Of all the bloody gall...

Okay, so someone was posting in a Phoenix Self Help group chat asking a question, and I responded with a comment that, while not very popular in some circles, is nevertheless absolutely true.

[2013/08/22 15:53]  Gulid Resident: Is there someone that can help me? My avi's body still looks grey even though I am on the v4.4.2 viewer, i did a clean update and everything and yet my avi si grey so idk what to do at this point :/
[2013/08/22 15:53]  Gulid Resident: i mean clean install
[2013/08/22 15:54]  Sophie Katsu: Guild you mean you're on Firestorm?
[2013/08/22 15:54]  Archangel Mortenwold: Might want to check the Firestorm Viewer support group, though I'll tell you right now their only response is likely to go out and buy a new computer.
[2013/08/22 15:54]  Mister Acacia: Guild, this is the Phoenix viewer group. You want the Firestorm group > secondlife:///app/group/3a1be8d4-01f3-bc1a-2703-442f0cc8f2dd/about
[2013/08/22 15:55]  Mister Acacia: Archangel, don't be an idiot.
[2013/08/22 15:55]  Gulid Resident: but mine says phoenix firestorm
[2013/08/22 15:55]  Gulid Resident: i dont know the difference
[2013/08/22 15:56]  Archangel Mortenwold: Who's being an idiot?  That's their response to most issues raised by users.
[2013/08/22 15:56]  Masdison Resident: You don't need a new pc other viewers work
[2013/08/22 15:56]  Mister Acacia: Guild, Phoenix viewer is a V1-based viewer that is now obsolete. Firestorm is made by the same people, it's V2/3 based and is current.
[2013/08/22 15:56]  XLR8RRICK Hudson: Guild I will IM you and help
[2013/08/22 15:57]  Archangel Mortenwold: There's Singularity and there's Cool VL Viewer, which both work well.  As for Phoenix being obsolete, that's true only so long as no one picks up the code and updates it.
[2013/08/22 15:57]  Mister Acacia: That's bullshit Archangel.
[2013/08/22 15:57]  Archangel Mortenwold: Isn't there anyone willing and able to that task?
[2013/08/22 15:57]  Sophie Katsu: why is it bullshit?
[2013/08/22 15:58]  StarlightShining Resident: really Arch - you told such troll rubbish
[2013/08/22 15:58]  Sophie Katsu: Jessica said anyone can have at it if they want to update it
[2013/08/22 15:58]  StarlightShining Resident: sure - go ahead - several have tried
[2013/08/22 15:58]  Mister Acacia: Because the support team does not automatically tell everyone to buy a new pc.
[2013/08/22 15:58]  Masdison Resident: Another thing the ssb has nothing to do with your avatar being gray, your av should look good its all the other av's that are gray
[2013/08/22 15:58]  Archangel Mortenwold: What's this "rubbish" to which you refer?
[2013/08/22 15:58]  Sophie Katsu: has that changed?
[2013/08/22 15:59]  StarlightShining Resident: sophie - go ahead and pick up Phx - many that actually know how to deal woith a viewer have tried and given up
[2013/08/22 15:59]  Sophie Katsu: oh ok i thought you were talking about his other comment
[2013/08/22 15:59]  Sophie Katsu: why are you telling me that?   i'm not a coder
[2013/08/22 16:00]  Sophie Katsu: i just repeated what Jessica said in one of the interviews that i saw on video
[2013/08/22 16:00]  StarlightShining Resident: as you said sophie - anyone can pick it up and take it forward
[2013/08/22 16:02]  Masdison Resident: I still use phoenix at time and its working fine in most sims but if you go to a sim that has the ssb all the av's look totally gray but your av looks good
[2013/08/22 16:03]  Mister Acacia: SSA (was ssb) is on all regions now.

At that point, the moderator blocked my ability to post in group chat.  Here's the screen cap so you can see for yourself.

Now, just to show you how true it is that the typical response to any and all issues with Firestorm really is to go out and buy a brand new computer, here's a screencap lifted right from the Firestorm blog itself.

