Pussycat Catnap

Bobbie Faulds wrote: Check out Humanoid, MyAnimation, and Akeyo The brands Bobbie recommends are great, with some amazingly high quality work. Don't skip looking at those shops as you are bound to find something amazing there. I will add three more: Abranimations Henmations Keekee Kyrie - These three have some really good stuff, and some that isn't. Try all the different styles. My favorite AND least favorites all tend to come from these three.

Avaraia Aljon wrote: years ago when i first started, there where tons of people who where very open to talking to you and groups you could just hang with, along with people you could discuss things with. whats happened to the community? If you could put conversation into a gatcha machine at a monthly branded event, people would start doing it again.

ChinRey wrote: Rya Nitely wrote: And I understood it to be a refugee swap deal. If it isn't a swap, why should America do it? I agree that it would be 'dumb'. I haven't read the details but of course it's a give-and-take deal both parties thought would benefit them at the time they agreed on it. Now the current US authorities don't think it's a good deal for them and they want to renegotiate or cancel it. That raises the first two of several questions: Which other agreements do the current US leadership want to run away from? Can other nations trust them at all? Which state leader wants to have a one-on-one talk with Trump knowing that he's likely to tweet details about the chat the next day? If this is the start of a new US immigration regime, where is it going to end? I think the last question is the one most relevant in this discussion. According to the 2016 Silicon Valley index, 74% of the computer and mathematical workers aged from 25 to 44 are immigrants. 52% of the Silicon Valley companies were founded by immigrants. People driven by smart policy rather than Jingoism know that the take here is simple: people who bring new ideas and potential innovation. Something above 40% of our tech CEOs are immigrants. As you note, 52% of the founders are. Some of them, like Steve Jobs, where children of refugees. Syrian Refugee in his case. The workforce has an even higher percentage. 74% seems higher than I would have thought, but it does make sense. The world's braintrust mostly works in the USA in coastal tech hubs or with firms that have close ties to Silicon Valley. - That is what drives the American economy. Without those people, given the USA's constant problems with incurious bigotry and jingoistic adventurism, we'd be a third world nation. So the trade with "being willing to take in immigrants" is winning the human lottery in your labor pool. What these incurious bigots don't like - is the tech jobs that go to Americans don't tend to go to stupid backwater bigots. They go to smart people. Smart isn't a racially specific trait - which infuriates them. And smart people tend to quickly learn the value of diversity even if they started out as 'backwater bigots'. That then starts turning them into either liberals or libertarians. I'm not a fan of libertarians in the least - but they're at least open to the idea of having a brain and recognizing the value in a person who likewise has one... So you get the coastal "libtard" cities getting richer and richer, and more and more into the age of the Jetsons and science fiction, while the inland is starting to look worse than central Africa used to (before it started getting tech investment from China and India). And that just drives the backwater types to entrench themselves even further into bigotry as if a solution that stopped working a century ago was going to suddenly save them.

It is always the right thing to do to take a stand against hate. It is always the right time to fight oppression. It is always the right time to work for social justice. Good move on Linden Lab's part. No action, no matter how small or how big - is wasted when it is against hate. More words on this: https://catnapkitty.wordpress.com/2017/02/03/linden-labs-statement-against-the-hateful-bigotry-of-the-us-president-is-a-good-thing/

Alwin Alcott wrote: avarage load of most people is between 100.000 and 250.000 I set mine to 80,000 - and I only get 2-3 jellies in many crowds. Most people are well below this. I find in many places I go, it isn't unless I go below 50-60,000 that a notable number vanish. I like to keep my FPS as high as I can, so I see no reason to let people who are being an unusual burden lag me. I also keep my own outfits as low as I can, well below the limit I set most of the time - because I don't want to slow anyone else up.

ChinRey wrote: Pussycat Catnap wrote: SL's userbase isn't fading. Here are the stats from gridsurvey.com A slow but relatively steady decline, a little bit ahead of and less steep than the decline in grid size, which is what one should expect. That's not what I see. I see a generally flat line in the overal shape after 2010. Which is fairly close to the point I was making.

