Scylla Rhiadra

So, @manoji Yachviliis opening a new exhibit tomorrow of her RL photographs, and @Horus Salubriusand I were invited over for a preview! It's pretty great; her photos are wonderful, and she's cleverly paired them up with RL art from an Italian exhibit to show her original inspiration, and her translation of her responses to the art into her own photos. It opens tomorrow! DEFINITELY worth a visit! (Unless, like Horus, you've been banned from the sim. What does that boy get up to?) http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Fantasy Forest/151/72/2011

Those aren't "people," Cindy. They are government-engineered mutants whose human rDNA has been replaced by that of jellyfish. I know this is so because Alex Jones says it is.

Oh, I do too. I liked Pep, sometimes a lot, and enjoyed sparring with him, generally. In fact, I feel a little guilty about how much I liked him, because he could be absolutely brutal with people he didn't like. And I think he had a generally negative effect on the forums. I'm not even sure how long he's been gone now. I wonder when his last alt got banned?

God forbid. That would be a horrible harbinger for 2021. Thank you for your lovely wishes, Persephone! I hope you have a lovely new year too!

@Madelaine McMasters YEAH! WHAT SHE SAID!!!

Another fun part of the evening was when we all got to play our favourite party game, "OMG Someone Hide Belinda's Car Keys." I'm not saying that everyone there was dressed like a tart, and drank too much . . . but I was the only person there who wasn't and didn't. But I'm not judging. Really.

My island mates, @Saskia Rieko, @Eva Knoller, and @BelindaN, along with @TatianaNikolayand @Stranger Hoxley, celebrated New Years a bit early. It was lovely, especially the part of the evening where Eva ritually pours champagne over herself.

The other element of the threat to privacy that people tend to misidentify is its source. As is suggested by your comments, those who are tracking and harvesting us online aren't the government. They are corporations, and not just the big social media companies, who are, after all, selling the data they mine to anyone willing to buy it. At least democratically elected governments are a little susceptible to public pressure and the concerns of privacy specialists. As for corporations, they don't need to worry about that: as you point out, we're all happy to pay for the privilege of being tracked by them.

Your view angle is changing as your camera position changes. Something that I've noticed in the newest version of Firestorm (the EEP one) which I think is new is that when you change your view on the camera controls (from front to rear view, for instance) it changes your view angle to the default (which is 1.047), regardless of what it was set at before, and refocuses your camera on the same part of your avatar. It's actually annoying as hell, and I'm wondering if there is a fix for it. Does that describe what you are doing here? Or is this yet another fiendish new and unwanted innovation in the viewer I haven't discovered yet?

Says who? Dahling, I've devoted my entire SL to being a measurably and irresistibly attractive force, with a galaxy of friends and slavish admirers in orbit around me. Ptolemy and Copernicus were both wrong: it is a Scylla-centric virtual universe.

Well, that's just remarkably silly. I think I'd respond to that complaint by planting my cross hairs on his crotch.

Well, am I incorrect in thinking that, if you fall to earth, your own mass is having an immeasurably small, but still real, impact on the earth, and that it is also moving towards you?

Thank you, Manoji! And a very happy, and much improved, New Year to you and everyone else here as well!

"It's not a very large turnout, is it?"

You'll get no arguments from me on this score. You're a very wise lion sometimes, Love.

I think I just did. Yeesh, Love, do try to keep up, will you?

*sniff sniff*

Ok then, that's actually just intrusive. I can get the point of alerting someone if a photo was being take of oneself (although I query whether scripting would even be able to determine that), but to simply announce that someone is taking pics that are none of your business is . . . well, none of your business. I really don't see the point of this, or an upside to it.

Yes, this sounds like something new and different. Quiet snapshots doesn't stop notifications -- it just means that there is no "clicking" sound when you take a snap. I'd like to find out if this is a thing in FS. I'm not sure if it's better or worse for privacy, to be honest. ETA: I'm not seeing anything like this in the "alerts" under FS preferences. Maybe it's not in FS?

Weirdly, I've never had anyone give me a difficult time about looking at them. And I've certainly never snapped at anyone I caught looking at me. Why would I? I expend a great deal of effort to look fabulous, dahling. The poor dears deserve an occasional treat.

I really only use this feature when I'm working in a sandbox, because I tend to be focused there, and not paying a great deal of attention to what's going on around me. I have found that having someone cross hairs locked on my face, and their name hovering above, is often a pretty good predictor that I'm about to be interrupted. It works better than radar, because they often don't physically approach. And actually, I'll sometimes turn it on during the relatively rare occasions I go alone to a packed club like Fogbound, just for giggles. Again, someone's cross hairs locked on to you for longer than about 30 seconds is usually a pretty good indication that an IM will shortly be coming your way. It's kind of a fun game to play.

I want to ruin even more interesting threads. 😁

You seem to be rather missing the point, and simply restating the obvious, and fallacious, premise of the comparison does nothing to address it. The study is comparing one very large population, of which only a relatively small proportion have been diagnosed with Covid 19, with another even larger population group, of which, again, only a small proportion have been identified as having the disease, and an even tinier proportion were treated with HCQ. What percentage, do you suppose, of that 1.8 billion people were treated with HCQ? It would be a statistically and scientifically negligible amount -- not even close to large enough to account for the differences the study purports to document. A straight-up comparison of Covid 19 patients treated with HCQ and those who were not might be scientifically and statistically valid, assuming other factors were also weighted properly. This study doesn't come even close to doing that -- its samples are indiscriminate and the number of actual treatments far too small a percentage of the whole to yield anything useful. And speaking of "other factors," there are pretty sizeable and statistically significant differences in the mortality rates within each of these two groups -- differences that are far more pronounced than the ones the study associates with HCQ. For instance, both Canada and the US appear within the "control group," but the mortality rate in latter per 100,000 population is two and a half times that in the former. Now, I suspect that that stat is more complicated than it looks*, but it does suggest that there are other factors -- political, cultural, economic -- that are vastly more important in determining recovery rates than HCQ. * Case in point: according to Worldometer, the US has about 4 times as many cases per capita as Canada -- which means that, although Canada has a lower per capita death rate, its mortality rate among those who actually have contracted the disease is actually higher than in the States. See how complicated statistics can be? And why comparing mishmashed numerical salads with each other can be misleading?

Did they look like this?

I use Ivory Tower too. It's not especially quiet -- you can meet odd people there occasionally. In fact, and speaking of odd people, I ran into Horus there not too long ago. And Maddy likes hanging out there sometimes with the intent of meeting interesting people. A couple of weeks ago, I ran across a couple of women racing around there on motorbikes, and one of them IMed me to let me know she was a forum lurker and recognized me from this place. I can only think of once in the past couple of years when I experienced anything resembling "griefing" at Ivory Tower though -- someone let off some fireworks in a backdrop I was setting up. So it's a pretty good place to use.