Prokofy Neva

I have yours already, thanks!

Why is "education" about *another person's over-usage of script time* going to help ME? It doesn't. I can educate myself out the wazoo. It's that neighbour who has no sense of "the commons" and needs to turn it into "the tragedy of the commons". What isn't needed is "education" so much as LINDEN POLICY. Overuse of resources should be an abuse you can abuse-report. It was, in a way, in the past. The Lindens also provided ways to see individual parcel script usage. But let them decide without people having to look at all kinds of complex menus. If you are lagged on your land and believe it isn't you, AR your neighbour for resource hogging. Sure, it's good to sweep around your own door. I remember in the old days before the servers were forced to their current socialist 99/45 by force, i.e. making some scripts work slower if they have to in order to keep the overall sim better working, I would get a ticket that someone was experiencing lag that they believed was caused by their neighbours' chickens. But when I flew out there, Ma and Pa would be sitting on their rocking porch swing with shotguns, in all their bling and prim hair (of those days). Who was lagging the sim? They were. I don't think there's a way to check script usage on one single parcel on the Mainland, in the viewer. You can with resident-made HUDs.

You're always welcome to try polite and even timid at first, but given that a person who paralyzes an entire sim on his one plot with all these breedables has already been by definition extremely rude, you may do better by being really blunt. And then you can contemplate doing things like banning him so he sees yellow lines, or engaging in the sort of typical -- and legal ---- SL warfare, putting out a zillion breedables yourself to lag him. But then, you've made your own land useless. This is why it's good to do ctr-shift-1 on a sim before buying land to see the stats, and to check them on different days and times. I realize there are more highly technical things to look at discussed here like "Update Objects". But there are simpler things in my view, although they still come under "Advanced" and may be confusing. o Use the built-in lag-meter. Why not? It will tell you green, red, or yellow. It's essentially bundling together and simplifying the other things. And you can see if it is on your side or on the sim's side. This is under Advanced/Performance Tools/Lag Meter. It shows Client (the browser, and your system), network, and server (on the Lindens' side). It might be yellow and saying "too many complex objects" so on your wide, you reduce the draw distance, perhaps the shaders and whatnot in preferences/graphics. o Use ctr-shift-1 but just look at "Time Dilation" (which should be at 99 and when it gets really low like 40, you are at a standstill) and "FPS" (which should be ideally at 45 but when it gets below 40 you can really feel it. These numbers, if low, can get you a sim re-set when you call Support. Yes, "Script Time" is important, like "total frame time" needing to be at 22, for example. But I think TD and FPS really tell you what is happening on a sim that may be outside of "my computer". If you see "number of scripts" is about, say, 3000 or 4000, and certainly above 5000-6000, you will feel lag. It's just a lot of scripted items. But as techies always say, what KIND of scripted items. From island menus we can see the items with the highest script time -- some breedable or sex bed could be hogging all the script time -- so even a few of those is going to be a worse problem than 500 doors with scripts to hinge them.

Not true. You have a choice to show your appreciation for a premium gift by snapping a photo and putting it on a blog or Twitter or Flickr or some other non-Facebook property where you are not required to have a RL name. You are not "forced" to use the Destinations/FB hook-up as it is now just because it's there. You can put Destinations you like on Twitter or Flickr or anywhere besides FB. I do this all the time. I am not particularly interested in liking Destination pages as my RL self, but I do sometimes more for the sake of signalling to other people in SL that it is a good place than anyone in RL who won't care. But I do much more posting on non-FB social media as my avatar. That's why I simply won't accept this "I'm being forced" or "I have no choice". You do have a choice. It requires making a little more effort and not getting instant gratification on the Destinations page with the chosen LL option, that's all. I do agree that it would be nice if the "Destinations" machine linked not just to FB, but to Flickr, Twitter, Instagram, whatever, to other places where an avatar can make an account without fear. It's a question of adding widgets that we've all added with a few paste-ups on blogs so it's not that big a deal. Yes, it means adding widgets to thousands of pages.

