Jupiter Rowland @JupiterRowland

Where did you find that dress, or did you texture it?

First of all, thanks for making this group no longer a one-man show.

Then I like the twist about this outfit: The jeans are good old-fashioned layer clothes, but it's next to impossible to tell with the pullover and the overknee boots.

200 friends? That's probably 10 or maybe 15 people in real life. [/Sarcasm]

Most young people have never even heard of SL. Most of those who have believe what mass media imply, namely that SL was shut down around 2008/2009. The rest believes that the concept of virtual worlds as well as the term "Metaverse" have been invented by Mark Zuckerberg, just like Zuckerberg has allegedly invented the concept of social networks, Apple has invented the smartphone, and Microsoft has invented the graphical user interface or the operating system while we're at it.

Besides, something that's free and open-source is uncool and something for pimply nerds with no life, something that doesn't require level-grinding is boring, and young gamers would never touch anything that doesn't run the latest, greatest high-end graphics engine.

I guess her main problem is that she came to OpenSim and expected "Second Life, but everything is for free". And now she tries hard to force OpenSim into being what she imagined, mostly by complaining.

It's a bit like those people who switch from Windows to Linux in expectation of a free-of-charge operating system which otherwise is identical to Windows, and who then demand everything that sets Linux apart from Windows, except for being free-as-in-free-beer and much safer from malware, be changed to the way Windows does it.

Funny how SL and OpenSim could do bottomless avatars long before Zuckerberg declared them a feature. Only that we can turn that back off.

Right. The last thing we need here are youngsters with next to zero experience in life who try their hardest to push forward all their ideas of "political correctness" to their full extents all over the Hypergrid, regardless of how practical or sensible these ideas are or whether or not they even contradict each other. Then again, their "cancel culture" may lead to them running a handful of grids of their own which are pretty much isolated from the rest of the Hypergrid because they've banned all other grids inbound and outbound.

Those who aren't snowflakes aren't interested in OpenSim at all. Not only is it too old and too old-fashioned-looking because it doesn't run on the latest, greatest, hottest video game graphics engine du jour, but it's boring. No missions, no quests, no opponents to beat, no power levels to grid and then brag about. Oh, and you can't buy OpenSim on Steam, and they don't know how else to install a computer game.

She keeps quoting and quoting that number as if it was a fact. To her it is one. It has sprung from her imagination, but she trusts her own imagination more than any official figures you may show her.

SL does have a freebie scene, but certainly not a big one. And that's for two reasons which can be illustrated by two historical examples:

Linda Kellie (yes, that Linda Kellie) was mobbed out of SL in 2007 by commercial creators. The reason: She offered full-perm freebies in direct competition with payware. And the payware in question wasn't that much better than what Linda offered, so people simply went where it was the cheapest.

Arcadia Asylum was banned by Linden Lab in 2008 for not playing along with SL's rampant capitalism by offering her creations for free and full-perm, thereby not paying sales taxes to Linden Lab. Her creations spreading across the grid caused costs nonetheless, so I guess Linden Lab lost money with her. At least one or several of her later identities (Lora Lemon, Aley Arai, Aley Resident) were banned for the same reason. The commercial creators probably only left her alone because her products were rather "special interest" and covering themes that no-one else dared to touch.

A major trick for the head is to pull the mouth closer to the nose and then lift the chin. Makes a huge difference.

It'd be funny if it wasn't that sad. "Child avatar = paedo. Always." Or so many think. This community is so ridiculously easy to trigger.

Then there are those who "know for certain" that in OpenSim the only difference between the Adult rating and the other ratings is that child avatars aren't allowed on Adult-rated sims, otherwise it's as G or PG-rated as everything else. In combination, I expect people soon to accuse all sims that aren't Adult-rated of being paedo hives due to not banning child avatars by rating.

By the way: Kodama avatar. When?

Yes, the idea was to have free and open-source mesh bodies to use as parts of starter avatars.

Ruth (the plain, no-attachment starter avatar in the painted-on lavender shirt and the painted-on red trousers) was just plain ugly, and so was Roth (the same avatar if you switch it to male). Every last alternative was stolen from SL and therefore illegal. At least some grids flat-out refused to offer starter avatars with illegal content, but pretty much all they could resort to was the system body + Linda Kellie.

So Ruth 2.0 was created in 2017 by Shin Ingen, Ada Radius et al. with the intention to have a new "standard" female mesh body for OpenSim. Roth 2.0 followed suit in 2018. Both never saw a proper release; Ruth 2.0 was stuck as the release candidate RC#3, and Roth 2.0 made it to RC#1 before the project was largely abandoned.

RuthToo RC#3 and RothToo RC#1 are forks by Sean Heavy who gave them a number of improvements, but rendered them halfway incompatible to what few clothes had been made for Ruth 2.0 and Roth 2.0 up until this point.

LuvMyBod is a RuthToo RC#3 fork by Hyacinth Jewell that came to exist because neither Ruth 2.0 nor RuthToo was "chunky" enough for Hyacinth's tastes and requirements. Ruth 2.0 in particular is a rather slim body with a small waist and a small butt. LuvMyBod is the closest to an "hourglass" variant that we have without being as exaggerated as Decadence-HG. LuvMyBod has since been discontinued and replaced with a BoM successor named Diana.

Ruth2 v4 and Roth2 v2 aren't forks, they're official continuations, now headed by Ai Austin. He and the old RuthAndRoth team also decided to declare the old bodies final releases and rename them Ruth2 v3 and Roth2 v1 to allow for proper version numbers. However, they aren't just the old bodies with BoM glued on. Ada Radius has thoroughly remodelled both, unfortunately breaking compatibility again, partly because the whole rigging was reworked to make the bodies resemble actual humans with muscles underneath their skins rather than showroom dummies.

