Ouch!

So I was back in the grid last night, getting my rent in at the last minute, when a dear friend IMed me, saying hello, and asking whether I wished to dance. Alas, I had to pass the chance for dancing and delightful conversation by--and ironically. it was because in RL, my left knee was complaining about my having sat too long in one position.

Unintended connotations

Am I alone in seeing the name Utherverse and thinking it's a RPG set in the world of King Arthur?

Maybe not a wizard prang, but...

I'm away from home, and SL 2.0 Beta doesn't work and play well with the computer I have access to for some reason. It crashes in pretty short order with unfortunate regularity. (Apologies to friends I've been talking to and then abruptly leaving--this is why that's happened.)

I hope that LL can find and correct the problem--I do send the dump information in.

UPDATE: I'm back home, and just crashed immediately after IMing a dear friend--I'm so sorry, Susyn! I hope this doesn't become common.

Whew!

I was unable to access my Google account for a day. Very scary, but I think it's OK now.

Well, shucks!

Two shucks:

1. The Ubuntu graphic hasn't switched to a countdown yet.
2. Fiddling with the settings in Gwyneth's article haven't done anything to make my eyes visible.
   

Graphics-related options on the 2.0 Beta

As an SL resident, you really, really want to read Gwyn's Home, Gwyneth Llewelyn's blog... and if I were smarter, I'd be keeping up with it better, and wouldn't have just discovered her March 5th post, "SL 2.0 Beta still running too slowly on your Mac? No worries!"

I don't have a Mac, but it's still well worth reading. I will be experimenting with the settings just as soon as I can. Thank you, Gwyneth!

So close...

I zoomed out on the map, picked a place at random that had a number of people present, and teleported there. I found myself in a campfire (eek!), but got out and went exploring where I ended up, a sim called Nuba. I forgot all about seeing what all the people were doing—with that many, it was probably a place I wouldn't want to go anyway—when I saw this wonderful scene, and I had to take a picture.

Just for a comparison, I should've turned off shadows and taken another picture, same POV, same time of day, same Windlight setting. I'm sure it would be far less immersive.

OK, so we have a lovely landscape photo. (Hey, if you take enough pictures, some of them have to turn out good, right?) The only problem is... if I put a person in, thanks to VWR-17063, it would turn into an instant horror show, because the subject's eyes wouldn't rez. Unfortunately, shadows (technically "deferred rendering") is officially an experimental feature in the SL 2.0 client—nearly two years after work started on it—and I fear that the JIRA entry will be marked "resolved--wontfix". Take a look at what can be done in SL with shadows (e.g. Dirk Schooner's gorgeous video of a matsuri in Hosoi Ichiba), and if you are so inclined, please vote for the JIRA entry.

β-2

Two days to go...

On March 18th, there will be reason to celebrate after St. Patrick's Day, because the beta release of Ubuntu 10.04, "Lucid Lynx", will be available. You'll know when it happens because the Ubuntu graphic in the right-hand column of the blog will change over to a countdown to the official release, scheduled for April 29th.

I've been running Alpha 3 (not, as they say, on a production machine), and it looks nice. If you're tired of brown, you'll be happy. :)

UPDATE (March 19th): the beta was held back a day to get fixes for a couple of nasty bugs in; expect the beta some time today.

Immediate Nostalgia

From back in the old days, i.e. about five weeks ago, when I had to do screen captures to get images with shadows turned on, and trees and arches and windows flickered in and out of existence as I moved my POV around, but at least I could see my eyes!

Seriously, even if you aren't interested in clothing, go to caLLie cLine's store in caLLiefornia just to admire the glorious architecture and decor. (You'll be interested in the clothing soon enough.)

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!

The plot thickens...

I would've sworn I saw it the other day, but I was on a wildly gyrating hovering dancing disk. Now I have proof. For some reason, now I can see other people's eyes, but not my own using the 2.0 Beta with shadows enabled. *scratches virtual head*

P.S. This suddenly reminded me of Jonathan Coulton's classic "Re: Your Brains"; is LL more unreasonable than the zombie coworkers of that song? :)

"How I Discovered Ubuntu" winners announced

Congratulations to the winners--though all the entries are worth reading. Check them out.

Must-read on women in open source

Do read Amy Vernon's article about groups that are doing something to encourage more women to get involved in open source software.

nvidia users, check your driver version!

WOW.com reports "If you're using an Nvidia graphics card you should check your drivers, as there is a chance the newest drivers could cause your card to overheat during World of Warcraft, the Starcraft II Beta, or even Warcraft III." They link to BlizzPlanet, which in turn refers to threads on the nVidia forums. The (Windows) driver they refer to is 196.75. The latest version available in a PPA for Ubuntu is 195.36; I am very hesitant to try it now.

P.S. How much sooner might this have been found and fixed were the nvidia driver open source!

It's not just me...

Other people have found that the 2.0 beta doesn't render eyes if shadows are turned on.

I hope this is corrected soon. I'm right on the edge of being able to take pictures with shadows enabled, without having to worry about parts of buildings or trees vanishing...

UPDATE: Oh, yes. If you have anything to add that might be of help in diagnosing the problem, please add it to VWR-17063.

Photos with Shadows

Just to show it works: I took this photo with the 2.0 beta client. The shadows are there to hide the problem of the disappearing eyes. The subject, of course, is the beautiful and talented Foxbean Liebknecht.

Now, if I could only see the eyes...

Tweaking the SL 2.0 client

Check out Viewer 2 Tweaks. Alas, they involve editing files, but it beats not having the capability at all.

Many thanks to the beautiful and talented Foxbean Liebknecht for pointing me at the page.

On even less than usual...

Hardware problems... aaargh!

"Doctor, My Eyes..."

Actually, the Jackson Browne song doesn't apply. Using the 2.0 Beta client, I can't see anyone's eyes. So what we want is It's A Beautiful Day:

Second Life 2.0 beta

I want to give it a while, so I give it a fair shake... but so far:

• It's pretty.
• PHOTOGRAPHS WORK WITH SHADOWS TURNED ON! (Next time I'll determine whether they've fixed the flickering alpha textures with shadows on bug.)
  
