People who have nothing better to do, and also good memories, may remember that a while back I acquired a little pied-a-terre on the "Adult" continent of Zindra. I found a 512 lot going cheap, put together a simple cave dwelling that was vaguely in-theme with a much larger neighbouring parcel, and prepared to enjoy a little creativity and/or naughtiness.
Well, that was then and this is now... during my period of Not Getting Into SL Very Much, a land baron type started buying up the sim my little parcel is in. And as this person's tendrils spread across the sim, the friendly lesbian vampire dominatrices all fled away, to be replaced by - quite frankly - distinctly mean-looking rental units.
You can tell where this is going, can't you? Finally, it reached the point where there was this guy, and there was my little parcel, entirely surrounded by the new development.
Well, obviously, overtures were made on both sides regarding me selling off the parcel... however, from my point of view, they didn't go well. The way I see it, I want a small plot in Zindra; if I sell the one I've got, I'll have to buy a new one. And Land Baron's best offer never got anywhere near the price of a new one.
So, I figured, my options were to sell at a loss - not very appealing - or to play a long game: hunker down and wait for Land Baron's development to dry up and blow away in the wind. Annoying, but that's not why I'm cross right now.
I have, from time to time, been keeping an eye on the place, you see. Up until my last visit, things stayed more or less constant, Land Baron having considerately plonked massive landscaping prims around my little plot and put a barbed wire fence around it. However, last night, teleporting in, I found myself stuck in something, and contemplating a fountain and a tree directly over my head. Yes, folks, Land Baron had stuck a chunk of landscape prim right on top of my little parcel.
And, yes, that is why I am fuming.
I submitted an immediate AR for encroachment, of course... then I remembered that landowners can return encroaching objects, these days. So I sent them winging their way back to Land Baron, along with a notecard of liquid-nitrogen politeness raising my objections to his little scheme. What effect, if any, either of these things will have, remains to be seen.
Obviously, there are two sides to every story, and Land Baron presumably sees me as an obstreperous dog-in-the-manger obstructing the Grand Commercial Design for the sim. Which is, actually, fine by me. Just so long as Land Baron realizes that he is, in fact, a Walt Disney villain. Specifically, he's Keenan Wynn's character in Herbie Rides Again, the arrogant developer riding roughshod over the rights of the small property owner. Does anyone have a white Volkswagen Beetle I could borrow?
Showing posts with label Miss Bulmer resides. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Miss Bulmer resides. Show all posts
Sunday, May 18, 2014
Thursday, November 8, 2012
Work in progress...
Things continue to develop, even when I'm not part of them. It's almost as if I wasn't completely indispensable.
Anyway. Among other things, a seismic shift has taken place in Caledon Steam SkyCity, my home in Caledon for much of my career.
The economy has been no kinder to that sim than to any other, and with parcels falling long-term vacant, our esteemed Guvnah was forced to downgrade it to a homestead. This meant, of course, a substantial reduction in the complexity and number of holdings there... Some people bailed out; others, myself included, announced a willingness to stay on after the redevelopment. So, one weekend, I packed up all my prims, threw my tentacle monsters into the proverbial red spotted hanky on a stick, and withdrew to await developments.
The developments concluded... sadly, not entirely to my taste.
The new Steam SkyCity is a visually impressive build, from the outside; a huge floating metal spheroid, supported by the requisite rotors (I for one argued, apparently persuasively, against replacing the rotors with a simple airship gasbag), hovering on high over the waters beneath.
Unfortunately - from my point of view - this is achieved by what's essentially a set of massive enclosing prims (the bottom bowl, the deck, and the dome and girders overhead) which severely restrict the physical space available for building on the city. Furthermore, in response to commercial pressure (people like leafy suburbs, apparently), the Guv has made that deck a single big lawn, and planted trees all the way around. In short, rather than the urban-industrial setting of the Steam SkyCity I knew and loved, this is something much more like an enclosed, suburban, gated community. (There's no conventional way in or out except by the CAT lift.... and the structure of the build means there isn't even a view from the main deck, it's all shut away behind a wall.)
It's all just virtual anyway, yes? Just pixels in a video game? ... yeah, right. This honestly, really, upset me. So I messaged the Guvnah to that effect.
