Aug 13, 2014 | Images, Monday Memes, Sightseeing
I went wandering today, looking for quiet and peaceful landscapes. I love the abstract, wild, impossible in real life sims, but I always seem to have the most fondness for the pretty, realistic, naturally landscaped places. I often wish I could transport myself into one of the quiet spots in SL and sit on a swing and enjoy the quiet.
With Love in Her Heart is one of those pretty places that was a joy to visit. According to the Destination Guide: “With Love in Her Heart is a simple seaside farmstead that evokes memories of days gone by. It offers a relaxing peaceful surrounding with spaces to hang out and enjoy the company of friends. Visit and experience, just know that it was created with love in her heart.“
I also noticed this week that Strawberry Singh has a new blog meme up, asking about computer specs and performance. I was curious enough to turned my stats on while I was taking the pics above, and on average I stayed at about 15 FPS, with things about one notch below ultra. This, to me, was perfect for exploring. I’m content puttering through the world at 10 to 15 FPS, I know I can more than triple my frame rate if I turn off advanced lighting and drop my draw distance, but I’d much rather have a low frame rate and beautiful surroundings.
- Share any of your computer specs (video card, memory, etc..) – 2011, it’s a bit aged now: 2.00 GHz core i7, 6GB ram, Nvidia 460M.
- Which viewer do you use most often? – Firestorm.
- What is your FPS (Frames Per Second) when you have your graphics on ultra? – It depends entirely on the sim, anywhere from barely 1 FPS up to 35 or so in really empty spaces. Quite a few of the art installations or nature sims will turn SL into a 2 FPS slideshow (dense forests are particularly hard on me) so I often try to find an out of the way spot to park my pixels, then I explore via the Space Navigator. It’s still slow going, but never seems to crash me like extensive camming with the mouse can.
- How often does Second Life crash for you? Is it usually just a viewer crash or your whole system crashes? What are you usually doing at the moment of the crash? I’ve only had viewer crashes. About half the time when I take a snapshot I will crash when I try to save to disk, but only on the first try, and usually if I’ve been camming a lot before the shot. If I can successfully save the first shot then subsequent ones never seem to be a problem, so I sometimes take a throwaway pic after I log in.
- Do you know of any tips or tricks in the settings that would improve performance? I think when I insist on running with graphics cranked up there’s not going to be much I can do to improve my performance short of getting a brand new machine, so I am tipless.
Berry says she’ll not be doing regular weekly memes any more, but I’m hoping she might give us a challenge at least once a month, I’ve really missed doing these. 😀
visit With Love in Her Heart
May 6, 2014 | Images, Random Thoughts, Sightseeing
Have you walked on the stones of years?
When you speak, is it you that hears?
Are your ears full?
Music keeps me afloat. Music has held my hand for the past six months and reassured me that life really will get brighter one day. A common love of two bands in particular has introduced me to some of my closet and most treasured friends. Sometimes I wish I could thank my favorite musicians, and let them know how much the music they’ve created has meant to me, but I’m sure they’ve heard people tell them these things many times. I’ll just leave my little bits of gratitude here and there for a while.
Thank you, guys. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
My song of the day is in honor of my prog sisters. They don’t read this blog or have much interest in SL, but I had to share the above pic of me and my armored pal at the Prog Museum with them earlier today, which they did find pretty cool. 😀
Feb 5, 2014 | Images, Sightseeing
Dragon Curves is a new fractal art exhibit by Mac Kanashimi, now open at LEA26, I learned about this via Ziki Questi’s blog a couple of days ago and have been looking forward to visiting. 🙂
You’ll arrive at the top level, and can grab a notecard at your landing point that will give you a bit of information about the build itself, as well as links to read more about dragon curves and about the artist. This is a huge build and they recommend that you set your draw distance to at least 384 to see more, though I was feeling brave and turned mine up to maximum so I could cam out and get a good look at everything.
There are three levels, connected by a dragon curve stairway. It’s possible to walk from the top to the bottom, although I wasn’t coordinated enough to get far before I fell off one of the platforms. I didn’t mind hovering off to the side, this build is constantly in motion and I enjoyed watching the objects change height and color.
Dragon Curves will remain open through June 30.
Visit Dragon Curves at LEA26
Learn more about fractal dragon curves at Wikipedia.
Jan 15, 2014 | Chatter, Images, Sightseeing
Today was one of those days where everything felt extra stressful. Just dealing with life made me want to run away and hide under a bed for a few hours… or at least to run away and dive into a carton of ice cream, or a pile of Cheetos. Anything with a lot of calories would have been good.
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Nov 27, 2013 | Images, Sightseeing
I just absolutely love astronomy. As a kid I was sure I wanted to be an astronomer, at least until I realized that it required rather a lot of math. You know what they say about the best laid plans and all… Oh well. Even though I reluctantly abandoned the idea of a science career I never lost my love of reading about the planets and stars and I still find it fascinating. When I saw pics from the Oceania Planetary Park I was excited to visit and wander around.
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Oct 23, 2013 | Chatter, Images, Sightseeing
All the talk about the Second Life TOS changes in the past few weeks have reminded me that there are some other worlds out there. I have no intention of leaving Second Life until somebody shuts off the lights and we all have to go home, but in the meantime if I see something that’s new and different from SL I try to take a look at it. Or, in the case of Cloud Party, revisit it to see what’s been going on there lately.
Last year my husband/fellow virtual world explorer and I both signed up for Cloud Party with our Facebook accounts, at the time that was the only option and I recall it frustrated those who didn’t want to tie their RL accounts to virtual worlds. They do allow other methods of creating an account now, but fortunately the Facebook log in still works so I was able to hop back in. My profile was still there, untouched for the past sixteen months, and I was amused to find my snapshots from that day still sitting in my avatar profile photo album. (more…)
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