I was just reading the January 28, 1935 issue of Time magazine. I got the hard copy off ebay because one of my hobbies is to collect everything about Kathleen Norris, the 20th century author who published in the 1920s-1940s (not the modern author by the same name).
And what's significant about the advertising then from 1935, which is of a familiar type to those who browse vintage sites, is that they illustrate something about how people grappled with technology.
There isn't much written about how people over the ages have adapted to technology -- except yes, of course there is, by all sorts of overnight specialists writing quickie Mcbooks. But there isn't really good, enlightening, well-researched stuff, it seems to me. There aren't studies of say, the Scobles of yesteryear and how they tried and wrote about technology and how ordinary people dealt with it. What you do find now is a lot of urban legend sort of hack stuff, of the sort Clay Shirkey puts out (like his fantastic notion that during the Industrial Revolution, gin carts were brought around and people kept perpetually drunk, and this is how they "coped"). Tekkies who write about this topic usually tend to exaggerate how technology has shaped and changed people, and exaggerate their adaptation to it -- and exult their own role, of course.
We would tend to think of something like the automobile as well-established and already affecting people's lives and already transforming society by 1935. Of course, I think you could say that it wasn't until during and after World War II and the national parks system and interstate highways were built in the U.S. that you could talk about a car culture. In the earlier days, cars were like horses, kept in barns and with staff assigned to them, mechanics who had to work them full time, constantly fixing them and driving them.
What we tend to not realize, because there really isn't any place where you'd find it, is how unfinished something like "the car" is when it was "already established". If you read the novels of Kathleen Norris, you realize that in the 1930s and 1940s, people going in cars were like people going on plane trips. They always arrived tired, dirty, jaded, and cold. They'd have to be wrapped up in blankets for the journey, I guess because it was drafty and perhaps there wasn't internal heating.
This ad for a car lets you know just how uncomfortable cars were, by the way the ad is touting a brand new invention by General Motors that fixed what apparently was a common problem -- neck whiplash just from riding in the back seat, i.e. not from an accident:
"YES, LADY, WE'VE ENGINEERED THE KINK OUT OF BACK-SEAT RIDERS' NECKS," blares a two-page ad for GM.
"An Eye to the Future -- an Ear to the Ground" goes the jingle of those years.
"This describes General Motors' policy, a policy by which the public is given what it wants in better cars year after year, and yet is safely protected against ill-timed or dubious experiments.
Says the ad,
"The highway is fast and firm, and to the man at the wheel the going seems smooth enough. But if you're traveling at speed in any car more than a year old, those bounces that hardly jiggle the driver certainly jar and jerk the folks in the back seat.
You wanted an end to that neck-tiring, nerve-fagging strain -- so General Motors engineers set out to perfect a new bounceless, wonderfully poised glide-of-a-ride, on rough roads or smooth."
All this is fine -- persuasive, and we'd happy to stop there.
But the nerds at GM in 1935 even in the copy department, press on:
"They found the trouble in the limited space between the front axle and frame. To keep these two from bumping together, front springs have had to be stiff, stiffer than the rear springs, and that caused a jerky ride."
"So they developed a whole new front-end design -- fastened the front wheels to the frame instead of the axle by using sturdy members which made steering easier and safer than before -- provided ample room for big, soft-riding coil springs, timed witih the rear spring action -- and thus eliminated the "whip snap" that puts such a kink in back-seat riders' necks".
"That's the principle of "Knee-Action" -- and simple as it seems, there were plenty of changes to go wrong. Others in the past have tried to lick the problem and gave it up -- but General Motors engineers, drawing upon the vast resources at their command, stuck with it until they developed the successful application of this principle which you now find in "Knee Action".
The best demonstration of how this principle works is, of course, a "Knee-Action" ride. What a difference it makes in front front- and back-seat comfort! Roads that used to be torment slip beneath you now with nothing more than a gentle, restful, smooth undulation -- more like flating than riding on wheels".
Today, a car ad might talk about a smooth ride or tight corners or hugging the road but it would never, ever spend an entire page talking about some technical facet of the axle and springs. It's taken for granted that such a thing was long ago fixed -- back in 1935, in fact lol.
Reading through oil ads, or ads for typewriters in the same magazine, you see the other things manufacturers struggled with. A typewriter is advertised as "silent," because they were so clattering. The Silent LC Smith also had "ball-bearing type bars" and "floating shifts" along with "interchangeable platens" and "non-glare key rings" as well as "half -spacing escapement" -- all lovingly detailed in an ad. Oil like Mobileoil Arctic was developed to get rid of the smudging cast all over everything as it burned, and the sludge. Then there were a lot of insurance ads, I guess with the riding in all those cars...
