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Scylla Rhiadra

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Everything posted by Scylla Rhiadra

  1. Scylla Rhiadra
    Another outtake, with minor adjustments to hair glitching and the bikini bottom laces. Otherwise, pretty much out of Black Dragon (for those who care about such things). @ValKalAstra -- the EEP I used for the shot above, and for this one, is a slightly modified version of Desert Sunset from the EEP library. I shifted the sun about for each shot, and reduced the Gamma a bit (which you can't do, or at least it doesn't accomplish anything, in the newer PBR viewers). To compensate for the latter, and to reduce the darkness of the shadows, I increased the "Effect" slider of the Ambient Occlusion setting. There may have been some other slight adjustments that I can't remember (I made this EEP a while ago), but those are the main ones. I'm not sure what you mean by tone mapping?
  2. Scylla Rhiadra
    Ok, just to address this quickly, because I understand and have some sympathy with this way of thinking . . . PEEVE: The illusion that one can "change" someone through gentle guidance and nurturing . . . I had a friend some 5 or 6 years ago whom I quite liked. He was smart, quite funny and witty, and all the more interesting to talk to because he differed from me on a number of political and social issues. I enjoyed our conversations a great deal. And then he started being, shall we say, "overly intimate." He took to slapping me on the butt regularly, a habit that I was able to cure him of after a few minor explosions at him, but he started to hit on me in other increasingly direct and sometimes crude ways. This developed as a part of our relationship over the course of some months. Because I had succeeded in getting him to stop slapping my ass, I had some confidence that I could "cure" him of his increasingly insistent come-ons. I valued his intelligence and conversation enough that I thought it was worthwhile trying. Boy, was I wrong. He just got worse and worse (and again, this was over the course of several months, and not a one-off thing), and began to narrate in really vivid detail his fantasies of "taking me" in various "interesting" ways on his parent's bed. (Yeah, some serious Oedipal issues there.) At last, reluctantly, I acknowledged that he wasn't responding to my attempts to shut down his advances, so I blocked him, and moved on. Maybe there are men who can be "educated" in this way? But I haven't met one yet.
  3. Scylla Rhiadra
    At one time, I did start assembling a Medusa outfit . . . 🙃
  4. Scylla Rhiadra
    Possibly, although I doubt it. But it is true that women are much more likely to be assaulted, sexually or otherwise, by men they know, at home or in the workplace, than in dark parking lots. I said that the perception that men might in some contexts pose a potential threat was a result of socialization, rather than a statistically-verifiable logical response to real dangers. That said, young women have learned not to leave their drinks unattended at bars and parties. And there are good reasons for that kind of precaution.
  5. Scylla Rhiadra
    That's actually an interesting question, Arielle. I'll answer you honestly. I think the answer is that, yes, I would have felt differently, but not necessarily more positively about it had it been a woman. I am socialized to think of men in particular contexts as representing a kind of potential threat. I think most women are, to greater or lesser degrees: speaking as an urbanite, for instance, I feel a great deal more uncomfortable if a man is approaching me on a dark street late at night, or in a lonely parking lot, or whatever, than I would if a woman was doing so. So, I'll concede that some of my reaction is probably born of that kind of RL conditioning, which isn't necessarily entirely relevant to a virtual context. But I also have to say that, while I am hit on my women not infrequently (there are a lot of lesbians in some of my social circles, and at events I attend), I have never been approached in this kind of way by one of them. They are invariably more tentative, subtle, and careful. I am sure that there are exceptions out there, but almost all of the idiots who've hit on me have been men.
  6. Scylla Rhiadra
    This is an interesting thought, and a real possibility in some of these cases.
  7. Scylla Rhiadra
    Mr. Arik, in my experience, is the Patron Saint of People Who Protect One against Idiots and Griefers.
  8. Scylla Rhiadra
    This is certainly true, but I think too that anyone who is trying to connect, particularly when it is apparent (as it certainly should have been in this case) that I wasn't angling for, nor even expecting, any kind of contact. Which is, I know, also what you're saying -- I just want to underline that the onus is always on the person reaching out, whatever their intentions, to not make assumptions about the person they are contacting. Which, to follow your line of thinking, is why, like you, I don't get this approach to mating, courtship, hookups, or whatever. Unless, as Nina or Pheeby suggest above, the person is looking for a particular kind of reaction of the sort that might be the result of deliberately being a jerk, I really can't imagine that this is likely to be the most productive or effective approach to women. Why, in this day and age, would one not take a more respectful approach? It's surely FAR more likely to succeed, or at least less likely to offend. Is this just the result of an unshakeable element of misogyny? Have they been Rip Van Winkling for the past 60 years? Are they just stupid?
  9. Scylla Rhiadra
    Yeah, I acknowledged somewhere above that he might have been hoping for a more positive response from me that he received. He can have had no illusions about my intentions though. I was literally 1800m above him: he had to cam that far up (and over: he was on a neighbouring parcel) to see me. I was clearly not inviting comment or even conversation, and this was very clearly not a case of two strangers randomly and serendipitously making eye contact across a crowded room. He knew I had the expectation of privacy, and he was quite happy to violate that.
  10. Scylla Rhiadra
    lol, I'd love to have obliged if that was the case, but he disappeared when I called him out.
  11. Scylla Rhiadra
    Too much like flirting! I'd rather tell them I'm a b*tch.
