Clothes that Perfectly Fit Your Skeleton

(See today's Ophelia's Gaze for a discussion of this issue that is more balanced and includes some photos that show just how good mesh avatars and clothing can look!)

Alas, mesh clothing has a problem as things stand now. They can take into account your skeleton, which is affected by some of your appearance settings (height, leg length, torso length, et al.), but not by a lot of others (e.g. body fat, love handles, breast size). Apparently the current solution is to use an alpha mask to hide the parts of your body that mesh clothing is supposed to cover, so that it will appear to do so even if you have, for example, a shape that makes Sir Mix-A-Lot happy. In other words--currently you have to adapt your shape to mesh clothing.

If you want mesh clothing to fulfill its promise, I join Ophelia in urging you to vote for and watch JIRA issue CTS-693. (LL hasn't taken away voting as it seemed they would earlier, but my understanding is they pay a lot more attention to people willing to put up with the email generated by an issue, which is what watching entails.) This proposal will let mesh clothing take your shape into consideration, so that it really fits around you. If you want serious booty, you should be able to have it, and your clothes should work with it rather than forcing you to hide it.

(UPDATE: CTS-693 has apparently been moved to an internal LL JIRA, so the above link is broken. In the publicly visible SL JIRA, it received over 470 votes in a few days.)

Now... the meshophobes will no doubt point and laugh, BUT... as we've pointed out (perhaps more times than you care for if you've read this blog for long) the current painted-on clothing has an issue with adapting to one's shape as well. It "fits" your shape, all right--by being stretched or shrunk to fit. It's as if in RL you went to buy clothes and found that everything was made of rubber and made for a size 6. You get to put it on and stretch it to fit over the appropriate portion of your body, with the pattern stretching and blurring as well. Real clothing actually uses more cloth for larger sizes! Clothes should have the opportunity to adapt to your shape, including the cloth patterns. Please also consider voting for and following JIRA issue VWR-10839.

Allons, enfants de la vie seconde...

...le jour de mesh est arrivé!

It's official; mesh is now in place grid-wide. (Please hurry, Firestorm team!)

Things to check out:

• This video of Cinder Roxley dancing in a mesh dress. Finally, actual skirts instead of a bunch of strips of immaterial cloth tied together at your waist! (Yes, someday you can pull an old flexi-prim dress out of your mothball-scented inventory, put it on, and when the newbies point out your legs moving through it, tell them all about what an advance it was when it first came out and share a laugh.)
• This post at NWN, which I hope will become more informative as comments come in with more links and less snark.

Let's hope that LL gets the PE issue settled reasonably.

Uncanny valley or ignoring the flaws?

According to the notion of the "uncanny valley", after a certain point, more accurate renderings of humans become not better, but creepy, and that one has to approach complete accuracy to overcome that effect.

On the other hand, I recall a story about 19th century venture capitalists. It may be apocryphal, but here it is: Alexander Graham Bell was looking for money to fund further development of his invention, the telephone, and so he did a demonstration for people who might provide that money. Did he have Mr. Watson go to the other phone and speak? No, he had Watson go there and sing popular songs of the day. Why? Because the VCs already knew those songs, and would mentally fill in gaps and glitches with the words they already knew should be there.

So, when we see our friends in Second Life, which of the above two apply, if any? I'm inclined to say the latter, at least for those of us who've invested ourselves in SL (and posing the question in terms of friends presupposes we're of that sort). We want to immerse ourselves in this virtual world, and we're willing to overlook the inconsistencies. But what about the newcomer to virtual worlds? I wish I knew.

Nothing whatsoever to do with Second Life, but...

I seriously urge you to give a look/listen to the videos of "Garfunkel and Oates". They are great fun--so much so that I even forgive them for including Sixpence None the Richer's sweet and beautiful "Kiss Me" in their medley of "worst songs".

UPDATE: Warning: at least one of their songs is very NSFW.

Ob2L: Maybe they'd consider performing in Second Life?

Found it!

One of the good side effects of organizing one's inventory is finding things one forgot one has, and I'm glad to say that I have the Poppins Umbrella that I need to finally take the Poppins Challenge. I have yet to do that, and my fifth rez day is fast approaching. The big question: where to do it?

Where's Hercules when you need him?

If you see him, let him know I need help cleaning my Augean inventory... though OTOH, while his methods are direct and effective, I want something left in my inventory when the smoke clears, or rather when the water recedes.

Inspired by NWN's post pointing at the start of Anya Ohmai's four-part series on organizing one's inventory, I've started on the process... and after almost five years of neglect, there's a lot to do. Seeing the way Ms. Ohmai takes a picture of each item of clothing to save on her computer is both amazing and daunting. I presume that one would have to use a program like f-spot or digikam so you can tag the photos for searches.

So, I'm still going through a very rough initial classification, getting rid of duplicates and outdated items (remember the SL Gendar rating HUD? I just deleted mine). It's tedious work, and I hope that you will all learn from my bad example. Keep your inventory organized from the start; it will save you much grief. Though I must admit, it's good to see the things one has lying around, like this:

Sometimes I tell myself I shouldn't buy anything new until I've worn everything in my inventory once... but that wouldn't help vendors I want to support, would it?

UPDATE: I think I just about have the first cut of sorting things out done... but of course, the next task is classifying clothing, and while that was not quite as big a fraction of my inventory as I thought, it is pretty darned big... and for prim breast users, things are made a little more interesting, since one will want to have a separate folder for outfits or items that are prim breast-friendly (by being either designed thus, adapted after the fact, or by not including tops so they're trivially OK). Guess I'll be wearing, if not everything, the vast majority of it so I know how to classify it.

Dancing on Water

Juggernutz Ivanovic invited me over to try out the dance floor she put on a lagoon, and I finally went yesterday, the sounds of the Cars' "Magic" echoing in my head. (Remember the video with Ric Ocasek walking on water as he sang?)

I had to take some pictures; you'll see the results of fiddling with the Windlight sky and water settings.

Manipulating Inventory

Not being able to find a skirt I wanted to wear finally nudged me to start organizing my inventory... and it's proving to be a major pain.

