It's true. I've been more salty and jaded than usual and it's no big secret that I'm pretty much done with Second Life. With all the bullying that was going on, my Wendy Starfall persona and creator handle have been destroyed, at least to the outside world.

Most stuff you find about me is extremely negative or just hateful and made up, usually with people creating fake accounts with the SL names of my friends, to hate on me in comment sections of blogs and whatever social networking. Even if there was great support from Fire Flower members, it's all been locked away in our cozy bubble on Second Life, and the only reason why I'm still here is because the Fire Flower community has been frankly amazing.

​I think Fire Flower is one of the best places left on Second Life, thanks to its many nice members.

I said that I was going to continue to maintain Peanut 9 and I very much intend to keep my word. When something breaks I'll fix it and there is enough on my todo list to keep me busy for quite a while when making a robust final version of the P9. However, when I look at the state of Second Life - the excessive geometry, the disproportional resolutions in textures, the lack of administrative tools, and the resulting laggy mess and strife among residents, then I am not sure if it is wise to innovate here much longer.

Second Life is no longer the sweet illusion and welcoming canvas it used to be, at least not for me.

​It was possible for others to destroy what I had built it in over 6 years, within only a couple months. It was possible to turn something genuinely positive that was shared within the community, into a disputed, negative and confusing mess, and no matter how hard I tried to disambiguate P9 from my old OC, every update warms this issue up again, as if I'm not allowed to move on. This is hell.

I believe what we are experiencing now is the sheer frustration of some supporters of the OpenCollar group, when putting into perspective what they probably expected to happen after the coup. It was supposed to put me in my place, but caused the opposite. It made me even more rebellious and obsessive, when I grimly recreated the wheel, and raised a community of more than 12,000 active individuals, gushing new features into the collar.

Peanut 9 empowered artists with little shops and role play groups to make their own collars once again, without being dependent on other people's help, which is an issue for the parties who supported the coup, who are only interested in making as much profit as possible, with as little competition as possible.

If you follow Second Life's economy, you probably noticed that there are fewer and fewer recognizable brands. This is so very bad. There can only be life and growth if there is enough variety, because variety causes healthy competition, which makes new and cool things show up.

In my case there is no healthy competition at all, innovation isn't responded by different innovation, but with destructiveness. In order to compete with me, all you need to do, is bomb my releases with negativity, attack me on a personal level, cause strife among guests at Arcadia and grief the sim. Which is exactly what has been happening.

There is no point to come up with new things. So when I talk about maintaining Peanut 9, it's not a nice and fun task for me. I have to make it more robust in aspect to how Second Life is now, and that means making it as responsive as possible under the extreme lag that is caused by all kind of other content. In order to do that, I have to make it architecturally a completely new thing, while keeping it as recognizable as possible on the surface, so there is no melodrama every update.

P9 is now half-way there.

The scripts that were written completely new are snappier and simply work under most lag situations. This is not my sole achievement anyway, it's Otto's engineering and fine-tuning that makes it possible to use features like "strippy" in a fully lagged down playground or residential sim. Strippy and other new features work well, but scripts that are still ticking the old way will be slow af.

That's how you end up with stuff like the new folders. I can easily justify having a fixed and flat structure with predefined categories because I know how bad the lag is now on Second life, and how futile it is trying to use legacy features under such conditions. I have to make sure that my product doesn't add to this lag, while making it work under the lag. This comes with lots of compromises and with new limits, such as the maximum of 54 folders per category.

I want a collar that is robust and that works. That's my simpleton philosophy on it. I don't care if I can rock 500 folders in my #RLV directory if my owner can't make use of it. The users who are just discovering #RLV folders, which is thanks to the changes in this feature type, are happy because they finally can make heads and tails of it. Structure and limits are not always a bad thing, especially when taking into consideration that a sim has only finite resources, and with all the AOs polling for states like crazy, and all those angel, demon and vampire combat HUDs spraying packets around like mushroom spores, I want the collars on people's necks unaffected and robust.

I want that when one day, when future civilizations discover the Aditi grid, and excavate a P9 collar, that the little beast will still be running in pristine condition, so that our grand-grand-grand-grand-children can say: "So that is what people used to do in the old age. Nerdgasm over virtual dog collar gadgets. I'm sure they had lots of fun!"

​Rant over.

Hi.. I said that I wouldn't release another major update this year but then I just couldn't keep my hands away, and had to do another. I'm usually better at this and normally really enjoy writing blog posts, but I'm not well and struggling to write this down at all. I hope it explains everything anyway.

We made a new anim script that let's users cycle through poses back and forth, as well as save the pose that was played last. You are now able to use a command <prefix> play that recalls the last pose that was played, or just press the play symbol in the new anims menu.

