Nika Talaj

Precisely. What's happening in Portland is not really about Portland. From the start, the federales have been using techniques that were not required in a town that was seeing less than 50 protesters acting out at a single property after midnight. https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2020/07/feds-conduct-surveillance-from-downtown-courthouse-analyze-social-media-videos-post-undercover-agents-in-crowds-records-show.html Portland is being used as a training exercise. Despite the fact that the federal forces' heavyhanded presence has resulted in the previously dwindling nightly protests now swelling to thousands of participants, including many white suburbanites, it will be deemed a success by the henchmen running the show, because their forces got to work the kinks out of their intimidation techniques. It's been effective, in a way. Local Nextdoor moderators appear to be removing any thread about policing; local journalists who were clearly wearing PRESS shirts and credentials are routinely threatened and, in at least one case, shot with a "less lethal" weapon. This deployment is not about crime. It is about voter suppression in Democratic-led urban centers. The Lincoln Project leaders are not angels. But they are right about the ultimate aim of these deployments. https://lincolnproject.us/video/how-it-starts/

/me gives this thread breakfast to keep it going.

Read the press release more carefully. They are not being acquired by the Waterfield Group; they are being acquired by an unnamed group of investors led by misters Waterfield and Oberwager. Mr. Oberwager does not appear to hold any role in the leadership of the Waterfield Group. Consider: if that group were acquiring LL, wouldn't the press release simply say: Linden Research, Inc. announced today it signed an agreement to be acquired by the Waterfield Group. But, it did not. ETA: It means, the company issues stock that is publicly traded on stock exchanges, i.e. the New York Stock Exchange (aka Wall Street). Such companies are under great pressure to post good earnings (or other good results) quarterly. Without good quarterly results, investors may figure the company is in trouble and sell the stock, which would drive the stock price down, and therefore make the overall company "worth less", at least on paper. So most publicly traded companies cannot afford to acquire companies speculatively. Unless some incredible good news is in the pipeline for Second Life or Tilia, this acquisition would be viewed as a speculative venture. I imagine that is why a new investment group has been created; Waterfield's portfolio does not include speculative ventures.

I had the same problem, and eventually found out that it was the HUD on my mesh head! (lelutka, not evolution). It has a "pose stand" stiff pose built into the hud (little picture of a body to the right of where you set ear position etc..). I had accidentally clicked it, and it stayed enabled even after I relogged. Mesh body HUDs also usually have a 'pose stand' built in that you could have enabled.

Good lord, it's Jumpy! *laughs* WB, dude

I'm actually taking a break right now from posting on the forums, but I felt I had to come in briefly to thank all of you! This thread is so informative. All your perspectives are REALLY interesting to see, and I hope folks keep posting. I 've played some more with Evolution heads, and have learned the hud well enough. As you all have said, the mesh is terrific. I agree that the HUD is a cleaner design, but personally I liked the old 'magazine' layout better. Partially because it is on a white background; I sometimes have to use a small-screen gaming laptop, and the tiny, grayish icons & text on a black background are just plain hard to see. But mostly it's because the previous hud just screamed FUN, whereas the Evolution hud has a much more professional look. I have to be encouraged to mess around with my looks, so LOOK! FUN! worked for me I'm sticking with Bianca for the moment, not only because of the HUD, but mostly because I'm not the sort of power fashion user who enjoys hunting down skins & tatts. Your work in that regard, Blush, is very impressive! I do like the Lake head, and am interested to see what Fleur will bring. I hope some day they choose to share a list of Fleur features in WORDS, in addition to glitzy but content-free videos like that which Janet posted. I was very disappointed when I went to read the Evolution "manual", only to find 3 very simplistic videos, none with content specific to using the Evolution head. Words are so helpful. I really like this suggestion. I'm really enjoying the 5.2 Maitreya body, and rarely wear the extra layers. But they are good to have, and have enabled me to update a few older outfits that I love. When I spoke of lag, I actually meant lag for other people, should have been specific. I often attend really large events, 60-80 avatars who are all dolled up, and believe me the mesh heads are the very last things to rez, lol. It seems a shame to have to derender everyone, but often there is no choice. I went once in a system avatar wearing only system clothes & no one noticed, lol.

Wow. See you folks in a month or so, maybe.

