Ceera Murakami

Same as any individual. Linden Lab eliminated the education/non-profit discounts, about a month into this most recent school year. (And after most school budgets were already cast in stone and unchangeable.) That effectively doubled the cost of maintaining a non-profit or Education presence in Second Life, as the old discount was 50% on the monthly maintenance fees, as well as a reduced set-up fee. Now? No discount at all. Sorry.

With the new web-based profile system, you have to first save the pic from your inventory onto your local hard drive. Then you can upolad it to your profile from there. It's free to save any image that you have in-world and full-perms, such as any snapshot that you took yourself. (Edited to add: Peewee is right - you also need to use a graphics application or file converter application to do a save-as of the .tga file that your Viewer saves to your hard drive, and convert it to jpg, gif or png format, because their web uploader won't accept the tga file that their own viewer saves to your hard drive! ) An extra step from the old system, but it is how it works now. Alternatively and in the short term, you could log on with a 1.2x based viewer, like the LL 1.23.5 Viewer, and directly add the image from inventory, using the old profile system. Changes made to the old-school profiles are reflected in the web-profiles. But that work-around will end when they arbitrarily decide to stop supporting the old profile system (Probably the same time when they decide to cease official support for Viewer 1.23.5.( I expect that deadline to fall in a few more months, when they eventually introduce the Mesh capability to the grid as a standard feature. The 1.2x Viewers can't properly render mesh, and will be made obsolete and rather unusable by that innovation.

These ARE new. The new settings have a finer granularity on who can and can't see the profile, picks, groups, etc. . For one thing, you can now choose to NOT have your profile searchable on the Internet or accessible via the web unless the person is already logged in via an SL account, and it actually works! If you choose "Friends" or "Second Life" as the access level for all of the areas, someone looking from the Internet without logging in can ONLY get your SL avatar's name and SL "birthdate" (Account creation date), and the in-world pic image - nothing else. No description, partner info, etc.. While an in-world search will still function. Here's the new settings: Five areas you can control for the information you share: About Me: This includes your biography, homepage, partner, and social identities. Real World: This refers to the real world section of your profile. Interests: Your interests can be seen by people viewing your profile, and are also used to recommend people and places to you. Groups: You can hide specific groups in your profile by using the group profile setting in the viewer. Picks: Your list of things to recommend to other people in Second Life. Each has three levels of access now: Everyone means that the information is available to the whole Internet and can be picked up by search engines. Second Life means that the information is available to all Second Life residents who are logged in to the website or inworld. Friends means that only your Second Life friends can see the information. On the prior version of the privacy settings, the choice that said you didn't want to be searchable on the Internet also made you inaccessible in-world on the 2.x profile viewer. You came back as "Name Unavailable" if anyone searched for you. So to be findable at all in-world, you also had to expose your profile to the Internet and to people with no SL account and no clue what SL is.

