It took me ages 40 minutes to find this video file from ‘the archives’. I remembered nothing about it whereabouts except that back then I had burned it to a red colored CDR, just to annoy the person that gave it to me. During this search I’ve held in my hands CD’s titled ‘Mandrake 8.1 disk 3′, ‘adobe photoshop 7.0, illustrator 10′, ‘bryce 5.0′ and ‘Die Ärtze’. Nostalgia, all right. :p

I loved (and still do love) this video, just because - although a lot of people don’t seem to get that - they put themselves into perspection. C’mon!? It are pigs drinking that wine in the end of the movie. Another reason why I love this vid: 1.22 on the vid’s counter, ripping open his shirt, the iron cross and the rather original way of drinking a german wine together with the lyrics ‘In the hands of the master / I am a slave / In the hands of the master / Broken or saved / In the hands of the master / In futility or lust’. ;) But whatever people say about Der Blutharsch, I heart Albin Julius’ voice, was there when they performed in Belgium and the band’s flag (an iron cross and oak’s leaves) hangs above my bed. (German ammo for Andro.)

Behold ‘In the hands of the master’ (or ‘time is thee enemey XI’) from Der Blutharsch (label: Wir Kapitulieren Niemals):

Took the video down upon request of the band. If you’re really that curious, just ask me for it.

Also on that red CD full of nostaligia lots of Boyd Rice stuff can be found. Again a very controversial person but I think the lyrics to his song ‘Disneyland Can Wait’ are amongst the best ever written. (Someday I’ll take you to Disneyland / We’ll go on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, and follow him straight to hell / But that’s not necessary just now / For now hell’s all around us / No rubber devils, no smell of sulphur / But hell nonetheless / Hell more grotesque than any medieval woodcut / Instead of dramatic demons: a lifeless shuffling horde / Without souls, without imagination, without worth / And beyond redemption / Someday I’ll take you to Disneyland / I’ll buy you a pair of mouse-ears / Tons of cotton candy / And a big helium balloon with Mickey inside / But all that can wait / Today I’ll buy you a 357. Magnum, with lots and lots of bullets / I’ll buy you a stack of AK-47’s, and a warehouse filled with banana clips / all loaded, and ready to go / I’ll buy you a B52 loaded with neutron bombs / And lots of soldiers, to do whatever is necessary / Disneyland can wait / We have time / Someday there’ll be more of us / Maybe then the world can be Disneyland / And visiting hell will be noble again.)

Here we have Mr. Rice ft. Walt Disney:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhxLovB2d68]

Then my lonliness closes in
So, I drink a German wine
And drift in dreams of other lives
And greater times…

Vint

Categories: Music, Opinion, Rant
5 Comments »

Mike Manhattan: (Saved Thu Mar 29 05:01:53 2007) Hello please remove the SLFlirt picture from http://www.vintfalken.com/ as this is copwrited material

Yes, Mr. Manhattan from SLFlirt.com, I understand perfectly that it is copwrited copwritten material written by a cop copywrited material, but I didn’t want to do any harm. Actually, I even think this small 150×80 pixel image is the best thing SLFlirt has going for it. I never though using part of a screenshot in a review about the place where I’ve gotten it with a link to that website right next to it would be considered seriously infringing on copyright laws. But I’ll take it down. Somehow I feel like removing the link to your website as well, though.

I guess this means you just didn’t like my review on SLFlirt.com?

Dear Mike, please don’t tell me that now my chances of actually dating you or using SLFlirt’s unique online dating and personals service, with local, sexy adults waiting to hook up online* dropped down to zero? Will I now never be able to find a great date, love, a committed relationship or even, intimate, erotic sex?!*

And here comes the laughter-part of this blogpost:

I’ll just have to comfort myself with the knowledge that my review on SLFlirt ranks first when doing a Google search for slflirt.com. Yes, even before the SLFlirt website. And when searching for SLFlirt, I rank second, right after your ‘unique online dating and personals service created just for the residents of SecondLife’ . You’ve beaten me on Yahoo! but aren’t even listed on Windows Live Search where I also rank first for ‘SLFlirt’. *Sticks out her tongue at Mike Manhattan.*

(* Quotes fetched from Mike Manhattan’s in-world profile.)

