Prokofy Neva

I haven't seen any Linden events that force an Experience on you. For example, the Halloween event had a HUD, not an Experience to get the trick 'r treat bucket. But if there is an unwanted experience that makes you feel mauled, then just don't go to Linden events. I don't think you will miss much.

*Shrugs* The Lindens have never said that in any of their literature or videos on PBR. Ever. They should have. But didn't. *Shrugs*

That's exactly what the more glorified graphic settings in the viewer do - the ALM. Instead of *enhancing* the SL experience it *degraded* it by making everything look blurry. So I'm avoiding PBR because I think it will work in exactly the same fashion. I don't see why we are to applaud "breaking old content". I suppose I will wait until it it forced on us with no other choice like Viewer 1.23 became 2.0 with unusable search, and if my game won't play, why, I won't log on. It would be some time before I'd buy an entire new computer or graphics card to wrap around the Lindens' latest shiny that I didn't ask for.

We missed your comments of this nature back when it was suggested (and with certain Linden enthusiasm) to put RLV in the official as a function to forcibly lift and carry people over regional crossings when they are traveling, something I personally would oppose as it means lifestyle capture of the public commons.

If there is such a thing, and I'm not sure there is, it's in their games, and you are not required to play their games to be in Second Life.

I have to chuckle at your "distrust of thee and trust for me" approach to SL which is so very, very typical. I'm always amazed at the people who feel entitled to deploy -- and also meekly accept the consequences for even their friends -- of harsh, nasty land ban orbs that bounce them away or teleport them all the way home, but when it comes to clicking "yes" on an experience, they feel as if they have been terribly violated. When you say you "don't enable anyone else's experiences," you're telling me that you refuse to allow a ChicChica or cinoe beverage deliver into your hands smoothly, as well as the hands of your guests. OK, so noted. In part, the Lindens are to blame for allowing their world to become a p2p shooter game in places, with "unsafe" land and teleporters that return you home as if you are in a MMORPG game killing monsters. This is all beneath our dignity. Even so, I think I can tell the difference between some BDSM type forced-animation in somebody's experience set, and a...teleport to the upper floor in their store. Plus, I'm in a virtual world and can log off any time. I have both commissioned Experience scripters and deployed them in quests (nowhere else that I can think of) in order to make people magically whoosh to a place if they click on a potion (the Experience TPs are preferred to landmarks across sims because you don't get the Linden splash ad as you are whooshing and it gives a greater feeling of immediacy and immersion). I have also used them to make a quester not pass through a door or a wall until they either drink the potion or type the magic word or hold out the object they scavenged; or have them collide into something to make them teleport or get a prize or whatever. You know, have fun. In a quest. In a game. In a virtual world. Again, you are always fully in control and can log off to RL if you are unhappy. Also, did you know that you can delete experiences out of your land if you tire of any of them for any reason? And did you know: To leave an experience by revoking its permissions, you may either Forget or Block it: Choose Me > Experiences... from the top menu bar. The Experiences window opens. Click the Allowed tab on the Experiences window.

For reference

I think they're great and I plan to try one. The terrain has broken shells in it like Brighton Beach. The inside has some kind of hinky spacing and I wonder what some of these little nooks are going to be used for? Crates of armaments? Washing machines? The yards are very spacious.

No, it literally disintegrated into 16m parcels. It was the damnedest thing. Because: see above -- Philip thought it would be a great way to collectively ensure a few extra prims to people. At some point they listened to people's howls and stopped it. This was before Mr. Lee's Hong Kong appeared, but he definitely then made hay with it. I used to interact with him quite a bit, especially when he would pop up in the middle of prime waterfront. Of course the landbot owners also did splitting, but the original splitting was an automatic process.

I could point out that you can't buy a 4096 and then group your land and buy microparcels to add to your primmage because the microparcels are for sale for 156L per meter. Not 1L per meter. 156 per meter.

