belated celebration: Stand Tall Week

I hope that, unlike me, you didn't miss Stand Tall Week, "an initiative to encourage women to embrace their height." Don't slouch... stand tall!

Less than a week...

...until Ubuntu 12.04 aka "Precise Pangolin" is officially released, if all goes according to plan. Shame on me. I haven't paid attention to the countdown graphic.

Looking forward to it.

UPDATE: Took a chance and upgraded. Happily, the Wacom driver appears to be fixed!

A Very Merry Unbirthday?

Take a look at this SL blog entry. A quote:

This year we will focus the spotlight on community events.  No one throws a better event or party than the Second Life community! If you’re having an event to celebrate Second Life turning nine, we want to know about it! 

Submit your event or party information to the Second Life Destination Guide by emailing editor@lindenlab.com with the subject line “SL9B Event.”

Outstanding by its absence: any creation of SL9B sims for builds as in past birthdays, or any mention of effort on LL's part aside from their possible selection of photos of community events shared on Facebook (need we mention the issues about Facebook and SL avatars?) as the "Pic of the Day".

I have to admit that my immediate reaction is: if they don't care, why should I? I will do my best to fight it off.

UPDATE: Some folks do seem to be coming around, judging by the comments on Tateru Nino's blog post on the subject.

Must-read from Penny Patton

i'm not sure whether there will be more parts of the "Beautiful SL" set of articles on Penny Patton's Digital Pasture blog. I hope there will. In any case, you really should read the two parts that are there now.

In it, she writes about why parts of SL, notably the infohubs, welcome areas, and other public works areas, are not beautiful and what can be done to fix that.  Whether or not one is of the "Second Life is not a game" persuasion--funny how that's reminiscent of the FIAWOL/FIJAGDH division in SF fandom--people have very high expectations of graphics quality set by games, and Second Life had better at least come close (which it can, as Penny shows) if it's going to survive.

I want it to be a proud thing to be an SL resident, but let's try to keep it from being lonely, please.

What the Heck is Kerbango, Anyway?

Like Billy Joel, I don't know why I go to extremes... but I'm off on another quest, namely one for an insanely long prim tongue. Not split, not pierced--just very long. Not reptilian, either. A long human tongue.

I found one resizable tongue, but it's only changeable with a script that grows it uniformly by a given percentage. I need to stretch it, so I'll get another one that I think will let me do so.

What can I say? I'm being silly again. Or still.

Foot, Meet Bullet: The Disadvantages of DRM

Read "Another Reason Why DRM is Bad -- for Publishers" at Techdirt.

Thank you, Kaseido

I wish to echo Maggie's sentiment. I'm honored to be mentioned in Kaseido Quandry's work on the Second Life prim breast community. Thank you!

Most of all, I'm glad that there are people who are interested in Second Life as it really is, and overjoyed at the notion that such people will be letting others know what they find.  

If you have not been keeping up with The Spathic Files, I think you'll find them very interesting. Kaseido has asked for feedback from the prim breast community on a first draft of an article.

More Mesh Hair

If, as I hope, you read the comments on posts here, you'll know that Eira Kalil of Tiny Things pointed me in the direction of Wasabi Pills hair as another source of mesh hair. Thank you very much, Eira. There I found some lovely hair that gave me a serious 60s flashback.

I like its asymmetry and the stray unruly strands that add realism (the sort that we may wish we could do without when trying to arrange our hair in RL, but in SL are welcome refinements). Alas, one does have to be selective (though won't mesh hair that falls on the front of the torso intersect even stock avatars when they turn their heads?), but when it does work, it works beautifully.

(Note to self: antialiasing is your friend. sigh...)

The Argument Against Achievement Systems

If you read New World Notes, one of the things you'll see Hamlet Au suggest as a way to improve Second Life (aside from point-and-click avatar movement :))  is some kind of achievement or ranking system (do read the followup, too; the link to Kanomi Pikajuna's parody of the idea in the article is now broken, but you can see it here).

The curious thing is that game makers are questioning the worth of achievement systems. In that regard, I highly recommend Chris Hecker's "Achievements Considered Harmful?" (One interesting datum Mr. Hecker mentions: "extrinsic motivations", e.g. achievement/ranking systems, tend to kill off intrinsic motivations more in women than in men--and Second Life, it is said, has a larger proportion of its user base that are (actually) women than other virtual worlds, so would an achievement system actually hurt Second Life, I wonder?)

I can't help thinking of a possibly analogous situation someone pointed out to me long ago. Back in the days when newsgroups flourished, there was one such newsgroup for Renaissance fairs, alt.fairs.renaissance. The folks who posted there typically signed their posts with their (persona's) name followed by an extensive list of self-assigned titles: "Joseph of Blowshire, Keeper of the Duke's Spittoons, Chief Cat-Herder of the Bloviate Empire, Lord High Pooh-Bah of Hand-kissing Certification..." I'm sure that it was in jest, but how different from the awards and orders in the Society for Creative Anachronism! In the SCA, one scrupulously avoids the presumption of assuming a title; such things are earned by right of arms, excellence in the arts and sciences, or service to the realm. They actually mean something. Game achievement systems, IMHO, don't.

Mesh hair

While we wait for the issues around mesh avatars and mesh clothing to be solved, you might want to give mesh hair a look.

There are a lot fewer relevant head sliders--your nose and mouth don't affect how hair fits, and does anyone really make his or her skull skew to one side or the other?--so the combinatorial explosion clothiers and avatar makers face doesn't bite quite as hard. I trundled over to Magika (one of the places Busted magazine recommends on its page for potential models) and looked around... and was blown away.

Mesh hair typically comes with a number of sizes in the package so you can pick one that works for you. As with anything else, try the demo first, to make sure you'll be happy with what you buy. Large worked fine for me.

Now, there is one thing that I wish for: if you look at mesh hair, you will find a lot of it has hair that falls forward over one's chest. That leads to obvious issues for those of us who use breast attachments. I hope that hair makers will take us into consideration and offer versions that accommodate us. For now, though, I'm very happy with the mesh hair that I can use.

The April 2012 Busted is out!

What can I say but that the photography is breathtaking, and Maggie's "Art of Editing" article is not to be missed. Get it in world or via the web.

Creative Response

Be sure to read this post from jessamyn Smith's blog.

