Dillon Levenque
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Posts posted by Dillon Levenque
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Pamela Galli wrote:Not unlike Second Life was for many -- the old Second Life, in which people took clunky prims and made clunky things that seemed beautiful enough at the time. Well, beautiful to people in Second Life -- people outside of it ridiculed it for not looking like Myst. It looked more like it was built with Legos. Like Minecraft does.Within weeks of joining Second Life I discovered how fascinating it was to build these clunky things. It was a challenge to figure out how to make things look organic, but back then (2007) we accepted the limits of prim builds and filled in the rest with our imaginations. Pretty much like millions of avid Minecraft players do now.Those days are gone from Second Life. I think Linden Lab developers got tired of hearing the same insults about how clunky Second Life looked compared to other games, how dated it was. Some users complained about it too, but honestly, most of us thought Second Life looked just fine, if not downright glorious. I remember trying to see it through detractors' eyes, as ugly -- but could not.Now, of course, I can. Mesh changed how we see content, and much more. My earliest model furniture looks positively ludicrous next to my mesh creations. Even much of the sculpted stuff I was once proud of now looks pretty sad.What is sadder still, to me, is the change in my job description. In the past, when asked about my job, I had to give this too-long explanation of building virtual things I sold in a virtual store for real money, which always drew blank looks -- because it was unique, it didn't correspond to any other job description anyone had ever heard of. Now, however, I just say I am a 3D artist selling things in a virtual world. While I assemble things inworld, all of my building now takes place offline in the world's most complicated and inscrutable software, Blender.But even that creation model -- making mesh offline -- is outdated. The smart thing to do now, in terms of efficiency, is to skip over the part about creating and just find things on the internet to import into Second Life, textures and all. Whole stores full of this content have sprung up overnight -- many of them full perm stores supplying retail merchants. And since it takes hardly any time to upload, it is often dirt cheap. The creator has been replaced by the uploader. No surprise there. (Though when I predicted this outcome, many objected, saying, "They said the same about sculpts!", although there were never warehouses full of sculpts available for import into SL.)However, I started out making things for the same reason kids make Minecraft creations. They don't want to just have (or sell) things, they want to make things. And that is what I want, to make things. I never get tired of making things, but I think the same amount of time spent uploading would get very old. More lucrative but so boring.So making things is what I do and will continue to do, although it puts me -- and everyone who makes and sells things -- at a competitive disadvantage. I am just sorry that for most of Second Life users, creation within Second Life was once within their grasp and no longer is. People are simply not going to run out an learn offline 3D modeling. Yes, everyone can still build clunky, high LI stuff out of prims, but now that we see them through mesh-tinted glasses, those things don't look so good to us anymore. So why bother?The powers that be have decided that it is more important that Second Life look good than for it to be a clunky creation-oriented platform like Minecraft.I like making mesh, I am glad I was forced into dramatically updating my skills -- but it is not clear to me that what Second Life has gained outweighs what it has lost.In fact, I suspect it has not. Certainly there is no evidence that this massive remaking of Second Life (and its creators) has had the slightest effect on user retention.Hopefully if Microsoft does end up buying Minecraft for $2,000,000,000 it will not make the same mistake re: goose and golden egg.
(replying to your post in general, to the bolded part specifically)
I suspect you're right, and there are plenty on this forum who agree and have said so. It's hard to tell about the population in general. I mean, if you're just a consumer in SL as I mostly am, maybe it's okay to only get cool things by purchasing them. If I hadn't known I could build my own houses, would I have bothered? I don't know.
I just remember how building things here, things that actually came out looking like I wanted them to look, was such a treat. When I finished my first house, an 1880's style frontier house: two rooms, a gabled roof, and a planked front porch that ran end-to-end and had a pillar supported roof of its own that angled slightly from the house's roof, I sent a pic of the yet to be textured build to Naz with an IM saying, "Congratulate me! I've built a house!". She IM'd congratulations and added, "It looks remarkably....houselike." I was undeterred. I haven't built anything in a long time, but it was part of my second life and still is. For someone who builds for the market it's no doubt a huge part of your second life.
