Persephone Emerald

^ This. I love my land. I pay $40/month in tier for it, but I don't expect to ever get back what I paid to buy it, even though it is in a beautiful location next to an inland sea. Linden Lab is predominately responsible for the collapse of the SL land market. The RL economy is partly responsible for people not wanting to spend as much money in SL. But the pre-2011 team at LL did much of the damage too. Reselling all newly abandoned land at $1/ square meter was the final nail in the coffin for all but the most desirable areas. Linden Lab seemed to almost systematically find areas of SL where users were making some profit & find some way to undercut them. First it was the sale of merchandise in world, by making it easier & more profitable to sell online on Marketplace (where LL is sure of getting a cut of the sales). Then it was rental property. They created nearly free housing for new residents & practically wiped out the low-end rental business. Then it was land sales, when they flooded the market with $L 1/ m parcels. Don't get me wrong. I'm not wailing on about how LL is destroying SL. I think they're finally starting to do things to turn around this destruction. But there was much damage done to the SL economy with poor decisions in the past, & it's going to take time, work & great ideas to fix it.

I also like the latest Phoenix viewer, with mesh. The main reason I'm sure is that I hate having to look for my cheese in new places when I was perfectly happy with where it was before. Phoenix looks alot like the old Viewer 1, but has all the extra options I want. This version is a little crashier than the non-mesh version, but it's nice to see mesh objects the way they're supposed to be seen instead of as big blobs & cubes.

I sometimes like tentacles, which can be a bit scary & certainly freaky on an avatar. Alycia, my alt, is also a little scary-looking & still makes my boyfriend/partner uncomfortable. Here's a picture from right after she killed the psychopath who had been imprisoning her in her home. She's not really a bad person, but I think you can see why she might make people wary of her.

As advice to you & other new users, most jobs in SL require a few months experience in SL. Being a stripper requires a nice-looking avatar & being able to text suggestive things to patrons. Being a DJ requires a collection of good music, the ability to stream it into SL, as well as being able to talk to the audience. The easiest way to get money is to put in about $10 with a PayPal account. Then budget yourself so you don't spend more than you can afford. You can also try doing the Linden Realms game to collect crystals to exchange for lindens, and look for good freebies on Marketplace, in shops, & on hunts. If you like looking for small objects, going on male-focused hunts is a good way to find nice freebies while also doing something fun with other people. Keep checking these forum for possible job openings & for surveys that pay you in lindens. For about 10-20 minutes of your time you can make a few hundred lindens from a survey, which is better than most SL jobs pay.

The OP didn't contact me about the house & land I was going to let him use, so I suspect he found other arrangements. Many newbies don't really need to own or rent land, as long as they have a place to rez items & change their clothes. I lived out of sandboxes & out of the way places for a couple months myself before I started renting a place. As for the house, I got it myself & had no problem rezzing it directly from my inventory. There was no rez box, just a version one can could walk into & one that was just a solid box.

