Batten down the hatches!

Cheyenne is, as I type, in New York with Sweetie. Most days I would just do a happy dance and mentally wish them well upon hearing that, but this is not most days:

Please take care, you two!

Clouds have gathered over Whimsy as well. At first little puffballs of gray clouds appeared, almost Bob Rossian (Be sure to check today's Google doodle!)...

but then they darkened...

and with the night the thunderstorm came...

...and it came very close indeed.

Everyone in Sandy's path, please take care (don't be like me :)), and be prepared to evacuate if need be. You're in our thoughts.

Thanks, Abbie

Abbie Jinx is closing down the Jinxed store on October 31st, though her products will still be available on the SL Marketplace. (Between now and then, the vendors in her main store will offer a 50% discount to Jinxed group members.)

Thank you, Abbie, for your beautiful clothing and for the work you have put into it. I hope that the circumstances that keep you from devoting time to the store are happy ones, and I hope that you'll continue to spend some time in SL.

As a reminder of the wonderful work Abbie does, here's a photo featuring her "Siena" dress:

You've Been Owned

(UPDATE: The banner's gone now, but I hope you will still visit youvebeenowned.com and take action.)

What's that banner at top right, you ask?

I'm glad you asked.

There's a case, Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, coming before the Supreme Court. It will be heard on Monday, October 29. The court will either agree with lower courts or disagree. If they agree, it will put an enormous crimp in the Doctrine of First Sale, the notion that once you've bought something, you can sell it, lend it, or give it to someone else if you wish.

Wiley & Sons is a book publisher. They publish cheap editions of their books for sale outside the US. Mr. Kirtsaeng noticed this, and set up a business in which he had relatives buy the cheap editions outside the US and send them to him in the US, where he could sell them for less than the expensive books Wiley publishes to sell in the US cost and turn a profit.

Wiley wants, and so far the lower courts have agreed, that Mr. Kirtsaeng shouldn't be able to do that, i.e. that the Doctrine of First Sale should not apply to copyrighted items made abroad.

That's quite a lot of stuff these days. Thinking about holding a garage sale and selling your used computer hardware, or your old iPod? (Or are you thinking of giving it to Goodwill to sell?) If Wiley & Sons get their way, you (or Goodwill) won't necessarily be able to. Remember Garth Brooks getting his knickers in a knot over people selling his CDs used? If the Supreme Court decides for Wiley & Sons, all musicians will have to do is get their work copyrighted and CDs pressed outside the US, and Garth can get his wish.

Please head over to youvebeenowned.org and learn more about the case and its possible consequences.

The Fontconfig Affair

(Sorry, I had a flashback to the days of The Man from U.N.C.L.E.)

For those of us who use Linux, there's a library called "fontconfig" that has changed in a way that breaks Second Life clients.

The version in question, 2.9.0, is present in the recently-released Ubuntu 12.10, so I suspect that many more are tripping over the problem now.

Third-party viewers are proving quicker to respond to the issue than LL. The upcoming Firestorm 4.3 will not have the problem. In the meantime, the fix from thickbrick.sleaford in the Firestorm JIRA page for the problem works.

Serendipity

Second Life is a wonderful place to take pictures. The creativity of builders, animators, and residents means there is always somewhere new and amazing. (And if you want pointers to such places, they are easily available. Look at Second Life residents' flickr or Picasa galleries, and at blogs that feature such photos. Dorka Barzane's Caminante de Sueños is a great place to start.)

Once you've found a place, Second Life gives you an advantage over RL: you control the skies. Create your own Windlight settings or find some created by others that you can use. Some Second Life clients come preloaded with a batch of them.

I have 453 pictures up on flickr as I type--I've taken more, but I don't put everything on flickr. Some aren't up to snuff, or are experiments with slightly different point of view or pose or whatever, so there's no point.

I'm not a great photographer. I'm no Maggie Bluxome or Whisky Monday... but once in a while, I happen upon a combination of location, lighting, and, if it's not a landscape, pose and clothing, that works. It happened this morning, I'm happy to say. The results are above.

It's a good time to take pictures in Second Life, and I hope that the mapping happens soon so it will be even better. (And could we bring back global illumination, please? *bats eyelashes*) The depth of field means that you can use still more techniques that photon wranglers :)--er, real life photographers--use, like bokeh or intentional shallow depth of field to keep the emphasis on a subject. There are tutorials, and many of the principles, e.g. composition and lighting, are the same in SL and RL... so if you haven't dared before, give it a try.

Gaming for Good

Sorry about the short notice, but I just found out about Extra Life. It's a gaming marathon taking place today in support of the Children's Miracle Network. Teams select a hospital they wish to help, ask for sponsors who will donate to the cause, and then they game.

Check it out, and participate if you're so inclined by creating or joining a team. (If you choose to game, please take the advice on the site's safety notice page!) If you aren't up for marathon gaming, then consider supporting a team, such as, for example, the CBT Tankers.

For once, I will have to actually say something good about the G4 network: they are supporting Extra Life, and live streaming a sort of online telethon. Well done.

Ubuntu 12.10 is here

I'm not sure why the countdown graphic isn't updated (UPDATE: it is now!), but Ubuntu 12.10 is available. I've upgraded to it, and so far, it's very nice. If you've always wondered about Linux, check it out. If you are a Windows user, you can try it out via Wubi without even having to repartition your hard drive, and if you don't like it, you can uninstall it via the Windows interface for deleting programs that you're familiar with.

For your reading enjoyment and convenience...

Maggie Bluxome of Busted magazine has put together a document that has all three parts of Angel Eulenberg's fascinating "No Fake Tits in Gor" in one spot. If you're a Busted subscriber, you know this (and you have it already). If you aren't, first I urge you to consider becoming one, but also, I have it, and will happily send you a copy ASAP if you wish. I have the knob twisted to get IMs via email, but I have still at times seen the "Too many messages", so email me at mel_yeuxdoux@yahoo.com if need be (or even if that's just more convenient).

It's Not Just for Minoans...

