Pussycat Catnap

See this recent blog on the subject of the begging scams: http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2012/12/beware-the-flatterbot.html#more - To learn some ways to spot people using it to run a con.

Phil Deakins wrote: The better way is to enter a maximum amount you are willing to pay. If someone outbids your current bid, the system bids again for you, but only the smallest allowable increase. And it does that until it reaches your maximum. If somone outbids your maximum, you lost, but you're content that haven't paid more that you are willing to pay. I'm sure that the auction system operates a maximum. I'm sure it used to, anyway - unless my memory is totally wrong. But that logic only makes sense in a world of rational actors. There is no such thing. People will bid what they feel it is worth, what they are willing to pay. Then when they realize others have an interest as well, they go through a battle of emotions that leads to either resentment, despair and walking away, realizing it wasn't of interest, or fighting tooth and claw because the emotional value of it has just been driven up. Looks like the OP got caught in the tooth and claw, and didn't fight fast enough or hard enough.

Amethyst Jetaime wrote: The basic mechanics of making a shape is not rocket science. Anyone can look up basic human proportions and with enough time and patience can make an acceptable shape. I say that because while there are people that make excellent shapes that truly are artistic, most of the shapes I have seen for sale do not fall into this category. I made my first draft of my shape sitting on a gray platform that I'd rezzed into back in 2006 on the old account. The sign said I was supposed to, so I did. I figured I would not be able to "edit my character" once past the character creation screens in this MMO. Over time most of my changes were limited to correcting proportions once I learned how to rez a set of prims and measure myself out (see guide below). I've tweaked the face only a few times - as I got out of gray and was able to see detail, and as I got a skin that wasn't just a solid color with 'grains' in it. Most recent adjustment being a bit to make the head more round and dial down the 'egghead' setting - but otherwise I like it, and it is anatomically correctly proportioned to my body - which is within the human range of size -AND- proper in proportion. Doing the body shape to be -PERFECT- to the range of possible human proportions is trivially easy. Anyone can do it if they get on a T-pose stand in a place they can rez a prim. Its all math. The art comes in with some of the body fat and muscle dials. And then the facial features (and the shape I sell has purposefully dialed back facial features as what I'm selling is meant to be the proportions and sizing predone for someone to be good both to the math -and- to the mesh standard sizes.). The above said, almost ALL of the commercial shape sellers are horrid... I'm sure there are good ones out there, but I have yet to see them. Many of them can do good faces - the art part. But they SUCK at the body proportions - the math part. Many also suck when it comes to scale and issues of where to assign body fat and muscle... (this comes with the caveat of having never been to the shape shop of anyone who has as yet posted above me in this thread.) Its like a freakshow gallery of pretty heads violently detached from their bodies and mounted on stick figures made of medieval pikes to be mounted on the London Bridge as a warning to people to stay away from SL.

*** wrote: It may be acceptable but it is grammatically incorrect. It is politically correct though. Up to the 60's (wasn't that about the time that Gloria Steinam . . . /foaming mouth of right wing oddity . . . I'm sure it will all evolve some more as time dictates..........I just hope it's not for political reasons like this evolution was. Charolotte Caxton wrote: I don't think it started in the 60's. From the link you provided: Singular "they" Main article: Singular they Since at least the 15th century, "they" (though, as with singular "you", used with verbs conjugated in the plural, not the singular), "them", "themself", "themselves", and "their" have been used, in an increasingly accepted fashion, as singular pronouns. This usage of the word "they" is often thus called the singular "they". The singular "they" is widely used and accepted in Britain, Australia, and North America in conversation. Many still consider this usage improper grammar, however. Dang liberal hippies and their "the world izza rounda, lika you head!" It's flat thou fools, like a GOD FEARING REPUBLICAN MALE pizza! Uppity technocommunists will next be claiming the world orbits the sun. I beseach thee to burnest them all! Its all Richard III's fault. And the Pope letting those foreigners take Constantinople. /shakes righteous paw of seriously outdated indignation over way too old of news to still be arguing about.

