right now is a time of change in second life, in so many different ways. get ready for ramble.

meshes are still a go, but we’ve lost qarl. 16 and 17 year olds will soon be coming into our world and who knows what that will bring. it could be nothing or it could be a shit storm. i am relived to hear that they will be locked to general grid areas only but that doesn’t stop disgusting people from communicating with them in ims. and yes i know 16 and 17 year olds are not idiots, i know you kids know about sex, i know you kids know about a lot of things. i was a teenager once too. the main problem is, while you might not think its a big deal, the media does, and so we now have a responsibility to make sure that second life doesn’t come off as a pedo-haven. i mean seriously, the media went nuts over ADULTS pretending to be children, how fast do you think they are going to latch onto this new change and milk the non-positive side for all its worth?

yes i am paranoid, live with it.

i cant’ say i’m overjoyed to hear about kids being on the main grid. yeah i know there are some decent ones. some have already transitioned to the mg by turning 18 (arwyn quandry and katharine barry are two that i am really glad to see still kicking around on second life) and yeah there’s probably some that will be joining us who are under age who are cool (smiley barry of course, is the only actual teen grid person i know anymore lol) but even if we are getting some great teens who are innovative and intelligent and possibly more mature than our normal adult mg residents, we will most likely also be getting the brats, the assholes, the script kiddies of the future, the copy botters who ripped off our stuff and brought it to the teen grid to begin with, and who knows what else. so no i’m not exactly thrilled by this announcement.

i’m also not thrilled by the stance of Q linden at the SLCC. telling us that we need to step up and say what’s wrong. where the hell have you been? how many people have to stand up and say uh.. this viewer is shit, before you people actually acknowledge it? we aren’t just complaining because oh you moved a few things around, no you’ve completely upended all of us and even new people can’t get the hang of this thing. a new browser should take someone like me, who’s been in second life for 4 years now, a few minutes to get back into the swing of things. here we are months later and i’m still using torley’s tutorials if i want to even try to use that thing. we have stood up Q, where the hell were you?

and while i’m on the subject of viewers let me just say how completely disgusted i am at the recent emerald drama. i feel so completely lied to and betrayed by these people. i gave them my trust only to find out that i have been lied to, and possibly compromised! all the times i have brushed off people who’s opinion on emerald seemed so paranoid. i kept thinking that if LL had them on the list, then they must be compliant and nothing dangerous could possibly happen! but no, that was not the case. first i read lordgreggreg’s post about secretly encrypted stuff in my viewer of choice, and then find out that they also used that viewer to attack someone’s website. both of these are big fat NO’s in my book.

i refuse to use something that i cannot trust. even if what lordgregreg’s post was about was just a butt hurt dev trying to defame (which i don’t think it is, i honestly think he is concerned with security here.) i still do not want to be caught up in some kind of retarded viewer drama. i am very disappointed that they have somehow managed to sucker in not one but 2 ex-lindens to help them out, and i hope that those ex-lindens will take the time to research what they are getting into before they are too deep to get out of it. these people seem so very immature to me..

looking into things it does seem like one dev may be a scammer in other communities, and that furthers my opinion on why i need to switch clients.

i apologize to those who i have brushed off and called paranoid for their opinions on the emerald viewer and its devs. and i apologize to those who i have recommended this client to, because it is surely not safe to use.

for now i have switched to imprudence, which is a very good substitute for someone coming off of using emerald for pretty much an entire year now. one of the dev’s from emerald is someone i was friends with on plurk and i remember her talking about it in its beginnings and so i chose to check that out before any other client. its great so far and it seems like the team is mature and actually focused on making a viewer instead of making a fool out of themselves. and weekly builds really show you just how active they are at fixing problems and working on new ideas.

for the past 4 years second life has been a second home to me and over that time i have watched it change in both good and ugly ways.

