Twitterfox

I just learned about Twitterfox today. Twitterfox is a Firefox browser plug-in that allows you to make and send Twitter tweets right from the bottom of your browser instead of going to the Twitter site. When you receive them, you're notified via pop-up immediately. Because it's separate from Twitter, you don't have to choose it on Twitter as the method you want to get tweets, but the plug-in will go check your Twitter account on your behalf.

Of course, Twitter is designed to be easy to update via IM, website or cell phone, but Twitterfox is the easiest of all. Also, the person who created Twitterfox also created TwitterFon for the iPhone...got to give that a try although my iPhone has never properly recovered from the grapefruit juice I spilled on it a few months ago.

I use Twitter to update people when I have Therebucks in stock to sell, and any little thing that can make that process easier and faster is A+ in my book. Those people looking to see if I have ThereBucks in stock should definitely give it a try if they use Firefox.

Tweet, tweet, tweet!

vMTV and IMVU majorly sucking

vMTV and IMVU are both causing me problems right now. Yesterday I spent hours relisting my vMTV auctions...since there is no listing tool, and no way to really know if your auctions are expired, the experience is a rather traumatic one. If you go to the Galleria (ooh la la) there is a link you can click to see all (but not really all once a certain amount of time has passed and you have a certain number of them) your past and present auctions. In one big long list. One. Big. Long. List. Current and expired auctions all jumbled together. Let's say I have a pair of black hightop tennis shoes...it will show all the times I have listed them in auctions (without actually showing me any more specifics, like was that the men's or the women's black hightops?) jumbled in with EVERYTHING ELSE.

Fortunately for me, almost all of my auctions were expired, so I could go through and relist pretty much everything. NOW, though, the old expired auctions and the current auctions are all jumbled together, and the 20 items still to expire in the next week...not only will I not be notified when they expire (that would be really nice, an email to let you know your auction expired) but I won't know WHAT ended. The thing to do is to cancel all your auctions at once (using Clobber Auctions) so you can just spend 8 hours or so relisting them all at the same time, but I didn't do that (curses!) It's sooooo frustrating and so totally not what I wanted to be doing with my time. It's insane that There and vMTV have never fixed their lousy systems. With There at least you have a third party listing tool (jinXplorer), but with vMTV there is NOTHING. It majorly sucketh.

If there were a small silver lining, I guess it would be that this forced me to spend a lot of time looking at each individual listing (which at the same time is the worst part about it) and do some price adjusting. Of course, a good listing tool should allow me to do this as well, but more easily.

It's sad, you know halloween is about three weeks away and there are only 8 pages of featured auctions on vMTV. I think that number would be MUCH higher if people (developers) could actually take vMTV seriously. Like, there is actually a humane way to relist your auctions, and of course vMTV would let people advertise their vMTV$ sales (and actually allow them to sell vMTV). Because, seriously, why would any devs want to submit stuff to vMTV if they can't make any money doing it? (And if they have to spend a whole day trying to relist?) People do sell vMTV$, even though it is against TOS, and that is the only reason most if not all of the experienced developers keep developing and relisting...so they can sell vMTV$ on what I suppose you could call "the black market".

It took me until 2am last night to finish listing my auctions...I still did yoga after that, though. Geez, I had to because I felt so kinked up from hunching over my desk for a zillion hours and not getting any exercise. If I had to do my There auctions manually like that, I'd cry.

***********************
So let's talk about how IMVU majorly sucketh...

IMVU recently made a new rule whereby credit resellers can't advertise off-site credit sales in their shoutouts. At least um...I don't think they can. They seem to be tweaking the rules on the fly, which is horrible for resellers since nobody knows what they can and can't say in a shoutout. First they say you have to be creative about what you can say...you can't say "cheaper" or "discounted" or even say that you sell credits. You can only say you have INFORMATION about credits, and you can then link people to a page on the IMVU site, like your homepage or a catalog page. But the rules seems to be changing, daily if not hourly. And you look at the shoutouts that are running and you say "heybutwaitaminute..." as you see another reseller with something in their shoutout that you thought wasn't allowed..and you don't know if they just got through with something they are going to be chastised for later, or if there is a new policy and now they simply have a better shoutout than you.

The effect in general, though, of not being able to link offsite, is devastating. It seems like the rules have settled down to be "you can post most of the stuff you were posting before, but you still can't link offsite." But, to get people to click one time and then buy credits is one thing...to get them to click twice to get to the ordering is harder. Like, multitudes of harder. Personally, my sales have dropped like a stone. Of course, this is the slowest time of week generally, but really...sales are really, really bad. It doesn't exactly help that IMVU is running a special where you get your avatar name and 15,000 credits for $9.95. That's just cruel. Why not offer your avatar name plus 10,000 credits for $9.95? Still a great deal, but doesn't damage resellers so much.

Argh.

People who steal money in There.com

Y'know, I like a lot of things about IMVU. One of those things is the fact that they work WITH trusted IMVU credits resellers to catch scammers, which makes sense because if they steal from IMVU, they are likely to turn around and steal from members reselling their currency, and if they steal from members, they are likely to use their same credit cards/mommy's credit cards, ex-spouse's credit card or whatever on IMVU directly as well. So everyone works together to prevent fraud, and it usually works pretty well, although there are certainly some people in IMVU trying hard to create that fraud in the first place. I recover probably 70% of all scammed credits.

There.com is better in some ways because it's more of a sense of a close knit community, and scammers are somewhat more rare. I have had a number of occasions where I have had PayPal chargebacks and people have jumped through crazy hoops to fix the credit card problem or whatever it was to make sure everything was alright. One unfortunate young woman found herself in the situation of owing me 2 million ThereBucks and actually spent about two months paying me painstakingly raising the funds and paying me back ThereBuck by ThereBuck. You see someone who belongs to a bunch of clubs, owns a neighborhood, has a bunch of buddies and you think "this person must be alright!" and usually, they are.

This is fortunate because There has a total hands-off policy toward theft. You steal from me, you make a chargeback against me, and There could really give a rat's ass. Oh, they're happy if I want to let them know about someone that I think is trying to sell ME stolen Therebucks...they're happy to come in, take the stolen Therebucks out of my account and say "thanks so much!" But when the table is turned they're like "sorry, it's our policy to sit here with our thumbs up our asses." A policy which seems strange to me simply because it is sooooo different from IMVU's policy, and yet both places have the same roots. How did they turn out so differently?

So, it's usually not much of a problem at There, but lately I've seen a disturbing trend of chargebacks. Like in July, there were $140 worth of chargebacks from Matt_Tobin and Sarah_G. As far as I can tell, Sarah_G isn't even a real person, just an alt avie for Matt_Tobin, and Matt_Tobin doesn't receive WhereMail and uses a dummy address. So who IS this guy who stole $140 from me? Hasn't he been around since 2004? Doesn't he own a neighborhood? Doesn't he have a bunch of buddies and is an active, "respectable" member of the There community? And yet this person joined my club, Jinx_tv_tbux, and then made a series of purchases from me on July 8th at http://jinx.tv and then reversed the transactions only one day later, and EVERY attempt I have made at contact has failed.

Is this what our There community has come to? We can no longer trust even the most involved seeming members?

