Pussycat Catnap

I was looking for the sexxors, freebies, and hawt furry pron. And I heard you could be a millionaire in 3 seconds flat by selling noobs junk. But all I got was a new religion, a ton of introspection, and some forum drama... (and a bunch of crusty old people for friends... ... ... ... some of them are even as old as me. )

Lucretia Brandenburg wrote: When I play around with my avatar's shape, I tend to consider my RL shape and work from there. I have very wide square sort of shoulders in RL, and I have a bit of trouble narrowing them on my avatar without getting a slope to them, since I sort of pattern them after RL a bit too much. This is one of those areas where SL has one slider for what needs about 5. SL's should slider just seems to expand the thing overall, and not always in the right directions... So you get that slope, and it ends up looking not quite right... On the one hand the more sliders they add, the more exponentially sluggish the avatar gets in rendering on various computers... but on the other hand, you can look at competing MMOs like City of Heroes (2004) or Champions (2009 or 2010) and see that you can add customizeability that works without suffering the same lag you would if editing this in Poser or Daz3D by being super smart about where you optimize. City of Heroes had pretty funky models too... primative for even their era. But still better than what we have if you remove our prims, mesh, sculpties, and shadow-baked skins... Ever want to know how 'fugly' ALL of our shapes really are, even if 137% proportional, put on a skin that is a single color, like just a white tiff image... and be prepared to scream a little inside... and then thank the maker of your skin...

Lucretia Brandenburg wrote: I should have qualified that and said for me, it is difficult to get my short shape into proportions I find attractive because I do what Penny stated, start off with a taller shape, the proportions of which I like, and begin the process of tweaking it down. A scaler would be great, but without that, it is a process that takes me quite some time. Below is me, 7 feet 1 inch, while wearing 3 inch heels down to 5 feet 5 inches in the same outfit. You should start from scratch making a proportionate avatar, then apply your face, and some body customizations. your arms remain too short in the shorter version, and your shoulders are as wide as a man's. The hip-waist-bust ratio might desire some adjustment, but this has variety among RL people - so this is where you can make yourself unique and still proportionate. But the arm length and shoulder width are what science makes them. The top issues in getting proportionate are, in order of severity: Body midpoint at base of crotch (put 2 equal length prims together, stretch to height, and they should meet at your crotch). Wingspan of arms = to height from sole to top of bald head (hold arms in T-pose to test). Shoulders of proper width for the sex of the person (a giveaway for a person who is transgender). Head size. No pin heads or anime heads. Body about 7 to 8 heads tall. Man hands (unfixable in SL, but in RL this is the other 'dead giveway' of a transgender person who transitioned as an adult). Man hands refers not to length but thickness / width / finger-to-palm ratio. SL slider only adjusts total length - the one thing that is not adjusted 'individually' in biology). If you can get these right, a lot of other mistakes people often make don't become as noticeable. I think arms are the biggest killer for SL avatars - because the slider maxes out before most people can get even close to proportionate - quite a LOT of the blame for the messed up porportions in SL falls on whoever made the original avatar '3d model' for SL back in 2003 or so. Even back then, there were amatuer 3D modelers all over renderosity who would have drooled at the chance to make their model in a low rez video game version. Had LLs gone for any one of them, we'd be looking at works of art today in SL for the 'worst case' shapes...

Amethyst Jetaime wrote: Charli Infinity wrote: jersey shore people befor the show? I think they would still be called tacky that's why they were picked. cheap dresses, overdone tan, and those t shirts ang gelled up hair...yeah tacky from any angle. People that says others judge easily often don't realise they are also judging others easily themselves. If you love it you why would you even care what other people think. Not to defend the Jersey Shore look by any means, but I must point out that the 'overdone tans' you complain about are the natural look of a lot of Mediterranean peoples which the people on Jersey Shore as well as a lot of people in that area of the country descend from. Their skin IS darker and looks tan to fair skinned people even when they haven't been out in the sun for months. Not so much. The look is more the product of a tanning booth. Thus why it is an odd placed tan - misfitting the features, or with splotches for things like lips being untanned, or an overly orange cast from a spray on tan. The mediterranian look is tanned, but not the same kind of tan. People in the mediterranian have natural casts to their skin. The 'Jersey Shore' look doesn't really refer to the actual people of New Jersey. But to a Hollywood parody of them. It is more a product of wealthy white trash that don't get out in the sun, do not descend from the same pool as the people around them, and use chemicals and tanning booths to 'overdo it' in a certain look - which again goes too far here but not enough there and ends up looking like a sad parody of the actually physically healthy local caucasians. One could almost call the Jersey Shore look "white face", as in a reference to "black face" because its kinda offensive to the actual people you describe if you think about what its made to say. Its weathly Paris Hilton types trying to be cool by acting over the top slutty and trashy because that is what they think working class whites are like... And that's really a slap in the face to actual working class white people from New Jersey...

