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!

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!

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.

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!

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!

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.

1. Enable Advanced > Rendering > Hide Selected. (Use Ctrl-Alt-Shift-D to turn on the Advanced menu if you need to.)
2. 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.
3. 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.

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.

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.

Isn’t copy/mod/transfer about as close as you can come to an ideal system for allowing people to create stuff, sell it, let others modify it, collaborate on it….all the things that Creative Commons purports to do but, well, doesn’t.

I’ll set aside the baseless (and frankly, irrelevant) jab at Creative Commons, and get straight to the point: No. Copy/mod/transfer isn’t as close as you can come to an ideal system. In fact, SL’s permission system has a variety of identifiable flaws and quirks that have plagued both consumers and creators for years.

• It’s too coarse. Where’s the permission to make prim hair recolorable or resizable, without letting everyone see the prim parameters? Or the permission to allow someone to only transfer an item back to the creator, so it can be fixed, exchanged, or refunded? What about the ability to have a no-copy/transfer gift box with an item inside that becomes copy/no-transfer when you take it out?
• It’s quirky. Did you know that for animations and sounds, the “modify” permission doesn’t actually let you modify them? It just lets you use them in gestures. Weird, right? And that “faux-modify” permission is so firmly established that LL would have to add another modify permission just to let people actually modify them, e.g. to adjust the priority level or hand poses on animations.

  And see if you know the answer to this one, without looking it up: If you have a full-perm object with a no-modify script inside, are you allowed to reset the script? How about if the object was no-modify, but the script was full perm? Even after 3 years of building and scripting in SL, I’d still have to check to be sure.

• It’s a hassle. Part of my job is making backup copies of collaborative builds, and this inevitably involves hours of checking permissions and calling in the builders to fix them. In one case involving many builders, the task of getting them all to fix their perms took a week, when the actual work of making the backup took only a few hours. In a few cases, we’ve had to discard entire sections of builds because we couldn’t afford to have it taking up space and prims for several more days while perms were fixed.

  You could argue that, being professional builders, they should have been more careful about perms in the first place. But that’s denying human nature: people forget things if they are not reminded. It’s this same human fallibility that Dusan offers as a reason why people must be protected from themselves by restricting their ability to choose their own default permissions. (I, on the other hand, offer it as a reason to have better reminders, and warnings where appropriate.)

  Store owners too have to deal with permissions for everything they sell, and they too can make mistakes. Setting the wrong permissions on a product can cause all sorts of headaches. If the permissions are too restrictive (more so than advertised), then customers will complain. If the permissions are too open (particularly if they are copy/trans), the product might “get loose”, being passed around for free or sold by other people, potentially reducing the store owner’s ability to profit from the product.

  Despite this issue being so important, it’s only within the past year that tools to more effectively manage permissions have begun to appear. (And I find it somewhat amusing that an optional tool to help content creators avoid permission mistakes, is being attacked on the grounds that it could encourage content creators to make permission mistakes.)

Indeed, SL’s permission system has been the subject of widespread criticism for years — by creators, consumers, and even Lindens! — precisely because it’s not all that great at the things Dusan thinks make it ideal.

C/M/T is what it’s all about kids: it’s Little Big Planet but with the right to sell your levels to others; it’s The Sims Online but with a wider range of avatars; it’s Facebook, or Twitter, but instead of little game widgets or bloggy haiku the whole PAGE is your own, and you can sell every bit of it, every photo, every poke, every status update, every font if you want and not turn around at the end of the day and find out that the platform owners, well, OWN it.

C/M/T built Second Life, C/M/T powered what must be the largest micro-transaction economy in the world today, C/M/T powered the ability to sell and buy stuff for fractions of a fraction of a cent if you want, C/M/T is what filled my inventory with 15,000 objects called, um, object, but they’re MY objects and I’ll organize them if I want to.

There are two big, leaky holes in the bottom of that argument:

• Linden Lab, the platform operators, do “own it”. Creators retain intellectual property rights on their SL creations, but the Lab owns and has control over the data. Can you really say you own your SL assets, when LL can delete them or restrict your access to them (i.e. ban you) at any time? Builders in particular lack a convenient way to create backups of their creations, and until that’s resolved, I’d argue that in practical reality, they don’t really own their creations.
• It’s a mistake to think that the only possible alternative to C/M/T is not having any content protection at all. C/M/T is not the only — or even the best — content protection scheme possible. And it’s silly to assume that Second Life would have been crippled if it had a different scheme. Indeed, I’d argue that the SL economy would be even stronger today if SL had been designed with an easier to use, more robust, more fine-grained permissions system than C/M/T.

Yes, counterfeiting CAN undermine the business. And that’s what this is all about – whether the Lab will actually protect content, or just give it a glance and move on. But there is enough protection in Second Life that it’s a damn good start: all content MAY be copiable. But the combination of good policy, strong enforcement, and reasonable uses of technology to counter it can all go a very long way to curbing theft to a minority.

