Prokofy Neva
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Posts posted by Prokofy Neva
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3 hours ago, JUSTUS Palianta said:
Wow none of this sounds good.
If my premium plus alt has to pay for uploads I'm not paying for premium.
Not really keen on verifying my avatar either and i frequent adult sims. If im not keen on the idea many other people will not even consider it and leave.
Why are we being punished for other peoples wrong doing.
Actually this could be final nail in SL's coffin.
OMG I'm glad I read this. I was just about to get a second PP account so I didn't have to keep relogging alts to do rentals pictures. MANDATORY 2048??? I can't help thinking that will cause visibility to take a hit. The only reason I have PP is for the uploads. If 2048 is mandatory and costs 10L per, I will cancel it. But is this really confirmed?
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4 hours ago, Katherine Heartsong said:
As pointed out above by @Coffee Pancake this is an interesting quote from the Lindens ...
"Child avatars should not be used to access or be near regions which have (or also have) adult-rated content / activities"
I think none of us have an issue with the section I bolded. But accessing or being near regions with A-rated content? That's every M-rated sim in SL. As others have said, and I'll use. a specific example ... you can't walk into a furniture store like Apple Falls now with/wearing/as a child avatar? Every piece of furniture sold is both PR and A rated. Access or near are awfully vague words. Stick to G-only?
Can't figure out the intent or how to enforce this at all.
(The vaguely child-like avatars will now have to get out of the M-rated clubs with adult furniture now. That'll be a nightmare for owners, if you think the current fear and banning is harsh, it'll get stricter I guess. Or maybe the intent of LL is to open up a heck of a lot more A-rated land to live on, de-populating mainland even more? Who knows.)
This goes back to the founding of Zindra, and the determination of some child avatars to push the envelope and insist that they had the right to enter Zindra and hang out in bars and clubs if they liked, or make a home, without being banned, as long as they did not engage in adult behaviour. Which kind of loses the plot, but it was a symbolic protest -- and it won.
I think if you are sincere and serious about being a child avatar properly, you should NOT be fighting to get into Zindra. So I support a ban on child avatars and child content in adult areas. It works the other way around -- you can't have adult activity in "General". So in "Adult" you should have child avatars and child content. That goes to the crux of the recent scandal: child content on an adult-rated sim, even if you can't prove "indecent" or "*****" activity.
As my mother always used to tell us, in the Catholic tradition, "Avoid the near occasion of sin."
Don't go to those roadhouses of ill repute where young girls will lose their virtue.
It's not about Apple Falls and having you walk in a store as a child avatar in an M region and a bed is on sale with both "M" and "A" animations. That's edge-casing and hair-splitting. There's all too much of that around this issue that denies common sense. Most merchants if they want sanity in their store do not put out the adult version of furniture so they don't get loads of day-trippers and looky-loos and kids "trying out the animations". Having it on sale is not having it in action.
Meanwhile, a child bed on an adult sim with a mixture of children and adults means that you have the setting where unlawful behaviour will take place. So you eliminate that climate. I think it's more than reasonable.
Every time someone attempts to deal with the ***** problem they encounter a welter of edge-casers saying "But mah anime waifu short avatar who isn't really a child." Please, let's not be children here, literally. The anime and cute cubs industries are built on this blurring of the distinctions deliberately and we shouldn't be forced to endure that game in SL. If you want to do adult things, don't be in a child avatar; if you want to be a child avatar, don't demand a presence on adult sims. The question here is not about "M" but "A"
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This is me watching the eclipse. I'm not supposed to go out in crowds but I double-masked up.
Also with my draw distance down and "no comment" mode in SL.
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On 4/16/2024 at 3:23 PM, Scylla Rhiadra said:
Interesting, and likely necessary, substitution at the end there!
I have very mixed feelings about Kipling, who was centre stage for much of the heyday of the British Empire as both cheerleader and sometime critic of the colonialist enterprise, especially in India. He was an excellent writer, and a great storyteller, but there is a machismo (not to mention Anglocentric) element to most of his work that leaves something of a bad taste in the mouth.
"If" was a very popular poem, the kind of thing that people would hang, framed, on their walls as an inspiration and a sort of embodiment of British muscularism. There is much with which I agree in this poem, and a great deal that I find unattractive as well. The final line, without the substitution, sort of sums that up, because it defines the meaning of this sort of character that in a way that is much more "judgy" and value laden than suggested by your substitution:
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!In the original version, it's not merely that these qualities define the kind of person that you are (a "resilient" person), but are actually the criteria by which we determine if you are a success or a failure (i.e., not a "man").
