Scylla Rhiadra

You come in . . . second.

I'm not sure why we even need to ask this question? Quite clearly, the most attractive female avatar is . . . MEEEEEEEEEEEE. Duh.

Yeah. I'm exactly the same height as the OP -- 1.81 m, which is also my RL height -- and, honestly, I literally don't think I've ever been questioned, challenged, or called a minor. My boobs are pretty smallish too -- I generally use Lara Petite or Legacy Perky, so it's not that I look "curvy" or obviously sexually mature. I am going to guess that it's because, while I do go frequently to Adult rated sims (and in fact live in one) and clubs that double as pick-up joints, I don't (intentionally) go to sex sims. Is it only in such places that people get uptight? I'm not doubting people's experiences -- but it's just never happened to me. My chief problems with my height have been oversized buildings and furniture in places I want to take a pic, and animations and poses (particularly couples dances).

While we're on the subject of "ideological blinkers" . . . how do you imagine this working, exactly? What kind of "help" will the merchants be motivated to provide noobs? How to find cool places to visit? How to communicate with IMs or group chat? How to interact with their environment, use animations, activate media? Yeah, no, I think not. What I foresee is a situation where new residents who have barely learned how not to bounce off walls are funneled to high-end stores where they are immediately confronted with the substantial RL costs of updating their avatars to mesh without having yet been given the slightest indication that there is anything in SL worth paying for. Or, they end up at a clothing store selling garments sized for bodies that they don't own, and described in an arcane language -- "Maitreya? Legacy? LeLutka? What are those?" -- that they don't yet understand. "Why, after dropping real money using my RL credit card, are parts of my body sticking out of this dress?" Actually, forget for a moment the substantial costs -- head + body + skin + hair + add-ons -- and consider the learning curve -- no, sheer cliff side -- that you are throwing them at. We have people who have been here a decade or more who still don't quite understand the intricacies of mesh, BoM, and attachments -- but you want noobs to master these, again, before they have even had a chance to explore SL and discover what makes that curve worthwhile? I can't even imagine what this will do to retention. You worry about favouritism and cliquishness, but seem to think that substituting a plutocracy in its place is the answer. The only merchants with the resources to throw at something like this will be the high end ones -- and they aren't producing goods that are of any use to noobs. And in the meantime, you'll be showcasing precisely those stores that don't need your help, and leaving the smaller merchants who don't have the staff, time, or money to get involved high and dry. Yes, sometimes the private sector does do a better job at things than the public one. But this is a recipe for chaos and disaster.

So far as I know, the new starter avatars -- "NUX" as LL seems to refer to them -- are not yet available. They will have, we've been told, mesh bodies and heads. The currently available crop of starter avis are old system avatars, with mesh clothing and attachments. The NUX avatars will supposedly become available at some point in the new year. A lot of people do this, but it's worth noting that it's actually against the ToS to share an account (i.e., share a password) in this way.

Pron can correct me on this if I'm wrong, but I think this uses "FaceApp," which is a tool for retouching selfies. It was very popular in SL photos a year or two ago, and you can still see it in use. I have one quite old pic where I experimented with it as well. Unfortunately, you can't achieve that kind of look on a mesh head: we don't have the "bones" for it. (Although you can buy BoM laugh lines and such that somewhat come close to it.)

What a LOVELY pic of you Moira! (And I love the skirt. I think I may own this outfit . . . but you wear it better.)

This is actually a picture that's going into a picture: it wasn't meant to be "standalone." But it looks ok, so why not? (God, it's nice not be doing Christmas pics anymore . . .)

Love these. Beautiful composition.

I think we've established -- and I'm sure you didn't need us to tell you -- that it's unwise to pay rent too far in advance. I pay a month in advance for my apartment, which I rent from a very well-established and reputable sim builder / renter, but of course stuff can happen in RL, and I'm sure I'd be kicking myself if I lost most or all of that for unforeseen reasons. Because there are almost zero protections for consumers or renters in SL, we do have to take special care. Fortunately, the stakes aren't usually too high. I do want to emphasize something that a number of people here have hinted at: that while you may have been "unwise" or even "foolish" to have paid so much in advance, this is still not your fault, anymore than someone who forgets to lock a window is "responsible" for having their house broken into. You made yourself more vulnerable to such an occurrence, but you are not, as they say, "the baddie" here, nor are you to "blame" for what happened. It's possible that your landlord may themselves be the victim of something that has caused this -- an illness, a death, or whatever. But in any case, what happened is not your fault, even if the magnitude of the consequences are the result of being too trusting. But then, I don't see being trusting as a "fault." And for that reason, I'm very sorry: you have my sympathies.

I think this is probably right. So many competing sales. Some places are still doing "Black Friday." Yeah, when I hit about 18, book stores, especially used ones, began to displace music stores as the sites of my post-Xmas binges. There used to be a strip of Queen Street West here in Toronto that had probably nearly a dozen used bookstores on it within a couple of blocks of each other, and I'd go on insane expeditions there, mostly from my early 20s or so. A few of them are still left, happily, but a lot of THOSE have gone too.

When I was young, Boxing Day was HUGE. For me, the best thing was that the music stores had these astonishing sales on vinyl and CDs -- I'd save up as best I could a couple of months in advance (and I often got money for it at Christmas), and line up for an hour early in the morning to get into them. I usually walked out a couple of hours later with about 30 albums at 40% off. It was the nucleus of my teen record collection. Sadly, of course, those stores are long gone now.

