(I'm working on a draft of a notecard to urge people to join my group, and so, as I did before, I post it here...)
Hi. I'm Melissa Yeuxdoux, a Second Life resident. I delight in the ability to remake myself here, and in particular in the availability of prim breasts.
What are those, you ask?
One of the things you can do in Second Life is build things. Objects in Second Life are created from one or more "prims", primitive objects of various shapes (box, ellipse, sphere, cone, torus, etc.) and sizes that can be attached to one another and painted with "textures" (square images that are stretched around objects and glued on--figuring out how to draw them so that they look right when stretched is one of the difficulties of building in SL).
Aside from things, Second Life contains people, or rather avatars. Second Life has two basic avatars, one for (human) men and one for (human) women, each adjustable in certain respects, but only within limits. If you've read The Making of Second Life, Hamlet Au's history of Second Life, you know that Linden Lab did this to avoid an "arms race" of height, muscularity, and other body parameters. That choice arguably succeeded, but it has meant that those who wish to go past these limits have to do so by means of attachments built up from prims and sneaky tricks played with the avatar shape, and so doing has major drawbacks.
That said, the unfailingly creative builders of SL have done amazing things to work around the limitations of the avatar shape, and one of those things is the creation of prim breasts.
In this context, one obvious limitation of the SL avatar is size, but that is not the only one:
- When you have a spare moment (and have saved your shape!), try adjusting your appearance by running the "breast size" slider up to or near the maximum. Save it, then pan around looking at yourself. Surprise! You have Bizarro World breasts, with corners!
- Remember about the painted-on textures? For the most part, SL clothing is just textures. Basically, in SL we all walk around like models with trompe l'oeil body paint--but your oeil can't be totally tromped that way. Real clothing jumps across concavities; SL clothes look like they're vacuum sealed to your body, and that sealing distorts the most exquisite T-shirt artwork and text into junk. Real clothes have stress wrinkles; SL clothing at best has painted on shading to suggest them.
- No jiggle.
- No nipples, either.
So, someone came up with the idea of prim breasts, attaching to the chest. Since there's only one attachment per attachment point, if you wish your breasts clothed, the clothes must either be simply a texture applied to them or the portion of the top that fits over them must be built in from the start.
Since that first creation, prim breasts have advanced considerably, in shape thanks to the use of "sculpted" prims, in options and user interface, and in clothing options. Prim breast makers have always made some tops, but that divides their attention, and they've not been able to make many.
Recently, some clothiers have taken to creating tops (or outfits including such tops) intended for one or more prim breast makers' work--though often their work leans towards the, shall we say, revealing end of the spectrum, and one is still largely cut off from the vast cornucopia of SL fashion.
So, one ends up having to adapt textures from mainstream outfits, typically retrieved via a screen capture or snapshot, or stick with solid colors that don't have details of weave or shading. (Some do amazing work clothing themselves thus; the lovely and talented Mesha Sewell leaps to mind.) I think that the former is "fair use" if you don't sell it, but as they say, IANAL--and how many out there are put off from prim breasts by the thought of not being able to go to Nicky Ree, or the Crystal Queendom, or RFyre, or any of the other amazing clothing stores in SL, and buy and wear what one wishes, at least not without a lot of work? I think very many indeed.
So, all of you who currently use prim breasts, or who would use them if only they didn't mean forever looking longingly through the windows of SL clothing stores, unable to wear the clothing therein, please join my (now somewhat misnamed, with the added hoped-for membership!) group, "Prim Breast Users". I hope that there will be enough of us to perhaps convince mainstream clothiers to farm out the adaptation of their work to us to those who have proved their skills in working with clothing for prim breasts, and convince animators to come up with prim breast-safe animations and poses.
I tried to ask on the SL forums, but for some reason, the "preview" and "post" were broken.
Has anyone tried to build the Linux SL client for something other than the x86? I ask because ARM is making noises about dual and quad core 2 GHz ARM CPUs for netbooks and smartbooks, and the nVidia Ion chipset-based netbooks that folks like Samsung and Lenovo have been promising don't seem to be showing up.
I really would love something small, lightweight, and portable on which I can run SL reasonably. ARM also has some OpenGL capable graphics hardware (look for sample videos on YouTube).
Before terribly long the little Ubuntu graphic on this blog will change, as the countdown to Karmic Koala, or more officially Ubuntu 9.10, will get close to the release date. I'm very much looking forward to it.
If you are a fan of elegantly curvy abstract art, then you should head over to Idle Rogue, Yeongheungdo (26, 203, 89) and check out Marnix Malifozix's artwork. If you're also interested in the techniques and the mathematics involved, you should check out Marnix's group Swirly Disco Flames (which is also the collective name he gives his art, as you can see from the photo).
I've taken the plunge and created an SL group, the rather prosaically titled "Prim Breast Users".
As the charter says, we know that those 25 slots for group membership are precious, but if you use prim breasts, we hope you'll join the group. Here's what I hope: I hope that all of you who use prim breasts will join, so that we can show we're a significant market in SL.
Then we can go to mainstream SL clothiers and say "Look! There are at least [fill in blank] people in SL who use prim breasts, and are cut off from the cornucopia of mainstream SL fashion. They'll be especially appreciative if you accomodate them, whether by adapting the textures of your tops yourself, or by entering into an agreement with one of the growing number of clothiers who specialize in tops for prim breast users."
We can go to animators and show them there are people out there who will appreciate animations and poses that don't leave us with our arms going through our breasts.
We can go to prim breast makers and urge them to work together to make it easier for us to find quality clothing, no matter whose prim breasts we prefer.
If you use prim breasts, please consider joining.
UPDATE: If you'd love to use prim breasts, but don't for some reason, please join too and let me know what's keeping you from it.
Well... I'm on SL even less than just having to work seven days a week for nearly a month would indicate, because now Snowglobe is dying on me even without shadows enabled. It hangs, though thank goodness it doesn't take the whole OS down with it as it does when shadows are enabled.
Ubuntu's Jaunty Jackalope repositories are behind what nVidia has available for download--perhaps updating is the answer. I'll look around.
UPDATE: Keep your fingers crossed. (OK, if you have to type, you can uncross them...) Adding the X-Updates repository and updating pulled in the latest (official) nVidia driver for Linux, 185.something, and I just got through a much longer session in Snowglobe than I've been able to lately. (And met the delightful Maggie Bluxome in person. I should introduce her to Xaxoqual Mandelbrot somday--they both have impeccable taste, and I think they'd hit it off nicely.) Next stop, as they'd say in Firesign Theater: back to the shadows again...
