Jupiter Rowland @JupiterRowland

Aaack Aardvark's Arcadia Shop has a Cthulhu plushie, if that's something for you.

https://opensimworld.com/hop/86546
https://opensimworld.com/post/85835

With a side of arcane symbols, of course.

This is not only about what Patch Linden has allegedly done. This is about the existence of sexual ageplay in Second Life itself which has been spoken about outside the SL bubble for the first time.

SL users are now ramping up their fight against sexual ageplay, also because Linden Lab obviously doesn't do jack against it.

OpenSim users feel like they have to do the same, also because there's no Linden Lab ruling over and overseeing all of OpenSim which is entirely governed by its own community. It's up to them and only them to combat sexual ageplay because they can't ask anyone else to do that for them.

This, in turn, will lead to a whole lot more collateral damage of which many more will claim it isn't collateral in the first place.

Child avatars will be more and more suspicious and banned from more and more places.

The Adult rating will be re-defined as "G-rated, but no child avatars allowed" more and more to the point that especially newbies will think this definition is official and end up deeply disturbed when they come across naked avatars on Adult sims.

Also, the criteria of what makes an avatar "underage-looking", which are ridiculous already now in the long-standing anti-ageplay paranoia, will be raised. I mean, sim owners already kick and ban avatars not only for being under 1.70m, but for having freckles or too small boobs or for wearing the wrong hairstyle, too brightly coloured clothes or too much pink without being a Jessica Biatchi look-alike. Many more sim owners will do this, they'll raise the minimum avatar height regardless of looks otherwise, and they'll add more criteria on top. I expect 6" heels and an even larger minimum breast size to become mandatory for female avatars in the near future as well as a deep suntan for both sexes.

Unfortunately, unless sim owners use a completely warped definition of what's "underage-looking" and what isn't. Already now, female avatars are considered underage if they wear too bright colours, or if they've got freckles, probably even if they're wearing flat sneakers instead of the usual 6' spike heels.

I've just been told to recommend you to ask Victor Clary or Samira Samtanko in Dereos.

I was tempted to say it's a custom build by and for Dereos, but if these things exist in other grids as well...

I think I should come over and check if I've got any Selea Core content that you haven't yet.

There's a shop named Costume Rental at Needful Things in Pangea. The door is at ca. 77/73, that's in the western half of the first parallel street to where you land. Use the teleporter to go one floor up. There's a box with five textures which seem to be original Cornflakes textures; one is a double (2 and 4 are the same). I've used the same textures for my furniture.

There are simply terribly intolerant people in OpenSim who claim the exclusive privilege for themselves to decide who and what may exist in OpenSim and who and what must not.

If they don't like someone or something, no matter why, they pull all stops they can to rid OpenSim of them or it once and for all with the most extreme prejudice. Attacking every last post or comment of a user on OSW, manipulation or destruction of websites, manipulation or destruction of grids, DDoS attacks, infiltration of grids and circles of friends, lies and slander, even psychological terror all the way to bluntly trying to drive a person to suicide. And I'm not even making the latter up.

In this light, it's always nice to see users who, in spite of all their enemies' on-going attempts at destroying them, don't back down and carry on.

It's one thing to drop one or several of those typical fast-food restaurants on your sim.

It's another to make them usable instead of leaving them as mere decorational props.

The hoopiest place in the Hypergrid. I hope there'll be an event on Towel Day.

Now I'm waiting for the first to take one of these to a race track.

Have you even read the sim description?

Dismayland is not Lbsa Plaza and doesn't want to be Lbsa Plaza. Spax Orion banned avatars wearing mesh ABSOLUTELY DELIBERATELY with the VERY INTENTION to make their travels unpleasant. This is a DESIGN FEATURE. All the way to the perma-ban if you do try to enter the sim wearing mesh.

Complaining that you can't go to Dismayland with a mesh avatar is like complaining that Savvy or Wright Plaza doesn't offer the newest, hottest Legacy stuff or that people go naked at Stark.

This could have two reasons.