From a University of Warwick press release:

Historian Angela McShane Jones from the University of Warwick said: “In the 1600s it was fairly commonplace for women to bare their breasts in public. The fashions were initiated by court members and Queens, then replicated by ordinary women, and common prostitutes. 17th century fashion, rather than demeaning women, could be empowering. The extremely low cut dresses were designed to encourage men to look but not to touch. They empowered some women to use their sexuality.”

For more information, check out McShane-Jones's article "Revealing Mary" (History Today, v. 54 issue 3).

Countdown to Ubuntu 12.10

Shame on me; I didn't notice that the Ubuntu image had switched to the countdown for 12.10, or to use its codename, "Quantal Quetzal". The second beta is out, so I should have realized.

What's new, you ask? Quite a bit--best visit the 12.10 Beta 2 Ubuntu Wiki page for details. There are changes to X and the proprietary nVidia driver (the latter of particular interest to those of you running with multiple monitors).

Eight days to go... at least as I type this.

80's Flashback

I went shopping today and stopped at Gatherings, where I bought a few items, including the "Women in Black" outfit that one can wear either with a skirt or with slacks. I put it on, had an 80's flashback, and knew what I had to do.

I bought gloves and a cane. I put on just the base that came with a red hairdo, and bought some tattoo layer lipstick/eyeshadow, and headed for an office furniture store.

I will have to look for the right gesture to do it up right, but here's the best I managed--and, believe it or not, as I took the picture, the store's audio stream had started playing Eurhythmics' "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)":

Fashion for a Good Cause: Perfectly Pink Latex Ensemble

Kayliwulf Kingdom has created a lovely pink latex ensemble that it has for sale... and all profits from such sales will benefit the National Breast Cancer Foundation. (And I would hope that, especially if you regularly read this blog, this is a cause near and dear to your heart.)

The outfit includes a skirt, a bra and an underbra, a thong, and wonderful fuzzy sandals and gloves. Were I not a shy sort, I'd happily wear it. Photo after the break; it is definitely NSFW. Give it a look, and thanks to Kayliwulf Kingdom for creating this ensemble and supporting NBCF.

This is the sort of thing...

...that makes you forget all the drama and flakiness and brouhaha and be happy that SL exists.

"ThankyouSL" at Shopping Cart Disco. Go read it, and see if you don't find yourself smiling.

P.S. Thanks to Hamlet Au for pointing the post out; I'd not have seen it otherwise.

The new Busted is here!

The new Busted is out... and as always, it's well worth your perusal.

You know by now to expect impeccable photos of gorgeous models, and indeed, they're there. The theme is science fiction, and if you're like me you will be seeking out the places where the outfits they wear can be found.

There's part two of Cindy Melglund and Whimsy Warrhol's series on creating a well-proportioned shape. If you are less than fully satisfied with your shape, you want to read both parts!

(And speaking of proportions, here's a plea I will repeat in a letter to the editor: please, Ms. Melglund and Ms. Warrhol, write the analogous article or articles on shaping one's head. I am happier having moved away from the heart-shaped head I started out with, but think I could improve a bit more if I worked at it, and I'd greatly appreciate advice from such knowledgeable folks as you two!)

Zarah Undercroft writes more about putting together outfits for the busty figure... and in passing has greatly heartened me about my shoe inventory. Invisiprims were once the state of the art for shoes--but now it's alpha layers, and current SL clients don't deal with invisiprims as they once did, with the result that the foot parts the invisiprims are meant to hide flash in and out of view as your point of view changes. I've been hoping there's a way to make those old shoes usable in the new regime, and apparently, if the shoes are editable, it is possible. Thank you, Ms. Undercroft, and I'm off to check my inventory to see which old shoes are editable.

Julianna Fashion

I happened to go searching for "busty" the other day. I saw "Busty's Beach Island" which I'd recently taken a very short trip to, and then saw "Busty Bitches Mall"--not a particularly enticing name, but I took the plunge and teleported.

They have a good bunch of shops there... but Julianna Fashion caught my eye, and I bought the Coral Silk Black Roses Long Dress. It came with two clothing layer appliers, one for (Implant Nation, I believe) Universal Implants, and one for Lolas. No problem--the Lolas applier got the clothing layer on the Foxbean Laboratories "Christina" breasts, and armed with the information from Maggie's excellent series in Busted, minor tweaks to the horizontal and vertical repeat factors had wonderful results:

I'll explore Julianna's main store as soon as possible.

New stuff, or "Wilkommen, Bienvenu, Welcome..."

Two new items:

• Foxbean Liebknecht has a blog! (/me fights the urge to sing "E-I-E-I-O"...) Don't worry. The link is there in the blog list so it won't disappear as this post sinks slowly in the west. Welcome to the world of blogging, dear friend. *hugs* I look forward to reading what you have to say.
• Speaking of reading what one has to say, there's now a "Translate" widget near the top of the right hand portion of the page. You can use it to read a translation, as good as Google Translate can manage (which is a darned sight better than Bing's translation manages), into any of the languages Google Translate knows about. Beware; it tends to translate names of people, web browsers, OSs, Second Life sims and stores, etc. (CarrieAnn Lemon turned into "CarrieAnn Citron" and "CarrieAnn Limón" when I tried the feature out a couple of times.)

I hope that the translation widget is of help. Second Life is a worldwide phenomenon; it's well past time that I should support that.

A view from behind

After writing about CarrieAnn Lemon's assistance with her Ellemeno corset tops, I should provide a photo...

"Solid."

If memory serves, that was the catchphrase of Linc Hayes on Mod Squad as portrayed by Clarence Williams III.

Solid state drives--not the very latest or fastest technology, but still far faster than hard drives that must sometimes wait over a hundred microseconds for an actual physical hunk of matter to rotate around to the read/write head!--have gone below the dollar per gigabyte price point. (Remember how excited we all were when rotating platter hard drives broke that barrier?) Today, as I type, there's a deal at Tiger Direct offering a 120 GB SSD for $0.67/gigabyte before rebate, $0.50/gigabyte after rebate.

