I hope I know the answer to this, but...

We are now in the world of fitted mesh clothing, which if I understand it follows the "bones" in the avatar (which term isn't really accurate. because some of those bones don't correspond to any bones in an actual human body but are added so mesh clothing will fit better, but that's not important right now).

If that's true, then what I seriously hope is true is this: that a knee-length skirt will be knee-length whatever the sliders on your body and legs are set to, and ditto for an ankle-length skirt.  If you know me, you know I want to be as leggy as I can, and that has made for difficulties with skirts. I have had to either cause a scandal in Caledon when my slider settings keep my ankles from being decently covered or tediously stretch the strips of virtual cloth that make up skirts... and for mini-skirts, oh my!

Is my thinking correct? I will end up taking the plunge and finding out by experience, but if you know the answer I'd love to hear it. Thanks!

The view from under the bus

From the tools and technology blog: "An Update on Linux Viewer Development".

For now, I'll try third-party viewers for 64-bit Linux and see how they do.

I am so behind, part N+1, in which we do a lot of happy dancing

First and most important: The Return of Foxbean! Thank you, Shayna Korobase, and thank you so much for the link, Maggie Bluxome (whose blog points you at all the goings on in the SL busty world)! The impossibly lovely and talented Foxbean Liebknecht has come out with new fitted mesh breasts, Sanira v1.0.

Fitted means they work with physics, and hence can jiggle. They also work with Tango appliers and, I am overjoyed to say, Omega appliers. If, like me, you have been SL subpetric for some time, you should know that Omega, the work of the folks at Love N Lust, is an attempt to bring sanity to SL fashion, which hitherto has been a maze of products with appliers that may or may not work and play well together. (For more on Omega and what it means from the point of view of designers as well as customers, read the joint blog post of Shayna and Stacia Zabaleta of Gatherings, "Omega is a Win-Win"... and politely ask makers of mesh bodies, body parts, and clothing to make their work Omega-friendly.)

The first-linked post from Shayna has photos--and I have to admit that from some of them I was a little worried. I thought of that wonderful compliment from Miss Blackflag for a photo in the Minoan Empire:

you know, one thing that i like about you is that even though your breasts are a bit out of the standard norm, you take the time to make them look like they have actual gravity to them, instead of them being just big balloons floating on your chest.

and was concerned... but then I took a look at the photos at Foxbean's SL marketplace page for the Sanira breasts, and was relieved. (*blush* Sorry, Foxbean, I know better than that.)

So, now it's more pressing than ever; I must find a good Omega-friendly mesh body, and ditto for clothing. (The breasts I've already bought.) Photos when I have them.

UPDATE: Speaking of happy dancing, as I type the hours are counting down to 2:00 p.m. July 26, 2015 SL Time (GMT - 7, also as I type), when the fine people of Brightflame Hollow will have a special event celebrating the release of Foxbean's Sanira breasts.

Rational Discussion of SL on TV? We can hope...

An episode of Dr. Phil that aired on the day I write this dealt with gaming addiction. I'm happy to say that at least in the clip embedded in this NWN post about it, the discussion was refreshingly rational. I'll have to watch the whole thing.

Lady Triệu

"I'd like to ride storms, kill sharks in the open sea, drive out the aggressors, reconquer the country, undo the ties of serfdom, and never bend my back to be the concubine of whatever man." --Lady Triệu

She's called Vietnam's Joan of Arc, assembling forces to resist the Chinese state of Eastern Wu in the third century A.D. Lady Triệu cut quite a figure, according to some accounts:

"...a woman from the Cửu Chân commandery named Triệu Ẩu assembled people and attacked several commanderies (Ẩu has breasts 3 thước [1.2 meters] long, tied them behind her back, often rides elephants to fight). Dận was able to subdue [her]. (Giao Chỉ records only write: In the mountains of Cửu Chân commandery there is a woman with the surname Triệu, with breasts 3 thước long, unmarried, assembled people and robbed the commanderies, usually wearing yellow tunics, feet wearing shoes with curved fronts, and fights while sitting on an elephant's head, becoming an immortal after she dies)." --from The Complete Annals of Great Viet, mid 15th century

