Tiny beach shack! And non-tiny Garage! And stores!

So v talented friend Karima Hoisan saw the famous Beach Shack, and immediately said that there should be a tiny-sized version. After the customary long delay of being distracted by shiny things :) I scaled it down, and Karima very kindly is hosting the prototype version on her lovely LINC Island sim:

The copy pictured has some extra railings and underpilings because it is on the edge of a Huge Cliff, and also lots of pretty decorations an’ landscaping from the landlady :). The version that, um, I thought I had out for sale somewhere but apparently don’t yet (oops haha) is just the building itself, and is in fact just a smaller version of the usual Beach Shack.

One thing that I in fact have put up for sale is the White Wood Garage, which is a garage made of white wood, and which goes nicely with the other buildings which are also made of white wood, in a matching sort of way (see prior posting).

And while I am on the subject! I apparently have not one but two (2) tiny little stores in SL now where I sell a tiny handful of things, including some of these White Wood buildings. One is in Hughes Rise (in the bottom of one of the two-level White Wood Sheds; comfy residential quarters are above), and the other is in the little Surf Shack on the famous Rag Dollz Island (which is probably not the best venue for a little shop which mostly sells things that aren’t clothes, but I loved the location and the rental rate).

So thanks much to Ms. Hoisan for the idea of the tiny beach shack, and maybe I will remember to put it out for sale sometime! And maybe I will also remember to change the “50L weekend” thing in the Rag Dollz location, which has been the same thing for more than a couple of weekends now, also oops. :)

I sell houses!

Well, that is to say, I put the Beach shack, one of the houses I was talking about the other day, into my tiny and neglected Marketplace store.
 

 
Is that not exciting?

And I may box up the other three I’ve built lately (the Marketplace doesn’t actually require or even encourage boxing things anymore, but I’m used to it, and used to buying things that way, so I think I’ll keep doing that for now), and maybe even have a Combo Pack of all four at a discount, and even put a tiny vendor or store somewhere on my land, and take part in Hunts, and, and, and…

Or maybe I will just leave this on the Marketplace for a bit and see if anyone buys one. :)

Pricing is so odd in SL; some things of about this same quality are available as freebies, others would probably cost five times as much. I tried to price it so that I might consider buying it myself. Which means it’s at the cheaper end of the scale!

The secret is out! “Placemaker: Plazas” released to worldwide acclaim!

Well, I’m sure there will be worldwide acclaim soon, anyway. Probably!

There is the publicity shot for Placemaker: Plazas (Basic Edition), just released onto the SL Marketplace.

For a mere 400 Linden-dollars, you can own a device capable of producing literally a whole lot of different and sometimes even interesting (and in any case full-perm) plaza-like structures!

I have no doubt if that price-point makes any sense :) but I thought I’d give it a try.

So buy it if it sounds interesting! Let me know if it works for you, if the instructions were confusing, or anything else. If I continue to find the general idea interesting, maybe someday there will be a “Placemaker: Houses”. That was actually my original thought, but that turned out to be a little grandiose to code from scratch, so I started smaller…

Avination and the Freebie Issue

Another alternative grid that’s been getting some talk lately is Avination. It’s another OpenSim grid, technically pretty stable from my small amount of experience there, with a functioning currency system, and a couple of interesting potential differentiators (i.e. things that might make it different enough from Second Life and from all of the other OpenSim grids to be notable).

The first differentiator, which I won’t mention outside of this sentence, is gambling; they haz it.

The second one is their novel and as far as I know unique Freebie Policy. Or, as it might also be called, their anti-Freebie Policy.

The Freebie Issue is another one of those controversies that I’ve studiously avoided in weblogifying about virtual worlds. The issue has enough facets and subtle nuances that it would take a whole essay to treat well, and on the other hand lots of people seem to have strong one-sentence opinions on it; not a great combination.

Personally I like it when people share stuff, and I think it’s healthy for an economy in general when in order to make a buck you have to work harder and/or have better ideas than the people who are producing stuff just for fun. On the other hand I do understand the argument that store-provided freebies are a sort of Tragedy of the Commons thing: that sellers would do better if none of them gave out freebies, but if anyone does, then in order to stay competitive you have to also. I suspect that the argument is true in some sectors, false in others, and irrelevant in others; but it would take significant work to get any good data on which are which.

Anyway, Avination comes down on the negative side of the issue in various ways. When you land at an Avination starting point, there are no boxes of free AOs, no stores giving away free “better than newb anyway” clothing. The Freebie Policy says “No Freebies may be given out in stores at the welcome areas”. And since you start with zero money, that means the only way to even walk like a person is to invest in the world.

It’s an interesting thought; they are counting on there being enough people who already know that they want to be in the world, and will be willing to put down cash before they’ve really experienced it.

(Yeah, I’m assuming that no one would want to experience a world while waddling around like a duck; a pretty good assumption I think!)

