Wise beyond her years...

Marianne McCann posts an insightful open letter to SL's new CEO: "Dear Ebbe". (And it took me until now to get the reference...)

RL inspiration

From the January 29, 2014 New York Post, "Meet the gal with the longest legs in NYC", about Brooke Banker, a 26-year-old model who is 5'11" tall with 47" legs (measuring from heel to hip):

Apparently Russia crowned Anastasia Strashevskaya "Miss Longest Legs" earlier this month; she has 42" legs. (Alas, I have not been able to find her total height.) That was followed by Alexandra Robertson in England, 6'1" with 47-inch legs, and now Ms. Banker.

I would think that legginess involves proportion as well as length, so that Ms. Banker (0.662 leg length/height ratio) outdoes Ms. Robertson (0.644). My goodness--being two-thirds leg by height! Could Ms. Banker create a similarly-proportioned Second Life avatar?

Actually, I think she could. I will have to make a point of figuring out my avatar's leg length/height ratio. I do like to twist the knob to 11, and the avatar stretching animations do most of their stretching on the legs. How far can one go?

UPDATE: Svetlana Pankratova still holds the record, 6'5" tall with 4'4" legs, and thus a leg length/height ratio of 0.675.

What next?

Things are happening. One is depressing; the other just makes me wonder.

Cloud Party has been bought by Yahoo, which is going to shut it down.

Sigh. I'm reminded of the days of Ziff-Davis buying computer magazines in order to shut them down. Cloud Party had great promise, and I'm very sad to see it go.

Now for the one I'm not sure of: Rod Humble is stepping down as CEO of Linden Lab. Who will replace him? That's a very good question.

Passing the Torch

The January 2014 Busted magazine marks the passing of the torch. The lovely and talented Maggie Bluxome has stepped down as senior editor, and Rachel Swallows has taken on the job. The new issue, I assure you, shows that the magazine is in good hands.

I look forward to what is to come from Busted, and I wish Maggie all the best with whatever she takes on. You're an amazing lady, Maggie.

Life imitates Second Life

Christmas brings ads for many stores--including jewelers. I saw an ad the other day, and I wish I remembered the store and the product--it was a ring or a bracelet, and I swear it sparkled like the most obnoxious bling-laden SL product you could ever imagine. I had to laugh; I guess in RL people wouldn't berate one quite as much for wearing it.

Dem bones, dem bones, dem avatar bones...

So after many people contributed real money to pay Qarl Fizz to implement the mesh deformer, and after years of, well, something, LL has decided not to support it. instead, they will support something like the "Liquid Mesh" (which was controversial because it took advantage of SL's actual behavior as opposed to its specified behavior). "Bones" will be added for body parts that in RL don't have bones so that those body parts can influence the position and motion of mesh clothing.

I am not a builder or virtual tailor, so I cannot have an informed opinion about which method is better. If I understand rightly, though, the mesh deformer would "just work": you make a piece of clothing to fit the stock avatar at whatever is considered the default slider settings, and the deformer would take care of making the clothing fit its user at whatever slider setting he or she has in effect. The mesh deformer, therefore, would at least seem to be easier from the clothes-maker's point of view.

One thing I think we can say: what sane person will now do anything to try to improve Second Life, in view of what has happened with the mesh deforrmer? IMHO this shows that the "shared experience" clause is every bit as destructive as we thought it would be.

P.S. In this regard, two must-read blog posts:

• Strawberry Singh, "Fitted Mesh Announcement from Linden Lab"
• Will Burns, "Stockholm Syndrome"

Disney heroines with beards

Imagine my surprise to see this image...

Not just surprise that Ariel's hair isn't soaked and plastered to her, but that she has a beard! It's from a blog post by Adam Ellis, "Disney Princesses with Beards". (They're not all princesses; he includes, for example, Mulan, Alice, and of course Ariel. I personally wish he'd done Rapunzel from Tangled.)

She wears it very well indeed, and it makes me want to go bearded again... but I want a curly beard like Ariel's! The fluffy Victorian-meets-ZZ-Top beard was nice, but I will have to go looking for curls. I wonder if there are mesh beards now?

UPDATE: O me of little faith! Google immediately turned up a truly impressive example, the Rustica mesh Norse beard, too long for my use, but complete with braiding. You'll definitely intimidate your foes with it!

Bewbstock

I've been to Bewbstock. Lovely clothing--though if you don't use Tangos or Lush, or one of the breast attachments that can use Tango appliers, your choices there are limited.

