SL Homestyle

With Valentines day slowly approaching and feeling the need to make something brand new, it is with great pleasure we proudly present our new Lovers Picnic Set.

Unlike most picnic sets in SL this one is completely sculpted and only 44 prims!!.  Dine the night away with your loved one under the stars and watch the sky with the beautiful "Star Gaze" animation.  Or cuddle up close and kiss, choose from 9 animations in the xpose menu.

Many people asked whether we sell our handcuffs in our store. It is terrible to keep having to say no, but we don't really like selling things that don't do anything, so we've decided to actually make it work!



The Cuff comes with 4 animations that you can cycle through by clicking on them. As well, we have included both a male and female version for that perfect fit. Whats more?! We have also included a bonus pair of cuffs with pink fluff!!



Looking forward to bringing more cool stuff to you guys, thank you for all your support :DD

Since launching our store Instinct we have been inundated with kind comments from customers and bloggers regarding the quality of our work.  It seems that most people were really impressed with the quality and type of animation we provided in the beds at Instinct.

To that end we thought it necessary to make these animations, and others we are creating, available to purchase as just that, animations LOL.  So it is with great pleasure we bring to you, Instinct Animations!!!

The animations section can be found at our Instinct store in Kisping, after tping in walk to the bottom of the store and take a left...hey presto!!

Here is a little taster of the animations you can find there...

So, since we are on a ranting spree, might as well keep going! Following up on the unfortunate event of people reselling our freebies, we wanted to talk to the people at Xstreet SL as well as Apez, where the unauthorized resellers are using as a primary channel to distribute our products. However, the experience has been disappointing on both occasions.

For XstreetSL, they wouldn't even bother to look at your complaint - I thought I was getting an automatic response by some robot because I keep getting the same reply. If you file a complaint, their employees must have been trained to give out this default template of copyright policy.

Now the policy doesn't fit my situation and I don't want to file a DMCA, nor do I know if it will even work in the country I live in. Upon asking for more help and information, we only got fed with the same template again. Eventually we got to one person and she insisted that they are not going to bother until we provide the information they need - which is your RL identity and your RL address.

WTF, you say?

Yes thats right, when someone is screwing with you, XstreetSL's solution is to obtain your RL identity. But heres the real kicker - upon further request to look at our situation, they replied that

"As standard policy we send the complaint to the person the complaint is against. They would need the real life information to be able to properly contest if the complaint is false"

Translation:
Not only will we refuse to listen to you, we are going to give YOUR RL information to the person who might be doing harm to you and potentially, your family.

There goes some great policy. You might ask "BUT BUT BUT, what about MY needs to contest properly...?". Well, they stopped replying after that... I believe the robot on the XstreetSL offices went "does not compute, does not compute..." and proceeded to explode.

Now, what about Apez? I've actually managed to talk to Cenji of Apez about the issue involved and I really respect his perspective and his right to do so, as well as taking the length to help us out. But at the end, the people who are reselling our products are running free... Correction - not free, they are actually selling our free give away and making a profit. They are being rewarded, or even encouraged to do the same to other people as well.

Now the justification for Cenji's resolution is that he follows the first sale doctrine in RL, which dictates that items people obtained either free or purchased can be resold without any permissions from the original creator. He further proposed that it is his responsibility to be balanced and not abuse the rights of the creators as well as the resellers, as it would be an abuse of power on his part.

Translation:
"You guys sort it out, I don't care whos doing the right thing or not, I wont be sued so as long as I get paid, I don't care. You guys work out who will survive, its unfortunate but you are on your own mate"

All fair enough, but you know what? Lets ask us this question, if this is the just thing to do, if this is the right thing to do, will either of these parties be proud enough to announce to the public, and state their policies right in front of everyone, to tell everyone unapologetically that this is their policy? Are these guys willing to take it to the public and tell all their legitimate customers that this is what they are in for? That is content creator's rights (or the lack of) when something like this happens to them? That they are going to turn the other way and say "sorry buddy, you are on your own, but we are happy to take your money anyway". If there is any hesitation or doubt when you ask yourself that question, you know that your honest self is telling you - hey, maybe I AM wrong!

What is there to gain from rewarding resellers of freebie items? What is so balanced about equal rights between creators who actually spend the time and money and love to give vs those who just leech off others? Does it really take a genius to work this out? This is not a symbiotic relationship, it is a parasitic relationship, even predatory. Do you want parasites? or do you like being preyed upon? Are we going to throw our hands in the air and adopt a hands off approach - oh hey its not illegal, therefore we should not do anything to reward the givers and discourage the takers who don't give?

