Clash of Cultures

We finally managed to see Dee over the weekend though our meeting was frought and brief due to a weak and inconsistent connection that barely kept me inworld. Crashing can spoil a first impression, but there really was not much to spoil. When you do a lot of solitary roaming around Second Life, you forget that two avatar-One Who Thinks They Know teams can live in completely different worlds. So it is for Dee and I.

My One who sometimes writes fiction says she could not have written it better. I was bushwhacking on ECU III, part of an archipelago run by East Carolina University. The place is huge, old, and in many ways a ghost town. I'll get to that, but educational sims are NOT on a lot of avie-One teams' radars. It was a good place to meet, low lag, neutral ground. We met on the Presentation Platform above the Mountain of Pedagogy. Yes, there really is such a place.

It is a very sad place. You can see why. The same PowerPoints have been there for several years. There has been no need to replace them, which means the place is no longer being used which makes it discretionary budget if you like euphemisms. Dee was not quite an adolescent. She wore a gray dess, made of mesh; had a lovely, mesh avie; and we were both polite and tentative. My One thinks Dee's One is a lot younger than she is in "real life." The average age for Ones in Second Life is thirty-five, or so we both have heard.

Dee confessed to liking to shop and having a nose for freebies. I said I liked to walk around the places that had gatchas or gachas. This is legal gambling and for us it is architecture and photography rather than shopping, Dee was flabbergasted that we built most everything except for my body which my One said was "standard issue." And no, that is not Dee in the image. It is a poster for an exhibition of photography at the University of Delaware's Art Museum. My One and I both wonder what Dee would think of museums. We never got to ask.

We also never explained about the zwickies, what they were and where to find more of them. We would have also have had to probably explain why we did not own any specials. Specials are hype and the gods of randomness, as my One calls them, provide lovely tricolored offspring. Besides, we love our zwickies and have never been cruel to them. There are not many people in Second Life with three year old breedables. And yes, that makes me weird, and yes hanging around the VA Hospital on ECU IV is weird too, but someone has to document that the place is several years old. We are going to test the health links for rot, when my One and I feel brave enough. My One and I move in a part of Second Life where stuff just lasts a long time, or a relatively long time.

My One and I, mostly my One, had to explain about my clothes. That we make stuff was kind of an explanation. That we made trees pleased Dee, but explaining my dress was hard. Look at the first illustration and you'll see what I had on. It's one of my favorite dresses. My One named it the Dead Mussel Disaster. She fell in love with a piece of clipart of a plate of mussels and with some washi paper for a background. It's just a great color and an original theme, and what is life without humor. The ever-polite Dee asked "Do you make all your clothes?" "I'm a hard to fit size," I replied. By the way, the VA Hospital on ECU IV has probably lasted long enough to treat victims of the incipient war with ISIS or the Islamic State.

The problem (and it may go away in time if we both stick this adoption out) is that Dee, herself, has a lot of explaining to do. Her hair and dress were lovely, but one of her accessories was a Giano Resident group tag. Iyoba knows what happened to Shaka at St. Joseph's Orphanage which is Giano. If Dee is a victim of Giano's authoritarian regime, we need to help her. If Dee has cooperated with or is on the side of the Giano authorities my One is not sure what happens then. The truth is we don't know, and the group tag is fraught. Dee of course does not know this. I mentioned the orphanage in passing. I asked how she liked it on the Giano Archipelago. I did not get an answer, and sad to say, we need that much if this adoption is going to go forward.

And if you are wondering about these stark and strange illustrations, they are a good record of what has happened on The ECU Archipelago. The patients have been in the Virtual Hospital for nearly four years. My One joked that we better call "Legal" in case they sue for false imprisonment. The MRI machine on the second floor remains without evn an old school pose ball for laying it its interior, and at Operations Research and Industrial Engineering the presentations on project are now missing web pages. My One says that East Carolina University pays $1,200 a month for eight islands, six of which are open to the public. Most of these islands sit unused. Wasting money in higher education makes my One emotional.

My One has not yet explained that to Dee, and we did not explain our newest dress, made on a garter snake theme. Garter snakes are the heroes of the garden because they kill vermin and are not poisonous to humans. Snakes make a great dress theme. I wonder if Dee would understand.

On Monday night, Iyoba had me give our schedule for the next three days to Dee. Dee was not online. Dee's One Who Thinks She Knows is a college student who has started a semester. My One says she undertands that much. We probably won't see Dee until some time Thursday. My One is still sticking it out. She says that Dee and I are in this mess together as are our Ones Who Think They Know. We'll have to sort it out, and my One hopes that we can do it like reasonable adults. We just have a lot of explaining to do.

