second life growth? seems to be on a vastly diff track than 3 years ago. come over to the dark side, your feet might bend funny, but i much prefer that to being bent over by LL

Of course, this suits well for idiots like the one flooding above me.

But for normal people, estate-level Windlight is mandatory.

If you can’t cope with it or your computer can’t, get the hell out of here.

You couldn’t opt out. You couldn’t dumb down. You couldn’t completely turn everything off. It wasn’t about atmospheric sliders.

It is not subjective. It’s just that you have fancier and more expensive computers in your work office and don’t feel what this is about because it’s not your experience, that’s all.

Jose, I will reiterate this to you once again: hogwash.

It is not about older PCs. If you just bought a brand-new PC right before Windlight, how is it that you have an “older PC”? You don’t.

What you mean is possibly a different thing, culturally. “Older PCs” are in fact the machines that come in the stores finally, after tekkies have graduated from them many generations behind with their hand-built versions? Perhaps that it? But I don’t see how that could be true with any huge lag of time. We’re talking a year here.

And let me state it for the 100th time: if the Lindens put up a spec on their website for a graphics card that works with their software — supposedly — and it STOPS WORKING after you go to the expense and trouble of buying it BECAUSE OF WINDLIGHT being put in, whose to blame there? Arrogant heedless tekkies like Doug Linden? Or? The average user who has merely followed what the website told him to buy?!

Once again, Windlight needed to be OPTIONAL OPTIONAL OPTIONAL AND THAT MEANS NOT JUST ABOUT THE SLIDERS. Good God, I certainly know how to turn off atmospheric shaders and such and that made no difference. My entire panel was dumbed down to the absolute zero possible level and that made no difference: I moved like I was in mud. This was a fact for many of us, and that was wrong and I won’t forgive the Lindens for that, ever. Ever.

I am as creative as they come. I have done many creative things in SL. You have no idea. Just because I myself don’t tinker with the controls of a laggy and annoying Windlight and hire others or use the results of their creativity and rearrange it doesn’t mean I’m not creativity.

Ease of use is about creating a comfort zone where in fact creativity can take place for more than just a few snotty people. It’s making a space where in fact not merely mass culture takes place, but actual deep possibilities for creativity.

Nobody can be creative when they are jammed to a halt and put in the dark because of arrogant SOBs who wanted to force Windlight on a population with the lower end of the specs indicated on the website because that was what was in the friggin stores.

There is nothing “esoteric” about the completely suburban California cliches you find in the presets of Windlight with their pirate skies and blood rivers out of war games. Ridiculous. And getting more creative with it is such a chore of sliding and fiddling that few will bother.

Honestly, the idea that people in the masses or at an amateur level cannot appreciate aesthetic scenes and operate controls to make them so just defies credibility. The people of Second Life prove that daily. That scares you, doesn’t it? It unseats your power.

Windlight’s “change” wasn’t change of some fabulous progressive sort that wiped out only backward evil FUD-filled idiots with 236 computers. No. It was an arrogant clunky nuisance (and still is) imposed on people against their will with incredible techno hubris.

WINDLIGHT CHANGED THE VERY FEATURES OF THE WORLD REGARDLESS OF HOW YOUR SLIDERS WERE SET.

You simply never saw how the world *was* in 2004 or 2005 to get my point.

The sun, the sunsets, the horizons — these were all rendered in a certain way.

EVEN BEFORE the Lindens put in Windlight, they *changed the sun*. It went from being a small orange and red ball to being a big drippy fried egg. The horizons changed and no longer made flat stripes. This wasn’t just something to do with whether you put draw on or environmental settings — the entire backdrop of the world CHANGED FOR SURE. All you have to do is compare and contrast screenshots taken in both eras *without any special Windlight settings* to see what I mean.
And WHEN that happened, it became impossible to move. Already BEFORE the deployment of Windlight, these new graphic styles taxed computers that in fact were on spec and were not old (I had one, I should know).

So stop lecturing and hectoring me with the obvious I already know about how you adjust slides here and there and try to allow some factual information in here — the world was changed to accommodate Windlight; the specs suddenly went out of date on graphic cards over night.