I bought one of the Gatherings Designs Boho outfits, even though they don't include an applier I can use, because the skirt is just so darned beautiful! Thank you, Stacia Zabaleta.

Hope to see you soon in a better virtual place, Qarl...

A must-read from Qarl Fizz né Linden: "goodbye, second life".

I am amazed and grateful that he hung on as long as he did in the face of Linden Lab's unconscionable foot-dragging on the mesh deformer.

Someone on NWN in comments on a video of an in-world presentation by IP lawyers on TOS and IP has already done a "So long and thanks for all the sculpties" HHGttG reference, so I'll skip that. Besides, I hope it's not so long, at least not forever.

Read the whole post, but I have to quote its end:

fellow citizens of the virtual world: next time we do this, we absolutely must be more careful. no matter how cute and earnest our rulers appear in the beginning, we cannot accept their promise "trust us". we need DEMOCRACY. we need it at the foundation, and we need it in writing. 

see you on the other side.

Graphics improvements with Linux 3.12 kernel

The folks at the Phoronix web site found that AMD Radeon graphics run much (where much ranges from 10% to 90%) faster on the Linux 3.12 kernel, and now they've found out why.

They have a neat setup to automate testing to find the answer to this type of question--it does a binary search on the kernel source commits to find the one where the change takes place. It turns out to be a change that affects how CPU frequency is adjusted based on load.

So, that should be good news for at least some SL residents using the 3.12 kernel. The 2^16-dollar question: what about other graphics card users? The change doesn't sound like it should be specific to AMD graphics, but until you try it out, you can't say for sure, and that testing is now in Phoronix's queue. (Darn it, it looks like Ubuntu 13.10 will have the 3.11 kernel.)

Anyone out there using 3.12? Have you noticed a speedup in SL? I'd love to hear about your experiences.

UPDATE: OhHeyItsLou reports that Nouveau (the open source nVidia driver) works nicely on 3.12, but he doesn't do any gaming sorts of things in the video, so the question is still open.

Survey at Whimsy's Closet blog

Of course, surveys in blogs have self-selected respondents, which pretty well guarantees a non-representative sample. But hey, unless we're willing to pay someone to do a serious survey, this is as good as it gets.

So... I hope you'll head over to "Which Prim Breasts Do You Wear Most?" on the Whimsy's Closet blog and give your response. I look forward to seeing where the results settle down. Thanks to Cindy Melgund for setting up the survey, and to Maggie Bluxome for posting about it on her blog.

Maggie Bluxome reinvents her blog again

...and the results are impressive indeed. Check it out: maggiebluxome.com.

An interesting reaction to the new TOS

Take a look at "The Content Liberation Front" on the Kitely Blog. Creators can copy their stuff to Kitely for free, and thence they can back it up to their very own hard drive. I'm no content creator, but it looks like a heck of a deal.

No Matter What Shape Your Avatar's In

I don't know how long the trend for women's avatar shapes has gone on, but it is out there. The stereotypical features:

• legs sufficiently separated that the avatar can stand astride a piano bench without bending her knees
• gap-toothed
• a sullen, frowning face

It's sufficiently well-known to be parodied; Iris Ophelia has written in New World Notes about a flickr image, titled "The Average Avi Body on SL", that pokes fun at it.

Do I like the trend? Not particularly; the legs would seem to require something other than a human pelvis, which creeps me out a little. Being gap-toothed has worked fine for Ali McGraw and other well-known beautiful women; I recall long ago seeing what was either a TV show or a short movie all about gap-toothed women--but I wouldn't choose it. The sullen look is the worst for me. Yes, it's hard to get a good-looking, non-phony smile in SL... but even if I can't show that I'm having fun in-world that way, I don't want to look like I can't stand it or whoever is around. I don't want to look blasé, too cool to care, or tragically hip, just as I don't want to be any of those.

All that said, what others do with their avatars is, for the most part, their business. In the immortal words of Thomas Jefferson, it neither breaks my neck^H^H^H^Hleg nor picks my pocket. Some things go over the edge for me--in which case I go elsewhere. For all I know, they may think something analogous of my avatar.

UPDATE: Thanks for the comments--and Ms. Tsiolkovsky, I hope that you are still writing somewhere. And for those of you who aren't as antique as I am, here's what the post title references:

In praise of Busted

I know I always say that the staff at Busted has outdone itself each month, but darn it, it's always been true... and this month is no exception. Especially impressive is how the photos of Missy Powers have been processed to suggest motion, something I don't think is possible yet purely via the SL snapshot facilities. (If only they let you set a virtual shutter speed...!)

