Just another gay talking horse

My SL/online partner of 2 years is coming to England in July. he bought his flight tickets today.  After the last couple of months when we thought it wasn't going to be possible, and now suddenly it's all possible and actually happenning. I am beyond excited about this.

Quoted from jarandhel:

A while ago, B and I had an idea. Kinda Discordian, kinda fun. But a very real idea for a good cause. Pretty simple. We want to prove to our nation's lawmakers that there are real GBLT citizens out there. No chants, no marching on the capital building. We want to fly kites.

Rainbow kites. On the National Mall. Nothing "in your face", but if we can get enough people involved, it'll get noticed.

We've created a community for this. It's called gbltkite

Due to the somewhat sensitive nature, it's going to be moderated for now. If you're interested, join up!

I personally think this idea rocks bigtime but unfortunately Washington is much too far for me to get to. But, spread the word among the glbt community if you can. Maybe other rainbow-kite-flying events can be arranged in other nations too?

I posted a little while ago about my "neice" Seiko, who recently joined SL. She's not a fan of LJ but she now has her own Blogger blog, Seiko's Heaven. Also I have one, less imaginitively titled Karl's Second Life.  Anyone else on Blogger too?

Well when things move, they sure move fast.  I found a perfect plot to rent for my store, IM'd the owner this morning, met him this afternoon and moved right in. Built my new shop in about an hour and a half (easy  - it's the second time I've built this) and spent the rest of the evening re-stocking it.  I've still not quite finished but it's open and 90% done.

So if you're looking for furniture, or even if you're just nosey to see what I've done, please feel free to drop by.

Herber Homestyle SLURL here

(Please note this replaces all previous in-world stores, which are now closed).

Oh my god. I cannot wait to get my hands hooves on this.


Also, I am quite impressed that at least some of the Lindens appear to read the second_lifers community. I had a technical issue which I posted about there, and got a reply from one of them. Quicker than sending an email to support, which I still haven't had a response back from yet.

Five weeks with no internet, starting today.

Herber Homestyle will be closed for at least 5 weeks.

Pferde is not amused.

My landlady's daughter, who's just turned 18, has been watching me play Secondlife and watching the building, and she decided to join the game. She signed up yesterday, I tossed 1000 lindens her way (which she's spent on two fine furry avatars) and already she's picking up the building really quickly, with very little input from myself. I've kind of taken her under my "wing" and made her my adopted daughter - but she's a smart cookie and I kind of get the impression that she's not going to need a lot of looking after.  Fisky I reckon this makes her your sister. ;)

If you see her, be nice to her.

Up until now I fully intended to keep my Second Life and my First Life completely seperate. I have changed my mind and now decided to link to my real LJ here too. So, if you're in any way interested in my First Life, you can also find me here: pferde.   It's friends-only but if you leave a comment in one of the public posts, and let me know you're from over here, I'll friend you back.

Because of some cowardly, anonymous hate-comments posted in this blog, I have changed the settings so that all anonymous comments will now be screened before they appear on the site, and will have IP addresses recorded.  Anonymous comments won't get through screening unless the commenter identifies him/herself.

I tp'd to my shop today, to find a FUCKING GREAT BIG RED FUCKING WALL built right across my shop entrance.  It seems that the land that had been promised to be a prim-bank and have nothing built on it, well, isn't going to be a prim-bank any more.

Oh man, I am so out of there. I don't pay to have big ugly walls right where people TP in to my shop.  And it's so close to the cutoff time for my broadband going off, I really don't have time to look for somewhere else right now and then not be able to use it for 6 weeks, so I reckon I'm just going to let it go, and then when I come back off my break I'll start looking f or somewhere else.

You know, if the owner of the big red shop had any brains at all she'd have put the entrance to her shop right next to mine, not the back of it. That way she'd get my passing trade looking in too.  Silly woman.

We've known Fisk in SL for quite a long time now, and for a while we've both sorta regarded him as a son. Well, tonight, I had an idea that we ought to make it somehow official, I talked about the idea with Viggo and he agreed, and then asked Fisk. Fisk was delighted with the idea so now, he is officially part of our family, our wolf-son.

We love you, Fisky.

Logged in this evening to find a pile of giant bright pink plastic penises in a corner of the lagoon right outside my home, along with a sign saying "I dun it for the lulz", and the name Mudkips Oppenwall. According to some neighbours who saw it,  it had originally been quite a massive attack, though by the time I got there, most of the trash had been auto-returned, there was just one little patch of land that had been overlooked where the autoreturn was off, and that was where the pile was.  They might have done it for the lulz, but I sure ain't lulzing. The bastard Mudkpis went inside my house (I have a visitor tracker set to record for visitors inside only, range and position carefully calculated).

Also according to the neighbours it was griefers from the 4chan and 7chan anti-furry groups.  Luckily the island management responded very quickly, and there are now at least 3 abuse reports with Linden labs.  And every avatar with the name Mudkips is now banned from my land.

Also, somewhat unsurprisingly after a 30% rent-hike, I find that 7/16ths of the island is suddenly vacant again. I am so tempted to ask Myz if we can move to a corner plot, but the thought of moving over a thousamd prims of property isn't too appealing...

This was in the attack of Wednesday-itis yesterday, I logged in and found myself Ruthed, and stuck.

There's nothing quite as good as a loud drumming session to release some tension. This was just what I needed today. The macro thing came about because Gylan (the cat in the middle) said he was "in ur garden, dancing on ur drumz".



Maybe this will start a trend for Second Life Macros.

If I had a "break furniture" animation in SL I would be using it right about now. Today I've had some bad news thats all come at totally the wrong time and I just feel like having a good old-fashioned tantrum.