Tags: review, sl web resources, slflirt.com
Categories: Laughter, Opinion, Rant, SL Web Resources, Vintfalken.com
15 Comments »

Until yesterday I knew only two ways to shop for SecondLife products: in-world, TP’ing from store to store and sometimes waiting ages for textures to rezz, and on the www using SLboutique and SLexchange. A friendly salesman from MetaMart told me about a third one: using an in-world hud (heads-up display) to browse through goods. ‘Might there be a way to raise my clothes per hour shopping ratio even more?’, I wondered as I started type lots and lots of question in the IM-window. I can only guess at the following conversation:

Salesman: ‘Hey boss, I have an eager shoppingaddict with a blog asking me tons of question and I can’t keep up answering them.’
Salesman’s Boss: ‘Hmmm. Would she be pissed if you mute her?’
Salesman: ‘Yes, I think so.’
Salesman’s Boss: ‘Ok, that would be bad publicity, we can’t have that. I’ll talk to her and see if I can calm her down a bit.’

… and this is how a ruthed Robbie Kiama ended up in my skybox to tell me all about MetaMart. They say MetaMart is a HUD search engine that will help you to search & purchase items in-world. I say it’s a huge in-world shopping-playground. Using it is like being on the grid and using slboutique at the same time, but then without having to do alt+tab’ing constantly. No need to rezz something in SecondLife to prove who you are, just wear the HUD and you’re good to go. Would I speak that positively about something without testing it first? Of course not!

This is how I told Dakota - now with guns! - about it:

[18:09] You: think of what a break through it is for strippers
[18:09] You: being able to shop
[18:10] You: while they are busy on that pole
[18:10] Dakota Buck: hahaha
[18:10] You: well, actually the same for escorts i guess
[18:10] You: *giggles*

My experiences as a buyer:

Pressing ’search’ on the MetaMart-HUD makes it search for the keywords you send to #8. Search results turn up for both ‘/8 silks’ and ‘/8 costume’. At this point I bought myself the lovely ganster girl costume that turned up in the search, but that’s heading ahead on things. ;) Pressing ‘advanced search’ allows you to search for ‘Latest items’, ‘Popular items’, ‘Seller’s Name’ and … w00t ‘Free items’.

So you see something that you like, and want to see more of it? Just click on the thumbnail picture and the full picture texture will slide out of the HUD’s interface. If the ‘i’ next to the thumbnail is bright yellow, the seller has included a notecard with more information about the product. Just press the appropriate yellow ‘i’ to open that notecard. Sometimes the large textures tend to load rather slowly, but that is the seller’s fault, as the displayed textures use asset UUID. Maybe there is a way to check the size of the texture through the UUID before loading it?

To buy a product that is not a freebie, - evidently - you need to have enough money in your MetaMart account. Depositing and withdrawing funds to and from your account is made easy with a menu that also allows you to check your account saldo. Both redrawing and depositing work without delay. The ‘ganster girl’ outfit was sent to me right away, and now I’m happy, goodlooking gangster girl. ;)

Robbie Kiama ensured me that version 3 of the MetaMart shopping HUD will include the ability for customers to rate/comment on a product. That’s great, because I must admit, with SLBoutique, I’m a bit to lazy to return to their website to comment after I tried the product I bought in-world.

Other things I would like to see added though:

• For the ‘free items’ search, the latest added item should show on the first page, not the last. But that’s solved if we get some ’sort by price up/down’ and ’sort by date added oldest/newest’ functionality. Please?
• A way to browse items by categories (avatar, clothes, security, hawt silks, photography equipment, … ;)) and a way to search only within those categories.
• More items! It’s just starting up, I know, but c’mon sellers, get your items up there. I want more choice. Especially in hawt silks! Preferably white, please. ;)
• I want to be able to ‘fave’ sellers, so I can easily sort all their products in one search query, listing the latest they’ve added on top.

From a seller’s/freebie-giver’s point of view:

Works the same way as SLboutique does. You’ll need 1 free prim to rez an in-world warehouse that will keep up to 40 items. If you want to become a referrer, that’s 6 prims. Keywords and price you can add/edit on the MetaMart website. If you want to give your possible customers more information, you need to add a notecard that has the same name as the product, but with _nc behind it to the warehouse. I hope that they will add that functionality to the website, so the information simply shows below your product on the HUD. Already to much useless notecards in my inventory. The texture displaying the item you need to upload to SL and then copy paste the asset UUID on your products item page on their website. So keep the texture you upload as low-sized as possible!

From the price your product is sold for, 97% of the money goes to you, 1.5% to Meta Mart and 1.5% to the referrer (the person that gave your avie-customer the HUD). You can easily get a report send to your email that tells you exactly how much money you made selling stuff on MetaMart and your referrals shopping spree’s. The report could be a bit more detailed though, but the same goes for SLboutique. I don’t want to know how much I sold in total, I do am interested in how many times I sold item A, B, C, … .

