Have I ever?

Time once again to relax my not-really-a-rule of not doing meme-a-like blog posts (I mean, I often don't do them, but mostly because they involve far more time and creativity than I can muster) and do a meme type blog post (I'm blaming Auryn this time).

Strawberry's meme this week is one of those question list type things, which is dead easy to do. If you fancy a go yourself just copy the list, rip out the answers and add your own. Just like I did here.

So here goes...

1. Have you ever owned a sim in Second Life?
   Yes and no. I'm responsible for and rent a whole region, which is where the Z&A main store and Raven Park are located.
2. Have you ever created content in Second Life?
   There's hardly a day goes by that I'm not working on something. And there's hardly a week goes by that I don't make something available.
3. Have you ever driven a vehicle in Second Life?
   Driven. Ridden. Flown. Sailed. Yes. Lots. I even make (RLV) vehicles.
4. Have you ever gone sky diving in Second Life?
   Yes. Still do on occasion. I especially like using a wingsuit.
5. Have you ever played a sport in Second Life?
   Does En Garde count?
6. Have you ever gone clubbing in Second Life?
   I think I've been to an actual club once, a long time ago. I do go to dances now and again (and we host dances once a fortnight).
7. Have you ever fangirled/fanboyed someone in Second Life?
   Heck yeah. Pretty much any time I meet or talk with a content-creator I greatly admire. And don't even get me started on the odd time that they might visit my shop...
8. Have you ever taken a picture of your avatar in water in Second Life?
   Yes.
9. Have you ever taken a picture of a sunset in Second Life?
   It's kind of hard not to isn't it? On a normal region there's 4 a day...
10. Have you ever taken a nude picture of your avatar in Second Life?
    It's kind of hard not to isn't it? On a normal..... well, let's say it's not that unusual, for me. ;)
11. Have you ever dated in Second Life?
    I suppose it depends on what's meant by "dated". I've been with the same person almost the whole of my Second Life.
12. Have you ever had or attended a wedding in Second Life?
    Yes. Just the one.
13. Have you ever drank, smoked or taken drugs in Second Life?
    I've SL drunk and smoked, yes.
14. Have you ever engaged in sexual activity in Second Life?
    Do I look like the sort of..... oh, okay. In that case yes.
15. Have you ever been to Bukkake Bliss in Second Life?
    I can honestly say I don't know what it is. So that'll be a no.

And that's the lot.

Twenty questions about my SL

It's that time again. That time when I relax the not-really-a-rule of not doing every meme-a-like thing doing the rounds and be sociable and take part. Like last time it's one of Strawberry's meme posts that got my interest. The questions are pretty interesting and I think I'll have fun "discovering" my answers.

So here goes...

