Conifer Dada

I tend to buy full-perms clothing so I can make my own textures for them using the templates provided. In our club I did all the lighting myself from scratch and it's not perfect but I can live with it for now.

Fun

I've had very few direct SL related dreams over the years, although more dreams might have been merely influenced by SL. The other night I did have an SL dream though. I was wearing a fleece type pullover and I was able to change its colour in RL by bringing up a colour selection display. Strange that the SL bit of the dream was something so mundane as changing a dark blue fleece to a maroon one rather than flying around some spectacular environment!

I'm afraid this horse fell at the first fence!! I came onto the forum expecting to see that someone had posted an April Fool topic. Straight away I realised this was it !!! Sorry 😁

The question of what made people join SL crops up regularly. I've answered it before but I'm happy to do so again.🙂 BBC news did a short feature about SL in 2006 and I thought it looked worth a try. My first attempt failed because I was trying to get into SL from the website and I didn't even realise I needed to download the viewer! Anyway, after a few months I gave it another try and I managed to take my first few faltering steps. On the computer I had then, SL only just worked, but something kept me hooked. My early interest was in building and exploring the virtual environment and also creating a reasonably realistic avatar. As time went by I discovered that virtual clubbing was one of the best things one could do in SL. Yes, there's lag and poor texture loading in SL but then in RL there's lots of noisy, sweaty people and there's usually someone nearby doing wild, crazy dancing with flailing arms. Also SL clubbing is much cheaper than in RL.

I might be wrong but I seem to remember that there was a very brief time when mirrors could be made in SL, when Windlight was at the testing stage.

I can't see the need for an additional membership level between Basic and Premium. If you're a premium member you can already choose and change your additional "level" in terms of land ownership based on how much land you want / need and how much tier you're willing to pay. People are always saying that SL is a steep and confusing learning curve for new residents, so adding an extra membership level would just add to the confusion.

I joined SL in 2006 and became a premium member a few months later. There was a shortage of land then and if you bought what seemed at the time a reasonably priced plot of land, you were almost guaranteed to be able to sell it for more a few days later. So I did flip a few pieces of land at that time. But it was not a business, I wasn't doing it to make lots of money. I was doing it work my way up to buying my first 512m plot, having started by buying 16m plots on ad farms and joining them to make bigger plots. The land market was dominated then by big land barons. My conspiracy theory is that several of these land barons were alts of the same RL person, who also used lots of other alts as fake 'customers' to 'buy' their own land, thus creating a fake land market that drew in genuine buyers.

Those from Britain had to start paying 20% Value Added Tax (VAT) on SL subscriptions several years ago. While it upped the cost a little, I didn't change my SL habits at all.

All I was doing was answering a query! I wasn't making any judgement on whether the new landmarks system is an improvement or not. Anyway, what I described isn't a workaround, it's using the new landmarks system in the only way available.

In the standard LL viewer, if you choose to landmark a place by clicking 'World', then 'Landmark This Place', you get the drop down menu at the top left of screen. Below where it says "Save this landmark in:" there's a bar that says "Favourites bar" by default. If you click on that bar it opens a list of all your landmarks folders. All you need to do is click the one on that list you want to save to and that's where your landmark ends up (instead of being on the favourites bar). When you've done that just click "save".

I thought that group was the one I started, but it's not. I started "Oops, sorry ...... Wrong window!" some years ago, completely unaware until I read your post that there's another group of similar name. Maybe it started after mine, maybe it was there already !!! I suppose the unique selling point of my group is that it's for those who are genuinely sorry that they posted in the wrong window whereas the other group might cater for those who simply wish to point out they posted in the wrong window without feeling any remorse ! 😁

My most embarrassing moment actually took place on the SL forum in General Discussion some years ago. There was a post that seemed to be about a talented designer and merchant who had closed their SL store and people were saying how sad it was. So I replied that some well known club had also just closed down and how sad that was too. The next reply after mine explained that this talented designer had died in RL. Needless to say I felt very bad about my seemingly flippant comment but I had genuinely misunderstood the topic.

I did my proportions by comparing myself with photos and scaled diagrams of real women with the appropriate proportions, as used by artists. One side issue of this is that when I go to venues I sometimes start questioning my proportions because so many other avatars have exaggerated shapes. Like when most of the women around me have hips three times the width of their waists while my hips are only about 1.333 (recurring) times as wide as my waist!! Am I the one that's out of step with the SL aesthetic?