Your question is sort of like asking if you can make money playing ping pong. I'm sure that like any other sport, Ping Pong has a 'pro circuit' and a vanishingly small number of talented athletes that can actually earn money every year by playing the game. But compared to the millions of people who play it just for fun, and who will never, ever, in their whole life earn one single penny from playing, the number of people making money doing it is incredibly small. There are millions of people who access Second Life for various reasons. Some play it as a game, some see it as a place to meet friends who happen to live on the other side of the planet, some see it as a fantasy world to escape into, some use it for sexual fantasies, some use it for education... Many people attempt to make money in Second Life, by doing various jobs in-world (dancer, virtual prostitute, DJ), or creating and selling content like clothes and homes, or by writing scripts, or even by creating whole sims full of stuff to the customer's specifications. But less than 1% of the people who use Second Life make enough profit here and cash out enough money from their efforts to break even over what they spend while here. What it takes to make money in Second Life is the same as in the real world. You need a business plan, good advertising (including word-of-mouth referrals from satisfied clients),and a product or service that others want. And you need to have sufficient talent, skill and luck to bring your efforts to the top of a very large heap of competing individuals. With effort and talent, yes, you can make some money here. Some people, maybe 1/10th of 1% of the business owners in Second Life, actually make money that compares to a decent real-world job. Most do not. Most who do 'make a profit' are lucky to have enough real profits to pay for the pizza on the weekend. Artists, programmers, and people who are willing to risk lots or real money speculating in areas like purchase and resale of virtual land, and landlords who buy enough sims to weather the ups and downs of the virtual economy, and who provide a unique level of service or a unique environment - those people can make money here. Maybe. If they are really good at it. But for 99% of the people who use Second Life? You're better off spending your free time flipping burgers for minimum wage in the real world. You'll earn more per hour of effort than most people who work inside Second Life tend to earn. It doesn't technically cost anything to be here. I've been here 5 years, and have never paid a membership fee. But many of the things you need to do to make a profit here do cost some money. If you are making clothes, or homes, or other products, you most likely need to spend money to download textures that you create on your computer, and you probably will want/need to spend money on software for making those textures. If you make anything that requires prims, you most likely will need to rent a certain amount of virtual land of your own, to have a place to create those things in-world. (Trying to make a serious, sellable product in a public sandbox makes as much sense as trying to make a real-world product while sitting in a busy shopping mall). If you want to have people see your products so they can buy them, you most likely need to pay to rent virtual land for a store, or for a stall in a mall, of for several in-world retail locations. If you sell only on SL Marketplace, you still probably will need to pay for advertising, and will have other fees to pay. I was, at one point, paying over $100 USD a month for rental of virtual land to live on, plus clothes, and rental of mall and store space, and texture downloads. I was earning about twice that much in-world by selling clothes, furniture and texture sets. So by spending $100 (and about 20 hours effort per week creating stuff), I earned $200, and cashed out $100 profit each month. Hardly enough to compare with a real-world job, and less per hour than flipping burgers, but I had fun doing it, and it was enough to buy a few nice things I couldn't have afforded, otherwise. Most of my in-world businesses have closed now, the days when they made good profits long-gone, and I spend far less every month now. The only decent profit maker that I have now is one that took me years to build the skills for - creating whole-sim and multi-sim areas for clients. The market for that service is very small, and you have to be very good at building, texturing, landscaping, scripting, and a wide range of other SL-specific skills to do well at it. It's also very erratic work. Sometimes I have so many requests I have to hire subcontractors, or turn down jobs and refer them to other builders. Other months I have no projects at all to work on, all month, and no income at all from that work. Most of the "high return" activities in Second life require a substantial investment in real cash, or time and effort, or both. Owning one or more sims and renting land to others isn't cheap, and profit margins are slim. The huge landlords get breaks on the cost of their sims that you, as a small landlord, will not be able to match. The ability to create whole sims of beautiful, usable content requires a substantial effort to learn the needed skills, plus a measure of artistic talent that money can't buy. I've made money here since my 3rd month or so in Second Life. Not much, at first, when I was selling clothes and simple textures. More when I had a store and a dozen mall locations and a wide range of products for sale. Much more when I got good enough that people would pay me thousands of real dollars to develop a custom-designed sim or sims for them. I have one client right now - a major university - that has me building over 20 sims for them. But though they pay fairly well, the work still is very time consuming, and at the rates I charge, I couldn't ever consider quitting my full-time day job and just building for people in Second Life. Even if I worked 80 hours a week, and could keep busy like that every week, I make more money on my day job. My best advice is this. If you need L$, get a credit card and a real world job, and buy them. If you want to make and sell things, do it because it is something you enjoy, and that you have suitable talents to do. Maybe you'll make money, maybe not. But don't do it just to make money. You'll almost certainly be disappointed if you compare in-world earnings to what you could have made doing a real-world job.

It's also frustrating when you're 16 and most of your friends have turned 18 and prefer to hang out in bars and other places where it is illegal for a 16 year old to go. That is life, and the law must still be obeyed, even if you have no intention of ordering anything stronger than tap water. You legally have to wait until you turn 18 yourself to rejoin them, because the law says you can't do so until then. Unfortunately, Linden Lab's Second Life software allows for no other way for the owner of property in a Mature or Adult sim to exclude you completely from their land, if what they do there is inappropriate for a minor to observe or participate in. Unlike real life, locked doors and solid walls can't prevent you from seeing into their bedrooms and bordellos. Parcel bans only affect access to 50 Meters above the terrain, so they can't lock you out of their skyboxes, or even out of the upper floors of some homes. Even with you being restricted to the G-rated sims, you're still going to be exposed to some adult XXX content that can be seen over the sim borders in neighboring Mature-rated sims - things that are flat out illegal for you to have access to, even just visually. The only 'solution' that Linden Lab has offered to allow you to have access to Second life at all before you turn 18 is to restrict your physical presence to the G-rated sims, and to isolate the Adult businesses to Adult rated sims on their own continent or private island sims. But it is still legal for a land owner in a Mature sim to have and use content that is in no way legal for a 16 or 17 year old to be allowed access to. And so you are not allowed to set foot inside a Mature sim until you turn 18. It doesn't matter if you are the most mature and well-meaning 16 year old on the planet. It's still illegal to allow you to roam freely in an environment that contains XXX Adult content. Whether you are seeking that sort of entertainment or actively trying to avoid it makes no difference. Allowing you into the Mature sims still allows you that access, and creates a huge legal liability for the adults in the Mature sims. The only way to allow 16 and 17 year olds to access Mature sims would be to eliminate all XXX Adult content from them, essentially rendering them the same rating as G-rated sims. And for most Adults in Second Life, rendering their land completely worthless and unusable. Not because they do sex 24x7, but because having the option to engage in adult activities on their own land, when they choose to, is a valued part of their social experience here.

