Strawberry Mondays on a Sunday: The Haunted Meme

I had this idea as soon as I read Nath Pevensey’s blog post about the meme, and went “Oh graphics card why must you betray me!” So I asked Nath if we could make time for him to be my terror victim and borrowed his photography skills…again. I had, you see, just obtained this mask off of the marketplace. It was free and something about the mask spoke to me of nightmares and terror. Now, my First Life revolves around those given what my job is (not an ax murderer! A writer!). The mask had stories for me, well beyond what the creator envisioned. It reminded me of the things in the night, that haunt you. That creep for you. The shadow out of the corner of your eye. The crawling sensation up your spine. The little fear that makes you rush to bed lest the monsters underneath it grab for your ankles. (This is why my bed has no underneath area, waterbeds for the win!)

Meme Instructions: What are you afraid of? What are you haunted by? Share some of your fears and if you can, create an image depicting one of them. Don’t forget to leave your link in the comments!

I am afraid of a few things, mostly things beyond my control. Nothing is more out of my control than the darkness. Ever since I was a small child I was afraid not of the dark itself but what lurks there. If you cannot see you are vulnerable. The man in the night can steal you way. You can hear him breathing… or is it just your dog? So you curl up under the covers, knowing very well that this is no real shield but what can you do about it? You may pray if you have gods that you think will hear your pitiful cries, but you try to not breathe, waiting for the night to pass.

At times you may think you see what is in the dark. The doll’s head turns slightly, the cat’s eyes catch a reflection from…where? The night closes in around you like an inky black cloak and you know that no matter how close to the wall your bed is the monsters are still there, behind you. Who are they? Their masks gleam and their eyes shine… and if you look and see them you may never wake again. It is the night and it’s cruel beauty that keeps your toes curled up close against you. You want to run and turn on the lights but… even then the night is still there in the shadows, waiting for you to let your guard down…

Nath is having a bad dream!

 

Even so… if you cry the dark does not ease. Only sunrise brings peace, and what if the sun never rises? That is what haunts me. The Eternal Night,  the cloak of shadows hiding all manner of dangers.

Style Cards:

Nath:

Dinojammies: Not available in World (was a Steam gift.)
Shape: His
Skin: Logo “Eternal Tristan – bk shaved bald”
Hair: Wasabi Pills “Dylan – Night Shadow” (Hair Fair exclusive)

Nightmare (only listing visible things):

Shape: My own creation
Cloak: [1A] cloaks- Assassin Series Black
Mask: Krux- Mask of Tharna
Bijou&T Gasp Mask in Black
Pose: Animare

 

 

 

Hair Fair!

I should do another post, like the one on changing your hands via Mesh attachments akin to the SLink I keep promising but as this is my third blog post I think a bit of goofiness is totally allowed right? (The answer is yes, people who can talk back to me only once I publish this post.) I was lucky enough to get to take part in Hair Fair designing some of the Bandanas for Bandana Day. My computer is on the breach of a cataclysmic collapse and yet the art still flowed. I feel like building again, so now First Life just has to behave so that can happen. All thanks to the fun of Sasy Scarborough and Hair Fair. 

The Bandana’s are now at the Bandana Kiosk and while I was there I did not actually price them but mostly squeed and ran about going “Ooh that hair is so pretty!” It is always a good thing when the hair fair rolls into town. I actually collect hair. I love unusual hairs the best, though the standard you can wear it anywhere hairs also are a good thing. In my inventory one of the most full folders? Hair. It is now sorted by style then sub-sorted by creator just so I can find what I am looking for.  I suppose I should add a tutorial on inventory maintenance in here sometime, but that requires letting a little disorganization occur so you can behold the before and after right? I will…take the plunge for you.  I may fall in to my inventory and never return from the efforts, but that is a risk I am willing to take.

The Bandana are donations made by individuals or store owners (also often individuals) who have chosen to donate their product to give 100 percent of proceeds to Wigs for Kids which helps kids with medical issues who have lost their hair to feel good and get a wig. When I was able to wear long hair I would grow my hair out for Locks of Love, another similar charity.  In my fun with creation I ran into a problem, the leaning tower of aged computer no longer can handle taking a decent picture in SL. There was a loud crackle from the tower, a pop, then everything went black. I had to reboot, and then I went to my dear friend Nath from What Fresh SL is This and asked for help. He kindly modeled for the ads and took the photos emailing them to me so that I could send them off.

So it was that last night I ran about the wonderful legoland that Hair Fair is this year. Between the wonderful freebies and amazing new releases I was in hair heaven. Due to the explody noises from the tower you will have to settle for the ads for the bandana but there is a hair is made to look like a dragon and has an option so it can…breathe FIRE. Wasabi Pillz has a fancy new man hair that is quite the bees knees. There is something for every taste this year.

Hair Fair 2013 Bandanas!

