Erwin Solo

Well, its all that and more. If a female asserts that a male has an improper thought, then as you say: "females jump on that poor bastard." He doesn't have to do it, or think it. He just has to be accused. Well, its all that and more. The forums are roaming with people probing, provoking, seeking to elicit responses that can be twisted into accusations using the process described in my earlier post.

I agree, but I think the logic runs another way. The resolution of the skin-textures could have increased to 1024x1024 to provide better looking skins, but that didn't happen. So, the user community hacked around it with mesh bodies, and once we had escaped the 512x512 constraint at the expense of incredible complexity, we then just grabbed the mesh in Blender, hit the "scale" shortcut and scaled out by a small amount (perhaps 0.5%) to make new onionskin layers. Having done so, we could do it over and over again and have all the onionskin layers that we could use. BOM came along and gave us the 1024x1024 skins we should have had in 2013, and tried to put Pandora back in the box, but (a) it was too late, and (b) BOM lacked material support (i.e., normal and specular channels).

I quit arguing several threads ago. Several avatars will tag team you. In one wave, several different avatars disingenuously misconstrue your words into some point that you never made, The next wave will disingenuously reiterate and amplify the misconstruction. The third wave will denigrate you for holding an opinion you never held or even remotely hinted. It’s like twitter where people pile on condemning a book they’ve never read.

Well, the context was detachable heads and neck seams. Since the 2002/3 beta, has something fundamentally changed in mesh or skeleton technology such that it is now essential to have a detachable head with a neck seam?

The reference system I was cloning is what it is. The commercial systems save a penny where they can. Buy a brand name pre-built computer, and you'll get a fancy logo, but you'll also get lower-end components than if you did it yourself. You'll also get a lot of junk software that takes time to uninstall. I did my pricing based on the not-that-bad, but nothing to brag about, components that I usually see when I open up a brand name system.

Yeah, the guillotine subtopic is not particularly welcoming.

All that being said, I would dial back some of the specs if building a Desktop. For the laptop, you have very limited upgrade capability, and have to get everything all at once. For example, I think the storage and memory in the specs are about twice what they need to be, even for a high-end build. If you have a Desktop, its easy to double the memory and storage later if you come to need such specs in the future, and those components get considerably cheaper over time.

I "built" a Desktop computer to these same high-end specs on PCpartPicker dot com and the price added up to $1916.62, leaving out the speakers, keyboard, mouse and display--thinking those could be carried over from the last build. Adding-in a name-brand keyboard, name-brand gaming mouse, and a nice name-brand 27inch UHD/4K/3840x2160 monitor, I get $2220.54. It pays to use a Desktop if you can, and pays to build your own, and building a computer is not that hard, and there are great tutorials available; for example:

If you are interested, you might type keywords like these into your favorite search engine: psychology today female competition. Perhaps vary the words depending on your interest. For example, adding the word "academic" changes the mix of articles. One of the common competitive techniques is to articulate and support norms of low-availability in public discourse to reduce competition, and then provide substantially more availability in private to gain competitive advantage. Like many behaviors, observation in arranged social experiments provides significantly different results than those gained through direct questionnaires (e.g., the broader narrative here). The key point is not that people are dishonest in questionnaires--though there does seem to be a level of 'spin' in questionnaire responses--rather it seems that the subconscious drives much of the behavior. This relates to the thread topic, "Making SL more welcoming to males," in that a certain level of discouragement (sometimes articulated in this thread) is just part of a social ritual.

They're still there. I find them useful for tester alts.

Activation of group-chat-snooze the little zz button in the upper right corner of the group chat box. Default snooze time is 900 seconds. Adjust default globally by Preferences -> Chat -> Chat Window -> Group Chat Snooze Duration. You may also set individual snooze duration(s) by check the little box under "Group Chat Snooze Duration"

Not necessary. I have an avatar scanner. Free for everyone on my MP. Primary use of scanner is for people to learn the creator of clothing they see in the wild, and might potentially want to buy. Beyond that, what one is wearing does provide some information on the sports in which one participates. Some women wear the most interesting things, many of which would appear to be intended to make SL more welcoming to males, which, after all, is the topic of this thread. My impression is that all genders, by and large, go out of their way to make SL more welcoming to males. SL is profoundly welcoming to males, in my experience.