My point in thinking about all this is that the Internet, Web 2.0, Virtual Worlds -- these are all technologies with their similar periods of very long adaptation. Perhaps you would even have to talk about a long tail of adaptation. If you think of Ford putting the motor car on an assembly line, that was in 1914, after decades of car experimentation and even mass production. Ford found that a bottleneck -- a scaling problem, the Lindens would call it -- was painting, as the cars came up in 15 minute intervals. They found that "Japan black" dried quickly and that's why all cars of that black-and-white era *were* black. "Any colour as long as it's black," apparently Ford said.
So an entire 20 years after assembly lines are put into production, GM was just getting to solve the "whip-snap" problem.
There's this built-in meme that everything involving the Internet moves faster, accelerates more, compounds, etc. I also chuckle when I hear people talking that way, because they are looking through the geek keyhole at their own time, their own stretch of history, and are in no position to judge it, really.
Sibley Verbeck and others often pontificate that there is a "Virtual Worlds Winter," that it has its peaks and valleys and such. All that may be true. I think we have to take a longer view over a century, because something changing the world, as the automobile did, doesn't do it all at once, and the problems it making it usable are very long in the fixing, even after technical solutions are solved (like 'How can we make production scale?). Imagine, the car manufacturers were obsessed with assembly and scaling and bottlenecks, but for 20 years, people in the back seat rode around getting whiplash!
How could advertising be so technical? Easy. It was pitched to men, mainly, who wanted to drive their ladies around in the back, and who would read the copy with interest, about the axles and the springs, just as they might be expected to look interestingly at the bit about the "interchangeable platen". I had a typewriter for years I worked on, and I feel bereft that I never changed the platen -- to my direct knowledge.
Of course, the same magazines of those days that advertised "breakthroughs" like "Now you can ride in the back seat without whiplash!" also advertised cigarettes, as if they were safe and even relaxing, fun, and healthy -- not realizing later the Surgeons General would ban them as harmful to health.
Go to the books, movies, theater section, and you will probably not recognize a single author or show, though they were important enough to be mentioned in Time. A lot of culture in mass entertainment or even high-brown intellectual arts and letters simple drops out, as if etched by acid over time. Most people never heard of Kathleen Norris, who was the most wealthy and popular female author of that era.
When I saw the Lindens are trying yet another thing to fix the newbie experience problem, I had to wince. Big Spaceship looks like something that Twitters about itself a lot. I don't know why Katt Linden is working overtime trying to spin this so hard in the comments, it's odd (she's also stepping up her policing of any "off-topic" discussion of OS -- gosh, the Lindens have been thorough in putting down this rebellion).
I winced, because it was yet another concept that involved essentially advertising. It's an advertising company, which nowadays aren't called that, but are called things like "creatives" or "experience creators" or some other damn thing. But the basic premise is the same thing: how can we pitch this better to people? How can we grab 'em and shill 'em as soon as they get in the door? How can we make them move to exciting places that will make them stick?"
Of course, there are people like Carl Metropolitan who have been in the newbie business since forever, and know something about this. The Lindens are terribly unwilling to bless such a resident-based operation, however, because they didn't pick it or start it. In that sense, they are as adverse to civil society as a Soviet government -- they yearn to displace/replace it like the Bolsheviks, and not let it be. Hence their taking up again with vigour this idea of the "certification" -- and essentially putting inworld schools of skills for SL itself out of business.
The group TUi which has been running a school mentioned in the events list for years very successfully, has announced they are going out of business. They don't say the real reason why. There's a lot of double talk there. They mention nothing about the Linden certification issue or hiring of other consultants. It could be simply that they can't pay for their sim any more -- these operations always buy sims and then can't pay for them, because they think they can't stay on a 4096 -- and of course, they can and should until the donations justify it. If you think managing rentals is hard, trying managing an inworld non-profit. I do that with the SL Public Land preserve, and while I have about a dozen core tier contributors who help enormously to cover tier, so that I can add another half of tier myself, the people who donate cash, even though there are actually large numbers of them and some very generous donations, only cover 15 percent of the cost of the tier.