Wow.  That looks like someone being told to go out and get a new computer, with the ass clown making the reply not even bothering to ask if the person to whom he is replying is even on a PC that uses Windows XP.  My computer runs Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit edition, with the following specs:

CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) II X2 260 Processor (3214.35 MHz)
Memory: 8192 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 7 64-bit Service Pack 1 (Build 7601)
Graphics Card Vendor: ATI Technologies Inc.
Graphics Card: AMD Radeon HD 6600 Series
Windows Graphics Driver Version: 8.17.0010.1077
OpenGL Version: 4.1.10750 Compatibility Profile Context

And guess what?  Firestorm won't run for you-know-what.  If it doesn't crash on start-up, it does very soon thereafter, and in the interim all I get is blackness with nothing fixing it.  My PC was designed to allow me to run graphics-intensive programs on high settings without breaking a circuit.  Yet the typical response to any and all issues with the badly-programmed Firestorm is "go out and buy a new computer, come into the modern age", as though that and not the crappy programming by the developers is the only thing to blame.  And when this is pointed out, it's met with name-calling, profanity, and censorship.  This is what the Firestorm developers and their merry band of suckups are like, dear readers.  You don't usually see this kind of behavior, this sneering contempt for one's own user base, in a lot of other places.

So yeah, I left that group and have no plans to return.  Now that Server Side Baking has gone grid-wide, I'm using Singularity Viewer full time.  Its building features still aren't quite on the same level as Phoenix, but the developers are a lot more receptive to input than the Firestorm elitists are, so who knows?  It just may end up becoming the premiere viewer for builders.

Review: Cold War

Alright, nothing bad really to say about this episode; I actually couldn't think of any major problems I had with it.  I did enjoy it, so count this review as a positive one.

The year is 1983.  A Soviet nuclear submarine is performing a launch drill somewhere near the North Pole when it is interrupted by Professor Grisenko (played funnily and brilliantly by David Warner).  The first mate opines to the captain that the Americans' aggressiveness is an indication that the Cold War is about to become a hot one, and that they must continue with further drills.  The older, less hot-headed captain informs him that the crew has practiced enough for one day and orders a stand down.

A little later, we see a sailor thawing out a block of ice in which some kind of specimen, thought to perhaps be a mammoth, is trapped.  Suddenly an armored hand bursts through the ice and grabs the sailor by the neck.  The submarine soon begins to sink, and it is then that the TARDIS appears on board with the Doctor and Clara exiting thinking they've landed in Las Vegas.  And from there "Cold War" really kicks into gear as we get to see an Ice Warrior for the first time in almost forty years!

Doctor Who contributing writer Mark Gatiss did a very good job with this episode, and director Douglas MacKinnon handled the story quite capably.  Gatiss had apparently been wanting to do one featuring the Ice Warriors, and after much begging finally convinced head writer Stephen Moffat to let him give it a go.

The rest of the episode revolves around trying — not always successfully — to negotiate a non-violent resolution to the crisis at hand, mirroring the handling of the Cold War itself.  The Ice Warrior, a famous Grand Marshall named Skaldek, is compelled by Martian law to go to war against any who attack an Ice Warrior, and having been attacked upon waking after 5,000 years in a block of ice, he's understandably cranky.  The episode really did a good job of playing on this as a reminder of the Cold War during the 1980s.  Although it was actually winding down at this point, with Russia going bankrupt as a result of overspending on its military and growing disillusionment with Soviet-style communism, paranoia and rhetoric on both sides were still running high.

David Warner as Professor Grisenko illustrates this disillusionment with an almost carefree attitude and a love for American pop music, which he listens to through his headphones.  By contrast, First Mate Stephashin is all too eager to see nuclear war break out, figuring that the Americans will launch their missiles soon so the Soviets might as well beat them to the punch.  Captain Zhukov, played by Cunningham, represents the middle ground between these two extremes.

Also well handled was giving us, the viewers, for the first time, a glimpse of what the Ice Warriors look like underneath all that armor they wear.  Although the CGI makes him look a bit silly, the practical effects are much better, and thankfully the CGI isn't used too much.  Check this out and tell me what you think:

"I floss my teeth with the tendons of vanquished foes."

Actually looks kinda badass, doesn't he?  The creative team wisely decided not to deviate too much from the classic design, opting simply to give him a gigantic size and body-builder physique (as opposed to the barrel-shaped costumes worn in the classic series).  Actor Spencer Wilding, standing at 6'7", was the perfect choice to portray the Ice Warrior Skaldek, having previously acted the part of the Minotaur in "The God Complex" and the Tree King in "The Doctor, the Widow, and the Wardrobe".

All in all, I give this episode a B+.  For another take on "Cold War", Den of Geek's review.

