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.
Thanks to Peter Stindberg for telling me about it!
-
23Dec
in SL. -
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
-
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.
-
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!
-
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
-
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.
-
31Aug
I’ve been making some positive life changes lately. You know, the usual stuff: eliminating stress, exercising more, focusing on the things in life that are important to me, … and transforming into a mermaid!?
As you can see, I’m shedding my human-ness in SL, and embracing my aquatic side. There’s still a ways to go in the transformation. I need new hair, eyes, and probably a new wardrobe! (Hrmm. I guess that’s what my fortune cookie meant: “You will be doing a lot of shopping soon… in bed!”)
But, the first stage is done: a new skin! My deepest gratitude to Eloh Eliot for her Starlight skin, which I used as a base. Without Eloh’s generosity, my skin would have taken weeks, instead of a few days. Actually, I probably wouldn’t have even attempted it, as it wouldn’t have been worth the time investment.
Here’s a tantalizing close-up of the patterns on the back:
Of course, I am far too lazy to have hand-painted anything as intricate and detailed as that! No, no, this is a job for technology! I relied heavily on Blender for this project, using its procedural textures, nodes system, and baking to create and tweak the patterns. As you can see, the nodes setup for the texture is a bit complex (click to view or Flickr, where you can view notes and a larger version):
Here’s how it works. The skin starts with a blue version of my Starlight mod (which I spent several hours tweaking to resemble my old skin in the face). On top of that are overlaid two layers of patterns, which were created from Blender’s procedural noise textures (specifically, “Clouds”, and “Stucci”), run through several processing nodes. I imported the default female mesh from the Avatar Databank to provide the 3D coordinates for the noise, so that the sizes would bake uniformly all over the body, even though the UV layouts are not proportional to the body part sizes.
The overall density and darkness of the patterns is controlled by a mask (grayscale image), which is close to white in the areas where the patterns are strongest (like the back, top of the arms, and outside of the legs), and close to black where the patterns are weakest (like the face, chest, belly, and inside of the legs), with a smooth gradation in between. The mask was painted by hand, using Blender’s 3D painting tool on the mesh. I created a new UV layer and mirrored the UVs of the left side of the body overlayed the right side, so that the mask would be symmetrical.
The mask acts as a threshold for the noise pattern: wherever the noise is darker than the mask, the pattern is opaque. So, since the mask is very dark on the belly, the noise pattern tends not to show there. I chose this approach for better realism in the way the pattern fades out. Rather than the pattern just becoming less opaque on the belly, the splotches actually becomes smaller and less dense, too. (For example, compare the small of the back with the buttock in the close-up above. The mask was lighter on the buttock, so the pattern is not as tightly packed there.)
There were also several layers of nodes influencing the skin color in more subtle ways, like applying a faint purple hue to the face, chest, belly, and inside of the legs, and slightly darkening the underlying skin in areas where the pattern was particularly dense. I also applied a little bit of baked-in shiny goodness (since, as a mermaid, my skin is slightly slimy!), using a system similar to this technique described by loonsbury.
I think that covers it. I’m quite pleased with how the skin came out, although I’ll likely make adjustments and tweaks in the future, and probably some new colors, as well. But for now, it’s on to the next steps in my transformation: hair, eyes, body additions (fins, gills, etc.), and new outfits!
You can see more pictures of the skin on Flickr to see its evolution, and watch for my future transformations.
-
21May
I’ve counted Dusan Writer as a friend (or at least a friendly acquaintance) ever since I met him in the course of his UI design contest a year ago. He’s an interesting personality, and generally an intelligent fellow and a thoughtful writer.
So, it’s with some disappointment that I read Dusan’s recent post on Second Life’s permission system. His post is prompted by the progress of VWR-8049, a proposal to allow users to choose the default permissions for new objects that they create.
Dusan comes out strongly against it, and although I’m firmly in favor of it, that’s not the disappointing thing; I don’t mind people disagreeing with me. What disappoints me is that Dusan has bought into the baseless FUD that certain individuals have piled onto the issue.
Alas, not only does Dusan believe the FUD and let it color his entire analysis of the feature, but he also regurgitates it in a most unsavory and uncharacteristic manner, littered with baseless attacks, ranting nonsequiturs, and flawed thinking. I’m usually content to let this sort of thing lie, but it boggles my mind that FUD of this sort could spread when it has so many holes in it. Continue reading »
-
10May
Deliverator users, rejoice! I’ve upgraded the server to be better than ever: Deliverator can now deliver to practically anyone in SL! If you’ve had trouble delivering to certain people, those troubles are a thing of the past!
The only people Deliverator might not be able to deliver to are super-newbies, less than a day or two old — and you can just try again the next day and it’ll probably find them. Woo!
This improvement was on the server, so you don’t even have to upgrade your Deliverators or anything like that. It’s magic!
As always, the Deliverator is available for just $500, only at Cuddlefish Junction. It’s totally the easiest way to send out gifts, invitations, and other items to your friends or customers! And you don’t even have to make them click some silly sign!
Tags: cuddlefish junction, deliverator
-
05May
Venerable Second Life journalist and blogger Tateru Nino is running an opinion poll to try to find out how the SL populace really feels about Linden Lab’s upcoming Adult Content policies.
She’s trying to get an accurate sampling of opinions, which means lots of people need to vote, so she’s asking for everybody’s help to spread the word and get votes from as many people as possible. But the idea isn’t to get just the people who feel the same way as you do to stuff the ballot — spread the word in all circles, so we can really find out how people feel.
So, please give it a vote and spread the word (but considerately — don’t spam). The poll is running until May 12, a week from today.
Recent Comments