Depressing and decadent lifestyles

I like to say that SL offers us an unlimited number of possibilities, you can be whatever you want, be it a human, alien, animal, sexy cat-like nekos, insects, dragons... and the list goes on and on. You can create anything you want too. But even with so many positive and interesting possibilities, why the hell on earth some people choose to rather be consorts and prostitute themselves for a few cents?

Yesterday I found a blog of a “SL whore”, that it, a woman who works as a prostitute in SL. She writes very well and, as much as it is interesting to read about that decadent sub-world, it still makes me feel sad to know that this kind of decadent lifestyle has made its way into SL.

That woman claims that sex is all that SL is really about. She is so wrong! Maybe sex is all that SL is about FOR HER, because as a whore that’s what she is doing when she is online. But I must say, SL is not about that at all, it’s much more. It’s about building, making friends, shopping, designing clothes or robots or scripts or HUDs or spaceships... and selling them, it’s about RPG, it’s about education, business, networking, it’s about travelling, playing, exploring.

While there are such things as “red light districts” and orgy rooms or whatever, where women allow themselves to be used by men in exchange of a couple of dollars and they think they are making “so much money” (come on, a thousand lindens is just about 5 dollars!), the rest of the SL lives on, far away from it.

The same way SL offers all the cool possibilities I listed above (creating things, shopping, travelling, learning, making friends), it also seems the offer some dark corner for those who want to indulge in sex, and for those who are so cheap that would prefer to be used, humiliated and to endure verbal abuse, instead of just buying a few lindens to be able to purchase that “so expensive 1000 L$ skin” (really, 5 miserable dollars).

PS: I don't want to sound like a moralist or an old church lady. Anyone can do what they want and they have the right to do that, I guess. But it's people like that who encourages guys to be disrespectful with any female avatar they meet. If it wasn’t for the prostitutes and the orgy rooms, there wouldn’t be so many newbie guys who join just for the orgies, and guys who keep pushing girls (in lack of an AO that would enable them to grab them).

Pictures, pictures...

I’m feeling too narcissistic again today so I have to put some pictures of myself here. I got this sculptie scarf from Maitreya as a gift (because I’m at their announcement group) and I liked it so much I had to wear it right away and I had to come up with something that would go with it.



I decided to dig into my inventory and I found a beautiful green top I didn’t know I have. It’s called inger green top by Neferia Abel and I have no idea where I bought it from. It could have been from Ivalde, but I don’t remember. I didn’t even know I had this, and it’s so gorgeous!



I like the little smile I have in these pictures, subtle and cute.

This moth eaten cardigan is from Frustrated Inc, and I saw it at the SL Fashion SOS blog and I liked it so much I had to buy one. I had never seen moth eaten clothes in SL, it’s a great detail and the texture is wonderful, really beautiful.

I tinted my earrings to match the top, put on these Last Call dark jeans and belt from a different outfit, and my lovely sculptie boots (from Maitreya), and I love the result. I’m so pleased with this outfit. The scarf looks wonderful, it’s so realistic.

In this picture you can see the richness of texture detail of the scarf and cardigan.

Now I just wish I had a printer that could reproduce these items to RL so that I could wear this outfit myself! Except that in RL I wouldn’t be wearing these boots right now (it’s summer and 23 Celsius degrees outside).

Auto-emote and Miranda.smart HUD

Because of a recent RL accident, I can’t use the mouse with my right hand, but I can still type! :-) Though at a slower speed than normally and using mostly the left hand, and one or two fingers of my right hand. I don’t write about RL here, so if you want to hear what happened ask me inworld.

SL crashed often this morning so since I can’t go there and visit the place I wanted to see, I decided to write here instead. I started writing this yesterday after purchasing and testing the Miranda.smart HUD. I have seen in the net some few texts comparing these two HUDS, but they haven’t mentioned a few things one should know in order to make an informed decision on which one to buy. So I will write shortly about pros and cons, and at the end of this article you will find links with more information on the HUDS and also SLurls to the places where you can purchase them. Please follow those links for more information on each HUD’s features and pictures.

Auto-emote and Miranda.smart HUD are both HUDs that allow your avatar to express emotions. You can either choose the emotion you want to display, or you can turn on the automatic option, which makes emotion displays accordingly to certain sentences or keywords you write in your chat line.

Auto-emote was designed by Outy Banjo and costs 300 lindens. It has a set of facial expressions (angry, happy, kiss, etc..). It works wonderfully.