And...does anyone know how to reach this Matt_Tobin person and why they would do such a thing? (I even heard he did the same thing to tbux.com.)

11 things I hate about vmtv

I've been submitting items to vMTV lately, and I realize that my POV is of someone who has used There and IMVU for a long time and we tend to like what we're used to, but I think even so, other than number 5 maybe, that my hate list is pretty fair. I was going to put these in some kind of order, but I really can't decide what bugs me more, so it's totally random...

11 things I hate about MTV's Virtual World

1. Skin Tones and Spas
I signed up for the vMTV beta in 2006 I guess, and that was a while back now, but I'm pretty sure I picked a milk skintone at the time. It's what I've always used in There and it's closest to my skintone in real life. Well, when vMTV came out of beta, they ended up with something like maybe four skintones. JUST FOUR! MTV is a bit lacking in ways to really customize your look anyway, and now we're limited even more by our skintone choices. Ack! So, ever since they came out of beta, my avatar has had a milk body and an ugly yellow face. I finally went to the spa and changed my skintone to vanilla so that my body AND my face are vanilla, but I HATE HATE HATE vanilla, I always have. I mean, don't get me wrong, vanilla chicks and dudes, maybe you love vanilla it's fine on other people, but on MY avatar it just looks SOOOOO wrong. It's YELLOW. I am not YELLOW. If you're going to make that the lightest shade available, MTV, at least make it a neutral tone. Maybe they got confused because I don't know about all the spas, but the one I visited was bathed in a green glow...HOW are you supposed to choose a new lookset in a place that makes you look like an alien? Heck, I wish I really were picking a green skintone...it would be better than being vanilla yellow.

2. I don't know how many vMTV$ I have!
Seriously, I was submitting a bunch of stuff (about 200 items) and I didn't know if I needed more vMTV$ until I tried to submit something and was told I didn't have enough moolah to submit. I looked ALL OVER the site, in the galleria, in the other store areas, in my profile, in the developer area...nowhere could I find my account balance other than logging into the actual vMTV client, which is not always that convenient when you have about five applications open on your computer! Well, the one other place I did find it was when you list an auction...it will tell you your balance after you've submitted your listing.

3. No Auction relisting tool
Speaking of listing your items in auctions (oh sorry...the Galleria...ooh, la la! Who ever heard of a "Galleria" working like an auction?) I know by September, when my two month auctions all start expiring, I am going to be TOTALLY hating the whole auction system. I have always felt that, while There.com community (and staff) members like KittenKat and Sonblock were total lifesavers in the short term for developers, especially those like myself with hundreds if not thousands of submissions, that in the LONG term they did There and member developers a bit of a disservice. It's very easy for There to keep pushing "build a better auction tool" further down their todo list year after year when members don't complain too much because of these work-around tools that have been developed. Really though, the auction listing page for BOTH There and MTV is a joke! It is more like a demo page someone made when they weren't sure how auctions were going to work and if they'd be popular. They might work okay if you have a half dozen items, but more than that and you'll soon be crying in your coffee as you try to work out what you've listed and what you haven't. Even if vMTV would do such a simple thing as send you an email to say "Hi, we wanted to let you know that your item 'Jinx's Red Kissing Heart' had ended. You sold 12 copies." Or even leave out the how many copies you sold, but even just letting you know your auction ended...and not just by the auction number, but by the item name. Another small change that would help would be, on the buy/list items page, group items by category and include a preview pic as well as the text you included in your last listing of the auction and/or the price you last listed the item at, or a link to the last known listing of that auction. Heck, or allow sorting by just items that are not currently listed! There are soooo many simple changes they COULD make, and although I would have given up long ago without the auction listing tools members created, they've allowed There and now vMTV to be lazy about it for too long. Wake up and prioritize that page!

4. Submission fees not well thought out
Okay, this makes me soooooo mad...I submit a (builder) lamp to vMTV and I pay the equivalent of nearly $5 to submit it. I can also submit a very complicated five person seating group and I will pay the SAME PRICE to submit that. Now wait a minute...a lamp is a very simple little item with no seating nodes or much of anything to look at...who the heck decided that things like lamps should cost $5 to submit? With a seating group, you have to check a lot more stuff on it and last I knew it took an approver more time to approve than a lamp. This has always bugged me in There...it leads to not enough simple decorating items like lamps in the catalog and a surplus of "big fancy complicated" stuff. And it's just not logical. A knickknack is about $2.50 to submit and is usually more complicated to approve. I could probably submit a lamp in the knickknack category and get it approved, but I want shoppers to be able to go to the LAMP section of the Galleria (ooh la la) to find my lamps! Is that so wrong? Couldn't somebody just maybe um...ASK AN APPROVER OR TWO how long it takes them to approve different items on average? I think THAT should dictate the submission price!

5. No bunny slippers, hoverpacks or hoverboats
What? No bunny slippers? I love my bunny slippers! Actually, my favorite pair is painted to look like frogs...I forget who made them but they are so cute with this green bathrobe I like to wear around There. How can vMTV not have these? I really would like to know...are they just trying to differentiate themselves from there.com or do they have something against bunny slippers? Meanies! And why no hoverpacks or hoverboats? It's like they don't want us to fly! Who ever heard of a virtual world where you aren't permitted to fly? Hey, I've got a great new advertising slogan for them! "vMTV: the virtual world where we don't let you fly around even though we could."

6. The site is totally whacked out
No seriously...it's really hard to find anything. I'm surprised that anyone can find the Galleria at all, and there are all these little stores for different advertisers or reality shows or whatever that may only have five items or may be in some really random place. It's obvious that they just tried to slap vMTV on top of a copy of the There.com site and then stick a bunch of extra stuff in it, and I guess sometimes it works, but there are plenty of places where the title bar says "welcome to There" or there is a category of items that don't actually exist in vMTV. It's also very hard to find the developer section of the site and to figure out where you list your auctions and where to go to see how many you've sold.

7. Stop the music, I want to get off
I was downloading and installing the latest version of vMTV, and I wanted to watch/listen to something on YouTube while doing so, but this proved impossible because while the program was installing, MUSIC was playing...with no way to turn it off! It was the most invasive install experience I've ever had. I had to take off my headset and go use a different computer until vMTV was done installing. And then in-world they always want to play me music, too. I turned that "feature" off, but still, it's there on my screen every time I log in or teleport until I'm done loading in and the system figures out that I've got that set to "off". Would it really be so terrible to make it "off" by default? Or keep it, whatever...it's the install music that really makes my blood pressure rise...just get rid of that invasive b.s. and I'll stop hating on you.

8. Developer approvals submission communication
Okay, I think people that approve stuff for MTV or for There are nice, I really do. The communication with developers needs a bit of work, though. I don't think it's the people, I think it's the system. Let's say you're getting a rejection. You'll get an email that says something like...

We regret to inform you that the following submission was not approved:

91612136
Here are the details

Reason: Copyright Violations

Details: This design incorporates copyrighted materials.

You will have been automatically refunded a percentage of your
submission fee for the above item. We encourage you to review our Submission
Guidelines, rework your design and resubmit.

Thanks for participating in the Developer Program. We look forward to seeing
your work!

