RIP WilliamD Bracken

My close and best friend in Second Life, WilliamD Bracken, hadn't logged in for weeks when I started getting worried. I began sending him the usual "hey are you OK?" IMs but no reply. A week went by then a month and still no reply. Sadly, just last week, I got a reply to one of my IMs via email from his real life son letting me know that William had passed away on January 26th. Color me devastated.😢

About William

Will (as I called him most of the time) was funny, kind and a great conversationalist. Whenever we were online at the same time, we'd often spend hours chatting up a storm while dancing at our usual club haunts such as Muddy's, FogBound or Junkyard Blues. Will was also well-known for creating elaborate builds on his home land, especially for Halloween or Christmas. You could also find us hanging out in his hot tub or mine.
I never knew exactly who he was in real life other than his first name and things going on from day-to-day; just as he knew similar things about me. Neither of us felt the need to extend things any further. Regardless, easily 75% of my time in SL was spent with him. I'm pretty sure he was a lot older than me but he never acted like it. (Although his tastes in music mostly involved 60s & 70s music while mine run from the 80s to current stuff.) We both liked listening to the blues from every era which is why we often went to Junkyard.
Will was also the founder and original part owner of Muddy's nightclub in SL (still going strong). It's kind of ironic that I never went to Muddy's when he owned it because I was busy doing things for Blackhearts (like playing occasional hostess and making club themed clothing for them). He had lots of stories about all the personalities and ups and downs from running a club. 
What else do I know? Hmmm. Will was always barbequing something in real life. He was eager to explore interesting new places in SL. One of our favorite SIMs was a Japanese island with a lovely forest, various onsens and interesting little hideaways. We also spent a fair amount of time in the HP Lovecraft SIM, Innsmouth. He was quick to give virtual massages (which, believe it or not, often helped). And finally, he never went mesh. I think it was a badge of honor for him that for as long as he was in SL, his shape and haircut were pretty much pure Linden OEM old school. We actually me each other through the inworld HUD game Tiny Empires about 8 years ago back when our mutual queendom (Hirilorn now Hirilorn Rising) used to hold parties. After a few dates (yes they exist in SL), we became regular besties. 

RIP WilliamD Bracken. I miss you a lot. May your afterlife be as fun as your Second Life and real life.

WilliamD & Snickers on Halloween Ride

Chilling by the pool.

Second Life group chat will continue to be borked

 By now, pretty much everyone who belongs to a group in Second Life has experienced chat frustrations. Whether it's one way chat (you send text to the group and never see replies or your own text), massive lag or group chats simply stopping altogether, it's gotten ridiculous. Of course there are several JIRAs filed on the issues and people like myself continue to open support tickets to keep this issue at the forefront for  a solution. After all, communication with others is pretty much one of the main reasons we are in Second Life. (Naughties and buying shooz aside ahem.)

So imagine my surprise when I got a response to my latest support ticket where a Linden actually says: "The solution we currently have in place will result in this issue returning intermittently." I mean wow, just wow.

Here is the complete response:

Hello Snickers Snook,

Thank you for contacting Second Life support, and for your patience. I am sorry to hear that you have been having issues with your group chats! I understand how frustrating this has been. The solution we currently have in place will result in this issue returning intermittently, and we encourage you to continue to reach out to us whenever group chats begin to misbehave again!

In the meantime, we were able to initiate some updates to our chat servers which should remedy these issues and errors. Thank you for your patience while we work to find a more permanent fix for this issue.

Please let me know if you have any other questions or concerns!

Best Wishes,

xxxxxxx Linden

Talk about mixed messages. What astounds me is that a tech company that can deliver complex graphic renderings and stuffs can't get something as seemingly simple as group IMs right. 

So yeah, group chat will continue to be borked. Deal with it foo.

Running alts in Second Life for Tiny Empires and TE3000 using Radegast and other viewers

If you've played either Tiny Empires or TE3000 for any length of time, you have probably created an alt or two (or more) that you also use to play the games. And while most viewers can be successfully used to run two or three avatars at once, going beyond this number can be challenging. Here's my personal experience that may help optimize your setups.

Using Firestorm or the Second Life Viewer (and others) to login more than one avatar at a time:

Firestorm (the most popular third-party viewer) AND the Linden Lab official Second Life viewer both default to only allowing ONE instance of the viewer at a time. To run more than one (and be able to log in a second or third avatar), you have to change your settings in Preferences.

