By Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor
Bellisseria
This isn't a very coherent post; I started writing it in August, and then stopped because I wanted to do more research on the subject and editing of the piece. But I'm not going to be doing that now and I'm not going to even put sub-titles in to help people scan it. I'm just going to post it on my long journey through the vicissitudes of the Mainland and call it a day. I have further thoughts on "Nature as Conceived by Eric Linden" (a very old topic, not really relevant any more); "Nature as Conceived by Moles in Bellisseria" (a new, and not terribly interesting topic) and "Nature as Conceived by Mainland Groups" - about which I have the most thoughts and expressions.
In the weeks and months since "NatureCon" in August 2022 described below, one big Mainland preservation group's leader seemed to drop out of major SL activity and dropped an activity sim (Bryce Sun); her group was merged into The Nature Collective (TNC) although she herself didn't appear to join it. (It's indicative that I can't even quite recall the name of her group now, although it wasn't the same of either of my groups which are called SL Public Land Preserve and Mainland Appreciation Society.) I asked her about this; she basically repeated only the scant information and didn't explain why she was in the new group, which is, of course, her business; read her typically jaded SL-type bromides and remarks on her profile.
I joined the TNC on one (or was it two?) of my accounts but the constant frenzy of announcement of activities -- tours, hunts, games, gallery openings -- is off-putting so I mute it. Most of all, like other major groups in SL, it helps sell people's reputations and influence in world, if it doesn't sell actual wares in businesses; some of it is actually about Appreciation of Nature. There's a sweaty feeling to it, somehow -- a kind of inchoate fear around all this activity -- fear of missing out, fear of being found not busy enough, fear of being alone on a sim with only one's thoughts. And perhaps most of all, it's simply fear of not getting the tier paid -- because without scampering around like one-armed paper hanger or Papa Carlo or pick-a-metaphor, you cannot get tier paid on the Mainland. Believe me, I know.
I never go to these activities -- that is, I've gone to a few, and found them over-produced, over-narrated, overstuffed with content. "Nature" to me isn't yet another heaping helpful of Skye trees and water and cliffs and Hayabusa trees on a mountainside, where we struggle painfully uphill behind somebody dressed in an old-fashioned Ranger's outfit, with numerous signs, rules, and unspoken social norms dotting the path. That is, I can kind of understand why all of this is necessary if you want to direct people around your fantasized version of a mountain or forest or caves, with various meaningful sites like "Devil's Pool" or "Angel's Cliff" or whatever. Sure. I especially thought it was fun on one tour, of Mars Scamon's big mountainside forest, when we fell, face-first, into a deep void and then bounced around crazily because it was on some kind of "admin group only" setting lol.
A certain number of people have fun going around these over-stuffed and over-produced locales every week -- every day! -- with hunts, celebrations, swag available in them. And that's fine. Lord knows, we need "things to do" in our virtual world. I even go on them at times -- and Amb. Hopalong rhapsodizes about his long train ride with that grumpy official at the BBB, and his incredibly dolorous and prolonged boat ride to the NatureCon fairgrounds from the Belli fairgrounds -- with his playlist stuck on the complete works of MuJuice, and other people's playlists competing in the chat on various automated programs over the sound of a boat motor and water lapping on the shore.
Awake, innocent creature!
Consciousness is a dream
Forgive the servant
The atlantises dropped the sky
Farewell, I can't go on
It's not wine, it's blood
***
Draft August 2022
Read Inara Pey's happy and pithy little blog post on this phenom if you don't like long meandering critical thought.
Here's her typically very mild and chaste knock on NatureCon -- though knock it is, and for that we're grateful, I suppose -- if Inara posts a very mild and chaste knock on anything, especially Linden code, you know it's got to be pretty bad:
It’s clear that considerable thought has gone into NatureCon 2022; so much so that drawing attention to personal niggles might seem a little unfair. However, whilst wandering, both Imp and I couldn’t help but feel while undoubtedly useful in some places, the boardwalks within the setting were in others a trifle over-used; this is a nature reserve after all, so why clutter so much of the landscape with (what felt like in places to be acres of) wooden planking? And while not exclusively affiliated with the Mainland, given their love of all things aquatic and for undersea life and nature, it would have been nice to visit the (otherwise bland) Mermaid’s Grotto and find information on Second Life’s mer communities.
