Conifer Dada

As an aside, in Britain there's a big nationwide house building company called Linden Homes

I nearly always wear the same red, green and yellow triple bracelet on my left wrist.

I'm happy with the idea of one or two semi-bots at clubs - avatars placed by the owner that will occasionally respond when spoken to but spend most of their time 'botting'. They are like the old regular in the corner of a pub, sort of thing. What I'm less happy with is the use of multiple avatars by one RL to skew the results of contests. It's difficult to tell when this happens. Often unlikley people win contests, but that could be put down to tactical voting rather than cheating with alts. After all, if you're in a contest to win, there's a disincentive to vote for who you really think is the best person, as that would increase their chance of winning and reduce your own. Occasionally my identical twin sister comes along to clubs with me, but residents can draw an obvious conclusion from that, and we don't tend to enter contests anyway if we're both present.

Personally I think that Linden Lab should avoid doing anything that makes Second Life more like Farmville or IMVU!

I like it when people come round to your viewpoint by saying: "but that's exactly what I've been saying all along" after arguing against you for 15 minutes. Not that I argue with people very much, it's not in my nature.

I'm actually surprised at how few times the grid goes down nowadays. I remember a few years ago when it was down several times a week, including scheduled 'down' on Wednesdays (I think). Now to the actual reason why the grid went down. My theory is that several key LL employees have become addicted playing with Lego bricks and so weren't concentrating on what was happening to SL.

I'm British. I meet lots of other British people in SL.

Has anyone become famous through SL? I can't think of any SL residents who have become famous outside SL. There's the woman who made a real-life fortune through SL - but I can't even remember her exact name !! There are people who have become famous within SL - obviously some of the Lindens are widely known. Then there's a handful of creators who are famous, but that's about all. In the long-gone days of high SL land prices and a booming virtual land market, some of the land barons were household names, but only because you saw their 'for sale' signs everywhere.

The things that are most likely to make me skip a post are: 1) The subject matter doesn't interest me 2) The post is very long. I try to use conventional language on the forums although I don't really bother much about the finer points of grammar. And before anyone says "the plural of forum is fora" I'll add - yes, in Latin, but we're not talking in Latin now!

Ceka Cianci wrote: ......so if you are wearing say 4 shirt layers ...... ......you should consider plumping up your avatar's waistline a bit to give an authentic '4 shirts' look

I've seen quite a lot of newish residents whose profiles say something like: "I decided to make a new start in SL" or "I've been around a lot longer than this profile says". I wonder if re-invented oldbies are statistically significant.

I sell my things in boxes - well, one box, actually, I use exactly the same design for all items. One thing that I find mildly annoying is when people use 'boxes' of several prims, like carrier bags with handles and bows on them. All that means is that if, like me, most of the prims on my land are used up, sometimes I can't rez the ornate packaging to unpack the contents. So my tip is: Creators, just put stuff in a one prim box. In real life we're all being urged to cut down on packaging. That would be a good idea in SL too, for different reasons.

Mesh has caught on in s big way in SL already and in a few months' time I guess most people will be using mesh items of one sort or another. Mesh objects appear to be more accurate looking than sculpts. Unless you want to go to clubs full of people with half their bodies invisible because of alpha layers (or perhaps naked if your viewer can't see alpha), then it's well worth updating to a proper mesh viewer like LL Viewer 3 or even the more experimental Beta version of it. You also get problems with people being warned or chucked out of clubs for being partly naked because the host isn't using a mesh viewer and can't see their mesh skirt or mesh baggy jeans.

I saw a feature on BBC TV news in summer 2006 about Second Life. They created an account and avatar for one of the presenters and had a look around. I thought 'this looks interesting' but didn't do anything for a couple of months. I forgot what the game was called and didn't know what to search for on the internet, being unfamiliar with terms like 'virtual world' etc. Anyway I eventually found Second Life and joined just to see what it was like. My first experience was a bit disappointling mainly as my computer at the time wasn't very good and it was all I could do to move from one stepping stone on Orientation Island to the next. But it was the surreal environment that appealed to begin with. After a while I came to realise that there's no such thing as 'surreal' in Second Life - the weird and the normal go side-by-side, often un-noticed!

