Zero Linden Newbie Experiment Part 2

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Weltenville/162/112/37

This is an SLURL link to the BPHWD Orientation Center in Weltenville.  You can use that link to teleport directly to that place in Second Life.  I'm linking it because there's a small room upstairs with freebies (including a free AO, the main reason I visited this place) but more importantly, there's a series of billboards that explain a lot of things in Second Life -- how to move, how to pan your camera about, how to fly, how skin and clothing and hair and Animation Overriders work.  Many of the things that Second Life FAILS to tell new characters that is REALLY HELPFUL, some of which I was trying to explain in my post yesterday (which -- if any brand new Second Life player ever actually discovers this blog and learns something from it I'll be very surprised, but anyway!)

So there!  Go there, read, learn!

The next thing I learned was how to post a picture to my profile without paying to upload anything (doing it for free).  Perspective is important -- your photos are probably taken the dimensions of your screen, much wider than they are tall. Mine are saved to my hard drive as .jpg images 1600 x 838 for example.  But the box for your profile picture is square, so what I did was take several good closeup photos and then cropped one using Irfanview (any image viewer/manipulator can work, but Irfanview is free and very awesome).  I cropped it to pretty close to even dimensions in both directions, and I was ready to upload.

Freebies:  be aware that a lot of freebies are junky.  If you're offered a box with 100 different skins... most of them aren't going to be worth your time to even look at.  Don't be afraid to try things out, but be ruthless about deleting anything you don't want or need.  Most importantly, high class shops often have some sort of freebie or hunt freebie available that is almost guaranteed to be of higher quality than nearly anything you'll find at a freebie place.  The difference is, freebie places are usually collections of stuff that the various random creators didn't care for and released to the wild, while a freebie at a shop is a specific gift from a specific, talented creator who wants to see you come back and buy something.

One thing I made sure to do today:  I logged into my main account Mint Rainbow and visited several of the money trees and donated 10 Linden or 20 Linden.  With ShinobuEden, I'd taken 8 Linden from the tree in Marienplatz, so I visited there and donated 20 Linden.  I'd also taken 1 Linden from Yadni's Junkyard, so I donated 10 Linden there, then also visited two of the trees that had been empty when I visited them on ShinobuEden, and I donated 10 Linden to each.  It's not that I couldn't just give money directly to my other account and call it good -- I want to see what a brand new avatar can manage on their own.  But I don't really want to steal money from actual newbie accounts, so a little donation to several Money Trees was in order.  ^_^

Still working my way through the free things I've picked up, but this dress from Purple Moon and hair from EMO-tions looks pretty good.