Blogger Mix And Match: "Mixing RL and SL – The dynamics and pitfalls of living and playing in SL with your RL significant other"

I participated in the Blogger's Mix And Match, allowing my neglected blog to receive a much needed new post and a good dose of something that I know nothing about, playing SL with a RL partner. That matches my post to Vint's blog about Non-profits in SL, another topic I know nothing about, but still wrote far too many words regarding.

Cat Magellan, owner of the Get A Second Life blog, wrote this wonderful post about her meeting, falling in love, and relationship with her partner. Thankfully, she didn't write in Portuguese like the rest of her blog, so I could read and appreciate her story.

Merrick Thor of the N0nslensical blog suggested the topic.

Without further blabbering by me...

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I wish – for the sake of my readers – that I could write a spicy piece about love, disgrace, sorrow, treason and flying plates and knives, but my impressions about the subject are boring, since my story is plain and simple. However, lately, I've found out that it was a very rare thing, so maybe by telling it, it may help some people. Or maybe not, who knows? These things don't depend solely on us…

Starting from the beginning,: one day I entered the grid and blogged about it on my RL blog. A lot of readers followed me. Some of them were bloggers and blog-friends for a long time. So, I've entered the grid and soon, some friends were sort of around. Everybody knows how this works: people get together and start exploring. And doing talking, a lot of talking.

To cut the story short and because 99% will remember that the same happened to them at some time or other, and know how things get going in SL, I became very close to one of these friends. We would walk around, talk, find places, talk, meet people, talk, discover things, talk and then, SL offline, send emails, then talk on the phone and write a lot of weird stuff on our blogs. And one day, with no fuss, not telling anybody else, no parties, we became partners on SL. And very very close friends in RL. We wanted to meet each other, but we lived on different countries, so that was quite difficult to implement, and we continued to talk and talk and talk (and not getting enough sleep…). For a long time we were friends and virtual lovers. For something like 8 or 9 months.

Let me tell you, it's hard. Very hard. Being together everyday and, at the same time, being apart, kills you. It's a very difficult mixture to manage; the completely stupid total happiness and the angst of not knowing. Oh, you know, you are so sure that this is the person you imagine it will be in RL. We started by playing houses in SL, we bought land, then a sim with some friends. You know your partners' favorite curtain colors and you know your partners' soul, inside out. Yes, you are completely sure…except for that 0,000001% of probability that there will be no "klick", no pheromones kicking, no hearts beating fast when you meet face to face. This is all very well, the soul side and soul mating stuff, but RL is made of more than that, let's be realistic.

Well, we survived all those months. Not without efforts, not without guts. As time went by, the more anguished we became. In the end we might as well had forgotten the whole thing, give it up, maybe it wouldn't be worth it. Your friends support you but tell each other you have gone nuts and need medication. I guess that what kept us both going, besides the romantic feelings, was our very strong friendship. We would dream about perfect encounters, but then talk about how we felt very openly with each other. We were very honest, from day zero. That's something to keep in mind, if you want to survive something like that.

Finally, D-day arrived. We met. We survived the first terrible five minutes and the next few hours just talking and looking at each other. And then it seemed like we knew each other forever. We became partners RL, till now. We are together for almost 2 years. We still do not live in the same country, we both have our lives quite settled where we are. We speak every single day, we spend all our holidays together. Some months ago, we found out we were speaking about SL too much. Funny this and a danger to a relationship: we meet in SL and speak about everything possible, and then we go from there and talk about SL most of the time. My partner almost left the grid. I took SL more slowly, and things started working out better for us from then on. Of course, all of this is not without pain or fights: we are an absolutely normal couple who gets mad at all the routine stuff. We argue about, well, almost everything, it seems. We also laugh a lot. Guess we are on the right track here. :)

Oh and btw…he's arriving tomorrow. :D

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Thank you Cat for the wonderful post and good luck with the relationship.

