Just another gay talking horse

From the land I own in Gavello, I can see an immense build just across the sim, an awesome castle in the Bavarian style, called Selene Castle. (Click for SLurl). The grounds are huge and actually border on my property, which is nice to know. So today I went for a wander round.

Selene Castle is HUGE. It takes up over 10,000 sq.m. of Gavallo plus another 12,000 in the neighbouring sim. There is a massive garden with waterfalls and a temple, an outdoor ballroom and event space. Inside there's an indoor ballroom and lounge, art gallery, then there's a courtyard and medieval-style market as well.

It's a really beautiful build, reminds me a little of the Gardens of Apollo, so I took some screenshots. Click the thumbnails for fullsize. It definitely beats having spinning "For Sale" towers as neighbours.

Well it's damn good to be back. I was hanging round on Mission Beach today, which is where I've spent practically half my time in SL since the beginning.  There are a lot of new faces, but some old familiar ones as well. It feels like coming home. I've missed the place. 

Now all I need is my Vig back on that log with me.

One thing's not changed in the 6 months I've been away. The damn thing still crashes just as good as it ever did. Although I now have a 3 meg DSL connection instead of 1 meg, and a faster graphics card, and the rezzing is SO much better.

I've built a new skybox to fit a standard 512m plot. It fits on a 30m x 15m footprint and comprises 2 storeys with ramp access and patio. The entire thing is just 25 prims including the door. If you place the building on the ground you'll need to add a second door in the ground floor. It's a really tight fit in a 32 x 16m plot so its better as a skybox or maybe put on a bigger parcel with some surrounding landscaping.

Meanwhile I got an email to say that Torley Linden had friended my Flickr account. Trouble was I couldn't remember my login, and it's not the same as what's displayed. Found it eventually though.

I've been wanting to get back into Second Life and so I've logged in a couple of times this weekend and hung out at Boots' Beach. I miss the place, mainly I miss the people I used to hang out with; Boots and Shawn, Jamie and Celty, Tarsh. I miss Tarsh the most. And my Vig, who because of RL issues, hasn't logged in either, in months and months. Its been months and months myself, I haven't really been around much since last September. Having Bigman (my son) here kind of eats into free time for messing about online.

But things didn't go so well in the end and now he's back with his mum and stepdad (they got married in January). I had some... well, lets just say, mental health issues... and I decided it wasn't a good situation for him to be here, seeing his dad in a state I didn't want him to see me in. So he went back and there are no more plans for him to be living with me long-term.

Which means more time for Second Life, if only I could get my arse into gear long enough to actually get motivated enough to do anything.

I have sold the old, big parcel of land and bought a 512m plot which I can keep without paying tier. A friend has bought the plot next door so we've kind of combined efforts so it looks like a coherent 1024m plot. His house, my garden. Nothing special, maybe I'll work on something a bit better in time.

When I logged in yesterday I found that I'd left my avatar in human form. I took one look, shook my head and switched back to the big blue horse. I sometimes think it would be nice to just be another sexy guy hanging out at the beach, but then I think "why?" Not like I'm looking for anyone. And besides, everyone knows the Herbster is a big blue horse. No-one would recognise me if I was human again.

And Vig is coming over again this year, at the end of June, for a bit longer this time. Things have been really hard for us both this year, him with work & study conflicts, working nights affecting his health. He forgets sometimes, that he's pushing 50 and not as fit as he used to be. And conflicts with his schedule and mine means I rarely catch him for more than 15 minutes, maybe 3-4 times a week if I'm REALLY lucky. But there's nothing we can do about it except wait.

A while back in SL, I found a freebie script which cycles textures. I used it to make a framed picture for the wall, which cycles through the snapshots stored inside it. Well, today I was Christmas shopping and I found one of these...

Digital Photo Frame.

Nifty. I want one, to fill with SL snapshots and hang on my RL wall.

Another big FAIL to add to the every growing list of Fails since 6A took over LJ.