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact us at
productsubmissions@vlb.there.com.
See you in There!

There Product Submissions

Let's see...what's wrong with this email? Well first, it says that submission "91612136" was rejected but I have NO idea which submission that is because when you go to your "my submissions" page, it only shows them by name, and when you receive an email saying your submission was uploaded successfully, it only shows them by number. Never do they actually tell you the number AND the name at the same time. You have to go into your list of submitted items and kind of guess based on what you can see has been rejected. Second, it says "this design incorporates copyrighted materials". Well, this is a real submission I'm showing you, and I managed to figure out they were rejecting a pair of hightop tennis shoes...a pair that has been approved and listed in auctions in There for four years. Since they don't say what the copyright infringement is, and as far as I knew I hadn't infringed, I was stumped. I had to email them to ask them and then it turns out...they rejected it by mistake or because they were confused or something! (I seem to have that power of confusion over people...especially approvers.) Okay then finally, they sign it "contact us at productsubmissions@vlb.there.com" but if you email them there they tell you to use Fuze instead (I hate, hate, hate the fuze system, I probably should have made it number 12 in 11 things I hate, but it's hard to find, totally inefficient and like talking to a robot instead of a person). They also say, although this is vMTV product submissions, "See you in There!" and sign it "There Product Submissions". I have to think it has said that same thing for what...two years now? Is it REALLY so hard to make a few changes in the email template? Argh!

Oh yeah, and it says "we have refunded you a percentage of your submission fee." WTH? 1%? 50%? 99%? Would it really be so hard to say "we have refunded you 50% of your submission fee" or "we have refunded you 400 vMTV$ of your submission fee"? Why so mysterious? I actually have NO idea if I REALLY get ANY refund at all! If there's a transaction history on the site, I've never found it.

9. Hey, that's MY pool!
I rented a beautiful house in vMTV. Okay, I should say the house was a bit drab and ugly, but I thought it was still worth it because it came with a big beautiful back yard with jacuzzi and pool! Then, after renting it, I felt soooooo ripped off. Not only does the house have no decorating nodes, so I can't change the wallpaper, floors, ceiling or hang any pictures, but the pool, jacuzzi and yard aren't REALLY mine. I can sit in/on them but so can anyone else AND I can't decorate them. Seriously, a total rip-off. False advertising!!!! I honestly think I should get my money back.

10. Garnier Fructis Hair
Okay, there don't seem to be that many hairstyles in vMTV and some of them are rather ugly. I think part of the problem is that the mapping on them is a bit weird but they want to make the hair "textured", but whatever the reason for the original vMTV hairstyles being weird, there is some hope, because Garnier Fructis has some special promotional hairstyles that don't suck. The thing is though, it's limited edition hair (I guess, although who knows how seriously they take that) and they release it like, one hairstyle for men and one for women each week. Well, they SAY one hairstyle but it's really one COLOR of one hairstyle each week. And there are only four different colors...so if you want to be blonde you can only be ONE shade of blonde, and same with red and brunette and if you want to be really picky then you might complain that there is only one shade of black as well (instead of blue-black, natural black, etc) and nothing that looks at all "punky" with cool highlights or anything...not as far as I've seen. Is it too much to ask for some strawberry blonde hair? I guess they're supposed to be like tamagotchi...gotta collect them all. The only thing is, it's NOT tamagotchi, it's HAIR. I know it's a virtual world and all, but in my experience most of the time people pick ONE haircolor and ONE skincolor and then they may want to change the style of their hair but not necessarily the color.

So, I'm just thinking if Garnier Fructis were SMART about it, they would first of all make eight colors instead of four, and second, instead of making you visit the Garnier Fructis empty building each week to click on a link and nothing ever changes, they'd have you sign up on their website with YOUR preferred haircolor and then each time they released a new style (in ALL eight colors) they'd email you and say "Hi, it's Garnier Fructis and we have a new hairstyle for you!" and have you go to their website to pick up your claim code which you could then use in vMTV to get the new style in YOUR color. It would make a lot more sense, and they could learn more about the people buying their hair. Even if that means they only release hair once a month instead of every week...so what??? Do you REALLY need to go to a hair care products building/website EVERY WEEK? Yeah, I didn't think so.

11. Against TOS to sell vMTV$??????
What??? Apparently it's against the vMTV TOS to sell vMTV$ (What are they really CALLED anyway? I've seen them called vMTV Bux, vMTV Bucks, vMTV Credits, vMTVs, vMTV Dollars and even vMTV ThereBucks. Personally I call them vMTV Dollars because of the dollar sign after the "vMTV" part, but who knows? I'm guessing MTV doesn't even know. What? We have to name our currency? Um yeah, I thought everyone knew that...it's just like having your own private island.)

What is vMTV afraid of, anyway? I guess they will even enforce this policy if you advertise anywhere on their site (like say, in your Galleria - ooh la la listings) or anywhere in-world or even by TALKING to someone in-world to say "hey, I sell vMTV-whatchamacallems, want to buy some?" Nice, way to encourage developers to submit new content to your virtual world! "vMTV: pay five dollars to submit a small lamp or table to our virtual world and get nothing in return!" Put that together with your outrageous submission fees for lamps and tables, your horrible auction listing/relisting system, the way the Galleria (ooh la la) is buried on the website and the way MTV has given out vMTV$ like candy at a parade and it's a wonder anyone ever submits any new content at all!

So, just for the record...I am definitely, positively, certainly NOT selling my big pile of vMTV$, but I will be giving them away, so check http://vmtv.jinx.tv for more info soon!

See you in There! Oops...I mean vMTV!

Why buy virtual goods?

We, as a society, and by society I mean basically everyone in a developed nation with discretionary income, buy loads of crap. We may complain about the economy of our country or our own personal economic state and how things have gotten so expensive and we can't afford all the stuff we want to buy, but for all that complaining we certainly accumulate a lot of stuff.

Every time we buy a new pair of shoes, a new electronic gadget, or that thing we just HAD to have that we saw on eBay or Craigslist or when we were out running errands and made a few impulse purchases, we are adding to our huge collections of "stuff". Not only can we not possibly use it all, I think most of us are running out of places to put it all.

If we already have more stuff than we can reasonably use (the clothes in your closet that you've never even worn that are now a few years old, that motorcycle you were going to ride every weekend that you take out maybe once a year, the books you bought but never read, all that stuff you bought for your "new" hobby that you never quite got around to starting...) then why do we keep buying and buying? It seems like a a compulsion. We are descended from hunters and gatherers and we find it quite difficult not to keep hunting and gathering every chance we get. It makes us FEEL good and advertisers don't make it any easier, always trying to sell, sell, sell and convince you that you HAVE to have the latest gadget to dust your blinds with or a free extra set of knives with every set you purchase.

What are we supposed to do? We are living in a world of plenty. If we don't always feel like that is so, it may be because our expectations are so much higher now. We don't expect to buy only one pair of shoes (if we're lucky) a year or share a phone with everyone in our house (much less everyone in our little town.) Most people in developed nations have soooo much more discretionary income than even one or two hundred years ago...it's a new development that we are perhaps by nature somewhat unable to deal with.

