there was nothing waiting but her frozen arms

(Continued from part one.)



The cobwebs seek to hide the things that people used to use on a daily basis. But even the spiders have moved on, now. No one uses the things that used to be polished and shined, washed and returned to their places.



The table is still set for a meal that never happened, for the family that never gathered. What did happen, in this house? On this island? Will we ever know?



Outside the nursery window, upstairs, another shade watches. Reliving what happened? Or simply keeping an eye on the land, that no one else will live in this place?



The girl in the chair never moved, never spoke. I'm...not entirely sure she was there, but she never faded away. The doll, on the other hand, watched my every move.



This is a marvelous haunt, start to finish. There are no screamers, no jump scares, it's just dark and pulses with dread. The moving spirits add their own special touch, as they circle through the trees. And scattered through the terrain, bright s pots of burning color throughout all the desaturated monochrome, are campfires, and logs to sit on, cooking pots to make impromptu meals. They're always startling in their normalcy.

I highly recommend this one. If you want to track down everything, it takes a bit to wander, but it's worth it. Or you could just arrow from the landing point to the manor house. Your choice. After all...no one on the island is there to stop you.

but I heard her howl and I heard her moan

Welcome to Hunting Hollows. It's very dark here.



There is an atmosphere about this place, heavy and brooding. A large part of that is the depth of the shadows, but it's a brilliant effect.



Sometimes, what separates a great haunt from a mediocre one comes down to a few little details. Here, it's the mostly monochromatic nature of it, but also, the small moments, like the odd lightning that seems to shift across the sky, or the sparking of stripped wires on the docks.



The broken ship in the bay never sinks, just stays, visible and accusing. Did the islanders break it apart, or did the rocks? Does anyone remember at this point?



There are spirits in the woods, and shades of death. They don't attack, but they are attracted to movement. And sometimes they move through visitors, chilling them further.



The manor house keeps a Sphynx cat, who seems more than feline-intelligent.



And inside the manor house, the cobwebs are deep, shrouding the piano that never plays.

(More in part two.)

from paranoid to paralyzed

God still surprises me sometimes.

yog soggoth's a cutie: So for an online dating thing, it asked what is the first thing people notice about you? I guess first, there's normally the screaming of children, as though from a distance. Birds suddenly drop dead en masse. The sky turns red, raining blood. I appear, covered in a thick black oily substance. My tentacles spread and multiply all over the ground, attaching to any surface strong enough to withstand the pressure from the writhing miasma of flesh. Seven of my nine mouths open in unison and send forth the klaxon that ends the coming of days and summons the dead.
Emilly: .....
Emilly: Y'know, normally, that would just be odd, but since I've spent the last three hours watching Slender vlogs, that's certifiably creepy. 
yog soggoth's a cutie: Thanks
Emilly: You're welcome!
yog soggoth's a cutie: its on my okcupid profile now
Emilly: HEE
yog soggoth's a cutie: Get at me ladies
Emilly: Well, anyone who gets that is either going to be someone you run from, or someone who really gets who you are. Either way, it'll be interesting.

Indeed so. I'll have to ask him how a hook holding such bait fares in the wide online dating sea. Cthulhu fhtagn.

Seen at the House of ACCentaury:

(from the scavenging album)

I don't know what it does beyond this.

(from the scavenging album)

What I do know is that it took me so many individual pictures to snap, to catch the entire movement cycle, that I had to make two gifs, not one.

Seen at the pub in Naseby Field: their...bar wench?

(from the scavenging album)

Now, I get it. Most roleplay sims are barely funded, if they're funded at all. They all have to cut corners where they can, and in the pre-pathfinding days, there weren't any NPC figures people could rez out to walk around and interact with roleplayers in the sim. Hells, even in the post-pathfinding days, a lot of folks haven't figured that out. It's challenging, to say the least.

And I also understand that not everyone crawls out of the rez box knowing all the ins and outs of texturing in SL. It's a mix of factors, but I don't automatically turn up my nose when someone's flipped out a single-prim textured object--even if that alpha texture has that bright white rim around it.