I'm Entering My Terrible Twos

Today, October 13th, 2008, is my second Rez-Day. Last year, my first Rez-Day passed without a post - I was in the middle of a two month hiatus in posting, it was a pretty down point in my life. However, things are looking better and better all of the time, I'm having a lot of fun building in Second Life, writing a bunch of scripts, and in general enjoying myself. When I started, I never would have guessed two years ago at all of the people I'd meet, the fun I'd have, the good times, and the sad times. I can hardly wait to see what will happen in the next two.

It's time for my 'terrible twos'. I pity you all, you thought I was bad before, I'm just beginning .

You Know It's Been A Good Night When The Police Get Involved...

Earlier this evening, I Plurked that I was going dancing this evening. I normally don't talk about real life, the last major post was when I was a real life neko exploring dirty talk in the back of a car. But, I'd like to give you another little glimpse into my real life and why I like policemen.

I went to my usual dance club, the bouncers know me, the bartenders know me and serve me my favorite drinks (without charge), and the DJs know me, playing my favorite music. I'm there about once a week. I go dancing, not to hook up but to dance, a fact that many men seem to not grasp. I frequently close out the club, dancing all night until they throw me out pouting.

Often, especially towards the end of the night, men become desperate and attempt to hit on everyone or anyone, hoping to get lucky. A usual night for me involves fending off 10-15 guys who won't take 'no' for an answer. Most guys who hit on me are fine with me saying 'no' and they go their way, the dozen or so each night that persist too far - grab me, grope me, forcibly kiss me, grab my hand and won't let go, grab my hand and put it on their dick (both outside and inside of their pants), show me their dick, tell me about how big there dick is and all the women they've had sex with, attempt to 'dirty dance' with me, and all manner of behavior that I'd normally associate with ill-mannered baboons.

Just because I gyrate my hips when I dance, that is not a license to expect sex from me. Speaking of licenses...

One guy towards the end of the night was particularly persistent, trying to dance with me, kiss me, put my hand on his dick through his pants, etc. Basically, your typical persistent creep. I left towards the end of the night as usual, saying goodnight to everyone who worked in the club on my way out, I jumped in my car, and drove away; heading home to rest my weary feet. Dancing for 4 hours straight in 5" stilettos makes even my feet tired.

As I pulled away, the creep waved to me from his silver Mercedes. I ignored him and drove away. I went a few blocks and turned to pull on the highway. I looked in my rear mirror and noticed a silver car behind me, could be a Mercedes, could be nearly anything. He can't be stupid enough to be following me, can he? I drove for a while, watching the silver car behind me, hoping it wasn't the creep. But, every time I changed a lane, a few moments later the silver car changed lanes. I began to wonder what to do, should I call 911, what?

I decided to test my theory that it was the creep, I pulled off at the next exit, noting that the silver car swerved over two lanes to follow me off. Crap, it had to be him. I decided to drive around a few blocks quickly in an attempt to lose him, otherwise it would be time to find a policeman and try to attract his attention, or call 911. My sore feet just wanted to get home, but I also didn't want the creep to follow me there and rape me.

I went around a couple of blocks rather quickly, and I noticed that he was falling behind, a few more blocks and I could zip back on the highway and he wouldn't see me. I sped up a bit and slid around a few corners, just one more corner to go and I would be around it before he could see which way I turned. I zoomed around the corner and headed for the highway...

Then, I saw the red flashing lights behind me. Darn! Where were you about two minutes ago?

I pulled over, turned off my car, rolled down my window and waited for my erstwhile savior. The cop swaggered out of his car and came to my window, I greeted him with, "Thank you so much officer for pulling me over, you saved me." I then babbled about leaving a dance club, a silver car following me, trying to lose the car, etc. The few times I've been pulled over have nearly always started with a 'thank you' to the officer, I think it confuses them, they probably hear nothing but excuses, insults, pleading, etc. Never a 'thank you', 'you're doing a great job', or any other acknowledgement. It's my mission to I brighten their day; they have a rough enough time without me making it worse.

"I didn't see any car following you Miss."

"I'm just glad you came to my rescue, Officer... Jim," I said glancing at his name tag and flashing him the biggest, most grateful smile I could. The name has been changed to protect the besotted.

