Second Thoughts

The Pastoralists: 12 Surprise Eggs - The Back Story

By Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor

So I made a set of a dozen Surprise Eggs -- plus a Bonus -- called "The Pastoralists: 12 Surprise Eggs".

I had them for sale as a set and some individually and not a single one sold at Mieville Silk Road. Oh, well. Meanwhile, I put one out for free and 130 people took that; although I priced the individual ones for only $50L, they didn't sell. In part, this because I didn't do anything to promote the event and barely put out a few posters inworld -- I had too much to do in RL.

So eventually I will put them on the MP, something I've been meaning to do, but meanwhile, my whole Mieville Silk Road store in now moved to my permanent store inworld in Tofalar. Come and get the eggs for $500 for the set. I'm not putting out the individual ones just yet.

For the first time, I made up a store that I put with these eggs -- in fact as I got into the story, some of the eggs then got changed and things added or subtracted. Here it is:

Like a lot of things I make, this series called "The Pastoralist Nomads: A Story in the Mountains" started as one thing and then along the way became something else. The one who is surprised by my Surprise Eggs is usually me. Usually what happens is that I can't execute a concept I have; I divert and deviate; I find that some prop I want won't shrink down sufficiently (not everything does even with "Perfection" shrink script) and cut prims; something occurs to me; something needs to be explained, and away we go. So the story thus far -- which I am posting now just to add a link to the fatpack package, and I will have to come back to put in the pictures later:

Coming Home to My Yurt - 1
1. Inside a yurt, we see a cozy scene -- some lavash or naan warming on the stove, a cat licking his paws, and some firewood just thrown down to get the fire going again. Inside the Mongolian stash box, we see a little orange and white speckled cat jar almost like one from an Egyptian tomb, and some herbs and flowers. The canopic jars, as they are called, held cat mummies, like these:

Or this one at the Brooklyn Museum:

Shaman Ritual by the Yurt - 2
2. Now we see a shaman outside his yurt performing a ritual with a herbal book and a brass vessel of some kind of potion. He is standing on a board depicting diamonds (this actually comes from my some AI artworks at my SL21B exhibit, you can go get it there until July 21, 2024 for free if you do the quest and get the special "Ross Scroll" gift  -- I will be placing this quest inworld in Ross in due course). If you look closely at the hollow tree, you will see the little orange speckled cat jar. We don't know what the shaman is going to do with it, or why he moved it outside from the stash box to the tree hollow. Does he fear a raid?

It actually says "Pier One" on the bottom which makes it all even more hilarious. It was produced by Neri Miarte.

Like a lot of things on the MP that we are sternly warned not to give away on transfer or share with alts, and never, never put on transfer, it has been shamelessly copied from this "leopard cat":

This isn't a criticism. I'm glad to buy that little cat and likely no one will ever complain about it.

It seems you can only get it used on ebay now anyway. And this "Leopard Cat" at Pier One in turn was possibly shamelessly copied from this:

But that person probably got it from somewhere -- and I don't have time to research it.

The point is, the cat jar got around, and still gets around. It's not clear how the shaman performing the mineral ritual got it, but he stashed it in the hollow of the tree.

That's all you need to know!

Sewing Day - 3
3. Happy domestic life continues in the yurt. "Pastoralists" are nomads that spend some time sedentary in one location or a range of locations growing crops or doing hunting and gathering, then they take their herds and go up in the mountains to graze them. So this Central Asian nomad woman has a Japanese gown, a Japanese fabric book and is in an egg with an early Ottoman Empire fabric (with poppies) gazing at a MidJourney swirl of fabric that is sort of Uzbek-looking. OK, then, but it's Second Life. And that's what I mean by accidents and deviations as I go along. You have to work with what is on the MP. The Tofalar people number something like only 752 or less, after the tsars and commissars were done assimilating and crushing them. They herd reindeer to survive and are conscious that they need all the parts of the deer, and can't eat them all up.

Tofalar People on the Move - 4
4. So now as for the Tofalar people -- there is a sim in SL named Tofalar which I got from the famous land baron Bob Bravo some years ago and it has a well-formed flat-top mountain which is perfect for a shaman's hut. The Tofalar word for deer is something like "tungus" (it belongs to the Turkic family of languages) so that's the name of this deer in the 4th scene, accompanied by a Deer Druid girl who looks like she's out of a Zelda game or something but work with me on this.

No, usually deer cannot serve as beasts of burden. But somehow, the Tofalar people who live completely enmeshed with deer can get them to saddle up and ride and carry stuff -- look at the picture here! They have saddles and firewood strapped to them. Deer usually can't perform this function because they are too skittish, they don't have the endurance, they fall prey to illnesses, etc. -- and as this article tells you, their hooves sinking into the springy taiga makes it hard to ride. BTW I saw something like the taiga in Alaska and it's true, you simply cannot hike on that springy stuff for more than a mile, you get really tired and sore, and you trip and fall constantly.

This being SL, anything is possible, and so when the druid Tofalar people (who might or might not have a druid factor in their legends, but they do have shamans) go on the move to their summer pastures, Tungus (or is he Mok?) kindly carries their gear. Cool, eh?

Note the Druid Deer girl is now carrying the orange speckled cat jar on her back. Is the shaman her father? How is it that she is part girl, part deer? We don't know the answers to these questions but you're probably wondering more about the tulips? Tulips, Prokofy? These nomads are pastoralists, but are you trying to tell us they grow tulips like common 1950s housewives in in American suburbia?

Answer: no, tulips grow wild in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan! Yes, we were talking about the Tofalar people who live in -- wait for it -- Tofalariya in Irkutsk oblast in southern Russian, near their traditional home in the Easter Sayan mountain range, i.e. very far from Kyrgyzstan. Like, 2551 km according to Google maps. Still, it's all part of the grand scheme of my SL eggs.

SO these are WILD tulips and therefore "appropriate". The ginger cat on this trek is wilder than the one we left back at the yurt....except the yurts were generally folded up and are being carried with us...

Danger In the Jaylyau - 5
5. So the Tofalar people reach the jaylyau, which is actually the Kyrgyz term for the pasturing meadows with tulips in the mountains, but ok, some nomads walk really far! Especially in SL. But...it's dangerous out there. And this cute Druid Deer girl is attacked by a blue wolf, as her sheep continue chewing grass indifferently. The porcelain cat jar falls to the side as she is torn to bits -- by a wolf who is actually completely uninterested in the jar, and may not know it contains treasures (did we mention it contains treasures? It does). He is more interested in a) eating her for his lunch and b) grabbing her jeweled staff which caught his eye because it's shiny. In the end he doesn't take the jar and doesn't even eat her all up. Somehow, the poor dear deer girl is given a "sky burial" and put under some rocks -- basically that means you just let Nature take its course because the soil is too rocky to dig a grave.

We Found Each Other - 6
6. Now we come to a scene that makes absolutely no sense in terms of Tofalar, Kyrgyzstan, or anything in Central Asia because it contains a large green frog and a colourful (and likely poisonous) flying toad that look like they are straight out of the Amazon, or some other swampy, tropical place, and not the mountains of Kyrgyzstan but did I mention this is Second Life? The big frog in fact unfurls a banner that says (true or not): "We are Kyrgyz".

If you please. And We are Kyrgyz if you don't please.

Very casually, he has picked up the jar, that apparently was left by the stony grave of the deer girl. And what does he do with it?

The Offering - 7
7. Being a conscientious denizen of the steppes and mountains of Central Asia, even though he looks like he belongs in the Philippines, he goes to the shrine of the Snake Goddess [think up a name for her besides "Naga" which is her Hindu name] to offer the jewels to her, because he really doesn't have use for them. At least, not all of them. What is the Hindu Snake Goddess of India doing in Central Asia, where there are no snake goddesses? Well, somebody got lost. I mean, read "Journey to the West." Some people go awfully long distances to find stuff. The frog then goes on his way.

Treasure Imperiled - 8
8. But the jaylyau, while carpeted with tulips like Holland, is a place of danger and death and destruction, and in the next scene we see not one but two dragons (because -- Second Life), both of whom have their eye on that pretty porcelain cat jar which has the shiny things in it which dragons love to hoard. The snake goddess doesn't have any guards or anything, so they make off with it. But then they must have had a scuffle between themselves, because in the next scene...

The Stolen Treasure - 9
9. The large, skinny dragon is missing, and only the sneaky-eyed Baby Fire Dragon has the treasure, which he has obtained by breaking the porcelain cat jar against a boulder and scooping up the jewels in it. He also seems to have acquired one of those Dog Dragon Chinese jars (they call them Foo Dragons), or maybe the Foo Dragon is sentient and has (temporarily) allied with the Baby Fire Dragon but... in the distance, at the top of the mountain, we see the deer (and beast of burden) who had been traveling with the now-dead deer druid girl surveilling the scene! (How did a Chinese Foo Dog jar get into Central Asia? Well, look at a map. Remember the Great Silk Road?)

Treasure Restored - 10
10. In the next scene, we see Tengus, the buck (if he has antlers he's a male) delivering...a bag made out of orange dragon skin to the Snake Goddess. The cat porcelain jar is missing, but then, it had been broken on the rocks...wasn't it? The Foo Dog has a cat amulet, and now Tengri, who is the proper god of Kyrgyzstan (who made the sky -- even if he looks more like a Norse guard here with a fish, but ok), is holding the Foo Dog where presumably the jewels are now held. The Foo Dog may have been working secretly for the deer people. How a buck was able to beat a dragon isn't clear -- the shaman has a stash box with a Mongolian manuscript on the killing of a dragon, so maybe there's some clues there.

Shamans Worship Tengri - 11
11. Now we see a scene of two shamans (who look different than the shaman from our original scene) paying homage to Tengri, who seems to be at a different location now -- but then nomads probably moved their gods around with them just like they moved their yurts and props and kids and stuff. Ah-hah, the cat jar is hidden in the flowers! It was put back together, perhaps? Left by the deer? Picked up somehow and repaired? In any event, there's a missing chapter here and it may appear as a bonus....Note the shaman are also providing Tengri with some rice cakes and a vessel of some kind of something....

At Home in My Yurt - 12
12. This yurt is similar, but different than the one in the first scene, but then, with nomads, it's always changing. Or maybe this is a different tribe -- the shamans were different in the previous scene. Somehow, they got hold of the Foo Dog jar and brought back with them. Hmm, the cat is the same, the bed rolls are different. Could be the same clan, different family. No sign of the cat jar.

We don't know what happened to the cat jar, which had appeared re-assembled at one shrine to Tengri. If anyone rescued it, it would have to be a combination of the sewing lady and the poisonous toad....It's not clear if Tengus an pick up things or people have to put stuff on his back (unlike RL where you can't do that).

Yes, our bet is the Japanese lady got busy, helped by the frog or toad or deer or two strange shaman or possibly even another character! And that should appear in the bonus : )

You'll have to buy the fatpack to ee the bonus!

But basically...there is a living tree and a druid-type tree goddess merged with the tree.

This could be a goddess associated with war, fertility, wisdom, and water, called Nana, worshipped by Eastern Iranian groups in Central Asia, including the Bactrians, Sogdians, Chorasmians, and Yuezhi. Nana is also associated with the Iranian goddesses Anāhitā, Aši, and Ārmaiti, and the Near Eastern goddess Anahita, and the Mediterranean goddesses Tyche and Demeter. Nana is often depicted seated on a lion and holding a cornucopia-like palmette. Whew. Won't find that on the MP I don't think, so this more Celtic/Norse-looking druid lady is put in.

Then there's Umai, a primary deity in Kazakh mythology, Umai is a protector of children and a metaphor for a strong mother figure. In Turkic nations, Umai personifies the feminine.

There are two placid, bovine gods near the tree goddess. I forgot their names already. There are some crystal treasures that somehow the goddess has around here, and the tree frog is in the tree, chameleon-like changing his colour, so we figure he may be involved in....