• "/me [predicate]" in IMs doesn't look right; it doesn't display as a contiguous sentence.
• After tens of minutes online, neither my eyes nor my prim breasts ever rezzed.
• I still don't know how to do things. That will just take time.
  

I have hopes for it... but perhaps I'll just wait for Emerald to adopt it as a base and get the familiar interface and the shadows fix (fixes, I hope!).

UPDATE: Yes, I think it's fixed the flickering alpha textures, but the dueling alpha textures problem is still there... and while my prim breasts have finally shown up, my eyes haven't.

The Joy of Convex

For a long time, I've been "clothing" my prim breasts the same way most "clothing" in SL works. Aside from attachments, people in SL walk around like those models with body paint designed to look like clothing.

Unfortunately for SL, clothing doesn't work that way. Real clothing is a separate object from one's body, and it assumes the position of least energy. In particular, it jumps over cleavage. Shirts and blouses look very, very wrong in SL—text on T-shirts is illegible and images on them distorted past recognition because they're just textures painted on the body.

Ironically, the only tops that look right in SL are those that are designed to work with prim breasts. That clothing layer can be made to take the shape that actual clothing would take. JIRA entry VWR-1080 asks that something be done about cleavage and clothing for the standard avatar, but it's languished since its proposal nearly three years ago, with no comments since June 2009.

For a long time, I've been rationalizing, because I was doing just what non-prim breast users in SL do. Now that I have prim breasts with a clothing layer, the increased verisimilitude is so much better:



I cannot thank the creators of prim breasts enough.

From a distance... a Caledon Smiley Face

If you've been in Second Life any time at all, you're familiar with the map, which gives you an aerial view of SL letting you pan and zoom. It makes it easy to find places where people (or bots... sigh) are, or that have geographical or geological features you might be interested in.

Some places are built to call attention to themselves for the map user. Most often I've seen buildings with labels or ads painted atop them. This morning, I finally noticed another approach taken in a place one might think of as staid and formal.

If you've yet to see the many lovely sims that comprise greater Caledon, I urge you to take a look. You might want to start at Caledon Victoria City. You'll arrive at a central telehub in a circular lawn surrounded by some of the many excellent stores that one can find in Caledon. One one side you'll find wagons laden with a sampling of quality freebies. You will want to take advantage of them as a thrifty and quick way to dress for the region.

Nothing struck me as unusual about the arrangement. It seemed purely utilitarian, until I took a look at the map:


Caledon Victoria City greets you on the map with a smiley face! (Come to think of it, the walkways are almost reminiscent of the old black and white TV test pattern...) Guess I'm slow on the uptake, Guv'nah...

Time for a change...

Seeing the elegant brush script on the masthead of Maggie's blog made me reconsider the handwriting font I'd chosen. I tried to find a clean, austere type face, and I like the result.

Return to Lemondrop's Forest

Maggie has such lovely photos up taken in Lemondrop's Forest that I had to visit. It's an amazing place, especially by night:


But it can be a place of wonder in the day as well, especially with a little help from Windlight...


Yes, I do like that dress a lot.

Yay Maggie!

I'm very happy that you're feeling better.

If you've not made Maggie Bluxome's acquaintance... she's a sweet, beautiful woman with impeccable fashion sense and a great talent for adapting prim breast tops to outfits (and taking wonderful pictures of the results). Take a look at her blog; you'll be glad you did.

New Emerald!

Inspired by Jan Hobson and Her Bad Review's Raccoon Song...

There's a new Emerald... YAY!
It doesn't fix shadows... yay...

UPDATE: For those of you who haven't had the pleasure:



Also, having heard the original, you should also check out "Raccoon Legs", a wonderful mashup of "The Raccoon Song" with the Art of Noise's "Legs".

Another reason not to use voice

A couple of times today I've been on and found that voice was enabled. Going over to a shell window and running "top" showed that SLVoice was eating all the CPU cycles on one processor core. I disabled voice... and SLVoice was still running. I exited the SL client... and SLVoice was still running, and now using up almost all the CPU cycles on both processor cores. kill -9, and away it went. Good riddance.

The SL client uses enough of my computer already.

Upstairs in a Chinese Room

Philosopher John Searle famously wrote against the notion of artificial intelligence describing an imaginary construction called the "Chinese Room", in which a man in the room receives cards with marks on them and, following a list of instructions, makes marks on other cards that he sends back. The marks happen to be grammatical Chinese, such that the Chinese speaker outside the room writing the cards that go into the room judges the sequence of incoming and outgoing cards to be a cogent conversation in Chinese.

Searle's claim, which I disagree with, is that the "Chinese Room" cannot be said to understand Chinese; like the magician, he misdirects your attention to the fellow in the room who is just following the instructions. You're supposed to think of him as a doofus who just reads the instructions and follows them.

The opinion I hold, the "systems reply", is that it's the room as a whole that understands Chinese. Searle's response: OK, let the guy in the room memorize the book of instructions. If he didn't understand Chinese before, he doesn't now... so how can the room as a whole understand Chinese?

While it may not have anything to do with the issue of AI, I would argue that anyone following those instructions will learn Chinese. Searle wants you to think of the instructions as having purely to do with the marks on the cards, but if the output cards are, by hypothesis, judged to be a sensible conversation in Chinese, they can't be just that. If the incoming card says in Chinese "Who won the Super Bowl in 2010?" the instruction book has to say at some point to go find that out; to do otherwise will tip off the Chinese speaker outside. There aren't enough sources of just the information one wants to be able to always get by with "go look at this table on this Chinese language web site and fill in the ideographs you see in the second column of the row that has '2010' in the first column," the kind of ignorance-preserving instructions that Searle wants you to imagine. With enough conversation going on, eventually the harried follower of instructions will realize what the marks mean, and the technical term for that is "learning written Chinese".

Why am I telling you all this? Because it occurred to me, while at some random place looking something up on what even the label "smart phone" is becoming laughably inadequate for, that eventually we're all going to be Chinese rooms, and if I'm right, we're going to learn quite a bit. I look forward to it.