recently there have been all these lay offs, which i cannot really understand. i do know when layoffs occur it usually means a business is in financial trouble, but with all the privately owned sims and people still paying premium account membership fees i can hardly believe that we would be in that much hot water money wise…

so what is bringing on all of these bad decisions? does anyone know? not even phillip linden would discuss it during the recent "town hall". instead it was more disappointing hype and a supposed promise to make things fast easy and fun.

today saw another linden lost to the axe, and this one shocked me beyond belief. of all the lindens to get rid of, they got rid of qarl?!? i’m not saying he’s better than any one else working at the lab but he is the father of sculptie prims and that only leads me to believe that we are not going to get meshes, or flexy sculpties, and that’s pretty disappointing. sculpties revolutionized our world and gave us so many more options for creating.

i wish that we could have some answers. what did we do to deserve a collective cold shoulder from LL?

i’m not a doom-sayer and i don’t think the end is nigh… but i think we are looking at some hard times ahead.

and no crap was not having problems rezzing. they have become a shadow of their former self.

you can check out the imagine peace tower here.

needless to say, i’m back in sl and everything is a-ok. i’m still getting back into the swing of things but i am alive and well and i figured i would let the readers of my blog know.

if you want to read about the computer set up and all that, check out my real life blog which has specs and pictures and stuff. my computer is named “legion” after the creepy AI in mass effect.

it lived a good life, but probably lived longer than it should have. i bought it from walmart in 2004 (i think it was 04?) after i fried my first computer. its lived though several upgrades but i think the day has come to lay it to rest and go get the monster computer sitting in my newegg wishlist basket.

anyway, because of this i will not be on second life much if at all until i get this new computer ordered. the only computer i have at the moment is my mother’s laptop which is kind of crap. i do have my ipod and the pocket metaverse app so you might see me show up online to get offlines or something but i will not be able to do anything else.

i should be back soon, i just have to go order this monster. if anyone has any questions about LuNi please direct them to Lucas Gerard as i will not be able to handle anything sl related until i return.

the other day was my 4th rezday in second life. i’m really surprised i made it this long.

when i started second life, i was not really joining it for any specific reason. i just like to join things, i like to play video games, and they had just opened the sign ups for people without credit cards, so i joined. i had seen second life over the shoulder of someone else, but they were strictly just a furry so i only saw the furry part of sl, and i assumed that furries ran the place. of course i was wrong :p

i used to go to random places like the angry ant, and sit on a bar stool or in a booth and watch other people because i had (and still have) absolutely no social skills. i guess one of the reasons i actually joined was because i was trying to force myself to be social in some way or another.

that is where i met my second life sister lindsay. she was a dancer at the angry ant. she’d only started second life a few months before me and she seemed like the life of the party, so i had no idea why she was talking to me, goofy little noob, but she was, and we ended up best friends. even though my stupid times and even though her stupid times, we have never lost that friendship. most likely if i had met her in real life, we never would have spoken, but thanks to second life, we have a bond that will last forever.

i love second life because it has helped me in so many ways, and even though there have been times when i have wanted to grab lindens by the collar and shake them for stupid ideas that they have come up with (the verification mess, the 2.0 client, the homestead crap) i still would not trade this world for any other. because of second life i have gained skills, i have made friends, and i found my soul mate. i have been a mother, a fashion designer, a model, a photographer, a dancer, and half a dozen other things.

i sound like some sort of infomercial for second life don’t i? every year i sit here in awe at how much i have changed since the first time i logged on. sure i still have a lot to work on, and yeah i’m still pretty bad at some things, but i have learned so much here, and i think i would be pretty lost if it went away.

my rezday party was small, and that’s my fault because i didn’t decide i wanted one until it was already half over. i dj’ed some random crap for who ever showed up from my and lucas’ friends list. it was mostly our sl families. and then i zonked out like a rock and forgot to do my poppins jump photo for moggsy i’ll have to do a belated one.

today was kind of a meh day, with nothing much to do and then rain and storms which lag my internets.. so i felt meh today and decided to go to little silent hill. to my dismay when i got to where LSH is supposed to be.. i was greeted with empty land, no fog, and a wishing well. for a moment i thought maybe i was lost, i checked the owner’s profile, her picks gave me the bad news i didn’t need. little silent hill has been closed down.