I wish I credibly belonged to a language group that could use the term "whilst". Sigh.
I guess Inara didn't notice the giant concrete building in the middle from Bay City, the concrete urban non-nature sim; the display booths about garbage cans or cars; the huge, winding railroad, for God's sake, and the disco dance floor and DJ booth -- because she was so busy getting all upset about the boardwalks getting up in her grill. LOL. And the absence of Mermaids. My God. There were no mermaids!
I always chuckle to myself at all these tech bros who name their conferences with the short term "con" without any seeming awareness of the undertow of "deception" implied. AccessCon anyone? Where "human rights" are only about access and privacy and never about an independent judiciary or the right to face your accuser on these big platforms.
Second Life's "NatureCon" definitely has that undertow, but certainly leader Soull Starlight, who frankly acknowledged that she took the term from tech conferences (with their nerdy booths but no longer any "booth babes!") didn't care to elaborate on the "undertow". The Lindens' "Lab Gab" have lavished an hour-long Strawberry-hosted talk show on the event, which already has 1,600+ views and 81 "likes," which is a lot for any SL video, even Linden made.
When I first saw announcements of the event on the forums and on a complex and lavish website (which I can't find now), I figured it was mainly benign. It was clearly a typical effort of the Bellisseria Bureaucratic Bureaucracy, an RP group blessed by the Lindens to be our "player government" in the "game" -- usually something universally loathed and resisted by player bases worldwide, but we're "not a game" and so here we all are, with a group whose office is not only three times the prims of the regular Linden homes, with two rez areas and wide open spaces on its own homestead (!), but whose members include two very special friends of Patch Linden, VP of Product Operations, whose marriage was featured at the opening of a much-anticipated community center in the elf-themed area called "Fantasseria" -- which features a giant statue of Patch himself and with a beloved "mole," as the Linden Department of Public Works call their workers.
(Sadly, no longer in actual Mole fursuits, unlike the earlier days when they were run by Michael Linden, an older man "let go" when apparently of no use in the new dispensation, who dressed up in a mole avatar with a perky little fez that invoked not the Ottoman Empire so much as the costumes of British gentleman explorers in the 1900s who also wore Oriental smoking gowns.)
These events at root are ostensibly to "encourage exploration of the Mainland" -- the vast contiguous original continent of SL which has a free land market of sorts and freedom of building on the lots which engendered creativity along with the "tragedy of the commons" in the form of ugly, intrusive builds, griefing and chaotic behaviour, and zillions of "ad farms," spinning billboards situated not just roadside by sometimes on a pristine waterfront or the middle of a hill "just because I can" -- and put to sale at exorbitant prices to encourage you to "buy back the view". Not to mention spam-pods appearing every 15 minutes without any riders, and giant boxes on acres of concrete in a game called GTFO.
"Ewww, Mainland!" as the groom in the happy couple mentioned above, a Mr. Riot Hax, was heard to proclaim at the opening of one of the Embassies of the BBB on said Mainland, wherein they anoint their friends to be "ambassadors to the Mainland".
These "embassies" are designed to serve as evangelists of the Trumansville built by the Moles dubbed "Bellisseria" (and related Fantasseria, Containerville, Sakurasseria, Stiltsville, as they are nick-named, etc.) mainly by having parties with their friends at visible Mainland locations where their various businesses and reputational enhancement projects can essentially get free advertising. They are supposed to sell premium accounts. I'm not sure they do, but then, you don't need a special program to get thousands of people to buy the premium account and get the Linden home with it where the buildings are nice to look at, the scenery, while repetitive, is predictable, and griefing is rare. Best of all, no commerce is allowed -- a cherished ideal of the technocommunist founders and their legion of shopping fans who want the commerce to be somewhere else where they avidly spend, not next door.
I'm a big critic of the BBB, and was once booted from their "grand opening" of yet another self-serving "embassy" with their friends named "ambassadors" -- embassies that have zero traffic in the next week, and whose ambassadors are scarcely seen at any actual Mainland events (or even fabulous island nature builds like "This Mortal Coil" by the Spark Project) -- with the exception of the tireless Yukiko who has amazing stamina for carting laggy busloads of avatars with varying degrees of computer graphics capacity around to Mainland sites that take 20 minutes to rez in, so overstuffed are they with "nature" decor.
