I wouldn’t sign up for this!

So it’s no secret that a lot of us have covered up the parts of our avatars that we don’t like with mesh parts. I haven’t really seen my regular system hands in forever, and if I’m not wearing Slink feet, it’s probably because I’m wearing boots. Now personally, I don’t go for the whole thing – the mesh jutting butt, the aggressively huge mesh breasts, the mesh heads, etc. But a lot of people do like that stuff, and most of the kids in SL that I know have the Toddleedoo mesh body.

When Linden Lab said “Hey, guess what? We have new mesh starter avs!” I was intrigued right up until I saw some photos. Yikes.

Last night, Brianna and I were hanging out before bed and I was looking for a dress to wear tonight [we’re having a double birthday party tonight for my sister and my niece!], I stumbled into the Library. Imagine my surprise when I saw that one of the new mesh starter avatars was named Alicia!! I almost never have anything with my name in SL! It couldn’t be TOO bad, right?

Wrong!

Good LORD, what is this mess?! That IS a mesh body but it doesn’t look smooth and well formed like you can get your body to look with other mesh pieces. The hair looks like burnt noodles, and the FACE. The face, y’all! I look like I’ve been in some kind of accident. I don’t WANT this avatar to be named Alicia!

Brianna was also equally as horrified.

The other human avatars in the collection are about as equally as bad. But you know what’s not bad? The zombies! I don’t know if they just had different people working on these things or what, but the zombies are lightyears better than the humans. I really like the expression on the zombie guy’s face.

To make matters even crazier, if you’re signing up for SL, the zombie and other non-human avatars are all under the heading of “Vampires.” They should change that to “Fantasy” or something. But the girl on the very front page of the website is gorgeous, and I think if I were signing up, my first question would be, “How can I look like HER?”

I just don’t understand why Linden Lab would allow the human avatars to be so so ugly when they could have hired any number of amazing meshmakers to make something wonderful for the new residents. I don’t know how many non-human avatars are out there in Second Life, but just from my limited view, I see mostly all humans. To put a newbie in a mesh avatar that they cannot change [these bodies are not modifiable] and then thrust them into a world where there are some really gorgeous avatars seems like bad business to me. Don’t get me wrong, the default avatar is not the best either, but at least seasoned Second Lifers can help someone look a lot better in really a short amount of time. These are so ugly, all we’ll be able to tell a new person is “Take EVERYTHING off. It’s hopeless.”

But, if you want to be a zombie and get your thriller dance on, at least that looks good.

Day 110 – I’ll never be done!

I swear, decorating is one of those things that I am always doing in SL, and yet I feel like I’ll never be done with it.

When it was just me on my own, my houses were always girly. But since I’m married and have a boy living with me, I try to not make it TOO feminine in the house. Of course, I don’t think I succeed very well in that, but he doesn’t seem to care if we have flowers and hearts around.

Last night as I was attempting to decorate the bathroom, I realized that SL has eaten MORE of my home stuff – like a bathroom set that I can’t get back because the creator is no longer in SL, and my pretty cakestand from Artilleri!! So unfair. At least I can get the cakestand back, but that’s not the point. It’s the principle of the thing. There are principalities! LOL!

I should be getting off my ass and going to the gym, but my legs hurt, so I think that’s a no for today. I’ll have to go tomorrow, though, because today we’re celebrating Father’s Day with my dad and his usual choice of restaurant is NOT a health food place. And I’m TOTALLY okay with that because Saturdays are my cheat days! 🙂

Day 93 – Now That I’ve Found You

So if you don’t keep up with the SL grid status page, and you should at least glance at it once in a while, we’re due some big maintenance in the evenings for the NEXT THREE DAYS. Dios, what are they doing over there? Transferring the hamsters who can no longer run on the wheels? :-p [Just kidding, LL. Don’t hit me.]

But I don’t mind really. It gives Aldwyn and me some much needed time at home where we can just sit. Um…not that that’s ALL that different from usual, but I’m normally opening boxes or trying to take blog pics or moving furniture around. It’s kind of like having an almost forced vacation from the normal nightly stuff, you know?

I guess we should get used to this hammock. We’ll probably be on it for the next couple of nights too. :-p You know, I’m totally down with LL trying to fix stuff, but it would be really nice to know WHAT they’re fixing and what we can expect to be better. But I guess we’ll just have to have faith that whatever it is, it’ll be good for all of us.

Oh, the title of today’s post comes from a song that I reeeeeeally like lately. I think I’ve played it about a million times in the past month or so. Love love love. 🙂

Will the real Lexi please stand up?

This is my friend, Lexi Morgan.

Lexi has been in Second Life since 2004, as you can see. Although she’d added her partner’s last name to her display name, if you look her up in search, she is still Lexi Morgan. There might be 10,000 other Lexis out there, but as far as Second Life is concerned, she has always been the only Lexi Morgan. At least…she was.

