What's my shape digits?

Strawberry Singh started up a challenge/meme/discussion on her blog about the numbers behind our Second Life shapes. Here's mine:

Interesting post by Kanomi Pikajuna

Kanomi is the nice girl who is friend to all and she offers a VERY interesting solution (saw it via New World Notes) to SL's woes....sell it to the Users al la the Green Bay Packers.

Do I agree? I don't know, but it is interesting. Personally I think the real problem is the freebie culture....but that...is another story and another post some other time.

Sax Shepherd Bunny Ears

I logged in today to see an IM from someone who was told to do so by former boss Salome Strangelove of the Late Lamented Linden Lifestyles, currently of Salome Says. Sure surprised me, thank you Salome, your piggie bunned greatness.

So this is a new creator...that made Bunny Ears...color changeable animated scripted bunny ears. Considering I was thinking about looking for some nice bunneh ears just 3 days ago, it was rather fortuitous.



You can change color, animation interval, set them to fixed position, set who can touch them, resize them, all useful things. Slightly less than 250L$ too. Now this is a new creator and this is their first item, but it's very nicely done. and worth picking up for easter fun, or if you want to do the playboy bunny look like I did. They're easily the best playboy bunny style ears in my inventory.

SLURL to Sax Shepherd in Seven Veils

Simone vintage bunny outfit, Truth Gabby hair, 5th and Oxford skin

Dear Shoe Designers with Love from CC!

Hello Shoe makers! CC loves shoes! CC Loves shoes in RL! CC Loves shoes in SL. CC bought a shoe tipjar....just because! Look at Awesome tipjar that CC has that CC never actually uses:



Tipjar from Khango

You make shoes...CC happy. But sometimes you not make CC Happy. :-( [frowns]

CC uses viewer 2.+ ...CC no likes invisiprims, CC wants viewer 2.+ viewer alpha shoes! CC no buy non-alpha shoes, though flats without alpha are okay.

CC wants designers to update older shoes....CC wants them to release update kits for the already existing shoes in inventory. It would be good if such packs were available to group members or free..but CC is willing to pay, oh say around 50L$....but not pay full price by buying same shoes all over again.

CC also wants to know when you DO release 2.+ updated shoes and not find out by accident...use your groups! Do some marketing so that CC knows of Happy Thing you have done to make CC Happy!

So please listen to shoe loving CC....please make CC more happy!

Luv, CC

Image, style and compliments

I've been socializing more, and experimenting with image and appearance in SL. I've also been getting a ton of compliments ever since I've been doing my social thing. I like Salome's take on compliments:

Also, how do you respond to compliments about an avatar being “sexy” or “hot?” I mean, I didn’t work out for this bod or spend hours on my hair and make-up. Do I think my avatar is cute and nummy? Yes — she fits my personal tastes. Do I appreciate other people may or may not feel the same? Of course. Would I take any feedback negative or positive personally? Um. How?

Don’t get me wrong — I appreciate it when someone says they like the sort of style I project, or when they squee over an outfit I put together. To me, that reflects a symbiotic pixel vanity and I do allow a smile here and there when someone compliments my aesthetic choices. But the “sexiness” thing always leaves me wanting to smirk and reply “thanks, your slider settings get me really hot, too.” But, you just know the sarcasm would be lost. To be fair, I don’t handle these sorts of compliments well IRL, either. Basically what someone is saying is they like the lot you drew in the genetic lottery. I suppose, comparing the two, at least I picked my own slider settings.

I often tell people that the content makers deserve all the credit...all I do is shop. I also say that I take the easy way out and keep it simple, classic and mostly real world inspired. Someone said to me that she thought me saying once that if Grace Kelly or Audrey Hepburn wouldn't wear something in SL...I wouldn't either. That's pretty close to the mark though I'd add a few more names to the list these days.

