Dozing on the deck

Recently, I decided to get a new furry avatar and settled on the Marble Fox from Lost Creatures. The black Aventity fox was a lovely avatar but somehow it looked quite dark and serious - I wanted something lighter and a little more frivolous. I particularly like the option for Lost Creatures avatars to have a ’smile’ as well as a serious expression. The tail isn’t quite so expressive though - I liked the way the Aventity tail swished and twitched. So I picked the Marble Fox purple colourway and changed the eyes to yellow. I managed to sneak up on myself while I was dozing on the deck early one evening and took this snap …

By the way, if you’d like to visit my Bijou Garden and take a look around, please feel free to drop in. Remember to bring a book to read on the deck or a friend to snuggle up with

Elfrida’s Bijou Garden

A Bijou Garden

Well, I’ve been tinkering and fiddling, removing, placing, moving, replacing and discarding and I’m reasonably happy with the Bijou Garden as it looks. Of course, it looks much nice with graphics options on higher but my poor three year old computer grumbles something awful and I need to make it last another year. Hubby said we would have a new computer next year so I’ll make sure we get oodles of RAM and a great graphics card.

This is the first pic I took, when I’d just rezzed a hedge so I could see how big my parcel was. 1024 looked pretty big to me but that gradually changed as I created the garden.

This is an interim picture, the first manifestation of the garden, if you want. I was still learning how to move, resize and position objects in the garden. So it was very much a work in progress.

This is an aerial view of the next phase of the garden. I’d removed most of the stuff and started again because my ideas were outrunning their space.

Next time, I’ll post some better images of the garden taken this month where I bumped the graphics up a notch and managed to get some movement in the water. In the meantime, if you want to check out my Bijou Garden progress photostream on Flickr, you can find it here:  Elfrida Snook - Flickr

I never thought I’d do this!

I must have had a brainstorm but I decided to go Premium and buy a little parcel on the mainland sim of Clearbrook. It’s only 1024 sq metres but it’s grassy, almost all flat, and it has a small waterfront with a pool. The parcels to the left and right of me are both for sale but are much more expensive than my little parcel. I don’t see me adding either to my land holdings but I hope they are bought by people who use them sensitively.

So now the question is - what to do with my land? Being mainland, it has a low prim count - just 234, I think - so I’m hardly likely to go splashing out on a high prim house to put on my parcel. Actually, I’d like to create a garden and have a corner for Zen meditation with perhaps a skybox as a private space. Although I realise that ‘Anything Goes’ in Second Life, I would prefer to create something harmonious rather than a jangling muddle of conflicting objects. So yesterday I spent some time looking around houses and garden centres, searching for the right combination of house + plants to make my little parcel a pleasant and welcoming place.

So do I opt for oriental, tropical, English cottage garden or what? I loved walking round the garden centre yesterday and it is really much better to actually stand in front of the plant or tree you are planning to buy because images on SLExchange or OnRez are so difficult to visualise properly. I’m tempted by tropical ….

A Guide to Orientation Island for new residents

About a week ago I registered a human alt called Sparkle Champagne and I’ve spent the last few days creating her simple pictorial guide to Orientation Island and Help Island on Second Life. You can find it here -

Sparkle in Second Life

The blog stats on this blog prompted me to create the website because so many search terms seemed to point to people desperately looking for a way off Orientation Island in particular. Second Life is a complicated place and the process of registering, logging in and then negotiating the tutorials on Orientation Island seems to be defeating many folk who give up in disgust and don’t bother to try again. So much for Linden Labs’ claim of several million residents …. how many are regularly active inworld, I wonder?

Anyway, I uploaded Sparkle’s Guide today and posted it on the Second Life forums. Now I’m posting it here in the hope that people who NEED this guide will be able to visit and find out how to escape from the maze that is Orientation Island.

Please leave a comment if it helps you

The Mutability of the Internet

It always amazes me how fluid and ever-changing the internet seems to be. It runs from one extreme to another. One webpage might have been frozen in time for months and even years without change, probably wildly out-of-date and no longer relevant. Another webpage might appear one day and disappear the next.