First, my internet is going to be offline from April 5th to 25th while I change ISPs. I was expecting 10 days, not 20. The worst part is that our anniversary is on the 15th, right in the middle of that. So the party I was planning to celebrate, well that's off for starters.

The other bad news is that our landlord's selling the land and transferring to another agency, on April 1st. The new landowners are hiking the rent by about 30%, which means I can no longer afford to stay there.  I need an extra £8 a month to cover the increase and on my combined RL and SL income that's just not going to be possible.  And THAT is going to be almost at the same time as well.

God. That beach was just perfect. It was just exactly the place Vig and I have been dreaming about for the past 2 years.  I'm just... heartbroken.

My ISP's utterly useless lately, so I'll be changing soon, in the meantime I've come to the conclusion that it's pointless even trying to get into SL, when my broadband speed is running at the same speed as an average dialup-modem. Of course switching means 7-10 days with no net at all. I need to make sure my rent is paid before that happens.

But there's no point playing, when it takes 20 minutes to rez after logging in, and once I'm in I can't actually teleport or walk anywhere.  *sigh*

Because not many people know me that well...

1. Do you believe in astrology?
Not especially no. I'm pretty sceptical when it comes to most things of that sort.  Although my partner believes in it, and he keeps telling me things about it, and I have to admit that what he's told me, is pretty accurate. I am apparently, a very typical Gemini. So maybe there's some truth in it after all.

2. Favorite candy?
I'm not a big candy eater. Timtams. Jaffas. Anything with chocolate, really. A lot of the candy in the UK I'm familiar with already from home, but there's a lot more variety here than there is there. The brits love their sweets. I've also discovered a liking for Haribo jelly and marshmallow stars.

3. Do you believe that SL is the future of interaction or just a cool diversion?
Hmm now thats a difficult one. I'm 100% certain that if it's the future of interaction it's not going to involve Lindenlabs. If someone else can run with the idea and make it work properly, then maybe. Otherwise I think that big business users are just going to get tired of the lag and the downtime, and pull out. And bye-bye goes the money, and no more Secondlife. 

4. Madonna?
I like about 2 of her songs. The rest is really not my sort of thing. Other than that, no opinion. Madonna who?

5. What time period in our history would you most want to live (and die) in?
The past? No way mate. I'd be 1000 years into the future.  We already know what's happened before. I want to know what's coming next.


If you want to be interviewed:

1. Leave me a comment saying, "Interview me."
2. I respond by asking you five personal questions so I can get to know you better. If I already know you well, expect the questions to be more intimate!
3. You will update your blog with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

The Snapzilla people once said that "coming soon" would be the facility to upload snapshots from hard-drive. Its looking like that's not going to happen so I'm switching to flickr (because everybody's doin' the taggin' thing) which allows me to both upload from HD and upload via email from within SL.  So I'll be using Flickr as my photo storage now and ditching both snapzilla and the photogallery here (which means I can also ditch those damned ads). I've already uploaded a fair chunk of the pics, mostly the more recent ones, now I've got to the point where I can't be arsed to do any more. And, you know, looking through other peoples' Flickr snapshots is so distracting.

Clickr for da Flickr

I was in my shop minding my own business when I was approached by a girl asking for help. She asked me how she might find money in SL. Since her account was only a couple of days old I explained to her about the Money Trees. Discovered that she had some serious gaps in her knowledge, didn't know how to save or use landmarks, or how to search places or  teleport using the map, so I taught her how to do that too.  But she was nice, and friendly, and after 10-15 minutes she was happy to go off on her own.

Right after she'd gone, I was approached by another guy. I forgot to check how old his account was, but he was still in noobie avatar.  He asks me for help to find out why the house he built had disappeared. "2 days before I try to build a house beside you but now it away" he says. (English not his first language but seriously his ignorance goes FAR beyond language differnces).  He asked me how to contact technical support to complain about his house disappearing.  I asked him to show me exactly where he tried to build it and he led me to a neighbouring parcel. This parcel is currently empty but I know who owns it, and it's not this guy. I check the About Land info to see if he's bought it recently, but he hasn't.

"Do you own this land?" I ask.

"I think I have no land."

"You built a house on land you don't own? That is why it disappeared. You cannot build on someone else's land."

He then went on to ask me where he could find free land that he could build his house on. I tried to explain to him that there was no such thing.   I told him how much I pay for the land my shop is on, and he just said "Wow. This is big."  He was truly shocked, that there would not be any free land. "I thought I could build a house without to pay," he said. "No," I replied, and he teleported away, presumably never to come back.

I am starting to wonder if avatars ought to be given a test, of basic necessary skills and knowledge about how Secondlife actually works, before they're allowed off Help Island.

Since opening my new shop I've made L$1900 L$2400 in sales in 3 days. Thats more than I ever made in a WEEK before. All the hard work paying off: but I really do need to work on some better quality stuff.  But still, I'm stunned.  Aside from anything else, here I am doing almost exactly what I told my dad I didn't want to do in RL. That, I think, is funny.

Oh and I'm reminded again why I avoid women. I met a nice girl who has the shop next door to mine. We sit and talk a mix of politics and furniture building. Then today she introduced me to a friend who reminded me of Scary Spice, and who proceeded to "joke" by making catty, bitchy digs at me being a horse, being a New Zealander, and about my furniture not being as classy as hers. So I just upped and teleported out. She IM's me back to say she was sorry and that it was a joke, I told her it wasn't funny.

Maybe I'm just turning into a miserable old grouch as I'm getting older.  My god I really am turning into my father. >.<