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  

Day 191 – Suck It.

Dear Linden Lab,

You can suck it.

Hey, I’ve been a fan. I make excuses for you. I promote you. I advocate for you. But you let me down. You. Let. Me. Down.

Why the hell am I being subjected to “It’s Wedding Season In SL!” emails? Do I look like I’m having a wedding? I couldn’t get married on a dare and having you guys shoving “Woo! Wedding!” emails at me is pretty low.

So on behalf of all of the SL singles – Suck it.

Also? Not all of us use Facebook!! Quit throwing it at us!

No love,
Ali

What I do love, though?

Dancing with my girls.

Houses, houses, everywhere…

Just as an FYI, I’ve turned off anonymous comments. 🙂

So, as into buying prefabs as I am, I find myself in the position of not having much that works down on the ground. I’m really more into buying skyboxes, I guess. I want a pretty house, that has nice textures, doesn’t have a lot of alpha glitches [or texture glitches, for that matter], that is spacious and open, but with defined rooms, and preferably with a porch and hopefully doesn’t cost half a month’s tier, since I do change houses on a regular basis. You’d think with so many builders in SL, I’d be able to find something decent. I have been scouring the XStreet listings for 2 days. Everytime I see something I might like, I check and see if they have a demo rezzed anywhere at their store. I have been to SO many prefab shops tonight! For people who think that listing their products on XStreet doesn’t work…let me tell you, it does. Without it, I never would have found even HALF the stores I went to tonight.

I don’t know, I think I might just be OVERLY picky. I’ve gotten a load of freebie/cheapie houses just to check out layouts and styles.

I kind of like this vintage/coastal style.

But of course, I also love a good southern style too, with a big porch.

I’ve seen good houses, I’ve seen really horrible houses. I’ve seen houses that were barely textured, and I’ve seen them textured within an inch of their lives. [Hey, not every prim needs a different floral/striped/polka dot texture.] I’ve seen some cute and very inexpensive houses, and I’ve seen some where you really wonder if the creator honestly thinks that their library textured box with a door cut into it is worth $5000L.

But what I haven’t seen is MY house. My perfect house that would make me happy to decorate and stay in. I’m home 95% of the time, my house must be somewhere I feel comfortable in. And yes, I still have my gorgeous house Noel built for me and Sophia decorated for me. But that is my private space in the air. I need a home for the ground and so far, I just haven’t found the right one.

I think I know what this means…

I may actually have to build my own. 😦

This…is not going to be pretty.

Rainy

I want to wish all my adorable Canadian friends a very happy Thanksgiving!! I have to admit, before SL, I had NO idea that you guys celebrated Thanksgiving. I know, that’s horrible, right? But, now I know, and knowing is half the battle.

Pork chop sandwiches!

[10 points if you caught that reference.]

Speaking of Canadians, I feel like I kind of need to bring something up because I was checking my Google Analytics last night and something came to my attention yet again. As most people know, CeNedra left SL in the spring. I was not informed of it any more than any of you were. She has deleted her blog and her SL account. I do not know why or what her reasons were. I know her RL became very busy with her boyfriend and her child and her job, but that’s all I know. I have no contact with her whatsoever. I also do not have any contact with Dyami and have not for quite some time. So to whoever keeps pairing their names together and looking for them – stop it. You’re not going to find anything because as far as Second Life goes, neither of them exist anymore. Please quit googling them and causing their names to pop up in my analytics. I miss the both of them dearly, but I respect their decisions to leave Second Life, whatever the reasons behind their leaving may be. I also respect their decision to not tell me why they were leaving, or to have contact with me or basically any of their former friends again. That is their story, not mine or anyone elses’. I wish the both of them well in their lives and will always hold a place for them in my heart. And that is probably the last time they will ever be mentioned in my blog again, so you can quit searching for them now.

_______________________

It’s been dreary in my physical world lately. I have not seen more than 5 minutes of sunshine in about the last 2 weeks, which makes me quite grumpy and sad. The autumn & winter season usually does that to me anyway, but I’m lucky enough to live in a place where usually there’s some sunshine. Not so lately and man, am I feeling it. I’m irritable and weepy and bitchy constantly. I’m SO sorry if you IM me and I rip your head off for nothing lately. Supposedly we’re supposed to have sunshine on Thursday, so cross your fingers.