In Firestorm, this setting is located under Preferences / Advanced / Allow Multiple Viewers (may reduce stability and performance). Note the warning "May reduce stability and performance". YES IT WILL. Firestorm is system intensive. Running two instances is even more system intensive.

In the Second Life Viewer, this setting is located under Me / Preferences / Advanced / Allow Multiple Viewers. Although the viewer doesn't say so, running two or more SL viewers will also reduce stability and performance.

In both cases you will need to restart the viewer so the changes stick. The next time you open the viewer, you can click on the icon again and a second instance will open.

Even though I have a fast computer, lots of RAM and a good graphics card, running two instances of either of these viewers will tax my system. I can hear it in the constant changes in speed of the computer fans. Running 3 at once will bring it to a crawl.

Use a less system intensive (but still full-featured) viewer:

Due to their high levels of functionality and configurability, Firestorm and the SL Viewer are both piggies when it comes to disk usage and system resources. There are several alternative viewers that are not nearly as greedy and in fact, may actually improve your Second Life experience, especially on lower performance computers. The two in particular I have used are Singularity and Cool VL Viewer. Both use earlier forks of the official viewer and have user interfaces that mimic older Second Life viewers such as Snowglobe, Phoenix, SL 1.23, etc.

I am a particular fan of Cool VL Viewer because the single developer, Henri Beauchamp, is constantly updating both the features and bug fixes. In fact, many of Henri's bug fixes find their ways into the official viewer, Firestorm and others. However, Cool VL Viewer is NOT on the Linden Lab Third Party Directory because Henri has a famous, long-running dispute with the Lab over the personal disclosures required which he believes violate EU law (he is based in France). Regardless, his viewer is highly trusted and he insists that it complies with ALL Linden Lab policy requirements. Those in the SL development community are generally very supportive of his stance. 

Singularity is the other less system intensive viewer that I have personally used. It is similar to Cool VL Viewer and is listed on the Third Party Viewer Directory. However, it is considerably behind Cool VL Viewer in its support for the latest Second Life features. 

Another full-featured viewer I would consider is active is Alchemy. The developer is active and it is listed on the TPVD in case you care about that.

Just to give you an idea of the performance differences, with Cool VL Viewer I typically get inworld frame rates of 60+ FPS. With Firestorm, a more typical rate is 35 - 40 FPS. 

Here are the download links for the above mentioned viewers. Again, as with FS and SLV, you will need to set their preferences to all multiple viewer instances.

Cool VL Viewer - Cool VL Viewer (free.fr) (scroll down to find the latest release for Windows or Linux)

Singularity - Downloads - Singularity Viewer (versions available for Windows 32/64, Linux and MacOS

Alchemy - Alchemy Viewer (Windows 32/64 versions only)

Move those caches and keep them separate!!

Texture and inventory caches generate a LOT of disk writing activity. By default, most viewers put their cache folders on your system drive (or wherever you installed the viewer). For Windows this is generally in Users/<you>/Appdata/Roaming/<viewername>. First off, if you have a Solid State Drive (SSD) as your system drive, the constant writing can be hard on it. SSDs have a limited life and while most of us won't reach it, heavy game play with caches on the SSD can shorten it dramatically. Second, in my experience, I get better overall performance when the cache is on a different drive from the program itself even if that cache is a hard drive.

Moving your cache is simple and similar for most viewers.

In Firestorm, choose: Preferences / Network & Files/ Directories

In Second Life Viewer it's: Me / Preferences / Advanced / Cache Location

So pick a spot on a different drive and relocate the cache there. I use D:\SLCache\Firestorm which is on a nice fast hard drive while my system SSD just has the program.

Note that if you run different viewers, keep the cache locations separate. For example if you run Firestorm, Cool VL Viewer and the SL Viewer, each should have its own cache folder. As above, mine are D:\SLCache\CoolVL  and D:\SLCache\SLViewer. You do not need to setup different folders for different accounts nor should you try. Also, size of cache may help. Bigger is better (within the limits of the viewer) if you have the space.

Use an ultralight viewer such as Radegast

For those that don't know, Radegast is an ultra-light-weight Second Life viewer. By lightweight we mean it doesn't use a lot of system resources such as graphics, CPU, RAM, etc. It is not at all full-featured, but it can be used to play Tiny Empires and TE3000. Plus it has some very useful command line options that you can script or put in a batch file.

