile information about it, show its location on the map, etc. (Maybe chat extenders do that "something clever" but I need to get in-world and fiddle a bit to see if "clever" is easy enough.) [ETA: Nope, it's not as simple as renaming the object with the viewer URI for the agent whose chat is being extended. Not surprising when I think about it. So I bet you can click the chat-extended name and get all about the chat extender. I'm not sure that helps here though.] [ETA 2: Oh. Well that's embarrassing. They could just set the object name to the empty string and do something like this: default { state_entry() { llSetObjectName(""); llSay(0, "secondlife:///app/agent/"+(string)llGetOwner()+"/inspect says unspeakable things about your daffodil garden."); } } so then if you right-click on what looks like the speaker, instead of a menu for the chat extender object you get the menu for the agent—in this thread's case, the very agent you tried to block before. So yeah, that kinda sucks. It's not an exploit, it's just a chat extender being too "clever" for its own good.]]

Unless that 74 m² was tier the account originally contributed to the group, I don't know mechanics for an individual account to do this borrowing, neither from group nor from another individual account. It's certainly possible for an individual to withdraw enough of their own group contributions to put the group briefly underwater for tier to cover land holdings. (Some transactions are almost impossible without that ability.) But I don't know how one could withdraw more than one's total contribution, if that was the suggestion

Yeah, this sounds the same but more like Philip's "town halls". They were scheduled at times convenient for San Francisco, and despite the world back then having only a fraction of SL's concurrency today, they filled a four-region corner to capacity (160, presumably), so they were also streamed (to Welcome Center parcel media, maybe?). Anyway, the point is the upper ranks of the org chart seem to be showing some interest in connecting with their customer base through transparent, structured interactions. May be all for show, but maybe they'll engage for real. Kinda depends on audience reaction, I suppose. Those town halls had some acrimony too. For whatever reason, eventually they stopped happening. I'm sure we can kill these, too, if we put a mind to it.

You can buy all 1400 m² individually as a unit and suffer the extra US$ 4 for the first month only during which time you divide the land between you and your friend. Or—and this is much better—you and your friend donate enough tier to the group first, then buy the land "for group" and you won't get dinged that extra four bucks. But unfortunately I don't think you can do that with auction land. I believe they will immediately set the land to the winning bidder's account and, if necessary, increase the land fee level for that account. (This is one way buying abandoned land is easier than doing it at auction because abandoned land is set for sale to the requestor, and they can choose to buy it for group.) But… I'm looking at the current and scheduled auction listings and I don't see any 1400 m² parcels. Not only that, but there can be no parcel sized exactly 1400 m² because land comes in 16 m² quanta, so maybe the "1400" is just illustrative? But anyway, just wanted to be sure we're really talking about auction land here. Auctions can be a cost-effective way to get land, but the price shown at any moment may be far below the price the land actually fetches during the last few seconds of the auction. Or not, but bid the amount you're willing to pay and it'll either win or you'll keep your money.

Is it correct that Firestorm launches, but then crashes after you provide your name and password and try to login? If so, you can (maybe) get a little more information to help figure out what's going wrong. Pull down the menubar "Help" menu, and choose "About Firestorm" which should show a window with a "Copy to Clipboard" button. Click that, then paste the results in a reply to this thread so readers can see more about your Firestorm installation and machine configuration and help hunt for clues. It probably also generates a "Firestorm.log" file in your <home directory> AppData\Roaming\Firestorm_x64\logs directory. If you search that for "error" (and/or "warning") you might find some hints about where it's failing. When it crashes it might generate a core dump (even if it never gets to the login screen). But that takes some special help to interpret, so let's hope it doesn't come to that. Oh, just to be sure: you said you tried "older versions". Does that include using the standard Linden viewer instead of Firestorm? If you haven't done that, I'd very much recommend trying some other viewer. (Not that there's anything wrong with Firestorm, it's just good to know if a different kind of viewer behaves the same way.)