Sometimes Sinner, Sometimes Saint

Before I created this avatar, Linden Labs released what I thought was a long-overdue “supplement” to Second Life, the SLim messenger. (Yes, I know calling it the “SLim messenger” is redundant. Tough.) I was ecstatic, because it meant a way to IM and keep contact with people, even during the times I don’t feel like logging into SL. Even now, if I’m logged in on one av in-world, the other’s in on SLim. Because of this, I found a rather irritating aspect of SLim, the topic of this post. I don’t expect LL to do a dang thing about it, but if anyone else is noticing what I did, this might explain to them why.

For an avatar to have access to SLim, they have to log in to SL at least once on voice, then “register” with Vivox, and all that. Supposedly that was the only time one needed to use voice, but at that point, I had voice on all the time anyway, so I didn’t think anything of it.

More recently, however, I’d turned off voice in SL. Voice works fine for me so long as no one has the audacity to, I dunno, TALK on it; if they do, it’s lag-city. Besides that, the SLvoice.exe application, while not a system pig like SL is, needs RAM and all that like anything else and I didn’t feel like wasting resources on something I couldn’t really use. Disabled voice, didn’t think much of it. Then I was looking at the SLim window for my alt, looked at my own in-world buddy list on this av, and realized these two avs were no longer showing up for each other. This, naturally, irritated me; all I want SLim for anyway is text IMs, so voice/no voice doesn’t matter to me. Turned voice back on in SL, and sure enough, that fixed it, but it annoys me that I have to activate that both a) to see SLim users on my friend list in-world, and b) to see in-world avatars on my SLim friend list. LL needs to make it so that’s not the case. Do I think they will? Of course not; somewhere between me taking a major hiatus from SL in 2006 and most of 2007, (suffice to say you know I’m seriously psychologically-not-well depressed when I’m too depressed to even log my butt into SL,) LL stopped being useful or helpful for much else besides keeping the grid online (mostly; I actually don’t have any beefs with them on that, but crud happens like everywhere else in life.)

So that’s that rant. I’m also throwing out two other tidbits from my weekend: the lawnmower hates me as much as I hate it, and apparently the “new rule” of the house is that I have to now be suspicious when Mom’s nice to me. Like, “OK, what is she going to try and manipulate me into doing?” suspicious. My mother. Yeah.

Been kicking around DJing a bit in SL, but my major concerns are bandwidth and other system-resource concerns, and whether I have enough songs that everyone would like to “keep it up” for very long. Most of the music I have is at least by Christian artists, even if not every last song is, “Hallelujah, Jesus r0×0rz” kind of thing. Genre-wise I’m actually pretty open, since lyrics are the important bit for me. There’s also the same problem I had while recording MnK on Friday: as far as my family’s concerned, SL’s just a 3D chatroom. That I’d talk to anyone from it besides text is something that would horrify them if they knew. (So anyone who heard my guest-host on MnK (downloadable here,) that was a ramped-DOWN version of my personality. Normally I’m even louder and more obnoxious, but everything hinged on my family NOT having any reason to pop their head in and ask who I was talking to. =-S ) So I’d probably not be able to talk on mic at all, and, say I’m doing a 2-hour set, I’d have to set it up so that I can step AFK as if I wasn’t doing anything at all. Also, I don’t pirate music, so what’s on my hard drive is the entire music library, so the odds of someone requesting something I have is seriously slim-to-nil, so I can’t take requests, which I know is a bummer for some people.

Blah…SL’s empty and I’m still annoyed about the mess with Mom that I blogged about yesterday. (Sorry again to everyone who read that. =-\ ) Current mood = frustrated.

Moving on to RL, Theology on Tap started for the summer at my parish tonight, but I didn’t go; topic looked dumb, speaker looked generic, figured, “Screw it.” The “social-warm-fuzzy” kind of religion doesn’t do a dang thing for me anyway (and I seriously question its power to “save” anyone.) I’m the youngest person in the young adult group there by ~5 years; no one from the high school youth group even goes to church anymore, and if Facebook’s any indication, most are no longer even Catholic, which confuses Dad, even though I spotted that one coming from a mile away…blindfolded. (Oh, and for those who actually read the link, no ours doesn’t include alcohol; it takes place in the same building Catechism classes are done in. I hate alcohol anyway, so I’d be drinking Sprite either way. =-p ) Add to that my general lack of desire to be social period anymore…yeah. (Seriously, about the only times I’m ever “social” IRL it’s either church or something to do with job hunting, such as a career fair or whatever.)

Anyway…I think I’m out of things to say for now…unless something monumental goes down before I go to bed. =-p Laters!