“Oh, awesome, I have a prepaid gift card! I can buy L$ with this! … Wait, what? I can’t? Seriously? WHAT THE FISH.”

Yeah, LL and Visa apparently don’t get along. With some help from a support ticket and some tinkering on my end, I’ve found a way to use your gift card with SL.

This requires you to have an Xstreet account, so you might want to get that whatsit sorted out before you try this.
You also need a PayPal, but we’ll go over that soon.

I. Go to the Paypal website. If you have an account already, awesome. If not, click “Sign Up”, click “Personal”, and fill out the required information.

II. Navigate to the “Add a Credit Card” screen. Fill out the required information with the information from your card – select Visa, then enter the card number, security number, and any other information you may be prompted for.

III. At the next screen, to verify your credit card, you have to enter a code that’ll appear on your credit card statement. Yes, it will make a deduction of about $2. Don’t worry, it gets returned to you. The cool thing here is, you don’t have to wait a few days for it, just around 5 to 10 minutes. So, hang out for a while, make a snack, watch some Youtube, whatever. Once you’re done waiting, log into the Vanilla Visa site with your security code and card number.

IV. The transaction history should have a PayPal entry. Somewhere within that entry, you shall find your code. If I recall correctly, it was similar to this format: 7484PAYPAL. What you do is copy the numbers from that and paste them into the box in PayPal asking for the verification code. If you got the right numbers, it will verify your card and you’ll be able to make purchases with it. Booyah, we’re getting somewhere!

V. Go to Xstreet, and log in. Once you’re in, you should see a box on the upper left side of your screen that has your SLL and USD balances on them. Click “Deposit” underneath the USD balance.

VI. You should come to a page with a text box asking you how much you’d like to deposit. On a normal PayPal account, you can deposit a minimum of $5, and I recommend trying out just that $5 to start with until you’re sure this will work for you, just as a safety measure. Click “Start Deposit”, and you’ll be taken to PayPal. Log in and continue from there.

VII. Now you have $5 (or however much you’ve deposited) in your Xstreet account. Awesome. The next screen is a bit annoying to get to – Click your SLL balance (The actual number, even if it’s 0), click My Currency Exchange Orders, then click Buy SLL. If you know a quicker way to this page, then you’re way ahead of me. Leave a comment, man! :]

VIII. The next page might look really out there if you haven’t used it before. It’s actually fairly simple to use. Type in the number of L$ you think you can buy for the amount of money you put in (or the amount you want to spend). A preview amount will automatically be generated and shown to you. Adjust the amount of L$ you wish to buy as needed and/or desired. Once you’re happy with your choice, click Place Order. [[Round up a penny when you're tinkering with the price, though. If you have $5 and try to buy exactly $5 of L$, it might not work because it might need an extra penny or so.]]

IX. If all went well with your order, you should have the L$ in your Xstreet account, shown next to SLL Balance. If not, go back to the Buy SLL screen and see if the order was filled or not (It will display this info below the Place Order button). If it did, try again.

X. Click “Withdraw” under your SLL Balance. Enter in whatever amount of your L$ you wish to withdraw to yourself in-world, then click “OK”. Depending on how laggy the internet tubes are being, you will get your L$ within anywhere from 1 to 15 minutes. If it takes more than 30 minutes to get your L$ to you, something’s gone wrong – file a ticket with Xstreet and things will get sorted out.

Tada! All done. :]

Hope I helped y’all out. If you notice anything wrong here or have anything to add, leave a comment!

Honestly, I’ve mostly just been hanging out with a couple of friends, testing furries, plotting to take over the world. That kinda thing. Nothing special.

Nothing really blog-worthy, in my opinion.

Maybe sometime in the future, I’ll go around some sims I’ve found interesting and show a few snapshots. Maybe I’ll blog the creation of a new outfit.  Who knows.

~

But Blau! We’re so interested in what you’ve been up to! Won’t you fill us in a little bit!?

Fine.

A friend and I have a skybox together. That’s where I’ve been spending a good portion of my time. When I’m not there, there’s a good chance I’m in a sandbox, exploding something or whatever.

I have been doing a bit of exploring, though, partly through mapping my friends to see where they hang out (*is not a stalker*), and partly through the Showcase.

I don’t understand why people don’t use the Showcase. It’s got a fair lot of neat places to check out. Then again, I’ve heard of people not using Search in general, so… *shrug* I dunno.