Under Linux, you can install on the SSD and then symlink from /home/myname/BigDirectory to a directory on your larger capacity old clunky rotating hard drive to keep all your collections of music, ISOs, images, and so forth from filling up the SSD while still having your various configurations and such on SSD for rapid access. (Windows finally got symbolic links for NTFS, so it should be possible to do something like that there, too.) Since you can bound the size of your Second Life cache, it should be possible to keep that there, too, which I hope would speed up your Second Life experience.

(Discussion here seems to show that it does, though people in that thread also point out that a RAM disk is even faster, and avoids wear on the SSD--as flash EEPROM, it has a limited number of writes on any given spot--but OTOH, the point of cache is to stick around until you clear it; you'd have to do something to back it up before you shut it down and move it to RAM disk before you fire up the SL client.)

Should you decide to go SSD, be sure your OS/driver and SSD support "TRIM", and tell your OS it doesn't have to play the usual games of scheduling I/O to minimize read/write head movement. Take a look at the Arch wiki or AB9IL's blog for suggestions for Linux.

About that photo...

if you were to download the photo taken at Heart's Desire, you might notice it's 3072 x 2214. That's significant because I took it while running the current version of Armin Weatherwax's Teapot SL client. The last time I tried Teapot, it was an earlier version, and high-res snapshots were problematic.

Now, though, that's working fine... and Armin produces a real live 64-bit Linux version, which gets around all the streaming media problems with 32-bit Linux SL clients that LL and everybody else but Imprudence/Kokua seems more than happy to ignore. So, especially since lately Firestorm has been regularly crashing for me--sometimes with no alert save the "do you want to send info about the crash?" popup, sometimes with a popup with text that displays all as little boxes (which makes me think that the text was overwritten with junk that isn't valid UTF-8 or at least doesn't correspond to characters the font has),  and finally recently with an intelligible popup reading

We are sorry, but Firestorm has crashed and needs to be closed. If you see this issue happening repeatedly, please contact our support team and submit the following message: 

ERROR: llrender/llvertexbuffer.cpp(1642) : mapVertexBuffer: memory allocation for vertex data failed.

I will be loading up Teapot with Windlight setting files and running Teapot. I hope that someday I will meet you in-world, Mr. Weatherwax... when that happens, I will thank you and offer you a hug.

P.S. I am happy to see that I didn't refer to Teapot as Teacup even once!

Heart's Desire

After reading about Ellemeno on Maggie's blog, I went to check it out... and found several things I had to have.

The tops I will try later on today, but I want to show you the teal formal dress. The photo was taken at the Heart's Desire ballroom.

UPDATE: I had the good fortune to meet CarrieAnn Lemon. She's a wonderful lady, and I look forward to seeing what comes from Ellemeno in the future.

UPDATE: About those tops: they are the corset tops that Ellemeno sells. As I've said, I tend to push the limits on things like hair length, leg length, and breast size. The latter, when the breasts are (collectively!) sufficiently wider that the torso, can cause skin where the breasts rejoin the torso on either side to be exposed that should be covered with cloth. I've seen this on several outfits from various clothiers, and this proved to be the case for the corset tops. I suppose I should have pointed this out the first time it happened some time ago, but I never have--until, when Ms. Lemon struck up a conversation with me, I said something about it happening with the corset tops. I would have understood had she done nothing... but she asked for a photo. I sent one along to show the problem. Could I come wear a texture laid out with a grid and let her see? Sure!

Later that day (if I remember the time rightly) I was pointed at a texture by UUID; could I try it? (Actually, I couldn't, until I found out how you can see (modulo alpha issues) a texture via a URL that's a function of the UUID. Grab it, GIMP the transparency back into existence, and put it on...) I sent back with a shout of glee that it was wonderful--the corset top proper has a baked-in shadow along the sides, and the texture matched that at the edge, but I had the size cranked so that the darker color was covered, leading to a mismatch--I could live with that, and it would be perfect for the vast majority... and back came another texture. How about this, Ms. Lemon asked? Perfect! I replied. She said that once RL permitted, she'd send textures appropriate for the "chubby pack" I'd bought, and they were waiting for me before I was able to get back on the grid.

I apologize to other clothiers--I am at fault in not mentioning this issue to you right away when it has happened to me before, to give you the option of taking action. I promise to give you that option in the future. I mean no disparagement to anyone; I just want to say that Ms. Lemon, when I gave her that option, went above and beyond to be of help.

Vacillating in style

A week and a half ago, hot weather had returned to Iowa after an amazing stretch of temperate climes for the Iowa State Fair, which is often oppressively hot and humid, with people standing in front of fans taller than they are in the Agriculture Building for a few seconds' relief. I escaped from it in Second Life.

This past weekend was cool, giving a taste of fall to come... and of course, I wanted what I couldn't have. (We have our stereotypical prerogative, don't we?) So off I headed to a virtual beach...

I should have put on the bikini, but the urge to walk out into the lovely clear water was strong.

At that point, it occurred to me that both these outfits are from VOOH Designs. For the fall foliage, it was "Seasons Green". (I love sweaters...) On the beach at Paradise Falls, it's "Floratta 4". (After spending so much time confined to solid colors for dresses and tops that I could adapt with my non-existent texturing skills, I am a total sucker for lacy and flowery detail. If you're reading, designers, any chance of paisley? *bats eyelashes*)

I hasten to add that these photos don't do the flexibiity of these outfits justice. I didn't have the wonderful Seasons hat on, and Floratta gives you both a dress and a bikini. Both include shoes.

So thank you, VOOH Designs, for the lovely work you do. When RL weather fluctuates, I can vacillate in style in Second Life.

Isolation

I forget what the buzzphrase is. A dictatorship maintains strict control over communications, so that each person thinks he or she is alone in thinking things are fundamentally wrong. When that control cracks, and people realize that they are not only not alone, but in the majority, they act, and the dictatorship falls. (Ah, that's what it's called: "preference cascade".)

I couldn't help thinking of that when I read about changes to the Second Life JIRA in a post in Tateru Nino's essential blog, Dwell on It. You can now only see JIRA entries that you yourself have submitted. Not only that, once it's been triaged, you will no longer be able to comment on it.