Lynda Baran wrote: A much simpler solution if you are unsure of the person's gender is to refer to them by their name. All this gender neutral stuff is just more political correctness in an attempt to promote sameness and less attention to individualism. I'm not a they, i'm a she or her. And I'm not like everyone esle, I'm and individual. I'm not a worker, I'm a citizen. I refuse to play the game and give up to become just one more face in the mass of humanity to be ignored like everyone else. And yet you yourself are just here guilty of this "radical socialist conspiracy to change the God fearing male dominated Queen's English into some hippy Castro-loving technocommunist bunny-fest" by using "them" and "their" above. Everybody's favorite CAPITALIST NATION: Red China, has a language with no gender pronouns. Then again, that evil socialist country, South Korea; also has no gender pronouns. And they're taking us over with their Gangnam style ways!!! * Then again, this might just have nothing to do with "political correctness" paranoia, or "individualism" paranoia... and be about the fact that language always changes over time, and its easier in a society that has less gender divisions to break it out of the pronouns... - Oþþe wit þē cweþan gecynde Engle.

Language changes over time. I've always found it funny that the dictionaries will add 'lol' and 'gnarly' or 'email', but not the longer-used and more common things like 'ain't' (which might now be in some of them) or using 'they' and 'them' as singular gender neutral pronouns. All ready to be commercial and hip, but not ready to be 'common' and 'down with the peasants'... People get it when you use they... so I will keep on using it... and my high school English teacher can take her fake British accent and shove it. Maybe get some real Brits to shove it for her while speaking Cockney...

So... You want mainland. But you refuse to help fund LL's maintaining of the useless cause of mainland. In SL you basically have a choice: A small themed area where you quickly bump into the edge of the world, or a wide open loosely if not unthemed area where you can explore. - Decide which is more important: the theming and zoning, or the exploring, driving, and sailing. You'll get one or the other. Lag in SL is almost trivial for those who don't carry their own lag with them. I'd wager less than 10% of the sims I pass through have anything really problematic. When they do - the problem is usually one of the other visitors. - It doesn't matter where you retreat to, other visitors can still bring that lag to you, or you yourself could end up doing things that cause it. Lag in SL is sometimes about location, but is more often about who is around. People who find SL laggy should look inward first.

Syo Emerald wrote: What has this to do with mesh? Alphalayers are much longer part of SL then mesh is. Before mesh you may just pick an alpha and use prim hands and feet. Guess how furry avatars work..... According to some comments I read in blogs, the mesh fetishists have destroyed all pixeldom as we know it, and are now moving on to take over the free world in a meshocommunist revolution. So... EVERYTHING has to do with mesh. Ok... Um... since the days of invisiprims, people willing to spend 1000L on X so they could save 20L on Y have been able to exploit makers of Y... I call non-issue.

Sorting tips: Lots of categories and sub-categories. My clothing looks a bit like this: clothing --> mesh --> tops clothing --> mesh --> skirts clothing --> mesh --> pants etc... And 'tops' has recently hit the point where it needs breakout into further categories. Regularly dump old stuff. I recently sent about 10k worth of stuff down to alts. Still boxing up the no-trans items. I prefer buying copy/mod - so this is the larger task. Leave nothing in the main inventory folder. Mine is a pure mess, but some of my alts are very clean here; having made them after I knew better. Use a different account for uploading textures and building from the one used to sell and the one used to play. - My building / product assembly alt mostly sits in a skybox. I can ruin my own inventory and not lose or have to re-upload anything. I also use a specific alt for anything that requires giving debit perms in order to pay me. She never has any money, and controls nothing else that I do. But she did inherrit a -LOT- of my older inventory. And I use her to test whether or not I set the right perms on things in my shop. seanabrady wrote: I think that pretty much sums things up. I started my most recent inventory clean up at about 36,000 items and I am currently at about 18,000. Much of that was silly hunt stuff I will never use and old non-mesh clothing. Not doing chairs and hunts and boards has helped me put a strong control on my inventory. If you're going to do these, do them mostly on an alt, and then come by on a main for only the good stuff. - I've mostly kept that conduct to 'new concepts', like the first few mesh hunts when mesh clothes were new. Otherwise I leave that space for the newbies.

