Prokofy Neva

January 18

I've got a 'Bama boat like this in SL.

January 16

Generally, I stay away from New Year's resolutions and I'm awfully late getting started (although if you go by the Russian Old New Year on the Gregorian calendar, I'm still fresh).

But I thought of a great one and I simply must do this. With my inventory at 251,000, even if I spent every day on this, I'd have to go through 687 items a day for a year to make any progress.

To be sure, there is low-hanging fruit like unpack and give scripts, those ridiculous doubled up names (why does that even still happen?!) and of course "object".

I fear "object" because what if it's one of these ancient builds I commissioned from various builders now long gone from SL and I can't ever get that beam or door back?

I suddenly realized the way to combat that problem is to do a search with "creator" on their names and pick out their "objects" and put them in a folder. After doing a few of those, I need to bite the bullet and delete everything named "objects". It's time. SL is almost 21 years old.

But here's my idea: for every single thing I buy, whether at a store, event or a 50L Friday type of thing, I have to delete ten other items. That's harsh, but fair! Makes you stop buying stuff you don't really want, or, lets you buy that thing but forces you then to delete 10 other items. And honestly, sculpty trees and Christmas decor from 2006 can go unless it has some actual meaning or talent behind it.

I don't promise I'm going to have the determination to hit "delete" on the "objects"....

January 15

2 hours ago, Luna Bliss said:

What do they charge for that? All these 10 dollar or so a month charges for this and that are getting to be too much!

It's true that everything seems to cost $10 now but you can't blame these services, they have to pay their bills. But I have to pay mine as well, so Flickr cancellation was low-hanging fruit for me -- I'm just a tourist snapping and posting unedited and unretouched photos and I'm never going to fuss with them, so it's not worth it. Yes, it would be nice to have better photos of my rentals but I do what I can and with the Premium Plus account the uploads are free, which is the main reason I get PP.

OpenAI costs me something like US $2.00 a month to run 6 characters in SL at various venues who use chatGPT and talk to people in character. MidJourney is $10 per month and that's much more valuable to me than Flickr. I've debated whether to get the premium Twitter but it doesn't seem warranted for many reasons. My blog costs me like US $125 a year and even though I blog a lot less, I want to keep it and its archive and it's worth it to me. Etc. But more and more I have let things like Substack subscriptions or magazine subscriptions go.

January 14

There are so many I don't know where to start.

Some five years ago, a new neighbour put up a giant photo-real wall that really blighted the view on two-three sims all around. He didn't have a build on the ground -- his main build was up in the sky. So it really didn't seem necessary to put up the ugly photo-wall, which always looks jarring in-world -- you can uncheck "avatars can see me" and be invisible on your land -- and in his case, this would be the rare times he would be on the ground. It was nuts.

The owner of another rentals company, another long-time neighbour, and I all IM'd this character and asked him at least to make the photo-walls clear on our sides -- we would be looking at nothing then. Some people want the "sense of privacy" or enclosure such idiocies ensure, but of course if we were really keen to spy on this fellow, we could cam in through his wall lol. He was never there.

Instead, he doubled down -- as such people often do -- and put up a giant, ugly picture of a disabled Black man leering into the camera. We AR'd it as racist and targeted behaviour such as to harass. Multiple times. The Lindens ignored us. The other company eventually abandoned their land and left, not only because they couldn't rent land near that idiot, of course.

I put up one of Felix's giant stone/tree walls as a backdrop and put a skybox for rent there which hardly ever rented. The down side of that photo real monstrosity is that it rezes first when you came on the sim, leering up at you

And there it will stay, ensuring that no one buys or rents any land around it for years, because spiteful little men like this never tire of the sense of power over other people they gain in a virtual world, clearly lacking in their real lives.

January 14

15 hours ago, Diablo Lioncourt said:

So we were actually talking about mainland ownership vs renting GETTING STARTED, as opposed to after you scale up. No one ever said it's always going to be cheaper to rent after you do the whole scaling up thing.

Thank you for providing a bunch of completely irrelevant information about an entirely seperate topic.

"Good 4096" is subjective AF. What's not subjective is prim count, stability, and performance. Per the Lindens themselves private islands will do better on those metrics.

