Anya Ristow

My 2018 look is a lot like my 2007 look. Just more expensive. At least I finally have anims that keep my hands out of my hips.

Me, at Carnage, Sep 27, 2006, still rockin' Ruth 17 days into SL. I at least bought some flexi hair and prim accessories a few days after this picture was taken. August 2007. I seem to have taken very few pictures of myself. This was taken by a friend at Hyles. This is the look I had for about two years. I slimmed down during the time I was photographing myself with products for the store. I disappeared from SL in 2010 or so, but I'm back with this look again, updated for 2018.

Aethelwine wrote: Well I can't really say I have noticed much change. Clubs I went to when I started out were always full of people gesturbating and others mostly AFK whilst they shop on marketplace and listen to the music. When was "when I started out?" If it was 2011 when you joined this forum then you've never known a time when people talked in open chat everywhere on the grid, because that started to decline in late 2007 and by mid 2008 clubs were full of what I called "club chat", which is gesture spam and nonsensical, tiny snippets of random prerecorded comments. That is, bots. No, they aren't AFK while they shop. They are brought in by the venue owner to make it look like there are people in the club. Multiple avatars are run by one person using a bot client, and the "chat" is generated by the client. The person running them can respond to chat or IM, but their own bot chatter can make it difficult to see that someone has walked into the club and said hello. That, or sometimes they're just watching TV, or too busy setting up bots in another venue. So, actual human visitors can be ignored. Aethelwine wrote: I actually see much less of that nowadays because I rarely go to clubs and instead go to events with djs and people chat at them and don't gesturbate. And the trick is to find these events. I know of one because I found a club owner on another web forum and got in her in-world group, where she posts event notices. And I know of a discussion group that posts in-world group notices because I found them years ago through word-of-mouth. Now, imagine you are running out of things to do because these groups and venues are closing up. How do you find new ones? When someone asks what there is to do in SL, this is the info they need, not a vague, unhelpful, "yeah, I still find things to do. I don't see bots at the events I go to." If you have a strategy for finding these events, describe it. Describe it in enough detail that someone else, perhaps a newbie who doesn't have twelve hours worth of patience before they find their first event, can reproduce it. If you know of a venue that has real events, name it. If the event it regular, name the time. If you know of a group that posts event notices, name it. I've asked many times over quite a few years where people are finding live humans at the keyboard, and these unhelpful responses account for almost all the answers: 1) A described strategy that no longer works, because the person is describing how they *used* to find things. Or it amounts to "check the events list", which only works if you have unlimited time and patience, and probably means you are describing a strategy you don't actually use, or that you can't tell the difference between humans and bots so the events on the events list seem real enough to you. 2) A named venue that currently has no live humans, because the person hasn't actually been there in years and they don't know that it is no longer active. 3) A named venue that *everyone* names (NCI, Shelter, Blarney Stone). Again, this tends to be from memory, not from current experience. 4) A named venue that is empty or has bots 166 hours per week. A more helpful response would be to name the update group where event notices are posted, so one can show up during the 2 hours per week there are humans there. 5) Most of the responses amount to "no, you're wrong, SL is full of human activity" without naming anything at all. I don't mean to pick on you, Aethelwine, but I have years of experience asking this question and in all that time only a couple people have been helpful. Almost everyone else is just here to tell me I'm wrong, out of pride or something.

FWIW I just went to the Blarney Stone to make sure it was still there, and there was actually conversation happening. I'm working, so I couldn't stay, but there ya go. One place that will always get mentioned without anyone actually checking to see if anyone goes there anymore is the Blarney Stone in Dublin...and it appears people do still go there.

ChinRey wrote: Anya Ristow wrote: Nobody is talking because nobody is actually there. These are bots. Or more likely afk "friends" of the DJ. Bots cost money, a long friends list doesn't. So, who's triggering the gesture spam? You're telling me gesture spam is automated for actual, human-controlled avatars? In every single club? They're programmed to be chatty while they are AFK, all the thousands of them...but they're human? What program are they running to accomplish this, if not a bot client? I'm afraid I just don't buy it. I looked for human activity in clubs for years. I even had a blog about it. If those are humans, they are the rudest SOBs ever. And there are a *lot* of them. Ignoring actual humans in chat, and in IM. Every single one of them. In every club. For years on end.