braylasana wrote: We merchants have been complaining for a long time about freebies and dollarbies (the tacky stuff) dominating the search. Make your presence known in the Merchant's forum about this as a customer. Check out ColdLogic and anything else made by Damien Fate for non tacky clothes. Great content is out there. And I see more and more of it everyday. I see people shopping for it all the time, but then when I start wandering around social venues I feel like I'm the only person who buys any of it... and I keep meeting folks on 2006 blinged-out freebies. Marketplace is tricky. But if they just had a toggle demo button, and toggled out anything labeled as demo, or in reverse, ONLY showed demo items - that would clean a lot of clutter while at the same time making the so-called clutter very useful when flipped on. - sometimes you want to find all the demos, compare them, then get the real goods. But these should not be grouped alongside actual freebies. As for filtering out freebies and dollarbies, just set your price floor to $2L+. But then again... this filters out the demos...

Suspiria Finucane wrote: Tacky is a perception of course and what you may think is tacky, others may not. One thing great about SL is that diversity reigns supreme. A suggestion if I may, when your friends ask, show them a picture of your AV. And yet 9 of 10 avatars (exaggeration folks) are that same tall blond super tanned cleavage monster with 'my pimp done smacked me good' black eyes and a frown, or the male 'beach boy tan' with governator muscles, t-rex arms, and tall enough to make Yao Ming feel like a dwarf. Diversity is possible in SL. But possible is not the same as actual.

For every forum hero that comes along and says "How dare you show me how to hold it when I use the bathroom without offering to hold it for me"... I get 2 people thanking me for the articles and comments I post on the subject. Thing is... mommy can reach over there and yank it off of you and hold it right... or just give folks enough instructions that those who want to do it right can figure it out. Because surprisingly enough, a -LOT- of people want their SL to look better - they just don't know why it doesn't look as good as it could. I'm likewise extremely thankful to the people who first pointed this out to me, and the people who pointed out windlight, and the neighbor I used to have who would hassle me every day to 'go take that class at NCI on building and stop moaning about how nobody's selling what you want' - because she got me hooked. We're not here yanking it off of you... and you don't have to read the advice if you don't want to know... and we're not demanding you do it. Ignorance should be a choice, not something that folks get stuck with; so I'll keep spreading the news. - This isn't like the countless times people get ejected from sims for being small... We're just forum trolling; which is pretty harmless.

Perrie Juran wrote: Why waste your time on a Waste of Time? Um... If any of us listened to -that- advice SL probably wouldn't last more than another day.

Perrie Juran wrote: Nimh20 Vandeverre wrote: But a lot of them are. I have a tool that tells you 16 and its legal by TOS. And I want something done about it for reasons mentioned in my post. I'd be really curious what this tool is. I once asked a linden "so which of these guys I just reported is a bot, and which is scripted or active" and they told me they were not allowed to tell me and I was not allowed to pry into that - but that if I kept seeing the particular abuse I had seen at the time, to just keep reporting and let them sort it out. That was not this issue I believe, but I assume the same rule keeps applying: if you've got a bot-detector, best to get rid of it - because unless you start monitoring things like IPs and how people connect, you can't really know this. And if you start monitoring that... well you can ask some people who used to have SL accounts how they lost them...

This game needs 'drowning' added to water... and swimming as something different from fly so that sims with no flight can still be swam in (a good few 'water builds' turn off flight - some of them linden builds... /facepalm). But drowning, followed by a TP home, would clean all this mess up.

I've gotten this message going to my own mainland home before... if the sim was down... SL errors sometimes seem to get tossed in a bag full of cats, jumbled around, and randomly pulled back out before being sent...