There is no style card for these, Nath has a blog where you can find the name of the skin,  and he is JUST in those Bandana. Naughty right?

Scroll up or click here to go to the hairfair site, pick your favorite store and get started! The sim is likely to be laggy so try to wear a full body alpha or something along that line and no scripts. It just opened last night so around 2am SLT or waiting a week should help with the “Sim is full” problem. Good luck! Fabulous Hair! Great Second Life!

Script Counts or How to Not Crash Your Friends!

I remember my third month in second life, the embarrassment when I went to a sim and one of the admin asked me to leave in IM, because of my script count. I was horrified. I had no idea I even had scripts in my hair, because that hair just sat on my head. It was not a beautiful stackable hair, or one of my scripted hair that I used to wear which lets me change the style with a little animation. It just had a resize script in it, I had never even known about.  Luckily for Second Life and the lag I left but took the time to ask what they meant. I was told about the hidden scripts but not WHY they were bad.

For those who need why, it became a quest to understand why the resize scripts were best deleted. Simple as the answer turned out to be I had no idea that second life had bloggers then and was afraid of asking my friends because I just did not want to look stupid.  Why do all of those scripts make us lag? The scripts keep an active channel open, which means at all times they are taking up server resources, so that when you click that button, this little blue square appears.

I am going to go over how to adjust prim outfits to fit as well as unrigged mesh in a future post, so if you need help there make a copy (always make a copy), and try to do your best then delete away! Why do I want you to try before seeing how I do it? Though I have years of experience in second life, I think that hands on learning is actually the best. My tutorials reflect that.  Once you have your outfit situated right where you want to wear it, click the prim attachment again, then choose all prims and delete. Not all resize scripts are identical. but they do have similarities depending on what they are reshaping and resizing. I used to think they were the best thing since sliced bread, but after a time I out grew them and find no mod items with just the script more of a hassle to fit.  Some scripts will want you to confirm the deletion, and others will not.

Now right click and choose edit, then go to contents. If you still see scripts with in the outfit you may need to manually delete them. Be aware if something is color change and resize this will neuter those scripts as well. This is why you want to make sure it is how you want it AND have a copy in case you change your mind or SL decides your look is delicious.

A resize script also cannot do everything for you with in fitting. A good pose stand, or with the latest firestorm the build in pose stand (which I prefer) means you can position your body so it not only is less wiggly but so it is easier to move those prims around. The edit menu is your friend and really won’t bite! Take your time to learn what each button does on something you do not care about or that you made a copy of. Learn which angles on the camera work best for you. I find without the alt camera function (Hold the alt key, click, scroll the mouse button to zoom in or out. Alt and click again if you need to adjust. Click and drag also works) fitting is also a lot harder. I like to make sure that my avatar is beautiful from every angle, not just where second life prefers her to be seen from.

The second life edit menu, it is your friend!

Now that you have cleaned up your outfit you are wondering “Wait, how do I find out what my scripts are? ” There are several methods. I like the in world script counters, that predate the ability to check with your viewer personally. Some sims will shout out your script count as you enter, others will have something like the Capt Blinker ScriptMemCount board. I usually find that sort on roleplay sims.  I took a screen shot of just such a tool and as you can see I have 61 scripts and am using 3.06mbs. I find this a bit high for my own taste but on average most places let you in with 4 mb or 100 scripts. It depends ON the scripts themselves and their taste. Not every sim has a script limit either. The Script Info button on the in world system requires first either clicking just the attachment you want info on or the flesh of your avatar being clicked. This is something that with the latest Firestorm viewer (as of this writing 4.4.1) seems to have trouble with. It is also a chore in the age of mesh. There are mesh avatars without skin visible, mesh clothing that replaces most of the body, and other challenges to getting down to the basic nitty gritty of the avatar.

Since my dress is now descripted, I am sure you are wondering where the other scripts are hiding! It isn’t my hair, but in other things such as my slink hands, which have a hud controlled color change system. While these scripts are active they are a more modern, lower lag system and I do not see a performance difference with or without them. This is important. I am one of the second life users with an out dated machine. My tower is five  years old and is so old there are not even parts on Ebay to upgrade it with. It does not really meet the basic functions of second life. I would love to have a high performance machine,  a great connection that can handle that stuff but I know each day I will crash from the general sadness of my tower. I try to avoid adding on to that so if an outfit even without scripts seems a bit laggy, I take it off and put on something else.  This is one of the secrets of lag that is rarely discussed as well. it is not always the script, the outfit or even Second Life at fault but simply the computer, the end user making a mistake or even the internet connection being too spotty and dropping packets left and right.