...you guessed it! The cat jar has returned. It is inside the flaming chest of the Vegetarian Wendigo. The Wendigo or Wendigaunt is a monster from our very own New York State who usually eats people, zombie like. But this one is vegetarian and helpful, having carried the mended cat jar with some jewels in it very long distances to present to Nana...Umai...whoever she is! She rocks! I didn't put in any rocks because it was already 22 prims!

This is hardly like Journey to the West, but it's just my own little story that I like to have fun with.

 

Rental Panopticon: After-Auction Report or a Visit With the Goon Squad

By Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor

This was a job for a low-load alt who wouldn't crash out of a teleport or a ban, so Telehub Ross (last seen fishing in Gone Fishin) was sent out to cover the story.

There's a back story here I had last night when I landed on this prospective auction bid and fell into conversation with a lovely lady named "Wolf" who was a scripter, rentals agent, and very knowledgeable about SL history despite her age. (She knew about Hank Ramos' rental script; she might have been Hank Ramos, things being as they are in Second Life).

It was a useful and valuable exchange in which she sent me her forked version of Hank's open-source script -- and I'll send her soon our forked version of Hank's script, which is All Part of Our Glorious Past.

She noted for the draw-distance-and-visually-challenged in RL (me) that across from this Mainland island -- a rare bird, even in General -- there was what we might call an "art lot" that was going to "help the rare Mainland island not get bids."

The glow was so strong that I literally couldn't see it at first when I put up my draw to 256.

The land claim date was like...yesterday lol. The art objects were...older. The group land owner was called Always Watching, founder Orion Starchild sytem name, display name more elaborate.

Again, for those watching at home: The glow value of the "art show" was to help people "not bid on the auction" so that these people could win it. 

You can't see past auctions after a day or week, they go away. So I pasted this bit of history into the forums.

Oh, there was also a "family hold back" donut hole on this island that could factor in later from the person who either abandoned it, or had it seized by the Lindens for non-payment, and here I have a possible name, living in the area as I do, but I'll be merciful here.

There were no bids on this auction until approximately 2:30 pm SLT, moments before it closed. LOL. Then there was a frenzy. Of land barons who always bid up every auction they have no intention of taking just to keep prices up, and the ultimate winner. A frenzy -- but you know, not THAT much of a frenzy.

There were no bids from me or my alts -- that would be stupid. I like art, but not that much.

Who are these guys? Siths? Land baron stand ins? There are some peculiar aspects to this story, as you can see from our dialogue. Pictures later, have to run to a RL work meeting now.

 

12:12] O'Ryan Reynolds (orion.starchild): ay
[12:13] M. Carter Blanc of (telehub.ross): So are you kids artists?
[12:14] Gundersuitten Ω Ashguard Man (gun.stratten): do you mind
[12:14] Gundersuitten Ω Ashguard Man (gun.stratten): we're standing here
[12:14] M. Carter Blanc of (telehub.ross): Do you think you'll be happy in General?
[12:14] Mercurial Amethyst: generally happy, yeah
[12:14] O'Ryan Reynolds (orion.starchild): I grew up on the teen grid and this land has sentimental value to me
[12:14] M. Carter Blanc of (telehub.ross): I'll bet!
[12:15] M. Carter Blanc of (telehub.ross): My son was on the Teen Grid, he's 30 now : )
[12:15] Gundersuitten Ω Ashguard Man (gun.stratten): 60k and the sim is yours

 

At this juncture, gun begins pushing me to the edge of the sim, so I abuse-report him for "bumps, pushes" etc.

This is a tell-tale sign that the group members assembled there do NOT control their control and the land they just purchased.

Their willingness to resell their auction win for 3 times what they paid after they strong-armed everyone else off the auction also suggests, shall we say, "a higher power" here or possibly a "Sugar Daddy".

[12:16] M. Carter Blanc of (telehub.ross): Is there a reason you can't eject me, sir?
[12:16] M. Carter Blanc of (telehub.ross): perhaps you don't control the land?
[12:16] Gundersuitten Ω Ashguard Man (gun.stratten): because i aint in the land group
[12:16] M. Carter Blanc of (telehub.ross): So Mr. Orion Starchild, group owner, can't use eject either? My, my
[12:17] Gundersuitten Ω Ashguard Man (gun.stratten): or maybe he doesnt want to.
[12:17] M. Carter Blanc of (telehub.ross): Wait where's that art build you had right across from your auction win?
[12:17] M. Carter Blanc of (telehub.ross): the one tht ensured no bids except from you?
[12:17] M. Carter Blanc of (telehub.ross): did you take that down?
[12:17] M. Carter Blanc of (telehub.ross) raises my draw distance

 

It was gone.

This:

 

[12:18] M. Carter Blanc of (telehub.ross): So tell me kids, er....grown men of 30+
[12:19] M. Carter Blanc of (telehub.ross): are you the same people who do those glowy spires?
[12:19] Mercurial Amethyst: glowy spires?
[12:19] O'Ryan Reynolds (orion.starchild): The ASR towers? No
[12:19] Mercurial Amethyst: Oh, no, that's Shawn Hutchinson
[12:19] M. Carter Blanc of (telehub.ross): well he's your neighbour! you should befriend him!
[12:19] M. Carter Blanc of (telehub.ross): you can all devalue land together
[12:20] Mercurial Amethyst: lmao
[12:20] Gundersuitten Ω Ashguard Man (gun.stratten): oh you care about land prices.
[12:20] Toast™ (egg.sausage): You win yet?
[12:20] Gundersuitten Ω Ashguard Man (gun.stratten): Nice
[12:20] M. Carter Blanc of (telehub.ross): So why are grown men of 30 able to come inworld in the middle of the day? Do you have jobs, families?
[12:20] M. Carter Blanc of (telehub.ross): or how does that work
[12:20] O'Ryan Reynolds (orion.starchild): I do, I have a job I enjoy very much that permitted me to purchase this island today
[12:20] Gundersuitten Ω Ashguard Man (gun.stratten): Imagine thinking Everyone is in US timezones

I don't. I do like to see if people will tell me they are from, oh, Germany or Russia or something lol.

[12:20] O'Ryan Reynolds (orion.starchild): I have a boyfriend I love very much who I spend lots of time with
[12:20] Keller Sanchez (nenenxi): It's Friday, it's my weekend.
[12:21] M. Carter Blanc of (telehub.ross): For approximately...US 480 lol
[12:21] M. Carter Blanc of (telehub.ross): er $80 [it sold for $2.71/m 

L$24,787 (2.71 L$ per m²)

2024-07-26 | 11:59:58 SLT

 

The amount is actually closer to US $95, plus fees and tax at the current cashout rate.

[12:21] Toast™ (egg.sausage): I'm a professional network pentester and I work from literally anywhere. But also my job starts next week

Why-are-we-not-surprised.

[12:21] M. Carter Blanc of (telehub.ross): "a song"
[12:21] M. Carter Blanc of (telehub.ross): I wonder why my island sold for US $500, to be sure, it was in Mature
[12:21] M. Carter Blanc of (telehub.ross): are you Mature even if in General? or what
[12:21] O'Ryan Reynolds (orion.starchild): What are you upset about, exactly?
[12:21] M. Carter Blanc of (telehub.ross): Oh, I'm just a reporter, I'm not upset, you are lol
[12:22] M. Carter Blanc of (telehub.ross): I'm just gathering facts here
[12:22] Gundersuitten Ω Ashguard Man (gun.stratten): Guy is just sore he didnt win.
[12:22] Gundersuitten Ω Ashguard Man (gun.stratten) whispers: :)
[12:22] M. Carter Blanc of (telehub.ross): so are you Trump or Harris?
[12:22] M. Carter Blanc of (telehub.ross): no I didn't bid
[12:22] Toast™ (egg.sausage): You smell like a gay bachelor's closet on a hot summer day, I love it
[12:22] M. Carter Blanc of (telehub.ross): THE ONLY WAY TO WIN IS NOT TO PLAY THE GAME
[12:22] O'Ryan Reynolds (orion.starchild): Take it down the road
[12:22] M. Carter Blanc of (telehub.ross): I'm your Mom actually, but ok
[12:22] M. Carter Blanc of (telehub.ross): Orion, do you not control your group land?
[12:22] Toast™ (egg.sausage): If you're my mother, does that make you female?
[12:23] M. Carter Blanc of (telehub.ross): or the land baron is going to get it and flip it now? or what
[12:23] O'Ryan Reynolds (orion.starchild): I've just been courteous up to this point
[12:23] Toast™ (egg.sausage): I'm from Alabama, wanna get together later?
[12:23] M. Carter Blanc of (telehub.ross): I've given birth to three children so no, I'm not a pregnant people lol
[12:23] M. Carter Blanc of (telehub.ross): so Vance it is then? or
[12:23] M. Carter Blanc of (telehub.ross): do you have guns in real life too Orion?
[12:23] Toast™ (egg.sausage): Why is Saturn so far away
[12:24] Second Life: You are no longer allowed here and have been ejected.

But see that's just the room chat. The script chat informed me that a security device warned me, then ejected me "home" -- but actually only a few meters away.

That lets me know -- again -- these people did not control the group land they just bought with their group. Their art group called "Always Watching".

That remains a mystery because they would have had to deed a security device to the group in order to cause it to warn and eject me.

Why would they do all that instead of just right-clicking and ejecting me? They've been in SL since their teenage years (15 years ago or more) so they know how to do this.

SL abounds with mysteries like this.

Hypothesis: the group founder of record is not the group tier-giver and group controller and owner and these people are all members without powers. Not being a member of said group, I can't be sure who is fulfilling that role.

Pictures tk.

 

Rental Panopticon: Your Second Life is the Price of a Latte

By Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor

July 24, 2024

Dear [Tenant Who Has Removed Tier Without Notice YET AGAIN],

Please do not put tier in our group expecting a discount, or pay cash rent for our rentals ever again. We need to put an end to this abuse.

We're not available to be abused here any more.

I have repeatedly noted that we need 24 hours notice when tier is withdrawn from the group because it EXPOSES US TO INSTANT LAND CONFISCATION BY THE LINDENS.

Because you and others have done this to us so many times, the Lindens will no longer give *us* a 24-hour notice but act immediately to randomly confiscate land when they examine certain "repeat offenders" manually every day.

This entire pose you take on, invoking the fact that you are a poor, divorced pensioner with limited income living in the Canadian provinces simply doesn't wash with me. That's because my grandfather came to Quebec and worked in a hotel until he could get a factory job in the US. That's because I went to university in Canada and lived on fishcakes and grapefruit juice while I worked menial jobs and went to school to pay the cheaper Canadian tuition as my father was unemployed, chronically ill, and then died young.

EVERYBODY has a story. EVERYBODY. To try to cry poor in Second Life -- a form of entertainment no one needs to live in RL -- is an absurdity. Don't do it -- it demeans you.

A pensioner with limited income? Oh, I know what that's like.

That's because I'm a pensioner too, but still working part-time because our pensions aren't enough to live on. I've been thrown off Medicaid with thousands of dollars of medical expenses now for my chronic disease, medical costs of the sort you do not have in Canada. Indeed because I'm poor, too, not a wealthy land baron, as every one knows -- that's why these sorts of hard-luck stories leave me cold.

You have a date looming for your annual subscription and a sputtering graphics card? Welcome to the world of many many people in SL -- but not me because....

I cannot permit myself the LUXURY of buying an account a year in advance to save money, even -- *I do not have it*. If you have a date looming where you are going to be billed $99 US, trust me, you know it and you are able to tell us 24 hours in advance about the tier removal.

It was fortunate that I had extra tier in the group and happened to log on very early in the morning before I had to do a freelance job so I caught the shortfall. You don't seem to realize -- again -- that the Lindens *randomly and instantly confiscate tier as a default now* after many warnings. I have had them do this, forcing me to buy back land from them at $1/m and sometimes suffer a move-out from another tenant.