Fmeh Tagore wrote: Want to go somewhere to listen to music and hear hundreds of "Hooooooooo!" and getting spanked by scripts where nobody actually talks to each other except in private messages? When you hear people tell you that conversation all happens in IM, think "you can't see it because it's invisible." Because it's BS. Nobody is talking because nobody is actually there. These are bots. Fmeh Tagore wrote: Or even at some of the infohubs where it's the 4chan/8chan SL equivalent where you have to deal with bullying and childish behavior. But at least they have fun... I guess... I personally do not like hearing racial and sexual orientation slurs constantly, or people making fun of other people's intelligence, and so on. Is this your current experience, or are you relating this from memory of the past? If you know of any place where conversation still happens, even if it's griefing, please let me know. I can't find any. The welcome centers and info hubs I used to hang out in are now completely silent. It used to be that when you asked people where to go to hang out they'd mention the same, old, few pubs and newbie centers, and if you went there you'd find avatars but nobody was talking. It's like people recite the same old things but haven't themselves tried what they are suggesting in recent years.

Dresden Ceriano wrote: Those of us wishing to project ourselves as make-believe people (aka, avatars) are and will always be in the minority (niche... if you will). Only in someone's psychotic,dystopian fantasy would a majority of so-called normal people adopt the sort of alternatepersonas which most of usSL users cherish about ourselves. We are not, nor will we ever be mainstream... and not just cause we don't wanna be. There's this thing called American Exceptionalism, which used to mean America is new and different but has come to mean that we're better than you. Among people who read a lot, there's a conflation of knowledge and intelligence, and the belief that people who don't know about topics specifically what I've read about must be uneducated, and therefore stupid. We'll call it Literary Exceptionalism. Among computer programmers there's this belief that people who lack computer skills, or who value social networks and clicking on things willy-nilly over protecting their computer, are dumb. We'll call it Coder Exceptionalism. Among Christians there's this belief that if you don't believe what we believe you're going to be tormented for eternity in this thing called Hell. We'll call it Christian Exceptionalism. There's a Muslim Exceptionalism, too. Among the illiberal left there's this belief that bigotry and prejudice are signs of ignorance and stupidity, unless the bigotry and prejudice is against the right people, in which case those are signs of enlightenment and progressiveness. We'll call it Progressive Exceptionalism. There is, of course, a Conservative Exceptionalism, too. And there's this belief that people who lack imagination and intelligence, that is, most people who aren't us, can't possibly understand or enjoy an avatar in a 3D virtual environment. We'll call it Rosedalean Exceptionalism. We know that the unwashed, mundane masses can't undertand us because none of them have ever played with dolls, worn costumes, played dress-up or cowboys and indians or cops and robbers or doctor, none of them have a favorite character in Anime or enjoy movies like Star Wars, none of them enjoy first-person shooters or online RPGs like WOW, none of them enjoy porn, or could even figure out how to find some online, none of them spend time online communicating with real-world friends, as we all know that the likes of Facebook are a total flop, we know that texting and IMing are beyond their abilty, and they wouldn't want to do those things if they managed to figure them out, and certainly none of them are capable of becoming friends with people they only know online.

Perrie Juran wrote: This reminds me of the Pareto Principle. I was always amazed when we crunched numbers how much we would see this at work. It can be dangerous to ignore the 80% who only account for 20% of your income because that 20% can still be a sizeable chunk of change. At the dawn of the loyalty card era, Kroger (a US grocery chain) decided that it was better to fire the customer than to please everyone. They found that most of their profit was coming from a small number of their customers, and the rest they didn't even want in the store. As an example, although candy is profitable to sell, the most profitable customers don't buy it. That shelf space could be better used to please more profitable customers, so the space devoted to candy was shrunk. Even the products that everyone buys, the unprofitable customers aren't willing to pay as much as the profitable ones. Loyalty programs allow them to figure out the price point at which some will stop buying and some will keep buying. It isn't enough to know that as OJ gets more expensive fewer people buy it. It's important to know at what price the loss-leader shoppers will stop buying it and the baby-products shoppers and the paleo-diet shoppers and the organic-prepared-dinners shoppers won't.

