Playtime

I didn’t feel like doing much to the house today. I need to, but I dunno…just wasn’t feeling it. There are just some days that you need to take a break and play. Maybe I’ll be more interesting tomorrow. Or not! 🙂

The Girl Next Door

I’ve made it pretty much policy that the only renters on Bluebonnet should be people that I’m currently friends with. Only ONCE have I not done that, and it actually worked out REALLY well, thank goodness!! I’ve just always found that having my friends there means there’s pretty much no sim drama, everyone is fairly quiet, and the place stays pretty cute. I’m not one of those “all up in your bidness” landladies. Pretty much anything they want to do with their parcel, as long as they’re not being an asshole, they can do.

But that doesn’t mean that I don’t like going around and seeing what people are up to! I enjoy exploring around the island to see landscaping and decorations. [I don’t go in houses/skyboxes unless I’ve been told I can. I know people say “It’s just SL” but I think you should still be invited into private homes and not wander in like you have no home training.] Today I popped over to my newest residents’ place. They had originally had a huge blacktop with a bomb and stuff, so I had to go check it out once I saw that they put a house down. And…I had to play in their sprinkler!

I hope they don’t mind. I didn’t smash the grass down too much or anything.

Aldwyn and I still haven’t put up a house yet. I know where I want to put it when we get it, approximately, but I’m still not sure if I want to face it so we’re looking at the off-sim stuff I bought for the wedding, or if we want to make that the backyard.

Holy shit! I’ve been married for one whole week!!

:-O

Fresh!

Over the past week or so, I’ve had black streaks in my hair whenever I try to take a picture with shadows. Someone on plurk said they had the same issue and a fresh install of SL fixed it. Thinking about it, I realized that I haven’t done a fresh, clean install of SL in WELL over a year. I just keep installing new viewers and updating on top of everything. Back when I used to help run a little browser based game site, once in a while we’d do a complete fresh install of the game. It made everyone lose a lot of what they had earned, but it’s not like anyone paid to play, and we always gave them some game money to replace things.

I set out to uninstall ALL the viewers on my system today. I had SEVEN different viewers. Seven!! After uninstalling, I went into my program files folder and my documents folder and deleted all the folders that were left over. I installed one viewer [LL’s beta viewer] and guess what? No black streaks in my hair, and everything was working pretty flawlessly! I didn’t crash when taking shadow pics even once, and was able to keep running around and all! So if you’re having loads of issues, copy your windlight settings to another folder [something you should do anyway if you have ones that you don’t want to lose] and do a fresh install. It might clean up some problems for you!

I’ve been working on the island today. I remember when I used to be more scared of terraforming and I didn’t want the island to change too much from how it was when I first moved there. Not so anymore. I have gone nuts on my parcel. Does it look good? Well, time will tell. I’m not done yet, and still need to invest in more landscaping items. Once I get my new house, then I can really finish up. But since I don’t have my house, Biscuit and I have been camping out in my trailer. At least, until today when I picked up the trailer and put down this taco stand.

Butterdish used to be one of my favorite places to go for pictures, but once I got over how pretty it was, I was also amazed at the funny little builds that were sold there for so very very cheap. I picked up that little stand last year sometime and once in a while, I remember that I have it.

Biscuit wasn’t that impressed. She fell asleep while ordering.

Did I mention that she dug up a 500 regard point arrowhead last night? LOVE HER.

Basic viewer is basic

So Rodvik Linden introduced us to the fun that is basic mode to the SL viewer. Supposedly it’s to help people when they first come to SL if they get basically the Fisher Price version of a viewer before they put on their big boy/girl pants and move to the real viewer.

Well, I obviously couldn’t pass it up, so I downloaded the beta viewer, set it to basic, and yanked my alt, Piper, out of retirement and put her to work. I wasn’t going to do it myself, obviously. What if I mess something up? Poor Piper. She gets the short end of the stick on so many levels.

Logging in, you discover immediately that when they say basic, they’re not whistlin’ Dixie. You have no inventory, no landmarks, no way that I could see to set the lighting, and no money. You get to pick from a bunch of avatars on the bottom row and that’s what you get. You can’t even mix and match items from different avatars.

Piper is usually more of girly badass type normally, so this was about as close as I could find.

There is a How To button so you can learn things like how to move around, how to change your view, how to find places to go, etc.

When you open up the People tab, there’s a minimap. This is actually in the Advanced beta viewer as well, and is a feature that I like.

Of course, there was no one on the island at the time because people have lives.

This is all well and good up on my photo platform, but we needed to find somewhere to go. However, you don’t have search. I guess Search is too scary for new people? So you get Destinations instead. Okay, great. I clicked on Fashion For Life and off Piper went.

It was nighttime on the sims there, so she couldn’t see much. And the worst thing of all?

NO SHOPPING!!!!!

Oh, and it has that point and click and walk thingy that Hamlet Au is so crazy about, but I kind of found it dumb. Probably because I was mousing over items and ended up walking on top of them because my finger jumped and clicked the button. Noob style, yo.

Needless to say, if you’ve been in SL for more than a week, basic is not for you. Piper was quite happy to get back to normal.

She might keep that outfit, though.

I have one real question about this whole thing.

How DUMB are people these days?!

Many of us have been in Second Life for years and managed to survive. They took away choosing a last name because it apparently scared people to have to pick a last name by themselves. They have to dumb down a viewer so much because folks can’t learn to walk without having their hand held. Hey, you know, I complained too when the viewer changed but I got used to it. My brain works just enough that I can figure out that oh, this little button on the sidebar is my inventory! Exactly HOW is this basic viewer supposed to keep people here? It’s not like anyone can help them out with helpful landmarks and freebies. They have no inventory! No one can let them stay on their land. They can’t teleport home! No, really, they don’t have the ability to teleport home!

I’m not a super smart person and I don’t know much about business, but I do know that this basic viewer needs to be a little less basic because the last thing we need are more really dumb people walking into Second Life.