Before, people could say "go look at [link to JIRA entry] and vote for it/follow it/comment if you've had this problem". Goodness knows I've done it with VWR-1258, for example. No longer. If you've tripped over a bug someone else reported and just happen to have a log file with the needed information to show its cause, it won't help unless you report the bug and someone recognizes it in the flood of entries that will come because don Fulano de Tal can't see any other reports of the bug he shares with others.

This change to JIRA behavior is not something that someone actually wanting SL to propser would do, IMHO.

More early clothing--yay!

Eira Kalil of Tiny Things has come out with a new dress, "Tudor". It's gorgeous, and like all Tiny Things products are amazingly inexpensive. Can you believe this is L$35, including shoes?

I am such a pushover for beautiful lacy detailed textures... so this dress makes me a seriously happy camper. Thank you, Ms. Kalil.

The Boobies Show?

Holli Thespian has a flickr group, "Second Life PRIM Boobies", for images that include prim breasts. My eye was caught by an image there, posted by Maelynda, owner of a store called "Mes Sucreries", that doesn't really meet that requirement--since I can't share it, I'll simply say that it shows sparkly 3D pink text reading "the BOOBIES show"--and then by the text beneath it.

I was, and still am, a little puzzled by the text; I don't think English is its author's native language. In any case, it appears to describe a month-long event starting on September 16th the poster is putting on, featuring designers of prim breast-friendly clothing. The text calls for such designers to participate.

It's a very recently posted image (as I type, flickr says it went up thirteen hours ago). Does anyone know anything more about this event?

Ending a group

A few days ago, I got a notecard from Holli Thespian, asking whether she could send notices to the members of the Prim Breast Users group about her store and its clothing--she has started to make applicators for some of her tops to support prim breasts. (They're sold separately from the tops, if I understand rightly.)

This rubbed my virtual nose in the fact that I really haven't done diddly with the group. As with various other things, I had good intentions, but we all know the terminus of the road built from those.... and even with forty-two group slots instead of twenty-five, those slots are still precious.

So... I will shut down the Prim Breast Users group come September 1st. Thank you, everyone who joined. I regret not having served you as I intended. I urge you to do the following:

• If you haven't already done so, by all means join the Buxom Lifestyle group!
• Be sure to take a look at Holli Pocket, Ms. Thespian's store. Maggie's wonderful blog has an article about it and an entry in her database for the store, including a SLURL.
• Also take a look at Ms. Thespian's blog and in particular her post "Prim Boobie Infos [sic]". My photos and the things I write about tend towards the extreme, so I rarely mention an important point she makes in that post:

  I think a lot of us (including myself at one point) have this misconception about prim boobs, thinking they have to be over the top and ridiculous sizes-that's not appealing to 99% of people I know at least. This obviously is NOT the case and they can look fulfilling but still in my opinion, tasteful. They sure beat the standard lumpy/jagged looking default boobs in Sl and now it actually looks like I have REAL boobs!

  It's good to be reminded; to gain wider acceptance, prim breast makers must also cater to, and we must welcome with open arms, those who don't dream of having enormous breasts. (Prim breast makers understand this. If nothing else, purely economically, the L$ of those who mainly want the lovely shape of prim breasts spend just as well as mine. :))

Thank you, Ms. Thespian, for joining the growing group of clothiers who support prim breast users, and for nudging me to do the right thing.

UPDATE: Having to eject people one at a time is educational. Thank you to all ninety-five of you who joined. *hugs* to you all...

UPDATE: Some of the ejection messages were delayed for some reason, so my count was low. It's nearer a hundred of you. Love you all.

Watch your bandwidth

Anyone whose net connection is capped or billed at exorbitant rates past a certain point, or whose ISPs look askance at what they consider "excessive" usage, might want to check bandwidth usage when on Second Life.

The reason is described on JIRA entry SVC-8124. Under some circumstances, your SL viewer may be sent a lot of "ParcelOverlay reliable" messages. One user reports seeing 2 Mb/s (that's megabits per second) at certain locations. It only happens in some places, and one's viewing distance may affect it.

There is a fix, but it's not yet been rolled out to the main grid. Keep an eye out, either via the statistics bar in your SL client or via whatever means your computer's operating system or router, if it tracks data usage, provides.

(Boy, I have been out of the loop. This bug was submitted on August 9, and I only found out about it because I decided on a whim to see whether the Alphaville Herald was totally stagnant and on another whim to look at the comments for the most recent article.)

Ken Starks (helios) needs your help

How to start? Depends on the audience, I guess.

If you're a Linux user: Ken Starks, a man who has done a great deal to spread Linux where it counts, among the coming generation, needs your help.

If you are concerned about the "digital divide": Ken Starks, a man whose motto is "A child's exposure to technology should not be predicated on the ability to afford it" and who has worked tirelessly to back that motto up by providing that exposure to many children who'd not otherwise have it, needs your help.

If you're a kind person: Ken Starks needs your help.

Yesterday (as I type) August 16th began the countdown of two weeks until surgery goes from 80% probability of cure for the cancer he's fighting to effectively zero. In a governmental Catch-22, SSI disability disqualifies him from the programs that would pay for that surgery.

I have a link to the blog of helios on my blog; read it and you'll see how he's worked to get computers and net access to kids who wouldn't otherwise have them.

If you want to cut to the chase, head to this entry on Thomas A. Knight's blog.

Darn it, this is the second time in a short interval that someone I admire and greatly respect has found himself fighting cancer without insurance. I really would rather it not happen again.

ERRATUM: It helps to look more closely at dates. Sorry.

UPDATE: Wonderful news! A surgeon, a specialist in the procedure in question, has agreed to do it for the money raised so far. He also has Mr. S on medication that postpones that two-week deadline so he can gather the data needed to give the best chance of success. Read about it (and be sure to read the comments).

UPDATE: Still more good news, and Ken's thanks to everyone. As Ken says, now if you wish to donate, don't donate to the fund for his treatment--donate to Reglue (which The HeliOS Project is now associated with) instead.

Getting medieval...

By Eve has come out with medieval clothing, so I had to try it out.

There are two outfits, available in various colors. I got the "Pleasantly Peasantly" in olive, which goes nicely with some moss green Lassitude and Ennui shoes I got a while back. Then off to search for castles...

