light a candle, lay flowers at the door

So, hunting about on the House & Garden hunt earlier, I ran across a Miss Sexxxual Delight. First off, if you have to stress the point that the "Delight" for which you're known is only horizontal? There is a problem, ladies and gentlemen.

But I pushed past that and read her bio:

Limits.. pretty simple..

Everything is pretty much negotiable.. send me any and all ideas . but Two non negotiables
1.) No OOC Drama.. If OOC turns into IC. I'm not gonna play like that.. I'll null and void the scene and then contact an admin..
2.) For anything you do I expect retailation or don't even bother wasting my time. Roleplay is about conflict! :)

I have an issue with this. Not the first one; eliminating mass drama in RP is always welcome! But the second.

RP is about conflict? Really? Plot devices are about conflict, nearly always. And plot can be--but not always. And secondly, think of how she's saying things to those who are trying to RP around her--no matter what I do, f'rinstance, be it handing her a daisy or shrieking at her whilst I run forward with an axe, there will be retaliation? For everything I do?

Gosh. I would not be looking forward to interacting with her. Period.

How'ver, onward we must go, because Fawkes has informed me he is going to train me how to use 2.1. Because I am, as he maintains, "using it wrong".

The first thing I notice when I log in that makes my blood boil: I was not in this outfit before. Nor was I in this skin, hair, eyes, or shoes. OR shape. This is bothersome in the extreme because I want to look how I want to look, damn it. Which should be how I looked when last on the grid, regardless of which client I'm using.

Strike one.

Fawkes says this is an issue with using multiple clients. He says there's nothing that can be done about it. There is also some confusion as to whether this has happened before--he says it has, with other third-party viewers; I say it hasn't, but in all fairness, I could be saying that simply because I want 2.0 to die instantaneously, preferably ablaze.

I could have a small problem with the 2.0 structure. This will likely not improve.

Secondly, he had me open inventory. Now, I have put significant time and effort into making my inventory line up how I want it to line up. I don't want system folders to the top by default; in fact, I don't want system folders to the top. Yet, there they are and there they stay; there seems to be no fix for this. In fact, all that careful work and time I put into ensuring I could find things quickly, easily, and with little muss or fuss--even considering my 72K+ inventory state at present--is now missing entirely. System folders are at the top, my folders are alphabetically beneath the trash folder, seventeen slots down.

Fawkes says I will need to get used to this. I grit my teeth and carefully do not scream.

Next up: I started speaking. And by that, I mean the little green lines flashing over my head, and my lips moving. So Fawkes talked me through how to disable that.

Then there was around half an hour of conversation while I got dressed. This was an ordeal. Not the conversation; the actual getting dressed part. Muscle memory, I am realizing, is something I've been relying on in SL. I know exactly how far down each folder is and exactly how many scrolls I have to go down before finding what I want, and where I find it. I keep reaching for the drop-down menu to close all inventory folders, and it's just not there anymore. Fawkes is right in this; it's like a whole new game, this browser.

And it's a game I don't particularly enjoy.

He talked me through making an outfit, and it does nicely save everything I was wearing, including eyes, skin, hair, shape, and bald cap--and it does save the prims. Of course, it also saves, under each chosen outfit, three separate categories: Clothing, Attachments, and Body Parts. To me, this seems more cumbersome, but to Fawkes, apparently, this makes perfect sense.

Then there was movement. I use camera controls. Yes, I know, I'm one of a vanishingly few people who still depends on camera controls; I like the tight control it gives me for photography, and it became easier just to leave it up all the time.

Fawkes had me take down the camera controls, and move as I'd move in virtually any other video game, using W, A, S and D keys. In 1.0 browsers, I had to disable the local chat bar. When explaining this to Fawkes, he seemed puzzled. "I don't use the local chat bar," he said.

I do. I use it all the time. But at least in 2.0, I don't have to sacrifice one for the other.

So, what are we at now, three strikes against, one point for? I think that's about close, anyway.

Then there's strafing. It sounds like an odd name for essentially hopping to the left or the right. In Team Fortress 2, for instance, A and D 'strafe' my character--hopping me to one side or another.

I told him that was why I don't use A and D to 'strafe', because if I want to move to the left, I want to MOVE TO THE LEFT, not hop for a bit and stop. Screw that; if I need to turn, I need to turn NOW, damn it, because I'm likely on fire or heavily wounded.

