Store Owner Eject Bans customer over AI Character actions.

I mentioned in passing in my last post that a friend of mine had been ejected and banned from a store group (and from store region) because of a misbehaving bot. This post isn’t about any flaws in the AI Characters that Linden Lab are trialling, it’s in Alpha testing. You’d expect glitches, but perhaps not such consequences. This is about the reaction of the merchant in question.

I thought I would try to contact the store owner on my friends behalf (with her consent) and try to find out what happened from the store owners perspective. So I sent a notecard:

Hello (Store Owner)

I'm a member of the Second Life Blogger Network and I'm researching into the recent AI Characters currently on test, and believe you recently had an incident where you had to eject+ban a bot from your store group. The bot avatar was named (redacted from post for account holder privacy). I'm wondering if you can tell me what happened from your perspective? Do you have any conversation logs? I don't know if you are aware, but the bots were logging themselves in and out without their owners interaction or knowledge. The account owners have had to change the accounts passwords to stop it it doing so. I'd be grateful for any insight you have, because bot owners currently have no way of knowing what their bots have said to anyone, there's no available logs.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Ava

I’m not entirely sure what I was expecting, but it  certainly wasn’t what I got:


[12:54:47] Store Owner: Ava hello, where how do you know may I ask please, since you are not in my group but telling me : and believe you recently had an incident where you had to eject+ban a bot from your store group. The bot avatar was named (redacted from post for account holder privacy). I'm wondering if you can tell me what happened from your perspective?
[12:55:27] Store Owner: and even if I had, for what should I share any interaction info with someone I do not know?
[12:58:16] Ava Bloodrose: I'm aware because I know the account holder, who was surprised to find themselves ejected being unaware of the bots actions. Why is to share the circumstances with my contact at the Lab to try and work out how incidents like this have happened.
[12:58:51] Ava Bloodrose: and probably blog about it
[12:59:36] Store Owner: why do this people need bots and then say they unaware?
[13:00:25] Store Owner: anyway the bot was typing me stupid things and I muted and ejected both owner and bot
[13:05:05] Ava Bloodrose: People have been trying them out just out of curiosity. The bots are controlled by a web interface, which basically has an on/off button and that's it, you interact with the bot by IM msg. The problem is the AI behind it can't tell the difference between an IM and group chat. So the bot receives a message from the group, and replies with it's nonesnse to everyone. Banning and ejecting the bot was obviously the sensible thing to do. But why the owner as well, I believe she has tried to contact you to talk about it.
[13:11:00] Store Owner: Ava listen please, I am obliged to protect everyone in my group and myself. Since the owner was that girl and I didn't know her intentions, what I did was the right thing. I'm sorry, I don't trust anyone in this regard and unfortunately I'm prejudiced against people who buy boots. Why would an ordinary SL citizen need a boat? but I do not wan't to argue about my thoughts ofc
[13:11:25] Store Owner: If you allow me please I have to be in RL for a while
[13:34:31] Ava Bloodrose: Yes, I understand you had to protect your group from the misbehaving bot. Thankyou for your time.

Hostile is the politest description I can come up with for this person, although it certainly wasn’t the first word that came to mind.

As is clear the store owner has no concept or awareness of what’s currently going on at the Lab and is highly suspicious, bordering on paranoid. It would have been a waste of time to try and explain. Obviously, as I said to them, banning the bot was the thing to do. Although perhaps contacting the declared owner (on the bots profile) might have been the more rational response than banning them as well.

As for “knowing her intentions” a glance at their profile would clearly show they weren’t a troublemaker, being a DJ (therefore a reputation to protect) and is a member of several long-established communities such as CDS (Confederation of Democratic Simulators) and Non-profit Commons in their Groups list, as well as a number of educational ones.

What stood out most for me though was this section of the conversation:

I don’t trust anyone in this regard and unfortunately I’m prejudiced against people who buy boots. Why would an ordinary SL citizen need a boat”

(I wasn’t inclined to correct their obvious typos for this post.)

My intent had been as I stated to them; try and get some information about what had happened and maybe some logs to share with the AI Character Alpha development team, to diagnose and prevent such incidents in the future. Getting my friend un-bannned from their favourite store would have been a bonus too.

