The Workaround

As mentioned on the Other Blog, sometimes there's just one tiny thing that's keeping a mesh outfit from absolute perfection. The dress looked great on Lludmila, so Annthrasite ran out to do the same hunt to get the dress for herself. But, when Annthrasite put it on - uh oh!

Total perfection except at the elbow. And this will not be helped by a larger size.

Because it's the non-mod alpha.

So, here's what Annthrasite did. She went into Appearance to Edit Outfit. She chose New Glove.

She picked a nice color to blend, and then adjusted the size for maximum coverage with minimal extra glove.
After saving it with an appropriate name, she moved it to the outfit's folder so it would always be there and would all come together with a "wear."

Here's what it looks like by itself. The glove layer can go higher, but it didn't need to. This is the "0" point for fingerless.

It can barely be seen in the bell of the sleeve

And now Annthrasite double-dog dares you to find it. And she didn't have to learn how to tailor an alpha (although she should probably learn that some day) and rescued a 1L hunt gift without extra charges for upload. Go dance to your heart's content, Hon!

This Much Fun ...

Ooo, pretty!

... Should be illegal.  We were just celebrating the US Independence Day and our friend searched her inventory for some sparklers but instead attached fireworks.  This led to a fabulous display of particle emission and ended in a conflagration that continued even after she logged off.

Who hasn't been in this position?  You only mean to take off one attachment or replace one and all your clothes and attachments vanish.  You make the mistake of opening a folder a stranger has given you that had an innocuous title and suddenly the whole sim is particle-bombed.  You can't hear anything going on and solicit all sorts of advice, emptying cache, logging off and on, toggling - only to discover that your headphones aren't plugged in.

When things like that happen to us, it can be somewhat embarrassing, but the delight it brings to spectators and the stories we create in our little minds make it all worthwhile.  Learning to laugh at ourselves isn't the easiest skill to acquire, but at least from the other side of the monitor your reactions are masked and a strategically typed, "LOL, aren't I the doofus?" makes you look well-adjusted and easy-going.   In other words, it Builds Character.

There, that's another good reason to spend time in the virtual universe.

But perhaps not as much time as I spend.

Erste Wolken am Himmel des jungen Glücks

Ruh-roh! Looks like Giacomo needs to call FEMA.

A virtual life is by nature one in which change is not only imminent but also instantaneous. So, let's say you could have a quick conversation with your landlord about a terra-forming project he's planning to implement and you be all down wid dat, you see what I'm sayin'? And then you go out dancing and when you get back, your living room is full of sand. The little bits and bobs you had out in your yard are now inside the ground (which is, thankfully, hollow so you can cam around and find them).

At this time you get the inkling that you're going to have to move. So you ask and you're assured that you won't be moving. But then you notice that the name of your land has changed and the name has now been assigned to an area on the other side of the island [island in this case being used in the common sense of the word as opposed to another word for a sim]. Hmmm, you think. Then you get the news that you are, in fact, moving.

How hard can it be to move your house in a virtual environment where everything you've got can fit into an invisible file folder? Well, there seems to be more to it than you'd think. For example, a house comes in pieces. If there are moving parts, they are separate to the house. The doors are an example of this. If I want to adjust the house after rezzing it, I have to have all the bits selected by clicking on one piece to edit and then joining the rest of the pieces by shift+click. Then everything will move as a unit until you click away. You can also take it into your inventory this way, and then re-deploy it when ready at a new spot with all the pieces intact and where they were. It is recommended you re-deploy while Edit is active, so that it will all stay together.

Despite knowing all this coming into the moving process, I was still able to mess it up. I thought I had clicked on everything when I took my house and furnishings into my inventory, but I had apparently missed some things.

In the interval, I put up a freebie tree house that I was sure the landlord's terra-forming could not possibly cover without revealing not-so-latent hostility. Ha! Take that!

Once the re-forming of the geography was complete and the go-ahead to move was received, I re-deployed my house and its furnishings ... and didn't like the way it fit. Then I tried moving it, but I hadn't deployed in Edit mode and had to re-shift+click in a hurry, which caused me to forget some bits. Finally, I "took" all the bits back into my inventory and resolved to redecorate after I'd decided where the house looked best.

A new waterfall (almost as important to me as carousels, I guess) was created for my new area. Trees were put in, and plants, and I was told I could return anything I didn't want. I'm unable to move them. That makes me a teeny bit cross. But I jiggled and I tinkered and ... it just isn't the same. It will take some getting used to, I guess. I had walked the old land like a Cherokee woman walks a deerskin before making it into anything. I walked it day after day. I looked all around. I tried to see a new and different house on the site. In the end, in a flash of inspiration, I bought my heart's desire and placed it where I wanted it. True, I was getting complacent and putting a new house together is more fun than actually just living in it day to day ... but it just wasn't right. I can't put my finger on it. It just isn't right. It might be later. For now it's not. It may look fine to others, nicer even, but I feel the house isn't sitting right on the land. I started putting things back in, but gave up. Because it isn't the same.



Then and now ...




The title of this post is from "Die Dreigroschenoper."

Maybe I Shouldn't Be Allowed Back On

Sure, I have a place to live in SL now, and I've been looking for the perfect house to put there (to replace the one there now). I dithered and dithered, looking and evaluating, and then when I finally almost decided on one, when I went back to the store, they were gone. I tried sending a notecard to someone in charge, but they were busy cybering, apparently, and my notecard got bounced back with an IM about how busy he was. Right. How, (ahem) Dare he!

