I'm About to try There

Check this out. Because I came into There last night and did some heavy duty socializing, they sent me an email which reads:


Wahoo! I'm a farkin' Neophyte Socializer! Hot digitty dayum!

So, the more people I steer away from There, the higher my There rank gets? Too funny. If they only knew.

-J

I got the same damn spam, lol. Maybe it's a new pair of eyebrows or another ugly t shirt. It looks like all you have to do is join chat groups for a certain length of time to win these valuable free prizes. I'll tell you one thing, though; next time I hear someone bitching about SL I will be sore pressed not to smack them...

Well, it's 9am and it's closed.

I'll try to be home for the 5:30pm invasion tonight.

-J

Darwin and I attempted to convert some people last night...didn't work too well. Maybe we will try again soon

As others have pointed out There is a glorified chat; the movements however are smooth and the hover thingies are very cool to play with. Just read the other comments for details.

SL is far superior, the people are much more interesting, you have much more control over your AV (hell, I tried to make my There AV look ugly and could not!), you can control your point of view much better, etc. etc.

I hope we can get some good vehicle, elevator, etc. functionality in SL soon. It gets in the way of the immersion experience.

BTW, here's a googled list of Kosher and non Kosher meats. Even though I am a Jew, I'm semi-vegetarian and non-kosher, so I can't attest to the authenticity of it, but it looks authentic. Sheep is ok. Enjoy.

(From http://www.geocities.com/apostolicpreacher24/dietary_laws.html)
Clean Animals
* Animals That Chew the Cud and Part the Hoof: Antelope Bison (buffalo) Caribou Cattle (beef, veal) Deer (venison) Elk Gazelle Giraffe Goat Hart Ibex Moose Ox Reindeer Sheep (lamb, mutton)
* Fish With Fins and Scales: Anchovy Barracuda Bass Black pomfret (or monchong) Bluefish Bluegill Carp Cod Crappie Drum Flounder Grouper Grunt Haddock Hake Halibut Hardhead Herring (or alewife) Kingfish Mackerel Mahimahi (or dorado, dolphinfish [not to be confused with the mammal dolphin]) Minnow Mullet Perch (or bream) Pike (or pickerel or jack) Pollack (or pollock or Boston bluefish) Rockfish Salmon Sardine (or pilchard) Shad Silver hake (or whiting) Smelt (or frost fish or ice fish) Snapper (or ebu, jobfish, lehi, onaga, opakapaka or uku) Sole Steelhead Sucker Sunfish Tarpon Trout (or weakfish) Tuna (or ahi, aku, albacore, bonito or tombo) Whitefish
* Birds With Clean Characteristics: Chicken Dove Duck Goose Grouse Guinea fowl Partridge Peafowl Pheasant Pigeon Prairie chicken Ptarmigan Quail Sagehen Sparrow (and other songbirds) Swan Teal Turkey
*Insects: Types of locusts that may include crickets and grasshoppers

Unclean Animals
*Animals With Unclean Characteristics: Swine Boar Peccary Pig (hog, bacon, ham, lard, pork, most sausage and pepperoni) Canines Coyote Dog Fox Hyena Jackal Wolf Felines Cat Cheetah Leopard Lion Panther Tiger Equines Ass Donkey Horse Mule Onager Zebra (quagga)
* Other: Armadillo Badger Bear Beaver Camel Elephant Gorilla Groundhog Hare Hippopotamus Kangaroo Llama (alpaca, vicuña) Mole Monkey Mouse Muskrat Opossum Porcupine Rabbit Raccoon Rat Rhinoceros Skunk Slug Snail (escargot) Squirrel Wallaby Weasel Wolverine Worm
*All insects: except some in the locust family
* Marine Animals Without Scales and Fins: Fish Bullhead Catfish Eel European Turbot Marlin Paddlefish Sculpin Shark Stickleback Squid Sturgeon (includes most caviar) Swordfish Shellfish Abalone Clam Crab Crayfish Lobster Mussel Prawn Oyster Scallop Shrimp Cuttlefish Jellyfish Limpet Octopus Squid (calamari) *Sea mammals: Dolphin Otter Porpoise Seal Walrus Whale Birds of Prey, Scavengers and Others
* Unclean flying creatures: Albatross Bat Bittern Buzzard Condor Coot Cormorant Crane Crow Cuckoo Eagle Flamingo Grebe Grosbeak Gull Hawk Heron Kite Lapwing Loon Magpie Osprey Ostrich Owl Parrot Pelican Penguin Plover Rail Raven Roadrunner Sandpiper Seagull Stork Swallow Swift Vulture Water hen Woodpecker
* Reptiles: Alligator Caiman Crocodile Lizard Snake Turtle Amphibians Blindworm Frog Newt Salamander Toad

