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
No matter where your interests lie, there are a lot of fun activities to do in Second Life. One of those SL activities that has been garnering a lot of interest is farming. Enter Digital Farm System (DFS), which started way back in October of 2016. DFS isn’t just farming, though. It is so much more.
Via: SL Newser – Design: Reader Submitted: Digital Farm System
This post isn’t being sent to Mastodon; I’ve been slowly cooking up a plan, an exit strategy if you will, for easing out of the Digital Farming System inworld game in Second Life. The essay linked and quoted above has been on my mind since I read it. It’s altogether enthusiastic, positive, and not really disclosing the risks and pitfalls a simple farming-and-cooking game poses to players.
The SL Newser article was reader-submitted, by someone who is clearly enjoying DFS, and more power to her.
It’s easy to get started with DFS. The DFS community as a whole is extremely friendly and open to questions. It is not uncommon to see people starting out in the DFS system by offering their assistance as farm hands, volunteers, and hired cooks. It’s also common to meet new people learning about DFS by visiting some of the many auctions that are held each day.
I don’t know much about the auctions, but I suspect that they are one of the only ways that some players can hope to earn back or profit from their investment of time and money in DFS. If you want any of the cool collectible stuff (and “cool” is a flexible concept here), you have to spend some serious money. The writer of the article did do a good job of describing the basics of gameplay within DFS, the use of the HUD to cook or craft things from your harvests of plants, animals, trees, etc. But she didn’t mention the amount of time it takes to grow all the ingredients you need in order to host a nice party for your friends… unless you just buy the ingredients rather than spending weeks and weeks to gather enough baskets of wheat or fruit to make whimsical desserts and main courses.
The auctions are a way for people to gather in a pressure-cooker environment, submit their stuff to be auctioned off by people using special scripts and timers, and they are designed to separate people from their money. They must be one of the most efficient and profitable way to get rid/sell your most valuable DFS items, which are usually the crazy-looking specialty items that get used up or expire, like water barrels and animals that end up as steaks and pork chops. I suspect that if you sell a good “lot” of collected produce, along with some rare stuff, you might get a nice windfall, but I also suspect that the auctioneers (and the places they run the events from, kind of like roving DJs) get a nice cut of the proceeds. That’s fine, it’s a way to make money off of the game, and there’s a hell of a lot of it in the DFS game economy.
There’s a lot to like about the game, but it takes over your inworld time. It’s relaxing to pretend to plant crops and harvest them, but you need fertilizer, which means either feeding male animals (and a lot of them, if you have a big farm) or you buy fertilizer in bulk (shifting the cost of production to someone else). And you have to feed the animals, too.
I was “away” from Second Life for 2 years, and as soon as I came back and realized all my DFS stuff was still rezzed out, I jumped right back in to tending, watering, trying to figure out what to plant, what to cook, and if I had enough milk, butter, cream and other ingredients on hand. A lot of things had changed – I was somewhat irked to find that they had changed some recipes and added some “limiting factors” that require the DFS cook to buy extra boosters or items that are ONLY available from the DFS main store, not on the (very active) secondary market. Just before I left before, the creator of the DFS game had changed the timing of how and when female animals “give birth” and in the case of cows, give milk. The original cows, paired with a bull, gave birth every 6 days, milk starting the 7th day, and live 30 days (0-29, really). .If the age timer hits 30, you get a “DIED OF OLD AGE” hovertext. You still “request the meat” though. Yum, yum. Then with the change, cows gave birth on the 9th day, and milk the day after. So that means 3 “crates” of milk lost per month. You had to rezz out new cows more often so that you didn’t have a big gap in age when your oldest cow reached Day 29 (and hopefully you got milk that day if the timing was right).
Milk is pretty important to a lot of recipes – many of them call for butter, cheese, cream, yogurt and so on. So throttling back the supply of milk may have helped with a glut in the market (too much milk), but really hurts smaller farmers who don’t have dozens and dozens of animals rezzed out on mega-farms. It’s definitely got parellels to real-world factory farming and Big Dairy squeezing out family farms.