Pamela Galli wrote: Be very careful emptying a lot of trash at once. One merchant (who has posted here about it) lost most of her inventory during a trash empty -- she crashed or something in the middle of it. LL was not able to retrieve it. (She closed her business after that.) This is strange. Because you can just use marketplace to send yourself your own goods, or if in an inworld store, 'take copy' the items in your shop. Being your own stuff, you'd have your original perms with it. Only damage would be with original textures that you were not selling. And that's going to got 10L per to re-upload. Lets imagine you use 5 textures per product and have 100 products. 5000L. Pricey, but if you have that many products - cheap. Probably what you make in a few days, or well, its time for product line clean out anyway (something I personally need...).

People are still making judgements about the official viewer we had in 2009 as if it was relevant to the one we have now. That's what you see when you see many of those complaints about it. Not all, but a good number end with "I tried viewer 2 back during the reign of Emporer Nero..." Much as I am a fan of V3 though, this latest speed boost seems to have skipped over my version of iMac (late 2011 model - the one that was current until just a week or so ago, on OSX 10.8). I see no changes in speed on the official nor the beta. The official viewer speed boosts, for those who get them, seem to be in the beta and not release. Firestorm might therefore have based its new update on the beta. I -have- seen odd behavoir with textures refusing to ever render (having to disable HTTP Textures), and compress textures on by default. And it took several tries to get it to remember my setting for rendervolumeLODfactor. At the default setting both sculpty -AND- mesh look bad as little as 2m's cammed back... Make sure to also boost up: MeshMaxConcurrentRequests to 100, not the default 35... http://catnapkitty.wordpress.com/2010/08/08/getting-started-in-second-life/#Preferences - scroll down to "RenderVolumeLOD"

EDIT: nvm, its a public sim. Weird, because there are 4 more public adult sandbox sims right next to it. But frankly... this is the nature of sandboxes, and the kind of community LLs prefers. Those are the people they wrongly feel are their core customer base. Don't expect anything to be done about it - unless you AR repeatedly, and the linden who answers the AR might very well get fired for doing so if recent rumors are true... I'd consider moving on, out of sandbox land.

Syo Emerald wrote: Now being human is set to such a high level....it feels like being different is wrong. I can understand some roleplay settings might not want certain avatars for storyreasons...BUT most of the intolerance places are far away from any kind of roleplay setting!!! I bet every single person who is holding up their "Furry is a choice" and "SL is such a tolerant place" papers would not agree if the tables get turned and suddenly they are the one being hated and kicked out. Or if the club rule change to "no black people, no people with shape X or no humans at all". I'll agree on both of these. Most of the roleplay places with strong themes, will be quite friendly to a furry who shows up in their welcome area - only getting picky once you move off to the RP zone, and then the picky gets about the whole theme, not just the species. The hostile places will take -ANY- WHITE human, no matter how off-theme. They just have attitudes - and they're usually not RP zones. You can talk it anyway you like: but a dance club, even a ballroom, is -NOT- a RP zone. Even Berlin 1920s is not a RP zone: its a themed live/hangout area (And another major classic wear themed area, Caledon, is furry friendly). A RP zone, that's a place like "Hyborean Adventure" or "Deadwood City" or 'Gods of Valor" - places where you have to be 'in character' and 'in story' when you talk. Mention something like "BRB, making coffee" and you'll get people asking you not to disrupt the RP even sooner than if you show up on a purple furry. A RP zone is running stories or its basically dead/on pause - waiting for the next story. Furry places, even RP themed ones, tend to welcome humans and others. I think I -have- seen one that didn,'t. But it was empty when I went so I'm not sure, and this was a few years ago so I'm not even sure if I remember it right... Some furry places will have communities that 'feel' like they're not human friendly while letting humans be around - but I've not tested that; it was just a gut reaction.