It would be one thing if the Lindens thoughtfully confiscated a 1024 in a field or that was for sale or that wasn't occupied by a tenant. But they RANDOMLY seize it, and I have had them simply take the sidewalk easement for an entire community and then put it for sale again which would disrupt the entire place if we didn't immediately grab it. They now directly sell abandoned land, they don't just auction it.

Again, the entire fictional "I'm poor, pity me" shtick does not wash. For your own good and ours, you should end it and examine why you are so unhappy in RL and SL and how some of it may be your fault.

Let's say for the purpose of argument that you want to buy a premium account (and you even have two!) for $99 annualized every year. Obviously, the $1200L stipend means you take off $4.62 each month as you can sell the Lindens back at the rate of 247L per US $1.00 -- or better, if you are willing to wait days or weeks to sell.

So annualized that's $8.25 - $4.62 = $3.63. You don't have $3.63 PER MONTH for your entertainment in SL? Coffee is expensive in Canada as in the US and can be $4 a cup, even a non-latte. $3.63 for our modest riverside rental is not even the price of a latte.

Oh, poor you, like dozens of other tenants I have and thousands of other people in SL, you have Canadian dollars that are worth only $0.73 on the US dollar? Again, this pity story doesn't wash with me as I spent years going to university in Canada and have relatives in Canada and tenants now in exactly the same boat as you.

So now we have a formula of $135 annualized in Canadian dollars? That's Can $11.25 month, minus the stipend which we'll calculate as Can $6.33 to get now Can $4.92.

You don't have $5 Canadian a month for entertainment as rich and diverse as Second Life? You don't have to rent a house but can live in a sandbox. You can also take the 1024 m2 they give you with the acount (!!!) and live in a Bellisserian home, which I would urge you to do. Then you can try to get customer service out of the Moles and Lindens, not us and come and go without anyone worrying if you suddenly take tier out of the group.

Let's say you decide you need to keep your stipend for the dresses you buy or rentals you take without tier, and have to pay Canadian dollars not annualized, per month, and not offset by the stipend. That would mean Canadian $16.42 per month. That's the kind of expense -- like a New York Times subscription online for US $18 per month -- that I myself CANCEL when business is bad or I don' have a RL job. I cancel $4.00 New York magazine subscriptions. I cancel $5.00 spent not on a latte, but 3 Vitamin waters on sale. Most people in SL are poor and many are sad or they wouldn't be here. The idea that you deserve a pity party such as to entitle you to subject others to harm is MISPLACED.

There's no more patience here because it's time for you to face up to your bad and manipulative behaviour.

I need a new graphics card or entire computer TOO. Mine broke down a few month ago, I cannot afford to fix it, and I am limping along on my daughter's previous work computer which really is not strong enough for the job.

I struggle to log on and move around TOO because I'm not rich. Henry cannot fix my computer once again nor give me his old gaming computer once again because he needed to sell his this time -- his rent nearly doubled and he and his family were forced to move into temporary situations. They are living out of their SUV.

You're not in a village being bombed in Ukraine or a refugee camp in Gaza or dying of thirst in Sudan. You're in the First World, in Canada, with robust socialism, and you won't be left to starve. You do not have the price of a latte for your entertainment even if you do with one less latte this month, or one less subscription or one less icecream.

Tell you what, we can do with one less customer doing what you have done to us now a half dozen times or more.

Everybody has a story, but they try not to inflict the damage they suffer on others. What if the Lindens randomly seized somebody's land in our group they had paid rent for? Again, it was fortunate that I caught it, but I haven't every time -- I was on grand jury duty last year when somebody withdrew tier that wasn't replaced and I had to rush home on lunch hour to fix it and endure endless battles with Lindens. This is why I am reducing this program so it loses less money.

If you're feeling sorry for yourself for causing this situation -- take ownership of it -- don't. Nothing happened to you, you did not suffer any actual loss, and your problems with your graphics card which MANY of us suffer are FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS.

And don't even feel sorry for us if you can somehow take the focus off your own self-preoccupation. We not available for this abuse any more and we're perfectly happy.

Prokofy Neva
Owner & Manager
Ravenglass Rentals

In the Second Life Exhibitors' Group

Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor

I wasn't here for this, and couldn't find this chat myself (was it removed?) -- but it was supplied to me.

So this notice came out today:

[2024/07/21 15:32] Squeaky Mole: Group Notice Sent by: Squeaky Mole
Important Notice: SL21B Regions Extended for Volunteers
Starting tomorrow, SL21B regions will remain accessible to volunteers for an additional week. You can pick up your items during this time. Thank you for your outstanding support and creativity throughout this celebration!

With gratitude, The SL21B Team 🎉

Feel free to reach out if you have any questions!

So I myself had an idle question when I saw this go by: who are the Volunteers these days? Do they mean just the people they had at the SLB welcome area and helping with the hunt or with musical performances or just in general being the hall monitors?

Or who? I didn't realize they still had Volunteers and apparently even a Volunteer group (do they?) They used to have a Volunteer HQ which was demolished in Tenera, quite a long story. I think the latter-day Volunteers do NOT have a hangout but educate me. Are the mentors -- aren't they called that again and aren't they back? -- called Volunteers? I have no idea and I can guarantee you this isn't in the Knowledge Base.

So as you can see here, the usual gaggle of fanboyz rocked up here to fan Squeaky, and Squeaky beamed. I see from this convo -- and I had seen him earlier at Philip's talk -- that Squeaky is rehabilitated since the Late Unpleasantness.

Then Henry Mixes In:

[2024/07/21 15:33] Woolfyy Wizardly (woolfyy): Thx Squeaky
[2024/07/21 15:33] iSkye Silvercloud (iskye.silverweb): WHEW! Thank you Squeaky!!
[2024/07/21 15:33] ღ Toуα Drexxar ღ (mstoya.bailey): Thank you Squeky :)
[2024/07/21 15:33] Squeaky Mole: :)
[2024/07/21 15:33] snazzy Zepp: Yay!!! Thanks Squeky!!!!!! ♥
[2024/07/21 15:33] Virgïl Kleizas (virgilius08): :)
[2024/07/21 15:33] Henry Hutchence: Because musicians who performed and exhibit builders are dog meat and are meant to just entertain the masses while they shop, but Volunteers Are Sacred!
[2024/07/21 15:33] Roy Sutton (penutbutterjellyman): I knew we'd have some time. Some people were like you have to pick it up at 11:59:59
[2024/07/21 15:33] Roy Sutton (penutbutterjellyman): Or they drop a nuke on it
[2024/07/21 15:34] iSkye Silvercloud (iskye.silverweb): I think ALL of us - including performers and exhibitors - are volunteers. I always thought so.
[2024/07/21 15:34] Woolfyy Wizardly (woolfyy): ahah and Volunteers also have a RL family life :-)
[2024/07/21 15:34] snazzy Zepp: I had surgery so I am hoping you all will keep your item up this week.
[2024/07/21 15:35] Henry Hutchence: We're not "all" volunteers. Squeaky, who I see is now rehabilitated, has some who are volunteers and others who provide content, music or builds to look at, we're not volunteers
[2024/07/21 15:35] Henry Hutchence: That is, we're not paid either but you know, Volunteers are Sacred
[2024/07/21 15:46] Tagline Resident: Is there a party going on somewhere for the SL 21st Bday celebration?
[2024/07/21 15:48] Roy Sutton (penutbutterjellyman): There were lots of events during the first week
[2024/07/21 15:48] Jvk1166z: thanks squeaky! that'll help us a lot
[2024/07/21 15:48] Squeaky Mole: No problem!
[2024/07/21 15:48] Roy Sutton (penutbutterjellyman): Now it's ending and the last day for public. We get one week to clean up
[2024/07/21 15:49] Henry Hutchence: So Squeaky, can you confirm or deny that "Volunteers" includes music performers and exhibit builders? Yes or no
[2024/07/21 15:49] Roy Sutton (penutbutterjellyman): It's group based isn't it? Everyone in here
[2024/07/21 15:49] Henry Hutchence: I'm asking the Mole here.
[2024/07/21 15:50] Squeaky Mole: Everyone that helped out with SL21B, that includes perfromers, stage crew, shop & hop, etc.
[2024/07/21 15:50] Henry Hutchence: This group is called EXHIBITORS not VOLUNTEERS yet VOLUNTEERS are referenced
[2024/07/21 15:50] Squeaky Mole: group notices went out to all groups, not just this one :)

Notice here for the third time, Squeaky does not react to the direct statement that expressed concern, even if sarcastic form, OR answer the direct question.

Instead, he exhibits that maddening tech bro forums mod passive/aggressive behaviour and simply ignores the statement and even the question.

He lets the fanboyz do his work for him. Then when asked a direct question again, he makes a statement -- but notice once again, he refuses to mention the builders, the exhibitors, although this group is the EXHIBITORS' group. Of course that's inferiorating, especially if you don't see it every day and aren't used to it.

People get sarcastic like this because it's clear as day that the Lindens and Moles always have favourites, always privilege one group over another, always give perks and boosts to some inner group, why, it's why I developed my theory of the "Feted Inner Core" in 2014 . The FIC is that special group of content creators and scripters who got thrown all the media opportunities and "solutions provider" gigs and who therefore lorded it over other people who criticized them on the forums -- always scot-free of any consequences for their bad language and bad behaviour.

If you are too young to have ever seen a giant billboard inworld with Jeska Linden posing in it, advertising a business called X Street owned by FlipperPA Peregrine which was later purchased by the Lindens and turned into MarketplaceSL, then you may not understand what I mean. (Elon missed an opportunity there!) But then, you have fresher examples like the "PetPlay" king named ostialabs featured in New World Notes and a guest star recurring  in the Recent Unpleasantness, or the scantily-clad PR person for bonniebots in a graphic Flickr screenshot, running away from Patch Linden in mock terror like the little girl in the sun lotion commercial trying to escape the nipping dog.

I guess I've so internalized that Lindens and their fan base who rule the roosts are like this, that I barely glance at it anymore. Of course they're smug assholes. Of course they're Legends in Their Own Mind and Widely Known in Narrow Circles (as the Russian proverb has it, better translated as "Big Fish in a Small Pond") -- but then let them cos-play being Very Important doing Very Important Things -- it's their game.

But I get when you stumble on these annoyances directly and repeatedly, it's infuriating.

So....

[2024/07/21 15:50] Henry Hutchence: OK does that include people who built exhibits since this book [sic: group] is called SECOND LIFE EXHIBITORS
[2024/07/21 15:50] Henry Hutchence: yes or no
[2024/07/21 15:51] Henry Hutchence: I'm in this group so I'm asking about this group since EXHIBITORS was not mentioned in your notice or your sentence just now
[2024/07/21 15:51] Jvk1166z: they just said everyone that helped out, soo that would include exhibitors
[2024/07/21 15:51] Henry Hutchence: I'd like to hear it from a Mole, please
[2024/07/21 15:51] Henry Hutchence: Because "helping out" means different things, and may not mean "those who made an exhibit"
[2024/07/21 15:51] Jvk1166z: i think you can infer that information.. but go off
[2024/07/21 15:51] Squeaky Mole: Correct, everyone that helped out with anything related to SLB. That includes exhibitors.
[2024/07/21 15:52] Henry Hutchence: GLAD TO HELP SQUEAKY ATTA BOY!

* * *

Note that Squeaky cannot answer a direct question, by a person who persists past the gaggle of annoying fanboyz, but then smarmily answers the fanboy, turning the interlocutor, Henry, who I don't think was ever a Volunteer and never would be, into a non-person.

