Louise in Chakryn Forest

I’ve been having some fun with my new alt, and discovering a very nice place for taking atmospheric photos – Chakryn Forest. I think I’ve taken what’s probably my best snapshot to date (the last one below)

Girly me

There was a thread on the SLU forums about showing off your alt of the opposite sex from yourself. You know, everyone has one, to try out those clothes or test poseballs… ahem.

Well, I don’t really have a girly alt (Salo is more butch than me, and my lady hobbit ended up getting deleted when I got bored with it).

And I started to wonder, what would Lewis Luminos look like if he were…Louise Luminos? So I went into Edit Appearance, clicked the “female” button, did a little tweaking… and then I went shopping.

I’m actually really pleased with this result. She could be my sister.

I’m tempted to sign up a new alt now, but I know what women are like. They just steal your credit card and spend all your money. (Actually I spent less than L$100 on this avatar – the only thing I bought was the top (L$10) and the shoes (L$75 for a fatpack) – everything else was either free, or already in my inventory.

Stats:

• Shape: Mine
• Skin: Eloh Eliot freebie
• Hair: Calico Ingmann
• Eyes: Mine
• Top: Pixeldolls
• Pants: Eros
• Shoes: Duh

The Evolution of English

Overheard (by someone else) in SL chat:

Muggle 1: yuh
Muggle 2:   u here by yo self
Muggle 1: no. tina heree
Muggle 2: wif tina
Muggle 1: *Mmhmm*
Muggle 2: oh  u bought dem boots
Muggle 1: Nuuuuuuu! buh im finna disz a demo- mama got det fit
Muggle 2: rainboots or knittedboots
Muggle 1: det hair dont go wit it doe sar.
Muggle 2: ik
Muggle 1: knitted boots
Muggle 2: me
Muggle 1: yuh should have got a hair form det place  get dha white ones so yuh can match
Muggle 2: i got on black ho
Muggle 1: wdff so yuh gpne get blk jjusz  match det fit oki well be stupid  iight i got em
Muggle 2: im gettin black  match my scarf freom reek
Muggle 1: smhh
Muggle 2: from* smh wat

I swear, if the language degenerates any further we’ll all be grunting like Neanderthals.

X Street Fail

I think by now everyone’s seen the changes that are upcoming for X Street.  Minimum L$99 fee for listing a freebie, listing fee of L$10 per item per month for everything. Minimum L$3 commission on everything (this affects all items under L$50 sale price).

People are de-listing their stuff in droves.

It seems to me, based on their stated intentions, that this is exactly what they want to happen. LL are not interested in allowing small businesses, newcomers or hobby merchants to trade, because they (potentially) won’t bring in as much commission. This, coupled with their new proposal for a FIC mall of major designers paying 30% commission is paving the way for a SL Grid where the only merchants that are able to trade at all are major ones with a massive annual turnover that can swallow LL’s fees without blinking.

Someone suggested piling all your freebies/cheapies into one box and selling them at a decent enough price to swallow the fees, but really this is what BIAB resellers are doing anyway, and that’s one of the stated things that LL want to get rid of.

There are a few alternative merchant sites where SL content can be found. I went off to look at one of them and the first thing I saw on the main page was a box of eyes for L$400; the same box of “fantasy eyes” that’s available in all the freebie stores for nothing. In any case as soon as any competitor gets anywhere near being popular or successful, LL will carry out a hostile takeover, and shut it down, as they did with OnRez.

Now that LL’s main “product” is the Standalone behind-the-firewall grid, and the only customers they really want are corporations, the rest of us; the consumers who only buy, and the small merchants who run a business with only enough profit to maybe cover their tier, are seen as pests to be gotten rid of ASAP because we spoil the professional image with our nightclubs and sex clubs and roleplaying games.