I had to skip a few; one was at a welcome area, and while the decor was nice, it was garishly lit. Then, success! The lovely RP area "Medieval Dreams" was the place to go.

Thank you, mizevangeline, and thanks to the creators of Medieval Dreams.

Bye-bye, playlist

playlist.com has decided to stop supporting players for one's playlist embedded on one's web page; you must now go to their site to listen to anyone's playlist... so I've edited out the HTML that once let you listen to my playlist. I'll put up a link to it on their site, once I find out how to do that.

First Valve, now Unity?!

From the OMG! Ubuntu! blog: "Mass-Market Games Engine 'Unity 3D' to Support Linux": "The viability of Linux as a gaming platform continues to grow, with today’s news that Unity 3D (no, not that one), one of the most popular games engines used by developers of all calibres, will be supporting Linux."

Why the switch? Google "unity 3d linux" and you'll find a bunch of links to Unity forum threads asking for Linux support, typically with people responding that there aren't enough Linux users to matter, etc. What changed their minds?

Well... Windows 8 isn't getting good reviews (google "windows 8 unmitigated disaster", or, more to the point, check out "[head of Valve] Gabe Newell Wants to Support Linux Because Windows 8 is a 'Catastrophe'"), but there's more to it than that. With Windows 8, Microsoft is trying to make itself into Apple. It's putting out hardware (computers, not just mice and keyboards), and hence OEMs are worried. Most of all, it's moving towards an App Store as the way people get applications for their Windows computers, giving Microsoft control and making applications developers... in particular for this discussion, independent game developers, worry. (See "Why is Windows 8 'a catastrophe for anyone in the PC space'?" for more info.)

I am hoping this is the "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers" scenario. I hope that the Unity people will work with (lean on? :)) graphics hardware makers as Valve has, making it even clearer that it's to their benefit to seriously support Linux. Things are, I hope, about to get interesting.

P.S. For non-Ubuntu users, the "no, not that one" aside above is there because Canonical, the makers (aggregators?) of Ubuntu, named their "let's impose a touch UI on everybody" UI "Unity", and it's had, at least until very recently, 2D and 3D versions.

Still having to choose

The Teacuppot Second Life client is a wonderful thing that Armin Weatherwax of the Imprudence/Kokua team is working on. Like Imprudence, it has a 64-bit Linux version, and sure enough, I downloaded, fired it up, and could hear streaming audio on Whimsy the way it should be.

So, flushed with victory, I went off to take pictures... and found that the currently downloadable version of Teapot suffers from the issue with high-resolution snapshots that plagued SL clients for a long time. I'm hoping that whatever was done to fix it will percolate into Teacuppot at some point, but for now I will still have to choose the feature that I think most important at any given time.

UPDATE: My sincere apologies to Armin Weatherwax for alternately referring to his work as "Teapot" (correct) and "Teacup" (which emerged from goodness knows where in my brain). If you want to try out Teapot, head over to where he has kindly placed it for download.

Another sad loss for SL

Amiryu Hosoi's beautiful four-sim region, Japan Kanto, is going away. The story is here.

SL tier is insane. The four sims come to $1,200 every month. Hosoi estimates a total expenditure of over $150,000 over six years. Unless you can sell a lot of virtual items or rent a lot of virtual land, that's a darned expensive hobby for anyone not seriously wealthy.

LL had better rethink its business model.

New prim breasts from Foxbean Liebknecht: Christina

Careful observers who've looked at the pictures in "Kind of ironic", or at pictures I've put on flickr like this:

will have noted that these are not Foxbean "Nadine" breasts. Clothed Nadines show no evidence of nipples.

As someone once said, "Now it can be told." Foxbean has officially released new prim breasts, named "Christina" in honor of Christina Hendricks of Mad Men fame. (And hence you know also that I was given some for testing. I don't think it has affected my opinion, but the info is there for you to weigh as you will.)

The "Christina" breasts have several advantages over the "Nadine" breasts.  The breasts now accommodate remote control if one permits it, a feature that is important to a significant number judging by its presence in other prim breasts. The shape has differences other than the obvious--in this photo I have on Bad Kitty's gorgeous "Tied Up" top.

It may just be that I have gotten better at tweaking textures after reading Maggie's wonderful helpful articles in Busted, but in the past I'd have shown a blatant discontinuity between the edge of the fabric on the torso and on the breasts. (I must admit to having done some photos in profile in the past to conceal such issues.) Christina seems more accommodating to larger sizes than Nadine was. That's important to me--I have a tendency to push such things as far as I can.

The associated scripts are more efficient. There are differences in the UI; no more HUD. Instead you touch the breasts to call up a menu. The division between options under specialized menu control and the standard Second Life edit facility is different, and, I think, better; for example, the edit facilities for moving an object, which you now use rather than a menu or HUD give one much finer control than a menu or HUD typically does, while on the other hand, scaling remains under scripted menu control, avoiding the "OK, I've stretched it...drat! Now I have to move it back into place!" problem of the standard stretch. 

I've yet to check Christina out without clothing. We'll see how that goes; I really liked the Nadine "torpedoes" model for use without clothing... From all I've tried so far, though, I am quite happy.

UPDATE: I forgot to give links. *blush* You can find them in SL Marketplace and in Foxbean's in-world store, which I give a SLURL for in the right-hand column on this blog. (BTW, I had to do a double take when I went from Foxbean's store, which is what the link goes to, to the specific entry for the "Christina" breasts; apparently in SL Marketplace's categorization scheme, breasts are genitalia?!)

Maps and Bumps and Why They're Important

The folks who bring you the Exodus SL client have undertaken to add normal maps (aka "bump maps") and specular maps to Second Life, and some other stuff as well. Here's a video showing what we're talking about:


Normal maps let you create objects with more detail without having to proliferate polygons. (The map is created from the high-detail object and applied to a lower polygon version--the high-polygon version will never actually appear in Second Life.) Specular maps let different parts of an object have different reflectivity.

Two things of note:

• This is open source. I hope this means that it will make it into TPVs.
• These features will make it possible to create very good-looking objects that don't put nearly as much burden on graphics hardware as would otherwise be necessary to look that good; games (I mean game games) have used these techniques for quite a while. BUT: things will have to be created to use these maps. Old objects without them won't suddenly look better.