(Is that one word? Surely it should be; "birthday" is.)
It must've been uneventful; once again I didn't write about it until the better part of a month later.
In the onward march of SL, I can't quite say shadows are there yet, since they're not official... but were I to do the now vs. then snapshot comparison, I'd definitely use a screen capture with shadows enabled for now.
Three years isn't really old--though it seems that way; SL years are often compared with dog years. I did just have a "You know you've been in SL a long time when" experience, though.
Just now, ironically enough in a CSI:NY rerun (no, not one of those episodes), Mac just said to a guy, "We're not done until a second life sentence is added to [your punishment]" (sorry for the []; I should have typed it immediately rather than trust my short-term memory). Of course, I heard it as "We're not done until a Second Life sentence is added..." and imagined someone in jail in front of a computer with a guard looking over his shoulder to make sure he really was on the grid... yeah, that'll show him.
Wow. It turns out that someone does make beards in Second Life. Yes, ZZ Top could come and perform here. :)
I went to Alli & Ali Designs and there they were, and searching on Xstreet shows that there are other beard makers as well.
I remember seeing a photo of a poster of a bearded lady as a child... I wonder if those beards are tintable?
UPDATE: Yes, they are!
Hmmm... I think I'd better raise it a bit.
UPDATE: The photo is on flickr, too. Gee, 0 views after nearly a day. Maybe that should tell me something. :)
I did finally leave the nude beach. I went to a store and was more taken with the surroundings than with the items there for sale...
I'm working in honor of Labor Day... and ditto for the two weekends after that, so I fear that I will have even less time than usual in SL. Like MacArthur and Schwarzenegger, though, I shall return, or I'll be back if you prefer.
Recently I put up a photo that really is in accordance with Marnix's meme. I guess I felt guilty, and besides, having (mostly) working shadows was nice.
I guess that opened the gates. Since then, I've put several pictures (OK, screen captures--shadows are still preventing photos from working...) up on flickr, taken with shadows enabled and on the same nude beach. It's even been a while since I've been anywhere else in SL.
Eventually I'll get back to normal, but for now it's kind of fun.
I've had shadows turned on for a while, but not now.
This morning my computer crashed hard a couple of times. It seems to be signaled by flashing of a window on the other monitor.
I was lucky; I was able to sign on for long enough to turn off renderdeferred, after which the problem went away... but of course, so did the shadows.
I think I'll submit two JIRA entries, one being to allow setting of debug options before signing on.
At the Black Swan sim one can now see an amazing work.
It's a large (perhaps three times life-size) photorealistic 3D figure of an odalisque in the artistic sense of the term. Like the many paintings, this odalisque is in repose, though this one is blissfully asleep.
It's a technical tour de force, but I fear it requires its darkened room surroundings to look as good as it does. SL has yet to even get basic shadows save as an experimental feature, much less skin and hair that realistic.
You really should see it in person, but here's a photo I took:
We look like bad CGI cartoon figures gazing upon a human.
I hope that someday avatars will look that realistic.
Even if I didn't buy anything at Reichlich Weiblich, I'd love it for its name. The store owner gives the translation as "bountiful female".
There are very nice dresses to be had--one day I will get a dirndl. (I've never worn one before, and besides, like Hobbes and "smock", I like to say the word.) What really caught my eye, though (ouch!), are the gorgeously textured shoes. I have a pair with rose texture, and I'm sure I will return for others.
UPDATE: "Reichlich Weiblich" is also the name of an all-woman jazz orchestra.
I kind of cheated on Marnix's meme of nekkid but tasteful [booty] pictures, I must admit. I took the Lady Godiva approach.
Now I feel guilty about it, so I have made what I think is a NBTBP publicly visible on flickr.
It's a little ironic; for a long time, there was a big argument on flickr about SL snapshots being mere screen captures, like people clicking PrtScrn to show you their spreadsheet or their spiffy window manager theme. Now, because of a bug in the Snowglobe client that causes photos saved to disk to be solid black instead of actually capturing the image you so carefully composed, to get this "photo" I actually had to do a screen capture--so you'll see the SL UI.
I've experimented with enabling shadows in the Snowglobe client. A lot of the problems I used to see have been corrected, and the shadows are beautiful.
There's one big problem that I've noticed: snapshots with shadows enabled are still solid black. The preview window just shows the sky as black (and if you look at the saved image of the last place you were before logging out, the sky's black there, too), and the saved image is solid black. I had to use screen captures to save what I saw--which, after I spent so much time arguing that SL "photographs" aren't just screen captures, is kind of ironic.
The other thing that I've noticed is objects coming and going; plants and strands of hair vanishing and reappearing. I can only conclude that enabling shadows ups the number of vertices to be processed enough that even after increasing the arbitrary limit imposed for RC/Snowglobe, it still goes over, so I have to increase it yet again.
Leia Sharple has started a service of customizing Implant Nation prim breasts to work with an outfit of your choice for a fee (L$500 for one outfit, L$2000 for six). There's a group for announcements and such, called, um... let's just say the name is perhaps inspired by one of ZZ Top's hits. (Search for "sharp dressed" and you'll find it.)
UPDATE: I didn't notice the little sign tacked on to the billboard; she can now accomodate eCorp prim breasts, too. (Foxbean Laboratories, pretty please?)
Sigh... I was distracted for a few minutes by an announcement on a web site, and when I returned, the Snowglobe client was well and truly frozen. Darn... and apologies to anyone who may have tried to contact me.
Maggie Bluxome's new blog A Little Sweet, A Little Naughty tells of her experiences and shows off the lovely outfits she wears. (There's a red gown from P.S. Design that is particularly beautiful. It's supposed to be latex, but it doesn't look like latex to me.) Do check it out.
New World Notes mentioned a huge painting, Comet Morigi's "Wind Observatory", that spreads out over four sims, so I had to go take a look. I will have to go back to really see it, but I am very impressed with what I've seen. Do go see it; photographs don't do it justice.
I've virtually stood in front of a David Hockney painting, so I decided I should stand in front of "Wind Observatory". One advantage of a four-sim painting is that you're unlikely to block someone else's view, so I didn't feel guilty. :)
In a scene early in Dune, Gurney Halleck teaches Paul Atreides the fallacy of mood. One can't wait for inspiration to strike. Edison and Pasteur had it right.
I think that's in part why Jonthan Coulton did the "Thing a Week", and now Lillie Yifu is posting a poem a day for a year on 2nd Sex. Be sure to check it out.