Have you ever been to a blog which has those annoying graphic previews of a website when you hover over it? The ones that are about 300 pixels wide and half the time they get in the way of the link so you can't actually see them? Well 6A have gone into partnership with snap.com that does those, and they're going to be doing it in LJ. You can choose to disable it on your own LJ but you can't choose to disable it for all LJs you view, only your own. Which is only half the job of disabling it, really. Of course LJ want you to see previews of all the juicy sponsored links they're filling up the News community with.

Here's the convo alerting me to it (note they've not actually announced it at all even though it's live). And here's a Digg article on why Snap sucks.

What annoys me the most is every single Bad Thing on LJ over the past year, has something to do with advertising; either increasing the prominence of sponsored content, or reacting in fear of losing sponsors. Even the whole fandom strikethrough fuss was ultimately because they were afraid sponsors wouldn't touch them with a 10-ft bargepole if there was anything dodgy on anyone's LJ.

I deleted my personal LJ a while back (actually I deleted the content but left the account, so I could read/comment on friends), but left this one going because I wanted to keep participating in the second_lifers community. Now, I'm not so sure I even want to do that any more, if all the links in it are going to be popup-enabled.  I am this close .. to deleting my LJ altogether - not just deleting the content and not using it, but actually deleting the whole account - because I am now at the point where I really can't trust the company any more. What next? Tracking cookies? Spyware?

One day, in the not too distant future, LJ is going to be like Myspace. Only it will be a squeaky-clean, censored, full of ads but no content above a PG kind of Myspace. And me, I will be gone for good before that happens.

The fourth incarnation of Bluff House is finished, aside from interior decorating, furnishing and landscaping of the grounds. It's taken me 4 days of work, and a lot of frustration (as seen in the last post) . It's based fairly loosely on the plans of some Spanish villas I found in a holiday brochure and on a website. The textures are all handmade by myself and also are inspired by those Spanish villas. And, amazingly, the entire house is, thanks mainly to sculpty stairs and windows-in-walls textures, around 70 prims, even though it's bigger than Bluff House III. I have some more interior walls to put in upstairs, so it'll probably go up to about 80, plus another 20 or so for the patio and pool. That's well under the previous house. Vig gets his computer back on Monday so it should all be completely finished by the time he gets back inworld.

And here's the pics I promised. More as I progress. 

My favorite meal: fish and chips

A drink I often order: caramel latte

A delicious desert: Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia ice-cream

A game I like to play: Tiger Woods PGA 2006

A book I strongly recommend: The Myst trilogy

An author who has affected me: JRR Tolkien

A magazine I read frequently: none

The newspaper I read on Sunday: none

Music I listen to when I'm alone: Bob Marley.

Singer or band I listen to most: varies

Film I could watch over and over: Bladerunner

A director I admire: Ridley Scott

An actress I admire: Liv Tyler.

An actor I admire: heh. Viggo Mortensen

A TV show I watch regularly none

Artist whose work I highly respect: I don't know enough artists to be able to answer this one.

A piece of clothing I love to wear: denim shirt

A monument I would like to have a view of from my bedroom window: The Ghandi statue from the garden near Russell Square. My Vig knows why.

Favorite time of day: Morning, between 9am and noon. Late enough that I've properly woken up, and early enough that I don't have to go to work yet.

Favorite place to sit at home: At the computer

What I most like to do on Sunday: Take my dog out for a really long walk, with lunch and beer in a country pub halfway.

My motto: " Don't worry about a thing, 'cos every little thing is gonna be alright"

I just realised that thing more than likely sent invites to people like.. omy father. Brother. People we know from work. People i've not written to in six years. People who have no fucking idea who Karl Herber is. Thank god I used my SL name, at least I can pretend it's to do with a game and it's a mistake.

Fuckfuckfuck.

I want to kill someone. Preferably someone in the boardroom at Quechuip.

How do I make an Official complaint about this?

If you get an email from me inviting you to something called Quechup, ignore it. For gods sake DON'T sign up for this piece of shit.