UPDATE: About that title: here you go. (I'll not embed the "video", as the page has links to other songs you will want to hear.) If you're unfamiliar with the amazing music of Laura Nyro, you have a lot of good listening ahead of you.

The column vanishes...

OK, this is weird.

After restoring files, I went to look at the blog... and found that the right hand column had gone missing, aside from the Free Software Foundation link.

I tried creating a new user on my system that would have a freshly-created profile. Same thing. I upgraded to Firefox 3.6. Same thing. I tried a different computer. Ditto. I tried Opera. No change.

The only way I can see my blog in its entirety today is to use Chromium (the Linux version of Google's Chrome browser).

Time to go seek out help from Blogger.

UPDATE: It's something about the FSF link I had in that column--the referenced Javascript file has to have changed somehow. I've let them know about it, and for now, it's gone.

There is, though, a bright side to everything--it motivated me to back up my Firefox profile and restore just the important pieces of it. Now it renders the middle column nice and wide, as Chromium and Opera do.

OK, here goes nothing...

Backing up and doing a clean install of Karmic Koala. That's where my evening is going, but maybe it will clear up the weirdness with SL... and if not, at least I will have moved to ext4. (w00t!)

Dark Whimsy Sunrise

I've been bad.

I had pictures taken of Whimsy in winter, and lots of time to put them up... and I didn't. Part of it was procrastination; I hear that there are classes in how not to procrastinate, and someday I'll take them. Part of it is that this year there's been plenty of RL snow.

So, I was wandering about the now snow-free Whimsy, playing with Windlight, and I found a setting that made it look as if Sweetie had decided to experiment with removing most of the atmosphere over Whimsy. It made for a striking sunrise, and I had to take a picture.

Tell it to the...

Looking at the various announcements of new fashion releases I came across one store on Paris Island. I went there, and it was a lovely store, beautifully landscaped, but something didn't seem right...

...until I googled. The Marine Corps Recruit Depot is on Parris Island, with two "r"s. Never mind.

Avatars United

I signed up for it a while back, and it became another one of umpteen social web sites that I don't keep up with... but now, LL has bought them, and activity there has spiked with that imprimatur.

I hope that they make some improvements--how about a search feature for groups? Also, I hope they don't expect me to use their blog feature. Too many people have already gone to "real life" blog facilities like Blogger and established blogs that have reputations, links, and familiarity. I fear I've been remiss in keeping this blog fed with new material, not to mention Pectoral Virtual Fashion--no way can I do justice to yet another blog.

UPDATE: I was mistaken. There's one search that will find avatars or groups.

How did you start using Ubuntu?

Just Me, Anna has posted about a competition for International Women's Day in which women's essays on how they started using Ubuntu will be posted and votes gathered to determine a prize winner. Also, Jono Bacon will be picking one at random to also receive a prize.

I should say prize package rather than just prize, as they will include a variety of neat Ubuntu and Open Source-related items.

There's also a post on it at the Linuxers blog; do take a look. Even if you also go to Just Me, Anna, the Linuxers article is worth a look for the elegant Ubuntu Women logo and the other articles.

Wear Red Day

Finally, I'm ahead of the game, and not posting about an event after it happens.

I hope that you'll join in National Wear Red Day on February 5th, even if your first life nation isn't the US. I look forward to a day when we think of heart disease, and someday disease in general, the way we think nowadays about smallpox or polio--oh yeah, people got that a long time ago, didn't they? For now, though, heart disease is the number one killer of women. Please help with the fight against it.

Keep "Tips for Linux" and "All Things Linux" Alive

Amidst the various links to blogs from this blog is one to the blog of helios, a blog by a fellow whose passion to bring Open Source computing to disadvantaged youth in central Texas is an inspiration.

I hope you'll make a point of reading the entry "A Monument to Bruno", and consider helping to keep Bruno's simple but effective web site "Tips for Linux" and the "All Things Linux" forum on the air. (And supporting Helios's work, too.)

Darn it, it's happening again...

I'm back to having SL periodically come to a grinding creep, eating all available CPU cycles. Moving it to another screen helps for a little, and then it happens again. Do that enough, and eventually it crashes. Back to the JIRA, and apologies to my friends for dropping out of the grid unexpectedly.

UPDATE: There's a JIRA entry for what I'm seeing, VWR-16750. If you are an SL resident using Linux, please take a look and vote for it if you're having the same difficulty.

UPDATE: This morning it happened and made my system reboot. After that, I fired it up and saved the logging output... and it ran fine far longer than it took to slow down before. So perhaps something other than SL is causing a problem. Excuse me while I beat my virtual head against a virtual wall.

DOUBLE TAKE: Was I awake when I wrote that? "grinding creep" sounds like an obnoxious guy working at a coffeehouse.

Foxbean Laboratories Releases Nadine 1.5

It's now official; Foxbean Laboratories has released version 1.5 of the "Nadine" prim breasts. Details at Pectoral Virtual Fashion.

My first peek into OSGrid

I've retrieved the Hippo Viewer and taken my first steps into OSGrid. It will take some time to de-Ruth myself, but it will be interesting to see what people are doing there.

UPDATE: It will take longer than I thought. Armed with a transcribed list of my avatar shape parameters, I went back to edit my appearance, and found I couldn't change anything. :(

Copper Canyon Dance Club

Minka Pearl has created the Copper Canyon Dance Club on the Isle of Aran sim near her store. It's a beautiful place, all copper (of course) and black and deep brown. Do check it out; photos are nice, but there's nothing like being there.

Firefox 3.6

It will be available today at 9:30 a.m. Linden Time... er, Pacific Standard Time. Read and see/hear about the changes and improvements.

In the past few days, Germany and France have joined the chorus of recommendations that people move away from Internet Explorer. If you haven't, consider making the switch today.

UPDATE: If that's not enough, one day after Microsoft released a patch to a security hole in IE, another one has turned up.

UPDATE: If that's not enough, I just heard Kim Komando, of all people, say on her radio show that if you don't take any of her other security-related advice, dump Internet Explorer and switch to Firefox.