Well, never let it be said that the Guv refuses to listen to people's concerns. Some people would have been annoyed by receiving a message to the effect that "your brilliant new build sux and I'm not going to live in it"... but the Guv took it on the chin, and we thrashed out a compromise, which involved him carving out a separate parcel, away from the city itself, where I can build, unencumbered, and in the sort of idiom I feel appropriate to Caledon STEAM SkyCITY, dammit.
Of course, now, I am honour bound to actually build something. Which means, I suppose (since life and other realities keep on intruding on my not-so-copious free time) that this blog may get even more neglected as I bolt prims together inworld. But I will be back, and building. Watch this space. Something may happen here yet.
Anyway. Among other things, a seismic shift has taken place in Caledon Steam SkyCity, my home in Caledon for much of my career.
The economy has been no kinder to that sim than to any other, and with parcels falling long-term vacant, our esteemed Guvnah was forced to downgrade it to a homestead. This meant, of course, a substantial reduction in the complexity and number of holdings there... Some people bailed out; others, myself included, announced a willingness to stay on after the redevelopment. So, one weekend, I packed up all my prims, threw my tentacle monsters into the proverbial red spotted hanky on a stick, and withdrew to await developments.
The developments concluded... sadly, not entirely to my taste.
The new Steam SkyCity is a visually impressive build, from the outside; a huge floating metal spheroid, supported by the requisite rotors (I for one argued, apparently persuasively, against replacing the rotors with a simple airship gasbag), hovering on high over the waters beneath.
Unfortunately - from my point of view - this is achieved by what's essentially a set of massive enclosing prims (the bottom bowl, the deck, and the dome and girders overhead) which severely restrict the physical space available for building on the city. Furthermore, in response to commercial pressure (people like leafy suburbs, apparently), the Guv has made that deck a single big lawn, and planted trees all the way around. In short, rather than the urban-industrial setting of the Steam SkyCity I knew and loved, this is something much more like an enclosed, suburban, gated community. (There's no conventional way in or out except by the CAT lift.... and the structure of the build means there isn't even a view from the main deck, it's all shut away behind a wall.)
It's all just virtual anyway, yes? Just pixels in a video game? ... yeah, right. This honestly, really, upset me. So I messaged the Guvnah to that effect.
Well, never let it be said that the Guv refuses to listen to people's concerns. Some people would have been annoyed by receiving a message to the effect that "your brilliant new build sux and I'm not going to live in it"... but the Guv took it on the chin, and we thrashed out a compromise, which involved him carving out a separate parcel, away from the city itself, where I can build, unencumbered, and in the sort of idiom I feel appropriate to Caledon STEAM SkyCITY, dammit.
Of course, now, I am honour bound to actually build something. Which means, I suppose (since life and other realities keep on intruding on my not-so-copious free time) that this blog may get even more neglected as I bolt prims together inworld. But I will be back, and building. Watch this space. Something may happen here yet.
Friday, May 11, 2012
Today Kuhrang, tomorrow the world?
The doomy Gothic building just to the south of my Mainland home in Kuhrang - the one I planted a small tree to hide, in fact - vanished recently, and a cursory check told me the land had been abandoned. After a bit of thought - probably, in all honesty, not enough - I decided to take the usual Mainlander's insurance against a naff build cropping up next door: buy the plot myself.
This was enough, of course, to nudge me up into the next tier bracket, and it leaves me with 512 square meters of unused tier, at the moment. So, I thought some more - probably still not enough - and went on a little road trip out in Zindra, to see if there were any abandoned or cheap parcels available out in the Land of the Rising Libido.
The "Adult" continent of Zindra has been shrouded in controversy since it first rose from out of the depths... I'm sort of pleased, in a way, to report that I couldn't find anything, at least not in one afternoon of searching. It's easy enough to find abandoned Mainland in Moderate zones - about half the time, just TPing to an old landmark will do it for me! But the land market in Zindra appears distinctly more buoyant.
I suppose, really, what's buoying it up is precisely the sort of thing that made me look for land there myself - fewer restrictions, a sense of being on the "frontier" of SL, where, as the saying goes, men are men, women are also men, and children are FBI agents. However. There is a sense of activity, of vitality, in Zindra that you don't often see in the Mainland. There is Stuff Going On in Zindra. Not even X-rated stuff, either, at least not all the time.
