Three Years Today.

Three years ago my newbie self rezzed for the first time on Orientation Island. It's hard to believe I've stuck with SL this long, to be honest. If you told me back then where I'd be in SL today, I'd probably have laughed in disbelief.

For all its warts, I still love SL and the people I've met because of it. Thanks to all my friends for making it the great ride it's been!

OMG! I Won the Look of the Day Contest on Flickr!

I'm beside myself right now! Jhuzen Ketsugo picked one of my Flickr pics as winner of this week's Look of the Day contest! I'm flattered that Kets chose it -- I must be doing something right! :D

Men's Basic AO Now On Sale

After weeks of friends telling me to get off my butt and do this... I did it. :) I took the anims most guys might want or need in an AO, set it all up, and stuck it in a box.

If you know a guy who can't configure an AO to save his life -- or worse, uses no animations at all -- then this is the answer. Just attach it and go: walk, run, sit, and five stands. It's all there. It uses a ZHAO II so it's all on the HUD and easy to turn on and off.

The AO is transferrable, so it's easy to buy as a gift. Help rid SL of one more duck-walk today! :D

Flickr page

I set up a new account at Flickr. It'll mostly be vanity shots and such - I'm just having some fun with it. I figured I may as well post the pics somewhere instead of letting them sit on my computer!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/seangorham/

End-of-Year Sale!

Well it's about time. This place had some nasty cobwebs around here. :P

I've put everything at the store on sale until the end of the year! Most items are 40% off. The multipacks are 50% off.

I've added two new AO sits for the ladies to the vendors. In fact, I've replaced all those vendor prims with the kind you sit on and click to view the animations. It should be easier to find the animation you want now. If there's problems with the new vendors, please let me know!

New Store on the Way!

I finally bit the bullet and bought some land. (Well, rented. Leased. Whatever. You know what I mean.) The folks over at Azure Islands had a small commercial plot available, so I snapped it up.

Now I just have to make the time over the next few days to do something with it. Once the store's ready I'll probably have a grand opening sale or something else appropriate.

"I'm not dead yet..." and new stuff in progress!

No really! But yeah, it's been ages since I've been around this blog. I've had a lot of RL get in my way the past few months. I finally managed to drag myself back to SL for a bit, and I'm (slowly) making things again. This time, I'm dabbling with furniture. Here's what I've got so far:


If this furniture looks simple, that's on purpose. It's designed to be low-prim. My first design was a lot more complicated (a couple dozen prims per seat!) so I tried to strike a balance between looks and efficiency. The set isn't static, either: not only will the seats support multiple sitting poses without poseballs, but the table will rez extra chairs as more people sit down.

I'm hoping to get this up for sale in the next few weeks. I just need to do some testing first. The scripting's definitely been the toughest part of this project!

Customer Service Needs Help These Days

My grandmother passed away recently. When one of my aunts called the phone company to have my grandmother's telephone turned off, she had an interesting conversation with the customer service representative. The CS person told my aunt they couldn't turn the phone off because the phone was in my grandfather's name, and that he would have to call them to cancel the service.

There's one small problem with my grandfather calling: he died thirty years ago, and my grandmother never bothered to change the name on the phone's account! When my aunt pointed this out to the CS rep, the reply was, "gee, we're not sure what to do, then." My aunt asked if she could just let the account lapse through non-payment. "Oh, no," the CS rep said. "They'd get a bad credit rating if they did that!"

My aunt's response: "..."

(This is where I would have handed the CS rep one of Bill Engvall's signs.)

My aunt then asked if a death certificate presented to the phone company would be sufficient cause to terminate the account. The CS rep wasn't sure, but thought that would work.

Geez. Where do they find these people?

Texture Theft, IP and Paradigm Shifts

(This one's a little late, but hey, I'm just getting started here. Bear with me. Also, standard disclaimer: these are just my opinions. Your mileage may vary.)