"Anyway Miss, I'd like to see your license, insurance, and registration."

"Anything you want officer. It was sliding through a stop sign wasn't it."

"Yes, Miss."

I rummaged in my purse, produced my license and handed it to him. I then opened the glove compartment and began to look for the rest of the documents he wanted. Who knows if they were even in there, I haven't had an accident or been pulled over by a cop in years.

I started to pull things out...

"Hmm, no this isn't it, but... is this a tire gauge officer?"

"Yes Miss."

"I needed one the other day, I have to remember that I have one in here..." I toss it back in and continue to look.

I bent over, trying to show as much of my legs under my tiny black miniskirt as I could. Yes, I'm shameless, but I didn't want a ticket.

Everytime I brought something back from the glove compartment, I made certain to look into his eyes with my blue eyes, bat my long black lashes, and show off all of the cleavage I could muster in my gold sequined low-cut camisole. A few flips of blond hair never hurt either.

I began to hand him all sorts of junk, asking him very politely to hold it while I continued to look. I pulled out the owner's manual, flipped through it, took out a few random papers, unfolded them, glanced at them, and handed them to officer Jim, while I babbled on about him rescuing me, the silver Mercedes, how afraid I was, etc.

He had quite a pile of random odds and ends in his hands when he finally said, "Miss, please take these back, I'd like to check on something." Finally, I was wondering how much stuff I needed to pile on his hands before he'd just go check my record. He took my license and headed back to his car, looked it up in the database, obviously found out that my record was spotless and wandered back. While he was gone, I did eventually find my registration and insurance.

He handed back my license, "Here you go Miss, I'm letting you off with a warning tonight, make certain you come to a full stop at all stop-signs."

"Yes, officer," I looked directly in his eyes and smiled as sweetly as I could, "let my say again, thank you for saving me, I was so afraid." I blew him a kiss, waved, and drove off. Even if he'd given me a ticket, I wouldn't have complained, just to guarantee the silver Mercedes creep wouldn't find me.

All the rest of the way home, I kept looking in my mirror, paranoid about silver Mercedes cars near me. This incident is just another example of why I love cops.

M Linden, Here's Why...

Reuters reports on SLCC and the reception Philip and M, received:

“Last year when I was here I had the ‘Missing Image’ T-shirt,” Rosedale said, alluding to his apology for bugs at SLCC 2007. “I think we made pretty good progress.”

The Second Life community has its own ideas. New Linden CEO Mark Kingdon followed Rosedale and asked the crowd: “We’re working hard to improve stability. Are you seeing that?” But Kingdon’s question was met with a stony silence from the crowd.

In the last week:
9/4: Logins unavailable to some residents (Duration: ~20 minutes)
9/4: Multiple Regions Offline (Duration: ~2.5 hours)
9/5: 600 Regions Down (Duration: ~2.5 hours)
9/5: Live Chat Temporarily Unavailable (Duration: ~9 hours)
9/5: Network issues (Duration: ~11 hours)
9/6: Network Troubles (Duration: ~1.5 hours)
9/7: Network Issues Again Affecting Inworld Functions (Duration: ~3.5 hours)
9/8: Network Issues Affecting Inworld Services (Duration: ~2.5 hours)
9/8: Issues with Public Issue Tracker and Wiki Access (Duration: ~9 hours)
9/9: Network Issues Affecting Inworld Services (Duration: ?????)
9/10: About 400 to be restarted shortly (Duration: ????)
9/11: Server Crash Affecting Logins (Duration: ~1 hour)

Granted, some of these are more significant than others, and I'm very glad LL actually provides the status blog; it was worse before that.

But everyday for the last week (I was not inclined to go back farther), there has been something happening. It seems like every day or two when I'm in-world, there is a global message, "there is an issues yadda, yadda, yadda please don't spend money or do anything useful."

They ought to be glad that it was only a stony silence that greeted them instead of stones.

I Got Pwned!