This is Lexi Morgan #2. Her username is beth36. If you don’t have display names turned on in your viewer [a lot of us do not], she looks like beth36. But she’s walking around with Lexi Morgan proudly as her display name. Even worse, when you go to look for Lexi Morgan in search…

When display names were first introduced, MANY people were upset. The content creators – you know, the people who make us look good and generally pay a lot in fees every month for sims and marketplace and uploads? – were especially worried. What would keep someone from using their name? Would that be possible? WHY would it be possible? But they were assured that no, that wouldn’t happen. Linden Lab would help protect them, protect all of us with legacy names.

Turns out? Not so much.

When Lexi was notified by someone that another account was using her name [she’d gone to search for Lexi and that is what popped up], Lexi was, rightfully, very upset.  She filed an abuse report, and this morning she contacted Linden Lab.  After all, they had promised this sort of thing would not happen, and unlike in the real world where several people could have your name, it was always a bonus in SL that our names were OURS.  So she did what any of us would have done and called Linden Lab.  And that’s where things really went wrong.

Lexi spoke with someone at Linden Lab who told her – get ready for this – to just keep filing abuse reports until it was fixed.

Wait.  What?

Now she has to take time out of her day to just keep filing abuse reports, when one has already been filed, when it would be easier for the person she spoke with to fix it right then and there?  Where is the protection that was promised when Linden Lab decided to charge ahead with the ridiculous AOL-esque usernames and display names?  [Don’t get me started on what I think about the username thing.  But you can vote in this JIRA if you feel the way I do.]  Shouldn’t there be some kind of customer service for someone who has been using a service for over 7 years?  Just keep filing abuse reports? That’s IT?

When Lexi told the person at Linden Lab that she was under the impression this sort of thing was never to happen, the person replied, “Yeah, I can see how that would cause a problem for you.”  Lexi also asked what would happen if this account never logged in again, and was told “You should AR separately with those concerns and be as specific as possible.”  Because calling and telling them isn’t specific or good enough?

Nice customer service, Linden Lab.

So now the real Lexi Morgan has to waste her time filing abuse reports and hoping that her customers read far enough to contact her and not Beth36 if they need customer service.  Beth36 can wander around happily with a name that is not hers over her head.  And Linden Lab proved, once again, that they truly do not always listen to their customers.

Edit 8/26/2011:  Lexi confirmed yesterday that after approximately 25 Abuse Reports, phone calls, etc, that the name was finally changed.  Beth36 is now Beth Morgan.  Oh, and she’s no longer an out of work exotic dancer, just in case you were worried about that. :-p  

Hello, new profiles!

So Linden Lab rolled out their new SL profiles pages today. I had been playing with the beta one for a bit and essentially it brings a little more social networking into our world. Naturally this is cause for much alarm from some people because they really don’t want to be social. Hey, I get it. I’m not always the most social person either! There are some privacy settings, but not as many as people would like. But maybe some of what I’m going to show here will help you out a little bit.

Okay. First, find your settings. It looks like a wrench.

That’s going to allow you to do pretty much everything you want to do to your profile anyway, so you need to know where to find it. As you can see, you can change your picture, edit your bio, all that good stuff that you used to have to log in world for. Now if you want to handle things while you’re out or at work or you don’t want to log in because someone you dislike is online, you can do it all from the web. I’m going to assume you know how to do all that, so we’ll move on.

Next, go into the Privacy tab.

These settings will allow you to lock things down to a friends list level, but no further than that at the moment. It could change later, but for now, it is what it is. As you can see by my settings, everyone in Second Life can see my wall and post on it, whether they’re on my friends list or not. I did change that to only letting my friends do that, once I thought about it a little more. I have it set that everyone can see the basics of my profile, whether they’re logged into Second Life/the SL website or not. You, of course, may only want friends to see your profile. Of course, if you’re a blogger or a creator, you might not want to have your profile locked that far down, as I expect it might get troublesome. And really, who is THAT flipping important that they have to lock their profile down that hard, am I right??

EDIT: There is a now a JIRA for allowing the option to not let anyone post to your profile.

EDIT AGAIN: It’s been handled! You can choose now to not let ANYONE post on your profile! Linden Lab DOES listen on occasion! 🙂

Now click on the notifications tab, because this is a biggie.

If you don’t want to be spammed to death with in world notifications of people posting on your profile or commenting on your posts TURN IT OFF. That’s right, just clicky click and turn that mess off. I have it set to email me when someone posts on my profile, but I think email notifications are broken anyway, since I haven’t gotten any emails.

I kind of dig the new profile set up. I can post things and comment to others without ever having to see them in world [that social thing, you know], and I can handle my friends list online, which is awesome!

But of course if you just hate this, you don’t want this, you can’t even believe that Linden Lab would want people to be social, you can always just turn off all your notifications, use a third party viewer that still shows old style profiles, and never think about it again. 🙂