Downsizing
Well, it’s been a while since I have been here and since I have some time now I figured I’d write some about what has been up. SL has lost much of it’s shine for me I have to say. When I think about it, there is much wrong with SL and LL but in the end, the reality is the place just takes too much time and money to do anything significant in.
When I came in at first I thought I would play music in SL but that was quickly put to rest. I need an real audience in front of me. Pixel people don’t cut it. So, I put a lot of time into learning the viewer code and going to the Hippo meetings. I feel like I never made an inch of headway there. No one was interested at all in what I thought or was doing and basically, even though I was putting a great deal of effort into the thing, the rewards for that were non-existent. What’s the point really if you don’t get some kind of thanks back at the very least? I got my name in the About box of the viewer and still pay(ed) $40/mo for a few bytes of a CPU and some MySQL space. Yay me! *cough*
I made that dark skin and at least a few folks shot me a line and said thanks for the effort. Not as many as are using it of course, but one or two is enough to feel like that was worth putting together and out there.
Then there is stuff like this:
This is an item I have listed on SLX, er, XStreet. 125 votes, clearly, by the blue bars, most of them are 5 votes but the item gets 4 stars. Now, this is typical of the way LL does math. Some big mysterious calculation to turn fives into fours… depending. How can one survive in an environment like this? I don’t know. I can’t do it. I play straight poker but it seems LL plays wild cards and doesn’t tell you which ones are wild until the hand is over. I never ever did figure out the ad listing/search bullshit.
The upside was I did meet some nice folks and did a few cool custom jobs. Of course I never made what I should have made on any of it but cool is cool and I’m ok with that.
I guess the bullet to the head for me though was LL doing in the XStreet forums and replacing them with that idiotic blog thing. People are hanging in there, and good for them, but man, it is so clearly designed to destroy a community, not build one, and if build one, build one that conforms. And don’t get me going on that web software they created for it. I would be fired in a heartbeat for creating something like that. I’d fire myself if I coded that.
Anyway, I guess I’m done. I already sold my land and took off all my ads and probably will just go NPIOF eventually. Lurk for a while for sure and wander in world from time to time, see what is what but I think that’s about it. The big question that remains is what to do with all my scripts and products. And I wrote a lot of scripts. Tons I never bothered to put for sale because I didn’t want deal with support issues from people who don’t read the instructions. I see 4 options
- Give them away, open source, free
- Find some deserving noob(s) and give them to him/her
- Try and sell them to someone with some script fu
- Fuck it dude, let’s go bowling!
I don’t know. What do you think?
Your Dark Skin is awesome, I plan to use it as the default skin in a viewer i am working on. Thanks for what you did there. I think we residents can keep developing things for each other regardless of LL’s policy. SL still has alot of potential to be something great. Maybe take a break from SL and log in less than usual instead of leaving.
Cheers!
Hi JB, I didn’t want to reply to you on the “suck-up” LL Blog. I always think that the brown-noser comments have got to be ALTAVs of LL employees, anyway, what’s the point(?) LL doesn’t care what most of the residents (their customers) think. Which in itself astounds me considering they’re supposed to be a company providing a “service” (lol – they don’t know the meaning of the word). If they are an example of a US service industry, god help them and all of US business: in New Zealand, most of us do things a little differently and I like to think, with much more integrity.
It is my belief, the introduction of “Second Life Enterprise” explains many things: We have been providing R&D funds for this product (whose price point alone is exclusive) while the service we pay for diminishes in EVERY aspect. There are many, many content creators on the verge of packing up shop and leaving as you have done. Maybe you leaving will provide the final impetus they need. It is a problem I grapple with every day.
The thought that the likes of IBM, Northrop Grumman and The Naval Undersea Warfare Center can pop onto the main grid, do WHATEVER they like and then run back behind their firewalls scares the shit out of me. Not only in terms of what “OS” means but also considering the ethics these institutions subscribe too. Drop into the world with a copy bot steal what they like then run back and hide. Vague notions by LL about signing ‘use agreements’ etc amount to nothing: Who will police their behaviour, LL? LMFAO. Besides if you’ve ever read the LL TOS you will notice you don’t actually own anything you create in SL… they do.
I don’t have the skill sets that you do. I so wish I did because as a content creator and a person of limited financial resources in RL, I try to purchase decent scripting for the objects I make so that they are the best that they can be. In many instances the scripting seems to be (to a guy of limited understanding) truly amazing but I have also often been stung by greedy programmers who’ve charged (for me) big money only to later find the same script for free somewhere else. Or I cop an attitude like “we are the keepers of great knowledge and wisdom and will only impart our products and services if you grovel before me”, i.e. I wanted a decent clock and chime script for my antique clocks, asked a programmers to assist, said I’d pay whatever and three months later am still waiting.
It would be great to find a collaborator willing to look at other, more imaginative business models where say, they share their skills and take a percentage of sales, something like that might work. To sit on high and jealously guard your “secrets” seems weird to me. I guess some programmers aren’t interested in seeing their work functioning… not sure… anyway off point and raving:-) So the point: have you considered leaving your scripting with a good friend in a situation like I’ve described above? That would keep it alive in SL, maybe generate some monetary return for you and help your friend out. It seems such a shame to me that good programming, which can only be used in worlds like SL, is lost for good to the benefit of no one.
I hope you consider this suggestion, but please, please please (yup begging) whatever you decide, don’t just release it into SL gratis. Sure enough I’ll come along and pay some rip-off merchant my last 5K only to discover it somewhere else for nothing. Who benefits from that? Me? No You? No. The creep? Yes.
All the best for your future, whatever you decide. Love & peace.
i would recomand to give your scripts not away for free. you would clearly ruin the life of a lot of scripters and vendors, doing in a certain way the same what ll does.. keep them on slx, delete them or take them to a new grid. im not a scripter myself, but i ve some friends who do and its hard for them, dont make it any harder.
+ the open source scripts would stop technical evolution as well, as most of the people will use them still in 5 years.. like poseballscript-freebies and other stuff, which come from long past, with a lot of missing features and probably not that good scripted, and every newbie uses them..
best regards!
Look into takeing as much of your stuff to other 3d worlds man SL is dieing off hard now but there ARE some cool worlds out there
Check out Blue Mars and the likes cool people and cool companies.