I know SL still has problems & Linden Lab could still improve our experience as users, but I'd like to take some time this holiday season to thanks Rodvik & the rest of the crew for a few nice things they've done for us. 1. Thank you for not raising tier prices for 2012. High tier costs has been driving many users away from owning land. I'm glad you guys apparently figured this out & decide not to try to squeeze more money out of users who are often already struggling to pay for their SL recreation time. 2. Thank-you for getting rid of the Basic viewer, which just confused new players & didn't give them an enriched experience. 3. Thank-you for more free sandboxes (even if they are just for Premium members). 4. Thank-you for the gifties to Premium members. The items you've offered aren't really that important to most of us, but I appreciate that you're trying to find ways to reward Premium membership. 5. Thank-you for the Linden Realms games. I don't need the few free lindens I can get from playing the game, but I think this is a great way for newbies to get used to using SL while also earning a few lindens. More people joining & staying means more money for Linden Lab, which is good news for us regular users, because we want SL to stay around for us to play here. If I might offer few more suggestions for improving user experience at little cost to Linden Lab: 1. Increase the "free" land for Premium membership to 1024 m. This would make owning land & having one's own home on it comparable to using a free Linden Home. As the situation stands now, a user gets more prim usage with a free Linden Home than they do from owning their own land & rezzing a low-prim house or sky box on it. If you can encourage Linden Home users to own their own land instead of using a "free" Linden Home, some of them will inevitably purchase more land & pay tier for it. Some of them will also learn to improve the appearance of land that is currently abandoned & empty. 2. Continue to develop public spaces that all users can use, especially roadways, waterways & parks. These look much nicer than large tracts of abandoned land & encourage users to explore this virtual world & get to know each other better. 3. Offer users, especially newbies contacts for in-world training on how to enjoy SL better. Newbies need help leaning to use the Edit menu & basic building. Almost everyone needs help with managing their Inventory better. I'm pretty sure all the huge inventories many users have is a drain on the servers, so if people can learn to delete duplicate items, that will help the servers as well as the users. 4. If this hasn't been done already, abandoned land should automatically send back prims to the previous resident & be set to disallow others from rezzing prims on it. Allowing just anyone to abandon objects on abandoned land creates an unsightly mess that may include Adult objects on Mature & General land. 5. If possible, keep General land separate from Mature land. If you have to keep one continent that is General, one that is Adult, and all the others Mature, then do that. Placing land that is supposed to be appropriate for 16 year olds next to land that includes Mature images & items for sale makes no sense if you want SL to be used by people who believes SL should be "family-friendly". I don't personally care what the teens in SL do, but I don't want Linden Lab to be sued by parents saying their children were exposed to inappropriate material.

You're best bet for finding a community might be to find people who have similar interests to yours, such as through a group. I know there are pagan/ witch communities and New- Age type communities that have some housing in their sims. There are role-play communities that have housing in their sims as well. I think there must be others too, but I don't know them. Another thing you can do is rent a home on a sim that has many houses or apartments for rent & then make a point of introducing yourself to your neighbors. You can say hello when you see them walking around or click on the rental boxes to see who lives there, then send them a short IM saying hello. I've always tried to be friendly with my neighbors & tenants, & sometimes that pays off with a lasting friendship. Even if it doesn't, being friendly with neighbors helps you resolve potential problems more easily, such as their prims being on your land or objects creating too much noise or glow. As with real life, I think people in SL don't always want to be chatty, but if you can find time to get to know each other a little, you may be able to connect on a closer level.

I love the places in SL that remind me of places I've been in RL. Santorini is one of them. Exploring it brought me dreams of being a there again (SL Santorini, not the RL one - LOL). Ah, if only we could have objects in SL that dispense glasses of champagne that we could actually drink (like one did in my dream).

You may want to add a section for doing the Linden Realms quest. This is a good way for newbies to get used to moving around SL while also earning a few lindens. There are linden rewards for completing parts of the quest, as well as numerous colored crystals that can be turned in for lindens within the game area. Just be careful about buying the items on the page the "Go to Store" link takes you to when you exchange your gems for lindens, because you may be able to find better clothes for free or almost free in other places. 50 red crystals = $L 1 50 yellow crystals = $L 2 50 orange crystals = $L 5 1 green crystal = $L 1 1 blue crystal = $L 2 (Edit to correct typo)

I helped my roommate out on a hunt, so I can say it's probably going to be more work than you realize right now, but it is do-able. 1st. Have you gone on many hunts yourself? That's how you get ideas for what can go wrong & how to prevent problems. Make sure the prize boxes are not set to "Show in Search", for instance, since the hunters can then TP right to them. 2nd. After you make your prize containers, have someone else check to see if they can take or buy the object inside, that they can rez it, and that they can't transfer it back to you. If you put notecards into the prize containers, make sure anyone can read them. 3rd. Remember hunters will try to cheat, so think of all the ways they might try to cheat & reduce those chances. You might want to have different names for your prize boxes, for instance, since there are ways for people to search on the name of the box to find where they are. 4th. Make sure you have plently fo time to place all the hidden prizes when none of the hunters might be watching you. Finally, don't kick yourself if the hunt doesn't go off perfectly. You're new at this afterall, so you can't be expected to do everything perfectly the first time you run a hunt. It's a process of trial & error most times. Good Luck.