It turns out that there's a joke schema:

1. Straight man says something that can, in some way, be interpreted as risqué.
2. Alleged comic responds with "That's what she said" with eh-eh-nudge-nudge intonation or facial expression.

Maybe it's funny the first aleph-null times, but someone where Ms. Smith works created an IRC bot that monitors text and looks for situations that might benefit from a "TWSS", and sends it out in response.

I love what Ms. Smith did in response--it's a very geekish thing to do.

UPDATE: Ouch! The bot sends out quotes from famous women in response. I got that very wrong, and I apologize to everyone, Ms. Smith especially!

Not Now

(I'm showing my age. That title makes Harry Chapin's harrowing song "Sniper" go through my head--but is that important? Not now...)

I don't think it's going to be any time soon that well-endowed mesh avatars (or any of a bunch of other mesh avatars) will work with sliders such as breast size, based on experimentation. The slider behavior is, I think, too tied to the specifics of the stock avatar and the limits its designer(s) imposed on it. The way the avatar is modified for different non-skeletal slider settings will have to be a function of the avatar.

To have a chance of getting what we want, we have to ask for something that has what we want as a subset and will benefit a lot of people. How many mesh avatar users are out there? Unfortunately, limitations on such avatars will mean the answer is "fewer than there might be", which in turn means fewer who would benefit from a proposed change, the usual loop that works against change.

UPDATE: I went ahead and asked about this issue and another in passing on the SL Forums (and thanks to the moderator who moved it to the appropriate forum!), and the responses have started. I am glad that people who know a lot more about these issues than I do are commenting. The thread is over in the mesh forum.

Back to Abnormal

Alas, the current Niran's viewer didn't seem to activate the mesh deformer alpha code, so I went back to my gangly, pale-skinned non-mesh avatar self. I will give Exodus a shot tonight or tomorrow, and see what happens to the mesh avatar when I twist the non-skeletal knobs (not to mention that I will get a pale skin suitable for the mesh avatar as well). Eventually we'll get that darned chrysalis open... though we'll have to see whether there will be a wide selection of clothing.

(Despite that issue, which isn't crucial at the moment, and despite Niran's viewer still having the problem of weird half-planes of differing intensity on high-res photos, I have to say I'm very impressed with Niran's client's performance, even with a bunch of graphics knobs cranked. Give it a try.)

I have to admit to feeling some relief. Eventually I will have a mesh avatar that is "an engine fit for my proceeding", to borrow a phrase from Ordinal Malaprop's wonderful, though sadly now inactive, blog. Until then, though, I'll feel a little weird with it. That's just me, though; to me an avatar isn't like a suit to put on or take off. Your mileage may vary, and I am in awe of the work of mesh avatar makers.

Puzzling error message

I was trying to visit a sim this morning. I entered its name as my signon destination and logged in... only to find that the login failed, with a message saying something like "we don't understand why, but your login failed". I double checked my password--it was fine. Finally I gave up, told the client to take me home, and poof--there I was.

When I tried to teleport to the sim, I found the cause. The sim is premium users only.

I suspect this is a new situation, and clients either aren't written to recognize the situation or whatever the results are of trying to sign on to a premium-only sim when you aren't premium can't be distinguished from some other failure case. I hope that's corrected eventually, but should this happen to you, I hope my example will save you some bother.

Yay tinies!

The Tinies of Raglan Shire have made their funding goal! (That said, their Kickstarter page will still be open for the remaining two weeks, should you wish to support them; it will help.) Best of luck to them, and I hope that their expansion into the greater world might provoke some to explore the Tinies' home turf in Second Life.

Read more at NWN... thanks to Hamlet Au for spreading the news.

A Visit with Bart Seymour

(UPDATE, placed at the head before the page break so everyone can see it: Be sure to read the comments on this post, especially those from Maggie Bluxome.)

I signed on for a bit this morning (RL is keeping me pretty busy these days) and was IMed by Bart Seymour. He'd been talking with Reine, and had some of his mesh avatars on display. We chatted for a bit, and it turned out he was making one model that he thought I'd like. I did indeed, and I bought it on the spot.

He helped me, clumsy as I am, with setting it up. I will have to seek out a pale skin (of the sort I prefer) in texture form; the avatar is set up so that such textures (which, if I understand, are packaged together to comprise an SL skin) can be applied to it--for testing purposes, I used a tan skin. (Let's pretend that I spent some time on one of those nude beaches in SL. :))

I had to tweak my shape to work with it--somewhat broader-shouldered, a little shorter (*sob*). (I made my torso a bit longer, which in SL shortens your thighs. I'll experiment to figure out the best settings, and see what's really necessary to work best with the avatar.) I took some pictures, but having just downloaded the Firestorm FUI beta (more on that later), I hadn't twisted the graphics knobs. Bart was already set in that respect, so here are the photos that he took, behind a break as there are some NSFW mannequins in view:

Blogger frustrations

Blogger is a very pleasant (and free as in beer) place to start a blog. Some outgrow it, or decide they want features it doesn't have, and go elsewhere, but I've yet to do so. I'm still here and blogging since September 7th of two-oh-OMG-six. They've steadily improved it, and for that I am grateful, but...

...one thing really bugs me about it.

It's the way the WYSIWYG editor deals with line breaks and what I'd like to think of as paragraphs in one's posts. I like a blank line between paragraphs, so I type away until I've finished a paragraph, hit ENTER twice, and start the next paragraph.

Blogger's WYSIWYG editor does the following:

1. Creates a span with my font specification that encloses my paragraph and appends a br (line break) tag after the close of the span.
2. Creates another span that encloses only a br, with a br appended.
3. Creates a third span that encloses the next paragraph.

That empty span in the middle, as far as I can tell, causes the browser to have two blank lines between paragraphs when the smoke clears. It doesn't display that way on the supposedly WYSIWYG page; you have to click "Preview" to see what really happens, and then go into HTML mode to pull the br-only spans.

Perhaps Blogger wants very much to encourage just one ENTER between paragraphs. I'll have to experiment to find out.... but more than that, I have to wonder why is it that the editor doesn't use real live paragraph tags instead of just spans? HTML tags are supposed to represent document structure, after all.

While we're talking about pet peeves, if Blogger wants the WYSIWYG editor to resemble a word processor, it would be nice for it to do "smart quotes" and conversion of -- into an em dash. (The knob would have to be twistable; sometimes you don't want it to do that for you.)