I had to try to show that not-totally-rendered jewelry to better advantage, something befitting it... and I think I managed, with some help from Windlight's "Desert Sunset" setting, one of LAP's Bollywood poses, and a lovely shop on Serena Island as background:
The other day I retrieved the latest Snowglobe SL client and went exploring. I noticed some strangeness--parts of buildings flickered in and out of existence--but what was fairly blatant and not seemingly intermittent was the way the client treated some jewelry that I couldn't pass up.
Here's a photo taken from a distance...
...and here's a close-up.
What happened to the stone in the necklace? Well, as the classic saying goes, "That's not a bug; that's a feature". From a comment on JIRA entry VWR-13868:
The large number of highly detailed sculpties has exceeded a recently added limit on the maximum number of vertices that the rendering engine will process. When the limit is exceeded, the renderer stops rendering any later vertices. The skip vertices could be from the same object or any other object in the scene.
That explains both the flickering buildings and the vanishing jewelry. It's a rather blunt instrument, as the commenter (Street Spotter, and thank you if you're reading this!) points out in the last sentence quoted, and that's unfortunate. if the choice is forced on me, I think I'd rather have some of my jewelry disappear than parts of buildings.
There's a workaround of sorts, though as a fixed setting, there will always be some scene that will force the problem:
The workaround for this problem is to reduce the number of high resolution scrulpties [sic], or to adjust one of the debug settings "renderMaxNodeSize". The default value of 4096 for renderMaxNodeSize causes some portions of [a necklace that displays the bug] to disappear when zoomed. Incresing [sic] this value above 6000 displayed all the elements of the necklace.
SL jewelers are understandably highly upset--but it's not just them. Q Linden says "Occasionally, imposing such limits will break a tiny fraction of existing content", but I question whether the content broken by this can be fairly characterized thus.
P.S. If you look at the full-size version of the first photo, it will be obvious that the stray spots on photos are back. Sigh.
I had to find the "Woman in a Box" that Cheyenne wrote about--fortunately, one of the photos had a sim and coordinates, with which it was easy to find her.
One of these days...
While sculpted prims are a major advance in SL, one can do surprising things with the original prims if one knows how.
In "The Ultimate Guide to Prim Twisting", Ayumi Cassini shows you some of those surprising things. Check it out. (And don't stop with that one post...)
Seeing more clothiers catering to prim breast users and a comment from a friend about seeing more SL residents with prim breasts makes me wonder: just how many of us are there?
I'd love it if everyone who uses prim breasts or makes them or makes clothing for them would leave a comment or email me (even if I already know you or know of you)... but this is definitely not one of the major SL blogs, so I seriously doubt that a significant sample would reply.
I'd like to know for a couple of reasons: first, it would be nice to be able to say to mainstream clothiers, "Look, there's a potential market of X people cut off from the mainstream SL fashion world" (for some large X, I hope!). I'd also like to be able to come up with a notecard or notecards for those considering or wishing to use prim breasts, listing vendors, hints, and the like.
Those clothiers who do make clothing for prim breasts--first, thank you! Second, I'm curious: what can prim breast makers do to make it easier for you to create clothes for their handiwork?
Frick, a store with skins that lean towards the fanciful, fae, and goth, is having a sale through month's end, clearing out old inventory--which means I'm doubly glad that I went right away. Otherwise, I wouldn't have found this skin, the Trickster Lyric Peach (with freckles):
I like the green eyeshadow; goes with the eyes, don't you think?
Be sure to go to the new location at the Munster Hotel, but be warned: the hotel is a very dark, moody place.
Emerald Wynn has a wonderful blog, Emerald's Eyes, and there's one entry in particular that you must read, all about love, the sense of wonder, insanely big hair and Fred the Asshole Parakeet.
Follow the link. You'll be glad you did.
The playlist... how I hate it, in the old sense of the term.
[Here we enter the "irritating story of the Good Old Days that you hear from your ancestors" mode...]
In the Good Old Days of radio, disc jockeys (actual humans with real-time control over what went out over the air!) could play just about anything, subject to FCC restrictions on language of course. You could actually call and they'd play what you requested--or perhaps, as happened to me a few times, they'd say "we've been playing that a lot; how about this instead?" The high point was in the late 60s and early 70s, but even as late as the early 90s I had the joy of hearing "O Fortuna" from Orff's setting of Carmina Burana followed by a David Sylvian track. (Alas, the station was sold after the flood of '93 and underwent the Inverse Midas transformation.)
Then came the playlist. A fixed list that was all that the station would play, until the next version of the playlist came out. For a while, you could request something--if it was on the playlist. Then the disc jockey would listen to but ignore your request. Now, more and more stations are remotely controlled, with the occasional local advertisement to trick you into thinking there's a human present. Just one more reason that American commercial music radio is the real "vast wasteland" of Newton Minow's famous phrase.
That was the old playlist, and its inventor merits a particularly incendiary portion of hell.
Fortunately, now playlists are often things under your own control, for your MP3/AAC/Ogg Vorbis/etc. player, or for your webpage via playlist.com. I've been adding to my playlist lately, and I hope you'll check it out.
I'm not totally about melancholy; I added some of the delightful songs of early Oingo Boingo (if only I could find "Capitalism" on playlist.com), Cream's ecstatic "I Feel Free", and Rasputina's "Bad Moon Rising". (Please, Rasputina, come play in Caledon. They'd love you!)
I also added what I could of Big Daddy's 50s and 60s restylings of later pop and rock music. Clever choices and arrangements, impeccably played.
But I will confess to be mostly about melancholy when it comes to music. It's a joy to put Pearls Before Swine's "Another Time" back on my playlist (and to add their "Translucent Carriages"), and don't miss Dave Mason's "Sad and Deep as You" or Heart's gems, "Dog and Butterfly" and "Dream of the Archer".
...which just goes to show that you should ignore the catsup: Carly Simon was right. "So stay right here, 'cause these are the good old days."
Why is it called the Rouge Forest when all the tree leaves are blue?
For the "tasteful nekkid [posterior] pics" meme, I played on my shyness... but to be honest, I am more daring in SL than RL; why else would I wear this in virtual public?
Some places in Real Life are more tempting than others to try to replicate. I doubt that you'll ever find an SL sim that lovingly replicates Bugtussle, Oklahoma. (OK, maybe if someone wishes to honor Carl Albert.) Paris, on the other hand...who could resist the urge to merge with the splurge... er, to recreate the City of Lights?