Let's be more precise here, Comrade. When Oz Linden (May his memory be a blessing) ruled that 1.23 had to die, and SL version 2.0 had to come into being, the Lindens destroyed search. They made it work way, way worse than it had before. That's because at that time, they decided the Google Search Appliance would be "just the thing" instead of MySquirrel lol tables which are oh=so-archaic. That a finite virtual world constructed on not-quite-the-same-principles as the vasty World Wide Web may not do so well with GSA didn't occur to them and still hasn't. Since then they have gone through all kinds of things, Apache this and whatever that and reticulated splines, and occasionally it gets a little better and then takes a dive to being god-awful. "Land Store" with all of its works is a particular horror. This is on the regular SL viewer. It's one of the main reasons that everyone flocked over to Firestorm -- search works. Search, which is the lifestream of a virtual world for shopping and finding things to do and people to meet. The reason for this is because Cinders (a heroine and goddess of SL to whom I have erected a monument in the Lost Garden of Slosser) ruled that FS should preserve "legacy search" from 1.23 and not scrap it and slavishly emulate 2.0 This didn't "just happen". This happened because one dev in that shall we say eclectic group was able to push through something that certain other fanboys didn't care about or thought was irrelevant. They didn't shop, but sandboxed. People who think the main value of Firestorm is the UX, or "area search" so they can do quests faster than anyone with the SL viewer, or whatever they like about it (perhaps: dresses?) are largely unconscious of the search mangle and how the search they actually use is still there for them to use. FS is the third-party viewer that emerged from the discredited Phoenix Viewer, and after various "hard talks" with the Lindens resulted in the FS you see now, a policy on third-party viewers in general, meant to sift out the griefer viewers, and yet...there is the continued existence of griefer and copyright thieving viewers based on FS because: science. Open source is as open source does. The Lindens could stop this but chose not to. Ditto FS devs. I think in the annals of Silicon Valley, there are few cases (maybe more, I don't know), where the creators of a product or platform deliberately maim and harm their own product, making it not work, refuse to admit that they have done this, call in teams of Google and other experts, and keep mangling it, and then enable third parties to create an ad-on to their product which most users then select to use because it works way better.

"Let them talk," is really the best policy on a thread like this.

You're forgetting our glorious past, Comrade. Back in the day, at least through 2004 if not latter, when you abandoned a parcel, it INSTANTLY, without you doing anything, disintegrated into 16m parcels all on its own, each for sale for $1/m. I'll never forget getting some First Land, and all excited as a newbie about building my little cabin and placing a little tree on this 512 parcel available only to avatars of a certain young age (a program since discontinued), and I clicked on the wrong button, and all of a sudden vultures came and began to eat my land. I couldn't figure out what happened at first, as land bots, which were not only allowed but encouraged as "science," came and began to feast on my land in chunks. I hurriedly tried to buy back my own land, but it was now a checkerboard. This was DELIBERATE as Philip thought it would be grand if people of good will, working together in harmony on a sim, sometimes joined in holy grouped land communes, could then "get a few extra prims". This disintegrated parcel would lay there for months on end, as neighbours of good will came and fetched a 16m now and then, like borrowing a cup of sugar -- but only if they needed it. He never envisioned extortionist ad farming, "networked ad systems" selling junk like "work at home" scams, and spinning billboards. There were no rules about any of these for FOUR LONG YEARS as groups of us continued to lobby the Lab to bring order to this chaos. Every sim that had First Land on it as a checkerboard -- to be avoided on the auction - turned into blighted masses of picked-away land abandoned either accidentally or on purpose, when neighbours put up giant towers or spinning junk on their land because "science". Eventually there was more of a warning and a nag screen "Are you sure you really want to do this" put on the viewer. Who are the people who did this early ad farming and came and deliberately gobbled first land, making dozens of alts and deploying dozens of bots? These weren't pure subsistence farmers from Brazil or Turkey. These were geeks in California earning six figures (as I discovered live, and in person, going to various "metaverse" and "SL meet-up" conferences of that era) who wanted to "see what would happen" or "see what people would do" -- you know, "Science". Lord of the Flies science. These patches of gobbled land were sometimes inland, sometimes on prime waterfront, sometimes in water (the Lindens set up decades of conflict generators by selling the water in front of waterfront land parcels), oh, and sometimes on roadside. Eventually years past, the Lindens banned bots in some ways, or those land barons got tired -- some of them started college. Some of them went to work for Intel, which at that time was a competitor for the Lab with its own prototype virtual world that never got off the ground. The OP is not in good faith here, and is merely channeling the spirit of those early "scientists". The Lindens could fix this. But they're "scientists," too, in a Lab.