This kind of behaviour goes on always and everywhere in SL with Lindens and their minions; it's on the forums; it's particularly dense at office hours; it's at events like BBB picnic this or BBB exhibit that; it's in the sea; it's in the air; it's everywhere. It's actually nothing for the Lindens to be proud of. In a setting where some residents get to have their weddings in community centers; where Moles build a statue to Patch; where friends of the Moles get "lucrative" DJ gigs and others get blocked -- it's ok to ask what "Volunteer" means and whether it is -- as the DEI rule book would dictate -- "inclusive."

The Lindens never explain the criteria for how someone gets the august title of "Volunteer" -- and in this case, evidently it was bestowed on us without our knowledge. 

The people who engage in these smarmy little episodes congratulate themselves all the way to the bank, and others gnash their teeth -- except...it doesn't matter.

I personally may not have been as persistent in drilling on this, although I do recognize that for Squeaky to rock up with a notice for VOLUNTEERS in a group called EXHIBITORS, and then when questioned, exhibit the usual snotty toolish behaviour can be infuriating, especially with his fanboyz forming the Greek chorus.

As I've been studying and thinking a lot lately about DEI behaviour, I wonder if this Game Mod/Fanboyz dynamic is a precursor (although ultimately Leninism, the Comintern, etc. are the precursors). It's part of the story, I think.

Some particularly annoying nuisance in one of these groups, perhaps even with a name like ThatGirlYouHatedinHighSchool (there really is a person with a name like that) might beam sickeningly and declare that Squeaky has been "managing a tough crowd" and isn't he brave and strong, or declare that there are "trolls" that have not been "fed," or bask in the warm knowledge that they are Volunteers, capital V, and Henry isn't.

Henry then prompty left the group -- before he might be ejected by Squeaky or some other busybody Mole trying to Protect the Honour of Uniform.

I believe this was his last chore for me for a good while. I had asked him to ask for an invitation out of fear of landing in the hospital or landing in a lengthy care-giving situation -- or both -- in case our prims needed to be picked up tonight as I thought I'd be late.

Oh, goodie, we have another week.

UPDATE

Compare and contrast Squeaky's typical divisive, clueless message and snotty after-chat with that of Missy Mole:

All Good Things Must End...
Mon, Jul 22 2024 8:00:22 AM PDT

But we always keep the memories :)
Thanks everyone for being a part of the SL21B celebrations! As always it was a pleasure working with all of you. The estate is now closed but will remain accessible through Sunday, July 28 for you to pick up your exhibits. They will not be returned before the regions go down so if you have no copy items please be sure to pick them up this week. Enjoy the rest of the summer. See you next year!

Missy & Squeaky

Rental Panopticon: Breaking Henry Hutchence

By Prokofy Neva Virtualtor

I'm going to just park this incident here now (the other one was here; there is yet ANOTHER one) while I've been sent it -- I haven't had a chance to read through all the chats and notecards and sheer assfuckery of a bunch of heedless morons in our rentals -- I will, and will comment in due course.

I'll just say that this incident here is the second terrain-related assholery today for Henry -- see above. And it follows four other tickets involving terrains on another sim -- so that's six terrain tickets which is really six too many, in my view. So I'm going to do a separate blog post on the phenomenon of terrains, and the sheer nonsense and idiocy -- and again, can I say assholery that goes on with them. Sure, some of it is newbie bungling and roads to hell paved with good intentions and all that. I get all that, truly I do. But the self-preoccupation and inability to cam out and SEE HOW YOU LOOK is fucking incredible.

Did your mother never teach you the poem?

O, wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion.”

― Robert Burns

Here's chatGPT's translation into modern American English if you have trouble with Scottish:

"Oh, if we had the gift to see
Ourselves the way that others do,
It would free us from many a mistake
And foolish notions too."

 

Henry came on the teen grid at my suggestion, with three of his RL buddies, when he turned 13 in 2008. They had a ball, learned a lot, got some real skills in technnology, marketing, group living, etc. until Blue Linden broke their little hearts by allowing the rich kids whose parents bought them entire sims to use traffic enhancers and Linden-giving chairs to create false traffic -- which contrasted unfavourably with their organic traffic on their venue, which included stores, hangouts, and a game called "Sewer Safari" which they had a decent following for (a precursor to the similar event held now by Second Syndicate).

They drifted off to WoW when SL became so unfair and became expensive and never came back in the same way.

Then in 2015 I believe it was, after Henry's RL motorcycle accident and recuperation and schooling, I had him help me occasionally with builds and tasks -- but soon he was off again doing other things of greater interest, acting, photography, etc. In 2016, when I had my accident and spent a year getting my leg to heal with constant hospital treatments, I delegated tasks to him so that if I couldn't get online the rentals would be covered. But he had no interest in this whatsoever really.

At the beginning of the pandemic -- he had COVID, I was housebound until the vaccine was developed -- he helped but in a very succinct matter -- moving people to the resident status from tenant so they could access powers. This is the one piece of the self-service rentals we can't automate -- there isn't a way to do this I think except possibly by maintaining a bot on the land which takes up an avatar slot, always scarce on Mainland, and adds to the script load and management burden. So we don't do that. We don't use bots.

That is, bots could issue invitations after payment events that already contain resident powers, that's a thing. But we have another concept -- no waiting for a bot or landlord, join on your own, rez immediately, set home immediately so you can find your rental again, and then a manager adds your powers to ban, put in media, change parcel etc later after your payment is confirmed (and a cursory check is made that you are not a griefer or stalker or putting up some ridiculous build).

At some point I believe Henry made a couple of little areas to see if he could make a go of them - he couldn't because Mainland rentals are not a viable business. Only people with huge amounts of sims and staff and working capital could make it such; only scamming slumlords and scumlords engaged in ad farms and land cutting can really make  a buck; a few individuals have fancier boutique operations, but basically the Lindens' Bellisseria has killed this off.

If you have 100 sims and think you're a Very Big Deal, I have not a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you, but a YouTube to show you. More on that later.

I wasn't going to publish this one because it contains no threats of violence or threats to organize boycotts -- that's my standard for publishing nasty tenant communications as a form of deterrent because we have no independent courts or independent media in SL and there is no recourse -- LL does not adjudicate personal disputes.

But I decided that since it led to Henry telling me he won't come back until after Labor Day, and because it so well illustrated that deep fuck-you hedonism in which too many virtual world denizens indulge, I'll publish it without the name. After this next incident, Henry came back to the sim, found yet another terrain customer had not paid their rent well past the grace period, and did not answer IMs, so he returned the prims and abandoned the land. OK, I wouldn't have done that? Because a kindly land baron gave that to me (or one nearby) because she rescued it from an ad farmer and held it for me. I value that much.

But....I get it. Because we're all tired of managing terrain land. There's other terrain land I abandoned last night. We're done. We don't wish to tier the view for you any more. Buy your own steep mountain and put your house on it and leave us out of it. And no, you vultures, Campanula has a long-term tenant on it so fuck off.

So...

What is fuck-you hedonism? It's not my phrase -- I believe the infamous Cristiano Midnight dreamed up 20 years ago on the forums to describe the people whose attitude was "fuck you, I get to do what the fuck I want on my land" -- hedonism, self-indulgence, concern only with one's own convenience and comfort and pleasure -- and heedlessness of how you look, how other people see you, whether you are making their life miserable. Total self-preoccupied, self-referential self-indulgence. Common to millenials -- but not only millenials.

I'm afraid I don't have a picture but this build overlooking Hector Lake was HUGE. Apparently Henry has some pictures but they'll have to wait. Go to Hector and see the set-up between the elevated Linden road and the slope down to the lake about 3-4 stories below at that area. Why someone would want to build an eyesore like that and then perch on it is beyond me --the build a ramp to it -- but it's because few people cam out and see how they look in the world.

I could note for added context that our neighbour in Laothoe, who owns half the lake, who once pledged to give us a heads up if she needed to sell her land, and who long ago forget that pledge, put all her land up for sale on the Laothoe side of the lake, and put it to sale for $2/m. I have looked away. More on that later.

[2024/07/17 07:05] Henry Hutchence: Hi, I'm sorry, but it was never our intent for the land you are renting in Hector to have a giant terrain on it, a ramp from a roadside rental to it, and thereby forcing other tenants to leave because now they are staring at a giant wall. So all of this has to come down. Our lease notes that no builds can be more than two stories from the ground -- that's for a reason. If you can't be content having your house at ground level only without a giant wall of terrain, then you can refund because we cannot accommodate a build like this that destroys the view in two many directions. Thanks for your understanding!

[2024/07/17 07:05] Big Mountain Girl: User not online - message will be stored and delivered later.

[2024/07/17 13:32] Henry Hutchence: I'm returning the terrain since I haven't heard from you and I have to address other tenants' complaints. You have 12 days remaining on your rental box which I am refunding. Should you be able to put your build normally on the ground and get rid of the ramps, etc. you can pay again. But if you require all this huge build, you'll need to find another place that will accept it or buy your own land.

The terrain was returned, not the house and furniture as a courtesy so the person could pick them up.

[2024/07/17 13:32] Big Mountain Girl: User not online - message will be stored and delivered later.

[23:04] Big Mountain Girl: (Saved Thu Jul 18 02:04:27 2024)Apologies,it was not my intent to make people leave. I was trying to create resonance with the rest of the land. They didn't have to just up and leave just because of that, they could have spoken to me directly if it affected them but no one did nor had I any complaints until yours. i had my house at ground level initially and only raised it due to my friend wanting me to feel closer. I have no problems to put it back the way it was. Also sending me a message in one day and expecting an answer in one day seems quite unreasonable. For future communications allow at least 24 hours for people to respond. Not everyone lives in virtual world 24/7. My build is certainly not huge,as my prim limit which you presumably know is at 206, quite a tiny allotment for any kind of housing structure in Second Life. (i've owned entire sims before so saying my build is huge is laughable) The only thing which appeared huge is the cliff which I put up to make it blend with the remaining land. Are you the land manager or the
[23:04] Big Mountain Girl: (Saved Thu Jul 18 02:04:27 2024) owner in an alt? Because it was the group owner whom I spoke with earlier and when I mentioned the lack of a land manager he said he was the only one.

[02:10] Henry Hutchence: Big Mountain Girl, there is nothing about a giant stone cliff that creates resonance with the land except the other stone cliffs *roadside* that are managed not to protrude into the view down below. I hope you can grasp that. Your job is not to complain about how they did or did not speak to you -- people are reluctant to start dramas and just leave. Some of the people who have been here for years and years just hope it will be fixed. You were given the courtesy of a message and option to remove it yourself so that you would not have all your things returned in a clump. As it dragged on as a real eyesore and the potential for more and more complaints, I could have just returned it and have been done with it. But I waited for you and the other tenant to respond. It's good you did, because 2 days into this, you'd get your prims in a clump. Nothing is unreasonable here; what's unreasonable is your notion that you can build a giant cliff in a small, compact, community like this with mulitiple people, with a beautiful lakeview, and not expect some static.

You're only looking at this from your own perspective perched up on your giant cliff without any consideration of the people down below -- frankly, I marvel at that. When you rattle on about prim counts, you are missing the point completely: you built a huge cliff that dominated the view on every side and blocked the view for several people on one side that they had enjoyed for years. It was supremely inconsiderate. That's why I refunded you immediately. Because you still aren't grasping the problem and usually in these situations people leave in a self-righteous huff. So please do that, if you need to -- or stay on the ground with your house within its limits, with two stories, and don't crowd your neighbours' view. Your house is really too large for this lot and now the lot next to you won't rent out except possibly as a skybox.

