Persephone Emerald

So many good responses here, but Pussycat & Willow, I think I liked yours best. I'm still becoming me after more than 2 years in SL. My first good skin was also a copybotted Redgrave that someone gave me. Later, I looked up the store & bought a legitimate one. Later I bought another, the same skin, but with slightly darker make-up. I have never changed gender or race in SL, though I do change species from time to time. My main avatar is an idealize version of me, a little younger & thinner, but still basically the RL me. A friend of mine told me how to tweak my body shape to make it look more realistic & less like a Barbie clone, so I followed his lead, but still go with a thinner & taller shape than I have in RL, because SL clothes just don't look right on my RL figure. I'm usually human in SL, but I have shapes for a cat, a wolf, a couple mermaids, a couple lamiae/ nagas, 4 astral serpents, & a tentacle-creature woman that I like & use from time to time. Persephone 2.0 Perephone 3.0 Persephone 4.0 Persephone 5.0, sitting with an alt

I think that for most of us, having to learn CB code whould be like learning another language. We have text chat & SL vernacular anyway. Affirmative = yup, yeah, ok, cool Away = afk, brb or bbl Going to the bathroom = I have to let the dogs out. (My roommate & I joke that this is the real meaning of that phrase in SL.) Answering the phone = phone Someone at the door = door Getting food or drink = brb, food / drink Coming back from any of the above = back Acknowleging the person coming back = WB Thanks = thx With those 2 girls, I typed in local that I could hear fine, but didn't feel like doing voice. They were both so caught up in talking wtih each other, that they didn't pay any attention to the text chat. Btw, for all the typeos I make in text, I still like checking what I'm writing before I push [send]. That's why I'm so terrible in chat, because I'm self-conscious about making mistakes & checking myself takes too long. By the time I write & send something that was relavant to the conversation, it no longer is.

Another point about voice: I've been told my voice is sweet & sexy, but when it comes to virutal sex in SL & just too shy to ever do that in voice. I can type the most descriptive, purrient lines & use voice gestures, but I can not say those things out loud.

You got compliments on your avatar in private IMs. I think that counts as getting attention. For me, pubic chat is often putting on a show & acting social, while private IM's is more personal & more real. That perception is probably a reflection of the kind of person I am in RL. I don't like being the center of attention, so I appreciate other people who feel the same way.

I like using voice with my boyfreind or other friends in SL, I like listening to a teacher or good story-teller, but I don't want to hear people blathering stupidly in the background & I don't want everyone else to hear my dogs barking, my roommate & me talking, or my typing. I once listened on voice to a couple young women having what I thought was a very shallow & boring conversation. Because I wasn't also talking, they assumed I couldn't hear them & started talking about me like I wasn't there. I think it's good to remember that just because you can't hear someone else in SL, that doesn't mean other people aren't listening in on your conversation in local chat. Sometimes it's a amusing, sometimes it's annoying, & sometimes it could be embarassing. If you want to go to voice, it's best to do it in private or group chat.

:smileyhappy: I love your sentiment, Randall

I think that if anyone would say to me that SL isn't real, I'd ask them if a painting is real? Then I'd explain that SL is like being able to walk inside a 3D painting that is constantlly being painted by yourself & other people. The painting gets bigger, more detailed & more amazing, the more you explore it. It's real because other people are always creating it & exploring it with you. "What Dreams May Come", with Robin Williams is a pretty good movie depiction of what Second Life is like. It's a about a man who dies, goes to Heaven & discovers Heaven is created by the people in it. Maybe you can rent it & watch it with your relatives?

You seem very clever & present yourself well. I don't have a job opening, but I'd be glad to let you use my land if you wish. I might be able to set up a small cave for you in the near future. I have access to water, & there is a lovely undersea area nearby. The sea monster over there seems friendly. Permanent prim usage would have to be limited, but I can provide a few for free & a good rental rate if you want to have more. Consider the land & space above to be a group sandbox, but please don't eat our pets or burn up the landscaping.

As long as you don't have to pay for the service, I think checking out other non-Linden grids now & then is a good idea. So far Second Life far surpasses all of them, IMHO. But some day, if SL goes under because of bad management, most of us will want someplace else to go, and then one or more of the other grids will pick up where SL left off.

On trick with Linden homes that may still work (though I don't guarantee it) is that you can rez an item on your land & then drag it over the property line onto common land. This would be a way to place a plant outside of your home boundary, for instance, without having the prims count against your allotment. If someone notices the item, they can report it & have it returned to you, but residents in Linden homes don't usually pay much attention to an extra plant or other small unobtrusive item.