One can have two inventory windows open, which helps a lot, but as I started a first cut of moving clothing into the "Clothing" folder, things got hairy. As I dragged cargo towards the destination window, folders would open there that I didn't want to open, things would change about the display that I didn't want to change--I wanted it to remain the way it was so I could accurately hit the destination folder and dropped things into it! I'm not sure exactly where some of my clothing wound up.

It finally occurred to me that this is yet another example of NIH. Your inventory is effectively a file system, and people have known how to access file systems across a network for a long time. There's NFS, Samba, and nowadays all those interfaces for cloud-based backups.

If you use a computer, one of the first things you learned was how to manipulate files--move them from one directory folder to another, copy them, and delete them. You have your favorite way to do so, be it via a command line, Windows Explorer, some Norton Commander-like program, Nautilus, Thunar, Konqueror, or whatever. You're familiar with it, and you probably prefer it... but the only option Second Life gives you that I've found is its in-world inventory window, requiring all the overhead of a 3-D world viewer so you can do the moral equivalent of

$ mv *Pixel\ Dolls* Clothing

So... please, LL, set up an interface that lets us access our own inventory using the interface of our choice. If we copy one of our files to it, charge us L$10. If we're the creator of an object, let us read it or copy it so we can back it up. Samba's probably the way to go, since necessity has meant everybody has to hold their noses and be able to access Windows file systems.

UPDATE: SVC-7188 is the place to look to see whether anything comes of this idea (and to vote for it or, more importantly, follow it if you wish it to be acted on).

UPDATE: Even if nothing comes of the JIRA entry, I can seriously recommend Radegast for this kind of usage. Right now, I'm not to the point of taking pictures, so I'm using the official, text-only flavor, and my graphics card is very happy to not be flogged heavily while I'm doing nothing but move stuff from one folder to another. Once I want to take pictures, I may well give the experimental version of Radegast that does render one's surroundings a shot. That said, I can't help imagining myself as Radegast pulls down my inventory standing there more or less immobile and unaware of my surroundings.

Perhaps there's something to this gamification... :)

Looks like someone has put together Kinect, the Blender game engine, and Metasploit to let you probe your system for vulnerabilities in a virtual environment. More details here.

0 0 Auspicious

That's the name of a sim, honest. With the digits and the following spaces. You'll need to type those to find it on the world map.

I came across it in Caminante de Sueños, an all-photo travel blog of the grid. If your favorite movie is Yellow Submarine, and your favorite artists the 60s-era Peter Max and whoever did the art for Family Dog Productions posters, you'll love 0 0 Auspicious.

I had to go there and take some pictures. There was a strange tunnel that went up into the air and ended with a blindingly bright area. I took some pictures there and a few on the way back down.

Out in the open is a riot of brightly colored trees, flowers, and even land.

Pay a visit to 0 0 Auspicious. It's quite a trip.

Becky Shamen's Guide

I was looking through Maggie Bluxome's directory of prim breast clothiers and happened across a name I either hadn't seen before or had forgotten: Becky Shamen. If the latter is the case, shame on me, because she sells, in addition to clothing for prim breasts, her inexpensive "Do It Yourself Guide to Implants: wearing, adjusting and making your own clothes." This, I hope, will finally pushing me over the edge to getting that T-shirt made--though I must admit that text is an interesting issue, because the things that render text don't know from UV maps.

(BTW, she also sells a package that includes the texture with coordinates that you want for this work.)

Lovely Gown from Gatherings--Thank You, Stacia!

I signed on yesterday and found an IM and inventory waiting for me from Stacia Zabaleta of Gatherings. She had a surprise for me... and boy, was it a surprise! It was a robin's egg blue version of the gorgeous brocade gown she has on sale in pomegranate (which I bought one of).

I was, and still am, utterly amazed. It's a gorgeous gown. It brought many compliments at Bosom Buddies Formal Night--and compliments from the impeccably dressed and breathtaking women who dance there are to be cherished. (If you've never been, by all means go! There's a contest; well, two, actually, one for guests and one for employees, for best-dressed. I swear that every week I go, it becomes harder and harder to vote as everyone looks more amazing, even though had you asked me the first time I went there, I'd have called it impossible.)

Here are a couple of photos, taken on Tempura Island. Yes, after going on about how wonderful shadows are in fashion photography, I picked one of the Windlight settings that flatten things out, but I didn't want to skew the colors as I did for that Jinxed "Siena" dress.

So head on over to Gatherings and take a look. I should add that this outfit is flexible--it has many more options than I am showing here.

P.S. I am a total sucker for details such as can be seen here, and having them on tops for the well-endowed is still a rare thing, to be celebrated when it happens. Thank you again, Stacia, and thank you to other clothiers who accommodate my tastes in this regard.

Maybe we can make everybody happy?

New World News reports that Radegast, a light SL client, is adding graphics. The version with graphics is not out yet, but there is a YouTube video showing what it looks like.

If you've been following the discussion of mesh "PE" (prim equivalence?), it's been mentioned that about a third of SL users have "class 0" (inadequate, e.g. Intel integrated graphics, or obsolete) hardware. That influences that PE decision as well as what features get implemented in LL's SL client. More bluntly: the SL experience of two thirds of residents is constrained by the one third with class 0 hardware.

Could LL please consider this: once Radegast has graphics up and reliably running, just point folks with class 0 hardware at it. (This is somewhat problematic because Radegast doesn't have a Macintosh version, but if it did...) Then LL can proceed without having to take class 0 hardware into account.

The August 2011 BUSTed is here!

The August 2011 issue of BUSTed magazine is out, and it's excellent.

The photography is amazing. In addition to Jinx and Wicked's beautiful work, you can see the photography of Shanti Bright, who you'll recall had a great exhibit of photographs of busty women at his Shanti Art Centre. It's worth repeating his comment on his exhibit, which Minka Pearl quoted on her blog:

Much too often, very busty women are seen in a bad light. Some feel they are ugly, some make stupid jokes about them, some see them as a sexual attraction. I want to show them in an artistic way, and I hope that this exhibition will help show them with more respect.

 Ashtoreth Walpole, a new editor at the magazine, has a great column in this issue, and there are now letters to the editor! By all means, read the magazine (it's free--how can you pass it up?) and do send in those cards and letters.

To see the cover, and get some more information about this month's issue, check out what Maggie Bluxome has to say about it.

Serious Bokeh!