But you know what? I honestly don't care. Your house fits within your [sic: our] rules, if you need to stay because you want to be next to your friend up above on the road, that's your call. Please don't be in any illusion that we make money off these rentals here. Do the math on how much tier we pay -- US 0,0030 per meter -- see what your value is in US dollars, and have a clue. Finally, what on earth does it matter whether I am owner, manager or alt? I'm an officer in this company who has instructed you to follow our rules and stop blocking the view. Your friend up above instantly understood that. It doesn't matter whether I am the owner or the manager, truly. I have no idea what you are talking about with some reference of "the lack of a land manager". This is a self-service operation owned by Prokofy Neva, owner & manager. I'm Prokofy's RL son who occasionally helps out especially when Prokofy is tied up in RL with care of a sick relative. We are not giant land barons like Anshe Chung such as to afford to have some huge crew of people to wait on people when -- did I mention this already? this is a self-service operation.
[02:10] Second Life: User not online - message will be stored and delivered later.
[02:10] Second Life: User not online - message will be stored and delivered later.
[02:10] Second Life: User not online - message will be stored and delivered later.
[02:12] Henry Hutchence: Any time you are unhappy with the service which you have served yourself, you may click refund. I sent you a refund manually to speed up that process. You violated our rules, which you didn't bother to read in the info card in the box and the FAQs, and you decided you could just inflict anything you like on to a nice lake view. You were given the courtesy of a warning about this so as not to get your house back in a clump. The expectation then is that you apology and either leave or you put out your house as indicated and stop justifying your actions. That you feel the need to keep doing this lets me know:

[02:12] Henry Hutchence: I quit.

 

Big Mountain Girl then moves her rather large house that doesn't fit on these smaller lots down to water level; it spills on to two other parcels, one a hangout, the other a rental where the person left. Now it becomes unrentable. So something has to be done, and her terrain -- not her house and things -- is returned.

[02:18] Henry Hutchence: Your terrain is returned once again because it overlaps on to other lots that either we need to rent out again, or which serve as a community hangout. You really need to learn how to live in group land rentals with other real people or else move to Bellisseria where everything is done for you and spaced out -- but that will cost more. Turn on view/property lines or on Firestorm, World/Show More/Property Lines while wearing the group tag to see the aqua lines that are your boundaries. A big terrain like that in fact really isn't needed. The land will not terraform like a flat pancake -- this is mainland. But it can be adjusted a bit around your house. Your house -- we have the same one on another sim -- has a *deck*. it does not need a terrain under neath it for you to place your furniture. A deck suits a lakeside; a giant terrain does not. If you don't like the Linden's terrain texture here -- it cannot be changed -- then *this is not the rental for you*. Look for rentals where you can have more space, change the textures, etc. But they will cost more. Good luck.

And do note: I don't live in a virtual world, something you clearly intend as an insult. But you do.

Next, there are a whole bunch of conversations which I can't get now because Henry is out. And the Lindens have made all our lives 100x harder by cracking down on the sharing of accounts. That these are clearly businesses where people with a shared business, even a shared address in RL (until recently), but with different credit cards on the accounts and obviously a different IP at times to log on, should be abundantly clear to the unaided eye when dealing with something like DRD, which first began complaining against the Lindens short-sighted crackown.

We're a fraction of the size of DRD and can't fight this. We have each others' perms, but certain objects -- teleporters come to mind -- can only be handled by one avatar. The rent boxes even can be transferred without disrupting their paid status, that's how they are scripted. The rent revenue coming in can go to pay the tier, great. It's not vital to log in every day for such a helper. But it goes to paying SOME tier, not ALL, and at some point this becomes a NUISANCE. I am trying to work on solving this now, but meanwhile, I've only got a summary for the rest of this story.

Apparently another tenant, related to this new tenant, intervened and seemed to be more understanding, perhaps because he'd been there awhile. But then he started pulling what Henry thought was "DEI" which frankly, I would not have deployed, given everything, and that conversation seems to have gone downhill and uphill with Henry finally saying, in response to the customer's apparently somewhat precious invocation of how he came on to SL to work "during certain time windows":

"Well, Time Window this: my dad sat in the GULAG for 9 years."

It's true.

The premise that Big Mountain Girl has -- that every landlord renting land for cheap and not always meeting expenses -- and tiering the view for you and managing it with rules -- is supposed to do X, Y, Z. And if he doesn't, why, he is rude, inconsiderate, failing to give 24 hours notice, blah blah. That if he has some little rental box he's come in to service from a very busy life of wife and kid, caregiving an elderly babushka to give her regular caregivers a break, shopping, repairing, cleaning etc. that he "must be living in a virtual world" -- well, that's whack. None of us can live in a virtual world 24/7; we don't have UBI, we have to work for a living or care for others or pursue other pursuits.

Henry will be back soon enough -- I've got some favour-banking chits in here and he'll have to step up.

Meanwhile, adjust your attitude, all of yez, you're disgraceful. The kinds of crazy-ass tickets I've seen this week go beyond what I have seen in 21 years of SL. 

 

Rental Panopticon: Borked

By Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor

Well, this one slipped through the cracks. Somehow, because Henry has been on vacation without a good Internet connection, the usual routine didn't happen: you see a payment event, if online, you immediately give that person resident powers. The whole reason why we allow self-join on demand by search/groups or a common, simple group joiner (not a bot) is so that people do not have to queue up waiting for dilatory landlords to log on. We also enable people to set home immediately wearing that instant group tag (which they got for $1 payment) because the most frequent ticket is: "I forgot where my rental is."

A lot of people don't realize there is a record of payments online for every single transaction, going back three months if you are on premium, and if on basic, one month (if I am not mistaken). So we have three months of record. In addition, we keep all our chat records within reason -- they get to be a big load and get deleted periodically -- but we do this for the precise reason that a chat record, when retained properly (saved to disc, with email attached to your account so that IMs do NOT cap), is a record of payment as well, going back more than three months! Payment events generate a chat line that goes into room chat or your IM if you are not online. Great! That's how, when someone contacts us and rents, we can open up chat, and see that they last paid us a year ago, then left. Then we can say "Welcome back!" which is a nice thing to do.

We can also see if they paid, then refunded because they had a struggle -- perhaps their house didn't fit. Perhaps they didn't realize they had to join a group and their prims returned. Then we give them a full refund and return of the cancellation fee so they can try again.

Most people read the info card, or if they don't, read my profile with the group powers on it, or figure out how to see the FAQs card in the office or on site in many communities -- we deliver information in five different ways, with ample duplication, knowing that most people don't read it.

This person NEVER contacted ANY manager, that's clear. 

This person did not live there for a month; she lived there since June 29, which his a little over two weeks -- 18 days. She paid for more than a month -- six weeks, as the records show.

Her behaviour is stupid, nasty, and unnecessary -- when people threaten us with violence (even in a virtual world); when they threaten to ruin our reputation (even in a virtual world), we publish their bad behaviour so that it serves as a deterrent to them ever doing that again to us -- and possibly others.

We do not take these posts down. Ever. 

We have no need to fix any attitude for any customer; we have many happy customers and many customers who have been here for years because they know a good deal when they have one.

We run self-service rentals. If any time you are unhappy with the self-service you are serving yourself, you refund. Full stop. That's the ball game. That's all she wrote.

If you need service, you read the notecard, you contact a manager, full stop, that's the ball game, that's all you wrote.

If you can't be arsed to contact a manager when -- contrary to normal procedure, you didn't get resident powers or didn't get furniture removed or whatever your issue was, let me repeat once again:

THESE ARE SELF-SERVICE RENTALS. IF AT ANY TIME YOU ARE UNHAPPY WITH THE SERVICE YOU ARE SERVING YOURSELF, YOU MAY REFUND FOR A SMALL CANCELLATION FEE.

I personally would not have returned a full refund to this person. I'd click the box and refund the time visible, minus the cancellation fee -- the end.

If she is too fucking stupid to call a manager with her issue, and is supposedly waiting like a martyr for weeks on end to get ban and terraform powers, then that's her funeral, and I suspect that this fake learned helplessness covers up another story: she had other things to do, was buy in RL, has other houses, etc. and it was not the center of her life. Good! Our rentals should never be the center of anyone's life.

I suspect she was on vacation, had other homes, other things to do. Because she had the power to put down a house -- and did not. I suspect her stalker issue, while something we always take seriously, isn't bothering her THAT much if she couldn't be arsed to call a manager.

As for "terraforming," anyone who visits this site at Hector Lake will see that this is patently ludicrous. It has a terrain on it. It is done neatly. There is no earth that needs management there. You can ask to have the terrain removed in some cases, but in THIS one we don't because people can't manage steep land properly (as witnessed by ANOTHER ticket break-out of people who built an enormous terrain there going from sealevel to road level which is above two stories (our rules), blocking the view in three directions, and forcing a moveout -- yet another chore to deal with.)

[06:57] Henry Hutchence: Hi, welcome to Ravenglass Rentals! I added you to resident powers in the group Seven Wonders. Switch to the title "resident" on the group menu to access ban, media, set landing, change parcel etc.
[06:57] Henry Hutchence: this will require relogging
[06:58] Aya Bork: not to be rude but can i get a free month cause thats how long it took for this to happen
[06:58] Aya Bork: havent been able to use it for that reason just maintain the rent
[06:59] Henry Hutchence: You are able to immediately start decorating the minute you use the group, and set home to here, before you get resident powers, just so you know. is there something else you needed to do?
[06:59] Henry Hutchence: er the minute you *join* the group with tenant status only you can place prims
[06:59] Second Life: Inventory item 'Seven Wonders Quickstart 2023' offered
[06:59] Aya Bork: parcel name, access, visiblity, terraforming,
[06:59] Aya Bork: all 4 of those things rendered it a placeholder instead of a home for this duration
[07:00] Aya Bork: access and terraforming are the biggest ones that affected it
[07:01] Henry Hutchence: Well if you read our lease, we do not allow ban lines or no-access, also the land has a mesh terrain on it so terraforming would not be needed
[07:06] Aya Bork: yeah but i need to be able to ban my stalker ex and you might not find it necessary but i like to blend the land and the mesh to make it as visually pleasing as possible
[07:06] Aya Bork: you're not losing anything just hook me up bro real talk lol
[07:06] Henry Hutchence: After you relog and change your title, you can put in any names you need in your own lot, or indeed in any surrounding group lot for good measure
[07:06] Aya Bork: i'm still referring to the reason i didnt get any use out of it for the last month
[07:07] Henry Hutchence: It's not about losing anything Aya, it's about explaining rules to you. PS are you related to the other tenants nearby? Because they are being asked to remove their huge terrain wall as it was not intended and it blocks the view in three directions at ground level
[07:07] Aya Bork: not RELATED like we're completely separate but i have met them
[07:08] Henry Hutchence: ok well now you know their giant terrain wall and build blocking the view is coming down
[07:08] Aya Bork: oh hes moving?
[07:08] Henry Hutchence: now you're all set and you can blend anything you need to blend
[07:09] Aya Bork: the store for car stuff next to mine right?
[07:09] Henry Hutchence: the car store was here for ages with just the main build but all of a sudden in the last few days they made this ramp and this other giant eyesore so that will come down
[07:10] Henry Hutchence: because it forced move-outs of other people plus it is against our rules which are no builds over two stories from the ground up or such as to obstruct the view
[07:11] Aya Bork: cool well that's his business and this is mine
[07:11] Aya Bork: for the last month i have not had ownership of the land i was paying for [COMMUNITY COMMENT: SHE WAS THERE ONLY 17 DAYS]
[07:11] Aya Bork: i could not ban annoying people
[07:11] Aya Bork: i could not fix the land how i want
[07:11] Aya Bork: please add another month or refund me for that month
[07:12] Aya Bork: it has been used 0 times
[07:12] Aya Bork: I think your attitude might be what's sending customers away. not random buildings
[07:12] Aya Bork: all due respect
[07:13] Henry Hutchence: So here's the thing Aya. This is a self-service business. At any time you are unhappy with the service that you are serving yourself, you refund. I don't see any payment for you going back a month? I don't see any messages from you requesting any change of status in the group. Usually we do this within 24 hours; usually you get a message. If that didn't happen, that's unfortunate but I certainly would not hand over a month's free rent without checking MY ACCOUNTS to see if that is true.
[07:14] Henry Hutchence: So given your tone, your snark, your belief that you need to terraform something that really does not need it, Ima give you a FULL REFUND RIGHTNAH and you on your way, bro, we good???? Buh bye
[07:14] Aya Bork: if you really want i can go back and find the exact date i paid you the first time to prove that i'll give you the transaction ID. I shouldnt have to harass anyone to be delivered what i paid for.
[07:14] Aya Bork: I've also just paid another month and you can refund that 

