Persephone Emerald

I think a large portion of the population of SL is in the USA, but there are Brits here, as well as Europeans, South Americans, Canadians, Austrailians, Middle Easterners, Japanese & more. I find that after midnight SLT (US Pacific coast time), I run into more Brits, Aussies & Europeans in SL. When you want to find people from a specific part of the RL world or who speak a specific language, use the Search function to find Groups for them. This is especially helpful for people who may not speak English or may not speak it very well. Then look for Places that cater to your nationality or to different interests you have. Do you like art galleries, poetry readings, live music, amusement parks, burlesque shows, building or whatever? Look for places & groups in Search for these things. Then select Show on Map to see if there are other people there (green dots). This is an easy way to find sims with other people in them.

Heaven's Gate Neo has some free lucky board skins & full avatars for newbies. This is a Japanese creator, so the avatars tend to have the young, soft anime look, but one of the newbie males looks a little more mature. They also have free child skins.

InVerse has nice, inexpensive furnised houses, many of which are low land impact mesh. Personally though, I think the furniture from Bazar is better, so why not buy one their houses & furnish it with their furniture? There are many fine designers of low land impact mesh homes & furiture now. I suggest joining a group that showcases them or going to the sale events for mesh furnishings. Search for Love to Decorate (LTD), FaMeshed, The Neighborhood, Uber, Fiffty Linden Fridays, and Consensual, just to name a few.

I'm a co-owner/manager of a new community in SL based around creativity, building & helping new residents. We have awesome builders making amazing builds, a fun train ride, building contests, & a community of new users who could really benefit from the experience of an oldie resident. We're planning an art exhibit in March with moving bubble dome exhibits by SL artists. We don't have RL-style residential homes, but we do have alot of fun playing around with bumper cars & stuff like that, whatever someone wants to make, rez & play with. Come check out Dream Creation. We're friendly & fun.

I think there are two main reasons why there are not more quality ethnic skins available, though they both boil down to the same reason. 1. There are not enough skin creators of color in RL. 2. There are not enough customers of color in RL. In other words, the majority of users are probably white. It's not that creators don't like ethic looks, but that they literally don't have any skin in the game and don't know how to make them look right. Add to that an insufficient number of customers asking for ethnic skins, and the result is very few good ones available. The solution is to find the few good ethnic skin creators and buy from them. Redgrave has some based on RL celebritities that are good. By Snow has some good free ethnic shapes. To get a really good breast or butt shape, you're going to have to get a fitted mesh avatar, no matter what race your avatar is. Other than that, I'd say look on Marketplace for ethnic skin & shapes. I have a beautiful honey-tone African woman avatar that has a modified free shape from By Snow & a skin I found on Marketplace. I also have a couple of good African male shapes & skins. I used the ones pictures below to illustrate a steampunk love story I started to write but didn't finish.

Is there a way to allow some roles in a group to keep objects rezzed, while others have an autoreturn time (& non-group members cannot rez objects)? Is there a way to set such differences by parcel? is there a way to set them by group roles? We're trying to avoid having different groups for different parcels, but perhaps we may have to do this in order to have a group sandbox area where most objects will stay for limited time vs. home & shop area where member objects need to stay put. What if we set shops & apartment areas to an autoreturn time even for group members, but renters have always allow Create Objects & Always Allow Bring in Objects as allowed abilities? Would this prevent non-tenant group members from leaving stuff in other people's shops & apartments?

The Drakensburg Mountains is a natural African sim. You might also try the Amazon River, but I'd be careful of the river. There are piranhas & crocodiles.

I don't know if the newer Zoobies are any smarter than they used to be, but I traded up from a Zoobie wolf to a VKC husky years ago. Zoobies can be set to attack strangers or specific people, so they're good for a watch dog that can push avatars off your parcel. VKC's seem more intelligent & independent, but have strange quirks too, like jumping very high or sometimes getting stuck at the edge of your parcel. My VKC dog seems to love her interactive toys much like a real dog might obsess on a favorite one. Depending on how you set them, they might even ignore your commands sometimes to play with a favorite squeeky. (The VKC cats are actually designed to be harder to train than the dogs, since RL cats are more independent than RL dogs.) Because VKC pets learn which behaviors you reward, they can each develop their own pseudo-personality - but only if you interact with them & reward or punish specific behaviors. (A reward is telling your pet, "(name) good". A punishment is telling it "(name) bad".) As for non-trained behavior, VKC dogs, are somehow attracted to other avatars & scripted objects, so they'll go around sniffing & greeting everyone & everything you have that's scripted, unless you tell them to do so quietly. This can be amusing or annoying, depending on your perspective. They can be told to follow other avatars, other VKC pets or Zoobie pets. They are in a sense friendlier than Zoobie pets, because they go to other avatars & let anyone pet them, while Zoobies will only allow the people you put on their friends list to pet them. If you want a funnier, friendlier, more unpredicatable pet, I'd suggest a VKC. If you want one that will chase off strangers, follow a set path, & only behave for the people on its friends list, get a Zoobie. Both can intereact on their own with their beds, food & water bowls, but I think VKCs have more interactive toys that you can buy. If you want a cat that talks to you & says funny things, you might consider Kitty Cats, but they require food.

