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Scylla Rhiadra

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Everything posted by Scylla Rhiadra

  1. Scylla Rhiadra
    I HATED Old English. I still hate Old English. BUT I actually quite enjoyed learning Latin. It's a very regular and logical language, and once one has grasped the foundational concepts, it's mostly a matter of memorizing the vocabulary, and handful of "special cases" or idiomatic usages. Latin is the only language I've ever done really well at in school. Sadly, my Latin is pretty rusty now, but I can still, as occasion requires (and it sometimes does) claw my way through a passage with a dictionary and my battered copy of Wheelock to hand. PS. Roman literature is WONDERFUL.
  2. Scylla Rhiadra
    I think this is worth noting. My suggestion that the GD was "dying" was, of course, a subjective one. The face of this forum that I most valued is fading fast -- but there are other things here that people have every right to value and enjoy, such as the game threads. I absolutely do not begrudge them that. And there are occasionally other things that I have enjoyed. I've learned a great deal from the ALM thread, for instance, and I'm very grateful for people there who have answered my questions and pointed me to some resources. As for the "team of regulars," though -- I think we'll be many of us fading into the shadows. In fact, I think you can already see that happen -- "regulars" who used to post quite a bit are barely making a show here now. I myself find I really have little to say here now: there's only so much funeral singing I can engage in! And I'm sure there will be the occasional thread in the future of interest. Fortunately, I have the "picture threads," where there is still a really vibrant, friendly, and supportive community, so I imagine I'll be taking refuge there more in the future.
  3. Scylla Rhiadra
    You may soon be granted that wish!
  4. Scylla Rhiadra
    Rolig, I need only look at your post count (which I don't need to because I already know it's waaaaaay higher than mine, damn you!) to know that you weren't being dismissive of the forums. And yes, you're absolutely right: the forum is not important at all to most SLers.
  5. Scylla Rhiadra
    Normal maps really only become visible when your perspective on them shifts: they create a sort of dynamic illusion of depth from shadow, and as your view of them moves, so does the fake "shadow," which is what produces the heightened 3D effect. ETA: I'm going to get corrected here, quite justifiably, but the primary function of normal maps is therefore to add extra "detail" to a mesh surface -- bumps, ridges, and such -- without actually using polygons. And that extra detail is what becomes visible through the fakey shadows.
  6. Scylla Rhiadra
    Fully one third of the responses since I posted that are by Love.
  7. Scylla Rhiadra
    Well, they're not, of course, in the grand scheme of things. Which is why I imagine LL feels it can safely hobble them. They're not as important to me as in-world either. But that doesn't mean that they aren't important. I haven't counted (and am not going to bother doing so), but I'd estimate that about a third or more of the active friends on my in-world list were made here. And that would include most of my closest friends, such as Maddy, and the six women I chat with regularly on Discord. (Maddy herself claims that almost her entire list of friends came from here.) ETA: And the friends I've made here with whom I don't necessarily interact in-world are important in their own right too, of course.
  8. Scylla Rhiadra
    In the past 12 hours, there have been a total of 74 new posts on the entire General Discussion forum. 11 of those were by me. Between 25 and 30, so far as I can see, were by Love. A little under two thirds of all the posts here were on this thread. This place is dying.
  9. Scylla Rhiadra
    Thanks, Janet! I'll do some looking around. I've experimented with making normal maps from diffuse textures -- and it has worked, imperfectly. If there are easy ways to generate better versions, that's great to know!
  10. Scylla Rhiadra
    I don't think that's true of me. For one thing, when I'm in-world, I'm focused entirely on it (except for excursions into Photoshop). Whereas I just pop into the forums on occasion: I rarely have it open in front of me for longer than a few minutes at a time. And . . . I wouldn't be here at all were I not going in-world. My participation in the forums is contingent on my use of the platform.
  11. Scylla Rhiadra
    And now you're just making stuff up.
  12. Scylla Rhiadra
    You're creating a false dilemma. The survival of SL doesn't rest on whether they pay moderators here. Nor would the loss of GD mean that they no longer needed moderators.
  13. Scylla Rhiadra
    Wow. Ok, thanks!