"Bokeh" is how English-speaking photographers spell the Japanese word that in Hepburn romanization is spelled boke, so that you don't think it's just one syllable, like "broke" without the "r". The Japanese word means "blur" or "haze" (not just visual--it's used to refer to mental fuzziness as well), and photographers use it to refer to what lenses do with things not in focus. Bokeh can be used to good effect--it can keep your eye on the subject, which is in focus, and it can make for a pleasant (if you're lucky) or unpleasant (if you're not--for real lenses it depends on how the lens is built and the shape of the aperture) background.

I was making sure I knew what I was talking about (that the current official SL client makes it easy to turn on snadows) and found that the client had been set such that the depth of field was shallow--and the result was some pretty nice bokeh. I had to take a picture, and here it is:

Now to learn how to control it (and find out whether or when it will be in Firestorm!).

A New Style for SL Fashion Photography?

Today is the second Friday in a row that New World Notes has made a point of featuring fashion blogs specifically because of the quality of the photography. Last Friday Hamlet featured Suri Yangtz's blog, and this Friday he featured Brie Wonder's Token Chic.

If you take a look at the blogs or the NWN posts, you'll notice something they have in common: shadows. If you take a look at Elysium Eilde's gorgeous Photographing Second Life blog, you'll see shadows there, too (in recent entries; she recently got a new computer and turned shadows on). It's very different from what one usually sees in fashion blogs--they seem to do their very best to flatten out their images and destroy all depth cues.

When Windlight came out, there was an uproar--how dare the sun actually cast shadows, like in RL! Many created Windlight settings designed essentially to undo Windlight and make things as they were before. Some simply turned off Windlight (see Mariko Nightfire's "Walking With Windlight" posts here and here.) But perhaps these blogs Hamlet has praised ("...so vivid and mysterious and tinged with silent contemplation, they remind me of a waking dream", "...so perfectly composed and luminously beautiful, they are more like paintings, than screenshots") mark a change. (I won't do it! I won't write "paradigm shift"!)

Is it a style issue, or just that shadows are now easily turned on in the mainstream SL client, the client doesn't have some earlier nasty bugs with shadows, and people have new computers? Heck if I know. I just like the results!

Lips Update

(These are the surreal ones, not the metal ones.)

Val Suisei asked me about the prim breasts with lips and where I got them. I told her, and she said she'd made her own using what turned out to be Ghanie Lane's "Nano Lips". Ghanie Lane has quite an amazing assortment of lovely sculpted prim objects for sale, and I seriously recommend that you check them out.

So, I will eventually experiment with them myself, time and L$ permitting. No tongue, but I can live with that for now.

Big in Nigeria...

...and Côte d'Ivoire, and Burkina Faso, and...

If any further proof were needed about the bogosity of spammers, surely this is it: that a Second Life avatar is being hit up by all those alleged lawyers, executors of wills, and people offering to share a big pile of money acquired in dubious circumstances if she'd just send some money to let them set it up.

Yeah, right.

Pictures of Sara

This morning Sara Halberd and I both happened to be inworld and Chakryn Forest seemed like a good place to take pictures, so... we did.

And we found that in one way, Chakryn Forest isn't a good place to take pictures. It is beautiful and picturesque... but part of the way it gets to be beautiful and picturesque is by having lots of alpha textures around for sunbeams and the like--so when you're panning and zooming, and juuuuuuust a little bit to the left will make the composition just what you want, you end up clicking on one of those alpha textures instead of the subject and your POV goes flying off into the distance and behind you! Now I can see one reason Maggie sticks with green screen...

But I shouldn't kvetch. Chakryn Forest is worth the hassle. Here are some of the photos I took.

If You Love Something...

[This is another essay that originally appeared in BUSTed magazine. Don't worry, we won't be quoting any Sting songs here, but the message is important, and we have an addendum.]

Thufir Hawat, the Mentat who served Duke Leto Atreides in Frank Herbert's Dune, said "Parting with friends is a sadness. A place is only a place."

I say bull! Especially in Second Life, where a place reflects the time, effort, and in special cases the love that its creator has put into it. A place is where  friends gather, and without it, they tend to lose touch and drift apart.

Who knows how many thousands in Second Life are finding this out the hard way now?

We in the prim breast subculture know about this kind of loss; after all, last year we lost Mammatus. Now, though, the closures seem to be coming thick and fast, or at least they're getting more publicity, and they're hitting far more people. Elysium Gardens: gone. Midnight Reflections: gone. The Minoan Empire: going soon, possibly definitely by the time you read this. Even the Lost Gardens of Apollo is (are?) gone! How many of you have not been there, have not had Apollo pointed out to you as a beautiful place to visit, explore, and dance? This isn't just entertainment; the Second Life presence of Fearless Nation, an organization that does real work to help people overcome post-traumatic stress disorder, is going away soon.

It's all too easy to assume that a place will be around to visit tomorrow, that it can get along without your attention and help, but it's not true. If you love a place, do what you can to support it. Find its owner and ask how you can help, before it's too late. 

ADDENDUM: Really, the above is a special case of what I should have said. If you love someone or the work they do, do what you can to support him or her or it--and don't pass up an opportunity to express your appreciation.

Happy Rez Day, Maggie!

Yesterday marks Maggie Bluxome's second rez day. I swear it doesn't seem like it's been that long! Maggie has done many amazing things in a short time in Second Life, and everyone using prim breasts has a lot to thank her for.

Be sure to read her blog post on this occasion (posts, actually! a second one is on the way), not just to read in amazement about all she's done but to learn. In the first post she talks about how she creates her beautiful photographs and things to watch out for.

Happy (belated) rez day, Maggie, and thank you for all you've done. You're an inspiration, and a dear friend.

Hispanic/Latin American clothing in Second Life?

I was walking around in one of the Al Andalus sims and it occurred to me that I should wear appropriate clothing. Since then, I've been looking for traditional clothing of Spain and Latin America, and it's not easy to find. Go looking in "women's cultural costumes" and you'll find a whole lot of clothing inspired by Asian clothing, ancient Greek and Roman clothing, Indian clothing, even Native American clothing (some of which I suspect that no actual Native American woman would ever wear). There are some flamenco outfits, and eventually I will try one.