How many people now have storage sheds out behind their homes to hold all the surplus stuff that they just *had* to have and now may have even forgotten they own? Oh how I envy people with attics and basements, or even just more closets than I have. My solution is sometimes to move and simply don't take all the STUFF to the new location. This technique produces a very managable amount of stuff for a while, but a few years later I am right back to TOO MUCH STUFF. People see me carrying a Whole Foods cloth shopping bag toward them and they just run the other way...they just assume I'm going to try and unload some of my extra stuff on them, and they're probably right.

So, if we have discretionary income, and we don't need to pack our homes until we can't even walk through them and can't seem to stop ourselves from buying way more stuff than we need, why not buy things that take up no space at all? Isn't that the logical next step? Forget just getting a better closet organizer or buying some more shelves, instead switch to things you can store on a computer hard drive...which, by the way, stay the same size as they continue to hold more and more data.

Why not buy a virtual pair of shoes instead of a real one? Fits perfect every time and you can probably buy a few hundred pairs for the same price as that pair of Jimmy Choos or those Manolo Blahniks. Or...a new car. You could buy a new virtual car every day. A new home! Heck, you could buy a certain style of home in a virtual world and it might help you decide if you'd really like that style of home in the real world. Or try painting the (virtual) walls a new color to help you decide if that color is right for you.

In a virtual world, you can shop 'til you drop and not only will you get more for your money than in the real world, but you don't have to worry about where to put your purchases or whether they will fit. Your car won't break down, your shoes won't wear out. I have sold virtual currency since 2003 and I have seen many of my customers get just as much pleasure from virtual world shopping as from real world shopping. I think it fulfills a basic need we have (the hunting and gathering instinct) and yet in a way that is less harmful to your wallet, the planet and your living space.

As the world as a whole becomes more and more affluent, we need to find ways to entertain ourselves and satisfy deep primal (shopping) urges without destroying the planet. So, why not try going virtual?

Circle of (virtual) life

Last week I emailed my club members. My intention was to remind them I'm here and selling ThereBucks in ten minutes or less mostly, but it was also rather chatty and encouraged them to email me about anything at all.

I received some very nice responses. I kept waiting for something nasty (wow, am I cynical or what?) but it was all positive. One person mentioned that they used to buy ThereBucks from me, then they started developing and bought ThereBucks from me less but purchased some of my model licensing rights. Then, they started selling ThereBucks to me sometimes as they became a successful developer. Now, they sell ThereBucks to me all the time!

The truth is, they aren't the only virtual life I've seen go that way. I had just been thinking the other day about the very same thing. I could name a half dozen avies/people like that off the top of my head and I'm sure there are more that did it so gradually I just didn't notice. And it's just...it makes me sooo warm and gooey inside. There are people who bought LARGE quantities of ThereBucks from me for SEVERAL YEARS who eventually started painting and even learned 3D modeling and maybe lost a bunch of money doing it at first, and now they sell me 500k of ThereBucks at a time or are just SO PROUD every time they have enough ThereBucks to get $100 from me.

Hey, if somebody never, ever takes an interest in developing, if the only time they ever sell ThereBucks is when they're unloading a neighborhood or decided to sell their rare one seater buggy to make a real world mortgage payment, or if shopping is their favorite activity and they wouldn't touch Photoshop with a ten foot pole, that's totally cool and I will sell them ThereBucks until the day There shuts its doors (oooooh....knock on wood!) But the ones that have made that journey from first time buyer to profitable seller/developer...those are my babies, my children, my darlings, my fledgling birds that left the nest but still migrate back to the same spot. I just want to give them a biiiiig hug.

Ooops, wait...There doesn't have hugs. '''sad

Hey hey...only 12 hours behind!

Hey, it's either talk about this or try to get a video card working in one of my computers while I wait for my bf to show up. My bf who is off having dinner with his business partners at OUR RESTAURANT. Well, I mean, we don't own the restaurant but it's the one we always go to when my cat has her chemo treatment and now he's going there without me. :(

Why is it that when you don't use a computer for a few months it can't just y'know...start right back up again? It's like a car you left sitting outside in a cold Minnesota winter. How am I supposed to fix a problem with nothing displaying on the monitor when no monitor will work with it and I think the problem is with the video card and the video card is built into the motherboard? Hmmmm?

Anyway...what was I talking about?

Oh yeah. I am not two days behind paying ThereBucks sellers, not one day behind. I am only 12 hours behind! And...I'm abnormally happy about it! Who cares if I've had $1000 worth of ThereBucks transactions come in from sellers in the last 12 hours so that being 12 hours behind actually means being $1000 behind? Heck, that's not so bad!

To all you Therians out there looking to sell off your extra ThereBucks I just have this to say: BRING IT!

Tbux musings

I've had ThereBucks in stock for over five weeks straight now, and no end in sight. Last night I went to bed feeling pretty great that I was only one day behind paying sellers. (Not to be confused with buyers, who get paid in ten minutes or less!) This morning I woke up to $750 more in sales requests. *sigh* Naturally, I've been a bit more focused on There lately because of this, and also on other ThereBucks resellers.

Ye olde tbux site particularly interests me because, besides the fact that I used to be a seller there (and am the only seller ever kicked off the site...a dubious honor bestowed upon me for refusing to stop claiming sales transactions as quickly as possible) and have long used "who is listed as selling and how many sellers and how quickly are they paying" as a barometer for how quickly ThereBucks are moving through the system and how long one might expect to spend trying to sell the ThereBucks one might have in stock.

The difference now is, well, now I can actually share my observations with others (you!) Please don't think I'm bitter towards kittenkat/tbux, it's more like I'm hurt (although at the same time grateful, as I probably wouldn't otherwise have gone off on my own and made all the buying/selling streamlining and automating improvements I have) and of course I can't help but be interested in what's going on there...even if I was tempted to pretend that the site didn't exist, that would be a rather foolish business move. Besides, there are a few tbux members who actually sell ThereBucks TO ME, which naturally makes me curious.

So here are my recent observations...

People who have been selling recently

Mercuria: Of course, you are more likely to see Mercuria selling than anyone else on the site. Who do you think took over most of the ThereBucks sale request claims after I was gone? Plus, although I hear she's not really developing for There any more and has turned her attention almost solely on IMVU, she has a HUGE amount of stuff in auctions. You know, it's really a shame that she stopped designing for There soon after trans mapping arrived...she has soooo much fantastic stuff in the catalog, but most of it is caramel skin specific. Anyway, I have noticed that she is usually listed as selling in 8 hours or 12 hours, so I'm thinking she must have a full time job again, and perhaps a boyfriend. It also seems like she is not actually claiming sales requests any more (as far as I can tell) which would be pretty weird/ironic after all the trouble she went to in order to be able to claim as many as possible in the first place. She also seems to have stopped accepting credit card or unverified PayPal account payments.

Xedos: One of tbux's newer members. It's weird the way kittenkat had asked us what we thought of adding new members the first time she did it, but didn't say anything at all the second time. Well anyway, Xedos always used to sell loads of ThereBucks to the tbux site and now he can sell directly so that's great. But anyway, it LOOKS LIKE he is listing himself as selling for a day or something, then giving up for a bit, then listing again. I mean, I get the impression he isn't selling out, is just tired of waiting for sales. Hmmm...he could always sell them to me...I'm two days behind paying people but that's still quicker than what he's doing now.