But since it’s been so rainy here, I wanted to do a rainy day shot in SL. SL is actually a great help for me, usually, with the sunshine issue. I can turn the sun up and run around in the ocean and that makes me feel better most of the time. But today, rain. I have several umbrellas in my inventory, but no real poses for them. Turning to plurk to get some ideas, Rosie Shark told me about, and then showed me, the Paraplu umbrella & AO from Torridwear. It was exactly what I needed!!

I really like the way the pic came out. It might look different on your screen, but that’s your monitor’s fault.

I’m almost pro on Wii bowling, so I think I’ll go back to that now.

Big Bitch Sunday

I’m not feeling so hot today, so let’s start off with me getting some stuff off my chest. You know how we do Love Thursday? Well, look out for Big Bitch Sunday.

I hate the new LeLutka skin because it looks like shit on my face, I am not a fan of the whole zombie look, I can’t stand that ::69:: charges for their group and has $1L demos that come in 3 sizes when their hair only comes in 1 size, I hate tier time because I don’t feel comfortable or feel like I can shop until I know it’s paid, I hate that I never get even near enough time with the people I love, and I hate that it’s still rainy, gray, and gross in my physical world.

There’s a big hubbub right now that fashion bloggers need to disclose if they paid for what they are reviewing or if they got it for free as a review copy. And that’s fine. I don’t mind telling people if someone was kind enough to give me something for free that they want me to promote on my blog. I’m more than happy to do it. But I do think there’s going to be a huge bitchfit if all the review bloggers start doing it. Most people think that anything we blog, we get for free anyway. For those of us who are not big time bloggers, that’s just not true. A lot of us pay for what we review. However, there are some bloggers that haven’t paid for a thing in ages because they ask for review copies and kiss a lot of designer ass. I died today when I asked a designer I love for a review copy, even though she told a group to please ask for a copy of her latest work if we wanted to blog it. But if some people knew how much free swag certain bloggers got, it would make them sick.

What else can I bitch about? Oh, plurk. There are 2 people on plurk that I absolutely cannot stand. One was a friend who showed her true colors to me recently and one has always been someone I don’t like. The problem? They are friends with almost every one of my plurk buddies, so I have to see them blah blah blahing all over the place. It makes it EXTREMELY hard not to reply back to their ridiculous comments sometimes, so as a result, I end up having to mute a lot of my friends’ plurks. It really sucks. And drama breeds on plurk, and the last thing I want to do is add to it. God knows some of these “fashionistas” can’t ever stop picking at scabs in order to make someone bleed. At least I stay quiet. Usually.

But it’s not all bad today. I get to blog a dress from someone I’ve long admired, I saw a cute movie on TV, and I have new hair.

Hopefully I’ll be able to have some fun tonight in SL. I really kind of think I need it. Badly.

Well. That was a Monday, now wasn’t it?

Ever just have one of those days?

Something that was a long time coming happened finally today. Even when you know something will eventually happen, it really kind of sucks when it does. Sucks more when you find out certain things. 😦 So needless to say, I was in a really unhappy, un-zen, overly emotional state today.

But luckily, my SLife is pretty blessed. I went and did a shift of being an in-store model at SySy’s with Emerald. We learned that not only are we pretty, but we are terrific salespeople. LOL I would have taken a picture, but unfortunately I’ve been having issues and Em’s feet looked darker than her legs and I just couldn’t do that to her.

Once in a while my friend Bon pops up out of nowhere with landmarks for places that I can go explore, but this time he popped up with a landmark to a store that was having a sale. Since I am more apt to spend money when I’m upset, I ran out there. I was surprised that I had actually been there before. I ended up buying a castle. C’mon, it was on sale! And fabulous! I actually really really like it. I will probably never use it, but I have it. I’m going to blog it for my style blog tomorrow, along with a pack of skins I picked up. But here, you all get one photo of the skin with a little photoshop work. You’ll see the unedited ones tomorrow. Believe me, it didn’t need much touching up at ALL. It’s so pretty.

I’ve been setting up a little outdoor ice cream place because…. well, I don’t know. I have the ice cream set and I wanted to do something with it. lol Sophia, Sehra, and Bone stopped over for ice cream. And yes, that is me doing the keg stand. What?! It was a tough day!