"Two centuries after the Trung sisters, another young woman, Trieu Thi Trinh, took up the same challenge. Although she, too, failed to dislodge the Chinese, the legends that grew up about her tell us much about both the dreams of Vietnamese women and the fears of the men who fought, followed, or heard of such women in following centuries. According to a late eighteenth-century account, for example, Trieu Thi Trinh was nine feet tall, had three-foot-long breasts and a voice like a temple bell, and was able to eat several pecks of rice and walk five hundred leagues in a single day. Yet she was also said to possess a beauty that could shake the soul of any man." -- from Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920-1945, David G. Marr, 1984

There's a temple dedicated to her, and many streets in Vietnamese cities are named for her.

I never learned much about the history of Vietnam, and definitely not about Lady Triệu. It would be interesting to try to create a Lady Triệu avatar.

Wow. Just... wow.

I am now seriously impressed with what one can do in Second Life.

You really should watch the following video--switch it to 720 and go full screen. It shows off Angel Manor Estate, which makes serious use of "materials".

It starts with what, if you don't look very closely, seems to be a shot of a man at a monitor showing Second Life as it was... cheesy, low-res, vaporous unrezzed avatars interminably hovering... but when the virtual camera pulls back, you realize it's showing on a monitor in a much different Second Life. Varnished woodwork and metallic ceilings, hardwood and marble floors. Fade out... and then fade in to a misty sun-dappled woods. After touring it, back to the outside of the manor through the seasons, and once again into the building to view the rooms, the furniture, a lunch gathering at a very ornate table laden with food, a theater, and on...

It's not perfect. One of the hardwood floors looks like the varnish is coating it to a considerable depth--for a second I wondered if we were on water. And of course, we humans are a lot pickier about recognizing humans than we are inanimate objects, so the gentleman, while quite good looking, doesn't tromp my oeil as much as the surroundings.

That said, it is utterly breathtaking. Metallic objects in Second Life have in the past required independent twin I-beam suspension on your disbelief--either they had painted-on highlights, or like some Indian jewelry in my inventory, were set to glow. The metal in Angel Manor Estate looks like metal. There's plenty of detail that is probably there thanks to bump mapping, and hence nowhere near the burden on your system or on SL that would otherwise be required.

Many, many thanks to Kaya Angel for this video. I hope that it won't be long before all of SL is as amazing.

Watch and then pick your jaw up off the floor.

UPDATE: Hereunder is a video of the manor from three year ago for comparison. The inspiration is there, but constrained by the SL rendering of the time.

New (to me)

I went Googling to see what's going on in the breast attachment world. (Sad to do that rather than going in-world and searching, but I suspected that the trend to Marketplace-only sales thanks to SL's outrageous land prices is still underway.)

With the fitted mesh option open, I went looking for "mesh breasts". Sure enough, there are several sources of fitted mesh breasts. (There are also non-fitted mesh breasts out there--you can scale non-fitted meshes, but the fitted ones are controlled by the relevant avatar sliders. I'll have to try both kinds, of course!)

I must say the video for the Cherry Bomb fitted mesh breasts is very impressive. My only quibble with it is the way the model's hands are positioned over the breasts at a couple of points; as a potential customer I don't want things hidden. Responding to avatar sliders is a wonderful thing; I like having control over buoyancy and cleavage. OTOH, will the size slider give me the size I want? I know me; the answer, of course, is "no", but it's a matter of tradeoffs. After all, fitted mesh allows jiggle.

I don't wish to slight other makers or products, but I will say I hope that they come out with videos as well.

 Is it my imagination, or is Tango compatibility the main, if not only, breast attachment support new clothing has nowadays?

A surprising amount of other things showed up in a marketplace search for mesh breasts, much of which I was happy to see--AOs that mentioned breast attachment compatibility as a selling point, clothing and hair... and, oddly enough, a set of mesh additional arms if you want to release your inner Hindu goddess. (I have the two "Kali" sets; they don't move, but they're nice when you want ten arms. If only I hadn't read about the thousand-armed goddess of mercy, I might be satisfied... :))

Lucidscape -- learning from SL?

