Dear Lauren Neutron… Week 2

Hi kids! Get syph! Only joking…

Thanks for the great response to last week’s column, and we’ve got some good questions this week too. I knew it wouldn’t take long before the “Hey, whose alt are you?” questions started… To clarify, I am not Tenshi, or any current or past SCD bloggers. I’m new! Don’t forget, anything that you want to ask can be notecarded to Lauren Neutron directly, or emailed to dear.lauren.neutron@googlemail.com – I promise to answer anything and everything. Except “Hey, whose alt are you?”.

New this week, you can friend me on Plurk – http://www.plurk.com/laurenneutron – and send me a private plurk with your questions. I promise, as always, to keep you anonymous – if I reveal your identity, I’ll reveal mine too. Five or six people might even care!

Four letters this week. Go grab a coffee, this is a long one! First up…

Dear Lauren,

How many people in SL now have lost their husband/wives/partners due to online infidelity?

Curious

A lot. I can think of one particularly good example of a high profile couple whose real life marriage ended recently because both of them were pixelfucking anything that walked past. Their list of crotch victims is as long as a ban list. Why did they do it, when they spent so much time and money getting “known” as a power couple? Who knows. It’s not my place to judge… which doesn’t stop me judging. Don’t get me started on SL couples and the juice involved – I’d be here all day.

Dear Lauren,

I have been just ‘hanging out’ (read “shopping!!!”) on SL for over a year now, and want to contribute something to the community instead of just existing. Do you have any suggestions about how to begin to be a content-creator? I like to do animations and poses, but wouldn’t mind learning about making clothing or hair or pre-fab houses. Furniture-building seems fun too. What are the best resources for getting started? And what about marketing, finding a place for a store, getting traffic, etc?

Thanks so much!

Love,

Done-Hanging-Out

Hi Done-Hanging-Out!

Owning a business in SL is more stress than its worth if you just want to contribute to the community. It’s not just the product that you need to manufacture to excellent spec, you need to keep on top of satellite locations, hunt invites (six a day, not joking), transaction failures, customer service queries, SLX listing, promotion, marketing, advertising… add that to your real life job and commitments, and your enjoyment levels of SL will plummet. Time to hang out and shop? Vastly diminished.

People who own stores and keep up with them generally do so because of a huge interest in what they’re doing – ask them and they’ll tell you they’d do it even if they weren’t selling their product for money. (Well, the ones that aren’t jackasses will).

With that being said, if you do still decide you want to make something in SL, let’s go through them one by one.

Animations/poses – you’ll need  a programme like Poser, Blender or Qavimator, and the av mesh, and the time to practice. The pose market is saturated at the moment, people don’t buy them often and when they do, they have an awful lot of choice. If you’re good you’ll do fine, but this is true of everything.

Making clothing – You can download the basic avatar mesh (this is a great site) that you can paint over directly from the SL wiki, and use a viewer like Emerald that will allow you to upload textures as a test image to minimise your practice costs. A great understanding of photoshop or similar editing software is a must. Make friends with bloggers you like and admire, because blogging DOES help. Do your research into styles and don’t be afraid to experiment.

Prefabs and furniture building is, again, one of those things you can practice until you’re great at it. Invest in some textures from SLX – a good set of woods, wallpapers, etc – and some sculpt packs as well if you can’t sculpt yourself. If you don’t have a basic understanding of different styles of furniture or buildings, google til you find one you like. Bounce around some existing furniture stores you admire and see how they do it.

Whatever you do, please remember that your product will not make you successful. A good understanding of the market, advertising properly, marketing and product placement is vital.

Whatever you do, good luck, but if you want to help the community, there’s plenty of things you can do that are much lower stress. Blogging would suit a shopaholic perfectly and there’s no customers for you to please!

Dear Lauren,

Have you ever seen anyone in SL claim they suddenly can’t afford tobuy their kids food IRL but are totally cool with paying their tier?

This puts a particular thorn in my side. Let me give you a few common sentences that people use, when they really mean “OH MY GOD, MAITREYA MIGHT RELEASE SOME SHOES AND I JUST BOUGHT TIER, FUCK”.

I’m not saying all of these things are bullshit… but most of the instances you see them, they’ll be bullshit.

1.       GUUUUUYS, I HAVE CANCER

2.       Hi, I’m ****’s sister, for some reason I have her password. I’m just letting you know that she has cancer. Here’s her email address for paypal, she spends all her money sending food to orphans in Cambodia

3.       Hi everyone, my landlord just came over and said I need to pay double rent this month, I also have cancer

4.       So, like, my mom has cancer, and I have to pay her medical bills

5.       My puppy has cancer, here’s some cute pictures I took from google images, I know I never mentioned having a puppy but anyway here’s my paypal!

Some of these will be legit, and my heart bleeds for the ones that are, but if you smell bullshit, that’s because it’s bullshit. Just remember, if they say “I hate to ask but… here’s my paypal”, no you didn’t just fart, it’s definitely bullshit.

Dear Lauren,

I was dating a man who was an alt because of too much craziness on his first account. He told me that he just wanted to start over and I believed him because we had such a good time together. Now I’ve discovered that he had other accounts while we were together in an attempt to find out what people were saying about him. We’re not dating anymore, so should I bring it up that I know or just forget about it?

Love,

Unsure

He was fucking other people. Here’s some condensed further advice, but you don’t need to read it because I’ve already said the important bit. Here we go… If he was running away, it’s because he got caught doing this elsewhere. You did not know about all of his alts. He had other accounts because he was fucking other people, or at least trying to, which is just as bad. If he snapped his fingers you would go back to him, so cut his card while you still have some self respect, you deserve better than this idiot in the long run but not while you’re being such a gullible schmuck. Sorry. Sorry because I was harsh, but also sorry because I’m right.

Until next week,

Lauren xo