He explained how, in 2.1, I could click on my avatar and hold down the left mouse button, and that would move my character too; in fact, I could combine that with W, A, S, and D to move both my point of view and physically move me, as well.

Which, by the way, is the only thing in Second Life I've yet found that kicks up my nausea, graphics-wise--that sort of jittery camera motion is why I can't play games like Doom and Quake--it was slightly better in UnReal, and I even worked my way up to UnReal Tournament before I realized how crap I was at the game.

So that's a point against 2.1, or at least, my ability to handle rapid graphical shifts.

"The point is not to depend on the controls so much," he said. Why? I like the camera controls. I like the precision the camera controls offer me. He tells me SL is the only game that has a separate camera control menu.

I tell him that's part of what I liked about SL, when I discovered it.

Now, the keyboard version of the camera controls, he explains, might be easier for me to cope with, and it is, a bit, because it responds like the camera controls: hold down Alt, then use W, A, S and D to rotate around the focus point, and use E to tilt and C to pan (up and down, essentially). He says that it's just like using E and C to fly up and down.

"The hell you say," I tell him. "Page up to fly up, page down to fly down."

"E and C," he repeats. And F to turn off and on flight directly.

Huh. Now I have to relearn flying?

Okay, so I sort of have the hang of the basics, now, and I ask why I'm doing all this, if I can do all this in 1.0-structured clients. He says it's because nearly every game out there uses these controls, or at least an easily grasped local variant. My question is, if I can use what I learn in 2.0 to adapt to other games, then why am I in SL? If I hate their browser so much, why don't I just go off and play something else--where I can have this control set and like the game more?

Yeah, I have no idea either. But those are the basics. And I'll work on them. Gives me something to do, I suppose--beyond everything else.

"Now let's deal with some of the errors made by Zha in her blog," Fawkes says. Hmm.

We start with inventory. At the very bottom of the sidebar, the little white gear, opens a smaller sub-menu. The top of that menu says New inventory window. I pressed in, and three seconds later, I had a separate, independent inventory window. Well, good gods, why didn't they show me that in the first damned place? Why do I need the sidebar?!?

...Oh, because I can't MAKE THE DAMNED THING TRANSPARENT. Gods, I hate the programmers behind 2.0.

We moved on to Appearance editing. To get to the new Appearance menu simply, just right-click on your avatar and it opens up on the sidebar. You can then make changes "live", as t'were; in fact, as Fawkes pointed out, I can walk around, port, shop, talk to people, whatever--all while editing my shape, or my hair, or my eyes.

Here's my problem with this, but to be fair, this is my problem, because I have a five-year-old computer: with the Edit Shape window open, I can't move well. My movements--the world's movements--slow down terrifyingly. I had to take a lot of time to explain this to Fawkes, and the best way I found was--there were two of us, alone, in a sandbox, and movement was fine; I pull open the Editing Shape window, and suddenly, it's like we're at a heavily scripted club with sixty-five dancers and everything animated and tossing particles--I mean, an insane and sudden amount of lag from nowhere.

I do not like this, but I can't straight up say it's a flaw in 2.0, much as I want to.

There are some cool features in 2.0. Editing "live" does allow you to check out how a shape looks with your AO movements; this isn't a bad thing. There's also an onboard height meter that can be read in meters, or feet, to tell you how tall (or short) you are. The problem is it doesn't work currently. You have to multiply that number by 1.1 to get the accurate height in 2.0; it doesn't work yet.

We started pulling up profiles. I loathe the new structure but I did notice something profound is missing from my profile--the "My Notes" section. It's gone. "You never could edit that," Fawkes says. I beg to differ.

Notifications Fawkes says, is both right and wrong on Zha's blog. For one, there's no differentiation between IMs from a resident, group notices from that resident, and notecards sent from that resident. On the other hand, I tend to be extraordinarily anti-social in SL under 2.1, because I cannot, absolutely cannot stand the IM windows, the chat windows, and receiving notices. Pop-ups that I can't control drive me spare, and having the name of the person THEN whatever they're saying, two lines for EVERY single damn line of chat, makes me homicidal. So I tend to close everything as fast as it comes in and don't answer people because I will throw things at them and spray acid just for contacting me.

Fawkes did say I can change this behavior in 2.1, which is good, because it restores the two-goddamn-lines-every-single-two-goddamn-lines to one, and one not separated; this is guaranteed to reduce the amount of vitriol and hatred spewed at anyone who dares say "hello" of an evening.