Now, here’s a point where I agree, albeit with some reservations. The general consensus among those in the know about such things, is that perfect, unbreakable DRM technology is a theoretical impossibility, due to the so-called “analog hole“: if you can see (or hear) it, you can copy it. The only way to be sure no one can copy it, is to never show it to anyone. But, even so, it is possible to use technology to make it harder to copy. SL does this, and I think that can be a good thing, in moderation. (Past a certain point, it just tends to become annoying and disrupt legitimate use, though.)

SL’s permissions system is an example of DRM and content protection done in a mostly sane, if somewhat flawed, manner. Trying to apply more technology to prevent illegitimate copying in SL would be, in my opinion, treading into the realm of “annoying but not that much more effective”. Rather, I think the proper area to apply technology to, is the detection of illegitimate copying. For example, tools to objectively analyse textures and objects for similarity could be useful for detecting simple rips.

However, SL’s main problems in this area are weak policy and minimal enforcement. LL deals with takedown requests enough to satisfy the requirements of the DMCA, but the consequences to offenders are weak: the content is usually removed, but they can just re-upload it the next day. LL has not taken the initiative to define its own, more effective policy.

Open source isn’t much different than a quilting circle or a barn raising. A community comes together, everyone brings their own tools and time, and maybe they help build a new church or whatever: the whole community benefits, everyone who bore a hammer feels good about themselves, we can all take pride, and the world advances towards being a little more civil.

The problems come when Joe shows up to help out and hopes to get hired as a woodworker the next day, or the church is built on company-owned land, or Pete wants the cost of his nails reimbursed.

See – C/M/T, the permission system in Second Life, helps to solve a lot of that. You can still do stuff for free if you want – but you’d better know that you’re doing it for the right reasons, because more often than not free is nothing more than a cheap advertising ploy that makes you look more like WalMart than Tiffany’s.

So, Joe has unrealistic expectations, the church-builders don’t understand property rights, and Pete doesn’t know what “volunteer” means? SL’s permission scheme doesn’t help any of that one bit. Nor does it stop the SL content creator who deliberately gives out freebies in a dubious attempt to bring more paying customers into their store.

Those are all “wetware issues”, and SL’s permission system doesn’t address any of them in the slightest. And there’s no reason to think that new tools to help manage permissions would make people more (or less) likely to act foolishly or have poor understandings of the permissions system.

There’s this JIRA out now that argues that the mechanics of setting perms should be changed so that it’s EASIER to make choices about the stuff you make.

Let’s say you’re a builder working on a team – you need to transfer your stuff back and forth, it’s just easier if it’s all full permissions. So the JIRA proposes that you should be able to toggle your default permissions: turn it to “Full permissions” or “Transfer Only” and leave it there. Avoid the hassles of having to remember that every prim you rez needs to be changed from its default, avoid all the complications of resetting them every time.

The support for the JIRA is support for choice, and choice is hard to argue with.

This is actually a decent summary of the JIRA issue. It is about choice. But the choice isn’t a simple toggle between “full perms” and “transfer only”; it gives much more fine-grained control than that. If you want to keep your creation permissions as transfer only, you can do that. Indeed, that’s the default, so you don’t really have to do anything at all. If you want to choose modify+transfer, or modify+copy, or copy+transfer, or copy only, you can do those too. And yep, if you want to, you can even choose full perms.

Somehow, though, the fact that full perms is a possible choice has got some people gnashing their teeth about freebie culture, and predicting the downfall of the SL economy, or even capitalism at large, if this feature is implemented and people are allowed to make their own choices. (How curious that capitalism, a system based on the ability to make choices in a free market, apparently needs to be protected from the ability to make choices in a free market!)

Of course, all that freebie obsession and doomsaying is utter hogwash. It’s just unfortunate that someone as intelligent and thoughtful as Dusan could be taken in by it.

The current C/M/T system is, in fact, the ideal ‘nudge’, and is one of the hidden choice architectures within Second Life that makes it what it is: it nudges us towards the protection of content but still allows us the choice to change it.

The C/M/T perm system is a choice architecture based on the realization that we are not all rational actors (and especially not when we’re new to Second Life). It’s a nuisance at times, infuriating at others, but even for someone like myself who has rezzed his share of prims, I STILL need the ‘nudge’ of changing those perms so that I make the conscious decision that they should be changed.

That’s fine. I can understand the concern about setting your default permissions and forgetting about them, then creating some product and releasing it with the wrong perms. As I said, people tend to forget things, especially if there aren’t reminders. I’ve suggested some enhancements that would reduce the opportunity for forgetfulness (display an optional on-screen reminder of your current permissions), and limit the consequences of forgetting (allow permission settings to optionally be set only for the current session).

But those enhancements can only be made if Linden Lab implements the base functionality. And there will likely be a period of time when only the base functionality is available, before the enhanced versions make it in. So I’ll offer this advice for the meantime:

If you’re worried about forgetting that you’ve changed your default perms, then don’t change them.

No one is forcing you to use permissions settings that you don’t want to. The initial default permissions will still be transfer-only. If you don’t want to change that, then don’t. Just leave it alone, and it will be the same as it has been for years.

That’s your choice, and I’ll let you make it. So please, don’t tell me that I shouldn’t be allowed to make my own.

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!

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.

• Poll: Adult content – Both sides of the question @ Dwell On It