Bitsy Buccaneer wrote: I think Alwin has a point which deserves to be considered. There are certainly female avatars run by men who seem to be acting out some pretty unhealthy feelings about women. This has nothing to do with feminist men, or trans women, or anything like that. It has to do with misogynists hiding behind female avs. I've noticed often in SL that I have observed some very overtly hateful attitudes towards women, from female avatars. Now... on finding out RL gender for the small segment for whom that gets revealed - not all of them turn out to be men. Something I have seen in RL as well. I have a RL sister in law that forced her daughter out of the home for talking to boys, and admitted this was casual conversation, not sex-talk. One of the primary leaders of rape-squads in the Rwandan genocide was a female MP before things erupted. - Those are extremes. It is also quite fair to say that many of the avatars that I found most hateful were in fact RL men. And there is a reason I don't really feel comfortable around men in my life, SL or RL. Not an issue of sexual violence, but direct violence in my youth. The truth is you cannot use 'identity' as a way to create a safe space. To find people to fit a safe space, you need to know those people. Despite my general fear around males and whites in RL (for a linked reason), that I always try to find ways to overcome, for much of my youth the core person in my 'safe space' was a white guy. - there's the gut panic reaction, and the informed one that allowed me to make that friend. No simple litmus test ever works for these things. We've always got to fight to overcome our instinctive biases, even when those biases come as reactions to real things that happened to us - we need to remember it was individuals and not categories that did those things. Not easy, the panic might always be there - but you work past it.

In a Zootopia... sure. But lets be honest, it wouldn't be a Zootopia. It would be full of glow-neon-purple & black wolves with 24" male genitals, female boobs, spiked collars, and pierced tongues. Using the word 'yiff' all day long while blasting death metal, talking about video games, painting confederate flags on stuff, and complaing about 'whiny minorities'. I don't mind nudity in my VR... and I like furries... but subtlety is lost in this.

There are 50,344 people logged in to SL right now as I type this. On the population tracker I have not reset since 2010, the highest it has ever seen was 73,721 - and that was in it's first three months of use somewhen... On average since then, it's been in the mid 40,000s. Lately it's average has actually gone up a little - but that's a subjective feeling rather than something I can prove. SL's userbase isn't fading. But the reasons to own land are mostly gone. Marketplace killed the need for many people to have inworld shops. Many still do because it is a very strong branding tool to have a place for people to go to - but only if you make that shop appealing and low lag and geared to sell product (good displays that are easy to work with for the new and top selling items). - and many of the shops still in SL fail to actually brand well. But these tend to just be 'labors of love' or 'failed business sense' or from forgotten accounts that somehow managed to pay the bills. Residential needs are met for many by linden homes - those still have decent occupancy (but are by no means full anymore). Others often just rent spots on themes or 'cheap by volume' estates and mainland rental spots. (By cheap by volume I mean those sims that often have a giant series of walls blocking off several lots, and people rent their corner/fraction and just pretend like there's nothing beyond that wall. the giant mega-land barons have plenty of these. Much as I see them as eyesores, they remain popular so clearly my opinion of them is not in sync with the SL community.) And the number of SLers that keep an SL home seems to be low (this is a personal opinion I cannot prove). As to SL mainland... it's attraction has dropped for many over the years. People often don't understand what you get for a premium account very well. I see questions on this quite frequently. Many Linden Home people don't even realize they could go to mainland. Many people overestimate the costs of mainland. See a parcel for $20,000 and balk - that is $80 US dollars after all. But then they spend $30,000L that month at a gatcha faire + rental on a sim they don't like. What people find value in changes over time... and shopping at events seems to be where the SL economy is now. In other places SL land barons have artifically kept prices high (think Zindra), so actual land owners also try to sell high, and when no one bites, they abandon before instead lowering price down... A good number of empty parcels are actually also NOT abandoned land, but being held by land barons in 'reserve' for reasons I don't really understand. One of the plots right next to my SL home is for sale for $195,000L. It's less than 1500sqm, but double prim. - The land baron prices it like this, but puts a rental box on it. In the time I've had my SL home, one person rented it for about 1 month. It is right next to another lot that was in the same price range, and is currently rented. This same land baron keeps prices like this all over Zindra - that seriously discourages even people who want to buy and keep land, like me, from doing so... Most of the land I own, I lucked into. Like the double prim land that is my home that I grabbed for $30,000 because a different land baron was holding it. - But a LOT of people in SL would not even pay $30,000 for a double prim lot, when you consider that you could buy about 480 gatchas at '[insert monthly event name here] with that money (Gatchas seem to be mostly priced these days at $50L or $75L, so I used 62.5 for that number)... In 2009 if I told people to go buy a huge stack of no-mod no-copy items that I refused to tell them what they got until after they paid me... I would have been laughed at and maybe even a few folks would have filed AR's against me for 'drama reasons'... But that's what everyone does now. In 2009, if I offered you a 1024 double prim lot on a sim with only 4 parcels on it and a wide open view, for $30,000 - people would be fighting each other to pay me for it. But today I could list it and sit there for weeks before it got a buyer. Unless I left a hundred gatchas on the lot to be transfered with the purchase...