The two sims rented for the occasion (or given graciously for free? That would be interesting to know) had very ambitious builds on the level of a Fantasy Faire, although not with their harmony and beauty; it's a kind of hodge-podge perhaps deliberately made to look "homey" and like a campgrounds. I don't know whether a somewhat disgruntled visitor to our own SL Public Land Preserve headquarters at Botany's Grove in Carlisle actually paid a compliment saying it "looked like a Texas fish camp". But you won't find Texas fish camps at NatureCon, it's basically a showcase for Bellisseria groups and businesses. I'm all for commerce, even if it is banned in this suburbia, and in fact what is more important for these folks is the reputational enhancement that comes with community manager titles -- awarded by themselves, and echoed repetitively by Lindens, although they aren't elected or acclaimed as such.
Community managers, although they don't really manage any communities but those that are on their land they tier, and most people don't even concede to have them manage their land tiered by themselves -- which is why this honorific is basically...strange...in Second Life.
To be sure, Soull Starlight is a highly talented person with a business (or hobby offsetting costs) of luxury high-priced rentals at $150/day (the same would be $55-$105/week in my rentals) that are truly fabulous. She runs various non-profit projects as well that are very welcome to the world of SL.
A number of Black historical museums have appeared now and then, sometimes in Black History Month in February, but usually they struggle with keeping open and paying the tier on an island. MEROE is one project that has lived and thrived by doing an obvious thing some people find unaesthetic and I can only heartily endorse as a survival model: having home rentals and community hangouts alongside the exhibits.
Soull had the stamina and ingenuity to put a reconstruction of a Black village on a smaller parcel on the Mainland, in the heart of what otherwise might have been merely a somewhat pedestrian recreation of something that seems like a cross between Scotland and Wales and Plymouth, MA and Schenectady, NY. Eatonville -- as this museum is called (and featured on the Linden "Black Culture" page -- has real voices speaking and real stories, and you can wend your way through an experience that does help you to envision the hard lives and persevering spirit of African American slaves in the US. It's an excellent example of just what you can do on a relatively small parcel on Mainland without the huge cost and maintenance of an entire private island.
Many times I've seen the popular book The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd recommended but never took out the very dog-eared copy from our public library until I heard and saw it enacted in Soull's installation. (I actually think it's a book more about dysfunctional white folks than noble Black struggles but then, they go together, the one causing the other.) Thus the site isn't just a jewel in the Lindens' crown, or a great destination within Corsica South Coast to encourage visitors to have Things to Do, but a real accomplishment within the annals of SL Mainland history, and I don't say that lightly.
So Soull is my neighbour in the former Campbell Coast, now dubbed Corsica South Coast after a tumultuous period like all Mainland communities, always and forever. The original owners had to step down due to RL illness and challenges and made an unfortunate choice of land baron as a new tier-helper and then as outright owner and then the wresting of the community away from this unscrupulous bottom-feeder (whose past deeds and deeds on other sims were known to older residents like me but about whom this crew seemed unaware) took awhile.
Yes, Winning Witte was a known quantity to me for years, with nasty practices like ad farming, fire-saling to stay on the top of the land-for-sale list, donut-holing, chopping, etc. -- all documented personally on my land in the sims Kuhnke (bought from him) and earlier on Adsciti. Pansophical, his alt feigning to be more ethereal and fabulous and female but still engaging in bottom-feeding land practices (just look at the map in Corsica or hop around other sims) -- is also a phenomenon that I thought would be gone from SL by now and isn't, what can you do.
It ended in tears, with him doing things like setting the easements he had created around home parcels to low prices, along with the roads, first to somewhat decent prices to get people to buy them so they wouldn't turn into ad farms, then fire-saling them, then abandoning them when all else failed, leaving them to their fate. To try to help salvage this ugly situation, I and others bought some land and put in a donated road and some rentals. There is a very hearty crew trying to keep this area going and for reasons I don't understand as I am peripheral to the managers and their politics, Soull has stepped down even though she remains an active member.