Majandi: I notice he is also not accepting credit card or whatever payments. There used to be only one tbux member like that, now there are five!

Banshee_Kate: She was listed as selling but isn't any more. While Xedos may have gotten tired of trying to sell, Banshee_Kate is more likely to have actually sold out. She has always been pretty active in-world and usually sold on her own before she was a tbux member, and she is quite likely to have sold a bunch of ThereBucks to her friends, fans or club members.

Randra_Loqqet: Not listed as selling very often. He hasn't been active on There for a while now but still lists auctions and comes back occasionally to sell what I can only imagine is a large chunk of ThereBucks at a time. On the one hand, he may be in for a rude shock wrt how slowly they sell, otoh I doubt he is counting on the money so won't really care.

Phedre: Well, I don't think Phedre has designed anything for There for quite a while. However, she makes quite a lot of ThereBucks because of her fantastic designs like the dragon hoverboards and, well, like...everything she has ever made. About three years ago someone at There, who doesn't even work there any more, had the brilliant idea that instead of paying her like, $100 an hour to make some cowboy hats and braided hair, they would let her submit them as her own items instead. You know, to save There some money. I'm sure in the last three years she has made and far surpassed how much she would have been paid as a lump sum. That's great for her, but she doesn't list herself as selling very often so when she does...watch out! She's probably trying to sell millions at a time and she's not as laid back as Randra, she'll list herself as selling in an hour or less for extended periods of time. When she lists herself, watch the number of sellers grow as she upsets the balance of things.

People who haven't been around as much

Ashy: Another one who has been gone from There but still lists in auctions. I sold off most of my inventory but you know one thing I kept was a limited edition coffin hoverboard s/he made. Such talent...Ashy, come back! Anyway, when s/he sells credits it is another situation where it doesn't happen very often so it can amount to a large chunk of them when it does.

Kittenkat: She doesn't seem to like to list herself unless no-one else is selling. You know, she has a baby, she does some...I don't know...accounting work or something, she designs websites or something with her husband sometimes and oh how could I forget...she has been pretty involved with IMVU stuff. Like Mercuria, she's making more money with IMVU than with There, I'm sure. Actually, I'm pretty darn sure she's making a lot MORE than Mercuria. So, I'm sure she has a huge ThereBucks balance right now, but you probably won't see her selling until someday when for some crazy reason everyone else is finally sold out, and even then she will have to actually notice everyone is sold out. Or maybe for some reason she will want/need a bunch of cash fast and try to sell.

Alexis_Josephine: Apparently she is back after something like 4 years MIA. It's kind of funny to think that she was a tbux seller all that time even though she wasn't even listing in auctions. Well whatever, it's pretty cool that she's back. Maybe someone should tell her about IMVU....

People who are just totally gone

Wildcat: This dude was one of the first 3d modeling members of There. In fact, he helped me out learning GMax. He had graduated from college and was moping around his parents house for a while working at some boring job. Then one day, he got a boyfriend and I think he may have moved to the big city and no-one ever heard from him again. Dudes...this was a LONG time ago. It's so funny that he's still listed on the site.

Viv: People thought I was the one who ALWAYS claimed the sales requests on tbux but originally it was Viv. Because of her, I was practically glued to my computer 24/7. I set up a laptop on the nightstand by my bed because of her. And...she still got more of the requests than I did! How did she do it? My theory was that she was based (she was in the military) somewhere close to the servers tbux was hosted on, and therefore received alerts slightly sooner than I did. And/or she had some buddies that would claim requests for her if she ever went to sleep or stepped away from the computer. Or maybe she actually WAS a computer. She was the beginning of my quest to find a way to claim sales requests quicker than anyone else could. I didn't complain about her, I just set out to be better than her. Not that it worked...she just disappeared one day. I hope nothing bad happened to her. No-one has heard from her for years now.

Kiana: Not much to say about her except that she hasn't been around for a few years now.

Rejeanne: Also has NO There auctions listed, so we should assume that she's not going to be around selling ThereBucks.

TNT: Okay, where the heck did TNT go? Maybe she just decided that IMVU was more worth her time? I have a hunch that she was one of the people complaining about me claiming all the tbux sales requests (hey, the faster they are claimed, the better for the people selling them, right? Actually, the whole claiming process is so inefficient, but I won't get into that right now/again.) When she was first invited to join the tbux site, we were partnering together on IMVU and talking quite a bit and I asked her, jokingly but keenly interested in the answer, if she was going to be trying to claim sales requests. She said of course she wouldn't, she knew I counted on the income from those. Then one day, she claimed one. Well, her bf who stays up all night did, but she said she was probably going to be claiming sales from then on. If Viv was the one who got me obsessed with claiming transaction quickly, it was TNT who lit a fire under my arse about automating the process. Some people have boyfriends who stay up all night claiming requests, some people use technology for even more reliable results. Hmmm...that sounds a bit naughty. Anyway...I'm a bit surprised she isn't listing in auctions...and I wouldn't be surprised if she shows up again eventually.

Starley: This chick has her finger in a lot of pie. Last I knew, she was pretty involved with Second Life. She's also been involved with IMVU stuff. Not surprising she doesn't have time for There, or even listing her stuff in auctions in There.

I know that's not everyone on tbux, but I don't really have anything to say about the others. They sell, they're active, I haven't seen them on the site selling in the last few weeks. This was really more just my musings about what is going on with ThereBucks and ThereBucks resellers. Not even sure it's of interest to anyone but myself.

Some There/Therebucks history

So, the other day...I guess it's been a few weeks now, Kittenkat contacted me because she was very distressed over IMVU's proposed tiers system and she thought, since I live only six miles from IMVU and have been known to sneak attack them and just show up there, that maybe if she could win me over to her cause, she could get me to march into IMVU and get them to listen to reason.

Honestly, IMVU should probably hire Kittenkat to be their in-house economist or something, but my days of IMVU peeps telling me that they owed me a debt of gratitude so great that they are happy to buy me lunch once a month for basically forever are probably over. The best I can do right now is publish what Kittenkat shared with me after being frustrated by one of IMVU's newer employees "Joepez" telling her she didn't understand the There economy as well as There's original founder and some of his cronies and tried to explain to her a few things about the There economy.

Please enjoy this wonderful bit of There history compliments of KittenKat!

As There's founder and ex-employees should be able to tell you, I was there since the beginning, and my resale site (tbux.com) pretty much single-handedly shaped the resale market from the beginning. If anyone knows anything about the resale market at There.com, it's me.

For the record, here is the story of the There resale market:

I became involved in the There developer program pretty shortly after it was released. After time I and the other top developers had accumulated enough therebucks that there began to be talk about selling them for cash. The first person to offer us cash for our therebucks was Baloo, who happened to be There's economist (he operated his resale site on the side). He offered us terrible rates (2700T/$1 as I recall) but we sold to him, because he pressured us and because it was money.