Putting aside the sexism here (Kipling wasn't really great at representing women, and usually didn't bother), does this mean that if you cannot manage these things, one is a "loser" instead? Does everyone need to have a stiff upper lip and a gung-ho attitude?
There's also a lot more required from this poem than just "resilience." I actually teach Kipling occasionally, because he can be nuanced and interesting, but I find this poem a bit trite, to be honest. It's one step above the rubric on the inside of a Hallmark greeting card -- at least in my view. Not his best work.
Interestingly, btw, there is a pretty good old film called "If" from the late 60s starring Malcolm McDowell that is a sort of savage and satirical riff on this poem set in an English school for boys (it's a little Lord of the Flies) -- what does the exercise of these qualities actually look like, on the ground? It ain't pretty, or so the film suggests.
Oh, and SL. To some degree, maybe this poem is of a piece with the "it's only a game!" or "block and move on" school of thought here? It's a short step from "resilience" or a "stiff upper lip," to "stop being such a snowflake."
During the early days of the pandemic before the vaccine when I couldn't go out of doors at all, I made my way through all the Central Asian greats that I never found time to read before -- I used to have a job writing about Central Asia daily and I would often say "I only know what I write in the newspaper" to stress my ignorance, as I had never gone to those countries as it happens. So John Buchan's "Greenmantle" (whose scenes I've re-created in SL in both egg and full-size form) is really the UR-novel of all of these types of works, and a lot of spy stories for the next 100 years like 007 and Smiley's People and such. And it is filled with the Orientalism and geocentrism and racism and antisemitism which you'd expect at the time so you have to take it as a period piece but it's still a great story, and politically-correct novels of our time like "The Bird King" have basically copied the same story line and even scenery. So I thought "Kim" was going to be even worse and it wasn't, actually, you need to read it through. Yes, people used to say "mankind" and "man's first step" and all the rest.
I'm used to thinking of "resilient" in NGO terms so I apply it to situations like Chechen and Ukrainian war refugees torn from their homes or torn limb from limb, not...a virtual world for affluent Westerners to sit in their pajamas and RP. You know?
Resilience in a virtual world? There's a very, very simple pathway to virtual world resilience: log off! Remember that CSI episode on SL that we were all fascinated by? And the "Log off! Log off!" scene?
But to put all of that aside and look at SL in its own terms...I think the key is to have good graphic settings. DO NOT CLICK that button on the viewer now that says "Improve Your Graphics" because it makes it WORSE. Dial everything down. Take off "avatar" view. Take down particles. You know the drill.
I just spent another evening with a friend TPing around aimlessly, lagging, crashing, trying to find some good live music or even just a place to shop at Fantasy Faire without dragging around in freeze frame. So we got a bit of shopping done, a bit of sight-seeing of the builds but the music wasn't workable. So, like the weather, wait an hour, and the Events list changes, you'll likely find something to your taste. Weedstock is in session although apparently mainly bikers and folk. I found this great show recently called Billy Bob and the Psychedelic somethings with old progressive rock tunes and a particle shows. So that's the second point about resilience: patience, ability to keep looking and suffering crashes.
Recently, another friend contacted me like 4 times and never caught me online, and I thought she had something urgent and specific, perhaps news of a show, a request about rentals info, some other time-specific matter. But instead it seems she just wanted to chat. I think she's on another time-zone. So I couldn't talk for long because I had to get to RL chores. And that's another piece of the resilience -- the ability to withstand the time zone challenge. SL overcomes space; it doesn't overcome time. Certain relationships seem to consist entirely of asynchronous communications so I try to keep them up -- I send a link to something interesting to read or watch, in or out of SL, a freebie, and LM to some gallery or whatever. And months -- years even! -- go by where I never see that person inworld, let alone talk to them in "real time" yet I feel as if we are "still friends."
Yet a third friend recently told me about a gatcha sale, I couldn't get it to hit the right thing, finally he bought it for me when he swung by and the tumbler clicked, and send it to me. I haven't seen him in ages -- and like a tenant I have, he keeps in touch by gifts (I send them too). So I would save give gifts. I wish the system had a thing whereby it would permanently leave a record tht a thing was a gift, so you could display that table or dinosaur egg in your home and it would say GIFTED BY PROKOFY NEVA on it as a conversation piece LOL.
