PostHeaderIcon When No-one Will Ever Even Notice Your Work

The first couple continents on the Second Life grid were more or less just kind of plopped-down. At least the sim names were relatively creative. My "first land" parcel was in Glenboon. From there I took a big bite into an 8192 in Dunbeath. I have since moved around a few times, the most recent in St. Diabloux and Croix and currently in ... well... Neobelow.

Okay, what the hell kind of name is "Neobelow?" The surname Lindens are seriously slacking-off. The ZHSL main store is in a sim called "Plain Jane." Even that's more creative than "Neobelow."

Oh well. One continent where Linden Lab at least "experimented" in creating a theme is to the immediate west of the Blake See, an entire island beginning with a massive and gorgeous lighthouse on Byth (I know, another totally uncreative lazy sim name). Byth (and Blake Sea) is to the right on the map below, with the seriously majestic Byth Lighthouse at the entrance (right edge of green mark) to the long canal leading into the fascinating circular area toward the western part of the island.


The point of all this is how Linden Lab leaves a lot of little surprises for us to find and no doubt very few, if any of us find them at all. For instance, you really should see the island shown above. Tune-out most of the resident builds and focus on the overall theme Linden Lab has built. It's stunning, fascinating, need-more-of-these awesome.

PostHeaderIcon Pathetically Sad Existence.

True story.

Scenario: you discover Second Life, sign-up. The newbie experience is exhilarating and you discover things, explore, observe. Within a month or so you learn to build.

So you build.

Stuff.


Like most creators, you build for yourself. To sell your creations hasn't even really crossed your mind, maybe later. It's exiting if someone notices your creations, you give away copies freely to thank them for the compliment and besides, it feels good that someone is impressed enough with your creation that they'll actually tell you about it.

Then there are those hysterical idiots who really do not have a life (first or second) and have nothing better to do than scour the grid, inspecting every object and person they see and come across - because they are the paranoid and vitriolic copybot nazi'esque soldiers.

One of them "inspects" you.

PostHeaderIcon Open letter to MarkTwain White and the United Segregationist Society

I don't pull punches and I prefer not to beat around the bush. Plain-talking is simply the way I communicate. Often I come-off as abrasive but the fact is sometimes truth hurts. However, overall I see myself as basically considerate and highly empathic of others. It's how I am able to look through the bullshit whining of the hysteria-paranoia crowd and see how a lot of what Linden Lab is trying to do with their roadmaps, ideas and policies is actually a good thing for us all and the grid whether we like it or not.

This post will likely appear as an angry rant, but it's not. I assure you I simply speaking plainly with a rather stoic if melancholic demeanor.

Linden Lab does a lot of things for us all. Things almost all of us on the grid will never see or know about or even fathom and I'll give some examples in my next post or two.

One of those things that is better known is the Blake Sea project. There are a lot of people who enjoy sailing throughout the grid and it is one of the reasons why virtual waterfront property is more valuable. Especially if there is access, direct or indirect to the Blake Sea.


PostHeaderIcon Why the Whiners Need to Kwicherbichen

Avatar Trademarks Copybotted all over the SL grid! Yes! Really! No shit!

It seems that every time Linden Lab burps, sneezes or farts, the hysterical uninformed, misguided, gullible empty-headed hysterically paranoid freaks come out of the woodwork. Okay, granted, the ones I have explicitly described above are only one in three of the overloud shrill knee-jerkers, but you get my point.

Copyright laws are not really all that complicated on the overall face of it. One easily understandable aspect of the law is that it squarely places the onus onto the copyright holder and owner to practice due diligence in defending that copyright and trademark (which are both actually different entities).

So, this creates a bit of a conundrum for the copyright owner: you are required by law to defend your registered copyrights, or risk losing them to the public domain.

And, to that end, if a copyright owner goes to an ISP or other entity displaying such copyrighted material must, by law, remove all access to it if requested by the copyright owner, and the copyright owner is technically and legally required to make that request whether they want to or not.

Some trademarks and copyrights are so prevalent that the holders, though they obviously retain all legal rights, have allowed these "fan" versions to proliferate. Anything Star Wars comes to mind. Disney. Playboy. Frank Herbert estate (Dune).

This also is why Linden Lab has made the public statement that obvious and blatant use of recognized trademarks will not be tolerated unless you are the owner, holder or authorize agent of the legal owner or holder.

But this statement is a simple legal maneuver by Linden lab to protect themselves. yet the shrill provocateurs will lambast Linden Lab for it. All without stopping to think.