I’ve always used Search. Granted, there wasn’t much of a need for it on the Teen Grid unless you were looking up a person, seeing as most of the places you wanted to get to you could simply memorize where they were, and given that the Showcase was broken (showing MG places, showing places a few years old, so on)…

~

In other news, I tried the 2.0 viewer today, and if you follow me on Twitter or Plurk, you know by now that I don’t really like it.

The UI was too big of a jump for me. Simply put, anyway. I’m sure that if I had the patience to sit down and re-learn everything I’ve spent the last year and a half mastering it wouldn’t be so bad, but I honestly don’t really want to do that. I want to work with something I’m comfortable with.

Small insults to injury – parcel music wouldn’t turn off and the inventory was pretty much obliterated.

Huge insults to injury – Uninstalling it removed my Emerald preferences and about 3 months worth of chat logs.

I’m sure there are some awesome features that’d have me completely sold if I’d just try it out more (The thing that lets you set bits of your body to invisible is very appealing to me. No more invisiprims for digilegs and handpaws!), but honestly… I’m assuming 2.0 is open-source. Once Emerald integrates the 2.0 features, I’ll start using it.

Until then, I’m going to just enjoy Emerald Viewer.

If you guys like the Wingless freebie furries floating around, you’re gonna like Main Grid… There are a few furries not included in the freebie pack (Reindeer, v1 wolves, a kangaroo, etc), and Chimera Industries (Wingless + Ephyu) is still going with four species at current – dingo, mammalian dragon, ghost dog, and ghost pony.

S.L.A.R.F. has some lovely reviews of the dingo and mammalian dragon, but they’re currently offline for maintenance.

At the moment, I have a ghost dog and a mammalian dragon. Here’s a photo of those, out of the box, no mods, along with a reindeer…

Click me to see the Flickr page... Lavender mammalian dragon, biscotti reindeer, and black ghost dog

Also, there -IS- a pink v2 wolf, it’s just not on the Teen Grid. Shame, it’s a nice av.

My point here is – the Wingless avs on TG are MG avs – kinda old, but still very nice quality, especially the wolves.

Here’s the Chimera Industries site, if you’d like to poke around: http://chimeraindustries.net/home.php

I hope to see you guys again soon!

That aside…

This expands to those things that bury you in landmarks (THUMBTACKS!! OUCH.), notecards, freebies, group requests, whatever you can think of, when you first TP into a place. I find this really… irritating, for lack of a stronger word. I mean, I just TP’d into a place, everything is rezzing, and my entire screen is being violated with blue boxes. That just adds onto the lag I get… But, eh, it gives me something to do while I’m waiting for things to load, I guess.

Just… Rather than bury people (in tacks and pieces of paper, no less), why not just have things like this: A group inviter you click, a notecard giver if there’s a new release, a freebie giver that randomly picks someone. Things like that. That way people aren’t eaten with blue boxes when they enter a region.

I was hanging out on my alt a week or so ago, trying to find him some decent freebie/cheap clothes (which, weirdly enough, is far easier on the TG; most of the freebie stuff I saw on this little excursion I had already seen on the TG, unsurprisingly)… Anyway, I teleported to a freebie place, some place in a skybox. I landed on a group of people, but as is with a lot of people I’ve noticed so far, they didn’t seem to mind… They were probably lagged out of their mind like I was when things were loading. To cut part out of this story, I got eaten with landmarks, denied them all, then realized I needed one to get to the male clothing area (which was on another sim completely). Once that teleport finished, I found myself being eaten with landmarks and stuff again. I mean…

To put things short:
Two places in a row.
6+ dialogs I had to kill.
Then I TPd to another few places and got the same deal, only 2-3 dialogs.
WHAT IS THE POINT OF THIS TORTURE?? I’m going to need a tetanus shot for all my tack punctures and papercuts, man.

I swear, when I get unlazy, I’m going to make a ginormous clickable sign that says “CLICK HERE TO BE MAULED BY THUMBTACKS”.

By the way – Spell Check, since when is ‘ginormous’ a word but ‘clickable’ isn’t? Or is this just one of my lingo things?

Prices changed.

The furries I’ve looked at on the Main Grid have a generally consistent price range – 800 to 1000L. Seaplanes, other vehicles, tools — I’ve not even begun to look at those yet, but some prefab houses I’ve seen go for far more than any TG resident could afford.

It’s a bit shocking at first. It’s a bit weird to value things. I still find myself being rather cheap – For me, 300L is still a lot of money. I find it hard to part with 800 for a new av or 400 for a rave outfit. I suppose this is something I’ll get used to with time, but for now…

It’s odd.

Just a quick blog post on something I was thinking about.