LSH has always been one of my favourite places in second life. when i started SL back in 2006, i looked up silent hill randomly one day and i found that place. i lived in jack’s inn for a while, i have all the freebies, i even wore the silent hill tshirt from that pack for a long time when i was just starting out. i’d always wanted my sl wedding to be in the balkan church. in 2007 i got my account payment info verified for the simple fact that they made the land restricted to verified accounts only. when windlight came out, i even made a windlight setting especially for it.

so many memories now gone.. i’ve lost way too much this year…

the second reason for this is that lucas and i were working on a sim for a store owner who contacted him. although he doesn’t usually do custom work, we were asked to build them a 100% custom build. everything from textures to sculpties to terraforming, all of it was 100% made by us, no prefab work at all. and he would have free reign on the idea of how it should look. that perked his interest and we decided to accept it.

it ended up with too many things changed to what was laid out to make the effort worth while, so we decided to part ways with them after the initial month.

fortunately we got some really good material out of it that might turn out to be sold at the store. among other things, it gave us a new store build to play with too.

to leave this entry i thought i would share some pictures that i took while we were building the sim.

most of this work is lucas’ i’m not much of a builder so he’s the star here. i made some cool textures though and it taught me a lot about making textures for builds.

lucas had a cool idea for this place including some stuff he never got the chance to build. one thing he was able to build was the heart.

in his own words:

“i wanted to imagine a sim having a heart, literally. and since we’ve kinda worked with ‘heart themes’ in the past this was an idea that kept appealing to me. to imagine a transplanted heart growing inside of a sim and spreading its arms out to touch and make everything its own.”

to give you an idea of how big that heart was… that little hard to see dot to the right is lucas standing there… so just imagine how massive it was in person.

the store build was based loosely on the house from edward scissorhands, and i’m really kinda glad we get to keep it, because i love it. and yes i’m trying to talk him into making prefabs, but feel free to try begging him yourself as well :p

i made this awesome window light thing! it came out pretty cool for my first try at something like this. i also made the textures for the store including that awesome shattered window.

in the end i can’t say i’m not disappointed that we didn’t get to finish the sim. we had some great ideas for the rest of the place that we never got a chance to make. i hope that lucas will put some of this stuff up for sale in the future.

please click on the cut to keep reading. be warned, its long and full of pictures!

well since i picked it up a couple weeks ago there’s apparently been an update so i’m checking it out again. of course i do dislike it a bit since its the official client and therefore does not have my sexy emerald client goodies, but i’m not going to take off points for that. i can only hope and pray that the emerald guys will take the GOOD STUFF from this new viewer (tattoo layer, alpha layers) and leave out all the crap.  please click on the photos for a larger version of the image!

first and foremost. I LOVE THE COLOUR SCHEME! its dark and that makes me happy in pants. sexy blacks and mint green and silver… thank you so much LL.

and now for a weird thing… you see this outfit i have on in the pictures? this is not the outfit i was wearing when i logged out of emerald an hour ago. this is the outfit i had on when i logged out of the sl 2.0 client over 2 weeks ago! i have no idea what is up with that but its very weird.

ah here’s a good time to talk about something i don’t like about the new client… see that little ass window there? that’s a notification that i just recieved something. seriously? i dislike this… i much prefer the big blue box. i know it was ugly but it was easier for me to recognize that i had something sent to me than this tiny box on the bottom of my screen.

and that brings me to another thing i dislike about this new viewer. they have moved EVERYTHING. i have ocd and one of the things i have trouble with is changes in position of things. in my usual emerald sl client, i have my minimap at the top of the screen, under that is my camera control box, next to that is my statistics box (cause i like to watch my fps go up and down 8D) my ims and chat window are on the left where they are supposed to be. of course i can move stuff around to get that same configuration but the thing that bugs me is this damn sidebar.