  12. Scylla Rhiadra
    If the idea here is to remove references to jointly-held corporate accounts, then all LL has done is made running a medium- to large-sized business in SL unworkable. Obviously the first task has to be to correct the DRD situation; they were operating in good faith (and with a long and responsible record) on the basis of actual existing instructions from LL itself, so ANY punitive action that has been taken against them, including the wiping of their MP store, needs to corrected ASAP. However, LL needs to address the broader issue really pretty quickly. Removing references to (and implicit permission for) corporate accounts immediately places an awfully large number of businesses in SL in extreme jeopardy.
  13. Scylla Rhiadra
    It's a custom EEP, I think, but I'll check next time I'm on BD and let you know!
  14. Scylla Rhiadra
    It totally is; in RL I look exactly like this!!! Sssssshhhhh, though. It's our secret.
  15. Scylla Rhiadra
    Technically, you are of course absolutely correct. I think there are three things, though, that can impact on how one feels about this. First, as the reference in the last quoted sentence above suggests, many of us identify very closely without our avatars. For better or worse, I am one of those people. So a "violation" of my avatar is, to some degree, something that does impact on me at some emotional level. It's important to recognize the difference, of course, between a "violation" (in whatever way) of one's avatar, and one in RL, and it would be silly to get upset in the same way about the one as one would about the other, but that doesn't mean that there isn't some impact. But, as you note of yourself, YMMV on this: we don't all "inhabit" our avi in the same way. The second thing, which I sort of referenced in my second post on this, is that I feel much less icked out about being seen partially or fully unclothed (which of course is likely to happen when one TPs into a crowded place anyway), than I do about interacting with someone who clearly gets off playing the voyeur. It's not so much my exposure, as having engaged with a person who not only enjoys playing Peeping Tom, but actually wants you to know that he's spied on you. That's where the issue of "power" that I alluded to comes in: it's quite possible that even he isn't nearly so turned on by the view of a naked Maitreya as he is by his belief that he's somehow established his dominance over me through his ability to look without my consent. He hasn't, of course, but it's not being seen, to me anyway, that's gross -- it's exposure to someone with that kind of creepy fetish that is icky. The third thing is probably somewhat less important, but real too for some people. There are of course people who don't care about the "real person" behind the sexy avatar -- as witness the existence of AFK sex places -- but for most people, I think, the avatar is a kind of bridge, or represents a means of accessing, the "real person." And, for most people (again, this is my assumption, but I think a valid one), SL sex isn't really between two avatars, it's between two typists who are using their avatars as the means of establishing and expressing that connection. And what I think that that means is that sexual advances, violations, or whatever, most usually have a sexual subtext that is implicitly about the "real you." This guy wasn't getting off on spying on my lifeless bundle of COLLADA-encoded mesh: he was getting off on the idea that he was in some sense spying on me. Anyway, this isn't a big deal -- I've experienced far worse in SL. But it's an unpleasant reminder that there are a lot of pretty creepy people out there.
  16. Scylla Rhiadra
    Speaking of poses and incidental features that conveniently censor a pic . . . Another outtake from the beach shots I'm doing right now. Again, other than a bit of mending around one shoulder and the sunglasses, and a little messing around with the DoF (which doesn't handle hair well) this is more or less straight out of Black Dragon.
  17. Scylla Rhiadra
    /me did NOT have fun! 😡
  18. Scylla Rhiadra
    Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww
  19. Scylla Rhiadra
    I don't RP, and I pretty rarely emote (although I do occasionally, of course, use "/me" in chat and conversations) so it's less the format than . . . I don't know, I just find the idea of describing yourself as "smiling" weirdly creepy and off-putting? Which is odd, because I like smiles! Usually . . .
  20. Scylla Rhiadra
    Thanks Spiffy! I'll survive! I think in some ways the ickiest part of it is not so much being perved, as his apparent compulsion to make sure that I knew I'd been perved. Possibly, I suppose, he hoped that I might respond with something like "If you like what you see, come up for a closer look" . . . but I suspect part of it is also about exerting power -- "I've seen you naked, and that makes you in some sense vulnerable, and there's nothing you can do about it." Your friend's experience is probably not an uncommon one. Unfortunately, parts of my parcel (the ground level, and the gallery) are public, and there's no way to restrict views into my sky platform. (And I get even less privacy in my little apartment in Voroznia.) Oh well. Learning to deal with creepy people is part of adulting, I guess. They aren't going to just go away.
  21. Scylla Rhiadra
    Peeve: Gross people. So, I'm on my sky platform, 1800m above my public parcel, trying on different swimsuits and poses for a pic. And I get an IM from a guy who my mini map informs me is on the ground level on a neighbouring parcel: [20:04] [Gross Person]: Sooo pretty ...nice pic:) [20:05] Scylla Rhiadra: Sorry, what is? [20:06] [Gross Person]: Y.O.U [20:06] [Gross Person]: smiles At this point, the "smiles" has me cringing, and any hope that the "pretty pic" he was talking about was the one in my profile vanishes when I asked him if that was the "pic" he was referring to, and he replied "Yes that too." And of course, he went silent and disappeared when I pressed him on this. So I'm now assuming that I've been visited by a virtual peeping Tom, who has possibly taken a snap of me naked or half naked on a pose stand. I've got quasi-public pics of me nude or semi-nude here and on Flickr, so it's not so much that I care about being seen without clothes on. It's more that feeling that I need a shower after contact with someone so utterly icky.
  22. Scylla Rhiadra
  23. Scylla Rhiadra
    My goodness! Wings of Desire?
  24. Scylla Rhiadra
    There was a "gross" thread??????? 🙄😞 NVM, I don't want to know.
  25. Scylla Rhiadra
    Ordinarily, of course, I edit the hell out of my pics. This is one I took for an exhibition, and it looked pretty good raw. I did some fairly minor surgery on one shoulder, but otherwise this is how it came out of the viewer.
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