1. When and how did you discover Second Life? -- I originally signed up mid 2006, although I'd known about it for some time before then. I'd been interested by the idea of it for some time but never went past the stage of reading about it for ages. Then, late one Friday afternoon, I got curious and created an account.
2. Did you know about virtual worlds before or was this your first experience with them? -- Depends on what we mean by "know" here. The idea of virtual worlds has been around rather a long time and given that I've always been into science fiction, and have always been involved with computing (both as a hobby and as work), it's a thing that I can't really remember even not being on on radar. And then there was all the time "wasted" playing LAN-based FPS type games too.
3. Has Second Life met your expectations? -- More than met. It's exceeded them. I joined expecting it to be a bit rubbish and something that likely wouldn't hold my interest too long. It didn't for the first few years, I'd dip in and out and that was it, but since early 2010 there's hardly been a day when I haven't been in-world for some period of time.
4. If you could teleport back to the first ten minutes of your avatar’s slife, what would you tell yourself? -- I'd tell myself that that L$5 (grabbed from money trees) I kept in my account for ages really wasn't anything special and that I should buy a few L$ and go have lots of fun.
5. How long did it take you to master avatar flying and driving vehicles inworld? -- I can't really remember not being able to fly or drive a vehicle.
6. Do you have a mystery alt? -- Technically I am the mystery alt.
7. Is your SL avatar a reflection of you, or someone you wished you could be? -- A bit of both. When I'm logged in my approach to people and reactions to people, etc, are no different than RL me. My in-world desires and interests aren't that different from part of my RL either. In-world they're just amplified a little and allowed to run a little wilder.
8. Is there an individual you met in SL that inspired you in your RL? How? -- Not really, no. That's not to say that I'm not lucky enough to consider some amazing people as friends in-world, it's just that my in-world friends and acquaintances are something that stays very much in-world. Only one person spans both worlds and we knew each other before we both got together in-world.
9. Do you feel it is easier to create stronger bonds/relationships with people you meet inworld as opposed to the real world? -- Not really. I think I find it easier to make smalltalk in-world, mostly because in-world it's easier to meet up with like-minded people, but I wouldn't say my in-world relationships are in any way stronger than my RL ones. I'm naturally introverted and cautious in both.
10. Did you ever imagine or believe people could fall in love with someone they never met before Second Life? -- As others have said in answer to this question, this has been a thing long before Second Life, or even the Internet, existed. I think you'd have to be pretty shallow and narrow-minded to imagine it isn't possible to fall in love with someone you've not physically met.
11. How has your perspective of dating changed (or not) since you started playing second life? -- I can't say it's changed at all. Then again I've never been in SL for "dating", at least not in the "going and seeking a date" sense.
12. How has your perspective of employment changed (or not) since you started playing second life? -- Again, it hasn't really changed at all. As a software developer the idea of making a living from "virtual goods" has never been anything other than totally natural to me.
13. Name three things in both your lives that overlap each other significantly. -- Miss Vila, programming and... erm.... Zardia! ;)
14. If you could live your life more immersively in a virtual world, would you? (Kind of like the Matrix) -- Yeah, no hesitation. Not to the exclusion of RL but I'd love to try it and I imagine I'd really love it. We encourage kids to get lost inside their own heads through play and reading and the like and then, for some odd reason, we often discourage it in adults. It's as if being imaginative and enjoying your own head is seen as a bad thing. Having tools to get totally inside your own head would be awesome.
15. How do you think behaviour changes for people if they’re inworld vs in real world? Why do you think that is? -- People can be arseholes in both words. People can be wonderful in both worlds. People can be entitled pricks in both words. People can be helpful and generous in both worlds. I don't much buy into the "anon makes people worse" line of thinking (down that route lies such nonsense as Google's nymwars). People will be what they are.
16. How has second life consumerism changed your perception of spending habits, the value of money, the need to be “bleeding edge” with fashion? -- I can't say it's changed my perception one bit. Then again I don't really do the fashion thing in either world.
17. Do you think virtual worlds like SL drive and redefine human interaction or do they narrow and limit it? -- Neither. People who think they narrow and limit it are, in my experience, narrow-minded bigots. On the other hand people who think that virtual worlds are the coming of a whole new paradigm of human interaction tend to be single-issue obsessives who care more about the technology, or their own punditry, than anything else.
18. If technology progressed tomorrow to allow you to send emotions to people the way you’d send text or voice messages, would it enrich your SL experience or infringe on it? -- If you're not sending emotions with text now you're probably doing it wrong.
19. Name three skills you attribute to having learned or honed in second life alone. -- I'm not sure that I really can. Generally it tends to be the other way round. The things I do in SL tend to be an extension of or an exploration of things in my RL.
20. If your grand kids googled your Second Life Avatar’s name, would they be intrigued, disgusted, proud or something else? -- While I suspect this question is aimed at how I'd view myself and what can be found about me on the web it's really more of a question of how mature and open-minded these future offspring of mine will be. That's their problem, not mine. ;)

Tools and stuff

Although I've often been amused by reading them I've never really been motivated to contribute to Strawberry Singh's Monday Memes thing. The reason is, mostly, time and the simple fact that they're normally on subjects that I don't have much to contribute to (or if I do I'd want to spend way too much time on it).