The assertion that it's not feasible to get a parcel of that size for that price of usable quality is bigotry. It's contempt prior to investigation. It may have been true in 2004 when your now hardwired views were formed, but things have changed considerably.

BTW, I think your purpose now, given what appears to be a "crashed" land market for you, is to bully and harass the competition on the forums, in tandem with tactics like aggressive returns and land-cutting and view-blighting inworld, safe in the knowledge that a) I won't AR you (I think it's tacky to AR people on the forums) and b) the mods will let you have your way, for reasons unknown.

So I'm pretty much done with this conversation and if anyone wants to follow up inworld with discussion of the land business you can always IM me.

January 13

This is one of the best events in SL I've ever seen.

A group of some 60 Japanese shrines, some permanent, some temporary, have gotten together to make unique stamps for each location which you can collect to display in books or on a board.

Along the way you will some breathtakingly beautiful sights.

Many of them also have free gifts or gifts for $10-100 which are beautiful.

It closes January 15 so be quick!

Goshuin Project

January 13

14 hours ago, blazewing76 said:

here's my 2 cents. Land sales are freezing because the prices are too high to get any kind of pay membership to qualify to buy land. Add the expensive pay membership and high tier costs and you see land sales slowing down or freezing. personally, in just 3 years I've watched the abandoned land increase exponentially, if you try to drive on mainland roads you will pass thousands of miles of abandoned land where there used to be stuff. SL is dying and unless something can be done this is one of the last years this world will exist. Maybe lower prices for membership or do something to interest people, like ban ban lines? i don't know but SL is dying slowly, it gets a few quick spikes when events that offer free stuff happen. Seems the SL people can't BUY what they want for their Avatar.

In the time this thread has run, I have sold 5 land parcels. I don't sell much land as I'm in the rentals not the sales business, but if land isn't renting, I sell it or sometimes abandon it rather than have it sit there or sell it for such a low price that it will be eaten by ad farmers.

So I didn't have to pay much tier on them -- about 2 to 2.5 months. I had to lower the cost somewhat on some -- $5/me for waterfront seems awfully low -- but others sold for much more and I had a 4096 sell for $55000 that was double waterfront/roadside and a 1536 sell for $55,000 that was non-Blake but prime saleable land.

No crashes for me, although I do think that overall, the market is down and the cashout is less. Accordingly, I continually downsize.

I think yes, people spend more on their avatars than they do on rentals and flit around to clubs and various sims where you can even have sex out in the open or in cheap hotels or cabins. Or they rent for short periods.

I think the Lindens charge the price that the need to charge to cover costs, as we all do in business. And as it is, they have a lot of free accounts -- the majority -- that are a load on the servers and not always a return to the economy or culture.

January 13

3 hours ago, Diablo Lioncourt said:

So we were actually talking about mainland ownership vs renting GETTING STARTED, as opposed to after you scale up. No one ever said it's always going to be cheaper to rent after you do the whole scaling up thing.

Thank you for providing a bunch of completely irrelevant information about an entirely seperate topic.

"Good 4096" is subjective AF. What's not subjective is prim count, stability, and performance. Per the Lindens themselves private islands will do better on those metrics.

The assertion that it's not feasible to get a parcel of that size for that price of usable quality is bigotry. It's contempt prior to investigation. It may have been true in 2004 when your now hardwired views were formed, but things have changed considerably.

It makes no sense to rent Anshe land and re-rent it when you could get your own island and completely control it and not worry about that business suddenly leaving SL -- unlikely, but it does happen.

If ACS charges so little that you in fact save the cost of your own start-up, they should review their pricing because they are merely foolishly enabling competitors on their own sims.

Good 4096 is not subjective -- there are very basic metrics of FPS, view, waterfront or flat status, disposition of neighbours, etc.

Nothing I've said is irrelevant as Mainland is not out of the scope, the issue is start-up costs and Mainland is simply cheaper across the board, despite the ultimate risks.

I don't have hard-wired views. For example, if an annoying neighbour apparently trying to "make a point" returns every single prim of mine or my tenant's "just because he can," in the past I might return them back, put up ban lines, file ARs for harassment etc.