@Wulfie Reanimator - No, I don't spy on tenants. Seriously, who would have the time or interest? I don't think I've ever actually seen you in your home. Maybe you're up in the sky? I have even less time for the sky than the ground. @chibiusa Ling "Mesh made SL better but it also ruined it massively IMO" This seems so profound. It really is the Zen Koan of SL these days. It ruined it massively, I suspect, because the Lindens were expecting to deploy it not on this platform, but another (Sansar?). My rentals are $150/225 or $250/350, not "$500 for 50 prims". And I know others with malls or properties that are about the same or even less. The prices you cite are what you would pay in a high-traffic mall but as I maintain, traffic does not make sales, sales make sales unless the traffic is like 100,000, and maybe not even then. I don't know what the expression "naffy tat" means. Tattoos? I don't understand why people have these in RL, let alone SL, but they do. I agree that mesh has made it so that far less people create, and that means far less people can make a buck. I have always been a big believer in a low threshold to creativity primarily so that people can make a buck, at least among their friends. Now it is harder, although not impossible. I still delight in the fact that there are still people in SL who make their own prim homes, and they are good-looking, and even their own prim furniture, and there are still people making things from prims and sculpties as well as full-prim mesh that are desirable and cheap. My goal isn't to bring back malls. If the very ones I own fail, I trash them and their land is sold, abandoned, or put into another form of rentals. The malls that I still keep have various other facts as I said -- Destinations, infohubs, rentals near them. I guess my goal is just to keep the ones I still have as they perform a function that seems important -- entry to the market, affordability, individuality -- and they aren't laggy at all. One thing I should have mentioned is that I find more people want their own land for a store instead of being in a mall, even if they pay more. It's partly psychological. But also they can get more or less prims and adjust them better and not be at the mercy of a mall build or sim theme they don't like. I love my tenants because they are making interesting things, finding an audience, or breaking into the market with a new idea or something special and making money, it doesn't matter if what they are selling is to my taste (i.e. baby things or vehicles aren't my interest). This is the heart of second life -- commerce. I'm not allergic to commerce because I'm not a socialist. My interest is in having barriers to it broken down if they are about class (affordability) or politics. Yes, I agree, that a mall has to have some kind of hangout zone, either a cafe or dance floor or even just benches to sit on which people still like even though their virtual feet cannot get tired.

Not true, " but there is no big market for those derivates." Click on "edit" on the product of quite a few of the participants of the big events. See how they have artfully put together full perm mesh items by hard-working full perm item suppliers. Even some of the top names make use of others' full-perm items because they are so pressed for time and product. It is indeed an art, as I've found when my reach perennially exceeds my grasp, and I buy beautiful full-perm things that somehow, I can't put together very well. I put them on mod so that my few customers or hapless tenants can at least modify their copy of my grade-school concoction. It really is a skill. And there is a LOT of it. Look at my Twitter feed, where I try to include credits to the full perm item providers along with the final craftsperson.

No, I don't underestimate it at all. I just don't care about it as I have my niche interests like others -- furniture, homes, decor. I change my outfit about twice a year. Clothes are just too expensive, and the alarming increase of separate removeable body parts like mesh heads are not for me. I ignore poses -- I have to, because almost none of them are open to the public, i.e. third parties, and nearly all must be operated by an owner, which doesn't work for me in providing rentals or the land preserve, my interests. I hate backdrops and I think they are over-running events now and as I've complained before, they are ruining what could be much better used skyboxes. But they don't care, because the backdrop business is HUGE because the fashion blogging industry is HUGE But what you don't explain is why this HUGE sector wants to be in events, not malls. They make enough money whereby they should be able to afford the more expensive high-traffic malls as much as they afford event booths (which may be somewhat less). Events are laggy and last 30 days, of which only 3-4 have any real traffic. Malls would be more persistent. Will the HUGENESS of this industry force malls back into existence because events are poorly serving them, too laggy, not enough exposure, too many of them, etc. It seems strange to imagine that the typical SL resident might log on, sit in her house and not move, chat even for hours with someone in private messages rather than in person (she might as well be on Facebook with Messenger instead of inside SL); buy from the MP, and maybe TP once to an event to buy a dress and a backdrop, so that she can take snaps of herself against her backdrop in her new dress, and upload them to her blog. She won't have moved two meters in many cases. I know this is popular because the backdrops are on top of roofs or in the yards of rentals of mine. The penny-saving avatar could just put them in sandboxes and be done with it. Why would someone find it more interesting to pose against a backdrop and snap a picture rather than actually walk through a beautifully-built sim, let alone their own beautifully-decorated multi-level home? But they do, because that's how it is.