I have had to face a great deal of disruption and loss in RL and SL. And I can only say the advice to all friends in RL working for any government or large corporation: keep a crime file. You can't always act, but keep a crime file, maybe you will be able to put it together to take action in the future. And if it is more along the lines of personal relationship trauma or suffering the loss of a person through RL death or leaving SL, write a journal even for just a few minute a day, it helps. Journaling advice and workshops get awfully twee or intensive and long-term -- a few minutes, and not even every day, sometimes even once every few weeks, can make a difference.
In that light my Just One Thing program which I got from yet another friend -- try to accomplish just one little thing each day, perhaps something you have been putting off. Chunk up the task. This applies to RL or SL. You will have a great sense of satisfaction if you actually unbox all your purchases and look at all the event gifts and toss most of them.
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On 4/18/2024 at 2:10 AM, Raspberry Crystal said:
I am definitely not a programmer, but this situation does remind me of encounters I have had with other games and software, where either a utility has been 'bought in', or was designed by someone who no longer works for the company.
In the cases I have met before the supposedly time-saving decision to buy in results in a facility that doesn't quite work as intended but which is not really robust enough to be altered, and would need a complete rewrite. In the case where people leave, it can be hard to interpret their work, maybe they don't write good notes etc etc.
I suspect if tweaking the program were an option they would have done it by now, and the complete redo must be the only option.
I have also been told, in the past, that dealing with very large databases is akin to sourcery, and things that would work with no problem on a small scale will throw up utterly bizarre and unpredictable errors.This "bought in" and "no longer works there" stuff is likely a factor in SL as there have been tons of turnovers in SL. There are very few Lindens that have been here since the dawn of time; some have died in RL at this point it's been so long.
I was just reading Vicki Boykis' nerd newsletter on this phenomenon of groupthink and people having beliefs that you "can't do" something because "we've never done it that way" and newcomers not being able to get the group to see the obvious problems. That can happen in any company, even a non-programming environment (although most offices are driven by the programmers).
Bellisseria is obviously a growth engine for LL, and while I'm aware people think it's a loss leader still, I don't see that they could be rolling out that many new homes if it really were (i.e. that the cost of Mole labour and materials is higher than the uptake of new premiums).
So it works, and while they are willing to change things in terms of templates or buildings or trees or whatever, I don't think they are willing to consider changing the aquisition process. If anything, as Andrew Linden used to say in the early days, the growth needs to be throttled. That might seem counterintuitive, but the CS can't keep up with too much of a surge.
There's an interesting slide show at the anniversary which I hope they post on YouTube or somewhere inworld permanently because it gives you some insight into how they think as they put out Bellisseria. They're in god-mode, thinking in terms of laying things out on a grid in big squares and the quality assurance that goes with it. They think of templates this or templates that. They don't adopt the consumer perspective even though some of them might actually have Linden homes or decorate them and go inside of them for special occasions.
And there's no need for them to be sent out on the equivalent of Door Dashes like the engineers are forced to do at that company because, in the inimitable words of Kenny Linden, "There's always another guy to buy the island." Don't like the way it's done and you quit and give up and delete your home? Someone else will be along shortly.
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On 4/18/2024 at 11:41 AM, Always Incognito said:
I hear ya and I thought so too for a while. But the thing is that its quite exciting hunting for houses the PP+ way too. Its more like RL house hunting maybee and u can never be sure u get the house. Someone might have ticket it before you. I got my first ticket trad after weeks of searching ( i have mainland too so I cant have 2048 and Im a trad girl by heart so Im Good anyway).
it was a really exciting Hunt and i gave up a few times as I didnt find anything i wanted. But eventually I did ❤️
Yes, that's true as well. There's a certain sim I've watched for ages and sometimes I fly around it with that HUD to find empty Belli homes, and never find anything.
I never got into the Trads, they seemed cramped. But then the Chalets are cramped as well. Meanwhile, you could fit a roller rink in the Ranches.
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12 hours ago, Matthieu Quander said:
If I wanted a specific home, I would do that. I want to browse. I just rolled a Log Home, dropped it, claimed a new one in less than 5 seconds, and got the same home. Ridiculous.
I still like the thrill of the chase, which takes me back to my youth, in the early days of SL when you shopped for First Land.