The current version is 2.33 and you can download it here: Radegast – A lightweight virtual word client for Second Life and OpenSimulator

With Radegast, I've had as many as 8 accounts logged in at once including one instance of Firestorm. Yes it's a bit slow with that many log-ins but for gathering gold and interacting with the HUD now & then, Radegast works fine. I've heard of some players logging in as many 20 alts on Radegast.

By default, Radegast is setup to allow multiple instances so nothing to do there. A few things to note however:

1. For many, the "clock" in the TE HUD won't display correctly. This seems to be graphics card related.
2. Displaying the HUD is NOT intuitive. You have to click on CHAT, RIGHT-CLICK your avatar name in the right hand column and then select Attachments. Now find the HUD in the list and select VIEW. Uggh.
3. Sometimes the HUD will look like it hasn't accepted your answer. This especially happens with check boxes. Generally, closing the HUD window and re-opening as above will clear this (and almost always you'll find that the HUD has accepted your answer).
4. Sometimes the HUD will seem unresponsive. Again, close the window and redisplay it. If that doesn't fix it, you can either detach the HUD and reattach it OR simply log out and back on.
5. When using Radegast it's best to use the full size TE or TE3000 huds. Not the compact version. Radegast does not display the compact version very well.
6. Be careful with the arrows. Make sure that HUD has displayed the new page or alternate selection. It can be slow to respond when running multiple avatars. The last thing you want to do is accidentally accept a bribe offer when you meant to "politely decline". :)
7. DO NOT OPEN A 3D WINDOW AND TRY TO USE A HUD. It won't work. Close the 3D window and then you can access the TE HUD again.
8. DO NOT TELEPORT WITH THE HUD VIEW OPEN. Close it then TP. In fact, even if you close the HUD view, you may STILL have to detach and reattach the HUD when you get to your destination.

Launch all Radegast boats at once

A cool thing about Radegast is that you can create command files to launch and login all your avatars at once.

START "AVATAR1" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Radegast\Radegast.exe" -a -u "AVATAR1 Resident" -p "<open text password>"

START "AVATAR2" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Radegast\Radegast.exe" -a -u "AVATAR2 Resident" -p "<open text password>"

The above commands would be placed in a batch (.BAT) file for Windows. Note that the START "AVATAR1" is required and gives the START command window a title. It does NOT have to match the AVATAR login name but for ease of identifying the Radegast windows, it's very helpful.

If you DON'T want to have your passwords sitting in a batch file in clear text, then you can leave it off but you may be prompted on each login.

Here is the complete list of Radegast command line switches: Command Line Options – Radegast 

Other tips and tricks

Optimize viewer for performance, not appearance

In general, if you're going to try to run multiple avatars at a single time, you should optimize your full featured viewer for performance instead of appearance. This means lowering draw distances, keeping graphics to LOW and ensuring you have drivers and system things up to date. Here's a link to tips provided by Linden Lab on optimizing SL performance:

How to improve Viewer performance - English - Second Life Community

Keep in mind that with server-side rendering, your avatar will look the same to everyone else even if you don't look so hot to yourself. However since things you are wearing can induce lag so minimize your scripted items, mesh stuff and other complexities. The most lag free avatar is Ruth. :)

Hang-out some place quiet

You will have far better performance if all your alts are lurking some place quiet like an empty SIM, or better yet, an empty SIM 1000 meters above the ground. 

FurtaCor fashion group goes rogue

 I've been a member of the FurtaCor VIP group for a few years now but today I just left it. Why? Because the owner has turned it into a vendor free-for-all. Instead of just being focused on her products, Marinahh Mayako has opened the group up to god knows how many vendors. Instead of being focused on her products, I'm now getting group notices from what seems like dozens of different vendors.

Designers, if you want to be a multi-brand outlet, don't mess with your core group.

I'm done with FurtaCor. And they actually made cool stuff for reasonable prices. :(

===

UPDATE: The owner contacted me and said the FurtaCor VIP group is for spam and she has a group just for her shop. I know. I was in both. The shop group ( :::FurtaCor:::Gifts and Discounts) is not worth joining either.

Hilly Haalan - Great fashion, great prices, excellent customer service

I admit it. I'm a value shopper when it comes to Second Life clothing & fashion. My attitude towards prices probably comes from my own experience making and selling my own line of clothing several years ago. If you make an item, price it reasonably, you'll get more than $L in return. You win the loyalty of your customers AND you feel like you've given this crazy virtual world something in return.

