After the initial costs of tier, tooling, marketing, blogotex access, customer support, and hours worked, the marginal cost of these products is close to zero on the merchant's side if the sale is done purely inworld. Merchants on FLF and Secret Sale Sunday and other similar "ridiculous price hour/day" schemes do them because they're betting the volume they get in return on the product as well as the eyeballs on other normally priced items will pay off. And it probably does, because this is a tendency that has long had legs.

*sits down on a plywood prim with a blocky cigarbox banjo* I wear my sunglasses at night, so I can, so I can bed Taylor Swift inside the Oculus Rift... *blinks blankly* *coughs* Boy, mixing Father Misty and Corey Hart is NOT doing it for me.

In this comic, Nylon Pinkney points out that the new version of Last Names Linden Lab is now offering is basically about asking too much for too little. #TLDR Seriously, the offer needs a rethink.

Would be interested in this session being recorded as well, as the times mentioned only cover half the globe and neglect people on either side of Europe and the Americas. As pedagogy-at-home becomes more common, more educators may be interested in this system especially in light of how messed up Zoom can be at times.

Extra points for the original hack using the classic pre-Internet parody ad for "Big Bill Hell's" *goes back to practising their challenge pissing to try getting no downpayments*

That's not how this works! That's not what it means! xD

This coming weekend promises to exacerbate the problem(?) of coronavirus failing to push an uptick in social VR: on 20th March they'll be releasing a new Animal Crossing game and a new Doom FPS that have been hotly anticipated for weeks (to the point where their entirely disparate fandoms have started posting love odes to each other, a peculiar data point in a gaming scene where opinions on what is good and what is terrible have generally been polarised heavily.). Several major musical acts around the world have been (2d video) livestreaming their performances such as Dropkick Murphys and the Melbourne Orchestra, with all indications that they will certainly not be the last.

I so badly need to go to this event. Also: Alexandra - there's always something disagreeable to someone happening in SL all the time. Unless it touches on a major universal no-go like pedophilia or Naziism, I can't see any point in being outraged rather than merely unsurprised and disappointed with some folks.

Adeon: given LL's recent refocus on Second Life, and the epic messup that the EEP project has become, Ebbe may not be averse to putting him in a position where he can work this into the main branch of the viewer AND get paid. We are in damn the torpedoes mode here - the only thing keeping LL afloat atm is Second Life, in the absence of any major signings of other VWs or MMORPGs with Tilia as a payment RWC-to-gamecash gateway. Perhaps it's time to make a few brash moves rather than be eternally cautious.

Black Dragon is a viewer with a niche appeal, but it is a surprisingly wide niche. Consider dropping a dollar a month in the tin if you can!

a niche concept aimed solely at a niche IO peripheral was never going to work out. We'll still need screens and keyboard/mice for a while longer.

A mistake was made. The mistake was costly. Hopefully going forward, Linden Lab can make decisions about Second Life's future that help to mitigate or even obviate the losses of Sansar entirely. Because consider the alternative is SL following Sansar into ignominy, rather than gracefully flapping its wings occasionally with new features in a controlled glide like a well-kept legacy platform with still much creativity and community running rampant in its fields.

How about Second Life, Sinespace and There on Stadia and NVidia, Sony? Most of the content on these services is streaming rather than time-critical, so the latency hit that would be the deathblow of twitch games would become relatively inconsequential so long as it's kept to within 2 or three seconds in total per input-output loop. Obviously the less latency the better, but we can put up with a bit more.

$50 a year, I meant. that's $5 a month, not a big ask. Made a mistake in my original msg.

$50 a month to keep the lights on at Flickr, as well as a reasonably bottomless storage bin for photos (not just the ones that are publicly published), a reasonably termed photoshare system, a relatively basic social interaction system... plus discounts on photoprints and Adobe Photoshop/Lightroom CC. I've paid for this every year after the first year in 2013 I was gifted Pro. I think it's not such a big ask to put the cost of a frappucino down every month towards supporting a good tool.