I hate the idea of SL certification, because it displaces independent efforts and co-opts some residents to compete unfairly against others. Not everybody can or should go to a school, or is good in school. But they can be good at what they do. It's a distasteful enterprise, and comparing it to a Cisco certification is retarded. It's nothing of the sort. It would be like having one giant government office that forced you to clear your building, programming, design, sewing, etc. skills through that one office, and awarded big stars, so that anyone without that star was not only suspect, but would face difficulty making a living. Disgusting concept. The market should take care of this, not the Lindens.
They are doing this so they can create a stable of "solutions providers" they can point to when government, university, non-profits, whoever has a grant, comes in SL and needs "dev help". Then they can pull out their approved list. Again, having a normal free market like the real world would be a better idea, and even having an open list on the website as they have now would be a better idea; certification will winnow the ranks and ensure only those who suck up to Lindens get in.
There is no shortage of blogs no fuming about how they could teach the Lindens a thing or two about the viewer and newbies -- and they then procede, like Jacek Antonelli with the Imprudence viewer, to make an even geekier and wonkier interface.
I'm not going to rehearse once again the things I say every time this topic comes up: a) organize jobs for newbies b) allow advertising in the welcome areas and infohubs to target newcomers with services.
No, I'm pretty sure that the bare minimum that has to be done is to take every Linden and geek and consultant off this thing completely. These inworld teams led by people like Blue have to be blindfolded or kept in a closet for 6 weeks while the facts are actually gathered. An outside firm with enormous dispassion and reporting skills, i.e. those agencies that conduct focus groups or a polling group, has to come in and actually ask real people real questions and put down real answers, not wishes of dev teams in glossy SF ad companies for swanky buttons here or there.
They need to drag in completely unrelated people, too, your grandmother, a 10 year old, Joe the Plumber, whatever it takes (Joe would find himself plumb out of luck with the certification team, which wouldn't recognize him without a license).
Just like when I had convinced by some friend to go into one of those intensive 4 hour focus group things, that meet 2 or 3 times, and pay you $50, which intensively monitor your reaction to some product or campaign, the same thing has to be seriously and dispassionately done for SL. The job isn't to sell SL to newbies; it's to find out why they leave. Philip used to say that if you found a friend, you would stay. People say it isn't the crashes or lag, but the inability to see where to go.
I had a strange thing happen today. A woman flew on to my roof in Magon in Nautilus and said she needed help. Where could she sell her wares? I gave her a landmark to my free marketplace and asked what she wanted to sell. She said she had made a magic wand. She took it out to show me. It had the most garish colours and twisted, tortured prims I'd ever seen on an object, but it was still kinda cool. She said her object had a million prims and wouldn't fit in my free mall. I explained how she could put it in a vendor, and gave her landmarks to the free vendor. She was starting to get daunted, and still looking for completely free land. I have a $50 fee for the group one-time only, just to keep all the hippie pay and other crap out of the place.
Of course, the makers of SL, and most people styling themselves as newbie helpers only think of freebies, never of how to make it possible to sell wares (I am always thinking of this and try to provide it cheaply).
But then the woman asked me: "How can I put scripts in it? You know, to make it do things." Of course, I had no idea. I said she'd have to take a course -- ooops, that place is closing now. I gave her an NCI landmark.
That person may never get their product off the ground, or their scripts in the product, or their sales strategy worked out -- she was only a few weeks old, trying to find her way. And she's one of the people who arrived without a fuss about having to use key boarding to move around and alt-click on her mouse to zoom into the picture. She now needed a finer type of newbie handling -- but this is the kind people like Yumi discourage, as they would tell her not to risk a business as she will fail. Most people *don't* create stuff in their first few days. I sure didn't, other than some crappy clothes that looked like a sack and some aluminum foil -- literally (my first avatar in SL was made entirely of aluminum foil -- his hair, his face, his suit -- I guess I had a long pent-up notion to become the Tin Man).
After the polling/journalistic/focus type of operation assembles data from a variety of strata, countries, etc. they identify the pain points (using that miraculous new software I mentioned the other day) and devise remedies.
A key problem of why the Lindens don't really get this right is because they can't really step up to the plate and admit that their world is mainly used for socializing, and that means cybersex. It's hard to plan around that deliberately, because of course, it's not good for business. So they maintain this sort of fiction that they are all about "exploring" and "cool places" which is sort of a euphemism for "fly to an exotic locale and see a cool build and maybe pick up a girl there and go to a club".
Now we are hearing RightAsRain whine and bitch about SL, and dump some sims. I am dry-eyed. I've been here for some years, and I've dumped some sims, too, from bad choices and harsh learning experiences (Tethrys).