Tiessa's New Look
Originally uploaded by Tiessa

Oh wait, I purposefully sold myself. To my complete surprise, I was not purchased by Codie, who seemed to purchase everyone else that day. She did bid on me, but the person who finally paid over L$14,000 for me was the wonderful and delightful Celebrity Trollop, editor-in-chief and publisher of Second Style magazine. I think I had only been at events with her once or twice in the past, and I don't believe I've ever spoken more than a word to two to her. But, I always assumed someone with such a clever name must be fun - I was right, she's very fun and amusing.

I think she's tired of my fashion disasters and wished to save the world from being exposed to them. Interestingly enough, she'd never heard of my Mistress Strangelove series, but assumed I was kinky. I wonder if selling yourself at a slave auction gave that away?

The reason I know she wanted to save the world from my current style, is that she immediately took me shopping and did a make-over on me.

Let's just say I'm stunned by the results. I realized I hadn't spent much time shopping for skins in SL in over a year - yes, a year. When I last looked at skins, semi-decent ones cost over L$3k for one skin and it wasn't much better than the L$1k for 5 I had already purchased. Also, I was away for a while and not very active for some time, but I didn't realize things had changed this much.

I'm very happy Mistress Celebrity or Mistress Trollop broke me out of my rut. But now she's re-awakened the shopping addict in me, there goes the credit cards again.

I'm having problems deciding what I should call myself, Mistress Celebrity's Pet or Mistress Trollop's Trollop.

Who Wants To Own Me?

Today, at the blogger party, I'm being auctioned off. Come, place a bid, and win my services for 24 hours.

I'll make it worth your while ;)

Wearing Latex In The Garden

Mistress Veyron instructed me to post a picture of myself in this latex outfit while in the garden at my palace.

AlienHearts "Die In Heaven" Homemade Video

These are pictures I took of the 2008 New Year's Party that AlienHearts played. The music is Amathaa's awesome song, "Die In Heaven"

South Gate Museum And Library's Rotundas

Museum Entrance Rotunda
Originally uploaded by Tiessa

I'm building a municipal museum in South Gate, part of the City of Lost Angels roleplaying group of sims. This is a view from above the third floor of the entrance rotunda looking down the twin spiral staircases.

One of the major difficulties in building this is the 12-sized symmetry of the room, a dodecagon. Getting all of the angels and position correct was difficult until I discovered the LoopRez script and the excellent tutorial by Natalia. After much less grief and with far more symmetrical results, the LoopRez script can generate my rotundas with ease.

Museum Entrance Rotunda
Originally uploaded by Tiessa

For size comparison, this is me at the top of the stairs in one of my favorite gowns.

Museum Library Rotunda
Originally uploaded by Tiessa

This photo is a view from above the fourth floor of the Library Rotunda looking down through the enchanted circle etched in the glass floor towards the central stone floor below.

Tiessa In Rose Gown
Originally uploaded by Tiessa

Here I am in my rose gown by CanDy, in front of one of the art deco framed stained glass windows.

Tiessa In Rose Gown
Originally uploaded by Tiessa

Finally, a close of of me in the rose gown in front of the window.

If you ever want to come see the museum in South Gate, feel free to join me.

Lively Is Anything But

Well, it appears that Google's Lively does not allow sexual content of any kind.

"Our community standards prohibit sexually explicit images and rooms intended for sexual activity, even if virtual. When we become aware of 'sex rooms' that violate or Terms of Service, we'll work to remove them."

No sex chat at all. Period.

"We don't allow nudity, graphic sex acts, or sexually explicit material. This includes making sexual advances toward other users."

You can't even flirt with someone - that would be "making sexual advances." There goes the breast cancer education photos as well - that would be nudity. This makes "the nipple controversy" at SL5B seem downright trivial.

"When browsing or searching for rooms, some Lively citizens come upon these rooms as the top results, which can erode their Lively experience...Lively is intended to be a place for Lively citizens to connect with each other and express themselves freely and in a safe environment," Google said.

You can express yourself freely, as long as you adhere to Google's Puritanical sense of morality and their sense of "free". Free as in you cannot create your own content and you cannot express yourself without fear of the "sex police" finding fault with what you said.

