The way I was blogging and posting to Mastodon from my profile feed for #SecondLife has some display problems; I think I was inadvertently duplicating content when I copied some links without editing them enough.
This post should have just one image, although there is a “featured image” specified as well.
My #SecondLife friend Cynthia Farshore was driving a cute Mardi Gras band along the route of the Caledon Mardi Gras parade and hit a bad sim crossing, derailing into a nearby lake. She frequently had to stop and reposition the train she was riding when there were tricky turns and crossings. I was “wearing” my vehicle and still had problems at crossings. Still, it was fun. Sorry, I didn’t get pictures of the dance party afterwards.
Visit This Location in Second Life (SLurl): Caledon Stormhold
The #SecondLife community of Caledon held their Mardi Gras parade and ball a week or so after the actual holiday. The parade followed a route that was set with fleurs-de-lys that was mostly along a scripted rail line (it’s community land, so the same music could be heard all along the way).
Naturally, people turned up with all sorts of transport. There were two elegant whales, a kilted centaur, and the Caledon Air Force was represented by someone who hovered in a steampunk helicopter at difficult sim crossings and tricky turns. The course was set to go by well-known builds across several builds, and there were some memorials set up here and there to remember those who the community has lost. We raised a virtual toast in their memory.
I had to chuckle when I saw the texture on the floor of the starting and ending points – I make a hat with that very texture plus others as it’s a texture-change type deal. (SL Marketplace link)
The Caledon Mardi Gras parade about to step, slither, or swim off. Nice kilt, Centaur!
Visit: Caledon Kittiwickshire
My fridge came with no-mod kitsch photos, so I covered them up with kitchen photos.
DFS often provides the ability to resize the no-mod tools so you can fit them into smaller or larger spaces as needed. But you can’t change textures, or colors. This cute retro fridge was a Mother’s Day special item that I bought used (actually it’s a freezer used for making frozen desserts, drinks, and ice). I didn’t pay too much attention to the image on the very small vendor prim before I bought it, or I might have passed on it.
It has very kitschy, kid-style drawings on it and a popsicle-stick daisy. I’m not into the family-RP lifestyle, so I covered it up with 2 linked prims (my ubiquitous mesh crate makes a handy picture frame). The snapshots are currently of my old greenhouse in Bruda and of a Mardi Gras float I danced on about 6 years ago. Problem solved, and the freezer fits neatly under my $L10 kitchen counter – which IS modifiable and has been retextured and torn apart to remove unecessary prims/bits of mesh).
Pardon any typos, RL spouse and I just got back from Best Buy, where I made an impulse buy of a new keyboard that was an open-box steal. It’s available from Amazon – to us it looked like Best Buy in our area is struggling, as the first store was permanently closed, and the second store had a lot of empty shelf space. I don’t recall if my Amazon affiliate still points at the American Diabetes Association or my church, so there may be a donation if you buy from that link.
Still getting used to the feel of this keyboard – the spacing for reaching the backspace key is slightly different from the Microsoft split ergo keyboard I used for years, but this is very quiet and smooth. I expect I’ll be blogging more of my SL activities as I speed up the typewrong… oh booger.
This entire region of “black kite” is a huge, literally immersive art installation. A well known #SecondLife content creator has a shop at the end of one of the jettys… the rest of the region has… adult interaction areas that are very artful, not at all private, and rather clever. And the music is nice.
A large version of this image may end up at Flickr later.
I used a Windlight setting called “Incongruent Truths” because it seemed to fit the setting.
black kite invites introspection. What is the meaning of my Second Life? Honestly, I just came here to check out 8f8’s store.Black Kite Visit location
It literally sorted itself out eventually. Most of the stuff showed up in the sorters that I put out, and some things sorted themselves back into the right folders. I was sweating there for a few hours, though.
Oops. I accidentally dumped my entire inventory of no-copy DFS objects into a scripted sorting prim; more than 1500 objects went in. For most of them, I had picked up the “target sortboxes” so I put them back out.
The #SecondLife #DigitalFarmingSystems game, or lifestyle, starts out with a simple “kit.” You start with a cow, a bull, 2 dirt fields, hay seed, tomato seed, and a water well.
The next thing you know, you’ve bought dozens of kinds of seeds, pigs, chickens, ducks, llamas, goats, gators, ostriches, 10 kinds of fruit trees, multiple kitchen tools and implements for processing what you produce, and hold at least 2 or 3 or MORE dozen fields of various kinds.
The DFS people work hard to bring out new products and new recipes, and they also produce “specialty” items each month that you pay extra for, in a kind of subscription box. The items can be re-sold, or used, and they come up with fun or kitschy seasonal items that can become collectibles.