I see I'm not alone in finding acquisitive behavior like this disheartening, but I haven't reported it because I don't see any violations of covenant or TOS. As I mentioned earlier in the thread, I see no actual EVIDENCE of commercial activity. All the accounts involved are paid for of course. Yes, it seems sad to see a bunch of coastal properties (that I know a lot of newbies and others who've not been lucky would love), going to one seemingly very small number of typists/groups in a very targeted way, but tbh I doubt anyone other than a very active hopper like ourselves would ever notice it. Once acquired, the properties' exteriors are usually competently decorated, so they're not a visual problem for the neighborhood. I don't think collecting desirable properties' is reportable. I mean, where do you draw the line? "Depressing other hoppers" also doesn't seem reportable 😉

I don't see these problems either. Altho it's always good to check one's client (and maybe a backup settings/reinstall might be the quickest way of debugging that part of it), I see why your initial instinct was to wonder about the servers. Everything you describe could be caused by an intermittent or unreliable connection to LL's servers, and although you've checked out your network, I'm still wondering if SL is experiencing network issues. Do you use SL's statistics panel? If so, do your sim ping and dropped packet numbers look OK? Another thing that can cause SL issues is if your primary DNS server is down, and the secondary one isn't quite doing the job. SL always used to do a large number of lookups, hard to believe that's changed. The only thing that discourages me from suspecting something about the network is that you do not say you're experiencing crashes. If your connection to the servers was bad enough to cause all this weird behavior, I'd expect to see some crashing on teleporting also. hmmm. Wrt the viewer cache, for such severe problems I wouldn't just clear the cache, I'd delete the whole cache folder. Your viewer will rebuild it. But unless it's gotten majorly corrupted, I wouldn't think that would be the problem.

I let that one go about a week ago. Really nice location, the Domingos pool right nearby, and of course the Blues Cafe!

Maybe "initially" because of what Oz mentioned, that SL initially will be confined within a single data center in the cloud? If the data center is newer/better than the colo they're now in, that should speed things up, one would think. Once they begin to distribute across the cloud, I'm not placing any bets on decent performance at region crossings!

Does it happen in a premium sandbox too, or just Belli? Have you tried relogging? This is all the Grid Status says right now. Still got your big "FIX THE GRID" signs from 2008?

Back on topic: anyone interested in train-y trad? This little guy in Quercus Alba is real near the interchange where, when you come up from Red Bluff, you might reverse your train to head waaaaaayyyy out East. Great view of that interchange from the Winchester balcony. It is nicely private, and the lot has an open feel (no hedges etc.), so you can make your own spaces. There's a cute little park bench corner across the street from it, and a train rez zone in the next-door region, Falcon Heights. Letting it go at 5:00 SLT-ish.

It's not really that hard to do with 2 computers, if you have the time to watch either the land page or, better, the map closely. You have, let's say, 3 different brands of browser up on each computer (so that you can hunt with one avatar on 3 logins), and 2-5 alts in play. You refresh the land page until you see a somewhat persistent vic, then look inworld to see if there's a dot in any of the regions in that vertical strip of unreleased Vic regions. Using the map, click on a parcel in that region to see if says "Linden Home". If not, check a home in each of the other unreleased regions. If you find a "Linden Home", refresh manually like mad, and you should be able to capture a parcel for each alt. You may have time to dump one round of parcels you don't want and try again. For me, I couldn't see this being a reasonable thing to do day after day unless, somehow, there was money involved. But, different strokes. Perhaps it's a little competitive game between them? Who knows.

Hmmm, looking at the parcel names (not bothering to go there), I see what you mean. I haven't been clicking on any Vics lately. It kinda turns me off to see the ... what, commoditization? ... of these lovely, unique coastal neighborhoods. These are not cloned regions. Many of the properties they claimed earlier have not changed hands, and yet, it is hard to imagine that they maintain that many premium alts just to accumulate properties. Odd. Perhaps they charge a finder & decorating fee that includes the alt's password? No clue what's really happening there.

Plenty of opportunities to watch Moles building today. A crew is busily landscaping SSPE1202 (bemusedly watching trees pop in and move around as I type). Seemingly overnight, SSPE1203 sprouted a cute pond with many waterside parcels. Moonstruck is laying down roads and has a bunch of parcels floating on high up in SSPE1211 (Loon Lake). Incidentally, she is wearing my more fashionable alt's favorite hair

Hmmm. Despite all the info, you may indeed still be the only one who sees it. Seems to me they're talking about two applications of ARM Treasure's CDP platform, one for ad placements on various sites to solicit new signups, and another for bringing inworld experiences to the attention of users who may like them, for retention. For example, sending info about sculpture galleries to someone who bought a statue on the marketplace? The second is a little scary, as of course it opens the potential acting like a Facebook news feed, and trapping users within a narrow tunnel defined by past interests. I don't know that I've seen LL attempting to do that yet. However, your inclusion of the Vivox and Upland press releases convinces me that I don't really understand what you're getting at, P... er ... D .... er ... Lance! That's it! Feel free to DM if you don't feel at ease being clearer.