I got to talking to Tali, later (as is oft my wont), and she commented about the way forward for SL being, perhaps, a contraction of the number of sims into a smaller but denser group of self-defining communities - like the Steamlands, or the SF communities, or many others on groups of private islands small or large. Tali cites the successful areas of the Mainland as already tending towards this pattern - the perenially popular Bay City being the stand-out example. I think, in some way, Zindra might be trending in that direction too; it has, in a way, a community linked by a common interest. OK, so that interest is smut, but is that necessarily a bad thing? If it brings people together?
It's easy, of course, to spot areas where community-building has been tried, and has failed - the themed Linden Homes areas being the outstanding example; there are others I can think of, though. And communities of interest need to watch out, too, in case they become too insular and too complacent.... But, as I have said before, the social function of SL is one of the two key things that keep me coming back to it, and if building a community isn't a social function, I don't know what is.
In the meantime, I have 512 square meters of snow that needs some sort of development on it... and if I can get another 512 square meters of smut cheap, that would be good too.
This was enough, of course, to nudge me up into the next tier bracket, and it leaves me with 512 square meters of unused tier, at the moment. So, I thought some more - probably still not enough - and went on a little road trip out in Zindra, to see if there were any abandoned or cheap parcels available out in the Land of the Rising Libido.
The "Adult" continent of Zindra has been shrouded in controversy since it first rose from out of the depths... I'm sort of pleased, in a way, to report that I couldn't find anything, at least not in one afternoon of searching. It's easy enough to find abandoned Mainland in Moderate zones - about half the time, just TPing to an old landmark will do it for me! But the land market in Zindra appears distinctly more buoyant.
I suppose, really, what's buoying it up is precisely the sort of thing that made me look for land there myself - fewer restrictions, a sense of being on the "frontier" of SL, where, as the saying goes, men are men, women are also men, and children are FBI agents. However. There is a sense of activity, of vitality, in Zindra that you don't often see in the Mainland. There is Stuff Going On in Zindra. Not even X-rated stuff, either, at least not all the time.
I got to talking to Tali, later (as is oft my wont), and she commented about the way forward for SL being, perhaps, a contraction of the number of sims into a smaller but denser group of self-defining communities - like the Steamlands, or the SF communities, or many others on groups of private islands small or large. Tali cites the successful areas of the Mainland as already tending towards this pattern - the perenially popular Bay City being the stand-out example. I think, in some way, Zindra might be trending in that direction too; it has, in a way, a community linked by a common interest. OK, so that interest is smut, but is that necessarily a bad thing? If it brings people together?
It's easy, of course, to spot areas where community-building has been tried, and has failed - the themed Linden Homes areas being the outstanding example; there are others I can think of, though. And communities of interest need to watch out, too, in case they become too insular and too complacent.... But, as I have said before, the social function of SL is one of the two key things that keep me coming back to it, and if building a community isn't a social function, I don't know what is.
In the meantime, I have 512 square meters of snow that needs some sort of development on it... and if I can get another 512 square meters of smut cheap, that would be good too.
Sunday, March 18, 2012
Home Sweet Linden Home?
My friend and fellow blogger webspelunker Ghostraven tells some more tales of exploring his neighbourhood.
Now, I too have a Linden Home - I keep it up, partly out of nostalgia, even though I now have much more space to play with on other sims. And, really, I have found much the same sort of thing he has, with a crowded neighbourhood full of cookie-cutter identical homes, and largely empty of people.
Linden Homes are a bennie advertised as an enticement for people to sign up for Premium accounts; I have to say, though, that it was by no means the largest factor in my decision to start paying money for SL. Going Premium entitles you to own a 512 square meter plot of Mainland; you can go forth and buy a 512 off someone (much easier now it is simpler to buy abandoned land), or you can put in a claim for a Linden Home, picking from a list of predesigned buildings in one of four styles.
The main advantage of a Linden Home, really, is that it is effectively double-prim land - the prefab house does not count against your prim allocation on the parcel, so you have a full 117 prims to play with, which - if you are me - you burn through pretty quickly, buying furniture and playing with builds.
