Persephone Emerald

Starr Heron said : "IDK but sure would love to have a Jack Russel" VKC has a cute Jack Russle.

I sometimes use the Library for textures. I hope that doesn't transfer those textures into my regular Inventory like wearing Library clohting or hair does. I just found a new trick for storing Inventory. Instead of putting stuff inside a box, you can put it on a notrcard. Lable the notecard so you know what's in it, same as you would for a box. The advantage to this is that you can open a notecard anywhere to see what's inside & take out pieces, without having to rez or wear it. The disadvange of using notecards is that you have to box clothing (& maybe body parts) before putting them on it. Otherwise, you lose the icon that tells you what clothing layer the clothing is on. Another limitation of notecards is that you can't put temporary textures on them. I suppose this is to keep people from sharing temporary textures. You can use temporary textures on objects or clothing, however, then treat those objects & clothing normally. This trick saves alot of lindens because you don't have to pay $L 10 to upload temporary textures, yet you can still use them to create stuff.

Keeping your inventory around 10, 000 is actually very good. There is some good advice above about keeping your inventory down, but it all takes work, which is not as much fun as buying stuff & opening packages. I've been boxing up some of my inventory, but then one has to lable the box to remeber what's inside. Boxing up seasonal decorations is a good way to start with boxing, since you know you'll only use those things at certain times of the year. If you're worried about accidentally deleting favorite items, you can save back-up boxes of stuff in-world too. Just don't end up like this woman.

I recently turned the attic of my SL house into a storage space for back-up items, just in case they might accedentaly get deleted from my inventory. This space is also useful for boxing up items, so they dont take up so much inventory space, and for seeing what is inside these boxes. Symbolically I think, my attic space represents my inventory in world. It's sort of an in-world extension of my server-based inventory data. In science fiction movies & TV shows about virtual realities there is usually some visual representation of the control center/ data storage area, usually shown as a hidden control room. I thought then of the virual reality world represented on "Caprica" & thought we're probably only about 20 years away from something like that, The technology to see images, hear sounds & even feel sensations generated by a computer controled headpiece & gloves exists now. We know that our 5 physical senses are experienced because of electrical signals in our brains, & we're not that far from recreating those senses artifically. I think "Caprica" depicts a believable scenario of how society would react to the ready availablity of a realistic & emersive virtual reality platform. Most people in that world are still more concerned with real life than with the artifically contructed virtual world, but many are so addicted to VR that they spend more time there than in real life. In one scene a woman tries to get a boy to build a model ship. He says he'd rather play in the virtual world, where he can be the captain of such a ship instead. In another scene a conscious AI avatar tells a person that when people know they can't be hurt (as in a virtual world), they give in to their basest instincts for sex & violence, they become insensitive to other people, they care less about the real world & the real life consequences of their actions. If one looks around Second Life to see what kinds of virtual worlds people create in it, one sees mostly shopping malls & private, ensular homes. Sometimes the worlds people create are beautiful & spiritally uplifting, but more often they cater to our baser drives for materialistic pleasures, sexual stimutlation, competition, power & violence. One sees dark & violent sims full of combat, vampires & torture. One sees an abandance of strip clubs, BDSM, virtual prositution & deviant sexuality. Anyone who's been in SL for a while is so familiar with vampire & Gorean RP, that it seems practically "normal". If our virtual worlds could reproduce touch, scent & taste as they do in science-fiction VR experiences, I have no doubt people would be even more hedonistic in them than they are now. What are your thoughts on the future of virtual reality & it's effect on people?

Alycia, my favorite alt, gets $L 150/ week for rent. I feel a little sorry for her since her own home burned down. (She set the fire, but we don't mention that.) She's given me some 7Seas items & DV8 outfits she caught fishing, which I resold to a yardsale. She helps pay her own way as much as she can. She was born in SL & had a troublesome life, so she doesn't understand RL economics. She's good-hearted & charming in her own way, so I don't mind helping her out. For myself, I've learned a few tricks to save $Ls, though nothing can reduce what my tier costs except reducing my land. 1.) Find images off the internet & upload them as temporary textures. You can save them on your hard drive instead of in your Inventory, then upload them as temporary when you want to texture something. This way your textures are free & you can still sell or give away the items you make with them. 2.) Systematically look for free & inexpensive items on SL Marketplace, searching from Low to High priced. 3.) Copy & Modify items. Also take them apart for the pieces. ( I just bought a renaissance gown from Wunderlich's Historical Garb $L 450, but it has so many pieces that are tintable, that it's practically the only renaissance outfit I'll ever need to buy.) 4.) Try making your own stuff when you can. Use free textures, free scripts, & pieces you've taken out of other items. Some merchants probably hate me for promoting freebies, but we can't all afford to spend hundreds of dollars on virtual merchandise that could disappear from our inventories if we're unfortunate. I've also been creating several LM lists of places in world that have good free or inexpensive clothing. One list is for general clothing, skin & hair. The others are for different cultures & time periods. I joined a time traveling RP group & wanted to provided inexpensive clothing options for people who will be jumping around frequently into different envirionments. Contact me in-world for my lists or visit one of my 2 Briar Rose shops for the general one. http://slurl.com/secondlife/witchfest/147/90/701 http://slurl.com/secondlife/Darkstar%20Enterprises/162/149/24

