RSS SL

1. Huge potential in social neighbourhoods but unreachable?

   This has always been the case for 22 years. Urizenus Sklar, the linguistics professor, had the great insight about the 4chan style griefers: they are actually zealous Puritans who FORCE on you a way of using the Internet/the virtual world in the way THEY think it MUST be used -- for hinjinx, sandboxing, testing scripts and crashing sims for fun, swarming around and annoying people -- fun! If you want instead to a) have a RL business representative office; b) have an SL business; c) run a Bible study or church service; d) hold a press conference like Anshe and CNET -- remember?! -- then that CAN'T BE. That must be BRUTALLY discouraged for the sake of FREEDOM. The biz and edu people would become enormously annoyed, and would pick up stakes and leave, or become engrossed in locking down their islands and making all these rules and banning people pre-emptively, because they feared not just griefing but adult activity or merely casual tourism. The Lindens refused to zone, which might have alleviated this problem decades ago. That is, they wanted private islands to be the de facto zoning -- those who could afford islands, like rich people in gated communities, could have the kind of world they liked -- a sedate business or school or a griefy sim crashing (although the Lindens eventually reached the end of their patience with the latter). But the rest of us who couldn't afford island set-up and tier had to make do in the wilds of the Mainland. Then they put in Bellisseria as the cure for that, and here we are all. But you are absolutely right, at root is the human intolerance for other people wanting to do things differently. Time to re-read Nostra Aetate, my friends! I'm not especially thrilled that on the empty M steep waterfront sim that literally stayed abandoned for YEARS, since the Linden cheapo direct sales, is now a huge capture RP joint with barbed wire and a roving animesh Nazi guy. Those with Firefox can de-render, and I can just turn my back on it in my own workshop or fixing the rentals. The tenants hope they won't be harassed by people straying off this "reservation" -- and that's not a given, as this kind of operation thrives on roping in people literally. It's like the establishment next to another of my small community in Zindra -- which I maintain reluctantly at tenants' demand -- which bombards everyone coming on the sim with their ads and group invites. This is not legal. But no amount of all of us constantly ARing them for months -- years -- cures this. You block them, yes -- but then they change the person sending the spam!!!. The Lindens could start zoning TOMORROW. They could change ratings on their many fully empty abandoned sims. They could say "let's fix this, and start taking some of these abandoned full sims and ZONING them." Let's have a ticketed process, as we did with Zindra, whereby people get a landswap -- ask everyone in a G sim if they want to change to M; ask everyone in a sim where a club is taking up all the oxygen and avatar space whether they want it to be a club sim with more avatar space (and higher tier, even on Mainland?) And do it. They fear deluges of tickets. But there population is still very small, and the subset of those willing to pay tier really quite small. They could cure a lot of annoyances now due to clubs/RP/stores/spam/traffic games etc etc by zoning at least SOME sims and adding avatar or prim capacity as the incentive to pay a bit more tier. There is nothing at all to stop them from stamping out a new Mainland sim at the raw edges of continents where they could be doing this. But it's not how their minds work. They want Bellisseria and its various activity groups to be the cure -- and it is for a tiny but vocal minority, so the Lindens have closed the case. All that can be done is to document and report on the realities of virtualities in the hope that behaviours and traditions will start to change over time.

2. Does anyone actually still enjoy Shop and Hops?

   i still go there and shop, find something i like or good discount, but i shop fast