I rarely priced anything over $99L and when I did, it was usually something completely and unique and unobtanium elsewhere. Fast forward to 2020 where everything is mesh, has to be modded for 10 different body shapes and requires even more attention to the details. Uggh. I'm glad I'm mostly just a shopper now and only occasionally try to make things.

HUDs make everything funner

In spite of the increased effort that goes into making just one outfit, there are still designers who produce amazing things at reasonable prices. For shoes, nothing beats KC Couture. Usually, when Klari55a (yes that's KC's owner and designer's name) brings out something new, she sells it for $99L for one week via VIP member announcement. Then the price goes up to $149L or $199L. Still a bargain because ALL of KC's shoes are HUD driven meaning you can color customize everything from the soles and insoles to the uppers and laces and buckles. If you like that cute pair of strappy stiletto sandals, you actually get 1000s of variations via the HUD. Literally. I can't tell you the number of times I've bought an outfit that needs a special color of shoe to make it "perfect" and wind up slapping on KC Boston or Suami heels. A few clicks of the HUD later and I've got the perfect match with say blue & white straps or yellow & black straps.

Another one of these great designers is Hilly Haalan (HH). Many of her items, like KC's, are HUD driven so with one purchase you often get 20 or more variations. Often she'll make half the variations in some sort of texture pattern with the other half different solid colors. Or for some of the more risque outfits, you might get both transparent and opaque variations. I can just imagine the work that goes into making versions for Freya, Hourglass, ISIS, Maitreya,Venus and Physique AND having the HUD change out the parts. And just like KC, they are very reasonably priced. HH also does frequent sales.

HH Skyla

So I have a LOT of KC shoes and HH clothing. :-)

Customer service

Which brings me to customer service. I have found HH outfits always fit correctly for my Maitreya Lara body. So a few days ago, I bought a new outfit (Skyla only $99L on SL Marketplace) without demo-ing. (Note that demos are ONLY available at her in world store.) Well for the first time ever, I had a mild complaint. Because the skirt was asymetrical, it couldn't really be alpha'd with the Maitreya Lara HUD. And with any leg movement, my inner thigh would show.

Anyway, I thought it was worth mentioning to Hilly so I did and suggested it probably should be rigged. She explained, not unexpectedly that rigging caused too much texture stretching and for this outfit, the best solution was to alpha part and restrict leg movement using an AO.

She also offered me my choice of a different outfit which I never asked for. I mean for $99L, I'm really not that picky lol. But a very nice gesture none the same. Plus the jacket and semi-bandeau top both work well by themselves as do the crazy high heels.

So what did I pick? A very cool retro look outfit (Tiffany) with bell bottoms, purse, platform heels (which fittingly, barely show from under the jeans) and a delicious cotton gauze looking top. Also $99. See below.

HH Tiffany

Oh and I wouldn't change a thing about it.

SLURL to Hilly Haalan Main Store 

LINK to Hilly Haalan on SLM 

Demos are at Main in-world store only.

New skins from Stix for Fantasy Faire 2020

My friend Pixy Snook has a VERY unique design style when it comes to skins, makeup and other goodies. She has outdone herself on the creative scale with Cosmos skins in 8 different colors for BOM and Omega. Each tone is only $100L exclusively at the Fantasy Faire location!!

SLURL for her store at FF: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Auxentios%20Pass/189/171/49

Cosmos by Stix - PINK

 

Cosmos by Stix - Red1

Second Life name contest!

Since Linden Lab will be allowing name changes for premium accounts in early 2020, they've decided to hold a contest to solicit new, creative last names.

You get to submit three ideas and the winners, regardless of premium status or not, will get to change their names for free (saving a $40L charge).

They won't be reusing any old last names so here's the "banned" list: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Current_Last_Names

Want to enter? Just click below to read the instructions and follow the bouncing links.

https://community.secondlife.com/blogs/entry/3110-name-changes-contest-is-upon-us/

Now's your chance to have that last name you always wanted. Personally, I'm going for Snickers Trump, Snickers Schiff or Snickers Pelosi.

Halloween Sexii Succubus Snick

Since it's Halloween time, what's better than dragging out your favorite sexy devil costume? Here's mine. It's from Bare@Rose (Belior Lady C2) and works well with my Maitreya Lara body and Lumae Eirtae skin. Hair is Rezology Epicure.