So really, even though most of the day was not awesome, I still consider myself pretty lucky. I’m hoping when I wake up in the morning, I can shake off the bad and just go back to concentrating on all the good that is in my SLife. 🙂

Lag

So I’ve been thinking about something a lot lately and since I’m in kind of a foul mood today, I figured it was the best time to be a total bitch about it. 🙂

Lag. Ok, I understand lag. I understand that if you put too many avatars in a place, there will be lag. I understand that too much of anything in Second Life can cause lag. We practically brought down Bluebonnet yesterday by throwing down a billion physical Legos. And I also understand that a person’s computer can be the source of their own lag. I understand all that.

However, it stands to reason that if someone around you is scripted all to hell and primmed out beyond belief, that you will be lagged out too, right? I know what they keep saying. “ARC is a myth! It’s all a myth!” Well, I’ve been in SL too long to not know that when an avatar with tails, ears, weapons, bling, and frizzy ugly flexi hair walks by, I’m going to lag. I’m sorry, it’s true. If it’s never happened to you, you must be on one super powerful computer. Please do not give me all the blog posts on how it’s not true. I’ve read them. They make sense…right until one of those avatars walks past me with particles shooting out of their butt makes me slow to a crawl – and I DO have a powerful computer.

I’ve been wanting to go to Hair Fair since it opened. I managed to make it in once, but it was so horrible, I ended up crashing out. And the rules are there. Don’t wear too much stuff. Don’t wear too many prims. Not that I saw many people complying with the rules, but they are there.

People started telling me things to do to reduce my lag while I was there. Put the settings to the very very lowest. Ok, that did help some, but now everything looks crappy. Turn off the sky. Great, now it’s like I’m shopping under a black sky. Turn off the surface patch, the water, turn off anything I can. Oh…ok…So now I’m basically just looking at busy sculpties and busy textures. Well…that’s cool?

The final straw was when a friend of mine said I could turn off how many avatars I saw. I did it, although it didn’t help all that much since the flexied, frizzy, blinging avatar that I was standing near was still there. But it really got me thinking.

If I have to go somewhere, take away EVERYTHING, even the people standing around me, what kind of fun is that?!

I think better sim designs and people following rules set by sim owners would be better. I know that no matter what, fairs and expos are going to be laggy. I expect them to be laggy and I plan my outfit and how I go there accordingly, as do most people who attend these events regularly. But something really should be done, because having to walk around at a 64m draw distance with a flat black sky and no ground and nothing’s shiny and 5 avatars are flickering in and out…that does not make me feel like shopping. And a world where I don’t feel like shopping is really a bad bad world.

No pretty pics for this post

So a few months ago, after bitching and moaning about my water being black and the whole palletized textures debacle, I got a fancy pants new video card. And man, was I in heaven. Lag was so so so LOW. Everything was smooth and beautiful. My SL experience was instantly more awesome. And it hadn’t been that bad before, but I’m telling you – if you have a lot of issues in SL, look and see what you’re running. Chances are, some of your issues are because of you. [Well hell, that could be said for almost anything, huh?]

About a month into my awesomeness, I turned on my computer one morning and it started to make noises at me. Immediately I shut it off, and on restart, no more noise. It went like that for a couple of days and then I figured, oh, maybe the fans are dirty. It happens, right? So I got in there and used the spray air and cleaned everything.

Nope.

My RLBF, who is my tech geek, said that it was the video card fan and it would probably need replacing because eventually, it was going to die. After attempting to contact the company a few times [this is why I hate buying online. The customer service is almost always crap.], and getting no response, we just kind of…left it. Restarting or smacking the front of the computer always seemed to fix it. But as time went on, I noticed more and more issues. I just chose not to do anything because I know flip about hardware and he didn’t seem that concerned.

This morning the damn thing wouldn’t fix. It was time to put it to pasture. RLBF called the company [why he didn’t do that ages ago, I don’t know] and the guy said he’d email the replacement forms. So now I wait.

But while I wait, I’m working off the … default? I don’t know. LOL All I know is that I’m semi-housebound while I wait for the new card. All the settings have been moved to the lowest, except for local lighting. But it’s still not good. And my WTFug pic taking will probably be put on hold until I get fixed up, unless it’s glaringly bad, since I’ve turned off particles and won’t see bling. Speaking of which, who the hell told Paper Couture to put bling in their shoes and no option to turn it off?! I felt so so so bad for Sophia when she put on her shoes and was blinging like a Vegas hooker. Her feet looked so sad.

Hopefully I’ll be able to be in SL and DJ this week, since I’ve got 2 parties this week to do. I guess we’ll see. 🙂

I’ve had this song on repeat for a few days. Enjoy!