There is also a new options called "Heels" that will lock your ankle joints in place. This is great if you are wearing tip-toe foot shapes a lot or high heels, and unlike ankle lock HUDs, this one doesn't lag.

Couple animations are now back by default, with a new nice hug by Grey Mars, and the old foot kiss and petting sequence. There are just these three couple animation choices, but they are good.

I removed the AnimLock option, it mostly caused pain and frustration to new users, so gone with it.

Capture is now based on my old "Kidnap" plugin, that we are using in the Heartcore collar. I'm solving some stuff a lot more efficiently, so there was space for another mode and three options.

You are now able to turn off the "capture notifies" right in the app menu, and you can also set to be automatically leashed once captured, and have your collar locked. In Heartcore the locking part happens anyway because of Heartcore's stricter style, so you won't find that as an option there.

Thew new "Bumpy" mode will get the collar wearer captured by the next avatar who bumps into them. That sounds risky, and really is, during bumpy play you can't turn the risky option off. You can finally play catch now! Careful using this mode when teleporting to sims with busy landing zones!!

I was getting really annoyed with memory limitations in the open source variation of this script. It was written dumbly in many places to make it easier for others to modify (which never happened), so I scrapped it and we made it completely new.

There is now space for more outfits, the force-sit logic is more reliable and less messy when searching for spots to sit the avi on nearby objects, and re-seating is more robust too. The Restrictions no longer have the Dazzle option (because people were abusing it to grief others), and instead I added an option to block opening and reading Notecards.

The old folders script had to go. It was so confusing and cumbersome for new and old users alike, I felt it was just using up space since the majority of the user-base started adapting outfits. The new folders script offers an easy to understand and simple to use method to wear, lock and remove folders. It requires a new directory inside of #RLV called "Stuff", and finally you no longer need annoying "+" and other symbols in front of your folders. Please read the manual page to learn more.

The updater is much more powerful than it was before. You can now update everything with the Wendy's Updater, even Heartcore and all the premium and legacy apps, granted that older versions are already installed on the collar that is updated.

Creators who are using the Peanut Kit can use Wendy's Updater to bring their whole item stock up to speed, and a delivery for the refreshed Peanut Kit went out already a few days ago to give all creators a head start before the big rush for updates.

Things have been hard this year, and I really gave my very best to disambiguate P9 from the so called "official OpenCollar" crowd. I added a ton of new features, wrote things completely new from scratch together with Otto, and made everything else fresh down to the name of the product.

Sadly this was to no avail, the bullying is still escalating each time we release updates, and I feel Linden Lab doesn't seem to react to the abuse reports and flagging most of the time, so I gave up.

​Until not so long ago I was still thinking that I was doing fine, but yesterday I was looking at photos from Christmas last year and couldn't recognize myself anymore.

I lost so much weight, I'm barely getting any sleep, I get messages from random people who I've never spoken to, telling me that I have no talent, that it is obvious why I have no friends, and that I deserve bad things happening to me, always mentioning the OpenCollar group owner reset.

In over a year later this didn't stop or calm down. When normally developers get a break after completing an extremely stressful release management, I have to deal with harassment every time.

I've been quietly preparing a large road map, dev notes and drafts so others can carry on my work.

I'm not saying that I will quit, but realistically I don't think that my body and psyche can handle it much longer. Friends I trust said that I rather not talk about this on my blog because it would give these guys another win, but I think that this has to be said, and I'm saying it from my heart.

​I'm just human and my strength isn't limitless.

When this stuff with OC went down last year, the only thing where I felt having had a purpose in my life was taken away from me in an instant, and I don't think anyone could possibly understand what that feels like after having dedicated themselves to something like this for almost a decade.

Life ain't fair, I get that. I just wished I had responded more firmly last year, rather than trying to make a better product. We have all the success, the user numbers, everything is fine, but I don't feel it. Every encouragement I get, is outweighed by 10 kicks in the mouth from Hate-Alt Number 2729.

​Second Life became such a toxic place for me, where anyone can make unlimited copies of themselves, and hurt people without having to fear any consequences or repercussions. To me SL became an environment where theft succeeds over hard work, and where lies and propaganda are more powerful than truth and love.

Maybe I will be ending up with even more problems when I write all this. I cause too much trouble, I always say how it is, instead of being "professional", and that is catching up with me.

​I believe that when someone bullies you on some other social platform, it's attacking "who you are to the outside world"... on Second Life though, what is getting hurt is the version of you that you have invented yourself, the version that is your intimate self, the way you wish to be, and express yourself freely. When people bully you on SL, they are doing this to your soul.

I'm sorry for all this drama...

Sincerely,
Wendy Starfall