Alazarin Mondrian

I use social media a bit. I was a latecomer to social media back in the day because I got into SL back in 2005 and couldn't see what the big deal was with flatweb stuff like MySpace and later Facebook, Twitter etc. I use them primarily to promote my music recordings + performances. I can't even get an instagram account because for some reason they want a mugshot + more info than the police take after an arrest so I'll pass on that.

How about keeping the core sim as a non-profit exclusively for Role Play with no rental units and the adjoining sims as 'regular' rentals? It could be classed as your usual value-added themed rental. They might have to convert one of the homestead sims to a full sim but that would boost the land impact available for rental units. No doubt if LL made such a concession to Djehann Kidd, every other value-added landlord would be clamoring for a similar deal. Hangars Liquides and Insillico are two of my favourite regions. It would be a real loss to SL if Hangars Liquides had to close up. Coming to think of if, the builds on the adjoining homestead sims could all be stacked vertically in a single full 'rental' sim with plenty of prims / land impact to spare. Not only that but the builds would benefit from the better script support that full regions have. Yes, it would be an epic job but it's nothing that you couldn't manage with a few days spent chucking rez box positioner scripts into each linked object. It's certainly doable. FWIW, I had a project 12 years ago that was 1.5 km in height packed into a string of RezFaux boxes [with their 100m radius limit]. The free CasperTech rezzing boxes will record the position of any object in an entire sim so it's definitely worth a try.

Everything went as smoothly as possible for SL16B. Even managed to rustle up a stage set that managed to fit in with the overall colour scheme and visual theme. It was fun to play for everyone there. The lag on the 21st almost ground my computers to a halt! The 28th was less laggy and we managed to escape without our computers catching fire See you next year at SL17B!

I hated all that sorta stuff... I was a progger back in my teenage years. Things like Grease made me want to spark up and listen to The Firesign Theatre or Cheech and Chong instead. *BUT* It's like this every year. They let the builders in early to set up their exhibits. I know, I had exhibits and my own stage at some of the SLB things long ago. Us performers are treated like some sort of tolerated afterthought. And every year there's different organizers who inevitably ask me the same question: Have you ever played at an SLB event before? Sure, but the organizers are the n00bs and it shows. Here's a thought: treat us performers like you do any other exhibitor. Be professional about things and work with us. Yanno, we might even integrate our acts into the SLB theme of the year. As it stands all you're gonna get is performers rushing in with their generic gig setup.

Guess what? I'm up on the 21st [Second Day] and the 26th so that gives me under 24 hours to size up the Festival Stage, design and build a stage set.

Hi! I'm booked in to play on the SL16B Festival stage and I want to find out any info I can about the stage's size, shape, colour scheme, etc., so that I can assemble a stage set that blends in nicely. I have tried contacting the people running the stage but to no avail and time is running out. Is it the same shape as last year's stage? If so I could recolour and tweak our rotating stage set for this year. Or is it your traditional venue stage set into a wall? Any info would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Plastic Duck?

I actually use the standard SL viewer all the time. I tried Firestorm and, meh, too many features I don't need.

It's actually a known psychological phenomenon: to become the object of one's desire. Don't feel bad, just roll with it and see where it takes you.

The price increases are steep but understandable. I liked the prepayment idea and used it to get two of my alts in at the old rate. This proves that LL can accept prepayment, so how about a scalable discount rate and/or other premium 'plus' features for prepayment? For instance if an annual account pays 1 months in advance they get a pro-rata discount on the annual fee and/or choice of 'Premium Plus' features; same for 3 months, 6 months, 9 months, 1 year or more in advance. If the whole price rise thing is to ensure future income and resident retention, surely encouraging people to pay in advance by giving them perks might work. This is where the 'smorgasbord premium' idea could become a thing: people who pay far in advance could then choose extra features such as more offline IM's, premium fee reduction / rebate, increased stipend, voice morphing features or whatever people think is an essential feature.

Oh, of course. I go to plenty of clubs and events with DJ's and have a great time. I was just banging the drum for live music performers [maybe a bit too forcefully ;-)] Like you, I will continue to keep on playing in SL for the foreseeable future. In my case it was SL that got me out of my pit pit of burnout and back to playing and writing music... a debt that I repay by basing my entire music identity and existence on my little band of alts that I have created in SL.

Yes, The Ark and Yiff for starters. Both are located on estate sims and the first few minutes after you land at either venue are spent looking at grey avatars and clouds of mis-shapen mesh clothes and body parts while you wait for things to load. And that's on a 70mb download connection with an i7 CPU amd GTX1050ti grafix card. Fun fun fun!