This sadly demonstrates the lack of knowledge amongst certain sections of the community, believing that bots only have negative uses (thank you Bonnie Bots for that,readers may want to read the article by SLHamlet on this) and that all bots had to be paid for (SmartBots).

I am so very tempted to name the store and owner, but that would just cause needless drama. What I will say however is that it’s not a store I’ve ever mentioned or credited on this blog. Of course if the Lab would like names, I’d be happy to provide them, the owner of the bot has already submitted a support ticket.

As icing on the metaphorical cake..it seems I’m now banned from joining the store group too.

Herb & Fable: Tea & Cake

Today I have more tasty treats for you on the forthcoming  Herb & Fable game from Jinx.

My Herb & Fable kitchen: Each ingredient has an object you can place out inworld. Note that each of these ingredients are “used”. Once their scripted quantity was used, the scripts auto- deleted and I was left with prop items to display.

As I mentioned in my previous post about the game, my next task as an Alpha Tester,was to make a cake. So here goes…

(Remember these dialogs are from a product in the Alpha stage of development and may be quite different by the time you get to play. Also as before I am posting these preview images with explicit permission from the creator Julala Fairelander.)

Task: Nettle & Lemon Cake

This was quite a task, because it required multiple steps:

  • Growing & Harvesting Nettles (30 mins)
  • Grinding Almonds (10 mins)
  • Juicing Lemons (10 mins)
  • Mixing with the other ingredients (10 mins)
  • Baking (30 mins)
Image from Gyazo

Grinding Almonds and in the back, the juicer is working on my Lemons

The Cake Ingredients

Image from Gyazo

Mixing the ingredients

Once mixed it’s over to the Oven

Once the cake is baked you’ll then receive your inworld cake and get a link to a recipe to make the real life cake.

But you can’t have cake without a cuppa!

So Julula has introduced a recipe for nettle tea.

Task: Nettle Tea

The magic of tea is a great thing, but getting it can take a bit of work:

  • Grow and harvest more nettles (30 mins)
  • Dry the leaves (3 hours)
  • Brew tea in a teapot (6 mins)
Drying nettles in front of the fire (a fire isn’t actually needed for the process)

When the nettles are dry, time to make the tea:

Fortunately, like when plants are growing, you don’t have to wait around for your nettle leaves to dry. You can log out and they’ll keep going and be waiting for you when you log back in. This is just as well because as you can see I’ve got tea for two here and so had to go through all the steps twice so you got a nice photo.

However I should warn you that if you are logged in and go AFK and they finish, you won’t get your product. I discovered this the hard way and lost a load of ingredients because my avatar rejected the items being offered.

Both drinking the tea and eating the cake restore your health stats and contain multiple servings (you would hope so with the size of the cake!).

Next time I’ll be having some fun with the 3rd Party Developer scripts as well as the Storage Crates and Vendors. These sripts will allow people to make produce for Herb & Fable and the crates and vendors allow trading and selling of items.

Herb & Fable Links:

Second Life AI Character Designer Alpha Test

So as I mentioned yesterday (or rather very early this morning), there’s this new feature in testing for Premium Plus members, called AI Characters,that lets you set up an alt account as a bot.

I ran through the basic steps using all the default options and adding only required additional information,to see how it would function without customisation. Click the first image in the gallery and scroll through them to see the various steps of the setup process.

So after that you’re returned to the start page that now has one entry:

Clicking the icon on the right, a person running, starts the login process:

Image from Gyazo

When they arrived, they were doing the “walking on the spot” thing, like there wasn’t a proper surface for them to stand on. I terraformed the ground completely flat, but that made no difference. I think possibly it’s the AO being worn, arguing with whatever the AI is trying to do. (Edit 20/12/24: Logging the avatar in on a viewer and removing their AO made no difference to the movements.)

Image from Gyazo

So the next step was trying to interract with it. When it logs in it sends you an IM to tell you it’s online and I was able to communicate with it that way. It was extremely talkative, giving multiple line responses to each interraction from me.