Not only can there be no freebies in stores at the welcome areas, no store can have more freebies than it has non-freebies, you can only give away freebies that you made yourself, and no freebies can be copy-transfer.

This led me to wonder just what they mean by “freebie”. The Policy seems to define them as “promotional gifts”, but just what does that mean? Is something that costs $1 (in the local currency) not a freebie anymore? What if I make something and want to give it away full-perm just for fun, not “promoting” anything but maybe my reputation for generosity; is that still a freebie in the relevant sense?

I posted that basic question as a thread on the Avination forums (which has since moved): does the Freebie Policy forbid me, as an individual rather than a store, from giving anything away full-perm?

For about a week it got only some unofficial answers from unofficial people (some sensible, some appearing to directly contradict the stated policy), and then finally there was an apparently-official reply from “Randolf Baxton, Forum Support”, which suggested two things:

• Avination needs to do something about the attitude of their support people, and
• The Freebie Policy does in fact apply to individuals just like it does to stores.

Which is pretty radical, really, if true. It’s not necessarily bad, but it’s a large departure from Second Life (differentiator, see?), and suggests a really significant outlook on the world: that this isn’t a place where the vision includes people randomly making and sharing things, modifying and passing them on, etc; on the contrary it’s a place for buying and selling, where the amount (and perhaps indirectly the quality) of stuff is carefully reined in. The rules about what you may create and what you may do with your creations are founded on the needs of commerce, whether you yourself intend to be commercial or not.

Not my kind of place, described that way, but nothing requires it to be. I think it will be interesting to see if it is lots of other people’s kind of place.

There’s an episode of Gridwrap (one of those long video things I never have time to watch) in which one of the Avination folks talks about the whys an’ wherefores of the Freebie Policy. I found it interesting both for what she talked about and what she didn’t talk about. She talked alot about how many freebies are copybotted (i.e. produced by using rogue client programs to copy other people’s stuff in violation of copyright), and most of them are very low-quality, and how Certain Other Grids have lots of “sims full of poor-quality freebies that no one wants”. She doesn’t talk at all (at least not that I noticed; my attention did wander) about how freebies compete with for-sale things, and raise the bar on how interesting your stuff has to be before you can get money for it. (Which I gotta think is part of the reason for the policy.)

And I think that’s about all I’m going to say on the subject tonight. :) Personally I like the sharing culture, where people make stuff and pass it around full-perm, or at least copy-transfer, and it passes from hand to hand forever. I probably like lots of stuff that the Avination people would consider low-quality (and when they say “freebies that no one wants” I have to admit what I hear is “stuff that isn’t to my taste and therefore should not exist”). On the other hand I don’t like copybotting or copyright violation; and on the third hand I’m not sure that freebies or full-perm things have much if anything to do with that.

I’m tempted to post a bunch more questions to that forum thread; about whether dollarbies count as freebies, about what the minimum price you have to charge before something stops being a freebie is, about whether it’s allowed to sell things copy-transfer (hint: for big sectors of the economy, like poses and scripts and textures, it pretty much has to be), and so on.

But probably I should try not to badger them (even Randolf) too much, and just keep an interested eye on them and see how they do. Maybe even log in again once in awhile…

(At the moment I am a very butch short girl in Avination, wearing boy’s clothes and walking around with a macho boxer-strut, because of the two AOs that I bought I preferred it to the hooker-slink in the female one. And I just bought some elf-ears!)

Into the Hollow

I don’t usually plug mere stores, but I love this one. :) Into The Hollow has a small but marvelous collection of stuff. Sort of I don’t know Charles Adams meets Peter Pan or something.

Here is me, in Homemade Wings (including harness), and the Birdsong Ladies’ Underbust:

With odd and intriguing things for sale on the wall behind me.

This lovely Entomologist’s Collection here is only 10L!

(There’s a Haunted version for I think the same price.) Come and buy things before the owner realizes how much more she could get for them! :)

Here is more of the stuff; note the extremely educational Young Practitioner’s Series!

(I got to feel useful by helping out the proprietrix (the new and clearly talented an’ also nice Dame Hollow) , when I bought something that she’d accidentally set to For Sale Original, and I ended up owning it…)

I iz a merchant!

Brief self-plug (unlike all the other postings here hahahaha): having finally been sufficiently assured by various friends that the Thingmaker is a thing that could be sold, and that selling things on xlstreet slstreet xstreet SL is easy, and having in a burst of realization figured out how to set the perms so that the Thingmaker can be no-transfer but the Things that it Makes end up full-perm, I have put it up on there for the utterly random price of 175L.

And three people I don’t know have already bought it!

How cool is that?

Selling stuff is really easy (although I hear xslstreetlsx is soon going to be replaced by some entirely different thing, so who knows). What else should I sell?

I have some Amusing “Tee” shirts I made once…

:)