The lesson is -
If I am a community menace, it will totally be my right, and perfectly legal and fair, to take freebies and resell them. If I want to force someone I don't like to reveal their RL information, all I have to do is to infringe on their copyright, and screw with their business, and they will be screwed anyway, unless they give me their RL information, which means I can screw with them even more in RL too!

Hmmm, some great protection we have here, and some real balanced power we have with these services we are using. Lets all turn a blind eye on it and not let anyone know, let it go quiet and have a few casualties. Oh BTW, better YOU be the casualty than us they say!

We implemented a lucky chair in our Instinct store some months ago now. Over recent weeks it has become apparent however, that a lot of people are merely coming to the store to wait for their letter to come up. That is perfectly fine, after all what is a lucky chair for if not to attract people to your store and share some of your goodies with the SL community.



Yesterday it was brought to our attention that a group has been formed telling people about what letter has been called on the chair at Instinct. I do worry sometimes that people are scamming our good nature and there is some kind of rip off going on. I wonder if it does more harm than good to our store to have this lucky chair. You know I don't want to ramble here but lately it just feels like you try to do something nice and people take take take or just throw it back in your face....why? Ghost hunts, lucky chairs etc we don't mind doing nice things for the community, but at the end of the day does it do us any good or are we just being naive?

I am always being reminded the ol'wisdom that no good deed ever goes unpunished. Oh yes, sometimes I wonder if it pays to do good at all and often, the answer is - you WILL PAY for doing good!

Recently we remembered the time when we were noobs, where we have received so much from the established SLers in the form of freebies, free lindens and lucky chairs. So we thought we ought to carry the torch and give back to the community like those before us. Man, did we get reminded how - no good deed every goes unpunished.

So the first thing we did was we had a lucky chair which gave away a random amount of money. It took less than a week before someone came in with a drone of avatars with names covering the whole alphabet, they didn't even bother to use a different surname! So this person came in with 26 avatars, grabbing one price after another. When I noticed it thousands of lindens was already taken - Ouch.

Then a few weeks ago at Halloween, we participated in a grid wide ghost buster's hunt organized by Vain mag. In this special event, we get to give away a special prize and we thought right, people are going to get a whole lot of stuff like pumpkins, bats, failed or old crap that didnt make it to the shelves and those god awful Tee shirts. So why not be generous and give out something nice? - Big mistake!!

So, instead of just doing what a normal person would do, some asshole(s) just stood there and took 50, 60 copies of our items and started reselling them!!! It was terribly annoying because we couldn't punish those other people who were legitimate and terminate our special prize... while at the same time, if we continue, you are totally opened up for people to screw with you! Yes, thats right I said "YOU", the SL resident. These guys actually managed to sell some of our beds while those people could have gotten them for free from us directly!

This is just terribly frustrating, and its turning me into one of those cynics.

It's such a shame that people feel the need to do such things because in the long run all they are doing is totally ruining it for other residents. We want to be able to provide cool prizes and freebies, but why should we when people totally take advantage and try to make a profit off the back of it?

Although I see nothing wrong with someone legitimately purchasing something from one of our stores, using it, getting bored of it, and then reselling it in a yard sale lets say. I totally DO see something wrong with someone taking something free and then charging other people for it!!!!!!

So the question is do we stop giving out prizes and free stuff and let these asshole(s) win, or do we just turn a blind eye to it and accept it as what people do? I suppose the lesson to be learnt is never give out a freebie with transfer perms on!

Right now I'm so angry about it I want to scream!!

So everyone anticipated that Apple was going to release new laptops a month or so ago for its special event. Turns out it was new iPods, which was exciting but not as exciting as new notebooks. Well today, Apple announced their new lines of notebooks and they look awesome. The specs indicates that the new MBP's are even more powerful than my G5 with way more capabilities. Since my G5 is aged, had gone through a few surgeries, have a tendency to overheat and simply getting a little sluggish... I needed a new computer, and a mobile one to top that. So this is perfect.

The new LED monitor makes it a perfect match too as that is the current display set up I have - A 24" main and a 15" second monitor. Of course, all with the benefit of less chunky stuff floating around. It is a little unfortunate about the clockspeed. I have a thing for whole numbers and Apple is shipping 3GHz iMacs and MacPros. For some reason the MBP is capped at 2.8GHz atm. Maybe the next generation...