In SL, you can't taste your foot in your mouth

Sigh. I made an inaccurate statement about editing SL objects. Lesson learned; check things out for yourself.

The Return of Miss Jane

I had to go back and try out Nanami's "Miss Jane" again now that Whimsy is once again green and blooming--after a foot or so of snow and horrible cold in RL, it was a joy. Shadows are on, and I wish I remembered the Windlight setting I used.

Hello, Mumbai!

Looking around on Google Analytics, I see that we've been visited by someone from Mumbai. Hello from cold Iowa... right now, the mid-eighties (Fahrenheit) high you're having sounds awfully good.

Sooner than I thought...

nVidia is showing off tablets based on a platform it calls "Tegra 2": ARM Cortez A9 CPU and nVidia graphics. $200-$300 noises are being made. There's already a "smartbook", the Mobinnova Beam, based on such hardware.

I hope somebody's trying to build the SL client for the ARM; I want to be mobile and on the grid!

Prediction Time

It's year's end/beginning, and that means it's prediction time.

I won't hazard predictions, but like art, I know what I like, and I'm hoping that several of those that Gwyneth Llewelyn makes come true.

The shoe dropped

It finally happened. One of the photos I put in the "What the Fug?" flickr group appeared in a What the Fug? blog entry, "Top 10 SL Fashion Disasters of 2009". Prim breasts, according to the author, are the number one disaster of the year, apparently worse than bling, sexualized child avatars, and jeans so shredded as to expose not-normally-exposed areas.

There are several example photos. All show women with varying levels of decolletage (in my case, the neckline only came down to the neck), but with none of the gratuitous nudity, oiled skin, or exposed nipples and areolae of the more usual targets of venom on that sort of web site... so I guess I got the result I was expecting when I first added a couple of photos to the flickr group.

Waiting for Baudot

If you wait for newer and faster hardware, you'll wait forever... but I'm inclined to this time. It's not been very long that netbooks using the nVidia Ion chipset have been out--but now, the claim is that there will be systems using the Ion 2 in Q1 of 2010. The Ion 2 will work with the next-generation Intel Atom chips, the "Pine Trail" version.

But on the other hand, the ARM Cortex A9 netbooks will be coming. What to do, what to do?

Another dream coming true?

Another of my dreams may be coming true.

Cyanide Ember has been working on a product called BIGAVS, and from what I see it's the best giant avatar to date. I will be experimenting with it. (If you wish to look into it, head for the Royal Dragon Club and Mall.)

Many, many thanks to Susyn Stenvaag for the news and the link.

UPDATE: There's yet another project underway that looks like it will be better still. Watch this space!

Photo Contest

Over at Big Booby Girls in Second Life, Tenyene Beaumont has announced a photography contest. Check it out.

UPDATE: It's also on Tenyene's own blog, of course.

P.S. I'm a little bummed at LL; submissions have to be of snapshots uploaded directly, so that skill with Photoshop/GIMP isn't a factor... but the SL client has a bug that keeps snapshots from working with shadows enabled, so I'll have to turn it off. Darn it.

A plea to clothiers--"let me wear your coat"

So there I stood in wintry Whimsy, echoed in RL by the drifts of snow and chill winds outside the window, wearing what? A bare-shouldered ballroom gown, sheer fabric, stockings, and skirt open up to there, minimal protection against the cold.

What to wear? I rummage through inventory and find a cashmere sweater and super high-top jeans. There we go...

...or not. The sweater proves to be one of those midriff-baring numbers that might be nice for Indian summer in Florida, but in this weather?

So, to the growing number of clothiers who cater to prim breast users, I echo Roger Daltrey's plea. Make a coat for us, please. I realize there are issues--you can't just take it off; you have to switch a jacket-appropriate clothing texture on the prim breasts for a blouse-appropriate texture, and conversely for putting it on--but think of us out there in the snow, freezing our, um, extremities off! Please?

UPDATE: Tenyene has shown me an example of her adaptation of a mainstream coat, so I will give it a try. I will follow her landmark and hope that my fingers will stay flexible enough to let me do the job. :)

Back in the Shadows Again...

Now that I can run for a reasonable interval, I can do things like explore and take pictures again... and even turn shadows back on. (Thank you again, Laurana!)

Maggie Bluxome recently posted some photos of a new red latex dress that included some taken in the Unintended Water sim, and the flower-laden meadow was too lovely to pass up. That, along with a really nice Windlight full moon preset that comes with the Emerald SL client, and the beautiful and talented Foxbean Liebknecht (think of a young, blonde Anjelica Huston), made for a nice photo.



UPDATE: For those curious about the setting, and for me, because I'll forget it otherwise, it shows up in the listing under Emerald as "Mighty Moon".

Thank you, Tenyene

Today I had the pleasure of visiting EPIC and chatting with its owner, Tenyene Beaumont. She's doing some wonderful things for prim breast users, though I think the office she's set up for consultations with those who express interest in adjusting their bosom is the most wonderful.

(Simulblogging again... sigh. Got to avoid that in the future.)

UPDATE: She has a blog now!

Apologies to Malaise Maladay

Sigh. I finally noticed that in the list of blog links, I misspelled Malaise Maladay's last name. Oops.

It's fixed now. Sorry about that.

Frustratingly short stays

Aargh. Lately I've been unable to stay in SL for very long. The client dies spontaneously, or it starts to use every available CPU cycle and grind down to maybe 4 fps if I'm lucky.

Today after a crash I saw a process running SLVoice chewing up almost all the cycles, so I turned off voice, but that proved not to be the problem.

Does inventory drag performance down? I really should delete a vast number of notecards from Fashion Consolidated and Fabulously Free.

UPDATE: I've updated to the nVidia 195.30 driver, which appears to help some, but the major improvement, for which I am greatly indebted to Laurana Newell, came when I cranked down the draw distance. (Makes sense, because we're talking O(n**3) here, right?) Silly me.

A poor workman blames his tools

I'm surprised at the number of folks I know who are wonderful creators in Second Life but who have, or had, far from impressive computing facilities. You'll remember Cheyenne writing about how for some time Sweetie saw much of the virtual world in gray. Minka Pearl, a prolific creator of clothing for the well-endowed, says her computer is three years old and barely runs SL, and I have a very dear friend and creator of things in SL who I wish I could afford to send a sweet quad-core system to...