However, via Inara Pey's entry, I realised that this was one that's close to my heart and that I'd have some fun with it. So, here goes... (warning, there's a lot of self-made stuff here -- this isn't an attempt at self-promotion, it's just that I'm a programmer by trade and we have a horrible habit of reinventing wheels when faced with a problem because.... well, it's fun)

First off, here's my usual viewer view of the world:

As you can see, I run Firestorm. On my main machine I use the last stable version and on my laptop I have the beta (I've not upgraded the main machine due to a rather annoying bug that impacts on one aspect of RLV). While I have a good number of other viewers installed for testing purposes Firestorm is my work environment of choice.

I try and keep it as uncluttered as I possibly can. When I'm busy it's normally covered with an inventory window or two, a build floater, the conversation window and more often than not one or more script editor windows. But when I'm wandering around I try and keep the view nice and clean.

I only have the following HUDs on all the time. First there's my Sub-Allowance HUD:

I guess this should be considered less a tool for me and more a tool for Miss Vila. The same can be said of the Submission HUD:

Both of those are locked in place and can't be removed. So, leaving RLV HUDs aside (well, there's one more to come, sort of), the only other two HUDs I use a lot are as follows: first there's the OpenCollar Submissive AO...

Although Firestorm has a builtin AO, which actually works really well (I use it with great effect on a different avatar), I like that the OC AO has tight integration with the OC collar (my collar is scripted with OC).

Finally, to help stop the non-locked HUDs being knocked off during outfit changes, I have my HUD Locker:

And that's pretty much it when it comes to tools that are HUDs. Given that a lot of my in-world time is either time spent with Miss Vila or time spent working in the workshop I don't have much need for anything else. My other useful tools are all about knowing what's going on in-world and knowing the state of our region.

So, this is where I wander away from the viewer-oriented stuff and talk more about how I try and stay informed about what's going on. One really important tool, for me, is the Linden Lab grid status blog. There's two really important and useful things on there. The first is the calendar of scheduled server releases:

I use Google Calendar (on the desktop, on my phone, on my tablet) so I subscribe to the above. That way there's absolutely no reason why I should ever need to guess about when any restart is scheduled. All too often I see people in various build groups making guesses about it when this information is really easy to get at and, with almost no effort, can be with you all the time.

The other important information on that blog is, of course, the status information itself. While we all know that it can, on occasion, be a little misleading, or a little late, it's still important to know what's going on and to stay informed. To this end I've got a couple of things in place. The first is I've got this script I (re)wrote a while back sat in a prim in the workshop. The moment something changes on the blog's RSS feed I get an IM to let me know.

But I've also gone one step further. I'm a fairly avid user of ifttt so I've got this set up:

This is an ifttt recipe that, when something new shows up on the grid status RSS feed, it sends a push notification to all my mobile devices (they're all Android in my case) using Pushover. This in turn has my phone or tablet make a nice loud "bong" sound to let me know that something happening (and, of course, it also sends the text of the status entry so I can read it too).

Another vital tool is the region restart notifier that I wrote some time ago. I have this in a prim in the workshop so that I can know when our region has come back from any restart. In fact I normally have a copy of this, in some form, in mall locations I have too. That way I can know that a mall has had a restart in case I want to double-check that the vendor boards have come back online (something that's never been a problem since I switched to CasperVend -- but that's another blog entry for the future, I guess). It's not uncommon for me to know (and announce in their group) that a region has come back from restart before the person who kicked off the restart knows. ;)

There's also one more vital thing I rely on heavily. It's actually a viewer thing. It's also a thing that confuses me about many other people. It's to do with this:

Given the gadgets and stuff I have in-world to keep me informed about what's going on this is a common occurrence. It's a common occurrence for anyone with a non-trivial involvement in-world, I imagine. But rather than announce this fact in my profile and use the usual "so send a notecard" line I do this: I have IMs go to email. It's that simple. No messing with notecards and instructions on how to get them to me (the one that never ceases to amaze me is when people say "send me a notecard if I'm offline" and then they hide their online status from people who aren't on their contact list). Just.... send an IM, as you normally would.

The best part about it is that I can reply. Email -> IM replies are so damn handy. I can reply to people and help them out without even being near a computer, I just reply via email on my phone.

And that's pretty much it. Aside from all the usual build tools (Photoshop, Qavimator, etc...) and the backup regime I have (that's another long blog post if that was to happen) they're my most-used and most-useful tools that relate to SL.