3. Huge potential in social neighbourhoods but unreachable?

   You need to ask why this doesn't happen. Even if you had perfectly sociable people on perfectly proportioned sims -- and there are some! -- it would not happen. Again, these are experiments I've tried. Why can't even strangers live happily on a sim, each one paying for 1024 m2 and getting 351 prims, with a shared commons and some trees? They don't even have to spend time together, but they can save money together and have some basic amenities they wouldn't get on their own in the wild. Yet people do not do this. Ever. It's because of human nature. People do not default to getting along; in our modern world they are often highly socially isolated and atomized and don't know basic social niceties and decencies. This does not get cured by spending even MORE time online in SL. If anything, SL in theory and sometimes in fact is a remedy for this isolation, but then, for it to happen, people have to stop being gits. It's really that simple. But they don't want to change, and they want someone else to do all the work for them. Example: The other night the owner of an art group I know, whom I don't know and is not a friend, who I've spoken to maybe once, and gone to his events once or twice some times ago, IM'd me out of the blue and asked me in exasperation, what did I think was going on in America?! He noted that he "had a lot of experience in many things" -- which in my long life I've found is NOT something that people with ACTUAL valid experience say. Now....why did he ask ME this question? Because he simply wanted to lash out at someone who he imagined to be a "land baron" and therefore "responsible" for our woes? Because he didn't realize, due to my name, I'm not in Russia or Europe but I'm an American here in America like him, and he thought he'd find an anti-American to sympathize? I should note that this is a guy who constantly asks for support and donations and constantly cries the blues about his RL poverty, but also asks everyone to chip in so he can travel to some RL rock concert/art event -- the kind of thing I simply don't do because I simply can't afford it and neither can my RL friends. I appreciate avante-garde; I support it up to a point. But I don't support socialism, especially that is one-way from me to someone who isn't really building a community. That is, maybe he is, that's his business. What he did not really want to hear was my own opinions or my proposals for "how to fix things." He wanted a fresh ear to yammer on about his own notions. I recently had a discussion with ChatGPT about the problem of how to create jobs in SL; how to find jobs; how to lessen the curve to entering the economy -- people can't socialize until they have met the basic economic necessities of SL, which aren't food, but are clothing and shelter. And at one point ChatGPT, which has varying levels of cleverness and stupidity as we know, actually said a very astute thing: SL has a remittance economy. SL is like NYC for Pakistanis or Guatemalans, trying to make a living, and then send money back home, sometimes supporting entire families in war-torn and impoverished countries. Outside the top elites and wealthy strata, many people come to SL to turn a buck, pay at least for their SL expenses somehow, and maybe raid SL somehow to bring a buck back into SL -- they are like Turkish guestworkers in Germany, and even if they live in Germany for generations -- even if they are born there -- they are always viewed as second class compared to the "real" people -- which in our case are the "makers" -- scripters, creators, and the Lindens themselves. It's a built-in inequality that most socialists don't really fathom and only want to fix by asking for more free stuff, and for LL to do more free things. LL has already put out an awful lot of free stuff, as have merchants -- but it's never enough! So do you see the problem? There are basic social inequaities, divisions, antagonisms and they are impossible to surmount. I'm not the problem, since I'm not the person who out of the blue rang up someone to harangue them with my views. I will be as rude as I need to with someone who has not learned even the basic social niceties. Another person IM'd me to express admiration for my Belarus venue. She was Russian-speaking so I answered in Russian which means having to tab out to a Cyrrilic keyboard or chatGPT bc I don't have the HUD/Browser with that capacity for SL, too much work. A lot of people in fact write in Latin letters in Russian. She then said she wanted to stay in the venue -- camp there, so to speak. I couldn't tell if she was joking and I said the problem is that it is a public place, a fair number of people would be coming through to do the quest etc so she would not find it very private but she could certainly hang out. She then proceeded to ask me a huge list of questions of the type that people experience from GRU agents. Where are you from? But what is your ethnicity? But where are you really from? What do you do? But how do you know Russian? But have you been to Russia? etc. This tends to be more the norm for people from that part of the world which is wearisome, but she had settled in the West years ago and should know better. At one point I asked her if she had gone back to Russia, she persisted with more personal questions -- maybe she was looking for a date? And finally really oddly said I was probably tired of asking pointed personal questions -- here I think she made a typo and left out the word "her" before "asking"! Whereupon I said pointedly: but that's what YOU have been doing for half an hour, I'm just trying to be polite. These are the interactions that constantly happen in SL because PEOPLE DO NOT KNOW HOW TO BEHAVE. They do not know how to BE CONSIDERATE OF YOUR NEIGHBOUR. THEY LACK BASIC SOCIAL SKILLS, possible from a LIFETIME online while Mom worked and Dad was MIA. I get some of this because I'm prominent, but I see ordinary people at events and ordinary tenants without fame also getting this treatment -- especially women -- and frankly, it cannot be explained away by "inability to see people's facial expressions" (Philip is big on this topic) or "language difficulties" (AI translations are good enough). I mean, how can you account for two German neighbours in a certain arty community -- this is one of those communities you dream of! -- who simply build a path across my store lot because they need a shortcut to their venue across the road? People I don't know, who haven't asked permission, who are not collaborating with me in any way, who merely join my open group, do not even leave a tip, and just build a sidewalk and trees across my property. This is the kind of thing that just astounds me in SL. Another time a neighbour build a bridge from her steeper land over on to my lower land out of the blue, without asking, and later explained that her tenants "needed to get to the shore". Huh? It wasn't even a sailable shore. People's expansive sense of self; their "I can do WTF on my land and your land too" -- it's astounding. The most basic courtesies are thrown out in SL -- or maybe they were never taught. You can wait month for someone to remove their GIANT MEGAPRIM PLYWOOD they put out and never finished building with. You can ask people to put clear on your side of their mega ugly photo-real "privacy board". They will merely swear at you. Human nature is the problem, not the technology, except that it was made by humans with their natures. When there are communities that "work" in SL -- there are a few -- it's because one person -- usually male -- is often tyrannical and persistent in herding cats and shelling out their own cash -- with just their one dedicated and overworked assistant or partner -- usually female -- doing a lot of the work. They make it happens for everyone else, and they take it for granted.

4. HOW I MAKE BOM TATTOOS

   I find images I like online (shurely shome mishtake). I trace using Adobe Illustrator's Image Trace tool and convert to vectors and resize to 2048 or 4096. I got the reborn dev kit and I paint or project the textures onto the body in Substance Painter. This lets me easily mirror or place images over the upper and lower half. The other benefit here is you could easily set up a body with projections and simply replace the images for next time - though there may be some adjustments required.

5. Long mesh rigged hair - eBody Reborn

   Try Aii. They have some very long styles that fit the larger butt of Reborn. https://www.flickr.com/photos/aiipie/