Ow, that and the warehouse does not look really that impressing. Either put in some other pictures (graphs?butterflies?!binoculars to be associated with SL-search?! that’s a tab window, for christ’s sake! geeh!!!) or I’ll just hang it on the outer side of my skybox. Yes, at 700 meters altitude! *grins* And I had a minor problem adding a notecard with information to my product. See, the product uploaded was already using the maximum amount of characters and object’s name can have, thus no way putting the _nc behind it. Well, people will just have to do without the explenation.

And some general ranting on the HUD’s looks and functionality:

I IM’d about that already with Robbie, but these are some things I only noticed after that conversation:

• It took me 4 seconds to much to find the ‘buy’ button when I wanted to use that. Place it somewhere more logical, on the right side from the product I want to buy for instance.
• Why is ‘minimize’ written out that big? It disturbes! And each time I maximize it again, it gives me yet another notecard. I have tons of that already!

Will I use MetaMart myself? Yes, I *heart* the idea behind it and believe it can become a very functionably SecondLife meta-shopping help. I will upload any future freebies to MetaMart as well as SLBoutique. If you want to try out the MetaMart HUD yourself, you can get one from the MetaMart Warehouse in my skybox. Yes, that will make me your referrer and I’ll earn 1.5% on each item you purchase through MetaMart. But, hey, clothes and guns don’t come cheap! ;)

Directions to get to my skybox: go to the Paradise Lost Club (SLurl) and then take the teleportal (round disk in the floor) to ‘Vint Labs’. You’ll probably rezz somewhere close to the warehouse where you can get your own MetaMarkt HUD.

Tags: freebie, HUD, meta mart, shopping
Categories: Links, Opinion, Second Life
8 Comments »

Welcome To SLFlirt.com!
SLFlirt.com is a unique online dating and personals service created just for the residents of SecondLife. NOW! Find a friend, lover, committed relationship or someone for any reason!

(Just not sign up yet. Read or scroll down first. *grins*)

Edit: There was a small but nice screengrab from SLFlirt.com here, but Mike Manhattan kindly requested me to take it down. More information on this in SLFLirt’s Mike Manhattan doesn’t want to date me anymore!

Aha. Finally, even the most shy Avies amongst us, can find themselves a date. No need to step up to a avatar to ask him/ her if he/she wants to TP somewhere with you and face the chance at rejection. Oh no, you can just find that perfect meta-soulmate on SLFlirt.com.

Although I still need to go on my date with JJ, I was curious nonetheless. So I registered, got the confirmation mail, clicked it and then I was ready to fill out my profile. There the problems started to arrise.

I am a:
Woman! That was still easy.

Seeking a:
Ow. I don’t know if I want a man or a woman. Actually I want a Neko. Ok, preferably a male Neko. But still, I want a Neko. But Neko’s not in the list. :(

Age:
Ok. I think that I’m 5 now. Months, that is. But the most recent date I can pick is 1989. Strange. I would have sworn that the grid did not exist yet at that point in time. Ow, this is so confusing!!!

Country:
Do they mean SIM with that? Devil’s Landing is so not in the list. Must email them to add it!

Body type:
I think I’m average to slender. I did my best not to overdo it on the sliders.

Height:
Vewwy, vewwy tall!

Eyes:
Hmmm. Strangely enough ‘Reflecting’ is not an option there.

Hair:
I don’t get all the color options. My hair says ‘prim ebony’. And my other hairs says ‘ponytails pink prim’. Oh well, it changes with the day anyhow.

Smoking & Drinking:
Socially I think. Only when I’m at the Pardise Lost. Or have something to celebrate.

Living situation:
Friends do visit often. Even when I’m not home. But? What for the homeless Avies? There is no such option that says ’strayhound’ or ‘wherever I feel like rezzing’ or ‘infohub’. But maybe this should say if you own land. Or rent. Or live with both feet steady on the grid, or in a nice skybox like me. Maybe it’s me, but I don’t know a lot of Avies that are living with their parents. Or that have kids.

Social setting:
I assume I’m a flirt. No? I’m a good girl?! Thank you!!! :d

TV watching:
Just not that interesting in SL. Sometimes I watch a video projection, but that’s about it.

Education:
Well, I was going to go to that scripting class, but something else came up. I do not have ‘High school’, ‘college’ or ‘university’ in my inventory. I must use search one of these days and find out what those are!

Employment status and occupation:
I’m a dancer and SL-photographer. So I think that’s self-employed, although if I dance at the club, Helena’s my boss. And that would label me into ‘entertainment/media’. No?

Income:
That’s strange. Is there a currency I don’t know about?! Or is that a typing mistake? They left the ‘L’ out of L$. Let’s say about 1500L$ a week. Multiply that with 56. *chooses 75,000 to 99,000$ from the dropdown menu*

Interests:
I like dancing. And photography. But why can’t I choose another hobby of mine: ‘explore’. And where is ‘playing sploders’. Ow, and building is fun too, but nowhere to be seen in the list. And where can I check ‘hanging around in mature sims’? And ’shopping’? And ‘roleplaying’?

