Chic at Ebbe's Place

In real life many of us know about the mysterious disappearance of socks. We seem to have many singles and no mates. We buy more sock as matching is important to the fashion conscious -- and we continue to lose socks.

Things have been disappearing in my virtual world. This isn't a new event; my first was six years ago -- my biggest, a loss of 10,000 home and garden items about four years ago. I kept backups when I could. That backup folder also disappeared. What's a gal to do.

I know it isn't just me. Folks write on the forums all the time about lost inventory. Others get on and tell them that it is only their cache that isn't working and we NEVER lose inventory. Well, I know better.

I note things are gone from time to time. I try not to let it bother me and with a sim to caretake I know have a lot of rezzables out in world (a slightly but not guaranteed safer place).

A couple of days ago I noted that a previous working texture change item I had made was no longer working. I fiddled a bit making it work but not as designed. Today I wanted to add some flower textures to a new build. They were gone. Others were also absent including ones I know were in my inventory a couple of months ago as I needed to find them in order to get a legal transfer to Inworldz. So I have the textures THERE but not HERE. I do have the normal maps that I generated to go WITH some of the missing foliage.  Hmmmm.

Another odd thing happened today. A pouf no longer contained all its animations. Script errors looking for animations came up more often than the poses -- well often anyway.

All this got me wondering if textures and animations -- and who knows what else -- might have been deleted purposefully. I have only had one placeholder plywood box appear in my inventory from a DMCA charge. It was a dance. I didn't care about it. I deleted the plywood placeholder. But what if textures are in question -- do we get the same head's up or are they simply deleted from the database?

I don't know the answer to that any more than I know WHY I am missing so many things and other items aren't working. Happily it seems like even if the texture is missing from the database (my UUID one anyway), items are not broken; the textures still appear on them.

It is still murky so far as porting textures over to The New World. Obviously we could reupload our own handmade textures, and The Lab could legally -- OK "legally" move our textures over for us under the August TOS of "we can do anything with all content" clause. Does that mean all the illegally uploaded textures would go into the new world? It is impossible to stop the uploading of stolen and copyrighted textures. We see them everyday in world.

While I would like to think this new disappearing syndrome was somehow connected to cleaning up stolen items on the grid, I am guessing it is most likely just another database meltdown.

Later note before this gets posted: Sunday morning I found a folder with many folders within it from Dec 2013. I clean my inventory regularly and this just (JUST) appeared. Another previously deleted folder from long ago also appeared. The textures did not :(.  So I suspect this is yet another inventory issue. It seems like that will never be remedied. 

It's August. A traditionally slow time.

And yet ---

And yet --

there are many things that don't seem slow at all --

* More new shopping venues are showing up with good attendance.
* My personal income is the best it has been for a summer month that I can remember. I have no idea if that transfers over to others, but I am not doing any advertising or changing product types. Nothing that I can attribute the raise in revenue to except perhaps support from the general public.


 and other things are regressing --

* The forums have very few post other than ads for land.
* Land prices (rentals) seem to be down; there are many spots with less than $1L per prim prices (my personal standard when shopping).

There is no way to actually know what those factors add up to. There are fewer people online but not by scads. Some folks have left the grid over the New World announcement, but not all that many judging from Inworldz's new account additions.

Are people be intentionally more supportive?
Have they switched to a more nomadic life and abandoned property or rentals planning to "play" and not "nest"?

We can't really know.

Someone on the SL forums aked why the linden dollar wasn't losing value with the announcement of the new world. Personally I thought that strange and couldn't see why one would necessarily influence the other. Any major changes are years off, not weeks. Life is moving on as usual for most folks. If they are ignoring the possible future -- well whatever works for them :D. If they just feel it is too far in the distance to worry about -- well I get that too.

From my point of view things seem pretty stable and in fact better than I would expect for THE mid summer month.

That is encouraging.

I started this blog in preparation for the future.

I thought it would be good to have a "New World" blog already in process (such a crafty dame).

I also wanted to chronicle the events and atmosphere leading up to the birthing of the new platform. I like keeping records. It is a bit like a diary.

Those were my reasons, but I find that people are actually coming here to read my thoughts. It's OK. It isn't private.

So here are my thoughts for today.

Someone on the Inworldz forums (before I stopped reading them) wondered why there were so many post about Second Life. Why should the IW population care?

Well, for starters -- Second Life was the vanguard and is historically the largest and most popular -- and "successful" grid around. The world watches SL, they don't watch the tiny grids with concurrency of 35 - 300. That just makes sense.

There are several "six degrees of separation" type theories. I find the idea difficult to fathom really but let's say it is true. The bottom line is that we are ALL connected -- and THAT I do believe. What happens to one of us sends ripples into the worlds of the others.

Blue Mars and Cloud Party both closed. Different reasons but the effect reflected on all virtual worlds. That might not be fair, but it is indeed true. Now folks point to the failures, and perhaps that is to be expected. The history of one of us is in some part the history of all of us.

I would have been much happier in Inworldz without the constant bitching about Second Life. I think I can say b*tching here; I have no affiliations to anyone on this particular set of prose pages *wink*.

We really need to be supporting each other, not try to rip each other apart.

I hope we learn some lessons along the way.

Somehow, I doubt we will.


PS. Thanks for stopping by.