Welcome to Second Life, newbie! This Newbie No-No’s series is intended to be a light-hearted look at the don’ts of newbiedom in-world. Hopefully, the major don’ts are pretty obvious (don’t be a jerk, don’t grief, don’t be rude… well, all of those boil down to “don’t be a jerk”, really) but the lesser don’ts can be a bit of a minefield and it can be hard for a newbie to understand the various social mores in-world.

To that end, we begin with bling.

Bling is possibly one of the biggest things that marks out a noob in Second Life, and that’s mainly down to the plethora of old, blinging items in freebie warehouses. While you can get the gentle ‘plink’ of subtle bling, the vast majority of bling items are an assault on the eyeballs. For every subtly glimmering diamond there is a pair of 2007 boots with a furiously-fast bling script in every single prim, and for every gentle glint at a female avatar’s corsage there is a ‘gangsta’ or ‘playa’ belt buckle that makes a newbie male look as though his crotch is throwing its own private little lightning storm (and no, boys; that’s not as interesting as you might think it sounds!)

In short: bling is Not Good. It’s all very well your using the /1 bling off command in chat that turns the sparklies off for you, but it still shows for everyone else (especially the older, poorly-scripted bling). Bling is a particle script, and while it’s possible for other residents to set their viewers to de-render attached particles, it’s something that many don’t like to do (we need to know, you see, if anything we are wearing contains bling, because sometimes creators don’t mention that it does).

Far from giving the effect of expensive diamonds, bling only gives a cheap headache. If your items are modifiable, then create a new script in your inventory, delete the text already in it, call it scrubber script, head to my Useful Scripts Page and paste the scrubber script text into it. Save the script, then edit your items. Check each prim (Edit Linked Parts) and whenever you see a bling script, drag the scrubber script in with it. Once you’ve done that, you can delete both scripts.

Another method you can try (if checking each prim is going to be a pain, which it is in high-prim footwear and jewellery) is to edit the item, then head into the Tools menu and check ‘Set scripts to not running in selection’. Again, this will only work for modifiable items.

Banish the bling!