Get a security orb that has settings for range and time, and lists for who is approved and who is banned. Set the security orb at say... coordinates x,y,z Set it's range to 'R' Get a solid prim and put it at the exact same coordinates as the orb, set it's size on each side to 2R + 0.1m - Just slightly larger than the orb. Now either make the prim transparent or give it an outside texture. Set the prim to 'prim' in physics shape type. Don't use convex hull. - this will let people inside walk around and not get 'moved out' but people outside will bounce off of it. I use a special 'mesh prim' I made for this purpose, which I give away for free here: https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Mesh-Prim/4255548 Once you do this, you can set the security orb's warning time super low... because people won't be coming in on accident. The prim also protects people who are flying in vehicles. When a vehicle hits a banline it gets stuck and its scripts crash. When it hits a teleport orb the owner gets tossed off the vehicle and the vehicle may or may not just keep flying through and can end up many sims off course and get lost... So I put walls just a little bigger than my orbs. Vehicles bump into them, but are unharmed. - The driver can just change direction and go around my wall. None of us gets bothered - me inside or them outside.

In this particular case I got lucky and saw an aligator I had bouncing off a corner 13m from his home spot when he was set to wander a 12m radius... /hmmm But I cut him to 11m and the error stopped. Now I have to find the flying squirrel I re-boxed thinking it was the problem last month. Also, thank you for the post about the bug, will take a look at that.

I keep getting spammed with: Can't move object '[OBJECT_NAME]' to [OBJ_POSITION] in region [REGION_NAME] because your objects are not allowed on this parcel.When on my land. How do I find what object is doing this?

ChinRey wrote: The chandeliers of the Grand Hall are a good example what I mean with a system favoring mediocrity btw. The rest of the hall is very simple, no signifcant modelling challenges at all. But the chandeliers are very detailed and require a lot of polys. They could have been uploaded at good quality and they wouldn't even have to be very laggy if they were. But they would have had a higher land impact and since people in SL tend to be so obsessed with LI that would really hurt sales. (And since that particular builder doesn't seem to have an organisation to back him up, SL sales is likely to be marginal anyway.) As I said in another thread, I'm not sure if I could have made those chandeliers with a sellable LI and if I can't, nobody can. My solution is not to do something like that unless I can figure out a way to do it properly. Others see it differently and I think we just have to agree to disagree. When the increased prim limit was launched, Patch Linden said that LL hoped people would use some of that extra LI to improve the content quality. That's a lovely thought but a forlorn hope is not enough encouragement to make any difference and so far it seems that's all LL has to offer. If I understand you correctly, then I disagree. SL is basically a real-time-3d-gaming platform. Graphics need to always be optimized for quick fast rendering. So if the builder made something to be ultra-low-land impact at the expense of graphical complexity... that was the right choice. Keeping that land impact low, usually means optimizing for real-time 3D animation. Or said the other way around: optimizing for real-time-3D-animation tends to result in the same choices that also lead to lower land impact: so as a consumer even with more land impact available on my land, I still look things that use up less as an easy guage of what is "likely" to have less impact on rendering-speed, and the FPS I get moving around with it in my presence. That said, when people follow suit with a unethical system and make unethical choice - I do not give them a pass for that. Bad ethics is bad ethics, regardless. It's generally a position of privilege that allows people to make excuses that say "well, the system is just this way... so I'm just being part of that system." - And that remains true in 'small things' like design choices in art, and big things like predatory criminal conduct. The scale and nature doesn't matter - being ethical is simply doing the right thing, regardless.