Thanks, Cerise & Clairschen. That's a bit easier.

Not to be snippy, but just to present an alternate point of view, - but I want to enjoy the view I'm paying for in SL. The land I own is on the coast, & I've landscaped it to look like a Northern Califorian coastal region. From my front yard I can view headlands with meadows, coastal pines, golden poppies, purple ice plants & surf crashing on the rocks in the sea. From my back yard I can see a a duck pond, blackberry bushes, a hill covered with golden poppies & a little white Victorian house on the top of the hill. From my side bedroom window I can see my neighbor's garden & pond. From the other side of my house I can see buildings that also fit well into this environment. I pay $40/ month for tier, to recreate a part of the RL world that I can't visit easily in RL. If I didn't care about my view, I might be happy in a sky box a 1000 m up in the sky, but that isn't the experience I want from SL. Lag is not a big problem for me either. . http://slurl.com/secondlife/Belleville/120/65/106

@ Blondin Linden, When I clink on that link, it seems to take me to a thread that doesn't exisit anymore.

Good point, Penny. SL residents would have more space for furniture & camera views if they'd shrink down to more reasonable sizes. For instance, if you want to build a low-prim house, a 10 m high wall is tall enough for two 5 m high rooms, which is plenty tall enough if your avatar is under 2m tall. Begin shorter thus saves on prims as well as on space. Unfortunately most clothing is still made for tall & skinny Amazon women. My avi is around 5' 7", based on my Edit Appearance menu, but I still have to shrink my prim clothing attachments to fit into my clothes.

Currently, when I want to see my previous posts & see if anyone has responded to them, I have to follow several steps. 1. Find a thread I've posted in previously. 2. Find a post of mine in that thread. 3. Click on my User Name to call up my forum profile. 4. Expand my recent posts list to see as many of those threads as possible. 5. Click on the new posts count to the right of each thread description to view the most recent responses. Could we have an option at the top of the forums page to take us directly to step # 4? Thanks.

I probably spend more than average on tier & rent, but less than average on purchases of virtual goods. I've been spending more than usual on purchases lately, so I did some calculations & came up with a realistic estimate of $60/ month total on SL expenses. This total is further broken down to $40/month in tier, $ 11/month on rent for shops & RP locations, & about $9/month on virtual goods. This means LL gets 2/3 of my money directly, while 1/3 goes into the SL economy. How much do you spend & how does it break down?

Couldn't we just go to 1920s Berlin & stand by the measuring stick in the train station? Serriously, though, I had to slide down to the lowest possible height in my Edit menu to reach a "normal" height. Normally I try to stay at 50, but even then most clothes are too big for me.

The Basic viewer doesn't have access to your Inventory. You need to use the "Advanced" viewer or a third party viewer to use your inventory.

@ Arkady, you're correct of course if the town is a Bristish Victorian Town. I was grousing about that because I was thinking of US Victorian towns. I should have been more specific in my post.

It's easy enough to make a new alt who can purchase funds this way. Maybe any Non-US customer who can't buy lindens normally, should make an alt to do these transactions for them.

Yay! 8-D

I think it sounds very cool & you should work on that idea. However, if the avatar could have more control over what rooms they enter, this could make a nice house to live in. The 1st room could be in our regular dimension, but the others would be elsewhere (with odd views from the windows perhaps). They might need only a small footprint for the room anchored in our dimension, while the other rooms could be temp rez or high above them. (I've seen houses with temp-rez rooms before on the old Marketplace, but I haven't seen them in-world.)