I briefly cooperated with her on fixing up the road and I'll note here also that she has done a wonderful thing for this area, and personally for the section of it I own, with my tenants, by buying a corner lot that Pansophical, Winning's alt, put to sale, along with others, at a ridiculous price in the millions. I believe she waited until it was clear he needed to tier down and then made him an offer, and she was highly unlikely to have paid any price like the one to which it was set. She put in a bar and grill which is very nicely decorated so that drivers along the Corsica highway, which is really the pride of the Lindens in terms of their roads (some continents don't have them at all) can stop and become familiar with all the many sites and activities within Corsica South Coast (which, as a tiny sub-set, includes my rentals, along with those of a few other companies).
In addition, Soull had rentals next to mine on several sims and I had always thought relations were cordial. If anything, I worried that her gorgeously decorated high-end rentals attracting vacationers roughing it on the Mainland with many pampering features, were going to put my little shacks to shame -- and not for the first time LOL. I literally had a shack next to her lavishly and densely decorated B&B and I thought it would never rent. But of course it did, and hers did not, and she abandoned the land ultimately. That's how Mainland works. Others probably do better. People don't want over-stufffed, heavily-decorated rentals on the Mainland, and can't afford them -- but those who can of course want all those amenities and features. There is a niche constituency for luxury rentals; they aren't my customers. There should be room for all on the Mainland; we should be for diversity of styles and incomes and inclusivity -- but that's exactly what there was not with NatureCon.
I supply this detail that otherwise isn't worth mentioning in the scheme of Mainland adventures and misadventures, all by way of describing how I was ghosted out of NatureCon:
I approached Soull three or four times, knowing she was busy, sending her a notecard, and simply got completely ignored. On purpose, deliberately. I could see she was online because she is in my Mainland Appreciation Society (probably not for long). I simply asked her if I could have a 25-prim booth in this elaborately planned and deployed NatureCon. I had no pretensions of wishing to be among the organizers -- I wouldn't want to be in a BBB/Linden thing with all that entails and with very, very different ideas about what constitutes "Nature" -- as it turns out. I just wanted a booth, among 100 other booths, not even the level of the lowest booth at Fantasy Faire, where I have participated for 3 years, to put up a sign and a few freebies. The end.
And I got ghosted. She simply ignored me. While in the past, she might not answer about a road or tree or whatever, if I didn't write to the correct account, Soull is her main account for this project and I could have gotten at least a polite blow-off -- they had obviously pre-cooked the entire thing long before it was announced. The fact that there was no open Googledocs type form where you could sign up, as you can for Mieville merchants' events, Fantasy Faire, Home & Garden Expo and other types of events, which I have been in a number of times, lets you know that this is a wholly-owned BBB/LPDW affair and no non-fans and non "positive people" in their definition need apply.
I don't think the Lindens should ever sponsor or preside over such affairs; they should be open to apply, like Shop 'N Hop is.
Next, I also write 3 times, with notecards, to Yukiko Yeshto, the other "community manager" and NatureCon organizer where I know there is no love lost. Indicative was her forums thread that announced NatureCon without explaining how you could join it -- because it was pre-cooked. In another thread I'd have to hunt for, Yukiko wasn't happy when I pointed out the favouritism and FICing going on in Bellisseria on the forums -- I mean honestly, guys, you get to have your wedding at the opening of a Linden community center?! When, by taking the first step, I empowered other people to complain about Bellisseria favouritism which they knew about in deep detail, more than I -- and enough so that the Mole mods apparently didn't dare close the thread as they realized it wasn't just me but deep popular sentiment -- Yukiko chastised me and told me that I needed to wait patiently with my projects to be noticed some day and get "glittered" by the Moles, as she put it.
I'm still waiting LOL.
Well, I can do without Mole glitter, thank you very much, and I just do my own projects. I don't want to be part of theirs, like I don't want to be in the inner core of Fantasy Faire, about which I have a certain critique. I merely want to be one in a mass of booths (and maybe not even that in the future). Yukiko, when she saw I was once invited to a managerial meeting of Corsica Coast where they were discussing projects and activities briefly sucked up to me when it seemed like I might be "accepted in polite company" and told me that I could put out ghost stories at a camp fire site I offered to build for a sort of roving Chatauqua of events. That I already had such a thing in my own rentals and didn't have the space in Corsica Coast -- and wouldn't buy any more abandoned land there for lots of reasons -- was lost on her.
(Of course, no one can think of that phrase of RL Chatauqua, NY, where I have been, which is the kind of wealthy progressive nature and culture enclave that our virtual Bellisserians and Corsica Coasters aspire to, without realizing that our liberalism in NYS wasn't protected properly and we let an Iranian fanatic seriously injure writer Salman Rushdie as he was reading there. Words fail.)
