Pussycat Catnap

Yep. I'm one of that quarter. I see no point in a security orb on my linden home. I DO tend to keep one in the skybox on mainland - where I set it to police ONLY the inside of the box. - and again don't bother with one at ground. I think it's best to discourage their use - so making it something you need to dig through your stuff to find and then use is best. If there was a way to make all orbs in Bellisseria cost 10x their current land impact - I'd be for it. Even if to do it it also applied to mainland. I'd be willing to suffer that cost for the one in my mainland skybox if it made that improvement to the grid as a whole.

I want to say a houseboat in Lolipop midway down the bottom pier that bordered the region south of it, not yet released at the time. I'm not sure that was my first though - I think my first was actually a camper... somewhere...

I use a day cycle unless I'm taking a specific image. My builds in SL all use lights with my own scripts designed to light up the space when it's dark and an avatar is present in the parcel. My screenshots where I pick a specific time of day lighting are just as likely to use my 3pm setting as they are to use my 3am one with an added spotlight or 3. (some of the best lighting works by using 3 spotlights strategically - which is how I do shoots in tools like Daz3d, and sometimes try to recreate with SL.) A backlight, blend light, and focus light.

In Jamaica this is referred to as a Riddim. Riddims occur when singer all record their own songs to essentially the same music - which can often start as an instrumental. Some of them will make some changes to that music, some will just use new lyrics. The results can be dramatic either way. It began as a way to reduce costs of studio musicians, but it's become something of a tradition and a great way for established artists to help lift up their junior peers. Put out a riddim album with some famous singers, and all the minor ones also get some boosted exposure, and some of those will eventually become established figures in their own right and then carry it forward.

The Kingsmen version had a lot of mishaps during the recording, and one of them yells out a profanity when he dropped his drumsticks in mid recording. The incoherent singing is because the lead singer was a kid with braces on... For some odd reason... somebody kept the recording and released it rather than trash it as was supposed to happen. And even odder still... of all the 1000 versions ever made of it, that is the version that went globally famous. After all, the original version was written by a guy in LA who heard a Jamaican on the radio while sitting on the toilet, grabbed a roll, and wrote the thing down before getting up.. yeah... because... reasons... I've set this to start right at the story behind it: But this video also has 9 other great stories about song often not understood or misheard. Almost equally famous is SpringSteen's "leftist antiwar song" Born in the USA - which most people don't realize they've got wrong. I need to rewatch that and edit this based on what the mishap actually was... It's actually a very tame song about a guy in a bar telling the bartender, who's name is Louie, that he hopes to sail home soon and see his girlfriend... But so much went wrong with that recording that people thought something else was going on...

Let's see... Rez and attach some prims and... Done. Easy as that. 😛 As you can see, I haz lots of books, so I've got me lots of learning on this kinda stuff. 😉 EDIT: Other people answered the serious question, so it was time for the literal answer. 🙂

Is this an advertisement? Anyway... here's one thing to consider about the smaller land limits of SL. They mean that most of us are forced into communities. If everyone has their own isolated island - why bother with SL at all - just use Open Sim.

The 'custom rigging' appears to be script loaded deformers. If you use the option to delete scripts, you can get as low as 256kbs of scripts still there. But among the scripts it will delete are the ones that keep those deformers loaded - so you lose all of that customization on your next login. Before removing scripts it's a big more script intense than the old heads. There are some good things, and some mixed things. It appears to be higher complexity than the older Catwa - but only by a small amount. It does remove some un-needed layers. It appears to be made presuming BOM - but oddly doesn't have BOM set by default. No more hairbase or brows (I think no brows, I didn't find them and I forgot to examine it in wireframe and with transparencies to see more detail. Only 2 heads out so far - and neither is as stylized as some of Catwa's older heads. I use Catwa Kittia which has unusually large eyes - you cannot replicate this with the HDPro heads that are out so far. I have the eyes in Kittia set a bit overdone to emphasize that my avatar is not human. They also need to update the teeth addon for it for me. I use a full row of all sharp teeth as a neko. It has vampire fangs, but not the fully sharp teeth I am using with their older teeth addon. Demo it. It will be great for some but not yet there for others. I'm on the fence, and wondering if a more stylized head will come in time for people that used Catwa heads like Kittia and Daria. Recognizing that we're the niche, and the existing choices were more mainline releases.

That's like how, back in the old days before they had as many options as they now do for reporting issues - it was very common practice to just file an 'Abuse Report' against Governor Linden. It was basically how you filed a support ticket for a glitch...

Ah... the joys of mainland... I've long felt banlines should be required to be visible to anyone who is able to go inside them, but people who are blocked by them should have the option to make them invisible. If they made that flip in design - a LOT of banlines would vanish. ps: You actually can write a script that will make actual global banlines of everyone in SL... but I won't post the details. I suspect if someone writes it, we'll see a new addition to the covenant.

