Conifer Dada

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

New Year's Eve - Two for the price of one. Me and my twin sister Willow. Happy New Year 😁

I have high-ish graphics settings with shadows on all the time and I use the same for photos. I do process my best pictures (but only mildly) in Gimp. I correct any glitches, adjust brightness and contrast, add some very fine RGB noise then a very, very slight blur. As for photo-realism, yes - that's what I strive for but it's difficult to get it 100% in SL. If I see dragons or unicorns and my travels, I'm more impressed by the 'realistic' ones !!!

Mesh can look better than "system" but there's a big overlap. We know that mesh is more defined and joints flex more smoothly, so it makes for better close-up views. But it's just as easy to apply an unrealistic skin or shape to a mesh avatar as it is to system one. While system avatars can sometimes look like they're made of putty, mesh ones can sometimes look like they're made of hard plastic.

Before Facebook appeared didn't we have other social media platforms which were better?

I think there must be intelligent life of some sort elsewhere in the Universe but it's so far away from us that we'll never discover it, let alone make contact with it.

The last RL thing I bought was some diesel fuel for my car. While a lifetime supply of diesel would be useful, will I be able to change that to a lifetime supply of electricity when I get an electric car?

I've had the same place, by the main road in Yosu, for years and years and years! The surrounding terrain is nondescript green and it's one sim away from the sea. But I've made it mine and I'm happy with it.

Here's another BBC article about the growing popularity of virtual worlds. It doesn't even mention Second Life! https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-59558921 The article says Zepeto is most popular with teenagers. I would guess that in this case that means 13-14 age group rather than 18-19!

I think it's for eyelashes on the system avatar but it doesn't seem to do anything. On the skins I made I apha'd it out as transparent because that's what other skins seemed to have. But my skin still has eyelashes.

This new metaverse idea is intriguing. It seems you have a thing called an avatar that can interact with other avatars in a simulated environment. 😄 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/technology-59674930

Have you checked for any of your outfits or animations by typing their name into the search window on your inventory panel? It's possible the contents of the folders could accidentally have been moved to another folder, even if their empty folders themselves are still there. That's happened to me in the past. It's very easy to inadvertently move something to a different folder, especially if you have selected several things simultaneously as the inventory scrolls much faster then.

Also I wonder why so many DJs and hosts at clubs ask people to TP in as many friends as possible, often saying "let's see if we can crash this sim".

During a lighting test.

See next post . . . Sorry, what was meant to be an edit accidentally became a new post.

It's not the only one in the category. As well as the SL-derived based on OpenSim, there's IMVU and quite a number of more cartoony worlds. Some of these appear to work more smoothly that SL but have less realistic graphics. Sinespace is probably the closest surviving competitor. I tried that a couple of years ago and it worked quite smoothly. There have been some real competitors for SL, such as Blue Mars, HiPiHi and LL's own Sansar (as was) but none of them lasted long in their intended form.

In the wider world of 3D graphics, maybe - but when it comes to user created virtual worlds SL is still tops!

But don't some people escape to Second Life in order to experience virtual 'suffering' ? 😁

I joined SL in 2006 after seeing an earlier feature on the BBC. I have a lot of respect for the BBC but this article seems a bit superficial. The top picture in the article - the one of the happy couple standing in front of a wooden house reminds me more of Sansar than Roblox. Second Life's biggest problem has always been performance - lag, slow rezzing and crashes. It doesn't crash so much these days but the other things are as much of a problem now as they were when I first joined. Up to now, all attempts to create a direct competitor have failed apart from Open Sim, which is based on SL, works just like SL , has exactly the same performance issues and isn't a direct competitor anyway.

It's years since I last heard of Second Life mentioned in the media or in conversation.

I had trouble logging in earlier. Now I have inventory problems - 'failed to find item in database'. I've tried clearing cache etc. all the usual things but it makes no difference.