Penny Patton wrote: Also, for the most part, one doesn't need to get rid of old content. So long as your content is moddable you should have no trouble reducing its size. The bigger problem is getting people to try alternate camera settings (necessary for smaller content). Such camera changes are really easy to do, but they require you to change some numbers in the debug settings and the average SL users is unwilling to play with that. Recently when having to adjust the cat furry avatar I now use down to my size, I discovered the joy of chat based linkset resizer scripts. There I was trying to eyeball stretching each paw by the same amount (click, drag, check that Z on the left toe, oops, its 0.01 different than the one on the right... oh and is this the same amount as I did the head by... and darn it, and eyeball just went out my left ear... ack, start over...)... And then I noticed the resizer I give away as a freebie is what I ought to try for this... And it works for EVERYTHING that can be modded. So after putting it into my new avatar. Measuring the difference in how tall it was to how tall I wanted to be... I was getting shorter by I think a factor of 0.82974... (ok I just made that up. but it was that specific, and I now have it written in a notecard, you will see why in a moment). So I pop it into the avatar and just type the resize command: /4 0.82974 - poof, entire avatar resized in about 2 seconds (cause I was laggy or it would have been faster). Then I thought... hmmm... this chair I bought is way too big... Popped the script in, typed in the same chat command. And poof, perfect for my avatar in a second. - Just had to remember to delete the script after, or EVERYTIME I type anyting in /4 it feeds it to that script. My freebie is nothing more than the same script the lindens put on the script library wiki. I just put it out as a freebie (with a link to the source) knowing most people have no idea there even is a script library wiki... (I could have charged for it... I'd be able to pay my tier off of the popularity of it, and I KNOW some of the others that are for a fee are identical. Though many are touch based). Advantage of a chat based one... remember that crazy number up there? Precision. Try and resize by EXACTLY 0.82974 down clicking some script a few hundred times to take off 0.05 per click... Oh yes and this: Penny Patton wrote: It's actually easier to get good proportions on a realistically sized avatar. The problem is the appearance editor, it's very difficult to make drastic changes to a shape since you basically need to redo ALL the proportions just to change your height. The various appearance sliders interact with each other in ways that are not entirely intuitive and there's no single "size" slider that keeps everything in proportion while changing your height. - It is amazingly easy to do proportions right when you're avatar is small enough that you can avoid maxing out the dials, but not so small that you have to minimize them. Right in the realm of about human size also happens to be a sweet spot for most of the proportion dials. Female arms being the notable exception... ONLY child AVs can get female arms right without being in some crazy high number... But they then have trouble on all of the other dials... Oh and yes, the first day I ever fixed my proportions, for the first maybe 2 hours I felt I had spider arms... then I logged out, looked at some art, and logged back in and noticed I couldn't look at about half the people around me without wondering how they managed to reach their own mouths... Because we spend everyday of our RLs looking at RL proportions, it really only takes a little bit of time to get used to it once you first see it in SL. The curse is that once you can tell the difference, a lot of your friends will look really funny for a while. Its often easier for me to look at my Tiny and Furry friends for this reason: no uncanny valley issues.

These are hilarious screenshot stories. Let me add one serious bit of advice: If you are just learning how to rez a prim and make things, head over to NCI or Builder's Brewery and take a class or two. They were extremely useful to me back in the day in learning to get started.

The scanty nature of the image is the last thing that bothers me about it. While they have begun to add the 'token colored' to somewhere a few clicks in on a slideshow that does not autoplay so many never even know... the first slide still seems to be a whites only playground - even when it has more than one person on it. But the outfit, I find playful and almost conservative in the style of bikini fairy.