The August 2013 issue also takes an enjoyable diversion into the Linden Endowment for the Arts sims; many thanks to Bellimora for a fine article.

Angel covers the First Annual Miss Busty SL Pageant, an event I wish I could have attended--but would not want to have to judge. I could never choose just one. (Remember how E.E. "Doc" Smith described the ratings of starship captains in the Lensman series, with hair's-breadth differences between the first N, for some large N? That's what I'm reminded of.)

Finally... I look forward to Xarah Undercroft's reviews of the many breast attachments that will appear in issues to come; if her "Tops and Bottoms" articles are any indication, they will be very good indeed! (And with the very welcome proliferation of breast attachments, quite helpful.)

I'll repeat myself yet again: if you have any interest in the Second Life busty community, Busted is among the very first resources you should turn to.

Zettai ryouiki as billboard?

I had a brief fling with zettai ryouiki a while back--I might revisit it. (It was fun... if only I'd properly tagged and filed the socks I finally came up with!)

Now young Japanese women are selling that space for advertising. (This is RL... though I wonder whether one could do that in Second Life? UPDATE: of course you can; that's what tattoos are for... but would it show up backwards on your other leg?) They must be at least 18, and have at least 20 friends on social networks. More info at the New York Post.

flickr and other changes

I've been as remiss with flickr as with my blog, so I went looking. Wow... it has changed! A lot of the limits on free accounts have gone away, but there are still things only a Pro user can do. Details are here.

The thing that amazes me, though, is what they've done to the display of one's photostream. Now, instead of a vertical list of a few images with text, it's more like a photo album. I was blown away. It certainly makes one's photos look more impressive--here's my photostream now; check it out.

With that many more images visible, and with a little scrolling, I happened across a photo I took of Kaseido Quandry, and with that I realized how long it had been since I checked Kaseido's typist's blog. Had her typist made it successfully through writing and defending a dissertation?

The answer to that last question, I am happy to say, is "yes", but alas, what little of the blog survives exists, without images and without comments on posts, in the Internet Wayback Machine.

So long, Kaseido.

Bosom Bloggers and the "Modesty Panel"

It turns out that the author of one of the blogs I link to, Thin and Curvy, is among a group of bloggers called "the bosom bloggers". They have a blog, The Bosom Bloggers, and a while back a number of them posted about the topic of modesty under the clever name "the modesty panel". The posts (and the blogs in general!) are well worth your time and very insightful. I will have to think about how I dress in Second Life--do I go overboard in the direction of "modesty"?

A new magazine: BaZoomba

Yesterday I got a notice with an attached magazine: the first issue of BaZoomba. One can infer from the title that this is a magazine featuring well-endowed models. I spent a little time before having to go to work reading it--or at least trying to.

The photography is very good indeed. I'm going to have to give the text another try, though. My aging eyes don't have a good time with the somewhat condensed Times Roman Italic white text on black background, especially with the amount of text on the pages. The initial greetings were larger and easier to read... but they were greatly in need of proofreading. (I can sympathize with that; good proofreading is not an easy task. We humans are forgiving of errors, or perhaps it's just that we zip over text and overlook mistakes, like the infamous "Paris in the the spring" in a triangle.)

Do check it out. I look forward to seeing future issues, and I hope that BaZoomba will set up a web site to make issues available. I am too seldom on SL these days to spend my time in world reading a magazine. (I can't tell someone "please leave me alone, I'm reading a magazine" while in-world; it would make me feel really bad!) Also, on a browser window I can make text big enough to read. (I once made the mistake of making an in-world magazine too big. I had to detach it, unable to get back to the controls; I don't remember whether I was able to shrink it back down.)

The Weight

The July Busted is out... and has been for a while, of course. You should read it. Even if you have, somehow, resisted the incredible photography, editorials, and columns, there's an article in the July issue important to all of us who wish to go beyond the limits of the stock avatar bosom: Bellimora's article "The Weight of a Big Bust."

It's weight, Jim, but not as we know it--and we who tend towards the high end of the size spectrum are thankful. The weight in question is that which counts in Second Life: the number of scripts and memory usage. Bellimora has gone to the trouble of determning those values for many of the breast attachments of Second Life. (And prices, too, a good thing to know.) Along with the table of data is a lot of other good information--and it's good to read that her experiences with those who make it possible for us to realize our dreams are consistent with mine; they are good people and willing to help.

I personally am happy to see that my favorites, Foxbean's breasts, have decreased in their "weight" as time has gone on, and that she's working to improve them still further.

Don't miss this issue. (Don't miss any of them, actually; Busted is the premiere magazine for the Second Life busty community.)