I still like what SL is, and what it's about. I don't know if the fun of creating inworld will disappear but it might. There are people on the blogs and on the forums who will dismiss any creation using prims simply because it uses prims. If a new person happens to hear enough of that garbage it would tend to dissuade that person from even starting to build. I mean, if you get this great idea for a whatever and go to all the trouble to create, shape, and texture it only to have everyone say, "Nah, it's crap. I mean, prims. Really?", you might not bother to even start.
I think that would be SL's loss.
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You say "...I set up this account..." which is rather confusing, but presumably you're talking about an account other than the one you posted with here, since the password is required to log in and post to this forum.
As far as I know your only option is to contact Support directly: http://community.secondlife.com/t5/English-Knowledge-Base/How-to-contact-customer-support/ta-p/739385
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He can get into a lot more trouble watching a belly dancer than he can playing a casino game. But chances are he'll have way more fun with that. :-)
Good on 'im. (I know, I was speaking Strine but at least that's in your neighborhood)
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Celestiall Nightfire wrote:Perrie Juran wrote:In the new world mabe we'll all be assimilated and only have numbers.Shut up number six. They're watching you.
I am not a number!I'm so sorry I didn't check the forum yesterday. This post was practically screaming for a response. Here it is, more than a day late but hopefully less than a dollar short. Best television series ever.
Oh, and to the OP. Relax. Part of the fun of coming to SL for me was choosing a name. If I have to choose a new one for the version ahead, I'll probably have fun with that too.
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I've had enough of this thread.
The dealer in a game of Blackjack played by the rules followed in the US always wins in the long run. Guaranteed. The players that actually win at Blackjack (as opposed to claiming they win, mostly by ignoring the fact they've lost sixteen bundles over the last month in favor of admiring the bundle they won today) do so by various strategies almost all of which are based on counting cards. Most casinos watch for those people and toss them as fast as they can.
Anyone who enters a gambling casino* expecting to win is an idiot. Every casino owner knows this. You make your money taking advantage of the stupidity of other people. I hope you're proud of yourself.
*I will make an exception to this. In California, where I live, there are what are called 'card rooms' legal and licensed in some places. They sometimes get called casinos, but in most jurisdicitons the only form of gambling allowed is card games in which players compete against each other Games like Poker, for instance. The house takes a cut from every pot in exchange for providing the place and maybe a dealer. Nothing wrong with that.
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Patrick032986 wrote:I haven't heard much about that.
It was in all the papers.
Not only that, they enabled free accounts. That ticked off a boatload of people.
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Well, if your internet is slow today it's probably accidental. There was no plan to actually slow anything: the sites onboard with the protest (and there are a lot of them) are just displaying the 'spinning wheel' to press home what might happen if the 'fast lane for fast cash' deal goes through.
So far I haven't seen one, but my understanding is that they'll link to more info as well.
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That is just totally cool. So much for my opinion that you were expecting too much too soon :-). Kudos to you and multi-kudos to the students.
I think they managed to glom onto the one great thing you can do with almost any facet of Second Life: have fun. That video appears to to me to show a bunch of people having fun.
Those yellow/black zebra bell-bottoms were fab ;-).
ETA: I missed your post saying it was OpenSim. Maybe having fun is a great thing one can do in all virtual worlds. Makes sense.
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Perrie Juran wrote:
Nike did at one time have a presence in SL.And while I can't cite anything official now, my memory is that they never had a problem with anyone using the 'swoop,' etc.Chuck's have a little bit of interesting history.Cool. Maybe Nike will buy Warner Brothers and I can't stop worrying about losing my Ghostbusters uni ;-).
