Pussycat Catnap

Yeah I am not going there. All I wanted to do with the Grace Jones pictures is provide what I thought might be an inspiration for the avatar above her. One which actually challenges my 'gut' about features - Grace's nose is atypical. She's Jamaican so like an African American there's a good chance she has European ancestry. The typical African American is actually 24% or so European, almost exclusively through the Y-Chromosome line (it is almost solely a product of the rape of black women in the South. This is in fact my own ancestry. Until basically 'within our lifetimes' cases that ran counter to that were rare enough to be newsworthy). Jamaicans I don't know, but they were enslaved by the same Colonizer, so it's likely similar - I do know that AFTER slavery Jamaica has had voluntary / free mixing more commonly and from an earlier point in time. But Grace Jone's ancestry is a mystery to me. Her father was a cruel pastor - which is about all I know of her bio.

Any ranking system scares the heck out of me. That Sansar thing makes me extremely glad I'm not over there...

The problem is they don't sell them split. I go to 'big brand shop X' and buy 'the new hot dress', and even if I buy just 1 color, I get it in a pack that has it for 3-10 different bodies... the merchant thus has no idea which body I'm actually using... 9 of those bodies could have been wasted effort on their part... And the polls... those are basically rigged by whichever fan group is currently the loudest. This is why I talked about ideas on splitting the sale of items earlier... Because it would be one way to find out the actual truth of purchase desire. But as I also noted... it would created outrage. The cat is already out of the bag and they can't put it back in without getting clawed. The idea of a script to scan what people who make a purchase are currently wearing has some 'legs'... but it would suffer as well from people who have 'shopping gear' versus what they are actually buying to use. I for example often take off everything and wear an untextured classic body when forced to visit a G sim: (This image was actually from my home, when I was trying to configure something... but it gets the idea...) Most people don't wear 'less laggy' or 'more conservative' when they shop... but enough of us do to mess up some scanning data...

It is really not all that different from the strategy used by the "free to play" MMO games. SL is basically nothing more than an old Free to play Sandbox MMO. Any gamer can look here and see this is a video game in that model - and one which has a much larger cash shop than any free to play MMO could ever dream of. I suspect that people buying $L to be able to shop already brings in more cash than land. It is likely that the point at which this happened was the point in time when they 'trigger was pulled' to start messing with prim limits and premium tier - and that this was planned out years ago. Because it makes a lot of sense. Where a lot of Free to Play MMOs suffer is they are usually design studios of 10-40 developers, and they have tight themes to match their games. They just can't make enough cash shop items to get people to buy enough to pay their salaries... and they're often strapping this onto older models where they failed to include a good 'player housing' system so all people have left to buy is 'looks and styles for dungeon gear, vehicles/mounts, and pet followers'. SL on the other hand starts as a sandbox with a primitive game engine. And it handed the developer tools over to the players. Those players found things they wanted... and made them... - so SL has the best 'cash shop' in the video game industry, on an old MMO, that the players have updated the graphics for on their own effort, and all the developers need to do is keep making sure the tools we have to keep updating the game keep improving, and skim off the top of the cash shop just enough that we have to keep putting in money.

The image looks to be Grace Jones inspired. Grace also has a pinched in nose - but there are subtle differences in the nostrils and the 'bulb' of the nose. Though here is her Wikipedia entry, taken when she was 66 years old, where her nose seems closer to that in the avatar above: So... With Africa having more genetic diversity in the average town of 1000 people than the entire rest of the planet combined... you can get a lot of different looks. Just because the avatar above doesn't "Feel" African to me, does NOT invalidate it.

Personally I'm not a fan of the nose in that avatar in the screenshots just above. It does look caucasian. That said... for an African American - a very large percentage of them have caucasian DNA though the Y-Chromosome paternal line as a result of historic rape https://www.legacytree.com/blog/dna-testing-can-transform-african-american-family-history-research So African Americans can end up with features that are not as common in Africa (where genetic diversity is also broad enough to give amazing variety). To me, the only thing African about that images face if the skin tone. Though you WILL find people with a look like that. Personally not a fan of the shape of those SKING (it looks SKING) bodies at the hips, but that's unrelated.