So, does anyone know where one can find a traje de gitana or traje corto, or china poblana in Second Life, or other outfits from the Iberian peninsula or Latin American countries? I'd love to hear about them.

UPDATE: The search is proving to be fun, turning up some very neat clothing. 

UPDATE: Do read the comments! Thanks to L'âme immortelle for the links she has given. (In my explorations, I'm amused to find that one source of flamenco dresses is ATOI, A Touch of Ireland! OTOH, the Irish play quite a role in history; remember that Bernardo O'Higgins, son of a man from County Sligo, was an important figure in the liberation of Chile from Spanish rule.)

A Happy Reunion

I am embarrassed to say that I hadn't seen Sara Halberd in a long time, but this morning (when I really should have been sleeping) I signed on and Laurana Newell offered me a TP. I rezzed atop a dance platform before a group of beautiful prim breast users and one fellow who were sitting there conversing. Sara was among them, and visually she quite dominated the scene. We chatted (after I realized what I was standing on and hurried off of it!), and she said she owed me thanks for introducing her to prim breasts.

That's happened to me a couple of times now, and it is a joy to me. I replied that seeing her was thanks enough... but I really should have thanked her. Sara is beautiful; should you meet her, be sure to move your eyes away from the obvious and admire her face.

I hope to take some pictures of her before long, and I'll put some up here and on flickr. Thank you, Sara! It was wonderful to see you again.

"I try to make everyone's day a little more surreal" -- Calvin

In my wandering and searching for metal and stone skins, I happened across something really strange: prim breasts with mouths. They can smile or frown, and can open to let a tongue out in any of various positions (not independently; whatever position or state one is in, the other is as well). One can switch between nude and having a simple bandeau. The shape of the prim breasts themselves is not particularly realistic, and to change their size requires explicit editing; the HUD that accompanies them is devoted purely to the mouth/tongue and choice of nude or dressed.

They sound like just the thing for surreal machinimas, and I got a set for fun and to check them out, but I think I would like some improvements.

I think the maker would find a larger market if the mouths were sold by themselves and could be attached to one's prim breasts of choice, ideally adjusting to match the size of the prim breasts. That would let the maker build on existing work and concentrate on what makes the product special, i.e. the mouths--existing prim breasts have far more choices of skin and clothing. Also, the mouths are determinedly goth, i.e. they look like they have black lipstick. I'd want them and the tongues tintable. It would be especially neat if the tongues could randomly flick out.... but I shouldn't get carried away.

In brief: a unique and twisted concept, but it needs work.

Which graphics card to use?

Linden Lab's system requirements page gives minimum and recommended hardware for running their Second Life client for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux in the form "so-and-so or better". The steady release of new graphics cards is a good thing, but it can make it hard to tell just what is better. (Graphics chip maker's nomenclature doesn't help.)

KirstenLee Cinquetti has made some interesting data available that may help. "Kirsten's GPU Awards 2011" picks out some graphics cards, both nVidia and ATI/AMD, as worthy of mention (and Intel graphics as particularly unworthy!), and has a pointer to a spreadsheet showing the summary data on which the awards were based: average fps and crash rates for various graphics hardware. One surprise: the poor showing of the nVidia 460, which I've always seen rated highly for price/performance. (A possible reason: the data doesn't split out the 768 MB 460s from the 1 GB; there are more differences than just the amount of RAM.)

Take a look. Alas, no indication is given of the graphics settings used, which makes it harder to compare... but I was utterly amazed by the crash rates shown! For example, KirstenLee calls the Radeon HD 4800 "stable", though its crash rate is 19.44%! Essentially one out of five runs crashes, and that's stable?! In comparison with the nVidia 270 at nearly 41%, perhaps. I'm not a gamer; is that kind of failure rate considered acceptable by gamers?

Ouch!

Strange things have been happening today. I started up Firestorm and the icon for inventory wasn't there. I had to deselect it and select it again to make it appear. Later, for some unknown reason, my avatar decided to briefly adopt a rather uncomfortable position at random times. I hope that won't happen again, as you can probably infer from this photo I was able to get:

 

Just doesn't have the same ring as "Goldfinger"...

I was looking around for stone skins (marble or perhaps granite) to try to look like a statue again when I strayed into metal. I know there are metallic skins out there, but was having a hard time finding them. I did, though, come across metal lips! The effect is kind of nice, actually...

Congratulations!

Maggie Bluxome and Jennifur Vultee were wed today in a beautiful ceremony. The sim was pretty well packed (45 were present)--it was a joy to be there. To show you just how lovely it was...

All the best to Maggie and Jennifur, and may every day be as happy as this one for them.

A great place for a wedding

Maggie Bluxome has announced the location where she and Jennifur Vultee will marry, so I had to go peek--and it's gorgeous.

Do read the linked post if you intend to attend; it has details and the couple's request for attire.

Mesh for SL strangled in the crib?

One of the issues about mesh in SL is the extent to which they count against a region's prim count. Unfortunately, it sounds like the mapping makes meshes so expensive that people may decide they're not worth it. See "The Death of SL Mesh" on the Heart Botanicals blog, and this thread in the SL mesh forum for more discussion.

UPDATE: Miriel Enfleld, maker of amazing things in SL who gave up on it when she felt she'd done all she could with the tools SL provided, has posted in the SL mesh forum thread. Mesh has tempted her to re-enter SL, but the insane PE (prim equivalent, I think) mapping may kill off that temptation, much to SL's loss. WTF is LL thinking?

New prim breast-friendly skins from Shayna Korobase!

If you've read my review of Foxbean Laboratories' "Nadine" prim breasts, you know that Shayna Korobase, at the time of writing, was working on skins with applicators for various prim breasts, including Nadines.

They're out! Check out Ms. Korobase's blog for details and a picture, and Maggie Bluxome's blog for bigger pictures. Many thanks to Shayna for her efforts and for the announcement.

Who Does Second Life Attract?

[This is one of a couple of essays that first appeared in BUSTed magazine. (If you don't read it, why not? There are vendors and you can even subscribe for free.) I'm going to post them here for those of you who may not have seen them.]

Facebook is designed around being able to grab data about you and sell it to people. Not giving accurate data decreases the value of the data Facebook accumulates, and hence Facebook forbids it. In particular, they'll delete accounts that don't correspond to real people. (It's not clear how determinedly they search for such accounts. I see a lot of people who create accounts for their pets so they can get ahead in FarmVille.)

