Anticlimactic best wishes

We've had all the RL and SL sales and ads and stuff that burns us out on Christmas long before it arrives... but now it is here, and I hope that you are with family and loved ones, whichever life you're occupying at the moment. It's from a silly movie, but it's hard to disagree with the sentiment: be excellent to each other.

/me hugs you

New from Tiny Things!

Eira Kalil of Tiny Things, maker of the very nice and quite modestly-priced B-Busty prim breasts, has been hard at work and has announced two new models:

• B-Busty Basic, an improved version of the original B-Busty breasts, with new skins, a tweak to their construction and positioning to better fit the avatar shape, revised menus, and a HUD!
• B-Busty Evolution--these are redone from the ground up, with two shape options and layers for both underwear and top.

Details and pictures on her blog; for now, they're only available via the marketplace, but they will come to the Tiny Things store.

SOPA update

For a while, it looked like Congress had not set another date to consider the evil SOPA act... but now they've decided to reconvene this coming Wednesday, December 21st, to consider the bill, no doubt hoping people will all be distracted by the upcoming holidays. Please, keep up the pressure on your representatives for SOPA and senators for the Senate equivalent, PROTECT-IP. Their passage means any site on the net can be wiped from domain name servers and cut off from any ad revenue by a mere accusation. Act now.

If you want something done right...

...do it yourself. In this case, fortunately there's an SL resident out there who knows how to do it.

Check out SH-2761. Alison Alena has gone to the trouble of analyzing the default SL avatar mesh, and has made some improvements in it. The JIRA entry (and Penny Patton's blog post about it, which is how I heard about it; many thanks, Penny!) describes how to set things up so your SL client will use the improved avatar mesh. (In brief: back up the "character" directory under the directory your client is installed in, then unzip avatar_lim.zip into the character directory.)

If you look, you'll see the JIRA entry is assigned to Charlar Linden, and fix version is listed as "Sprint 33". Of course, we all remember what happened to the JIRA entry to let mesh clothing adapt to non-skeletal shape parameters, but maybe this change really will go into the official client. We can hope, and in the meantime we can take advantage of it ourselves.

The Poultry Report: Behold, the Power of Boobies

Word is getting out that prim breasts exist and can look very good indeed. Check out "Behold, the Power of Boobies" at Uccello Poultry's blog The Poultry Report.

Many thanks to you, Uccello.  Outside the prim breast community, I fear many discussions of prim breasts are at best dismissive, at worst vicious and insulting. Your post is a breath of fresh air.

My favorite snow...

Sometimes when it's snowing and dead calm, the snowflakes don't clump or freeze with air bubbles or whatever it is that makes them white rather than transparent, so that you can see countless perfect little hexagonal panes of clear ice falling to the ground. If you're lucky, it's nighttime and you can stand under a streetlight in the glittering cone of reflected light and marvel at the snowflakes landing on your coat.

In Second Life, there are particle generators that emit a stream of snowflakes... they are quite pretty, but typically white snowflakes. Has anyone tried to simulate the clear kind of snowflake?

If I could only remember my name...

Since display names were implemented, new residents, instead of choosing a first name and then selecting from a list of last names, have had to choose a unique first name, and appear as "<first name> Resident" in the absence of a display name.

Not having a choice of last name has driven people to the kinds of choices you end up making on other systems that ask for a user name/login id, i.e. appending a bunch of digits to a name to ensure uniqueness. A display name will hide such names... mostly... but can't be counted on to be unique, and the underlying name has to be used where one must uniquely identify a resident. For example, my hug/kiss attachment won't work with display names.

Worse yet, the divide between old and new naming seems to have created a class division in Second Life, and some argue that it's harder to feel an attachment to SL when you're just Joe1234567 Resident.

The JIRA entry requesting true last names, SVC-7125, has 2,136 votes and 696 watchers as I type, but has sat unresolved since its creation in July... but now there may be hope. A recent comment points one at this from Rodvik Linden. To quote:

Last names under active discussion. We are trying to figure out how to do it in a way which would be excellent rather than just ok. We want it intuitive with extra features. Hopefully we will roll out what we are thinking early January latest.
Identity is very important so as we touch it we need to make sure we are adding something great.

I'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with, and especially whether all the current <line noise> Residents will be able to change their names.

UPDATE: "we will roll out what we are thinking" doesn't mean that it will go into effect, just that they will announce it. (Yeah, it had me thinking the former.)

At a nudist resort?!

Shayna Korobase, creator of the lovely "Spanked" skins, tells of her experiences as a prim breast user at an SL nudist resort.

I'm flabbergasted. It's hard to imagine an RL nudist resort telling someone she needs to get breast reduction surgery before she could return, but the SL equivalent exists, it would seem.

UPDATE: Take a look at the SL forums from four and a half years ago, and you'll find this thread starting with a message from a lady who was... you guessed it... told she couldn't use prim breasts at a nude beach. Plus ça change...

Welcome back!

I am very happy to be able to say that the blog A Busty Second Life is now up and running. Pay it a visit, and welcome Ali back!

Spathic Files update

There's a new episode (is that the right term?) of The Spathic Files. I very much look forward to seeing the results of the project--I have tweeted the UK conference folks mentioned in hopes that they're going to publish (dead tree or otherwise) proceedings, and can't wait--all right, I have to wait, so I guess I can; I just don't like it--to find out what happens at the Console-ing Passions conference!

UPDATE: do read Kaseido's comment on this post, and keep an eye on the "Spathic Files"-tagged items.

P.S. I don't recall whether I already mentioned this here, but, for those seeing "spathic" and scratching their heads: minerals are called "spathic" if they resemble spar, in particular by having good cleavage. It's used humorously to refer to a buxom character in Spider Robinson's Callahan's Bar short story "Did You Hear the One About...?", and if you didn't know that already, I hope you'll head promptly to your favorite source of books and acquaint yourself with that lamentably fictional establishment.

P.P.S. It was used earlier in Algis Budrys's classic SF novel Michaelmas, which I similarly urge you to read.

Farewell, PixelDolls

On the first of the upcoming year, Port Seraphine will close down, and PixelDolls as well, along with the Gallactic (I checked; that's really the spelling), Romance, and Chroma shops. Until then, all items are going for L$50, and there will be a special limited edition last item.

I am happy to say that Nephilaine Protagonist isn't leaving SL, and will still be doing things.

For me this is kind of like Goldie Locks going away; I have a LOT of items from PixelDolls. I use the skirts from the Bourbon outfits a great deal, as well as many of the PixelDolls tops that lend themselves to easy adaptation to prim breasts. Thank you, Nephilaine!

For more details on what's happening, including things to commemorate the event,. take a look at this thread on the SLUniverse forums.