Inventory and seeking updates
We spent a good part of the morning in Alternate Metaverse working on our inventories. Lots of items in Opensim are free for the copying or freebies, in the places where land is cheap and occasionally free. So we shop quite a bit.
As a result, both of our inventories are packed in the first place. On top of that, creating and re-creating means a lot of stuff comes apart into bits and pieces and most are labeled “object” or “primo-mesh”. Because of this, there are lots of unlabeled things in inventory, making it hard to find what we are looking for. So… every so often we have to go through and find all the bits we want to delete and or put in an appropriate place in Inventory.
An important difference between Opensim and Second Life is that in Opensim, if you go outside your “resident” grid (Alternate Metaverse in our case), everything you pick up or take a copy of goes in your “suitcase”, instead of directly to inventory. Thus, a busy shopping trip can have hundreds of objects inside your suitcase objects directory. You have to move these into your normal inventory in order to use them.
The best and safest way I have found to do this (the reason for this I will explain shortly) is to make a platform out over water and bring things out of inventory. If I decide to delete an item, I will name it “Delete me”. Every so often I will delete and “purge” those items. What makes this “safe” is that I am out away from any other homes or built areas and I won’t accidentally “grab” some item that I wanted to stay put and delete it. That has happened far too often in the past and I’ve ended up having to rebuild or “re-rez” several homes because of the dangers.
I have more experience inworld than W, but he is picking up tips pretty darn fast. So today we made a fairly thorough examination of inventories. Yesterday we did a lot of shopping in one place and plan to go back again soon as we got tuckered out there.
In working on the new 5×5, I pulled out a dance “Hud” (explained yesterday) and found it had some major flaws. It has the ability to bring out a non-player character to dance with. But there are several dances where the NPC doesn’t dance and several where the avatar person doesn’t dance. This was a flaw…
We know things are always being upgraded here in the Virtual World, so we went out to Alternate Metaverse welcome area to see if a new dance ball had been made. Looks like there is, so we picked one up and will try it out at “home” later. I have some dance spots in a couple of our regions and will add the new dance ball there. So we are spending time dancing in Alternate Metaverse.
While on the subject of music… I find it rather wonderful that here in Opengrid worlds, I can listen to Muddy’s Music Radio which is a club from Second Life. I rather wish more of the clubs in SL had reachable radio stations, but I will take what I can get. Sometimes I listen to AMV radio as well, and sometimes I like the Cinemix Stations, which play epic movie music. Just depends on the mood. There’s a whole list of radio stations you can play in your region, and everyone likes different things. I remember when I spent a lot of time at Fairy Crossing in Second Life, Irish Pub Radio was a favorite. I should look them up again soon, and maybe bring them in if I can find them.
We have not been participating a whole lot in Alternate Metaverse as of this year, since we married there. Partly it has just been too busy while working on our places when in world. The other thing is navigating the ins and outs of keeping in touch online 24/7. We both had to buy additional webcams for when we get knocked off Discord – “Clyde” is a stickler for making sure all participants are actually conversing or in contact online. Thus, we have been unceremoniously disconnected in the middle of the night. Figuring all this out for real life means less time inworld at times. (“Inworld” is our term for Virtual existence.)
But things are working out better these days, which means we can hob-nob with people more here in the Metaverse and other places. We have several nice homes set up, the farm on a regular schedule, and the new 5×5 doesn’t need much added. So it’s time to involve ourselves a bit more.
As well, we love these worlds so much that we want to help them succeed. They are the reason and the method by which we met after all. That’s part of the reason for this blog as well, to acquaint people with the fun you can have in the Virtual. I should mention I also have an Oculus Quest 3 and after a hiatus, I am getting involved with that again as well, mainly for exercise. Virtual dancing is fun, but doesn’t help real bodies much. So Synthriders on MetaQuest is my preferred method of exercise.
At this moment, I am parsing this out while W and I are dancing at AMV. He is reading some news to me at the same time, and there are two other people here. I tend to be rather reserved so after exchanging hellos, there is not much talk. They appear to be as involved with each other as we are. It does sometimes happen that you find a true partner online. We married here in AMV Jan 2025 and partnered in Second Life a bit before that. We haven’t had a Second Life marriage ceremony yet as finding the right time proves more difficult since we don’t spend quite as much time there at present.
We have a nice quarter region we rent in SL and a lovely home which houses us and all the alts I used to use when I was alone. I feel responsible for them somehow and W doesn’t seem to mind the extra avatars. I will sometimes let one go shopping while we are alone at home. It’s like having pets, I suppose – though they are all me. Our other residence in SL is a set of apartments and they can be there as well – though I have not set that up yet.
Quite a few people in Second Life have alternate avatars or “alts” as they are called. I don’t think it is as widespread here in the Opengrid – it’s discouraged here in Alternate Metaverse. Although at one time (not anymore) we each had another in another place in Opengrid and allowed permissions with in a group on our properties. That was rather fun and I have one photo of the four of us. But we cancelled those accounts later.
We’ll be leaving the dance soon. Time for a late-night chat with W before sleep.
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