For years I put out this Willowind tree (I think they're out of business now) which I think was one of the first mesh items. The only problem is the star on top spins and it's not on mod and it drives me crazy if I have to be at home looking at it. So I decided to go with Lantian Flox's old-fashioned one with the candles (no one would do that nowadays in RL). ~L/Fx~Old Fashioned Christmas Tree (blue spruce) 7li MCt And I could put a few ornaments on it.

Yes, I agree, Half-Deer trees are great, I put them in the rentals. I want something different at home, however. I have that same set of ornaments from Apple Fall/Apple Pancake and they cost a bundle to assemble back in the day and now I think he occasionally releases them as a pack? I'm trying to find that tree made up of cats that was the gatcha rare, anybody?

I love Alazarin Mondrian/Alazarin Mobius' characterization of Second Life in general these days: "God's Waiting Room on the Internet" Boy, do I know it.

Look at my new winter home! What you have to look at are not the prices people ASK FOR, but the prices they SELL FOR. In this case, a 768, it was a mere 2L a meter -- not exactly a bargain, as I could have probably found abandoned for $1/m or something hot off the worthless auction for like 0.8/meter if I looked. But I didn't have time to look, and this "just in time" quality is what enables many a hard-scrabble (and in this case fairly newish land baron) to succeed in convincing me to buy his bad buy, a long strip of nothing inland snow. I love my neighbours' builds in front of me, where I intend to look, as behind me is something that my Mom might have characterized as "busy". Snow, snow, snow! This will be my home for like...two weeks maybe? lol

As much as you'd like to rewrite history for whatever your purposes are, there isn't this concept of the *Lindens* calling anything in SL "a city" as a widespread practice -- except *Bay* City which really is a Mole one-off -- where they put a lot of brown, drab 1940s Chicago-style buildings like in some noir detective movie in vaguely an "Art Deco" style on sims like Nova Albion -- hence "City". My recollection is that they did not *start* with that title when they rolled out those sims but it came along later. Sadly, there's no more Sluniverse picture archive to be able to prove these memories. What happened is that various glorious builders of yore -- Maxx Monde, Traxx Hathor and Ingrid's boyfriend, what was his name? With the sort of Magellan Linden avatar? (Or maybe Magellan copied him) -- put up these YUUUUGE towers, like many many stories high, which you can do on a sim with DOUBLE PRIMs. With DOUBLE PRIMS, somebody might have thought "let's make bucolic ranches" or "let's make little houses with picket fences and use up all those prims" but instead they thought SKYSCRAPER. The builders of that era were skillful and the buildings looked good; that can't be said of every tower built since then, emulating them or cities of RL. In Nautilus, the Lindens failed to enforce a height restriction and thus curb that yen for so many men to create certain symbols in virtual worlds. There weren't double prims on these sims that shot up in value quickly AFAIK (altho perhaps there *were* more prims, I'd have to go check) -- but something else -- they had a lot of easements, and that meant that you didn't have neighbours crowding you. There were huge Linden builds and Linden protection everywhere, like a !@#@#$$% 7/11 store selling Trojans. They gave you packs of inventory but it was too high prim for most people to justify and not good-looking enough (remember those sculpty vases with Philip in an Egyptian pose?), so people didn't use them. You had a LOT of people at first making very nice Roman, Greek, whatever sort of builds in that heroic vein -- you had a huge Starax sculpture garden at a time when his sculptures went for three and four figures in US dollars (not Lindens) and so on. There was a skirmish and a war for influence with Lindens, alternatives, stuff, nonsense (as in Zindra and elsewhere) and then -- wreckage, caused by a few building ugly towers that overshadowed many sims in all directions, and not even living in them or even putting shabby rentals in them. When land gets devalued by the few and the absence of rules enforced, as they were never intended to be in Nautilus, you leave, despite your $50,000L auction win for only 1024 m2 It's just "Nautilus". Not "Nautilus City." It may appear "city-like" as they put in a lot of old stone builds and ruins that look like the end of a civilization's capital city, sure. They have *urban* sims which form the core of *Bay City* so-called, but not a concept of "cities across the grid". There are a lot of reasons for it which I could go on about, but the long and the short of it is: cities, and high costs associated with double prims on the auctions, are NICHE. Not everyone wants them or has the cash to live them. Most people want suburbia. And they have gotten what they want in Bellisseria.