Hummm. I tried Dana's settings, on an avatar set to breast size 64, and all it did for jigglies was when the dance animation hit the loop break, I saw a brief jiggle as the animation glitched and moved me really fast from one position to another. But in a normal, fairly energetic dance move animation, I saw no effect other than at that glitch? Am on an XP system with a pretty darned good graphics card, and with graphics settings for avatar physics set to max.

Have you changed your hairstyle recently? Some prim hair includes "face lights" - local light sources that illuminate your face. Perhaps you changed to a hair that didn't have face lights, or perhaps you turned off local lighting in your graphics settings?

If I wasn't booked to the gills building multiple sims for a client, this would be a fun texture set to make. Try asking the staff at Textures-R-Us. Surely at least one of the texture artists there would be happy to make a set like that, at a reasonable price.

One of the big problems with script limits, Avatar Rendering Cost (ARC) calculations, and similar efforts to "eliminate lag" based on a simplistic score or formula, is that there is no simple, hard and fast answer to what is acceptable and/or necessary. If you are a Human avatar, then sure, you can strip out most of the lag-inducing scripts in your wardrobe - things you don't really even need like resizers and scripts to change the color of the barrette in your hair to one of a zillion colors - and can feel really good that you got a near-zero score on some arbitrary scoring system. You may well have even helped yourself and those within draw distance of you to improve the percieved lag, to some degree. The system is built to represent Humans, so it's fairly easy to do without certain scripted developments that don't really add that much to your experience. I have one Human avatar form with an ARC score of 1, and a script count of zero. And she's still reasonably good looking. But to be up to current appearance standards, I would have to at least add prim hair, which would increase my ARC score. But some other avatar types require scripts and higher "Avatar Rendering Cost" scores merely to exist in Second Life. To be a typical Furry avatar, with even close to realistic looking fur, you have to put up with an ARC score that would make some Human avatars wince. Do we shave off our fur or look like smooth-skinned cartoon caricatures, or just Humans wearing smooth animal masks? We need scripts, too, for mouths that move and eyes that blink and show expressive emotions in animal-shaped prim heads, and tails that wag, and wings that flap, HUDs that allow a dragon to breathe fire, or scripts to allow horse avatar to wear a saddle that allows another avatar to ride them... I certainly do try to eliminate unnecessary lag inducers like scripted resizers in clothes and hair, but I am not going to go back to being only Human for the sake of an arbitrary low numeric score. Looked at another way, every prim and texture used in Second Life adds to lag. Would you give up detailed, realistic forests, buildings and roads, and strip down to cartoon-like flat-colored boxes and open plains for the scene around you, just for the sake of a very low-lag experience? Or for that matter, give up the 3D experience entirely! After all, a text-based chat room doesn't experience script lag or texture lag at all! Yes, I am being somewhat facetious here, but I hope you can see my point. Basing decisions on what should or should not be allowed on some sort of score or formula just doesn't work. Script counts and ARC scores can certainly indicate where improvements can be made, but they should only be a guide, not a restrictive law. Much of what is beautiful and creative in Second Life requires scripts, textures, sculpted prims, and other things that can all be pointed to as 'causing lag'. You have to strike a balance between what is needed to create the virtual world and make it pleasant to experience, and what is excessive and unnecessary. No simple formula can make those judgement calls. Also, much of what exists in Second Life can not be easily replaced or upgraded. If you own a scripted gadget called a "Starax Wand", you have an artifact that can never be re-purchased and you can never get a more script-efficient version from the maker, because the creator if that item left SL years ago, and is unlikely to ever return. Making script use counts and ARC scores available can give the makers of new content a way to measure the efficiency of their new or upgraded creations. If they make a resizable hair that uses only one script instead of 200, they can market the low-lag benefits of their product, and if it is of high quality in other ways as well, it may well take over the niche held now by less-efficient products. Let the market work on its own, and newer developments may well make some older, lag-causing items obsolete, and willingly discarded in favor of newer products. But don't try to force the issue, because some things will never be re-created by anyone, and are still valued in this virtual world.