@ Vania Chaplan I like the idea of a tesseract house. Would it be like having tardis rooms perhaps? Let's incorpoate Istara's idea of non-normal gravity too. What if you could open a door from any surface on the interior of a cube-shaped room & find yourself in another room? What if after that, you, could do the same & find yourself entering 5 more rooms, rather than going back into any of the others? What would a tesseract house look like from inside & outside? Could you use TP scripts to walk into rooms that can't be created in normal 3D space?

I've long been saying SL is as real as RL, even though it's not physical. Lately, though, it seems less real to me. Good illusions make it seem real, but bad ones can damage the construct. I thought last night - as I was looking for places that look like the Northern Califorina coast - that few people in SL know how to create good illusions of real life places. Victorian towns shouldn't have Tudor buildings. Non-tropical lands shouldn't have palm trees. Shopping areas shouldn't all be malls of white marble. Art galleries should be small sometimes, but not just wall-less platforms. I want places in SL that recreate the places I love in RL. I've been lucky to have visited many beautiful & awesome places in RL. Seeing them recreated in SL brings back memories that can make my emersion more rich, but seeing poor recreations is disheartening. To recreate the Northern Califorina coast, I want small shops & houses of stained wood, painted white, or in pastel colors, with Victorian gingerbread. I want wooden sidewalks. I want redwoods & other evergreen trees, ferns, blackberry bushes, grasses & colorful realistic flowers. I want mountian streams that run down to sandy marshes & beaches that don't have palm trees. I want cliffs that are rocky & sprinkled with bright flowers. I want natural-looking animals that move & make noise. RL Venice is also not a collection of pretty boxes intersected wtith canals of clear blue water. It's a stage of decaying grandure upon which real life is acted out. It's wide open plazas of lights, music & people, contrasted with twisting streets & narrow back alleys. It's the smell of salt air & pizza contrasted with that of algae & urine. It's the sound of people talking in a dozen languages, music playng, the signing of gondaleirs echoing through the canals, children playing, footsteps on cobblestones, seagulls crying, pigeons flyng up, motorboats roaring & waves lapping against stone. It's fantastic white marble, painted plaster & gold trim from a distance, that's dirty, chipped & flaking up close. It's a city that's brilliantly alive, engorged & overflowing with a thousand years of memories, actively growing & dying in every moment that one breathes in it's air. I can see the shallowness of most SL places because I've seen some of the wonders of RL. Some people may like emersing themselves in fantasy worlds that could never exist in RL, but I think being reminded of places we've been in RL can create a more emersive experience as our minds fill in the visual details, sounds & smells that SL lacks. Do you have RL places you like seeing recreated in SL or would like to see recreated here?

I think the lack of interest in sports in SL has less to do with gender & more with our sedentary lifestyles.

1. If your other land is owned by you personally & not as a group, form a group & deed it to the group. This way you can hold 10% more land without paying more tier. ( All you need to form a group is one alt and $L 100..) 2. Contact the other land owners in the region & ask them if they'd like to take some of your land off your hands to lower your tier. 3. Remember that $L3000 isn't really that much money in RL, but paying tier every month adds up pretty quickly.

There is a parcel of Abandoned Mainland behind mine that I can't travel through to reach the next sim. It's bad enough when neighbors put up banlines, but why do they remain on abandoned land? In my previous neighborhood, the abandoned land at the end of a Linden road became a dumping ground for automatic vehicles, while a parcel I'd abandoned accumulated prim junk of it's own because I'd allowed Object Entry before I'd abandoned it. There is a JIRA open for this problem & plans in the works for changing the way abandoned land is handled. https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-6167 http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Mainland/interesting-abandoned-land-changes-in-the-works/m-p/772199/message-uid/772199#U772199 What do you think would best fix Abandoned land problems?

I must be mistaken about Amanda. There was a very nice Linden who helped me retrive land I'd abandoned before the last culling. I thought her name was Amanda, but I must be mistaken.

I'm in good mood today so I thought I'd start a thread about the Lindens we like best. Some of them really do go out of their way to be friendly & helpful. I think my favorite is Torely, because not only is he friendly & helpful, he's also wickedly off-beat. Amanda was very helpful too when she was still here. Who is *your* favortire Linden & why?

@ Torley. Nice thread & tutorial video. It makes me think, though, that a fun additon to the LL viewer would be a "Create Postcard" option. As you say, SL is largely a visual experience., so if we could send postcard images with an attached SLURL to our Facebook page, that might get more people interested in visiting this amazing world. ETA p.s. On second thought, some people might send naughty pictures for their postcards (imagining hentai scene). Maybe not such a good idea afterall.