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It's kind of interesting how we forumites tend to view the intellectual property debate, isn't it? Selling sneakers/trainers called 'Chucks' might be technically not a violation, since I don't think Converse ever specifically marketed them under that name, but the ones I've seen are clearly imitations of the 'real' thing and we don't seem to mind. They're all over, too. I'm suprised Nike, who now owns Converse, hasn't said anything.
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Kelli May wrote:Phil Deakins wrote:I'm only going by what the guides told us. I wasn't around at the time, of course. But 'sleep tight' was explained at the castle and then we visited a very large house (called a hall). In the hall were old beds and under the matress was rope (I asked and it was shown to me). The corner is where the knot is to tighten the rope. I'm happy to accept that as the source of the saying, especially as it accompabied by the bit about bugs.The 'upper crust' makes good sense as it was explained to us, and"Kutt the upper crust for your soverayne" appears to support it. It's easy to imagine that the nobility came to be known as the 'upper crust'.So all-in-all I'll accept the origins as they were told to us. After all, nobody can be certain. 'Sleep tight' may well have been a nautical term, but that doesn't mean that it's origin was nautical.
I didn't want to have to post a storm of links to support my opinion on 'sleep tight', but here are a few...Neither did I say it was a nautical term (that was Drake). I was only pointing out the meaning of 'fast' as 'secure' to be a common nautical term (it's used eslewhere too) for my comparison of 'fast asleep' to 'sleep tight'.Folk etymologies get passed on in just this way, heard and repeated without anyone checking their facts. Tour guides are rarely historians or experts in language; many are just working from a script and throwing in colourful anecdotes they've picked up. Such definitions make make clever stories, but they are largely just stories. There are definitely rope-strung beds (I've slept in one and they can be very comfortable), but the origin of sleep tight has little or nothing to do with them.Interesting on the usage of 'fast'. Does 'fast asleep' have something to do with 'make it fast'? One expression I DO know came from old naval use is what my dad used to say when we were getting ready to go away from a visit to relatives or elsewhere: "It's time for us to shove off.". From hearing it so often I knew it meant 'leave' probably by the time I was old enough to parse words: one and a half, two? It was not until I read Patrick O'Brian's novels (in my forties) of Jack Aubrey and the Royal Navy in the 18th century that I discovered it was an actual nautical term. Shove off, meaning those in charge of rowing the boat should put the ends of their oars against the ship (or pier) and push, to move their boat out far enough so they could begin rowing away.
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30 new posts since I last looked at this thread! Not only that, the subject has turned to one of my very favorites: etymology. I was delighted to learn that 'tire' is in fact probably the most correct spelling (despite the fact that to a mere colonial like me 'tyre' looks ever so distinguished). As for the two pictures: In my part of the States the first one is a baby buggy, second one is a stroller.
And now for something not exactly completely different. I read/have read a lot of history. It's a subject that fascinates me, so picking up a good history book for me is like picking up a good science fiction or suspense novel (my two favorite non-fiction categories). I don't do anything with it; I just like reading about it. The Durants are my favorite historians. They loved to side-track into how certain words or customs came to be.
In medieval times, as Europe began to grow out of Feudalism, commerce became an important thing. Merchants came to be: people who bought things one place and sold them somewhere else. One of the magnets for those people were the Fairs held in various places each year. Huge events, with products from all over. Some merchants began to purchase goods from the fairs in large quantities and then transport them back to their home bases where they would resell thim in much smaller quantities (but, of course, at a price that, should they sell enough, would more than cover what they paid for the big lot).
The practice of buying big chunks of someone's produce became known as buying 'en gros' or 'en grosse'. In the British Isles those people were called by an anglicized version of the French original: grossers.
I love stuff like that. :-)
ETA The stuff about 'en gros' and all was not copy/pasted from a Durant book (re-reading my post, it looks like I"m quoting them). What I wrote is just from what I remember from reading; it's accurate as far as I know but it's just how I recalled it. I did not bother to go find the volume on the bookshelf and find the original explanation (which, I assure you, would have been far more eloquent than mine).