I've seen three Paris sims so far, and I'm sure there are more. This most recent one (to me) is by far the most impressive: Paris Eiffel.
I promise I'll have photos, but to my great dismay I find that the Snowglobe SL client seems to have a bug that caused me great trouble for a while in the past--photos have stray spots. Watch this space.
I guess I am still deluded by Maya, as they say in Hinduism. I could not stay with the ways of Zen and achieve enlightenment... so I have put away the robes and gone out looking for ballrooms.
First I came upon the Midnight Romance Ballroom, an elegant place indeed...
But then I headed for Tempura Island, and found the path to the ballroom itself so beautiful that I didn't even make it into the ballroom proper. I will have to actually enter next time.
Perhaps I can find some middle ground. Moderation in all things... but doesn't that mean moderation in moderation, so that one should go to extremes a little of the time?
The Legends of China sim was, according to Koinup, among the most photographed regions in Second Life last week. Having visited, I can see why.
To fit in with the surroundings and keep my promise to wear things I've not worn for a while, I put on the Zen monk robe I acquired late last year and set out through the beautiful landscaping and buildings of the sim.
There I came upon some gorgeous clothing.
As you know if you've read this blog for a while, I love ornate dresses. It's masochistic in a way; the only clothier accomodating prim breast users with such lovely clothing is Raven Ivanova of Smashing Prims... ah, well, "Sì dolce è'l tormento..."
Anyway, there I found the work of Stone Ryba. He does amazing traditional Chinese clothing, and if you share my love of beautifully detailed dresses you should look at it. He's a RL artist as well; CM Gallery has an interview with him that shows one of his RL paintings.
While experimenting with Snowglobe, I came across a menu choice that I initially thought said "Cheesy Bacon". (I guess I was hungry.) It actually said "Cheesy Beacon". I selected it, and waited for something to happen. Nothing did.
At least nothing did until I came upon Tao Takashi's explanation of how to see the effect. Suffice it to say that the "beacon" is the red beam of light that points at a location you've selected on the map.
P.S. Hey, maybe this will replace "cheesy phrases" as a popular search leading people to this blog.
I'm a sucker for new SL clients. I use Release Candidate clients when they come out. I've used Imprudence, and now that I've heard of it, I'll probably try the Emerald client as well. (Ixnay on Gemini; I can only find a Windows version.)
The "Snowglobe" SL client is LL's attempt to work around the ossification that the official SL client is subject to. (To use the current programming buzzword, it has a more agile development environment.) It's now available, and I think LL's decision is paying off. There are several reports of faster texture loading times.
When I first tried it out, I saw that maps were filled in more quickly, and though "Gee, that's nice." But the above-linked articles mentioned setting Advanced > Rendering > HTTP Get Textures, and that made a significant difference. I tried one of the slowest-loading places I know, the FallnAngel store, and while the objects still took their time, textures were right there. (I expect storekeepers and shoppers will especially appreciate the change. Stores necessarily have LOTS of textures to load, one per item on display.)
Lately, teleporting has been a tedious, battleship gray experience as textures and objects take a VERY long time to rez. With Snowglobe and the new setting, though, things are considerably improved. Objects still take some time--though perhaps the faster texture load means more bandwidth can be devoted to object loading--but textures load much faster. It's not the instant thing one would like, but where before, textures and objects slowly drooled into view, with Snowglobe the drool is a lot runnier. (Ick... I can't believe I typed that. Maybe I'll give breakfast a pass...)
Good job, Snowglobe people--I hope the method can be readily applied to loading objects as well as textures. (Shame on me. That's the standard user attitude. "That's nice, but can you just change this and this and this and...")
I looked through my inventory the other day, and I was reminded of just how much stuff is in there, how many outfits sit waiting for me to wear again.
It's often pointed out that SL lacks one major incentive to buy more stuff: things don't wear out; you can't spill your virtual beverage on your virtual blouse and stain it irreparably. Walking in SL doesn't wear down the heels of your virtual shoes. (And it's not aerobic, either, darn it.) Your avatar doesn't gain weight unless you go out of your way to make it happen, and even if it does, SL's paint-on clothing will still paint your shape.
All I can say is, if I'm any example, clothiers don't have anything to worry about... but I will be pulling old outfits out of the virtual closet. They're still just as pretty as they were when I bought them.
Thinking back, I am amazed that I never watched The Drew Carey Show; I'll have to fix that. I loved the Americanized Whose Line is It, Anyway? that he hosted (and still do; it's on cable on the ABC Family channel). I loved his book Dirty Jokes and Beer: Stories of the Unrefined. It was a joy to discover that he's a libertarian, and if you haven't seen The Drew Carey Project, a series of videos on reason.tv, by all means, follow the link and check them out (you'll have to do a little searching, alas, even though the page deceptively has a "Drew Carey Project archive" image with link). They're wonderful, and one of them is about Second Life and gets it. None of the sensationalist BS that is all the rest of the media seems to be able to talk about.
So, I am delighted to find out that Drew Carey has a blog, and that he still gets it, and is active in Second Life. There's a wonderful entry there about Curio Obscura, Pandora Wigglesworth's store of ingenious steampunk inventions.
Welcome, Mr. Carey; I'm delighted you're here. (And thanks to Hamlet Au for his post on New World Notes about the blog and the entry.)
They exist, at least in testing versions; you'll recall that there's a test version of Imprudence that supports them.
I'll be happy when they're official. Cheyenne has already described the strangeness of current hair using sculpted prims; they won't look right until they can be flexible like the rest of prim hair.
They have other applications as well--I wonder if you could make a realistic looking springboard with them?--but I will admit to wanting them for realistic jiggle. I am grateful for the efforts of people like Raven Ivanova of Smashing Prims, but doing it up right will require flexible sculpted prims...
...but that by itself may not be enough, I fear. Prim breast makers, and a growing number of stores that specialize in clothing that works with prim breasts (yay!), make actual tops that are tops, rather than just painted-on textures. Given the way prim breasts work, they're really one attachment, with the top attached to the prim breasts. So, question: how's that going to work with flexible sculpted prims? I hope that clothiers and prim breast makers are experimenting with this against the day that flexible sculpted prims become official.
P.S. Bless all of you out there who specialize in clothing for prim breasts, but I hope you will consider the following... pretty please?
- Some of us wish to be modest varying amounts of the time. (Some more than others.)
- Please consider expanding the set of prim breast makers you support to include Foxbean Laboratories products.