Don't expect to be able to do everything at once in SL. There is always more you can learn here. First of all, a Shape, Skin and Hair are the basic parts of your look - unless you don't want to look human. Then you would most likely have an avatar shape made at least in part from prims. If you want to play around with free stuff, there are places in SL that have freebies & freebies for most things on the Marketplace. If you want fun non-human looks, you might try Grendel's Children in world. They have some free stuff & lots of inexpensive stuff.

Not having money is a common complaint of new players. Fortunately Linden Lab has started Linden Realms as a game within Second Life. You can earn a few lindens while you learn how to move & do things in SL. Check the Showcase page or Search for locations in world. Here's one http://slurl.com/secondlife/LR%20Portal%20Park1/76/125/22

I was able to rez the box, select Open, & Copy to Inventory. I then pulled each of the 2 versions out of inventory & they looked fine. The only odd thing was that the houses rezzed about 10 m above my build platform, but that's not unusual with large items such as houses. Maybe the house rezzed, but you needed to pull back your camera to see it. Then you'd have to drag it down to the ground. The version of the building with an interior is very nice, but is missing upper story floors & stairs. It's modifiable, though, so one could add floors & stairs to the build. Lumychan, If you contact me in-world, I have an unused house I'm planning to rent out. I can let you use it & my build platform for free till January, but after that I reserve the right to ask for rent or ask you to leave. I've rented out houses in SL before, but lately I don't want to be available to tenants as often as they might like. The location is very nice & has access to an inland sea. http://slurl.com/secondlife/Belleville/104/170/120

I'd suggest the older Phoenix viewer, the one that is not mesh-enabled. No matter which viewer you use, you may have to turn down your graphics settings to reduce the lag.

Since this item is free, I took the opportunity of buying it myself to see what problems you might be having with it. First, read the reviews to see if anyone else has had problems with it. I suspect you may be new to SL, so maybe you're just having problems opening the box or using the rez box? You should be able to rez a building in a sandbox, but it will get returned to your Lost & Found folder when the auto-return time for the sandbox is up. If you don't have a Premium account, you might be better off renting a place to live, rather than trying to find sandboxes & land where you can rez a house. It is possible to live for free in SL, but doing so either requires dressing in hidden spots, rezzing temporary structures in sandboxes, or finding some place where you can get free housing.

Ah, I see the problem. You're expecting the people who write these notes to have a British public school understanding of English instead of an American public school understanding. The average American's understanding of the use of our language is unfortunately very poor. (I was lucky to have a very good high school English teacher and a couple of good college English teachers.) I also suspect the folks at Linden Lab are intentionally vague with their estimates of what work will be done & when, so they won't be held accountable for any maintenance that's not completed in a timely manner.

Sounds lie thry may have been sent to you by mistake then. Contact the creator to be sure, but I don't see any reason to delete them. If you like the free shoes, you might want to go buy some more from them.

I agree. It sounds likely to me that the creator meant to resend the to another resident, but your name was similar and you got them instead. If this is the case the creator will want to know that the other person didn't get the shoes. If they were somehow copy-botted and sent to you by someone else, the creator will also want to know that. It's also possible they were a prize you won somewhere. Don't delete them unless you know they were copy-botted. I'm assuming they are not full-perm, because if they are, then they probably are illegal.

I've said this in an earlier thread about what mesh clothing needs, but I'll say it again here. I think mesh clothing needs to be offered in 3 sizes - for slender, normal, and curvatious (or muscular) avatars.

Venus Petrov: "I have not finished reading this thread and apologize if this is redundant, but I discovered if you remove someone from your friends list, they automatically go on your 'Follower's list. So, you never really remove them entirely. Good times!" Persephone: That would explain why my roommate's ex is now on my followers list. When they broke up, I returned his house & things, removed him from our land group, & unfriended him. I thought that made sense at the time, since I no longer had any reason to have contact with him. What doesn't make sense is why anyone would want an ex-friend or ex-partner to continue following them.

I voted & commented the following: "I want to know what it means when a person follows you and why I never heard about this before? I don't want followers. I have my roommate's ex-partner following my SL profile. Why would I want that? Why would anyone want an ex partner or one-time friended and later de-friended person following them on SL? I want control of my privacy on SL and elsewhere. I want to be able to block anyone from following me." I further want to know what all this wall stuff means? I don't want my Facebook account to be linked to my SL account, but that's what all of this sounds like. Are people following our posts on the forums? I've never posted anything to a wall for SL. I didn't even know there was such a thing.