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ArtieMacnar wrote:Ariel Vuissent wrote:Trust me, Artie, most of us agree with you!
I'm pretty sure a lot of people do, but fankly, the squeaky wheel gets the grease and most with a mindset like mine are a rather quiet bunch.Most of us do agree with you, I think. Even people like me who 'own' something that is probably in breach of copyright laws.
I found a costume/outfit in my first or second year and glommed it for a Halloween costume. I did wear if for Halloween 2009, but I have worn it (and have pictures here and there of me wearing it) several times since. It's an outfit made famous by a movie. One of the funniest movies ever made (one that in fact was so well loved that it is being re-released in some theaters right now in honor of its 30th anniversary). In my early days things like IP and copyrights never even crossed my mind. I just assumed anything went here; and that it was perfectly fine to bring any object/theme/idea/product you cared from RL to SL.
I now know better. I will probably still wear the outfit occasionally, since I love it so much. The one thing I will not do is whine if and when Columbia Pictures decides enough is enough and LL deletes it from my inventory.
I have, however, paid RL money for approved products in RL. One of my family members has a t-shirt I purchased that has the official shoulder patch as well as the words, "Back off, man. I'm a scientist!"
Edited to correct my incorrect spelling of 'occasionally' for perhaps the millionth time
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That's good to read. I'm sure you'll be happy with your choice. That's the nice thing about 'auditioning by auditing': you can see how you feel about a DJ without wondering whether he or she is doing something different to please you personally. You really get to see how the DJ interacts with the audience. Of course there are always 'regulars' at any gig, and they do tend to dominate the chat a little, but a good DJ will make sure everyone who arrives gets drawn into the conversation.
And, because of your other thread, I see I really do need to find out about Cards Against Humanity. I'd never heard of it prior to your thread.
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Sassy Romano wrote:I've been looking at new cars, just window shopping but quite a few are leaving out the spare now and just offering a can of stuff instead. I've never had a flat tyre and with the roadside coverage, do you *really* need that spare or is it just a warm fuzzy feeling? (especially in a city then where recovery would be relatively simple).
I've never used it but I know people who have. I live in a place where tyre is spelt tire, but I've been told by someone who did squirt a flat full of goo that when he went to his shop to get the flat fixed he was advised to tip the guy who had to do the actual repair (that's not the kind of thing that normally results in a tip). Apparently that stuff makes an absolute mess inside the tire, all of which has to be cleaned out before the tire can be patched.
As for the rest, I'd want a spare. Never know how long the roadside assistance will take in the places I drive. On my summer trips there might as well not BE roadside assistance since a lot of the time I'm in places with no cell phone coverage. My gas purchases are usually determined by how much money I have at the moment (except, once again, when I'm on a trip: then I fill up everytime and use plastic. I can weep later.).
eta Jinx ;-)
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I knew that whole discussion would go straight to H*** once the engineers got involved ;-)
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Well, I had thought of chiming in with a clip from my personal favorite, "The Searchers". Instead, in honor of one of the most enjoyable derails I've witnessed or participated in, I'll try this one. It's from way back, but he's in there :-)
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Coby Foden wrote:Pamela Galli wrote:I think the reason Americans cling to Imperial measurement is that it is based on body parts, so you can estimate using, say, a literal rule of thumb (or foot, or stride).Now I am curious about how they came up with a mile.
:smileysurprised: :smileyvery-happy:See, that's the thing. None of that precise divide-by-ten jazz all the time. They were Brits. They were relaxed. They were humorous (or, I guess, humourous?). I mean, come on? Rods and furlongs? Once you've gone there, deciding a foot should contain 12 inches instead of say, 10, makes perfect sense.
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I'm surprised this hasn't been answered; everyone must be busy. First, google "sim crossings in Second Life". Just the list of entries will give you an idea of the scope of the problem.