I said it's *one* indicator of the economy and not definitive because it's a small sample, but the real question is: why are there any malls at all? And there are, for the reasons I've stated -- events are for big name merchants with the money to pay the fees to the organizers; malls are for those who have less or no name recognition and money only for much lower rent. So they are more democratic, which is why I've always supported them despite the hate on them from the sophisticates who think they are high-brow while the rest of SL is low-brow. The "hundreds and thousands"renting come with big malls that were first on desirable telehub land on the Mainland, then when that was killed off for purely ideological reasons, then later on private islands, where owners had to charge a lot to make tier, and because they provided traffic with traffic bots and frankly still do in some cases, creating "traffic," they could go on charging. But the Lindens' criminalized traffic bots -- good! -- and even their lower-price islands are still hard to pay for, so that helped kill non-Mainland malls more than anything. But people don't go to a thing once a month. They go practically every day -- look at them. To events where in fact the same merchants repeat over and over. In fact, I marvel when yet another new event is announced because I worry how the stressed-out creators -- represented at this new event as well as so many others! -- can keep creating. And this is a factor as Chic Aeon. As a consumer, when I see creators consistently turning in rain, balloons, branch mobiles, picture frames, and gazebos instead of the more intricate products they made before, I know they are burnt out. They should stop. I don't need another version of rain, balloons, branch mobiles, picture frames or gazebos. I think you've really hit upon the truth here: events are the new malls. Because there are so many of them! Because they are laggy, like those hated telehubs were (there were actually only a few of those that were actually avatar traps and laggy). If you have to de-render everybody -- or not put on your fanciest outfits to show off because of your own high count -- then what's the point? You might as well stay at home and click on the MP. Every time someone talks about technological innovation driving progress, I recall a period in American history when every home had a half-gas-light, half-electric-lamp device, i.e. one wall lamp because electricity wasn't trustworthy. Techs today go to great lengths to put in the sound of pages turning, for example, because old habits die hard. If people only shopped online, I literally wouldn't have to wait in the cold outside to get into say, Gamestop or Macy's, during Christmas. On the other hand, Lord & Taylor's just closed their flagship store despite having the best Christmas windows and I didn't even get to its last week despite getting everything from my first winter coat in NYC to my daughter's confirmation dress in that store. People's habits do change. The whole point of a virtual world, however, was to restore some of the personal contact lost by the impersonal internet. To be able to try on the dress or look at the house with the $0. To TP in friends and shop and to strut your stuff. I think these human needs for trying and showing and socializing are still inherent.

Yes, one big name has taken away mirrors, but I wouldn't say this has changed A LOT; just look at the map for the latest events and watch them as they are announced. Some even have added more mirrors than they used to have. I'm surprised that events that are rather old (years) and not all that (creators are at other, better events) still are overcrowded for 2-3 days. Maybe it's because the Lindens advertise them on Destinations by habit. It's true that after 3-4 days the sims can empty out completely, meaning that people trying to rent an extra sim are defeated with a sim they used only 3-4 days. Maybe the Lindens can devise a "mirror sim" product that is rentable by the day like some of their old vehicle sims. To me, what's interesting is that one by one, these big event managers have been forced to drop their ambitious sprawling and even multi-sim builds. Their theory may have been originally that as in real life, you have to both wow customers with an impressive big store or mall, but more to the point, you have to force them to walk past all sorts of displays and counters where they "stick" before moving on, i.e. like the perfume desks at Macy's or the candy and cards and knick-knacks at drugstores or even book stores nowadays. In SL, merchants who try to drag customers past things they don't want to look at lose them due to lag and short attention spans. So they have consolidated size and builds so you can just walk around a half circle or circle. When they finally all bite the bullet and put all displays in alphabetical order so you can find the reason you came (usually only one or two things) then we will know a corner is turned either of efficiency or desperation or both. Some events think they've cleverly grabbed you by never giving their "shopping guide" to Seraphim or other portals. But perhaps they should know that people like me them simply never go to their events, ever, especially if one visit involved ardurous crawls around big malls with "no fly" on. Perhaps the gatcha craze is waning when you now see merchants put out a whole set for sale as a fat pack for say, $1200, in addition to a chance to win just one of the things for $50/pull.

