Chameleonic Possessions

Somehow, my drawdown plan to get out of the daily drudgery of “playing” the Digital Farm Systems inworld game involves buying a few selected items. I’m selective about what I want: good quality mesh, well designed, that works with a traditional early 20th century aesthetic.

On the other hand, I discovered with dismay that I had 17 unsold “0 day” bulls at the community market where I’m trying to offload DFS content. So I discounted them heavily, made a joke about “start a herd,” and announced in the various groups. Within moments, all 17 were sold. So lesson learned, clever marketing can work even in a glutted market.

So I discounted a few more things, and have an idea of how to proceed.

A lot of the stuff I’m queueing up to “cook down” into scripted lunchboxes requires dairy products, which means virtual cows (which don’t give milk until the 9th day, grr). And cows require bulls, which also can’t “perform” until they’re 9 days old. That’s a lot of care/feeding. Bulls and most other male animals give fertilizer, required for food crops and produce crops. For now I’m sticking to cattle, as the virtual recipes for other meat animals are more complicated and require ingredients like salt – which is expensive and time consuming to acquire. Also, the feed for other animals is complex and requires resource/time heavy ingredients.

Cows and bulls: simple. But they keep having babies – so selling them off instead of continuing to raise them is key. Eventually I’ll cook them all down, and I could even sell off “milk cows” and “stud bulls” for decent prices. I have tons of fertilizer, and I could buy milk in bulk easily.

MEANWHILE, all of this energy expended thinking about virtual livestock is blocking me from working on new hats or trying to make something for the Dinkies market. I have ZERO interest in making/rigging stuff for human avatars.

I’m inspired by my fellow Steelheader Zaida Gearbox; she created beautiful decor and homes but is pulling back from selling on Marketplace. More of her items can be found in New Babbage. It’s across from the Academy, right on the trolley line. Look for the big Caspervend vendor on the second floor, it’s searchable.

I bought several of her cute shotgun cottages and some “Hoosier” style decor items for prettification of my mainland farm in Tweddle along the roadside (next to the new GTFO airport).

More to come; have to get going in RL for now.

The progress report on reorganizing my bloated and discombobulated #SecondLife inventory is… it’s in progress.

At least I’ve been able to enjoy going to events and seeing friends, or chatting in my old groups. I also figured out the Star Mesh Body a bit better and made one new outfit (from stuff I had in folders from last year) that fits well. I have a lot of outfit folders based on the Ruth Too/2.0 mesh avatar that I’ll be able to convert to the SMB mesh avatar. Now I just have to figure out how to use the fancy head that has facial expression animations, but make it look like “me.” The built-in SMB “skins” are not as nice to me as the older skins I had that I’m comfortable with.

This image is from last January or so, when I started to set up a “Secret Garden Platform Sale” to get rid of the #DigitalFarmingSystem inventory that I had grown, bought, raised, or crafted over about 5 years. That inventory is “no copy” status, meaning that I can sell or give it to someone, but once it’s out of my inventory, it’s gone. I’d rather sell than delete it all, because I spent way too much time and virtual moneys acquiring it. It’s like an addiction, too.

I got frustrated in January and hesitated to pull the trigger on announcing the sale in the various inworld DFS groups, and then real life got more interesting and I wasn’t logging in. Sometime in March, I missed a deadline for paying the yearly subscription for one of my alts, which meant that after a while, some of my inworld holdings expired and the stuff sitting on them were returned to my inventory. I’m not re-subscribing any of my alts, and only Dhughan and I will remain as “payment on file” for holding virtual land. Blah, blah blah! Are your eyes glazed over yet?

Since getting this fast, capable new computer, I wanted to resume my social stuff in Second Life, dump the DFS stuff because playing that farming game is a little like indentured servitude; to get essentials like virtual fertilizer, you have to log in at least every other day to “care” for your virtual poo-producing animals, or they “die.” You can pick them up and put them in inventory indefinitely but they have no more than 20 or 30 days to “live” once rezzed out, depending on the species. Lots of people still seem to enjoy this farming game, and there’s a lively inworld economy of resellers, auctions, and person-to-person trading and selling going on. I’m just ready to find other things to do with my time inworld.

Right now, my spouse and in-house tech support Rock Fall is transferring files from old computer to new computer, so my progress on getting the sale ready is on hold. Somehow, this “getting rid of DFS inventory” consists of making more of it into a more marketable state; think turning raw materials into pantry essentials. I’m then re-packaging it for bulk sales, and that’s where the Caspervend outage comes into play. I can’t load the sales boxes into the inworld server until this outage is resolved, and I can’t rez out vendors or update them – all their display “screens” are greyed out. That’s when I checked on the Caspervend group and found people repeating the “system is down, don’t do anything” message.

Meanwhile, the stuff that was returned to my inventory is a jumbled, coalesced mess that’s got random names because a “collection” of items returned together are given the name of the last object selected. So I’ve been rezzing out stuff from the “lost and found” folder to check what’s in the collection, and re-taking it as individual objects. Fortunately, this latest version of Firestorm’s third party viewer has this nifty “take as collection OR take as individual objects) option.

All this is of absolutely no interest to anyone except me, it’s just to help me keep track of what’s been done and what’s yet to be done

I’ll need to create an announcement for the sale to be posted in the DFS groups – I think I started to do that in January before I got busy.

I’ve got the “Secret Garden” platform recreated and ready to put down vendors. Depending on my “objects budget” I will be rezzing out the various plants and trees and seeds and fields; people like to see stuff they’re buying to make sure it’s working or as advertised.

I started “cooking” some raw materials down into what I consider the pantry essentials” category for one server. I have a ton of virtual livestock; the ones that are “zero days old” have slightly more value than the aged ones, except for “milk cows” that have to be a third of their lifespan old before they give virtual milk… ridiculous addiction, this game. I’ll have a ton of “meats” that aren’t worth much, but this early in the month the cooking addicts might buy some in bulk. Prices will be at or below market value for sure.

All the cooking tools, farming tools, and other sellable items will be on the block, too. Just waiting for Dear Spouse to finish installing stuff on the new computer so that I can get back to working on the inventory, and waiting for Casper Warden’s tech people to get the server issue fixed for setting vendors up.