There’s a lot of perceived social pressure to sell your stuff in markets, typically collections of stalls selling the same stuff for about the same price. Some landowners provide “community kitchens” with multiple sets of stoves, spinning wheels, carpentry desks, and other tools, so people can bring their produce and harvests to work on making batches of recipe items or final products.
Marketing your stuff to a community of people all trying to market THEIR stuff is pretty stressful, to me. You belong to multiple DFS-focused groups and several times a day, you make announcements, trying to sell your stuff. Other DFS owners run auction events, where people rent a spot to put their stuff out, sometimes grouped by theme or rarity, and other DFS players compete to buy the lots that catch their eye.
Every now and then, someone who’s reached a point where they’re tired of tending animals, watering fields, and pruning virtual plants announces that they’re shutting everything down and selling everything off. This can cause a kind of buying frenzy – people show up at a sky platform somewhere and descend like locusts. I’ve experienced this myself – but now I know what the prices SHOULD be and the “fire sale madness” doesn’t get me.
There are ways to check the “going rate” of things because one of the scripters that makes accessories for DFS – sales boxes and inventory systems – publishes the part names, prices, and locations where his subscribers are selling animals, tools, produce, and rare products. It’s very useful, but my own selling/inventory tool doesn’t provide this information as far as I can tell, so I’m at somewhat of a disadvantage in marketing my stuff.
I had taken 2 years off from Second Life, came back in to clear up my payment on file, and took right back up with the DFS stuff I had, because it was all still there, waiting to be watered and tended. All my “livestock” were safely hibernating in my Second Life inventory.
First I took out my “tiny coops” – basically immortal chickens that produce egg baskets but no meat. They can’t die but they do require feeding and care.
I had a huge backlog of ingredients and produce from before, and started “cooking it down” to the most concentrated forms, as there’s energy in the food and some products that you need to restore your “energy meter.” There’s a whole secondary market of “lunch boxes” that you fill up with food energy and with a set number of uses and maximum energy given. So my goal became to fill up my somewhat collectible 2 year old lunch boxes, and sell them at auction.
I’ve figured out which “core products” result in the highest amount of “EP” for the least amount of intermediary steps. I have lots of virtual beef, pork, lamb, chicken, and so on, and I’ve, yes, bought in to a Patreon support level where I don’t have to use my own energy to care for plants and animals – I just click a helper object. And I don’t have to run a big herd of bulls or sheep to produce fertilizer, I get more than enough compost for that. I also don’t have to run “windmills” or fill up water towers by pulling barrels of water from my well; I get plenty of barrels for my Patreon subscription.
Still, about a month in to my return to Second Life and virtual farming, I realized it was taking up all of my inworld time again – marketing to groups, updating my vendors, updating my vendor textures, etc. and I still wasn’t creating anything new of my own. So I joined a Blender study group and have been taking lessons and attending workshops, getting ready to update old products I created.
I “picked up” some of my fields and concentrated on the simple, core products that I liked growing and cooking with. I’m going to pick up more of my trees and plants that produce stuff that I don’t care to cook with, and I’m going to start selling them off. I stopped making marketing announcements in the groups. And yet I continue to pick up “bargains” so that I have multiple tools, because it’s more efficient to make animal food with 4 feed mills than with just one… because the kind of “cooking” that I like to do is simple and relaxing.
I’d never been able to sell any of the dozens and dozens of bags of “cleaned barley” that I grew 2 years ago; there was only 1 product that used barley then, Irish Whisky, which required a still. Now, there’s “Scotch” and a couple of other easy products that use barley, and for some reason, Scotch is made in the Fermenter tool. And I currently have 8 of those, because I used to rely on making yogurt, a fairly high EP food item that’s a precursor to “fruit smoothies,” a really high EP, popular food item. I’ll still make yogurt, but that requires milk and I was starting to run low… so I brought out 2 milk cows and a bull and I’m back to tending animals that can die if neglected, but at least give meat when they reach the end of their lifespan.
I used to sell batch boxes of smoothies to regular customers, but no more, because DFS changed the recipes and they now require a special freezer item that costs money, can’t be crafted, and only gives 10 uses. FORGET THAT. I have enough supplies to make a few smoothies, and then I’m retiring the product and dumping them all in a batch sale, or into a lunch box for auction.
As far as tending animals goes, I wanted more eggs (they’re required by some of the core food products I’m focusing on) so I bought more “coops.” And I have cows again, as I mentioned. Meanwhile, I finally found a use for all the wool that I had gathered and not sold from when I used to run sheep (yes, it’s a kind of insanity, virtual farming).