It didn't take me long to decide that we had to be able to sell them for more he was offering. So I got together with There's other top developers, showed them my proposal for tbux.com, formed tbux.com, and began to sell directly to There members at 2000T/$1 (~200T/$ savings over There's official rate). Sure, Baloo could offer consumers a cheaper rate, but he had depended on having the major developers selling to him, so by banding together, we eliminated his supply, so we had no trouble selling for that rate. Shortly thereafter we began to resell other developers' tbux, offering them a rate of 2200T/$1 (our spread is and always has been very low).

We've had a small handful of competitors over the years, but none have ever succeeded at driving the rate of tbux down. Even during the period of economic turmoil and panic which followed There's "Black Friday" (in 2004, when There Inc. announced that it would no longer develop the consumer version of There), tbux.com kept buying and selling at the SAME rates.

And here we are, in 2007, buying and selling at the same rates we always have, and still selling out. 2000T/$1 is now the standard resale cost of Therebucks across all resellers, a whole 200T savings over There's rate of 1800T/$1.

So, to say that There's resale market is where it is because its "mature" is just completely inaccurate. There's resale market has not changed at all since it started with tbux.com back in August 2003."

For the record, *I* never sold to Baloo. My first sale was actually an exchange of ThereBucks for frequent flier miles which allowed me to attend the first There real life gathering in 2003.

Anyway, thanks to KittenKat for allowing me to share that nice writeup of There and ThereBucks history in my blog. Maybe it won't help us stop tiers, since Will Harvey has indicated that they only implement things we suggest that they were already implementing anyway, but it's still a great read. Cha right...like Will knows more about the There economy just because he founded There. According to any IMVU employee who worked on the blox project There is already dead, and yet as far as I can tell they are still growing strong. Wishful thinking, guys?

Want to know a secret?

Want to know a secret? Today I feel like telling you why I stopped developing stuff for There for a while.

It's partly because I was doing stuff for IMVU, partly the frustration with pricing (the pricing on some items just doesn't make sense, like for lamps) and partly because currency sales was taking up a lot of my time, but MOSTLY it was because I felt like a failure.

It started with the Wild West event. I had planned to make quite a few items for it, in fact when they were planning it I was like "ooh, oooh...I'll make this and that and I can make that other thing, too!" It's like I didn't want ANYONE else to make anything. I would have liked to make the entire Wild West all by myself.

I think I should be forgiven for this a little bit as I think it's natural for There Developers to be somewhat solitary, and the more people are working on stuff together the more they have to cooperate, which is not only hard, it takes time away from developing. My goodness, you should have seen Meret with his Christmas village. Not only did he want to do most everything himself, he wanted to enforce a huge number of aesthetic and other guidelines on developers, who were acting like cats trying to be herded, myself included. In the end, I didn't end up doing anything for that project, but my point is that developers are just like that. They generally want to be in control and they want to do what they want to do and they don't always play well with others, myself included.

I did do quite a few items for the Wild West. I made decks and buildings which I think were the first 40 meter dev items in-world, I made a water tower with couches for supports, a bunch of signs, benches, jail cells, a wild west bar which I believe had the first varied-level seating on it (one of the seats is ON the top of the bar, it wouldn't be weird at all now, but at the time it pretty much had to be snuck in) and a bunch of other stuff...I think I'm most proud of the staircase, which took quite a long time and is available actually attached to a second story floor, and I think without the floor as well. I also made a bunch of tombstones and some coffin seating groups for the Undertakers.

Despite all the items I DID make, I failed because of all the stuff I DIDN'T make, because I didn't allow enough time, I bit off more than I could chew, etc. There was supposed to be a whole general store and the only thing I ever got done for that was a catalog and a bench that had the catalog built into it. It was really discouraging...I don't know that anyone even noticed there was stuff "missing", but *I* sure did.

Then, I hadn't made anything for There for a while because of IMVU but I wanted to spend some time on There stuff again so I was going to enter this virtual world contest that was something about public spaces. I totally didn't allow enough time for this. This is my "Parkway" stuff. I didn't get all the pieces I wanted done with it, OR the matching website that was supposed to go along with it, and when nearing the deadline for entries I was frantically trying to put the pieces I DID have together. Argh...I am one of the worst in-world builders and I just couldn't get it together quite right plus some of the collision meshes weren't working the way I wanted. Basically, it simply wasn't done. I was really upset about this.

Then finally, I had a folder on one computer that held most of my There stuff and the folders starting with A, B and C just went missing. Poof, gone. This included a TON of builder items. Most of my builder items, actually. I thought maybe I had burned them onto DVD or CD to make room on my hard drive, but I searched everywhere and couldn't find those files. It was very strange and made me pretty paranoid AND very discouraged.

So there you go...that is why I stopped developing for There. But, today I am going to see if I can export a builder item from 3ds max...something that never worked for me on my old computers (I've made all my There stuff in Gmax.) It seems like TheChaz has done a good job of packing up the exporters to properly install, so I'm quite hopeful it will work. I just want to have some FUN making stuff, y'know?

Then later...maybe I will have some more secrets for you.

Ode to a bowl

Bowl, you were perfect
for popcorn
for brownie or cake batter
to mix up pizza dough
for ceasar salad
I'll miss you but
I guess it was your time to go

Haha...worst "poem" evar.

My mom gave me this bowl about maybe 14 years ago when I first moved to Boston. It was part of a set of items to make popcorn with, a big white bowl with a blue stripe near the rim, a hot air popper, some gourmet popcorn and some seasoning salts. It was an awesome (birthday I think) gift and I especially loved the bowl.

I guess it's moved about six times with me since then. I play favorites with bowls and this was my hands-down favorite and perfect for so many things. SO perfect that I just had to bring it to my bf's to make pizza this past Sunday. I guess it finally got knocked around one too many times...it got a big crack in it and bye-bye favorite bowl :(

I realized, though, that it's kind of immortalized in my Cheese Curls Party Bowl in There, so it's like I'll always have it.

I was right...and other There stuff

I was speculating about There approvals being delayed last week because of Sonny being on vacation, and I was right! Sonny sent me an email last night/this morning at 3:50am!!! "Why?" I wondered, "Why the HECK is he sending email at 3:50am, especially on a weekday???" Well, when I read the email I knew...he said he was up until then approving stuff! I don't know where Rosie was, but that new guy approver got pretty behind, I guess.

No wonder Sonny almost never takes time off. You kind of can't blame the new guy, though...I mean we have some pretty high expectations of approvals sometimes BECAUSE Sonny works so hard, but does that mean everyone is going to work as many hours as he does? (Or approve as fast as Rosie, who has been doing it for I dunno...four years?) Maybe the dude is hourly and wasn't authorized for overtime...maybe he just doesn't want to work 60 hours while being paid for 40, maybe he was askeered of approving all those things people try to sneak through submissions...maybe he wants to stand around chatting with Baloo about WoW all the time (oh no wait...Baloo is long gone...that was one of the old approvers, it would be nice to think they don't do that any more.)

I don't really care if my silly wallpaper and floors (I had some floor covering approved...whee) take a few extra days...it's not like it's going to be a runaway best seller or anything. I'm just hoping to sell a few copies once there is some matching other stuff to go with it, but mostly I'm glad to be redecorating my clubhouse slowly but surely.

Hey, I heard There is moving! Not like they are going far, more like next building over, but it's mention-worthy because Forterra isn't going with so they will finally be physically separated.