Requiring Residents to comply with real-world tax requirements while not providing proper access to transaction records required to fulfill that request strikes me as a form of neglect.

Yeesh! With viewer comments like those, who needs impostor syndrome?!

@NiranV: Propose altering the viewer so that users can either file abuse reports alleging offensive/bannable poses, or use the Poser, but not both at the same time (i.e. if the Report Abuse panel is brought up the Poser temporarily disables all client-side posing, allowing only inworld animations to play during the screencap as collected by the Report Abuse panel, until the report is fully delivered to LL. But I would say that it would be better if this too was done on the down-low - there's no pleasing some people.)

This may be a bit problematic, but the product is not available for sale at Hextraordinary atm. Perhaps the proprietor could look into it to take advantage of the good publicity.

NiranV: am aware of the constraints you are innovating under. Appreciate you're trying your best to get us what you and other folks would appreciate in a graphics-specced viewer. Hopefully one day those responsible for saying no to potential improvements to the viewer simply because it means a little more upfront work are replaced mentally or totally by people who are actually capable of saying yes in early-era wonderment instead of no in conservative fear.

vwfan: The poser DID have those capabilites initially. The poser technically is capable of doing those things, since it is capable of not differentiating between animeshes, your avatar, and other avatars. The reason the Black Dragon Viewer doesn't fully push that envelope is a policy reason, not a technical reason. It may be something the viewer needs, but it is not something the viewer will be allowed to have.

The Letuka Axis HUD as an inworld tool is limited to some extent to LSL's limitation of no more than 30 simultaneous animations playing at once on an avatar. Depending on what pose tools you use you may run into that limit fast, especially when posing both body and facial bones. Another option to get around this not mentioned in the article is using Black Dragon Viewer's Poser option, but that is slightly hampered by the fact that all changes are reflected only client side, and that only animesh and the logged-in user can be animated by it due to limitations imposed from above. (so it's only viable for selfies and not shots taken with the involvement of other people)

Sony's puritanism with regards to what content it'll allow on its console proper, let alone PSVR, is possibly a factor in this regard as well. A significant amount of VR developers are working on experiences that contain content that would not be accepted under PS guidelines. Not necessary even raunchy, maybe even merely fanservice at most. This has locked a lot of Japanese developers to working with PC VR. Another factor depressing PSVR sales may be rumors of a new-generation PSVR headset with a wireless connection coming out soon this year. Wireless headsets are becoming a liberating factor in VR systems, with getting choked, tripped or hamstrung by the cord a common fear in many full-body setups an attractive feature. (not necessarily roomscale as long as the player is free to turn around and move around a lot even if only in a spot) https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/new-sony-patent-reveals-a-wireless-psvr-headset-could-be-on-the-way/

Han: Pleasantly surprised at that response to my mention on CDS. it is heartening to see it still exists even in the face of the cost of SL being what it is on that scale, based on ye olde "Money Where Your Mouth Is" principle. I need to share that I've kind of slipped into virtual dotage myself. I'm still working with mesh and doing occasional mesh work but usually for low-rent causes and simple requests. so yes, I can partially understand what you were getting at. Which may have played a factor with me opting to taking it easy. Also, being impolite is best reserved for people who need a hard dose of reality, not a even-keeled debate. (Seriously, do NOT go looking for my Twitter account, it has more rancor in it than Dathomir LOLOLZ)

Pulsar: unfortunately, the remeshing tech you described requires a lot more horsepower than the average SL resident can field even with a GPU doing part of the compute work needed, and is mainly the province of indie/professional 3d dcc software like Blender and Maya etc. It also tends to produce unwieldy geometry depending on the fidelity you demand out of it, further work by hand often needed to improve results. Not necessarily something that could be easily popped into the viewer codebase without a significant hire of a team with experience developing 3D DCC tooling.