The main disadvantage of a Linden Home - apart from those times when LL do an update without figuring how it will affect people, and suddenly you find out you can't open your own front door* -
is the extremely restrictive covenant. Basically, this was set up to prevent some of the abuses and exploitation that came with the old First Land programme. So, if you have a Linden Home, you can't ruin your neighbour's property by turning it into an eyesore, or running an obnoxious business (or, indeed, any sort of business). You can't eat up sim resources by running a nightclub, or using temp-rezzers, you can't even change the form of the home except for a few cosmetic options.
In fact, you can't do a whole heck of a lot with a Linden Home, and that, really, is the problem.
LL, bless them for trying, did define the four different themes for the Homes, in the hope that they would attract people with particular interests - so, my friend web might be surrounded by fellow Japanophiles, while I could sit in my fantasy-themed home and talk to the hobbits, people in the Tahoe theme areas could go hunting and shooting and fishing together, and the suburbanites of Meadowbrook could do... whatever appeals to people who live in a place like that.
Which is all well and good, except... there's nothing to do.
There is no commercial development allowed in Linden Homes. So, no clubs, no shops, no educational areas**, no nothing. Never mind, we can divert ourselves by looking at all the weird and wonderful builds people come up with! - oh, wait, I was forgetting, you can't modify the Linden Homes, so no interesting builds. (Web and I both suffer especially in that respect, since the Japanese and the fantasy themes have only four types of houses each. So buildings start repeating each other with deadly regularity every couple of dozen meters.)
And, for greater efficiency no doubt, the Linden Homes are packed together just about as densely as the servers will stand. So, no open spaces of any note, nowhere that might serve as a gathering spot - well, that's not strictly true. Each theme - not each region, or even each continent, each theme - has an infohub devoted to it. It's used to show off the builds, and to provide some bits of entertainment (except for Meadowbrook, because I think it would be some sort of crime if anything interesting ever happened in a Meadowbrook-themed area). In some cases, the Linden Moles have clearly had some fun - not just in the infohubs, too, try checking out the bottom of an Elderglen lake sometime - but it's not enough, not nearly enough.
The fact is, there is just not enough reason to be in a Linden Homes region. Not while there is an entire grid out there full of people to meet and things to see. Tour one of the infohubs, and you will see all there is to see about that particular themed region, and very probably you will have met all the people you're likely to see from day to day around your home - which is to say, no one.
With no focus for a community, no scope to exercise creativity, the Linden Homes continents are, at best, retreats - places you can go to unpack boxes and generally not be bothered by other people. And - for me at least - community and creativity are at the heart of the SL experience.
I have fond memories of my little Wizard's Castle in Elderglen - it was my first secure foothold in SL, it was the place I took friends to entertain, it still is a nice little backwater to return to when the hurly-burly of SL gets me frazzled. But, at the end of the day, it is no place actually to lead a full and satisfying SL. And, in that respect at least, the Linden Homes have to be rated as something of a failure.
*The update was an anti-griefing measure preventing scripts on an object owned by someone else from operating on your parcel without your permission - the problem being that your Linden Home is technically owned by someone else and has its root off your parcel, so until that one was fixed, the scripts in the home didn't work.
**The matter of how LL treated its educational customers is a matter for a whole 'nother rant, probably.
Now, I too have a Linden Home - I keep it up, partly out of nostalgia, even though I now have much more space to play with on other sims. And, really, I have found much the same sort of thing he has, with a crowded neighbourhood full of cookie-cutter identical homes, and largely empty of people.
Linden Homes are a bennie advertised as an enticement for people to sign up for Premium accounts; I have to say, though, that it was by no means the largest factor in my decision to start paying money for SL. Going Premium entitles you to own a 512 square meter plot of Mainland; you can go forth and buy a 512 off someone (much easier now it is simpler to buy abandoned land), or you can put in a claim for a Linden Home, picking from a list of predesigned buildings in one of four styles.
The main advantage of a Linden Home, really, is that it is effectively double-prim land - the prefab house does not count against your prim allocation on the parcel, so you have a full 117 prims to play with, which - if you are me - you burn through pretty quickly, buying furniture and playing with builds.