Evolution's been out for a while, I'm interested in hearing your experiences with it. The tl;dr version: I think Evolution is lovely mesh that tends to only look good with skins/tattoos created for it. Being full BOM, not much in the way of 'looks' are provided in the HUD; I think I'd spend a lot of time & money finding tattoo layers. Lelutka supplies zero written documentation for it, and only very rudimentary videos. Feel free to skip my experiences with it below and just post your own ------------------------------------------------ I spent a few hours playing with Lake and Erin, watched Novata's videos, as well as the Lelutka ones. Given the very good written documentation Lelutka provided for their earlier heads, the paucity of information for Evolution puzzles me. What is the best review you've seen/read? Though I love the work @Strawberry Linden is doing, at this moment I really miss Strawberry Singh! I hoped that Evolution would be lower lag than other Lelutka heads, but looking at its complexity/triangles, I don't see that. Am I wrong? The mesh itself seems great to me, great noses and better head shapes. Full BOM. I had hoped this would mean that I could wear old system makeups, but the lipsticks look rather bad. Some eye makeups might look ok. Full system skins - didn't find one that worked, and I don't think playing with the sliders would help. The older Lelutka heads can also use BOM, and interestingly, old system lipsticks seemed to work fine on my Bianca head. The one system skin I tried on Bianca worked well enough that I am tempted to try some of my old novelty skins. True or false: Evolution heads using BOM only look great with BOM makeups/skins made for it. What do you think? I believe you can use old Lelutka appliers for eyeshadows & lipsticks with Evolution? Haven't tried it yet, do they work well? New HUD. It is similar to the old HUD, but different enough that I really want written documentation for it! Because Evolution is meant to be used mostly in BOM mode, it has no skins in the HUD, you just wear the 'face' you want. Personally, I don't like the HD lipsticks that are built in, or most of the HUD eyeshadows. So it seems to me that you get a whole lot of flexibility with Evolution to create exactly the look you want, but the downside is that you have to find and wear a bunch of new Evolution BOM tattoos & skins to do it. I expected to love this head, but I can't seem to find any compelling reason to get it.

No. In Logland, itt's not actually track yet, it's green prim slabs just to show where the track will go. See my pic above.

I have to say that I am amazed at all the focus on adult content in this thread, when I see no reason to believe that that subculture would be perturbed in the course of this acquisition. I'm sure that LL is aware that some of the most innovative uses of SL have come out of that community, LL knows its importance, and has sometimes acted to protect it. Personally, while I support the rights of adult practicers and merchants to pursue their interests in SL, and I own and (discreetly) display adult art, it's been probably a decade since I've discussed such issues with anyone. It's just kind of a given, and this strident advocacy for it in the absence of any threat surprised me. LL is not being acquired by Disney. If anything, by focusing on adult content issues, y'all have probably succeeded in alerting anyone from the M&A team who may be reading this thread to a possible source of issues within SL. Congratulations?

Oh, I'm sorry! I thought you meant in the general market, not just within SL. That I haven't thought about, could be. As you say, it might be hard to get folks to switch.

Blockchain is a fabulous way to store data of any kind in a secure, distributed fashion. So, eventually, I'm sure blockchain will be coming to SL. Well, that would be amazing, but it's fantastically unlikely. Paypal is immense, has longstanding relationships with finance companies, and incidentally acquired a blockchain services company in 2019. Why try to compete with them when there are so many niche markets that need custom accounting/ledger services? If I had a company with blockchain expertise and regulatory compliance for currency conversion in my pocket right now, I wouldn't be interested in creating a currency for it to trade. I would be interested in finding more niche markets where: They had need for blockchain-based accounting, but no expertise They have money to pay for services (which may bump virtual worlds a ways down the list of desirable markets) I had access to expertise in their industry I had contacts with potential customers Let's see ... with this acquisition, what other industries might Tilia possibly be able to reach ... hmmm... [But you know, even if Tilia stays within the gaming industry, their potential could be large. Having a conduit to convert legally between RL and virtual currencies might be of interest to many gaming companies, even tho most might still shy away from offering it to users.]

If anyone cares, Abnor has extended both the east and west legs of the Mountain Line so that they are brought to an end at the raw northern edges of the subcontinent. They do not have terminating blocks, though, so it is reasonable to assume that when regions become available again, those edges will be finished with more LogLand regions. This is SSPE1111, the other leg ends at SSPE1217. Perhaps the two legs will be joined so as to form a big loop? That would be nice!

I love rezzing into a home that seems nondescript, but when I look around turns out to be a great location. This trad has excellent privacy, a train track running past its back yard, a nice mole park on a pond in a pleasant camper neighborhood right over the hill you see next to it. I would put a home with a front balcony here, because its elevated position gives it ocean views at rez distances under 200. It's a short horse ride to Campwich Forest. http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Blue Duck/64/234/35 Look for it in 20 minutes, at 10:30. .

I'm not familiar with easypolls.net, so no, sorry. Also sorry that this forum software appears not to support "poll" as a message type, though if any power user knows how to do that, I'm sure Starrah would appreciate knowing how. Or, if you list your ideas into a numbered list (points to the toolbar icon to do that), you could receive feedback that you could easily tabulate.