Prokofy Neva

I don't think you're admitting my point, which is that in a very finite world like Second Life, serial processing in a line, with first available coming up, then next available etc. is more productive and fair than any form of randomizing whatsoever. The 5 pulls are not in isolation. For one, people use 5 pulls per account, and they may have dozens of alts. For two, lots of people are pulling, so it's not in isolation. That's why there are scarcities. But the Lindens can't afford to add more sims that will be empty when the fad dies out.

I've never had any neighbour ask me to take any art work involving nudes down in Mature -- only in General. As for welcome areas, they are filled with working girls holding up signs, not "superprudes". I don't know where you got that crazy idea. You must be in the wrong line of work. The Lindens will dilute what little value Zindra has left with "adult" by adding Bellisseria adult regions, but I can see why that is in their interest.

No, auctions are a Linden's judgement that what was abandoned will likely sell on the auction, and not be left to sit there and be requested for only $1/m. So indeed they are a reflection of the market, a very powerful one, since this is a CONTROLLED market. AND they reflect the willingness -- or not -- of land barons to use their trading tier to pick up land they can flip or sell long term if they pay a lot. So of course it's a reflection of the land market. It IS the land market.

"Crash" was never the word to use -- "Crash" was Ryan Linden opening the old auctions at ridiculously low prices years ago, THAT was crash. But downturn? Steady decline? Signs that virtual worlds tend towards entropy (my theory)? Indeed. I feel it picked up a little bit latelyy, that's only because I sold a few parcels after lowering their price a bit -- they had long been sitting out there and baking in the sun. Fortunately, one is to an end user, I'd prefer them as neighbours. I just saw another neighbour who bought land I had sold to some flipper ABANDON rare 40+/- waterfront on deep sea. I thought of asking for it, but you know what? I am steadily tiering down and that's the right thing to do. The other parcels sold went to flippers, and they've put these so-so Sansara waterfronts at ridiculously high prices, so now they can tier New England, which they've covered with sea-sand-fun junk which I think will actually harm their sales potential.

No, that blue is the exact blue of Titania so I think I'll keep it.

These are dreadful, I love them : ) Managed to snag one, abandoned it, got it again, checked on another account whether there were any left and they weren't. Not too happy with the location but it will do now for... THE HONORARY CONSULATE OF TITANIA ...which is on the run again after that unfortunate incident after the New Year's Eve party. I think we managed to ditch M. Carter Blanc back at the fishing grounds of the last place but one, in any event he's ON HOLD FOR NON-PAYMENT and that's where we like him. Carry on!

I'm starting a new thread as the "Mediterranean Theme" thread is more about house furnishings and landscaping. As of 2:06 PM EST on January 8, 2024, there were NO AVAILABLE Mediterranean Theme homes randomly from the website. I don't know if it makes sense to go inworld and look around for one to request via ticket. I realize when they are first rolled out, new themes are in big demand, then people tire of them. PS There were no available ranch homes or stilts on water, either, according to my view of the page. So I will come back later.

The Lindens put "randomizing" in various things -- not just Linden Homes. They used to randomize the infohubs on the Mainland to which newbies would be set. There is a techie fascination with randomizing in the belief that it is "more fair" and "more democratic." But the obvious problem with it as I'm sure you know is that if you have a very finite set of elements to randomize -- and everything about Second Life is very finite -- it is not the Internet at large, it is not Google -- then you will randomly get the same items again and again, sometimes many times in a row, because it's random. That's what random does. It can randomly give you the same things again and again. That's why I believe serial selection would be better for SL than random selection when it comes to these kinds of offering of available choices.

Internet sites of radios and media deliberately change the streams to drive people back to their site to click on the ads. They need to pay their bills. It has become harder and harder in recent years to find the numbered URL you require to put into the SL land menu. Some companies like Radionomy got fed up with SL users taking their streams and thus disabled them. You can sometimes go to a site that converts lettered URLs to numbered IP addresses, but they don't always work. You can buy radios from various SL merchants but the URLs inside them always go dead eventually and the creator may not bother to try to update them. This site occasionally has some workable streams but less and less lately. Take Ambient Sleeping Pill, for example. You can convert it on a domain-to-IP converter page but does it work? No.

