Second Life’s Caroline has a Secret Hideaway

The Hideaway is a recent addition to SL. It is a place to meet up anonymously and hook up. Think about being anonymous in SL… really!?! How does one do that? Caroline and crew found a way.

If you haven’t found Caroline Takeda’s Second Life Adventures and the Second Life Escorts sites (both NSFW URLs) and are into sex… then you are missing out. Caroline is always working on ways to make a buck starting sex businesses. Sex sells… don’t you know? And the articles there while sometimes educational are almost always titillating.

Eye Wide Shut!?!

One of the more recent efforts is her Secret Hideaway. She has written about it (here and here) in her blogs. Alas I only occasionally check in on her blogs. So, I hadn’t noticed the club opening until Caroline sent me an invitation to get a free mask. They normally cost a thousand Linden. O.O So, yeah, I thought I better get my little tush down there and get one. I did.

If it is about new features, or something, in SL I haven’t seen in SL then I’m interested. But a thousand Linden, that would have put me off. I won’t spend L$200 without a demo first. But free… I’m all in.

This anonymous thing had me curious how will they do that? Plus, the place is secret and you supposedly can’t find it without the mask.

In SL your RL ID is confidential. But your avatar’s ID is way public, like living under the UK cameras. But they did find a near-perfect way to hide your identity while in the club. Surprising. It works.

I used to scout enemy bases in NOR (combat/sex RP). I am pretty good at getting into places I’m not supposed to be in. So, claiming it couldn’t be found was a challenge. But so far, it has been difficult enough I gave up.

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Second Life: Sessions’ Vagina for Slink

Back in December of 2019… that long ago? …I wrote a review of available women’s genitals. See Second Life Vaginas: The V. That is the vagina for the Maitreya body. Now there is a version for Slink Original and Hourglass and Inithium Kupra (with a 50% off Kupra version until Feb 14, 2021 – see details at the in-world store. – MAP URL). The marketplace URL is here (URL – NSFW).

A working girl…

I got the Slink Hourglass demo. It comes with Slink Classic and Redux versions. Both in the same package. If you don’t know Slink, the Redux version is the version highly optimized for BOM. Slink Classic is their older more complex applier style body. Whichever you prefer, they have something for you.

The Original and Hourglass versions of The V are different and NOT interchangeable. So, for Slink users that frequently swap between Slink bodies like I do, they will need to make a decision. Hourglass or Original or buy both? They don’t have a package deal for buying the two.

More pages… links below.

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Second Life is in the Cloud

An article appeared on SL’s Featured News page: An Update on the Second Life Destination Guide.

We know all the region servers are now running in Amazon Web Services aka THE CLOUD. A number of backend services were moved before the region servers. The uplifting of all the services needed to run Second Life™ and render it was announced January 5, 2021, in a featured article: 2021 Update: Life in the Cloud. They were announcing the completion of the move to the cloud.

The idea of SL being completely moved to the cloud depends on who is speaking and what they are thinking of as the Second Life SYSTEM and what they mean by ‘moved’. On a general and practical level, Second Life is in the cloud. In Strawberry’s article of January 22, we are told the Destination Guide is in the cloud and running too.

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Second Life: Paying for It

No… not for SL, for “it”. For those with the standard perverted mind that generally lives in the gutter the intent for “it” is obvious, SEX.

I write when I think something is interesting (sex qualifies), surprises me (I didn’t know that), or is a happening thing for SL residents (oh, there are people here). I recently came across Bar No.5 (map URL) in an area labeled Street Whores in the region Hoogenach. The region qualifies on all three. While the bar isn’t all that busy it is notorious… well… to some. I hadn’t heard of it.

Waiting in an empty bar…

For some reason, I had gone over to Caroline’s Second Life Adventures (NSFW URL) and saw a couple of posts on Bar No.5. Hmmm… so what is this place? Candy, the girl in the post, was having fun. Curiosity. I decided to check it out.