Switching to the beta viewer cleared up the blurryness. On a rebake I came in blurry until I turned off HTTP textures. Texture compression is now on, but unlike in past is it not forcing my avatar to be blurry. So I'm going to leave it on for a few hours and see what happens. EDIT: Just noticed the back braids of my mesh hair were a mess of random jaggy triangles. I flipped off HTTP textures again, took off and then put back on the hair and it came in properly...

I'm seeing similar. You can fix your avatar by going into debug settings and changing rendervolumeLODFactor: This works even for a mesh avatar. But notice how the texture of that sign looks. Even focusing on it and editing it refuses to fix it. Also go turn off HTTP textures: As with it on everything will rebake as blurry.

An early case in American law - pre-1800, involved an American failing to show proper deference to a European noble walking on the streets of one of the American cities. A crime in Europe at the time - the man was convicted of that crime, in a US court. Driving me nuts trying to remember the case... We do honor 'international laws and obligations' as a part of our Common Law tradition - save for where the US Constitution gives us a specified way out. In the modern era, we have extradition treaties with a number of countries. And in business, treaties regulating trade. Within both of these - its common to honor judgements of the courts of other countries unless there can be found a reason under principles of justice not to. - Ie: Assuming the country in question is one we recognize as having rule of law; you have to win an argument that the foreign court is operating outside the bounds of 'civilized norms on justice'. There's a specific "term of art" that labels this, but its been a few years and I don't recall it offhand.

On the official viewer, this is a choice under 'Privacy' in preferences. I would guess Firestorm has kept it there, or moved it to whatever preference tab they use for chat.

Dillon Levenque wrote: Your dissatisfaction with people who don't like furries is understandable, but being a furry is a choice. None of us are really furries in real life. That's an avatar choice. I frequent a club that has no particular ambience. It's just a club. One of the regulars is a furry (a big orange furry with rather alarmingly large teeth). Not a problem. If the club was trying to provide the ambience of an Elizabethan tavern circa 1600 A.D., I imagine that the person I mentioned would be asked to leave. I really don't think that sort of attitude is intolerance. Before you get too hard on Syo for her view on this subject, go buy a furry avatar (or a free one), and spend a month on it - going places and trying to be social. Try furry places and non-furry places. See how you feel after that. Intellectually yeah - its a choice of cartoon style. But its not going to feel nice when you start seeing the cold shoulder folks will give you for no rational reason. I also get it when I change my human avatar's skin tone... the darker I go, the less people will approach me - though I also notice some guys start IMing me with "man I wanna do a black chick," to which I just /facepalm... Cause maybe they do, but that's just the wrong way to being the flirting... As I noted once before, I have alts - so I know this reaction isn't against me, and I'm really not that famous either... much to my chagrin sometimes. Outside of the forums most folks have no idea who I am. - So is that intolerance? After all, I could just be white. So am I 'asking for it' by choosing black, or my RL native american? Inside of the context of SL, is this different than the choice of furry? Likely so... because it parallels to something in RL. But in a world where we can be anything, why so much hate against those who excercise that choice?

