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Scylla Rhiadra

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Everything posted by Scylla Rhiadra

  1. Scylla Rhiadra
    Yeah, this remains my main complaint about how PBR has been rolled out. I can take a hit to my FPS and compensate, but in my experience most existing EEPs either don't appear as good in the PBR viewers, or actually look downright awful. And it's ironic, because this is supposed to be about making SL look better. And it won't, for a very great many users, because they're inexperienced with messing with EEP, there is no guidance on how to tweak them for PBR, and LL itself has done almost nothing to update the library or default EEPs. It really is a job half well-done.
  2. Scylla Rhiadra
  3. Scylla Rhiadra
    Hmmm, maybe? I'm not really much of a sportsball girl (except for baseball, which I do love), but in the past I've followed both the Euro Cup and the World Cup a bit, almost entirely because of the forums. Not a big fan of the canary yellow Ukrainian uniforms though. 😬 Canada generally calls this "soccer," btw, because we have this incredibly dull game called "Canadian football" that is somewhat like American football. Happily, though, here in Toronto, it's usually "football" because of our huge immigrant population. And we have a football team, Toronto FC, that is quite popular. The city generally goes nuts during these tournaments. I live on the outskirts of Little Portugal, which is actually also Little Brazil, and if Portugal or Brazil win a game, the entire neighbourhood for about 8 city blocks square gets shut down as the party moves out of the sports bars onto the street. And when ANY team wins, you can expect cars honking the horns and sporting flags to be parading through the city. It's kind of cool. I like it!
  4. Scylla Rhiadra
    I am not sure I see the point. People use Firestorm because of the interface and additional tools. The mobile interface is of necessity entirely different, so a FS mobile viewer wouldn't reflect the things that people like about the computer version anyway. And, while I suppose they might integrate a few new tools into it, the capabilities of a mobile viewer are also going to be pretty limited. AND it would take them forever, and distract them from their main business. FS is already 6 months behind the LL viewer (and a few others) as it is.
  5. Scylla Rhiadra
    Savages. This may be more of a consideration for the future then, when (or if) all of this new eye candy attracts newer, younger users. (I'm not, however, holding my breath.)
  6. Scylla Rhiadra
    How many people actually use voice? Almost no one in my circles of friends does -- at least, not in communal settings.
  7. Scylla Rhiadra
    As predicted: "The new viewer is more demanding on hardware, and while there have been a lot of enhancements and optimisations that go a long way to offsetting the increased demands, some of you, especially those who already struggle with performance, are likely to find things more challenging." This in interesting, though, and may hasten the adoption of a PBR viewer even by those who might want to hold off for performance reasons. I wonder how quickly we'll see PBR terrain adopted? "Moreover, for terrain, there is no possibility of backwards compatibility. Once a region has updated its terrain to PBR, non-PBR viewers will see nothing but the base colour (probably grey/white)." I have to admit, although I've been using off-and-on both the FS PBR Beta (as it now is) and the BD PBR viewer, I'm not entirely looking forward to this, especially as I'll be struggling with EEP settings for a while.
  8. Scylla Rhiadra
    Sssssshhhh! (said gently) This is Truth and Reconciliation Day on the forums! 🙂
  9. Scylla Rhiadra
    Yeah, the irony didn't escape me. That said, I try to respond by my own standards, and I'd rather be "wrong" in offering up an unnecessary apology, than be "wrong" by refusing to give one where maybe it is deserved. I'm more than willing to give Arielle the benefit of the doubt on this.
  10. Scylla Rhiadra
    Very much so, again because there was no property involved. In a novel from 1740, Samuel Richardson's Pamela, a 16 year old servant girl is locked up by her master, who wants to "seduce" her. She manages to get a letter out appealing for help to the local Justice of the Peace, who shrugs and essentially says "Who cares?" because no "families" (i.e., propertied families) would be hurt if she is seduced / r*ped. In the poor classes, common law marriages were also quite common for the same reason.
  11. Scylla Rhiadra
    In general -- and we're talking mostly about those of the middle class and above, because no one much cared what the poor did -- women were betrothed at a much younger age than men. Usually, that's because of property: one wanted to snag a younger woman so that you'd have a good chance of her producing heirs, and because, if she were "off the market," there was a better chance of her not screwing around on you (and potentially producing bastard heirs). But even "love matches" usually featured disparate ages, and this continued well into the early 20th century. Emma, in Jane Austen's novel, is something like 17 years younger than Mr. Knightly, and even Elizabeth Bennet is 7 or 8 years younger than Darcy. So Brodiac can relax for a few decades, probably.
  12. Scylla Rhiadra
    This is ringing a vague bell, because I think you did say something at the time, but I don't remember the full context. It's entirely possible I misrepresented you, because I misread stuff too, but the odds are reasonably good that it was not intentional, or designed to "hurt." Whatever the case, you really and truly do have my apologies for that. I value discussion and even disagreement -- and I appreciate the perspective you bring to this forum, even if I seldom agree with you -- but I am disappointed with myself when, as occasionally does happen, I fight "dirty."
  13. Scylla Rhiadra
    Indeed. There is a sort of gesture people make about age and sex, where they note that Juliet is only 13 in the play. Which is true. What is interesting, though, is that Juliet's own father thinks she is too young to marry: when he arranges her marriage to Paris, he urges him to wait a few years because she's not old enough for marriage (or sex) yet. Another bit of interesting context is that our cultural understanding of "childhood" has changed a lot over the centuries. And of course "teenage" is a very modern category. Kind of, but by the Restoration women were allowed on stage. Which meant playwrights could add a new wrinkle: the "britches" part. In the 17th century, women's boobs were pretty much on display, but women's legs and pelvis were not, and the skirts of dresses were designed to obscure their lower halves. So playwrights devised scenes in plays where an actress (who were of course mostly youngish and beautiful) had to be disguised as boys. That meant they'd be dressed in tight-fitting britches, which showed off their curves to good advantage. And yeah, men would go to plays just because they knew they'd have the opportunity to see Nell Gwyn, Anne Bracegirdle (her real name!), or whoever in tight fitting pants. Sex has always sold well!