We had nothing even approximating the elevation of certain resident personalities (and their businesses) as we have now in Bellisseria in the glorious old days of SL -- I dare say we frankly had a more deserving and talented elite then, actually. Because when I use the term "business," they are nothing like the actual top designers and scripters of SL past or present. Although of course every media article about SL featured LL-pitched residents like Amy Weber or Cubey Terra -- an issue I complained about as getting repetitive and not representative on the forums, and for which I was banned -- as a Linden explained to me privately -- not because of any actual violation of the TOS -- the moderation was lighter in those days but there were no "personal attacks" merely listing all the articles featuring the same people and urging diversification. I suppose you could say that it wasn't exactly going with the Linden program to characterize Amiee Weber's name as "like a cheerleaders" with the extra "e' and the "i" no doubt having a little heart drawn in with a Magic Marker pen -- but it was pretty mild stuff.
They are awfully thin-skinned, however.
"You have to understand, she makes Linden women feel beautiful," and oldbie explained to me in brutally cynical terms about Aimee's fangirlz among the Lindens, and her popularity on the grid with flimsy lingerie and little flouncy tennis skirts. It was the kind of comment I wouldn't even come up with, devoted as I am to women's rights and rejecting "lookism". But there it is. "Touching Amy's Panties," was the provocative and disgusting headline written by a male journalist in real life about Aimee and her virtual store -- about which she beamed in gratitude with all right-thinkers -- yet I was the one accused of misogyny (!) because I said figuratively we should cut through Aimee's panties and get to the point of how the economy was really working.
My friend with the acidic remark about dumpy Linden employees went to the heart of the matter, because the story of Linden Lab and the guinea pigs in their virtual world known as "residents" is essentially "You look good/we look good/we look good/you look good" -- which is why the TOS allows them to scoop up any art they find helps sell their product and even not credit the person, as I once discovered at a tech con in New York City featuring a talk by the late Joe Linden with a giant reproduction of my very own tenant EmeraldEver Kline's lovely mermaid avatar. (Yes, we do mermaids at my rentals and don't wait for NatureCon.)
"Couldn't you at least put her avatar's name in small print on the poster?" I said to him in distress. To his credit, he understood; he was one of the "grown-up Lindens" but it was probably Bub Linden (long gone), beloved of the fan group "Bub's Underwear Models" (!) who did the poster. Yes, the Lindens may be PC and woke as all hell but they do have a lot of tech bros in their midst.
To be sure, Yukiko has beautifully designed jewelry and accessories in an MP business and Soull of course has her lovely rentals -- so in the Linden pantheon, they do count -- they're just not at the top and more patted on the head as "community managers."
After NatureCon, I went to sample one of Soull's rentals next to mine, when I took back some land I had abandoned, which was first requested by a neighbour who bought land which I had sold to a friend for cheap -- he is good at thinking of copy like "Builder's Challenge!" to appeal to the vanity of some SL landscapers to sell steep/nothing/toxic wasteland in Heterocera. I put a Flying Arts rickshaw shack and some KW popsickles out along with 8f8's Bali dock, which is very versatile and I worried that it looked too shabby next to Soull's delightful paradise. I rented it and hung out and looked over at my build to see if it were intruding upon her rental bliss. She has this "Infinity Pool" where you can swim around and look out at the Linden Sea that really does feel like a real "Infinity Pool". There is a rare Apple Fall cappuccino delivery tray and other nice appointments. Of course, she can always put her hedges up higher.
I thought after I paid $150 for an afternoon drinking virtual wine by her "Infinity Pool" she might IM me and say, "Sorry I didn't get to your note in time about TNC." Nope, nothing. I fully expected that neither of them are ever going to say: "We couldn't give you a booth, because Abnor Mole in particular really dislikes you, because you challenged him publicly on the forums over their unfinished roads." These pronouncements of his like a post "Road Finished" are such a perplexity given that they have all this abandoned land all over and could build out those ridiculous areas that have giant, jokey teleport billboards instead of roads -- in an afternoon. Hell, give me the perms and I'll do it for you.
