As I previously posted, Cuddlefish Junction is now closed and all products taken off the shelves. Thank you to all my customers over the years for your business! I hope my creations have touched you in many places ways.
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31May
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24May
Don’t forget, May 30 is the last day to buy all Cuddlefish Junction products, including the Deliverator and Squidograms. Everything will be gone in a puff of smoke on May 31!
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16May
I mentioned in my previous post that I was closing my store, Cuddlefish Junction, but making arrangements to sell some of my products (such as the Deliverator) through other SL stores. After further consideration, though, I’ve decided not to sell my products elsewhere, but rather discontinue them altogether. It’s simply not worth my time to bother with them anymore.
So, this blog post is to announce that Cuddlefish Junction is closing May 30. My XStreet listings are coming down that day as well, so the next two weeks are your last opportunity to purchase Deliverators, Squidograms, or my other products in SL.
Even after I’m gone, nearly all of my products should keep working forever (until LL does something to break them, anyway). The Deliverator is a bit different, though, since it relies on my server for looking up people’s UUIDs, and I don’t know how long I’ll be running this site. So, fair warning: some day in the future — it could be two months from now, or a year, or ten years — the Deliverator service will be shut down. If that concerns you, don’t buy one.
You can find all of my products at Cuddlefish Junction in SL, or buy the Deliverator, Squidogram, and Bubble Ride at my XStreet SL storefront.
P.S. If you come by the store, be sure to give the Giant Octopus a goodbye kiss while you’re there.
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23Apr
Yesterday, April 22, was my fourth rezday. It was four years ago yesterday that I logged in to Second Life for the first time, and the persona of Jacek Antonelli was born.
Yesterday was also the last rezday I’ll be celebrating in Second Life. A recent culmination of circumstances has pushed me away from Second Life, and triggered my migration to OpenSim. I’ll be wrapping up my affairs over the next month, then putting my Second Life account on the shelf. By this time next year, I expect SL to be mostly irrelevant to my day-to-day life. Continue reading »
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23Dec
Meriken Co. has a nicely sculpted and textured freebie octopus to wear on your head! It’s even wearing a festive holly cluster. Such a stylish cephalopod!
You can get it at Meriken Co.
in SL. Thanks to Peter Stindberg for telling me about it!
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19Dec
It’s that time of year again: time to
plug my productsremind you how easy it is to send your holiday cards and invitations with the Deliverator!Instead of going through the chore of opening your friend’s profiles and dragging the item onto them, one by one, until you get RDNDI (Repetitive Drag-N-Drop Injury) — just put the item and a list of recipients into your Deliverator and let it do the boring part while you munch on gingerbread cookies and watch TV.
The Deliverator can be yours for just L$500, and will serve you dutifully and lovingly, again and again. ;)
P.S. Don’t forget, Cephalopodmas is just 3 days away! A Squidogram always makes for a slimy and surprising souvenier for that special someone. Just L$50, with 5 packs and 10 packs at a discount!
Tags: cephalopodmas, deliverator, squidogram
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05Dec
Linden Lab announced yesterday that they’ll be starting Linden Homes a new land program to entice users into upgrading by providing premium users with a free 512 sq.m. mainland plot, including an unfurnished house. There will be some restrictions on the parcel, though: “the house cannot be removed and the parcels cannot be sold, joined, terraformed or divided. Events and classifieds cannot be created for these parcels; only Premium Members can own them, and only one per account.”
I’ve heard some grumbling from various established Residents, along the lines of, “Why do they think I would want this?” Indeed, it’s a really weak incentive for existing premium users who are already established in Second Life. A small parcel you can’t sell, a house that you can’t change or remove, and no events or classified listings allowed? Pshaw! Who would want that, when you can own your own, fully featured and customizable land?
Well, to all the people unimpressed with LL’s offering, allow me to point something out: It’s not for you. Or for me, or anyone else who has owned or rented land before.
The Lindens don’t think we would want this. They probably don’t care much what we think about it. We’re simply not part of the target market for this program. For an established land owner to ask, “Why do they think I would want a Linden Home?”, is like a professional mountain biker scoffing, “Bah! This bike shop sells training wheels! Why do they think I would want training wheels?”
If you want to evaluate the effectiveness of this plan, you must consider its goals. Jack Linden writes in the announcement:
A key aim for the beta is to provide easy entry into inworld home ownership (especially for new Residents) while not competing with estate owners. These estates do an amazing job of providing quality experiences for Residents. We want to create an on-ramp so new Resident can learn how valuable and simple owning land can be, but then move naturally on to larger parcels elsewhere.
The Linden Homes program is the spiritual successor of the ill-fated First Land program of years ago. Jack Linden wrote when the First Land program was discontinued, way back in February 2007:
The First Land program was put in place to encourage land ownership for those moving up to Premium membership. Increasingly we have found that these cheap L$1 per meter parcels were not benefitting those people as intended. Because of the low price, they were being immediately sold, or bought via alts, purely for profit.