So now that you can remove some lag inducing scripts here are sources of others, HUDs or attachments on your screen such as your AO (animation over ride), Roleplayers may have titlers and interfaces that allow combat or other functions from eating on to magic. There are endless things you may want to use, feel you need and this is wonderful but know your scripts give you  more lag risk. Each script, texture, object (prim, mesh, sculpt) must be downloaded and processed by your computer. The fact second life exists at all is pretty fantastic in general. This is in no way a reprimand for you to give up your beautiful avatar. Fur avatars can be costly with scripts and there are more advanced ways to descript things you may want scripted later that I will go over in a future post about attachments and body modification. However, the resize script, the color change jewelry script or other scripts are only useful for a limited time so let’s limit them!

In my efforts to find a beautiful spot to take a photo I went to the Venexia sim, and found myself not just standing in a ring of fire, which was entirely too fun but presented with a free HUD for script counts and laginess. This means there is a portable way to make sure your every outfit is not going to crash you or your friends. Venexia is located at: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Venexia/40/246/609 . That takes you right to their info hub. There you can find the needed tools to join up in the beautifully written roleplay with some of the nicest bloodsuckers in Second Life, or just the explorer tag, as well as the SGS Lag HUD. The Lag hud, explorer tag and roleplay tools are all free. The RPers I met in my efforts to quietly tip toe through their sim were so fantastically nice, but I also had a bit of extra help from Lirynn in identifying where I was for the photographs below and listed on Flickr.

What does the SGS Lag tool say about my dress?

Before Descripting:

[14:06:49] SGS Lag HUD:
╭◈━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━◈╮
Morsmordre Furman, here is your script assessment:

238 Running Scripts (max allowed: 100)
239 Total Scripts (both running and stopped)
Your Script Memory: 14288K (max allowed: 5000K)
Your Script Time:   1.560 ms (max allowed: 0.200)

RESULT: BAD – You are a resource hogging LAG MONSTER please remove some scripts

Please review all your scripted attachments (including HUDs)
and identify and detach those causing more lag.

╰◈━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━◈╯

After Descripting:

[14:02:31] SGS Lag HUD:
╭◈━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━◈╮
Morsmordre Furman, here is your script assessment:

44 Running Scripts (max allowed: 100)
44 Total Scripts (both running and stopped)
Your Script Memory: 2192K (max allowed: 5000K)
Your Script Time:   0.081 ms (max allowed: 0.200)

RESULT: BEST – You are a low script yummy Avatar thanks for not lagging our sim 🙂

Please review all your scripted attachments (including HUDs)
and identify and detach those causing more lag.

╰◈━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━◈╯

Please remember both ways include other scripted items including my hands, feet, eyes and jewelry. I chose the TWA dress because the week of this post it is free for group members, beautiful, and still uses the older system of scripting to best show this sort of change over.

Here is the HUD with a different outfit that is moderately more scripted than the Worst Case Scenario, same eyes, hair, AO and hands and feet. (No pictures though)
[14:10:02] SGS Lag HUD:
╭◈━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━◈╮
Morsmordre Furman, here is your script assessment:

54 Running Scripts (max allowed: 100)
54 Total Scripts (both running and stopped)
Your Script Memory: 2832K (max allowed: 5000K)
Your Script Time:   0.072 ms (max allowed: 0.200)

RESULT: GOOD – Thanks for trying but you could do a bit better

Please review all your scripted attachments (including HUDs)
and identify and detach those causing more lag.

╰◈━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━◈╯

Fashion time! For fun and my feelings on leechy avs with too many scripts I chose to draw from Dracula today. The vampiress Lucy:

Fashion Card:

Sim: Venexia
Slurl: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Venexia/40/246/609 by the Arsenal Gate

Dracula’s Lucy is wearing:

Pose: Gesticulate Fab10
Shape: Made it Myself
Hands: Slink Elegant 1 and RElax
Feet: Slink Medium
Lashes: *GA* Mesh Lashes Fantasia
Eyes: FATEeyes 2.0 (Large)
Skin: Glam Affair Lulu 09 (Red) (Arcade June 2013)
Alternate suggestion Glam Affair Amberly in Petal
Stockings: Izzie’s Sheer Tights in White (Slink Add on)
Shoes: Slink Vintage 2 Strap Pumps in Cream
Make up:
Soiree Cheek Contour/Razorbone in heavy and light (stacked for added effect)
Modish Miana Lips set A lips 4
2.0 Tattoo Layer eyes Pink/Silver gift Mystique
Nails: blackLiquid Nails SLink AE in Metalic Ombre texture 4
Hair: Wasabi Pills Veronica in Cinnamon
Fangs: Sensations Sculpted Fangs
Jewelry: Illusions Curatia textured in White (Mask Not Used)
Dress: The White Armory’s M’Lady’s Courtship Gown (No train)

Lucy, newly made vampire who hungers so fiercely finds that the high script counts of second life curb her appetite!

With the scripts reduced she can hunt and feed, Lucy is satisfied and thinks perhaps you may make a fine meal.

As always bigger and better photos are located on my Flickr.

 

 

UPDATE: I got a bit wrong here, Venexia’s In Character RP hud is not free. I am told it is 400L with several weapons and life time updates.