And now let’s see what I want to know about the avie of my dreams. Is he human, neko, furry, a dragon, a gorean slavetrader, … ? Does he like to hang out in mature or PG sims? Does he pay for escort services? What are his ‘appearance’, ‘building’ and ‘behaviour’ ratings? Does he has a partner on file? Is he willing to put me as a partner on file. What are his online times? Does he have a job as ’securtiy’, is he a scripter (that would be neat!), or is he just more a ‘camping’ person? Does he have his payment info on file? What’s his favorite SIM? Does he have a decent graphics card? Download limits? Is he using the normal client or first look? Does he speak Typonese fluently like I do? What are his goals in SecondLife? Having fun or gaining quick wealth? Does he have alts?

Why aren’t all those questions answered?! If you promote something as ‘a dating service for second life residents’, you must take into account that we are not exactly the same as our human counterparts. We look different (and change appearance often). We can be female or male, whatever we feel like. We dream in wireframe. Our interests are different. If not, just call it ‘yet another dating service for IRL peepz, targetting people that play SecondLife, just because I’ve read somewhere that that’s the next hype and I can make money from it.’

Some other slick features I’ve become rather tired of by now: ‘rate my picture’, guestbook, blog, pictures and videos. Videos? That should be ‘machinima’, no?

Please take the ‘SL’ out of your domain name. Don’t see why it should be there!

Categories: Opinion, Rant, SL Web Resources
11 Comments »

Why do some SecondLife snapshots/photographs get over 2k of views on Flickr and some end up having only twelve? Are they really that bad? No! Just look at Phinn Boffin’s awesome picture ‘Angel‘. This awesome photograph has had only 31 views in more then four months time. Yes, the Flickr Universe is that injust! ;)

Flickr has invented a horrible punishment called ‘Not In Public Site Areas‘, or shortly put: NIPSA. They reckon we are uploading ‘not photos’, ’screenshots’ and that some of us are even uploading snapshots that are ‘inappropriate for public areas’ or that ‘display full frontall nudity’. Booohooo!
Anyway, if you’ve been NIPSA’d by Flickr, there is nothing that you can do about it except complain and sob. Complain doesn’t help, not even if you have a payed account. The effect of the NIPSA/ban will be that your Flickr contacts can still see your pictures, but they will not show up on the main site and in group pools if the person viewing the photographs is not a member of that Flickr group.
Flickr staff say they are working on a ‘content filtering’ system that is high priority, but no further information about how it will work or when it will go public is released.

But let’s assume Flickr still thinks you’re a nice person and did not NIPSA you. Then this are some things I’ve discovered increase the view rate:

• Naked Avie Flesh, preferable female. It didn’t come as a suprise to me that my two best ranking photographs contain uncovered breasts. Work well too: shiny, oiled skins and short skirts, huge minimally covered breasts and long legs.
• If there’s one group you need to submit your pictures to it’s the Second Life Flickr group. The latest pictures from this group’s pool are shown on SecondLife.com’s media page as well as on blog.secondlife.com. That is, if you are not NIPSA’d. Do post when the grid is down as then a lot of people seem turn to clicking those pictures to get their daily dose of SecondLife. Remember that as this group pool is shown on the official SL site, you can only post PG stuff!
• Close up action! Preferably an action that involves kissing and other foreplay stuff, hugging, posing really sexy, … . We are all curious about other people avies, what they do and how they feel. A photograph depecting a strong feeling of emotion, or that has an obvious sense of action in it will score better. It’s even better when the pictures is taken up close, as we are all voyeurist after all.
• Is this possible within SL?! Bright, saturated colors, strong shadows, reflections, twin avies and images that are clearly post-processed do well too. The say bloody shots work great too.
• Be original. Do not take photograph number 5658 that has the back of your avie in it, but hover your camera around, try some different angles, watch your composition. Take advantage of the fact that there are no limits as to where you place your camera in SL.
• Tag your snapshots. You have a hawt lady-avie in your photograph? Well, then tag them ‘beauty’ and ’sexy’ for instance. A nice beach scene? ’sunset’, ‘beach’ and ‘romantic’ will make great tags. This way the photographs will show up when people search for those tags. And we all know what’s searched for most on the internet - besides Paris Hilton, maybe. :d Consider adding a (relevant) description too. Search engines look at that too to ‘label’ the picture.
• Square Size 75×75 is the thumbnail format the pictures will show up in on SL’s official site. So pictures that still look interesting in that size are more likely to be clicked upon.

If you have knowledge I don’t have or totally disagree on this, feel free to comment.