Oh, and if you take a look at the Github repositories (https://github.com/RuthAndRoth), you'll notice that Ada has started working on Ruth2 v4.1. I think now would be a good time to send in some bug reports to tell her what, if anything, is wrong with the bodies.

I've said it many times before: "OpenSim should be free" and "Never buy in OpenSim" are propaganda. They originally came from those circles who mass-copybotted in SL and flooded the Hypergrid with illegal content. They saw both commercial creators and freebie creators as competition that had to be destroyed so that they'd soon have an absolute monopoly on all content with their stolen SL stuff.

In order to get rid of commercial creators, they created the slogan "Never buy in OpenSim" to rise as many OpenSim users up against commercial creators as possible; ironically, the corresponding neon signs are original OpenSim creations and therefore legal.

As for freebie creators, their M.O. against these was limited to anti-Linda Kellie hatespeech, probably because they themselves didn't know any other freebie creators in OpenSim.

Trouble is, I can re-iterate this as often as I want, but the most common reaction upon this is probably, "So this slogan came from the same people who gave me Athena and all those sweet, sweet clothes for that body? Not to mention my huge mesh mansion? Kewl!"

By the way, it's interesting how license culture changed for original creations in OpenSim.

In the early days, everyone held on to their creations as if their lives depended on it, everything was copyrighted and "all rights reserved" and so on, and nobody shared anything because everyone was afraid of content theft.

Then came Linda Kellie, she covered just about everything people needed or could need with her creations, she offered them to the community for free, and she put them all under Creative Commons CC0 to make clear that everyone could re-use and modify them.

Years later, Creative Commons and copyleft licenses have become standards for original freebies. However, it isn't all CC0 nowadays; many creations are licensed CC-BY-NC to keep others from making money with them, and be it in SL. All you have to do to comply with this license is credit the original creator which happens automatically unless you decide to god-mode your own name into the creator entry and refrain from selling the item in question for money. But if you take it to SL, declare yourself the original creator and sell it for L$, that's a clear enough license violation that Linden Lab can and will go against it.

This goes both ways, of course. Where there's no defined license, copyright and "all rights reserved" has to be assumed, especially in the case of payware, and I guess many creators in SL explicitly put their creations under copyright. Sure, there is such a thing as fair use. But you can't go and bot Maitreya blind, put all the boxes up in a store in SL (!) for free and try to get away with it with, "It's free-of-charge, so it's fair use!"

And the only reason why it's easy to get away with it in OpenSim is because we don't have a Linden Lab that goes after license violations, and especially the mass-copybotted content from the 2010s has spread too far to realistically combat it with legal means. Each affected SL creator would have to DMCA each grid separately, one by one.

But I wouldn't count on nothing ever happening. I still remember a short-lived German grid that was run under the assumption of "they won't catch me anyway" with absolutely no regards to laws. I think it actually went as far as stealing website content from other grids. It did include a "freebie store" labelled as such where not only nothing was legal, but everything was offered for money. OS-$ Monopoly money which could be replenished by asking the grid owner for more, but still money. And then the grid owner had the audacity to steal new content from SL, offer it in this "freebie store" largely unmodified (except for the grid owner implying to be the creator) and demand money for it. I wouldn't wonder if the grid was so short-lived because Linden Lab plus at least one original creator forced it into closure under the threat of a lawsuit.

Also, remember there was an actual legal threat looming over at least one grid back in 2015 due to copybotted content. This ended up triggering a panic amongst many freebie store owners who threw everything out of their stores of which they weren't absolutely certain that it was legal and replaced it with Linda Kellie stuff mostly dating back to 2007/2008, the only things they knew for certain were legal. They simply didn't want their home grids or the owners of the sims where they had parcels to shut them down to keep the entire grid from going down.

Shameless plu-, I mean, PSA: I'm surprised to see that you as a Ruth2 and Roth2 user haven't joined my Ruth and Roth group yet. (https://opensimworld.com/groups/1014/members) As a benefit, you'll get tips & tricks, freebie shopping advice and lots of pictures of Juno (and a few of myself) plus the opportunity to share your own ideas and experiences.

Also, Ruth2 v4 and Roth2 v2 don't need detailled alpha HUDs because they can use alpha masks.

I could do a check-up and make a list of what doesn't work.

And wasn't the mesh of the shirt originally made by Damien Fate? Looks like one of his T-shirts.

By the way, if you've got an Athena 6 body, you can make alpha masks work fairly easily. I've posted instructions here: https://opensimworld.com/post/84164

That's because the masses brainwashed by the copybotting mafia say that not only there's no place for commercial creators in OpenSim, but there's no need for them due to the boatloads of copybotted stuff from SL. For the same reason, many of the same people demand the Hypergrid be purged of any and all legal freebies because they're all "crappy" in comparison to the copybotted SL payware.

Seriously, OpenSim users would pirate entire sims if that was possible, and if some content mafia brainwashed them into believing that's the right way to go. And then they'd attack all those grids who charge money for land.

And what comes next?

All legal freebies made in OpenSim = "Linda Kellie crap" that needs to be purged?

Support for legal content made in OpenSim = "drama" that needs to be purged, too?

Slightly wrong topic.

This isn't about whether or not charging money for content is justified. This is about someone looking for legal content, preferably made in OpenSim for OpenSim. Regardless of whether it's payware or freebies. Anything, as long as it isn't stolen from SL.

And no, stolen SL content is NOT the only alternative to payware.