Yet another clothing designer gets ripped off. Grr. Ginny Talamasca is without a doubt one of the more talented designers in SL. I suppose it figures that being such is like walking around with a bullseye on your forehead -- or, in this case, on your textures. Life is full of people willing to profit from the work of others.

Unfortunately, there seems little anyone can really do to prevent texture theft in SL. It's not really the fault of Linden Lab, either. Blame the way computers work: if your computer can see (i.e., read) the textures, then it can write the textures, too. The only difference between your screen and a file is the computer's writing the texture to a different place.

According to SL's page on the DMCA, LL will remove infringing content if you file a notice. Scuttlebutt on the forums says that's not happening, though, or that enforcement is lax at best. My guess? There's probably so much infringment going on that LL couldn't keep up if they tried.

I can't help but draw parallels to the music industry here. Lots of people download music. What can the recording industry do about it? Not a whole lot. Sure, they can sic lawyers on people and the courts can prosecute the offenders, but history has shown before that criminalizing a behavior doesn't always deter that behavior. Just look at the prohibition of alcohol or the war on drugs in America for examples of that.

The comparison between the music industry and the SL content industry isn't exact, of course. The RIAA is a big corporation only concerned with money; content creators in SL are for the most part your average joe just trying to make an extra buck or two on the side and have some fun. The RIAA already has lots of money and lawyers for their "war on music"; most content creators have squat in that area, and so can't bring that kind of power to bear on LL or those who steal their textures.

Some designers watermark their textures. That protection has its limits, though, as Strife Onizuka notes in this forum post:

Textures can be easily stolen [...] As long as images can be edited watermarks can be removed; no matter how good the watermarking scheme. Any watermarking scheme that LL defined, that definition could then be used to strip the watermark.

What to do? To me, the problem isn't the textures, the data, or even the computers. The problem lies with the people and their behavior. If you really want people to stop stealing textures (or downloading music, to continue the comparison), you have to change their reasons for wanting to take them in the first place. Unfortunately, I don't know how that can be done -- it's no simple problem, or I suspect we'd have solved it already, and this discussion would be moot.

Do I think it's OK to steal textures? Hell no. I'd be angry if somebody stole my work and repackaged it as their own. Do I think I could really do anything about it, though? Nope, at least not as far as removing the illicit copies go. Once they're out there, they're out there. I'd probably come up with something new that would render the old designs obsolete, but that doesn't prevent the thief from stealing those textures as well.

What's the monetary value of something which requires lots of effort to produce the first time, but no effort to produce infinite copies?

CGBG: Tights Multipack

(No, this isn't a new CGBG product, but I figured I'd throw it up here anyway, just for practice.)

Here's Cool Gear by Gorham's most popular item, by far: tights! I like wearing stockings, but sometimes it doesn't look right with a short skirt. I decided to fix my problem and hopefully fill a need that others might have, too. :D

The tights are fully tintable, and like my stockings and panties sets, come in versions with or without backseams, and with tintable or black trim. In addition, the upper half of the tights comes on both the pants and underpants layers so you can wear them with just about anything. There's three versions of the waist: regular panty, crotchless panty, and sheer-to-waist.

Check the Links section of the blog for places to buy these items in-world or at SLBoutique and SL Exchange!

I can NOT find this outfit...

It seems fitting that my first "serious" post is about clothes. :P

I've been looking for the outfit in this picture for ages now. I even posted to the SL forums about it once, but never got a good answer. I've looked around the grid for it more than once, but anyone who's randomly searched for things in-world knows how fruitless that can be at times.

Anyone have any ideas?

Maybe this isn't my thing.

So I finally caved in and set up a blog. The last time I tried anything like this, I was seven(?) years old and tried to write a diary. I remember my last entry: "Maybe this isn't my thing, keeping a diary." That might be true for blogging as well -- we'll see.

Don't be surprised to see the layout change a lot. I'm still playing around with the blog software and tweaking the templates. It's going to be ugly for a while yet!