This other thread might help you with some Marketplace links. Can-my-avatar-look-like-me-My-picture-is-linked

Newbies can be cute sometimes,...kind of like very young puppies. :-)

I heard about this book earlier. What do you think about the subject of real spirituality in virtual reality? Interview with Robert Geraci on the “Virtually Sacred”

Since you like German culture, I recommend visiting 1920's Berlin. I hear the folks there are pretty friendly. For Steampunk, check out Caledon , New Babbage , & Mieville . If you like hunting for nice freebies, hunts are good way to meet people & see new places. The Historical Hunts group hosts The Rensaissnce Hunt (going now), The Slik Road Hunt, STEAM (a steampunk hunt), and they're also an active, friendly group. There are also game enviornments in SL, such as zombie hunting & Linden Lab's The Cornfield. Looking on the Destinations page can give you more ideas of places to explore.

I think the Steve skin (no facial hair) might work better than the George skin, since your RL skin tone seems lighter. Search on Mature male to see what else you can find. Always buy demos before paying full price. You might like these: Aeros Avatar Maxwell :: demo , Steve Mature Skin M1 (by Unique Megastore) , Demo - Saint Avatar By Tellaq , Once you find a skin or full avatar that you like, find a modifiable body that's close to the look you want. Make a copy, then try to modify the copy body to look like your real shape & face. This is not something you can fully achieve overnight, but it's possible to tweak a modifiable shape until it looks very natural & realistic. Look at a few photographs of yourself & at your face & body in a mirror. When you see how your nose really looks, you can adjust your avatar's to look like it, then your eyes, your chin, your eyebrows, your ears, your jawline... Eventually you can get very close to your RL look, but the combination of skin & shape make a big difference on the final look. Shapes of ADAM & EVE - Douglas DEMO shape , Tt. George shape , Body & Soul - MATURE SERIES - Cousin Derek Avatar , Body & Soul - MATURE SERIES - Uncle Paul Avatar , Body & Soul - MATURE SERIES - Uncle Peter Avatar , Body & Soul - MATURE SERIES - NEW William Avatar , Eyes are the easy part. Find a merchant who makes nice, realistic eyes, then pick the iris color that most closely matches your own. I think having avatar eyes that looks like your own, makes it feel like people can see the real you through your avatar. It doesn't hurt if your avatar ends up looking a little younger or not exactly like your RL self, but when you personalize it, then it feels like it's you. (Edit to add links)

Since you're new & because of all the changes going on now in which types of mesh bodies & body parts are available, I suggest not spending too much money on any of them just yet. Get the free demos for each brand & try them to see what they look like. The first mesh bodies I got were for small mesh avatars - Minikin, Yabusaka Petite, & Little me. Minikin was a free avatar, but creators didn't have the option of making their own avatars with this mesh model & few creators made clothing for it. You can hardly find any clothing for Minikin bodies now. Little me also doesn't allow other creators to make bodies based on it's models & few creators make clothes for this one. Yabusaka, however, lets other creators make bodies based on it's model & gives away mesh forms for people to use for making clothing. This brand has now become the most popular small mesh avatar. The feet, hands & breasts on the default avatar shapes have long been problematic, so mesh replacements for these parts were some of the first made. Full-body meshes, with or without heads then followed. Most mesh bodies don't respond to changes you can make with the body adjustment sliders, but TheMeshProject body does, so you can adjust the size & shape of your avatar to be pretty much exactly as you'd like it to be. Because the breasts respond to the basic body sliders, they also respond to avatar physics, meaning your breasts & ass can jiggle when you move. My guess is that fitted mesh will replace standard mesh as the most popular type of mesh clothing & bodies, but right now it's harder to find fitted mesh & not all viewers will show it correctly. If you want to try a fitted mesh body, TheMeshProject has a free version with limited options. You won't be able to use most clothing with this one, so consider it a demo. If you decide to get one of their bodies with more options, remember that they're still in beta & therefore have a few problems & glitches. Customer service is not very good with them yet either. The Basic & Deluxe models can wear most mesh clothing & applier-type clothing sold for this brand of body. The Basic & Deluxe models include an alpha layer HUD that can hide specific bits of the mesh body to make it workable with standard mesh clothing, but fitted mesh clothing still works best. - Regular system layer clothing will never work with a mesh body, because your standard body has to be hidden with an alpha layer (as if it were beneath the mesh one). Whatever you do, customizing your body with mesh options requires buying specific kinds of clothing to fit it. This might mean spending more or having the style of body/body part you buy go out of style. Don't spend too much too quickly, just in case this could happen. If you like how your avatar looks, that's what's important, but don't spend a bunch of money & then regret it later. I didn't buy Slink hands or feet. I got some inexpensive mesh feet instead that don't have shoes made to fit them. Then I got this fitted mesh body & love it so far, despite the glitches & problems. Now I don't wear the mesh feet, because I have perfect feet, hands, breasts & ass all in one body. The skin choices are limited though, so the skin is not as detailed as many regular skins are & doesn't perfectly match my head. In the future, I expect more skin makers will create appliers for their skins, just as a few clothing designers are making appliers for clothing layers.