There's a good blog post on making Blogger work and play well with Google Web Fonts. I'll be experimenting with it. Verdana's nice, but there are other good fonts out there that aren't overused.

The Return of Aporia

Aporia, Kaseido Quandry's blog, has returned to the web. (Someone managed to break in and do something to it that got it disconnected for a while.) If you haven't been following the "Spathic Files" posts there, you should--check out the latest entry. Things are getting even more interesting.

Must-view from Cheyenne Palisades

Don't miss her blog post featuring beautiful photos she took at the new Africa sim. I'm headed there ASAP; take a look at her photos and you will be too.

Change of pace

Every so often you decide to rearrange things, and I decided to do a little of that to the blog, or at least put up new wallpaper and change the painting over the mantelpiece. I'll update my profile photo soon, too. (Actually, that's what nudged me over the edge. A while back Crap Mariner pointed out problems with a profile photo leaning towards orange, and while I dearly love that picture I took by Minoan firelight, it is very orange. So I said to myself "Self, you should change that--and why not redo the blog a bit while you're at it?"

I hope it meets with your approval. I toyed with Scriptina, but kept my tilt towards simple elegance in type.

A plea to 64-bit Linux users

Please do the following:

1. Head to the Dolphin SL viewer web site.
2. Download the Linux viewer (there's what I presume is an RPM file for OpenSUSE, and a gzipped tar file for other distributions) and run it.
3. Go back to the web site and respond to the "I'm on 32-bit Linux"/"I'm on 64-bit Linux" poll.

I doubt that you can even buy a new x86-based computer these days that doesn't have a 64-bit processor; peeking at newegg.com, one sees the majority of the netbooks on sale have 64-bit CPUs.

There are a bunch of us running 64-bit Linux out there; Ubuntu Community documentation says that unless you have some special reason to run 32-bit Linux, run 64-bit Linux. and I suspect people are following that advice--including non-geeks. Canonical, for example, is working hard on giving Ubuntu a user interface that will appeal to the average user, and while geeks like me don't care for Unity and despise the arrogant, high-handed approach that the GNOME 3 developers are taking, I have to admit that usability is at least their stated goal and respect the work being put into it.

Unfortunately, with the exception of Imprudence (and someday, Kokua?) and omvviewer, the latter not having updated their Ubuntu PPA since Lucid Lynx, the SL clients for Linux are 32-bit. Running them requires not only the ia32libs packages, but hackery to put 32-bit gstreamer libraries in place if streaming media are to work--and remember that non-geek portion of the Linux user population? They aren't going to go to that trouble, and will probably just blow off Second Life.

64-bit mode does have advantages. The x86 architecture is infamous for having a limited, highly non-orthogonal register set. For those whose response to that is "Huh?", a brief explanation:

The 32-bit x86 (80386 and newer) CPUs, or 64-bit x86 CPUs in 32-bit mode, have the following integer registers (a register is a place in the CPU that holds a value, upon which one can do various operations (add, subtract, and the like); the CPU can access the registers faster than anything else in your computer): EAX, EBX, ECX, EDX, ESP, EBP, ESI, and EDI. That's eight altogether.

ESP and EBP have dedicated uses to keep track of memory allocation and function calls; they can't be used for anything else, so in practice you just have six... and every single one of them is magic--that is, there are x86 operations that can only work with values in that particular register. That limitation is why we call it non-orthogonal, and it means that a lot of x86 code is taken up with moving a value into the magic register it needs to be in for a particular operation that the program has to perform. The limited number of them means that a lot of x86 code consists of moving values between them and memory, which is a lot slower to read or write.

Compilers try to minimize these moves wherever they can by evaluating expressions into the registers they know the results will have to be in for the next operation, but they can't get rid of them all.

In 64-bit mode, x86 processors have eight additional integer registers, and all sixteen of the registers (eight old and eight new) can hold 64 bits of data and can operate on 64 bits at a time. They can also use a register we haven't mentioned yet, IP (the "instruction pointer") to reference memory, which makes what's called "position independent code" easier, and simplifies access to tables of constants.

All this leads to a performance improvement--how much depends on what you're doing. That Ubuntu Community page points at a Phoronix study that showed no loss, and some respectable gains, in performance with the move to 64-bit code.

So... [pauses to catch her breath] there really should be a 64-bit Linux SL viewer. With that poll, Dolphin appears to be listening... and this is a kind of innovation that LL hasn't forbidden, at least not yet. Please let them know you're out there.

UPDATE: I took my own advice. The Dolphin Viewer 3 worked very nicely for me!

If the Velveteen Rabbit can do it...

The Tinies of Raglan Shire want to expand to the greater world via other media, with an eye to being able "...to fund ideas [they] have for humanitarian projects that help people in health and art related areas."

They have a page on Kickstarter; as I type, they're about halfway to their goal with thirty-one days to go. It sounds like a good cause... and I have to think that if they succeed, people curious about their origins may be inspired to come to Second Life, which would make it win-win all around.

More details at New World Notes, the Tinies' Kickstarter page, the Raglan Shire blog, and at the utterly cutely-named Jazz Paws site.

UPDATE: Twenty days to go, and they are almost 80% of the way there. That's great, but it's not a time for complacency. Please help if you can.

"SL on the Go?" Thanks

First, thanks to Maggie... and thanks to the people who have IMed me since the release of the March 2012 Busted to chat about the notion of a Second Life client for mobile devices--I hasten to emphasize chat only; I know of no current plans for a full mobile SL client. Some SL mobile clients already exist, though they don't give you a view of the world around you:

• Pocket Metaverse, for i{Phone, Pad}
• Sparkle IM for iPhone and iPod Touch
• Mobile Grid Client for Android

I'd love to see it happen someday, and I think it will as low power processors become more powerful. I couldn't help noticing a post on the Muktware blog (and if you are interested in Linux or Android, you really should follow it) this morning: "Android Aims to Become a Gaming Hub? Increases App Size to 4GB from 50 MB".

Smarter?

Kaseido Quandry sent me a link to an interesting article. (Thank you, Kaseido!)

We all know the stereotype of the stupid well-endowed woman... but here's an article about an interesting study. "A study by a Chicago university sociologist of 1,200 women found that large-breasted women tend to have higher intelligence."
(I presume the author meant to write "A study of 1,200 women by a Chicago university sociologist..." or "A Chicago university sociologist's study of 1,200 women...")