What does that leave?

"Hey, nice weather we're having. What about those Mets?"

"Let me show you this *awesome* hat I got!"

To which everyone takes out and wears *the exact same hat*.

Zero differentiation on appearance, on action, on conversation.

Oh, did I mention that it's slower than SecondLife?

I think I'll stay with SecondLife where I can have all the sex, drugs, and rock and roll I desire. Even if I'm not allowed to show a nipple...

Everybody Wants To Write A Book

It's been said that everyone wants to write a book. But, it's hard, time consuming, and you have to find a publisher. Self publishing is expensive and problematic. In others, it's hard work.

Until now.

Blurb has an application where you can design a book, get it printed, etc.

But where to get all of the content...

Did I mention, that Blurb's application, which runs on both Mac and PC, can slurp data, pictures, etc from the web? From your blog on Blogger, Wordpress, Flickr, and others? It can download and auto-typeset for you, all of your blog's content, then you can go in and tweak it to perfection.

Well, now I mentioned it :)

And when you're done, you can sell it on the web through Blurb.

Prices begin at $12.95.

To all you bloggers wishing to be an author and who have already authored a bunch of content, slurp your photos and articles into a book and put it up for sale.

Feedburner Better Be Wrong...

I was going through my Feedburner stats just a moment ago and everything seemed fine...
Traffic. Normal. Check.
Subscribers. Hmmm, a bit down. Check.
Incoming links. Usual suspects. Check.
Outgoing links. Usual...

Hey! wait a minute!

I don't remember writing about "Huge Teen Tits!"

Hmmm, or did I...

Nah, that'd be weird, even for me.

Search blog. No results.

Weird. Use Feedburner to track it down...

Darn! Some spammer slipped an ad into my blog...

Photo Meme Using Flickr

From The Winder Market, Nadine shows off a nice new meme - a photo mosaic from Flickr.

Meme Rules:
You type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr search. Then, using only the first page, pick an image. Then, copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into the mosaic maker from fd's Flickr Toys.

1. What is your first name?

Tiessa. the view from the top of Tiessa's Palace

2. What is your favorite food?

Nectarine. Nectarine Blossoms

3. What high school did you go to?

Paradise Lost (in SL :). paraiso perdido / lost paradise

4. What is your favorite color?

Duh. Pink. Rocks of Gold. Why its labeled pink, I'll never know, but its a pretty picture.

5. Who is your celebrity crush?

Veyron Supercharge ;) Vint & Veyron. And I got to pick a picture that had my #2 in it, Vint Falken :)

6. Favorite drink?

Strawberry daiquiri. Strawberries, anyone?

7. Dream vacation?

The stars. Fly me to the Mooooon...

8. Favorite dessert?

Cherry Pie. ~I smell sex & candy~

9. What you want to be when you grow up?

Me (Tiessa). Tiessa. Who or what else could I possibly want to be? I'm perfect already :)

10. What do you love most in life?

Me (Tiessa). Just Kidding :) Freedom. Jonathan Livingston Seagull

11. One Word to describe you.

Bimbo. Bimbo.

12. Your flickr name.

Tiessa Montgolfier. Tiessa at the May 20, 2007 blogger party

This Is Considered Good News Analysis?

Reuters makes some interesting conclusions from Linden Lab's economic statistics. I just happen to think that the analyst didn't think it through enough to give reasonable causes, or rather they preferred to reach conclusions that were sensational and would sell more newspapers rather than boring and reasonable ones that people wouldn't get worked up about.

Here's a relevant excerpt:

Second Life had 88,585 of the subscription-paying accounts at the end of May, down from 89,845 a year earlier.

The overwhelming majority of avatars use basic accounts, which are free. Premium accounts, which cost US$10 a month, come with additional privileges including enhanced support and the right to own virtual property on Second Life’s mainland.

Even as Linden Lab’s base of paying customers shrinks over the past year, the total hours spent by avatars inside Second Life has increased dramatically. In May of 2007 total usage of Linden Lab’s virtual world was about 20.8 million hours. A year later the number spiked to almost 32 million hours, a gain of 54 percent.