By now you may well have heard of Lucidscape, but just in case...Lucidscape is an attempt to create the metaverse that looks like it's trying to avoid  aspects of Second Life that keep it from scaling. To demonstrate scalability, they simulated ten million participants on an 800-server cluster. The "participants" are a mixture of movable but largely stationary emitters and constantly moving drones that the emitters control and communicate with and which are constantly communicating across server boundaries.

(One could very well argue that one of those aspects is user-created content--people can and do create things without concern for efficiency--but that's too important a feature to forbid; on the page they say "the [emitters and drones] were purposefully crafted to be inefficient [emphasis in original] in the same manner we average user-written code may be.")

I especially like this:

We are a team of developers who are passionate about creating a future where massively multi-user virtual reality is pervasive and everyone can participate in a Metaverse which is:

• Free and open source so everyone may add their own worlds to the Metaverse the same way anyone can run a web server today.
• Devoid of any form of centralized control, free of gatekeepers and censorship under the guise of curation. Because if anyone can tell you what you are allowed to do in it, then it is not the real Metaverse.

I hope to see more from them.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes...

A lot has been going on, and keeping me away from the grid. I hope that's over.

More layout changes as I can get them in--the way out-of-date Ubuntu version countdown is gone, as I can't find one for Utopic Unicorn. (Sigh.)

On to what might be more important (OK, it doesn't take much importance to do that): this JIRA entry, VWR-9203. Curiously, it has recently been marked as fixed. Does that mean we'll get flexible sculpties someday, or does "fixed" just mean that top men are working on it. You know, Top. Men. ...so that it won't ever happen?

Google+ changes its name policy

I'm happy to say that Google+ has announced that they will no longer place restrictions on the name you can use. Details on the Google+ Google+ page.

I hope this settles the matter once and for all. I've been on Google+ as Melissa Yeuxdoux for some time, but I've hesitated to link my blog to my Google+ presence (so that, for example, my Google+ feed includes links to blog posts) after reading about some Blogger blogs that went away over "real name" issues. I'm hoping the link will be safe now.

(N+1)th Life?

Here's part of a statement that Hamlet Au received from Linden Lab and posted an article about on NWN:

"Linden Lab is working on a next generation virtual world that will be in the spirit of Second Life, an open world where users have incredible power to create anything they can imagine and content creators are king....The next generation virtual world will go far beyond what is possible with Second Life, and we don't want to constrain our development by setting backward compatibility with Second Life as an absolute requirement from the start."

What comes to mind at that news?

• The Osborne Effect: how much effort/$ are you willing to invest in something when you've been told something far better is coming?
• Will they support both kinds o' computers--Windows and Mac? While it's still a sore point that Linden Lab has never provided a 64-bit Linux version, it has provided a 32-bit Linux version for a long time, for which I am extremely grateful. That said, it would be really nice if they'd come out and say "yes, we will support Linux for this new virtual world", especially given that it will at least initially be closed source. (For that matter, did you hear about the improvements to graphics in Android "L"? I hope you're targeting capable tablets and smartphones, LL.)
• Can we be anonymous in the new world as we can in Second Life? I hope that is the case; Ebbe Altberg tweeted "Yes, we clearly want to... let you bring you [sic] identity and friends across", which gives me hope.

What comes to my mind the most, though? Sheer delight!

How many times have I quoted Fred Brooks here? At least twice. Let's bump that number.

"Plan to throw one away. You will anyhow. The only question is whether you deliver the throwaway to your customers."

Of course, backwards compatibility would be nice... but Second Life looks crude compared with other 3D environments. Every so often you see a link to a video of avatar configuration in a game that makes Second Life look pathetic in comparison, both in simplicity and power of UI and quality of avatar. Creators shouldn't have to find obscure bugs that they can take advantage of to do things SL's creators didn't envision or even wanted to forbid.

Bless the creators of Second Life for their ingenuity and skill--but they deserve an environment they don't have to fight. I will cheerfully give up inventory if I can have better.

Textures not taking?