37.5% increase on the Annual Premium. That's a steep price increase and, as someone on a fixed [and low] income, this will probably mean having to scale back my land holdings in SL. It's a shame, but I've had a good run of things here. I arrived in SL in 2005 in a state of burnout. Within two years the people I'd met in SL got me back on my feet and playing [and writing and recording] music again. Around that time I also got lucky building and selling treehouses which meant I was able to do the premium alt thing and keep some land on the mainland for a home and music venue. They're all old accounts with 500L / week stipend so they'll just be able to scrape through the new regime although any overhead that I used to have to spend on things like audio stream / mesh uploads / clothes / costumes / stage props / etc., is now a thing of the past. I make next to no money from performing music in SL and have financed it out of my stipend [plus any money made building and selling stuff] from the get-go. For me, the price increase is the beginning of the end. Not this year. Maybe not next year. But I can see that I'll have to start scaling back in SL eventually. It's a shame... I've built up a virtual band using avatars and alts which I've been live streaming on YouTube and Facebook for the last 3+ years. Yeah, I could ditch the Second Life virtual band thing and keep going but a live stream of an old hippie faffing around in a home studio doesn't quite have the same SciFi ambience that my band of alts has. One thing Second Life has taught me is that the visual component of live music is a lot more important than most people would think. After all, sight is the most important and powerful sensory input we have. So it makes sense to craft the visual element to fit / augment the themes / narrative in the music. But I digress.... Here's to the good days that have passed and the tough times ahead.

Thanks for your replies, Alyona Su, Rhonda Huntress and CoffeeDujour. The weird thing is that I have Belleza Jake male mesh bodies for several of my male alts and have had no problems whatsoever when it comes to saving outfits in the HUD. All 10 slots save and recall outfits perfectly. That was what made me decide to buy a Belleza Venus mesh body. I've been using a Maitreya Lara for the last few years but found that the outfit save function in the HUD was completely broken. It would either not save outfits in all five slots or else get them jumbled up. It was weird finding the same problem rearing its ugly little head with the Belleza Venus.

I'm having trouble with my Belleza Venus. The HUD can store and recall skins just fine but I've run into a problem where the HUD doesn't save or recall outfits correctly. [FWIW, I've fun into the same problem with the Maitreya Lara HUD]. The HUD appears to save only parts of an outfit, sometimes gets outfits jumbled up when attempting to apply them and even scrambles the textures. I've tried swapping out the HUD and body to no effect. Cache clearing made no difference. 1] No texture save on one arm + texture scrambled on the other arm. 2] No texture saved for arm and torso. 3] Recalls outfit incorrectly. 4] Recalled outfit with scrambled texture on one arm and no texture on the other. 5] Outfit saved with upper texture missing and lower texture scrambled. 6] Recalled outfit: Lower texture applied scrambled, upper texture appears normal. It looks like Belleza doesn't do tech support so I've come here hoping that someone with more experience might be able to help me sort out this problem. I've tried other outfits that use clothing + underwear layer combos and the results are completely unusable 😕 I save one outfit [for example in slot #3] and it half-saves. I set up another outfit and when I save it in another slot [for example #4], the outfit in slot #3 gets scrambled and parts of the outfit from slot #4 appear when I apply the outfit from slot #3.... amongst other weirdness. Is this problem caused by the clothing textures? I've been able to set up multiple outfits from Bare Rose on a single HUD with no problems.

Actually you can run quite a few Win3.x apps in the 32-bit version of Windows 10.

I remember seeing an advert for Second Life somewhere long ago with a guy playing an electric guitar to an attentive audience and thinking at the time about giving it a go. It took me another year to get a computer and graphics card that was able to meet the minimum requirements with something like a Pentium 4 and an Nvidia GeForce 5200 or was it an MX440? So I was finally able to take the plunge in early 2005 and landed at the DAMB welcome area which was a pretty hectic carnival at the time. Or so it seemed. I did a bit of exploring from there and found Nexus Prime, Miramare, Luskwood, The Ivory Tower of Primitives, The Shelter, Numbakulla and many other places in my forays around the grid and recall being totally floored by the places people had created for themselves. My first avatar was a bit of a lame mini-me with cannabis-leaf wings. Then I found a shop selling Daleks and bought myself a Dalek avatar. Meanwhile the DAMB welcome area was a non-stop party with people passing around and showing off freebie outfits. I bought myself a dragon avatar from Luskwood and spent many happy hours flying around the pristine open lands of Heterocera after I claimed my little 512m parcel of First Land. I got to know my some of my SL neighbours and for a while that little world was all I needed. I built my first weird retro SciFi home and got ejected from a nearby mall by Prokofy Neva who was showing new clients around while I was doing loop-the-loops in the sky above them and buzzing through at ground level. Fun times It was another year and a half before I got round to playing any music in SL. I remember being disappointed at the time that you couldn't really play music in SL. Your instruments were essentially dummy props with a few animations which might be able to spit out a few loops at best. But once I got over that and learned how to stream live music from my home studio, I never looked back. Nowadays I merrily perform in SL to my own empty venue and live stream the video to Facebook where my main audience is... but that's a story for another day.

Better Gnomes and Gardens used to have a few for sale or at least non-moving manniquin NPC's. I'm not sure if they're still in business after they closed their sim.

Logged in an hour ago and all was good. Had to log out to reboot my computer and now I can't get back in Sod's law, eh? I shall keep trying!

OOC time.... I could never 'get' this thing with SL babys. Especially the Zoobies the way they'd spam the events listings remorselessly with their fake all-day promo / marketing events. So, yes, I'd quite happily throw all the SL babies down a well, drown them with fermented prim juice and set the lot of them on fire.

It depends on the age.

Humour. Remember that thing? I'm a dragon. I breathe fire and I eat people. Babies are tender juicy snacks.

Do they roast nicely when you hold them over an open fire pit?

I don't think I'm all that interesting in SL or RL *but* if they want to spend some time filming my live music shows, I could sure do with some free promotion ;-)