Coming from The Sims Online, where you just select ANY parcel that is free and take it, when I first came to SL, I kept right-clicking on land that appeared empty and it never "sold". I was mystified for days. Much later, a Linden explained it didn't work that way.
Then I went on the hunt for "First Land," an old program the Lindens had back then whereby if you were under X number of days as a newbie, you were eligible to buy designated 512 parcels for only $512.
I had heard so many scare stories about it and how everything around you goes south and turns to hideous grief builds and obscenities, that I dithered and dithered for weeks on end. I could see for myself what happened to the sims with "first land" which turned into a giant postage-stamp sheet of horror. Naturally this program got gamed and exploited by land flippers and the Lindens ended it eventually and Linden Homes became the replacement ultimately.
But back then, given those conditions, finally, I reckoned that if I chose a steep, rocky waterfront I could sail from, but wasn't "attractive sandy beach land," I couldn't go wrong. I still have that land, in Refugio.
I underestimated the ability of other people to create havoc. That you could make an alt and go and do the same thing and then link all your lots in a group never dawned on me and I waited way too long to learn that as well. (Not sure we had that robust "knowledge base") back then.
There I was, clinging to a rock and singing to myself "We live in a beautiful world (yeah we do, yeah we do)" , a hit song of that era, when this really aggressive oldbie, angered that some of "her" sim had been turned into first land parcels, grabbed them on alts and then put boards over them so you couldn't tell they were for sale.
Until I learned how you can see underneath the boards and indeed how you should always take off "volume" to see what the land really is all about. A newbie friend of mine came and got a boarded-up parcel.
We then found ourselves fired upon, orbited, surrounded by ban lines, subjected to particle attacks and spam etc. The very first thing I purchased in SL was a weapon called "Axe of the Leviathan." I also had the superstitious idea that this might aid me in combat with this person battling for the whole sim, who had the same last name.
It didn't.
Even so, I'm still there, and she isn't. Ah, Second Life! Ah, youth!
So yeah, I like to get a random surprise scouring the areas of Belli. Putting in a ticket feels like paying a phone bill or something, not as fun.
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10 hours ago, Quartz Mole said:
Have you encountered this recently, Prok? Our update of March 7 was supposed to fix this, and it did, as far as I know. At least if it hasn't, this is the first I've heard (and when anything scripted goes wrong on Bellisseria, I normally hear about it pretty quickly). We can tell when the house controllers have successfully configured themselves by checking their description fields (visible to estate managers with Region Objects) and when our QA team checked the regions after the update everything seemed to be in order.
If you noticed this issue after March 7th, please, if you can,let me know where and when it happened.
I wasn't able to check every single account just now but from what I can see of several where I recall attempting Linden homes, you're right, nothing comes after March. It's all in February. I thought it had occurred *again* only in Sakurasseria this week (not Fantasseria) because I selected the house, then hovering over it, couldn't get the post office box to do anything, couldn't get anything to work. I relogged and kept trying.
Finally, I realized I was not on the parcel that I had selected, but the one next door. Derp.
So it's all good!
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Where can you see that dancing bear?
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3 hours ago, Matthieu Quander said:
You are overthinking it. It's more likely that the list of available parcels is sorted by an assigned static index number. The order of the list changes when when homes are claimed. When a home is put back in the pool, it ends up in the same place in the list due to its index number. Homes with the largest index numbers may never reach the top unless only a subset of the entire list is being used, and that subset is rotated regularly. I have no idea if that is happening, but if it is, it is not helping much due to the low demand.
For example, If I claim a Log Home now, and that home has index number 01234, this would mean that all homes with a lower index number are owned, and the next available home will be the one with the next lowest index number (01235 if it isn't already owned). If I release 01234, it ends up back at the top because it will again have the lowest number. This is why it is possible, and even likely, to get assigned the same home multiple times in a single session of claims, depending on how quickly a home ends up back in the queue.
To fix the issue, they need to change the method they use for which home in the list gets assigned. Instead of first in line, it needs to be a random selection. Alternatively, they could index the list by abandoned date, and sort by oldest to most recent, but that method isn't as fair. They could also require a period of time that a home cannot be added back into the queue, but that would impact themes with low inventory, and does not address the issue of ending up with the same homes the following day.
Obviously the easiest thing they could do is leave it as is, but perhaps if enough residents complain, they will consider making a change. They may feel that allowing specific claims via Premium Plus ticket adequately addresses the issue.