  14. Scylla Rhiadra
    Well, yes. That would include me. I took exactly enough Old English to get through my program. She had my scrambling for my old textbooks.
  15. Scylla Rhiadra
    Pet Peeve: Speaking of which, god it's dead around here.
  16. Scylla Rhiadra
    This is why I'd like to learn how to make maps. I make a lot -- probably most? -- of my own backdrops for photos, although obviously I use commercial mesh elements. But much of what I use is full perm, so I can modify it. I do make really basic spectral maps myself, but normal maps are beyond my capability at the moment. I think newer versions of Photoshop can generate normal maps. And you can do it in Blender, but only I think with mesh that you can import into the software? Anyway, yes. It'd be nice to produce the kinds of reflections and lighting effects we can see here.
  17. Scylla Rhiadra
    Unless you're a moderator. Or a forum user?
  18. Scylla Rhiadra
    You've got problems? I have fielded three four phone calls in the last 20 minutes from a niece who is confused about the difference between "strong" and "weak" nominal forms in Old English.
  19. Scylla Rhiadra
    And unfortunately this is the insidious way this sometimes works. It's an old tactic: change something enough that it breaks, note that it is now "broken," and so use that as a justification for just dumping or completely replacing it with something you'd prefer. Change forum rules --> Gosh! People aren't using the GD as much --> The GD is hardly used. Is it necessary, really? --> Kill the GD forum
  20. Scylla Rhiadra
    This is just basic, dude.
  21. Scylla Rhiadra
    Or, alternately, an even more old fashioned concern that someone is breaking rules in ways that are designed to hurt someone else? In fairness, I'm not sure that I'd do anything if I came across a profile such as that described above. At most, I might consider contacting those affected, and suggest that they do something about it. But the "mind your own business if it doesn't affect you" school of thought is what tends to lead to people pretending not to notice the bruises that might signal that someone else is being beaten up or abused, walking by the person in obvious distress on the street corner, or conveniently "not hearing" the cries for help echoing across the street at night. "It's not my concern" is perhaps a brute truism, but it's also a pretty inhumane way to conduct oneself in society. But there's another point here: the SL ToS and Community Guidelines are built upon the premise that, if people see violations, they will report it. LL doesn't have a "police force" that watches for violations: these can only be rectified, and the ToS enforced, if we take action to report them. Without our engagement, literally almost no violations of the ToS would ever be addressed by the governance team in-world. And that would pretty quickly reduce SL to a dystopian hell, I suspect. So, if being a good person isn't incentive enough to not "mind your own business," maybe ensuring the continued well-being of the platform is?
  22. Scylla Rhiadra
    Well, it also always seems to necessitate remembering passwords that I haven't had to use for, in some cases, a year or more. Yes yes, I know that there are apps for remembering all of one's passwords. But that would require organization. Organization. Is there an app for that?
  23. Scylla Rhiadra
    Despite the back and forth, and some probable dissent, I'm sensing something of a consensus here. I think that the differences in views here are mostly less dramatic than the agreements. We agree that there was a real problem here, and I think we mostly agree that at least some of the posters were generally responsible. (I am also acutely aware that there are a few people who would number me in that group.) And I think mostly we regret the changes that were made, in the sense that we think that they went too far. There are some differences within this consensus, but they are mostly ones of degree rather than fundamental. For those who come here mostly for discussion that is purely and narrowly about SL -- threads on tech, for instance, or on events, or places in-world -- this all likely seems, for obvious reasons, fine. Those who were here for broader reasons that probably encompassed those things but also included more general "free play" and banter are inevitably less happy. /me shrugs I don't think I've a lot more to say about this; it's all been said more eloquently than I could probably manage. So PET PEEVE: My computer updated last night and it took about a half an hour this morning to go through all of the nonsense that was necessary to get it running normally again. Grrr.
  24. Scylla Rhiadra
    What? No. I'm at a complete loss to understand how you came to this conclusion.
  25. Scylla Rhiadra
    So, the one that is new here is Emissive? Is there any change to the effect, or ways in which one can tweak, Normal and Specular (i.e., Metallic-Rougness)? Or is it that this separates the last two, which are together now?
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