Dilbert Dilweg wrote: How many of you are realy being honest and how many of you are just showboating for the proper eyes? lol I was being honest when I said 'no' to the first 4 questions and 'probably' to the last one. I'm not saying SL is perfect or that LL don't sometimes get things a bit wrong, like any organisation would. But I've embraced all the changes to SL without any problems and all the changes I can think of have been for the better. Viewer 2 was a bit underwhelming when it first appeared but now we see why the change was made and Viewer 3 is fine most of the time. For me, lag is still the main difficulty, although it almost seems a cliche to even say the word lag! There have been times when it was almost non-existent but now, even with a good computer, there can be several minutes of grey people after arriving at a moderately busy place.

I can't sleep because it's morning and I've just got up after a good night's sleep.

Do you feel that SL is changing so much that you don't know where you are..............No Do you feel it is becoming elitist controlled and push out others that don't agree......No Does the way SL treat you make you feel under valued and worthless........................No. Did you invest to much and now feel you were wasting your time.................................No. Or are you addicted and still in love with SL.......................................................................Probably

Mesh enables much greater realism in some things, like cars, loose-fitting clothes and perhaps furniture. In time I think it will become the norm in SL. Prims will still be useful for making basic things like dancefloors or simple buildings, though. And I can't see that mesh underwear, for instance, would be any more realistic than the 'painted-on' type. At the moment it's more complicated to make and texture things in mesh than using prims. I've tried it, making shapes in Google SketchUp and importing them, and was surprised to see that they worked. But to make more complex things I'd need to learn all over again. Why not download the latest LL Beta viewer, which has mesh? That's what I normally use. That way your V2 should remain intact and you'd have the choice.

I suppose I have an emotional attachment to some of the things I've made for myself, even if they're not particularly wonderful compared to some of the things made by other people. Other than that, virtual things are important to me when I'm in SL, but I hardly ever give them any thought when I'm not logged in!

Rene Erlanger wrote: Mesh won't replace prims or sculpties....there;s room for all 3 of them. I think mesh might well replace sculpties - at least for new objects. I've only made simple sculpts and meshes, really just to find out how it's done. I wouldn't see the point in making something as sculpt if I could make it as a mesh. I agree there will always be a place for normal prims, as they're the simplest way of making simple objects, like a dancefloor, for instance.

Perhaps the Lindens are testing out 'away' and 'busy' modes:matte-motes-big-grin-squint:

Each time a content creator leaves SL, that's one less competitor for those who remain - at least as far as new products are concerned!

I was in one of the public sandboxes once doing some work. I had dark glasses and a baseball hat on and my hair tied back in a bun, and was wearing shorts and a crop top. A very short, very fat and very ugly woman came over, wandered around a bit and then said to me 'you look stupid!' and wandered off. Another memorable thing was when I was at a beach. A fat, bald man turned up, dressed in a tiny red thong. I looked at his profile and there was a picture of him in real life - a real fat, bald man in a tiny red thong!

I'm amazed by some of the mesh creations I see in SL now. By not having a mesh viewer, increasingly you'll be missing out on an enriched visual experience. I know that mesh objects can take a while to rez properly, but that's the same with sculpts. So the choice boils down to that between having lots of grey spheres all over you or lots of grey sharp triangles!

I use Facebook under my real world identity. If you're careful not to upset any of your FB friends, it's unlikely that you'd be posting anything that would be of interest to governments etc. anyway! I don't use Twitter because I don't feel any need to. It is what it says - twitter - for the most part! I think the trend will actually be towards greater use of real world identities, or online nicknames that can be traceable to an RL identity) I don't see that affecting Second Life, that seems to work perfectly well with account names. But - I suppose one unknown is future legislation. If a law were ever passed in USA or possibly even another country with a big SL population (e.g. Britain or Germany), requiring disclosure of real names by internet users, then LL would have no option but to comply.