The past auction wins are an instructive page to examine; these disappear nearly instantly on the official SL page (or are hard to find, and when you do pull them up, they only go back a week or two on the regular web page). So this is one thing that bonniebots does that is useful, although it comes at a cost, of course, of bots everywhere. Note Zindra - $4+-$5/meter. Supposedly this "can't be". Yet there it is, again and again on the auctions -- or less. Remember, as Qie pointed out, everything on the auction was once abandoned! Or, in far more rare cases, the owner died in RL or their land was seized for non-payment by the Lindens and then auctioned. Note if something is $0 it's because it got no bids at all.

Only objects in "share" can be moved, but you don't want to put them in "share," at least for long, as then they can be jetted up to the sky by griefers or even stolen if on transfer. The Lindens will not respond to a request of this nature unless the deceased left their land to you in their will. You can try, however, you never know.

Very helpful to understand how people come to take the Soviet/Russian view of history, economics, politics -- and of course the Holodomor, which Duranty reported falsely. (And this problem persists today with the war in Ukraine). Interestingly, he reported the Volga Famine accurately, and his problem was not believing Bolshevik propaganda naively, but understanding it all too well, as he spent a lot of time foot-padding around places to be an eyewitness to traumatic historical events. Rather, the issue was that he admired and approved of the Bolshevik methods of brutality, mass terror, disinformation and manipulation for the sake of building communism -- the end justifies the means. Not for the faint hearted. https://www.amazon.com/write-please-Walter-Duranty/dp/B008GDH8F8

Pick up your mic, already. You're stubbornly persisting in only reviewing this in Firestorm; I am exclusively on the SL Viewer, and since that is the official viewer of Second Life, then it should work optimally there. It doesn't. And I haven't misunderstood the issues -- in fact I've explicated them. Changing out of it is is difficult/impossible on some routes; having a scripted item to do this, even if low script time, will add to the load on regions. The end. The Lindens could have had one line in their blog: "Test first before you ruin anything as you might not be able to get it off until you learn all its complications." The idea that everyone is supposed to study wikis, learn physics, learn optics, and stare wide-eyed with mouth open at scripters and Lindens is preposterous. If you have inworld building tools, they should be simple and intuitive. You can have a simple caution that people not ruin their stuff.

No, it's already been established in this thread (see above) that it does not work in the regular SL Viewer as imagined. Just because a small percent use this viewer for valid historical and current reasons doesn't mean the point is overridden. I always marvel at the way people align themselves with the powers-that-be in SL in ways they never would in RL.

Nope. I am going to go on posting on social media and warning my tenants about this because it is NOT easy, NOT intuitive, and a general PITA. If I DON'T do that, my customers will soon be saying YOUR LAND IS MAKING MY THING SHINY AND I CAN'T TAKE IT OFF *REFUND* If more of you were in high-contact business with low-rent customers, you'd be less cocky and assured about all things LL. Having a Marketplace page is not the same thing as being in business inworld although I do appreciate binoculars that are far less land impact than the one I've had for years and just deleted, let's hope I can resize it. (I don't care about Materials and most people don't.)

I'm long, long used to that silliness in the library now and I push past it. I'm actually glad things in the Library tend to be on no-transfer now. For years and years, the Lindens put all the Library items not only on all perms, but on "share." This created endless griefing vectors not only with Philip's party hat, making it appear that he had created a grief object; your own library object, left outdoors, could be swiped and it could be made to appear that YOU created a griefing object. So it's good they closed off that loophole, I suppose, although it's too bad all the things in the library aren't on full mod, especially the avatars and clothing, which can be hideous otherwise.

Um, we're not talking about wiki-woos, we're talking about one line in a blog that says: WARNING: TEST ON A PRIM FIRST AS YOU CANNOT REMOVE PBR TEXTURES EASILY ONCE APPLIED. That's all. That.