The article is from March, 2011. The study itself was done in 2003, as one of the article's linked sources show--which makes me wonder, did it get much publicity back then? I guess word did get out; there's a page from 2004 mentioning it.

Alas, I've yet to find a link to the paper I expect the sociologist wrote... and of course, all that's claimed is a tendency, and independent confirmation would be nice. (For that matter, none of the articles mention whether the test included women who had plastic surgery.) That said, it's nice to have some data contrary to the stereotype.

Must-read at Prim Perfect

Thanks to Crap Mariner for pointing out this post at Prim Perfect about the name debacle. Be sure to read the comments; they're insightful and make some interesting proposals.

Excelsior!

When I go to Formal Night at Bosom Buddies, I have the delightful difficulty of keeping up with the others who are there. I swear that every time, they are all more beautiful and more beautifully dressed.

Busted Magazine is like that, always outdoing itself, but this month is even more so. The photography and models are magnificent, and the first part of Maggie's guide to tweaking one's clothing for the best fit possible, "The Art of Editing", is very helpful. I'll be studying it seriously.

You can find it at the web site linked above, but you can also subscribe, and I recommend doing so. Check it out.

The Residents

There's a good chance that you've never heard of The Residents. (I really wish they'd continued with the American Composers series; if you have a chance to hear Stars and Hank Forever!, which features the music of John Philip Sousa and Hank Williams, don't pass it up! WARNING: it's an acquired taste.)

Part of The Residents' shtik is anonymity. They started out all performing in the eyeball masks you see in the image; after someone stole one of the eyeball masks, they made a golden skull mask to replace it, so now it's three eyeballs and a skull.

I can't help thinking of The Residents when I think about the absurdity of the Second Life resident name clusterflop (thanks to the folks who made the TV-friendly version of Heartbreak Ridge for that euphemism). As I'm sure you know, along with display names came the end of choosing a first and last name for newcomers to SL. Places that displayed a last name always displayed "Resident" for them.

The results? Having to be unique in just one name led to a lot of the Joe231235 style of name that everyone used to warn against, and concatenating multiple words or names into one contiguous string. "But that's what display names are for!" Perhaps, but they're not unique, and scripts take the "real" name; you can't type "/1 hug Display Name" and have it work, so everyone's nose is perpetually rubbed in this mess. It also created a divide between the folks with two names and those with one, and breaks verisimilitude. (OK, the hacker (in the original sense) community tends to refer to a few famous people by their loginids, but it's a buzzkill in a virtual world. "Hey, it's Joe231235! How ya been, Joe231235?")

Rodvik Linden raised our hopes when he posted that LL was looking into a solution. Hosannas were raised (and I think I did some of that). We were promised word on what LL intends to do... and now the word has come.

They'll make it possible to put a hyphen in the one name, so if you had hoped for "Joe Blow", you can be joe-blow. On to the next round table! (UPDATE: or not. "rodvik.linden Hey folks, as I mentioned to some of you over the weekend I am going to do the next roundtable stuff in private one on one's [sic] rather than as a free for all. That makes it more low key and doesnt [sic] turn it into something which is contentious. Thanks for all the feedback.")

People are not happy. That unhappiness is compounded by the knowledge that if you go in via one of the still-extant (for now, at least) educational portals, you can in fact still choose a first and last name; someone did it in the past few days as I type this. That means that all the code for handling a first and last name is still there; it's just not accessible save through those portals.

First the TPV policy change, now this. I hope things improve soon.

Thank you, Crap Mariner

While looking around for more reactions to the TPV policy I happened across something I'm embarrassed to say I hadn't noticed: this blog is on Crap's blogroll.

That Crap is, at least when blogging, a curmudgeonly sort who doesn't mince words makes such a thing doubly precious, like a compliment from that teacher who drove you hard and who you'll never forget. (I hasten to add there's a huge gulf between being curmudgeonly and being Greatly Disturbed.) I will do my best to live up to the honor.

Thank you!
/me curtsies, blushing

"I feel happy! I feel happy!"

I noticed in one of Emilly's posts on The Train Wreck Love Life a reference to a web site I'd not heard of, urlai.com. It's a site that lets you enter the URL of a web site and then displays an "analysis" of that site.

I succumbed to temptation. According to that site, "vidasegunda.blogspot.com is probably written by a female somewhere between 51-65 years old. The writing style is personal and happy most of the time." Whoa... I guess I am happy, at least among the sites they've been handed: "vidasegunda.blogspot.com is the 11th most happy blog of 582 ranked." Good thing I wasn't blogging during my teen angst years back in the early Pleistocene.

UPDATE: apparently as I keep writing, things fluctuate. Now it thinks that I'm between 26 and 35, and I've gone way down in the happiness rank, 123 out of 586. I'll peek every so often... but I won't keep writing about it. :)

The 2k problem

Linden Lab recently announced a new TPV (third-party viewer) policy. Most of it is straightforward... but the zinger is at the end, part 2k:

You must not provide any feature that alters the shared experience of the virtual world in any way not provided by or accessible to users of the latest released Linden Lab viewer.

The $64 question: what does LL consider the "shared experience", and what do they consider an alteration of it? Some say that features that solely affect what the user of a TPV sees don't fall under that prohibition... but OTOH, Qarl Fizz's mesh deformer code, though it is just such a feature, apparently falls under the 2k ukase. Fortunately, since the latest Linden Lab viewer lets one adjust the level of graphics, enable or disable shadows, and change one's Windlight setting, those aren't considered impermissible alterations of the "shared experience"... but parcel Windlight settings, OTOH, are.

Linden Lab supposedly has something in the queue to give functionality similar to parcel Windlight settings... but would they bother if people hadn't seen what it could do and decided it was a good idea? This decree would seem to kill any non-UI improvement in a TPV, by saying "you can't do anything until we have already done it". I fear that this will slow improvements to SL to a crawl.

OTOH, SL isn't the only grid around any more. Is LL shooting itself in the foot?

Tomorrow morning there will be a downloadable recording of a discussion with the folks behind Phoenix/Firestorm; check their blog for details and a link when the file is available. I guess we'll have to see whether LL clarifies 2k, and how TPV writers react.

UPDATE: Read Cheyenne Palisades's excellent post about the changes to TPV policy.