Looks like Linden Lab has finally closed the loophole that allowed third party sites to continue to offer the old surnames. I checked Anshe Chung's Dreamland Reg API site, and the only surname they offer now is "Lastchance". Until very recently, it was still possible to go there or to other sites and register new account names with previously approved and not yet closed surnames, like "Mirror".

Ah, you may be right, Griffin. I had heard that Phoenix and some other TPV;s were trying to figure out a way to do that. But if that is what they encountered, it will only work for Phoenix viewer users. No one else would ever see it. And from what I read in a brief look at the page you linked to, it can only reference the default preset Windlight settings. You couldn't make your own custom settings and give them out on arrival that way.

That avatar would remain restricted to that sim, as far as I know. Education/non-profit sims that were dedicated to under-18 access remain under the same restrictions as before the teen grid's merger, and so would the accounts tied to those sims. So if the library discontinued their sim, you'd be locked out of the grid. Try contacting the sim owners? When you log in with a normal account, can you see that library's sim on the map?

That is probably a new feature that they are still testing on some server release branches. It isn't yet available grid-wide, to my knowledge.

Create a notecard in your inventory, politely explaining what happened, what you were trying to purchase, and when. Include in that notecard the info from your transaction history for that purchase, which shows that you got billed for it. Go here to find the transaction info: https://secondlife.com/my/account/transactions.php Then search for the store owner's profile, and in their profile there's a place to drop inventory items. Drop the notecard there. They will get it, and can check their own transaction history to verify that they got your money. SL sometimes glitches when lag is bad in a sim, and transactions can fail for reasons the merchant can't prevent, or even know about. But if you got billed and they got paid, most merchants are quite happy to re-send your item.

As long as you refuse to (or are unable to) put some sort of payment info on file, there will remain some areas of SL that you can not access. Individual sim owners and parcel owners can choose to require payment info on file to access their land. So just doing the Aristotle ID method will not get you into those areas. If you are in the USA (or Canada, I think), you could get a PayPal account and use that as the payment info. You'd only have to use it once, to buy $2.50 USD worth of L$, so the in-world systems see the payment info. Or put the payment info on file and try opening a support ticket and see if they can get the payment info to show in-world without you using the payment method first. That would get you into all areas that don't explicitly require the Aristotle age verification method. Outside the USA there's issues using PayPal, but they have quite a few other options for payment info. Some areas do require both Aristotle age verification and payment info on file. You do not have to become a Premium member and pay monthly dues to have payment info on file. You just have to have a valid and accepted credit card or PayPal account, and at worst use it once, for a fairly trivial amount of money. (Also, once that card expires, you'd still show up as Payment Info used, even if you couldn't use it again without updating the expiration date info.)

Torian Carter wrote: If you enable this I am guessing it only shows for someone else using the beta viewer? For everyone else there will be no jiggle. Yes. I asked for a clarification in the Knowledgebase FAQ, and only the beta viewer (and TPV's or later releases using this code) will see the new jigglies. Also, in the beta viewer, you can turn off your own ability to see other people's jigglies by moving the avatar physics setting in your graphics preferences to zero.

Bear in mind also that a brand new avatar with virtually no user-added inventory items will show an inventory count of around 2300 items, because of the default content and the content in the "Library" part of their inventory. They really shouldn't count the Library, since that is shared content and isn't really a part of your actual inventory at all. There's a debug setting that can prevent the Library from loading. If you want an accurate count of what you really have, use that feature temporarily and it will only count what is in your real inventory. It does also count folders in the inventory, though, and all the 'links' that 2.x generates for current outfit and the like also count against total inventory.