Maybe I should try to run SL on my netbook--nah, that's a logical fallacy. Darn it.

A new blog for prim breast users

Don't miss Big Booby Girls in Second Life, a very new (as I type) blog for prim breast users. Cindy Melgund intends for it to become "a place for all sorts of how-tos, news, pictures, tips, and gossip about our gang".

Thanks to Minka Pearl for posting about it!

(Simulblogged here and on Pectoral Virtual Fashion because I want as many as possible to know about it)

Another spike

Recently someone mentioned and linked to this blog on a site called the "Breast Expansion Archive". A spike in traffic here and to my flickr photos has occurred, I expect because of that mention.

To those of you who are here because of that mention, hello and welcome.

Some hope, perhaps?

I came across something in the Alphaville Herald that surprised me greatly.

Analogous to British tabloids' "Page 3 girls", the Herald has a "Post 6 Grrrl" (that's the right number of "r"s, I think). To be honest, I don't understand why anyone not a masochist would volunteer to be featured there, because the near-universal response to each such feature is a batch of insults of varying levels of viciousness.

The latest (as I type) "Post 6 Grrrl", Alessandra Narayan, is a reporter at the Herald, and her appearance was followed by the usual sort of comments, but... what surprised me was a comment of a sort one doesn't often see in big name blogs:

You want to see a really beautiful big busted avatar? Look up Minka Pearl. She is drop dead pretty. This one is trying hard but, Oh my, she is not a representation of the wonderful looks that have been achieved lately in the big busty girl world. But Aless has every right to look the way she wants.

Admittedly, the commenter is not praising Ms. Narayan, who has a nice figure that I'd say is generously proportioned to match her prim breasts, but--to see someone in as widely-read a blog as the Herald refer to any well-endowed avatar as "really beautiful" and "drop dead pretty" is, I'd say, a significant advance.

I hasten to add that I don't mean to discount the lovely compliments I've received in comments here. It's just that prim breast users are, in the mainstream of SL, typically mocked and derided. One can't make much from a sample size of one, but one can hope.

UPDATE: Shame on me for not including a link to Minka's blog, where she models and advertises her limited edition clothing for the well-endowed.

TMA: A Jewish Neighborhood in Second Life

Many times, many men
Took our homes, took our lives,
Kings they were, gone they are—we're still here
—"When Messiah Comes", Sheldon Harnick

As and where I type we're about halfway through the first day of Hanukkah (or whatever transliteration you prefer), so I headed for search and looked for Hanukkah... and I had the joy of discovering The Jewish Store and TMA: A Jewish Neighborhood in Second Life. Many thanks to Beth Odets, without whom these magical places probably wouldn't be.

So I give you a nosh, a little taste, of what I saw. Just to make doubly sure you go, I will say that there's a hilarious cartoon hanging in the air just off the edge of the photo above.

Thank you!

My sincere thanks to Mr. Adzer Thorne, a very courteous and knowledgeable gentleman I met this morning as he was about to give a father and son a ride on a lovely locomotive. I greatly appreciate your kindness and your honesty.

NixiePixel

If you have considered trying Linux, or even wondered what it is like, I cannot recommend too highly reading NixiePixel's blog entry with the admittedly somewhat suggestive title "Taking My Linux Virginity". Go for the blog entry, stay for the rest of the blog and for her videos.

UPDATE: She's in the running for Sexiest Geek of 2009. (And even if you don't vote for her, please go vote down Olivia Munn, whose sole claim to geek fame is appearing in assorted clothing on the putrid obscenity that is Attack of the Show.)

post in Pectoral Virtual Fashion

I was undecided about where to post "On Modesty", but decided on the sister blog. I hope you'll read it and comment.

Official Forced Perspective

If you've read my blog, you know that, until such time as I can have a giantess avatar, I have a thing for taking forced perspective pictures to have at least a little bit of the experience.

Imagine my surprise when I happened to head for the Second Life web site and found this:


Very nice work, and I feel kind of justified in a strange way. I should go take some more forced perspective pictures, though I don't know whether I'll ever do one better than this one:


P.S. Shadows make forced perspective photos a lot harder; not having a shadow while everything else does wrecks verisimilitude.

About that dress...

It's Ingenue's "Christmas Girl". I am looking around at Ingenue as I type, and while I don't see it, the "Tracy" outfit and "Birthday Girl" have skirts of similar design. They look wonderful, and I feel wonderful when I wear it--especially with shadows enabled.

Even if you're not as taken with this particular skirt as I am, Ingenue has lovely vintage fashions, and is well worth exploring. (Now to find some hairdos of that time...)

Happy Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving finds me, as it does each year, with RL family. I hope that you all are with loved ones, in whichever life, and that you have much to be thankful for.

Good Ubuntu News Blog

I hope that I've encouraged some of you to give Linux a try. If you have, and chose the Ubuntu Linux distribution, or if you use Ubuntu without or despite my going on about Linux, take a look at the OMG! UBUNTU! blog.

Serious Shadows

Yesterday I didn't get what I was really after. Actually, I'm glad of that, because Paris 1900 was gorgeous with the "bergamot & rosemary" sky, but I really wanted to show off how wonderfully shadows fall on that dress. I was trying for something a little more like this, taken in Roma Centro:


The full effect would require machinima.

Windlight and shadows in Paris

I vacillate between shuddering and laughing when I go back to the first pictures I took in Second Life. Shuddering at my composition and technique, which haven't really advanced much in three and a fraction years, I fear, but also laughing... or rather, smiling as one does looking at a child's scrawled first efforts at art.

I went back to Paris 1900, armed with shadows and with the amazingly large toolkit of Windlight settings that come with the Emerald SL client. In the context, I promptly fell in love with the setting labeled "[EUPHORIA] Bergamot and Rosemary", and here's what I came up with:

Chrome/Chromium

If you've not tried Google's Chrome web browser or the open source version, Chromium, you should. It's blindingly fast, and much as I like Firefox, I will give Chromium a serious workout soon--just use it for a few days or a week. Who knows? I may switch. (Finding an adblock extension for it closed the deal; it's a sine qua non.)

