Raspberry Crystal

It might be quicker just to write out the relevant bit by hand, and add quotation marks before responding. eg; "Blah blah blah" said Windy Bags, but I say no, no, no!

Get orf my lawn or I'll stab you with my long finger!!! The five o'clock shadow was an interesting addition I thought! 😁

That was so wonderful it felt worth breaking the time continuity of the thread to comment! My favourite line; "The more chairs in your McMansion dining room, the more people allegedly like you enough to travel 2.5 hours in traffic to see you twice a year."

I found an empty home by the waterside, and it was the view out of the main window which struck me. I know there is lots of luminous stuff but those big crystal things are the most eye-catching. I thought getting rid of those just from the house window view might improve things, from my point of view of course. I realise some people love this stuff. Weirdly I was able to find lots of Lousiana tree houses online so it felt even less of a stretch to have a Bayou themed house.

I have had a break from SL for a while so it has been a pleasant surprise to see how far the Mole building has progressed in Bellisseria. I like the new property page as well, and it has been a great idea to show the availability numbers for each home type. Although there are many Belli home styles that I like, I found I had a tendency to drift back to the old style 'modern' homes for various reasons. I was somewhat put off the Newbrooke properties by the demo region, which when I look back on the forums here had a few problems at launch, and wasn't really finished off on first release. However, touring around the Newbrooke Estates recently I found I really liked the feel of the place, both the landscaping and the sense of variety. Another thing that really appealed to me was that there is a decent surplus of homes available, so it was surprisingly easy to find a really nice spot. Many of our houseboats, stilthomes and so on previously have had lovely outlooks, but tended towards being laggy. The Newbrooke I have now is, most of the time lag free, and it isn't unusual to have the whole region to myself at my UK logon times, so it feels very peaceful. I don't know if I have just been lucky, but I have seen less evidence around of over enthusiastic external decorating which could clutter up the street scenes in my earlier Belli days, often with off-theme items or 'helicopter on the roof' type scenarios. This lack of visual distraction is another thing which makes my experience less stressful So I am definitely feeling the absence of that pull to escape the crowds in Meadowbrook, the views out of the window are so much nicer!

Funnily enough I didn't find the idea of fantasy home that appealing, but when I went to look at the area the sections of housing by the water reminded me of images I had seen of Lousiana Bayous which felt much more interesting. It would only take a bit of derendering of the luminous stuff to get that swamp-like feel.

I think these are meant to be American 'Mediterranean Revival' style rather than homes based on the actual area in Europe. So 'new buld housing development vibe' would fit that brief. It will be interesting to see what people do with these in terms of creating interesting shells as mentioned in a response to your post. An issue I saw mentioned elsewhere was the large window size, which is hard to change, and changes the look compared to the original buildings which inspired the style. It could be possible to get an authentic Mediterranean look and then get penalised for being off-theme, which is quite amusing really.

I think this name will cause some confusion outside of the USA, but the homes themselves look really nice!

Sorry about no toys again DECOR

This remark made me smile! I have found so many of these house reveals confusing because of american terminology using the same vocabulary words that I know to mean something else (although the non-american meaning of Mediterranean architecture would be a very wide brief!).

I am not sure if this entirely answers the question. As @Paul Hexem says, some parcels are priced so they will *never* sell. In my case I am talking about those ordinary mainland parcels, away from roads or coastlines, and not islands in the middle of someone else's property. I realise that some are up for rent, but definitely not all. Some have been for sale for years. They clutter up the map when searching for property, and are often completely empty. My feeling when I see them is like encountering old grafitti with 'Baz wuz here.' written in aging, faded spray paint on a crumbling motorway underpass. What are these, a kind of 'up yours dead grandfather' thing?

I was looking at the land auction site, and it seems it can be cheaper to pick up parcels there than adopting abandoned land. eg around 0.5 Linden dollars per metre squared (some go for higher of course). A few aren't selling at all. I don't remember seeing this last time I checked which was around 18 months ago.

That is frustrating! I wonder what happens if someone actually does attend the web meetings, do they get flushed into a shark pool?

None currently. We had a very laggy stilt home a while back, the position was lovely but it wasn't a joyful experience overall. I'm now renting on mainland. The thing that I miss about having a premium account is the 'hopping', especially back in the days when the neighbourhoods were more diverse.

I'm excited to see what you might achieve with a homestead @Marianne Little. Changing the ground textures becomes an interesting diversion in itself. I've found that you can control odd patches with 'slight terraforming', ie digging out or raising up just a little. I have had more success in landscapes with less height difference, where the texture changes are squashed together. For instance you can create a beach this way which has both dry and wet sand of the same type, the dry sand being activated at only a slightly higher height than the wet. The quality of the textures can make up for missing 'prims', you don't need to hide the ground quite so much, as you have said yourself.

Sigh.

I don't think the misery spreaders confine themselves to any particular category, you can be affected by them whether you are a sailor stuck on some poorly placed off-sim rocks, or a land owner being harassed by deliberate griefers.

I always feel touched and grateful when private land owners go out of their way to give back to the community, whether that is allowing passage, or creating builds which enhance not just the owner's land but the general landscape scene. I don't expect it, but it is much appreciated. Finding a beautiful underwater scene is a wonderful bonus! Conversely, those owners who seem to go out of their way to inconvenience others remind me that awkward ****s exist, and will exploit any avenue to spread misery. I wasn't in SL in the very early days, and I would be surprised if the management of the time foresaw how long this virtual world would last. If they had, then maybe more time would have been dedicated to considering how land allocation would impact the experience of everyday users going forwards. I believe it was a mistake to allow any kind of private building in water areas. It is a very rare construction that looks at home floating in the sea, and if this means excessive cost for management, then I'm blaming poor coastal design in the first place. Of course making these observations with hindsight is much easier than predicting how a completely new entity will develop over time. Many parts of the SL mainland coastline can look quite jarring, aesthetically, and it is a real shame, because the underlying topography had a lot more potential.

Patch isn't well known for his architectural naming accuracy though, ranch style could mean anything.

I had a look through that album, and it is mixed in the content, with some seasonal images which simply feature LH content rather than being actual teasers.

Maybe it is just a Halloween picture.

Loud noises are difficult for my whole family, but some family members have very acute hearing and get annoyed by relatively quiet sounds. My current peeve, due to the warm weather, is 'drunken shrieking', emanating from two of our not so near neighbours houses in what I suppose must be BBQ parties. I imagine the people making this noise think that they are laughing, but it sounds like howls of pain to me and very different to normal everyday merriment. I don't know if it is common for inebriated people to make this awful noise as I tend to avoid situations where it might occur. Just so we are not annoying the new forum moderation policy, I will include an SL relevant thought. In virtual worlds there is always an audio mute button, something which isn't available at 2am in my RL, only the sauna like effect of closing the window.

I'm not sure, but the behaviour seems to fit , if let's say if in order to be in some sort of second life 'platinum club' you need to have a certain level of land holding, and maybe to hold so much currency as well. In that case having the plots bought up would be an inconvenience, because they would need replacing. Setting the prices high would prevent mass sales and accidentally dropping below the set threshold, but still leave room for the odd high profit win in the property market. This sounds like a speculator mindset. I don't want to get mod censored by trying to guess what kind of benefits this imaginary club might have. The benefits to LL would be more stability in inworld currency and land holdings, and exporting some risk in general.

Unless you are running a grid on your own pc, then everyone here is renting, it is just different kinds of contract. Even LL are renting the server space.

You need a haberdashery which functions like an old fashioned hardware shop! No pre-packaging, you could buy nails / screws / fittings by weight and these were sold in a paper bag