Bad Grid Day

The past couple of days have been a little rocky on the Grid. Login problems, and once you get on, sims offline and TP delays and hangups. I did manage to get in a little sailing today in the Nantucket complex (Santa Barbara was offline, so the route to Hollywood was cut off).

For lack of anything better to do, I sat on a seagull.

Access Denied

Second Life is inaccessable this morning. *sigh* I guess I'll have to hang out in RL for a while while the Lindons bang on things.

Mermaid Landscaping

The ground area under my friend Minto's home wasn't being used, so I convinced him that a part-time mermaid needs a pond of her own. He had previously made me a small pool up at what he humourously calls his "castle", but it was pretty small. So he very kindly relandscaped his land to put in a sizable pond for me to swim in, and moved my "shack" down to poolside. Now if I can find some friendly fish to eat frolic with...

The Skyship Docks at Grendel's Children

Checking out Mr. Incredible's Deltoids

So why don't you dump Elastigirl and come rescue this cute kitten?

The Crowded Skys of Caledon

Wrong? Why, Nothing's Wrong...

The latest update seems to have spawned some mysterious avatar twitches around SL. When I logged on this morning, I noticed that my av seemed to be a bit confused:


Other people I talked to mentioned mysterious eye twitches as well. And a newly-created bug in the "open mouth" emote animation makes one look like a fish. It's effecting so many products and animations that a JIRA report has been started on it: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-318

Green Eyes!

Considering a new eye color.

In Support of SLiberty

The blog, The News from Bardhaven, has an entry questioning the statement by Lindon Labs that many activities, including those containing "broadly offensive content" will be banned from Second Life. I also question this development, and posted the following reply to the post:

I am not a citizen of Caledon, but I want to add my voice to yours in questioning this latest statement from Lindon Labs.

SL is not RL. The participants here do not face the same dangers as in the Other World. One can always refuse to participate, teleport to some other location, or log out of any Second Life situation. There are existing channels for dealing with harassment and violations of the existing TOS. To impose draconian limits on activities by consenting adults in Second Life is therefore entirely unnecessary.

The attitude that this statement by Lindon Labs appears to represent is an unfortunate reflection of the growing intolerance and discrimination lately occurring in Real Life, particularly in the USA. Until now, Second Life has been a haven from this; a place where we have a chance to shape our own realities and experiences -- whatever they may be. It would be a tragedy to lose that which has made Second Life so precious to us.

For me, at least, there is no attraction in a bland, G-rated playground with little scope for creativity, closely fenced by regulation, where infractions are gleefully reported by self-imposed morality monitors.

We must stand up for the world that we have made!

Just Squeaking By

I spent some time today teaching the rats in Master V's dungeon how to squeak.

Technical notes: What that really means is that I found some .WAV sound files of rat squeaks on the Net, used a sound-editing program called Goldwave (highly recommended) to convert them to the format that SL will accept (44.1 kHz sampling, 16-bit mono), and then loaded them into SL.

I added a simple little squeak script and the sound files to the rat object. The script sits in an endless loop and does random-length llSleep calls and then plays one of the squeak sounds (also picked at random).

Just another element added to the dungeon ambience. Maybe dripping water next...