Tag: Second Life

Second Life Steals, Deals, and Freebies: Your Guide to the 2023 Advent Calendars and 12 Days of Christmas Calendars in Second Life

December is the most wonderful time of the year—for freebie fashionistas in the virtual world of Second Life! This month heralds another edition of the popular Holiday Shop and Hop shopping event* (running from December 1st, 2023, to January 1st, 2024), with a gift at every participating vendor booth. We can also expect another iteration of the annual LeLutka Holiday event (dates as yet unknown), where you can pick up free male and female LeLutka heads, as well as many other freebies from a variety of creators supporting LeLutka, such as LeLutka EvoX skins, hair, and cosmetics. There will be sales and freebies galore all month long!

But the biggest reason why December is such a great month for freebies is that so many stores have an Advent calendar*, or a Twelve Days of Christmas calendar, where you can pick up a gift each day until (and sometimes, including) Christmas Day!

Various Second Life stores, groups, and organizations are still putting the final touches on their calendars and lists of calendars, but one that is already up and running is TeleportHub.com’s Advent Calendar Store List.

TeleportHub maintains a good list of Advent and 12 Days of Christmas calendars

UPDATE Dec. 1st, 2023: Another popular list of calendars is Seraphim’s 2023 Holiday Sales and Advent Calendars List, which also includes details on December sales being held at various stores.

Seraphim compiles a list of dozens of stores with holiday sales and Advent calendars

UPDATE Dec. 1st, 2023: Fabulously Free in SL (or FabFree for short) maintains the December Advent Listing of 24/25-day calendars and 12-day calendars. They also helpfully subdivide each section into free (or free-to-join group) calendars, and calendars where you have to pay a group fee to pick up each day’s gift.

Remember that these lists are updated often, so bookmark them and check back regularly. As I hear about other lists of Advent calendars, I will add them to this blog post! And please feel free to leave me a comment if you know about a store Advent calendar (or calendar list), thanks!

PRO TIPS: Dreamer Pixelmaid runs a Discord server, called Dreamer’s SL, with a dedicated Advent Calendar channel. Here’s your invitation to join us.

Popular Second Life YouTuber Naria Panthar also runs a Discord server with an Advent calendar channel; here’s the invite to join her Discord.

Volunteers (like me!) will try to post pictures of the gifts from various calendars to these Discord channels, but it will be somewhat hit-or-miss. Please see the next paragraph of this blogpost for another way to stay on top of the avalanche of Advent calendar gifts in Second Life!

UPDATE Dec. 1st, 2023: For the past couple of years, the very hardworking folks over at the Russian-language VKontakte group Second Life – FREE have posted a daily roundup of that day’s Advent calendar gifts, with pictures! And those Russian-speaking freebie fashionistas are doing it again for 2023. They even went so far as to create a handy directory of stores with links to pictures of each day’s Advent gift!

Bookmark this list and check back daily; this is probably THE easiest way to actually see each day’s calendar gifts without teleporting all over the grid, collecting and unpacking items! (Please note that you do not need to set up an account on VKontakte; if you click on an image, and it asks you to sign in, just click on the X icon in the upper-right hand corner of the pop-up window—see image, right. The image will then load in full size.)

To get around the language barrier, I usually have the VKontakte list open in one browser tab, and Google Translate in a second browser tab, and just cut and paste the Russian text into the translator. As I said, this is a very useful hidden resource for us seasoned Advent calendar plunderers! 😉

UPDATE Dec. 2nd, 2023: The HuntSL website has a number of posts about Advent calendars; you can find them all here.

UPDATE Dec. 5th, 2023: I just discovered another Advent calendar list which I had never heard of before, by AmigoUFO, called Christmas Advent Calendars List 2023, which seems to focus on just the free ones (or those that require a free group join). Amigo also maintains lists for Advent calendars for dinkies, tinies, and child avatars, and Christmas trees with gifts.

Bookmark this blog post and come back often for the latest updates! I will do my best to keep this blogpost as up-to-date as possible throughout December, and into the new year (yes, a few stores do have New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day gifts!).

Happy freebie shopping!

It’s the most wonderful time of the year…

* I regret to say that, as I did last year, I will NOT be doing a daily round-up of Advent calendar gifts every day, either here on the blog or in the RyanSchultz.com Steals, Deals, and Freebies Second Life group (although I will still try and post some fabulous freebies and bargains to the latter, as I come across them). I’m sorry, but it’s simply too much work for me this year, and therefore I will leave that task to others. I have already posted my picks for the best 2023 Holiday Shop and Hop gifts to the group notices of my group. Happy holidays to all!