New version of Radegast viewer for Second Life released!

This is really good news and I'm surprised I missed it. The folks supporting Radegast released a new version (2.28) on August 19 which fixes a lot of the problems introduced when Linden Lab finally pulled support for some (long) outdated asset fetching protocols. This blew up a number of viewers including Radegast, Lumiya and Singularity. Singularity has released some beta fixes. Lumiya is apparently an abandoned project. Radegast is staying current!

From the Radegast blog:

The current supported method for fetching assets is now supported in 2.28. This is an update you will really want to do. It fixes missing functionality like playing inworld sounds and animations, viewing landmarks. You may also notice a little more “pep” when fetching textures and mesh.

Beside those changes, there are some minor fixes regarding command line arguments, and an OpenTK update. I have more in the works, but wanted to get this change out as soon as possible and as bug free as possible. 

 So it you need a lightweight viewer capable of most Second Life functions, give Radegast a shot. It's perfect for chatting, running multiple instances as bots or on older systems without the graphics or processing power of new ones. You will need Windows .NET 4.6.2 and it does not yet run natively under Linux or MacOS.

Download here: https://radegast.life/downloads/

Singularity Viewer hiccups in Second Life

On July 2, Second Life users using the release version of Singularity Viewer started experiencing bake fails (avatar as cloud), inventory issues and other problems. Turns out Linden Lab formally turned off access to some server-side APIs grid-wide that had long been scheduled to be shut down. Apparently Singularity had some leftover code tstill using those APIs causing the issues.

At first the Singularity devs recommended switching to one of the nightly development builds but that turned out to create new problems (those things are generally alpha releases and not suitable for primetime). A couple of emergency roll-outs later and things are more or less back on track. Assuming you want to mess with nightly releases, here's the link: https://virtual-nexus.xyz/down/

For a more complete (and technical) write-up about what happened, read Singularity Goes Sideways from Nalates Urriah's blog. (If you aren't subscribed to her blog you should be!)

Now if you're like me and don't really enjoy messing with alpha releases there is an alternative -- Cool VL Viewer. It's lightweight and easy on lower powered systems, uses the classic interface and is actively maintained and updated reliably. For more details and downloads, visit: http://sldev.free.fr. When I need better framerates and want to run more than one avatar at a time, I use Cool VL Viewer. It's been very solid for me.

Yes I can hear you yelling "BUT SNICKERS! IT'S NOT ON THE THIRD PARTY VIEWER LIST!" No it's not. The developer, Henri Beauchamp, states that it is TPV compliant but he doesn't want to release his private info to Linden Lab AND he believes the laws in France say that he shouldn't have to. That's fair and to his credit, I have never heard another developer EVER question whether Cool VL Viewer was safe or not.

I really do hope Singularity can get back to having a solid release version since the more lightweight, capable viewers there are, the better.

UPDATE: If you do want to continue using Singularity, UNINSTALL your current version completely and (as of this writing) install version 7685 from the link above!

NOTE: Users are reporting issues with the Android Lumiya Viewer that sound somewhat similar to the Singularity problems. Since Lumiya hasn't been updated for over a year, it wouldn't surprise me if the two were related.

Limited Edition Skin from Stix

Get them while they are hot! Only 35 available -- 10 on Marketplace and 20 at the Stix mainstore. I'm not going to try to show this skin on me because my look is too different. But trust me, Stix skin photos look exactly as intended.

Includes LAQ, Genus, Omega appliers & Classic skins. Body appliers available main store (which are free).

Total price until sold initial 35 are gone is only $300L.

Store: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Coulours/242/110/80

SLM: https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Stix-Twee-LIMITED-EDITION-Promo/17474081

Dollarbie wonderfulness (OMG cute)

If you know me, you know I love to shop for inexpensive clothing. Not because I'm cheap but because when I find something really nice, it's rewarding and I can share with friends. Plus anyone who doesn't have a lot of Lindens in their account can get something that won't break the bank.

Today's find is from the SL Marketplace. It's called ShuShu ButtonUp PROMO Set. The cool thing about this outfit is that it comes as a dress with a sort of halter / suspenders look AND as a skirt with a separated corset top.

Yes it look amazing in SL This is natural light (noon, nothing weird).

It also comes with some funky socks and oversized sunglasses which honestly are more like afterthoughts and not really needed.