PostHeaderIcon Tall tales

Did Ari just call me a loafer and freeloader? Yes, yes he did. He's so asking for whatever happens next -- he has no idea what he's just unleashed on his poor unsuspecting blog...


I also feel constrained to point out that I've already added some meat to my bones after he told me I was not sexy enough. Men, there's no pleasing them, is there? *folds arms and sniffs, nose in the air*


Speaking of shapes and proportions, Ari has this *cough* difficulty *cough* with uncommonly tall people. If you don't believe me, pull up his SL profile, it says so right there. When I first met him inworld, I breathed a sigh of relief that he was taller... and now I'm even shorter since I've just adjusted my shape.


Na'vi

At the moment I'm definitely looming over him though, because I've turned into a Na'vi and you know how tall they are! And if you have no clue what I'm talking about, that's a reference to the movie Avatar. I was going to ask if you've been living under a rock, but then an Italian friend told me this evening that the movie is only opening in Italy on Saturday. So much for snide humour, eh? Darn.


...Suddenly Malaysia feels a whole lot more "advanced". o.O

PostHeaderIcon Linden Lab Offers Turn-key Simulators


Goofing around on the Second Life web site on Monday and just basically blowing the dust out of the place. You know the routine: ensure contact information is up-to-date, tier amounts set properly and all that stuff. In doing this, I've discovered a couple things. Two are good and one is bad.

The first good thing is that I get to have a full region for free. Even though I'm tiered-up for it, Linden Lab billing isn't sucking a region's worth of cash moolah from my account (and that's good news - that even though you're tiered-higher, LL will only take what you owe. But they aren't taking for this region for some reason). That's all I'll say on it as I will leave it Linden Lab to figure it all out on their own. All I can say is I'm tiered-up for it and doing everything legally and according to all the rules on my end. Almost a shame, really. Because I don't really want that region. But there's that whole "what-if?" scenario. Oh well maybe it can be turned into some disgusting garrish thing to scare all the neighbors away.

The bad thing I discovered through my all-things-SL-related house-cleaning is this: The SL Blogs and the SL web site proper still aren't really speaking to each other. And that leaves a little problem.

PostHeaderIcon Evil Group and Subscribe-O Notices

For all you people on the Second Life grid whom have the power to send group notices or wield the power of a Subscribe(Spam)-O-Matic machines to spam people with: a lot of you need help and to get help you need to get a freaking clue.

In order to not flat-out piss people off, try to not send a single "notice" more than once every few days. Once a week would be good. Once a month would be better. Anything more often than a week and you already have half the people you are sending your notice to thinking about bailing. Don't get me wrong - if your notice is so large it requires two or three in a row, that's okay. Just not more often than once a week.

I would rather be spammed only once a week with a blast of three or four or five group notices (from the same group, folks) that complete the same message than have to experience the evil sin of group notices that don't say anything in the notice itself:
"Important notice about the group! Read attached!"

PostHeaderIcon Now We're Talkin'

Whew am I rusty.

Got my hands dirty in the CSS blog theme and template design again. I forgot how much I enjoy it. It's a strange mixture of creativity (where a creative's mind is a wild, untamed thing wanting to always be free) and the hard, logical 1+1 always must equal 2 disciplined routine.

Linden Lab had it right:
"We'll do the non-flexible world-container coding side of things and let you be the creative types to build the world."
I think I'll offer blog-theme design as a "product" in SL. I'm thinking L$5K for a custom theme.

Muahahahah!

PostHeaderIcon Poluted Waterways of the Grid

I know, you're probably tired on my rhetoric on tall boats and sailing in SL. This sill likely be my last post on the subject for a while at least. Ironic that on yesterday's post, Anna Tsiolkovsky described literally just what I ran into in my continuing travels. So, her words, my pictures as she describes literally what I experienced myself:
I used to have to cross into the Blake Sea and Nautilus through Kshumay. On one end, the owner erect this giant tree right into the corner and the other side had this hideous grass textured block (as well as having banlines on his parcel).
Oh, ho-ho-ho, you go girl:
Note the tiny shack at the near-left. There is a dinky little bit of water that passes to the left and then behind it. Bad news: that hut is on the very corner of a region. Taking that (the only) path means a kitty-corner region-crossing through a four-corner area. The crash potential was high. (And note the picture-screen wall a bit further in the distance.)
However, I made it. It took some serious maneuvering. Moving westward there was another of these blocked areas...