Drake1 Nightfire wrote: I would like to point out there is only one RACE on this planet.. The human race. The word you are looking for is ethnicity. Are you going to say all black people are from Africa? what about Haitians? or Dominicans? Are all white people from England? African American isn't even an ethnicity, its a Country of origin. Where are the Irish starter avs? The Germanic, Russian, Turkish, Aussie and many others? Not every single look on the planet can be covered with the basic starter avatar. Like many others have said, since you will be changing almost immediately, why does it matter? Erase 500 years of brutality and oppression against Africans (and I might add, other groups as well, including a multi-century genocide against Native Americans) and that might start to not sound absurd. In biology there is one human species - proven despite centuries of bloodshet by those trying to deny it. But culture and history matter. The blood of my ancestors is on the hands of yours. I can forgive, but I will never forget. It is one reason why I am so fond of modern Germans. Unlike Americans, they know darn well that to forget or deny is to become complicit in the crime. To acknowledge and then champion against it ever happening again anywhere puts them on a moral high ground above many others in the world.

16 wrote: a9a wrote: Why wouldn't this company think to include a basic African American male avatar in the r otisserie of starter avatars to chose from? The selections are a bit one sided as diverse as this appears to be. sometimes on here someone will post and ask how come is hardly any RL black guys in SL. like never see any hardly ever. maybe this is why. plain old dumb no think on part the promotions/marketing department Pretty much nailed it there 16. Minorites often stay away from online gaming communities, and "table top" ones as well, because they are excluded by highly racialized stories and a lack of a diversity in marketing material. SL is no exception to this, even though its not sold as a 'gamer platform'.

16 wrote: Pussycat Catnap wrote: STANDARD SIZES HAVE *******NOTHING******* TO DO WITH HEIGHT. Mesh could care less about your height. Staying informed is half the battle folks... yes they do if you wear a XSS size on a 7ft tall shape you going to look like a anorexic beanpole. and if you wear XL size on a 4ft tall shape you gunna look like you got squished by a building that fell on you Flat out wrong. Look at the numbers. If you're seeing beanpole and squished its the shape itself - not the standard size numbers: http://catnapkitty.wordpress.com/2012/07/01/mesh-clothes-dont-care-if-youre-tall-or-short-thick-or-thin-they-care-about-stretch/ - How many times do I have to link that? Where is height in this list: Women: Body Fat Torso Muscle Breast Size Love Handles Belly Size Leg Muscle Butt Size Saddle Bags Men: Body Fat Belly Size Torso Muscle Love Handles Leg Muscle Butt Size Saddle Bags Package Pectorals ???

Check your script usage. Check the script usage of the people regularly in the places you go to? If they're your friends ask them. If not, you can kind of guess by looking at some people: - the more things on them that can be 'touched' the higher -chance- they are causing lag. - If they have a lot of no-mod items, likely lag-causing. - human avatars tend to be laggier than non-humans. But non-humans on -OLD- designs can also be problematic. (Furry makers have gotten very good about cutting down on script burdens). But -nekos- can often be lag-monsters if they have clickable tails: Neko parts are often made by less experienced builders... - If they have sculpties on, that could be causing lag. - Mesh tends to be -lower- lag than prims or sculpties. Only exceptions are for people who actually are having trouble with things like windlight or scripts and wrongly blame mesh instead. - flexi hair and flexi outfits are often scripted. Mesh outfits are less likely to be scripted. So this can also be a clue. - Nothing above is fullproof. Just tendancies of where problems can end up when they exist. Check the script usage of the place you're at. Easiest way... go somewhere else and see if it gets better or worse. Try sims that are nearly empty - mainland oceans that lack fish/plants. If you own the land, you can find all of the needed info in the About Land window under scripts. If things are getting laggier... its someting above. Something a change of habits -will- correct. Many of us are experiencing the exact opposite - lag getting better by the day.

Innula Zenovka wrote: I think people may be misunderstanding what I said. To clarify, it seems to me a lot less work to some minor tweaks to my existing shape to get it to fit into a standard size mesh item than it does to get a standard size shape from the marketplace and tweak the however many sliders it is that make up my face. As you rightly point out, there's only a few settings I need to adjust to get my shape to fit the nearest standard size. There's the best part of 100 I need to adjust to get a shape from the marketplace to have my face. Yes on this I agree. Especially as the list of dials that standard sizes effects is not that many. Most people, once they find the standard size closest to them, can take those dials and add them to a copy of their shape and still look nearly the same as they did before. Which is the better choice for another reason as well. The actual shapes they hand out as the "standard sizes" on all of the -other- dials that don't count are horridly disfigured.