Vivienne Schell wrote:... ..."What made Second Life fail in the mainstream sense"...To me its a mixed bag of reasons. ´The most obvious reasons are: - Pricing (it´s WAY too expensive to rent a server - probably it´s CRAZY expensive to host these servers and backbones, too) - Ease of use and learning curve (It´s WAY too complicated to learn for mainstream - not only because of a borked UI) - Nipples (Mainstream hates nipples) - Scalabilty (When SL scratched the 100 k user barrier in 2008 it almost died) - The limits of the average home PC (Yes folks, look at what sells on the mainstream PC/tablet market). Here are mine: - Bots. To a new-comer every place you visit in SL seems to be full of anti-social people. There's a room full of people who are apparently talking to each other, but they aren't saying anything intelligent, but more importantly, any attempt to talk to them is ignored. To someone new to SL this is off-putting. It appears you are being ignored. Even more off-putting and creepy is a room full of or an info node full of avatars who aren't saying anything at all. And they, too, will ignore you. - Make money selling crap. People came to check out SL and what they saw was an eyesore. Tacky, ugly, empty stores everywhere, selling tacky, ugly crap. When they searched for stuff they found crap. When they checked the events list they found crap. When they sought clumps of avatars on they map they found empty stores, empty because the box of bots was hidden in the sky. Every avenue for finding stuff and connecting with people was gamed and full of crap. LL let this happen because they have a libertarian left, west-coast philosphy of everyone gets a pat on the head. Even people who are damaging their platform. - Fake success. Actual, human activity peaked in 2007 or so. The only economic measure that wasn't gamed was classifieds spending, and it peaked in 2007. Google's interest plots are shaped the same way. They peaked in 2007. Every other measure was gamed, by residents and by LL themselves. Concurrency plots are shaped (but not scaled) exactly as they were in 2007, almost line-on-line, as if someone captured a week of data in 2007 and simply replicated it week after week since. The grid is so much bigger now than when people were actually interested in SL, but it's mostly empty, as if half of it isn't being paid for. LL used a doubling, and perhaps even a quadrupling, of server capacity to grow the grid with unused regions, rather than lowering tier. But the worst part of fake success is that almost all the I'm-making-money-in-SL stories that got so many people into SL turned out to be making tier, or almost making tier, or beer money. - Nipples. You say mainstream hates nipples. Actually, this is a residents-killed-SL thing. Mainstream isn't frightened by tacky, slutty avatars and kink. They just don't feel like they are in the company of adults when they find it *everywhere*. There are three take-aways: 1) Had SL been actually successful, the technical limitations of the platform could have been fixed over time. LL's striving for the appearance of success killed any chance of actual success, so having no resources to grow the platform is their own fault. 2) The great bulk of people who might be interested in the platform came in 2006 and 2007 and they didn't like what they saw. There will never, ever be that many people visiting SL again. The platform is now limited to only people who are newly old enough or newly computer-enabled. This is a small number compared to 2006 and 2007. The same thing will happen to Sansar if LL doesn't get it right. They need to retain more of the great bulk of initial visitors. 3) The type pf people SL did retain mock everything that is mainstream. This does not bode well for any VR platform that will attract the same people.

ChinRey wrote: Did SL fail? It certainly fell far, far short of LL's goals. And from the perspective of those of us who loved SL and heavily invested time and treasure into it, but no longer sign in, yes, it has failed.

Perrie Juran wrote: One of the reasons for SL's success was the ability for people to make money here. This may be a bigger reason for SL's success than what we have given credit for. It got people into SL chasing far-fetched promises and made SL a place of redundant, low-quality crap in eyesore stores with traffic-faking bots, gamed marketplace, gamed events listings, gamed search, gamed classifieds, gamed map, creepy, non-responsive (bot) avatars to make newbies feel unwelcome, phony banks and stock exchanges, ad farms, spam, and creepy fake events in the pursuit of trivial amounts of tip money and side sales from tacky, laggy vendors. IMO "the ability for people to make money here" caused SL to fail.

seanabrady wrote: in my opinion, Sansar and SL are totally different. So different that I think SL will be around for some time. Sansar is meant for building virtual experiences... I don't feel like it will ever be a world like SL. SL will die the same way small shops die when Walmart moves in. Say you own a little fabric shop. You sell fabric and sewing supplies. Walmart moves in and they sell fabric and sewing supplies. But you sell things Walmart doesn't! You have better quality items and better selection. You're a full-service sewing needs supplier and Walmart isn't! Doesn't matter. Your business was low margin before Walmart came. Can you survive when people stop coming to you for the basics? Even if Sansar won't have everything SL does, there will be some overlap. Some people will leave. New people will try out Sansar first. Can SL survive even emptier than it is?