I’m a proud smallholder – and working toward being an even smaller smallholder by October, when one of my paid accounts is up for renewal. By October, I have to decide if I’m paying another $99.00USD, and keep the 1024m of land tier that the account contributes toward my group owned land. If I don’t renew that account, I have to reduce my holdings, attempt to sell that amount of land, and go on a strict prim diet.
I’ve been “cooking my inventory down” into a form that I can sell off in “lunchboxes” that are consumables players can rezz out or wear – if you don’t pay extra for (oh LORD this sounds insane) “clickies” that save your energy when tending animals. And yes, I pay extra for “clickies,” fertilizer, and scripted trowels that speed up the time tending fields. I was thinking about reducing that, too – but the next level down doesn’t include the fertilizer. I’d have to cut back on “field” crops and stick to the relaxing “Bees, trees, and chickies, and planties” model to keep playing, with probably 4-6 fields instead of the current…ye gads, 29 or 30 fields (I have a few more in inventory). It’s a hell of a way to downsize, but I’m gathering ingredients for my “core” meals and that takes time, and virtual acreage. Now reconsidering the “buy ingredients in bulk instead of farming them” strategy.
So tonight I bumped up against yet another unpleasant change – the male animals now have to be at least n-days old to be “ready to breed.” I had 2 cows also ready – nothing happened. Why? Because I recently sent a 29-day bull off to my butcher block, and the 3 day old guy doesn’t have what it takes. Someone could make a lot of money offering stud rentals of 9-day and older bulls, I’m just saying. And also, the other change, is that the old brown cows and bulls are “retired.” When the cows give birth, you get brown-and-white “Ayrshires” instead. Fortunately, my old brown bull could give satisfaction – it hadn’t occurred to me that I’d have to plop down an Ayrshire bull to pair with the…. this sounds absolutely INSANE.
Here’s a picture instead.
There they all are, with their feed and water – I’ll have to make sure I have plenty of both but fortunately they are into the Slow Food movement still.
And here are my fields. Currently I have about 3 or 4 times as many as I should have under my “simplify my Second Life plan” – as I’m gathering specific ingredients to be cooked down.
However, it occurs to me that this is simply an addiction – duh. The acquisition of fields, tools, gadgets, “special” ingredients, it’s all just a distraction from what I should be doing in RL, and the better creative work I ought to have been doing in SL.
I recently saw an uptick in sales of my older texture-change hats, partly because of Mardi Gras, partly because my stuff may be more searchable now that I’m active again (and paying a small amount for searchability on my shop parcel). I also got a very kind review from a young SL friend on Mastodon, who posted a photo of herself in the hat in front of my event-dependent shop in Flox:
It’s a beautiful shot and it’s her style – she favors the lighter palette. I’m more of a jewel-tones gal myself. Anyway, the hat is cute but it’s based on an old sculpt, and the mesh hat I made 3 or 4 years ago isn’t quite as nicely shaped. So I have to knuckle down and and get through the process of re-learning all the most useful keyboard shortcuts in Blender, and watch all of the Blender School videos by Goon. And to have the inworld time to do this work, I need to cut back on the farmie-clickie-cookie-tendie stuff in DFS.
Which somehow has resulted in having more fields now than I ever had in the Bruda Plateau, when I sold my farm and contents off and “just kept a few fields, 8 or so.”
Yikes, it’s an addiction.
I’ve been gradually “turning off” some of the scripted trees and plants, I turned off the beehives, and today after I harvested a few things, I started to “pick up” a few fields. My friend Wyvvern sells some very cute floral raised-bed items that seem well suited for my funny old squashed mesh cubes that I’m using as field borders; more of my parcel is going toward “decor” and away from “farm.”
Can I dial it back to a reasonable, sustainable level? The one thing I prefer to avoid is posting the “leaving DFS, everything must go” notices and watching the locusts descend, I’ve seen too many of those lately to want to go through that.