Rezzable did a number of things wrong. I'll list them:
o putting the 128/128 landing point *under* a huge garbage build, so that avatars can't escape from it. This is awful. They must have lost tons of customers that way. Many people open up the map list and type in the sim's name, they don't use search or landmarks. So if they came that way, they'd be out of luck. Not caring about how/where your visitors land is usually a good indication of how you don't really want customers.
o not renting out land or condos or any thing at all -- they scorned rentals and said they could do better
o not selling LOTS of content and providing ways for people at varying levels to sell content -- which of course you can do by rentals in a mall
o selecting only an elite stable of builders who worked on closed sims and were made to feel special to provide all the content
o not having enough for people to do -- they get to a Greenies sim, and only about 3 of the things are interactive
o they expected people just to come gawk at their big-ass build, and be satisfied with that -- and even pay them for that
o they didn't try anything long enough -- towards the end, in recent months, they've been desperately trying to sell content of a sim theme (the Black Swan), sell prefabs of drawers made off the Greenie theme, and sell passes to the land. None of these things can work in a mere 90 days, they need enormous cultivation over time.
o constantly blogging with sour, hateful, spiteful cynicism about the land business and Linden Lab as failures. They are a classic case of the Russian male ballet dancer who claims he can't dance because his balls get in the way.
o A fanboy at the dump when I landed began to berate me, tell me to write something positive, and explain away all of Rezzable's problems. The Lindens didn't help them. They didn't give them the tools. They had no understanding. Huh? They got the same tools as everybody. They got featured on the friggin' website and Showcase, for God's sake. They didn't get to buy a splash ad. Cry me a river.
o This fanboy then proceeded to berate me for renting out an OS sim undermarket in this glutted climate, without failing to see that that it was only one sim, and was better off rented under cost than not rented at all and that other parcels were at market cost.
So Rezzable just never got it. You need rentals, you need customer care, you need lots and lots of content, not just professional "high-end rich content" and you need interactivity and of course room for adult themes.
That is a policy whereby the public is given what it wants, as General Motors told us about cars in 1935. "YES, LADY, WE'VE ENGINEERED THE KINK OUT OF BACK-SEAT RIDERS' NECKS!"
Ok, let Blue out of the closet now that you have found out some of these kinks and do talk to him and other Lindens, who aren't of course completely useless because they've lived and breathed this, and now they have to implement it.
Advertising doesn't help get the kink out of the back-seat riders' necks. Engineering doesn't help it, either. Listening to what the public wants will help -- and as we can see, only 20 years after Mr. Ford started the assembly line did someone get around to this problem of the lady in the back seat, since, geeky tools that they were, they were focused on the males in the front seat.
What is this "SL Certification" stuff you are talking about? That thing they tried to start in April 2007?
What a joke. Linden Lab does not know who is on the other end of the connection. Certification is total bullshit unless you physically go to a testing center and use their system. And pay the test fee (minimum $100 USD) And then your not really doing anything but answering tough questions that are written by people that know what they are doing and also know how to write questions properly.
I see someone even suggested using VNC so someone from LL can remotely access your computer screen to see what you are doing. Good god with a goal of 1 million concurrency what exactly would they do? hire 10,000 certification testers? Or have a 10 year backlog?
No. Not happening.
Certification is possible. Via the same testing centers everyone else uses. And it will be multiple choice testing. Oracle certification tests are hard. You can't fake those. If LL wants certification then they have only that choice end of story. I can't believe they are silly enough to even be engaging the community other than to develop a panel for question development.
And then the cheese is always moving around. What would be the most significant part? Defect avoidance? Working around LL induced issues that get fixed and then return? What is the best way to ship everything out of SL to a website for handling by real code?
*sigh*
Posted by: Ann Otoole | 11/04/2008 at 05:41 AM
Engineering that's worth doing *includes* doing "what the public wants". Especially when the public doesn't know what it wants--or more precisely: doesn't know how to articulate it.
What you're more likely to hear is what the public *doesn't* want...which should be a clue. An engineer who hasn't read Donald Norman's "Psychology of Everyday Things" (or at least understands what Norman is saying) is likely not fit for exposure to humans.
There's way too many of them....erm...the engineers, not the humans.
(I recall encountering that "arrival point under building" design failure at the Sun Microsystems region when I first got here.)
Reading old magazines is a wonderful way to learn form the past...and there is easily twice the information in the advertising that there is in the editorial content. As a child, I was fortunate enough to have available to me massive collections of back issues of "Scientific American" and "National Geographic".