I have the Basic body & had the same thing happen to me after messing with the cleavage options. I had no problem before this, so I think the glitch must be tired to the cleavage adjustment. This is definitely a bug they need to know about to try to fix it. * Note: Going into the cleavage adjustment option & hitting Unstyle fixed the bug for me. *

My friend has the same problem with her regular body showing through the mesh one. The problem probably is not wearing the correct alpha layer for the mesh body. When you put on a regular mesh outfit on, or even shoes, you may be removing the alpha layer for your mesh body. Search in your inventory for "body/hands/feet" and you'll find the alpha you need. Add it. This will hide your regular body.

Good observations, Jerilynn. I hadn't considered how the prevalence of a Gorean subculture, for instance, reflects rather dated views of gender roles, let alone how dated views of other cultures creates such odd presentations of them in SL. Other examples are how Native American cultures, African cultures, and Voodoo are portrayed in SL.

You do not have to use your real name on Facebook, despite what they tell you. You only have to use a name that seems like a real name. This obviously excludes using your Second Life name, since a SL name can almost never be identical to your legal name. The only other ways to link your SL character name to your Facebook account is to create a page for your SL character as a Fictional Character page or by using your SL name as a nickname for your legal name self. To me, linking my SL account name to my RL legal name would defeat the spirit of freedom & anonymity in SL. Using my legal name on FB would also be counter to my ability to speak & associate freely online, without fear of RL reprisals.

When you encounter griefers in a sandbox, teleporting away usually works. Don't engage with them directly. Talking to them does no good & will probably just get their attention. Abuse Report them with the Help tab on your viewer. If they're in your home sim, Abuse Report them, include a picture of the spam objects, then mute/block the objects & their owners. If the objects are on land you control, return them & reset your land so non-land group members can not rez objects or bring in scripts. (You can change these settings later after the griefers have stayed away for a while.) If the objects have multiple owners, chances are they have similar names. Search on the similar portion of their name, such as the word Goon or Bro, and preemptively ban all avatars with such names, especially if they're new accounts. If this is a major problem in your region & neighboring regions, find out the names of your neighbors from looking at who owns the neighboring land, contact them to politely let them know about the griefing & suggest they AR the perpetrators as well. The more people AR these folks, the faster they'll be IP banned by Linden Lab. Unfortunately this is the only long-term solutions to persistent griefing, since it's so easy to create new accounts. After a few days of ARing & banning, griefers usually move on to some other region. They're basically the trolls of the SL, so they have limited attention spans when their egos are not fed by people acting upset with them. It's sad really, that with so many cool & engaging things they could do in SL, the best they can think of is to annoy other people, like a child having a temper tantrum in a store. Here is an older thread on the same problem: http://community.secondlife.com/t5/General-Discussion-Forum/I-think-i-need-help-I-have-been-greefed-or-spammed/m-p/1942381#M100000

I also assumed the Favorites folder was for me to use as I wished & put favorite objects into it. I later learned it was specifically for Landmarks & emptied it, after some people scared me that my favorite objects might get lost there. Now it is empty & unused, another great idea from Linden Lab.

Seriously, go play & have fun in SL. But stop begging for attention on the forums.

That was a lovely story, Marigold. :-) * Goes back to having tea with my own stuffed animals now. *

I just had to say, what a cute name for a gentleman's club. I hope the Dancer's or Escort's title is Pastisserie Tart. ;-)

I'm sorry & don't mean to sound like I'm snapping at you. I suggested the Answers section because technical questions about how SL works usually get better answers there. People who get postitive feedback for giving a good answer in the Answers section get points, so they have an extra incentive to help there. The Land section is also a good place to ask these kinds of questions, and you did start a thread there already. (I also mistakenly thought you were asking this question in the General General Section, rather than in the Land General section.) Continuing to ask for clarification in a thread you've already started is probably a more effective way of getting more in depth answers, rather than starting a new thread, because the people who have already responded once, may be following that thread already.

Dang! I missed this. Sounds like a good group. I've been looking for live readings & broadcasts in SL lately.