Calleta is not a "little sim". It's a full-sized region. It has an outsized place in the history of SL because the creators there provided free content that many, many people took copies of. If it's not your thing, understood, but it has been popular. And once again, it is not "right by" Magellan's Crash, which is in the middle of the Columbia sim -- Calleta is two sims away. Your notion of "city" is not one that anyone in the history of Second Life has ever had; the Lindens have never used this concept or term in the way you are using it -- it's just your own effort to try to give legs to a real estate advertising concept. I'm well aware that Kama City is a part of Zindra, but Zindra is not of great interest to me. I just never went and explored it. Meanwhile, I have visited Nova Albion, Bay City, Shermerville (where I had land), Nautilus (where I also had land) many, many times, and before you were born. I think as a newcomer on a sim of recent vintage you might want to get the history of the surrounding sims accurately. Of course, history is written by the victors, but Magellan's Crash has never moved -- such Linden builds don't move. It has always been on Columbia, and not "near" Calleta.

Well I would say in fact NOT so significantly less. And some of them eyed a certain monopolist who actually brought his prices DOWN and actually sold one long lot there for a not-bad price I think more than a year ago in the depths of the pandemic, and then JACKED UP their prices fairly recently. If such parcels got on the auction, that means someone abandoned them, which really puzzles me then, because anyone could very quickly sell those lots for a good price. To be sure I recall once -- just once! -- an abandoned plot there by someone who may have died, and I asked the Lindens for it, and got it. So it's possible there was a situation where one of those truly ancient oldbies with the 4096-for-life -- who would leave parcels there for decades and never log in -- finally went to Our Father's house which has "many mansions".... Could it be that the Lindens actually cut into their park land and auctioned it? They do that now. But I recently combed Brown looking for small parcels I might in fact get for prims and found nothing. People put those sheds in the "marketplace" at ridiculous prices although that has no traffic, is not a marketplace, has a few odd little art displays or ancient vendors, and is not worth what is being charged. But prices in SL don't always make sense or follow even the logic of virtuality.

It's simply not true that Calletta -- the hobo encampment -- was formed around Magellan's Crash site. Go and look. I have been there for nearly 20 years now. Magellan's Crash is on Columbia, not Calleta. It's a small site by Linden standards and the Moles can't be bothered to put a BBB stamp there in the stamp game, although I put one on our UFO there. And there has never been any hoboes at all in Columbia on my properties or the ones owned previouisly next door, which for many years was a huge furry sandbox. Originally we had the space theme in keeping with the Magellan crash sim. Gradually, since space is very niche as a rentals, it turned to just ordinary houses on 512s and 1024s mixed in with skyboxes. I can't recall a single tent or hobo-like thing there in all this time -- because the hobos are further down the tracks in Calleta. Calleta was never laggy. I also had other land adjacent to it and never, ever experienced lag from their primmy and sculpty builds. it was a cool place, it had a good long run, the people were very creative, and now pretty much I think they are gone -- occasionally the hobo-in-chief drops in and talks to me at my other sims and he now goes to another open sandbox if he's on, not there. It's simply not true that Zindra land is "unchangeable". Again, you must not have ever gone there or owned it. You must mean *Horizons* which indeed they made unterraformable and unable to be parceled smaller or joined -- like a kind of Bellisseria early variant. They put space houses on it originally, but you could return them -- and virtually everyone did because they were ugly and primmy and PS did I mention, space is very, very niche in SL. It's for full-sim end user's RP, occasionally some cheap exotic rentals, it's not a thing. Do I know it! It's also not true that Zindra got "substantial protected land". Yes, there are some roadways and railways that by contrast with all those later continents like Jaegeot that have zero infrastructure and vast tracks of no water bodies inland seems like an easement paradise. But Zindra also has entire sims of chopped up uglies. Fly around and look. The Lindens originally offered a trade: take your adult venue in M that they wanted you to remove from the view, and get the exact straight equivalent in Zindra. So some of us got Zindra early with that but I personally got rid of most of it because I really didn't like the strange black vinyl type textures on the roads and the bridges, and it did not rent in fact as people might imagine -- originally it was mainly clubs. Only gradually did it develop an end-user residential population over the years -- and PS this situation is artificially maintained by the lead land baron monopolist who buys and holds, jacks up bids on the auction, and keeps prices overly high. Sl is oligarchy. Were a few of these types to disappear from the scene, and the areas get a lot of diversified small holdings, the society would be better and prices would normalize and value would be added. The Lindens did not mitigate lag in Zindra -- it is a fast sink hole of adult furniture and if you fly around with a XOPH sensor your radar will go off the charts. The script time is abysmal and the lag terrible in places, which is one reason I don't do rentals there except for a few small cabin areas. As for Horizons, I think some of the top stores in that continent wouldn't be up in the sky if the lag was so absent on the ground. Zindra enabled the Lindens to tell the brands that they had the adult content that the brands didn't want to be next to (Twitter, anyone?) well out of the view -- adult was not findable if you set your search without "AL' and also literally out of sight and out of mind. Philip also had this idea that everything really objectionable, whether boring university classes or Gorean empires, would be on private sims. He thought the Mainland would be like "a nation of shopkeepers" under St. Jane Jacobs. I actually shared his idealism.