I still hate that I can't make the window transparent. That deeply, deeply bugs me. I view it as a very personal intrusion into my life off the keys for every single big opaque block the viewer tosses onto my screen. It's annoying beyond reason.

Back to the popups for a moment...Fawkes calls these "toasts". I have no idea why except that's also what Second Life calls them. They bug the crap out of me.

Now, how I have been arranging SL chat and IM windows is to tear them off and move them to the upper left hand corner of the browser. Because in smarter structures--like 1.23--those windows transluce when anything else is clicked. This works for me.

Instead, I have a choice of not docking the windows--in which case, moving them up where I've been keeping them in 1.23 means I lose all sight of the sky with more than one conversation, or I can "dock" them. When I "dock" them, I lose the ground when they're active, and when I've clicked anything else, they disappear--or, at least, reduce to small tiny image sets on the lower right hand corner of the taskbar that are hard to read and annoying. Yay?

This is not a plus for me. (Apparently, those teensy little images are called "Chiclets". This is also not a plus for me.)

Another new thing--there is no "keep" anymore; there is "Show", "Discard" and "Block". Block most likely will block the item and mute the sender, but I'm not sure; "Discard" is self-explanatory, and "Show" means auto-accept and take me to that place in the inventory by opening the sidebar. More loss of screen acreage, yay...

I hate this browser. It is not getting better. I really, really, want to stab it with knives and dig a deep hole and toss it in and cover it in lye. None of these feelings are getting any less severe. Honestly, I'm scaring myself a little, here.

Sending objects remains basically the same, it's just the terms for them that altered. Also--an odd trick--if you right-click on an object, and click "Share", apparently you can share with anyone (within 130 meters), friends from your friends list, or searchable individuals--if they exist in world, they can be sent whatever you want to give out. I suppose this is a good thing, but I think there's far more potential for abuse.

I think part of the struggle, for me, with learning 2.0 is the atavistic phobic reaction from the first time I used 2.0--when all media was auto-on, and I suddenly had four inputs screaming for attention and I flatlined into dead emotional trauma. (Anyone out there who's OCD may understand this; for everyone else, all I can say is it's what I did then, and this memory just hasn't departed yet; I still remember shoving the headphones off my head, shaking in distress, tempted to turn the computer off and walk away entirely for the night without word to anyone. I didn't, but I was highly tempted.) But there's another part to this struggle, which is all bound up in how I behaved on IRC.

I developed, quite likely, a lot of bad habits on IRC. My main two were: I didn't want to talk with people I didn't know, which made me quite the hostile little ball of insanity on IRC, and two, if someone I didn't know DID talk to me, I gunned after them with the ferocity of a thousand razors. If spraying them with mace and chopping at them with a rusted hand-axe didn't drive them from me, I'd get mean. (Miss Sphynx can verify this; she was there on more than a few occasions.)

Now, when I hit SL, I was quite gregarious. (Oddly gregarious, and likely, that first year or so, more than was good for me, frankly.) I've never had that hostile I-hate-you-get-away-from-me-DIIIIE reaction...until 2.0

2.1 hasn't changed this. People IM me; I close the windows. Group chats open, I growl and close them. I get notices, my hands tighten into fists and I have to breathe and let the stress go.

I'm serious, it's a physical reaction, and I don't know why, but this must be what bigots feel like with the skin color they most despise; I mean, if I had the base code in front of me I would burn it without a second thought. It's intense.

All I know is, now I know how to do more things in SL, and this may influence things when I go back to 1.23; but I'm going to resent every single moment I lose to SL 2.1, until (and unless) it gets better.

And better for me means transparent windows; resizeable sidebars; smaller camera controls; and a folder architecture where system folders aren't automatically and always on top. Is this me being hidebound to the old structure? Likely. Am I going to change my opinion? Not likely.

But I will keep chipping away at it. It's important to Fawkes that I not hate this as much as I hate this, so I'll try. It's important to the Octoberville creators that by October 2011, if SL exists then, I have 2.1 fluency so I can go in and experience Octoberville-on-a-prim. And I do want to do that, if that's the only way I can hunt there October after next.

Still. It remains distressing, invasive, and annoying beyond all things. I don't like the structure. I don't think the improvements were necessary. And I wish they'd just taken some of what does work in 2.1 and applied it to 1.23 and everyone could be happy.