I was watching YouTube There.com videos yesterday. It's so cool to watch this stuff just to see all the content that is there somewhere in There. I mean, people don't always keep pazzes out all the time, stuff goes in and out of auctions, neighborhoods can be hard to find, so a nice lazy way to take a tour is by checking out all those videos. My favorite one is still the one Chagall did in 2004, "Party There".

Why, There, Why??

Okay, below I have proof that There does stuff with regard to the Developer program that makes no sense. Not exactly a newsflash, I knew this at least since 2003 when one of the approvers rejected a TON of my builder items for basically no reason other than maybe he didn't want to take the time to approve them right before they shut down the developer program for six weeks. Six weeks that were some of the most depressing of my life.

Yeah so anyway, I know we don't exactly have resource based pricing and I mostly understand that ('whatever) but...

I was submitting a few rasta style hairstyles, and I noticed I was accidentally submitting them as hi-res and I kind of panicked. OMG...I don't want to pay high-res prices for this little tiny texture! Turns out I needn't have worried. See the chart below...rasta hi-res is only 100 ThereBucks (or about 12%) higher in price than the "regular" version...


Now let's look at the item I just submitted. I submitted a house painter floor texture, which is 128x128 pixels. After submitting it, I wondered if I should have submitted a high res version instead. So, I checked out the pricing....


Both the rasta high res and the house floor high res have a texture that is four times the size of the "regular" resolution file, however, the hi-res floor texture is 133% higher in price than the regular texture. That is over ten times the increase of the hi-res rasta! What sort of crack are they smoking at There? I want some!

*disclaimer: I don't REALLY want any of the crack they are smoking at There, I'm just kidding. Drugs are bad, boys and girls (and thereians and There employees)...just look at what they've done to these prices!) You need to be a rocket scientist to figure out what to use when...although how many rocket scientists do you know that have time to develop stuff for There?

Not a There Hermit today

This past week, I've been spending some time in There in my clubhouse, which is ALWAYS deserted by anyone but me, and I've visited a few places like THE WATER and the amusement park (also deserted), but today I actually hung out with other avatars!

No kidding.

ZachC IMed me to tell me that he was with Nalora who was doing a video on Icons of There, and he was all like "I saw you signed in and I was like if anyone is a There Icon it's Jinx_tv", and I was like "yeah, haha...you're the icon. Nalora should be filming/interviewing you. Oh wait...that's why you're with her right now." Yeah, I'm a little slow like that.

So I spent some time hanging out with some different peeps like Nalora and ZachC and several others that you can probably see in my screencaps. It felt somewhat surreal to me to spend time with Nalora because it seemed like she held a grudge against me forever for making fun of some spelling mistakes her nephew (who is an amazing developer) made in his There auction descriptions. Sorry, I have a childish sense of humor and his descriptions made me laugh. I need a "doesn't play well with others" shirt. Then one day, she started buying ThereBucks from me and I was like, "that is sooo weird, I thought she wasn't even SPEAKING to me." Now she says she prefers to buy them from me. Maybe that's just her moving on while I'm obviously stuck in the past.

Yeah, so, these great diehard Thereians gave me lots of info/gossip (you can set the environment in pazzes now! The new "real" water can be turned back to cement in preferences! etc) and Nalora showed off her incredible pazzes, which you see here in my screencaps. I was quite flattered to find Jinx_tv stuff here and there, and btw I made those dice you see in the first pic :P

It's soooo cool to look around and be able to name the designers of half the stuff in her bedroom. AND to be included among them.

Also, this wasn't from Nalora and I'm not going to tell you who I got this info from as it's kind of gossipy, but I was told that WikkeDiva is not buying/selling ThereBucks any more because it got to be too much like work (I can definitely understand that...it's work for me, and not just like, really cool fun work, I like to compare it to being a night watchman, because all you're doing is babysitting stuff.) Also, it sounds like she had a hard time with people sending her money for ThereBucks when she was sold out, and then getting mad they didn't get any ThereBucks in a timely manner. I can totally relate to that, too. That used to happen to me at tbux.com, but it rarely happens to me on my new site...that's why my new site shows you EXACTLY how many ThereBucks I have for sale, it won't let you buy more than I have, and if somebody buys some, the number reflects that. It makes life sooooo much easier that way.

Oh, oh and...lookie! I had some wallpapers approved and not a minute too soon. Actually, this pic doesn't make it look very nice...I hate the compression of the ThereCam. My new approvals totally make me want to get some more stuff in (Like, um, WINDOWS, FLOORS, FURNITURE!) I really need to start making some models. I got really distracted using Adobe Captivate today and of course CHATTING IN THERE. Argh.

Tomorrow I can't make models because we are going to be making Chicago Style Pizza. If the pizza won't come to Jinx, Jinx will MAKE the pizza. :)

Actually, the Philippines are RIGHT THERE

Okay, what do I know...it seems that There Philippines IS actually right on not just the There servers but right on the There planet mingling with the rest of us. This is great because I was on There last night and it was like being on a ghost planet, I think we could use the additional members.

Therian Water: found! There Philippines: merged!

So, last night I finally found the There water. Not like it should be hard, right? I mean, There is a series of ISLANDS surrounded by *ahem* water. But it did take me a while, maybe because I'm lazy.

So, I found the water by teleporting to where, a few Christmases ago, there was this amazing snowflake maze on the cement water. Sure enough, I was knee deep in water. With a skirt on. (That's pic one up there.) I tried to find something in my now meager wardrobe to wear, but was having trouble with it actually loading in. (That's the middle pic.) I tried a little retail therapy and bought something a little more appropriate. (Pic three...oh my goodness, check out that cleavage!)

I was trying to find a bikini or other swimsuit but there just didn't seem to be many options. I am loving the new skintone independent items, but there are soooo many in the catalog that aren't skintone independent. I noticed this most strikingly when looking through Mercuria's stuff...I was actually at that point looking for something my bf could (or would want to) wear in There when he visits it, something he has indicated an interest in doing. I figured he could just use the male avatar I already have...but what I forgot is that all that avie has left in his wardrobe is a navy sailor outfit and some pink boxers. 'doh!

So, while looking through Merc's stuff, which I adore, I couldn't help looking for myself at the same time. Of course she has new skintone independent tops, but all the old caramel, caramel, caramel stuff is still there, too. Maybe I expected it to all magically change or something. I think her inventory is much like the whole catalog, sure there is some amazing stuff...but as old items are still listed in auctions over and over and over and over, a lot of sifting has to be done to find the new stuff. It's really too bad the skintone independent stuff isn't in a separate section. Like, if it has a trans map, approve it into a slightly different path.

Speaking of a slightly different path, I read that There Philippines just merged onto the regular There servers. Not sure what that meant, I had asked Sonny if your avatar would be able to get from There Philippines to regular There or original There or whatever...he said he didn't think so. Still it's a bit confusing that they now, if their name is already taken in original There, have to have "_ph" appended on to the end of their avie name. It's like some kind of code telling the world you're a clone or a copycat or something. How could they merge, though...isn't the exchange rate different there? I mean...There? I mean...There Philippines?