I noticed one thing just now that is a bit odd, but practically is a point in Chromium's favor: it doesn't give the empty columns at the right and left of this blog nearly as much space as Firefox does. (It seems a little weird that they should differ, but perhaps that's something that web standards don't totally specify.) That means images, especially the masthead, are much larger. Text is the same size, but a wider column means less scrolling, and that one can set text ragged right and have it look a little nicer.

UPDATE: There's more to it than that. I tried viewing the blog on a test account on my computer, and it looks just like it does with Chromium, so something about the files under ~/.mozilla/firefox/mumble.whatever is making it display differently--but what?

Er, what was that settting again?

One of the nice features of the Emerald SL client is that it has a LOT of Windlight presets. Admittedly, many of them would be irritating to have on all the time, but they make for some striking photographs:


So everybody's happy... there's no way one can mess this up, right? Wrong. Remember how there's a problem with shadows enabled that makes snapshots come out black, so you have to use screenshots? Well, I took my screenshot, went on my way, and then opened it up in GIMP to crop the UI and stuff out of the picture--and I noticed that at the instant the screenshot capture happened, I had the mouse cursor sitting near the portion of the UI that shows one's location, and a little popup explaining that was smack dab in the middle of the image.

Go back to last location... uh, which Windlight setting was that again? Maybe this one... no. Maybe... no. Eek! So, I hope that the GIMPery to hide the popup isn't too obvious.

Time to suggest that metadata (camera location and direction it's looking, and oh, I don't know... Windlight settings?) be stored with snapshots, and to check up on the JIRA entry for snapshots and shadows.

An interesting aspect of a harrowing tale

New World Notes has a post pointing people at this harrowing story of several soul-destroying months Sasy Scarborough spent gathering evidence of widespread illegitimate copying of SL fashions, hair, skin, and so on.

It's an emotionally draining read, but I urge you to read it.

One curious part:

You see Emerald viewer gave us this incredible function, the ability to see last owner on items in edit, yes that means that now not only were you able to see who copybotted it, but also could see who had it in their hot little hands last, and not the original , no the actual stolen item…. yes yes little thief enablers the trail to your door just swung wide open.

Gee, does that sound like something that evil opensource technocommunist wikinista [imagine endless ignorant incoherence inserted here]... would do?

Landmarks: Threat or Menace?

So there is, or perhaps there was, a brouhaha over landmarks, and whether they'll go away in favor of something else. Frankly, I wouldn't mind if there were something else, at least in addition to the current landmarks.

Why? As it stands, a landmark has two things: something you really don't care about (sim, x, y, z), and something you do care about (the thing that you want to be able to get to again, or rather some text and an image that describe it). Once you create that landmark, it can become obsolete at any time, because the thing you care about can be moved. Businesses move. People move, or more accurately, their homes do.

When that happens, if you're lucky, someone will give you a new landmark that you can keep--and then you should find and delete the original, assuming you remember to. If you neglect that task, I hope you have your inventory displayed in chronological order or can remember which is the current landmark.

Of course, often those landmark updates will be embedded in a group notice. If you get many of those, you may fall prey to a common mistake: continuing a sequence of clicks on the same response once too often ("OK, OK, OK, OK... oh !#$%@!")... and isn't there a limit on how many pending notices you can have?

Better to have a landmark that doesn't directly contain the (sim, x, y, z) values, but instead points at one that does. (For that matter, the pointed-at landmark could have the image and text, too, so all the new "landmark" need have is the object ID of the real landmark. After all, maybe the store owner remodeled as well as relocated.) Then it's up to the store owner or whoever gave it out to update the single pointed-at landmark, and everyone having a "landmark" that points to it has up-to-date information without having to catch a message, save a new landmark, and delete the old one.

I'd also like an SL client that takes action to let me avoid redundant landmarks ("You already have a landmark that refers to a spot just X meters away from there--do you really want to clutter your inventory by saving this one, too?") and helps me organize landmarks ("Do you want this saved in an existing or new subfolder of Landmarks, or just in Landmarks?"). It's as easy to lose track of landmarks as it is to lose track of one's web browser bookmarks; landmarks have no particular advantage in that respect.

(Let's not get started on the way people abuse Picks, OK? Some other mechanism ought to be in place for non-landmark items, be they your Significant Other, BFF, what you consider acceptable behavior in roleplay, your store's policy on refunds, gifts, etc., ad infinitum.)

Home Again

I've been wearing some lovely clothing that supports various brands of prim breast, and it's been a pleasure expanding my fashion horizons... but today I went back to Foxbean Laboratories' "Nadine" prim breasts, and it was like coming home. I just love their shape.

As time goes on, I'll have to stray again, but I will always return.

In support of Emerald

There's been a recent brouhaha about third-party SL clients (aka "viewers"), including a strident and, IMHO, at the very least totally misguided call for banning all third-party viewers.

Lately I've been experimenting with third-party clients, but I've settled on Emerald. I hasten to state that I'm not a griefer, and I spend far more L$ than I probably should on clothing and the like, because I want people who do work I appreciate to keep doing it.

So... as a personal statement of support for the Emerald SL client and third-party clients in general, I will buy some emerald jewelry and wear it constantly in SL until the issue is settled--rationally, I hope. I hope you will join me in this quiet protest.

P.S. The vendor labels the eyes as "emerald", too. :)

Thank you, Mesha

The beautiful and talented Mesha Sewell helped me with editing the top for "Miss Jane". Depending on prim breast size, it can require some adjustment.

Once again, thank you, Mesha.

Le Ubuntu Nouveau est Arrivé

Ubuntu 9.10, aka "Karmic Koala", is officially released.

If you've not tried Linux before, it's a good time to consider it. Karmic Koala boots faster (and unlike Windows, doesn't log you in and then grind away unusably as it loads up a bunch of applications so that later, if you happen to use them, they look faster). It has a new, faster file system, ext4. (Tired of having to defragment your hard drive? You don't have to under Linux.) Also new is Ubuntu One, your own personal cloud.

massively multiprogrammed MMORPGs?