(PS, this is what a NYC pol electioneering in what seemed like a zone closer than 200 yards from the early polling station told me recently when I complained about the terribly cracked -- cratered, really -- sidewalks where I fell and sprained my ankle - an injury that literally took months to heal due to my immune disease. He said he would come and pour the concrete himself when I said I filed complaints repeatedly with 311 for some years. Such sidewalks are NOT the city's responsibility, but the private entity that owns the land next to them, in this case the beleaguered, COVID-stricken Hunter College. Even so...)
Or perhaps Soull or Yukiko could have said:, "You know, our Silent Partner here is Feorie Friman who really detests you and thinks you have 'spewed vitriol' about her on the forums, so we can't possibly give you a booth." Well, yeah, I stood up and barked when she claimed the Lindens had encouraged residents' groups to rebuild and repurpose their old builds that some people thought served no purpose and were outdated.
Feorie wasn't in Strawberry's line-up because the Moles have never "glittered" her stamp game competing with their glittered one, which I continue to praise as a more popular and accessible stamp game than the BBB/LPDW game (which admits they stole the idea from me LOL). I've paled now completely on FF's stamp game and her sweatily ambitious subway-in-the-sky system called OMT featuring her paid ads but more on that in another post.
I think really, they had no excuse and weren't brave enough simply to tell me to my face. I thought briefly of just expelling Soull from my group but then why be exclusive the way they are? They have their need to be needed and recognized and I don't. I want to think out loud about these issues but I don't need recognition. My project is the oldest one of its kind of the grid, and actually likely the largest, although I haven't counted it up lately. Certainly the Campion Forest is very large and of course much more beautifully built out and promoted than anything I could make, or volunteers who occasionally build a site can make.
But I don't want overstuffed Skye cliffs with that bird-drop granite texture (do you guys know there's a brown rock texture even of Skye's you could put over those ugly granite cliffs of his, and that Campion even figured that out so you should?). I don't want a sea of Windswept Skye trees and all the other predictable trees even though I have them all myself. I now put out Balderdash giant Underhill trees just because they are so different and wonderfully wispy looking instead of planar as even very good trees are. Of course I am utterly devoted to Mr. Fundati and I think even the NatureCon glitterati could appreciate him -- I didn't notice if they used them, likely because generally, they aren't the 60L weekend sale types.
Every day, the sites in the SL Public Land Preserve are used. I don't keep visitor trackers as they seem pointless as I am not trying to build up this group of 850 or so people, probably only 500 of whom log in regularly and all the others who visit without joining the group. I just put it out there, often next to my rentals, so the land looks better. A cynic will say the land preserve sells the rentals. No, the rentals sell the land preserve. My system isn't some money-maker. I have always wanted the rentals to pay for the land preserve and my projects, and to try to sustain them with rents, content sales, and tips. I want it at least to break even, but it doesn't. So I have to let some locations not used go, but then inevitably I start a new location as I just did in Rowley by the wonderful Meiji Linden build and river with a walk up to the Linden road on the old Teen Grid.
But I know of their use by the tips, by the sailboats and horses returning to my inventory after someone uses them, by the guest books, and by people writing to me. Just in the last week I had a person tell me that the 1950s vacation area is "so realistic" and she supports it every week with tips; other people suffering from losses of loved ones to COVID or struggling with their own health challenges find respite and tell me -- and not even in the COVID prayer garden but all over. People write funny notes and even one guy called me last week "the OG of the Mainland," a term which I had to have defined which I guess is gamer (and tech bro) talk for not "Old Guy" but "Old Gangster," i.e. an old-school authority.
And old school is what I want "Nature" to be -- like the simple designs and blank faces of the Montessori dolls, so that imagination can grow and people can add their own little camps, which are allowed for short terms. I was thrilled when I made a "Suitcase Park" which was never finished (and still isn't since I moved it again) for guiding people to interesting destinations, that people came and left all kinds of suitcases with messages.
I have a Memorial to the Victims of Communism; Memorial to the Victims of Terrorism; and Memorial to the Victims of Mass Shootings, all appreciated, all visited every day with people getting signs or leaving a note. I have the major religions of the world represented -- Notre Dame de Cyberie, St. Paul's, the Drolma Lhakhang temple to Green Tara and Tibetan monastery, the Druid Forest, the Whispering Witches of Belarus, the Shinto shrine in Tethys and so on.