Iyoba BatOni with lots of help from Eileen H. Kramer, the One Who Thinks She Knows -- August 26, 2014

Finishing What We Started

My One Who Thinks She Knows inists that it should go without saying that our adoption of Dee should have NEVER happened. According to my One, Never B Solo was efficient and professional at throwing out those who were poor matches, and that means my One and me.

The way this works is simple. The easiest way to eject those who are a bad fit is make it unpleasant for them to stay. The grating decor and constant public address system announcments make Never B Solo a less than happy place to be for any length of time. Likewise, parent panels are designed not to get old. They vanish after two weeks and are nonrenewable. You are free to replace a parent panel if you want to stay longer. Never B Solo is always happy to have your money. This system keeps parents and their panels from getting old. Panels only hold twenty "Likes," so if you are a less than successful parent, you feel like the only one. This means that when it comes time to renew your panel, you may not feel like making the effort, and when you walk away you will do it with no hard feelings, not realizing you have bowed to subtle pressure.

Best of all (for Never B Solo) you can come back any time. You don't have to leave the group, though you can't talk in group chat unless you have a panel, which means that you have an incentive to quit the group where you are locked out of conversation.

This is quite ingenious, but my One is quite ruthless. She is in some ways more ruthless than a lot of other Ones. She kept renewing our panel so we could advertise the The Free Academy and now....we have a long-lost, never-met, daughter, Dee. Meanwhile, our lives go on. We went back to Liason Market on Fall, so I could climb the Route66 Tower Thursday. We gave our schedule to Dee who was not around. My One says she can think 48 hours into the future due to what she does for a living. She can't get further ahead but that is OK.

Now my One, who is very tired, has forgotten her schedule. She'll get it back from the Conversation Log. Meanwhile, on Thursday, I had less trouble finding the climbing block to get on the Route 66 Tower's ladder, and my One finally captured a decent picture of me climbing up. Yes, they probably need to set the box higher up or else mow the grass. The grass at the tower's base is beautiful, but it makes the climbing box very hard to find.

And face it, if there is a tower, I have to climb it. I understand that much. There is something about that achievement that makes it more important and worth more than whatever is for sale. To my One and me, Liason Market on Fall is a beautiful touring destination. We have no interest in shopping, but the modern style architecture; fancy, mesh items; and yes, the tower fascinate us. We might make a good fit for a fashionista child. Even though we might not purchase anything, fashion venues are great touring destinations.

Actually my One broke down and bought me a popsicle in the Gatcha (random purchase machine) at Flowery, a store wtih all sorts of gatchas. I got a lemon-thyme popsicle which was fine with my One who thought the rare flavors were gross. She also wondered who needed all that detail and scripting in those chairs in the poster. I think Flowery owed its 15L sale of a popsicle to the area's beauty. Beauty can go a long way in Second Life.

So too can surprises, like the inside of the Route 66 tower. I walked around the edge of the platform and found that the tower was hollow! There was no furniture in the room inside the tower, but the wallpaper is subtle and lovely. Finding this not so secret room was very much worth the effort of the climb.

Of course earlier in the week my One had planned to have me star in a fashion shoot at She & Him. Of course, She & Him is gone but Liaison on Fall remained, and so too did Apple, a store across the street from Flowery. These plain, gray walls and wide stairs made for a perfect photo shoot. My One made this zinnia dress the summer of 2012. It was one of the first dresses to have a bead for a waistband.

The green pea dress is a lot older dating from 2010 or 2011. It is still a very original design, in the way that all beaded dresses are. Celadon green is a common color in my wardrobe, and one designers other than me should use more often.

The cicada dress dates from early in the summer/late in teh spring of 2013, in honor of the emergence of the seventeen year cicadas. My One was born in a year of the cicadas, but now lives too far south in "real life" to enjoy them. She thinks she hears them every summer, but they are short term cicadas, not the seventeen year variety. Seventeen years is a very long time for an insect to live.

And here I am in my Narwhal Dress. My One also made this last summer while she was reading The Book of GIMP to help improve her technique and as part of her striving towards fame and fortune in "real life." I forgot completely what this dress looked like so wearing it was a surprise. Finding Dee in world would be a pleasant surprise. Having her like and bond with us would be beyond a surprise, but I never thought we would have an adoption or last this long at Never B Solo.

Iyoba BatOni with lots of help from Eileen H. Kramer -- August 22, 2014

We Are Family!