with my usual configuration of windows, the sidebar is partially obscured, which means i will have to get used to a completely new configuration. while this might be not a big deal to you, someone like me has a lot of trouble with this sort of thing.. its like moving my desk around and expecting me to work like that.

ok so lets move some crap around *grumbles* and take a look at this sidebar. at first glance i honestly dislike it. it takes up a large chunk of my screen space and when its minimized those windows that i had to shove next to it don’t go to the edge of the screen.

but lets dig deeper into this thing. the first page (the little house button) has some boring junk that i guess is tailored to noobs.

tab 2 is your profile and let me tell you.. I HATE THIS. my profile info is cut off and you can only read it by clicking more… there’s all this empty space that they could fill by just allowing the profile info to extend to the full box size, so no one has to push the more link, because you know people arne’t going to bother to push the more link and therefore if you had anything important written there, they won’t see it.

profile photos have been reduced to this tiny live journal icon size format and that kinda makes me sad cause i usually put a lot of work into my profile photos… they could at least offer something to let you see the full size version, like emerald currently does.

i do like that they have included your avatar’s age on your profile.. as you can see i’m almost 4 years old (is that a good thing though O_o)

the picks section when i first looked at it, i about shit a brick.. everything was so damn tiny… i am one of those people who uses their picks to write mushy crap about my other half, and advertise my store and other junk like that.. so tiny ass picks was NOT COOL!

however if you hit the little grey arrow next to the more link you’ll get a full size pick with all the info on it. why can’t they do this with the regular profile info?

the next tab on the sidebar is “people” this includes a nearby list (which is a pathetic attempt at radar. not as good as emerald’s!) your friends list, your groups list, and an awesome tab called “recent” which allows you to see who you have spoken to recently. great for picking up convos after crashing.

this tab i don’t really mind. its a nice change from the old friends list style, and it makes it more accessable without losing your eye on the local chat window.

the next tab is “places”. pretty straight forward here.. you have a list of all your landmarks without all the inventory stuff. i like this tab.it also includes a teleport history so you can easily get back to where you were if you need to.

the next tab is inventory.. yay look at all that crap.. i don’t like the inventory being docked in the sidebar but eh.. at least if you hit new window (for sorting and stuff) you get another inventory window that isn’t docked inside that sidebar as well (that would drive me insane)

the final tab is a new one for second life. the appearance tab. this allows you to save an outfit to a folder for later use. right now all that i have in there are the example outfits that LL stuck in there. the apperance tab also has a wearing tab which is great because i am really spoiled on that with emerald.

so the side bar isn’t too horrible.. the main thing i would like is to be able to have those windows snap to the edge of the screen when the sidebar is closed. but that might just be me being picky.

the “view” box (aka camera controls) can also be docked into the bottom bar and accessed from the view button, so i guess i’ll just have to get used to that and have a little bit less clutter on my screen. and i’ll minimize my minimap and stats boxes since we’re going to just sit here.

another thing i really like, the chat history box. i am one of those people who keeps this window open most of the time. i really like how they have styled the new history box, its a lot easier to tell who says what now, and you can definitely tell if its an object or a person speaking because of the icons next to them.

also on my like list, the address bar! i like that i can type in something and get a google like list of possible landmarks that i could be typing. it makes using those landmarks a bit easier.

it also makes the title a bit more prominent (so people can see that my home is private and please gfto!)

clicking on the little info button next to the land title pops the places sidebar up and gives you info about the place you’re at.

clicking on the bar its self gives you a spiffy slurl which is much nicer to deal with than the open map, copy slurl to clip board, paste somewhere, etc. it also allows you to paste an slurl in that box and teleport somewhere.

under that is the favourites bar which i haven’t used but apparently i can add my favourite lm’s to that not unlike my browser’s bookmarks bar.

