Relief Bears, Pacific Crisis Fundraiser and FFL/RFL

My blog is really meant to be a diary and not a current affairs blog. But I am making an exception now because... I don't know. I feel overwhelmed, but not in a way that anyone should get worried about.

SL designers have put up a very commendable fundraising event which will start today. Proceeds will be used to support the Americares efforts.
SLurl is here: World of Beauty (204, 146, 1003).









If you are not interested in shopping, you can simply purchase a Relief Bear by LL from the SL Marketplace. Proceeds will be used to support the American Red Cross efforts.








If you belong to Eturnal Night, we have a donation bottle right outside Club Eturnal and the donations collected will be used to purchase the Relief Bears.

Yup, you probably already know it.







I am a little belated in posting all these, but your donation efforts will not be too late.

And since I am at it, Fashion for Life / Relay for Life is also going on from 12 to 22 March 2011. It is another worthy cause that goes to support the American Cancer Society. I won't link up any more SLurls, they are easy to search for.

Posted by Tashi Core

Yay?

(My blog statistics soared to a breathtaking high the day after I posted "WTF" in my post. I really should do that more often. :p)

It seems like the inventory bug is solved. At least I've heard. But my lack of courage is holding me back from checking on my own account in Viewer 2. I think I shall wait a week or so. Meanwhile, Phoenix looks pretty on my screen.

Posted by Tashi Core

Found the Problem... sort of

The good news is, the loss of inventory is likely a glitch and the lost items are likely to be just sort of hidden and not lost after all.

The bad news is, a few items will probably still be lost and there will be quite a bit of inconvenience until this bug gets resolved.

I did some tests that involved uninstalling and reinstalling Viewer 2 several times and found that I was able to make most of my inventory come back. I still could not reclaim a few items, but those are thankfully easily replaceable so that I do not have to bother the designers.

Apparently there is some sort of glitch in Viewer 2 now that is causing every other item to disappear from the folders which has an item in it that is being worn. And at the point of discovering that something was wrong, I was wearing a hairbase from my Dutch Touch folder and a hair from my Maitreya folder...

I managed to make most of them reappear by changing out to different folders and then uninstalling and reinstalling the Viewer. Only very few items did not come back. But of course, there were newly-disappeared items - items from the folders of my newest outfit that I did not choose to wear.

I am using Imprudence now. :(

Posted by Tashi Core

WTF is going on?!

I suddenly lost about 100 items from my inventory, including my favorite EXPENSIVE Dutch Touch skin and Maitreya hair. I have been losing things over the past few days but I have been sucking it up.

Now, WHAT THE FUCK. 100 items at a go!

LL, what's going on??? Why am I losing so many things?!

Posted by Tashi Core

I found the cause.

I became a mist because SL ate up my folder of body shapes, including the one I was wearing. So I went around a clueless bodyless ghost for 2 days. :(

I managed to set back my body, but my face is slightly different now. I can't figure out the exact stats to get my old face again. Oh well. The current face isn't too bad. I'm just glad that I didn't seem to lose anything else. I hope.

Posted by Tashi Core

My Most Recent Portrait

That's right, I've been involuntarily roleplaying as a glowing spiritualmist in SL for the past 2 days. Wassup, LL?

Ugh. Somebody save me.

Posted by Tashi Core

Should we give Emerald another chance? Now?

I had actually prepared another post to put up for today, but I can't ignore the news. :p

When I first came to SL, it would appear that the whole SL world was praising the Emerald Viewer to the skies and kinda dissing SL Viewer 2, which is the only Viewer a SL newbie would know. I was contented with Viewer 2 though, and I did not make the switch till the day my Viewer 2 simply refused to work.

I found the Emerald setup more informative but messier than Viewer 2. I ran between both viewers for a while before getting used to Emerald. After a few weeks (which was really recently), I finally went total Emerald because it allows me to login 2 AVs at one time on the same computer.

Anyway, that's my brief story with the Emerald Viewer - the SL world was promoting it to the skies, and just when I had learned to accept and like it, the SL world moves on to tell me that it is wrong to do so now. It's so totally my kind of luck. *faints*

It also never fails to amaze me how instantly one can fall.

Yes, the Emerald team had committed a lapse. (Won't talk about the story, it's already all over the net.) And it should take responsibility for it's so-called ignorance that had resulted in the so-called prankster getting past them without their detection. But my question is, is it unforgivable? And to the point of forever distrust?

Or did the team even condone it with knowledge, as some are speculating?

I really don't know. Only the Emerald team knows how genuine their claims are. And because I am not a mind-reader, I can't judge.

And I don't even know if I should continue using Emerald. (Yeah, my opinions are not always helpful.) I am actually both willing to leave Emerald, or to give them a chance to try again as they had promised. I have plenty of arguments from both sides, but I'll spare you my confusion. But someone/anyone, tell me what you think???

What I do know, is that if I decide to leave Emerald, I will still wish them well and hope that they do not give up with the Viewer but make a comeback after a good cleanhouse. They have contributed much to SL fun with their work, which should not be discredited as much as their lapse should not be easily dismissed like it had never happened.

Posted by Tashi Core

Display Name Concerns

Oh, I heard the news. I have not read the official news yet, because apparently my company bans SL sites from our computers. So much for thinking about entering SL. :p Joking. I am already grateful that I can use blogger and fb. :D

Ok, I am out of point already. I just wanted to say that I don't know the details of this new Display Name feature yet, but I can already pinpoint several concerns.

Of course there is The Good Stuff.

1) Users who registered with crappy usernames and ended up not liking their names finally see sunshine. But there is really a better way to solve this without impact on users who are happy with our names. SL can give every user a chance to change our username just once.

2) Roleplayers get the fun without the inconvenience of switching from one account to another. Non-roleplayers also get the fun of nicknaming ourselves every now and then. I can name myself Superbimbo when I am feeling lame and know that I can change out to suit a different mood next week. :D

Now The Concerns.

1) The griefers. Many users are already getting away with trying to abuse others on the grid simply because they can hide anonymously behind their AVs. Imagine how this will be aggravated with the convenience of further anonymity to our already anonymous AV identities.

To check this group of nonsense, the username of every AV should be CLEARLY DISPLAYED and not hidden to other users. It is important for users to be able to distinguish the ok AVs from the problematic ones, preferably upon sight. And right now, what enables us to do so is the unique username displayed on our AV heads and in our IMs.

(And with some foresight, SL should not allow display names to take on any registered username, to prevent griefers from posing as an already established and respected AV.)

I wonder if there will come a day when I just have to set up all security barriers at home, hole my AV in there and never talk to anyone again? Gawd, I might spend the rest of my SL roleplaying as a mental.

2) The SHOPPING. How easily will a shopowner be able to track a purchase down to a username? A display name involved in a purchase may create confusion and inconvenience if not chaos for both shopowner and shopper. The shops are arguably the key group of income contribution to SL and it is therefore vital for the shopping processes to be easy and smooth. If SL pisses off the shopping industry, it is akin to business suicide. Has SL put something in place for this?

I have not started breaking things down to the nitty gritty. I won't be surprised if the impact of having display names turns out to create more problems than what I had just briefly thought of, and some bloggers may already have mentioned other things. SL, just make sure that you know what you are doing ok?

Posted by Tashi Core