And that's just it. My sites aren't just "Nature" in some kind of 1950s nostalgic camping theme, although I have that, too in the Grote/Juanita/Patagonia vacation area. They are places of meditation, relaxation, chilling, usually with nature but not of the strenuous "safari" type of activity. They are unabashedly political (terrorism and mass shootings) or religious (mosques and temples) and the Lindens basically ban all things of that nature from Bellisseria -- it can't be "political" -- it can't have campaign signs on the lawn; it can't even have a bowling alley. The world is this sort of ersatz 1950s or early 1960s idyll (which I personally didn't see on the colour TV we didn't have in that era) where nary a discouraging word is heard on the range and anything "controversy" is airbrushed out. My Bellisseria Commissary has a light parody of this -- go upstairs to the Mushroom Room and watch a movie of my RL 1950s style suburbia which is basically gone now.
Every day, multiple people pray at the only working mosque in SL. There are Islamic educational sites but not mosques for some reason any more (again, it just too expensive, and people start on sims then regret the cost.) They leave small tips or notes. As Muslims pray three times a day, there are a lot of them, and people also visit the cafe and second-tier help stalls, freebies, and quest on the same sim of Ross, called Memory Bazaar, a Linden-owned resident-run infohub, the sequel to the old telehubs in part.
I suppose the most popular nature site is the Bridle Path in Athetis but there is also boating on locations such as Hector Lake and Grote Pond, which I worked hard to restore from the madness of land chopping and an intrusive resident railroad project I first supported, then found it devalued my land with giant pylons and a cement overpass.
Which brings me back to THIS techcon -- NATURECon -- and its decision to put a squat, cement, 1960s building smack in the center as a tribute to Bay City....which is an urban region of SL with tall skyscrapers, macadam roads, various retro buildings of the squat, brown "Chicago" style beloved of the Moles (which the old telehubs followed, and were hated). How is it that Bay City reflects "Nature"? The displays are of their tall buildings and Mole sites. I suppose the docks of the bay could be called "Nature" with a stretch but then I don't pretend I'm going out in "Nature" when I go to the South Street Seaport, even if I take the ferry on the East River.
Come on, guys. Just say this is a jamboree of all your friends. Call it "OutdoorsCon" so you can fit in cement, transportation, and DJ parties. A booth for Bellibin, which is an RP garbage disposal system (oh, alright, I suppose they have RP recycling). A booth for Bellisseria Entertainers, the select DJ group that has pushed out "non-compliant" DJS and of course has the custom of direct tipping as you can't put tip jars out in Belli. (You can at NatureCon!)
So...Everything but the Chinatown Bridge but then, I'll point out, that wonder of SL was built by my very own builder, Jessica Ornitz, and only put out once because it has so many prims and I really don't know where to put it -- which you can get as a gift for any amount of tip at the Society for Virtual Architecture where I have a sculpture garden and even a secret Masonic temple. I'm telling you, I do preserve land and do attract visitors although I don't call myself "community manager" even to my paying tenants in what amounts to communities. They do their thing, they come and go, I facilitate it. That's really all I want to do; it's all they really want me to do. I wish there were less self-appointed and self-elected people feigning to "manage" us. We don't need managing. We're not in a community together when you can't even give me a goddamn both with 25 prims.
The NatureCon website has long, long lists of "collaborators" (a Soviet word if there ever was one) but notice, there isn't any SLURl to "go there" (I'm not kidding, it's an endless revolving door of clicking to see the glorious list of contributors and glorious community managers, for all the world like one of those Soviet "honour boards" LOL. If you know those, you will instantly realize what these BBB things are so like! Dom Kultury! Total DK!
The site is low on descriptions of their content, and big on photos and descriptions of the "community managers". Now mind you, these people are doers and achievers and I appreciate what they do, but the BBB culture of cult of personality is just way over the top. Every event features not swag for the visitors, but stamps of themselves dispensed in person from their virtual laptops. We've now learned that the BBB has a private helicopter transportation system with live pilots that ferry them around the grid to their many ribbon-cutting events featuring themselves and their friends. I'm telling you, I could not make up this stuff.
I don't own a helicopter. I have trouble figuring out airplanes and boats and I don't understand why we have big ugly concrete airports in SL, a world where our avatars can fly.