UPDATE #2: Read Emilly Orr's post and followup on the changes in TPV policy.

UPDATE #3: I was optimistic about the recording of the Phoenix/Firestorm discussion, alas--but Second Life Newser has a post with a summary, including lots of links to web content discussing the changes.

UPDATE #4: The discussion itself is up with audio and video on treet.tv. Apparently future episodes of the Phoenix/Firestorm Hour will also be on treet.tv... that's good to know.

Wear it and Weep

I am amazed--I seriously doubt that this would ever happen were it not for SL allowing user-created content.

Check out Iris Ophelia's article about mesh tears in New World Notes.

Good grief...

The LL Second Life client won't remember how you set the resolution for snapshots saved to your computer... but by golly, it will remember that you enabled UI display when you wanted to capture the displayed land impact comparison of sculpted prim, old prim, and mesh guitars and thereby ruin your next landscape photo!

Tweaking My Head

If you've read this blog for a while, you know two things:

• I'm not the sort who changes avatars as one would change clothing, and hence I give serious thought to possible changes... but also
• I am not satisfied with my head; it looks sufficiently like the stereotypical pointy-chinned anime head that I have made fun of it

So, this morning I finally sat down (in RL) and stood up (in SL) and did something about it. Here is the result... and it's amazing how I'm hesitating in RL before typing this and inserting the photo, and will probably hesitate again before clicking "publish". (I have to laugh at myself a little because of that...)

I may tweak my nose a bit... we'll see.

UPDATE: Sorry, Kaseido, I missed a good geeky reference by not titling this post "Fun With My New Head".

YAUPDATE: Eek! I swear, the image didn't look that dark when I saw it locally.  If this tweaked version doesn't work, I'll go inworld and get another picture.

UPDATE**3: T talked with Reine, and she suggested that I tweak my nose, so I did. Here's the result--I should have gone for something a bit less like a mug shot. *sighs*

Mardi Gras at the H-Bomb Lounge

Starting at 6:00 p.m. SL time on Tuesday, February 21st (0200 GMT February 22nd), the H-Bomb Lounge will have a Mardi Gras celebration.There will be a "Most Colorful Costume" contest, with the winner receiving a set of vString prim breasts (to use yourself or give to a friend), and L$500 for a shopping spree. Put on your finery and come dance!

Bring back global illumination

For a while, there was a graphics option in the Second Life client called "global illumination". With global illumination, objects are rendered not just based on direct light, but also reflected light. Raul Crimson has a blog entry that shows a scene with and without global illumination; it gives you an idea of the difference it makes. There's definitely overhead involved with it, but it makes SL graphics more real, or should I say verisimilitudinous?

Unfortunately, we no longer have that choice, at least for now. From JIRA entry SH-2965, "Global illumination didn't even work properly. It was unfinished, and Runitai decided it was best to just remove it with the OpenGL 3 upgrade."

That JIRA entry asks that global illumination again be made an option. I hope you'll consider voting for and watching it. Thanks.

The Man Revisited

A while back I wrote about The Man, the oldest object in Second Life. I am embarrassed to have to say that I forgot about this amazing artifact, but glad to say that Cheyenne has written a very good article about it and linked to a downright awe and reverence-inspiring post from Serendipity Haven. Do read them both.

I was inspired to return, and this time I, too, peeked to marvel at the antiquity of this imposing Art Deco statue:

oldjohn Linden, as you can see, is nearly nine and a half years old. I feel a mere child in comparison, and the statue indeed inspires awe.

More Mesh Avatar News

The other day Bart Seymour was kind enough to chat with me about mesh avatars and show me what he was working on. Today I went to his store, and he has models out so the general public has an idea of what's coming:

The sign reads as follows:

New Mesh Body Shape, Coming Soon

No more tinting, one texture for the complete body, matching clothing that can be wrapped around the body. Allowing clothing like slingshot bikinis.

Perspective here exaggerates the difference in sizes, and I am sorry to say that mesh avatars, if I understand rightly, have skeletons with the same limits as the stock avatar shape, so unless I'm wrong or something changes, it won't be possible to be 5+ meters tall. (Darn it.)

UPDATE: I am happy to say that I am wrong; be sure to read Aliasi Stonebender's comment!

I believe the coloring of the figure at the right shows the components that make up the mesh avatar. They have no heads; perhaps that means the alpha mask won't hide your head. That would certainly be a simple way to make sure the head is as configurable as it is now, because it would be the current head! I'm just guessing on that point, though--so I hope that Bart will comment on this post with any additional info he might wish to mention or any necessary corrections if I've erred.

Bart intends to make it possible to change breast size and hip/booty size--and  I've definitely seen some impressive examples of the latter!

I very much look forward to seeing what he comes up with. I have to think that the man who made the third-party prim breast-friendly clothing market possible will want to preserve that, but we'll see.

Jamie Schnook at Wet and Wild has also been busy creating more mesh avatars (NSFW picture behind a page break; shame on me for forgetting this when I first posted):

Après la déluge: Minoans rebuild

Recently, Ariadne sent out a notice about a build inspired by what post-catastrophe Crete might have been like. I've had a chance to take a look, and I'm highly impressed!

You arrive first at a region with a circle of locations for stores and a central enclosed area. Around the central area's exterior are posters showing the history of the Minoan civilization and how it was rediscovered in the late 19th century. Inside is a platform from which one teleports down to the build proper. The TP object sits before a bull, and on the wall by the bull are indicators of the online status of the Queen, Ariadne, Mistress of Arts, Rhiannon Carlucci, and Architect, Abby Python.

(The design is beautiful and functional--the use of a skybox for the shopping area leaves more space on the surface. Clearly a lot of thought has gone into it--high honor and praise are due to the Architect!)

The surface is wilder than the very urban and tightly packed Minoan Empire was, but it still bears the marks of Minoan civilization, and I cried when I first saw it.

You will find temples there...

...and I am very pleased to say that the statue of the Earth Mother has miraculously survived; she is now in the natural shrine of a cave.

There is a labyrinth, but rather than the confusing original labyrinth with the fearsome, man-eating minotaur at its center, here we have a more contemplative labyrinth of trained and trimmed shrubbery.

I've not shown you everything--there are shrines I've not shown, and there are some buildings whose purpose I do not know--but I hope that you've seen enough to be interested. One thing I should mention--there is a racetrack! Races are on Saturday, which makes me happy, since I can attend both them and the races that have been conducted by the Minoan exile community on Sundays since the closing of the Minoan Empire sim.