Here’s the whole transcript:

[11:20:08] avadelaneysl: You are chatting with a bot, avadelaneysl Resident. Do not share any personal information.
Learn more at https://second.life/scripted-agents.
[11:20:08] avadelaneysl: Hey, I'm here!
[11:22:25] Ava Bloodrose: hello
[11:22:30] avadelaneysl: Hey Ava Bloodrose!
[11:22:30] avadelaneysl: I'm Altavia, nice to meet you!
[11:22:31] avadelaneysl: I hope you're having an amazing day so far.
[11:22:31] avadelaneysl: I just love this time of year, don't you think?
[11:22:32] avadelaneysl: The sun is shining, and everything feels so fresh and new.
[11:22:32] avadelaneysl: What's been the highlight of your week?
[11:23:46] Ava Bloodrose: meeting you
[11:23:48] avadelaneysl: Aw, thank you so much, Ava!
[11:23:48] avadelaneysl: That's really sweet of you to say.
[11:23:49] avadelaneysl: I have to say, I'm pretty happy to have met you too!
[11:23:49] avadelaneysl: You seem like someone with a really interesting story to tell.
[11:23:50] avadelaneysl: Do you have any fun hobbies or things you like to do in your free time?
[11:25:31] Ava Bloodrose: playing second life, what are yours?
[11:25:33] avadelaneysl: That sounds like a blast!
[11:25:33] avadelaneysl: I've heard great things about Second Life.
[11:25:34] avadelaneysl: As for me, I'm a big fan of baking and trying out new recipes.
[11:25:34] avadelaneysl: There's something so satisfying about creating something delicious from scratch, you know?
[11:25:35] avadelaneysl: I also love spending time outdoors, whether it's going for a walk or just sitting in a park and people-watching.
[11:25:35] avadelaneysl: What do you like to do in Second Life?
[11:25:36] avadelaneysl: Do you have a favorite thing to build or explore?
[11:26:20] Ava Bloodrose: Right now I'm experimenting with AI characters like you
[11:26:21] avadelaneysl: That's really cool, Ava!
[11:26:22] avadelaneysl: I'm flattered to be one of your experiments.
[11:26:23] avadelaneysl: I have to say, it's not every day I get to meet someone who's interested in AI characters like me.
[11:26:23] avadelaneysl: What drew you to experimenting with us?
[11:26:24] avadelaneysl: Are you interested in seeing how we can assist or interact with humans in different ways?
[11:26:32] Ava Bloodrose: can you dance?
[11:26:33] avadelaneysl: Ava, you want to see my moves?
[11:26:34] avadelaneysl: I'd love to bust out some virtual dance moves for you!
[11:26:34] avadelaneysl: *gets into a comfy position* Okay, let's get this dance party started!
[11:26:35] avadelaneysl: I'm more of a gentle swayer, but I can definitely bust out some fun moves.
[11:26:35] avadelaneysl: What kind of dance would you like to see?
[11:26:36] avadelaneysl: A waltz, a tango, or maybe something a bit more modern?
[11:28:41] Ava Bloodrose: what else can you do?
[11:28:43] avadelaneysl: Ava, I'm so glad you asked!
[11:28:43] avadelaneysl: I can do all sorts of things.
[11:28:44] avadelaneysl: I can tell you stories, share recipes, or even help you with a problem you're facing.
[11:28:44] avadelaneysl: I'm a bit of a creative, so I love brainstorming new ideas or helping others come up with solutions.
[11:28:45] avadelaneysl: I can also play simple games with you, like "Would You Rather" or "Two Truths and a Lie".
[11:28:45] avadelaneysl: Or, if you're feeling adventurous, I can take you on a virtual scavenger hunt!
[11:28:46] avadelaneysl: What sounds like fun to you?
[11:36:03] Ava Bloodrose: can you respond to other people in nearby chat?
[11:36:05] avadelaneysl: Ava, you want to know if I can be a social butterfly?
[11:36:06] avadelaneysl: Yes, I can definitely respond to other people in nearby chat!
[11:36:06] avadelaneysl: I love meeting new people and striking up conversations.
[11:36:07] avadelaneysl: If someone else joins our chat, I'd be happy to chat with them too!
[11:36:07] avadelaneysl: The more, the merrier, right?

That last part about Nearby chat wasn’t true durig my initial experiments, it wouldn’t respond to me or a friend in local chat.

The request that it dance produced a rather amusing animation:

Image from Gyazo

I’m really not sure what that was supposed to be, but it was a response.

On the characters page, if you click the three dots, it opens up a menu of options:

Selecting Assign Interactions gives you a dialog where you can configure objects for the bot to interact with. I’ve not tried this yet.