Second Life is different. You can be who you'd like to be. You can reveal as little or as much about your "real life" self as you wish, and for someone else to reveal such information about you violates the Second Life Terms of Service.

The ability to change what you don't like about your body—height, weight, proportions, skin, even gender—appeals strongly to a lot of people, I'm sure especially to those who don't conform to the general public's notions of beauty. "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" is even more true of Second Life. (Ouch! I have to wonder whether the original cartoonist meant to allude to "dog" in the sense of "ugly person".) Plain women can know what it's like to be beautiful, and may even be at an advantage in SL compared with those who in real life have gotten by on their looks. The elderly can feel young again for a while. Handicapped people can spend time in a world where they can walk, run, and even fly. Those with gender dysphoria but who could never "pass" in real life can experience at least a little of life with their appearance finally matching their true selves. At least before voice the deaf, stutterers, and others were all on a par with everyone else, and strong accents or inability to produce or distinguish all the phonemes of a non-native language were not an impediment to communication.

That in turn gives rise to the stereotype of the fat old man in the basement in Second Life as a younger person. (Just in case we want to refer to him again, let's use the acronym: FOMITB.) "If you don't use voice/go on webcam so I can hear/see you, you're a FOMITB." We are still ourselves in Second Life, and some people only traffic in the counterfeit coin of feeling good about themselves by putting others down. (David Letterman's career is built on it. As a fan you are in on the joke and can join in the smugly superior contempt in which he holds the average people he interviews.) Second Life takes away some of that. (Admittedly, it adds some, too; vide SL Fashion Police and What the Fug?)

In Second Life, I'm very tall and leggy—as much as I can make myself with the stock Second Life avatar—and I'm towards the high end of the breast size distribution. I'm far from the tip of the tail, as a look at Laurana's Cuties, a Second Life group of women who agree to always maintain an avatar bustline of at least one hundred inches, will show. [UPDATE: I am a proud member of Laurana's Cuties, but I am barely over the lower bound.] Even so, I'm still well out in the distribution... and the author of "The Long Tail" is right. Here are some comments on some of my self-portraits on flickr:

"....And, gods, you're beautiful."
"Great picture, and what an awesome figure you have."
"Exquisite, sensual, and erotic."

(There are less complimentary comments as well, but that's largely my own doing. As an experiment, I submitted myself to What the Fug? I wanted to know what they'd say about modestly dressed but large prim breasts. I found out, all right.)

That's heady stuff for anyone who's never been complimented on appearance, and a strong motivation to continue in Second Life. So to some extent, Second Life may be selecting for those the stereotypers bash. Should that make anyone not participate? Of course not, and I hope Linden Lab doesn't throw any residents under the figurative bus to pander to the stereotypers. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

UPDATE: You're right. It should be "Whom Does Second Life Attract?", but I'll leave it as is.

Flood

Crete is largely underwater. I know not what we may have done or not done, but Poseidon's wrath is truly frightening.

 

Last Dance... for now.

I spent an hour yesterday on the Minoan Empire sim with dear friends and virtual family, first doing tai chi, and later syrtaki (a modern dance, but one that includes aspects of traditional Cretan dance). Thank you to everyone who was there, and thanks once again to Aeneas Anthony, who started it all and kept it going for so long.

Does this dress make my... ?

Yes, it does, but I don't care, because I came upon the skirt while going through my inventory and it's from Last Call, and reminds me of Ginny Talamasca, who I never had the good fortune to meet but who everyone in Second Life in late 2007 with an interest in fashion will remember. If there is an afterlife, I hope she is doing well there.

Overte Foundation for OpenSim

Good news via NWN: there is now a foundation, the Overte Foundation, for OpenSim. For licensing reasons, this will get around a six-month contribution barrier that has slowed OpenSim development. Yay!

/me groans

Resting in hopes of getting well... off to bed.

Bless you, Chrissy!

I've been beating my head against the wall about streaming audio on 64-bit Linux, and Chrissy, beloved bartender of the Minoan Empire, just let me know how she deals with it. If you can't tackle it head on, work around it--peek at the media link and open it up in a separate program, like VLC.

Thank you!

Ohne Dich

While looking through the various YouTube videos set in the Lost Gardens of Apollo, I came upon this one. It's a sequence of stills, but nevertheless it works--and especially now, the music that accompanies it seems appropriate: Rammstein's "Ohne Dich" ("Without You").

Bittersweet

RL prevented me from attending the chariot races and the gathering that followed today, and I will regret it forever.

King Minos, wise and capable ruler, you and the Architect, Aeneas Anthony, whose skills surely rival those of Daedalus himself, have my gratitude for the amazing things that you have done. One of them is creating a family, and I hope it continues.

Apollo: In Memoriam

I went out to Apollo one last time, and immediately regretted not having done so earlier. With the improvement in Second Life graphics, it was even more beautiful than I remembered.

I took some pictures. There was no time to try replicating some of the forced perspective photos from long ago, but I wanted to record a bit of it before it closed. The statue, the shops, the harbor... and the open space in the woods where a group of people were doing tai chi. Suddenly the memory of tai chi on the beach in Crete swept over me, and I had to sign off lest I break down completely.

If you happen to read this on the day it's posted, you may still have some time to visit the Apollo sim--do it now! If it's too late, or even if not, be sure to watch this machinima. It's one of many YouTube videos of the sim; search for "lost gardens of apollo" and be amazed.

UPDATE: It's too late. A commenter in the NWN post with the machinima was there for the sim's last thirty minutes. Shortly after I read that, I saw the sim on the map with one person there, but couldn't teleport to it.

Also in the comments on that post: Fearless Nation, a sim that helps people dealing with PTSD, will be closing in a week. Is there any evidence that LL cares?

Must-read from Penny Patton

Read Penny Patton's post "A Matter of Scale - How scale affects content creation and land ownership in Second Life" in the SL Building and Texturing Forum. Out of whack scale is a major issue in Second Life.

(I'm one to talk about scale, eh? Perhaps, but consistent scale makes for verisimilitude. You can't be a giant[ess] if everything is built to a large scale.)

Thanks to Tateru Nino, without whose post on Dwell on It I'd not have known about Ms. Patton's essay.