PostHeaderIcon Let the Arm-twisting Begin!

For those of you who actually do visit this blog on a regular basis, you may have noticed in the left rail that little area titled "About the Scribblers" and how Quaintly's name just mysteriously appeared there one day, even though she is completely missing-in-action with regard to any reader-facing aspect of this blog and, I can assure you, she has nothing to do with or helps in any way with anything on the back-end and so, she is just a loafer and freeloader here.
There.
Perhaps that will nudge her to finally write something! Quaintly is not so much as shy as she is thoughtful of what to actually write here (being that she is contributing and it's not officially her bog). I keep telling her: hey, write whatever the hell you want - yes, even {/me shivers} about SL Fashion.
In fact, consider this the place were you can be hugely opinionated and say what you really think about things. But, twisting of arms kidding aside, there really is no pressure to "force" Quaintly to post anything. I invited her here so that she can post if she wants to and for no other reason.
{Yes, I had to find a good, yummy pirate picture of Quaintly. Now to force-feed her something, anything to get some meat onto them skeleton bones!}
With that said...

PostHeaderIcon Hey, Linden Lab, Mainland Needs More Crust!

I looked and looked and looked but I just could not find the giant graffiti sign that said "Torley was here - LULZ!"
I really enjoy cruising the grid in my tall ship. I have a fleet of them more or less, but sometimes I really like to take-out my gunboat. The prim build is stunning and it certainly is one of those joyful-surprises, quality-wise. Among the (very few) best purchases I have made in three years.

And it even takes damage if "UR doin' it wrong!":
Yes, there is the Blake Sea, but the problem with the Blake Sea is that the entire area is a no-rez zone, save for little square parcels slat-and-peppered through-out where you can rez your boat and off you go. However, the island areas are beautiful builds and there is a lot to see and explore. However, the better boats in Sl are two-parts: the main hull and the attachable "detail" portion, built this way to get around the 32-prim limit on moving vehicles.

PostHeaderIcon Why Linden Mainland is Good and Not Good

Second Life, Linden "Mainland" - the staple of the grid. When I first entered SL in spring 2006, there were (if I remember correctly) three continents and a couple hundred "estates" (private simulator regions) and that was about it. After a few weeks I, like most others, got the land-ownership itch. I went to a few lessons graciously provided by "New Citizens, inc." - general overview of the grid and how to go about doing things. it was a two-hour class and I was riveted.

It was shortly after that class (and shortly before Linden lab discontinued the program) that I went and bought my "First Land" as my first land. The program was simple: Linden Lab offered 512 square meters to all premium (preemies) accounts at L$1 per square meter - to keep it affordable. I'll never forget those few weeks I owned that parcel in the brand new region called Glenboon. It was within a couple weeks when I decided I needed more prims and sold-out for I could buy a larger chunk (I went strait to a 4096 in Dunbeath and was the only one on that entire sim until others started showing up three months later. It was heaven.)

Private Regions: the bad.

I have never "rented" land from any other SL resident. Part of this had to do with my own perceptions. At the time everything was Anshe Chung - and expensive. I was still buying my Linden Dollars through my credit card and slowly gaining grid experience. As beautiful as those builds were (and I presume still are if they're still around,) they were expensive. Besides, I didn't want a house and luxurious place (have one already in first life. The house part, anyway.)

PostHeaderIcon "That's so gay" is...well, so "gay"

Driving in to work this morning listening to the radio as most people do and I heard an ad from the "Advertising Council" (Ad Council), a massively influential not-for-profit organization and leader of PSA (Public Service Announcements) production in the United States. The advertisement is part of a campaign called "think before you speak" - good advice to be sure, and is running on radio and print.

The specific advert I heard was called "Gay". Here is the exact quote1:
"there once was a time when "gay" meant happy. then it meant "homosexual." now people are saying "that's so gay" to mean dumb and stupid. which is pretty insulting to gay people (and we don't mean the "happy" people). 2. so please knock it off. 3. go to [redacted because I don't want to advertise for them].com"
Wow. Talking about a massive partisan agenda. You know what? Feck those gay people who are offended. And feck you Ad Council for this dumb-ass advertisement. There is no "right", Constitutional or otherwise to "not be offended". Talk about hypocritical on a biblical proportion! You are so effing gay. Our language evolves. Word definitions change constantly.

PostHeaderIcon Why Tradewind and Most SL Sailboats Totally Suck

I have finally and officially decided why I really don't like the Trudeau (and probably most other) boats and tall ships that are so-called "SL-wind sailable". They are built for looks, not function.