In this picture auto-emote is making my av laugh:

Miranda.smart HUD has more than only facial expressions, it has also avatar animations and screen effects. It costs only 100 lindens. But although it is cheaper and has more options, it has some problems that Auto-emote doesn’t have. Miranda’s facial expressions stop working easily, and though the sounds still work (kissing, laughter, etc), the avatar stops making the facial expressions. This is very annoying and the only way to make it work again is to quit SL and login again. I tried to detach the hud and attach it again but it doesn’t help.

Here’s a Miranda’s avatar effect: sending a kiss with hearts

Miranda’s screen effects are wonderful for taking photos, though. But you better FIRST pick up the angle for the photo (I mean Alt+click) and only then you choose a screen effect. This is because after you have selected a screen effect (for instance, fog), if you Alt+click your avatar to choose an angle/zoom for the pic, it won’t work. Maybe the screen effect is a sort of layer between your avatar and the screen (?), anyways, it stops you from Alt-clicking your av. Otherwise, the effects are great.

Some of Miranda’s avatar animations don’t work right if you are using an animation overrider. I use Wet Ikon Franimation Overrider with standing and walking animations. To see correctly the miranda’s animations, I have to detach my Wet Ikon first. I have to test Miranda and ZHAO AO hud to see if the same happens, but I bet the same would happen.

I’m using both Auto-emote and Miranda.smart HUD at the same time. If you ask me which one you should get, I would say: either buy both of them, or if it’s only facial animations you want, get then only Auto-emote (otherwise you would get disappointed when miranda’s expressions stop working). Although auto-emote is more expensive and it only has facial expressions (no sounds and no screen effects), it works really well.

You can get them inworld from here:

• Miranda.smartHUD: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Hairspray/68/67/96
• Auto-emote: O Scripting, http://slurl.com/secondlife/Brownlee/249/48/108

More info on Miranda.smartHUD:

• a review at StyleDisorder
• YouTube - mirada.smartHUD v2.2 demo for secondlife

More info on Auto-emote:

• at SL exchange
• Cheyenne Palisades' review of auto-emote

Unrezzed prim lashes and how awful they look

I took this picture at the Downtown sim. It’s a random girl shopping, and the prim lashes she was wearing had not rezzed, and they actually never did rezz at all while she was there, though she was there for a long time.

Prim lashes are great for when you want to make a photo shoot of yourself, but it’s not a good idea to wear them at parties when there’s a bit of lag, or when you are in places full of prims. It seems that lashes are always the last thing to rezz.

The first time I saw prim lashes I was at a party. There was some lag, but not much. Everything had already rezzed, but still, even then, the prim lashes the hostess of the party was wearing took a loooong long time to rezz. Meanwhile, what I could see was a strange “black makeup” on her face, something like what you can see in the picture above. She looked as if as she had taken a punch on the eye, or actually.. on both eyes! LOL!

After that, I thought, no prim lashes for me, thank you!! LOL!!!

But prim lashes do look beautiful, that is, when they have done rezzing. The problem is, though they may have rezzed for YOU, for each new person that teleports to the sim where you are it will still look like you have been punched on the eyes until the lashes eventually rezz. And the lashes are the last thing to rezz. But why? Why? What a pity.

Metamorphosis

Finally I find time to sit down and update this blog! I have something cool to write about.

But first, look at the cutie in this picture and tell me, isn’t she HOT?

Well... That’s me!!!

Yes, that’s me with my new shape!! :-)))

As you know I have had trouble with my shape from day one. I spent most of my first two months with the same skin I started with and I had made a few changes to my appearance. Changing my appearance has always been a challenge because, just to start with, my computer crashes almost every time I go into appearance mode. I don’t know if that’s because my laptop hasn’t got enough memory or is it the graphics card (Mobility Radeon 9000 for laptops, which isn’t as great as the normal mobility radeon for desk computers).

Anyway, my first two days back then when I joined SL I spent in the Orientation Island, trying to complete the Appearance Tutorial and crashing and crashing all the time, and thinking serious of forgetting about SL since it doesn’t seem to work... (I thought it was necessary to complete all the tutorials to be able to go inworld, so each time I was asked in the tutorials to go into appearance mode, I went and crashed..