When you're new to SL, it's best to either rent, lease (Estate land) or get the lowest level of Premium membership & use a free Linden house. If you use your 512 m to buy a small plot of land, you'll end up with fewer prims to furnish your house than you'd get with a Linden home, since the house & landscaping around it is free prims. With a Linden home, however, you won't have use of land owner tools like setting the music stream or terraforming the land. If you want to play with building stuff, I recommend finding some good sandboxes that have long autoreturn times & don't tolerate griefers. I'll send you a list of some to check out in world. If you still want to own land, I recommend creating a group with yourself & at least one other person in it (or joining a land group with a friend you trust). You can even create an alt & have them join your group, so you & your alt are the only members. Then you can buy land for your group or buy land & deed it to your group. The advantage of owning group land vs.. personal land is that you can buy about 10% more square meters (which means you also get about 10% more prims) without having to pay more in tier. You can buy many parcels in SL now for around L$ 1/ square meter. If you pay more than L$ 2/ m, be sure you're getting a really good location. Things to look for with land are access to water, a road, Linden land you can walk across, or private land you can walk across. Walk or fly around the neighborhood before you buy. Avoid places with breedable animal farms, games like Zingo, high traffic from dance clubs or sandboxes, particle emitters or anything that causes lag. Can you move easily & quickly around the neighborhood? If not, then you might not enjoy living there. As in RL, remember Location. Location. Location. Another point to be aware of is that it's usually much easier to buy land than to sell it, so you may not get your sale price back if/when you change your mind & want to move later. Most important of all to remember when buying land is that the real cost of owning land in SL isn't the purchase price, but the monthly Tier you pay. If you can afford to pay $5, $8, $15 or more a month for tier, I suggest getting an annual Premium membership instead of a monthly one, to save on your yearly cost. Then form a land group to get the 10 % bonus in free tier & prims. Just be sure you keep track of when your annual payment comes due each year & either pay it or downgrade to basic before it comes due. Otherwise, Linden Labs can lock you out of your account for non-payment.

Most people who are computer litterate think of SL as just another game like WOW. I try to explain that it's not a game, so much as a virtual world. Most don't get that concept & their faces show that lack of comprehension. At that point, if you take too much time to explain why you love SL so much, they'll probalby think you're a little crazy, so it's best to keep explanations short & simple. Second Life is a vitual world where people create whatever environments & experiences they want to explore. Some people play games in SL, but it's not just a game, it's a 3D world in which you can interact with other people. You can look however you want & do pretty much whatever you want. You can own virutal land, make & sell virual goods, explore, role-play, go dancing, & chat with friends. You can do whatever you can imagine doing. It's free if you don't want to spend money on it, though most people do end up spending money on virtual clothes, land & stuff. I don't have much cause to explain SL to my relatives, though. My Mom is 89 & still doesn't get it even after I showed her a little walk through.

This is good advice. SL is both a visual & textual medium. This isn't Facebook or Twitter, so the appearance & behavior of your avatar matters. I don't know why LL still gives newbies that horrible walk my friends & I call the "stupid walk". There are plenty of good free AOs available, as well as nice skin, hair, clothes & everything you need to personalize your avatar & make it reflect who YOU are. It's actually much easier & cheaper to create an avatar that reflects your inner self than it is to look nice, scary, gorgeous or however you'd like to look in RL. Second Life is a fine place to experiment with how appearance affects how people treat you, but be certain it DOES affect how people treat you. I want people to see my main avatar as nice, approachable & "normal", so that's how she usually looks. Sometimes I want to look a little scary or off-putting, so sometimes I use an avatar or body that looks a lttle scary or even monstrous, but that isn't how I normally present myself in SL. How you speak, write & gesture also affects how people view you. Using too many gestures shows that you want people to pay attention to you, but don't really care how they feel or what they have to say. Not using understandable grammar & spelling gives the impression that you're not educated, which most people translate into thinking you're not very smart & probably not worth talking with. A limited use of text-speak is reasonable when writing in chat, but long run-on sentences with no punctuation are difficult to read & inconsiderate toward the person trying to understand you.

In my experience, all jobs require some job skills, even in SL. If you get a crappy fast-food job in RL, you'll have to learn to show up on time, smile & do what you're told without talking back (which are actually good job skills for most RL jobs). If you get a stripper job in SL, you'll have to be able to sweet-talk customers by saying things that are suggestive but not too dirty (usually). It's alot like doing phone sex or RL retail, because whether you like the customer or not, you have to pretend like you do & make them believe it. Lot's of jobs look easy from the outside, because people can't see the work the employees really do.