If anyone is even remotely interesting in this sort of jewish stuff:
http://www.jewfaq.org/

This is a great site. I spent days reading everything there but it was like 4 years ago so it might have been changed and expanded substantively.

I would like to thank the There Beta team and the Second Lifers here. Thanks to There for making me wait for two months to try their beta, which was enough time for a friend to alert me to Second Life. And thanks to the Lifers whose reports have saved me the trouble of trying the There beta now that I've been granted the privilege.

I suppose the Lindens must enjoy threads like this

No, Cadroe, do check it out, if only to see what Linden Labs got right. I spent about 45 minutes in the spa the other day, playing with my avatar, trying to make it look a little less like a cartoon without much luck. I am SO glad that Polynesian architecture hasn't made many inroads in SL...

I actually would, David, except that I'm very conservative about what I put on my 3D machine. I try not to install things unless I have to - dull but stable.

Eggy, that is a great site. Thanks for posting. Even though I'm Jewish, its still quite interesting. I happen to be a conservidox, which is a mix of orthodox and conservative. However, I'm not kosher, I hardly ever go to the synagogue, etc. I'm a bad, bad Jew. *giggle*

ok guys, when is the next recruitment drive? Im in. Look for "Emjay".

I am getting There.
(will the puns ever end?)
It's horribly slow at the moment, only 20k/s, and it will take me nearly 2 hours to get the gigantic monster of a download that is There. 122 megs? Jesus. I cant remember the last time I downloaded something so big.
Anyone else think the whole website reeks of corporate dull and greyness?
Try getting the CEO of There to hang out and chat with you in the game... if he ever set foot in it.
It's all so "canned" and disneyesque.
Sheesh.

I'm up for another foray into that depressing Tiki Gulag, but I'm thinking that maybe we can do better next time. I have this wierd vision that we should be opening up an embassy or consulate there

I got my beta-acceptance note and download link for There yesterday.

A few short minutes later (gotta love cable modems ), I'm ready to, uh. go There...

The revolution has moved to another phase - ready to expand the SL culture borders into a new and different sim...

=SV

I noticed people advertising websites using scroll looking things on poles. We ought to figure out how to do that and leave them all over.

I went There today.
I looked around and it was all guys. Gah. I found a girl with a cool nickname, Arwen_2, she helped me out, we talked for a long time, she showed me around, very nice person.
The hoverboards are WAY COOL. The avs are hideously cartoony but the setting is beautiful. The draw distance is amazing and there's zero lag even when you are with 10 or more ppl. I would have to be sitting at a $5000 dollar computer, hooked up to the SL servers via gigabit ethernet to get the same kind of performance. Or something.
It is, like I said before, canned entertainment, preplanned and inflexible. It's perfect for joe luser to stand around and chat but if you're used to being able to change the world as you see fit, There is a bit castrating.
I am EggyLippman there. I added EmJay to my buddy list because it was the only one I could remember off the top of my head.
It has some way cool features. You can see where the Lindens got most of their ideas for the next couple of versions. Teleports are free-as-in-telehub (you can teleport to only a few specific points) and although you can go from an area to another on foot or by hoverboard you have to wait for it to load and as far as i could tell you cant see the border which is annoying if you werent planning on changing regions. Its not seamless like here but then again areas in There are gigantic.
Oh and btw... WE NEED A NEW GESTURE SYSTEM LIKE IN THERE.
Please, for the love of god, screw the stupid offline IM system, who cares about that, and no one asked for telehubs either so why bother with them, is it really that hard to fly around, or that expensive to teleport? I want to be able to kiss and hug and all the stuff that makes me a human being. There seems like the perfect place for young couples - a beautiful tropical paradise where you can actually kiss instead of typing.
Would it be that hard to allow us some control of our individual body parts' relative positions through scripting?
You can work on an animation editor for the clueless masses later...
Oh, and I would definitely want one of those retrieve commands... wherever you left your object, you can always get it back. Even if its currently being used by someone else. We should really implement the concept of lending.
If I give something to another person with the expectation they will help me out with it, they shouldnt be able to later run with it and use it for their own benefit instead. I should be able to get it back or at least have all their copies deleted from their inventory, land, whatever.