In the gap years I was gone, DFS introduced “sewing machines” (another tool to buy) in addition to the looms they already had, and they brought out a kind of rug you can make (that has many, many annoying intermediate steps that require 6 kinds of flowers and herbs). The rug gives EP if you stay within 10 meters of it, but I found that you couldn’t load the EP into a lunch box. So I went to a community kitchen (I have a stall there for the moment but not seeing a lot of sales), that has multiple spinning wheels, dye vats, looms and sewing machines, and in about 90 minutes “cooked down” ALL of my remaining wool into a couple dozen of these EP-giving rugs, which I now use after tending the “coops” to re-coup (heh) my depleted energy.
So all of this activity translates into maybe 20 or 30 minutes, twice a day doing “tending” and watering and feeding tasks, more if I decide to make a batch of something. It’s pretty efficiently laid out, but I’ve got more paring down to do in the next few months.
The alternative is to lay everything out on a platform and announce a fire sale and watch the locusts descend, but this slow drawing down to the essentials that I like, and retiring the products and crops I don’t like, seems to be more graceful to me. I’ve shopped so many different places that range from desperate looking, disorganized collections of boxes and fields, to showplaces with big houses and dozens of working stills and fermenters, with livestock stacked up in “feeding station” circles. That kind of “factory farm” is not for me.
I like the sound of the egg-laying chickens. I like how the cows moo. If I decide I need wool again, I’ll run a few sheep for wool, fertilizer and meat, and I like the sounds they make, too. I have some stuff to work on for updating my actual created products in the next week and I’ve been socializing more, which has been pleasant.
I’ll retire some older products (both my own and the DFS ones) and pull back from the stall rentals I currently have. I may keep the one rental just to have community kitchen privileges, so that I don’t have to buy any more tools just to make a batch of something. And I’ve got some “rares” to put together in a themed collection to put up for auction too. I’m aiming for reducing my footprint through Easter – currently I have 17 fields in crops, but as they are harvested I’ll pick some up. I think I’m shooting for 5-10 fields in production by June. That’s enough for feed crops, essential produce (sugarcane and wheat) and maybe occasional stuff for easy high EP food (potatoes, onions).
At some point I may be able to drop or reduce the Patreon subscription if I get a big backlog of water, energy “clickies,” and fertilizer.
DFS exists to provide a revenue stream for the creator and his staff, and that’s fine. Where I have a problem is with some of the changes that have been made over time to old recipes that now require new and harder to obtain ingredients, and with the constant pressure to buy more and more of the specialty, seasonal, and “rare” collectible items for the secondary sales market.
I’m not sure that a “smallholder” (casual, low volume farmer) like me can come out ahead financially with DFS, and the people that drop serious amounts of real cash for the upper Patreon levels, (like early access to new products) and the monthly subscription boxes can’t be making much money. I look at what they have for sale in their yards and stalls and think “why do you have 3 dozen ovens for sale at a drastically reduced price?” I have to wonder how much they’re paying for land tier for their big farms on top of the subscriptions for DFS. It’s some serious coin.
For me, I’m content to not worry about marketing, or constantly announcing “SALE SALE $1L Baskets!” I’m happy to do small farming, a little tending, and free up some time in world for creating, socializing, and photography again.
Calla Cela got settings for NVIDIA card, specifically her 970, from NVIDIA tech support. She made this handy video. Using it I decided to check my settings it has been forever since I looked at them. zOMG! When the Lindens changed the install folder name, (like L O N G ago) my SL setup apparently went away…
Looks like I need to re-visit Nalate’s site and completely re-do my graphics card’s settings, because I’m BACK babies, and my lighting and graphics are pretty bad.
I had been gone so long that my main account and at least one other alt had expired payment information, which borked my land group. I was contacted by Whitney Linden last week to warn me that I needed to do something or everything would be returned and my land lost.
I figured it out, with their help, when I finally got my account revived by updating arrears, getting inworld, and realizing that my main parcel in Tweddle was blocking me and was shown as owned by Whitney Linden. It was quickly resolved; all my stuff was still out and rezzed, the group was still my land group, so I IMed Whitney and asked what needed to be done. She told me to go to the smallest parcel and buy it for group for $L0 via the About Parcel.
Why was I gone so long? My main desktop machine had a big update a long time ago (my partner Rock Fall is my RL spouse and is also my in-house tech support). In the refresh, I didn’t lose photos, textures, or my badly made Blender files, but I had lost a lot of links and useful tools. Also, my RL work is spent on a computer all day, with a headset on, and I had needed a change for a bit.
I’ve topped up enough avatars to hold the land I need, I’ll keep downsizing the DFS items to something less… hoarder-y, I look forward to chatting with friends, listening to music, dancing, and blogging again.
Why am I back? In RL I’ve been immersed in Twitter deeply for the last 5 years, mostly with a rather fun group of people. We’ve all come around to the idea that Twitter isn’t where we want to be any more, for various reasons, and gradually we’re moving over to other social media, including Post.news and Mastodon. It was so much fun being able to see people without an algorithm forcing ads on me every 3 posts, and I could see people whose posts had been drowned out in the noise on Twitter. And then I kept running into accounts I knew from #SecondLife, and wanted to reconnect.