The main disadvantage of a Linden Home - apart from those times when LL do an update without figuring how it will affect people, and suddenly you find out you can't open your own front door* -
is the extremely restrictive covenant. Basically, this was set up to prevent some of the abuses and exploitation that came with the old First Land programme. So, if you have a Linden Home, you can't ruin your neighbour's property by turning it into an eyesore, or running an obnoxious business (or, indeed, any sort of business). You can't eat up sim resources by running a nightclub, or using temp-rezzers, you can't even change the form of the home except for a few cosmetic options.
In fact, you can't do a whole heck of a lot with a Linden Home, and that, really, is the problem.
LL, bless them for trying, did define the four different themes for the Homes, in the hope that they would attract people with particular interests - so, my friend web might be surrounded by fellow Japanophiles, while I could sit in my fantasy-themed home and talk to the hobbits, people in the Tahoe theme areas could go hunting and shooting and fishing together, and the suburbanites of Meadowbrook could do... whatever appeals to people who live in a place like that.
Which is all well and good, except... there's nothing to do.
There is no commercial development allowed in Linden Homes. So, no clubs, no shops, no educational areas**, no nothing. Never mind, we can divert ourselves by looking at all the weird and wonderful builds people come up with! - oh, wait, I was forgetting, you can't modify the Linden Homes, so no interesting builds. (Web and I both suffer especially in that respect, since the Japanese and the fantasy themes have only four types of houses each. So buildings start repeating each other with deadly regularity every couple of dozen meters.)
And, for greater efficiency no doubt, the Linden Homes are packed together just about as densely as the servers will stand. So, no open spaces of any note, nowhere that might serve as a gathering spot - well, that's not strictly true. Each theme - not each region, or even each continent, each theme - has an infohub devoted to it. It's used to show off the builds, and to provide some bits of entertainment (except for Meadowbrook, because I think it would be some sort of crime if anything interesting ever happened in a Meadowbrook-themed area). In some cases, the Linden Moles have clearly had some fun - not just in the infohubs, too, try checking out the bottom of an Elderglen lake sometime - but it's not enough, not nearly enough.
The fact is, there is just not enough reason to be in a Linden Homes region. Not while there is an entire grid out there full of people to meet and things to see. Tour one of the infohubs, and you will see all there is to see about that particular themed region, and very probably you will have met all the people you're likely to see from day to day around your home - which is to say, no one.
With no focus for a community, no scope to exercise creativity, the Linden Homes continents are, at best, retreats - places you can go to unpack boxes and generally not be bothered by other people. And - for me at least - community and creativity are at the heart of the SL experience.
I have fond memories of my little Wizard's Castle in Elderglen - it was my first secure foothold in SL, it was the place I took friends to entertain, it still is a nice little backwater to return to when the hurly-burly of SL gets me frazzled. But, at the end of the day, it is no place actually to lead a full and satisfying SL. And, in that respect at least, the Linden Homes have to be rated as something of a failure.
*The update was an anti-griefing measure preventing scripts on an object owned by someone else from operating on your parcel without your permission - the problem being that your Linden Home is technically owned by someone else and has its root off your parcel, so until that one was fixed, the scripts in the home didn't work.
**The matter of how LL treated its educational customers is a matter for a whole 'nother rant, probably.
Friday, March 2, 2012
What's been going on
I said I'd been busy, right? Since the various i's have been dotted and t's crossed, statuses assigned and groups created and parcels divided, and (mostly importantly) the first tranche of Lindens paid to the Guvnah, I may as well come clean; the lovely and talented Tali Rosca and I have taken on one half of the Caledon Burroughs sim. It's only half of a half of a homestead, but it's still the largest slice of SL I've had my teeth into (is that a mixed metaphor? I don't care), and I am excited about the prospects.
We will, of course, be developing Burroughs in consultation with its current Duchess, my dear friend Turley Hallenbook, and our general aim is to make it a sort of steampunk beauty build, not a commercial enterprise. So, we are both thinking about our own ideas of the steampunk aesthetic. Tali is talking about building romantic landscapes, with reference to the art of Caspar David Friedrichs, and I am designing an enormous tower full of sparking generators and tentacle monsters. There's room for both, that's the fun of it. Working with Tali, I suspect, is going to be enormous fun.