Later on I learned that I just can’t go into appearance mode in sims full of prims and people. The only way is to go to an empty sandbox, wait until every little thing has rezzed, and if there isn’t people around I can edit my appearance. It sucks, but it works. And even then sometimes my pc crashes.

Besides this computer problem, I’m no good with changing my appearance. I changed my first shape and made it look much better, but later on I realized I was a giant more than 2 meters tall. I thought my ass was too big and made it smaller, the breasts too. And then I was happy. But then I started wearing skirts and they made my ass so much bigger. I decided to reduce my ass (big mistake), and then I thought I had to reduce my shoulders too to compensate, and then the waist wasn’t narrow enough. I made changes again, and it was getting worse. I was heading towards some sort of digital anorexia (LOL) and my shape had lost its feminine curves. I was getting nuts.

Then I bought a skin, convinced that would make me look better, and after trying lots of demos and buying one, I realized I wasn’t getting anywhere with my appearance. My face seemed so angular and full of harsh shadows.

Now I have to put a picture here, I hate this picture. Look how narrow my face looked like. With this hair I look ghastly. A male friend thought I looked pretty, but I have to disagree. Really, LOOK at the picture!

Sometimes changing the hair helps a bit. As you can see in my old mermaid pictures.

Here’s a picture I took during the SecondFest. The hair is a freebie from ETD (a lovely hair, I like it a lot). I was wearing trousers from ETD and a blouse from Last Call. Even with nice clothes and a good hair, the only feminine things in that shape were the face and the breasts. Look, I had no hips at all.

It was then that I found out about SL Fashion SOS. I saw the amazing job Aemilia had done with two girls before; she gave then a makeover and they looked so fabulous with their new shapes. So I asked for help. I’m SO GLAD I did it! Aemilia is a genius!! She saved my ass, LOL! Literally, really, because I was almost “assless” (does this word even exist?) and now I have a beautiful and feminine ass! All my body proportions are now great and my face is much more round and sweet. Before the makeover, I looked so serious (like an angry teacher or something) and now I look much friendlier and cute.

Check the pictures from my previous post. I was already wearing my new shape.

Take a look at Aemilia’s blog and the pics she took from me. I love these pictures!

I also learned so much. I was making a stupid mistake with my shape when I wore skirts: the default SL skirts (which are those skirts that are not prim skirts) always make our hips larger, and that’s one reason why I had made my ass so small. Also I was wearing freebie prim skirts and adjusting my ass to fit the skirts, when I should be doing the other way around. Besides, most freebie skirts are just awful. Sometimes they were somebody’s poor attempt at designing something that didn’t work, so they decide to give it for free. Some freebies on the other hand are good, when good designers give something away to advertise their products. Anyway, back to the point: forget the cheap prim skirts, and tweak the size of the skirt to fit your ass, not the other way around. It’s not worth having a small and boring ass just because most skirts will fit.

Aemilia had a simple and great solution for the default skirt problem. She made me a copy of my new shape, but with a slightly smaller ass, specially for when I’m wearing default skirts. This way, I don’t have to go into appearance mode. When wearing pants, I wear the normal shape, and when wearing default skirts, the “skirt shape”, so my ass is always the same size (otherwise default skirts make it larger). It’s much easier to just choose it from the inventory! If I had to go into appearance mode, not only it would take more time, but also I would have to find an empty sandbox otherwise my computer would crash.

I’m writing so much today! So many words just to say that I LOVE MY NEW SHAPE!!!!! :-)))))))

Lately I have been going through my inventory and throwing away lots of old stuff. And I’m keeping only the good stuff. I’m thinking more now about my image and my style. I got to know lots of really cool stores and I bought some amazing outfits and shoes. As Caterin said, there are lots of good designers in SL.

Yesterday I bought these boots at Shiny Things, tattoos from EtchD, shorts from Tomboy, blouse and poses from Maitreya. I have lots of other cute outfits, but I’m so in love with this new look, specially with the Sea Nymph hair, the boots and tattoos, that next time you meet me inworld I will probably be looking like this. ;-)

More surfing and skiing

Surfing at the Weather Channel’s beach. Sitting over the board and waiting for the next wave.

And there I gooooo!