It's one of those rubbish social netowrking things, I signed up to take a look, decided it was crap, and deleted my account.

Now it has apparently trawled my addressbook and fucking sent invites to everyone (or at least some people) out of it.

grr.

*smites it*

Since dropping the Blogger blog and relying only on LJ/IJ, I've regretted not having a more "professional"-looking blog for my Second Life posts. I was never keen on Blogger's interface, and since I'm used to Wordpress now, I've got myself another Wordpress blog for Second Life, titled rather unimaginatively, "Karl in Second Life".  And apparently the Semagic client works on wordpress.com as well as IJ, so I'll be able to crosspost everything.

My friend Russ Kanno also has a blog there.

So after some talk about it in the past, Second Life are going ahead with identity verification. The short story is, that in order to access all parts of the grid, it will be necessary to provide a third-party company (which specialises in fraud prevention) with one of the following items: (a) Passport number (b) driving license number, (c) social security number. Nothing else is acceptable.

Never mind that in some countries it's actually illegal to give that information to anyone, and in countries where it isn't illegal, well it bloodywell should be. Any one of these three items can be used by criminals for the purposes of identity theft and fraud, which ironically is what they're trying to prevent.

The article says that the verification would be a simple online procedure, residents just type in the number and bingo. Done. What happens next? That data packet containing my passport number goes on around 30 or so "hops" from one internet server to another, between here and Lindenlabs (or other company I've never heard of before today). Any one of those stages is vulnerable to hacking, interception, screen-scraping, or just an unscrupulous employee at some random internet provider looking at a screen. If the worst does happen and my identity is stolen, I've also effectively given away any possible recourse for compensation, simply by being stupid enough to give my passport/social security details online. No lawyer in the land would be able to defend me.

Um. No thanks.

So what does this mean for me? Well. Given that residents with "adult sites" will be expected to ban non-verified residents, I guess that means I won't be able to go in any sex clubs, bdsm dungeons etc. Hmm. Not like I ever go in places like that anyway. I have a sex-gen mattress in my SL home, and the hottest stud in the game to share it with, I don't NEED anything else. No biggie, if I'm banned from places I never visit anyway.

Except, there's one place. Mission Beach, which is my favourite gay hangout. Mission Beach has been my home-from-home for over a year. I love that place, I love all the guys that hang out there, many of my best friends in the whole game are from that beach. Now when the idea was first suggested by LL a few months ago, Boots was much in favour of making the beach age-verified only. I'm not sure that he fully understands the implifications of doing that. He seemed to be under the impression that the only reasons that anyone would choose not to verify was that they're either a griefer or underage. I'm neither, but I'm still unwilling to risk my personal tetails to the insecurity of the 'net. That makes me a citizen that apparently can no longer be trusted. I guess if Boots does choose to the beach to non-verifieds, I just won't be able to visit any more, but I shall be very sad to lose that contact with a place and a crowd that I've loved so much.

*sigh*

This fucking sucks.

I decided to hang around some newbie areas today, to do a bit of mentoring, so I picked a random Help Island where there were some people gathered. When I arrived, one of them was Hermia Linden. We chatted, she asked if I was enjoying being a volunteer, and she was pleased to see me. She'd heard of me, apparently. Or at least, she'd heard of the big blue horse.

I'm not sure whether to be flattered or worried. It's one thing to be known, but when Lindens say they've heard of you that's kind of scary. I guess that's my own fault for picking a memorable and unique avatar.

Well, a month or two ago things were looking pretty grim, but I have much good stuff to report since I last posted here.

First of all my RL work situation is much improved, and though as I suspected I'm not earning quite as much as before, its not proved to be the huge cut I feared.

Second. My Viggo came to England in July, and we had a vacation together. Although I've known him two and a half years online and 1 year in SL, this was the first time we've actually physically met, so it was quite a nerve-wracking thing. But it went WONDERFULLY, we get along even better in First Life than we do in Second. He is definitely coming back next year, and this time he's intending to come long-term, with a view to study or work in the UK. Of course the holiday wasn't long enough and now he's back in the States, and because of differences in work schedules we're not "seeing" much of each other at all at the moment.