Syo Emerald wrote: There we have the "Non careing male newbie-look a like", who can be here for ages but still looks like he wandered out of some freebiestore around 2007. Then we have the invisible pony rider girl with a fish face. Oh and speaking about tolerance here.....SL will never and was never a place of tolerance, especially when it comes to all that is not human. You can look like an hoe on crack, but don't you dare to wear a tail or anything else not human! Then you are not allowed in ballrooms, not allowed on roleplay sims, not allowed on many adult sims.....Oh, and nobody will hire you anywhere for anything! True, and very furstrating, er frustrating. Some of the avatars I've seen in ballroom sims make me wonder... And I will say that many of the nicest folks I've met in SL have been, in order: Tinies, Child Avatars, Furries, Ferals, and Nekos. The Child Avatar one was a wake up call to me. Go back far enough and you can find me calling them out in various places online... then I started meeting some of them in situations where I had to be polite and had reason to not just TP away, and quickly found I was being guilty of judging a whole bunch of folks by my assumptions about their avatar style (Baby talk folks still unnerve me, but I do have some as friends). Pony riders - I've yet to have a full conversation with one. I've not noticed any trend for or against mesh among them. My first thought was that the standard sizes wouldn't work for that shape, so they shouldn't be on mesh. But hip width is a rigged deform - so mesh will stretch with it. ( this page has all the dials that need to match the clothing for mesh: http://catnapkitty.wordpress.com/2012/07/01/mesh-clothes-dont-care-if-youre-tall-or-short-thick-or-thin-they-care-about-stretch/ ) - But to me Pony riders, and blond avatars over 6' tall: both freak me out for the same reason. And having now met many "blingtards" and "frankenbarbies" (blond avatars over 6' tall) that were very nice people... I'm not ready to call Pony Riders out until I can prove to -myself- that there's something wrong with them other than different visual aesthetics than me. (again, go back a few years and I've got all kinds of comments about frankenbarbies out there... The look basically is tall, blond, busty, thin waist, spider legs, and often scripty hair/feet. Coined not by me - but during someone else's flame war against a person who had prim-boobs. And its not really reflective of the personality of the people who like to use it - its just a visual preference). Keep in mind that the Pony riders might be judging a Furry just as harshly as they often get judged. Its easy to walk into "furry town" and see folks on glowing neon colors and strange leather outfits and come back with some harsh views. Guys on noob-looks... some of them too, I can count among my friends. Drives me nuts that they don't even realize sometimes that they've never gone fashion shopping... But I've had engaging conversations with as many of them as with others I've gotten that blank bit or the 'it has the sexxors or else it gets the eject again' reaction... (if only I'd thought to screenshot that once resident I had as a neighbor on my second Zindra lot... I did for the first one, but those shots are not safe for public view.) Some people just really don't see any value in even setting a look for their avatar. Having a close RL friend who is full color blind, and needs help putting the jeans on over the underwear and not the other way around... I've long been aware that people with -ZERO- sense of style can still be interesting and engaging to talk to and hang out with. I do have some dim views of some SL communities - not based on their -look- but on their conduct. The one I've been most vocal about the conduct of, has a look that many outside of it copy or buy items from, self included. So... "wisdom for a newbie" out of the above: Make your decisions about folks and communities based on what they do and stand for, not how they look. Oh, and I'd also recommend getting to know them -inworld- before judging them by their forum / blog posts and stances. Quite a few folks express themsleves in forums and blogs in harsher or stronger ways than they do in person or inworld or even than they intend to. Many of us 'are read' sounding harder than we intend.

Perrie Juran wrote: Don't turn your sky box (platform) physical. (Or any prim for that matter if you don't know what that does.) No wait. Get inside your skybox, cam back a bit, edit it, and -THEN- turn it physical. - Best down while recording video. For extra lols, and maybe to get AR'd once or twice by some fool, -unlink- it first, then turn the whole mess physical - but this is only fun if you're sitting on one of the pieces...

Perrie Juran wrote: If a ban happenned there was another TOS violation by whoever was using the account at the time. That's the story of a number of bans it seems. A does violation B, does not want to admit they were caught, so claims they were banned for acceptable conduct C. - Not all bans, maybe not even most. But rather often 'B' emerges somewhere later in the tale. If OP is getting the specific phrase 'account on hold' though - that's very different from what I'm talking about. So I'll stop sidetracking. An account hold is almost always resolveable, once they've got all the happy boxes in the right spots.

Read the part in parenthesis that you quoted.