I wondered for some time why the BBB puts so much emphasis on these manufactured personality cults. Big "online" boards in the office as if they were a club or a rental agency or a brothel! -- but their "help" mainly involves wending through the complex maze (which to be fair has gotten easier) to get a passport, a mailbox, etc. like in a real municipality.
I realized finally that they are aping the Moles' cult of personality, which now with Bellisseria, is even more elaborate than it was in the old days of just Bay City and some office hours when Michael ran "Governance". (They put the most poorly paid on these scut-work jobs, like forums moderation, where they have no business being -- Moles are glorified, and rightly so, for their content creation but on the forums, they are deployed REMOVING resident content in tiresome threads).
The Moles each have avid followings, people who live for sightings of them, who swoon when they even drop by their house for coffee (!) -- something we never had from Lindens or Moles through the years on the legacy Mainland, the ordinary continents with no roads or waterways. I could go months and months never seeing a Mole or Linden and literally IMing them one sentence in the process of obtaining abandoned land. These people are constantly actually partying with Moles, and gushing types like Beth McBain even want them to spend less time building so they can relax and party with residents -- truly like the GMs of Club Med. I think most people ignore this, or find it sickening. I mean, you come to SL to do your own thing, not have it be like RL in your office, school, building coop or many other RL arenas where the cool kids get themselves elected and decide how to spend your university dues or worse, your taxes.
The BBB embraces concrete, so Bay City's blob is there because they are friends. Feorie in particular has worked very hard to schnorr her way into the exclusive Bay City elite, with mixed results, I'm told. It's not clear whether she is tiering/contributing/cheerleading only for the Glastonbelli complex which is how she decided to join Corsica South Coast -- after first buying and abandoning other parcels as her business designed to pick up and "beautify" abandoned land didn't work out -- most people can figure out how to get it themselves and plunk down the same Skye cliffs and HPMD trees without putting so many of them that they have no prims left over for their skyboxes.
Glastonbelli is truly impressive and a work of love and talent by Cranston, who is a leader of CSC and the BBB. I've enjoyed wandering through it and I like collecting the stamps. But modes of transportation are big, metal, laggy things and I'm not sure they belong at a "Nature Con". Maybe the redwoods, also a big part of this complex, should have been the main feature?
I've heard at least one prominent rider of the rails at NatureCon chuckle over the self-important station announcements.
Amb. Kerensky corrects me, with this report:
"In fairness, even with 37 on the DJ party sim and about 27 on the adjacent sim with the lighthouse and shore, the trains and such were not laggy. That is, they move slowly and choppily as trains will do in SL but you aren't like a fly in molasses as you were at SLB18 concerts for example. I'm not sure if the organizers were rigorous about keeping to 512 textures -- I think they tried. It is actually remarkably traversable given what it is.
The signage is a problem -- the Info Booth only directs you to the cul-de-sac of the web site and the only info poster has the DJ session times. There is a timetable for the ferry of course. In vain could I get a notecard of descriptions of the groups with the booths, their main sims, and what was in them after wandering around for an hour -- but surely they must be there.
A highlight is the Bug Pavilion with the story of Mr. Beeb's collection, Mr. Beeb being a sort of curmudgeonly bureaucrat modeled after Bartleby the Scriver or actually more like Akaky Akakyevich perhaps in the Overcoat, but now he's gone all Franz Kafka on us. Boo has published the story of his transition and put up displays of his bug collection, showing himself perhaps to have missed his calling as a short story writer rather than photographer. But why couldn't we have a souvenir of Mr. Beeb's bugs! Just one beetle! In a little jar! That would be easy to throw together! If you can make stamps of one colour (except for BBB management who get to have colours), you can make a bug jar!"
Swag is really the weak point of the BBB and even the other groups represented seem curiously short of freebies, although it's quite possible we simply missed it. Surely the Nature Consortium, with its hunts and events and games and such will have some?
Some old projects besides mine were missing -- non-Western gorgeous sims like the Japanese beach near Motocyclone and nearby sims; like the oldest Buddhist Gardens around in Achemon; the Arbor Project with Timo Daehle which waged the war against ad-farming; amazing sites like a Hispanic educational installation with the story of pond life; I didn't see Yellowstone, whose owner has grown it from a small location to a whole sim, although I suppose since she's part of The Nature Consortium, that counts.
Nature is larger than NatureCon and those who conceived it. Carry on.
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