A company called Tilera has announced that it will have samples of a 36-core x86 family processor in the fourth quarter of 2010, and 64- and 100-core versions in the first half of 2011. Details at TG Daily.

It will be interesting to see how implementations of MMORPGs change with that kind of hardware.

Speaking of the SL blogs...

A couple of other things that I think would be good ideas:

• No "sig files" or their moral equivalents. If you want to advertise, do it elsewhere, and text attached to every single post from a given person is a waste of bandwidth.
  
• No alts. The "sockpuppet" phenomenon is well known.
  

I know better than to do that again...

I've turned off the "email me responses" for the SL blogs, and deleted the hundreds of emails that resulted from having it on. The responses aren't threaded, so it's a major pain to follow, and the usual suspect has driven the S/N ratio down to zero.

Ubuntu 9.10 Release Candidate is out

It's less than a week until the official release, but the Ubuntu 9.10 release candidate is available for download.

In related news:

• New South Wales Police: Don't use Windows for Internet banking
• Avoid Windows Malware: Bank on a Live CD

UPDATE: I upgraded, with little trouble. I will have to look into switching the hard disk over to an ext4 file system, but that shouldn't be difficult.

The Jiggle Controversy

Hamlet Au writes about the new Emerald SL client's ability to enable simulation of physics for the female avatar shape's breasts. This has evidently caused a sharp spike in downloads and some controversy; some residents object to this being done without their consent. The makers of Emerald are looking into how best to deal with realism versus the understandable wish to control one's own appearance.

This does make me wonder about something, though. If avatar rendering is done locally, then the shape parameters are sent to the client--so a client could, in theory, modify those as the user wishes along the way, giving the user broad control over how you look to him or her. There's the obvious stereotype: if the avatar shape is female, set leg length to 100, set waist to 0, set breast size to 100, etc... the "I don't want to see [commonly disapproved avatar shape setting]" modification, and so on.

But what if you could say "if it's Jane Doe, then..."? Remember the controversy raised by magazines Photoshopping news images, like the OJ Simpson mug shot? This would take it to the next level, and would be subject to various kinds of abuse with photos or machinima taken with one, some, or all avatar shapes modified from the client's point of view.

I'm not sure what I think about this, and I have to think that someone has thought of this before. For that matter, I don't know whether the premise is really true, so this may be a pointless Gedankenexperiment. I still wonder, though.

Just ten days left!

A lovely pre-Halloween gift: Ubuntu 9.10, aka Karmic Koala. I'm looking forward to installing it.

Silly me...

Switching templates in blogger means you have to replace all the little inserts for scripts for things like Google Analytics. I noticed that very quickly back when I did that... but forgot that I'd inserted a script for MyBlogLog as well as for Google Analytics. It's back now. [blush]

Failed experiment

Sigh. I should have thought about it more carefully.

Had I done it with SL Fashion Police, I'd say "I turned myself in." What I actually did was submit two self-portraits to the "What the Fug?" flickr group. The question: what would they do with photos of someone with prim breasts but dressed modestly, no oiled skin, no nudity or exposed areolae?

And I blew it. Clearly I couldn't submit photos of someone else, but for that kind of blog, printing self-submitted photos would set a bad precedent.

Sorry. I should have asked someone else to submit a photo of me.

Le sim engloutié

I had a bizarre experience.

I'd not completed a tour of Northstar Mall to find all the prim breast vendors there, and I'd just heard that Imprudence 1.2.0 Beta 2 was out, so I fired it up. All I could see of myself was the swirling plasma of the anti-Ruth, but surely that would change soon. Map, "Northstar", Teleport...

...into blackness. I stumbled around, hoping I wasn't bumping into anyone. Was it something to do with shadows? I turned off "renderdeferred" and things cleared up a little; I could sort of see, though I still wasn't rezzed. I walked from the Northstar telehub toward the mall, that eventually drifted into dim view.

The glowing swirl of my non-rezzed self and the glow of some signs inside were the only light sources. Oh, yes! I searched through inventory for an obnoxiously bright facelight I'd somehow accumulated. Right click, Wear... and a bit more of my surroundings came into view.

I looked around a bit, and with a sudden inspiration zoomed my camera's point of view back, back... and suddenly I found myself seeing moonlight playing on the waves.

Northstar was underwater!

I had a sudden urge to find someone, anyone nearby to ask: was it just me? Maybe it was the client. I let Maggie, with whom I was chatting via IM, know I'd be relogging, and exited. Out, and over to the Emerald viewer. Last location... and there I was, still underwater, and, as I'd been all through the last session, unrezzed.

There was someone nearby... away--darn it. I headed back out to the area around the Northstar telehub, where you can find residents chatting darn near 24/7 in my experience. "Excuse me, but are we underwater?"

The kind person I'd asked sent down a rope of sanity to grab where a mere thread had been before. Oh, yes--it's for Halloween.

Whew!

I didn't think I'd get much done, so I headed homeward. Over half an hour, and I was still a swirling plasma. Out and back again, this time with the new Snowglobe, and finally I came into view. The half-hour of madness had taken its toll, though, and I said my goodbyes via IM and headed to bed.

Northstar Mall, dimly visible in the depths.

An Experiment

If you frequent SL Fashion Police or What the Fug?, then you know that a frequent subject of their cheerful vitriol are those who use prim breasts. What I'm wondering is this: do they consider them inherently bad?

I've done something as an experiment; we'll see what happens.

Now what?

Susyn Stenvaag just asked me a very good question indeed: I've joined the group; now what?

I don't have an answer right now. I was hoping, and still hope, for sheer force of numbers to show that there's a market for prim breast versions of mainstream SL fashion.

So, what to do? Maybe a T-shirt, or a piece of jewelry to wear to show you support the cause? (Not a ribbon--are there any colors that aren't taken?) A petition? Asking you to help spread the word?

I have a free weekend for once (yay!) and so I will put together that notecard--I will have the time to make it short, a la Pascal.