I am left wondering now, how long it will be before LL apply commission charges and “listing fees” to all inworld merchants too, not just those on XStreet. Playing Nostradamus here, I’ll take a guess at 12 months, and then the death of the grid as we know it very shortly after, because then the only people who will be able to afford to stay in this supposedly “free” grid are those major corporations that LL are so keen to suck up to. Small merchants will be gone because they can’t afford the fees. Major merchants will raise their prices because (a) they have to recover the value of the fees and (b) they have no competitors any more so they can charge what they like. Consumers will leave because there’s nothing interesting to buy any more, and what there is left is pretty, but too expensive. That leaves the IBM executives. And none of them are going to buy stuff either, have you ever noticed that people who are inworld for actual work are still wearing system hair and skin, and wearing the same freebie suit their avatar started with.

For the rest of us, I think it’s time to look for another grid. And don’t think that’s not what LL really want. They don’t want your hundred bucks a year. They want residents who are going to spend thousands.

at the back of the wardrobe

First of all a little background. I’m writing a novel, for NaNoWriMo, so I’m not in world much at the moment, but one thing I did yesterday was look for a writing group. I found one on the Events listing, though it was too late for me to attend, but it had an interesting exercise, to write about the oldest wearable thing in your inventory.

That got me curious, so I went looking through my inventory for my oldest things, and I put them all on.

The oldest garment  that still remains in my inventory is this t-shirt, which was one of a bunch of things I got from the various freebie places, and dates from 2 days after I was “born” (I think it took me 2 days before I left Help Island). This one was from either Velvet or the Freebie Dungeon. Most of the freebies I deleted, mainly because they were both not very good, and also instantly recogniseable as freebies. This t-shirt was the only one I liked so I kept it. Green goes well with ginger hair, and it has thistles on the back, and I am very fond of Scotland.

I apparently didn’t keep any of the jeans or other pants from the freebie places, and my oldest pair of pants is actually also my first ever purchase in SL – this pair of jeans was purchased from the Rebel store, by Rebel Hope, and it’s still one of my favourite pairs of jeans.

I can’t actually remember what skin I wore before this one I purchased from Signature. I think I just wore system skin, because I remember having a ginger beard right from the start.  My first hair I do remember – that was the ubiquitous “Dirty Biker” hair which I tinted to ginger instead of black.

When I think about my hunt for the right skin I recall it having taken ages, and if I’d been asked to guess I would have said a month. Apparently it took only two weeks, and I’ve worn this skin ever since. There are a couple of other freebies in my inventory (a few Eloh mods and a group gift from Belezza) but I’ve never worn them. And, honestly, I never will. I can’t imagine any reason why I would want to wear another skin when the one I have is absolutely perfect. All I’ve done since then is purchase a few more beard options.

This hair came from Laqroki and was purchased on the same day I got the skin. I wore it for a long time, and I still love it, despite the awful alpha isues. It looks great in still photos but not so much moving around.  The shades are also from Laqroki, and I also picked them up on the same day. I think they were a store gift.

I didn’t bother showing the shoes because I don’t have anything left even from my first month in SL. I think I mostly wore the sneakers from the “Boy Next Door” avatar.

So, considering that everything in this pic, I got when I was 2 weeks old or less, I think I did pretty well. Mind you I did have a lot of help in the early days.

Now I suppose I could go back even further, to my first SL avatar which I had briefly in 2006 before I got bored with it…

Unfortunately I have no idea where any of these things were from. The tanktop had a wolf on it and I wish I knew where I got it because I loved that top, and would have it again if I could. The jeans look like the basic freebies. The hair, from the looks of it, I’d guess Here Comes Trouble. No clue on the skin. I looked awful.

So… what’s at the back of YOUR wardrobe?

Happy coincidence

Shortly after finishing my last post, I was browsing through the Events>Discussions page in SL, when I came across a name I recognised, Lizzie Gudkov, who I’d first met at SL’s Portmerion-inspired Village Sim, where she used to host some really interesting philosophical discussions. Lizzie left The Village, and so did all the other interesting people, so I stopped going too. (There was another reason I wouldn’t go back but I’m not discussing that in public).

Anyway, Lizzie has set up a new discussion group at her own venue LnL Square, and by sheer coincidence it was just about to start, so I went along. It was lovely meeting Lizzie again, and some other old faces from The Village that I remembered too.  By another coincidence the topic of conversation was “SL Drama” (a topic I remembered from before) and somewhere in the discussion came that old Immersion vs Augmentation debate which I’d just been talking about in my blog.