Yes it's only $1L on SLM. What gets me is that for the price, a few people have whined about minor details and knocked it down to 2 stars. NO NO NO. That's not right.

Anyway, here's the URL to the outfit on SLM.

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/ShuShu-BUTTON-UP-outfit-PROMO-set-SLink-Maitreya-Belleza-Tonic/13707920

Just about every mesh body available is supported too. Shown here with Maitreya Lara and Lumae Eirtae skin.

Two Bento dresses from Arcane Spellcaster

Gramy by Arcane Spellcaster

OK, I admit it. I'm a sucker for the unusual when it comes to fashion. Retro, modern, odd. Anything that looks different from the usual cookie cutter fashions or mesh template outfits. Today's finds came from Arcane Spellcaster at the February 2019 Designer Showcase (link is SLURL).

First up is Gramy. The dress is Bento rigged and comes with an optional "jacket". It's really an interesting outfit especially from the back. Very much an OMG that's so cute moment.

Gramy from back

Gramy is HUD driven and the jacket and dress are separately colored 10 ways. So for $350 you get 10 different outfits or if you care to mix and match the jacket and dress, 10 to the something power lol.

The last view shows how you might color the top and dress separately. Probably would be better if I'd done black and white but oh well.  Click on any of the images to view them full size. Note that there is quite a bit of side boob and the bottom is VERY short so it might not work for some.

Gramy is $350L at the showcase and worth every $L.

Pirette by Arcane Spellcaster

Next up is Pirette, also by Arcane Spellcaster. This one is borderline BDSM but it has an extra feature that really says buy me. The mesh is animated to look like the wind is gently blowing the back of the skirt up from your butt! Sort of a Marilyn Monroe poof on a mini-skirt.

Like Gramy, it comes with a color HUD but with 20 options.  I've show it here in black, teal and bright pink with advanced lighting but it seems to look a bit more natural without advanced lighting.

The designer claims both meshes are original and I have no reason to doubt that. Nothing else like these have crossed my fashion inbox. :)

Pirette is $450L.

For anyone who cares, my skin is Lumae Eirtae, body is Maitreya Lara, head is Utilizator Normie, hair is Roxana by Truth and shoes are Boston by KC.

Side view

The death of Flickr?

Since Flickr (the online photo sharing service) was purchased by SmugMug, a lot of people have wondered what the new ownership would do with its new shiny toy. Well yesterday, the other shoe dropped and here's what Flickr users are now being greeted with:

While 1,000 free photos sounds like a lot, the longtime integration between Second Life and Flickr (with Linden Lab having an official presence on Flickr) means that it really isn't. Many Second Life users have Flickr accounts with TENS of thousands of photos. Per Flickr, come February 2019, anyone OVER the 1000 photo limit who does not upgrade to Flickr Pro at $50/year, will have their photos deleted. It's not clear from Flickr's blog how they'll determine which photos get ditched.

Another worry is that a LOT of work available through Creative Commons is hosted under free accounts at Flickr. It's not clear what will happen to that content although Creative Commons is said to be working with Flickr on solutions.

Second Life users have long had another outlet for photo sharing called Snapzilla. It's a sister site to the virtual worlds online forum site, virtualverse.one (previously SLUniverse.com). I reached out to the owner/developer of both, Cristiano (aka Cristiano Midnight) who had these observations:

"I have been following what's going on with Flickr - there's an active thread here (virtualverse.one) about it. While I think their 1000 image limit is still fairly generous, SL Flickr users are definitely looking for alternatives. Snapzilla has always been focused on SL (though I'm expanding it right now to include other worlds including sinespace, Sansar and OpenSim grids), so it's a good fit for SL bloggers and photographers. It already has 13 years of SL history on it. 

I just recently moved Snapzilla to new hosting and split the actual image hosting off from the main site to make it more manageable and scalable (web hosting can be expensive, while image storage is fairly cheap). Transferring 600k images was a challenge, but it all worked out well. 

I think there may be an influx of some new users to Snapzilla from Flickr - I'm not concerned about the impact really. The site could handle it if they do decide to switch, even if it is a large volume of new users."

I'm am personally not someone who feels compelled to document every moment of my existence -- either in Second Life OR in real life. So it's hard for me to imagine accumulating tens of thousands of photos in the first place. But for those that do, I'm sure there's some very real angst involved. After all, Flickr did promise everyone a free terrabyte forever. Storage is cheap, user retention is harder. We'll see how it all shakes out.