Posted by: Maggie Darwin | 11/04/2008 at 07:33 AM
Yes, they are wheeling it out again. They just haven't gone public yet. And no, they don't mean with testing centers and standard written tests and fees (well, there might be fees, who knows). They mean by Lindens at the Lab, inworld, of your building skills. Of course they will find the time to do this.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 11/04/2008 at 10:04 AM
Prok, I don't know where you have gotten this idea from, that I would "tell people not to risk a business as they will fail". NCI even has a free mall explicitly so that newbies who want to start businesses can get a start.
What I, and most helpers, *don't* do is to tell the "how do I get L$?" crowd to start a business; or at least, list it only as a later option. And that isn't just about the risk of failure: it's about the likely need to buy some L$ to get started (even if you can use a free mall you still need marketing), and the fact that business is not a good way to earn L$ with which to do other things, since usually to remain competitive, you'll need to spend almost all of your SL time (assuming you have a day job) making things or managing sales of them.
The idea that I would try and tell a newbie who had made something, not to try and sell it, is actually offensive to me because I generally encourage newbies who have made and enjoy making things, to try selling them. In fact, I find it a little upsetting when newbies who do make things want to give them away - it's understandable, it's because they've been forming friendships with groups of other newbies and none of them have any money either.
Now, ok, I might be a bit jealous of a newbie who'd made a magic wand. But that's about all ;)
Posted by: Yumi Murakami | 11/04/2008 at 01:15 PM
Thanks for proving my point in spades. By failing to tell newbies they CAN start a business, sell things, make things, get free market space, get free vendors, you ARE discouraging them and ARE steering them -- and I'm glad we've got that on the record.
They have no need to buy Lindens to do any of those things.
You don't have to wait to see a newbie make something that fits your idea of what content should be, you can tell them to make content, and by God, they can at least make a t-shirt or a table, even I can do that.
As for this, "the fact that business is not a good way to earn L$ with which to do other things, since usually to remain competitive, you'll need to spend almost all of your SL time (assuming you have a day job) making things or managing sales of them."
It's total, utter, socialist bullshit. It simply isn't true. There are plenty of people who have made things and sold them for a fair amount of money right from the start -- I can think of Barnesworth and Ingrid for example, and today, Barnesworth can make a RL living doing this. I remember when he made newbie starter houses for $200 Lindens.
The idea that you have to 'spend all your SL time' to remain competitive is simply false. You don't. If you have a good idea, if you have an entrepreneurial spirit, and if you are willing to learn the skills, you can make your way. There are challenges, but they need not be over-emphasized.
We know everything that you already think, Yumi. You think the market is saturated. You yourself are burnt from your own self-admitted failures. So scared, scarred, burned, you stand at the gates of SL, creating a cramped, fearful impression. We need to put you in the close along with the Lindens.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 11/04/2008 at 01:33 PM
Prok, you'll need to take this further than just complaining at me, because even most static tutorials in world now suggest buying L$ for US$ far above trying to start a content business. Even the Lindens' own introductory notecard, that used to be dropped on you when you arrived in a WA, did that. In fact, I took my lead from that trend.
Many newbies just don't _want_ to create content. If you "tell them to" when they ask how to get money, it jars with their perception of what they wanted to do in the world, and they get upset. You know the newbies who _do_ want to create content, because they're asking "how do I make content?" - not "how do I get L$?".
Yes, they can make a t-shirt or a table. Maybe they can even sell them, although that's by no means guaranteed. But is that what they actually want to do?
I don't think that the market is completely saturated, but I _do_ think that the market has moved on from selling things that a random person who has just wandered into SL can produce. And that's a good thing - if it hadn't done that by now, that fact alone would make it a spectacular failure. But it does make thing harsher. Yes, I'm sure that Barnesworth and Damianos and all of the others started making basic cheap houses - but they didn't have to compete with Barnesworth and Damianos. Moreover, they did it because they enjoyed making houses, not because they wanted the nifty outfit they just saw in a shop and quickly dashed off a house build in order to get back to what they actually wanted. That might have worked at one point but it certainly won't work now.
It isn't as simple as "learning the skills" - there's a talent component involved as well, that you don't have a choice about.. and that's not just from me - it's what practically every building helper I've ever had has told me.