'''drat

This morning, for the first time in a VERY long time, I woke up and thought "I wonder if I have some approvals in There today????"

I used to wake up this way all the time...sometimes I didn't know what day stuff might be pushed into the There world, other times I DID know what day it was supposed to happen (of course SORD can ALWAYS break) but either way, it was always a feeling of Christmas morning. Or like, potential Christmas morning, like you forgot if today was REALLY Christmas or not, or you were kind of naughty during the year before so you weren't REALLY sure Santa was going to visit you. There were days where potential There approvals were pretty much the only thing that got me out of bed.

So this morning, I thought "hey, I might have some approvals!" Wheeee! I got up out of bed and I fired up Outlook on my Alienware laptop. The laptop is old (I think about a month older than my There avie - I think it was the last Hivemind that Alienware ever made, it was also the last laptop they ever let anyone pick up in person - I flew to Miami to get it - and they erroneously labeled it an Area-51 so if it were a postage stamp it would be worth a fortune instead of an old laptop that might maybe be worth $25 or might actually cost me $25 if I were trying to take it to a recycling center), that copy of Outlook has been installed on there forever, and the email addresses that get downloaded there are also old (literally 99.9% spam and other junk, and lots of it) so I waited for a while for Outlook to boot up and check for mail (like, the mail that goes into my there/submissions folder) but I was impatient so I logged in-world on my shiny new computer that has all new apps on it and does everything super fast.

'''drat. There is no new wallpaper. '''sad. Wait...I shouldn't say '''sad, that's a kind of ugly face, maybe just 'sad. I checked the There forums to see if anyone was in the Developer forum complaining about how they didn't get their item approved, and then checked the Advertisements forum to see if anyone was advertising freshly approved stuff and...nothing. Hmmm...aren't approvals on Monday, Wednesday and Friday now? Which is actually friggin' amazing...three days a week! How spoiled we all are now. Oh, except no wallpaper. Maybe because Sonny is on vacation and the approvers are a bit behind? I've seen Sonny approve while on vacation. I've seen him approving items on Christmas Day, seen him approving while pretty much everyone else at the There offices is off skiing in Tahoe or going to a There Gathering. But...this time, I think he is really, actually not approving things.

I don't have anything to go with the wallpaper right now anyway. I'm hoping to submit some more items today and to fire up 3ds Max, but my bf is coming over for lunch today so I may not be able to do anything until later.

........I am still waiting for Outlook to download mail. Thank goodness that's not the only way to check for approvals.......

Oh...I just bought my first transparency skin-independent top Monday. Soooo cool! I'm not much of a clothing painter, but if I get inspired or something maybe I'll try it out just for fun, especially since I downloaded the latest beta of Stylemaker. It's amazing what TheChaz has done with it.

I've had a lot of clothing envy over the years, since I refuse to use Caramel skin, now I am very tempted to go on a little shopping spree. Oooh...must save ThereBucks for submissions, though. Right now I have a TON of ThereBucks, but those are to SELL not to SHOP WITH!!!

Frappr is strangely cool

Yeah, I know...it's like I can't stop posting today. It's like I'm trying to make up for all the times I posted like, 3 times in one month. I just stumbled onto a Frappr map for Thereians and added myself to it and then I did a little search and I found there is a really extensive Frappr map for IMVU maintained by BoogiePanda not surprisingly!

I've never seen Frappr before, although it sounds vaguely familiar. I find it weirdly fascinating watching the different people go by with either their real or avatar photos.

Below is the There map (don't you love the way it ruins my page layout?) but I recommend you check out the IMVU one which has over six thousand people on it as I type this.

Oh, and Yoshitoshi put his full address in the There map...I so totally want to stalk him now.

I was searching for a map of my highschool on Frappr, too. Didn't find it, instead I found AdultBabyWorld. Scary. I dunno about you, but if I liked to dress up and act like an adult baby, I wouldn't put a clear picture of myself on a map that shows where I'm located. Or anywhere else, for that matter. I guess you have to decide how badly you want to connect with other people like youself, though.

A Glut of ThereBucks: Where is WikkeDiva?

I was looking at the books that ended up in the pic in my last post and I thought I would give you a closeup just because I think it's amusing that there is only ONE computer book in the whole pic, "Real World Scanning and Halftones".

You'd think I'd have a lot of computer books, and I DO, they are mostly in a big metal cabinet on the other side of the room and scattered in piles here and there waiting for me to buy another bookcase. Instead we end up with "A Passion for Potatoes", "The Complete Idiots Guide to Improving Your IQ", "Car Smarts" (I don't even own a car) and a book that looks like it says "Intercourse" but it really says "Intercourses" (see, it's actually a play on words) and is a cookbook with a bunch of recipes that contain ingredients said to have aphrodisiac properties. Personally I think the Passion for Potatoes book is enough for me...I effing love potatoes, but Intercourses does have a killer chocolate bundt cake recipe. I love to cook.

ANYWAY, that has nothing to do with a glut of ThereBucks, other than maybe the fact that I'm hungry and even though my ThereBucks sales are MOSTLY automated (that's why they're so fast unless there is a problem, which is why you should email me at jinx.tv@gmail.com if you don't recieve your ThereBucks in 30 minutes) I sometimes (like now) need to stick around to make sure sales are going okay so I can't go grocery shopping.

What is going on? I've had more people than normal selling ThereBucks to me lately. Is it because WikkeDiva closed her tbxbank.com? And why is that anyway? And if that means her sellers are seeking other places to sell ThereBucks, shouldn't her buyers be looking elsewhere as well so it would all even out? Where did WikkeDiva go? Is she coming back?

I love/hate a mystery.

It's great to have so many sellers selling to me, the only thing is it would have been great to have a little advance notice, ya know? It's like I've put all my discretionary income into purchasing them and I would have liked to be more prepared. I guess that's just life.

Please buy my ThereBucks! :) Oh yeah, and if anyone knows what happened to tbxbank.com, please, please, please won't you tell me?

There is expensive!

It's been an embarrassingly long time since I've submitted anything to There. According to my submission page, almost exactly two years. That's not quite right, though, since I did a commission a little bit more recently than that.

Yeah, so imagine my STICKER SHOCK when I started submitting some stuff today!

I'm really excited because I FINALLY got my nice new computer connected to the Internet and up and running. I got it with Windows Vista because I wanted to play with all the shiny new buttons, and I was askeered because I heard there were tons of incompatibility issues and places not supporting drivers for Vista but SO FAR, even though I don't have my second monitor hooked up yet or gotten my second hard drive working in there, the using of Vista hasn't been a problem.

So, I'm submitting some stuff and I'm planning this BIG SET of coordinated items and then I remembered why I've never really submitted more than a few versions of anything...it's so expensive! To submit a little 128x128 wallpaper texture costs basically $3. You could submit oh...let me think...a whole um...crapload of IMVU items for that same price! I know There has a real human being approving stuff, but WALLPAPER? Now I just need about a zillion other items to go with all the wallpaper I submitted...floors, windows, ceilings, paneling...wait, maybe I don't need paneling, I'll have to think about that. I forgot how addicting this is. Too bad I'm not addicted to making sexy cleavage tops...I could make a lot more ThereBucks.