Demo it all, and demo slightly beyond your normal shape dials. That said I would say the best flat out is Belleza. It can handle the widest variety of shape dial and avatar physics settings without distortion. This shows up particularly strongly in the bosom: https://catnapkitty.wordpress.com/2016/04/26/mesh-avatar-bosom-comparison/ and in sit poses. Maitreya has the most clothing support - I believe they require many people to agree to support only them in order to get the developer kit. But Belleza and Slink also have good support. My review of Belleza: https://catnapkitty.wordpress.com/2015/09/13/belleza-v3-mesh-body-review/ Is actually one update behind the current version, and the current version vastly improved things to a level putting it way above the competition in terms of quality. It is now a very highly configurable body and possibly the lowest lag option available for human bodies.

YoSung wrote: It really sucks how arrogant and rude many people are towards " minorities " - racism is also a known issue on SL - but it's only against males Here, you might need this: http://www.dictionary.com/ SInce you have no idea what 'racism' means. But yes, racism is a big issue in SL.

That's a pretty unusual find too. I don't think most of us would think to test on a sit pose because most of us have not encountered anything like this before. That said - I will take your own comment as advice and remember to also test things I desire to buy in a sit pose from now on. I already do a common female version of this - I have some intense 'bosom settings' I use to make sure I won't pop through a top when moving. Put on the 'shaky' physics file, dial bosom up to max, and see what it looks like when doing a dance animation. I'm sure there's a couple of these tests we all ought to be doing each time... but often forget to.

A quick perusal of the forums here, the SL feeds, and many inworld groups for clubs and fashion will quickly inform you that this place has a very strong LACK of geeks. The lack of technical aptitude among SL's user base is sometimes astounding. SLers seem less tech savvy than even the general internet / web browsing global population. Sometimes the questions asked are amazingly basic in nature. What this place needs is a customer support not geared towards the tech-savvy, but the tech-intimidated. That said, it has rarely had either approach.

ChinRey wrote: Chic Aeon wrote: It is going to be interesting to see who goes and who stays in the content creator arena as it appears that the learning curve is kinda in that professional area and those professionals can likely make more money elsewear. There are quite a few skiled content creators who do good business with quality meshes elsewhere and still sell horribly poor uploads of the same meshes in SL. The reason they do that is - and I'm actually quoting one of them here - "People in SL buy anyway." Spending time and effort optimizing builds for SL when you could have invested it on a more lucrative market simply isn't cost effective. Some do it anyway because they can't bring themselves to present half-baked works, but many won't and some evn can't afford to do it. I mentioned in another thread that the SL version of the Grand Hall is such a bodged job and I have to make absolutely clear: that is not the creator's fault. He's just being prudent, taking the logical consequence of working within a system that tends to punish rather than reward quality improvements. I do my best to ducate people in SL about things like avatar complexity, how to tell a rezzed mesh is not optimized, and so on. But people just get mad when I tell them how they can make their own SL experience faster, smoother, and less laggy - and improve the experience of others around them. There are a LOT of people that are uninformed and remain they way because they view education as a personal attack... Oh and saying it's not the creator's fault (Grand Hall exampls) because he isn't properly rewarded for taking good ethical action is flawed. Good conduct should not be done because one is rewarded for it, but simply to be better. If someone does wrong by others, we should not make excuses for them. Maybe sometimes it's good to have people mad at you - if the people getting mad are doing harm.