Sassy Romano wrote: It could only be a failure if it failed to meet its objectives. Since we don't know what the objectives are, lack of inworld creation tools or cheap land may not be relevant. I suspect many will be in for a surprise when they discover what and who sansar is aimed at. Indeed. LL knows how big the market is for an SL-like experience, and I'm betting they aren't satisfied. We are high-maintenance cheapskates who scare away a broader audience with our creepiness and our mockery of everything mainstream. Don't be shocked if LL doesn't care what we want from Sansar.

The destination guide is the best thing LL ever did for retention, but it is not successful because... 1) They pick things that are pretty. Pretty things are interesting only briefly. People need people to talk to, activities to do, and they want to know where to find high-quality things for their avatar. 2) They pick things run by friends, or things that really are decent places. They *should* cherry-pick things. But they don't put enough effort into this. They don't actually know where to send people. 3) They pick things that residents suggest. This is gamed. To appear fair, they allow it to be gamed. They should try harder to reject things that are crap. The events list should be another indispensible tool for users, but suffers the same problems. It could be cleaned up by punishing people who game it or flood it with crap. LL has never been willing to punish people who poop on their platform. SL needs human-curated lists of things to do, places to go, and good stores, and only LL can make such lists visible to large numbers of users, particularly new users. It will never be fair, so people won't let them do it, and it has to be done by people deeply involved in SL, so LL couldn't do it themselves, even if they were allowed. So, SL suffers from people coming, not finding anything useful, and leaving. In 2008-ish I tried to create a system that would scan the map for activity at known venues so I could report where people were hanging out *right now*. I hand-picked interesting social venues, mapped them, and automated monitoring them. Problem is, before I was ready to launch, it became clear that this was a losing battle. Interesting places were disappearing faster than I was adding them to the list. So, I gave up. I had planned to make the data available through an API so that people could curate their own lists and publish on their blog or website. Despite this, I don't think I or any other resident could really save SL with a working destination guide because only LL can make such a list visible to enough people, and there's no way they'd do that for a list that wasn't allowed to be gamed. And there's no way they'll endorse someone else's cherry-picked list. And then they launched the destination guide. I had high hopes, but like everything LL creates, it was pooped on and LL let people poop on it. And it currently doesn't have enough interesting places to report.

It's getting harder and harder to find info about SL's past on the web, as old info disappears with dying blogs and websites. I wish I had saved more than I did. My latest frustrated quest is to find a plot of classified ad spending over time. They stopped reporting this info in 2009 or 20010, but last time I went looking for it I could find someone had posted it somewhere. Anyone know where I can find that plot these days? Thanks.

Perrie Juran wrote: But last of all, what makes us think that we are their target audience? Certainly they'd like our business. But really I think the Next Generation Platform is going to be targeted at the next generation of Users. We aren't the target audience. We scare people away. LL has seen how big a market there is of people like us and they are not satisfied. They will try something else. Don't be surprised if SL2 doesn't even appeal to us. That might be the plan.

When I started in late 2006 you had to know where to go to find privacy. Now, you have to know where to go to find conversation. Complete reversal. Some of that is because there are a lot more sims per person now than there were then. Mostly, though, it's because there aren't many people exploring for the first time. In late 2006/early 2007 the grid was full of people visiting welcome centers and clubs and stores, and they chatted openly and they IM'd you out of the blue and asked questions and solicited for sex and dropped boxed of freebies on you whether you wanted it or not, etc etc etc. Every plot of SL interest that isn't manipulated by LL or obscured by resident automation looks like the following image. Even the plot of classified spending looked like this, before LL stopped publishing it. That is, interest peaked in early 2007. By late 2007 I was suggesting club visitors were mostly bots and people told me I was wrong. There are probably about as many people at their keyboards today as there were in late 2006, but in addition to being more thinly spread out, most of them are doing things they discovered years ago, and not exploring and asking questions and chatting.