UPDATED! An Editorial: Climate Change, Civilization Collapse, and Looking at the Metaverse from a Broader Perspective

Well, now, there’s a blogpost title designed to attract attention, right? 😉

I was one of those people who, at the height of the bird flu scare, stocked up on rice, beans, and N95 masks to prepare for what I thought (at the time) to be an imminent pandemic. Well, we had a pandemic, but I was wrong about the when and the why of it.

Well, I have been doing a fair bit of reading lately, and following a number of intelligent, well-read people on Mastodon, and I feel like I’m in a situation somewhat similar to the one I was in a decade-and-a-half ago: I’m willing to bet something bad will happen, but like with the pandemic, I’m probably going to be wrong about the when and why. What is that something bad? Climate change (fuelled by growth-at-any-cost, maximize-the-value-to-shareholders capitalism) leading to widespread agricultural failures, leading in turn to famine, war, and civilization collapse.

Cheerful topic, eh?

But I am increasingly of the opinion that we, as a society, are going to continue to see more and more of the kind of things that would have been unthinkable even at the beginning of this year. A hurricane-driven wildfire leveling a Hawaiian city, Lahaina, burning 100 people to death before they could flee. A torrential downpour in a Libyan city, Derna, leading to dam failures and flooding, with 11,300 dead and 10,100 missing.

The Lahaina wildfires in Hawaii on August 8, 2023 burned so hot and fast that many people were trapped in their cars trying to flee; some only survived by jumping into the sea (image source).
Overturned cars lay among other debris caused by flash floods in Derna, eastern Libya, on September 11, 2023 (image source: CNN).

And my home country of Canada is not immune. This summer, almost every city and town in the Northwest Territories had to be evacuated due to an unprecedented wildfire season. A tropical storm named Lee rapidly turned into a Category-5 hurricane due to off-the-charts ocean warming, finally coming aground as a still-fierce storm attacking the Maritime provinces as I write this.

My usual response to depressing events like this is pretty much summed up by the following picture:

But the truth of the matter is, there’s only so much you can stick your head in the sand, like an ostrich, when it’s becoming increasingly clear that things are not okay.

Recently, I read a Medium post by Jessica Wildfire, titled The World Has Already Ended. In it, she writes:

We talk a lot about saving the world or preventing the collapse of civilization, but we don’t talk about what it really means. We don’t talk about which world or which civilization we’re trying to save.

It can’t be this one.

This civilization is gone. This world is gone. It already ended for millions of people. Some of us just haven’t felt it yet. It was never an easy one for most of us. It was never fair, but there was a level of predictability. There was a level of comfort and convenience. That’s gone now. Things aren’t going to get better. They’re not going to get back to the way they were.

Now, when the pandemic hit, I bewildered and even irritated some of my regular readers by abruptly swerving my blog content from “news and views on social VR, virtual worlds, and the metaverse” (as the tagline for this blog states) to wall-to-wall coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic. So, you’ll all no doubt be quite pleased to hear that I’m not planning to turn this into a doomer blog about the end of the world.

However.

From now on, my writing about the metaverse will take place in a context that we might be in the earliest stages of a climate-change-driven societal upheaval, perhaps even collapse. For example, how will sales of virtual reality headsets fare when more and more people are struggling to put food on their table and keep a roof over their heads? And, as the metaverse evolves, how many people will consider it as an acceptable alternative to airplane travel to conferences, given that plane travel adds to the overall toll of global warming? How can virtual worlds and social VR be used to help educate people on the challenges facing our world? What happens to VR/AR/MR/XR headset manufacture when components from companies in India or China or the U.S. are impacted by supply-chain problems caused by climate change?

So, while this will continue to be, first and foremost, a blog about virtual reality and the metaverse, I expect that, from now on, I will be looking at everything that is currently happening from a wider perspective, encompassing climate change and its possible impacts. And, if I should stray from that perspective, please feel free to call me out on it.*

UPDATE Sept. 21st, 2023: One of the people whom I follow on Mastodon, who posts about this topic regularly under the pseudonym Bread and Circuses (profile link), recently wrote the following (post link):

Okay, so here’s where we are…

If trends continue on their present course, within 30 years or even less, human industry and commerce and land use will have altered Earth’s livable environment to such an extent that modern industrial society will collapse. This would be an utter disaster. Hundreds of millions of the most vulnerable among us, perhaps even billions, will die. Not to mention all the thousands of animal and plant species we will have driven to extinction.