So as time goes on, new builds can look far better--perhaps even living up to the expectations of gamers--and, I hope, old items can be recreated using the new capabilities. 

Many, many thanks to the Exodus developers, and thanks to Hamlet Au, who wrote about this in NWN.

UPDATE: Blender Cookie, a source for Blender tutorials, has a tutorial on making normal, specular, and diffuse maps. (Thank you to Laverne Unit in the SL Universe fora for posting the link.)

P.S. ObBreasts: Two words: Montgomery tubercles (two more: link NSFW!). (i.e. that's the sort of small detail that can add verisimilitude but would, without normal maps, involve adding to polygon counts more than they're worth)

Kind of ironic

So today I went looking for a beach to take some pictures... TavWear makes really nice swimsuits, and I'm overdue for some pictures. Down through the search results I went, and came to one called Busty's Beach Island.

Sounds promising, right? I headed there, and found the billboard with the rules, and near the top: "No overly-sized or un-natural [sic] body parts."

As I took a picture of the billboard, the lady whose island it is asked me, with impeccable courtesy, to remove my prim breasts. I told her I'd just seen the billboard and was headed home. She thanked me, and I said it was no problem. 

Of course, it's her island, and she can establish the rules she wishes... but it seems kind of ironic for "Busty's Beach Island" to forbid prim breasts. I had to smile just a little. I did find a beach, though, and got a picture or two. Not being actually in the water, I had on a wrap skirt.

Yay Valve!

As I often say, I am not a gamer... and therefore I hadn't heard of Valve. Now I know, though, and I am deeply grateful to them!

For those who, like me, aren't gamers: Valve is a company that develops games (including many that even I have heard of) and ways to distribute them (Steam). Valve recently confirmed that it's working on Steam for Linux, and we're starting to see some of the results, which will benefit us all.

Evidence? It's on the Valve Linux blog, in particular in the post "Faster Zombies". Left 4 Dead 2 now runs faster on Linux than it does on Windows.

OK, that by itself is meaningless to us on Second Life. It's how they did it that is important.

I am among those who are royally urinated off at nVidia for their lack of support for open source drivers. (It's bitten them in a sensitive place; a few days ago a security hole in their driver was made public. Had the driver been open source, how long ago would it have been fixed?) Unfortunately, nVidia doesn't care what I think... but it does care about a serious game company like Valve. (Such companies create the vast majority of the market for their hardware.) Because it cares, it's willing to work with Valve on issues with Linux drivers. (So is AMD, owner of ATI, and Intel.) That should mean better graphics performance for everybody. (Yes, even Windows users--while trying to figure out why the speed increase, Valve found an inefficiency in Direct3D that they can work around, or maybe Microsoft will do something about it... Whoa, I must be in a good mood to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt.)

So, don't despair. To the extent that things not in Valve code improve, we will all benefit.

UPDATE: Second Life will be distributed on Valve's Steam network. (Thanks to Hamlet Au for posting with this news and more.)

Another reason to use Firestorm...

...can be found here.

Basically, the Firestorm developers have found the problem with operations that load or save files that cause the Second Life client (not just the LL client, I hasten to add) to hang in Linux if you try to save a photo to disk.

Now to go over and see whether I can be a beta tester if I make puppy eyes at them. :)

UPDATE: No need. I am now running Firestorm 4.1.1.28744, and I can save a photo to disk. Please, people responsible for other SL clients, adopt this fix ASAP.... and thank you to the Firestorm developers. The grid is in your debt.

Height inflation revisited

Mock Cosmetics has one of the "show your height" objects that you click on, but alongside it are three objects whose labels you can't see in this photo, but which should be by every single "show your height" object in the entire grid. From left to right:

• Average height for American women, 5'4"
• Average height for American men, 5'9"
• The height of Robert Wadlow, the tallest man who ever lived, 8'10"

Alas, they are behind a counter, so I couldn't take a picture showing them in their entirety--that does magnify the differences as per Darrell Huff's classic How to Lie with Statistics, but I didn't have a choice.

Things are so askew in SL that avatars of RL average height or even taller get accused of being child avatars. Maybe this sort of display would help were it more common.

(No discussion of scale and height in Second Life should be without a reference to Penny Patton's "A Matter of Scale". If you've not read it, I hope you will.)

For my European friends...

Please read "This Week We Kill ACTA - Or Get Locked Down in Monopolies for Decades" at the Torrentfreak web site, and consider emailing to the address mentioned in the article. The passage of ACTA would be a disaster.

Yay Blogger!

I don't have to go back and edit HTML to just get one blank line between paragraphs instead of two now! I guess the folks at Blogger finally noticed, or had it pointed out to them.

I am a happy blogger.

Happy news from Shayna Korobase

Shayna's found a prim breast-friendly nude beach! (You'll recall that she, and others, have found that some nude beaches, amazingly, are very unfriendly to busty avatars.) I will make a point of visiting the beach, named "The Island of Bare-Naked Angels"--it's important to support those who support us.

Actually, she has a lot of happy news at her blog, especially about her wonderful creations. Check it out.

Coming back

I've not been inworld for a while. Part of it is RL having to take precedence, and part is that it's very easy once you get out of the habit of doing something to not do it.

I'm back now, and that makes me happy.

Nobody's normal...

If you think that all it would take for Second Life to go mainstream and life to be happy forever after is for Linden Lab to get those people off the grid, read "Going Mainstream Means Letting in the Weirdos" by Tateru Nino. (Even if you don't think that, it's worth your while; she's a wise lady.)

Encouraging stories

BetaBeat has an article that's worth your while: "Eight Real Tales of Learning Computer Science as a High School Girl". Despite its subtitle, the tales either write about the gender divide not at all or only in passing, as an initial misconception that "CS is for boys" that experience erases. I find that extremely hopeful. Ganbatte!

Ride the invisible pony

There's a strange combination of slider settings that I've seen occasionally. They make one's hips and legs look sort of like slightly padded versions of the copper pipe figures from those commercials for some drug to control incontinence.