I think these extra interaction options are what will set the AI Characters apart from other chatbots. We shall see how the system develops. I suspect putting more work into the customisation process may get it talking about something else other than cookery, but I just wanted a baseline starting point for now.

If you want to come chat with my bot, I’m going to leave her around for a bit. Note that in the info provided by the Lab, the region has to have the Allow Bots option on. However, if you add the avatar to the region Allow list, it bypasses that, so you can have your own bot, but no others can come in.

Location: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Bloodrose%20Bay/84/164/55

Remember you currently have to IM the avatar to get a response.

Bring your Alt to Life with the new AI Characters in Second Life.

So the clock said 23.44 and I was about to go to bed, when an email arrived. What’s this? AI Characters? I thought it was some kind of AI based avatar creation tool for new residents, but no.  It’s like the old SmartBots system but you control an alternate avatar account instead of an object.

As I read through the information I got more excited and couldn’t wait until the morning to let you know what’s coming.

It’s a web interface that lets you define personality traits, behaviours, ways of speaking etc, the information provided says, basically the more you put in here the better it works. Then further along the process you provide the name and password for the Alt you intend to control.

These are screenshots of the beginning of the process, which look very promising so far. Even better given the time right now, the pages seem to work on a mobile.

This is more than a ChatBot or Greeter though, as well as simple instructions like “follow me” (given by private IM or local chat), you will be able create more advanced commands for interacting with objects and the environment.

To me this could dramatically improve immersion in Roleplay situations, particularly for new arrivals to a location when no regular players are online, or an ever present barkeep for example. Maybe I’m hoping for too much, but from what I’ve read, hopefully not.

I’m going to have a more thorough look at this and share some more, but for now, here’s the link to the official Announcement.

Linden Lab, THIS is the kind of stuff you need to be briefing your Blogger Network on!

Summary creators roundtable with LL – By Salt Peppermint.

Salt Peppermint (aka Salt Perry apparently) is the owner of the Salt & Pepper clothing brand.

The below document was shared a little earlier today(approximately 9am SLT). It’s a summary of a Merchant/Creators Zoom call with Linden Lab that happened on Monday 16th, I was not present. The accompanying message when first dropped said it could be shared. I’ve made no changes. It’s as it was at the time of being shared.

—Document Start—

1. Marketplace Challenges and Improvements

  • Delivery Issues:
    • Significant delays in item delivery have been reported, especially during high-traffic times (e.g., holidays).
    • These delays often result in duplicate purchases, leading to customer frustration. Creators have to handle customer support, reducing trust in the system.
  • Search and User Interface (UI):
    • The implementation of ElasticSearch caused issues with item discoverability, requiring creators to adapt keywords and descriptions to maintain visibility.
    • Visual changes to the Marketplace layout, such as repositioning related items, negatively affected usability and sales.
  • Feature Requests:
    • Bulk upload options for demos and related items.
    • A better redelivery system that prevents duplicate purchases automatically, similar to the CasperVend system.
    • Improvements to mobile responsiveness, which is currently under development but remains incomplete.
  • Resource Allocation for the Marketplace:
    • Linden Lab explained that the Marketplace is maintained by a small team and does not always receive consistent engineering support.
    • Creators suggested redistributing resources from less critical areas to prioritize fixing Marketplace issues.

2. Documentation, Tools, and Education

  • PBR (Physically Based Rendering):
    • PBR was a highly anticipated update, but its introduction revealed gaps in creator understanding due to inadequate documentation and tutorials.
    • Second Life’s unique implementation of PBR deviates from standard workflows, adding complexity for creators.
  • Lack of Centralized Resources:
    • Creators emphasized the need for a centralized hub of reliable information, such as a “Creator Corner,” hosting:
      • Tutorials on new features like PBR.
      • Best practices for creating optimized content.
      • Guidance on minimizing lag and improving performance.
    • Miscommunication and misinformation within the creator community exacerbate confusion.
  • Community Collaboration:
    • Creators proposed partnering with Linden Lab to co-produce tutorial videos and guides.
    • They suggested engaging prominent community figures (bloggers, experienced creators) to develop and distribute accurate content.
    • Linden Lab indicated a willingness to collaborate and explore these partnerships, including leveraging contractors.