After the discusion I stayed to chat a while, and four of us ended up on the MHOH2 hunt for an hour.

It was great fun, and I’m so glad to be able to catch up with old friends again.

Oil and water

This post came from a thread in the official SL “flogs” (as bad as they are, and in need of much flogging there are occasionally some good thought-provoking threads there).

This one starts with the common profile-statement “RL and SL are seperate and I do not mix them”. The Immersionist side of the Immersionist-Augmentist debate.

A fascinating subject, and lots of thought-provoking answers. To me, if I see that in someone’s profile I assume that either their avatar is nothing like their RL self (possibly a different gender) or else they’re married and not intending for SL relationships to become RL relationships.

In a sense, both of these apply to me and yet I still don’t feel like I do keep SL and RL seperate at all. My avatar may be taller and fitter and better-looking than I am in RL, and I don’t do voice or share RL pictures or phone numbers with SL friends. I am married in RL so I’m not in the market for a RL relationship. I have no urgent need to meet up with SL friends in RL (although I would not object to doing so if the opportunity arose). But despite this, my avatar is still me in every possible way. Aside from identifying personal information, I am open about my RL with SL friends. I can’t even say “my avatar is the same as me” because that would imply that we are two alike but separate things, and I don’t see my avatar that way at all. It’s just me, as I wish I looked, as I look in my dreams. In The Matrix movie, they call it “Residual Self-Image”.

And yet while I am very much myself in SL, I have no issues with people who see things differently- for whom their avatar is a roleplaying character very different from their real self (I have a couple of roleplaying alts too). It’s odd really, that I seem to fit on both ends of the I-A scale – both being very much true to my RL self in my avatar (although one of the biggest turnoffs for me is someone who asks too many questions about what I look like in RL and what I do, as opposed to what I think), and at the same time having no need to drag SL friendships into RL.

I have the following in my profile (and the same in Salo’s profile as well, actually):

I respect others’ avatars as they choose to present themselves, whether that matches RL or not is mostly irrelevent to me. I would hope to be treated with equal courtesy.

This means, basically, that I don’t care if your RL self doesn’t match your avatar – I’ll treat you as you present yourself inworld until you instruct me to do otherwise. Because it really doesn’t matter, for the purposes of a SL friendship – I’m much more interested in the words you type. And it shouldn’t matter to you that in RL I’m not a fit, red-haired hunk, I’m just a short, weedy nerd with glasses and greying hair.

Short stuff

Salo has been tweaked again.  It started when I tweaked my height back down to 6′4″, and then I realised that Salo was actually TALLER then me which just won’t do. So I had this idea to make her height much more realistic to RL… so now she’s 5′9″

And she looks TINY.

This pic was taken this afternoon, the guy next to her is just some random stranger.

Now, given that she has an androgynous shape, with no breasts, and an androgynous skin with no makeup, I’m just wondering how long it will be before she’s accused of being a child avatar.

Folky folk

One of the reasons I joined SL to begin with, way back in 2006, was because of the live music. In the end, I hardly went to any, but lately I’ve been going to events and I’ve found a superb folky British singer-songwriter called Russell Eponym.

He plays a mix of his own material along with some more well-known folk classics, like “Last Thing on my Mind” and “Speed of the Sound of Loneliness” and intersperses with friendly chatter, and will acknowledge every guest by name. He even ad-libs songs about members of the audience. I got mentioned twice, I think by the end of the song he was forgetting who he’d included and who he’d missed. The way he chats between songs reminds me of a RL musician I know, Pete Ryder.

By some odd coincidence, there was a guy there tonight wearing exactly the same skin that I wear. Except he’d stretched it to about 7ft 6 tall. (I still think it looks better on me).

There were two girls in matching skins and hair and Regency outfits, one in red and one in green, dancing in unison. That was neat too.