Payment record shows not two months, but six weeks:

2024-07-14 21:40:09	661fd794	Source: Aya Bork Payment Region: Hector Description: Ravenglass Rentals $225 in Hector Roadside Lakeview 3		L$810
2024-06-29 15:10:58	d6839aff	Source: Aya Bork Payment Region: Hector Description: Ravenglass Rentals $225 in Hector Roadside Lakeview 3		L$675

 

 

[07:16] Henry Hutchence: I personally will go back and review the same records which we have too obviously. I am refunding 32 days that I see on the box now and if you are owned more, you will get it
[07:16] Aya Bork: thanks. I sure you think you're a hotshot but i highly suggest you get your head out of your ass and stop being a massive douchebag who thinks he can act however he wants talk about his customers however he wants and do anything he wants to people.
[07:16] Aya Bork: someday someone is gonna slap the fucking shit out of you
[07:16] Aya Bork: and you're gonna deserve it so bad
[07:17] Henry Hutchence: Yes, well you might consider why you have a stalker, you must have really pissed off some guy in the worst way. At any time you lived here for the supposed month plus, you could have asked a manager to a) immediately put in a ban b) give you resident powers. We usually give these immediately after payment if online or within even less than 24 hours, so it sounds like you are a martyr. Enjoy. Bye. Block/ban.
[07:17] Aya Bork: (busy response): autoresponse/Blocked
Too slow sorry
[07:23] Henry Hutchence: https://gyazo.com/e88608bdfc9f5a24f51b478e60853915 [her payment record, proving there is no "two months" but six weeks; and she has lived there NOT a month, but only 17 days]

[07:23] Aya Bork: (busy response): autoresponse/Blocked
Too slow sorry
[07:23] Aya Bork: yeah told ya
[07:23] Aya Bork: gg

[07:24] Henry Hutchence: 6/29 isn't two months ago; it's two weeks. There are absolutely no messages from you about anything; don't like [lie]. You're a bitch. Your life is not a good one as a result. Change your behaviour and maybe you will have partners instead of stalkers. Bye!
[07:24] Aya Bork: (busy response): autoresponse/Blocked
Too slow sorry
[08:08] Aya Bork: (Saved Wed Jul 17 11:08:47 2024)sorry i had a cranky morning i hope nobody slaps you goodbye thanks for the refund
[08:09] Aya Bork: (Saved Wed Jul 17 11:09:33 2024)and just to be clear i just meant people's responses to that attitude, i dont slap people XD
[08:33] Aya Bork: (Saved Wed Jul 17 11:33:41 2024)really should fix your attitude towards customers though thats was a big unnecessary bullshit

 

We rarely have time to look up somebody's profile and examine who they are and why they are behaving like ass-munches. But here's Ms. Bork's profile:

 

01/03/2023
(1 year 6 months; 561 days)

 

[bunches of shopping groups]

No picks

🌺 🌺 🌺 🌺 🌺 🌺 🌺 🌺 🌺 🌺
Hi curious person ⊂( ´ ▽ ` )⊃
Here for fun and friends!
but... very socially awkward also awkward jokes (｡T ω T｡)
my brain may be slow... but my car is fast!
🌺 🌺 🌺 🌺 🌺 🌺 🌺 🌺 🌺 🌺

cars cars cars cars cars cars cars cars cars cars (☆ω☆)

vroom

skrrt

nyoom

zoom

crashing noises

 

 

Someone else will be along to enjoy this roadside parcel for a low price on Robin Loop, we don't need to cater to crankly asshole millenials of this nature. 

Rental Panopticon: Why Your Prims Are Returned

By Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor

So this is a six-part series. Or maybe it's a three-part series. Or maybe I won't get through this post, let's see.

Evil landlord taking away your prims.

In our first episode, we dealt with the chief awfulness of Mainland -- annoying and even nasty neighbours. Those particular nuisances at least have nice builds, more or less, and don't blight the skyline, put up giant glowing spires like the Siths or stick out a black-box club like they're in Snowcrash which you can't de-render because they put a zillion things in and around it that keep changing. 

Why Panopticon

This series used to be called "Rental Dementia," but nowadays, as the population in Europe and the United States gets older, more and more people have to deal with dementia and they find this an insulting term when used casually. My uncle just died with early-onset dementia at the age of 76; my mother-in-law doesn't recognize me any more due to dementia; my aunt has the early stages of it; one of my oldest friend's mother has it and drives him crazy and I listen to him repeat information 100 times on the phone when he's here. And so on. I get it about dementia, truly I do. 

But I decided to use "Panopticon" now to go beyond the "madness" that "Panopticon" can connote (Russians even cry panoptika! when something is particularly weird and funny) to its display powers. Read up on what the Panopticon is if you don't know.

That doesn't mean I spy on my tenants, which forums bullies always imply. Trust me, I have no inclination to spy on my tenants. I don't have the time or the interest, and PS if I burst in on my tenants, or cammed in on them, I wouldn't have tenants as they mainly use Firestorm, which has a feature that lets them know when someone is camming in on them. I find that creepy, and even forced to use Firestorm as I am now (more on that debacle later), I've never found and used that creepy cam-reveal feature because I don't care. Of course it's humorous that people dress up to the nines (or dress with very little left to the imagination) and go out to shopping events and clubs, then get mad that someone is staring at them lol.

I don't even look at my tenants' profiles, and really, I should try to do that more, they might serve as an earling warning system. Sometimes when the tenants are missing and haven't paid their rent I might look, or when they do something awful -- then I'm surprised to discover that they are male when I thought they were female, or female when I thought they were male, or both, or neither, or a vampire, or something. (Vampires seem to be back; or maybe they never left.)

But when I tenant has been with me years and years, generally I get to know them, the patterns of their behaviour, whether they are always on time and in full or always late with increasingly fabricated excuses, whether they overprim or watch their prims -- the basics.

So along comes a situation that doesn't end well for anyone really, but it happens and it's just how it is.

No Automated Removal Systems

I do not use automated systems that remove people's prims the minute their rent expires or after some engineered grace period. There are such systems in use; I'm not sure if there is a "return prims upon non-payment event" LSL command but it may merely function as an alert system that has the CSR then go and return the prims manually, or perhaps bots can do this now, I'm not sure.

I think that's insane because you only lose tenants when you return prims abruptly. I also don't use web-based systems because I see no reason why my business information needs to be handed over to third parties for them to exploit as they will. I don't want to fuss with all these trappings for a small business that can  have accounts on a simple Excel spread sheet or notecard.

I most certainly don't use Casper, never did, and was a very early -- and punished -- critic of Casper -- whom hordes of people have now finally come around to loathing after this scandal (which has died down, with Casper still in place along with all the other dramatis personae).

Casper's rent-o-matic is laggier than the open-source rental script I use. I know this because I have tested them repeatedly. How can I do that if I have never bought Casper's products? By renting various stores or homes myself which have the vendors in use, and using a script radar to see how much script time they take up. Perhaps Casper has features that people appreciate -- certainly despite everything it is in wide use for vendors for shops -- I think mainly for their ability to resend merchandise -- but I'm not sure how much they are used as rental boxes. Probably a lot. But here's the thing:

They do not refund and do not let you pay ahead more than a month.

NO REFUNDS AND NO PAYMENTS AHEAD

Could I repeat that for the hard-of-hearing in the back? THEY DO NOT REFUND AND DO NOT LET YOU PAY AHEAD MORE THAN A MONTH.

That is, maybe they do? You tell me. But not a single person I have ever rented from has ever used those features, and keeps them set at NO REFUND and NO PAY AHEAD. This is extremely annoying because the notices to pay come out EARLY and when you go to pay, you can't pay a month because you're still got some part of a week left. You can end your rental and send a notice -- you don't get anything back if you do that. That's how MOST landlords work.

RAVENGLASS REFUNDS AND LETS YOU PAY AHEAD

Not me. I provide refunds and I provide the ability to pay ahead -- and more on those vexations in the next posts. I'm a big critic of the cultist open-source movement, the Richard Stallman and Tor types who abound in SL. But I use Hank Ramos' "liberated" script (because he got angry at all the competition cutting into his rent-seeking rental box business) because I can have people adapt and fix it. More than a dozen have, some paid, some unpaid. It's available for free at my shop, which is a boon to people new to the business. 

On my rental boxes, you can a) click REFUND and for a small early cancellation fee get back what remains; b) pay ahead if you are worried your rental will be taken beyond the 4 weeks that gives you 10% discount. More people avail themselves to a) than b), but more on that in the next episode.

Notifications and GRACE PERIOD

Each rental box sends out multiple messages over 4 days telling you that your rent is due. The "my messages cap" excuse simply can't apply because at least one of them is bound to get through. I often go and send manual messages to chronic late payers because I'm sick of them stiffing me. Most people get the reminder or they are organized and have a day they know to pay their rent each month as in real life. After the box expires, it is in a GRACE PERIOD with a KEEP CALM sign with a "red" state. During that grace period of two days, no one else but you can pay it.

The purpose of the grace period is not to have people always take advantage of it and get 30 days instead of the 28 day week prescribed by the rental script. Some do, some don't. But it's there should they need it. 

A Sad Story

So now let us come to a tenant who need not be named because she hasn't done anything wrong, although no doubt she feels victimized and feels that evil landlords have prevailed once again. These posts of mine are dedicated to illustrating how the "evil landlord" trope doesn't always apply in SL, but has applied enough to give the job a bad name, as in RL. 

Most people are decent; most people pay their rent; most people don't grief. But the few who aren't like that will be blogged, sometimes named, simple because we have no other recourse to enforce civility in SL. No amount of threads, weird, crazy, insane messages harassing me for years will get me to cease the publication of bad behaviour or the explanation of situations that illustrate that the problem is not on my side.

So this tenant always pretty much paid on time -- more or less. But sometimes was late. She had a rental that was cheaper than all the other rentals on the sim -- 0.65/prim which was the old cost of my camp sites (many of which were removed due to abuse by alts on "two per person" limits, or creepy child avatars or day tripping harassers/griefers). The other campsites were either abandoned, sold, or turned into the higher cost and larger rentals of 0.75 or even 0.85 depending on whether they were roadside, waterfront etc. 

When I raised the prices a few years ago when the Lindens thrust state tax on us (which cost me as much as an entire private island sim tier per month -- but with no island to rent out to show for it), I got rid of some of those low cost "camp sites" but that particular one happened to get "grandfathered" simply because that person was in it for four or five years or more. Sometimes it's too much bother to refund, reset scripts, roust out the person and listen to their complaints (over a....5L or 10L increase), etc. Thus it was left.

Takeover Policy

Unexpectedly, a person I hadn't had rent from me before IM'd me and asked to have the tenant's prims removed from a site he just rented. I hastened to the sim and saw to my chagrin that it was that long-time tenant who had been there for years. Normally when I see that someone's box has expired unattended past the two days or even a week, I IM them and see what the issue is. Maybe they've moved on or have COVID or whatever. It's not always possible to do these things in a timely manner, especially with my own increasing RL challenges. But it's standard as anyone who has rented from me knows. I didn't this time -- and someone pounced seeing the cheap rent.