This is such a vexatious topic that even studying and doing this for 14 years, I can still get error messages. All the stars have to be aligned just right! o You need the group tag activated over your head before you buy the land "for group". o The group you are buying land for has to already have tier in it to cover that land you are buying -- tier covers land like a blanket on a bed -- you need both the cover and the bed (the land) to sleep or do anything else OR o The group contributors have to check off 'ALLOW DEED TO GROUP' AND check off "OWNER MAKES CONTRIBUTION WITH DEED" at the same time on the land menu or the group can't receive their land. o You have to watch that the three checkmarks before a sale all stay green or you will be jacked up in the amount of tier you pay. They don't stay green when there are things like 1) you didn't put on the right group 2) you don't have enough tier in your group; 3) you don't have enough tier in your account 4) you haven't checked off "makes contribution with deed" to add tier to the land you are contributing. So I made a tutorial on it with a war game on a board as a visual aid -- this might make it easier for some, or more confusing for others, but in any event, it has some funny touches. Comments welcome. Go here to Memory Bazaar in Ross here to see it -- go to the little post office with the awning and red banner outside next to the goat yard. To the left on the desk are also further cards on various aspects of making and managing groups -- a work still in progress. This tutorial, like this whole infohub, is based on the idea of the "Memory Palace" of the ancient Romans, which is why we have the expressions, "In the first place, in the second place" in languages. So if you want to teach about, say, how to turn on the sun, you put the lesson in a tent top, i.e. the top of the world. Or in a lantern. If you want to teach about griefing, you put it in a goat. Teaching about Linden dollars could go on a money-changer's table with a stack of bills. And so on. The user has some visual memory to attach the knowledge to. He or she can move around the bazaar and find the lessons and if they forget or need a refresher they can come to a specific part of the build. More and more, young people learn on YouTube. This personally doesn't work for me as an old person. But I put links to YouTube tutorials on grouping land in case that's useful. I have to see things in print and read it, so I have a notecard just explaining it simply without visuals. The visuals of the war game are merely to make you follow through scenarios, like what if one person quits, or one person doesn't pay their tier, or you need more land, etc.

I have a tutorial on grouping land here. (Go in the little post office building with the awning and red banner by the goat yard). If three friends decide to group land, each using their "free" 1024, the resulting total of land of 3072 they obtain by each deeding their land to the group *with contribution of tier* does not put any of them over tier. They are making a contribution to a group which shows up on their account and their tier will be reflected as "0 remaining" once they make that contribution. If they get 3072 as contributions, let's say, then they get 307 m as the 10% discount of a bonus.

I was worried that Linden Lab would end up removing many precious and quirky things when they purged the Marketplace. But does anyone miss them? And how will we know? One of my favourite past-times is to plug odd and interesting search words into the MP and look for odd things. I have found many amazing things like that. You'd be amazed at what people in SL actually undertake to make sometimes, and there have been some real finds over the years. I use "favourite" a lot just to bookmark items that are interesting, and now I see quite a few have been purged from the MP. I can't really complain, as one of them is a merchant from whom I bought two things that didn't work, who promised to fix them, and disappeared. Another is a fantasy creator who made really great prim and sculpty things who felt she couldn't continue after mesh. This was really sad as I would still get her items. Now she and they are all gone. But as I look at my list of favourites now I feel as if I can't delay on purchases for some of the odder and less famous people, they may be purged...