Anyway, although I hadn't decided on a house to fit in with the general "Welsh Village" appearance of the island, I had lucked into a free (free!) Balinese long house that I use as a skybox. Part of it is pictured above, having sprung some leak from a free (free!) shower I had unpacked to look at. When I deleted the shower, the water running on its floor did not go with it and I didn't notice for a couple of days. Fortunately, Bali is a humid place and their houses are built to stand a bit of moisture.

The open Asian-style house in the sky contrasts nicely with what I plan on being a small, thatched cottage on the ground. I can be all cosy on island level and then, when I need some space and what barely constitutes privacy in SL, spread out in the skybox. It also gives me an opportunity to exercise my delight in all things Asian that I inherited from my mother. I've got some Asian frills that go nicely with modern furniture: the paper lamp, the Tibetan prayer flags, the stone lanterns. I have more, but there's conflict with the alpha layers making the kimono stand pointless.

On island level I had been torn between a small, dark cottage and a mill. My land had a waterfall on it and a stream to the water surrounding my tiny peninsula. I worried that it would encroach too much on the neighboring land and had gone out to look at the property lines one more time ... when I noticed that the waterfall was gone. I also noted that I had an actual neighbor in an actual thatched cottage. I looked at where the waterfall was. I looked at my neighbor's build. There is a small waterfall there. I looked at where "my" waterfall used to be.

Having come back one day to find my house gone is all that keeps me from weeping. Perhaps this is just some temporary thing. Perhaps the waterfall is in the process of being moved, moved to accommodate this new home that is nowhere near where the waterfall was.

Regular readers (ha!) of this blog may know that I have a tendency to accidentally delete things.



Two years ago I deleted half of a sky-sandbox trying to put out a fire. Okay, I was trying to find the particle emitter. It didn't occur to me that I had the power to delete someone else's build. This did teach me a lesson: even if you do finally find the tiny prim you were looking for, you can't control it when you are hundreds of meters below on the ground. So, if you finally are able to click on it and still can't delete it, it must mean your avatar isn't where you thought it was.

And this happened to me this weekend. I was unpacking some boxes from the Albero hunt and one turned out to be not a box at all, but the actually necklace. I clicked on it and tried to "take" it - but apparently, I did not take the necklace. There was all my furniture hanging in space, and the necklace now much easier to see, and I was nowhere to be found. If only I had still been sitting in my chair!

I had to try twice to put up my Balinese skybox. It was a regular comedy of errors. I suspect that there is another one up there somewhere that I don't know about. I can't see it, but I'm thinking it's there, perhaps at 5,000 meters or something.

If that were the only dumb thing I'd done this past weekend, I wouldn't take it so hard. But I ran my motorcycle into the stream and had to delete it. Could I have deleted the waterfall at that time? Would I have even noticed? Deleting a nearby waterfall isn't as noticeable as deleting a platform in the sky you were nominally standing on (and chances are if you were looking intently at something else, it would be a while before you noticed that).

I'm still working up the nerve to mention this to the landlord.

Goddess of the Hunt

All hail the Albero Mall Hunt! I saw a photo of a cute blouse on one of the freebie blogs and thought I'd go looking. (Note: still haven't found the clue box for that blouse - rats!) I'd never been to the Albero Mall, but it's an attractive space with many nice shops and very little empty space.

Even though the hunt has numbers, the prizes are not necessarily sequential, so if you can't find one, you aren't totally lost until you can wheedle a clue that makes sense from the hunt group IM. That's a plus! Also, the merchandise at this mall seems to be really great stuff! Avs who know me will go into shock when I say that I actually bought some items ... with real Lindens. But the hunt itself is a bit fiddly.

You walk around the mall (which is huge) and find the grey boxes with numbers on them which are supposed to be in front of stores, but some may have strayed. They may also be slightly embedded. These numbered boxes have a word floating over them. So, what I did is, I wrote down the number and the word next to it and created a big list. I didn't find all the boxes (prob-bo-lem number 1, but since it's not sequential, who cares?), but at least I had a list to go on.

Next, you find the grey landmark givers in front of particular stores. The landmark is to the main store of the satellite shop the LM giver sits in front of. Yeah, try saying that five times fast. You click on it, and, theoretically, you will be sent to the main store where you will have to hunt (in vain in some cases for me, but it's not sequential, so who cares?) down the numbered box. When you find it, you just say "/(number) (code word that goes with number)" near it and it gives you your prize. It took me two days to get the hang of this!

Lest you think I'm somewhat of a "thickie" - I was hindered in my searching by frequently being sent to the wrong location:



The above picture is of the map with the landmark (above, circled) that was given to me by the hunt LM giver. Along with it, the shop itself gave me a different landmark (below, circled). Note the difference. Using the hunt landmark, I often wound up in strange locations, causing me to tp back to the mall, relocate the shop and the giver, and trying again. Usually, the second time took me to the correct location. Usually. As far as I can tell. (This is prob-bo-lem number 2.) A good clue that something was terribly wrong was that instead of rezzing on solid ground, I would rez in midair and fall a considerable distance.

Eventually, (note on learning curve graph "over two days" for this maze rat) I tried the shop's landmark that was given at the same time. That landmark was accurate. Look where the hunt would have landed me on this next example (see orange arrow):



Can yew say: "Refreshing landing for Lludmila"? In another example, I would have been sent to coordinates that were similar to the ones from the shop, but on a totally different sim. I might have found that a tad confusing! (See below)





















Those two problems aside, it's still a fiddly hunt with much traveling back and forth even after you've found every single numbered box. And then there's more hunting at the main stores. If the quality of the shop merchandise hadn't been so good, I'd have given up long, long ago. Haven't had a chance to look at much of the hunt merchandise, but I have high hopes for it.

By the way, the mall map above, which is posted in several locations, is, as far as I can tell, utterly useless.