drama begone!

Ok I really need to blog this so it stops bothering me.  At the behest of a friend (in all honesty it was someone whom I sort of had a small crush on) I joined up in this fantasy RP sim with a large population of pagan/wiccan friendly people.  Groovy, cool neat, the neatest ghost town you ever saw.  No one ever went there to RP that I could ever see.  It was all private residences and the things that went on are better left unsaid in this venue.  Long story short, there was never anyone there in any numbers that could make for any sort of interesting event.

 

One of the residents gets a bee in her bonnet and sends out a message via the group chat thingy that people shouldn’t leave things sitting around.  She was a little pissy about it and frankly I was a little pissy at getting a lecture via email about something that has nothing to do with me as I wasn’t the dumb goober leaving prims lying around.  Now keep in mind, you anonymous reader, I can be reactionary and more then a bit of an ass.  I fully admit to this failing and I try really hard to rein it in but it does sometimes get the better of me.  So I pop off with a snide remark along the lines of could the person please deal with the issue by addressing that particular offender rather than spamming the group with the notice.  Chances were that the offending party was a newb and a temporary visitor to the sim anyway.  In which case spamming the group and lecturing about leaving things lying about is pointless.

 

The response is that I must be a total newb going by my rez date ( which is Nov of 06 I think) and how anyone who doesn’t like it can either leave the group or tweak the groups options to avoid notices.  This riled me a little.  So I asked why I was supposed to deny myself the ability to get worthwhile notices because the other party was too fucking lazy to handle the situation one on one like they should have.  In my defense, I did not make it a personal affair first.  She insulted me rather than engage in a discussion or address my concerns, which I admit were presented in a snarky manner.  So she chucked me out of the group. That really ticked me off.  In the process she also took a stab at my vocabulary and word usage.  Two things on that front; If you are going to bag on someone’s word choice and use make sure you spell check your reply and don’t end your statement with a fragment.  So instead of calling this brainless broad a moronic poster child for retro active abortion (which is what I was thinking) I just pointed out the grammatical error, muted them and went on with what I was doing.

 

Ten minutes later I get another IM from a stranger.  She had logged into her fucking alt in order to continue her harangue.  Needless to say I will not be spending anymore time in Noumenon and Cellside what’s her fuck can go piss up a rope for all of me.

 

The happy side of SL RP is that the new SpellFire HUD and meter are freaking awesome.  Compact and easy to use, it is the most attractive meter/HUD combo I have seen so far.  Granted I have not tried DCS2 really although Gotham City uses it (if I recall) and most of the Star Wars sims use it as well.  But it occurred to me that there needs to be some steam punk weapons that are SpellFire compatible so I will drop a note to the SF developer.  Granted I don’t think some of the HUD based systems are developed to their full potential but the CoLA group is pretty close despite DB problems that sometimes pop-up.  But SF items have cool times; the weapons aren’t stupidly over powered, although I don’t find the archery scripts to be realistic.  You should not have to aim 10 plus degrees higher than your target in order to hit our target at 30 meters away.  SF also has an expanding magic system which works pretty well.  Although I would like to see a separate HUD devoted to magery and theurgy.  Thieving skills would be nice but the only way I could see it working is if players kept any items available for thieving in a scripted pouch/box/prim deal that could be accessed some way.  Not being a code monkey I am not totally sure what can be done.  My understanding is that LSL is a very watered down bastard child of VB and C+.  Though I have seen items that can be stolen available for sale on the SLX, I don’t know how that would transfer to an in game dynamic.  I admit I am really partial to Spell Fire though.  Clean, simple and visually appealing it is my current favorite combat meter/HUD.

What happened?

Whatever happened to SL Lovecraft?  A couple of people have asked me this recently and I came across the profile of an acquaintance (whom I would prefer to have as a full blown friend) that mentioned the late lamented SL Lovecraft project.  For those of you who have no idea what I am talking about, bare with me as I briefly explain.

Roughly two weeks into my initial SL experience what I really wanted was some good spooky horror, combined with one of my sporadic Lovecraft reading binges, I decided to go looking in SL for some Lovecraft goodness.  I figured that since a body can find nearly anything in SL that it would be a good chance I could find me some Arkham.

 

No dice.

 

There were a few places offer some Cthulhu based goodies and one person is actually selling HP Lovecraft’s books in an SL friendly format.  Not exactly legal but I won’t harp on that here.  Long story short there really wasn’t anything organized that I could see.  So I asked around on the SL live journal community and surprise, surprise a few people spoke up and said they would love to see something like that.  So we all started chatting about the possibilities.  Keep in mind I had been in SL all of 2 weeks at this point.