Yes, it is possible to run multiple SL viewers – two ways to enable this.

1. On the Second Life (or whatever viewer you run) shortcut in your desktop, right-click -> Properties. Add -multiple to the end of the Target box, hit OK. Using this shortcut you can open multiple viewers.

2. In Debug Settings, accessed through the Advanced Menu, go to “AllowMultipleViewers” and set it to True.

Now, if your computer can barely run SL as it is, I don’t recommend doing this unless you’re fairly sure your computer won’t die from it. It’s a bit hard on the computer to run two SL viewers at once, hah.

It’s pretty neat running two viewers at once. You can test things out on your alt, see how they look from another person’s point of view, explore multiple places at once, so on and so forth. You could do like I do and use your alt for target practice, but that’s up to you.

Now, like I said, this is rather taxing on your computer. Also, when you exit out of one viewer, it kills some of the sound on the other viewer (I don’t know if this is just a problem that likes me for some reason, or if other people have it too, but it’s a nuisance). Also, don’t forget that you have two viewers running… heheh.

I personally enjoy running two viewers at once, though this laptop can’t handle it. I like having two accounts on if I’m, say, backing up my inventory, and need to push a lot of Accept buttons on the other account… that type of thing. It can be very useful, but like I said, and I stress this, it can eat your computer if it’s not capable of handling such a load.

From memory, here are the tools and gadgets I’ve got from the TG:

Multitools–
-Fur.Tool 3
-NK Tool 2 (I think)
-Multigadget
-Avander
-XVirus Silver
-GlitchTEC Multitool (Incomplete)
-<YOURNAME> Multitool Home Edition (it takes your last name; mine would be the <RASCON> Multitool)
-Gizmo Eclipse

Multitools I do not own, but know of–
-HAKD Multitool
-Doug Tool
There are others, but I can’t remember them right now.

There were other tools other than multitools. We had several radars, a few sim lag meters, a jump tool, flight enhancers, that type of thing. It was mostly simple things, though – simple inworld enhancements. One gadget I really liked was a translation HUD – automatically translated text between two language sets of your choice.

The thing is, most of the tools I’ve listed have the same features – flight enhancement, platform/workspace rezzer, height jumping / z-moving, warping, trapping, a calculator, a radar, so on. Some had a few neat features, like the XVirus’ weather feature (showing current local weather on the HUD) and ‘weaponry’ (the Hounds, push ring, air support, etc), and the <YOURNAME> tool’s sim-wide radar and translation support (auto-translation available on the Ultimate edition, if I recall correctly), but overall, these tools had the same general features with a few nifty extras tossed in.

I’ve only been on the Main Grid for about four days or so, and I’m already pretty impressed with the array of gadgets and tools available, even from just browsing Xstreet. I’ve only gotten freebie tools so far, and I haven’t gotten any multitools (I’ve stopped wearing my Furtool even, for the time being, as I use Replace Outfit a lot more than I used to now), but still – I’m eager to try out more tools as they become available to me.

One tool I got today is Tweetciever – the free version from Xstreet for the time being, but I’m excited with this already. I can only update my status from inworld – can’t send SLurls, view friends or messages, so on so forth yet, but I’m still very excited and so on with this neat little tool. Being able to tweet from inworld – and eventually, being able to post SLurls – shall be very useful and time-saving.

While not a tool on its own, the eye color + pupil dilation adjustment HUD included with the Uchi Felis avatar, more clearly outlined here, is a pretty amazing customization HUD for me – I’m used to only being able to pick one eye color from a set list of colors, and if I wanted a different color, I’d have to alt-cam inside my head and set it myself. With this tool, I can set the iris and pupil to be different colors, using RGB and HSB sliders (HSB, hue saturation brightness, fyi), and I can easily adjust the pupil dilation with a simple slider movement.

Again – I’ve only been on the Main Grid for a short while, but I’m already pretty impressed with the array of tools available for purchase and trial.

I didn’t really review any of the TG tools here – if anybody is curious, I can review a few of them more in-depth in another post. Just comment and let me know which tool you’re interested in hearing more about, I’ll be glad to explain it further.

Today was my first day on the Main Grid. Technically I should have transferred on the 10th, but I didn’t log in until today (late 11th). I was very, very nervous at first… I’m going into an extremely large world, where I know almost nobody. I’m leaving everything I know behind.

Then I thought…

Cool.