Because of my generosity and leniency in this regard, people thus can get by with not paying for weeks on end -- but if they have been there for  years, they know I won't return their prims. Because they will pay me the back rent when they show up -- most of the time. Lately, we've been enforcing that way more because certain people are deadbeats and made good on threats to return prims of even people who have been there for years if they chronically deadbeat me. (With 25L rentals I go and instantly return prims, which is explained in the lease; with a 2500L rental, I might let it age a bit longer).

But there's an exception to my tendency to err on the side of contacting people and going beyond the grace period of two days. 

And that is our written and widely promulgated policy that if your grace period expires, then anyone who comes along willing to pay it at that point can pay the box and then ask to have your prims removed. If you were there for 10 years before that and now have COVID in the hospital, that's sad, but time and tide and tier wait for no man, and we have to pay the Lindens tier to maintain your rental. I've been in the hospital a lot this past year myself. Everybody has a story. Your story is sad, but so is my tier bill and I cannot subsidize your SL.

Trying to be Nice

Even so, I do check things in a situation before the new tenant starts building, and sometimes I will stop and refund them if I see, for example, that in fact they paid on time, but a Linden sim re-set caused the rental box to reset in time as if unpaid. This is actually very rare, but it does happen. Or I see if in fact a message was sent to me in IMs or email that somehow I missed.

In THIS case, the first thing I noticed was that the person had logged on the previous day -- that you can see in the group. So there was no reason for them not to pay their expired rental box which they could easily see at their home, even if "their messages capped" (a problem I don't believe in, because accounts tied to email enable IMs to go into email to be read there.) When I see a recent log-on like that, my sympathy dwindles. 

Yet I still sat down and read all the past payments. And now I'm coming to the point of this story. You can only see payments going back 3 months, so that means April. I saw 9 payments were made from April 4, sometimes for one week, sometimes for two weeks, which was X amount of days according to the rent amount, which would take you to...23 days unpaid, in fact on the day it was taken over.

Now, if this person routinely made use of the grace period, that would be 9 x 2, and now we have 18 days accounted for, and only 5 days unpaid -- and we can't be sure they were 5 consecutive days.

Even so, it gives one pause, eh? A grandfathered cheaper rental. A grace period constantly exploited essentially leading to 18 unpaid days across 3 months at the very lease. This person happened to pay only one week at a time, instead of paying ahead 4 weeks and getting the 10% discount. 

Every time I become aware of how untenable low-priced rentals are -- sometimes kept at, or moved to a low price because otherwise they won't rent -- I remember the words of this retired man in SL who ran a rentals business, who used to work at Lockheed. He used to run a loan company and gave reasonably-priced loans to buy land, and I once took a loan to buy land that was at risk of ruination next to my existing rentals (an age-old story). (Such loan companies and "banks" and "stock markets" later became illegal in SL. He is long gone from SL because rentals proved so time-consuming and unrewarding.)

When he took a look at my newbie communities for less-than-tier prices, he said simply:

"You've got to get out of those."

You've got to get out of those.

And so I did, as newbies communities or cheap camp sites have been closed, sold, or abandoned in Obscure, Patagonia, Tuliptree, Cayuga, Grace, 

SOME RENT DOES NOT COVER TIER

With the rent she was paying, had she paid the 4 weeks with a discount, at that low "camp site" rate, her rent would not cover the tier for that parcel.

That's not her fault; it's my fault. I'm heedless of the scorn heaped on me by "big guy" landlords strutting around the forums and ridiculing me because I believe in having humane rentals. But you can see in a situation where the overall Mainland rentals business is now really hurting (for lots of reasons as I explain), a rental that still generates something -- 18 cents a month profit -- is let go rather than being policed or abandoned or raised.

Remember, the tier I pay is US $0.0030 per meter, at the rate of US $166 per sim of 65,536 meters, and 8.25% sales tax in NYS. Even if you were fortunate not to have any Internet services tax in your country/state or a lower one (like NJ or FL), you would still not be making bank on lots like this.

Raise the Rent?

That whopping 18 cents per month rapidly disappeared as it covered the handful of camp sites remaining at lower prices whose rents also didn't cover their tier. I  have a choice now to raise these rents once again, or leave them as is, as the camp sites are all full, and in combination with some of the higher cost waterfronts or larger home lots, they either break even or make some modest profit. Raising the rent even 5L could cause all of them to flee; some of them; 80% occupancy is already a real loss and a reason to close an area or reformat it. The margins are razor sharp in Mainland rentals.

There really is no good solution here -- somebody might try raising rents and putting in more fancy content -- I find overstuffed, overlandscaped mesh rentals do not move. Most peole want to put out their own stuff if they are on the Mainland and not Bellisseria. There is a niche clientele to move into those very overstuffed overprice B&Bs -- but I see a fair number of them go vacant or get abandoned, too, even as my crappy shack next to them stays rented for years on end.

Hospital

How did this sad story end?

This person showed up and lamented that she had been in the hospital, and if I had contacted her, she could have paid.  I apologized and reminded her of the policy.

And here where others might have hardened their heart, because she had been there for years, I offered to give her the same price at another location (unrented, but with a higher price) and even offered to BUY a cheap lot across from her previous rental, now taken, that still would have cost me about US $14 -- which I would never make back -- ever. That was madness. She didn't reply, and no doubt she's found another rental or moved to Belli where she tells stories of evil Prokofy. I didn't persist.

So... this is a rental that I have to subsdize 23 days of the 90-day period if they take the 4 week discount AND take advantage of the grace period every time -- or earn 18 cents a month from at best if they don't. If she had left, and there was no new person, I would have most likely ABANDONED this land because IT WOULD NOT SELL. The land around it for sale was either overpriced and not selling, or had sold to land choppers and ad farmers and had ad farms already on it. That's why this nice land essentially, on a quaint cobblestone by a Linden waterfalls would GET GONE because it's just dead weight. The 1024 or 1536 won by dumping this loss-leader former camp site would be well applied elsewhere.

But sadly, I've now got a tenant who is paying 4 weeks ahead -- not one week at a time as my old, long-term, prized tenant -- and that means my tier is not covered there. If he deadbeats through every two-day grace period, it will be an even greater loss.

No Solutions

Again, I can institute a price hike but it has to be done for a price globally, or a type of rental globally, not just given to one tenant.  That would not be ethical. A new tenant is more likely to move out than not -- so perhaps I can soon staunch this cut like a million other little cuts and abandon this parcel, perhaps after an attempt to rent it at the somewhat higher price of .70/m.

Another thing I could so is end the grace period for high-occupancy cheaper places like camp sites. But that would require rolling back or re-doing the current script set up to work with grace periods and I don't want to wait for/pay for/test for that change now and make it globally. It's not worth it. Again: move-outs galore.

Who Rents?

The people who are in campsites and cheap small lots of 512 or 1024 costing 0.65 or 0.66 or .70 per prim are of two types:

o People from the non-Western world, poor people from developing countries as they are called euphemistally, people from countries without easy access to credit or even debit cards who have trouble buying Lindens; people whose spouses won't let them spend on SL (these are mainly women and yes, there are plenty of such women left in the world -- see the popularity of BDSM, findom, and Gor) -- poor folks.

o People slumming from their big island or homestead rentals, or bigger rentals from Anshe-land or Markland or one of the other big companies, who are either on alts so they can have affairs or get some peace and quiet from their RP lifestyles on other accounts or just people who like to explore and rent a place here and there, like they would a camp site in RL.

If somebody ends up in a cheap rental of mine like this for years, that other people might only day-trip to or have a "vacation" at on their alt, it's generally because they are poor. And that's what I'm here for. I want people who can't or won't pay for premium accounts be able to have a second life, even if only on a 256 or 512. I think it's possible; I've done it myself.

It's just costing me too much, and it will have to end, bit by bit.

 

How to RESET Your PIN on Messenger and Stop the Annoying Madness Over Imposed Encryption

By Prokofy Neva, Virtualator

Are you PLAGUED MERCILESSLY by constant annoying messages to put in your PIN for Messenger because of these new end-to-end encrypted chats you didn't ask for?

Are you frustrated and baffled as to WHERE you can RESET YOUR PIN? Here is the pathway:

1. You can't do this on your desktop on Facebook OR Messenger! That's the secret! Some help pages take you to resetting the PIN on "Facebook Payments" but that's useless for *Messenger* -- it's only 4 digits and the Messenger required pin is 6, that's how you know it's the wrong one.

 

2 Go on your PHONE, either Android or iPhone. Then:

 

3. Go inside Messenger app and find SETTINGS, on the Android it is the gearshaft in the upper right-hand corner.

 

4. Scroll down to Privacy & Safety

 

5. Next, go to End-to-end Encrypted Chats

 

6. Now, counterintuitively because it doesn't seem like a thing to reset a PIN at, click Message Storage.

 

7. In Message Storage, voila, you will see RESET PIN in the middle of the screen on the Android (likely similar on iPhone).

 

8. Pick a 6-digit PIN that you will remember because otherwise you will constantly be resetting a one-time pin or finding your way back here *every time you use Messenger, encryption is imposed on you.*

 

9. Let Google Drive save the key. I hope that saves it in Google's Managed Passwords, not sure, on Chrome. But in any way your PIN is now permanently reset, remember it, and type it into Messenger to stop the madness!

 

Can We Confirm Some of the Allegations Made Against Lindens, Moles, and Their Friends or "Family"? Let's See What's Missing

By Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor

Still of Patch Linden (L) and Squeaky Mole (R) at a "Meet the Lindens" video at SL19B. Photo by Kunisaki Izumo.

So our little virtual world is abuzz with chatter about the serious allegations made in this anonymous post on Medium, to which I've made the following post with comments, basically concluding that not enough legitimate research has been made to make these allegations, by credible, known, identified persons, with querying of the Lab -- and/or the Lab's own investigation.

Instead, there is a cloud of silence over the issue on the forums, with at least one timid thread being closed and "disappeared". Inara Pey, among the most respected and widely-read bloggers in SL, has only very vaguely hinted about the scandal in reporting about the departure of two two Lindens -- VP of Engineering and CEO of Marketing -- which was discovered by perusing the Linden Lab corporate page, as no public mention of it was made by the Lab.

Second Lifers are used to looking at what isn't visible as much as what is visible when they try to follow stories and rumours and scandals. A web page with removed names or a 404 of a previous public page; a banned account gone from the People List; an empty sim where there used to be a store; scrubbed profiles -- these are all common points of reference for our world which often requires a "lost-wax" kind of approach to evidence to follow what's going on. So in sum, as of this hour, we have some key "Missings":

o Stitch Frostypaws from the People List

o Patch Linden's Flickr Page (locked from view and/or scrubbed)

o Linden Lab's board and staff page -- empty

To summarize my corroborations so far for those who hate reading anything larger than their hand:

o Some adult men with avatar pictures on their profile -- which are of young adult male avatars sitting in an embrace -- have a house with a M/M sex bed on it on an adult sim, and profession of their love for each other on their profile with a significant date for them. They may be tied to a Linden and a Mole, but this is speculative. Even if tied, this is not news. It's not even questionable. Lindens get to make alts and have private lives on their islands. Perhaps there are company guidelines for this, perhaps not but so far -- Nothing to See Here.

o  One or both of these avatars with their young adult avatars in their profile screenshot (not child or teen) are the owners of at least four sims, which have alleged to have adult content on them. One island, mature-rated appears to be a little "suggestive" with the name "Sausage Land" and a crude sketch appearing on the map as of yesterday -- now it shows as white and blank; another, also mature-rated, is also blank and has the name "UwU Family" -- neither of these can be accessed by outsiders. A third, adult-rated sim named "Isle of Tharen" is an goth-themed sim open to the public with a bunch of stores on it, some now empty, and empty lots. Again -- even if these avatars present on the sim, or owners or land or content on the sim are Lindens or Moles, it's not news. A fourth sim, Xeo Realms, is mature-rated and closed to the public.

o A four location is on an M-rated sim has the store called XeoLife which allegedly has strictly child content in it, with nothing objectionable about the content (although in a larger sense, some of us find the entire child thing in SL creepy even when "innocent" -- especially the furry/hentai/anime etc renditions of "youth" which all appears to be a scam to evade child porn laws). The sim is closed to outside teleports. This sim's proximity to the other three wouldn't necessarily be a "thing" -- Lindens randomly locate and mix sims of different ratings both on the Mainland and on the map of islands as the orders come in. The only problematic point here is that the owner of the fourth "child store" sim is the same avatar as the owner of the adult group and land in at least the public goth sim (Isle of Theren). Even so, no smoking gun here.

o Now comes the problematic allegation, that can be still seen, and has not been scrubbed: the Xeolots and XeoLife Main Store has now moved to a fifth, separate location -- which was ostensibly selling strictly innocent child content, although it was previously situated on an adult sim (why?). "We Have Moved" signs have been placed in this now-empty store. The store, shelves, and signs are owned by Scout Frostypaws.

