Random Thoughts

• It has become abundantly clear to me that I blog almost exclusively on Tuesdays of late. I post my Topless Tuesday pic with a brief few comments, link to Flickr then I'm off like a prom dress. This tells me that I need to explore Our World some more, something I used to do quite a bit. Now I mostly pop into various beaches and swim around or lay on the beach while reading.
• Swimming in SL is fun, though I miss Real Life swimming. Having to attach a separate swim HUD is annoying as is turning on/off my regular movement AO HUD when I exit or enter the water. I know that Our World is now (in some eyes) obsolete, but perhaps it is time for The Lab to re-engineer the viewer so that there are standard animations for being in water.
• After all these years, body parts still talk. You know the ones. They are annoying at best and downright inappropriate in public places like shops, Infohubs, and the like. Why is it important that I know what one of your organs is doing at a particular moment? I'm tempted to go rogue and click away, randomly and often, until I get booted or someone leaves.
• I find it amusing that when I cam around at home the Kennylex-made cannon I have on my porch fires without being touched. Some particle sources do this. Also, some animations. As I write this I cammed about to greet someone and a row of girls "bounced" on the beach towels from Standing to Laying, taking on the pose in the towel.
• The User Interface of the Official Viewer still operates as if designed by engineers and not users. You would think that Third Party Viewers would fix this as they are, almost by definition, designed by users. No. In each case the designer is a geeky programmer not who tends to think in logical progressions like the ever present Directory Tree. There are too many bloody steps to change Windlights and the pop-up panels are unnecessarily large. Stop relying on "the task is done" and go for "the task is done with elegance."
• Sometimes if I forget to turn off my AO when sitting on furniture so the HUD's sit animation is played. Others don't always see it this way when I do and sometimes I don't see the AO being dominant while others do. This applies to everyone, I suppose. Right now a girl near me is floating mid-air in a relaxed sitting pose when I know the animation in the towel she's occupying should have her laying on her belly. Maybe SL 2.0 will address this.
• There is so much progress with using mesh to create ultra-realistic homes, furniture, and landscaping, but it seems to me that very few creators are working to bring similar gains to the underwater realm. PADI's Dive World sims were spectacular in their day and I'd love to see what they might look like with today's mesh advances.

• When I was showing off some new bedroom furniture on MySL today (see above plus here and here for more examples) I was trying to angle the shots to as the mirror wouldn't show it was fake and thinking "I used to have a table with an animation to do this" and "I wish SL really had mirrors." Not long after, I ran across a MySL post from Torley Linden that eventually led to the video below.

•  I need to enjoy my home more. Finances iRL are getting tight and even the $15/USD monthly tier I pay might get squeezed. Gone are the days when I raked in tons of SpaceBux hosting events at Lesbos and handing it to my sister Threshin for rent so that isn't an option, either. Premium membership is paid up for almost a year so I could at least have a Linden Home.