Apparently it's sort of a trend in some circles; see this SLUniverse thread. Those who have their avatars set this way are referred to as "riding an invisible pony".

Having heard too many sea chanteys at Renaissance fairs, I immediately thought of this:


It wants to be filked. (It's only fair; "Donkey Riding" borrows the tune from "Highland Laddie" which got it from "If thou'lt play me fair play".)

RIP Ray Bradbury

I am remiss in not mentioning the passing of Ray Bradbury. I think others have written of him and his work far better than I, but it merits mention that some time back he turned his imagination to a virtual reality room rather like the ST:TNG holodeck in his short story "The Veldt". If you haven't read it, you should.

Important notice

Please read this post on Maggie Bluxome's blog concerning Essentials Breasts, especially if you received a full-permission version of them during these past few days.

It's sad news. I do not know what this will mean for those with legitimately purchased Essentials Breasts, and I hope that we'll see a return of breasts with the Essentials shape--Jennifur does beautiful work.

Very pretty!

Boho Bikini makes some really lovely RL embroidered bikinis. I wonder whether there's similar fashion in SL? (If there are any for the busty community, that would be even better!)

They're singing what?!

If you have always wondered just what the whole "Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi" thing was all about and what the heck they were singing... well, this won't help you at all, but it's hilarious!

Seriously, there's more to Carmina Burana than Orff's setting. Take a listen...

Happy birthday, Busted!

Busted magazine has come out with its second anniversary issue, and it is glorious.

It features photos of those who make the magazine possible--those of the always impeccably-dressed (OK, in one case impeccably undressed) Maggie are especially beautiful. The first part of Angel Eulenberg's writing about her experiences as a busty kajira in Gor is not to be missed. I very much look forward to what is to come, for Angel's experiences and for the magazine as a whole.

One sometimes hears of a project referred to as so-and-so's baby. The analogy needs to be tweaked a little bit, because instead of the "terrible twos" I think "terrific twos" the more accurate characterization for Busted.

Thank you once again, Maggie!

A very cheesy workaround

As we await a solution to VWR-28846 it turns out that there is a kludgy way around the problem: mail snapshots to yourself.

If you know of a way to mail yourself a snapshot in PNG format (which doesn't do lossy compression), let me know. I don't see that knob.

Thank you!

The folks at Chounyuu (link NSFW!) have done something I consider a great honor.

Chounyuu is a web site for people interested in large-breasted characters in manga and similar art. A while back I found that there was a thread in their forum about Second Life, so I took a look around and posted some images that I thought they'd appreciate.

Recently I got some email asking permission to place some images of me in the set that the site randomly selects from as page header images, and I happily approved. Sure enough, a week or so later I found myself there atop a page--again, they're randomly selected so it's like Forrest Gump's box of chocolates.

Thank you! I hope we'll see other images from Second Life there soon.

Second Life for Linux... does anyone at LL care?

If you run 64-bit Linux and use Second Life, chances are that you are having to get along without streaming media. (Fedora has RPMs for installing 32-bit gstreamer libraries on 64-bit systems, and worst case you can peek at the URL for streaming audio and fire up VLC or something in another window.)

That's been true for a long time; as far as I know, as long as there's been a Linux SL client. More recently, a problem's shown up for 64-bit and 32-bit Linux: VWR-28846, "Viewer 3.3.1 freezes on picture taking attempt". There are actually two issues here. On 32-bit Linux, it freezes after a complaint about PCRE (a library that implements Perl-style regular expressions) not being compiled with UTF-8 (a common Unicode encoding, which some, me included, think should be used everywhere). On 64-bit Linux, it freezes after a complaint about /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/2.10.0/menuproxies/libappmenu.so being a 64-bit library.

People, me included, have been clamoring for full 64-bit Linux support for quite some time--we're coming up on the third anniversary of the JIRA entry asking for 64-bit support--with no result save for third-party clients such as Imprudence (and Kokua someday, I hope!) and ArminW's Teapot. Not having streaming media cuts one off from an important part of SL, i.e. live performance, but the existence of kludges, I suppose, lets one rationalize. Not being able to save snapshots, though, is a lot harder to ignore. If Linden Lab only fixes that problem for 32-bit Linux, pulling 64-bit Linux users out from under the bus and throwing us under again, at the very least they'll be guaranteeing we'll give up on the LL client.

Avis was #2, and tried harder...

...how about #3?

"Our own viewer users are a minority. A significant minority -- we're the number three viewer behind, behind [Phoenix and Firestorm]... Phoenix is far and away the number one viewer, although it's quite steadily losing market share these days, has been for some months now. And Firestorm is the newer technology viewer from your project, is the number two, and it's gaining market share... And our viewer is number three behind Firestorm." --Oz Linden, March 2012

Check out this article at New World Notes.

It would be even more interesting to know what the share is like if one doesn't count alts, and even better if one could exclude bots (or do they use some text-only client for efficiency?), but even so I'm surprised.

One of the comments on the article claims that it shows how few new users are coming to Second Life, since you'd think they'd start out with the LL viewer... but I don't know whether that's the case. I would suggest that it may mean that the newcomers who stay are those introduced to SL by friends who can guide them through that important initial interval, and that those friends are more likely to point their charges at the viewer they themselves use.

Double Bind

Hamlet Au asks why we put up with the technical problems of Second Life, and says that our putting up with them (and thereby letting Linden Lab get away with not fixing them) will doom Second Life.

Technical problems here are exemplified by the poor performance of the current Linden Lab SL client on Hamlet's roughly year and a half old Alienware laptop that  he refuses to do anything to like installing the latest nVidia driver--after all, that's doing LL's work for them. (It's not clear whether he puts adjusting the SL client's preferences in that category, but "Why should I spend an hour or two tinkering on software when it should just WORK BY NOW?" sure sounds like it.)

And to an extent, he's right. A lot of people can't be bothered to maintain their computers, and hence are unlikely to either have a reasonable first experience with Second Life or want to bother to take any action to improve that experience.

On the other hand...