Thoughts about these crazy hunts

To say the Valentine hunt season is in full swing would be an understatement. That picture just shows a bare sampling of stuff that I picked up from ONE hunt.

What I’m about to say is probably going to label me as ungrateful or whatever, but I really think it needs to be said. So just keep in mind it’s my own personal opinion and don’t go crazy.

First, before I say anything else, I want to thank the creators who give out gifts. You are utterly and completely appreciated. You make Second Life a better place to be. I know many designers and I see the work they put into making brand new gifts for every hunt or for their groups. I see how they light up when someone says thank you or when their gifts are blogged or worn out. I adore you all and I thank you all from the bottom of my heart.

However…

These hunts are getting out of CONTROL. There are the people on the sidelines bitching about how gifts and freebies hurt the SL economy. Well, I don’t think that’s necessarily true as I’ve found many designers that I just love now and spend gobs of money in their stores just because they had a fabulous gift.

But you guys have GOT to stop throwing so many huge huge hunts together so close together!

There’s only so many hours in a day, right? And only so much time any of us have to be in SL, correct? These hunts start becoming ALL we do for the couple of weeks or so that they’re on. And then? We spend the rest of the time sorting what we got in the hunts, which usually takes us up to the NEXT big gridwide hunt!

Go to almost any woman in SL and ask her about the Ghost hunt. Ask her about POE. I almost guarantee they will tell you they either

a) Haven’t finished sorting those gifts

or

b) Threw away a lot of things because they weren’t their style/weren’t good quality/they simply got tired of sorting and threw it away just to be done with it.

Is that really what these hunts are about? Just grabbing something to throw it away without looking? If there was a landfill in SL, it would be full of unopened hunt gifts.

For those who think gifts and freebies hurt the SL economy – well no, they don’t always. BUT, when do we have time to look at your stores when we’re so busy going to 400 stores in 2 weeks? With SL lag, crashing, and blingy crazy people running around with 10,000 prims and 7000 scripts… Yeah, most of us are grabbing and running.

And for Phil’s sake, quit being mad that people share cheat sheets. Unless you just want 40 people standing in your store screaming that they can’t find the item and IMing you about it. But seriously…what’s it hurting YOU if someone shows someone else where the gift is? If it’s good quality, you may have made a customer for life who will come back and shop. If you throw a hissy fit, move your gift, and generally act like a complete ass, I guarantee that you will lose customers. It’s for fun, ok? It’s not hurting you if someone gets help when they’re trying to get through 300 stores.

My suggestion would be to please please please scale back on the hunts. If you want to put together a gridwide hunt, limit it to 50 stores, or 100 stores. And make the application process better! Put together a committee and check out the gift that the store wants to give. If it sucks [and c’mon…you know if something is bad quality in SL if you have done even a little shopping] then they don’t make it in. Also, space out the hunts. If it’s gridwide, make a month. If it’s just in ONE store with 12 gifts, then yeah, it can be just a week so everyone can get it.

Will I continue to be sucked into doing hunts? Yeah. Most of my friends enjoy the hunts [some of them are outright refusing to do them now, though, because of all of the mess] and it’s fun when we get together afterwards to try to sort through everything. But something really needs to be done to keep them more fun and less of a hassle.

Just my opinion, anyway.

[Yeah, just another excuse to show off where I sit when I blog lately. LOL]

No title, too tired.

I had like, 5 blog posts in my head earlier. I’ve got pictures, I’ve got a boot review. I still have my Spooky Zone to finish up. I want to flatten out the land where Cen and Dyami are going to live so they have a blank slate to start terraforming on. [The previous tenants terraformed the smack outta their parcel.] I’m still looking for pretty & elegant furniture for my elegant living area and some office furniture for another area of the skybox. I have yet to get the creative bug in my head and start revamping my products. I have to begin building the room for the Sock Hop on Wednesday since I think I’ll be going out that evening and won’t get back in until just before the party will start. I have a lot to do.

But instead of doing any of it, I spent most of the day out of SL, playing online with my friend and having a much wanted chat with someone else. When I did finally get online, I hung out with Sam, his Army buddy who is new to SL, and a couple of girls I haven’t seen in months, and then spent some time on the island, sitting on top of the mountain with Sam, just talking. That’s the nice thing about family. They always listen to you even when you have nothing important to say.

It’s definitely bedtime, though. I’ve been asked to go hang out with my friend and her kids tomorrow, and rest is a necessity before doing that! LOL