I decided to catch up on some of the classic old locations again, and so made a visit to Port Babbage. I’ve never been much for steampunk; but I have to say that the Babbage regions are fascinating … if smoggy (lol).
I wasn’t quite in costume. Then again, as I said, I’m not that into steampunk; and anyway, as I understand, Port Babbage and Caledon aren’t that fussy on outtatime visitors.
Skin: Raonhausen Gweneth Milk Brows
Body: Maitreya Lara 4.1
Head: LAQ Skye 3.07 Bento
Eyes: Ikon Triumph (Chocolate)
Hair: rezology Sky 218
Outfit: A&M green moss turtleneck (system); Vextra Messing opaque pantyhose (Blue); Maddict Starlet leather pants; The Annex Belle coat (Gray)
Strawberry Singh may be a Linden these days, but she still can do separate posts — just not plug stuff. She put up a challenge on the Community Forum a few days ago. Below is my contribution to the thread.
The photo on the left is from my November 2010 article, “Sweater Weather.” The one on the right I just took yesterday. Skins were improving by November 2010, although makeup tattoos (what we think of more as Bakes On Mesh these days) were still a few months away. This is probably the best photo I took in 2010; many of the others I’m embarrassed to confess to these days (grin).
(Author’s note: since I didn’t have access to some 50 Residents in the proper skin and costumes, I’m asking you to suspend disbelief on my photos, and supplement things with your own imagination. Either road, here’s a short Christmas story from the 48th Century, and my character Ariel Sherman. HG)
Ariel glanced around her at the four dozen-plus gold and silver people surrounding her. As usual, The Land of Fantasy had put on a phenomenal production of its current revue show, and everyone looked satisfied with things, no matter the changes in the script for the evening. Of course, for cyborg memories, “changes in the script” were rather small beer. It was the human pride in their craft that shone here, pride in performing in a once-a-year show to the satisfaction of both themselves and a demanding audience.
There was still a final act to go before they rang down the curtain for the next four weeks, for the show’s annual break. This would not be the usual finale, though, with its famous nudity; not on this night. For this was Day 357 on the Limlight Standard Calendar. There were children in the audience tonight, and the entire performance was much more family-oriented. Especially for tonight’s finale, the one element of this special show which had not changed from year to year. To Ariel’s demanding eye, everyone looked happy, prepared, and confident. She nodded happily back to them, said, “Alright, people; let’s do it,” and got back words and signs of agreement. “Go, Dalton,” she whispered to her organic stage manager, who grinned back, tapped at his tablet, and gave the needed orders. Recorded music began playing; the “small” curtain in front of Ariel opened thirty seconds later, and Lady Ariel Sherman entered at stage center, sweeping through the curtains in a massive ball gown of white satin.
She dropped into a stage-depth curtsey as the audience cheered and applauded and the rest of the cast and company entered behind her. Each of the feature acts took their own bows, then arranged themselves behind their star artiste. The audience quieted at last, and Ariel said into the amplification field, “Thank you all so much for coming tonight to The Land of Fantasy! It’s always our joy and pleasure to perform for you, but doubly so on special nights, such as this.”
The above was posted by SmugMug on the Flickr Blog on December 19. You can read the entire letter on their site. It outlines a situation that I’ve wondered about for some time — how Flickr pays its bills to pay for what is probably thousands of servers and thousands … if not millions … of terabytes of storage. Clearly, they’ve been having problems, and they’re still having problems, even after being purchased by SmugMug. Nobody can afford to pour water out a flagging-open window forever.
Some fast (and not necessarily authoritative) thoughts —
The concern is not absolutely immediate, but it’s something we users of Flickr need to be aware of, especially if we have photos on the service that we haven’t backed up in recent years. As I’m seeing it, SmugMug has a few options open to them:
Let Flickr eventually go under
Find outside backing
Sell the service to another company
You may see other options I don’t.
We also have choices we can make. The ones I can see at the moment are:
Buy a Pro subscription
Locate to another service — many did when SmugMug changed Flickr’s terms of service, moving to Instagram
Moving our galleries to our own blog spaces
I advocate none of these in particular. I do point out that, whatever choice you as an individual make, you have to do it with your bank account and future purchases in mind. We’re each probably going to end up paying for a service at some point, no matter where we end up if Flickr goes under. We can’t keep on getting something for nothing. (That’s one reason why I eventually bought a premium subscription to Second Life.)
What you decide to do is up to you. I’m probably, since I have a Pro account, going to offer exhibit space to my blog-sisters and -brother again, as I was doing a year or so ago, as I know they can’t or won’t buy a Pro account for various reasons. That’s not a guarantee for the future, though, and we’ll need to discuss this together at some point.
There’s one thing all of us should do, though: back up any photos we don’t have copies of, if we want to save our archive of work. I’m fortunate; I’ve kept an archive of everything since the start of 2013 on an outboard terabyte drive. (Frankly, most of my earlier stuff was trash by current equipment standards, anyway.) The others are so recent (or do so little work in world) that they have their entire archive already safe. Your mileage may vary on what you want to keep; if you do want to preserve all the work you’ve done, whether Flickr survives or not, I’d urge you to get down to it.
And now, as my professors said on the exam papers at the end of an essay question or two, “Discuss.”
Second Life® with Harper, Conan, Jem, Diana and Morgan
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