We decided to build us some Lovecraft.  Ok several rude awakenings hit but nothing that discouraged me.  I had people round me that wanted what I wanted so in my own idealistic way I figured we could make it happen.  Initially there was a lot of talk and tons of input and the core group of three grew to a group of five then a dozen and when we had our first development meeting we had about 17 to 20 people show up.  Seemed on track right?

So I had started doing research, got people to agree that 1890’s was a good time as Lovecraft’s timeline trends to start round there and we could incorporate a lot of great late Victorian fashion and architecture.  I put up scads and tons of reference material asked builders to build, asked coders to code and had everyone working on getting investors.  We had a half dozen well known merchants lined up and planned to rent out housing space in the sim we would rent/buy.  Now in retrospect this is where things started to ravel and quickly at that.

The builders turned out great stuff but not to spec and one of them hadn’t ever even once referred to the reams of reference material available.  One of them flew off the handle because when he tried to take someone to the demo/building platform they ended up in mid air because the landing point had drifted.  (Ok we forgot to lock it down, not a big deal) this guy through a fucking fit, dropped from the group and off everyone’s friends list saying how “unprofessional” we all were.  Hello pot this is kettle!  He turned around and put the buildings he had built for us in his shop for sale.  More power to him.

One of the other group founders dropped off the face of the planet, in fact she is rarely ever in SL any more.  That left me and the other founder who it turned out had some serious socialization issues which I didn’t realize until they backfired on me.  So second dev meeting rolls around.  Smaller group, less energy no one volunteers for anything mostly we sit around and talk about how to do things instead of doing them.  It is decided that one of the group with more money than the rest of us (not too hard since I’m half broke most of the time) is going to buy an island.  WOW ok significant investment.  Sort of alienates the two people we were going to rent an island from but hind sight will show it worked out better for them this way.  So we will have space, great, awesome, neat.  When people ask what needs to be built I refer them to the reference materials, or in some cases make straight up requests and nothing, crickets never hear from them.

About this time, my student loan creditors start bugging me big time.  Essentially they want 50k USD from me ASAP.  To say that my own focus waivered would be an understatement of epic proportions.  Nothing gets done for weeks.  My own SL relationships shift a little.  Founder number two tells me he is taking me off his friends list because he doesn’t want to know when I am online or not.  He also leaves the SL Lovecraft group.  This is the same person that had a freak fit because I hung around with pretty half naked girls and he had a tendency to whine when he didn’t get his way and blow things way out of proportion.  So at this point the SL Lovecraft list is a ghost town of inactivity.

The remaining builder and the money man are asking for another dev meeting and while in the process of trying to discuss what needs to be done I learn that this 2^nd builder (who has some serious skills) refuses to build to spec and has never even poked at the reference materials.  Now anyone who knows me, (which would be pretty much no one reading this) knows that I can be infinitely patient when working with others.  I save my impatience for petty occurrences that serve to make me seem much less mature.>=) But at this point I pretty much snapped.  I was tired of repeating myself and tired of trying to drag effort out of people who obviously thought the idea was a good one but didn’t want to take time from other projects to make it happen.  Tired of being badgered I turned over control of the group to the builder and the money man and walked away.  Frustrated and angry.  I hate to see projects go to hell, especially when I personally invested so much energy in them.  Granted, I gloss over a lot of details here, it would require a larger manuscript than I wish to produce to cover all the crap that happened.

The lesson learned was this; I took on too large of a project without first learning what sort landscape I was dealing with.  I feel bad for the people that did produce too.  Some of the members came up with a lot of stuff.  The downside is that we had two extremes of ability going.  On one hand we had the guys who would produce all manner of props and buildings with super generic textures that looked flat and all over cheesy.  The other producers would crank out really nice, stylized stuff with high end (provided by e mostly) textures.  No one could really understand why I wouldn’t stack these up next to each other and call it done.  Call me a perfectionist at your peril.  Perfection is fascist and boring.  Continuity however, is key to avoiding a high cheese factor and production designers get paid a heap of money to ensure against that cheese factor.  I think I was wearing rose colored glasses basically.  I saw stuff like Caledon and thought that with a handful of like minded people we could produce something as nice if not nicer, a living sim for horror RP.  Not so much. 

Things on my mind

My one true beef with SL is that many people don’t seem to care about the property of others.  This is explemplified in two distinct ways.  First and foremost is the sale of product which they did not create, specifically art.  Now there is an extenuating circumstance.  If someone sizes and uploads an image of a popular movie poster or some bit of art work from a popular artist and decorates their own virtual home with it, I can totally understand.  But to turn around and sell that even for the minimum price of 10L to cover the upload fee is just shitty.  People either don’t care that they can be prosecuted for copyright violation or they don’t know that they can be prosecuted.  What really gets me is that the willful violation of copyright can balloon into a 200k USD fine and somehow I don’t think a 10L item is worth that.  Really it wouldn’t be so bad if certain organizations, like the SLX, would take pains to police the products offered.  They think that just pointing to the DMCA (http://www.copyright.gov/legislation/dmca.pdf) and denying responsibility for the actions of someone using their service to sell product is going to protect them.  That will be a rude awakening when a well known artist or publisher ends up pursuing legal action.  Hell even when a not so well known entity seeks litigation

