Hair Fair ‘08
Finally found some time to update my blog again. I have a few stories on my backlog to write. I’ll start with the Hair Fair. I assume you’re bored of reading about Lag Fest ‘08 since it’s covered on every little hellhole, but whatever.
I ended up spending less than I feared, but more than I hoped for. In other words, there were more decent male hairstyles than I expected, but not as many as I wished for. I ended up with buying 5 styles and keeping one of the freebies.
My first job when I got to Hair Fair was to locate Dernier Cri and rush for them. Sadly, they only seemed to have new styles for women *sobs*. So a day later, after the worst lag moved away, I returned and decided to travel through the place on a box. Yes, apparently flying through the fair on a box is the best way to view it. Lag is minimal this way compared to just walking or flying. It’s even easier if you find someone else willing to ‘drive’.
From left to right, I’m wearing Roni by Discord Designs; Tyler by Mirada; Normal Hair (freebie) and Noble Asymmetric by Find Ash; Dylan by PixelDust.
The style shown in the top left picture is a glowing fantasy hairstyle by booN which I decided to buy as a fatpack. The blaze version is my favourite as it looks most fiery, but it comes in many coloured versions.
Now that’s dealt with I’ll discuss the fair itself. It looks pretty good. The Mayan theme looks quite fine – and it seems they didn’t use many high-lag prims like toruses etc for the theme itself, so that’s fine. Also, by adding the demos to OnRez a day in advance they did share the load a bit I assume (though they did succeed in crashing that website). Those are the good things.
On the negative side, it seems many fair booths were built by people who had to overcompensate for something. HUGE sculpties (which never rezzed so resulted in the entire booth being covered by a red blob), entire safari landscapes and so on. When the rest of the place is lag-free it’s nice to see those things. But in a place as laggy as this, come on. Yes, you were allotted 400 prims. So what? That doesn’t mean you have to use them all if your vendors only use half that amount. Novocane and Bewitched were probably the biggest sinners, though definitely not the only ones.
However, lag isn’t the fault of the vendors alone. The fair organisers could (and should) have stepped in when they saw people decorating their booths like this, so it’s hardly fair to blame it all on some store owner who might not be used to working with a sim that’s this laggy.
Also, the place was full of retards with their AOs/Mystitools/1000 prim attachments attached. Deprim or GTFO! If you really want to look good while visiting the Fair, wait until the crowd has disappeared. I’m sure that the final days of the fair will be less crowded, and then you can run around through the sims all on your own with as many fucking attachments as you want.
Let’s hope for next year they’ll switch to a system more alike that of the Creators Stamp Rally which distributes the lag evenly throughout the grid (and which I’ll write about tomorrow I hope). It has been shown for several years now that Second Life is not stable enough for huge centralised fairs such as the Hair Fair without crashing sims or insane lag.
Leave a Reply