Yes, I do not believe the current monopolist on the vendor market or Linden Lab in general should allow this practice physically. I have had three merchants block me from purchase of their products. One didn't like my criticism of them on my blog. Another read something I said on Twitter, took offense at it although none was intended, and blocked me, finally unblocking me when queried. This monopolist put my name in the ban list of his teleporter, ensuring that many people blocked me from teleportation, their sim, and their vendor. He said he did this as a "sample name". Um, ok. Odd. Of course, you can get around this sometimes with an alt but why bother? If someone is that vindictive, you don't need to buy their products. It's a very, very creepy precedent for virtual living that LL should not permit. Imagine in RL, for example, if you criticize, say, Trump's wall, and the conservative owner of your supermarket prevents you from using your credit or debit card to buy food. The marketplace needs to be as free as possible and that means not having strange inventions like this based on totalitarianism.

New World Notes has a survey for merchants about sales, but it doesn't include rentals and landsales. I would love to see a survey on that subject. People endlessly speculate about the economy, and their notion that "SL is dying" and so on, but few have hard numbers other than Tyche Shepherd, who actually chats the number of sims, which is one measure of the economy and population, anyway, and a fairly good one. So I will tell you one measure I discovered, take it or leave it as you will -- the number of people who rent land for stores and who rent mall space. So in 2010, this number in my little rentals was 76 individual avatars renting either empty land space or stores or stalls within malls or boardwalks; in 2018, this number was down to 35. I reduced land/space accordingly. During that time, I got rid of one boardwalk and one entire mall in PG -- PG is just hard to rent because people feel like they can't put out a revealing outfit or adult furniture without it being abuse- reported and the Lindens swooping down and removing even classical art showing a breast. So they shy away from PG. Even so, I was able to fill one PG mall that was very nicely built by Bill Stirling for about 14 years, imagine. Tenants included people making jewelry -- but I suppose mesh killed their prim business. People with games -- but now this has to be registered and put on a gaming sim if related to legal games and that's that. Also people making outfits -- but again, with mesh, people are forced out of business if they can't do mesh. I would often have pregnancy, baby and mom stuff -- these people were the worst about not paying rent. Some of them were re-selling famous baby stuff. Babies are still pretty big business in SL I think. But in the end, it was more bother than it was worth -- too few tenants, too many overprimmers or non-payers. So away it went, and the land was sold. It's funny, other PG malls I have still do OK, but that's because one is next to a landmark in Destinations and the other is next to an infohub which still produces some traffic. I'm a big believer in the concept that traffic does not equal sales. Only sales = sales. Sales come mainly from search/all, according to my polls. Some come from search/places, or blogs, or picks, but not so many come from fly-bys or walk-ins. Still, enough do to make it worth it. It's very hard to break into SL business. But I do see people still doing it with all kinds of things, houses, furniture, services like photography. With the price of land much lower, and no more telehubs, people don't have to rely on malls -- and don't. The real killer of malls, I suppose, are merchant events. You'd be surprised how many creators actually still have stores -- "mainstores" -- and even on the Mainland, and I make sure to patronize them to keep Mainland flourishing. Having an entire island with the upkeep of tier is too steep for many people -- I see some band together to make a sim with like 6 creators -- or they sell only at events, plus the marketplace, of course. The Lindens have encouraged the move to the marketplace because they've always had this idea that the future of virtual money making is not in heavy server re-rental -- "land" -- with its upkeep and cost -- but in what is essentially commissions or sales tax. I think they are gravely mistaken about this, but then, I'm not a virtual world platform owner so I can't really speak to the issue with enough information. Perhaps the miracle is that there are any malls left at all! But there are! Occasionally I stumble across old malls on the Mainland where some unknown has filled it with their friends and random people -- none of them are famous creators, but they might be re-selling breedables or gatchas. Merchant events and of course gatchas have boosted the economy in some ways, and killed parts of it in others, like the Internet itself. I think I'd have zero customers in malls if it weren't for gatchas, breedables, and the persistence of some people who don't make really famous stuff but still make cool or fun stuff to keep plugging away at it. So I keep maintaining them. This isn't just about me and my information drawn from the 50 sims where I have land. It's about all my neighbours. I have an "Area Attractions" card I update regularly where I put the stores and malls and such of my neighbours on the same or nearby sims. I counted a mall, a war memorial, a freebie depot and a few stores all gone. The mall seemed like it was doing well, I would go shop there. But, it didn't have many people. Events are what draw people; that's where they buy. Why are malls a good thing, and important to keep going? 1. The rent is way cheaper than the cost of owning an entire sim or paying the fee to be in an event. 2. They are persistent and not just 30 days and not just dependent on blogs and portals to get attention, they can use inworld search, word of mouth, picks, classifieds, etc. (BTW, I was surprised that "classifieds" is now the top way in which people say they buy and sell on my polls, THEN "search all" and "search places".) 3. The renter can control a list for media and even ban. Why are events likely better? 1. ENORMOUS traffic -- all events usually have sims you can't get into on the first 1-3 days of the event. It's routine for some to have 1-4 mirror sims now. They've all learned to stop spreading out giant, winding, confusing builds and have very compressed shopping circles now to minimize lag and people not finding their favourite merchant. Traffic makes sales when it is THAT enormous -- swarms of thousands of people streaming through. The difference between 10 traffic and 1000 traffic isn't a difference to help sales; the difference between 1000 and 100,000 is. 2. More advertising -- big portals like SeraphimSL push them as do inworld groups and lists. 3. Gatchas -- this is where most of the new gatchas are released and they account for a lot of sales. Malls in RL have died because of the Internet, and they are dying in SL for funny, similar reasons.