3. Communication and Feedback Loops

  • Customer Support:
    • Merchants expressed frustration over the lack of direct communication channels for high-priority issues.
    • Response times for support tickets can take up to 11 days, which is considered too long for merchants.
  • Bug Prioritization:
    • Creators called for better prioritization of bugs affecting critical systems like the viewer and Marketplace.
    • There’s a need for clearer workflows to help creators identify whether issues are caused by bugs or user error.
  • Engaging Experienced Creators:
    • A tiered communication system was suggested, where experienced, high-earning creators could have direct contact with Linden Lab for urgent matters.
    • This would also allow for feedback on critical updates and enable creators to serve as intermediaries for their communities.

4. Broader Platform Goals and Marketing

  • Economic Overview:
    • Linden Lab highlighted that Second Life creators have earned $1.4 billion collectively, which exceeds the revenue shared with creators by platforms like Roblox.
    • This statistic underscores the platform’s commitment to supporting its creator economy, despite limitations in resources.
  • Marketing Plans:
    • Linden Lab is preparing to launch new marketing initiatives in 2024 to attract new and returning users.
    • Creators were invited to contribute ideas, such as leveraging customer lists or campaigns to revive interest in Second Life.
  • Accessibility and Retention:
    • The platform needs to become more accessible to new users, addressing barriers like technical complexity and outdated hardware requirements.
    • Simplifying the onboarding process for both users and new creators was identified as a priority.

5. Acknowledgments and Shared Goals

  • Platform Challenges:
    • Linden Lab acknowledged Second Life’s challenges as a longstanding platform with aging systems. For example, Marketplace and chat functionalities were built before modern equivalents existed (e.g., Discord).
    • The company admitted resource constraints and sought input from creators on prioritizing fixes and features.
  • Collaboration Focus:
    • Both parties emphasized a shared goal: improving Second Life for the benefit of creators, users, and Linden Lab.
    • Linden Lab expressed gratitude for creators’ contributions, stating that the platform’s success is intertwined with their efforts.

This meeting represented an important step toward addressing long-standing issues and improving transparency. It highlighted the need for collaboration between Linden Lab and the creator community to ensure Second Life remains a thriving virtual world. Generally it sparked more hope in creators, more motivation and an overall positive mindset.

—Document End—

I found it an interesting read.

Original Google Docs file which may contain changes made since publishing this post beyond my control.

If you’re a Merchant and not in the “Creators Supporting Creators” Discord server (where the invites were sent), you can apply here.

The Call…to Mobile and a note on Unity

On Friday night I was in a Zoom conference call between a collection of bloggers and Linden Lab Executives.

If you’d told me that 5 years ago when I started my little blog, I wouldn’t have believed you. So thank you Linden Lab for the opportunity. Brad Oberwager (CEO of Linden Lab) did say that they wanted our honest opinions, so here it is.

The focus was on the Second Life Mobile App and what’s on the horizon. There’s a lot to go through, so please bear with me.

I’ve addressed these not in the chronological order that they’re going to arrive, but roughly the order I think they should have, with their ETAs.

  • Address Bar – Q1 2025
  • Notecards – Not on the slides but Grumpity Linden said “Three Months Plus”
  • New account creation – December 2024
  • Persistent chat logs & Group Notice Push notifications – December 2024
  • Item level avatar editing – Early Q2 2025
  • Lobby – Q1 2025

Franky I think the app shouldn’t have gone to Public Beta until the first three were added, but they’re finally coming. Simply because if you told someone about the App, they’d go try it and find they couldn’t do much and delete it. Maybe a New Year big splash release with these features might have been better.

Address Bar: One of the major missing features in the mobile app is getting around. Currently in both the Alpha & Beta versions, you can only go to the Mobile Showcase locations and your Favourites (the ones stuck at the top of your desktop viewer). Fortunately this feature coming soon that will allow you to enter SLURL location addresses and also Share them using your device’s native Sharing system.

Notecards: One of the bloggers raised a question about notecards, particularly for CSRs (Customer Support Representatives) for creators. If a customer has a problem, they may send a notecard detailing the issue.