You may still be able to contact the actual owner of "your" land to find out what happened, but it's possible he just took off with your money. When you "buy" land from the owner of a private island, what you're usually really doing is leasing it, but without the RL protections of a legal contract. The truth is that none of us really own land in SL. Linden Lab owns the servers that create our virtual land. When we pay for premium membership and tier, they let us use part of this virtual land as if we own it, even though we're actually renting it from them. We can resell this land to other users, but they'll have to keep paying for their premium membership & tier to use the land. We can also rent or lease or rent it to other users, but then we'll still have to keep paying for out premium membership & tier fees. When you rent a home or land in SL, you probably know the person who owns the land could kick you out or stop paying their tier or premium membership fees to LL. If this happens, you don't have much recourse to try to get back the money you gave them. Unfortunately many land owners in SL give potential tenants the illusion that they're selling them land, when they're actually just leasing it to them. Linden Lab always owns all of the land. The rest of us are either renting it from them or subleasing it from someone else who is paying tier to Linden Lab. If the person you rent or lease land from defaults on their payments to LL, you're unfortunately out of luck. If they take your money and run, you're also pretty much out of luck. The best you can do is report them to Linden Lab with an Abuse Report, but that doesn't usually result in you getting any of your money back. (Edit to add) My response assumes the worst case scenario. The 2 above seem like they may be more helpful. I hope you're able to resolve your problem to your satisfaction.

Lilah Munster wrote: There's currently a grid-wide For Men Only hunt going on. That would be a start. BothamFidor: CBA jumping around wannabe designers who hide their minimised hunt tokens in satellites and mines, even changing the published name of the gift so you can't find it using the Phoenix area search facility. Although maybe I'll send the gf out to look and she can tp me when she has found the stuff, so thanks for the idea. Me: So you're lazy and a misogynist? Very little in life is truly free. If you want to get SL clothing the easy way, you can buy it with your hard-earned money, wear crappy-looking freebies, or get other people to do the the work of finding the good freebies for you. Most of us who know where to get good looking freebies (including the girlfriend you want to go hunting for you) have put in some work to figure out where the good freebies are located. I don't really think you're a bad guy, but your response to this advice above really irked me.

I'm going to disagree about not buying form the Marketplace if the owner doesn't have an inworld store. You take a small chance doing that, but nowdays some SL creators have found they can't afford the tier to own land or the rent to run a well-stocked shop. Also, when you shop on Marketplace, you can search from the lowest priced to the higher priced items, so you can find free and inexpensive items first. If an item isn't delivered, 9 times out of 10, you either don't lose any money or you can contact the seller & they will resend your item. Always be polite to the seller when you have a problem. Being nice pays off. Being bitchy doesn't. I've had several creators give me extra items for free because I told them I liked their work & appreciated their helpfulness. In world, there is the small risk that another person may have put an invisable prim over a merchant's vendor. If that happens, your money would go to the wrong person and you'd get nothing. That can't happen on the Marketplace. If you go to a large shop that's on land owned by the creator, that probably wouldn't happen. But if a vendor is near a sandbox or on land that allows anyone to rez objects, be careful. There are lots of good items available on marketplace & inworld that are free or very inexpensive, but you have to know what is good and where to look. My best skins are from Redgrave and are under $L1000. All their demos are free, so you can try out as many as you like without paying anything. You can find good inexpensive skins from Miss Murder on Marketplace, from KRB and from other shops whose names escape me. If you're new and want good free stuff, join the Fabulously Free group. If you want good free & inexpensive gothic stuff, join The Thrifty Goth group. If you want good stuff for a guy, join the Make Him Over Hunt or one of the other men's shopping groups. Look for gift boxes in shops that have free items for group members. Look for Midnight Madness boards & lucky chairs. Most of the freebies in places that have nothing but freebies aren't very good, but when you see alot of people in a place who aren't all newbies, chances are the quality of the product is good. I'll send you my current list for good freebie shopping. A couple of the shops might be gone now, though.

Another way to get a few lindens that doesn't take much time and effort is to take one of the surveys that will occationally be advertised in the forums. Most only require 10- 15 minutes of your time and pay a few hundred lindens.