If you go here to the infohub in Ross and go down to where the giraffe is (follow the beacon because an exact SLURL will not take you directly there) will see a stand with various SL blogs and links to their pages. It has all the ones you would expect -- the official Linden blog, New World Notes, Living in a Modem World, Strawberry Singh, SL Newser, SLuniverse etc. But some of the other ones haven't been updated in two years. I'm looking for blogs (or even forums) that are not about fashion or music but are "travelogues," i.e. that have posts on people exploring the world, news about SL itself, etc. There are a zillion fashion blogs and I get it, and I have a few, but the purpose of this stand is more to give links to blogs that have news about SL itself or people's travels, finding an interesting build or sim, that sort of thing.

The other day, I was exploring in a sim, and I saw the owner standing stock still, and I thought he was AFK but he wasn't slumped over. I IM'd me and asked about an event, and he said he couldn't show me the event sign because he was dialed up to SL on his phone and couldn't move. But that enabled him to at least talk in IMs, and possible click on groups? And I have had customers tell me they are logged in "on their phone". Not just to their email answering IMs via email, but somehow in SL. Not sure how they are doing this.

I think you shouldn't play SL without a budget because it's real money. You have to think of it in terms of entertainment -- you don't have enough likely in RL to go to movies and a restaurant or bar every night, so you don't in SL either. You can have a house and car and boat and fancy clothes and travel to exotic places etc in SL but it is still real money. I find a lot of customers on a budget, they choose cheaper rentals for that reason. If they lose a job in RL, they stop their premium and their rentals -- recurring bills are the worse when you have to cut down. More wives than you would think exist in this day and age of feminism are limited to how much they can spend by their husbands and can't have recurring bills on credit cards. So they live entirely on what they can make in SL from various money-making schemes, selling gatchas, working rentals, or sex work. For that matter, their RL husbands might be happier letting them use the credit car for $9.95 a month. A number of tenants pay me in small amounts daily from what they make. Some take out X amount of RL dollars to exchange at the beginning of the month, and when it's gone, it's gone, they don't keep buying more. Some aren't as disciplined but I think people are aware that in a virtual world the meter is running like anywhere else. I am always trying to find even small ways of offsetting costs with dollarbies or tip jars or group fees or any other thing that reduces the outlay for tier.

GNC is still there.