In Search of Dress and Tattoo

I'm a sucker for the LBD... but I've also been known to fall for a flaming red dress. The Ingenue "Christmas Girl" freebie is a wonderful example... but it I can find. I'd love to be able to find this dress in my inventory; does anyone remember it from about three years ago?

(That's from the days before clothing layers for me, as you can tell.)

Happily, I've found another fun red dress recently--it's in the discount, but not so discount as the Reese babydoll, section of Bliss Couture.

I like it a lot, but it makes me want to take up an old search again. Now that I have a dress slit up to there, I want to find a tattoo to accompany it, one with a vine, preferably with red flowers, that runs up the outside of my leg from ankle to hip. I've been searching in-world and in SL Marketplace; does anyone know of such a thing? (It would be especially nice if it supported the tattoo feature of the 2.x clients.)

UPDATE: I pulled out a tattoo from inventory from the last time I went looking. It's still not quite what I'm after, but it isn't bad.

UPDATE: Looking again at this, I can't believe I chose that pose. OK, it shows the tattoo, but the rest is a bit much, don't you think?

Inexpensive Babydoll

I was wandering about Bliss Couture admiring the lovely gowns when my eye was caught (ow!) by a sign for discount items. Seeing the magic word, I went looking, and found a babydoll dress for a mere L$89 easily adaptable for prim breasts. It's their "Reese" dress.

Happily, it's long enough that (with hose, at least) I will wear it, and the glitchpants don't get stretched down too far on my legs. I decided after taking these pictures that I should ditch the ribbon, which defies gravity and sticks out behind no matter what, and switch the collar ruffle around so I can attach it to my spine. There are various colors, and I'll probably get them all eventually.

Kettle Quest

Via NWN (thanks, Hamlet): Gaia Clary's Kettle Quest. Leverage your sculpted prim knowledge into a leg up on mesh. Elite my eye.

Is this really possible?

Take a look at the comments on the NWN article about the closing of the Apollo sim; in particular, look at Maria Korolov's comment. Costs a tenth of what LL charges? If that is really possible, maybe some of these sims could survive.

Vivat Regina

I have a link to the "Laurana's Cuties" web site, but I don't think I've mentioned it in a post. Laurana Newell started the group for adult female avatars who maintain a bustline of at least one hundred inches. (The measuring process is interesting.)

The group member who has (and maintains) the largest bustline is proclaimed to be the Queen, and a notice went out that there is a new queen, Cali Arabello, with an amazing estimated bustline of 1,300 inches. I was up way too early (as usual; sigh...), and had a chance to meet Her Majesty. I'm not sure I could wear the top, or rather harness, that she had on--it looked kind of painful--but here's a photo, with Laurana and me nearby for scale.

I suspect Queen Cali will reign for quite a while.

POM Dependent

I have no idea what causes Kirsten's client, Firestorm, or the 2.7.x beta to decide to grab all available RAM and crash.

Just now I fired up Firestorm twice; both times, it sucked down 3 GB of the 4 GB available and crashed--OK, the first time I saw it coming and signed off before the inevitable. Rule of Three: I started it a third time, and it behaved. No change in settings; I didn't clear the cache.

Maybe it will settle down into mostly working, the way the previous Firestorm did. I hope so. I may try global illumination again; if this is a Heisenbug, I wouldn't be surprised if it was just chance that made me think it affected anything.

I wish there were a real 64-bit build of Firestorm that I could try.

UPDATE: I tried global illumination; no apparent difference. It just happened to crash once when I had it on, and then not crash the next time when I happened to turn it off.

A beautiful tribute to the Minoan Empire

UPDATE: alas, the YouTube video is no longer there--but you can see it on Vimeo. (If there's a way to embed Vimeo videos, please let me know via email at mel_yeuxdoux@yahoo.com and I will embed it here.)

Farewell, Apollo?

NWN has a post up asking for what one might put on an "SL bucket list", though I'd call it an "inverse bucket list". The bucket list is what you should do before you "kick the bucket"; the places on this list are those you should see before they kick the bucket.

I am very sad that one of the comments states that the Lost Gardens of Apollo will go away on June 26th. Apollo is an amazing, beautiful sim, and one of my favorite places. I have taken so many photos there, including many of my experiments with forced perspective.

So... with Mammatus, then Goldie Locks and Nantli Xolal, then the Minoan Empire, and now Apollo going away, does the metaverse have it in for me? I can't believe that. I may think it sometimes, but I can't believe it. Unfortunately, the alternative would seem to be that a lot of places are going away, so that they'd happen to include my favorites. This is not a good sign.

NOTE: The ordering above is not chronological order, but the order I happened to think of them in. The Minoan Empire is due to close on July 6th.

UPDATE: Apollo, like the Minoan Empire, is one of the "featured Second Life destinations". To be featured, I would think that someone or some group at Linden Lab would have decided that the featured sim is special, that it represents what is best and special about Second Life. Does LL care that such sims are going away?

Blinded by the Light

"Facelight" is a dirty word to many residents of Second Life. It's amazing how many people walk around with a 500 terawatt arc lamp hovering in front of their faces, as if a perpetual Ground Zero accompanies them, washing out all detail in the entire sim, or the entire building they happen to be in.

It's not just facelights, though. I've been in a store where the posters for the clothing on sale were made to glow so brightly one could only see a fuzzy outline of the outfit, and couldn't make out a name or a price. And last night, while exploring and trying to figure out just what circumstances and settings cause SL clients to leak RAM like a sieve with the wire mesh cut out of it, I came upon a region that called to mind Roger Zelazny's greatest work, Lord of Light: "...this general area must have appeared in some quarters as though the Universal Fire did a dance upon the map."

This blinding light supposedly came from a small campfire on the beach. I have no idea why the prim skirt was immune.

I've seen buildings similarly lit. I don't know of anyone who virtually sleeps; what's the point? But some places, which seem to have been filled with hidden halogen lighting, would make it impossible.

No one could possibly intend that beach to look as though it had been teleported to some place inside the sun. There must be some client and configuration that makes those batteries of facial klieg lights and perpetual low-yield nuclear devices look good. I wonder what they are.

UPDATE: Boy, Google is fast. Maybe half an hour after I posted this, I googled "zelazny facelight", and (despite suggesting that maybe I meant "face lift"), this post turned up on page three of the results.