Gatherings has a lovely new (to me, at least!) blue suit, so I bought it. It comes with heels and cute glasses (now I have to go looking for a pencil-behind-ear attachment :)), and all was going well... until it came to the trousers.

They were gray.... or were they just not rezzing completely? Rebake textures... rebake textures... no change. Put on a different pair, and they rezzed. OK, take them off. Off they went. OK, put them back on. They sort of went back on. I could see what were intended to be cuffs... but they were textured like me. OK, sign off and back on... and they were gray.

I guess I'd better go back and look at the poster--but I can't believe the trousers are intended to be gray. Strange.

New graphics card

Things have been tight, and I'd not upgraded anything since adding a 120 GB SDD. Still running with a 2.8 GHz Athlon 64 x4 630 "Propus", an AM3 socket CPU that you can't even get now. It's sneaking up on its fifth birthday (though I ordered mine about a year after it came out), making it ancient in computer years.

In the past week or so, though, I have upgraded my graphics card. I was using a PNY card with 1 GB of RAM and an nVidia 560Ti GPU; PCI Express 2. It's a HUGE card, 8.25 inches long. While the cute little Micro ATX case that I use claims to be able to fit a 10.5" card, I'd not even try, and I'm amazed I managed to fit this one in. It's power-hungry; it has two 12V power connectors in addition to pulling 12VDC from the PCI Express socket, and the size and additional cables impede air flow, which a Micro ATX case seriously needs. It's the most expensive computer component I've bought for many years, at $250.

Its replacement is an EVGA card with 2 GB of RAM and an nVidia 750 Ti GPU. Fortunately PCI Express 3 will work with a PCI Express 2 slot, but I'm losing throughput because of it. It is only 6.7" long and doesn't need the extra power connectors, so the air flow is much better. It cost 40% less than the 560 Ti card--$150.

The new card made for a bit of fun installing, because it has the new "Maxwell" chips, and one either has to directly install the proprietary driver that knows about Maxwell or add a repository with that driver packaged. I chose the latter (if by some strange chance you're reading this and are the person who set up the PPA, bless you!). If, like me, you decide to do a new Ubuntu install at the same time (don't ask...), do not tell it you want it to pull in proprietary drivers at install time; it won't get the right one, and towards the end of the install, the screen image will be stretched vertically and you won't be able to see what you're doing!

It's in and running, and running quite nicely. I have to put my ear within five inches of my computer to hear fan noise. Maxwell isn't the highest performance GPU out there, but it's excellent for performance per watt consumed.

More travails for 64-bit Linux users

I should have realized it earlier.

Ubuntu, back in 13.10, got rid of ia32-libs. I had my nose rubbed in that this morning after a somewhat rocky transition to 14.04 (the rockiness was my fault). The claim is that ia32-libs was a "huge hack" and you should instead pull in the individual ia32 packages you need. How do you find out which ones? Run ldd on the executable.

After being silly and trying to run it on the shell script that you invoke to run Second Life (not much point to that!), I peeked down into the bin directory and...

melissa@storge:~/SecondLife/SecondLife-i686-3.6.8.282367$ ldd bin/do-not-directly-run-secondlife-bin 

linux-gate.so.1 =>  (0xf775b000)

libopenal.so.1 => not found

libalut.so => not found

libpthread.so.0 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libpthread.so.0 (0xf771f000)

libcollada14dom.so => not found

libfreetype.so.6 => /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libfreetype.so.6 (0xf7680000)

librt.so.1 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/librt.so.1 (0xf7677000)

libhunspell-1.3.so.0 => not found

libboost_program_options-mt.so.1.52.0 => not found

libboost_regex-mt.so.1.52.0 => not found

libboost_context-mt.so.1.52.0 => not found

libgobject-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libgobject-2.0.so.0 (0xf7624000)

libglib-2.0.so.0 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libglib-2.0.so.0 (0xf7518000)

libGLU.so.1 => not found

libGL.so.1 => /usr/lib32/nvidia-337/libGL.so.1 (0xf740d000)

libX11.so.6 => /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libX11.so.6 (0xf72d9000)