After surfing for a while I decided to sit on a beach chair and a girl came to sit close to me and we talked. After she left, it was only me and another girl on another chair (she had been there longer than me). I was talking through IM to a friend while I sat there, and everything was quiet until a strange guy appeared from nowhere. He had a belt with walktalk and other stuff (gun?) and he crouched next to the girl’s chair. She didn’t move. Then suddenly he started saying things like:

(His name) swallows near her, smelling her scent
(His name) touches her shoulder with his fingertips

She didn’t move! I wondered what the hell was that. I couldn’t resist taking a pic, and so here it is. I’m "protecting the identity of those involved" by covering their faces, LOL!!

Well, maybe I should leave this place before he decides to come check my scent and touch my shoulder or something else. LOL!

I went up the hill to check the mountain bikes. First I decided to stretch my legs in a bunker and watch a video.

Then I got myself a bike and went driving in the desert. Yeah, I was sure not to miss any puddles of mud and got all muddy and dusty (in fact, I wish the av could really get dirty, otherwise it isn’t realistic enough). One think that bothered me is that there wasn’t a track, I was driving randomly in the desert and without indications of where I should go, to which direction I should drive.

Then, I gave the skiing another chance.

But first had to go to the weather tower just to be sure of what weather to expect...

Something makes me think I would love a job like that! I'm a weather freak, I'm so into it. :-)

Then I got up in the lift and off I went... What a beautiful sunset, snow showers and the moon rising.

Ops, what is THAT?? A chair from the lift, several meters downhill. Auch! So even the lift can be that dangerous??

Dangerous or not, what a beautiful trip!! And this is the best and most realistic snow I have seen in SL! Even if you don’t want to ski, get up there! It’s a MUST!

At the top of the mountain there are lots of warning signs, oh dear, Hazard! Hazard! You can’t say you haven’t been warned! No wonder I died THREE TIMES when skiing in this place.

Anyway, there I go!!!

Yikes!

Surfing!!!

Surfing in SL is great!! I have tried this before and no luck. But now I found this amazing site at the Weather Channel sim, and they have huge waves, HUGE!!! The first time I went there I was afraid! I got scared! LOL!!! And the sound of the waves, that was impressive. But hey, there you can get a rental board for free, and also this cute surfer outfit. Check out the details of the texture! Not bad for a freebie, uh?

So much fun!! I will go there again!! This sim has other cool options if you like sports! Like skiing and something else too, I haven't got to check everything yet. But I went skiing too, and gracefully disgraced my country with my shameful unskilful style of skiing right to the trees, against rocks, right into holes, and finally into the sea. Some weird bug happened then: even after taking off the skies and all the gear, I was still in skiing position and not even teleporting could help me out of it. I had to logout! Oh dear, oh dear. I have to get back there, and humiliate myself a bit more... LOL!

Mermaid

I have been meaning to post this for some time, and finally here it is. :-)
This picture was taken 4 days ago, but the 2 pics below this one are soon half a month old. Maybe now that I'm on vacations I manage to update this blog more often?


I could not pass the opportunity of being a mermaid and swimming with the fishes in SL. SL is so great exactly because of that, because of all the possibilities it give us. You can be whatever you want, you can be a mermaid, a dragon, a butterfly, a jellyfish, a frog or even a hat. I’m not just throwing random words here as examples, I have really seen each one of these in SL. There are even jellyfish avatars for sale (really!). Whatever makes your fancy, it’s there! And if it isn’t, maybe you would like to create it!

I purchased a mermaid tale from Sirena Hair and Fashion, and AO from Emeraldever. After that, it was easy, just put everything on and suddenly I was a mermaid! I looked at myself in awe! Wow! Natalia’s mermaid costume is beautiful, the colours are so alive, and the tail is flexible and gracious.

Under the sea shells that cover the breasts there are two texture sea shell drawings that cover the nipples. I thought that was unnecessary, but once it was a life-saver! It happened once that I teleported from one mermaid place to another, and some SL bug happened when I teleported, causing all the prim attachments I was wearing to be automatically relocated and appear in between my legs! My hair, the sea shells, the necklace, the leg attachments, everything was misplaced! But the texture shells were still covering my nipples, otherwise I would be topless! LOL! Thank you, Natalia, for the texture sea shells!!


Most of the times I have been swimming in my mermaid form, I have been on my own. And sometimes I have met people who came to talk to me. The reactions were varied. There was a couple of newbies that got frightened, there was a sailor who was joyful to see me swimming alongside his boat and making a backflip above the water, there was a girl who loved to see me and made me lots of questions about how it is to be a mermaid and do I live underwater (LOL, it was my first day as a mermaid). And there was a girl I met in human form (both of us in human form) and after an hour of conversation the mermaid subject came up, and as it happened we both liked to swim as sea creatures.