This list is just about views. As for fav’s and comments I can only give you this advice: be nice, comment on other people’s pictures, join groups, take good shots, … . ;)

Categories: Flickr, Opinion, SL Web Resources
14 Comments »

Linden Dollars: we spend them, earn them, curse them, worship them, … but when you dream about L$, how do they look? Are they just another number in the upper right corner of your computer screen, close to the package loss? Or are they shiny and bedazzling?

My L$ look like this. Just imagine the giant, blinding ‘bling’ effect the L$ would have when you own lots of them! The SecondLife Dollar shines as no currency has ever done before! ;)

PS. This blogpost is not without irony.

Categories: Opinion, Photoshop, Second Life
6 Comments »

On the Belgian Second Life forum there is lately been a lot of commotion about the region ‘Vlaanderen’ (Flanders) and Belgian politics and politicians. The person behind all this is Jurgen Verstrepen, a member of the Flemish parliament and a former radio host. He has put down a huge villa with pool, dance club, radio studio, etc.

So what, you say? What’s all the fuzz about? The party he’s representing, the ‘Vlaams Belang’ has the name to be ‘leaning to the extreme right’ and a history - under their old name ‘Vlaams Blok’ - of being declared guilty of racism. So some Belgian Secondlifers are furious at the thought that with ‘Vlaanderen’ that mischievous party has found yet anther way to convert stupid but innocent souls. Other are disappointed at the fact that out of all political parties the Vlaams Belang is the first one to explore the possibilities of Second Life and yet other figure they should forbid first life politics in Second Life.

My opinion? The smart thing to do is to just ignore them. Don’t visit ‘Vlaanderen’ if you don’t like the idea behind it. Stop complaining. Do something constructive. Build something better. Start your own community. … . They are not even worth the L$ buying a nuke costs! ;)

But we all know that I’m not a girl who listens to her own good advice often, so curious about that giant evil place Vlaanderen is said to be, I figured I’d check it out myself. I went into my inventory, put on my pink camo clothes and TP’ed over.

It was rather disappointing that there wasn’t a single person there. Thus no way to verify if the ’say a wrong thing and you get banned from Vlaanderen’-story is correct and also nobody to see the though pink camo outfit. So I slipped into something more comfortable. ;)

Soon I found Jurgen’s desk. Curious about what file cases he’s working on as a representative or as a talk show host, I decided to take a look at his documents.
Strangely enough the file on the desk was totally empty and so were the desk’s drawers. No documents to be found.
Stupid me always thought parliamentarians are just ordinary people like us but surrounded by tons and tons and tons of documents. My mistake. :D

Disappointed that I didn’t discover anything yet, I walked along until my digital eyes noticed a sign saying ‘tentoonstelling’ (exhibition).
Hmmm. Art. Perfectly lined up and beautiful looking prims? Hawt photoshop stuff?
Nah, forget about that: a lot of pictures with Jurgen’s head on it and some text. Interesting? No! Megalomania? Yes! Kings ordering their portrait to be painted, wasn’t that done mostly during the middle ages?

Things started to get a bit more interesting when I went into his bedroom. ‘Sit’ is still the best picklock to be found in the whole of Second Life and ’sit’ made me end up in his bed.

Jurgen’s the bed: yet another disappointment. No Jurgen there and no animations besides just ’sleep’. I guess he hasn’t explored all of Second Life’s possibilities yet.

// Mr. Morreau/avatar Qualibre Green pointed out to me that it’s actually his bed I found pretty boring, not Jurgen’s. I quote: ‘… is owned by qualibre Greene (sl) and the bed is he’s playtoy.’ Now, does anybody know which bed is Jurgen’s? :D //

Then what does he do in the bed?

Aha! Magazines! Pr0n? A guide to create the perfect Arian looking avatar?

Nope. Some Russian literature on Linux and the Spanish ‘Confort’ magazine. Well, at least he knows his languages.

At that moment LindenLab issued out a warning that they’d close the grid in 10 minutes. Aargh! Did they find out about my espionage activities? Are they trying to boycott me?

I’ll just take a quick peek in the club and then I’m out of here. In the bar I found lot’s and lot’s of booze, some good looking furniture, a dance ball with only one animation and a couple of nice sitting poses.

I do think Jurgen should reprimand his cleaning staff, as there was also a left over empty can of Heineken.
Dutch beer! Has he sold out? Is there already a secret contract between him and the Dutch governement that Flanders will become a Dutch vassal state?

Unluckily just when I wanted to take a closer look at the empty can of beer to search for finger prints, LindenLabs closed down the main grid and thus also closed down my top secret investigation.

The conclusion of this state of the art espionage work? ‘Vlaanderen’ is far from 3v1l and dangerous, but also far from interesting.