If I posted my avatar's nipples on the forums I'd get banned, because I only have female shapes. But if I posted pics of a shirtless guy or a famous painting of a Madonna nursing baby Jesus, I could get away with that. I've seen nice, artistic photos where I wasn't sure what gender the model was, so what should I do if I want to post those? It's not fair. Give me a thread where this debate is relevant - maybe in the art section? - and I will gladly push the line as far as I can without being banned.

I have over 20,000 items in my inventory & probably only paid for a couple hundred. Some of the best hair I have was free, some from SL Marketplace & some from in-world. Gurl 6 is a good place for free hair when you're new. Dr. Life used ot have some nice free hair at the Gnubie Store. Anyone know where they might be available now? Savoir Hair has some good free stuff by several designers, so you can try some & then buy more from the designers you like. Miss Murder has some nice free skins & packages for guys & girls. You might try Fab Free too. Many stores offer a couple freebies to get potential customers to come back & buy more. Hunts are also a good way to find nice items for free. I'll send you a Notecard in world with lots of links for good free clothes & such.

I agree that these posts are annoying, but where else can people selling or renting land market their SL property? Merchants have SL Marketplace, which works pretty well even with it's weird problems. The classifieds & Search function work pretty well, though I think the classifieds are probably not cost-effective. Is there a section of SL Marketplace for land sales & rentals? If so, then perhaps this where these ads actually belong. As much as I feel for folks trying to make a virtual living on buying, selling & renting property. I don't think it's fair that they can plaster the forums with their ads while other merchants can't do the same.

I agree. Witches Island is friendly & active pagan community in world, with good classes, interesting shops, & fun events.

Montaigne Noir ( the link above from Valarie ) has a lovely pink floral day dress as its free group gift right now. The clothing there is always appropriately modest for a Victorian lady or gentleman.

Lexie, you do indeed Rock! Thank you for helping to bring back our favorite forums & keeping them orderly & sensible. :smileyvery-happy:

Yay for nipples! We all have 'em, so why do only half of us get to show them?

The first 2 links are for boards that let everyone know who the script hogs are. Most of the rest of the links are for personal use script counters. The last one is for a Welcome Mat that announces script usage as people walk over it. p.s. I was wearing hair while on the Silk Road Hunt that had a re-color script in it, though I didn''t know it did. When the topic of scripts & lag came up in the chat group, I checked my new hair & found it was scripted. I was able to copy it & remove the script from the copy. Then I weighed myself on my script weigth scale & saw the difference in memory use. It does make a difference in personal lag when you reduce the number of scripts you're running.

No, you can't name the store that makes laggy hair. I totally agree with this post. Lag is basically caused by 2 main things, a poor computer (user side only) or poor judgment in what you wear (affects everyone). Unfortunately, we residents aren't usually aware of how many scripts we're running. Some hair, clothing & jewelry manufacturers let their customer know they can delete resize or recolor scripts. Others produce No Modify items that don't allow users to remove the scripts. If residents HATE lag, they have to do what they can to clean it up. It's like not littering because you don't like seeing trash all over the place. (Yeah, we all know how well that rule works in RL.) Nobody is going to give script hogs a ticket for littering. Dancers & hostesses need to have nice hair, because they won't get tips if they don't look good. Try suggesting stores that have removable scripts & put a script counting board into your club, so everyone will know who the script hogs are. (My roommate says several fighting groups do this, because lag is even more annoying for fighters than it is for dance clubs.) There are also a couple of good free script counting devices on SL Marketplace for personal use. .:BLK:. Avatar Script Memory Monitor Avatar/Object Script Memory Monitor Kit Weight Scale Script Counter * Script & Memory Use Scale Counter Script Counter - Click Me! Coagulate Script Counter Welcome Mat Script Counter * I've only used the Weight Scale Script Counter, which has a good buyer rating. I can't vouch for the other products.

You agree to the Second Life Terms of Service (TOS) when you join SL. The TOS uses a bunch of legal double-speak to claim lindens are not really money & that you don't really own anything you make or buy in SL. If you ( a customer of Linden Labs) later decide that LL is behaving in a fraudulent or illegal manner (which could include expecting it's users to agree to a TOS that is against US Federal or California state law), you can take Linden Labs to court to have a judge decide who's right. This has been done several times by others, & Linden Labs has changed their TOS following each case in efforts to cover themselves legally after the rulings. Most of us would rather play in SL than fight Linden Labs in court over their policies. Some choose to remain ignorant of those policies, while others choose not to worry too much about them, even though they know what they are.

The Silk Road Hunt (June 1 - 30) is very good for Asian clothing & items.