One, you can't DMCA OpenSim as a whole in one go. You'd have to DMCA everyone who spreads your stolen stuff individually. Since you can't do that, you'd have to DMCA the grids. And OpenSim has got thousands of these, only a dozen or two of which are either idealistic enough to keep illegal content out or have spent at least the last 10 years under a rock. Have fun filing over 3,000 DMCA claims.

Two, probably even more importantly, you have to prove that you've created what has been stolen from you, otherwise anyone could claim something was stolen from them.

There were actual DMCA threats looming over OpenSim in 2015, causing loads of freebie store owners to rip out everything they offered and replaced it with Linda Kellie, just to keep their stores open while keeping the grids they were on from being shut down by the authorities. But the most we actually got was an open letter from Maitreya whose entire in-world shop was circulating in OpenSim as full-perm freebies back then. Some food for thought.

And Gloebit has to happen to be online, of course.

Always nice to see sims whose builders don't shy away from building believable and usable beaches the natural way.

The only thing I can think of that's missing here is swim rezzers. I think I should come over and bring you one.

So you have "creators" in OpenSim who whine about freebie store owners god-moding their "creations" and hanging them up in their own stores full-perm.

Only that these "creators" themselves have god-moded post-2019 Sacrarium boutique content, renamed it and replaced the box art.

The Sacrarium "creators", in turn, have illegally exported that content from Second Life. Regardless of how they've acquired it there in the first place.

And the Second Life "creators" have either exploited art students or broken the license of free 3-D downloads. AFAIK, some have even stolen their "creations" from other SL users.

The hilarity.

"The Permission code has changed on a few occasions in core also so how a permission was supposed to be is not always how it winds up."

The best example for this would be that boxes inherit certain permission restrictions from their contents now. A while ago, a full-perm box was always actually full-perm, regardless of the permissions of its contents. This is no longer the case. And so you have lots of sales boxes in older stores that are supposed to be copied but can't be because the permissions of the contents are too limited. Shop owners have to go around and fix loads of boxes and their contents, and they often don't even know they have to.

"On the God Mode again, Grids come and go like clockwork. If I as the owner of the Arielle avatar purchase something from a creator, the license is to the living entity behind Arielle. Since Arielle is on multiple grids, I use the content I have purchased for her where she has an account. Should one of the grids she has an account on close up then I feel I have a right to transfer that content to her on another grid as I own the license, not Arielle as she is just my visual representative."

If OpenSim development had enough capacity, I'd suggest a new feature, namely linking avatars together to one identity. The most basic variant of this would allow you to transfer no-transfer content to your alts. The most advanced one would sync the inventories, at least optionally except for friends and groups. Both cases would also exclude no-export content.

If payware looks like from pre-mesh times, it usually is from pre-mesh times. Put into commercial stores in the early days of Kitely or DigiWorldz when that stuff was still fairly state-of-the-art, and the only competition was the first wave of Linda Kellie creations from 2007/2008.

In most cases, these creators haven't logged into OpenSim in a decade, probably not even into SL, so that they don't even know that their stuff is hopelessly outdated now. They may even have forgotten that they've still got a shop or a whole sim in OpenSim with items for sale, especially if they don't have to pay rent. Bonus points if even the shopping sim owner hasn't logged in in years, so nobody has ever taken into consideration clearing that shop.

If some of them are still active, they should really do a reality check. First, premium mesh clothes in SL are cheaper in real-life money than their layer-and-prim creations. Second, these premium mesh clothes are available in OpenSim for free.

Lastly, yes, there are still a few OpenSim users who refuse to use any mesh. But they've still got a lot of pre-mesh stuff to choose from. Yes, that stuff isn't easy to find, especially if it wasn't made by Linda Kellie. But all this pre-mesh payware isn't actually any easier to find.

Now, layer clothes do have their use since the arrival of BoM, particularly for anything skin-tight. Underwear, lingerie, hosiery, swimwear, latex... Legal BoM bodies like Ruth2 v4 or the BoM version of RuthToo RC#3 depend on them, and besides, they don't clip through anything you wear over them.

But still, you can get more of this for free than you'll probably ever need. Legally even. No need to spend money on it.