Khaire Wanassa! I cannot say how happy I am to see this place. Thanks to you, to the Mistress of Arts, and to the Architect.

Be My Busty Valentine: almost here...

Maggie's blog has more info on the "Be My Busty Valentine" hunt, which starts tomorrow as I type this. Many thanks to Shattered Axel and Tw@tty C@ke for hosting the hunt, and to the participating makers! (And of course to Maggie; if you don't follow her blog, you really should.)

ParaBoobs

What is it that we in the SL busty community all wish? That we could go to any store we wish and buy and wear any dress that strikes our fancy. Can we do it? Right now, alas, no... but Rygel Ryba and Pixel Paradigm have set out to make breasts, "Pixel's ParaBoobs", that are as easy as possible for clothiers and skin makers to support. In their words,

"With the ParaBoobs system, you just make everything as you normally would - and then paste a UUID into a script, lock it up so it's non transferable and secure and you're done. (Well, actually, there are three lines to change - but it's EASY)."

A brief aside: Icon Allen has made mesh breasts since November 2011. ParaBoobs are mesh. I've got to train myself to stop saying "prim breasts" if I want to be inclusive. To refer to all these things that make it possible for us to live our busty dreams in SL, I will start saying "attached breasts". If you have a better term, I'd love to hear it.

What makes it difficult to support attached breasts? It goes back to cartographers.

Pre-mesh Second Life clothing is mostly painted-on textures, and to make the clothing look right--or as right as it can; let's not go there now--there has to be a flat map. Not of the Earth, but of the avatar or a portion thereof. Those have already been created; the Second Life Wiki's "Clothing Tutorials" page  has a link to the "Linden body and clothing templates", which are maps of the head, torso, and the rest of the body. The majority of creating clothing in Second Life is like making a detailed map with features painted on the parts of the map that correspond to where they are on the avatar, just as on a map of the Earth you'd draw in cities, mountains, and rivers in the places that correspond to where they are on the Earth. In computer graphics, it's called "UV mapping".

ParaBoobs are designed so that the map that works for the breasts on the stock female avatar will work for them, i.e. so that if you create a map showing the "geographical features" of one, it will serve as well as a map for the other.

Now, that's handwaving a bit. If you go to the store and look at the model ParaBoobs on the wall, you'll notice that they include a bit of the torso, namely, the region around the clavicles and top of the sternum, so it's not just the breasts. Also, ParaBoobs are bigger than the stock avatar breasts, stretching the texture in non-uniform ways, so that, to use Ryba and Paradigm's example, buttons that start our round may end up oval. Stretching textures, since they are raster graphics, also blurs them. (If you ever studied topology, ParaBoobs and the corresponding piece of the avatar shape are homeomorphic.) We'll have to see how many clothiers and skin makers take advantage of the opportunity and how good the results look.

This design decision has a consequence. When you get your ParaBoobs, you will want to scale them to work with the settings of your avatar shape, but that size is the one that works for you. At a different size, they won't match up with the avatar shape where they join. For that reason, ParaBoobs don't support dynamic scaling. If ParaBoobs prove successful, the makers plan to come out with different sizes and shapes, but if the ability to grow your breasts or let someone else make them grow continuously over time is important to you, these are not the breast attachments for you.

I'm not mentioning a lot of ParaBoobs features--you will want to take a look at the documentation on the makers' web site. In particular, they're intended to work as part of the LustBaby project, which, if I understand rightly, is a project involving hypnosis as an aid to immersion in erotic roleplay in Second Life. For me, the important thing is the length to which Ryba and Paradigm are going to encourage mainstream SL clothiers to accommodate ParaBoobs users. No, that's not the whole busty community, but it's a start. I wish them well, just as I wish all those who do amazing things to let us fulfill our well-endowed dreams in SL well.

UPDATE: Saying two things are homeomorphic really doesn't say as much as you might think, or more to the point, I might have thought; after all, as the saying goes, topologists are mathematicians who can't distinguish a donut from a coffee cup. There's a stronger relation that holds, but I'm not sure how to characterize it.

VOOH Designs

Yesterday, I had a lovely visit with a friend I hadn't seen in way too long. (Hi, Dae!) We had a nice chat, she showed me a neat object she was building, and when I complimented her on her lovely sweater, she kindly showed me where she got it: a store that was new to me, VOOH Designs.

VOOH Designs has a wide variety of prim breast-friendly clothing, ranging from formal to intimate, demure to daring... including my new favorite dress, "Seduction":

The only things I have on in this photo that don't come with this inexpensive outfit are my hair, skin, eyes, and prim breasts. The shoes, which this photo doesn't show, alas, have an alpha layer; they hide your feet, so you'll want to tint them appropriately for your skin. The HUD that comes with them allows that, and many other choices as well. The skirt is scripted for easy modification. If there's one thing to watch out for, it's your ARC. I peeked at it: 229,000! (Not 229,000 factorial, which would be really big, but 229,000--wow!) Of course, hair contributed to that, but I will experiment with taking off the jewelry and otherwise trying to minimize my rendering footprint.

UPDATE: The jewelry was indeed the source of a lot of the ARC.

Wearing Red

Don't forget... today is Wear Red Day in the US. Heart disease kills more women than all the cancers put together.

Google sets up to facilitate per-country censoring of Blogger blogs

Shortly, if you follow a link to a Blogger blog at .blogspot.com, Google will route you to .blogspot. where is your two-letter country code. As I type, the domain for India, country code = in, exists. You can go directly to it.

The idea is that the . version can be filtered to match whatever censorship the corresponding country wants to impose. (Which I would suppose mean that they won't let you directly go to .blogspot.us; better learn to use proxies.)

It's a shame that Google feels the need to do such countries' dirty work for them.

I do have some NSFW photos here--not many, and they're behind page breaks. If you should suddenly discover that some articles or images are no longer accessible, I'd be very interested in hearing about it. Comment here, or email me at mel_yeuxdoux@yahoo.com.

Clothes for the daring prim breast user

If you've read this blog or seen my photos, you know that I lean towards modest clothing. Because of that, I won't be modeling for this post, even though I did make some purchases--but if you like nicely-textured and well-executed prim breast-friendly clothing of the more daring sort, be sure to check out Tw@tty C@ke. Here you'll find low cut (from above) and high cut (from below) tops, jeans that are jeans in front and lace in back, shiny metallic outfits and pants, and swimsuits and lingerie.