I went wandering through the Greater Caledon area (apologies, guvna, if that is not the correct term, but if I just say "Caledon" it sounds like I'm confining myself to one sim). I had the good fortune to come upon Caliber, where I found some wonderful hair. Isn't it lovely?
I also had the bittersweet experience of coming upon glorious, beautifully detailed gowns that I adore but cannot yet wear, as I have managed to procrastinate in acquiring the needed skill for their adaptation. I urge you to visit Akina Fashion Emporium to look, ooh, and aah over their work.
SL6B includes many amazing builds; more, I'm sure, than I'll be able to get to, but I will visit what I can.
I'll start with the beautiful (if a bit bright) Islam: From 6th century Arabia to 21st century virtual world. I am a calligrapher, if a bit out of practice, and the use of calligraphic type faces, both English and Arabic, is breathtaking. Posters describe various basic concepts of Islam, and photographs humanize people we tend to only hear the worst of, as if one only knew about Christians via reports on Fred Phelps.
I first visited the build early Tuesday morning, as the exhibitor, Ruuh Cassini, was putting on finishing touches. I came upon it unawares. Announcements of the vigil for the Iranians protesting the stolen election mention the recommendation that women attending wear headscarves; suffice it to say that I was rather past the point of just not wearing a headscarf. Nonetheless Mr. Cassini welcomed me, told me about the build, and answered my questions with the utmost courtesy.
When it comes to religion, as they say, I don't have a dog in that fight. I do say, however, that this build is beautiful and well worth visiting. Some pictures to give you a taste:
I guess a lot of people were curious; some of the most-visited regions listed this week in NWN were from the new "adult ghetto". I didn't realize until I got there.
There were a few people there; like me, they were wandering about, looking at the buildings.
Here's a photo of the Port of Kama City building at sunset. I think it's quite lovely, and the incongruity of it amazes me. In RL, the adult ghettos seem to be in run-down, seedy parts of town (or, if you've been on the road lately, you may have seen "adult stores" popping up in the middle of nowhere at exits on interstate highways). It's sufficiently strange that I will revisit it once it is populated just to see how it changes.
It's been a while since I indulged in pricing up a nice little computer that should play SL very well, so here we go again. I'm being a bit extravagant this time, I must admit.
Ground rules: we're upgrading, so we aren't getting monitor(s), a keyboard, mouse/trackball, or speakers. We already have those. Prices are rounded to the nearest dollar. You may be able to find these items for less, and you will be able to eventually, technology being what it is.
AMD Phenom II X2 550 Black Edition ($103 at newegg.com)
It runs at 3.1 GHz, with a generous 6 MB of L3 cache, and is rated at consuming just 80W. Dual core... but there are reports of being able to significantly overclock it and unlock the other two cores. I don't indulge in that pastime normally, but for that kind of gain, I'd be willing to try. Retail, so it has a fan and heatsink, but if you set out to overclock and unlock, you're going to want a hard core fan/heatsink.
GIGABYTE GA-MA78GM-US2H ($75 at newegg.com)
AM3 capable, though admittedly it doesn't do DDR3. Still, it does the job, is well thought of by most reviewers, is well-equipped with I/O options, including eSATA and 1394, and it has the Micro-ATX form factor, which lets us use...
APEVIA X-QPACK2-BK/500 ($100 at newegg.com)
In the old days, peripheral interfaces were separate cards that plugged into the motherboard's bus. As technology has improved, more and more stuff has come onto the motherboard--serial and parallel ports, floppy and hard drive interfaces, ethernet, keyboard and mouse, sound, and now often graphics, so that one needn't have all those slots and the motherboard can be smaller... hence the tiny computers from Shuttle and others, and hence the Micro ATX form factor, which for me provides reasonable flexibility (no sole source custom power supplies and such, and you can swap out motherboards), and no more insanely heavy cases! I wish they'd sell it with a modular power supply, to allow better airflow, but we'll stick with the 500W power supply that comes with it, so we choose...
XFX GS250XZDFC GeForce GTS 250 1GB ($150 at newegg.com)
It's a good card, and the GTS 260s want enough 12V current that the power supply that comes with the case would not suffice. We're not so hard core as to want SLI.
Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS ($100 at newegg.com)
A 1 TB, SATA 3 Gb/s hard drive, 7200 RPM and 32 MB of cache. Remember when IDE hard drive prices dropped to a dollar per gigabyte, and we were all so excited? (Never mind that they were tiny, slow, and had pitiful amounts of cache by today's standards.) Now we're hitting, and sometimes under, the dime per gigabyte level for rotating hard drive space.
G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM ($50 at newegg.com)
Dual channel, of course.
SAMSUNG 22X DVD Burner Black SATA Model SH-S223F ($25 at newegg.com)
Blu-ray is still way too expensive for my tastes.
If you add the actual prices rather than the rounded ones, before shipping it comes to $598. Like I said, I splurged a bit.
Oh... software cost? $0, of course; we're using Linux. Someday I will back up all my data and experiment with LOTS of Linux distributions to see whether any stands out as snappier for Second Life use, and report on the results here.
(I've written about this before, but a recent entry on Cheyenne's blog set me to thinking about it again. It still seems a good idea to me. For those who don't doggedly track through every single entry in this blog (not that I expect anyone to do that!), I bring it up again.)
In Second Life, clothing initially was, and mostly still is, trompe l’oeil body paint. We mostly walk around in SL like Demi Moore on that Vanity Fair cover—but she had the advantage of being in a still photo. We move, and the illusion is harder to maintain with motion and being visible from nearly every point of view.With time, couturiers added attachments. A majority of skirts now are essentially lots of strips of cloth sewn together at the waist along with “glitchpants,” pants intended to match the pattern of the strips lest the vagaries of SL physics move the strips so as to reveal too much. Bell-bottomed jeans now use attachments to get their shape.I hasten to add that I write this to point out SL’s limitations, and the genius of the clothiers of Second Life. Like the makers of furry avatars, tinies, macros, and prim breasts, their products are a tribute to their ingenuity in overcoming those limitations.We all know the distinction between custom (“bespoke” if you’re English) and prêt à porter (“ready-to-wear”) clothing. Perhaps you think of Second Life clothing as prêt à porter… but it isn’t, not really. In First Life, aside from the rare “one size fits all” items (and do they, really?), ready-to-wear clothing is on the racks and shelves in various sizes. It has to be; matter’s funny that way, and economies of scale are such that automated one-off clothing is still rare.Second Life clothing, however, is one size fits all, or more accurately, one size fits the shape the clothier used: - You can, within limits, adjust the lengths of the prims that comprise prim skirts, but that stretches or shrinks their texture, making them inconsistent with the glitchpants. If your legs are longer than the shape used to design the outfit, the glitchpants become longer than the prim skirt. Shortening glitchpants in the Appearance menu has the same effect as cutting strips off.