Some more (serious) information about ‘Vlaanderen’ can be found in Politiek op Second Life? (Dutch).

Categories: Belgian, Exploring, Opinion
7 Comments »

One day or another, everybody needs a blog post like this. It could be very well possible that there is already a way to do these things, but I didn’t figure out how yet. Do tell me if that’s the case. ;)

1. The ability to highlight keywords in main chat. With good old mIRC there was the possibility to let certain words be highlighted and to get a sound notification when they were used in main/room chat. For instance, if I highlight ‘Vint’ and somebody mentions my name in the general chat, it would be in sparkling red so I don’t miss it, like I usually do. :D
2. A ‘mark as unseen’ option for objects, notecards, landmarks, … you receive. When you receive something, you have the option to keep or discard. I would add a checkbox in that panel that lets you mark these objects as ‘unseen at’. In your inventory next to the objects the same checkbox option would be available. That way you can easily mark the things you need to take a look at later, when you have more time. A simple ’show only unseen items’ option in the inventory would show you all of them. I know I can go into my inventory after receiving them and put them in a separate folder, but that’s just to much trouble. Please implement, so I won’t have any unpacked new clothes that I forget to wear in my inventory!
3. A ‘Warning! Laggy!’ before TP. I realize officially, there’s probably no such things as ‘lag’. But sometimes, on *coughs* rather rare *coughs* occasions, it does happen. It would be great if the client could somehow warn you before teleporting to extreme busy places with huge tons of lag. “The place you want to visit is rather crowed and doesn’t run completely up to speed, do you still want to go?”
4. Download / Upload figures. When checked, it shows you your Second Life data traffic in the SL taskbar. How much bytes kilobytes megabiytes gigabytes have you already downloaded and uploaded in total, in this session and the average per hour estimated if you look at the data traffic of the last 10 minutes. I know I can easily monitor that outside the client. If the SL client wasn’t that egocentric to eat the whole of my CPU and RAM on it’s own and would leave some for other programs, I’d probably do so.
5. Give me the possibility to offer a non-friend a TP back! You don’t offer friendship to every hitchhiker you take along, do you? Or to every handyman that comes to your house to do some chores?

Categories: Opinion, Rant, Second Life, Vint Falken
6 Comments »

Unfortunately, she has serious personality issues. As you could see, I stripped out about 98 percent of the text, along with the links to her site. Next possible step is deleting this post altogether.
Cheri Horton

Ow, no! I must be evil. Does someone know of a good Second Life psychotherapist?

Cheri, like I said before, I do did not want to pick a fight, and if you hadn’t overreacted in the first place, this post would have been about last night’s shopping spree and Mardi Gras beads. I doubt if I respond at - what used to be - my Photo Friday Finish you would leave the comment, although you’re rather willing to insult me there and on my own blog.

I’m not going to accuse you of having personality issues. I do think your reaction is rather childish and unprofessional. I did send you an email which you chose not to respond to. We could have had this discussion by mail in stead of out in the open.

You say I should be grateful for the exposure? Well, I did not ask for you to blog about my photographs. Your Second Life PixelPulse is a commercial blog/magazine that sells adspace. Did you ever consider sending me an email to ask me if I was OK with a nude me featured on PixelPulse’s front page? No. I just had to figure it out by the trackbacks and the comments on my photographs on Flickr. Well, I figured you would have to find out about the spelling mistake the hard way too.

Talking about trackbacks and comments linking back to your magazine/flickr stream, you leave them on my tutorial posts and photographs, but your site does not accept trackbacks. Doesn’t seem very fair to me. If you don’t accept trackbacks, don’t send them out either. This way it’s just link-whoring. (Before you overreact again, I’m not calling you an escort, just a link-whore!)

About taking down the photographs screenshots and the blogpost: I did never and shall never delete / change a blogpost, except if I made a flagrant mistake in the information I was providing. Not even if you would have asked to take them down. Which you didn’t. View rates on the two screenshots are 76 and 44 views so I hardly think the whole of Second Life knows you spelled my name wrong.

As for marking spelling mistakes in red, it’s not utterly tasteless, it’s just common practice in Belgium. I don’t remember if I ever accused my teachers that handed me back my papers with lots of red upon them of having personality issues. Probably I did.

I never did send someone into orbit. I try to help out if people have questions. I don’t laugh at people who don’t have a decent skin and I tend to be honest about what I think. Am I really such a horrible creature Avie?!