The Lindens used to bother with Boardman (which is the better sim because the Boardman Preservation Society had the top builders of that era and they did some nice things with that sim -- a few of the buildings survive) and Brown (which has more of the ugly dead palm trees we couldn't get Jack Linden to fully remove). Yes, they used to physically appear and enforce things like "no skyboxes because it's G". But now they don't. My God, who has the time. They have Bellisseria to police now, where the green dots are. So skybox all you like. However, if you have enemies, they will seize the opportunity to AR you. You also can't terraform there, not that you need to -- except on those really funky external lots abutting the next sim with a bad job on the seque-way. You can put out a mesh house, but basically, it's a weird sim with some really ancient stuff on it like Ryan Linden's FLW knock-off. In fact, those people you see holding the land there did NOT get it for "cheap" -- I've watched Brown for ages. But they got it for less than Blake, and they've been holding literally for years thinking someone will bite. Then rarely they get someone who is nostalgic and they make a sale. I have done that, at far less than what they are charging, but still more than regular Mainland. There really isn't a reason to move there, to buy or rent, versus Bellisseria which has much better mesh houses, although some of the items in the packs are strange odd sculpties, and much better landscaping. It just doesn't make sense to spend more than $13.05 a month (in NYS at least) if you want flat suburban tree-lined streets, you can get them in Belli. To spend US $150 or more to buy a plot there is nuts when you could annualize a premium and have a much prettier set-up. I'm all for SL nostalgia. But you can pick better nostalgia, truly. I think Sharp continent is much more wild and free and pretty if you don't mind G.

It's always best when people self-discredit, eh? This thread delivers! I totally grasp the restrictive clause -- we had good English lessons where I come from back in the day. But that's just the point. What you sell is not representative of all the developments across the vast Mainland by any stretch. I can go find you two abandoned 1024s next to each other, and find them with the names of clubs -- one of the most frequently failing ventures in SL. What's in the view tells us all we need to know about a land dealer, despite their blustering : )

Well, that's something! I never went out and looked at Kama City although I vaguely recall people talking about it. Yes, it's an aberration and doesn't reflect anything about the general Mainland land market, a story which is better told by all those parcels with NO bids, bids under $1, or bids that lead to land flipping and serious, blighty land-cutting and ad farming. Like the many children we poor Catholic folks have had historically -- two to work on the farm, two to die in infancy, two to give to the priesteens, two to keep Mama company in her old age and visit Pops in prison -- land cutting is a sign of poverty and distress, not wealth. Yes, land inside a Linden build like that which I find interesting and aesthetic, even if made of prims, would indeed be valuable for nostalgic if not for actual reasons. I find people still charging -- and not getting -- fantastic sums in Brown, a very old Linden-maintained sim that preceded Linden Homes and Bellisseria, even though it is in G, has ugly dead palm trees on it from the library and junky old Linden and oldbie builds -- such is the power of the incantation "Linden protected". I'm so old some land dealers put in their ads "protected" for being next to MY land LOL. Not for long. But congratulations on that win of land you had your eye on, I know what that's like, and what matters most is your own valuation.