At 3pm EASTERN DAYLIGHT TIME on Tuesday, my One and I made an urgent trip to Never B Solo to end our match with Dee. Dee had done nothing wrong except not meet me, even though we had tried to meet countless times. Sometimes I would be five to ten minutes late. Sometimes Dee would just not be there. There was no bad faith. Real life and a not-so-great connection on Cmputer #1 were coming between me and my potential adoptee. This can happen. As you can see in the picture, we were too late. Click to to read the blue text. Yes, it happened this way, and I am now a parent who has never met her child. My One Who Thinks She Knows, who by the way has never been a parent in "real life" simply sighed.

I cheered. Our experiment with Never B Solo was over! When our panel disappears, we will not be able to replace it. Meanwhile, if our adoptee, Dee, goes back to register for a new panel after hers goes away, she will have to fill out what happened to her last adoption. She can lie. She can tell the truth. Either she lies or she has a failed adoption on her record, a warning to all other parents. The parent application only asks about other siblings. That means we might have to lie too if we try again, and my One is not up to lying. Dee is now our "long lost daughter." It is over!

Meanwhile, my One Who Thinks She Knows and I had to figure out what to do while we waited around and tried to unsuccessfully catch Dee. We are still trying to meet up with her, but we no longer have a trial hanging over our heads, but with the trial going on, my One did nothing for the Free Academy except put it up this week. We tried to make a meeting on Imagination Island. It was a meeting of educators and librarians. We showed up a few minutes late only to find out the meeting was elsewhere, there was a landmark giving sign. Fine, but if you are not in the know and have connection troubles....You figure out the rest. We did not have time for drama. My One, however, made me a dress on Black Bear Island, one of our favorite places. The dress had sacred ibises on it, and my One very nearly lost the textures for it before uploading them.

We also went bushwhacking on Bradley University. My One and I both noticed something looked different, and indeed the library and all other exhibits there were gone! They are coming back....eventually. Bradley gave/sold/split half the island with San Jose State University which teaches library school through Second Life. It has an "immersive scholars program." Now the "Palace de Versailles" has replaced the library, but it only has fancy wallpaper and no furniture.

 

Well, I'm lying. There are lovely, cloth-covered, scripted, mesh window seats. The seats are trully state of the art if you bother to find an empty room and want to sit down. If I sound snarky I am. Most of the SJSU build Bradley University is just plain awful. It looks great, but any one can throw up a prefab and most of this is prefab. And most prefabs have severe useability issues.

Put simply, avatarim DON'T need walls or roofs. It doesn't rain in Second Life, and large groups as in lectures crowd a sim. Lag is an issue, interactivity is an issue, having a place to sit is nice. Platforms, kiosks, outdoor area with walking courses, work just as well as if not better than a huge, ornate prefab. This by the way is Stinky Stinky on Eddesign Island where I have land. I got rid of my house and put up a two level platform. I have furniture. I have more space, and I actually use the thing and have not outgrown it. The Ovi-Ring, as I call my platform would work very well in an academic setting. There is place to sit, a place to put prsenters, and a safety barrier to keep avatarim from falling off. It is nice to have a firm place under your feet. Just take my word for that. In my case, I can also plant trees on the ring and watch the zwickies come and go, which makes my One feel better when she is out of sorts, as she still is. Poor one.

Then we decided we'd do a fashion shoot with my new dress at She & Him but the place had vanished, so in the way that Ones look for trouble she sent me to Jeddah. I was not thrilled. We had been griefed there last time by thousands of mltiplying, shocking, pink cubes. This time though the cubes were gone, and the island was a lovely, Arab, build, that included this roof top garden and a public sandbox.

Of course my One had to make me another dress and here it is complete with nearly, black carnations with silvery leaves. The "Sandbox Therapy" calmed my One a bit. She thought straighter. She wanted to try the fashion shoot with this new dress, and we went back to American Bazaar to use whatever store had replaced She & Him. Then we found a link to Liaison on Fall.

Let's just say we found what was lost, and then some. Also with a more modern browser, though not too modern, we experienced the old She & Him under a new name and without undue lag. Yes, this DOES NOT look like either a store or a mall. The Japanese started this ultra-designed environment. You'll notice it is mostly outdoors, but that gives it a lot of useability. Even those who don't want to buy anything, can enjoy a sim like this.

