Four

Tags

meaning, rez day, second life

It was four years ago tonight that I first came out blinking into the virtual light of a Second Life day. I used a tree branch in the newbie rezzing area as my changing room and spent hours and hours trying to learn my way around and especially to find something to do and someone to do it with.

Photo taken on a cake you can pop out of at Sinful Temptations Boutique

I’m in a very different place in my life now than I was then. I’m always busy, but these days I have some very specific priorities that demand more attention than the things I was playing around with in 2006. Together with my family, there’s also my First Life partner, who makes me profoundly interested in spending more time in what my friend Soph used to call the "atomic world" (which is to say, the one made up of actual matter).

I think this was on my very first day, or close to it. No wings yet, even! That’s Chastity Sin hovering over the water.

It surprised me recently, when I looked at some posts from the very beginning of this blog (started less than two weeks after I joined Second Life) to realize that my theory of what Second Life was good for then was pretty much exactly what it still is today: I think Second Life mainly serves us by filling in the things we’re not getting from our First Lives. Freedom to do as we please, wealth, youth, beauty, even friends are easier to come by in Second Life than they are in First. Relationships are much simpler (but perhaps no less likely to blow up! Even though none of my own ever did), escapes are much cleaner, and everything is much closer in Second Life. Even now, I’m drawn back to Second Life from time to time just because it’s so much easier to find a place to have fun and talk to interesting people. True, it’s much harder than it *needs* to be to do that, and sometimes you can go all evening without finding a single interesting person to talk to, but in First Life interesting people can’t be teleported to, and you can’t skip from one event to another and browse people’s profiles just by clicking on them. I wish you could!

My first "home," a tree branch in a public area. When I changed here, *usually* I didn’t get anyone popping in unexpectedly.

And yet I’m clearly on a general trend of drifting away from Second Life. Who knows if I’ll even be around for my fifth rez day? Most of the people I knew from long ago when I started are gone now. It’s fairly common for me to be in a room full of people and find that I’m the "oldest" one there. While Second Life is still so difficult and limited–more of a world-sized chat room you can build in than a different way of doing practical things like First Life shopping or having business meetings–maybe it’s doomed to be nothing more than a chapter, or a few chapters, in each of our lives.

But I’m not gone yet, so who knows? I’ve thought of myself as being on the way out the door for quite a while already. Maybe I’ll even be successful in getting Finch in, although why we would spend much time in Second Life when we can be together in First I don’t know.

Who else is here of old timers? How are you feeling about your Second Life? And in case I missed yours … Happy Rez Day!

^^^\ Kate /^^^

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Minimalista

Tags

clothing, hair, hair fair, harper beresford, second life

So, I’ve been to the Hair Fair this year. Three times! Each time hoping that things would be different, and each time … not so much. 😦

Before I went, I read and resolved to follow most of my friend Harper’s tips for the Hair Fair (except of course for the one about waiting until it was less crazy!) at http://slfashionpassion.wordpress.com/2010/09/04/hair-in-my-soup/ . Especially, I put on an outfit that used very few prims, relying mostly on system clothing, and no scripts. I went barefoot and without a facelight or AO, and my wings were a simple 2-prim set with no scripting.

Voila! The result: a great butch avatar to take to Greek lesbian club–which is to say, not exactly my style. While I’m happy to be obviously and publicly bisexual (in Second Life, anyway … in First Life almost everyone seems to assume I’m straight, what with the boyfriend and all), I do like to have *hair*, at least!

Actually, I wouldn’t have minded a bandana, but I’ll tell you a secret about my shape: in order to get my face exactly the way I wanted it (I made my shape myself long ago when I first joined Second Life), I had to sacrifice a gracefully-proportioned skull–which normally doesn’t matter, because I always have hair! Unfortunately, my short, flat skull (which I hope to someday fix if and when Linden Labs introduces additional avatar design tools) looks completely grotesque to me, so I can’t get away with the cropped-to-the-skull look or the just-a-bandana look. I need a hairstyle to make my head the right shape!

But please don’t bring my weird head shape up – not unless you want to see me use a crying animation, and I assure you those, like my skull shape, aren’t pretty!