Help for Helios

One of the blogs I link to is the Blog of Helios, the blog of the HeliOS Project that puts computers running Linux in the hands of kids in the Austin TX area who would otherwise not have access to technology. The Project could use your help; consider donating your not-too-old gently-used hardware.

More urgently, though, Diane, the partner of Ken (who runs the project) is in need of help. She suffered a stroke due to an aneurysm, and the surgeons were going to go in and install stents... until it came up that she's uninsured. More details here.

64-bit Linux version, please?

So... the new Firestorm came out yesterday, and of course I tried it. It's become unusable for me, as Kirsten's client has been for some time.

Here are the symptoms: I sign on, and within minutes the SL client allocates all available RAM, the frame rate plummets, and the client crashes.

This has happened to me on several 2.x based SL clients, including some from Linden Lab. It may have also happened to others as well; see this thread in the Kirsten client forum. I seriously hope that the message from Steffi Honi in that thread is not accurate.

It makes no sense not to create a 64-bit Linux build (or a 64-bit Windows or Mac build, for that matter). It can be done; Imprudence has done it for some time. It's just about impossible to buy a computer these days that doesn't contain a 64-bit x86 flavored CPU, unless you're buying a netbook, which can barely run SL anyway, or a tablet (which probably has an ARM processor that LL doesn't target). The 64-bit extensions correct infamous drawbacks of the x86 architecture, namely its poverty of registers and the extreme register pressure caused by the horrid non-orthogonality of the instruction set. (Translated to English: a whole lot of the instructions executed in any 32-bit x86 program are moves in and out of registers, and in particular moves in and out of a special set of registers that are the only ones that can be used for certain operations like shifts, multiplies, and divides. That in turn is caused by the x86 being the result of decades of backwards compatibility with ancient 8-bit and 16-bit processors.) If you look at Ubuntu Community documentation, they recommend running 64-bit if you can.

People should have learned their lesson when Microsoft C compilers moved from 16-bit int to 32-bit int. The ISO C standard requires standard header files that make it easier to avoid assumptions that trip one up when moving from 16-bit to 32-bit, or 32-bit to 64-bit.

Can I be sure that this particular problem is caused by problems with running a 32-bit SL client on 64-bit Linux? Not yet; since Imprudence goes to the trouble of doing 64-bit Linux builds, I think that running a 64-bit version of Kokua will tell the tale.

UPDATE: I do have to say that the new Firestorm's orange-brown smoke is nicer than the stock Casper, especially at night, and they do give one the option of pie menus, which are really nice for doing things quickly and accurately via muscle memory. But never mind the results of ergonomics research, surely the people who gave us 2.x know what is best for us... [slap] Thanks, I needed that. Sorry about the sarcasm.

UPDATE: New Firestorm is usable for me if I turn off "global illumination".  Alas, that doesn't suffice for Kirsten's client--it still grabs all the RAM and crashes in minutes. I hate to lose global illumination, though I guess I should tell myself at least I can take high-resolution pictures again (vide VWR-24178). 

UPDATE: Um, maybe not on the high-resolution photos. They're not blatantly ruined as they are with the VWR-24178 bug, but there's a pesky vertical line over to the right... here's an example. 

UPDATE: I don't know what changed, but Firestorm is once again sucking down RAM and dying. I had the System Monitor up and watched it grab 100 MB of RAM about every ten seconds.

UPDATE: OK. The SL 2.7.something beta client ran for hours for me today, and then I signed back on only to find it allocating all RAM and crashing very quickly--no settings changed. Is it the cache? I don't know. I do know that the SL client is very much still subject to the VWR-24178 bug; it ruined the high-res pictures I took in the grand old style, no piddly black line for it.

I also noticed something else... if you ever go to the Boobie Tops main store, it's set in an enclosed region that is permanently a rainy urban environment. I would teleport there and then notice that as I moved, there would be flashes of light--possibly the light from the outside day cycle flashing through; I don't know. When I stopped, they would stop. Today, with LL's 2.7 beta client, I saw that effect a lot in several places I went.

Not Over Yet

I should not leave the story of us Minoans where I did. We're trying to figure out some way to continue. If this interests you, please let me know.

Yet Another Must-Read from Gwyneth Llewelyn

"Meshed Drama" is an interesting discussion of various classes of SL content creators and how mesh might spread once it is official.

Over the Line

I am sorry to say that I got an announcement today from Ravishing Racks, a maker of very good clothing for prim breast users, that they have added to their business virtual pit bulls that can be made to fight. I cannot support that, even in a virtual world, so I won't be spending my L$ there. You will have to decide for yourself what you will do.

I hasten to add: pit bulls are not born aggressive and dangerous. Some are made that way by vile people who train them to be so, and I will celebrate on the day that practice ends and those responsible get what they deserve.

UPDATE: I am partly wrong: according to this page with a review of The Lost Dogs,

One law enforcement officer experienced with dog fighting is quoted as saying that as many as 80% of the dogs in a typical dog fighting operation never fight, even when coaxed and treated harshly and trained for it. 80% just don't show the aggression necessary.

So even though these scum try to make the dogs fight, the vast majority don't.

I am not wrong about pit bulls not being inherently vicious or aggressive. (Details here.) 

The Lost Dogs is the story of what happened to the dogs in the illegal dog fighting operation Michael Vick was involved in. From the page linked to above:

Out of the 51 dogs rescued, at least 20 were suitable for foster care immediately.  Others were sent to sanctuaries, and after some work, were then sent to foster homes.  Many of the fosters passed the Canine Good Citizen Test and the ATTS behavior test, and some are currently working as therapy dogs.

Only two had to be euthanized.  One for aggression, and one because of a severe health problem that was inoperable and causing the dog pain.

Only two.

And this was after the president of the Humane Society, Wayne Pacelle, publicly stated that it didn't make sense to keep any of the dogs alive.

UPDATE: Do read the comments.

Ominous News

Word has come from King Minos that the gentle, smiling dolphins who normally play about the shores of Crete have disappeared. I know not the cause, but in the coming days, you will find me at the temple of Poseidon, earth-shaker and ruler of the sea.