When you land there at Memory Bazaar in Ross, right by the landing, there is an International Bazaar kiosk, they are like round land markers. Because you can't sell things on Linden land (this is a resident infohub on Linden Lab, part of a group of a dozen such outliers from an ancient program when they converted the telehubs) they are just out there to see, with an "International Bazaar" sign next to them that TPs you to the Council of Virtual Relations where you can get them. I used to have many other countries there - something like 3 dozen -- but not only because the reduction of such sims (remember Virtual Estonia?) but the display was lost -- due to this incredible debacle with the Lindens, where suddenly the existing prims there that had been there for ages shot up in land value because of some glitch, they forced me to pick up the entire build. It all had to be redone from scratch. The Linden claim at the time was that the alleged prim overage impacted sailing -- which isn't physically possible because it was land owned by Governor Linden and set to our group and not grouped land -- could not have possible impacted the other Linden land/water there in their other group -- there was some false claim by a harasser that they couldn't ride their boat down a strait there (which is in fact owned by my group and in fact free to sail through -- as was all Linden water in this area) and this prompted all the hysteria. It was one of the wildest things I ever dealt with, and I did get an apology from the Lindens later, but honestly, it has taken forever to build it back up. The reason the Russian card is empty is that for a time all the landmarks were dead, i.e. the lots disappeared except for one persistent one. So I erased them all to re-do them -- there are a few new sites. Thanks for the reminder to add these. This stuff is endless work which I do just in a minute or two of spare time when I go to that sim every day -- in between tending to many other sims. The new Russian sim called Club Orange is exactly an elaborate sim with lots of activities. It's not always populated with the time difference but perhaps you could try that. There are others I'll send you. No, I'm not interested in working for free as a translator in SL, when I am paid in RL for such work. Makes no sense. UPDATE: Oops, I spoke too soon. Club Orange is completely gone, sadly. It was a great sim, but perhaps the tier was too high? But I'm told the people involved with that old club are now on a new sim called "Russia" with a replication of a Russian village called Sovkovo (a kind of inside joke based on the word "Sovok" which means a sort of Soviet rube). I see it has a list of lectures and "Wednesdays -- newbies" with poetry discussion in voice and other things.

1. Ugly -- the terrain looks like a$$ up close, and even from a distance is blurry. That can't be fixed. Again, look through them, and you will see if you are honest. Sculpties often have weird texture distortions that are never fixable. Mesh often looks blurry. Prims can look *too* photo-real. I often wish there was a substance like playdoh in SL that I could mold by clicking, the way you can terraform SL land. JVTEK enables you to do something almost like that with a device that creates sculpties perfectly matched to the contours of your land which you can texture. So I do those. But it is time-consuming and expensive (you have to keep uploading the sculpties) to do a whole sim. Imagine if a product enabled terraforming as you go, like SL land. 2. Too high-prim -- the lowest I have is 20, and the highest 37 or more or even 130 for a whole island. Expanding them not only makes their ugly textures look worse -- it considerably adds to their LI. The best terrain makers like Skye tell you to put out their landscaping components in multiple copies rather than trying to big up one copy, as you will use less prims. 3. Not on mod -- I can't try to change the ugly textures. 4. Hard to get kits to look good. If you aren't a builder and buy a kit because you can't build -- the world is made up of all kinds of skills and it is not a requirement to "learn Blender" like it isn't to "learn Russian" -- then it STILL doesn't look good because your hand-eye coordination or sense of decor are still amateurish. It's hard to line up all these little corners and what-not sometimes to make them as good-looking as the creator can. 5. Hard to get terrain from different makers to look seamless -- yes, you can use various little terrain patches and such but they never look perfect. Even so, I've bought a few of these here and there and I've now narrowed down to Skye landscaping for my next project; as I said on this current one, I was very happy with FelixvonKotwitz Alter and Leo. Take a look here.