What do these images say to you:



That one got a compliment of "You remind me of that Black Swan movie", and that I thought of as well. Kind of princessy-ballerina-y. That's a L'Abel dress IIRC, Truth Tanya hair.



That one I nicknamed Zindra Hub CC. Your usual tanned, tattooed and shmexy SL Avatar look.



Tableau Girl, of course. :-) Makes me look like a 12 year old playing dress-up with mommy's clothes and makeup though.



Retro in ICING's Peggy, Clawtooth hair and Shiny thing's shoes. Got asked several times if I was a Joan on Mad Men fan while I was wearing it....which of course...I am.



Yes, that's the pen necklace. Was told I look sexy in that. Which is very funny considering how simple the look is.



Someone asked me if I was a fan of Desperate Housewives Bree when I wore that. Got a tonne of compliments with that. Mostly about how all the little details worked together. I like Bree's style , but that's not Bree inspired but Laura Bennett from the Third Season of Project Runway I have some similar white blouses of varying cleavagey styles that I wear with varying skirts a la Carolina Herrera. I call those my "uniforms".

That's the Coco Broadcloth blouse with the ingenue pencil skirt. Hair is an old ETD, Tyra that I haven't found a more recent replacement for. Sunglasses are the Heiress frames from Paper Couture and the jewellery is also from Paper Couture. That's the old Tete a Pied Heiress handbag. The Belt is from Fri.day, the shoes from Shiny Things, hosiery from Insolence.

My "issues" with New World Notes

New World Notes is one of the oldest and well respected SL blogs. It's founder, Hamlet Au, was once Hamlet Linden, Linden Lab's own embedded reporter in SL. I heartily recommend it to people and read it myself daily.

However...I have issues with NWN and have apparently have been blocked from commenting there. That disappoints me, though I can understand why.

I probably mentioned Hamlet's indirect financial relationship with Facebook a few too many times when Hamlet kept flogging Facebook as the be all of what SL should be more like. He consults for a company that uses Facebook for game logins and thusly, indirectly financially benefits from it. I was a bit perturbed that he did not mention that connection earlier in his promotion of SL becoming more like Faceook, unlike his Blue Mars thing, which he was quite open about.

My issues with NWN are as follows:

1. Hamlet lives in the tech journalist bubble in California and is thusly disconnected from "average people". This in part led to my disagreement with him about the future of Blue Mars, because while he probably knows people who upgrade their computers often and buy a new iPhone whenever it comes out, that's not the case amongst the SL userbase. He simply didn't understand that Blue Mars had no future as a desktop virtual world with it's Cryengine based graphics when the mass market "Marts" of the US have machines on their shelves with integrated Nvidia 6150SE's in them.

2. Hamlet talks to much to the people behind virtual worlds, when it's the USERS who are the important people...without users, the worlds cannot survive. That also leads to him being a sucker for buzzwords like "the cloud" He thought that "the cloud" would save blue mars, that it wouldn't matter that all those housewives in SL had low end integrated chipsets on their PC's, that BM would be rendered in the cloud and displayed locally.....dumbest thing I ever heard. They didn't have the money! or the number of users to justify doing it. They'd have needed to start on that years ago, and they ran out of time.

3. Hamlet is guilty of the "if it's popular it must be good and anything that wants to become popular should be more like that" fallacy. That's the Facebook thing. Facebook sucks...it truly does. It's interface, it's privacy tools, the requests for "facebook aps" to do things to your info. But Hamlet thinks that because it's popular SL should be more like it, or become connected to it. That's kind of like the people who say smartphones should be like the iPhone, when the iPhone might not be the best device for someones needs. Facebook is all about real world identities and SL...is not. Hamlet says that SL users could use facebook to learn about events in world which tells me that:

4. Hamlet doesn't spend enough time in world talking to "the masses" in world. If he did, he wouldn't say half the stuff he does about SL users. Why use facebook for event listings when there's google calendar and SL's own group system....that he doesn't use effectively. Go on, check the NWN group...no notices...and the group is assigned land that is not covered by Tier:

More Land Credits are needed to support the Land in use."