Now I just abandon the land near that return-happy idiot. They can tier that land or worry that it gets cut up to ad farms rather than bother me.

That's only one of a 100 ways I have changed my views since 2004.

January 13

I find that it won't show that availability but persists in showing the home I own.

But when I saw on another account that 8 Mediterraneans were available last night, I decided to risk dumping the one I have where I wasn't too thrilled with the location OR the sim name. I have to like a region's name before I will buy it, and for one, I want to make sure it's not too hard for people to spell. At least once a week, I have a tenant who IMs me and asks me where the land they rented is! And they can't remember the name of the location. So I have to look up their payment which shows that information (they don't always know or think to do that). So I got into that habit of being mindful of sim names.

To be sure, you can't rent out Bellisseria parcels and I use them as public venues in the Land Preserve that people can visit and do activities like quests and pick up free gifts. I still have to be happy with the name! The first one I got had "Marina" in the name but I was totally landlocked!

So I rolled several times and got a fairly decent one with a flowery name near some ponds and was even able to fish in one with the 7S barrel put at the very corner of my lot. There are probably good waterfronts to be had, but right now they are still rolling out sims so you might find yourself in "waterbehind". I think the parcels and easements are large enough that you don't feel cramped.

January 13

3 hours ago, Diablo Lioncourt said:

Business question: why do you think SL chooses to lease servers from Amazon Web Services?

Why do you think Apple, Netflix, and even Google do this?

One possibility is that you know something they don't. Then there's the other possibility...

For Lindens, and even more, Netflix or Apple, it makes sense on a large scale to rent and then re-rent AWS.

That's because Amazon engineers then take on the headache of dealing with server performance, and in the case of SL, this means deliberate griefing and sim-crashing and overuse with intensive scripts and avatar traffic. So naturally they want Amazon's robust capabilities to take care of DDoSing etc so they don't have to.

But it certainly doesn't make sense given the costs on the scale of land business that the average rental company -- even large dealers -- is doing within SL. Because of the cost of tier and *tax or VAT* plus your own labour costs and content purchase costs, if you estimate them, and most people don't.

I've been in RL jobs where -- imagine! -- I had to handle the Amazon servers. Have you?

I find if you start with the premise -- as you do -- of assuming that everyone but you is stupid, you don't learn anything.

Nothing in SL or LL itself is remotely like the scale of an Apple or Google obviously, much less their prosumer business.

January 13

3 hours ago, Diablo Lioncourt said:

Lindens use a script or bot to decide which AL they're going to auction off. It's looking for regions with avatars present almost 24/7 already ("high demand" areas). Idea is to have as few mainland regions actually "awake" as possible.

It's possible you weren't understanding that because you didn't WANT to.

This is not the only factor for Linden decisions of what goes on the auction. There is a human determination regarding what abandoned land goes to auction -- if you've ever requested prime waterfront, you know that the Lindens can go either way on granting your request because they weigh whether they could make more on the auction. The biggest factor for them is likely the rating, G, M or A.

As Lee Linden inimitably and bluntly put it, sims perform at their best when their are no avatars on them.

But LL does not run a system like Kitely where regions are "asleep" and only spin up if an avatar comes on them. They have to be "always on" in this configuration. So the "awake" concept isn't accurate.

Also mitigating this factor -- if it is true -- would be the tendency of people to look for land on a region that is NOT full of avatars making it laggy, i.e. a sim with a club on it.

I'll find an opportunity to ask a Linden directly if this is how they do it because they have never stated it, and it makes no sense. Maybe you have your inside Linden dope but again, there are human factors to these decisions. Yes, the Lindens have their own land bots for this purpose and others (like Destinations).But they must have a staff person go inworld and physically prep the land, often by terraforming it and taking an advantageous photo - sometimes to block the view of the ugliness on 16m ad farms which their policies or lack of enforcement helped spawn.

January 13

2 hours ago, Diablo Lioncourt said:

Factual basis for this?