I miss so much the option that pre-BoM Slink bodies had, of just turning off auto-alpha entirely. God, it's a pain in the butt. And half the time, it doesn't work properly, at least not on Maitreya, and you end up having to hide slices by hand anyway.

Boxing Day is sort of a British / Commonwealth thing, isn't it? Do they do Boxing Day in the States? As I understand it, it was originally a day devoted to giving to the poor. Oh well . . .

Well, I'll agree that there is a problem here, but I'm not quite sure what your proposed solution is. No one is compelled to close their business on holidays. Nor indeed, in the States anyway, are there any federal laws that regulate how much extra employees working holidays should make (I think just two states have such regulations), so if companies are closing, it is likely because 1) they want to retain staff and keep morale high, and 2) they don't think they can make enough money on such days to justify remaining open. Are you arguing that there should be laws forcing companies to remain open, at a minimal operational level at least, in order to service essential workers who do have to work on holidays? I can't see that going over well. And which companies? Do you think LL qualifies as a company that should be forced to retain fuller services and staffing? I think a better solution would be to ensure employers who do keep operations open during holidays, including essential services, are making reasonable accommodations for those workers -- not forcing employees to work consecutive holiday days, for instance. And actually mandating overtime rates of pay (as is the case, for instance, in Canada) rather than leaving it to the discretion of the employer, might be a good start.

This is the kind of story that distresses me. I understand the desire of paying customers to get value for their money, including full service when it's needed. I've had very few issues with SL myself over my years here, but I'm sure there are many ways in which LL could improve its responsiveness to customer issues and problems. But this particular issue isn't just about "value for money" or "customer service." It's also necessarily, because of the particular issue at stake, about the quality of life of those who are employed by LL. To me, "essential services" are those things without which people will suffer serious and substantive harm or even risk of death -- heating, electricity, access to medical care of various sorts, policing services, special services for those in need (homeless shelters, women's shelters, and so forth). Briefly losing access to SL, even if it is a source of income, doesn't really fall into this category. On the whole, LL seems to have a pretty positive and progressive corporate culture. I have the sense that, relatively speaking, it is a "good place to work." And part of that is undoubtedly the result of not forcing employees to work at times that our culture has designated more private or "family" time -- i.e., holidays. I personally think that maintaining a happy workplace is more important than providing marginally better customer service. I'd far rather patronize a company that treats its employees like real human beings with real emotional and social needs, than one that ruthlessly exploits them in order to better service customers (looking at you, Amazon!).

Happy Darkest, Bleakest, Coldest Night of the Year! There. Happy? 😏

My concerns about focusing too much upon this as a marketing venture aren't really ideological: for well over 99% of residents, the stakes and sums involved in "capitalism" are so low that it what we have here is mostly a pretty harmless simulacrum of a real capitalist economy. Rather, I'm concerned about the impressions it might convey to new residents. SL is much much more than a giant mall (although, yes, it is that sometimes) and money pit. The additional point is that most noobs will have no idea how to spend their money, or what they should expend it on. For most, first priority will be avatar customization, and our "system" for that is so byzantine and involved that they will have absolutely no idea how to go about purchasing the bodies, heads, skins, hair, etc. that they would need to upgrade their appearance. Do we really want to send someone who's been in SL for a few hours off to LeLutka to buy a head? So what exactly will we advertise to noobs if not such things? Land? Houses and furnishings they have nowhere to place? I'm hoping that the forthcoming NUX bodies will mitigate this problem somewhat, make it less imperative that they immediately upgrade to new bodies and heads (because there will be mesh clothing and hair that will work with these already), and also "training" them in how mesh bodies, heads, skins, BoM, HUDs, etc. work.

Sure, but I have two concerns. One is that it will leave the impression that you need to spend money right out of the gate to enjoy SL. And that's not merely untrue: it undercuts one of our advantages, which is that you can enjoy it freely. And the second is aesthetic. The billboards I've seen at some infohubs are unspeakably ugly. The design has to be attractive. If new people think they've just landed in the middle of shopping mall or a strip of highway with ugly billboards, they are going to see little reason to hang around.

Lovely to see you back, Hippie, if only briefly! I hope all is well with you and LadySue. 🙂

We all know of bugs and issues that certainly need to be addressed, and we can cavil reasonably about the priorities that LL has set. On the whole, though, I'm impressed by how much they have been delivering of late. And while I'm not entirely convinced that this plan is going to be easily workable, or even necessarily beneficial, I think it targets something important that we've all long identified: problems with the new user experience, and particularly the difficulty many seem to experience in finding "something to do," or people with whom to connect, when they first arrive. If this works, that'll be a very good thing, and might make a measurable impact on retention. As for how to do this, and in particular what sorts of communities get targeted -- some of those will be fairly obvious: role play, LGBTQ+, avatar customization, new user communities, etc. And while I take Prok's point that we wouldn't want to see these, and the places such hubs point to, being determined through favouritism, backroom dealing, and so forth, I think that paid billboards, etc., is an even more awful idea. It just replaces a notional "FIC" with a sort of plutocracy, and ensures that we're directing noobs not to places likely to appeal to them, but rather to places where they will be almost certainly be pressured to spend money. It shouldn't, surely, be that difficult to produce a list of themes for these hubs that actually corresponds to what people might be looking for?

Wait, that's not an SL screenshot???? 😲

(In case the title wasn't clear, this is an invitation for everyone to post their holiday greetings and/or cards here!)

Happy Holidays, everyone. Give us peace. 🙂