Posted by: Yumi Murakami | 11/04/2008 at 01:56 PM
Yumi, duh, I always tell people to buy Lindens instead of camping, because they can spend just $3.65 US and get 1000 Lindens. However, here's the problem, as I've found on my constant polls on this issue:
o a great number of women, far more than you'd ever think possible in this modern day and age, are dependent on their husbands. Their husbands will not let them run up charges on the cards, and leave them with restricted amounts of cash. They are afraid to use the card for this
o Yes, you'd think they could just go buy a card at Wal-greens, but maybe that system isn't so available in all cities, I have no idea, we have it here in NY, you can buy a temp card for $10 or $25 or $100 and use it without having to get a credit card per say, you just fill it with cash on the spot
o People who are non-American often have trouble getting some kind of payment system online
o People are terrified of giving payment info on line and want to scrounge for awhile -- I have tenants who camp and scrounge like that, living in a rentals for a month, then leaving for a month, then coming back -- I have the land preserve for them to hang out in for free if they want
o I have no art skills. I'm someone who actually failed high school art, even attending the classes and making the objects. That's actually possible to do. Yet I make and sell stupid little objects. Anyone can! I also have ideas sometimes and commission a talented person to make it, then give them a fee or split sales.
o the market has never moved on -- it is ever fresh -- there is always a newbie landing who will spend $2 on something stupid, trust me on this
o there are so many people now on SL and from so many countries that the new Barnesworthski of Poland will never have heard of Barnesworth, and just go ahead and compete and sell to other Poles. Of course it works. I see it work CONSTANLY with new people entering the 512 prefab market ALL THE TIME and selling to people who happen to find them -- the world is quite spread out n ow
o You hate and fear commerce, Yumi. This is a psychological disease for which there seems to be no cure.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 11/04/2008 at 02:29 PM
I don't see any relevance to the "reasons why people might not want to buy L$". Yes, that's true. Again, people who are going to become successful content creators will be people who like creating content and doing business, not people who are doing it only because LL don't accept their credit card. Content creation and business just don't work when done as sidelines. I'm sure you know that.
"There's always a newbie landing who will spend $2 on something stupid, trust me on this." Yes, and in a few days they will realize it was stupid and that their US$ (or camp time) is now gone, and start distrusting creators. I'm all for newbie creators getting a chance to be noticed, but not at the cost of newbie consumers feeling cheated.
I don't hate or fear commerce, Prok. I just know that it's work. And not everybody wants to work in SL.
Posted by: Yumi Murakami | 11/04/2008 at 02:43 PM
Prok, your notion of how easy it is to sell things that you have made is, quite frankly, 'bullshit' in today's SL.
Ingrid and barensworth? Old user of SL?
Guess what?
It WAS easy back then. Now? Nope, it isn't quite as easy as you seem to think. There's this little thing called Time that, as it flows along, causes something else called Change.
Now, let's see what has Changed shall we?
1. The base focus of new users is no longer on how to create and sell content. It has moved to instant gratification in terms of getting Linden Dollars.
2. The current 'market' is FLOODED by the sort of businesses you describe. So much so that a new user, fresh off of the boat does not even have a snowball's chance in Hell of making anything. TO do so, they'd have to learn a whole host of OTHER skills to make their wares truly unique.
Let's take one of my friends for example: In real life, he designs web pages and is a graphic artist. In that alone he has a leg up on the typical new user. Add to this the fact that he is a perfectionist and makes damn sure all of his builds in SL are aligned properly (both the prims, AND the textures). In addition to this, his specialty, low prim furniture, is aided by the way he thinks.
Ever seen a chair done in TWO prims? with the cushions, sides and 'legs' intact?
He's even started doing buildings and custom orders. The funny part of this?
I taught him a few of the tricks he now uses. Not all of them, but some of them.
See what I mean however about the need for a unique item? A special skill set?
Hell, another of my friends is a scripter that has quite literally been able to take many projects that the older resident scripters will say are impossible ... and he manages to do them, proving the nay sayers dead wrong!
Second Life no longer has much of a 'market' for basic, generic 'products'. Had these two friends not had the skill set and ability that they do, they'd never have been able to sell a damn thing.
Oh? The builder? He goes by word of mouth and people seeing him working on his builds. No real advertising, no shop ... Just on the spot.
Posted by: Sean Williams | 11/04/2008 at 02:49 PM
"...there is always a newbie landing who will spend $2 on something stupid, trust me on this..."
Or, as Mr. Barnum said, there's a sucker born every minute. Even further back, "homo vult decipi, decipiatur." It speaks volumes about one's attitude towards newbies, and I know I'd react as Murakami describes once I realized I'd spent my L$ on dreck.
Posted by: Melissa Yeuxdoux | 11/04/2008 at 03:58 PM