something that everyone else was bitching about, the pie menu is gone and now we have a context menu and honestly? this doesn’t bother me! i guess i’m one of the few who can work with it and not have a problem. also, i like the sexy green selection frame instead of that bright ugly yellow yay!

of course i like the features i’m not showing here which is, tattoo layers and alpha layers. i will be making some things with that in the future.. if i can stand to use this client :p i also like the web on a prim thing even though people are screaming about its security hazards. i think it could become a useful tool for businesses.

under the hood i have noticed a major jump in fps as well as sculptie loading times. my fps in the house on emerald recently has been very low, but it seems to be a bit higher in the new 2.0 client. as well, sculpties and textures are rezzing much faster. not sure what emerald has done but fix it you guys!the client seems to be eating about the same amount of resources but i don’t see anything leaking horribly so that’s a good plus. lets how it keeps that up. amazingly, when i opened my windows task manager i noticed it was not eating 100% of my cpu as i usually see. its fluxing now between 79 and 89% cpu usage. this possibly could be the reason why i have better fps. my computer is not all that fancy so this is a big plus for me.

something that does bother me though, my ims show up on the right hand side of the screen. like i said before, stuff moved around makes my face melt off… i need my ims on the left with my chat window. i know i can tear them off and drag them over to the left, but i’d have to do that for every single window. if nothing else they should give us the ability to choose right or left for the window.

there are some things i could not find on this client. namely the option to turn off attached lights! please put this back in the menus somewhere LL! i hate facelights and i always have that off in other clients..

oh i just found it.. you have to enable another menu called “develop” and then look in rendering… the develop menu is enabled in the advanced menu. honestly.. why did we need another menu? just put it all in advanced, its not that badly cluttered >_<

i also find it strange that they moved the image upload menu to the advanced menu under shortcuts. why is this not somewhere more easily accessed? it could at least be placed in the build menu… putting it in the advanced menu under shortcuts makes it harder to find and being a creator you need to upload textures for your work!

another option i cannot find is enable hovertips on all objects. right now i can only see hover tips on clickable objects and people. i dislike this, as i like to hover over objects to quickly find out who owns them (when i need to know if something is mine or lucas or some other person’s which needs to be returned)

it took me forever to realize that the little “search” box up there was the only way to access search now. i am so used to it being a button at the bottom of my screen that i didn’t even think to look there.

search seems mostly the same except for a few differences… to get those nice tabs where you have people and places and events you have to search for something first.

i do like how the search results fold out of the main search window, much nicer than having to hit back after reading though a search result’s info.

one thing about search that really sucks? you cannot access the people places events or group tabs without searching for something. this really makes it hard to browse for events without having a keyword in mind, something that lucas and i do frequently when we are bored.

snapshots are fucked for me.. i have the tiny box in a big black square problem that some others are having. (its hard to see here because my blog is black, but if you click on the picture you’ll see what i mean). this pretty much kills the client for me, as i will not use anything that borks up photo taking. i also have no anti-aliasing… but that might be my fault because i’m not sure if i checked to make sure it was enabled before looking at the snapshot function.

another weird snapshot issue, taking a photo with the interface and huds showing does not show the interface in the snapshot preview, and just look at what you get from taking a photo like that O_o. and that is why this entire blog was snapped with an external screenshot program!

so in closing.. not really digging the sl 2.0 client quite yet. i hope that they will take the time to look at all the things they have changed and make it much better before they push it on us as a final product. and if nothing else, i hope that the emerald devs will make a client with the old ui! i think that this thing has some potential but it also has the good old LL fail… it is still in beta though, so lets cross our fingers that they fix more and break less.

55/365

Originally uploaded by NIMIL[is] too busy being a badass

lucas and i were wandering mainland. we found this odd little japanese club out on an island in the middle of nowhere. it was really nice and they had these great couches that we fell in love with >_> ended up buying it and its loveseat for our house!