I'll add that... some years back when MP was kicking off I was in the panic crowd over 'this is going to kill SL land, and if there aren't stores inworld, SL will die...' But I don't see it that way anymore... Yes most of the SL shops died off inworld. MP ones took over, and smarter designed brands use inworld shops for branding / experience... And that DID lead to a massive chunk of mainland being abandoned and a lot of islands closing up... So the panic was right... but also wrong. The other notion I explored back then was that MP could fill the gap... and it seems to have done so... But we do now have all this vacant mainland... So why not turn it into residential land. That's what I think some of this is about.

I believe that revenue stream exists here: https://secondlife.com/my/lindex/buy.php Which is used to gain access to this new feature: https://marketplace.secondlife.com/? I'm actually serious here though... Over the last few years the "in thing" to do in SL has changed from "be a curmudgeon on your plot of 512m land with all kinds of hostile textures rezzed to chase off your neighbors and a bunch of angry breedables to take over all the land around you" over to "OMG... get me into this event so I can buy MORE MORE MORE..." followed up with "Well, I clocked 12 hours today buying mah lootz on MP... and I made a single new outfit... but I won't ever use it because tomorrow Imma going shopping againz" SL users, in a generalized sense, have gone from 'residents' to 'shoppers'. Bringing down land though... is not about lowering their revenue... its about getting us to SHOP more... We don't need to really own / use this land... we just need to keep buying it... BUT... making it cheaper to own more of it... gives us more reason to shop on MP for not just clothes and mesh bodies, but furnishings and houses and so on... This move is all about giving us more reasons to shop.

This was me trying to get through that and read your post.

Look through my recent flickr, nsfw - you can see that head on my alt from March 19, and on me from March 1. The pics at the skin fair though - those are my alt on her old head. The face looks bad there because I had been using a shape to hide flaws in her old skin... The images series on the 19th - the graphic nature aside, plenty of face shots. Demo it at least, and play with sliders. It's only 1795L... whereas the other brands are 5000L...

Yeah. I'd agree on that. That's how I generally try to play things as well.

I doesn't trigger people it doesn't apply to. I've lived in mixed communities my whole life - and that's an observation almost any person in such a community, across all the race lines, will make. Nobody gets triggered for whom it doesn't apply.

Yep, I use Janet for myself and for my 'human alt'. The lips will come in a bit extreme, but it responds very well when you dial it down (or maybe just my old dial was extreme because my previous head didn't have full lips to start with, and now my dial is actually normal midrange).

A few others do too... but be VERY CAREFUL to test when go off brand... Some of them, when you add in the sway, also move the ribcage (Tonic), or your frontal bits (Eve, turn up butt sway and/or bounce (I forget), and your front bounces up an down). - Make a physics file that has everything dialed up to 'maximum bounce and sway'... (which means the dials that are used to 'slow it down' should be set to 0, the other dials to 100)... then use that to test bodies and AOs... If like me, you might get some jerk making fun of how much you juggle because they think shopping is about posing oneself to look cool in a store... but you're there to make sure you spend your money well... you want to FIND all the flaws in what you buy... and then decide if you are OK with those flaws... So when I shop this stuff.. I put in my extreme animations and jiggle... and let the jerks make fun of me because they don't know how to buy smart...

Carefully learn how to do all of that on 80,000 Complexity Score or LESS. Please... I recommend Mayreal for mesh heads, 1/3 the price, 2x the quality.

Here's one of the skin fair ones, I just realized I made several of my screenshots in 'pg', so I also edited my previous post to add in an actual screenshot. I was so upset when this one didn't have Omega... but for you one of these skin-fair skins might be perfect. The rest at the fair ranged in tone between these two screenshots.

Somebody please help me pressure them to add more of their skins to the omega list too... I slammed myself up against a brick wall 3 or 4 years ago trying to get them to support Omega... now I guess enough other customers yelled at them as well, so they support it for bodies pretty fully, but only one skin in only one tone so far for heads... (for about 2 years they had their own mesh head so they ONLY supported that, but it seems to have been pushed aside now, they largely support Catwa, and I think Letuka... and now they're just starting to give in on Omega). Angel Rock is the best African skin tone maker. THAT SAID... The skin fair this year had at least 4 to 8 African skins that were being sold ONLY for Catwa or Letuka... and exactly 1 for Omega, which I bought... Saniyah Cocoa. If the skin fair is still on... the person who was asking was asking for Catwa right? Go there, and you should find plenty of choices. I think most were fair exclusive, and listed at lower prices...