libfmodex.so => not found

libGLOD.so => not found

libSDL-1.2.so.0 => not found

libgdk-x11-2.0.so.0 => not found

libgthread-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libgthread-2.0.so.0 (0xf72d5000)

libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0 => not found

libexpat.so.1 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libexpat.so.1 (0xf72ac000)

libssl.so.1.0.0 => not found

libcrypto.so.1.0.0 => not found

libboost_thread-mt.so.1.52.0 => not found

libfontconfig.so.1 => /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libfontconfig.so.1 (0xf7270000)

libboost_filesystem-mt.so.1.52.0 => not found

libaprutil-1.so.0 => not found

libapr-1.so.0 => not found

libstdc++.so.6 => /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6 (0xf7186000)

libm.so.6 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libm.so.6 (0xf7140000)

libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libgcc_s.so.1 (0xf7123000)

libc.so.6 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 (0xf6f73000)

/lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xf775c000)

libz.so.1 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libz.so.1 (0xf6f59000)

libpng12.so.0 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libpng12.so.0 (0xf6f31000)

libffi.so.6 => /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libffi.so.6 (0xf6f2a000)

libpcre.so.3 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libpcre.so.3 (0xf6eec000)

libnvidia-tls.so.337.12 => /usr/lib32/nvidia-337/tls/libnvidia-tls.so.337.12 (0xf6ee6000)

libnvidia-glcore.so.337.12 => /usr/lib32/nvidia-337/libnvidia-glcore.so.337.12 (0xf49cf000)

libXext.so.6 => /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libXext.so.6 (0xf49bc000)

libdl.so.2 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libdl.so.2 (0xf49b7000)

libxcb.so.1 => /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libxcb.so.1 (0xf4995000)

libXau.so.6 => /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libXau.so.6 (0xf4990000)

libXdmcp.so.6 => /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libXdmcp.so.6 (0xf4989000)

The lines of interest have "not found" at the end...

libopenal.so.1 => not found

libalut.so => not found

libcollada14dom.so => not found

libhunspell-1.3.so.0 => not found

libboost_program_options-mt.so.1.52.0 => not found

libboost_regex-mt.so.1.52.0 => not found

libboost_context-mt.so.1.52.0 => not found

libGLU.so.1 => not found

libfmodex.so => not found

libGLOD.so => not found

libSDL-1.2.so.0 => not found

libgdk-x11-2.0.so.0 => not found

libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0 => not found

libssl.so.1.0.0 => not found

libcrypto.so.1.0.0 => not found

libboost_thread-mt.so.1.52.0 => not found

libboost_filesystem-mt.so.1.52.0 => not found

libaprutil-1.so.0 => not found

libapr-1.so.0 => not found

This has its good points--had we had to do this, or known to do this, or (ahem!) someone at Linden Lab who gives a darn done this from the start, we'd have known from the start what we were missing, installed it, and not have sat in the limbo of "why does everything but streaming audio work?" for years. Or rather, we would if we did something like

cd [wherever you keep SL]/bin; find -type f -exec ldd {} \; | grep "not found"

so we get them all; like Pokemon, you gotta.

On the other hand, we now get to potentially do this for each 32-bit program we want to run, and have the additional issue of working back from individual libraries to the packages to install.

Or you just say the heck with it and install all the 32-bit libraries.

Or...people could make actual 64-bit versions of the viewer. Some do, and to them all I say thank you; I'd hug you if I could. Now, if only Linden Lab would...

Someone send this link to Linden Lab...

From the nVidia blog: "NVIDIA, AMD, Intel Explain How OpenGL Can Unlock 15X Performance Gains". An enticing quote: "the techniques presented apply to all major vendors and are suitable for use across multiple platforms."

The blog post has a slide show; check it out.

"Howls of derisive laughter, Bruce!"

I just deleted some spam email... I saw the first line, and it said something about loving my photo on Facebook.

Facebook?! In the immortal words of the Philosophy Department of the University of Wollamalloo, "Howls of derisive laughter, Bruce!" With Facebook's policies, it's the last place I'd ever sign on. *plonk*

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.