I'd greatly appreciate suggestions.

Birth of a Blog

All right. I've been doing a so-so job of it off and on, but it's time to start what will be so a fashion blog...

"Keeping Abreast of Fashion" turned up way too many Google hits; too obvious, and I didn't want to have to worry about whether it's kosher to insert "SL" to try to make it unique. So I decided on "Pectoral Virtual Fashion." Who knows? Perhaps other virtual worlds will cater to those of us who, in SL, are driven to prim breasts.

My intent is to have a place to which you can go to find out about every maker of prim breasts and/or outfits that go with them, with sim and coordinates, SLURLs when it makes sense to provide them, and links to XStreet SL when they're available.

If you make prim breasts or outfits to go with prim breasts, please email me with information at mel_yeuxdoux@yahoo.com. I need your help to keep up to date.

UPDATE: It's up now: Pectoral Virtual Fashion

Karmic Karmic Karmic Karmic Karmic Koala...

I'm typing this while running the Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala beta Live CD (so I can check it out without touching the hard drive--OK, Live CDs will look for swap partitions and use them, so I should technically say "without touching any files on the hard drive".) It's definitely beta; a stray GNOME application or two died for some reason, though it didn't affect my ability to use the system.

It's pretty; the default theme is more orange than brown, and it booted quickly, even though it was having to load from a CD rather than a hard drive.

You'll notice that the countdown has started again; soon it will be officially released. Give it a try.

Song with No Words (Tree with No Leaves)

Looking for places to go?

Check out the gorgeous blog Caminante de Sueños (Walker of Dreams, though that's a bit stilted for English; "Dreamwalker" would be more idiomatic). Dorka Barzane features a sim in each entry--no words, just beautiful, eloquent photos and a SLURL. Even if you somehow never go to any of the places featured, you should see the blog just for the photos.

P.S. The title is that of a track from David Crosby's underrated album If I Could Only Remember My Name. I've added it and a couple of other tracks from the album to my playlist; give them a listen.

Taking the AO plunge

I have various animations and several copies of the Zhao AO, but I've yet to seriously set up an animation overrider.

I just need to set aside time to pick the animations I want--natural looking (I've seen some that cycle through poses that I can't imagine anyone assuming!), modest, and of course nothing that gets in the way of prim breasts.

Time to search and see what others have found.

UPDATE: Do read the comments; Danball Tureaud mentions a typing animation that stays safely above prim breasts.

Fizzle from the Past

Remember when we thought that this was a beautiful sunset in SL?

I went back, and while the site itself is not as pretty; it's cluttered with signs and boxes sitting around on the ground, here's a photo (OK, a screen capture--shadows still break snapshots):


OK, it's far from the best one can do with Windlight, but it beats the first image in that respect (and others; check out the trees). I explored the area a bit, and with the "Maroon" Windlight setting, got this:

Nice, eh?

Speaking of Maggie...

...she kindly let me see her abode. It is a wonder, as is the urban landscape in which it is set. I hope that she'll write about it with appropriate photos.

Maggie Bluxome on the dilemma of the well-endowed in SL

The lovely and talented Maggie Bluxome comments on the dilemma of the well-endowed woman in SL (in some ways like the RL version) in "Prim Breasts: Trials and Tribulations" in her blog.

I fear she gives me too much credit and herself not enough, but please do read it.

Elegance at Small Expense

I went to look at a dress at the Fabulously Free in SL HQ, and after checking it out I went out the back to look around. It was a lovely evening, with a full moon (as if there were another kind in SL...) rising over the water, and it suddenly struck me how different SL is from RL in that respect.

Imagine you're at a store for inexpensive things in RL; that's likely to be a "consignment store" or a Goodwill. How likely is it to be adjoined by elegant architecture and overlook a lovely seascape? Not very. Here in SL, though...

Diva

While wandering about, I came upon the lovely Diva sim. It's an island with beautiful trees and buildings and.... giant hummingbirds?!


Cheyenne... we won't get any of these on Whimsy, will we? (whimper...)

(OK...must not think about hummingbirds...)

I saw Luki Davi, the lady to thank for all this beauty (including the items she sells in her store on the island)... she was understandably busy, so I left a thank-you IM and went on my way...


Alas, the lovely buildings and scenery were impeded by something I first noticed when I ran across the "feature" of the arbitrary limit on the number of vertices the client will render at any one time. The limit is modifiable, but I more than doubled it, to no effect. So, move your POV, and things pop into and out of sight. Here's an example:



You can see how pieces of building appear and disappear as we move the point of view. I will drop back to the RC or the release client and try to narrow things down.

UPDATE: It's something to do with, or at least provoked by, having shadows turned on. I see it in Snowglobe and the Emerald client.

It's back! The Second Annual Boobie Ball

I don't use colloquial terms for body parts in general, and breasts in particular. Maybe it's how I was brought up.

But, as they say on Airplane!, that's not important right now. What is important is that we've yet to defeat breast cancer, and so I urge you to participate in Second Life's Second Annual Boobie Ball. I'm sorry to say that RL events make it unlikely that I can attend (darn it; I could wear that Cretan outfit outside the Minoan Empire!), but the Balls are but a part of the 2009 Blogger Boobie-Thon.

For still more info, take a look at this entry (among others) on Eva Bellambi's blog, The Realm of the Red Rose.

Speaking of prim breasts...

...does anyone know who was the first to make them in SL?

I mostly remember whose I first came across: the Rhenworks shirt, made by a sweet vixen whose name I am abjectly sorry to say escapes me right now; Kayi Laa's breasts, by far the most advanced of their time; Ittindi Gavaskar's fine work. But I have no idea who was the first. I'd like to know so I can appropriately honor him or her.

Of course, nowadays, there are many makers of prim breasts; we really do have it far easier now. I'm a newcomer compared to many, and I'm sure that there are many stories of way back when a lot of women made their very own prim breasts--and some still do. I have huge respect for them.

Gorgeous Renaissance reproduction

If historical clothing interests you, by all means head to Italia Vire and check out the amazing SL recreation of a dress from a painting of Anne of Cleves.