 

Only slightly worse than that is the idea that there are numerous people out there who take joy in griefing others.  What sort of sorry sack of shit are they who feel the need to go and ruin the good times had by everyone else.  That is honestly pathetic and it astounds me that someone could be so socially inept as to perpetrate such behavior.  The general response being, “hey lighten up, it’s only a game!”  Of course the minute someone screws with their game time they get ticked off and aggravated too.  Social apathy is bad enough but apathy combined with hypocracy is the tell tale sign of a diseased civilization.  I happen to be lucky and not had many griefing experiences, granted I have seen some mighty odd shit in SL.

 

There was the fellow who plopped down onto the roof of my building while I was working and proceeded to drop a line about being part of MI5 looking for terrorist activity in SL.  In retrospect I should have just bounced his ass and put him on the banned list, but I figured he was just having his own little RP so when I didn’t play along he would go away.  When he continued to not go away, I sent an IM to my landlord as she would have the ability to ban him from the island.  When it started to get really tiresome and I said, “You should really leave now.”  I can only imagine the look on the chumps face when his reply of, “I will leave when I say an not befo. . .” was cut off by my landlord booting him and dropping him on the banned list.

 

But that sort of psychosis isn’t nearly as bad as the people who go out of their way to be a malevolent presence in the virtual world.  Why is it such a big issue?  Because if you are willing to follow through on a malevolent action in virtual situation then how much more of a stretch is it to contemplating similar action in RL.  Now I am not talking about someone who plays the role of a villain in a good RP sim.  I am talking about someone with the ability to operate within a moral vacuum, gather the tools needed to cause someone grief and follow through with it.  Games theory will show that that person is also likely to exhibit malevolent and anti social behavior in RL as well.  So basically if a person lies, cheats and steals in SL, chances are they would do it in RL as well.   I thought it was a laugh when I saw job listings in SL for security guards.  Now I just think it is sort of sad.

 

I have a separate bit of ranti-ness today too.  If someone has a glaring error in their information and you point it out in a polite manner doesn’t it piss you off then they come back with snotty attitude?  Example; I was reading the note cared for a popular fantasy RP sim after I saw all the great events they have on their calendar.  ( I wont say what sim but their sells some of the best cloaks in SL)  So one of the first things the note card addresses is Dress Code.  Fine, it is a medieval fantasy sim groovy makes sense that you tell people right off to dress appropriately right?  Ok but they turn around and cite 16^th to 17^th c. as medieval.  WTF?  Anyone with half a clue, meaning most fans of fantasy and SF are going to know that the term medieval does not apply to the 16^th and 17^th centuries.  You are looking at the 15 and 1600’s here damn it, the ass end of renaissance which is as far as you can get from being medieval.  Considering the heavy Arthurian theme of that sim I would think they would want to correct that glaring error so that people don’t show up dressed like musketeers and wielding flintlocks or wheel locks.  I was half tempted to do that very thing then call them on it by bringing up their own rule book when they gave me shit, but then I can be a real dick that way.

 

I guess the bulk of my frustration is in trying to find a good fantasy RP that isn’t a damn ghost town 99% of the time.  Granted, population limitations in a sim do cut back on the number people you will find at any given time but a dozen or so folks geeking out now and then would be appreciated instead of popping into a barren yet well decorated landscape.  I would happily go for a good SF rp sim too but those seem to be as rare as shoes for snakes.  Ok could go hang in one of the star wars sims but most of those are generic versions of SWG and some even have swiped textures from SWG to decorate the setting.  SL needs some good space opera, maybe one of the trek sims has some fun times, I will have to look into it.

group owned= not a good idea

So I rented a large parcel.  I mean big. 700 prims and the space looked small till I started dropping a wall around.  I was in hog heaven.  I had found a place I could go build whenever Ella and I had a tiff and I needed some space.  Go team right?  Relationship integrity maintained everyone is happy, for the low low price of $12 a month.  Right?

Wrong.  The land is group owned.  Ever rent on group owned land?  Big mistake.  Anything that uses scripts to access a media URL like TV viewers and radio tuners is a total wash.  Building and placing items is a dubious process and way too many complete strangers suddenly have access to a lot of your stuff if you are not careful. 

Essentially you have to be part of the group and everything needs to be set to group permissions.  My take on this is that the wall section I built when my group tag was not active showed up as prims belonging to someone else.  WTF?  So I step over the boundary to my neighbor’s place and I look at the objects tab, sure enough a mess of prims show up as not belonging to the parcel owner, and there is a highlighted option to return those prims.  So anyone in the group could walk onto my land and choose to return my shit?  I bloody well don’t think so!