Try Angel Rock. They make skins for African tones, and they have shapes you can start with, they make specific shapes for a few Catwa heads, and maybe Letuka also. I personally am partial to Mayreal Janet for a mesh head, and Angel Rock now has one Omega head applier that can be used with it.

I would flip that around, Mos of my comment was about someone bringing hostility to the thread. Race was only a side mention as a "possible" motive. So why have all of you hyper-focused on that, rather than the main thrust of my point and my note that everything was friendly until the rather hostile take-down posted about people who don't use Maitreya? This: To someone else complaining about that, I said: So why are you focusing on a side parenthetical of my reply, rather than the initial instigator, or even my actual point? I always wonder when people get hyper-sensitive to comments about racism. What are they afraid of in their own motives? As a parenthetical note, a logical response from anyone it did not apply to, or if it was wrong, would have been to just ignore it. Focusing on it starts to validate it. And frankly, if it is wrong... then logically this post would also just 'fade into the wind' without further comment.

I have no opinion on that.

Yes Maitreya would be leader as the larger market. If I were an active merchant I would really want to know what the top 3, maybe 4, bodies my buyers were using - so I could focus my efforts. I would likely then try out a 'niche of the cycle'... and add in one 'odd body that I had the dev kit for' for each such cycle... A cycle being every so many products I released... - that would be my attempt to see if I was missing some demand somewhere... BUT that depends on just how hard it is to support multiple bodies. I hear from some comments that it is a LOT of work to make all the multiple body stuff, and then I go to a store of another brand and see them putting out for a half dozen or more... and I wonder how they pull that off. All things said though... I am actually rather surprised that the merchants don't seem to have some organize plot going on to determine what brands are best selling... if they all got together and said "I may hate you for selling to people that would otherwise buy X from me... but we BOTH benefit if we sit down together and figure out the demand... so let's see how we can team up on that." I dunno... maybe they do... and we just don't realize it. Some others have now corrected me on the point about being able to detect what attachments someone is wearing... So with some clever scripting you could scan everyone landing in your venue, find out what folks actually wear... and then know where to focus your efforts. Now the question becomes... do you share this data with your competitors in the hopes of getting the same data from them for a larger sample? Do you convince social hangouts to do some scanning for you as well - or do you ignore those as you can't be as sure there who is a buying customer and who is someone just happy with the inventory they have? ... One idea would be to get whoever makes your vendors, to do this scan when someone makes a purchase... so you can weed out window shoppers from actual buyers... But does this lose the potential data of 'window shoppers that WOULD buy from you if only you supported them right'? All said... I do think that if they scanned buyers like this... the numbers for Maitreya might be similar to what the website polls show... it's the bodies jockeying for the positions after that that it would be revealing for... My own preferred body might even drop as a result... of course I HOPE it would rise... my 'gut' tells me it would... but who knows...

Did you know the first standard US Dictionary came out a few years before the British one. Before that neither country had a standardized spelling system. Some native English countries, like Jamaica, still have no standard spelling system for their own dialects. And I'm not sure either the US or the UK has an actual legal standardized spelling, like say, Japan does for it's language (thankfully too... one of the great things about this language shared by various former members of the British Empire is that it has so few standards that it is able to adapt quickly to changing times, and adjust spelling, grammar, and vocabulary as needed).

It goes beyond that. This was a pleasant discussion until you stepped in. You are all trying to sidestep by focusing on my race comment, but look to your own initial words that attacked others in the thread - that is where hostility began.

I can only hope you're not American. Watermelons and Kim Kardashian body shaming comments... you're basically looking at a proxy attack using 'memes' that are brought up in 'black body type shaming'. Especially given it's the same person making all these comments attacking larger bodies by using extremes that are taken from 'race baiting' themes.

I'm an engineer... I need to fully outline and explain an idea if I am to tear it down... so we can all understand why it is bad. If you say something is bad without first outlining it in enough detail, why be believed? This should have been obvious from the text of my post should one actually read it, where I called the idea a bad one after detailing it. (There is a popular note on the internet: "TL:DR" <- to a trained mind, this reads as a person who is willfully ignorant. Discussion of ideas requires detail, or we're all just stumbling around in uninformed opinions.)