Thanks for registering at There!
Your There avatar name is: Sinclair <snip>
When you first visit There you will also be able to:
Play in the Hoverboard Park
Take an Island Tour
Hang out at Karuna Fashion Plaza
Join a conversation

...I'm just tickled beyond words to finally be able to do all these things I've been missing... will I still be able to play the piano, Doctor?

OK, that said... now for the neutral observer observations.

* Speed: Fast, fast, fast - maybe a bit too fast, I found things disappearing off my screen occasionally when I turned to look at them. But smooth, very sweet otherwise.

Interface: Nice design, a mix of buttons and menus. Don't try right-clicking anything thru force of habit, it don't help you here... Very clean. Some info not obvious to find. A few interesting data points not avail to SL folk, such as how many folks on your Buddy List, how many have "you" on their list, how many have you "ignored" (some of us need this more than others). Overview map did not work for me (was blank) - I think my Ad-blocking software might be responsible(!), so finding places to go was not too fun.

Travel: Walking, running, jumping all fairly intuitive. Riding the vehicles feels like one of the "killer apps" for them. Tried out the boards and buggies - the boards were indeed a rush for a few minutes, but the engine misses a few points for not accelerating down hills (!) and the jumps were just OK. Buggies were not pleasant travel, too bumpy and sputtery.

Activites: Uh, chatting with folks is nice. Riding around is OK, but not something I will do full-time. Just what is there to do in this place? I miss building already...

Shopping: Given an incomplete - not really enough money to try yet. I do want to try out the dogs, though...

Bottom Line, so far:
Try it for yourself and see. It's much more "pretty" and the interface is smoother - many aspects of the interface are much better than SL's. BUT: If you want to "do" anything creative, SL is still the place to be. I was feeling bored in There within the first hour or so - something which doesn't happen to me in SL.

=Sinclair

The dogs at there.com are excellent. I'm not at all sure we could get anything like it, but they are animated to look and act like real dogs - which this isn't a knock on any SL dogs, either - but the ability to run and the dogs are about the only things I really liked. Some other things, like the wierd fan or dressing screen thing that appears around people when they teleport in, the jerky movements, the annoying and hard to follow conversation bubbles - plus the just generally crappy support you get from there liasons - ensure that I would never even consider subscribing. I am interested, though, to see the new features they are introing on this Sunday.

Features that interested me were gestures. Like when you sit you slouch or sit back or lean on one elbow or two. I hope this all will come here when we can customize our own.

I also am now interested in seeing the dogs. I didnt get to that.

There are more negatives for me There than positives though. I dislike that men or women can only select clothing and accessories from their own gender categories. I dislike the lack of freedom of creativity and the overall atmosphere of a glorified chat room.

Speaking of chat, when I asked about chat history (can't look away with those annoying chat bubbles) I was told chat is stored in a folder on your computer and if you dug it up you could read history... HAHAHHA and while you do so you just keep missing more !!

I do think there are things there that are worth a second look but not enough to subscribe. I already tried and deleted it in January. I got on this time to get in on the fun of going There and recruiting.

There actually has a chat history, however, its hidden in one of the menus. Control + H won't get you anywhere.

Uh-oh (gets bucket of water, throws water at fellow posters).

Better? Two words...

$3000.00 haircut.

Back to Earth now? Good.

huh? Who said better?? We go there to recruit!!

I stand corrected. $3000.00 haircut is technically four words.

I just got "There" and the only enjoyable thing I can find to do is drive my buggy off of cliffs. While this CAN give you hours of enjoyment, it can only get you so far. (You can "temporarily" steal people's stuff though, which is cool.)

What really sucks (aside from the crappy money system) is that you are screwed, and can't join in certain activities, if you don't have the neccessary equipment.

AND MY AV IN THERE IS TOO FREAKIN' HAPPY!!!!!

I feel like I'm in a "Coming of age" movie...


Oh yeah, I'm Xeno_Mezphy (Dionysus_Starseeker didn't fit :^/ )