Agreed. For me, and I suspect many others, the purpose of Linden Homes is that covenant and the assurance that my neighbor's build won't be some nightmare of inconsistency and lack of design, at least not on the outside. (yes one of my neighbors has managed to put a bed halfway through an outside wall and leave it there for months... but that's still mild compared to mainland). The covenant brings a LOT of value to the table. Yeah, the prefabs are not as amazing as the latest thing from Trompe Loell, and not as customizable. But they're still pretty good. I suspect they might actually be from Trompe Loell or another builder in that tier of quality - but then constrained a bit due to the needs of linden home layouts. They DO look to be made to... actually... a higher quality standard the most of the 'current top for sale' items. The scripting and LOD management and UV mapping is superior to even the top brands we can buy... it's just the design is more constrained. And it's clear that is purposefully so. One of the top designers has been more or less 'outed' as being a mole working on the linden homes. I wont' say who... because you had to be here and in the inworld group at the right time when people figured this out looking at models. Either one of the moles is the same person, or they copied them so close it's DMCA time. All I will say is this one at least, was not my example above of Trompe Loell. I've seen some things that share broad theme with Trompe - but seem to have been built & styled very differently. The reason Bellisseria is so top quality is that some of the best skills in SL are on that team - both linden and mole. And they HAVE done things that we also see in models sold on the market. The trads, houseboats, campers, and vics all look a lot like themes folks have been buying for mainland and estates. What differs is they were homogenized for mass production without mass-lag inducement. They render better, use smaller scripts, and have more thought put into the fact that they're designed to stay there inworld for years and not just until next month's designer event.

I could go for a southwestern / Mexico / Pueblo theme:

A lot of folks seem to easily forget that this is all variables and instantations of blocks of data in the memory and CPU time of assorted servers in a datacenter and on datacenters on the cloud. They seem to start thinking these are real objects, and a real inventory. So they make odd comments like that, that... completely miss what's going on. This is why I worked so hard in my first post to not call them what they're called in programming, objects. Because non-technical people confuse that with an object... and get jumbled about what rezzing involves. an object... is NOT an object... it's an object.

Some of those builds are annoying. Some of them really help to understand what is possible on that land. I built a cliff house for myself back in 2012 or so, and stayed in it until 2015: I only built this after seeing something like it on the land of that 'big Zindra land baron' on a nearby region. - To this date, that house remains my favorite ever design, and I still have the pieces of it in inventory in case I ever live on a cliff again. Other times when I have gone to an area looking at the land and considering a purchase or not - it's been those builds left by land barons that have gotten me to deciding for or against. If I like one of their ideas - I often do my own take on the same theme. If their ideas all look bad, it helps reveal to me that I won't be able to make what I want in that area. That noted - yes some of these builds are just blighted eyesores with for sale signs... but not all of them.

That's actually 'somewhat' one of the old linden home themes. As such the Lindens and Moles likely know already how viable such a theme is in terms of popularity. I suspect it's not... but I could be wrong. The themes we have seen come out so far all seem to be echo'd in some of the commonly done themes from house-makers. It could be that the Lindens / Moles started by looking at what was selling well. It's a common theory also that some of those Moles are actually well known merchants that got invited into the Mole team as a result... and if that's true, they probably brought their expertise on what sells well with them to the team.

Yeah. I'm of the opinion that Vics and Trads should be merged in the mailbox and called one theme on two different land styles. They're way too similar. That's also why I think styles 7 and 8 will be 'more of the same'. They seem to not want to go too far out there. There's what I wish we could get (Jetson's /Star Was Cloud Cities, cities hundreds of meters underwater, fantasy, etc)... And what I think is the best I could hope for (container houses, brownstones - still similar to what we have, but nice enough that I might like them). Yeah. That's key. Much as I love the idea of that underwater city - I did see someone build that once in SL and set it up as a rental estate. They got 0 takers, and closed pretty fast. "Too cool" of an idea ends up having too niche of an appeal. So... gotta look for the best idea that can be had within the framework of also appealing to the broadest possible audience. That's... not an easy objective.