To see what we're talking about, head for the store in world, or take a look at the store on SL Marketplace. If you walk more on the wild side than I do, it's well worth your time.

Out of the frying pan...

...and into the fire. First SOPA, now ACTA. More details from Forbes.

UPDATE: check out "Thought SOPA was Bad? 10 Reasons to Oppose ACTA" and "The ACTA Fight Returns: What is at Stake and What You Can Do". (In the US, the dodge to get it through is to say that it's not a treaty, but an "executive agreement", so that the President can commit the US to it without that pesky Constitution getting in the way.)

Clay Shirky on SOPA/PIPA

I could spend the next day or so posting nothing but embedded YouTube videos about the evils of SOPA/PIPA, but I'll stop, at least for now, with this TED talk from Clay Shirky, which does two important things:

• puts these laws in context
• points out that just stopping SOPA/PIPA is not sufficient; the groups that want all content production to go through them will try again and again, as long as they exist.

UPDATE: That didn't take long.

SOPA Cabana

Eternal vigilance...

So... the administration has issued a statement that at least sounds like Obama would veto SOPA/PIPA as they stand... though all those waiting for Gitmo to close might question whether the administration has much concern for keeping its promises. Some in Congress are backing away from SOPA/PIPA, and at last week's Republican debate, all the potential candidates on stage stated their opposition to SOPA (gee--are they, or the Heritage Foundation, who also oppose SOPA, "technocommunists"?).

That said, it's not time to haul out the noisemakers and confetti:

• Chris "friend of Angelo" Dodd, ex-Senator now working for the MPAA, essentially said that politicians who don't back the legislation the MPAA wants shouldn't expect funding from them come the election. (There's a little issue about whether that kind of thing is legal, and you might want to sign this petition asking that Dodd and the MPAA be investigated for bribery.)
• Word is that PIPA will be up for discussion and voting in the Senate on January 24th. Take a look at EFF's page on the matter to see what you can do.

I think Y Combinator is right: it's time to kill the dinosaurs. Actual creative people have come out against SOPA/PIPA; do take a look at their statement. (No, the interests of the {RI, MP}AA aren't those of musicians and actors; see Courtney Love and Steve Albini, or look up "Hollywood accounting".)

UPDATE: More on the difference between Republican and Democrat responses to  the opposition to SOPA/PIPA at Ars Technica.

A Plea to Human Mesh Avatar Makers

Since around the beginning of 2012, there have been (and still are, as I type) SL clients that include the alpha version of Karl Stiefvater's mesh deformer code. As you can see from Karl's video, it causes meshes you wear to be influenced by more shape sliders than just those related to the shape's "skeleton". This has some very important consequences:

• Mesh clothing is no longer Procrustean; no more alpha masks to force avatars into the shape that the mesh item was designed to fit, and no more having to actually make umpteen sizes of mesh clothing.
• Mesh avatars themselves are influenced by those same sliders.

I would like to urge you to experiment with those clients with an eye to:

• making them behave reasonably with a wide range of settings of those sliders--that is, they shouldn't develop discontinuities as the sliders change
• pushing the envelope on the limits of the standard avatar (in the sense of Snakekiss Noir's Proposition 125 under the old system for suggesting changes, VWR-1258 in the JIRA)

I am interested in the first in part because I'd love to have a mesh avatar, but I want it to look like me. Running into people who look just like me is like meeting someone at the party wearing the same dress, but even more so!

I'm interested in both, though, because I'm a member of Second Life's busty community. We exist because a number of creative folks, bless them, have overcome the avatar's limits with prim breast attachments--but those in turn limit us when it comes to clothing. There's a growing number of wonderful clothiers who cater to us, but we are still cut off from the vast majority of dresses and tops in SL fashion. Not all prim breast users delight in having enormous breasts; the pitiful polygon count of the stock female avatar breasts mean that practically, the stock avatar is far more constrained than the slider might suggest--unless you like having breasts with corners.

With the refinement and general adoption of the mesh deforming code, mesh clothing will grow in popularity, greatly so IMHO. Who wouldn't rush to buy tops that aren't vacuum-sealed to one's breasts making T-shirts with art or text a joke, jeans that don't look like your colon is attached to a vacuum cleaner, and skirts that act like real physical skirts, making glitchpants a bad memory, rather than a bunch of strips of cloth sewn together at the waist that go through your legs when you walk or sit down or the wind blows?

With the mesh deformer and mesh avatars, we of the busty community at least have a chance of avatars that will support the figures we wish to have and that will open what I hope will be the focus of new SL fashion. I beg you to help make this happen. Thank you so much for your time and attention.

To members of the busty community reading this, no, this won't be paradise:

• I fear that the limits may not be pushed very far, so that not many of us will be able to leave attachments behind.
• This definitely won't support polymastia.
• Accommodating those for whom real-time growth is important will require another serious change to SL, namely allowing scripts to modify your sliders in real time without making you assume the position as is done when you modify your appearance. I hope that will happen someday, but it's definitely more distant.

UPDATE: Something I forgot to mention here: if you watch the video, you'll see that mesh clothing and hence mesh avatars will be influenced by the physics layer, giving one control over jiggle.

UPDATE: Upon reflection, it's not that easy for clothing. Mesh clothing is going to be designed for a particular shape, and it will take some way to map it to another shape to be usable on more than one kind of avatar. I think people will want to implement that kind of transformation anyway, so that people can migrate their traditional painted-on clothing to a mesh avatar.

Be My Busty Valentine

Word from Eira Kalil is that Tiny Things will participate in a new hunt for the busty ladies of SL, "Be My Busty Valentine", from February 10 through March 10. See her post on the Tiny Things blog.

I'm delighted by something she says: "It seems the prim-breast community is growing and I'm really happy because I feel comfortable in this community in which I have met many wonderful people." Thank you, Eira, for your work on prim breasts and clothing for them. I'm glad you're part of the community.

We're back!

We're back, but la lutte continue. Learn more about the evil that is SOPA/PIPA at the following links:

• This Khan Academy American Civics lecture
• This YouTube video, "WTF is SOPA?"
• This YouTube video, "What is SOPA and Why is It Bad?"