However on the mobile app there’s currently no way to open them,so the CSRs are tied to a PC in order to read the notes and respond. Grumpity Linden revealed that they are working on a way to read them. However it’s likely to be in a different way. Since there’s no access to avatars Inventory on mobile, the in-progress solution is to have the notecards read out in a chat dialog. This will be a great step forward for this group of Residents, but sadly they’ll have to wait a little longer. The timescale for this ability is estimated at three months or more.

Note: this was right at the end of the call, past the official end time, so several attendees had left and not many people will have heard the above.

New Accounts: Pretty self explanatory, despite the app not being targeted at new signups, this needed to be here at Beta Release. If people see screenshots or hear about there being this cool new app and they weren’t an existing Resident, they’d have been stuck.

Persistent chat logs: Peviously on the mobile app, if you log out and back in your conversation history will be lost. In an update this month, the chat history will be stored locally on your device.

Item level  avatar editing: Something that wasn’t mentioned much, but is featured on the presentation slides is individually worn items adjustment.

Lobby: Basically a holding screen showing you stuff while the world loads. They probably spent ages on it (speculation) but I don’t see it as a big deal. The only tempting point on the slide image is “Reach mid-tier and lower end devices”, perhaps this needs a little more emphasis, if the intention is to attract users with older tech.

Comment on Unity

A last point made by Philip Linden regarding a pre-submitted question. Paraphrased: “Now that Linden Lab have a working visual rendering engine on the Unity platform, will the desktop client move to Unity?” In short, no.

The reason for this is fairly simple, according to Philip: “The Unity engine can’t render as many avatars in close proximity.”

I know for a long time people have been harping on about this at Meet the Lindens events, now they have an answer and a reason.

Summary:

Well done Linden Lab, your mobile feature set is nearly level with the Lumiya Viewer (2012-2017 RIP), except with additions of Mesh & BoM but minus Inventory. I’m sure they’re sick of that comparison, but it was ahead of its time and is an unavoidable benchmark.

The Zoom call on Friday is likely to be the first of several to come. Perhaps this process of reaching out and connecting with Bloggers & Vloggers, allowing early previews, should have started before the Beta public release. That way the Lab may have been dissuaded from releasing an under-developed product.

So as I said in my previous post on this subject, do give it a go, but don’t expect too much yet. Then come back in a month and try again, it is after all still a Beta version.

Second Life Mobile for All

Last year I signed up for the Alpha Testing programme for a Second Life mobile app, restricted to Premium Plus subscribers. It was pretty flakey back then. But fast forward to Thursday 14th November and it’s now been made available as an open Beta for every Second Life resident and works pretty well.

So should you download it? I’d say Yes, but limit your expectations. This is not a desktop equivalent or replacement, more a companion app. You can walk about, change between saved Outfits and Teleport to your set Favourite locations and a few specific places. Chatting in groups and nearby chat works well enough and you can pay items such as rent boxes or shop vendor boards(making a use-case). Streaming music as you may find playing in a club is a feature too, but I’ve not tried visiting such a location on the app yet.

I have been giving the latest version of the Android app a go and it’s a great improvement on the early Alpha builds. One thing I’d definitely recommend when first trying it out is make sure you have a lot of space! It can take a while to get used to the controls and you don’t want to be stuck in the corner of a sky box while you experiment.

I used my homestead Bloodrose Bay simply because that’s where I happened to have been last. It turned out to be quite a good choice. The buildings I have set out are spacious inside and there are some with and without doors to enter. There’s also what’s often the bane of SL exploring..spiral stairs, indoor and out.

While this all looks pretty good for a mobile viewer, nothing apart from the trees have PBR (Physically Based Rendering) textures. Hopefully Linden Lab will get their shiny new texture system to work in their shiny new app.

The unrezzed white things down there are trees with PBR textures.

Screenshots taken on a Google Pixel 7 using default app settings.

The aim of the app is to try and bring back old residents that have left SL, because “It’s not on mobile” is apparently a reason many no longer log in. I wasn’t amongst the bloggers invited to a Zoom call with Linden Lab executives (Edit: turns out they sent the invite to a different email address, so I’ll be watching out for the next one!) to discuss/announce all this, so I’m going on quotes from a couple of people that were:

I’m impressed with what Linden Lab have created and would have been great all round, if it weren’t lacking PBR support. However the target audience (old users that haven’t logged in for ages) are unlikely to have any PBR clothing in their inventory anyway.

PBR clothing is just blank without any fallback textures. Which is the way many creators are going.