Next, I got accepted finally to be an official Mentor. I've been sort of informally helping people out with the game, well, ever since Vig joined it 3 days after I did, but it's kind of nice to be able to do it in an official capacity, with the official group tag on so that the newbies can find me. Not that it's difficult to spot a 7ft+ blue horse...

Lastly, because of the RL work situation improving, I decided to take the plunge and get a paid account, and as a result of that I bought a (rather too large, but was pretty cheap) parcel of land on one of the new continents, where I will be opening what will hopefully be a permanent location for Herber Homestyle. I spent most of this morning building the new store; I couldn't just relocate the other one because of the slope on the land, so I've had to make some changes, but I have 1/3 more space than before which is great. The new store isn't finished yet but the slurl is here: Herber Homestyle in Adrift

And lastly, I'm permanently quitting Livejournal, mainly because myself and a lot of friends are involved in fandom, and very few of them are wanting to hang around here any more. After briefly trying out Greatestjournal I decided it sucks, but I was introduced to Insanejournal, which is where you'll be able to find me (kherber on IJ). I have also created a Second Life community over there too: (Second Lifers on IJ) so if you're ever over there do drop by and support the community. I rather like the idea of being in a place that's called "insane". *grin*

LJ's wankery and incompetence continues to annoy me so I am moving my RL stuff over to wordpress http://talkinblues.net/pferde/ and SL stuff to kherber@insanejournal. I will be closing this LJ and the other soon, though I'm leaving this up so people have a chance to find where I've gone.

Well. I hate how fast things can change for the worse.  I learned today that I've effectively lost my job.  Which means I need to cut down my expenditure in this game to zero.  Which means I won't be buying land for a shop any more OR renting anywhere. It also means bye-bye to my lovely tropical island where Vig and I have lived happily for nearly a year.   It's paid for up until the end of the month but that's it, there won't be any more.

I feel like just quitting SL altogether. That house we shared was everything to me.

The Herber Homestyle store is closed and gone again.  Partly my own fault, I've not been inworld much lately, been far too distractedc by other things (not the least of which being the imminent visit of my Viggo to England).   The other thing is that while the new site looked pretty, traffic was pretty negligible compared to when I had the other site on Mainland.  So when the email came in to say that my lease was expiring on the Haven Shire site, I decided not to renew.  I have also decided that I almost certainly will buy mainland, but that means saving up some RL cash and rather than waste more lindens on another temporary rental site I have decided to leave the store closed until I can afford the downpayment on a purchase.

It's looking like I'll need something in the region of about £100, which is kind of scary, for something that doesn't actually exist. My i-pod cost me less than that.

In the meantime my SL Exchange store is still running. Ironically in the last month 99% of my sales have been from there anyway. I sold ONE ITEM from that damn store. Just one.

So last night I downloaded and installed the new Firstlook Windlight viewer, and had a play with it. It reminds me a lot of Terragen, in the way it can be modified to alter the lighting and clouds etc.  Not really sure if it's laggier than usual, it was pretty laggy anyway. But I did get some awesome screenshots

A recent post in the second_lifers community inspired me to take some before/after photos of the mods I made to my house. It started off as one of those cheap $200-linden houses, which are cheap because the textures are mostly horrible. I re-modelled the whole thing. So here's some before/after pics and commentary.  The whole look I was going for, was something influenced by South-Western, or Spanish style.

See the photos full size here

Oooh. You l33t haXX0rz think you're so damn clever.  I bet you're the same wankers that go round SL dropping giant plastic penises all over the place, and think it's cool to join groups like W-Hat.

Well I'm tired of having to delete your screened comments, which I never look at anyway, so I'm now blocking anonymous comments altogether, and screening anyone who's not on my friendslist. So unless you're going to come clean and actually have the courage to post non-anonymously, you'll have to go find some other sandbox to play in.

U R PWNED.