I had to do some searching using the viewer’s search to find the bar. One has to enter Bar No.5 with the period and no spaces between the ‘No’, period, and ‘5’. You find the region Hoogenach, which Google Translate thinks is Dutch but the translation makes no sense.

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Firestorm 6.4.12 Shadows for Photography

I recently saw a video about getting Firestorm Viewer’s shadows to look as good as Black Dragon’s shadows. Huh? What?

The thing they were doing is getting hair shadows to render well on the avatar face. The video (4 min) I found has horrible audio. Luca The Guide, the author, was ill the day she made the video. So, I can’t complain too much. I don’t even try to make video tutorials when I am sick.

The video did get me looking and comparing Black Dragon and Firestorm.  I launched Black Dragon (BD) and took a couple of pictures, see below. Then Launched Firestorm (FS) and took a couple.

Black Dragon – My typical environment
Firestorm – Again my typical environment

With both, I used the same projector attached to the Center of Gravity attachment point aimed at my nose and in front and above my head. Both viewers were set to use the default environment in the Bellisseria region. Both viewers were using their default shadow settings.

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Firestorm 6.4.12 Released – Yay!

Firestorm has released (12/10) a new version of their viewer. This is about seven months after their last release and about 4 months after the release of their beta version for EEP, Enhanced Environment Project.

Winter Season – Ooops….. by Jessica Boo @ Flickr

I am not going to review the viewer as Inara has a good review up here. You can get the update from the splash page of the Firestorm Viewer or download it at the Firestorm website.

If you chose to install the beta version then there is a gotcha in this version’s install. The 6.4.12 install program overwrites the version prior to the beta version or the previous ‘main version’ install. You’ll have to manually remove the beta.

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Second Life Update 2020-10

I am not keeping up with SL tech like I used to. I play more these days. But, today I made it to a Server-Scripting meeting. BIG changes.

UPLIFT

The Lindens tell us the UPLIFT is the biggest change to the service ever made in the history of Second Life™. Expect problems and odd glitches. They even posted a request in the SL Tools & Tech section of the SL Forum, A Light in the Cloud. Patience. As they move to eliminate the one foot in data center and one in the cloud, things are likely to get bumpy. Expect odd problems. Lots of people are working hard to make this change as smooth as possible. The optimistic completion is before the holidays.

Leonorah Beverly @ Flicker

The UPLIFT of region simulators to the cloud is in high gear. You can tell if the region you are in is running in the cloud in Help->About… Look for the “You are at…” part. You have to know how to read server names and URI values to tell. But, simply said cloud addresses are amazon.com and Linden Data Center servers have the address linden.com. This simple distinction will go away as more regions move to the cloud. The Lindens will use what they call a synthetic name, which gives the Lindens more useful information about the server and its regions.

Knowing which region is located where is not going to matter for long. Soon it will all be cloud based. Then only the Lindens will need to know which server is carrying which region.

We are told that last Tuesday night at minimum use time about 1,000 regions were Uplifted to the cloud. Mazidox Linden tells us those regions have been running with only minor problems.

They anticipate moving may be 2,500 regions Wednesday (10/28) to the cloud. Which means problems are very minor. This will also mean more than half of all regions will be in the cloud.

Today we got our first set of server Release Notes for the cloud versions. See an example: Release Notes.

More pages… links below.

Photoshop CC 2021

I’m over my CoVid-19 and have much of my stamina back. Hikes are close to 3 miles now. So, I am getting there.

I have the new Photoshop and have been playing with it. This video takes you through the new features and changes. I chose this one because of the time mark references in the description.

Photoshop 2021 Released October 2020

Much of the ‘NEW’ is about the Neural Filters which are Artificial Intelligence in action. Some of them require access to a cloud account and are processing on Adobe’s remote servers rather than in your computer. They can take almost a minute to respond. There is only a small easily missed indicator that anything is happening. Took me a bit to figure out I just had to be patient.

Most of the Neural Filters are amazing. Some… they aren’t quite ready for prime-time, which is why those are called BETA. Even if not that great now, we can see what is coming.