I think the system is quite frankly designed to drive you to Premium Plus, if only for a month, because you get to keep the house you've picked with a PP account, even if you go back to regular premium a month later. I've done this once and may do it again.
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18 hours ago, Raspberry Crystal said:
I think it would take too much tme and effort for staff to manually patrol empty homes and assess whether they are the best plots or not.
The suggestions posted elsewhere seem more likely, that the website is optimised by only making a limited number of the available plots to choose from, and that recently abandoned plots, for whatever reason seem to get put back in the 'choosing pile'.
The usual reason that things like this don't get fixed is lack of time, and concern about breaking something and ending up with facility not working at all (or taking a long time to put right).
In that circumstance, the best time to go home shopping is when new themes are released, because some people usually abandon old homes and the piles get shuffled that way.That may be the reason. They may also have the logic that abandoned lots were chosen, after all, so could in theory be chosen again, unlike those not chosen, so why not put them back in the pool? They are more likely to be taken.
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16 hours ago, Sparkle Bunny said:
That's because they were using alts to keep the ones they didn't want out of the available pool. When GoH was at its peak you'd get groups or couples with a few dozen accounts at their disposal snapping up the majority of any new release. Premium Plus has largely negated the need for that, as well as cutting down on the number of alts people need/can afford.
Oh, so you're saying ANOTHER strategy to play the Game of Homes is to use the alt NOT to hold the not-so-bad one so that you have at least *something* after 3 days, but to hold the dogs, so that they don't keep recurring. I'll try that next time!
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4 hours ago, Matthieu Quander said:
What qualifies as a good house is subjective, and will vary to some degree, depending whom is asked. I like parcels that are adjacent to water but also have some geographical features that allow them to feel private.
I do not believe that the better homes are being deliberately saved and that we are intentionally being force fed the less desirable parcels. I think it is simply an issue with how the list of available homes is generated and indexed. It was obviously not programmed to prioritize randomness or full inventory churning. When there is high demand for a theme, this is not an issue, as all houses will get chosen eventually. When demand is low, we are at the mercy of how the available homes list is sorted, and how quickly abandoned homes are put back into the list (it is amazingly fast at times).
I'm sure there are some good reasons why the process works as it does. I'm not looking for an easy button to get the exact home I want. Premium Plus is there if I want that. I simply want a real opportunity to evaluate the 5 homes I am allowed to claim per day instead of the 2-3 I'm getting now. I'd also prefer to not get the same 5 every day.
To me, there are two obvious solutions. One would be to truly randomize the homes claims. The other would be to at least force abandoned homes to the bottom of the list. Either would be an improvement, though randomization would be the most fair.
I can't understand why it is so hard to have the system just not let you repeat what you alreay tried. You only get 5 tries. So that they aren't wasted, it shouldn't do repeats. OR if it *does* do repeats, it should generate another chance. Maybe that's easier to do?
If I take 3 alts and work one themed house area for 3 days, that's 45 chances, correct? So why the same list over and over, and dupes on each one? I see not just desirable houses, but actually empty houses that just never appear in the list. Instead, it's the same limited stock, as if it is not drawing from the entire stock of non-taken Linden homes. I don't see how it could possibly be doing that, given the number of repeats over time, and sometimes in a row.
If it were truly drawing from the entire stock of all vacant or abandoned Linden homes in a theme, there would be far fewer repeats. This is what I don't get.
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Mendeleyev, call your office.
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My first and only ranch home was styled as a venue on the steppes in Kazakhstan because I couldn't really see them as "Nebraska" or even "Upstate New York," i.e. any kind of "ranch" or "farm" that I'd ever seen in RL.
They didn't make them perfectly flat as this would make them feel crowded, and that's fine, but the easements seemed to have either odd ponds or windmills on them that didn't really say "ranch". I agree that a field with a crop circle would have been really cool. Maybe it's the house styles as well that don't include "barn" from what I recall.
I ended up changing to a Med for this reason.
I think like all tech things, the Linden Bellisseria phenomenon is about white tech males who grew up largely in American suburbia having a vision, and then tasking to fulfill it a huge crew of people from all over the world who never lived in, let alone saw these styles.
Also, even if you disagree that cultural norms and executions are not the issue, there's the hard reality that trying to convert RL buildings into SL is always a challenge because "math" or "isometric" or something something.
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I've had this happen every time, and I've had to put in a ticket to solve it, and wait several days for it to be solved, so maybe it is a damper on Fantasseria uptake.