• Linden Lab can't be blamed for inadequacies of the operating system (does Windows not nudge you when new graphics card drivers are available? Linux does) or of the computer user--and would you trust an application that tried to install system software, or changes your environment (maybe having Aero or Compiz turned on hurts SL performance because of the eye candy they offer), or like one that changes your SL client settings (maybe you have the graphics cranked for photography, or turned down for racing)?
• There are a lot more problems with that first experience than the purely technical--to only mention one, there's the way that the newcomers get their initial training and then are dumped into welcome areas infested with, shall we say, people who are less than concerned with the quality of the new user's experience in SL.
• Any boycott of SL has to be on a large scale; a few people going away won't make any difference. Indeed, the departure of much-loved sims in the past year or so doesn't seem to have made much difference. Vendors won't boycott alone--they'd be giving up income while their competitors do that much better in their absence.
• What was the old line? "We don't care. We don't have to; we're the phone company." Linden Lab is in that position. Where else can people go to create as they will or remake themselves in a virtual world, and still be able to interact with the friends they've made in SL?

So it's true. We're in a double bind. Second Life is the only place the existing user base can get what it wants; possible competitors are likely to be scared off by the media's predominant mischaracterization of SL as, in the ignorant words of Chris Pirillo, all sex and gambling. There's no such thing as mass media for Second Life in the way there is in RL; trying to organize the residents is a lot like herding cats, and the last name clusterflop is good evidence that it won't matter anyway.... so LL can continue with the assumption that the existing user base will continue to put up with whatever they get.

Perhaps Second Life will manage to continue, with enough people willing to pay the outrageous tier fees to support an ongoing user base, though without new blood, eventually that user base will die off (barring the Singularity, but in that case nobody will care about SL save maybe as the moral equivalent of a "living history" site). Perhaps OpenSim will win out or at least allow an ongoing, if smaller, collection of users.

IMHO, to survive, a virtual world is going to have to use as much existing code as possible, preferably open source to avoid licensing issues such as have come up with kakadu, Vivox, and Havok, with "NIH" ("not invented here") verboten. Apologies for the repetition, but... how much better off would Second Life be if, rather than throwing together a homebrew scripting language, we'd had an existing language like Python or C# or Ruby from the beginning? We'd then have

• far more documentation and tutorials than LL could generate on its own
• far more work on optimization than LL could ever manage
• already existing IDEs
• an existing talent pool and source of help for newbies
• a market for skill in said language outside of LL (seen any postings for IT jobs that have LSL experience as a requirement lately?)

For examples, take a look at the Lua Wiki's "Lua Uses" page. Let's see... SpringRTS, SimCity 4, World of Warcraft, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, CryEngine2, FarCry, Supreme Commander, Garry's Mod, Psychonauts, Heroes of Might and Magic V, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, Impossible Creatures, Multi Theft Auto: San Andreas, Homeworld 2, and others... Oh, look! There!

Last chance to see Whimsy Kaboom

Whimsy Kaboom is going away. Visit it while you can. For more details, read Cheyenne's post on the subject.

I am perpetually amazed that as many people pay the insane tier costs of land in SL as do. Grateful, but amazed.

UPDATE: Hooray! Whimsy Kaboom is saved! More details on Cheyenne's blog.

Calling all mesh clothing makers

If you want the mesh deformer to become official, please head over to VWR-28846, see what mesh clothing is being requested for help with testing, and provide it. If you don't, there's a good chance that the mesh deformer code, after all the hassle, brouhaha, and shaming of LL by crowdfunding the deformer code, won't make it into the official SL client, and therefore, by the infamous 2(k), nobody will be able to have it. Here's Oz Linden on the topic, from the JIRA:

Perhaps this issue really isn't all that important, or worth the trouble to integrate. 

So far, only one designer has responded with one test garment. 

Let me be clear - the lack of test material is a major blocker for testing, and therefor[sic] accepting, this proposed feature.  If you want it, step up and do it soon.

I have to wonder why LL doesn't have such items left over from testing, but that's irrelevant. Please don't give them an excuse.

UPDATE: Designers have already commented that five days four days and not quite sixteen and a half hours, the time between the request for clothes in the JIRA and the above thinly veiled threat, is a pretty short interval, and it is. I just want the feature to be adopted.

UPDATE: Do read Nalates Urriah's post on the subject.

Taking the plunge...

I'm now on Google+. Should issues about my identity come up, I'd like to think that a blog that's been around over five and a half years would be good evidence. We'll see how it goes.

A dream come true?

I got a message from Cheyenne urging me to go immediately to New World Notes. I did... and I'm dumbfounded.

Ceri Quixote has created a 62-meter mesh avatar.

There are other reports. There's a video... watch it in 720p mode and full screen.





Shadows are enabled, and the positions are such as to rule out forced perspective.

Note also the quality of the avatar; giant avatars built from prims have improved over time, but at the joints it's obvious that they are built up from multiple prims. Look at Ms. Quixote's shoulders and abdomen; they are smooth and the body is a single unit.

So... we have an existence proof. (The NWN article says Ms. Quixote will be selling (somewhat shorter) giant avatars on SL Marketplace.) I think I will go IM Bart Seymour...

UPDATE: Be sure to read the comments on the NWN post. Ms. Quixote is not alone in creating giant mesh avatars, breathtaking as her work is. Indeed, if you have read past articles and comments here, you'll recall that Aliasi Stonebender has done so and mentioned it back in mid-February.

I hope I don't have to drop back to screenshots...

Lately I've been crashing every time I try to save a photo to disk in Second Life. Firestorm, the LL client... they both do it. Could this be related to my Ubuntu upgrade? I hope not; it's hard to believe anything would change about the file save dialogue.

Aargh.

UPDATE: VWR-28846. Linux users, please vote for and follow this one; it's serious proctalgia. Also, if you use 64-bit Linux, please leave a comment here and let me know (1) which distribution, release thereof, and windowing interface you use and (2) whether you have this problem? Maybe it will help narrow things down.

UPDATE: There may be two issues. When I look at the log, I see a message in which the client gripes about a library being 64-bit; someone running 32-bit Ubuntu 12.04 sees a message about PCRE (a library that does regular expressions in the style of the Perl scripting language) being compiled without UTF-8 support.