Fun in the water

I was sitting in the stands for the boat races in the Minoan Empire in Exile, awaiting the excitement of the very first such races... when Esteban said "You'll have to race, Melissa."

I did a double take, and allowed as how I had never done such a thing before. He pointed out that he didn't say I'd have to win. I chuckled, agreed, and bought one of the lovely and elegantly simple racing boats available.

The gods smiled on me; another race came before mine, so I was able to see the path to take. (Whew!) They smiled wryly, though; my lack of experience stood out. I overcorrected a lot, and ran aground on the first lap, losing what was fortunately not too much time.

I lost, of course--and ended up being teleported back to shore after derezzing the boat out from under myself. (I did see the spot to disembark. Later.) I lost...

...but it was FUN!

Thanks to my fellow Minoans for their support, and special thanks to Esteban for nudging me into giving it a try, and to Westley, always noble and kind and a worthy opponent. Now, to schedule a little time to practice...

(They really are sweet boats. Minimal, but well-wrought economy is also known as elegance, and I believe they are the work of The Architect himself. They're designed for racing, not passengers, and they are simple to operate.)

The "secure boot" plot thickens

In an earlier article, I've written about Microsoft's requirements for computers if their makers want them to get Microsoft's stamp of approval for Windows 8. Those requirements open the possibility that such computers will be rendered incapable of booting any operating system other than Windows.

Now we find that for ARM-based systems, it's going to be more than a possibility. For x86 based computers, Microsoft apparently is willing to approve of systems using a "custom" secure boot mode that will allow its owner to boot other operating systems. For ARM-based systems, though, Microsoft explicitly states that they will not approve any system with "custom" secure boot mode; they must be set so that they can never boot any operating system other than Windows.

ARM, at least currently, is the predominant CPU family for mobile devices. Intel has yet to put out an x86-flavored CPU anywhere near as efficient in terms of power consumption versus processing power. These days you'll find a lot of people claiming the desktop is on the way out--and Microsoft is looking to lock out competition so it can dominate mobile devices the way it has the desktop.

For details, see the Software Freedom Law Center's article, and Glyn Moody's article in Computerworld UK.

UPDATE: Even on the x86, the constraints will make life quite difficult. Check out "Why UEFI Secure Boot is Difficult for Linux".

Important: Help Stop SOPA and PROTECT IP

Hamlet Au in NWN has posted some very important information on the law that the {MP,RI}AA are trying to ram through Congress. (In the House, it's SOPA, HR-3261, and in the Senate, the corresponding measure is called PROTECT IP or PIPA, S-968.) According to the EFF, any Internet site that hosts user-generated content will be seriously affected by the proposed law. Read Hamlet's article and the linked-to pages, and take action.

Must-reads from Maggie

Of course, Maggie Bluxome's blog is like Gwyneth Llewelyn's. It's all must-read, but the two latest (as I type) articles stand out even there:

• A review of the new Essentials prim breasts. They look very good and featureful. Thanks to Jennifur Vultee and TammyTgurl Umaga for their work.
• Photos of Maggie and Jennifur. Looking at them, I cry, just as I did at their wedding. They are such a lovely couple!

Giantess avatars

Yesterday, Susyn Stenvaag kindly invited me over to see some amazing work on giantess avatars. I am embarrassed to say that I don't know whether this is new; clearly I've not been keeping up.

I should say that the photos here show stationary figures, but I believe them to use the same constructs as are used for the giantess avatars--I met someone using the avatar to amazing effect. (Hi, J4ne!)

In particular, we visited the Giantess Avatar Shop... here's a photo I took later on:

The boots are sold separately. Note in particular the array of faces one can choose from. That's been an issue with giant avatars--you'd like to be unique, and the face is the main way we recognize individuals. (Of course, one always wants more; I'd love to be able to hand over my head slider settings and get a customized head that is me.) The faces are even better than this 2-D photo would indicate. If you go to the shop and walk around, you can see them in three dimensions.

One of the issues with avatar shapes built up from prims is joints. I think that the unadorned mannequin in the poster shows improvement... though of course the modest clothing and standing pose hides and minimizes joint issues.

Thank you, Susyn, and thank you to the lovely people I met for the first time.

UPDATE: Read the comments--you owe it to yourself to check out the image of Aliasi Stonebender's impressive work!

UPDATE #2: Definitely check out Ms. Stonebender's latest comment, and the images linked to. You'll be amazed, as I was.

The new BUSTed

The January 2012 BUSTed magazine is now available. It's an issue of firsts:

• Of course, it's the first issue of the new year!
• It's the first issue with a new, very classy logo.
• Most importantly, it's the first issue assembled by the new staff.

It's not first in one way: breathtaking photography has been part of BUSTed from the very beginning.

Many thanks to Maggie, Shieara, Maylinde, and Tahnee for their excellent work.

Unwelcome wagon

There are some places in Second Life where prim breast users are not welcome. It's not a new thing; the SL forums archive has a thread from April 2007 about a woman who was ejected from a nude beach (!) for using prim breasts. I was told to remove my (completely covered) prim breasts in one of the Gossip Girl sims in January 2008. More recently, Misty Rain and Shayna Korobase have written about their similar experiences.

So... perhaps the thing to do is to put together lists of prim breast friendly and prim breast unfriendly places in Second Life. Let me know of both kinds of places; I can be reached by email at mel_yeuxdoux@yahoo.com. Then everybody wins. If you're a sim owner who doesn't want prim breast users to darken your virtual door, let us know and we will take ourselves, and our L$, elsewhere.

Picard: The only benefit to the Klingon Empire... would be our gratitude.
B'ljik: That is what you want me to tell [Gowron]?!
Picard: Yes, and please tell him that, if he is unable to provide us with a ship, then I am sure that there are others in the Klingon Empire... who would be willing to help me. And then, they would have our gratitude.

Mesh deformer news

First, my apologies for time away from the blog and from Second Life. It's nice to be back.

Now for the important stuff.  There is an alpha version of the mesh deformer code, and there are SL clients that include that code, for example Niran's Viewer v1.03. There are still some open issues, and like any alpha code, it needs to be exercised, so I hope you'll try it out.

For information, check out not only SH-2374, but also STORM-1716.... and this video.

UPDATE: I hope that the mesh deformer changes will have consequences for SL's busty community; the video looks very promising. Time to experiment.