Whenever someone criticizes anything about SL, there's always this sneering, suspicious swipe at the critic with the false belief that they must want something for free or cheap of they have some selfish ulterior motive. Why can't you just accept that I've called out a myth about mesh -- it's not low prim -- and called for examples of good mesh -- there aren't many, due to lack of incentive? There's nothing untrue about these two statements, and they're not about me, they are about the state of reality. Lindens introduced mesh with big fanfare, killing off many prim and sculpty craftsmen's businesses, to my regret, and yet what we get isn't for living (skyboxes) or building out the world (nature). That's important to realize and contemplate. There's absolutely no basis for the notion that I need skyboxes on the cheap -- ask the makers of skyboxes how much I've spent on their wares. I spend thousands of Lindens on skyboxes. If there is a good skybox that meets all the criteria, I might spend $1500 or $2000 per unit but at least I'll be spending $500-750 which isn't exactly cheap. BTW, in the old days, some house makers used to insist that landlords buy a bulk package of no-copy houses or pay more for a license to use multiple copies, because they hated the idea that not an end-user but a landlord would rent out their houses. After awhile, all those creators who did this dropped that silly idea. Why? Their products are too breakable and have too many problems rezzing to fit land, especially mainland, that they can't afford to have not be copyable. And they saw that far from decreasing their sales, a landlord's display of their house helped sales, as tenants saw the houses, then bought them themselves, to put on land that they bought -- a goodly percentage of renters go on to buy their own land. And why wouldn't something appealing to a landlord -- who has a feel for what people like -- be appealing to the general population who, after all, are represented among renters? That isn't logical. Again, what's operative here is only a viciousness that starts with your belief that landlords must be evil, rapacious capitalist slum lords who try to get everything on the cheap and bilk their customers. So do examine that prejudice, because it's not true. Mainland landlords are nearly extinct due to the cost and the losses. As for hiring builders, if you look through all my properties, you'll see I've done exactly that, especially when I need a sim-wide build. So again, it's a red herring to invoke this idea that I, as that supposedly greedy, grasping slumlord, want to avoid paying people. I do pay them. Lots. But why haven't I done this lately? I'll tell you: the cost cannot be recouped when you have low-priced rentals on the Mainland. You can't do this as a charity -- although I do parts of my holdings as non-profit land preserves with interesting builds and activities. You have to pay LL tier, and that cost has to be met. Another problem I've found over the years is that builders want to keep their IP, understandably, and won't turn over the object to you, so you run the risk of losing that build if it accidentally returns. Some do; some don't. Some intend to, forget, then leave SL and you can't reach them again. That's why I have "prim drift" on some very old builds -- I can't fix them. There are more losses that you realize in this business. Why do they want to keep their IP if it is a custom build? Because the going rates for builders are still not at RL level, and a Mainland rentals agent couldn't pay RL costs anyway, so they want the ability to re-sell at least their textures if not the build. Understood. But then you are left with a liability -- losing the build.

Well, that's ultimately the point. Destinations "likes" mean nothing. They aren't use. You are often the only one making that "like," I find. And even popular places have only a few likes, because of the FB link. So it doesn't matter to the inworld economy or inworld politics. If the Lindens made it so that your own SL account was all you needed to "like," probably an extensive work of programming customized to SL, so what? People STILL wouldn't use it. Because -- wait for it -- they don't use Destinations that much to start with.

Yes, I get it that the particular social media welded to the "Destinations" page is Facebook and people don't want to link RL and SL. But if they still want to show their enthusiasm for a particular location, they don't have to use the Destinations mechanism for FB, they can manually go to Twitter where they can make an account with an SL name. And they can lobby the Lindens to add Twitter to the "like" mechanisms. The OP wants her own SL account on that page to be linked to the "like". But the Lindens don't care about that. They're here to sell pretty places not to inworld customers they already have, but to the external world.

I'm not sure why you didn't get this answer right away -- no, you can't do that, because if you do, that tenant then becomes the owner of the land and pays tier to LL instead of you. You would lose your double prim land! Horizons is considered part of the Mainland. You have to give her rights within your group (except land sale! and group-set prim return!) but not turn it over to her group. If she insists on her group then she needs to go to a private island. But you can offer virtually the same thing in a Mainland rentals.

There isn't a function on the "about land" menu. In my rentals, you can join the group, donate tier, and then IM me to reset or remove the rental box. The rental box doesn't automatically adjust for the tier donation (I have discounts of $250/wk for 512 and $450/wk for 1024 donations).