Sounds bad, right? And that’s what happens on our present course, which includes the belated (and much applauded) shift of most electricity generation to “renewables.” Sorry, but that ain’t gonna be enough to stop what’s coming.

I’m not the only one who can see this, obviously. Many scientists are now raising a similar alarm.

The rich and powerful can see it too, which is why they’re quietly buying large tracts of land in New Zealand and constructing luxury bunkers, hoping to get through the apocalypse that way.

Government and industry leaders certainly can see what lies ahead. And if they use their brains (which not all of them have), they’ll realize that the only possible way to head off catastrophic collapse is to begin an immediate shift to a post-growth economy.

Except — that would mean the cessation of capitalism. Well, we can’t have that! So, instead, they’re now making plans to drastically alter the environment in order to overcome the problems caused by altering the environment.

Yes, you read that right. Capitalists want to use fossil-fueled technology to fix all the damage caused by fossil-fueled technology. 🥴

Our Mastodon friend Geoffrey Deihl (aka Sane Thinker, @gdeihl) recently published a thorough exploration and evaluation of those plans.

“Stratospheric Aerosol Injection: Earth’s Last Chance Dance?”

See https://geoffreydeihl.substack.com/p/stratospheric-aerosol-injection-earths

*True confession time. Hey, I still don’t bother to recycle my plastic. 😱 I recently bought a new gasoline-powered car instead of a hybrid or electric vehicle. 😱😱 And I just booked a plane ticket to go see the rest of my family. 😱😱😱 I’m just as much a climate-change hypocrite as the next person. All I can do is continue to educate myself, and try to do better.

UPDATED! The Biggest Problem with the New Senra Blake and Jamie Mesh Bodies in Second Life (and TWO WAYS to Fix It)

I have spent my weekend testing out the new Senra line of mesh starter bodies, Blake and Jamie, which were launched in beta last week. While I think that there is a lot to like about these bodies, my investigation has led me to the following conclusion: that these mesh bodies, while nice in many ways, have a big problem.

But first, I want to talk about what I do like. I really like fact that Linden Lab has, finally, created a mesh starter avatar system that gives new users an out-of-the-box, modern mesh body, with a generous, mix-and-match unisex capsule wardrobe to get them started.

For example, here is my oldest male avatar, Morden Winkler, hanging out at the bar, listening to the music at FogBound Blues. I used an old Belleza male skin called Ewan from my inventory, and if I may say so, he looks damn good for a completely free avatar (an important consideration because, unlike the many options for women, men have relatively few free/inexpensive mesh body choices in Second Life):

The Senra bodies and wardrobes I like; it’s the heads that are giving me conniption fits. Let me explain.

I am rapidly coming to the conclusion, after trying on innumerable older skins on both the Blake and Jamie bodies, that they all have this weirdness to the eyebrow and upper eyelid area, such that any SLUV skin (i.e., any skin based on the standard system avatar mapping) is simply not going to work with these heads. 🙁

Morden may look great in still pictures, but watch this 8-second video and see what happens to the eyebrows on this old Belleza skin when he blinks:

You see how his eyebrows get deeper when he blinks? This problem, as near as I can tell, happens with all SLUV skins. It means that the older skins that many of us have in our inventories will be absolutely useless on the Blake and Jamie heads, no matter how much fiddling we do with the eye and eyebrow sliders (and trust and believe, I tried everything!). It’s a problem with the underlying mesh of the Blake and Jamie heads. It’s incompatible with SLUV skins.

I shared this problem on the Second Life Community forums, and someone suggested I try a Bakes on Mesh eyebrow concealer from Izzie’s (exact SLURL; it’s also available on the SL Marketplace), for L$149. It comes in a variety of skin tones to match just about any skin, and they are tintable to match any skin.*

Picture showing the Izzie’s Eyebrow Concealer on an old Izzie’s skin, Bonita

Here’s two pictures showing another old female skin I had in my oldest female avatar’s inventory, the “photorealistic” Bella Snow skin from IC Skins (a store long since vanished from the grid and the Marketplace). The picture on the left is the skin as it looks on the Senra Jamie mesh head (where the eyebrows do move when the avatar blinks). The picture on the right is the same head and skin, using the Izzie’s eyebrow concealer and the Jamie brows, taken from the hair folder in the Senra Jamie package.

Jamie Senra head with IC Skins Bella Snow skin
Jamie Senra with Bella Snow skin, Izzie’s eyebrow concealer, and Jamie eyebrows

You can very clearly see just how much higher up the Jamie brows sit. There is a lot of real estate between the eye and eyebrow, which is fine if that is what you want. But I set the eyebrow height slider to its LOWEST level, and they are still sky-high compared to the regular brows! I’m sorry, but this is a deal-breaker for me.