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9 hours ago, Matthieu Quander said:
That is one of the suggested fixes, but it is likely more complicated than that.
I'm not cynical enough to argue that they are leaving it this way on purpose. I tend to believe that the current situation is more likely to cost them Premium memberships than it is to result in people upgrading, but that is pure speculation on my part.
All I know is that residents should not repeatedly be given the same home choice over and over when there as an ample supply of alternatives. This has been an issue since the L1 days, but feels worse currently, most likely because I am shopping a theme that doesn't see much activity.
Yes, surely it's possible to do that? But maybe they have created a "stock list" and don't really give you "the entire list of what is really available". The thought occurred to me as I went through these same frustrations the other night.
I kept finding that the really desirable one could never be captured, even while empty -- the system kept giving me the dogs around it. Days went by, and nobody else seemed to get that gem, either. Is this because the Lindens have a reserve of "really nice" ones that they leave for the Premium Plus people to choose, i.e. all-sides protected, waterfronts, etc.?
This would be reasonable for them to do -- we don't know if they do this and they won't tell us.
But...How hard would it be to ensure that you never get the same one again??? So the reason they won't change this must be due to the fact that they are keeping a set list -- not ALL the choices, not the prime lots, but just a set list that they hope to unload.
Therefore, you are forced to play with several alts, at least to hang on to one more or less tolerable lot with one of the alts while you try with the others.
I've had times when I've settled on the first try because what I was doing with the house didn't require actual "living" and a "feel" for a neighbourhood, but the stamp venue inside or a story I was making with the house as a prop. But most of the time I want it to be tolerable to hang out in, at least a few hours a week.
Which is about all I can tolerate of Belli houses by contrast with my more spacious and in the end more diverse Mainland lots.
See my thread elsewhere here about Sakurasseria for additional thoughts. Also I'd be curious to know what you mean as a good house.
For me, a good house these days has to have at least two sides "protection" -- a Linden road, park, or waterway. Ideally, three or even a lucky four. Any less, and I feel I'm in the Pete Seeger "Little Boxes" song.
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8 hours ago, Sparkle Bunny said:
Sakura's one of the less popular themes, tbh. I could only find one Parade of Homes listing.
I wonder why that is. I thought that generally, Asian themes were popular in SL, judging from merchant events and so on. So I wonder why this is.
Do real Asian people find that it is a Disney-like notion of what is "Asian" and dislike it? I would love to hear from them.
Conversely, do non-Asian find it uncomfortable as not "familiar" enough from the themes they are used to?
I will venture a more mundane guess: while the overall look of this suburban village look is nice, a fair number of the lots are dogs.
In my first several times with a house in Sakurasseria, either a private home or one I made a venue for the SL Public Land Preserve, I thought "you can't go wrong in Sakurasseria". It seemed like it was very, very easy to get a waterfront house -- if you accepted that "waterfront" meant a canal. The canals had enough little parks in the middle of the waterways, and sweeping, majestic steps leading down to them in open areas, that they didn't seem cramped but interesting.
I never felt my neighbours were on top of me if one part faced to a waterway, and the side was maybe a Linden road and a park, with maybe two sides "unprotected". To be sure, at my last waterfront house, I saw other green dots close by, and I wondered if they'd be annoyed by visitors using the chatGPT characters, if the chat went off my lot 96 meters. I never had any complates. You can now click an option to keep MOAP on your own parcel -- thank God, and I wish more people would click it. But chatting objects like a chatGPT character? No, it does not seem so from tests.
Still, the place seemed empty. I went on some "walkabouts" and didn't encounter anyone for miles, even with the houses rather close together.
And I think that's a problem -- the houses are very close together, and a lot of the styles are flat and one story, and that may make people feel more crowded than in a Victorian or a stilt.
Then this time, I tried a bit of "Game of Homes". With one account, you only get five tries -- and using another browser brand doesn't work any more to add to the 5. But you can get 2-3 alts going trying -- if you have the stamina and time, and I don't. But I tried a few evenings working the GoH front -- and I was surprised how awful most of the choices were -- AND how I kept getting those awful choices *again* on the alts, as if there was a short list of dogs that the Lindens were trying to unload.
Everyone has their own definition of what constitutes a good Belli home, and I think the Moles try to make as many "good" ones as possible with waterfronts, parks adjacent, easements, interesting geographical features. But the problem in Sakura is the urban features -- heavy roads, bridges, short stone walls -- kind of overwhelm the delicate Japanese feel when the lots have neighbours or even a corner street lot (which I usually accept).