- Adjusting body part size stretches or shrinks the texture applied to it when you put on an outfit. Stretch it too far, it becomes a blur; in any case it may wind up inconsistent with the same texture on another piece of the outfit if the relative body part sizes don’t match their ratio on the shape the clothier used.
What can be done?The only way I can see is that clothes have to have associated scripts that can access the parameters of your shape, so that they can generate a custom version for you. To minimize overhead, it should only be done when you first put the clothing on, and afterwards only when you have fiddled with relevant body part sliders. The result will be SL clothing as it is now, so that it’s not as if everybody who sees you is slowed down any more than they are now.Since clothing would be generated by scripts, the original form wouldn’t have to be that used in clothing as it is now. For example, textures could be vector graphics, to avoid the problems of scaling raster graphics......or in some cases there wouldn’t be initial textures at all, and it would all be done in code. Alan Turing didn’t spend all his time putting computing on a solid formal ground or breaking ciphers. He also studied how the patterns on animals’ fur and shells form and how to model them mathematically. Look up images with the search string “Turing patterns.” Not only could it be usable for clothing (virtual fur coats, anyone?), it could lead to high-quality skins for furries.
There's been a lot of talk about how freebies are ruining things for SL clothiers. If you had a choice between a gown that looked OK, but it's not floor length for you like it was in the picture, etc., etc., and a gown that, when you put it on, adjusts itself precisely to your shape, which would you choose? What would that be worth to you? Second Life clothing doesn't wear out, so to get people to keep buying, clothiers, like everyone else, have to continue to top themselves, to get enough better to be worth the money. That takes ingenuity, but eventually even great ingenuity runs up against SL’s limitations. Miriel Enfield closed her store for that reason.
I've put up a JIRA request, VWR-10839, to allow the association of code with clothing. If this seems worthwhile to you, I hope you'll vote for it.
Check out "Dispatches from the Iranian cyberfront", and be sure to follow the link to information about NedaNet.
SL is so large, in the virtual geographic sense, that one can't keep track of everything; I end up looking for mention of interesting places in blogs, or invitations from friends.
(Does SL have a Rick Steves? Perhaps Vaughn Hannon of Living with the me...)
Lately, New World Notes has been putting up periodic lists of "most popular sims" as determined by where people who use Koinup are visiting (and posting photos from, presumably) the most. I've been going to those places, and they're proving quite beautiful.
Drowsy is a curious, slightly askew place, gently glowing by night. It's a place that is built to look old and worn, and I hope someone writes up its imaginary history--I'd pay to read that. Be sure to explore the woods next to the village and shops.
Empress and Hierophant (that's one sim, not two) is all hills and winding roads, and lots of sheep, some apparently with dreams of being a circus act! It too has gently aged buildings, and the sun shining down through the decaying roof of one feels almost like a cathedral.
Read "What to Do About Iran" at Second Thoughts, in particular the list of things one can do.
Sigh. I'm glad that the disappearing water that I saw, or didn't see, the first time I used the official 1.23 client appears to be a fluke. What's not a fluke, though, is the inability to hear streaming audio. A friend had invited me to hear a singer, and I was looking forward to it--but I couldn't hear it, and wound up leaving--a darned shame, that.
(And I forgot again that it would forget the custom resolution for photos saved to hard disk I'd set up, darn it...)
According to the LL blog--or rather, one of them--this past Monday, the 1.23 client having been released, the renamed "adult" continent Zindra has been opened up for a couple of weeks for the perusal of any resident with a verified account.
Presumably, those whose businesses will forced to move there will be the most interested in such inspection, but out of curiosity, I went.
Much of SL feels like a ghost town when one goes there. Of course, if one could teleport to random places on Earth, and truly chose randomly, the results would be the same, not to mention that most of the time you could drown--but this was even more so. That said, it's really quite a lovely place at the moment.
There are several large hydroelectric dams there, according to the blog entry; I saw one myself. I've led a sheltered life, but I have a hard time imagining adult activity by a dam... and actually, I had a hard time imagining it at all in those open spaces interspersed with tasteful buildings waiting for occupants.
I wandered over to my Flickr page yesterday and was astonished. It showed hundreds, as in several hundred, of views of my photos that day. I was kind of pleased--maybe a bunch of people had decided to take a look--but also a little worried--maybe one person had decided to take a lot of looks.
Well... today I went back, and apparently it was a fluke. Just twelve views yesterday, none the day before, and apparently none so far today. Curious.
UPDATE: The plot thickens. A photo I took of a friend meditating on Whimsy shows 29 views yesterday, when the summary graph says nobody viewed any of my photos. Curiouser and curiouser!
UPDATE: Poof! It's back... June 18th, 376 views. I wonder why there would be such a spike? (And if I look tomorrow, will it still be there?)
By way of NWN, via Nalates Urriah: Machinimatrix has written a collection of add-ons to the Open Source 3D package Blender to aid in the creation of sculpted prims, called JASS (Just A Sculptie Studio). Check out the video at the Machinimatrix blog entry.
Those of you afflicted with Windows can download a package that includes the latest release of Blender with the JASS scripts already set up. Everyone can grab the scripts, which want Blender 2.46 or later.
FLOSS Weekly episode 72 interviews Justin Clark-Casey, a core OpenSim developer. Give it a listen.
UPDATE: Try not to cringe when Randal claims you have to write scripts in C# now
Oh, dear.
I just heard a commercial for some kind of medication. The unfortunate part of it is the name: it's called "Aciphex". Say that out loud.
"Ask your doctor what Aciphex can do for you..."
Don't the women who take that wind up on SL Fashion Police or What the Fug?
UPDATE: SL Fashion Police seems to be down. I hope it's back soon.
OK, it's not Roccoco Fantastico, the ultimate big hair from Curio Obscura, but you could hold your head high anywhere in Texas with the hair that Vanity Hair sells. I took the plunge, and fear I will return and spend even more L$.
[Watch this space... I will have a photo as soon as possible.]
As I type this, you have under a week to visit the beautiful Miriel sim before it goes away. I hope you will; if you wish to purchase any of Miriel Enfield's excellent products, now's the time.