These somewhat pessimistic thoughts are provoked by the discovery that Benja Kepler and the excellent video tutorial blog he/she was keeping on WordPress has vanished into thin air. The blog has been deleted and the video “How to leave Orientation Island” seems to have been removed from YouTube. According to the ‘Snap’ preview, the last entry on the blog was over 31 weeks ago. There is a brief cut-off snippet in the ‘Snap’ preview window about removing the vidtuts because they might be now, or become in the future, rather confusing.

However, with a little diligent searching, I managed to find Benja’s YouTube Video Index:

Benja Kepler on YouTube

and clicked on the “How to Leave Orientation Island” … to find that the link still works. The video came up for me. Anyone else care to try it out and see if it works for you too?

There’s that mutability issue again, isn’t it? Second Life is changing all the time in response to its citizens needs (or their needs as perceived by the Second Life management) and things become out-of-date.

Of course, there’s still the official Second Life Wiki page where you can find all the SL video tutorials:

Second Life Wiki - Video Tutorials

It’s just a matter of knowing where to look

My tail is in the wrong place!

I’ve been into SL a couple of times recently but yesterday evening was the most frustrating visit. On the previous visit I’d been conversing with a brown foxy gentleman and realised that, while his tail was swishing to and fro, my beautiful long black bushy tail was noticeably absent

So I tried to rectify the problem when I visited yesterday evening. Well, I tried everything to attach that damned tail but nothing worked - it usually ended up about a hands length behind me level with the bottom of my ribcage. I took it off and put it on … took it off and reattached it to a different spot … took it off … logged out … logged in … and reattached it. Absolutely nothing worked.

Then I got logged out of SL when I teleported to a different region … three times

In the end, I just gave it up as a bad job and went to bed, feeling very glad that I wasn’t actually a ‘Paying Customer’

Uninspired by Luskwood

A couple of evenings ago, I thought I would check out Luskwood which is the oldest Furry sim on Second Life. Its reputation as a friendly place seemed to be widespread so I used the Search box to find it and teleported there.

I arrived on a circular wooden platform facing a large noticeboard with a friendly greetings and a warning about ’scams’ by people trying to extract money from unsuspecting visitors supposedly to support the Luskwood sim financially. Having read it, I strolled down the wooden walkway towards a platform suspended high in a tree which seemed to be pretty full of furries. Some were dancing, some were chatting, some were just watching.

I stood to one side, watching the furries who were dancing and looked around at the other furries, checking out the various friendly profiles. I wondered whether to approach someone and say ‘hello’ but they all seemed to be occupied. In fact, I almost felt as if I were invisible which was strange since I am, inworld, a 6ft black female fox with long purple hair and golden eyes dressed in a black leather bustier decorated with chains and a short flared skirt.

I waited a good ten minutes, not wanting to disturb anyone’s conversations, before getting a bit fed up and heading off down a wooden walkway. Whether my departure was noticed or not, I’ve no idea and, to be honest, I wasn’t really bothered. I wandered around a bit but the immediate area below the tree platform Welcome Area was pretty devoid of interest. Even more disheartening, I suddenly ’sank’ into the surface of the sim grass I was walking on and found that my legs had disappeared up to mid calf height. Nothing I did seemed to resolve the situation.

Thankfully, I was IM’d by a friend I’d made on my last visit to SL and teleported over to Babbage Square to join him.

Will I be returning to Luskwood again? I don’t know but I’m not likely to be rushing back. There’s plenty of Second Life still to explore when I next find myself inworld

An Alternative to Orientation Island - Join a Community - plus SLNameWatch

I was browsing the Second Life Resident Forums yesterday evening and spotted a thread discussing the recent release of new surnames into the Second Life registration process. Being curious, I followed the link and ended up here:

SL NameWatch

“SLNameWatch.com is a database of the last names available for selection inside Second Life®, the 3D Metaverse created and maintained by Linden Lab®. Both currently available last names as well as “retired” last names are available. Statistics are collected on the usage of the names. There is an announcement list whose members will receive an e-mail notice every time Linden Lab adds new names available to new Second Life accounts”

There, on page 8 of the ‘Retired names’ database, I discovered that I am one of 32416 Snooks!!!!! On that page, the only name that exceeded our total was Slade with 48323. You can sort the database by ‘active names only’ (four pages), ‘retired names’ (47 pages) or all surnames. If you go to ‘retired’ and click ‘Usage count’ you will discover that the most-used name in Second Life is Allen with a staggering 151402 residents! Second placed Oh is a long way behind with only 96971 residents.