To start a simple 4096 skybox/platform/multiscene deal (I'm intentionally choosing a sample endeavor with a reasonable chance of success in today's environment), lets compare LL vs (biggest estate):

             LL.      (biggest estate)

Parcel Size.      4096    4080 (16 m2 microparcel for rent meter)

Prims                           1406   1867

Cost (MONTH)          $22      $15.96***

Startup Cost (Land) $38.66* $16.03**

Subletting Allowed     Yes     Yes

Zoning Restrictions.   No      No (if you choose an "unzoned" sim)

Reliable Performance ???     Yes. Virtually guaranteed.

*Startup costs only include those related to land. Mainland example startup cost based on 4096 m2 of Abandoned Land at 1L per m2 +1st month's tier

**ACS example startup cost based on "Buying" parcel for 40L + 1st month's tier.

*** Estates charge by the week, so weekly tier for an unzoned 4096 (30k region) was multiplied by 52 then divided by 12 to get the most accurate calculation. You can rent a 4096 for 900ish L now!

The easiest way to figure out if you're making money getting started is when you're literally taking lindens out of your own pocket and putting them on a meter, and then watching lindens from your own meters refill your pocket and grow every week. This also saves conversion fees (cashing out pre-tier to pay LL in USD is more costly).

It's a good idea to start buying mainland with the intention of renting or selling it AFTER you start to understand the "Statistics Bar" in Firestorm. Learn from my mistake on this one:)

The factual basis is that a 4096 ON THE MAINLAND costs me only US $12.28 -- and others even less if they have less state tax than I do in New York State. I use the figure of 0.0030 to include tax on tier payments. I also have a grandfathered island, so that tier is $194 (with tax) which means a 4096 costs me $12.12, slightly less than mainland.

Why would I pay an island dealer $15.96 per 4096 and attempt to re-rent that parcel for the same or more??? To break even, I'd have to charge about $1025 per week in rent, so that means I'd have to charge more. I'm not in the island business, with only one island where I charge $1300/1300 prims to stay competitive against those who apparently have large bulk island discounts.

The idea that "you can rent a 4096 for 900ish" overlooks the fact that this won't be a *good* 4096 -- if in fact you do find this theoretical parcel. It will be a flat, sandy pancake on a neglected server with ugly builds all around it as no one is policing the view and enforcing rules.

In this market with high competition among islands because so many of them and vacancy is high. Look at the number of premium accounts out of the concurrency (if this is to be believed). There are only so many people willing to spend, say, US $25 per month on SL (the purchase of premiums is an indicator of this -- it's only 20% of the concurrency!). Long ago, the Lindens provided precise statistics on spending inworld which showed that the number willing to spend even a dollar, let along $25 or $100, was a significantly small proportion of the concurrency and registrations.

Sure, there are people without premium or premium plus accounts who have money to burn on SL. But by and large they don't, especially the non-US contingent.

Islands enable the owners to create "estate managers" and leave SL on automatic and sublet their islands to those who in turn may sublet further (if allowed under the lease). That means you can troubleshoot by re-setting the sim, mainly, and file tickets. Even so, it's not the same level of confidence and service you could have by outright ownership when something goes wrong.

Even if I were in the new island business, I don't see that it makes sense to pay ACS or another large dealer for an island and then attempt to re-rent it, competing with that dealer.

And I don't see that payment of tiers in Lindens is an advantage.

January 13

On 1/11/2024 at 11:29 AM, Diablo Lioncourt said:

In his defense, most of the "land barons" who post on these forums are little guys like myself who serve one particular niche. Most of us do this for fun; it may pay for our SL, maybe our Internet & light bill, etc. It's a hobby we made into a side hustle.

Before my skybox business got so big that it financially made sense for me to buy my own sims - its actually cheaper to leverage someone else's buying power and sublet getting started - I personally spent most of my SL as a tenant. In some ways I think that helped me become a better landlord when I decided to get into it.

Anyway, most of the places I rented parcels from as a tenant were huge estate companies with hundreds of private sims managed by a skeleton staff of humans, with some scripted help to restart sims as needed, dynamically adjust asking tier in response to current demand similar to Amazon pricing bots, autoreturn abandoned objects, etc. They give you a covenant with some basic rules, instant access to your land as soon as you pay, and then they're as "hands off" as possible as long as you keep paying and follow the rules. Their game is all about serving a large volume of people with relatively thin margins; they don't typically have time or patience to explain anything to anyone or teach you how to use your land, and they sure don't have time to tell anyone their trade secrets here. There's too much work to be done when the sim to human ratio is 100 (or more) to 1; they may be incorporated in another country just to get around VAT, outsourcing Chinese staff, etc to turn a profit. It's ultra-competitive.