Hamlet Au has written about this in NWN, and you should in particular read the comments—especially that of Ms. Enfield herself, who felt she had to speak out. An excerpt:
...I quit because I was frustrated with a lot of things, especially SL's artistic limitations, my own inability to work around those to my satisfaction, and my belief that LL is not going to ever give me the features I want.
I respectfully submit that there need be no evil Linden conspiracy to get rid of user-generated content. They need only pay no attention to eliminating the limitations Ms. Enfield refers to. The best creators will go away, and residents will follow.
Tymmerie Thorne's exhibit of the "nekkid but tasteful butt pics" is now up at the Ghambt Gallery, and will be there through June 30th.
I was fortunate enough to be present for part of the Opening Reception. There was quite a variety of images from some very good photographers, and I met a great many wonderful people. Embarrassing moment: I had wandered to the second floor to look at the photos, and suddenly noticed Crap Mariner relaxing on a couch. Surprised, I blurted out "Oh, Crap!"
A moment later, blushing furiously, I assured Crap that I was honored to finally meet him (what personal pronouns do you use for a robot?). Crap was gracious, but I suspect I won't let myself live it down.
UPDATE: Do go, and get the notecard available at the gallery—it has a brief description (sigh... I should watch my choice of words) of the exhibit and a list of the URLs of the bloggers who participated, so that after you've seen the images, you have a lot of good reading ahead of you.
I finally remembered the other example!
Neil Innes is a brilliant writer and composer who's worked with such folks as the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band and Monty Python. If you've heard them, or recall The Rutles (you know, the Pre-Fab Four?), then you've heard his work.
In the context of deadpan delivery, one of Innes's songs stands out: "Randy Raquel". It's a perfect little gem of a song, a short, melancholy waltz in A minor--a love song to an inflatable doll. Like "Zaz Turned Blue", it's the totally straight performance that makes it work.
There are some live performances out on the net, but don't miss the version recorded by the Grimms, another band Innes participated in.
"Paranoia strikes deep [clap clap]
Into your (second) life it will creep [clap clap]..." --with apologies to Stephen Stills
Goodness, there's a lot of brouhaha over some images of what turns out to be a very early Linden/Big Spaceship attempt at a new UI for SL.
I've seen the images. While I'd much rather be able to try it out, and should withhold judgment until that's possible, just from those images I can't say I'm very impressed. (Flabbergasted, yes--a "Geek" menu?!) If that's how the final result turns out, all I can say is wait up, Imprudence, here I come!
Anyway, a huge stink was raised based on those images--because Tateru Nino didn't happen to take and post screenshots of building or editing objects, they, it was said, prove that LL is going to put an end to user-created content in SL! That and what MMOs other than SL allegedly said about what they're going to do. Yeah... that's the ticket....
Never mind that it's SL's distinguishing feature, the source of SL's economy, and that a Linden developer states he or she knows of no plans to, and has heard no discussions of, getting rid of user-generated content, and that he or she and many other LL personnel would quit if it happened.
From Adam Frisby's blog, news of improvements to OpenSim. (Again, it's news to me, which shows that I've not been keeping up.)
I'm highly impressed--they've made significant improvements to how OpenSim moves data across the network. We're talking a 71% reduction in packets transmitted with 100 avatars in a region, and 29% drop in CPU requirements... oh, wait, that's just for one change. Another change to allow faster garbage collection of packets cuts CPU requirements by 40%, again with 100 avatars. Let's see, (1 - .29) * (1 - .4) is a bit under .43, so the two improvements together cut CPU requirements by about 57%.
Excellent work.
Throwing caution to the winds, I've decided that yes, I will post a "nekkid but tasteful butt pic"!
I went to a nude beach, picked a lovely Windlight sky, and clicked on the virtual shutter... and here's the result:
P.S. Perhaps that's an advantage of having led a sheltered life; you can feel deliciously wicked by doing something really minor.
Marnix Malifozik is a gentleman I had the good fortune to meet one day when he was up either way too late or way too early, exploring Whimsy. If you don't read his blog, give it a look.
He's set out to start a meme, and it's caught the eye of Hamlet Au. The meme: "nekkid but tasteful butt pics". A fair number of people have helped spread the meme by posting photos of the specified sort.
So... should I do it? I'm not sure.
P.S. If Wikipedia is to be believed about this (and since it's not a controversial matter, I would tend to do so), the classic Allman Brothers album's title is not a reference to Prufrock. (When I chose the title, the question occurred to me.)
P.P.S. Perhaps Codebastard Redgrave, maximally callipygous resident of SL, will take note of the nascent meme and also participate.
Apologies to all who have IM-ed me and had the IMs fall into the bit bucket. Somewhere along the line, my preferences were changed without my knowledge so that I wasn't being emailed IMs sent while I'm not in SL. I've corrected that now, but I apologize for not having noticed earlier.
Mel Tormé was a magnificent singer and composer, but you may not know of one of his recordings unless you're a fan of the obscure and twisted.
On Was (Not Was)'s album Born to Laugh at Tornadoes, the closing track, "Zaz Turned Blue", is a gorgeously arranged ballad about a young man who was choked and who may or may not have suffered brain damage as a result. Tormé sings it beautifully and utterly straight, and that's what makes it work. Playing it for laughs would have been totally wrong.
....and I had a point, or at least another example, and I've utterly forgotten what it was. Ah, well--at the very least, do find and give a listen to "Zaz Turned Blue." It's worth your while.
UPDATE: David Was wrote a short article for NPR about how the song came to be, with a link to Tormé's wonderful performance.
From the End User blog on amazon.com: "Lenovo debuts first nVidia "Ion"-powered netbook." Be careful; the first versions won't have the Ion; you'll have to wait until later in the summer.
The remaining question: can I get a version that's not contaminated with Windows?
For a long time, when I'd look at Google Analytics, the map option was a little embarrassing, because the state with the most views was Iowa, i.e. I was viewing my own blog rather a lot. Maybe I made more typos then, or I was repeatedly checking for responses—goodness knows I'm embarrassed at the number of comments I've missed for a long time.
So, it's a great relief to look at Google Analytics and find several states showing more views than Iowa. Comes from how I was brought up, I guess: pride is a sin; don't blow your own horn, and so forth.
helios doesn't mince words, and particularly not in "The Thin Line Between Victim and Idiot"... but sometimes you have to be thankful for someone with the courage to point out the elephant in the room.
Lillie nails the real issue with permissions in SL.