And yes, I tried to climb the water tower. The climbing cube was hidden in the teall grass. It took some drender magic to find it. Also the platform at the top is narrow and rickety. I fell off twice. With a more solid connection, I should be able to get up to the top and explore. Oddly enough, I look forward to it, though I want my One to get back to working on the Free Academy. I think she can do that now. Whether we ever meet Dee or not, the pressure is off. My One can move on to better things, and I am VERY RELIEVED.

Iyoba BatOni with help from Eileen H. Kramer -- August 21, 2014

Weighed Down by a Boulder

Even if you can't read the red writing above our panel at Never B Solo you can see that something is different, and that something is that late Thursday afternoon we began a trial with a seven year old (An adult in real life but she plays a seven year old inworld) girl we are going to call Dee. We have yet to meet Dee and our trial period is half gone. There, I've spoiled evverything, but in many ways, the fact that we have a slow trial is good for my One who still is....but sometimes the music at clubs makes her cry these days.

We still go to clubs, and my One has me dutifully leaving messages to Dee to tell her when we are online. She has touched base. She is acting in good faith, and my ruthless One Who Thinks She Knows says we must reciporicate. Normally this would be easy, but given my One's totally retched condition, it is harder, and then on Wednesday evening, we went to Never-B-Solo to check our panel and....

we met up with three avies. There were two adult women and one little girl. The women wore the kind of outfit you can see in this picture from Second Life Marketplace along with shoes with spiked heels. The women also had very wide hips much like the models in the picture. No, we did not photograph them. There are privacy issues, and niether my One nor I behave like jerks inworld. The little girl had a perfect, mesh avie with golden hair and all the right gestures....well sort of.

It is no secret that many animation overrides (AO's) make avatarim appear fidgety, but this child's AO made her so squirmy that she reminded my One and me of a lion in a cage at the zoo. It was hard not to feel sorry for her, and my poor One could not help herself. I squatted down on the floor and we both suggested the child run around to relieve her boredom. I even told the story of teaching newbies to jump over the fence at the now long gone Info Island International.

Suddenly the kid began to howl. I thought she was just tired. I was squatting on the floor making civil, small talk. Then one of the adult avies explained that I was scaring the kid with my avatar. I needed to fix up my avie if I ever wanted to adopt I was told. Neither of these adults, by the way works for Never B Solo, and they are "living proof" that the adoption agency's numerous public address announcements are worthless. I told the two "adults" that I was the only one who bothered to get down on the young child's level while they towered over her in spike heeled shoes. Meanwhile, my One was starting to come unglued. We stepped out as I listened to the One tell me about people who needed to complete middle school and BOUNDARIES! Ours of course had just been violated big time.

My One did not need this added stress in her life. It was a struggle to return to Never B Solo during the rest of the week. And yes, I did have a funny looking badge on my chest Wednesday night because I had needed three security credentials to enter the buildings at Very Secure Corporation to insepct their computer security on Really Engaging Accounting. I was still wearing my red credential, but is this any more frightening than this old, school hole punch also found on Really Engaging Accounting.

My One and I pointed out to the two adults and one very, fidgety little girl that children are usually more tolerant of difference than adults. Maybe this is true in "real life" but my One was soon beating herself over the head wtih guilt and a memory. When she was two and lived in Flushing, Queens she had a phonograph record that played selections from Gilbert and Sullivan including The Flowers that Bloom in the Spring Tra La from the Mikado. My One said that she had been curious about the word "caricature" in the second verse, and that her mother had told her the word's meaning. Some time after this, my One saw a gardener at her apartment complex, a man whose face was severely scarred, and she told her mother that the man was a "caricature." OK, my One loved learning new words, and the man was an exception to the rule of children being tolerant, but my One had also done her share of BOUNDARY VIOLATION when she noticed the very, realistic, little girl's nearly stereotyped movements. Of course she simply reacted to the movements and did not tell the girl to get a new AO, so I guess that is different. And the "caricature" incident had to do with a very unusual individual and trying out new vocabulary, so again it is different, even if it is only a difference of degree rather than kind.

Normally we wouldn't let the insults from a couple of ignorant idiots bother us, but my One is raw and sensitive, and she got hit at the wrong place at the wrong time. We should have stuck to bushwhacking, at great places of course like Really Engaging Accounting. Here in the Security Office is John's application for offsite use of a laptop he is home sick.

Of course John forgot his flash drive which sits happily in his computer's drive port, or maybe the flash drive belongs to the receptionist, a bored-looking but friendly bot in a crimson colored t-shirt. My One said the receptionist looked like someone she knew at her job. I wish we had a picture of her, but you can't have pictures of everything. Anyway, the receptionist is quite obliging and will give you credentials if you just ask. In this way, I was able to get access to all the inner offices.