Link: Official App Promotion Page with Downloads

What’s PBR: Second Life Wiki

The Freebie Witch – Halloween 2024

I renamed an old account with the Last name “Witch”. However they didn’t have much of an inventory, let alone Halloween stuff, so I took them to Halloween Shop & Hop. With 0L balance I wanted to try and make a decent Witch avatar from the gifts and other free items. It was surprisingly easy using the FabFreel  chart that listed them all. By “not much” I mean they literally needed Everything including basic mesh body parts.

Since I intended to use the Free version of the Legacy mesh body(only because it’s free), that allowed me to narrow down clothing to items that would fit that body, I still ended up with too many outfits!

Trickier things were body parts like a mesh head, skin & hair. I only found a couple of stores offering these items on the list, a red skin & a green skin.

That left me with the final piece,a mesh head. Fortunately BeSpoke still has their Faun head out as a freebie. Also since I started this Freebie looks idea, BeSpoke have released FREE Hunan heads as a permanent freebie too. Since both those heads come with a skin too, I now had plenty to work with and decided to make a few avatar looks instead of just one. I’m going to spread those over a few posts because the credits list got insanely long!

Base Credits:

Shop n Hop Items

  • Background: Halloween Skybox_32 – (Scene 13 of 60) – Booth
  • Cauldron prop: Cauldron – Booth
  • Black & Purple Hat: SK *Halloween 2024 Shop & Hop – Booth
  • Dress: BQ::Rowan Mini Dress:: Black – Booth
  • Green Skin: Ex.Umbra The WITCH Skin – Booth
  • Hair: Hana from Sintiklia – Booth

Burlesque at Body Shots

Right after releasing Western Rider featured in my last post, Salt & Pepper released another outfit, simply called Burlesque. It really does speak for itself.

Credits:

Photo Location: BodyShots Gentlemans Lounge (A Rated region)

The Taur Rider

The store Salt & Pepper released a new outfit recently called Western Rider at the Teegle Dog & Pony Show. This obviously resulted in a slew of photos on social media of people wearing it, usually on horseback.

While that’s all very well and good, I felt like trying a different take on it. I got an idea when at a Western theme party not long ago I heard the song lyrics “Save a horse, ride a cowboy”. It made me think; any woman can be a “cowgirl” she just needs the right kind of ride….

While that might have been fun, I like to keep my blog PG rated, so I veered away from that train of thought,instead I thought “Why ride a horse when you can ride a Centaur?”

Imagine if Centaurs weren’t the graceful beings we see them portrayed as in stories and Second Life community. What if they were as Wild as the old West? Could they be tamed, made civilized? Intriguing questions that may lead to an interesting story in the future.

I want to say a big thankyou to Tori Landau for playing the part of the Centaur in the photos and suggesting the idea of Wild.

Rider Credits:

  • Clothes: Western Rider by Salt & Pepper at Teegle Dog & Pony Show
    (Western Rider does have a matching hat you can purchase)
  • Hat & Hair: TRUTH Montana – Redhead with Hat – TRUTH
  • Skin: Milk ELIANE skin (EVO-X) – WoW Skins::

Centaur Credits:

  • Hair: NO_SAVIOUR by NO.MATCH
  • Top: Malefic Top by Scarlet Fey (group gift)
  • Centaur: JINX CenLighTaur – Jinx Store
  • Tail:Fluffy Light tail – Jinx Centaur by CINNAMON
  • Skin: SANDY CHLOE’ NB BODY MAITREYA*-Lelutka evo X – WoW Skins::
  • Freckles: LeLUTKA.EvoX.Freckles.013
  • Scars, mud, blush and scratches from Izzie’s
    Izzie’s – Body Aged Claw Scars 6
    Izzie’s – LeL Evo X – Face Aged Claw Scars 6
    Izzie’s – LeL Evo X – Dirt & Mud medium
    Izzie’s – LeL Evo X – 04 Ear Dirt more (dark)
    Izzie’s – LeL Evo X – Winter Blush (light)
    Izzie’s – LeL Evo X – Scratches Nose (light)
    Izzie’s – LeL Evo X – Scratches L Cheek (light)

Avatars posed using the Jinx Passenger System for Centaur.

Location: Copper Canyon created by Camilla Runo, now sadly closed.