(Assuming SL cooperates... I logged back in today and found myself wearing a sort of combination of the last two outfits I had on last night. And, indeed, my discussions with Tali on the future of the sim were thrown rather off track, last night, when she experienced a distinctly embarrassing bake failure while trying to change outfits. Details will not be forthcoming, because this is still Not That Sort Of Blog. Somebody, though, needs to feed the hamsters that power SL's asset server, I think.)
(And now I shall shake off these parentheses and retire to SL, to import some sculpted structural members and otherwise prepare for Massive Constructions.)
We will, of course, be developing Burroughs in consultation with its current Duchess, my dear friend Turley Hallenbook, and our general aim is to make it a sort of steampunk beauty build, not a commercial enterprise. So, we are both thinking about our own ideas of the steampunk aesthetic. Tali is talking about building romantic landscapes, with reference to the art of Caspar David Friedrichs, and I am designing an enormous tower full of sparking generators and tentacle monsters. There's room for both, that's the fun of it. Working with Tali, I suspect, is going to be enormous fun.
(Assuming SL cooperates... I logged back in today and found myself wearing a sort of combination of the last two outfits I had on last night. And, indeed, my discussions with Tali on the future of the sim were thrown rather off track, last night, when she experienced a distinctly embarrassing bake failure while trying to change outfits. Details will not be forthcoming, because this is still Not That Sort Of Blog. Somebody, though, needs to feed the hamsters that power SL's asset server, I think.)
(And now I shall shake off these parentheses and retire to SL, to import some sculpted structural members and otherwise prepare for Massive Constructions.)
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Good fences make good neighbours
I've had surprisingly little of the angst and trouble which supposedly come with owning property on the Mainland. My little plot in Kuhrang - well, it's not much, but it's in a fairly stable neighbourhood, and, while I'm not there often enough to get heavily involved with the social life on the sim, the contacts I have had with my neighbours have been generally pleasant. Long may it continue, say I.
But, not all is sweetness and light - looking out of my window today, I caught a glimpse of something odd, cammed closer, and saw this:-
Baffled? Well, there are a few things you can't see on that screen grab... like, for example, property lines. Or the hovertext over the Union Jack box which reads "Get this bed off our land!"
Yes, it is an encroaching object... I'm not quite sure, though, what the story is, here. The bed is almost completely covered by the box; I'd have to guess that the bit that isn't is the illuminated headboard, which is over the other side of the property line - and that that illuminated headboard contains the root prim, so the property owner can't just click on the thing and return it. Why can't they talk directly to the other landowner, though, and get them to move or return it? Or just AR it for encroachment? Of course, I don't know why my neighbours do many of the things they do. (I don't have a clue what those two square things are on the ground to the right, for example. Or why anyone would want a sex bed out in the open air in Kuhrang, anyway. It's a Snowlands sim, it looks chilly. One of the nice things about having my bed indoors is so that I can snuggle up to a partner and think about how nice it is to be inside and warm, amid all that snow. Also, my doctor has advised me to spend less time in parentheses.)
Anyway. What does all this Drama portend? Blessed if I know.
But, not all is sweetness and light - looking out of my window today, I caught a glimpse of something odd, cammed closer, and saw this:-
Baffled? Well, there are a few things you can't see on that screen grab... like, for example, property lines. Or the hovertext over the Union Jack box which reads "Get this bed off our land!"
Yes, it is an encroaching object... I'm not quite sure, though, what the story is, here. The bed is almost completely covered by the box; I'd have to guess that the bit that isn't is the illuminated headboard, which is over the other side of the property line - and that that illuminated headboard contains the root prim, so the property owner can't just click on the thing and return it. Why can't they talk directly to the other landowner, though, and get them to move or return it? Or just AR it for encroachment? Of course, I don't know why my neighbours do many of the things they do. (I don't have a clue what those two square things are on the ground to the right, for example. Or why anyone would want a sex bed out in the open air in Kuhrang, anyway. It's a Snowlands sim, it looks chilly. One of the nice things about having my bed indoors is so that I can snuggle up to a partner and think about how nice it is to be inside and warm, amid all that snow. Also, my doctor has advised me to spend less time in parentheses.)
Anyway. What does all this Drama portend? Blessed if I know.
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