And no, in most of the offices, the computers required finger-print identification, and few workers had their passwords on sticky notes on their monitors like John in the security office he shared with the bored but friendly receptionist. My One finds sloppy lab simulations very funny. It was good to see her laugh right before we ran into the three less than civil idiots at Never Be Solo.

Then on Thursday the roof fell in. We have had four trials with Never Be Solo. One lasted five days and resulted in the potential adoptee getting banned. He has since returned and been adopted. I think he is back a third time though or a six hundreth. He is fairly easy to spot, and sometimes my One and I like him just for the heck of it. Our first trial lasted a bit less than twenty-four hours. The other two trials have each lasted less than an hour. This trial is two and a half days old, and has lasted that long only because we have not yet met Dee. My One does not need the added stress from a FIFTH rejection. We are just prolonging the agony. We owe Dee a fair trial and good faith. It's not our fault that we ran into a gang of jerks Wednesday night. Like my One and I, Dee is also in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Iyoba BatOni with help from Eileen H. Kramer -- August 17, 2014

Some Things Can't be Fixed

For those of you who stick with this blog, and I'm sure there has to be at least one loyal or disloyal fan, you know my One Who Thinks She Knows' predominant mood is OUT OF SORTS. Say that three times fast, but the last few days she has become immeasurably worse.

If you see us inworld, please treat me kindly on her behalf, though you probably won't see me. When my One is this far gone, we become fiercely antisocial. We hide. My One makes me clothes because she needs "Sandbox Therapy." I got to wear this new dress to work at the CVL Reference Hut on Imagination Island. We had no clients, so I got to try out gestures.

We also try to bushwhack. "Try" is the operative word here. My One can't bear sims where tax payer money goes to waste. I don't fully understand money in her world, but there is either way too much floating around or way too little, and people lose their jobs. I know that sounds weird. My One was still brave Monday afternoon and we explored a lovely art deco building on East Carolina University. It belonged to the business, psychology, and language and literature (English??) departments, but it was mostly abandoned or maybe never finished.

The only accessible exhibit lacks notecard givers, posters, or talking scripts that could offer an explanation or interactive aspect. That's me lying on a couch in a room filled with various illustrations from various murder mysteries, but no explanation of what goes with what. You can see how this can make a One or an avie who is out of sorts a lot worse.

And it is not that my One Who Thinks She Knows wallows in self pity. All weekend long she was very brave. She even busied herself with her quest for fame and fortune. Then she saw chioggia beets at Wholefoods. She has always wanted to eat them. They were priced right. They were good quality. She even phoned all her friends to tell them that they were there. But chioggia beets are part of my One's condemned woman's last meal. The irony of this did not escape her.

The weird thing is that my One has asked me NOT to discuss the reasons behind her unhappiness, but I think when she bought those beets in Whole Foods she saw it coming. She has seen her present problem for months. She lives with it every day. A One, however, by her nature is ruthless, and she is ruthless with herself. She is just not a stone. Only a stone can not shed tears and grieve.

That is why my One and I stopped bushwhacking on the ECU Archipelago. She was one big wound all over, and did not need to take a roll in a bed of salt. Instead, she made me a dress and we worked on it on Yale University Island. The dress had one of Es0 Torok's amazing spikes for part of its waistband. I think his spikes are his best creation, though my One is not yet ready to buy a builder box of them yet. Note: I don't want to reveal where we made the dress. That is blog policy for sims with a high squatter risk.

After we made the dress, we went somewhere pretty and well maintained despite the fact it is not particularly new, London Old and New on RSC SE Staff. The build is old, but well made, so it has aged well. Simplicity helps with boxy builds like this. There is simply less to get dated, and look like yesterday's hot idea. Also, the decorations are functional and good. You saw those tulips a few paragraphs ago. There are also pictures on the walls, graffitti, educational posters, restaurant menus, street signs, etc..

And there are ways to be realstic without being photo-realistic and failing. The fenced in yards through this window in an empty room are a great example. They remind my One of something called air shaft which old apartments had when they didn't have enough outside windows.

So you may as well ask what happens next. I think I'm going to have a wardrove expansion. Looking at pictures and working with graphics soothes my poor One. Last night, my One made a minor adjustment to our browser on Computer #1. It seems to work a lot better. We are probably going to wrestle with Viewer 3.7.xx (It may have changed already) when my One regains her strength. When my One finishes her current quest for fame and fortune she is going to try to adjust the script and look of our forty some prim white board and make a give-away version of the Zebra Browser kiosk. And yes, when my One grows less sensitive, we'll return to bushwhacking in earnest.