Tradewind_002

In my three-years on the grid I have never owned or wanted to own any boats at all, especially sailboats. Because they aren't "boats" - they are cars on water that don't "sail" - they drive. Even the "motorboats" drive like a car. and cars in Second Life don't really handle at all like a car. In fact, it's just "flying" the same way you can fly in SL without sitting on anything. The only difference is you have a prim (name your vehicle here) attached to you, and because it's set to be physical, the simulated gravity is in effect.

Car, airplane, boat, submarine: I find it cheesy and silly that at a dead stand-still, you can spin around and around like a top. I really roll my eyes if it's any kind of sailboat. And it's the creator's fault because they are focusing on how it looks, not how it works.

Like everyone who has one of these, I wouldn't know any better - except that as of a few months ago, I do.

PostHeaderIcon Unscrupulous Creators Breed Copybot Hysteria

Copybot.

It's a loaded word the very mention of tends to generate some serious paranoia if used in the context of being applied against someone.

In the Second Life vernacular the word "copybot" conjures utter fear among creators - and perhaps it gives a little insight to how musicians and book authors and movie producers feel with regard to the whole file-sharing of their works.

However, it is a statistical fact that the anything that has been "copybotted" - an umbrella term to represent copybot proper along with all other methods of "ripping" prims and textures to create full-permission copies (it doesn't work with scripts) - is most often not resold or given away, but rather users "stealing" for themselves.

It also is a statistical fact that all copybot activity across the grid amounts to a fraction of a fraction of overall grid business activity to begin with. I am not trying to minimize the effect and devastating circumstances the use of copybot against a creator can have. I am only saying that Second Life and its economy is so large that copybot activity is barely a noticeable drop of water in a swimming pool when viewed in context of the "big picture" - though it really is a terrible tool that can wreak havoc on a creator's business. But that's not what I am really writing about here.

What I am writing about here has been going on ever since copybot first existed back in 2006. It simply is a lot more prevalent now and is a way that the very word "copybot" is misused and abused in a far more insidious way. As a competition-killer and nothing more than that.

PostHeaderIcon Good old days: "Second Life Grid Down for Maintenance"

Spotted this at the Grid Status reports:
"Wednesday January 6 2010 at 5:00 a.m. Pacific, we’ll be closing logins and disabling major in world services for ninety minutes of upgrade work on our databases.
During the maintenance, logins and account registrations will be unavailable."


All, I can do is laugh with fond memories! If you are an "oldbie" then you recall how every single Wednesday the entire grid shut-down at 6 A.M. to 10 A.M. for "grid maintenance" which often included a viewer update (and sometimes lasted a lot longer!)

Yes, the entire grid was completely shut-down to public access. Only Lindens were allowed in. The SL Blog back then didn't have a 150 comment limit and it was fun to follow that entry and reading how so many people were actually going through serious withdrawals.

Ah those were the days. Of course those also were the days of complete and utter frustration when Teleports wouldn't work for three days straight, or the grey-goo attack that screwed the grid up for three days, or the bug that cause the Lindens to turn off all scripts for three days...

Of course anyone who signed-up after the "new" grid technology that allows "rolling updates" won't understand the nostalgia of the entire grid effectively shutting down and just can't appreciate it.

(Via Second Life Grid Status Reports » Blog Archive » Logins and In World Services Down for Maintenance Wednesday a.m.)

PostHeaderIcon Second Life 10-Years From Now?

Fleet_010

M Linden put up this predictive post at the official Second Life blog on the potential direction of Second Life, here's my take:
When I set my draw distance out 10 years and envision Second Life then, here is what I see:
Everyone has an avatar. Avatars have the ability to travel across virtual worlds, maintaining their unique identity (and inventory) as they go. Some are stunningly vivid fantasy avatars and others are hyper-real. You express yourselves through your avatar using interfaces we weren't able to imagine in 2010.
Actually I'm not so sure about that. Unless you consider a photography of my real life face being my "avatar" (avatar is not necessarily 3D in nature) to represent me in non-physical form. In this case, everyone already has an "avatar". As for the interfaces part: no doubt about it. Especially if Microsoft gets involved as they can't seem to leave a good interface alone. Windows Vista to 7 is a shock that they didn't radically change the UI between versions. But then again, 7 is just Vista that's had the garbage gutted out.

Blackthorne™ ≠ inSL

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