Raspberry Crystal

I found a few nice trads lately which were tucked away and only had footpath access, or had an interesting set of steps leading down (or up) to the road. My lusch car is fairly forgiving, but does make some alarming clanking noises if I try throwing it off a cliff, or bumping down a stairway, so I had a search around for any nearby traffic rez spots without success. My memory doesn't reach back to the very earliest Mole new continent building, but I was inworld for the completion of old Belli, and I just can't remember if car rez spots were brought in later, or were more spaced out? Have I just been unlucky in my searching and they are hiding right there in plain sight? I saw some 'obvious' spots for boat rezzers as well that hadn't been utilised, was it just the lighthouse island facilities available back then? Maybe my memory has lapsed, or been overwritten by Newbrooke and Bellivaria where seemingly every single sim has a rez spot for cars.

I can't help thinking that sushi chef looks more benign than advertised. What you really need is a time machine to capture the look cultivated by a Northern English fish and chip shop owner for use when a group of teenagers come in asking for free 'scraps' without wishing to pay for a main meal (scraps = bits of batter that fall off the fish). Or the look produced by his assistant, used to terrify uncertain adolescents into buying mushy peas as an extra, thus causing them to walk home because they spent their bus money on unwanted processed vegetables.

I had no idea how Patch pronounced it, so I just went with the Bell - iss - seyr -reeya type thing. I'd really like to switch the Chalet district to Shalleys, it is more phonetical and less likely to cause confusion with the different style of homes which are called chalets in real life; https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/chalet

Why not make another @Persephone Emerald? Use the names that have been thrown up and whittled down by use on the forums. I usually think of the desert terrain continent as 'the meds'.

Oooh, I am quite fond of 1930s semi-detached houses, but the density of Hounslow wouldn't appeal to me. SL has its limitations, and of course Belli has its own subset of those. I quite like it on the whole though. It has taken me too long to realise that cultural filters are invisible from the inside, in the same way that within a family you see how you differ from your siblings, but an outsider will notice the similarities. I'm not sure if it might not be worse to have Cotswold Cottages as a theme, because to someone from that area of the UK they would end up looking too changed to be totally familiar and that could cause more dissonance in the end, especially as the americanisation would be somewhat invisible to the majority and could cause conflict. What I have come around to liking about Belli, are the accidental joys, finding an area of the log homes which reminded me of the English Lake District, with its deep, long and narrow waterways, or a windmill free waterfront in the chalet area, which had a familiar riverside vibe. They are better doing what they know, and if there is enough SL randomness in the process, we may end up with something we want almost unintentionally.

I really do not like the look of banlines, but how they appear, and usually behave is much preferred to being sent home by a zero second orb. I would say that most reasonable people do not want to stray onto private property without the blessing of the owner / renter, but the limitations of second life make this difficult to achieve at times, especially with the added confusion of lag and sim crossings and it is a confusing and upsetting experience to be targetted when acting with the best of intentions. Unreasonable people will be that way whichever extreme of the access debate they adhere to, but even in the case of extremely annoying and inconvenient behaviour, I do not believe any kind of griefing or bullying is acceptable. I also realise that the perception of home invasion can be traumatic for some people, in ways that they have little control over, and while this can get covered up with masking aggression there is always a person under the attitude.

@SarahKB7 Koskinen that looks like an amazing journey, and you made a great graphic as well!

It totally sucks the fun out of leisure time if the costs are stressful. We take home made cake in plastic boxes and find free stuff to do, though to be fair our museums tend not to charge for entry so it makes things easier.

I must be tremendously unpopular. I haven't ever had had anyone invade my parcel. In all the time I have been in SL.

Those who look at the map. Those who never do.

Amazon seem to have a very unfixed idea of where they are actually located, depending on local tax laws and other inconveniences, so they might very well buy up one of those soon to be underwater island nations, and build a stilt office. In any case, large parts of sl have already decamped and gone down the decentralised self-hosting route, it just isn't officially acknowledged. I imagine the situation would become even more fluid still, should SL need to ban pixel jiggling in earnest.

I think it is a luxury, and a nice one to have. Netflix, starbucks, restaurant meals, theatre trips and all those other comparisons don't really work for me as I wouldn't consider purchasing them in any case. I know how much we spend on groceries per week, and that is my usual yard-stick.