Halloween 2018

• 

Cobbled together from 3 outfits and some extras. Skin is by Lumae. Makeup was a freebie from SLM. Lara body.

Specular madness with Advanced Lighting Model in Second Life

Recently I've been playing around more with Second Life's Advanced Lighting Model or ALM. While it's great for photography (enabling cool shadows and all), it wreaks havoc on items with materials that have specular highlights built-in. And while many techies complain about ALM (it can also render mesh weirdly), the default is to turn ALM ON whenever graphics are set above "High" in the Second Life Viewer.

What led me down a very deep ALM rabbit hole was a new dress put out by Hilly Haalan (HH). Honestly, I love Hilly Haalan's outfits. They are reasonably priced and most are HUD-driven with amazing color variations. So for the price of one color-way in a line like Blueberry, you get 20 or more colors and textures from HH. In fact, her HUD textures often make the same exact outfit look completely different with a mouse click or two.

#1 Specular turned on, ALM on

So here's the new dress, Felicia, by HH. You can see in the ad that it basically overlays various colors onto a mesh base.

Now I normally demo everything I can. But in general, HH's outfits have almost always been perfect out of the box when it comes to my Maitreya Lara mesh body.

#2 Specular on, ALM off

Well take a look at the photo of me on the right wearing the same dress in the ad above. (Violet color applied but it happens with all colors.) What happened to all those nice even colors? After posting a few Gyazos to two different mesh body groups (Maitreya Lara Friends and Mesh Body Addicts), I finally got my answer from some smart person. "You have ALM turned on, the dress uses materials and specular is set too high for ALM." Ohhh. OK. I have no idea what you're talking about lol.

After a few explanations in chat, it sorta made sense to me.  So I ended up sending a notecard to Hilly Haalan about the issue. Mega kudos to her. She made a custom version of Felicia with specular removed. So I can wear the dress with ALM turned on and it will still look normal.

 #3 Specular removed, ALM on

As you can see between the last two photos, there is very little difference in the appearance of the dress. However, what you do see is that my skin looks a little more natural and slightly shiny in #3 with ALM turned on. So I don't know if this is a lesson for designers but for sure it's a good one for shoppers. DEMO and make sure you look at the item you're buying with ALM ON and ALM OFF.

And now the usual stuff. Skin is Eirtae by Lumae, hair is Cray by .b, shoes are KC Amelia wedges and of course the dress is Felicia by Hilly Haalan. The link below is the SLURL to her main store.

Hilly Haalan mainstore

Fantastic bargain rigged mesh mermaid tail

I've always had a thing for playing mermaid in Second Life. From the early days of attachable fins and system skirts made to look like mer tails to sculpties with deformed avatars, I've tried just about every type. Of course it helped that a couple of boyfriends were into mer-life. It's so much fun to cuddle underwater. :D

BareRose Black Scale Mermaid

Anyway, my favorite mer avatars are from BareRose. As you can see from the photo on the left, they are gorgeous and amazingly detailed.

BUT, they are also incredibly complex. Wearing a full B@R mermaid outfit WITH a mesh body and all the accessories will easily push your avatar complexity into the stratosphere. Well for me that's around 165,000 and enough to render you invisible to a lot of people.

So I also have two mesh mer tails I use just for less complex situations or where I don't want to wear the full B@R mess. The drawback is that they are both relatively early rigged mesh and kinda clunky where the top of the scales meet the your pelvis. It's even worse with a mesh body like Maitreya Lara.

You can see that the blue tail has this added layer of fishy fat making it look like I'm really just wearing a wetsuit disguised as a tail. Which, it sorta is.

Generic mesh tail

OK fast forward to today where I went to an underwater event and of course, wanting to impress, I wore my BareRose tail and all the goodies. But there was that 165K complexity again. Yikes. Thankfully there weren't too many of us there and everyone could see everyone. BUT still.

That set me on a SL Marketplace hunt for something a bit simpler but better than my ancient mesh tail. After hitting a couple of real clunkers (thank you Demo) and some tails advertised as rigged that weren't, I finally found a simple tail that didn't suck.