As a result of all that capitalism, unless you own a half sim or more, its often cheaper to rent from one of these big companies than it is to own land directly through LL as a premium member. This is more or less what the creators originally intended.

It makes absolutely no sense to rent land from somebody else to then run as a rentals business. There is no way that this is cheaper in the long run.

In fact, I forbid it in my rentals, because I don't see why I need to absorb all the business costs of purchase and tier for somebody else's business. It's always best to own your own land.

January 13

On 1/11/2024 at 5:19 AM, Love Zhaoying said:

Wait, that doesn't describe you?!

Nope, I'm a very small landlord, I have a total now of about 13 sims' worth of land, spread across about 55 sims.

January 13

https://3dblogger.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2024/01/this-is-what-midjourney-and-chatgpt-are-like-every-single-day.html

January 13

The AFK avatars *are* the newbies.

January 12

Tenants who send me a friendship request merely to see if I'm online, in order to make a request.

They haven't figured out that they can look in the group to see if I'm online, it's small enough.

I used to just accept them, but that spawns ANOTHER aggressive, obnoxious behaviour -- sending force-ports to their DJ session or event.

So now I reject them routinely.

And they also don't realize that contrary to what many evasive merchants say, my messages don't cap because I have tied them to an email, which I read.

January 12

On 1/10/2024 at 5:20 PM, Cinnamon Mistwood said:

A barrage of IM's arriving the second I log in.

Give a person few minutes to check the mail, set their keys down, and take off their coat before demanding their attention.

Yes! And...Give them another few minutes to find those keys they set down...some place...and put them back in their bag because they need them to unlock so many things in SL...

January 12

18 minutes ago, JUSTUS Palianta said:

Im still using flickr, I just had to pay 60 US bux so i can advertise and flash my boobies. I don't think it's as busy as it was but it's still useful as a merchant. I use the SL web feed too for lazy pics and for making my SL X Jealous. ♥♥ I also use wordpress so i have a back up of my store images should flickr die.

Yes, I'm glad you reminded me about your back-ups. I rue the day when I used to post SL photos on a service that died, leaving lots of holes in my blog. So now I save them on my hard drive when I do a post to my blog.

January 12

I post mine on Twitter/X much of the time -- very rarely on Facebook. I like to snap and post photos of my travels and purchases in SL and I miss the old system where you could easily do this with an inworld app, long since retired.

I let my paid account on Flickr go when I saw a lot of people file out of Flickr last year, when they began to enforce their rule that if you have adult content, you must have a paid account. I could see where they were going with this and it's their platform of course, but they also very vaguely defined it as "global norms" which can include...Iran.

I personally don't enjoy NSFW type SL photos in my face but for a lot of people, taking and displaying photos is central to their SL experience.

I've been amazed to find what seems to me self-evident -- that a lot of people left Flickr a year ago -- is challenged now. But maybe they crept back? Or maybe it's like this forums, a few vocal types get the mindshare?

I personally don't get that much out of Flickr and rarely go there except at times like Fantasy Faire. Some stores seem to have left but I still see some top SL merchants, only not with paid accounts.

Google Photos works fine to store a lot of SL photos if you are worried about losing them. But I guess I treat everything on the Internet as ephemeral.

I will say this: whenever I see a merchants' event that doesn't have the photos displayed on seraphimsl.com itself, but link you to their web page or to Facebook, their items automatically seem lower quality to me. Something about it...

January 11

19 hours ago, Diablo Lioncourt said:

I doubt what's posted on these forums has any real impact on prices/sales in-world. I don't believe most of the grid knows.

Note that not a single major land baron -- particularly the really big dogs with hundreds of islands -- ever post on the forums.

A few lesser breeds do read them as I have discovered, but they don't post. Some have sworn never to post because the Lindens used to have this mantra that if you were permabanned on the forums, you should be stripped of your land inworld and ejected from SL. But then they dropped that in later years, although one can never be entirely sure.