So, the goals of this plan would seem to be:
- Entice non-land-owners into upgrading to premium accounts.
- Introduce more users to the benefits of land ownership.
- Provide a safe and positive first experience with land ownership.
- Encourage users to move on to full-fledged land ownership afterwards.
- Prevent the new land from entering the commercial land market.
- Avoid directly competing with estate owners and land rental businesses.
We’ll see whether the plan will actually achieve these goals in the months to come, but I think there’s a very good chance that it will be successful. The Lindens have clearly put thought into this, and learned from the problems of the old First Land program — even the ones they didn’t mention directly, like the unattractive sprawling masses of tightly-packed “shoebox homes” that one would find all over the First Land areas.
What’s more, there seem to be very few downsides, and few ways in which the plan could seriously backfire. Of course, many estate owners and landlords/ladies will probably stamp their feet and curse Linden Lab for competing with them. The wiser and more far-sighted of them, though, will be pleased that LL is growing a new crop of future customers for them.
All in all, this is one of the best plans I’ve seen come out of Linden Lab in a long time. Well thought out, well communicated, with their goals and motives laid out in the open. It’s not often I get to say this, but gold star to the Lindens on this one.
Now, returning to the current premium owners who are bemoaning the fact that this offer is useless to them: notice that none of the goals is “provide an additional incentive for established land owners to keep their premium account”. This plan isn’t about you.
So when you ask, “Why does Linden Lab think I would want this?”, what you’re really asking is, “Why is Linden Lab paying attention to someone other than me?” Whether we established Residents like it or not, the answer to that question is obvious and simple: Linden Lab is a business, and they have judged that it’s more profitable to put most of their effort attracting new customers, than to spend their days fawning over the ones who keep coming back anyway.
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15Oct
Tomorrow, October 15 from 3-4 PM SLT, we’ll be having a discussion at UXIG about new features and improvements to the SL viewer that would improve Second Life (and OpenSim) as a platform for creating machinima.
We’d especially love to hear from machinimists who are currently working with Second Life:
- What are the most frustrating or annoying aspects of working with SL to make machinima?
- What new features would help make SL machinima easier, better quality, or more expressive than it is now?
The in-world discussion will be tomorrow, October 15 from 3-4 PM SLT (i.e. Pacific time) at Hippotropolis in Second Life. If you can’t attend the in-world discussion, I’d still love to have your comments here on this blog post, on Plurk, or on the SL-UX mailing list!
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11Oct
O HAI THERE!
This is my first experiment in animating SVG with JavaScript! The image was created in Inkscape, then I edited the XML to add JavaScript code to adjust the arm’s rotation every 35 milliseconds. This is my second JavaScript program ever!
It should work correctly on most modern browsers. If you don’t see the arm moving, you may need to turn on JavaScript. If you don’t see the image at all, you should upgrade to a browser with SVG support, like Firefox or Chrome!
Tags: chibi
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17Sep
The SL fashion world has spawned a bizarre and mysterious type of device known as the anti-inspect shield. The primary purpose of these devices is to deter other people from checking the names and creators of attachments you are wearing, so that they can’t go and buy the same things you did and copy your “style”. The shields accomplish this by surrounding your avatar in many layers of transparent prims, so that other people can’t right click and Inspect your other attachments — their click will hit the shield instead.
Anti-inspect shields are a contentious issue for many reasons. Not the least of these is that it deprives designers of the new customers they could have gained from people seeing and admiring your outfit, and finding out who made it. But just as bad is that they severely reduce your framerate and the framerate of everyone around you, as Gabby Panacek has demonstrated.
Hurting the creators of the items you love, and slashing everyone’s framerates in the process? Well, that’s pretty vain and selfish, but maybe it’s worth it to stop “copycats” from stealing your style? Perhaps it would be, if the shields actually stopped people from inspecting your attachments — but they don’t.
In fact, there’s an extremely quick and easy way to completely bypass the shields, and you don’t even have to fiddle around trying to get the right camera angle. All it takes is 3 easy steps, which I’ll demonstrate with Caer Balogh’s lovely
brown paper bag“Advanced Fashion Shield 1.0″, which Gabby kindly passed on to me. It’s just as useless as the real shields at stopping people from inspecting, but doesn’t hurt your framerate, and is way more stylish.
- Enable Advanced > Rendering > Hide Selected. (Use Ctrl-Alt-Shift-D to turn on the Advanced menu if you need to.)
- Open Edit mode (Ctrl-3) and click on the shield to select it. It will disappear from your view (except for its outline). If the person is wearing multiple shields, you can hold Shift and continue to click them until you have selected (and thus hidden) them all.
- Click on the attachment you want to inspect.
Even the biggest, primmiest, laggiest shield, whether scripted or unscripted, sculpty or nonsculpty, can be bypassed in just a few clicks using this method.
So if you have a shield, please, take it off. All you’re doing is making SL less enjoyable for yourself and everyone around you.
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