I logged in. Expected it to kick me off as it ran the transfer program, or however they do things, but instead, I got a screen that said “Please wait as we transfer your avatar to a new estate” or something along those lines. Hmm, interesting.
I ended up in an infohub – not sure which infohub exactly, but an infohub nonetheless… not as crowded as I would have thought, but still more crowded than most anyplace on the Teen Grid.
I had a shock moment though. I didn’t rez, at all, period, apart from my shape and clothes. I flew up as fast as I could (my jump tool exploding all along the way), and quickly and furiously attempted to re-attach my outfit.

Once all that was sorted out (about two minutes; things had to load, I suppose), and after adjusting my draw distance down to a comfortable 48 meters, I met up with my friend, also a MG newbie, and we went off to explore.

My first stop: Kinzart Kreetures, in Okarthel. I was very impressed with even my first teleport. The area I landed in was lovely, with the vendors I was searching for nearby, and some friendly furries hanging about them.  However, I couldn’t find the avatar I was searching for… After browsing about a bit through the avatars and noting their prices, I popped over to Skittle Beans to visit the Tokushi vendors.
These are definite love items for me, no matter how weird that sounds – I love the Tokushi avatars. I couldn’t find what I was looking for here either, so, after more browsing and price-noting, it was off to Curious to view their items. I was surprised, there weren’t as many avatars as I thought at this place, but they were still lovely. I picked up the Curious Inc. Felis freebie, some eyes, and chatted a bit with some other furries browsing the avatars. While Curious had avatars close to what I was searching for (which was a rabbit avatar, by the way, since I seem to fail at mentioning that), I headed over to a Mutation Industries vendor in Zoe.

I wasn’t planning on spending over 800L$ on an avatar, but I fell in love with the MI Fox. I bought the OnyxBlack Male fox (which was a mistake; I was going to buy the female one, but hey, I love the av nonetheless), and I’m loving it. It’s very well made, very well textured, the HUD is very nice, and it comes with its own, special-made outfit. Lovely find.

My friend and I spent some time putting together our new avatars (He put together a Wingless horse, I put together the MI fox), then I skittered about some different sims searching for new AOs, or at least animations to put in my Client AO.

My search for these animations led me to Grendel’s Children in Avaria Tor. I knew Grendel’s Children made the free Dragonlet avatar I so loved on the Teen Grid, so I was rather excited, and with good reason – I bought several avatars here with the remaining money I had, including the Fae, Ether Felus, Pelagic Seadragons, and Avarian Black Wolf. I’m very impressed… and, I love feral avatars. These are also far cheaper than I had imagined. Blau was in heaven here. The sim was lagging pretty massively, unfortunately, so I had to leave for the time being to try on my new avatars.

I was on my own for a short while after this, as my friend had to leave the computer for a while, so I figured I’d look for something that interests me – collars. I looked up OpenCollar and found a vendor in an occult/wicca shop (I can’t remember exactly), skittered over, and got several collars for myself, along with the Sub AO and the Owner HUD. While I was at this shop, I got some dollarbie boxes – free dances, toys, pets, the like. My friend returned, and we did a few crazy dances while we browsed.

Next, it was time to find some freebie places for me and my friend. Our first stop was the FabFree shop in Car Wash, which struck me as surprisingly small. I was expecting a rather large area of freebies, but I was wrong  – these freebies, while it was a rather small shop, were very nice, very good quality. We picked up a few freebies, I modified my AO, and it was time to go to the next shop – YadNi’s Junkyard in Leda. This was the size freebie area I was looking for originally, but it was also rather… different. It was very, very large, but there didn’t seem to be very much here. I must come back some other time and look more closely at these places… we picked up a few freebie boxes here, and left for another sim, searching more for AOs and animations.

Our search landed us in Vista Animations. The prices here shocked me a bit – 2100 for an AO, 150 for one animation – so I didn’t look very much… I’m running a bit low on money, heehee. The animations, from the people trying them on and the ones I’ve seen before, look lovely, though – I’ll definitely be back.

We browsed about there for a while, then it was me on my lonesome again – 1:10 in the morning now. I headed off to find a rez zone so I could unpack some freebie boxes for myself, and spent the next hour or so sorting through what I already had versus what I wanted to keep, so on so forth.

While I’d love to spend more time on SL tonight, I must head off… it’s 2:30 in the morning for me, and I need my sleep, hehe. I’m very eager to come back in-world tomorrow.

Oh – my views on the Main Grid so far?

Very lovely. I haven’t had a chance to converse much, but things are already a fair lot better than the Teen Grid. There are more places to explore, more things to buy, higher quality things… it’s like an entirely different world.

Ciao for now~