What's The Most Useless Piece Of Advice You've Been Given In SL ?

When I first started playing with building and textures someone told me that saving my textures at 1024x1024 would make them clearer, so everything I made, even small 1x1 prim boxes had 1024x1024 textures on them. Thanks to the forums and my "Why does it take my house forever to rez" question I got corrected on it fairly quickly.

I gave someone some pretty bad advice when I was new. I had made a newbie friend on orientation island on our first day. When exploring the mainland I had pulled a box out on someones property and a few minutes later it was auto returned so I quickly informed my friend that he never had to pick up his stuff from inventory, it all came back. We were a couple of litter bugs for awhile till someone IMed me about my gazillion spheres I left on her land.

So true

Heard dat. Also heard "kid avvies are not allowed in SL," an the ol' chestnut, "child avvies are all pedos."

Worst advice, though? "use big textures"

Her: Stop goofing off - if you can't give serious answers then you aren't welcome here.
Me: But I give all sorts of serious answers when I have them.
Her: All I see is you making jokes that aren't even funny and scaring people away from asking questions.
Me: Who did I scare? I'd like to apologize to them.
Her: It doesn't matter - noobs like you don't know enough to give good answers anyway. If you want to play, go find some other forum.


Worst advice ever. I almost believed her.

LOL! Weren't you around for the whole discussion about not pestering women while they are shopping?????

And...you were probably telling her to go barefoot.

Ooohhh..yeah, gotcha now XD

or not unfortunate enough?

Most useless: When the person giving you Computer and/or Network advice doesnt know anything about it. Just what they've "heard".

2nd: When someone says "You MUST use *insert software/hardware name* to work in SL".

Good one! It's also one of my pet peeves.

Me too! I'm a fair brunette in RL and looked long and hard for a skin I liked..

The part of these comments that I can't understand is - who the hell goes around telling people that they are ugly and should change their appearance anyhow? I wouldn't do this in RL and I wouldn't do it in SL either.

I compliment people's appearance when I am moved to but I never, never criticize someone's appearance unless I have been specifically asked to.

So I am not so much shocked that there are people who find others too pale, too skinny, too short, or too blue, as I am that these people will actually open their mouths, unsolicited, and say so.

Anytime someone says I'm too pale I tell them it was the darkest skin where I got it ^_^

It was, and it's exactly the shade I wanna be!

(Gothica. Anything less tan there than mine looks really really really white during the day)

Time and again I'll see SL parents, within a day of adopting their new kid, take them out for new skin, a new shape, and new hair. It always makes me wonder what attracted them to this kid in the first place.

A few of mine:

1: "Go to the Ivory Tower of Primitives."
The Ivory Tower is great, really! BUT it's not a universal 100% panacea for learning to build. Certainly spending someone with an general interest there is a good idea, but I've seen people sending _back_ newbies who'd _already been there_. I've also seen it admitted on this forum that some builders use the Ivory Tower as a blocker because they see any knowledge of building beyond what it teaches as a "trade secret".

2: "Creativity can't be taught or learned."
Might possibly be true. But what you usually mean is that _you_ can't teach it, and that's usually because you haven't actually put any effort into learning how. That's fine, you don't have to if you don't want to, but don't avoid accepting that by telling other people that they'll never be able to learn it when that isn't true. Many experienced teachers agree that creativity can be both taught and learned, and although it can't be taught by standing in front of a blackboard and talking to the class, nobody said that was the only way of teaching! For some great examples, see the books "Drawing on the right side of the brain", and "Tools for dreamers: Strategies for creativity and the structure of innovation."

3: "SL is what you make it."
This is actually true, but giving it as advice in this way is a bad idea because it sounds too similar to things like "Life is what you make it" which imply that a person is inferior or lazy if life isn't how they want it to be. What each person "makes" of SL will indeed differ but the people who "make" less of it are not necessarily any worse, they just have a different view on reality and roles. I've thought of some examples of this but they're a bit too long to post out of context I think.

Lets see.....

You will have to make your hands bigger for the rings to fit because we dont make them for short people. You know I almost resized my hands and then I found a different jewelry store hehehe.

"You're too tall."

My neck hurts! (>_<

This is an extraordinarily deep question in the psychology of individual differences and in psychometrics. For some operational definitions of "Creativity", the construct is almost perfectly correlated with Intelligence, up to an IQ of 140 or so.

These findings, however, do not make a good base for popular books.

I've been told that I'm creative and yet I'm quite sure that I would score quite low on a IQ test. That's not to say that I'm stupid, but just that I'm not very good at IQ tests.

I've learned that creativity is a desire and nothing more. I've seen somebody become extremely creative and then suddenly grind to an halt for reasons I wont go into. and the person wasn't creative at all in their past.

It's not talent or magic. It's just desire. If you have the desire then you'll learn. Although some people don't have the desire because they don't believe they can learn. Then there's the fact that the creative process can be really hard work. So some people just can't be bothered.

Intelligence very rarely comes into it. In some ways, intelligence can hinder creativity. It can cause you to question what you're doing and why. This often leads to what's known as writer's block and lots of drinking. After the brain is sufficiently damaged from all the booze, then creativity may return.

The desire is key.

Having said all that, I don't know of any chimpazees that can paint the Mona Lisa. So yeah, I'm sure some intelligence is needed.

Then again, Picasso painted like a monkey:

Come and meet so and so. You will really get along with him/her.

Kelli, you would be hot if you were taller. You would be hot if you were shorter. You would be hot if you were square. Let's face it, no matter what you do ... you are HOT!


It must be your attitude, wit and charisma.

"Go into Edit Appearance and make yourself taller"
"You need hair" "Ok now lets get you some skin"
"You should give me 10L so I can take a pic of us together"
"You shouldn't open an art gallery, you should build a mall"
"Buy this estate land off me for L$35k"

best one yet?
"Take the Blue Pill"

Funny... I get that more in my tall avatar than my main kid size. Maybe there is this window of height that some people just don't like. Oh well... I'm most happy being totally on the short anywayz! (^_^)y

Dont feed the trolls.


Sometimes it is too damn fun.

Nobody's ever really criticized my being a kid av - although one person did come up to me and say, "your too skinny. you need to eat some more peas". To this day, I can't help but wonder if that was some secret code I'm supposed to decipher.