It’s been fun – just now I DMed with an old RL/SL friend I haven’t seen in about 10 years, but we stay connected via #SecondLife. Turns out she also bugged out of #Twitter, and belongs to multiple social media site the same way I do. Guess a lot of people got the same impulse – “Migrate or die.” It’s good to be back #Inworld as we say. Because there are freebies to be had.
I am bummed, because Kitty picked up most of his wonderfully eclectic junk from his bar in the Bayou, before I had a chance to take more pictures.
Meanwhile Janus Rhiadra’s general store across the way is gorgeous, stocked with gacha stuff. Makes my old Dry Goods store look so 2007.
So today I tinkered with a long-stale project in Blender, got frustrated several times, will keep trying and will review the basics. Again. Because I forget them from long disuse, again.
I also chucked out some old products from the Second Life Marketplace and my vendors. I visited a friend’s little town in SL and found a beautifully made stained glass lamp, with wrought iron and frickin light bulbs, and it’s ONE PRIM. Dhughan is feeling quite depressed as his old-fashioned products just are not up to snuff. Not. Up. To. Snuff.
It’s either bootstraps, or kits. Prims and sculpts are just not happening.
Onward into the future! Time marches on! Education is liberation!
Oh, and Happy New Year.
Gabrielle Riel, owner of the St John Estate where I currently live and have a shop, has come to a hard decision:
I believe this. I always told everyone that if they needed to cut back their time in the virtual world that I would fully support their decision, because as much as I love and respect the platform that I turned into two businesses, I believe in Real Life First. Always.
With all my belief in “Real Life Firstâ€, there was one person to whom I never gave compassion or the ability to choose real life first.
Me. And it’s time for that to change. There are serious things that I need to attend to in my real life.
Ladies and gentlemen, friends and residents, I am closing the St John estate and I am semi-retiring from Second Life.
This was the scene last night at Kitty Vinje’s place in St John Bayou, next to his bar, the Love Shack:
I went along on an expedition with Kitty and other Bayou denizens to check out a land sale at one of those sim-rental/sale places. There was a lot of discussion of what to name it but there may need to be more discussion of how many people would be committed to going in on a shared sim rental, with one person designated as the owner to collect rents. They have a lot of thinking and organizing and number-crunching to do, I can’t even imagine. It’s a talented group but what they want to do is re-create their beloved bayou, and that takes work and passion.
Meanwhile, I have to get ready to pack up the shop in St John Parish, change all the landmarks in the Marketplace, change all the landmarks in all my boxed products, and make a fresh start.
I started by going to the beach.
I bought a simple cheap parcel, on the sim edge looking east, just a 512 with a little beach shack I found on the Marketplace called “Life’s A Beach.” I can put out a few things and call it done; last night the others were talking about the prims they need to put out by the thousands. I just need a place to be and listen to ocean waves and maybe a little music.
I spent the afternoon yesterday thinking about what Kitty will do with his wonderful “Love Shack” bar, which has such a wonderfully eclectic collection of stuff. He really does need to find a place with swampy ambiance for it; it won’t do to simply plop it down in the middle of generic grassland. He doesn’t know anything about terraforming or sim management; my dabbling with Open Sim gives me some dim idea of what’s involved with RAW files, terrains, terraforming, prim budgeting, and water levels. I hope he lands on his wee black paws. There aren’t many other places with a bayou vibe, and of those, I don’t know if they have a spot for a tough little black cat in a bowler hat and a set of brass knuckles.
I’ve had a lot of fun in St John but have to admit I’m not as shocked, surprised, and grieved as I was over the closure of Steelhead. In the former case, it was a very unfair situation – the estate owner got in some dispute with Linden Lab and was locked out, unable to pay tier and unable to resolve. In this case, Gabrielle had given some very clear signs that things in her personal life were needing to take precedence. Also, although she had plans for Christmas decorations, I missed any announcements after her first notecard; something went wonky with my ims-to-email and I wasn’t getting inworld messages. I feel like I let Gabi down on my general lack of presence, but my own First Life got busier 2 years ago and there was less time for Second Life.
I just wish we could have had one more Mardi Gras. I missed the last one with my own hiatus, and regret that.
I have some admin stuff to do too, and also I have some simple Blender projects in mind, which this little beach hut will benefit from. The “beach” is a sculpt prim and I’m pretty sure I can improve on it. And as the hut is prim based, it can be edited. There was another hut I liked that had a small deck for lower LI, so I may try that later. I was thinking of making a simple mesh deck and maybe an ice cooler. My needs are simple (and so are my skills).
For now, I will just try to be present, reconnect with friends, and get stuff done that I enjoy doing (along with less enjoyable chores).