But look at it on the bright side: even bad exposure is exposure. So may I kindly ask you to link the ‘personality issues’ in your comment to vintfalken.com? :D

Tags: cheri horton, vint falken
Categories: Opinion, Second Life, Vint Falken
8 Comments »

Today I started a quest finding out where our Second Life avatars can meet, if not in-world. There seem to be a lot of possibilities, especially if I count the services that were originally meant for first life people, but who are now also used by SL avatars. Each of them have their pro’s and there con’s, although some have a lot more con’s then pro’s.

If there are any other Second Life oriented Networking Sites that you know of and I don’t: pretty please, let me know. I’ll try to keep this overview up to date.

Make your pick:

Second Life Profiles: slprofiles.com (my profile there)

Second Life Profile titles itself ‘The fastest growing second life community’ and resembles MySpace a lot. What is most unique to this social networking site, is that it gives you a lot of options as it comes to sharing your first life information too. Not something I’m willing to do, but some of my fellow avatars seem very willing at that.

SLProfiles has expanded functionality as it comes to Second Life snapshots and First Life photographs and some blogging options too. For adding friends, commenting on profiles and the abilities to pimp your profile, they copycatted MySpace. That’s not really a drawback, as most people are used to the MySpace interface, so SLProfiles is easy to use for them.

When signing up, SLProfiles tells me I can later on add multiple Second Life accounts to my profile. Until now I haven’t found out how to do that. Not that I have multiple accounts, but for some this could be handy. As I don’t want to post stupid questions in their forums, I decided to read their FAQ, only to find that they don’t have any. Hmmm. Serious drawback!

• (-) Limited search functionality. (Users / 1sth Life Name / 2nd Life Name)
• (+) The ability to mail your snapshots directly to SLprofiles.
• (+) Blog functionality.
• (+) Event calendar where events can be added by the users.
• (+) The ability to rate user’s 1st and 2nd life pictures.
• (+) Second Life jobs with job offers.
• (+) Pimp your profile.
• (+) The Mini Profile option: you profile and profile pictures are automatically (and decently!) resized to fit the Second Life browser.
• (+) SL Gadget v1.9 that connects you to your SLprofiles account even if you are in-world. (The bookmark function is handy too.)
• (+) Unlimited(?) amount of photographs you can upload and the shots you upload are divided into 1st life/2th life. En plus you can create separate photo albums.
• (-) No FAQ file to be found!!! (When googling SLprofiles.com I only found a FAQ specifically about the usage of their forums.)

No user statistics to be found, but I am able to see all member profiles in search. That gives me 42 pages with 30 profiles/page, which makes 1260 members. If we assume you should have changed your profile at least once in the last 2 months to be counted as an active member, 1080 of them are active members.

Second Life Network - A place for AVies! : SecondLifeNetwork.com (my profile there)

SecondLifeNetwork.com is also an obvious MySpace clone, but with some great extra features. The most important one is that you need to activate your account by clicking an in-world box, so there’s no possibility to falsely claim someone else’s avatar.

There seems to be a lot to do around dating on this site. There are many options to be chosen from as it comes to your dating status: Do me now!, Confused, Hurt, Horny and ready, Desperate, Divorced, In love, … As I wasn’t sure if they mean my 1st or 2nd life dating status, I decided to go with ‘Unfaitful’. Also in the search functions, we see all the search options we normally see on first life dating sites: Sex, Dating Status, Smoke, Drink, Location, Occupation, Religion, State, ZipCode, City and keywords. So if your 2nd life avatar hasn’t found the love of it’s life yet, and you have trouble meeting that right one in-world, maybe secondlifenetwork.com isn’t a bad place to start looking. ;)

Again I search for a FAQ or something that tells me more about the possibilities on this second life social networking site, but - just as with SLProfiles.com - I can’t find any. Pressing ‘Help’ only brings up an overview of tags you can use on the site. This is getting frustrating.

My account type says ’standard’, but checking the FAQ for what the other options are, is no option. :d

• (-) No FAQ!
• (+) Good profile search functionality.
• (+) You need to register your avatar with secondlifenetworks.com in-world.
• (+) Picture functionality, although less then SLProfiles.com. Unlimited picture space, but max. 300kb and only accepts .jpg and .gif files. (Does allow converting to .bmp.)
• (+) Blog functionality
• (+) Pimp your profile.
• (+) Picture rating and battle system. Especially the battle system is original.
• (-) No ability to mail snapshots directly to secondlifenetworks.com
• (+) Event calendar.

Members: 133 pages with 12 members/page makes 1596 members.
Active members: I shall look into that later, the site’s a bit slow at the moment.

Flickr : flickr.com (my account there)

Most people that frequent the world wide web already know about Flickr. It’s a photo sharing site that allows you to easily share pictures with friends, groups and makes it easy to comment upon them. Now more and more Secondlivers start to use Flickr’s services too. Some of them with a paid for account, a whole lot of others are using a free account. The drawbacks of a free account are that only the latest 200 pictures you have posted are visible to others and that you have a monthly upload limit.

