As part of SL’s “Second Pride 08″ festival there’s a Space Park set up in Osmium. I went to have a look today and it’s amazing. Do try to visit soon, it’s a temporary exhibition and will be gone when Pride closes. I will simply let the images speak for themselves.

Oh my god. I hate how builds in SL just can disappear overnight with no warning.

Selene Castle is gone.

I’m glad I got snapshots.

Russ introduced dragged me to Avilion today, so I decided to go as a centaur.  I need to make a copy of this and modify it. It’s got to be blue, although I will need to keep a grey one for Avilion, as creatures of an un-natural colour are frowned upon. And it’s got to be bigger, if at all possible. I’m still shorter than Russ. What am I, half shetland pony??

Also, I look ridiculous trying to dance, with my hindquarters going in the air all the time, and spinning round and stomping people.

Fun though. Can’t wait to show it off at Manifesto.

last night something happened that in the space of five minutes turned a fairly ordinary day into one of the best ever. See, Vig and I have a friend in Second Life, someone that initially Vig met and got close to, mainly because he reminded Vig a lot of his own son. As things went on, we sort of adopted him, we both think of him as a son and he thinks of us both as “Dad”. I just don’t see much of him these days because he’s always on later, and of course he doesn’t see Vig at all now, any more than I do.

Well last night I was on SL, and it got past 1am and towards 2am and I didn’t want to go to bed. I was tired, but I didn’t want to go. And then out of nowhere, an IM from our wolf-son. We chatted a bit, I invited him over to see my new place. SL was being a bitch and I couldn’t even put on prim hair, and I think its probably the first time that he’s seen me as a human instead of a horse. And he hugged me and said “happy Fathers Day, Dad.”

And if you’d seen me in RL at that moment you’d have seen me dive for tissues, because I literally had tears running down my face.  Oh my god. THAT was why I had this feeling that I had to stay up.

Best Father’s Day Ever.

Sometimes I am so tempted to jack the whole mentoring thing in, at least officially.  See, all Mentors belong to a Group, which is how we get certain priviledges like being allowed back on Help Islands and OIs.  The trouble is the rules for what is allowed and not allowed to be said on the group channel gets crazier and crazier.

It used to be a channel where it was possible for mentors to ask a question and share answers, which was really helpful.  Then they started saying that it was okay to ask questions but answers had to be returned in private IM which is useless for several reasons

- the rest of us who also want answers to the same question don’t hear the answer, and channel guidelines rule that we’re not allowed to say “IM the answer to me too please”.

- If someone gives an answer that is incorrect, no-one will know so the questioner may get wrong information that ought to be corrected

- the questioner might get a thousand replies. Or none at all because everyone assumes “someone must have answered it by now”.

The current guidelines are here. It clearly states that mentors may ask questions here, for reference, as well as rally mentors to places as needed.

Today someone got blasted by a Linden (I’m not going to say which one, but it’s someone I thought ought to know better) for simply asking a question at all, and the Linden said that both answers AND questions have to be in private IM.

Um. HOW???  HOW THE FUCK are we supposed to ask questions of a group, in private IM?  What are we supposed to do, scroll down the list and find each member that is online and IM them all individually? If the Lindens don’t want chat AT ALL on the channel then they should simply say so, instead of making guidelines and then criticizing people for following them.

I think what I really want to do is find another helpful group dedicated to helping newbies that actually allows members to help each other instead of forcing them to struggle alone.

So the Second Life 5th birthday is coming up. I’m not going to comment on the hoo-hah about whether or not child avs will be allowed to participate in the exhibits or not. All I will say is that LL are flip-flopping like a pair of jandals, and there are enough pages of comments about it in the SL Forums that if you try to read them all, the party will be over by the time you’re done.

One thing has slipped through most people’s notice, but one or two have spotted it and started to speculate. On the latest official blog post about it, it says;

The second week, from June 30 to July 7, will feature exhibits from business, education, health care and nonprofits. We’ll close with a ceremony including a special guest speaker with a very important announcement.

Well well. Anyone care to speculate on what that might be?

• Turning the whole grid PG and ban all sex?
• Banning furries because they are obviously into bestiality?
• Selling Linden Labs to Google?
• Requiring all residents to undergo age and gender verification, psychometric testing and twice-annual blood sampling?
• Doubling of Tier charges?

Whatever it is, it can’t possibly be good. And this at the same time that Sims Online is finally closing down for good. Are we going to need to find another place to play? I hope not.

…if my postings are scarce in the near future, or if I’m not in-world quite so much. Real life issues – my mother has recently been diagnosed with cancer, and she’s not in good general health anyway, and I’m just… not coping particularly well.

A new blog, created today, to review freebie stuff for men in SL. Free For Men. Featuring someone’s alt. I wonder who that could be, hmm?

If you have any ideas about any good free stuff for men, please drop him a comment.

Finally I have answers to what happened, and indeed everything was all related. The “Ultimate Sale Sign” was an object with a broken script, hence the repeated IMs every couple of seconds. And apparently not only was the sign sending messages to me, with every message I got a reply was sent back FROM me to the object’s owner, who it apparently was that reported me for spamming. And there was me blaming the owner. Lindens report that they have located the object and removed it.

Its not the only scripted object that doesn’t work properly since latest upgrades. My wonderful surfboards no longer work; instead of floating on the water they now sink to about a foot beneath the surface, and when you fall off instead of just dropping into the water, it catapults you across the sim. Which is very not good. I trierd a different surfboard script and it does the same. So all my boards are now in the trash.  Which means if anyone knows of any suitable scripts for surfboards that STILL WORK and are full perm – because I want to sell these things- please let me know.

One very good thing has cropped up though. I made an alt while the spam was still ongoing, and went on a hunt for freebies.  Now, skins are always the big problem with dressing free, but I managed to find an awesome set of free skins – and not only free but full-perm which means I can pass them on to other new dudes in need.  The set comes in 4 tones (but one of them is so horrible as to be unusuable, so let’s just say three) and each tone has 6 different beard styles and a small amount of body hair.   This is the medium tone as modelled by yours truly. 

The skins can be found here: There is a set for ladies too but obviously I didn’t pay it any attention. http://slurl.com/secondlife/Parioli/28/147/41

after 4 days, 3 support tickets, 2 live chat sessions and 1 AR, finally the spam has stopped. At one point I was getting a thousand IMs an hour. I was starting to worry that I might have to delete my avatar altogether and start from scratch with an alt.