More Regions Disappearing from SL

Over at New World Notes Hamlet Au is disappointed to learn that one of the Next Big Things to save Second Life isn't doing what he hoped it would, namely, turn SL into the gamers' paradise he apparently wants it to be.  This latest revelation comes on the heels of his blog entry last week that hyped the "publish[ing]" of SL "on Valve's Steam distribution network", which is apparently the latest Next Big Thing that will save SL from the slow disintegration of the grid.
Some people are joining Hamlet in hyping this Steam thing as the feature that will bring swarms of 25-40-year-olds to the grid, injecting new life into it and making up for the loss of regions that has been taking place over the last couple of years.  Others are downplaying these developments as not having any significant impact on the number of new users to SL, and I happen to be among that crowd.  And there's a reason why we don't expect this to take off: the high price of land in SL and the inescapable fact that Second Life is simply not a gaming platform.  It never was and never will be.
A popular region called Hosoi just announced that, because of financial difficulties, the sim owner is forced to close it down and leave the grid.  And it's not just one but four full regions shutting down.
Now, this should not be surprising to anyone who has kept up with news of SL on NWN.  In May and September last year, and in June of this year forecasts predict a ten percent loss of privately-"owned" regions.  The single biggest reason for these region losses is the ridiculously high price of land in SL, with Linden Lab charging people up to $1,000.00 USD to buy a new region and $295.00 USD a month for maintenance fees on the server that houses it.  And since servers are shared by several regions, this means that each server brings in many hundreds if not thousands of dollars a month.  It's a pricing model that only barely worked back in 2006, when there was still the illsuion maintained that the U.S. and world economies were somewhat strong.  But that illusion ended in 2008 — four years ago — and it is just plain stupid to expect people to sustain what has become an outrageously expensive luxury when most of us are not even able to earn a living wage and the ones who are able are finding their savings being gobbled up by everything from higher food prices to economically-crippling medical bills.
Now, the simplest solution to bring in more revenue is to cut region prices by one half to two thirds, making SL land pricing competitive with grids such as OpenSim and InWorldz, both of which charge less than $100.00 USD for private islands — both the initial buying price and the monthly server maintenance fee are around $75.00) — and provide far more resources for those regions.  Linden Lab currently allows only 15,000 primitives (the basic building blocks that are used to generate the amazing constructs users have made over the years).  InWorldz allows up to 45,000.  If you had a choice between paying $75 a month for 45,000 prims and shelling out $295 a month for 15,000 prims, the choice really doesn't even exist.  You'd opt for a grid that charges far less and gives you far more for what you're paying.

That's exactly what SL region owners are doing.  OpenSim was reported this past February as having experienced a small explosion of new users flocking over from the ridiculously expensive Second Life, a healthy increase following a December 2011 report that OpenSim gained 915 regions with InWorldz being the busiest of the independent virtual grids.

It is simply foolish to market something that isn't a gaming platform as a gaming platform, especially when none of the tools are present for turning it into one and the interest from users isn't there. But that's exactly what Linden Lab insists on doing, and with its primary revenue base drying up without a replacement to make up for the losses, the company really can't expect to fund all the non-SL projects it wants to. The latest deal with Steam may be an attempt to secure a new revenue source, but I can think of plenty of more efficient, more viable ways to increase it than by trying to attract gamers from one virtual environment to one that is not set up for gaming.

That's why the Bloodlines clan I belong to is trying to raise funds for a full year for the Nocturne Project. Until or unless Linden Lab wises up and dramatically lowers land tier prices, it's just prohibitively expensive to try and maintain a full region unless you have the business acumen to rent it out at a price that bring in a healthy profit. You can have mesh and pathfinding and all the deals with Cloud and Steam and whatever going on, but at the end of the day it's still the economy stupid. And if Linden Lab refuses to wake up to that reality, it's going to price itself out of business within a few more years.

For an alternative take on this subject, go here.

Ass Clownery and Upcoming RFL Events

Remember when I wrote earlier about a clown who got himself banned from a London-based region?  He's up to his usual tricks again, this time going on the offensive against a vendor who sent out a note card warning people about alleged griefing activities by a group to which clown-boy belongs.  He's in a tizzy because someone did to him what he did to another group entirely last year.  The hypocrisy on display is stunning.

Anyway, on to important matters.  With the semester winding down I plan to schedule three RFL events in May.  I'll post more info when I finalize the themes, but I hope to do a May Day fund-raiser as the first one.

Relay for Life is managed in Second Life by dedicated people, many of whom are or know people who have cancer.  Some of the RFL captains, volunteers, and other members have already suffered losses this year and my thoughts go out to them.  Cancer is a nasty disease and it takes no prisoners.  Whatever we can raise to help wipe it out, let's raise it!