Since I am a Furry, I decided that having a human ‘alt’ (alternate) avatar would probably be a sensible thing to do so I went through the list looking for surnames that appealed to me. There were quite a few In the end, I selected a name which appealed to the pagan side of me and headed off for the Second Life Registration page (bear in mind that I use Firefox as my browser so I can’t guarantee that everything I say from here on will apply to Internet Explorer or any other browser)

On arrival, I found that things were different since I registered as Elfrida Snook on June 24th. Now, instead of having one single option - Orientation Island - there are many other options to choose from including Second Life Voice Beta, Anshe Chung’s Dreamland, Sl Netherlands, Second House of Sweden, Azure Islands, BigPond, STA Travel, Pontiac Motorati, Ben & Jerry’s, NBA, Mainland Brasil and The L Word. I thought Azure Islands sounded fun and interesting Of course, you can still choose Orientation Island if you wish!

Unfortunately the Azure islands registration page returned an error message with no explanation of what had gone wrong apart from suggesting that the name I wanted to use might already have been taken. So I tried three variants and got the error message each time.

In frustration, I returned to the main SL registration page and, to my amazement, managed to register my chosen name without any problem (the ‘Check this name’ option on the SL page is very useful because it let’s you know why your registration has stalled) So I registered my chosen name, selected the City Chic female avatar from the rather uninspiring selection of six on offer and validated it by responding to the email from SL.

But it was a pity because I wanted to try out the new ‘Welcome Areas’ option that is now offered to new residents Maybe once I’ve escaped from the prison that is Orientation Island, I’ll make my own way to the Azure Islands and check out the Welcome Island which was promised in their registration page ….. in the meantime I’m checking out their website Azure Islands …

More useful Resources for new residents of Second Life

As the read count for the previous post continues to rise (27 and climbing today, 20 yesterday), I thought I would add a few more links to useful resources for new residents of Second Life.

Firstly, from the Second Life Wiki, we have Gwyneth Llewelyn’s - Beginners Guide to Second Life, written by an experienced Second Life mentor and full of valuable information for the new resident.

Beginners Guide to Second Life

Secondly, again from the Second Life Wiki, the official Help: Second Life FAQ

Help: Second Life FAQ

Thirdly, from the always helpful Torley Linden, a video tutorial on YouTube dealing with the troublesome problem of getting a fast-growing Inventory under control.

How to manage your Inventory

Lastly, a collection of resources on the Second Life in Education Wikispace with heaps of valuable websites covering most aspects of Second Life.

Second Life Resources

As an interesting footnote, I came across this article on the Reuters Second Life News Center website which might indicate a planned change in the Orientation Island experience.

Linden to outsource Second Life orientation

On the downside, I’ve been so busy backing up my computer this evening ready to remove Norton Systemworks and replace it with Kaspersky Antivirus/PerfectDisk (a wise precaution in case everything goes pear-shaped) that I haven’t had time to be inworld….

Orientation Island - what is going on???

I am astonished by the Search Engine terms being shown in my blog Dashboard! These are the terms people are using to find my blog. Why are so many people looking for help getting off Orientation Island or is it this same poor lost soul trying every search engine in a vain attempt to escape the island’s clutches?

Yesterday (Thursday 26th July 2007)

second life leave orientation island      3
second life furry freebies      2
getting off orientation island      1
second furry life      1
second life furry      1
getting off orientation iskland      1
fox avatar second life      1
how do I get off orientation island 1
“second life” furry videos 1
how to get off of Orientation Island      1

* * * * *

Today (Friday 27th July 2007)

leave orientation island second      1
how to leave orientational island on sec      1
second life get off orientation island      1
how to get off orientation island      1
leave orientation island on second life      1
furry avatar teleport second life      1
how to leave orientation island in secon      1

* * * * *

I am a very mystified fox ….