The forums do have an impact, but it is not always measurable.

It's not true that the rest of Belli would be abandoned if they made an adult Belli. For one, if you are up in a skybox, in mature, and you don't display yourself, the Lindens basically declare you as "safe" and won't prosecute you. It's more the public adult activity like clubs that they want in Zindra. Some of the extra cautious with enemies who spuriously AR them will also go to Zindra.

Again, as I know from my tenants, there is a sizeable contingent of SL users who do not engage in any form of adult activity. This may due to the fact that they "have lives" and RL partners who, at the end of the day, with all their human failings, may be "more fun" and more stable than the virtual types that can and do disappear at any minute -- and the beauty part is, they can't make alts in RL, at least not without a lot of trouble and expense.

More people prefer shopping and socializing -- which can consist of IMing people while they sit in their house alone -- than sex. True story.

If the Lindens saw Belli empty out into an adult Belli, all they'd have to do is allow commerce in the original Belli and they would stop that outflow. And by "commerce," I mean even tip jars in art galleries or at parties with DJs, which are not currently allowed.

January 10

5 hours ago, Diablo Lioncourt said:

Auctions are just one source.

My biggest source of good parcels is directly from the end users who want to move and don't want to abandon their long-loved Zindra City/Coast or Blake/Belli area parcel. They may have no recollection of what they paid for it 10 years ago, but they know its definitely still worth something. They often figure contacting land dealers directly & comparing offers is an easy, convenient way to get someone to come take it right away.

Then there's abandoned land. Some people just have "the eye". Most people I know like this also happen to have a lot of rentals and rental experience, and have lived or owned land many many different places. "Good land" (mainland that will keep residents long-term) is very complicated. Things like "protected roadside" and even "protected sailing" adjacent are only part of the story. Its as much an art as a science. Some people (especially those who sail/fly a lot, and have lots of sailing rentals in moderate) just seem "get lucky" with AL over and over.

Back to auctions: They're more important to land-flippers than they are to your average resident or even your average landlord. They appear to be implemented in their current form to "suggest" options to newbie land flippers and anyone else interested in some "high demand" access inventory (typically at a higher price than direct purchase, and with a limited selection compared to the "aftermarket") , but auction inventory appears to be scripted-process-selected, based largely on region avatar count. This is certainly one common-sense measure of" demand", but things like a club full of AFKs, sailing waterfront vs mountains in the same region, etc etc etc will fool it over and over.

The point isn't that they're "one source". Obviously there are far less parcels on the auction than inworld.

But they are a good indicator and an important one, and most of all, an easily visible one, because the map is sprawling, and you can be distracted by $50,000 1024 m2 lots that aren't reflective of the norm.

Sailing is overstated, and sailors have gotten a lot of Linden love that other groups have not. I find most people even on waterfront DO NOT sail. It is expensive, difficult, and boring. They'd rather fly or drive, if they have to have some kind of transportation.

I have no idea what this gobblede***** is supposed to mean: "but auction inventory appears to be scripted-process-selected, based largely on region avatar count.

Supposedly land barons have scripts to determine which parcels on the auction come from sims with low avatar count? By what definition and time slice? The reality is, there are few enough auctions that a land baron can tell at a glance using his own experience and common sense what is worth it, based on rating, waterfront and protected status, etc. The end users and sometimes even the barons will go in real time to look at a lot and see claim dates, FPS etc. I don't see evidence that this is done by bots, or that it would be easy to script and interpret if it were.

January 10

6 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Ah, so all of those people selling land don't count..? Only auctions..?

They're selling it for lower prices AND abandoning it, duh.

They're not selling it for higher prices.

Don't be fooled by the outliers of $50,000 for a 1024 m2 sailing lot not even in the Blake Sea. Look around what even good land is going for.

I'm beginning to think this thread is a troll to drive prices up to the benefit of the few...or something.

January 9

On 1/7/2024 at 6:27 PM, Garnet Psaltery said:

I'd been looking for Vogon poetry (as in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) but went down a rabbit hole and found this.

There are dozens of those, it's like space prog banjo rock Muzak.

Subscribe to 666MrDoom and you will get a ton of similar types of bands, usually prog rock or space rock.

January 9

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