I think the biggest determinant for what makes a "good" Belli home is whether or not you feel your neighbours are on top of you. When people talk about "commuuuuunity" in Belli, they have to realize that it comes from affinity groups or general citizens' groups with activities like ferry rides -- NOT going over to immediate your neighbour's house to borrow a cup of sugar. You never see them or if you do, they scuttle away behind their ban lines to their skyboxes.
In playing GoH, it was especially frustrating because some gorgeous 3 sides or even 4 sides protected lots kept getting a miss. That led me to wonder if the Lindens code some of the gems to be available essentially only to the Premium Plus account where you can put in a ticket with a specific request. I avoided that temptation -- I have only one Premium Plus account I'm happy with mainly for the huge savings on texture uploads but also the 2048 Linden home with a Med -- but more than one would really be an unnecessary expense.
And...I wonder if the Moles feel they have the flexibility, if an area isn't selling, to simply tear up an entire sim, even if it means having to move some people out (but some appear entirely empty), and starting over with more ponds, waterways, parks or something to make them more desirable.
After many log cabins and campers with glacial ponds or other types of ponds nearby, I thought I didn't care, but the Mole pond in Sakurasseria is so beautiful, that a lot even with neighbours chock full around me, the pond in the back was a real selling point. It has bamboo shoots and delicate flowers and a nice benh.
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I am making a 1950s style tourist pamphlet giver "Area Attractions" and I want to put some locations to visit. I am reopening "Blogging Outpost" where you can pick it up (and freebies) although it is still under construction.
I could not find a single resident or Mole stamp in Sakurasseria EXCEPT at the Shibu community center -- which is absolutely gorgeous, go visit if you have not yet. Did I miss any??
Also looking for any kind of clubs/galleries/bars or just a "house beautiful" open to the public.
Too many ban lines in these areas!
Gorgeous Mole pond here to enjoy. This one has a bench to sit on (unlike others).
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3 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:
Oh yeah, now I remember that thread. I remember trying very hard to behave myself even though I'd hate for such a system to become commonplace. It's really a way to use a "blacklist" named-ban script to get around the height limit of "whitelist" access control, but it's gussied-up as a way for orbs to avoid ejecting people from parcels by pre-banning them.
So that script would indeed ban everybody upon entering the region unless they were excepted, perhaps in an owner-supplied list, or by having an owner-favored Group active, or whatever. That all would be working as designed, though, so the "scripting error" here would be… something else?
There are many things I didn't like about that entire enterprise in that thread, but I'm puzzled why, if the goal is to avoid a "teleport home" -- wasn't that the goal? -- that you couldn't just select "eject" rather than "teleport home" as the optioni. The security system called LazyGuy has that option and no doubt others do (the Linden-created one offered in Bellisseria to comply with their regulations that it *not* teleport home.)
"Teleport home" is a throwback to gaming mechanics where, if you fail to beat the boss, you "die" and have to go back home or back to some spawn point or something. It's super annoying.
But are you saying that merely being bounced a bit under an "eject" is the issue, so that they want not even ejecting (which can force you on to another parcel, sometimes farther away than just a mere bounce).
I fail to see why this "good" would override the senselessness of banning everyone who came on a parcel. The chief problem with this is that it bans a lot of your fellow tenants in a rental system -- where they, too, have ban powers and can merely reach into the parcel menu and unban themselves then. I do find some tenants come on a rental and sit and ban everyone they see on the sim because they fear all of them are bent on invading their privacy. "Avatars can see me" UNCHECKED never seems to be good enough for them, in combination with a normal white-listed ban system.
I think "avatars can't see me" was a brilliant invention of the Lindens but there isn't the social trust in it that there should be.
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On 4/9/2024 at 1:47 PM, Sid Nagy said:
And yet again, I can save me the money easily.
I thought some of these were great in time for Fantasy Faire. It's just an expense I can't bear now.
I wouldn't take "Ravenwood" because I like to be able to go on saying that none of my accounts/alts use anything resembling my business name, so that when griefers do this and harass groups on day-old accounts, it is easy to disavow them.
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17 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:
It's a good question why a public venue would ever resort to scripted access control at all. An explanation for that might be pretty hilarious.
