About that last photo...

Yes, there were harsh shadows in it--my face was in the shadow of my hat.

That's a bad thing, or it would be if the photo were taken for a reason other than to provide evidence for a JIRA entry. But where SL is concerned, it's a good thing, because it means that SL is a better environment.

Consider the musical analogy.

A sampling-based musical instrument, when you do whatever it takes to play a note on it, plays back a recording, possibly modifying the gain or picking one of several samples based on how hard you strike the key or blow into a breath controller or whatever. The person who has the most control over that note, though, is the nameless person actually played the instrument that got sampled.

There's another kind of instrument, though--it does what is called "physical modeling." It actually solves the differential equations that describe the behavior of the instrument in real time, and it takes the same inputs that the instrument being modeled takes. That means it's possible to play it badly!

Oh, you can play a sampling instrument badly--you can hit the wrong notes at the right time, or the right notes at the wrong time. But the individual notes will be exemplary notes of their kind as played by a good instrumentalist. You can't play a sampling instrument badly in all the ways you can play the real instrument badly--but you have full control over the physical modeling instrument, so you can play it badly.

So my ability to take a bad picture in SL means that SL itself is improving!