(BTW: In RL, there's the Doctrine of First Sale. If I buy something and decide I don't want it any more, I can sell it to someone else, or give it away to the tenth caller or the first person I see walking down the street. Copyright doesn't preclude my doing that, as long as I haven't made any copies of the thing I'm selling or giving away.
SL could implement that--if copies are identified as such, they could all go along with the original. Why isn't that allowed in SL?)
In "The OpenSpace fiasco: six months later", Ms. Capalini writes about her experiences moving to OpenSim after suffering the OpenSpace double-cross. It's an honest account, particularly interesting because it proved to be a good solution not just for her as an individual but for the company she works for.
Women have been involved in computing from very near the beginning of the devices we'd call a modern computer.
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, understood the implications of Babbage's Analytical Engine probably better than Babbage himself. The world might be very different had she not died at a tragically early age.
For a time, alas, "computers" were the people stationed at ten-key calculators grinding through numerical calculations, and women certainly occupied many of those positions.
Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper was the first programmer of the Harvard Mark I, wrote the first compiler, and was instrumental in the design of COBOL. (COBOL is, to say the least, not highly esteemed these days, but you have to remember its historical context to realize just how much of an advance it was in its time.) The Navy needed her expertise so badly that her first two retirements each lasted all of a year.
Jean Sammet was also highly involved in the development of COBOL, but will forever be known for her monumental book comparing and analyzing the programming languages of the late 1960s and before.
If you use languages with iterators (e.g. Icon, Python, C++) or object-oriented languages that constrain inheritance in accordance with the Liskov Substitution Principle, then you have Barbara Liskov to thank.
When you crank up the optimization level on your compiles or watch both CPU cores grinding away on a parallelizable problem, you have Frances Allen to thank for her pioneering work in those fields.
OK, VLSI design isn't the same as programming, but you may know about Jeri Ellsworth, self-taught in the field, responsible for a couple of remakes of the C-64.
That's a short list, but OTOH, a list of men of similar stature wouldn't be very long either. Not all women in computing are Grace Hoppers or Frances Allens, but darned few men in computing are Alan Turings, Edsger Dijkstras, John Backuses, or Tony Hoares either.
Still more proof that there's more to Whimsy than whimsy...
Cheyenne and Sweetie are ever busy coming up with ever more amazing things to do and see, and recently I discovered a beautiful spot for meditation surrounded by greenery that I'd not seen before. It's subtly lit by night--the photo was taken a while before local sunrise.
Do pay Whimsy a visit. It is a place of wonder, whimsy, and beauty.
Alas, the new 1.23 RC client still has the problems I've seen with shadows, most notably that if you take a picture with shadows on, the sky won't show up in the preview, and essentially nothing will show up in the saved photo!
I hope that will be corrected soon.
A few days ago I wound up going in to see the doctor, and since haven't been very much up to visiting SL. I am improving, though, and hope to be on more soon.
Thanks, all of you who've wished me well; it means more to me than I can say.
Virtual World Business has a very good and insightful post about freebies, and how vendors should best deal with the issue. From reading vendors' descriptions of jerks demanding freebies or complaining about the ones they get, I can't say I'd blame anyone for not giving them out, but I think the recommendations in the post make sense.
I make a point of doing business with makers of freebies I like. To do otherwise is to shoot myself in the foot. As Milton Friedman would say, I should communicate my desire for what they make via the communications medium the market understands: money.
Do read the post, and check out the blog in general.
VWR-6467, add avatar "scale" parameter.
The sliders that affect avatar height interact in subtle ways, and it would be very nice to have a twistable knob that would simply scale one's avatar up or down, preserving all proportions.
I have some lovely luna moth wings (thank you again, Pavig!) and would love to be a fairy from time to time... but somehow, a 7'+ fairy is a bit of a stretch. I tried editing my appearance, and couldn't get the results I wanted. I didn't want to change my proportions, just my height, and there wasn't a way to do that.
So, I hope you'll consider casting a vote for VWR-6467.
So I was trying out the 1.23 RC client, with shadows enabled. I set the time to midnight, and was a little disappointed; I had a faint shadow as if from moonlight, while the much closer and brighter lantern didn't cast a shadow.
I looked off to the west at the Sun Gate just offshore.. and was amazed to see that the moon was positively huge! I took a snapshot... hmm, I don't see the moon in the preview, but I'll save it anyway... Later, I opened it up under GIMP, and it was solid black!
To show I wasn't just seeing things [um, wasn't that just what you were doing? --Ed], here are screen captures:
It's a neat effect, but... I've made a JIRA entry for it.
Now, I did have Compiz Fusion turned on. I will try with it off, and see whether that makes a difference. (BTW, that video is almost two years old. It's even better now.)
The new RC client has the code for shadows (aside from Macintosh,alas). It's been announced at New World Notes, and in the comments you can find out how to enable it.
I have a 9800 GT, and ended up dropping back a bit from all the knobs set to 11 to up the frame rate a bit. People have reported some very weird things going on with some skins, and I notice little sky colored dotted lines around the edges of the strands of my hair. (If we're lucky, those are aspects of the same bug.)
In any case, I'm going to go take some pictures, including one I've wanted to do for a long, long time. More news as it happens.
UPDATE: Those pictures will have to wait; snapshots I take with shadows activated come out solid black--and even in world, my body doesn't cast a shadow, just my attachments.
UPDATE: The "downloads" page has dropped back to a 1.22.x version of Release Candidate, so I guess they think the 1.23 needs more work--most likely because as it was it had a change that corrected a bug that many in SL, most notably skin makers, had come to depend on. That change gave rise to a HUGE outcry.
UPDATE: ...and I can see why; using the 1.23.x client, my eyelashes look like Tammy Fae Bakker did them for me.
Yet another UPDATE: they did something to get rid of the eyelash effect. (Whew!)
Soon, if not immediately, after you buy computer hardware, a version that is cheaper, more capable, or both will appear.
I moved up to a 9800 GT, and it has made Second Life much nicer... but now ATIAMD has come out with the Radeon HD 4770, with a very nice price, comparable or better performance, and consuming less power. (Leaving the question, how is it set for drivers for Linux?)
Cheyenne and Sweetie were graciously showing a new friend of mine the wonders of Whimsy, and my friend was particularly interested in Pele.
Cheyenne summoned Pele, and the volcano started to erupt... but I couldn't refrain from saying something less than respectful--and my SL client immediately died.
Clearly Pele was not at all happy with me. I will strive to come up with an appropriate penance.