At this point, it is very clear to me that entire eyebrow/upper eyelid area on the Blake AND the Jamie mesh heads is VERY different from the SLUV used on most older skins, and it is therefore unlikely that any will work with the Blake and Jamie heads!

I do consider this a MAJOR problem with the Blake and Jamie heads, and frankly, I’d rather just use one of the free LeLutka heads I picked up at previous Christmases than try to find an old SLUV skin in my inventory that will work with it. It’s extremely disappointing; I was so looking forward to being able to use all the old skins in my avatars’ inventories with these heads.

However, the Senra line of starter mesh avatars will provide an opportunity for creators to make new skins which will work with the Blake and Jamie bodies. But part of me is also hoping that Linden lab is taking the word “beta” seriously, and listening to the feedback from users like me, and are willing to make some changes to these starter mesh avatar heads so that they do work better with older SLUV skins.

Also, please keep in mind that this is an experienced SL user talking here (almost 17 years), and most SL newbies will not be aware of this issue, not have any older skins in their inventories, and be happy enough with the Jamie and Blake bodies as they are, until they decide to upgrade the head and/or body to another brand.

I guess we’ll see, won’t we?

*I did test out the Izzie’s Eyebrow Concealer on the older Belleza Ewan skin that Morden Winkler is wearing in the top photo, and unfortunately, it does not completely cover the bottom part of that bushy male eyebrow, so I cannot use it with that skin. It’s a shame, because I really liked it a lot, and wore it a lot, back in the old pre-mesh days.

UPDATE Aug. 15th, 2023: I was discussing my frustration with using SLUV skins with other SL users on the Second Life Community forums (in this thread), when Theresa Tennyson suggested:

Strip the blink script out of the head. Think of it—when was the last time you actually noticed someone blinking in real life? The blink animation in the head is unrealistically slow, and I’m not sure, it’s even possible to have a realistic instant blink by animating bones anyway.

And I went and tested this on both the Senra Blake and Jamie mesh heads, and it works! Both Senra mesh heads are modify/no transfer, so here is how you do it, step by step:

  1. Make a copy of the Jamie (or Blake) head first, by right -clicking on the head in your inventory, then selecting Copy from the drop-down menu.
  2. Then, click on or in the folder you want to place the modified head in, right-click again, and select Paste to save it.
  3. Find a place with rez rights, like a sandbox, and drag the head you wish to modify from your inventory onto the ground.
  4. Right-click on it, and select Edit.
  5. IMPORTANT! In the first tab, change the name of the head to indicate that it is non-blink, e.g. “Senra – Jamie Head NOBLINK”. Otherwise, you’ll never know which is which! 😉
  6. Then, click on the Contents tab in the Edit window, and delete the blinking script (there is only one, you can’t miss it).
  7. Close the Edit window and take your modified, no-blink head back into your inventory.

I have tested this, and it works well! The head no longer has that slow blinking motion which seems to deform the skin around the upper eyelid and brow, but the eyes still have natural, looking around movements (you can see all the eye movement animations in the same Contents tab as the script you just deleted).

Please note that this is a solution for older, SLUV-based skins to get them to work with the Senra Blake and Jamie mesh heads and bodies, and it should not be necessary for any skins created specifically for the Senra line. In fact, one quick-working creator, Alaskametro, has already released a line of female skins for Jamie, and an associated shape (SL Marketplace link) . The skins cost L$50 per skin tone, and the (modifiable) shape is only L$10 (I used it as my starting point in the pictures below, fiddling with the head and body sliders a bit until I got my desired look).

I found it very interesting that, even with a skin designed for Senra, and using the default body shape from Alaskametro, that the inner parts of the eyebrows still deformed, ever so slightly, when my avatar blinked. So I stripped the blinking animation out of a copy of the Senra Jamie mesh head, and used the non-blink version instead.

I’m quite happy with this avatar look, and after spending only L$60 grand total, I think she would blend in seamlessly in a bar or club, mingling with other avatars wearing much pricier, brand-name mesh bodies and heads!

So now you have two different solutions to the problem with the upper eyelid and eyebrow area on the Senra Jamie and Blake avatars! Personally, I am just going to go with deleting the blink script from these heads, since I do want to be able to use older SLUV skins from my avatars’ inventories with them, and that solution is cheaper (in fact, free!) than purchasing Izzie’s Eyebrow Concealer I mentioned up top, and using the brows that come with this body, supplied by Linden Lab.