As for real life, my One has her health and her employment, and she is in no legal trouble. She says she has a lot to think about, and that is not a euphemism. That is not even ruthless. This really isn't a time for my One to be ruthless with herself or others. That is the best way I can put it. My One's feelings and passions are valid. She has a right to hurt, and she feels bad about something that is very important and real to her, and it might very well be important and real to other people too. Those people are just not the Ones who can do anything to help her. Please for now, just be kind to my One. She's always with me inworld. She hurts very badly. I wish I could say more.

Iyoba BatOni (the avatar) with help as always from Eileen H. Kramer (the One Who Thinks She Knows) -- August 13, 2014

You Can't Pull This Off!

Thursday my One Who Thinks She Knows installed a fresh copy of Exodus, our viewer of choice since 3.7.13 is laggy and buggy, on Computer #2. Let's just say I found myself in a whole new world. My One should have felt relieved, but if you believe that, well you don't know my One. She was completely and totally wretched. Thursday night she barely remembered to take down the Free Academy Learning Platform. Friday though we got it up without a hitch.

Meanwhile, there was only one thing that would make my One feel better, Sandbox Therapy! I did get a new dress out of the deal. It even had the panels on the prim skirt reversed, something that takes patience to do. Of course My One reminded me that making new dresses, which she needs to do, does nothing to help the Free Academy.

For that my One and I would need to network with others in the education community. The role play/adoption community is a lost cause. Shaka, our altie, is hiding off stage. My One is also seeking fame and fortune in "real life." Worse yet, my One maintains The Explore SL Spread Sheet. This is good work if you can get it, but it is ugly work too because we get to see all the neglected educational builds, the laggy builds, the builds that just sit there a waste of tax payer money. Most of them have a public institution or a private institution getting state and federal aid behind them. When there is money, college and universities spend it like water. When they don't have ityou can read for yourself. My One Who Thinks She Knows is a R.I.F. survivor. R.I.F. stands for reduction in force. You can see why she takes things emotionally sometimes.

"You can't pull off a meeting like that on a good day," I tried explaining to my One. And she was not having a good day on Thursday. She was distressed and tired and her usual self, on steroids if you know what I mean. We were in no shape to go out dancing. It was too soon to make another dress. We went and toured the huge geometric sculpture which repeats itself over and over again on LEA1. It was beautiful if a bit boring. The image is me at about a hundred meters up and it's that way for a hundred meters above me and all the way to ground level. It's big, beautiful, but at least it's a temporary extravagance here for a month, and all it has to do is look pretty.

That seemed to be OK with my One Who Thinks She Knows. The big, sculptured, build looked pretty enough that by Friday we went out dancing at Afterlife. Despite it's description, it is a fairly nice bar, a dive so smelly, you can smell the sweat and stale beer absorbed into the distressed wooden flooring. There are a few weird pictures on the walls, but the place is clean and well lighted, and definitely respectful as in they treat all avies with respect!

My One believes that the only difference between an adult sim and most other sims in Second Life is usually they want to keep the newbies out by having you have to have payment info on file to get in. This one could have been G-rated if they took down a few of the pictures. And, yes I've seen worse, and my One says adult sims are part of Second Life so why not discuss them on this blog. At least Afterlife has a sense of humor. A good laugh is hard to come by.

Of course by Friday, my One started out her usual out of sorts self again. She was not up for dancnig. She was NOT even up for bushwhacking on ECU II where we still had work to do. She said she wanted to ride the train to SouthernTier New York so we could visit some really beautiful builds. The train derailed and I ended up in HealthLink New York where we found more building at the hospital and got an extra site for the Explores SL Spread Sheet.

We did a lot of exploring and finally reached the the Autism Awareness Center in Western New York. They have a display of torture instruments on the first floor and of course I had to try them out. This kind of thing pleases my One, who needed something, anything to cheer her up.

And this restraining crib is particularly fiendish. Every time we visit the the Autism Awareness Center my One likes me to try it out. At least this time she has paired the image of me being humiliated (I've been through worse. Ever try one of those refrigerators that trap you inside when you open them!) with a sketch from the museum. I'm glad my One likes doing fancy graphics.

