Relaxin’ With Flat Ebbe

I’m almost a week late in keeping up with Strawberry Singh’s Monday Meme, but life was tossing me around a little and  I just didn’t get in world.  On a bright note, I have finally been reunited with my wayward laptop, all repaired and ready to let me explore again, and, more importantly, take pics. Yay! Of course the first thing I did was grab Flat Ebbe from the marketplace.

Since he’s had an entire week to hang around with lots of bloggers I thought he might be tired by now, and I didn’t have a good plan for sims to tour, so we just stuck close to home at Kannonji Zen Retreat. We started off just chilling by the pond so he could unwind after all that traveling.


He still seemed to be feeling a bit stiff, so I suggested taking a few moments out of his time to have a quiet sit at the main zendo. There wasn’t a scheduled meditation going on when we stopped by, but it’s still a great place to find some peace and rest.

I’d originally hoped to check in on Flat Ebbe from some fun location via SL Go, but unfortunately despite trying at least a half dozen different places in town I can’t find any free WiFi that has a high enough download speed. These are all national bookstores, or restaurant chains, so I don’t know if it’s part of a general policy or just bad luck in my city, but in every case but one the On Live app advised that the speeds were too low and it refused to even connect my account. The one time the speeds were sufficient there was apparently some sort of firewall in place to stop On Live. Oh well. I still think it’s a pretty cool service, even if I can only use it in my house.


Ms. Berry also asked us to include three things we’d like to communicate to Ebbe, so we sat at the coffee bar for a few moments before he set off on more adventures around the grid and I tried to think of what I’d like to tell him. I’ve read through what others have said and really I think I just want to echo some of the suggestions:

  1. Please work on the public relations issue. I couldn’t agree more with all of those who wish SL wasn’t regarded by the media as that virtual porn game. It’s also so frustrating that people who use SL are so often portrayed as stereotypical friendless losers who need a “second” life because they don’t have a “first” life.
  2. Tier prices. While I probably won’t be in a position to own land again anytime soon it would be nice to see some reworking of the tier structure to lower the fees and make land ownership more attractive.
  3. Keep talking! I love that you’re being so communicative with the users, and I hope you keep it up! 😀

Many thanks to Berry for our meme and for Flat Ebbe! I’ve been following his comments, from the keynote speech to his twitter feed and so far I’m feeling pretty optimistic about the future of Second Life. I’m eager to see what happens next!

Go! Go! Go!

This past week OnLive announced an adjustment to the pricing for their SL Go service, adding the option to subscribe for a month of unlimited usage at $9.95, and lowering the cost to $1 per hour if you choose to buy credits for hourly access. I had tried the twenty minute free trial a week or so ago, but at the time the $3.00 per hour fee was a little too high to consider giving it another try – I know how I tend to use SL and the last thing I wanted to do was watch the clock and worry about wasting time and money. An entire month for a flat fee is a much more appealing option, and they note that you can cancel anytime. Now that a month works out to about the same cost as a couple of magazines, and provides just as much entertainment value to me, I think it’s worth 9.95 to give everything a proper trial run and get to know how it works. Having spent several hours using it I find I like it a lot better than I did immediately after the trial.

Calas Galadhon is always a good place to enjoy the scenery 😀

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Dance With Me

My involuntary vacation from SL has made me very sad this month. It never fails to amaze me how when I can’t do something it makes it a thousand times more appealing. That’s certainly been the case with Second Life lately, if I had easy access I’d take it for granted and put off logging in. Can’t explore at all? Massive withdrawal, especially since I really wanted to go to Skin Fair. *Pauses to cry a bit.*  I’ve been wondering if I might still be able to visit on this machine if I set draw distance to 32, turn all the eye candy off, and cross my fingers and hope really hard…

Oh well. Since I couldn’t manage a brand new pic for Strawberry Singh’s Monday Meme about dancing  I’ve gone back in time and found one of my older shots that I’d always liked, mostly because it was just a fun memory. We didn’t dance too often, but it was a good bet if we were involved in any sort of a couples dance I was trying to take pics of us because we were so darn cute. I always loved to watch our avs dance. ♥︎

dance with me04182010

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So I Gave SL Go a Try…

I didn’t originally have much interest in the free trial for SL Go. I’d been following the news with interest, but I hadn’t considered trying it out until I found myself without a computer that could run SL. Now, while my laptop waits for new parts, I’ve had to resort to using my hub’s aged iMac and it is not a fan of Second Life. I can log in and putter around in my skybox, but even then I have to keep graphics low and my fps is in the low single digits. Exploring is not an option at all, and I was beginning to miss playing virtual tourist. It seemed like a good time to try out the SL Go free trial, both on the desktop and the mobile, and see if it might be a good temporary way to access SL, at least until my laptop is fixed. I was seeing a lot of reviews about how amazing everything looked, so I signed up for the trial with high hopes.

Having now used all of my twenty free minutes, my experience with the trial convinced me that one of these applies: 1) All the people raving about how amazing this is must be using totally different software, or 2) I’m way too picky and hard to please. (more…)

Doing Memes While I Wait

Lately I’ve had a feeling that I’m waiting for something to happen. What? I have no idea. Waiting for Spring, for warm weather, for new beginnings. Maybe I’m really just waiting for myself to do something remarkable. (more…)

Is it spring yet?

I am so completely ready for warm weather, in RL and in SL. I finally took some time to de-winterize my SL house and make it a little greener and warmer looking. It felt pretty good, so it progressed into a bit of stealth landscaping at ground level. That was a thing the husband and I would do from time to time, we’d wait until the sim was empty, then buzz around the island and swap out trees or reroute waterways and install little groves and tranquil ponds on a whim. Sometimes I’m surprised we’ve remained on the estate manager list for so many years. 😀 (more…)