It would be really nice, though, to actually SELL some of this stuff. I’ve been posting notices, I am gradually getting the high value “rare” collectibles I stupidly bought 4 years ago listed in my Caspervend vendors… but they really sell better on the SL Marketplace, which takes a cut. Eh.
I’ll keep making announcements (I hate marketing) and eventually people will start to crack loose.
Or I’ll put together an auction lot. Lord knows, there’s an auction event happening every day, almost every hour. But no matter what it all sells for, there’s little likelihood of recouping what I’ve spent over the years playing this game-within-a-game. And when I see what other people must have spent to gather hundreds and hundreds of fields, collectibles, rare items, and massive herds of exotic animals, I wonder how people make their RL mortgage payments. And pay their medical bills. It boggles the mind.
I cannot stress how much this had affected my inworld mood lately – something changed with the way this station’s stream was handled by the Firestorm viewer, and I could only listen via the web, and not play it through my parcel radio. And bonus, I can look stuff up while I’m working or cooking inworld. So now, I can invite friends over for listening parties when something really good is on – KJAC/The Colorado Sound is the sister/all music station affiliated with KUNC Greeley/Ft Collins, an excellent public radio station.
Visit Location (SLUrl) Tweddle
Via: Lelani Carver’s Profile Feed 
– Second Life
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.
I took a class in #SecondLife last night on how to “mesh” an object created with SL’s inworld build tools and take it into #Blender to optimize it and clean it up to re-upload.
The instructor is very nice but… she had no experience with the third-party viewers that can export your own created objects to a Collada file format that Blender can read. She only works with expensive scripted tools in the bog-standard Second Life viewer.
She pretty much balked at my comment late in the class asking “why don’t we export using Firestorm or another viewer? It’s free.” She doesn’t support that and can’t answer questions about how it’s done.
So I went looking for a better answer than “Buy an expensive script and make your ability to create mesh dependent on server uptime.”
And I found it at Beq’s blog – she’s a Firestormviewer developer, and actually improves the SL export/import process herself.
After that, I actually opened up Blender and tinkered with the student project that we made in class last night. Tiny steps.
Those familiar with my blog may recall that our journey together through the art/accident of mesh making began with, and often returns to prim2mesh tools such as Mesh Studio (MS). During a period of particularly poor reliability from the Mesh Studio servers, in 2016, I made a blog post and video explaining how some of the optimizations achieved by Mesh Studio, could, with a little knowledge, be replicated in Blender.
Via: Beq’s techy blog: Cleaning up your act – how a round trip through blender can improve your mesh
Last week, I blogged about making my #SecondLife simpler, more organized, and spending more time in creative pursuits and less time on mindless virtual farming, tending, planting, harvesting, cooking…and so on.
Over the last couple of weekends, and late into the night all this week, I went a little crazy with the “reorganizing” part and tore apart my virtual kitchen, which had been up in a skybox. I also reorganized my other Digital Farming System fields, animals, and tons of single-prim scripted sorting boxes. For some reason, I have this need to play with scripts that sort and then rezz the ingredients I grow or make, which makes “cooking” more fun or convenient. It turns out that linking all my sorting boxes together and using the “convex hull” setting results in a savings in LI, the land impact metric, of about 1/4 to 1/3 of the prims in the linkset.
I also revamped my ground level stores to use slightly less primmy, much more compact vendors that sit flat on the walls, and freed up some ground level space by deleting two entire shop buildings. I still have to do that with my “farmstore” building, which is in a separate parcel down the road. That parcel is where the fields, a little house, and a drastically reworked design will go – it’s a somewhat narrow parcel with the typical zig-zaggy edges, but it’ll work with the way it’s going to be landscaped.
I went from something like this up in a big skybox, with virtual tools and storage boxes scattered around the “rezz pad” tools for crafting DFS foods and products:
To this – an outdoor kitchen on the ground, after removing 2 of my mostly empty shop buildings in Tweddle and substituting several less primmy buildings for different aspects of My Second Life (or lives, if you add in my alts).