But program bugs can be arbitrarily nonsensical. It's perfectly possible to keep a list of special accounts intended to populate the land access list and instead a bug adds them all to the land ban list. That's not to suggest anything like that is happening here, just an example of nonsense a buggy script can get up to. It's essentially unprovable that a particular outcome wasn't a bug but was how the script was intended to work. So I don't think any technical analysis of this situation could have a definitive result.
I can't for the life of me imagine any possible scenario where a script would have a bug of some kind, and it would then ban a specific avatar by name accidentally.
Your scenario would make sense if, say, all the group land owners or members or some known quantity like that accidentally all got banned by some mechanism from their own land. But an outsider? Coming for the first time? That is simply not possible UNLESS you are using that script that bans everyone as they come on the sim. I will find the link to that discussion and return.
UPDATE: This operates by first banning everyone who comes on a sim, then deleting them as there isn't a space to hold them all.
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There's a certain person who claims he banned me "by accident due to a scripting error". Let us look at this generically.
I'm not a scripter, but I know enough about scripts and their uses and misuses, and how to do a bit of editing on them, to know that this story does not hold up.
First, there's the issue that if you are running a public venue, open to the public, i.e. not your private skybox, in my view, you shouldn't have a banning system in place of this nature in the first place. That's my default. I don't use them; I don't allow ban lines or orbs of any kind on the ground in my rentals, full stop. They can be used in skyboxes only.
So, there are only certain ways that someone can end up in a ban list:
1. The land owner manually enters you into the ban list.
2. The land owner has a ban system that uses a stock list of shared names to ban which are used communally. This was long ago proposed by the operator of the Shelter, and I vehemently opposed it back then, because I thought it would be misused, and of course it was. I don't know if shared ban lists as an automated feature still exists, but of course some owners do share ban lists anyway, manually, and possibly automatically.
3. The land owner used an open source list being touted here on the forums that functions by first banning everyone on the sim, then letting them out of the list after X amount of time. This might make sense if you are trying to keep your private home, especially a skybox, free of bots or intruders, although I think it sounds like a riotous public nuisance.
4. You use a certain product that has me in the ban list as a "sample griefer".
5. You turn on a ban system that automatically closes your lot and keeps everyone out who isn't whitelisted.
So, no. 5 does not seem to be the case, as other people would come and go from this venue. I tested an alt who was also banned, so I had to conclude that either I was unlawfully banned by IP address using systems still available on the MP, or again, manually banned, and someone who knew my alts added them.
No. 3 is a possibility, but it doesn't make sense to me to use this kind of overkill for -- again -- a public venue on the mainland that isn't a club.
What's most likely is the shared banning system or a manual ban.
It's not the case that this "scripting error" banned everybody because not only did other people go there when I was there -- no one else complained that they couldn't get into the site, i.e. the land wasn't put with ban *lines* -- that would be different like "group only". This was a ban with *my name in the ban list*.
So my attitude towards this phenomenon is:
1. Anyone who uses any ban system of any kind on an open mainland vanue expecting high public traffic is a control freak and doesn't understand what "open to the public means". Again this isn't a club, where trouble can happen, drama, griefing, fights, etc.; it's just a sight-seeing transportation hub sort of deal where no one stays for long.
2. It's possible to put in bans manually when griefing occurs, and not use automated shared lists or anything automated. This is not a griefable area (like a club). So again, the "scripting error" alibi is nonsense, the sort of thing people say when they imagine you will be baffled by some tech reference.
What I see here is not a scripting error, but an error in judgement, using an automated banning system of any kind (especially the "shared list" type or the "ban on entry to sim temporarily" type) or using a product that has a "sample list of griefers" with actual residents' names in it, without recourse.
So, my attitude towards this incident is that this person should be manually banned from my venues and should admit they are prevaricating.
Technical assessment welcome.
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Lab Gab April 2024 - Comments? Discussion?
in General Discussion Forum
Posted · Edited by Prokofy Neva
I just went and listened to parts of this again. I'm hearing that yes, they will have this range of prices for uploading the 2048 texture -- 50L for free accounts, 40L for Premium and 10L for Premium Plus. So it's a shame to lose the free uploads, which for me is the only point of the PP account.
BUT it's not clear to me IF 2048 will become the ONLY type of texture and "mandatory" (with a hardstop when you atttempt to upload? or how?) or whether there will still be the range of 512 and 1024, with the same old prices for those sizes, i.e. free for PP.
I'm just not getting why they would make 2048 mandatory, when it won't load for many people.