You really want to demo them all for a few hours on both your shape and some notable changes to your shape. And try some different avatar physics out - like one for clothed and one for a bikini/nude. Some of the mesh bodies don't respond well to more active physics. In demoing you should really push beyond your day to day look / use because you're likely to stick with the body for a long time and don't want something you can't use for "those unusual situations". Try dialing the bosom size up really high, and down really low. Try messing with torso and leg muscle - some bodies stop listening to these dials above 40 or 50... and this makes getting a curvy look require really fiddling with a half dozen other dials... I find Belleza looks better than any other body, and responds to avatar physics better than any othr body - no matter what I do to the dial settings. But Maitreya has more clothing support. However it responds rather poorly to more active physics, and the bosom gets distorted if you dial too high or too low: https://catnapkitty.wordpress.com/2016/04/26/mesh-avatar-bosom-comparison/ (this distortion actually begins if you go below 45 or above 55 - but it's mild there, and gets severe later on). - However both Belleza and Maitreya are fairly well supported. Slink also has decent support. All of the other brands are low on clothing support so hard to handle unless you're a full time nudist...

ChinRey wrote: StJohnOfGods wrote: You all are racist What? All of us??? That being said, I use European, Asian and African looking avatars for my different alts and yes, I have noticed the difference that makes in how people treat you. I actually did a test once. I went to a popular beach wearing my very best African avi and was left all alone. Then I went home, changed to blonde hair, pale skin and blue eyes and returned to the beach... I always use the African avi for that sim since then. There is such a thing as unwanted attention. When I started SL in 2009 I started on a lightly tanned skin because it was the deepest tone I could find. I'm not very much African in Real Life (a small bit, but not visible unless you think my nose is African). I looke more like my Asian and Afghan sides (even though I have less Afghan than African). But I couldn't even find a skin as dark as my real life tone. Over time I found progressively deeper tones, and eventually found people selling African specific tones of high quality (Angle Rock and the now gone Lyrical Oh, and the now retired product lines of Elysium - who went whites only a year or so back). With each transition people got less friendly. But I was also becomming more vocal in SL so I started to wonder if it was me and if I had a reputation outside of places like these forums. I made some alts - gave then different skin tones, and used them actively for a while. And that confirmed the bias for me. Which is no surprise because in my real life this is no different. In many places I will be ignored if on a black avatar, or only greeted by the scripted greeter. Even in some of my regular hangouts I will get notably less attention and / or talked around. If I comment about feeling awkward as the only person of color in some situations, I will get replies like "oh but there are other colored who come here also" and I think to myself... "when, where? What kind of race-exclusive enclave in RL do you live in where people like me are not 30-50% of your everyday all the time experience?" Or where they will come back with "but we have LGBT people" as if that was diversity. Those are still, in terms of the ones they are speaking of in most of these cases, people from their culture and ethnic circle. They see basically, a token person here and there, and think they are being overwhelmed by diversity. But I see a token here and there, and I feel isolated. Especially when we're all getting a cold shoulder in so many places. But what can make this dramatically worse in SL is going to a sim that is angled on some 'minority theme' only to realize its a fetishization. Like one of those 'black men raping white women' sims that pops up if you try to go to a 'multiracial' hangout... Or even popping into a hip-hop venue and seeing everyone talk in fake funny ebonics. The kind of ebonics Stormfront neo-nazis recently used when they tried to go after black twitter... This gets even worse if I try Amazonian or Incan themes - a notable part of my ancestry. - those experiences can make you feel not only isolated, but like when they notice you, they think of you as a 'thing' and not a person. ChinRey wrote: Madelaine McMasters wrote: Have you taken the any of the Harvard implicit bias tests? https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html Really interesting. The one test I tried there seemed to be seriously flawed though. The test went through several rounds. At first you were told to associate negative obejcts with black Americans and positive objects and the test measured how fast and reliably you could do that. Then in the middle it's suddenly switched, now you have to assoviate positive objects with black Americans and negative ones with whites. As far as I could see, the test did not take into account the confusion that sudden switch caused nor the test subject's fatigue at the second part and both those factors will of course significantly reduce the speed and accuracy. The correct way to make such a test would be to have alternating rounds. As it is now, it's just a silly game and not in any way a serious or reliable test. The whole point of such a test is to test your instinctive result. The sudden confusion switch is intentional in that it prevents you from having the ability to think beyond your bias.