This image is from flic.kr/p/2oewFvx
And earlier Friday there were further developments in my so-called “make my #SecondLife simpler and reduce my time spent on virtual farming” campaign.
Yes, I had found that I had enough group land tier available to add more than 1100m2 of land to my holdings in Tweddle on the mainland. My silent business partner Dhughan Froobert handled the thrilling negotiations, which consisted of opening several “is abandoned land adjoining my parcel available to purchase” support tickets and waiting several days for a Linden to set some funny little fragments of parcels for sale to Dhughan at $L1 per square meter.
Nothing happened for a few days, and then that morning I happened to be near one of the little fragments and noticed that it had been set for sale to Dhughan. I yanked him inworld to purchase all the bits for our land group, and after a short delay while he had to cut one little 16m2 piece off of one parcel, we had enough tier for it all at no additional cost. Then Dhughan joined all the contiguous parcels to each other, so now we hold 3 biggish parcels that are separated from each other, but we enjoy the benefit of the 10% group discount, and the extra objects that entails, because they’re all in the same sim. Group land ownership is tricky but works well if you have trusted members with payment on file, who donate their land tier… in my case (and this is common) I run several paid accounts, because who can you trust more than yourself? Each account kind of has their own vibe, though two of them don’t get much play. Eh, it works.
Anyway, the next phase will be landscaping the “farmstore” parcel and arranging the fields in some way that is both practical, and aesthetically pleasing, and then plopping the virtual livestock down. I wondered about putting the animals off on the most distant parcel, which is on the south side of the sim far from the roadside. But that would be riskier than having them in one place with the fields, plants, trees, and whatnot. I’d rather do all the tending and animal care in one place. And with all the extra objects now available to me, I will NOT be carpeting half Tweddle with fields and feedlots. I’m going to put down some nice decor in my buildings for a change; and in my workspace I’ll be able to rez out texture organizers as needed so that I can work on new products.
Dhughan will have his parcel, and the DFS tools and fields that are in his name that are non-transfer, so he’ll be responsible for growing feed crops. He’ll have a cow, a bull, water, a stove, some seed, and a little hut. He’ll be fine. He’ll be able to harvest his stuff and through it into a sorter… because I love me some sorting scripts.
The other night I took my new kitchen out for a spin, so to speak – I use “rez pads” to cook the DFS recipes, which are done using a 9-digit grid on the DFS HUD. The rez pad is a 9-slot object that can hold ingredients and rez them safely so that they don’t skive off to the edge of a sim and get lost. And I’ve adapted my freebie rez pad so that I have the ingredient textures on the individual buttons – it works like a charm. The sorter boxes (the big bank of textured boxes on the left side) can rez their contents on a kind of target prim for making something easy that doesn’t to be arranged on the 9-slot grid. All the appliances are easy to reach and make for efficient cooking, and I’m planning on “cooking down” all the non-essential ingredients that I’ve collected over the past 3 years.
The plan is to get rid of the non-essential stuff; the ingredients that I currently consider “essential” are normal pantry items, fruits and vegetables. Eventually, even those will be reduced.
One of the sort of frustrating things with DFS cooking and farming is that there are a few items that act like “limiters” or have a kind of braking action on what you want to make. For example, salt is required in a lot of the recipes with the most “EP” ratings, but it can only be acquired a few ways. You can’t make it unless you fish in the DFS Fishing places, and it’s very rare that you get it that way unless you’re very skilled. You can buy it in the secondary market – people with the patience and skill and luck to fish for salt sell it, and other people with more money than sense buy weird looking plants that let you “grow” it, but you only get 20 “salt mills,” at about every 6 days if you care for the plant properly.
Et voila, the “DFS Manny Chomper Salt Plant.”
WARNING: The Manny Chomper is a people eater. *Avoid being eaten.* Feel free to feed him your neighbors, misbehaving children, and all your ex-girl/boyfriends. He loves the meat and will crush their bones into salt.
My Second Life will be less salty once this is gone, but it’ll also be less crazy monstery.