In fairness, the Black Forest supplied such a tutorial, touted by Lindens, but with its brutalist approach in the first graph, I gave it a pass.

I let weeks go by without reading your forums, dear. I didn't "read down into" the one thread on PBR. There aren't "scads". One can look up Blinn-Phong. I'm glad he/they are getting credit for his work. Which is more than you can say for lots of things in SL. Plus a lot of people who don't have much going on in their lives rn can get a certain frisson of superiority over others because they know this double-barreled exotic nerd term, right up there with Epstein-Barr and Anton-Babinski syndrome (quite common in SL).

So the official viewer of Second Life -- which I definitely prefer for many historical and practical current reasons -- does not work so well with LL's new shiny, PBR. It works better on Firestorm, as many things do (starting with Search, which thank God, was rescued by Cinders back in the day on Firestorm). And...It will work better if I add to the script load on my already heavily loaded Mainland regions. OK, got it.

No, that wouldn't work because that isn't the point. I don't like something that is sprung on us and changes the nature of the elements of the world in irreversible ways -- and that is indeed the case. I don't care about the wiki. The very first blog could have had a line or two with a warning about this. It's NOT the same process as removing a texture because you CANNOT select it from inventory on the edit menu. You can ONLY select OTHER PBR textures. You have to "just know" to click in the texture window and "just now" to select "none" to get the plywood. I don't care about adding PBR to anything. That's what's hard for you to accept because you think everyone should be fanbois and get in line to be whupped by whatever is inflicted on us.

I don't need anyone to post a JIRA, that's not how you effect change in SL anyway. Henri's JIRA isn't about my point, it doesn't matter. As I noted above, using "blank" leaves it still with a ghoulish glow, and "none" works to restore the plywood original. And? It's beastly stuff and I have no more respect for it than I did starting out. I even bought a 25L texture of a volcano on the MP done in this "substance" and it looks like congealed blood. I thought the point was to show actual inworld reflections like a RL mirror.

That's why it's not a texture. That's why it's a substance. It's like shellac, that you can't take off, not wallpaper, that you can.

I appreciate that you're trying to be helpful -- I think -- but you also can't help being knowier-than-thou -- it's a common problem. None of what you are saying is the point. In fact, you reveal that my original post is spot on -- because Once you've added PBR, you can't go back and add, or edit, the old Blinn-Phong textures we used to use Of course, I've never heard of the term "Blinn-Phong" before now and I dare say most people haven't. The problem is: you can't remove the textures if you can't override them "in the old way" and if clicking on "blank" turns them blank, but still that odd, ethereal glow of PBR (which I really don't like, I feel like it's "Tales of the Crypt"). You have to "just know" that you need to click "NONE" to get it "back to how it was". I've made a point, the point is valid, and if you all need to keep man-splaining it and tech-splaining it, understood, but the point is: none of it is intuitive, you would have to come and ask on the forums and put up with knowier-than-though or actually vicious types to get answers -- or experiment by ruining a few things first, before you get it. None of this is necessary. If the Lindens and their fanbois weren't so hell bent on shoveling shiny at us to distract us from other failings -- literally! -- they would supply some basic prompts like this at the get-go.

So this is ridiculously and needlessly complex and again, no instructions were given with the blog, then Lindens advertised a tutorial on Twitter and elsewhere from a creator resident that started out with the snarky "Physically Based Rendering (PBR) is here. Long story short: you will be immersed in it whether you like it or not." -- that same instrumented nastiness was how mesh was introduced -- which doesn't guarantee it a read. If you hit "Edit Selected" you will get a menu that only gives you all the PBR options and nothing else, like "base color" and "Metallic/roughness" etc. That's why it seems like you can't change it. So yes, you have to go back click in the window itself labelled "Material" to get the old option of "blank". So you can change it out of "Gold" or "Copper" etc from the "Materials" file in the library to BLANK, BUT IT HAS A BLUE SHEEN BECAUSE IT HAS BEEN PBR-ized. That is NOT "putting it back like it was". Only "none" brings it back to the plywood that God intended.