I have recently encountered a line of gaming machines in SL that give no prizes at all, and are all group play. 'secondlifegaming' I think was the company behind them, but I can't find them on google. The ones I tried were pretty fun. - A venue full of these would be nice. It'd be a social place. But like all venues, has no built in way to fund itself... I've sometimes thought of rezzing out a zyngo box as a way to make some tier funding... but it seems unethical. Marketplace tells me to look up these: K.R. Engineering NuzzleTech Aphrodite Games Kottos Games Factory

16 wrote: Drake1 Nightfire wrote: i have yet to find any mesh piece of clothing that fits my av without the alpha layer. no, i am not a giant barbarian. I am 6'3", just like in RL. for some reason, mesh designers have made all mens mesh with sloped shoulders.. like we walk around depressed. Standard sizes is a joke. Thats like saying there are only 5 sizes in SL. And THAT is why i wont buy mesh till the deformer is done. the standard sizes was worked out by some clothes designers wanting to start making mesh clothes. they just did to establish some guidelines for themselves to work to when making their stuff STANDARD SIZES HAVE *******NOTHING******* TO DO WITH HEIGHT. Mesh could care less about your height. Staying informed is half the battle folks...

Aria Repine wrote: Innula Zenovka wrote: That's good that they do. Certainly though, some of my favourite stores' mesh clothes quite simply do not fit any of the standard size shapes they purport to be. That doesn't worry me; I would still, I think, rather adjust my own shape to fit the mesh that's the closest size, rather than use a standard size shape and then change the face to match my own, since that's far less work. Yea there's still a time or two i have to make minor adjustments (usualy its only my breast-boyancy, which is something no mesh designer, even with templates, can account for). But thats just a minor change. If you have breasts in RL - or have sufficiently handled them; you might know that they move when you clamp things onto them. Cleavage, bouyancy, and even size are -ALL- settings that should change with outfit. The standard sizes set to breasts size, though they -should- ignore this within a slight range downard to account for tighter outfits. Also, to the person you quoted... the standard sizes effect a -LOT LESS- dials than that person seems to think. If you look at the list (on my blog and the standard sizes blog), its a fairly tight list - ONLY those things not affected by rigging and not (other than a few) affected by clothing squeeze.

Innula Zenovka wrote: I suspect you'll find that standard sizes are, in fact, anything but, and vary from designer to designer. I've given up using them as anything other than a general indication of size. Almost -ALL- of the shops that use the standard sizes plan do it right. I've only found a few that fail on it. That said, there -IS- a competing standard out there, from a template maker, who puts out 4 sizes (the standard sizes are a set of 5), but does -NOT- put out their shape numbers... - This can cause confusion, but look for the standard sizes logo. See also my blog article on what numbers do or don't matter in seeing if you can fit to one of them: http://catnapkitty.wordpress.com/2012/07/01/mesh-clothes-dont-care-if-youre-tall-or-short-thick-or-thin-they-care-about-stretch/ Also, I have made a set of shapes for the standard sizes that are -ALSO- proportionate. The ones in the kit are horridly disfigured, but fortunately only on all of the dials -NOT- used for the sizes... so I was able to fix them.

This is like asking if its ok to use drugs if you only use them to feed them to your own kids... Just think about it.

Amethyst Jetaime wrote: There are a lot of reasons someone would ban nudity on their land that have nothing to do with complaints or morals. If a sim owner feels nudity is not appropriate to their venue, which it isn't in a lot of places, it is their right to make rules against it. They are not required to accommodate exhibitionists just because they have land on an M sim or even an A sim. I have often been an SL nudist. But when not in the mood I can be seriously not in the mood. Nothing can be more jarring than sitting between a pair of friends who are nude and about 1.5 times taller than you, so that you feel like your head is being squished by mega-boobs... Which for them was a casual afternoon tea and conversation, but for me was a "ok, what's my excuse going to be for needing to log out?" So despite often being an SL nudist, I can understand this. But I do think people who don't want any nudity around should stick to land where that is the TOS. If you arrive on an A sim, you can -expect- that the default assumption is nude-ok. If you arrive on M, it could go either way. When in a nudist mood, I -will- tromp around on M land sans outfit. But quickly cover or leave if the local place feels otherwise. If the local place feels otherwise on A land, I feel put out: they have that right, but they are rude to use it on A land.