She also likes discussing the financial future of sims though she is very bad at predicting it. Sims have a way of surprising both of us when they disappear. My One was particularly intrigued by a bunch of apartments in MidState New York. They were completed and partly furnished, but their rent boxes were locked. There is a lot of empty real estate on the HealthLink Archipelago. My One wonders if the place is subsidized or if it makes ends meet.

Of course the police station on MidState New York is NOT for rent. I had to inspect the jail. I don't want any bots treated like dirt. Ones treat eachother quiet inhumanely if one of them breaks the law, and they bring this vicious custom to Second Life. My One and I had an argument over whether this cell had toilet facilities. It has a wash stand. That's the metal bowl, but we were unsure whether the wooden bowl was for waste water or waste. I think the police let the prisoners out to use the bathroom. My one thinks the wooden bowl is a "chamber pot." Even if it is a toilet, at least it is a clean one. I think this is a pretty humane jail as jails go.

And yes, my One went to an educators meeting and I got to tag along. She felt outclassed but that was fine. It was better than the way she thought she would feel. She mostly had problems with lag which given the place we visited did not surprise her. Everyone was real nice to us, which was a surprising change. I even got to go dancing. My One says she is going to get rid of one of our groups and join the edcuators' group that made the trip. It was not their fault that the sim we visited was laggy. Oh and our panel runs out at Never B Solo. We have to let it expire so we can keep lking. We also hve about two weeks worth of advertising left on our board. We'll renew that of course as well. My One brought home kitty litter early Sunday morning in "real life" and the money she saves by not having it delivered goes in the "land kitty" for the The Free Academy. I guess my One Who Thinks She Knows is really sticking with the project.

Iyoba BatOni with help from Eileen H. Kramer -- August 10, 2014

Drafted to be the Bearer of Bad News

You're looking at one of the few good pieces of news in the past few days. Our Free Academy Group is down to three members. One is my altie, Shaka. The other is Salaud, head of the Beggars' Army, and the last is me. We lost our two other members, because one wanted a class schedule, and the other was on in a different time zone. Neither were English speakers, though German Alex spoke English quite well. Meanwhile, either the Exodus browser on computer #2 is corrupted or the mouse on computer #2 is on its way out. Either one is possible.

Meanwhile, my One Who Thinks She Knows has decided that both Shaka and I have been poked in the eye one time too many by liquid/fitted mesh so we must try to adopt to the new Version 3 browser. This does not sound so bad on the face of it. Exodus our browser of choice is outdated but it is a version 3 analog. We started with a beta/release candidate version of 3.7.13 and it refused to open. It just sat there connecting to region and loading world for a good twenty minutes. We next tried a stable 3.7.12 It worked great until we hit a crowded club. That is a fairly common problem. We reduced settings and tried to build. That was when clothing would not come off, files would not rename, hair would not change color. You want more.... Isn't that enough?

My One thinks it is just a learnning curve, though the forced upload to 3.7.13 was not promising. There were several write failures that we finally just ignored. The browser was and still is laggy laggy. We attempted a clothing change with one wardrobe malfunction and attemtped making hair with it. The hair would not recolor. I've made more complex hair pieces than this too and never saw the problem before.

A browser that won't recolor a thirty some prim hair piece has asset management issues. Isn't it nice when issues have a name. My One thinks she'll curl up with the JIRA (bug reports). I think I'll just tare my hair out in big, bloody hunks, and no Thinkerer, this is the most productive strategy even though I am bald and run around in hair pieces. We took this photo at Black Bear Island's Presqu'ile Sandbox, though I did not make my new hair piece (Thank you Es0 Torok. You never know what you do with sculpties until you really try.) there. I did make most of it in version 3.7.13 until I had to color it and then... my One and I had both had enough.

Yeah.... we really did see the whole of the moon too, and my One was desperate enough to dust off Singularity, our old back up browser so I could make the blue dress with hot red impatients on Friday. No, we can't use this browser for anything but building since we are completely mesh blind with it, but it does make nice photographs sometimes. That we can still use Singularity means our software rather than our mouse may be corrupt. My One is in research mode and I'm in charge of the hair tearing out department, remember.

We're both in charge of the losing members to the Free Academy group department, but my One says that really isn't her fault. She was honest. No, there are no classes. The web page even says so. No, we're not on any other time than what you would exepct for someone from the Eastern United States. Yes, we sent notices. We even packaged up links for German Alex. We lost him anyway. What our exemembers saw is what our exmembers got. No, there aren't a hundred people here. There don't need to be a hundred. And we were honest. That is simall consolation.