The fix for the media toys?  Yeah, deed the item to the group and possible give it to the parcel owner so that they can place it.  Riiiiigggggghhhhtttt!  One, my favorite radio tuners is a really nice 20 prim juke box.  Menu driven and totally sweet looking.  It was pricey too.  No way am I going to deed that to the group nor give it (it’s non trans actually) to the fucking parcel owner and let them place it.  Aside from the fact that I tried to move my rental box aside a bit and I didn’t have perms to edit stuff placed by the parcel owner.  So I would have to call the parcel owner over every time I wanted to move my furniture around?  Screw that noise.  My decorating tastes are far too mercurial to have to rely on whether there is a baby sitter online to help me out.

Thankfully the rental guy was groovy with my displeasure and agreed to refund me half the months rent and being out $6 is better than being out $12.

So Ella wasn’t feeling well which could be the key reason she jumped in my grill a few days back.  It hurt my feelings a little but the world at large knows I can be way too sensitive at times.  It is really weird actually.  You could flip through my portfolio and call my work dog shit or dump all over my writing and I really couldn’t care less. (I tend to create for me first and everyone else second so I don’t care whether you like what I do so long as I like what I do.) But when it comes to social angst sometimes I can be one whiney bitch.

It also seems that I do indeed suffer from hypoglycemia which could be indicative of other issues.  This was ascertained by my RL g/f talking to someone who in fact does suffer from that condition and our symptoms are simpatico.  So when I schedule a visit to the doc for a check up I will be looking into that.  It is possible that my depression issues may need a little more help then I can give alone so I am looking into a few non-drug alternatives.  I figure I either lubricate the social machine (that sounds nasty) or I go become a hermit.

Funny, the new store location in the Isle of Shadows mall has given me a leg up in texture sales but the tombstones, table and medieval house I have for sale are apparently not appealing to the shopping crowd.  Funny I thought people would totally dig them. I do have two stained glass windows to add to the vendor which means that I am going to have to buckle down and do the new buttons for the second vendor.  I think it is going to become pretty much all windows and then a pile of low price misc stuff which I tend to think of as doodles and experiments.  I may look for other similar mall spaces.  It is an affordable alternative to renting a parcel and putting up a store.

I may end up getting into clothing design just so I can run the marketing gauntlet of the fashion bloggers and get my name out there.  No one ever hears about architecture and building bloggers, I mean there isn’t anyone I can drop a sample pack of textures on in the hopes of getting a review and there by generating a mess of sales and traffic right?

Marketing anything other than fashion is a pain the butt or possibly just more work than I am willing to admit to/do at the moment.

So anyone know a good way to build a gothic arch that doesn’t leave flickering edges? 

Angst much?

Ok, the Store in The Rift is toast.  3300L a month and I was getting very little foot traffic much less any sales.  So I abandoned the land.  On the outs with Ella at the moment too so I feel sort of homeless again.  I did open up a new location though in the Isle of Shadows Mall.  It is a BDSM resort community and the mall is a groovy little shopping experience.  It has all the stuff you usually see in such malls but well presented and the traffic is way better.  I have had 1500L in sales in the last week where as at the other location I hadn’t had a sale in 2 months.

Part of the issue is of course that I don’t seem to be creating the things that people want to buy.  Texture wise, everything I do is good, it is reasonably priced, full perms and my vendor is hands down better than anything else I have seen in other texture shops.  So I started building.  Right now there are tombstones, a medieval fantasy table and a small medieval manor house.  I have seen one other set of tombstones as nice as mine and one scultpy set that isn’t bad but does have the sculpty texture distortion.  There are better tables than the one I built but very few textured as well and I have a few ideas to revamp the table design, or maybe just offer others.  I bought the spellfire furniture scripts last night so I am hoping to create a few things for that crowd as well.

The thing about being on the outs with Ella is that all my SL friends are her SL friends because we have spent so much time together online.  As in I met them all through her.  So I can’t really go round and say, “Zarquon! She really steams me sometimes!” because they either don’t want to hear it or don’t care.  Granted I am the first one to admit that I have some issues when it comes to interpersonal relationships but still.  So I spend a lot of time at the new shop site and wandering around Caledon in the hopes of finding space there which I can make my own.  I don’t even totally understand that drive, to have space to make my own.  Was the same in SWG and DAoC.  That was like one of my goals, my own space, decorated my way all the time.  SL is even better since I can build my own space from the ground up.

I gotta find another crowd to hang out with.  I could spend more time in Noumenon.  It has been nearly a month since I was last there.  I am sort of tempted to create an alt that does nothing but fur stuff too.  Then I wouldn’t get peeved over all the groovy outfits that are no copy.