Bitsy Buccaneer

One of my favourite texture creators only put a tip jar out because a group of loyal customers demanded it. She's in the "I'd rather you bought something" camp. For whatever reasons they had, these customers wanted to give.

I could make you a full avatar textured in just 0's and 1's if you like. Do you think we could get it to be the new fashion trend?

The samples box is only available through MP. It's not included in the free things on github or the AVsitter website.

whew. blows giant raspberries all around 😋

A mesh body is an object worn over a system body. It responds to the shape sliders, but not necessarily in the same way as the system body does, so you may need to tweak your shape (save as a new copy of course). Most important thing to do is take your time and demo demo demo. Also, the less skin you have showing, the less it matters if you're wearing a mesh body, provided of course that you can find clothes you like. And if there are clothing brands you like, demo their stuff with your mesh body demo to see how it all plays together. And yes, it is ridiculously confusing. There is a lot of jargon to learn and it's easy for experienced people to forget to back track enough in explaining. @Skell Dagger is the expert on men's mesh bodies. He has a blog, just search for his name.

/me quivers in fear and looks for a place to hide.

Sometimes that's useful, like if you want to examine your lowest LoD up close without it switching or really stress test the shape and texture. When I'm buying FP mesh, I always do a LoD 0 check too as it's easier than derendering walls. Anytime I want to quickly know how good the lowest LoD is, LoD 0 shows me right away.

Individual faces on mesh can be textured/retextured by script. An "applier" for this would just be a device which textures a particular face, like a texture change HUD for the fabric areas on a piece of furniture.

What kind of clothing are you after? Ancient freebie stuff is probably the least likely to still be around in texture form, but there HAVE to be (not quite so ancient) system clothing creators still inworld who still have their textures but aren't doing much with them. Could an applier system for animesh be feasible? Would it be secure enough that some who aren't keen on releasing textures straight out be alright with it? This would require setting up a separate face on the animesh model for each bit though, which would be a significant downside if you need to put them in different styles of clothing. I have some old FP system clothing textures, mostly from MM boards and group gifts. TOS won't let me give them to you, but if I know what you're after, I can have a look to suggest names to contact. Putting them into appliers might work under the TOS too. Just thinking out loud in hopes it sparks some better ideas for you.

Before mesh and animesh allowed for objects wearing system clothing, there was next to no reason to distribute as textures rather than clothing items. Mesh and animesh have created a situation in which these old pieces have a viable use once again. Most of them won't have much of an market as clothing items for avatars, but they do have a use for the kind of animesh animats is making. So all of this about the creators not wanting anyone to have the textures is out of date.

I followed a RL friend into SL. He's a RL architect, so he had a similar habit of building, fixing, tinkering, building more, and never giving a thought to decorating. I have a store today because I did the decorating. This is one of the things I adore about SL, how we can work together to make something far more interesting than most of us can do alone. And I very much agree with you about mesh too. My Blender skills are good enough at this point, but there are so very many steps to get it inworld as reasonably optimised mesh that my health usually gets in the way long before it's done. I wish it were less complicated.

Talk to the creator, if they're still in SL. Setting it up as a clothing layer will have made sense years ago and the creator might not realise that system clothes are now useful for animesh, but need to be a texture. It could breathe new life into older work.

The grid's been working so much better than it used to, and given the complexity of all the pieces that need to talk to each other to make it all work, the outage left me feeling more impressed than upset. Yeah, I wanted to go inworld and couldn't. But isn't it so very cool that we have this amazing world to go into at all? That was my reaction, recognition that overall the grid is doing alright.

You have no idea what people would do with the FP skin you've "gifted" them. I don't know what the legal implications might be, but morally you'd be responsible if any of them stole the work and did something dishonest with it. Why would you want to go there, especially for a sample skin? There are other ways like Omega or a link to the skin.

I know there's this whole RP family eco-system, but for most of the people I've known who've used "family" language it's been a way of describing especially strong or close friendships. My early friendship circle used to make up complicated meandering (and frequently changing) back stories about how we were all related to each other. It was just our way of goofing around and exercising our imaginations, but also saying you matter to me. From what I've seen, drama seems to be more of a facet of personality than inherent in a SL family dynamic. Those who are inclined to drama create and nuture circumstances in which to play it out, whatever the environment. One person can cause disruption in any social structure if they're manipulative enough with it.

The "alt thing" is just using two premium accounts. One in a house and one to search with.

Chronic illness, every day's a day off sick unfortunately. Bad days I don't have much stamina for anything including SL. The plus side of not being able to get out much is that I don't catch many bugs though. Good wishes for everyone down with the flu or cold.