That picture above was taken at the NWN headquarters location in Waterhead...his building is gone and his furniture and pot plants are just floating in mid air. The man really needs to spend more time in world doing the things that other SL users do, like maintain their land and socialize and stuff. You may not believe it, but in the old days, NWN actually sponsored events in-world!

Another thing that leads me to believe that Hamlet isn't as connected to the masses of SL users as he ought to be is his avatar appearance. Most avatars, even male ones that don't shop much...update their appearance quite a bit. Could you imagine a female SL blogger looking like she just stepped out of 2006? No. Sure, Hamlet's a guy, and a tech journalist and doesn't himself cover SL fashion, leaving that to Iris, but still. DJ's shop, Land Baron's shop, content makers shop. Shopping, especially of things related to avatar appearance, drives the SL economy.

5. He doesn't talk about the SL economy as much as he did in the past. That's hurting SL more than anything. It isn't sim crossings or group chat problems that really hurts SL, but people NOT spending L$.

6. Hamlet doesn't get that SL is a niche product, like hex based strategy games and roguelikes are. The same applies to Minecraft. Sure it's a lot of buzz, but it's coming from hard core nerds who love that sort of crazy complex stuff.

7. The core SL user is probably a 30-50 year old woman...but Hamlet rarely talks to them and would rather talk with Ex-Lindens starting up micro-worlds based on SL code that are going to go nowhere without content that will attract those 30-50 year old women. No pretty shoes, big hair, sexy dresses to make their avatar look kardashiany? They aren't going to be there.

8. Hamlet doesn't realize that NWN is a bubble itself. He's not getting true feedback on
how the masses see and feel about SL via the comments on NWN because NWN's readers are oldbies, FIC and near FIC. Almost all a part of what calls the 100000 That's a problem because the things they care about sometimes don't matter to the "masses" of SL. There's folks in SL who don't give a damn about group chat...and there's plenty of people who simply don't cross sim borders...they d on't need to. In fact, I tend to only cross borders in the steamlands! Everywhere else, I TP.

So that's pretty much it. It's not that I dislike Hamlet or NWN, since it's still a great source of information, it's just that Hamlet needs to be more "grounded" like he used to be.

SL Client 2.6.4 and the bouncy boobeh physics

I was using the development series builds anyway, because they're the only Linden Lab viewers that have the c-ares glitch on Linux fixed (starting with late 2.6.3) so I've been using those builds and moved to along to 2.6.4 and the bouncy came with it. Here's a video demonstration I did:



The physics for breasts, belly and butt are implemented as a wearable physics layer. If you're running 2.6.4, go to My Appearance and Add Clothing> New Physics. That will give you the layer to play with. Here are the settings I use:

breast bounce max effect: 100 spring: 25 Gain: 15 Damping: 50
breast cleavage, max effect: 20, spring: 10, Gain: 9, Damping: 50
Breast Sway, max effect: 20, spring: 10, gain: 9 Damping: 50

And under Advanced Parameters:
Breast Mass: 10, Breast Gravity: 10 (in the video though I have it at 0 now), Breast Drag: 30

The other settings related to Butt, and Belly are at the defaults. To me, it looks best subtle.

Here's the caveats:

You need a 2.6.4 viewer to see or use it. If you have a 2.6.4 viewer you will see bounce on anyone who uses the physics layer, even if you don't use the layer yourself. Likewise, if you use the layer, anyone running 2.6.4 will see it no matter what. Prim attachments don't move with the body parts, they stay where they're attached. so if you were wearing prim pasties and have bouncy...your boobehs would probably bouncy beyond the pastie.

Go to the Snowstorm Development wiki page to download the 2.6.4 builds. Even if you don't use the feature, testing out the viewers by as many people as possible with different hardware and whatnot is a good idea.