My High School had a whole huge African Studies department. The only class I ever took there was "African Dance" as one semester of P.E. The school put a lot of 'social pressure' on non-Black students to NOT take classes there. And it put a lot of pressure on Black students to take every class they could through that department. In effect - the end result was the school I went to in an ultra 'left wing liberal Bay Area city' managed to use "African Studies" as a way to create segregation. The only time I saw Black students in the same class was in P.E. I would have been tracked with them and the other Hispanics, but before moving to that city I'd lived in a more conservative location and they had tried to force downtrack me into 'special ed' but somehow my mother got in there and made them test me - which is how I found out I have a genius IQ, and got to have an education from then on where I usually the only non-white kid in my classes. That's a big part of why I used to carry a knife to school and grew up in so much violence - getting harassed of jumped by white kids. The 'kids' in the Liberal Bay Area school I went to where the first whites I knew (including teachers - my biggest beatdown as a child happened when the teacher stepped into the hall so he wouldn't "officially" see my white classmates assault me - the day after that is when I got my first knife) that were not violent towards me. But the school was setup against all of my peers. I note this story because... even when they do teach about Africa - they take pains to keep the white kids from learning it. They don't want them knowing any of the beauty of that place's history or cultures. Think about Netflix for a second... Not a non-sequitur by the way. If you live in the USA, before Netflix went global you probably rarely if ever saw documentaries or foreign movies. When I grew up even British TV like Dr. Who was hard to find - it was basically 'weekends on PBS' (public broadcasting) only. I never knew that one of the world's richer cinematic histories was just a few miles south of me in Mexico - I actually learned that from Koreans when living in Korea... All that culture and history from pretty much anywhere in the world was a total mystery. Netflix went global around 2013 or so (+/- a year. Could look it up but not important to this point). One of the things they did was start showing a LOT of documentaries. Even American made documentaries were pretty rare before them. Cable channels like "History" just show weird reality TV shows about people that hunt bigfoot... and even when they do show history it's just about WWII. Netflix brought Americans documentaries on a massive scale... Both domestic and international. And then it started bringing movies and TV as well. My friends from Korea now watch a LOT of Netflix here, because it has all the shows from 'back home' and it's subtitled so many of my non-Korean friends watch it as well (I find Korean dramas too repetitive and their comedy doesn't hit with me well - or I would watch it as it's my second language). Once Netflix did that, other venues have started following. Especially YouTube. Through Netflix and YouTube I learned that the second biggest movie industry in the world... is Nigeria. - I did watch one Nigerian movie recently. It was kinda weird... Not sure it was my thing. A few years ago I would have had no idea that industry even existed... When I was young they worked to keep us all isolated both from the world's cultures, and each other. Whatever else I may think about Netflix and YouTube - they've together torn that wall down, which is a great achievement. Look up some documentaries or TV shows from parts of Africa on Netflix or YouTube. The one I saw was really 'corny' (weird and silly). But they're interesting to see too for helping bridge that mental gap where the west has been taught that 'Africa is a different planet'.

With the new legacy bodies - you can apply BOM onto even a demo. BOM is just an applied texture - so any body that allows appliers can allow BOM Compliance. being native BOM however - by removing (or having the ability to take off / remove) all the onion layers is another matter. I do not know if Legacy does this... Maitreya 5.x+ and I gather Slink Redux both let you wear the body without any onion layers - unless I am misinformed about Slink Redux.

Oh... I got an idea now for the 512m size if that becomes theme 7 or 8. Micro homes and/or homes built out of Containers: You could actually put half of these on piers over the water and half of them in hills / mountains (hint hint hint).

The existence of Horizons might blunt their desire to do a spacey theme again - though I hope not as I would like to see that, but only if it featured skyboxes as the prefabs. (Like a series of sky platform houses - and things floating around on the 'protected space' in between such as traffic signs or little robots. We have 5 themes out so far. a 6th announced. The plan was 8? I suspect the last 2 won't be anything too fancy. They will probably mirror some common form of real world housing. If we guess one will be a 512 and the other a 1024 - I'm not sure what that 512 could be that wouldn't be problematic. Much as many have suggested apartments - they would be too close together to actually be popular once they came out. If I look at what I see house makers making the most of, it seems popular items not yet covered in the linden homes would be brownstones, lofts, and post-industrial things like converted warehouses. Lofts falls into the apartments problem - and this is why most of them are sold as skyboxes. They wouldn't work as a linden home theme. So I'm suspecting one or both of the last two themes might come from brownstone or converted warehouses. That noted... converted warehouses stop working well as a theme when you mass replicate them... and every image I get when googling brownstones has them placed right up against each other: - but the building style does work well when spaced out... And I see that in SL a lot, just not in RL.

My neighbor has an example of a great basement on his plot that neighbors me on Zindra mainland. Of course our region allows you to go +/- somewhere above 40m. That said - he was able to use mesh prims that he textured to match the local ground to great effect. My own attempt to do the same thing on my plot a year or two ago... looked like an absolute mess. At various points in time many of the neighbors have had underground builds there. The neighbor on the other side of me also hase a deep basement, but did it with a simple prim raised above the ground and textured in a brick texture - it doesn't look that good. Her build is more prims almost no mesh, and very little sculpties. Been waiting for that person to get an updated building for years... On regular mainland you can get about 8m clearance - raise the land around, lower a cutout. It seems to go smoother if you divide up your parcel a bit first... slice away the part you want to dig. Give it to a different group. Make sure that whatever alt does the land digging ONLY has permission to dig on the new cut parcel but cannot do anything on the remaining land - lacking perms there. That seems to force the system to not 'extend' your cut too extensively and not mess up the "neighbor" (which is actually you) too much... Otherwise, I find digging basements tends to make radically weird spikes in the land around it... - you can rejoin the parcels after you've finished the land edit. Once you do it all find some mesh prims that can make a smooth hill - preferably with a cut in them somewhere that is either a clean shape (a cut hole or square), or by positioning them around your building at least leaves nothing exposed. Then just assign the same texture to those prims as the mainland ground around them. Put some plants or rocks in spots with odd angles. Done well enough you can keep it to almost the same height as the land around it.

Yeah... one of the reasons male alts don't get much time from me - I like Bishonen looking men, not the body builder look...