Lately Flickr is tagging all Second Life residents’ accounts (be it a paid or free account) as NIPSA (Not In Public Site Areas) because they look at Second Life snapshots as just ordinary screenshots. The drawbacks of that are that they don’t show up in group pools, in tag-search or on secondlife.com’s media page.

In an email CodeBastard RedGrave tells me she thinks it’s time someone starts a SecondLife Flickr clone, but I’d rather see Flickr looking at our avatars as real people too (especially if we pay for the account!) and starting to accept our snapshots as real photographs, or Flickr giving us our own SecondLife subdivision. They should realize that most of us spend real world money converted to Linden Dollars in-world, so we have credit cards and are willing to pay 25USD/year for a decent snapshot photo hosting service.

Despite this handicap, a steady Second Life community is developing on Flickr and groups like SecondLife, SecondLife [Mature] and Flickrites of Second Life are building a steady base of active members. I assume there must be a TeenGrid group too.

You can upload your snapshots directly from Second Life to your Flickr account by using the ’send a snapshot’ option. That and they have an impressive detailed FAQ. ;)

• (-) The focus is mainly on photographs, not on the person behind the photograph. (Which figures, as they are a photo hosting site after all. ;))
• (-) Limited profile editing options
• (-) Second Life snapshots are regarded ‘NIPSA’
• (+) Great photo functionality
• (+) Works well together with Wordpress and other blogging CMS and blogging services.
• (+) It’s possible to mail snapshots directly to you Flickr account.
• (-) Limited search function as it comes to persons.
• (+) Advanced search function for photographs using the photograph’s tags. (If you ignore the NIPSA-idiocy.)
• (——————————————) NIPSA

Numbers for the Second Life group:
Members: 1068
Total photographs: 16916
Total non-NIPSA-tagged photographs: 6724

Despite the stupid-NIPSA rules, I think Flickr has great things to offer to Secondlivers. You can for instance use a group to collect all the party pictures of a club (let’s call it the Paradise Lost) in one pool, despite which member took it. All the members just need to send their pictures to that pool. Example given: group Paradise Lost Club on Flickr. ;)

Second Life Universe / Snapzilla : SLUnivers.com/pics/ (my profile there)

Snapzilla is trying to be the Second Life’s Flickr. They are doing a good job at that, but not a great. They must realize that as they allow you to automatically send your snapshots to Flickr too, if you mail them to Snapzilla. But Snapzilla is still in beta faze - for how long is nowhere stated - so we’ll wait and see. It has some good potential, although I miss Flickr’s good looking and intuitive user interface, awesome group functionality and tagging system.

• (+) Just must send a snapshot from in-world to snapzilla to activate your account.
• (+) Mail snapshots directly to your Snapzilla and Flickr account using ’send a postcard’.
• (+/-) Pictures automatically become linked to the SIM they were taking in.
• …

A more decent review will follow when they realize that I did send that snapshot and that they don’t need to refer me to unlinked.aspx anymore. ;)

Just found out that they don’t allow you to upload snapshots that you saved to your hard drive first. Which makes me qualify them as non-interesting.

Snapzilla’s numbers:
Members: 2565 (1312 registered/linked)
Snapshots: 135 200

MySpace.com : MySpace.com (my profile there)

This is probably the most famous and most used first life social networking site. I don’t like it for first life, neither do I like it for Second Life. All the features it has - blogging, pimping your profile, adding photographs, adding video, etc. - won’t help me get over the fact that I have about 20 annoying ‘my band has a myspace profile and will now soon be rich and famous’ friend requests each day. Let alone the over-pimped profiles some have, the popularity contests ‘lookie, I have more friends then you do’, the stupid comments just to comment, etc.

Although I have an account of my own there, I strongly advise against using MySpace.com

Numbers: No way to find out which users are Second Life avatars and which users aren’t.

CherryTAP : CherryTAP.com

Someone suggested this, as it has a lot of users too. Well, beside that it’s just like MySpace but worse, they succeeded at tagging my profile photograph NSFW. So f*ck you, CherryTAP!

Local Second Life Fora/Forums

Mostly found at www dot SLforum dot ‘country extension’.

Examples: SLforum.be, SLforum.nl, SLforum.de, …

I don’t know who’s responsible for those local communities, but I can’t find any adds, so I assume it’s either a local Second Life adept, or local Linden folks. Each country/community differs in looks, functionality, … .

I think it can be interesting if you life in a country that has a thriving Second Life community. I shall be wise and not comment upon mine. :d

Tags: flickr, links, web resources
Categories: Opinion, Second Life
2 Comments »