I'm generally not bothered by the words. If there's sexist or belitting intent behind them, then it's the intent I dislike rather than the words. In the UK there are so many different regional habits and they're generally used more as a sign of inclusion than a term of endearment. It's all very context sensitive. A public term in one city might be a private one in another - the accent, context and surrounding language all tell you which it is. With people you're familiar with, the local term(s) indicate that familiarity, you're one of us. With those whose names you don't know, they can be used where you would normally use a name if you knew it. In that case, it can be a moment of connection and kindness. I remember getting on a London bus early one morning after an overnight trans-Atlantic flight I hadn't slept on, needing to get to a train station I'd never been to and fumbling to find the pocket with the UK coins for the fare, and the driver said "It's alright love" and all it meant was he saw me as a person in a moment of stress. There was no belittling, derogation, sexism or anything else. It just meant he saw me as a person. Like any other part of language, if the speaker carries negative intent, it will come through. Sometimes there will be habits of negative intent centered around certain words. Sometimes words need to be let go of because there's too much negative intent associated with them. But sometimes - especially when there are regional differences - the negative intent can be carried by the hearer rather than the speaker.

Fine. Pick another word for that sense of being unable to get your thoughts together quickly enough to keep up and join in before it's moved on and you're trying to get your thoughts together quickly enough for something else and it all gets increasingly exceedingly exhausting until you can't think straight enough to remember how to make a decent farewell. Whatever word you want for that, go for it.

Why is this blame question even going through your head and out your fingers in the first place? I've absolutely changed my mind about finding it interesting to read about the different points of view. It's doing too much damage to me. I had no idea that what is essentially an accomodation for my disabilities was so looked down on or seen as harmful to sociability in SL. Creepy, rude, weird, intrusive, those words are going to stay with me for a long time. I gave you my experience and point of view but since it's not what you're interested in, I'll leave you to it. I honestly don't have any insight into this cumulative shift because my disabilities have effectively excluded me from most local chat for years now. Best I'm out of here.

Is the participation of those of us who can't compete in free-flowing chat, whether due to disability, temperament or both, not an advantage to the community?

It's never been this either/or kind of thing that you're presenting. I'm not the most chatty in local, in part because the more ill I got the harder it was to keep up and there were always people who were more out-going, quicker, already knew the others. By the way of thinking you're presenting, no one should have said a quiet hello to me until after I'd spoken enough for them to have a sense of me, and I shouldn't have said anything to anyone either. When I went into a place with local chat, I'd do my best to participate. My natural preference is to get a sense of a place before I say much though, so even if I was healthy and quick-minded I'd still be on the quiet side to start out with. And I just can't compete in the back and forth well enough for others to get any real sense of me in local. I simply don't have that gift. Those side conversations in IM would always help me acclimate and get my bearings, get a sense of who the people there were, which would help me figure out more things to say in local. That's an enormous advantage for me and probably some others too. If there was local chat going on, I'd always say hello and a thank you for the invitation, or whatever was appropriate, at a minimum. Depending on how the group flowed, whether they made room for me in the conversation or carried on (which was the more common experience), I might say more or not. But if IMing someone with a compliment after that was seen as a faux pas, weird, rude, intrusive or speaking on the phone to someone next to me, well I guess we never would have had the chance to get to know each other inworld.

For me, an intro IM is more like making eye contact, extending my hand to shake someone else's, or any of the context sensitive things we do to start a conversation with a new person in RL but can't really do in SL. Generally it will be something like a compliment on clothes or something in the person's profile. To say that sort of thing widely, where everyone can hear it, feels out of place to me. So not a phone call by any means, but the sort of quieter conversations which often take place in a larger social gathering. If IMs are phone calls, where do the smaller conversations happen?

Jumping off of what you and Rolig said, I sort of do the opposite. When I'm inworld and IMing with my closest friends, we're both ourselves, at our computers, typing to a dear friend on the other side of a country or an ocean, somtimes just talking, and sometimes talking as we work on our different projects. It's a different kind of immersion and being present. One friend will tend to give more focused attention when our avatars are both sat in one place, with another it doesn't seem to matter. Reading everyone's thoughts on all of this has been fascinating. Thank you Scylla for starting the conversation and to everyone who's joined in. I didn't realise there was so much dislike of introductory IMs. IM has just always been my default for any two-person conversation. It's an old norm I picked up from my first friends and one I never thought to question or examine. I'll try to remember to start in local and then IM if there's no response. Thanks for all of the insights x

Did you really do that? JDIRE