(from the scavenging album)

No, what made me port out of the sim without even bothering to find the Steam 8 hunt prize was the attire and the color text over this particular bartender's head. It started with "hey baby", and went downhill from there. And keep in mind--Naseby Field is supposed to be a medieval roleplay sim. Since when did "medieval roleplay" mean "fake boobs worn with a spandex mini"?

I realize this is SL, yes, but really, people. Have some standards. Ugh.

and it's not the weather, hand me my leather

NNNNNG. Replica razor? Sure. But from the prop! It's so pretty...

Also, lipsync technology for machinima. Has Professor Sputnik heard about this?

And Damen Gorilla is evil. After carefully debating my finances, and the new Clomps shoe advertisement he sent through the group, I have decided that yes, I could be conservative and buy the four pair I think I absolutely need to fill out color ranges I do not have for doll shoes...or...

*hangs her head in shame*

...buy the 'super fetish pack' of all ten colors for L$650.

DAMN YOU SALAZAR! ...I mean...DAMN YOU GORILLA!

...actually, no, we like Damen, we do. Okay, no damning. But EVIL, yes, evil. Him and his wicked cool-shoe-designing ways.

All right, back to serious stuph. Leapfrogging from the last entry on the topic to this one...I may indeed have to post a retraction of the "Stroker bailed" assertion.

This is going to be a lot of links at first; be patient.

First of all, September 2006's plague of sim crashes seems to have, in fact, been caused by Catteneo and a group of other hackers with the deliberate intent to clone the SexGen engine for resale. A content creator and I were just discussing this possibility last night, and bingo, they find a link for me confirming that very possibility.

Part of the new (very irritating, and very non-rational-seeming on the surface) policy LL is doing of random region restarts is, in fact, directly intended to foil such plans.

So LL cares a little about content theft. Yay.

From there we go to the SLX forums--for some back-and-forth chatter on the topic. Let me lift the relevant info from that long posting, though, if you don't want to read through all of it (and it is worth the read-through):

This I posted in comments to the last entry; it's the announcement of settlement.

But later in that forum commentary, a Fox News story is mentioned--in the context of, apparently, the Tampa Bay Online story was trimmed from that Fox News story. So the Fox News coverage--weirdly enough--is more in-depth.

(I will say there's one highly relevant comment leading back to the 'he bailed' turf in this: "The settlement does not involve money or any admission of wrongdoing, court documents show." But even with that, let me be absolutely fair--pursuing a nineteen-year-old idiot who lives with his grandmother for any financial gain whatsoever--and even, one may say, pursuing him for the finer ethical points of establishing case law--it might easily be seen as the more rational course of action to put your hand in a blender and hit "frappe"--in the long run it would cost less, cause less stress, and take less time to recover from, than a protracted law suit conducted at the speed of court.

(Let me also note that's the general tone of the other forum posters--"I know it was aggravating, but it would have been nice if you had actually pushed to establish case law for cases like yours" is the overall tone of most of the responses. However.)

And here is the Chez Nabob interview in full--for anyone who doesn't know, he's the mind behind the "parodying" (oh, how careful he is, using that word) of PETA's ad campaign in the first place.

Having read through all of that, I will now say this:

While I still believe it would have been better for Serpentine to push for establishing precedent of case law on this issue...it would have been a huge financial commitment, taken even more years off his life, and beyond all that, been a hassle of monumental proportions. So I can see, believe me, why he eventually chose the lesser of things here and went for settlement.

And let me make this also very plain--again:

I am not saying content theft is a good thing in any way. I'm saying insisting that content theft is the only reason sales are down is not understanding the issue that the SL economy faces. Moreover, I'm saying that--even though it's something that could cause harm to PETA, which I am completely for--it's still stealing someone else's intellectual property to protest stealing intellectual property.

Which has been my issue with things all along, the vast and untapped reservoir of irony behind that statement that is not being perceived.

Now, then. Before the train wreck actually catches on fire again from four posts on this one topic...I'm going to declare it reasonably closed (though comments are always allowed), and move on to lesser offenses and picture fluff.



Or, y'know, back to fishing.