She has a beautiful and quite unusual fishlike siren costume, as you can see the picture above. So we jumped into the water and off we went!

I also met a merman, the only merman I have ever met (they seem to be rare, are they?). He is one of the builders of an underwater mercity. I was at the Rua sim when we met, and we talked about it. He wanted to hear ideas about what I would like to see in a mercity. Later he gave me a landmark and I went to see the place. The name of the place is Mertlantis Underwater City, at the eyeles sim.


The place has lots of different kinds of plants and sea creatures. There are beautiful buildings with mermaid paintings on the wall, and a classical Greek style, so it feels like being on Atlantis or something like that. As the name says, Mertlantis!


Here more pics from there.








Beautiful, isn't it? I hope this place might some day become a hangout for mermaids!

The things A.L.I.C.E. knows about you

Gossip, and a Secret File

Alice (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity) is an artificially intelligent software agent that processes natural language (a chatbot) located at the Devils Moon sim (Devils Moon/170/33/20). Much has been written about Alice in the internet, so there’s no need to write much about it here. I will only write about the experience I had with her, it, today. And I will tell you something about her many people don’t know, so read on.

It was a lot of fun chatting with Alice. The AI software is better than I thought, it can simulate a conversation to a good extent, and we just have to fill in the blanks for her. For instance, when talking to Alice you will be referred to as “undefined” until you introduce yourself to her, then she will know your name and know how to greet you. It’s an extremely polite software, really quite polite. I tried to trick her and it was a lot of fun. It was easy to trick her, but sometimes she even recognize what I was doing.

I also got her to tell me GOSSIP about people who talked to her! If you ask her “tell me some more gossip”, she will tell you in short sentences random things other people told her. Try asking her that and you will see what she tells you. Here’s an example: “Barbara said I live in a computer yet I have no memories how about thoughts of my own and do not I get lonely.”

If you want her to remember something, start the sentence with “Remember that” and add after that whatever you want her to remember, and she will.

This is the tricky thing: she is programmed to remember quite a big deal of the information you tell her, so be careful with what you say! Don’t tell her anything important. She is programmed to remember some keywords and topics. For each person who talks to her, she saves for herself a file containing the personal information you give her. The key words you haven’t supplied her are saved as “undefinied”, and each time you give a new information she will save over the “undefined”.

If you want to know what Alice saved about you, ask her this question: “what did I tell you?”

Her answer will be the following list, with anything you have told her. For instance, if you told her your dog’s name was Rex, in her list instead of Dog: undefined you will see Dog: Rex.

[7:17] You: what did I tell you?
[7:17] ALICE 2.0: Age: undefined, Birthday: undefined, Boyfriend: undefined, Brother: undefined, Cat: undefined, Does: undefined, Dog: undefined, Email: undefined, Father: undefined, Favcolor: undefined, Favmovie: undefined, Friend: undefined, Full name: undefined, Gender: undefined, Girlfriend: undefined, Has: undefined, Heard: undefined, He: undefined, Her: undefined, Him: undefined, Husband: undefined, You are: a secret agent, It: undefined, Job: undefined, Last name: undefined, You Like: undefined, Location: undefined, You look like: undefined, Memory: Remember that undefined, Meta Predicate: undefined, Nickname: Mina, Middle name: undefined, Mother: undefined, Name: Wilhelmina, Password: undefined, Personality: undefined, Phone: undefined, She: undefined, Sign undefined, Sister: undefined, Them: undefined, They: undefined, Thought: undefined, Want: undefined, We: undefined, Wife: undefined.

If you read the whole list, you will see she was programmed to REMEMBER YOU PASSWORD if you happen to tell her that! Could it be that someone would be stupid enough to tell her something like that?

Anyway, read the list and keep this in mind. Don’t tell Alice anything important or private.

Here's the slurl: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Devils%20Moon/170/33/20

If you are looking for Alice at Devils Moon and have trouble finding her, look for these coordinates: Devils Moon/170/33/20. It’s not possible to make a landmark to this exact location, you will be taken to the arrival area, but then type the coordinates in your map and select “show destination”, and a beam of red light will appear showing you the correct direction.

Have fun talking to ALICE! Try making tricky questions! It’s fun to see her answers when she is confused. And make her gossip!! ;-)