Stroker & Munch vs LL

You probably know this already, but Stroker Serpentine and Munchflower Zaius have initiated a class action lawsuit against Linden Lab for failing to protect content creators against copyright theft.

I have a very bad feeling about this.

While they declare that their intention is “not to bring down Linden Lab” I am concerned that if they win the case* then this may well happen anyway. Even assuming that the fines and damages costs are affordable – which I’m sure they are – it seems likely to me that the courts will require Linden Lab to set systems in place to make content theft and selling of counterfiet goods totally impossible.

Now already there is rumbling in the Lab about a certified content-creator program, whereby only avatars with RL info and payment info registered with LL, and who are in good standing (ie never been banned or suspended – oh look that rules me out) would be able to sell content.

Personally I don’t see how this can work, at this level.  First of all there are millions of avatars, some already involved in content theft, who have never been banned or suspended, because LL is so incompetent at acting on ARs. They are quick enough to ban the innocent while the guilty get away with everything.

Secondly, it still permits the content theft to happen, and relies on a system of reporting to root it out and remove it, after the fact. Often that’s too late – by the time they find the stolen content it’s already in full perm circulation.

Finally, how do they police “selling?” They might prevent an unlicensed creator from listing on X Street, or listing in Search, but it doesn’t stop them actually transferring the stolen goods and making money from it. Even if LL bans them from letting an object for sale, they can still use a vendor, or pass things on by direct inventory transfer and taking a direct L$ payment for it. Bottom line here, is nothign will change and the grid will still be overwhelmed with stolen content.

The extreme that I fear, is that LL will ban unlicensed creators from creating anything at all. That the “Build” button and the “Upload texture/file” facility will be greyed out and unavailable for anyone who is unlicensed. This will give Linden Lab absolute control, and they won’t have to follow ARs. Second Life will become like IMVU or Blue Mars, where only a limited few are able to create anything at all, and the rest of us are limited to purchasing only from licensed stores who are free to raise prices as high as they like.

Now, a world where creation is impossible for me, is of no interest to me, and becomes nothing more than a proprietary chatroom like IMVU. I am sure that a vast number of residents feel the same. This, I think would lead to a mass exodus of people like myself, who cannot be licensed, and yet who still want to make things, even if it’s only for fun. Whether or not Linden Lab’s profit margin can handle the loss of all the players like myself – I don’t know. But I doubt it.

So I have been trying to think of some alternative solutions, whereby the content theft is eradicated, and yet still allow content creation.

The first thing, which I regret but fear is necessary, is to forget the Open Source client project, and restrict LL access to official (or officially approved) viewers only. This is the only way to prevent copybot-clients from being able to connect to the grid. By all means allow people to make their own viewers, but those people should be “certified” too, and their code should be inspected by Linden Lab before the client is able to connect to the grid.

Secondly I think the solution to the sale of stolen content lies in an overhaul of the permission system.  Suppose the default state of any prim, even for the creator, is no-transfer. And that only these “certified content creators” have the ability to toggle the Transfer permissions box and enable the item to be passed on. That way, everyone is still free to create content for their own use, but they can neither sell it nor give it away unless they are licensed to do so. It also means that if stolen content is found, there can be no doubt that the person who owns it is the person who made it, since it won’t ever have been transferrable.

A system like this would not depend on reporting of content because the stolen content could not be sold anyway, it defaults to “failsafe”, which is, I think, what a court would demand.

Yes, it would be a shame that I would not be able to share my creations with my friends, but if my friends are sad about that then the blame for it would lie squarely on the shoulders of the thieves and copybotters who made this all necessary in the first place.

*All of that said, I really don’t think this case will pass anyway, because the implications of a win are just so vast. It’s a bit like suing the inventor of the VCR because there are pirated movies being sold.

Another thing I haven’t seen pointed out yet, is that Stroker has set up a rival company “Eros 3D” which will be an adult virtual world. So he is effectively suing his main competitor. I don’t think the courts will look to favourably on that, and neither do I.

Then it will be an even bigger shame, that the case fails and nothing changes, except Sexgen and Nomine disappear from the grid, and the copybotters and thieves continue to profit.