So glow is another tool that enables those whose graphics cards permit to create objects with a little more ambience or prominence than light might allow.

However, like everything, it tends to be a little overused…abused even.

Now I can understand when people are messing with glow settings and they do not have the hardware or the settings to see it, that they might think the glow is a tiny little bit and just end up leaving it on full. This often stays on until someone who can see it screeches out in agony at their temporary loss of eyesight and the aforementioned non-glow enabled individual rectifies the matter. But what is with people trying to deliberately blind the population of Second Life™? Ok, so by all means a little glow around your store entrance, or in the frames of special offer items and so on can be a great effect. But when it gets to ludicrous extremes it can be incredibly annoying.

Just a hint for store owners who think they need to have ALL the light from the sun flickering at their store entrance just to get people in: If we cannot see the entrance, we are unlikely to go there. Would you like an example? You’re getting one anyway!

When I saw this outside a store I was actually a little afraid to go in. Once my retinas recovered from the short term damage and my eyes stopped bleeding, I walked a little closer. At one stage I was half tempted to drop down onto my knees and beg for forgiveness for 27 years of sinning, but then I realised it was not God. An alien being coming down to kidnap me, maybe? No, it wasn’t that either. Some bizarre effect of a solar eclipse somewhere? Again no. Just excessive glow.

I have adopted a “don’t stare directly at it” approach with glow now. But honestly, if you went shopping in real life, walked into a clothing store and the sales assistant said, ‘Ok, before you can shop here I have to blind you? Would you mind if I stuck this fork in your eyes?’ would you hang around? I wouldn’t. And I won’t buy from places who insist on blinding me before I’m even allowed to look at the products.

For all the people out there who do this, let me ask one thing…

Categories: Random Thoughts and Musings

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 30th, 2008 at 11:43 am and is filed under Random Thoughts and Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.