Before being logged out I usually go to my sky platform and make sure I'm wearing sensible everyday clothes ready for being logged in next time. In the 15 years I've been in SL I've only put myself to bed on-line about half a dozen times. What do I do when I'm disconnected from RL? Apart from sleeping, eating, etc., I take my turn cleaning the club and maintaining its garden. Linden robots come and do some of the chores at night but they don't like polishing brass and there's a lot of that in the club.😁

I think LL should update the system avatar body. With a bit of updating and a few extra sliders they'd be fine. I still happily use a system avatar, despite the known shortcomings. An update of the system 'classic' avatar would include: - Minor improvements to their mesh in certain areas, e.g hands, feet, shoulders, etc. while preserving the alignment of existing skin textures. Some extra sliders allowing one to adjust basic stance of avatar before adding an AO, to raise or lower the knees in relation to leg length, to texture left and right arms and feet separately, and maybe even to 'bento-ize' the system avatar. Then the starter avatars could be offered with a set of full-perms clothing complete with templates and the same for mesh hair. This would encourage creativity which would enhance the SL experience for a lot of people.

Or make an inworld list on a notecard, complete with landmarks.

With a few more in-world building tools similar to what there are in Sketch-up, like 'draw' and 'push/pull', making your own stuff would become more popular - at least for things like buildings and furniture. It would still be difficult to compete with mesh for things like hair, loose-fitting clothing or cars though. Imagine if we were able to subdivide and sculpt prims - I don't mean 'sculpties' but actually manipulate the surfaces.

I think we're all familiar with what 'ownership' of land means in SL!

Not really griefing, but if I discover a piece of land near my home that is clearly disused but left as open build, I make small linked object consisting of enough spheres to uses up the prim allowance of the land. I do this to stop some other random passer by from rezzing annoying particle emitters or gigantic spinning pandas, so I see myself as performing a public service.

I tip DJs quite often but I do agree about the begging, usually in the form of: "our DJ has been wonderful tonight, so don't forget to hit him/her up with some Linden lovin' ". Presumably this would apply particularly if you've "jumped in their naughty box" to request a tune. Having a host and a DJ means that the DJ doesn't have to beg for their own tips. I would imagine it's not unknown for a host to be an alt of the DJ, so when you tip both, you're tipping the same RL person twice. When you do pay a tip, the payment panel has suggested payment options, for example L$25, L$50 or LS100. That's fair enough but I've been to clubs where the lowest suggested amount is L$200. Of course, you can choose your own amount but there's a strong hint carried by the minimum suggested tip. Another annoying thing some DJs do is to taunt the guests, perhaps making fun of some of them or threatening to play cheesy tunes until enough people have entered a contest. And then there's the DJs who sing along (badly) to the tunes, which is not cool. The exception is one DJ who occasionally announces "I'm going to sing to this tune, I hope you don't mind." but she only does it very occasionally and she's quite a good singer! Finally, there are some DJs who are so bad they're actually entertaining. Then there are the mash-up merchants, who think playing two tunes at the same time is twice as good as playing one, which is rarely the case.

Thanks - I'll bear that in mind but I'm going to be very careful not to accidentally delete my club again ! I normally use the LL standard viewer which doesn't have the option to 'restore to last position' but do I use Firestorm for my OpenSim standalone.

I was just fiddling about and I'm not even sure if I clicked to change to alpha masking on purpose - it just happened and then the club disappeared. Anyway it's all back in place now. If I was building a new club from scratch I might have a go with mesh but the existing one has evolved over several years and so I'm not in a hurry to alter it !!

I'm lucky enough to have a good PC these days so I have shadows enabled all the time. Avatar shadows have always been slightly "off" because they start a short distance away from the feet, as if people are hovering about 15 cm above the ground. I had always assumed that this was just part of SL - a graphics glitch or whatever. Anyway I decided to look at the debug settings for shadows and played about with them a bit. I found one debug setting named "RenderShadowBiasError" which had a small minus value. I reset it to zero and guess what !! My shadow began under my feet like in RL instead of starting a short distance away from them. Then I decided to see if I could improve the shadows in the Egotherapy Club. I experimented with one window section and changed the texture setting from "Alpha Blending" to "Alpha Masking" to see what effect it would have. The transparent part of the window texture went black, not surprisingly. But before I could change it back to transparent the whole building disappeared! All that was left was the doors and various other items that weren't linked to the building. I couldn't understand what had happened. The first thing I did was check "Lost and Found" in my invo and there was the building. So all I had to do was rez it and then position it exactly where it had been before. But . . . the building wouldn't rez because a message came up saying it would make the parcel too full. This was the exact same club that had stood on this land a few seconds earlier. Why wouldn't it rez? It's not as if the prim allowance was used up before when the club was in place. So I decided to go to a sandbox and rez the club there to see if I could find out what the problem was. I managed to rez the club that was in "Lost and Found" complete with black window from my experiment. Then I noticed it had a land impact of 3344 !! When I changed the window back to "alpha blending" the land impact dropped to 168, the proper value. So now I knew this, I was able to save the repaired club and rez it on my land and then spend about 20 minutes getting in back in exactly the right place !! So the last day of 2021 was not one of my best in SL but after 15 years here I'm still learning new things. 😊 Wishing you all a Happy 2022