Our one bright moment in this week's fiasco was when my One asked Salaud to join the Free Academy. "Make me an officer!" he begged. "I want control of the sim. I can get you hundreds of members." Remember the Beggar's Army, and that is a rhetorical question. My One and I explained several times over that there was no sim. Somebody didn't read the web page, but we pretty much have Salaud with us forever.

When we had a working browser, what my One Who Thinks She Knows wanted to do was bushwhack. Yeah...and if you think our browser and mouse woes and our useless Free Academy are depressing, well let's just say my One thinks they make bushwhacking look good. That, however, does not say much for bushwhacking. First there is Eagle Island2 which replaced Eagle Island with twice the propaganda twice as sophisticated. If you want to believe chicken eat pure, quality tested, grain feed, this is your sim. They don't mention prophylactic or growth promoting antibiotics, the products of rendering plants etc...

Then there is the Library on ClevelandPlus II. Perhaps it was never finished. Perhaps it was just the way they built things in 2009, but there are no links to web sites, catalogs, eBooks (Think Project Gutenberg!). Some of the chairs are unsittable, and the grass protrudes through the floor.

Even sadder is Youth for Christ. This sign looks good, but the cave with its exhibit of Bible stories and Fundamentalist, Christian belief is gone. In its place is this church with a spiffy new sign.

This lovely church has state-of-the-art distressed texture walls and a few Second Life photos and....not much else. I got tired of doing the Siri in empty shell buildings. That was getting to be way too much of a cliché, so I picked out a different dance for this shot.

And neither my One nor I could figure out ECU V ECU stands for East Carolina University. This sign sits on the outside of a bare hut, one of several in the village of retched poverty. The children have no shoes and messages over the well say the water is contaimated. This hut has some of the only furniture in the village, a large table, on which rests an intellibook dating from 2011. The book has no illustrations but explains how sex trafficking works. Ironically if I came from this awful village, I might very well sell myself to have clean water, nice clothes, and a few sticks of furniture.

Actually, this baby's mother may be off being trafficked. The caption over him reads "barefoot child." He has on a nice onesie though and it has footies, so he's in good shape even if his mother engages in the world's oldest profession. Actually, he is probably just a little bot or statue that came fully dressed from the baby store.

Actually, much of the ECU Archipelago is either built on the cheap or showing its age. These bleechers were thrown together surrounding business student Power Points that are one to two years old, but thrown together is the word! They have no pose balls. They have no sit menus, and when I tried to sit on one, you can see the results in the photograph. The ECU Islands apparently do get used from time to time and the university is committed to paying the rent. "Let the money flow and the good times roll," says my One Who Thinks She Knows.

The good news, and there is some, is that my One will put up the Free Academy platform on Friday afternoon. after she takes it down Thursday night. "We're not giving up," she insists. This morning she reinstalled Exodus on computer #2. Version 3.7.13 is just too badly put together to be a mainstay browser on that computer. We made one trial one, and our "mouse problems" were gone. We even picked up some new games at what used to be the library on ECU II. Next week may be better, but always beware when this blog goes silent.

Iyoba BatOni with help from Eileen H. Kramer -- August 7, 2014

Eileen and Iyoba's Do It Better 2013 Roster
Name of Place	Why it Qualifies
The State Fair at Morrill	It has great rides; fun games; a huge, educational, archipelago nearby and also the Avatar Fitness Club near by with hard, house music and a crowd.
Hanako Land	Interesting architecture, amusement park rides that are kinetic sculpture, a four story castle, and a house of horrors that is sure to have your nightmare waiting for you. This sim vanished May of 2014.
Shinrei Ueno Hospital	This is a unique build with shadows, darkness, urban exploration, and ghosts. It also is an abandoned mental hospital with all the assocations this brings.
Fiteiro Cultural	Two clubs, art exhibits, innovative builds and architecture, sculpture, an old Dutch village and more!
Towson Innovation Lab	Art that comes alive and is always updated plus a well run, public, sandbox.
Soho New York	Home of the Cyclone and gateway to a variety of museums and galleries, temperate nature walks, the largest train on estate land, and the second longest ski run in Second Life. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Portugal Porto	Enter the Old City to see a Southern European fishing port as old as the Roman Empire. Visit four clubs. Shop in the stores, or just go for a walk. Unlike most of Second Life, this sim is populated but almost never crowded enough to crash or lag.
Virtual Rosewood	It can happen here and it did. A monument to and museum about the Rosewood Massacre that happened in January 1923 in Florida.
Electrobit City	Gaming meets kinetic, flat work and hard edged art for an immersive and exciting experience that never grows stale.