Anytime you cross from one sim to another in Second Life, your information has to be transferred from one database to another. 'Sim' stands for simulator and a simulator is a program running on a computer. Quite often when you cross a 'sim boundary' you information not only has to move to another application but another server altogether. As fast as computers are, they aren't fast enough to handle that data transfer gracefully when you are zooming down the road with a big grin on your face, trying to see what that baby will do on a straightaway.
It's a long known and complained about issue and it will most likely never go away on this version of Second Life. The platform was not designed with vehicular transport in mind. That being said, from my small experience and from what I read here and there, sim crossings have been greatly improved in the last year or so.
Advice: learn to read the minimap or the co-ordinates so you'll know when a sim border is close (or get a HUD that does that for you, there are many and they give other very useful info besides). Slow down when you see one. Personally I take my foot off the gas and coast. Once across to the other sim (hopefully still seated on your bike or in your car) you can speed up again and continue to the next one.
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Coby Foden wrote:Christhiana wrote:It says 9-3-2014, which is today...
Oh no. Where I live (Europe) it definitely says 03.09.2014 = 3rd September 2014However in America it indeed does say 9-3-2014 or 9/3/2014 or 09/03/2014 which amazingly means September 3, 2014.Wow, same date as in Europe, Americans just love to put it in a strange illogical order. :smileysurprised: :smileyvery-happy:Logical orders for dates are:Day-Month-YearandYear-Month-DayVery illogical order (the American way) is: Month-Day-YearTherefore to avoid confusion what a date means, ISO needed to step in and make ISO date format as: YYYY-MM-DD:smileywink:Coby, we couldn't change now even if we wanted to. None of us would be able to remember our birthdate on short notice. Dropping off a prescription request or visiting the doctor; that's the first question they ask.
"Date of birth?"
" 6-12...no. Wait. 19...no wait. "Um, June..."
"NEXT PLEASE!".
It'd be a disaster. Epic.
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Is it just me, or are we seeing more of this sort of entitlement (for want of a better word) attitude around here lately? It seems to me the number of posts asking questions about and/or complaining about rules and policies has increased. Not only that, it seems to be pretty common for those OP's to call 'hater' on anyone who points out the rules and the policies.
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I didn't get under $800 for my latest but I was at least close, and considering what a huge upgrade it is over my prior five-year-old box I'm quite happy with it.
From a surplus/used computer site that I've used often for my work, I found an Asus box with an i5, 8 GB, Win7 Pro 64 bit for $599. And it was brand new, not used (ordered and presumably delivered but never put in service). Still had the original Asus box and plastic wrapper. I added a 750 Watt CorsairHX power supply for $120, but what really drove me over-budget was the Nvidia 770 GTX. I'm still not sure I made the right decision; an older version (the 680) has better numbers, but to be honest since I was moving up from a GT9500 I knew no matter what I'd be pleased.
I did shoot past your $800 budget but at least I squeaked in at under $1000 (sale on the Nvidia card). You have to be willing to wait and look, but you can actually build a decent system for a lot less than buying a preconfigured one. It's been a rather long time since that was true, but it's clearly true these days.
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I know a few DJ's who would meet all your qualifications, but I'd be really surprised if any of them would agree to an audition. Were I in their shoes I certainly would not. They would, on the other hand, probably be more than happy to let you know their current schedule of gigs so you can visit one and form your own opinion.
If you would like a list of names send me a PM here or an IM inworld, I will forward a list. I realize you're leaving it rather late if you want something in place for this Sunday, but you might get lucky.
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I was actually going to try to explain how to find the answers to the several questions your post contains. I decided to check your rez date first to see just how new you were, and in the process saw your earlier post and your comments concerning the Linden Home. That was enough for me.
I won't even bother linking the wiki. Google it.
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Sim cosed?
in General Discussion Forum
Posted
Today, as are most Tuesdays, is Server Maintenance Day. LL does rolling restarts of sims. Today's restarts began at 7:34 AM, according the grid status page . Your sim probably got re-started. Give it a few minutes and try again.
edit: What Freya said.