Since you have two premium accounts... It is very easy to find cheap 512m land, and moderately priced 1024m land. The 10% benefit is very nice, but people very rarely cut land in sizes like 560 and 1120m - though I have owned land in these sizes. Often even in nice locations - depending on your needs that is (if you want land with water or on a cliff prices go up dramatically, but roadside is as cheap as unprotected in many places). G- rated land and A-rated land tend to both be more expensive than M-rated land (but G-rated land is hit or miss: some of it is very low priced and some of it can be quite expensive. I think this depends on how well isolated away from M-rated it gets. There are 2 mini G-only continents that I know of, and they both tend to be priced higher; west Bay City and old teen-grid). - Picking the right rating for your needs is very important. It shapes not only what you can do, but what you can expect your neighbors to plop down beside you (you aren't going to get a sex-club next to you on G-land, but you can pretty much expect it on A-land. And on M-land your neighbors might be nudists, and you have the option of joining them. But on G-land if you're naked in your private skybox at 4090m up for a half second while changing clothes and have visibility turned off... you can still be reported for a TOS violation). But be warned: shopping for land is SL can be quite addictive... I have to be careful opening that map with the 'show land for sale' thing ticked... or I get tempted to move... Lastly: if you get land in an area that has a special angle or theme of some kind, look through SL groups and see if there is a group for that region / continent / etc. Sometimes these groups are great places to make new friends, like the ones for Bay City and "East River" (the sims near "Whinlatter").

entity0x wrote: My position has been handling the defaming comments made on personal blogs and alternate SL forums (which can be seen today) which call for boycotting of, and even labeling with nasty anti-consumerist-ish names, of creators who dont carte blanche mod/copy on everything. Let the market decide, is really the only fair answer here. A boycott IS the market deciding. Consumers will join it - the market standing against something - or refuse to join it - the market standing for something. A boycott is the most vocal way the consumer voices their collective opinion. It is the perfect way to let the market decide. If you're on the right side of this, a boycott will not harm you one bit. It is a great way to see if consumer opinion is with or against you. There have been product lines in SL that people have tried to organize against for the very reasons discussed in this thread - to no effect. There have been other product lines that have been killed off because of these very reasons. The market spoke loudly in both cases. But my issue in this thread has been that everyone here but one poster has maintained a civil and polite method of discussing their stance. That one poster though, has repeatedly said things like: "Screw your design professionals." Using angry hostile words when not being personally attacked - highly uncalled for. And that HAS shaped my opinion as a consumer.

Baked textures often mean lots of higher resolution textures. Too many of those around your SL home and you start getting texture thrashing - where things blur out when other things manage to become clearly visible. So I tend to replace all of those after I buy something. As a consumer, I bought a set of very nice textures that I like for wood, cement, brick, metal, etc... - I re-texture a LOT of the things I buy using these over and over again so that I avoid texture thrashing. As long as you're going to go mod - make your UV cuts friendly to people using their own textures, and you'll also end up being more 'render friendly' for the skilled consumer. (If you want to go the extreme opposite route - tell people where they can buy the textures you used if you used textures from others... OR, put out your own base textures as a kit for your customers... what better compliment for you than if I re-texture my whole house using the kit I got from you that I first saw in 'item X' I bought from you? - I get my ability to reduce textures and have smoother renders, and you get your style all over my builds. When somebody asks me "hey, where did you get the this wall or that rock?" I end up sending them to your shop...

Theresa Tennyson wrote: Incidentally, Loki Eliot sells mod. Back when I was attempting the child avatar, almost all of the things I got that DID work for her came from Loki Eliot and were boys clothes. They didn't look right because I wanted girl's outfits - but they were at least modable to be closer to my desired look. I have a few buildings and things from him as well - because they were mod, I knew I could fix any issues I needed to to fit the theme of my land. Loki is basically an easy sell for me. I haven't bought much from him, but he pops up on 'check that brand' list a lot.