UPDATE: Here are Christopher Smadga and I, praying to Poseidon:

UPDATE: From the Perseus web site, the Homeric Hymn to Poseidon (minus the line numbers in the translation):

I begin to sing about Poseidon, the great god, mover of the earth and fruitless sea, god of the deep who is also lord of Helicon and wide Aegae. A two-fold office the gods allotted you, O Shaker of the Earth, to be a tamer of horses and a saviour of ships!

Hail, Poseidon, Holder of the Earth, dark-haired lord! O blessed one, be kindly in heart and help those who voyage in ships!

UPDATE: I've about cried myself out, for now.

Aeneas Anthony has announced that the Minoan Empire sim will close on July 6th. There will be two more chariot races, on June 19th and 26th, at 1:00 p.m. SL time (or 1300 if you prefer 24-hour notation). I beg you, if you have not visited the empire,  do so while you can. It is a wonderful place, and I will never forget it. Thanks to King Minos, to the Architect, Aeneas Anthony, and to all the wonderful Minoan citizens.

UPDATE: A photo taken from the beach with no dolphins to be seen:

UPDATE: we are not resigned to our fate; see "Not Over Yet".

Must-watch Video via Grace McDunnough and Marianne McCann

Phasing Grace | Social Architectures and Virtual Worlds: The Magic Soul of Prims: "When you think all the light has been drained from the world, remember to stop and ask yourself: ' Can you see the shadows ?' Watch them d..."

Anticipation

I tried to log on just now, and couldn't. Sure enough, the status report page showed that database maintenance is underway. People who want Second Life to be like it was in the "good old days" now have their wish in a way, though not of course what they'd say they meant if you asked them.

I can't remember the last time I wasn't able to log on--at least the last time that I can say for sure was due to issues with the centralized part of Second Life. I would say that indicates that those responsible for the reliability of that part of SL are doing a good job. Thank you!

Carly Simon got it right way back when. These are the good old days.

UPDATE: Even this morning, it's not like the good old days; downtime was just half an hour.

Goldie Locks Closing

It is with great sorrow that I write the following: Goldie Locks is closing. Now through June 16th you can buy Goldie Locks hair for half off; on the 17th the store will go away. (UPDATE: not just the store, but Nantli Xolal sim.)

I have far more Goldie Locks hair in my inventory than any other--I can always count on it to look good, its default size fits my head :), there are many lovely styles, there are no dueling alpha textures to make your head look like one of those cheesy plants made out of intersecting planes, and the superlong hair catered to my inner Diane Witt, especially with a little editing on "Jordan" to make it 3.5 meters long...

So, thank you, Selena Gateaux. I am more indebted to you than I can say, and I hope that you will continue to create in Second Life.

UPDATE: I went back again with a friend (Hi, Kaseido!) and said "Next to Nantli Xolal is the Rainforest sim, I hope it will remain..." and then zoomed out to see it was gone; the pyramids, the trees with comfy beds up in the branches... it's already gone away. *blinks back tears*

BUSTed Magazine First Anniversary Issue

As Maggie Bluxome has already mentioned, BUSTed's first anniversary issue is now on the stands, hot off the virtual presses. Don't miss it.

Thanks are due to many people: Cole Deischer for starting it all, everyone who works on BUSTed, Maggie for asking me to write for BUSTed, and all of you who read the magazine. May BUSTed continue for many years to come.

Formal Night at Bosom Buddies

One of the things I enjoy most in Second Life is Formal Night at Bosom Buddies. I don't have photos from it; for those you definitely want to visit Aliecia Lionheart's blog Happenings of a Busty Second Life Dancer.

Bosom Buddies has other theme nights, but this one is special. Go and you will see a huge room full of beautiful, well-endowed women impeccably dressed. (There's a contest for best-dressed. Two, actually; one for employees and one for everyone else. It is very hard to decide who to vote for.) It motivates me, and I'm sure everyone else, to do better. Last but not least, I get a really good laugh at the thought of this going on in the face of the fizzling out of a certain blog. To borrow a couplet from a song that didn't make it into Fiddler on the Roof, "gone they are--we're still here!"

Don't miss Formal Night.

UPDATE: Shame on me for not saying when it is. Formal Night is Sunday, 6-8 p.m. SL time.

Mesh Timetable

It's out, as promised. (The timetable, I mean.)

Barring unforeseen bugs, in July some sims on the main grid will have mesh enabled, and by the end of August, it will be enabled everywhere.

Yay, finally! (Or as they say in Esperanto, finfine! That's an example of emphasis via repetition; it might be translated as "at long last!" or "geez, fi-nally!")

Jumping the Snark?

It's been quite a while since the SL Fashion Police and What the Fug? blogs have had a new article posted. The latter changed a while back so that date stamps don't appear on posts--but they didn't think to pull them from comments, so it's highly likely that WTF? hasn't had a post since late September 2010; SLFP hasn't had one since early December 2010. The What the Fug? flickr photostream is still up and accumulating photos and comments, to be sure, but that hasn't resulted in new blog posts.

Perhaps people have burned out on snarky posts commenting on photos of people who typically have at least questionable fashion sense. (I can't persuade myself to take the time to look at the rate of posting or commenting on the flickr stream since the last WTF? post, but the data would be interesting.) We can hope.

Jinxed Fashion

Last night I was looking around for a sleeveless low-cut halter top for a photo. I never found it, but while I was looking, I came across a couple of stores I'd never seen before. (That's good; you know that prim breast-friendly clothiers are doing well when there get to be more than you can keep track of!)

The first one I came across is Jinxed Fashion. There's a store in the Busty Village Mall, but to see everything you'll want to visit the main store in the Valle Verde sim.

I bought a couple of outfits--first a dress, called "Siena", that caught my eye because of the lovely texture. Note: Windlight settings make it look black and gold rather than black and silver. (If the creator happens to read this, please consider a black and gold, or black and copper, version!)

The second, "English Rose", comes in several colors; this is the black. Note: the skirt is very short; so much so that I took advantage of multiple attachments and put on both Rufeena "Temptation" black  and black pantyhose. Again, local lighting gives a yellowish cast to the dress, and it's also very bright, but I liked the idea of going to one of the  Mainland London sims for this photo. I couldn't quite get standing beneath the "Welcome to Carnaby Street" sign to work, so I took my picture here.