With hours up but premium accounts down, the data suggests that while Second Life is failing to attract to new users, existing customers find the virtual world more engaging than ever, spending ever-greater amounts of time there.

The facts of a 50% increase in hours spent in SL and the falling number of premium accounts led the analyst to conclude that the increased number of hours spent in Second Life is due to the old users using it more? Huh?

Did the analyst bother to read their own paragraph talking about the vast majority of users being basic not premium? Linden Lab states there are over 14,000,000 accounts in Second Life and growing at the rate of over 1,000,000 per month. Did the analyst not even bother to think that many of the new sign-ups over the last year actually used the system? Nope, they'd rather conclude that SecondLife is atrophying.

Following that dubious conclusion, Reuters, goes on to talk about OpenSim.

A wild card that Linden’s statistics cannot account for is the rapid development of open-source Second Life variant OpenSim. The zero growth among premium accounts may represent a shift in the most die-hard avatars.

Avatars unable to find a home within Second Life including banking institutions and ageplayers have already migrated to OpenSim.

Doom! Gloom! The sky is falling and I'm selling more newspapers because people want to read about the non-existent rock about to hit their head.

I think a simpler explanation for the drop in premium accounts is that there are few benefits for having a premium account. First land is gone and the stipend no longer covers the cost of the membership. Two big benefits have disappeared.

Mainland/Sim ownership and access to better support are the only benefits left. Could it be that people are realizing they can buy/rent on the non-mainland sims and have parcels that look the way they want instead of being next to ad-farms? As people flee the mainland for the private sims, the benefits of being premium go away and now they can use that US$10 per month to pay the tier on their new parcel.

Sounds pretty reasonable to me. I think the dramatic growth in private sim land-size and the current freeze in new mainland (or is that over already), are far better indicators of where people are spending their money. Not that they are going to OpenSim.

And why on earth would the bankers go to OpenSim? There aren't very many people on it to make banking a viable business.

As usual, simple use of logic shows that most "news" is actually "hype" designed to sell more "news".

A Bimbo's Guide To Retrieving Lost Inventory

One thing that I've found useful is to clear your disk cache and relog. That forces the client to download all of the inventory information from the server again. Often, inventory loss is just a matter of the client forgetting about what's in your inventory for various reasons.

I had this happen to me the other day when I was copying a few hundred animations and scripts from my inventory into a prim. It eventually timed out with an error message after only copying some of the animations and scripts, there was a lot of lag in a laggy sim so the copy took forever. Unfortunately, my inventory window showed that all of the "no copy" items were not in my inventory and checking the prim, they were not in the prim.

Like any good user, I panicked and cursed Linden Labs as my first step.

Then, I realized that my client had told the server to do all of the copying, but did not handle the error of "only some of the stuff successfully copied" that the server returned. Probably because of laggy communications or other load related issues. Since the server had not actually copied the inventory, I hoped that refreshing my client's cache of the inventory would work.

It did.

For more extensive inventory loss, over on the Huddles site, there is a post on how to retrieve lost inventory, one of the comments provides nice step by step instructions on how to do it.

Ok, finally retrieved both my huddles… here’s what you have to do:

1) sign up as a premium member - you can’t do the below without it…
2) go to the support page
3) go to live chat
4) tell the operator everything that happened to the best of your ability and request: I need an inventory repair. Be as specific as you can. It will take sometime, approx 30 minutes. Be patient.
5) they will come back and say check your inventory. It likely won’t be in there… you need to REBOOT SL. When you come back in it will say Repairing Inventory Folders.
6) check to make sure it’s there - report this back to the operator.
7) If this doesn’t work, the last resort is to submit a ticket — good luck getting it heard.

GOOD LUCK! I hope it works for you as it did me, I’ve spent most of the day trying to get this back together!

Xanthia Lisle

What Girl Band Are you?

You Should Be In The Donnas

You've got that a bit of an edge to you The bad girl that all the good boys want!

What Girl Group Should You Be In?

Because everyone else is doing it...