It is more like a raffle. 100 units over a period of 30 days (or 31 days, depending on interpretation).

Well, I was uploading full Avatars back in 2014. I found that the barriers to offering a product were: 1. All the skins were obfuscated into the SL Skin construct, so that one could not ('legally') extract them to textures for application to the body. BOM fixed that. 2. The skins were based on 512x512 pixel segments for upper and lower body, whereas the mesh could take 1024x1024. So, mesh bodies didn't really make sense because skin makers were not in the game. Time has fixed that. 3. Facial expressions required scripting hacks, because there were insufficient bones in the skeleton. Bento fixed that. 4. Doing anything original with the shape (e.g., more shapely curves) required customization of clothing that required a full clothing ecosystem. The clothing ecosystem is what is drives the market now. The bodies with high market share and the clothing ecosystem are resonating with each other. Its a marketing game not a technical game now.

The models are opensource from Linden Labs at http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Project_Bento_Resources_and_Information .

Yeah, but mesh bodies and heads are way overpriced, and the bubble is just bound to burst in this modern-day version of Tulip Mania (cf. article on wikipedia). One would hope that more body makers would start putting out decent heads, bundled with the price of the body. There is frankly no reason for the head to be a separate mesh. The whole body can easily be uploaded as a single mesh. The current artificial division of body parts into products generates much work for the many, and sales for a few. It is one of those marketing coups in which the populace is fooled into paying more for less.

Aye. A way to describe being a man in Second Life is to allude to that mythical man stranded on a mythical tropical island, with a dozen or more supermodels. Most of us decide that a dozen is more than we can keep serviced, for once sated, our interests shift to higher things. Others decide to engage in more challenging fishing expeditions, as previously described. I tend to go for the smart ones. Poor men go for rich ones. A majority of the so-called male-dominated role play SIMs are paid for by the female, who props up her man as roleplay Ruler (with appropriate title for the genre).

I completely agree. Creating is by far the most fun thing to do in Second Life, and creating is how I spend most of my time here. Anything and everything that any man might want is easy to come by in Second Life, to the extent it gets boring. The female to male ratio is such that we can't keep all the females entertained. I realize there are a lot of threads in the forums about men randomly saying "hi," which some interpret as men having to work at it. It is just not so. There are two cases. One case, which is the less common of the two, in my opinion, involves truly new players that have not figured out where in-world to go to get whatever they might want. That doesn’t take very long, even for slow learners, which is why this is the less common case. People are more than willing to help a new guy by passing a landmark or suggesting keywords for search, depending on whatever the new guy might be seeking. The second case, and I think this is by far the more common case, are experienced players who go fishing in no-fishing areas, just for the challenge. I'm not into it, but I have a very experienced acquaintance who maintains a new-ish alt (recreating new ones as they age), with modest appearance to go out fishing just for the challenge. The business of maintaining a new-ish alt is a bit over-the-top, but men are known to enjoy fishing.

Its an add on to make second life more welcoming.

That is a pretty good indicator. Leave the "hi" stuff to the people that don't understand. Not by words but by deeds.

The fact that you have to do anything at all to deal with any neck seam at all is a problem. I wear Aesthetic, and the head fits perfectly. No adjusting. No nothing. It can be done right.

You can do it self-service. The forums have an "ignore-user" button that functions much like the in-world mute button, but with more options. I've learned to never argue here; they just all pile on--whether alts or separate people, I'll never know.

I must be hanging out at the wrong places. Its true that women outnumber men in SL about four to one, but have not noticed that working to men's disadvantage.