RE Rollig's comment, I just checked, and the Estate controls for fixed sun do cover an equal day/night range of possibilities. My suggestion wouldn't have the day cycle in use at all - it would force a specific fixed time 24 or more times per real 24 hours, based on your PC's clock, not on SL time and SL's 3 hours daylight + 1 hour night schedule. BUT... the Estate slider for fixed sun position doesn't show you a specific time of day, like the Windlight day cycle choices do. So the bot would have to position the slider based on a relative position left to right. Probably best if it first moves the control all the way left, then moves it a fixed distance for that time choice to the right, then applies it. But since that action is not a numeric entry field, making a bot move the slider to the position you choose could be a real pain.

Also try Serenity Woods: Lots of friendly furries there: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Serenity%20Woods/112/144/2

One more pic to share. Ceera did have a Human form before SL. Well, almost Human... She had Phoenix wings and a dragon's tail, if you saw her true form, though she usually hid the tail, and sometimes hid the wings. And though she isn't a vampire, she does have an affinity for bats. There's usually a number of small Mexican Free-tailed Bats (a small brown insect-eating variety, with a body about as large as your thumb) dwelling near where she lives. Some things haven't changed though since her arrival in SL. In her normal adult human or anthro form, she's always about 5"7" tall, has long auburn hair, and has green eyes. And she's very fond of wearing purple clothing, as you may have noticed in the other images. She's also always been a shapeshifter - capable of assuming almost any form you can imagine, from a butterfly to a dragon.

Since you're posting in the Mesh sections of the forums, I assume you are trying to make a mesh avatar. SL only supports a very rudimentary skeleton structure for mesh avatars. They are trying to get the basic functionality working before jumping into a more complex rigging. What they support right now is a skeleton with the same limited set of 'bones' as the normal SL Avatar, and a limited subset of linkages between the rigging of the mesh avatar and the appearance controls in SL. So no matter what you try to build right now in terms of a mesh avatar, it simply can not respond to facial expressions or other features that Linden Lab has not yet implemented in their Mesh interface.

Thank you, Mags. Ceera was a vixen before she came to SL. She was a role playing character elsewhere. But even though she isn't usually Human, and even though my profile clearly states she's Partnered in SL (to Mariko Saito, played by the same friend that was Lady Marianne in the earlier role playing venue), and Married/Monogamous in RL, she still gets hit on by all sorts of guys (and quite a few girls, too). Dug out some images to share: Ceera and her Partner, Mari, before we came to SL : 2005 versus 2008 : New vixen form in 2009 : New Human form in 2011 :

You'll have to wait a few years for Mesh technology to catch up to your desires. (If it ever does.) At this time, it is impossible to get Mesh to accept info from any appearance sliders other than those that only change primary bone lengths (like torso length and leg length). The rest, like breast size, all facial features, and over half the body sliders, simply have no link in the code to allow those to be controlled as yet. Mesh avatars at this time have zero capability to show facial expression/emotion. The face is a rigid mask. Same for hands. Again, the code LL has made so far just doesn't allow rigging a mesh avatar that deeply.

When I joined SL, my first step was to become a fox furry. I bought a very good (for the era) anthro red fox avatar. But I still had the system hair, and very simple clothes that I made just in the appearance editor. Then I started shopping for better clothes and hair. That's been an ongoing evolution for 5 years, as I moved away from self-made and freebie clothes and from fairly normal street clothes to more of a focus on Asian fashions. My avatar has evolved a lot as avatars in general have improved in SL. Sculpted prims and other improvements have made my vixen much more realistic. I've also experimented with versions made by several different makers, and these days I almost always customize the appearance of the prim parts with custom textures, and subtle tweaks to the shape and proportion of the parts, so my avatar isn't a clone of every other red fox from that maker. I also started collecting alternate forms - furries ranging from a tiny quad fox to a huge red dragon, and even some really good looking Human forms (though I rarely appear as a Human any more). I also experimented with a wide apparent age range, from young children/cubs to mature adults (Haven't ever bothered with elderly or 'past their prime' forms, though. Why be old when you don't have to?)

What you want can not be done with the standard SL configuration. SL just doesn't support that option. You could force the same rough effect using a scripted bot, where the bot account has Estate Manager rights. The bot would have to log in every hour or half hour or whatever, and change sim time to a specific fixed time. So from 2 AM to 3 AM Berlin time, the sim sun time would be locked at 2 AM, then at 3 AM it would jump to the 3 AM position, and stay there until 4 AM, etc. . If you did that every 15 minutes, it would appear fairly smooth to most visitors. Hopefully someone else can add further information on how to set up the bot for that. I don't use scripted bots myself, so I can't fill in that part in detail.