In fact, the detail in the tail scales and such is every bit as good as B@R but without all the accessories and add-ons. Fellow peoples of the mer persuasion, I give you the prosaicly named "[ReS] Fitmesh Purple Mermaid" lol. Even the package looks cheesy. BUT, the tail is very good AND it comes in 5 standard sizes plus Maitreya, Belleza and Slink versions. Up close the scales have real depth and shine. What would make it perfect would be for the scales to be scalloped where it meets your pelvis so it doesn't just look like a slip-on bottom. An added bonus is that it comes with a decent mermaid AO with real control buttons. Yay!

[ReS] Rigged Mesh Tail

Oh did I mention this tail is only $65L? No, I didn't. It is. Really. It's prettier than a lot of tails that sell for 10x that price. This one is NOT available in DEMO form so you'll have to trust me that it works. You can click on the photo below to see it up close -- my body is Maitreya Lara. Oh and the mesh is auto-hide for Lara which is cool to. And tah dah, my total complexity with this tail is only (hee) about 75K.

The one thing I wasn't keen on is the included hair. It's a very basic and clunky mesh that didn't cover even my generic hair base. So the hair shown above is Rezology Wavy Hime re-colored with purple on the dark blond base. Trust me, it looks wayyy better than the included hair.

Anyway, check it out on SLM for yourself here: [ReS] Purple Mermaid Tail

InWorldz dead! ....Or is it?

I have an account on InWorldz but I've never spent much time there. However, many people have full sims and playgrounds there because, well, it's hugely less expensive to have a million prims there that it is in Second Life.

So I was shocked to see a note from one of my SL groups (Underground) that they were facilitating migrating template purchases made InWorldz to SL. What??

Turns out that a royal mess-up of some sort is indeed potentially sounding the death knell for InWorldz. Which is so sad. It really was a decent alternative to Second Life.

I've read through all the various posts and I'm not sure exactly where the whole thing stands. There's a GoFundMe campaign -- which seems to have raised the requisite $$ to restart Inworldz but there's also no update from the owner if they are going ahead. Anyway, here's some reading for your weekend. :(

From the owner:

https://inworldz.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360007381013-State-of-InWorldz

And the GoFundMe page:

https://www.gofundme.com/inworldz-in-trouble

You figger it out.

The Path to Madness -- An H.P. Lovecraft Festival

I found the Innsmouth sim, which is a slice of Second Life weirdness on steroids, about 3 years ago. If you haven't explored it, do. Fantastic build, volunteer supported and really downright creepy. While it helps to be familiar with the works of H.P. Lovecraft and his gothic horror tales (Google "Cthulhu"), Innsmouth stands on its own as the recreation of a small, New England fishing village where something is terribly wrong and evil.

So what better way to celebrate than with LoveFest 2018 running August 17-26. This 7th annual event is focused on all things creepy and Lovecraft-ian (is that a word?). Held in honor of his 128th birthday, LoveFest 2018 features shops, fun things to do & see, entertainment (DJs, live music, dance troupes, etc.) plus there's an interactive mystery to solve. You get to figure out what led one poor soul into the clutches of madness by following clues. As the sponsors put it:

Find yourself at the notorious Arkham Sanitarium, where a particular patient is beset with a dark, quite disturbing mental affliction…
Discover clues as to what brought this pathetic lunatic to his state of crazed despair, and follow a trail of clues. Find yourself at places such as the prestigious Miskatonic University, or the back alleys of some less-traveled, shadier parts of town. Perhaps a journey to Dunwich village or the dread fishing port of Innsmouth is in order, maybe even further off beyond New England.

I covered some of the things in Innsmouth three years ago. The SIM has simply gotten better every year.

SLURL to Innsmouth - http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Innsmouth/86/213/24

For more info: https://lovefest.wordpress.com/

4th of July Dollarbie Romper

Elusive 4th of July Romper - $1L

Sadly I got a late start on an Independence Day outfit since I was super busy yesterday in RL and had a party to got to today. Oh well. If you still feel like celebrating, this super cute little mesh romper by Elusive is only $1L. Sure it's a template (I have a different version of it in inventory) but the price is right! Here I've combined it with KC Amelia wedges which I colored to be red, white & blue! Gotta love KC shooz -- the HUD controls are amazing with individual coloring of straps, wedge, insole, leaves, and outsole.

Rest of the outfit is Kizzie hair by Truth, Maitreya Lara body, my go-to Lumae Eirtae skin and red glasses by Preda. Hope you likey!

SL Marketplace links:

Elusive July 4th Romper Gift

KC Amelia Wedges