Lastly, I guess that many in-world payware vendors don't work anymore anyway because nobody has been around to reset their scripts since at least 2013.

There's no way one could ever make a living on selling stuff in OpenSim like some manage to make a living on selling stuff in Second Life.

First, in SL, you have to pay for just about everything anyway. Making it on only freebies is so difficult it's a challenge. In OpenSim, you can do just about everything without ever paying a penny.

Second, OpenSim has a whole lot fewer users than SL. Even if everyone had money, and everything cost money, you wouldn't make nearly as much.

Third, of these users, only a tiny fraction has in-world money to begin with. They're probably fewer than those who are fully convinced that "Never buy in OpenSim" is an official OpenSim slogan.

Fourth, you'd have to compete with professionally-produced, almost-industrial-grade, premium luxury content stolen from SL.

And fifth, even if you can pull that off quality-wise, someone will god-mode or out-right copybot your stuff and put it into their own freebie store free and no-transfer, renamed and declared their own original creation. And then someone else will god-mode that and offer it free and full-perm.

That said, sometimes god-mode is a blessing, especially for freebies whose creators are no longer around.

For example, something is wrong with a freebie, e.g. it's glow-in-the-dark full-bright because whoever made it had always set their viewer permanently to midday. But that someone hasn't logged in in forever or doesn't respond otherwise or takes any bug report as an ad-hominem attack. And that item is no-modify. Then you can throw it away and try to find an adequate replacement. Or you can god-mode it, turn full-bright off and have something actually useful.

Or you want or have to move to another grid. Of course, you want to take your stuff with you. But some of it is no-transfer, it's very dear to you, and it isn't available anymore anywhere because the only shop that offered it has disappeared. You can either leave it behind and carry on without ever being able to use it again. Or you can god-mode it, make it full-perm for personal use and share it with your new avatar.

Or something is actually supposed to be full-perm, maybe even as per the license notecard inside the item or the sales box. But there's only one shop left offering it. And the owner of that shop decided to make all items in that shop no-transfer so that nobody could build a competing freebie sim from items from this shop. So this item is only available no-transfer although it should be full-perm. Again, you have the choice: Either leave it as it is and watch it vanish when that shop disappears. Or god-mode it back to full-perm and share it.

I've actually thought about which grids would be the best for complete newbies as opposed to SL converts. SL converts are easy to handle. All they need in the beginning is a grid with a not-too-convoluted freebie sim chock-full of SL stuff where they can get things for their avatars before they even learn how to Hypergrid.

But on-boarding complete newbies is difficult, especially in comparison with SL. From the top of my head, I only know two grids with landing sims that have instruction panels for newbies while most other grids are geared towards either experienced SL users or people from other OpenSim grids, if they even let new avatars in, that is.

OSgrid has a nifty sim that was made for newbies to walk through and learn the ropes. It's still online, but it's no longer the place where new avatars rez for the first time, and it isn't even listed on OSW. Instead, new avatars land in the middle of Lbsa Plaza.

Lbsa Plaza does have these panels, too. But new avatars don't land right in front of them. In fact, they can't even see them clearly enough from where they're standing. And if you even need instructions on how to make your avatar walk, then having to walk to get to these instructions is dumb.

Also, yes, Lbsa Plaza always has a bunch of avatars around the landing point. But I dare say that the avatars at SL landing sims who aren't tagged as mentors are more informative and helpful than who you usually come across at Lbsa Plaza.

The other grid with a useful place for newbies is 3rd Rock Grid. It has a large building with a newbie course to the right and an avatar freebies section with quite a bit of exclusive stuff to the left, so you can theoretically gear up your avatar right after learning the ropes.

However, it does not give an impression of being the place where new avatars land. And if they have to teleport there manually, it's useless as a newbie starting ground. Besides, I don't know how active 3rd Rock Grid's staff is, just in case someone has a question.

By the way, another topic worth thinking and talking about is what to offer complete newbies for their avatars. Classic layer clothes on the system body are easier to handle, but so outdated that you can be lucky if people only pity you. Mesh from SL looks better, but it has a steep learning curve unless it comes in the shape of complete avatars, pre-alpha'd mesh body and all.