Anyway, Greek Butch didn’t quite suit me (although there are butch lesbians and Greek people whom I admire, and it’s no offense meant to either), so I tried again, giving up the hat and instead searching out the lowest-prim hairstyle in my entire inventory. It turned out to be my snood hair, which normally goes with a net and bow (which make it look much nicer), but which without weighed in at only 22 prims. This, I decided, was as low as I could go and still feel like me. I was also happier with the more casual shorts and top, because they matched the bare feet better, and I had a wider choice of skins because I didn’t have to find one with a hair base. Needless to say, my wings had to be selected to suit the new outfit. Here’s how I came out.

But enough about my attempts to dress semi-presentably at low bandwidth! How was the hair fair itself?

Unfortunately, I can’t say I was inspired. The dun-colored canvas tents were anything but festive, and the lag, of course, was absolutely terrible. I tried flying, running, and walking (running seemed to work the best for me), and soon stopped caring about doors and instead just walking directly through walls, which doesn’t help the feeling of browsing happily through vendors.

Each vendor had only a few hairstyles on view, which I hadn’t remembered from past Hair Fairs. To my great disappointment, I found very little that I really wanted to buy! I think the real problem is that I already have many, many hairstyles, and finding one that I really like that isn’t a whole lot like some other hairstyle I already have is a bit of a fool’s errand!

I wished that they used different colors for different tents or even for different vendor sections within each tent. That way it would have been much easier to see where I was going and where I was coming from!

But even more, I want Linden Labs to come up with a solution for the lag problem for large events. I know, it’s a terribly difficult technical problem, but surely it’s not insurmountable! Right now it’s excruciating to ever do anything with large numbers of people. There must be a better way, right? For instance, what if there were a way to lock a sim as "no changes" after everything was set, which would mean that while already-rezzed objects could be manipulated, the only way new objects could be rezzed would be for someone to teleport away, change their attachments, and then come back–through some specific portal or something. This would allow preloading of all prims and textures, with only a trickle of new information at once–you would wait patiently while the sim loaded and then enter.

Oh, I know, that probably wouldn’t work–I can think of half a dozen problems with it now, and there are probably dozens more, but my point is, Second Life isn’t a viable place for people to gather until we can do it without ridiculous lag…so some solution – Faerie magic, perhaps? Anything will do, so long as it works! – is desperately needed. Gathering lag is stunting the growth of Second Life along with some of the other big villains, like the learning curve and the inability to find an interesting group of people to spend time with on demand despite there being tens of thousands of people online!

I think I’m beginning to sound a little hysterical, though, so I’ll stop right there. In the end, I think what I learned from the Hair Fair is that for me, it’s not worth going to mobbed sims, and that I don’t need any more hair. Now, if we have a *shoe* fair, my attitude may have to change…do we have one of those?

^^^\ Kate /^^^

Why I Use Viewer 2: Outfits!

Tags

clothing, fashion, features, outfits, second life, viewers

Now, I’m no expert on viewers. I use Snowglobe when I’m on an underpowered laptop I have, and I used to use Emerald, but mainly I use Linden Labs’ own Viewer 2, and I haven’t been looking around for another one. Why? Because I *love* the outfits feature. Do you know about this? It’s not how it used to work on the old viewer.

On the original Second Life Viewer, you probably know that you could assemble outfits, and all of the objects in that outfit that were copied would be copied to that folder, and all of the objects that were transfer would be moved to that folder to make it impossible to find them anywhere else. Since I hate for my inventory to be muddled, I basically never used the old outfits feature.

But the new one! So simple, and yet so good! With the new feature I can right click my avi, select Edit Outfits, and use the Save As option from the little menu at the bottom where it says Save. Everything stays in its original folder, but now you can click the outfits icon to see all of your outfits. It takes three clicks to change completely into a new outfit, including AO, skin, hair, clothing, attachments, and (in my case, of course) wings.

I admit, I spend a lot of time getting dressed. It’s not unusual for me to spend half an hour rummaging through my inventory to find exactly the right way to coordinate, say, my shoes and my earrings and my wings. And I like to combine things from different sets I’ve purchased without moving them around. For me, it’s wonderful to be able to feel as though I can save all those efforts and go back to that outfit whenever I like–even though I’m much more likely to put together a new outfit instead!

Unfortunately, one thing that can’t be preserved is settings for a particular item, for instance if I color a pair of wings to match a dress, or have my AO off because of dancing but want it to start out on. Still, I’m in love with this feature. 🙂