I notice they made a Raspberry Ridge!!

It seems likely there would be a new home style presented that could then be named by the winning bid? Otherwise there could be a mis-match between the name and style. So it seems possible there is a new style to be released after this event. A new 2048 maybe, they have been very popular?

This was a good moment to revive! My new driving skills have really made me appreciate the mole's work on a whole new level. My inspiration yesterday though, was sending some warm thoughts towards @Abnor Mole for his very particular naming of the log region's rez points using the word 'pictogram' because it makes it so much easy to do an area search for these amongst a thicket of resident's objects which also use the 'rez' word.

What a lovely outfit, it looks so comfortable!

House hunting (hopping) in Belli usually takes just a few minutes, and the five choices per day run out quite quickly, so I thought I would add to the realism by driving / boating / walking to each new possibility thrown up by the web-page. As I was following the @Sid Nagy method, of swapping house styles each time I thought this would be an interesting challenge, a good way to get a sense of the neighbourhood of each home, and create a chance to see and appreciate more of the Mole's wonderful work on the way. I started in the morning, and by mid-afternoon I had viewed two homes, got lost multiple times, had to swim to a lighthouse island when my boat sank and ran out of fuel for my car, causing me to walk some distance until I worked out how to disable the warning. When the web-site kicked up choice number three right in the centre of the log home continent I wavered in my quest. Those dirt tracks with multiple switchbacks, the cunningly hidden rez zones, the ever present map confusion where roads and trackways are only vaguely represented, all of these felt overwhelming. So I bought a cheap helicopter, as you do, and spent as much time plummeting as I did flying but it did speed things up a bit. Eventualy, around tea-time, after much circling around the area, I finally found my house, staggered through the door, and decided never to move again (at least this week!). It would obviously be utterly frustrating to never use the teleport system, or to ban my avatar from flying, but this experience has made me wonder if all my previous flitting about has insulated me from some of the fun that SL has to offer, and 'making things more realistic' is just one of the ways to achieve this.

I don't think so Sid, I'm not sure where you got that from. How long ago did you do your mega-hopping and what kinds of intervals did you leave between your search days?

I think that might need a tweak to allow for those occasions when available homes have never been claimed.

...and since you are already here officer, I wish to report some trees for recklessly wandering in front of my vehicle!!

Now I have found the proper button for my lusch car speed limiter I am a behemoth of driving, and very nearly on the road most of the time. In your face lamp posts!

No!! Add plaits and ribbons, where is your fashion sense?

I found that post easier to understand, thank you! The idea of a cache sounds very plausible, and it does seem as if the process gets stuck with less favoured homes churning around the pool. Now that there are so many styles to choose from there will be less motivation for people to choose a location they are not keen on, as they can switch over to a better performing cache of homes in an alternate home style. I wonder if the system is manually 'reset' from time to time? ie 'given a hard flush'!

There are currently 2550 Chalet home available. There is another recent thread where a frustrated potential home owner had been given the same small selection of chalet homes repeatedly. Whilst that *could* happen randomly it seems very unlikely. We already know that recently abandoned homes seem to jump to the top of the list. Again, unless this is from a very small pool of free homes, this does not seem to be a random event. My recently abandoned chalet home was taken up by one of the people who had been struggling to get a real choice in that style. In a situation of slow turnover, it seems possible for five 'meh' homes to get stuck on the choosing shelf being continually rejected. @elleevelyn I'm sorry, I am sure you are making some very good points in your post but I can only skim the surface so I hope I have grasped the essential meaning, my summary is 'it is quite possible to get a proper random selection, why aren't they doing it?' My answer would be, that if something is basically functioning, even if not in a particularly efficient way, then there is a huge disincentive to change anything, because of the risk of something going horribly wrong, which would take weeks, if not months to sort out, and the only person who could fix it is locked in a room, guarded by a dyspeptic dragon, and that person is already fully occupied sorting out the last three hundred problems caused by some utterly random event that hasn't even been identified yet.

Thank you everyone for your input and recollections. I guess i had better make my mind up what to do from the currently available options, as hoping LL are ready to change their terms is not a short term solution. Also it's getting pretty nippy out here!