Second Life will only live on in our memories. There's no chance it or its successor will survive as a service or business. The problem is us. This kind of thing appeals to people who spend an inordinate amount of time online. We make it inhospitable to "normal" people. Someone in this very thread is going to tell me SL is better off without "normal" people, and that is the very attitude that will prevent SL and its successor from surviving in anything but our memories. The mathematics of obsession look like this: If you are online five times as much as a "normal" person, you will be over-represented online. "Normal" people will see five times as many people like you as there actually are. Five times as many people online who are impatient that they don't already know something they "should" know. Five times as many people online who hold in contempt their affinity for mainstream things and for social networking. Five times as many people who will give them incomprehensible explanations for how things work, and then ridicule them for not understanding. Five times as many people who think our lifestyles need to be prominently on display and their lifestyles need to be shamed and changed. Five times as many people who aren't interested in the things they are interested in. Five times as many people who would rather be hiding in a build cave than having a conversation. Five times as many people who will produce things that look incongruent and strange. Don't be surprised if SL2 intentionally works against what "we" want. LL has probably figured out that "we" are the problem. But LL should be prepared for "us" to dominate their new platform, anyway, because we will work around their obstacles in ways they don't anticipate. Because we are obsessive and determined. Moreso than they are. Moreso than "normal" people. So, SL2 will meet the same fate that SL will. "We" will make it inhospitable to their intended user base, and incompatible with large-scale adoption.

seanabrady wrote: IMHO time is better spent looking for decent freebies than it is looking for crappy work. 250L$ an hour is just 1$ US. hardly worht the time. The same could be said of the time spent looking for freebies. If you enjoy it, and actually find stuff comparable in quality to things you could buy, then it's a free return on time spent. If you don't, or can't, just spend a few RL dollars/euros/yen to save yourself the time.

If you have even a little bit of RL money to spend on SL, it's best to just buy L$. Almost nobody gets real-world return on time spent making and selling things, and certainly not from in-world "jobs". For the cost of a fast food meal, I can use a credit card to buy enough L$ to get some awesome stuff for my avatar. It'd take hours (or weeks!) to "earn" the same L$. For a home, even new residents earning the lowest stipend can have a place to call home for about US$1 per month, after the value of the stipend is taken into account, with a premium account paid yearly. On the other hand, if you enjoy "earning" the L$, or making and selling things, then any return you get is free money.

walterwhiteSr wrote: they are not just at bottom of water areas.. I have found several in skyboxes. one had over 30 with all very similiar names, and creation dates in groups only each a day apart. the region was owned by one with similiar name. had a few stores on land level. That was a green dots farm. The traffic doesn't help them much nowadays, but someone looking at the map may wonder, "what are all those people doing? must investigate!", and when they teleport in they get placed in the store. The ones at the bottom of Linden seas are probably bots that could be doing anything. Maybe they have their home set there, so that's where they land when they log in, or when they fail teleporting. You'll find them at info hubs, too. When I ran a map-scanning bot I programmed it to go home, which was a box to sit on in a sky box on my land, and it'd keep trying to get there if it found itself somewhere it didn't belong, because of sign-in or teleport snafus. If I didn't own land I'd probably have sent it somewhere out of the way, like the bottom of a Linden sea.

Then somewhere along the line i had to go and learn a bunch of stuff and get to know a lot of the world too well and those simple things that made it so much fun faded away. My first year was my best year by far,for sure hehehe ^This. It's less awesome when you know how to do everything you see. But also, you joined during the great rush of new people on the grid. Your first year was at a time when there were real, live people everywhere you went, and they actually talked in open chat, and IM'd you out of the blue. You joined at a time when you had to know where to go if you wanted some privacy. It's now the reverse: now you have to know where to go to find live people.

I got another one. LL apprently isn't doing the one-step-thinking thing of filtering anything with a link to mmook. One hopes they're working on something better. If mmook was smart, they'd scan for active avatars, so their 5000 per day messages would reach more real humans. More likely, they'll just get more IP addresses so they can do more than 5000 per day.

Phil Deakins wrote: I looked up your "one step thinking" phrase because I hadn't come across it before... Sorry, it does seem to be not as well-known as I thought. This might help: Behavioural studies of strategic thinking in games

Phil Deakins wrote: I looked up your "one step thinking" phrase because I hadn't come across it before, and I found that it's not a well known phrase or saying. So, unless I'm mistaken, you use it to mean that people (including me) are suggesting a single step to take that will solve the problem. No, it means you are not thinking more than one step ahead. Like when you play Go and you put your piece on the end of a row and turn the whole row, but you leave another space for your opponent to do the same, and he reclaims all the pieces you turned, plus one. Turning off PMs was one-step thinking. The more important spam vector--IM--was the obvious next move for the spammer. Suggesting email filters on the client side is one-step thinking. Anyone who's been online for twenty years knows how well that's worked. Mmook so far hasn't even had to resort to obfuscation. And we only have one spammer. A solution that addresses only that level of trouble isn't very forward-thinking.