  14. Scylla Rhiadra
    I don't either, Arielle. But I don't doubt that it happened. God knows, I screw up too.
  15. Scylla Rhiadra
    Oh god, I do that too of course! I am a veritable catalogue of nastiness, Love! You'll find my pic next to any of these definitions in the dictionary!
  16. Scylla Rhiadra
    Thanks Luna for this, but I'll have to admit that I can also be a real b*tch when I want to be, or sometimes when I'm not paying attention to my tone (Oooooookay . . .). I am also a racist, a homophobe, and even have some internalized misogyny. Most of us are guilty to some degree or another of these things, as well as a tendency to just be mean on occasion. The important thing is that we acknowledge those things in ourselves, recognize that they are wrong, and do our best to overcome their influence on our actions and communications. And, like anyone else, I've had mixed success doing so. But I do try. (This actually mirrors a discussion I had with Maddy yesterday. Weird.)
  17. Scylla Rhiadra
    Thank you, as I definitely do not belong there. I am, as you correctly discern, very human indeed. But I am also self-aware enough to know that I frequently fail, and I do my best to acknowledge that, and remedy my mistakes. So, although I'm not sure what you are specifically responding to, please do accept my very genuine apologies if I hurt (rather than merely disagreed with) you. But yeah, no pedestals please. I get vertigo.
  18. Scylla Rhiadra
    Hmm, I don't know that version of the myth! In the versions I know, it is Hades who r*pes Perseophone (literally: he seizes her forcibly and carries her off to the underworld where she becomes his Queen). But the case of Cassandra, the prophetess whose ability to see the future is discounted by everyone, and who is dismissed as mentally unstable, would be an example. Another good example might be Eros' treatment of his lover Psyche. Or Jason's betrayal of Medea.
  19. Scylla Rhiadra
    Well, serious answer (sort of). I try not to be an ***** even to assholes, because 1) I don't think it's as effective to respond in that way, and 2) I don't like myself when I sound like an *****. So, I actually do try not to be too sarcastic or flippant or mean in my replies to people whom I think are jerks. What is ALSO true is that I'm not always very good at it!
  20. Scylla Rhiadra
    Arielle, have I hurt your feelings!?!?!?
  21. Scylla Rhiadra
    In the sense that there are people who care about others, on the one hand, and assholes on the other? Oh, definitely. If I've accidentally hurt someone, and even if I think that they are being a bit unreasonable about feeling "hurt," I will apologize, because it was not my intention to cause hurt. Because I try not to be a sociopath.
  22. Scylla Rhiadra
    Sadly, yes, that's sort of what I'm hearing from some people here. I don't get it myself. Will it hurt their feelings, though, if I call out their behaviour and label them an ***** for it? Nah. Who cares! Toughen up, snowflake!
  23. Scylla Rhiadra
    It's amazing how complicated this all seems. If you've hurt or upset someone doing something that you should reasonably know might cause hurt or upset, you're being an *****. If it was legitimately inadvertent, apologize. Why not just . . . don't be an *****?
  24. Scylla Rhiadra
    Correct! Meanwhile, Olivia, who is in reality a boy playing a girl, falls in love with Viola, whom she thinks is a boy, but is actually a girl (played on stage by a boy). And Viola (who is, as we've established, a boy playing a girl pretending to be a boy) has fallen in love with Orsino (a boy playing a boy). Complicated! With some possible homoerotic elements included into the mix! When I did this for a pic, I used a male head and skin for Olivia, but dressed her up as a girl (I used a female body), and an androgenous-looking male head and body for Viola. I'm honestly not sure how well it worked. Should Viola, when she is disguised as a boy, retain in her looks something "feminine"? Or would she just be played in a straight-up fashion as boy (which would be easy, because of course in RL she was a boy.)
  25. Scylla Rhiadra
    A "different take" is exactly the right way to describe it, because really worthwhile literature always continues to produce new meanings and ways of being read -- or else, honestly, we'd probably stop reading it. Literary readings are evidence-based, like anything else, so there are wrong ways to read a text (there's no textual evidence for it, or the textual evidence undercuts a particular reading), but a nearly endless variety of possible "right" ways to read it -- and every reader, every culture, and every age will of course see "new" things in a text because of their particular perspective. In the 19th- and especially early 20th-century, psychology (as you say) becomes a thing in criticism, sometimes usefully and sometimes stupidly. (An example of the latter might be a reading that over-literalizes Hamlet's Oedipus Complex, as though he were a real person with a real childhood, rather than a fictional construct made of words and stage actions). Anyway, readings that overlook Hamlet's emotional abuse of Ophelia and see her death as the result of, essentially, a broken heart, aren't necessarily "wrong," but they prioritize certain kinds of evidence over others, and view her character through the very limited frame of a particular set of cultural assumptions. As, arguably, do I. "Trauma Studies" aren't really my thing, but it's actually a newish sub-field within literary and cultural studies, and it would be pointless to claim that I'm not influenced by it. Probably for as long as there's been literature? I could certainly find instances in Greek myth, for example. Shakespeare might not have known it as "gaslighting," but there is no question whatsoever that he'd have recognized the phenomenon.
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