Thus, on the same sim as this former XeoLot/XeoLife child store, on the outer corner of the sim, are the home and land of an adult avatar, Stitch Snowpaw, with a sex bed for male-to-male explicit activity, also owned by Stitch, as easily seen with a right-click on the land, which is open and not closed to any group or access list. This seems like questionable judgement -- placing the "child content" store on the adult sim, not far from decidedly adult content. Since no avatar in their child get-up has actually been seen also in this house with the adult furniture, it's not "a thing" in Linden Lab abuse report terms, although for me, their proximity on the sim with the same owners would be enough to send back all the content and eject all the avatars and AR all those concerned, both the owners of furniture and the owners/residents on the land. But in the scheme of things in SL, this could still be merely a matter of "a bad judgement call by staff" and in theory could have led merely to a request to move the store to a G sim and cool it with the mixing of A- and G-rated activity on one avatar.

The continued presence of this adult content on this adult sim -- rather than its removal along with the child store -- seemes more like a statement of "nothing to see here, it's not an issue" than neglect. If it had been known to be there, and was removed, then it would stand out more.

I'll say here it is actually quite hard to eliminate this sort of mixture. Let's say somebody makes only religious content for churchs and has a G-rated store on a G-rated sim. Or makes this G-rated child content that is a substantial part of the economy, from all indications, whether abused or innocent. That creator may also want to have a private life on an adult sim where they as an adult avatar do adult things. If their profile also has links to their G-rated store, no action can be taken because they aren't in flagrante in the moment -- the locations are different. I think there isn't a single person in SL who hasn't sworn on a G-rated sim (I've been banned for 3 days for that sort of thing when a griefer or enemy exploits this rating system to "get" me), or put out a painting that may be classical but have a breast exposed (so that a Linden returns it -- again, after a busybody reports it, or an enemy), or -- like me -- who has conducted a generally G-rated public life, but has rentals in M- and A-rated sims with adult furniture on the sky or ground. The mixing of ratings of content on one avatar and his properties and objects is not prohibited.

But I think we can agree that if you have decided to devote your content creation activities to child content, your having any kind of adult activity on that avatar of any kind leaves you open to suspicions.

The bed is filled with M/M adult animations (no need for a screenshot upload but it's available).

Again, there is nothing to link this bed to the RL persons of Patch Linden or Squeaky Mole except the marriage date of December 18, 2018 -- identical on the wedding registry and on the inworld profile of the avatar owner of the bed -- and to the owner of the land of the store which has now moved.

So basically, while I think there are many problematic things here, possibly related to "ageplay" and not, there is likely no more that will come of this, although for the first time, with some disappearances now, I think we may possibly see some heads rolling but I won't be surprised if Patch remains on staff, and it's Squeaky who has to fall on his sword and lose his job at LL.

Now to show my work:

WHY ARE THEY ALL STILL IN SL?

The question I've asked from the first day of this scandal is: if any of this is true, or true enough or serious enough to warrant an investigation, why aren't any of these people missing from the People List -- that is, banned, temporarily or permanently, or with deleted accounts? The Medium piece is nearly a week old; it appears the story actually began unfolding in December or even earlier -- why are they all still in place?

And the presence of ALL of them in the People List, with quite a few of them online at various times of the day, left me to wonder if this was all basically an obscure furry/Mole/Linden/child/cub war of some kind, with blogs carrying out a vendetta, and the crime of "ageplay" or child pornography being wielded to kick rivals out of  "the game" (however that is to be understood -- and I still think that's the most likely scenario). The gaming types that commented laconically on Twitter or Reddit or the Medium page (now locked to comments) that it looked like just a few furries wanted to kick others out of "the game" seemed to be the most apt.

But now I can say there is one person missing from the People List.  And after investigating this a little more in totally "open source" fashion, with no "inside dope" or "inside dopes" such as are really required for a story like this, I can say I think there's a problem here where action was warranted. Action has been taken, yet curiously, but possibly not enough to satisfy everyone observing these phenomena.

IF THIS WERE IN MY RENTALS I'D REMOVE IT, EVICT THE AVATARS, AND AR THEM

Let me put this as succinctly as I can again: if this content appeared in my rentals in proximity on a sim -- an adult home with an adult bed next to a store selling child items -- I would instantly evict the content owners and the tenant of record any anyone on the land, and AR the guilty parties using the AR system for "age play," the euphemistic term for depicting child abuse and sexualization of children.

So since everything I've seen so far would get gone in the worst way from my rentals, I don't understand why it didn't get gone quickly -- and thoroughly -- from the islands in question in SL.

That's what I would do because the mere proximity of the content is sufficient to take action. But Lindens might get legalistic here -- especially with one of their own -- and NOT take action if there was no actual "activity" -- just proximity of content.

UNKNOWN UNKNOWNS

So let me start with the unknown unknowns of the Medium story, which are the most serious allegations, and about which I have nothing to say because to research them -- as I indicated before -- you'd have to do the kind of journalistic footwork that you'd do to research GRU assassins -- infiltrating groups, looking at content with anonymizers or incognito to keep the links from appearing on your own computer; saving any screenshots elsewhere than your own computer; interviewing all kinds of strange characters; buying data from shadowy data brokers; scouring social media in meticulous, time-consuming ways with attention to all kinds of meta data on screenshots; recording and comparison and geolocation of IP addresses; looking at ownership and histories of web sites, etc. etc. So Not For Us. 

The most serious allegations concern Squeaky Mole, Loki Eliot, and Casper Warden, are regarding their alleged alts and their alleged activities both inworld and content creation on other sites, some clearly adult in nature (I thought one appeared innocent enough, but when I clicked on it I had to back out of it in a hurry as I got a face full of frank adult porn in the form of a video clip. So no thank you, other people can work that beat. I remain unconvinced that any of these people are related to the content that is questionable or even criminal in nature. 

Why? Because each one of these people -- and by extention Patch Linden, said to be related to them in various ways -- are highly public figures; highly sought-after figures that many people want to befriend, obtain favours from, stand next to, take selfies with, and get into their events -- so that means that they all have enemies or even people simply jealous of their visibility and professional, social, and financial success, and therefore they'd be motivated to "take them down" with making these kinds of linkages. Some of what the mysterious and anonymous Robert Bartos says about these people may be true, but it isn't proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Likely only Linden Lab would be in a position to look at all the log-in records of these people to follow their alts, and likely only law-enforcement (the FBI as it crosses state borders) would be in a position to track IP addresses and obtain warrants for perusal of chat logs and telephone communications such as to see if any of this makes connections. Journalists can sometimes replicate (or more often imitate) this sort of activity through confrontation, impersonation, hacking, and purchases from data brokers -- I personally find these methods to be inadmissible, although increasingly in the last 10 years I see them used more and more without anyone caring.  So I leave that piece of the story to my betters.

MARRIAGE OF PATCH LINDEN AND SQUEAKY MOLE IN RL?

Next, I noted that we haven't confirmed that Patch Linden, whose real life name is known, is in fact married to Squeaky Mole in RL. Squeaky's RL name can easily enough be found with enough persistence as well, once you start with the hypothesis that they are married, had a wedding, and a wedding registry. A web site with the RL name of Patch wouldn't be enough because it's a fairly frequent name on social media and the Internet and you can't be sure it's the same person. His purported husband's name is less common but you'd still not have confirmed this relationship. I personally continue to note that unless you had a marriage license, or a newspaper of record with a report of a marriage, you couldn't really be said to have proven it as it is all too easy to fake web sites especially of a social nature.

Even so, regarding a page I found which I won't upload here, I did notice that the RL registry page of these two men contains the same date for the wedding -- December 18, 2018 -- as the marriage date on the profile for the two love-bird avatars in question within SL, which may be evidence that these avatars are the alts of Patch and Squeaky. And an added touch -- the RL husband of the RL Patch Linden has a shock of green-coloured hair, like one of the online avatars said to be related to Squeaky Linden.

A lot more work would have to be done for this to stand up in court.

Again, get into any chat room or even party of 50 people and ask everyone's birthday -- you'll find some people have the exact same birth date, and more often than you think, the same year. Marriage anniversaries can work the same way. It's a clue -- but not what I would call firm evidence. Even so, two of the avatars in question -- Stitch Frostypaws and Scout Frostypaws have the same picture of a couple of young men  and the date "December 18, 2018" as does the RL wedding page -- and there's the green hair.

For many commenting on this tale, the name change is tantamount to a "smoking gun" but it may not be.

As "Robert Bartos" pointed out, some of these avatars appeared to have changed their name from "Snowpaw" to "Frostypaws". "Snowpaw" can be seen as far back as 2011 and likely earlier; Frostypaws became available only in December 2023 as a last name. So these individuals paid (or were given the option) to change their last name to "Frostypaws" in December 2023.

If you look in Google search with the terms "Rhyph Somme" and secondlife.com you will find the profile of Rhyph Somme, yet if you click on it, it turns into "Scout Frostypaws," his new name.

What I confirmed, using the Artizan script which searches for avatars inworld, is that Rhyph Somme did indeed turninto Stitch Frostypaws. If you type in a name of someone who has changed their name, it will then instantly turn into that other name, because the avatar UUID is the same (that's why this isn't the ideal way to "re-spawn").

But there's another character named Scout Frostypaws who now appears as the owner of XeoLife. If you type "Xelm Snowpaw" into Artizan, the result turns into "Scout Frostypaws". He has an old birthday of February 20, 2010 but it is not as old as Stitch Frostypaws, whose birthday is December 2, 2005. Scout has a newer name than his birthdate would warrant. Also both Stitch and Scout have the very expensive Premium Plus Lifetime accounts. (Geez, I didn't realize staff were taking some of those highly-coveted and limited number of accounts -- if they are indeed staff).

It's not clear that Stitch = Scout and is related to Squeaky, or if he is related to Patch, and others will have opinions about this.

I had written earlier that the Isle of Theren, named as the "scene of the crime" in Robert Bartos' piece didn't have anything untoward on it -- not surprisingly with a story a week or even months old. Looking around at the ground level stores I just saw a lot of goth content, starting with the landing, which is the DRD goth castle (the same one I used to have in Motocycle, in a community now gone -- it was an annoying build to work with -- and quite a few empty stores. Yes, there was the house referenced above with the adult bed, but it's an adult sim. There were on two occasions I TP'd in about 9 avatars evidently in the sky (I couldn't see them on the ground) over the Blow-Up adult store -- they looked like bots for traffic enhancement.

STITCH SNOWPAW IS GONE FROM PEOPLE LIST

I decided to take another look at the Isle of Theren. This time, I let the objects at the landing rez more, and went further into what appeared to be an entirely empty store. There were several signs amid the empty shelves that said WE HAVE MOVED. The move of XeoLife is to a store on the G-rated sim of Zoie. The move could be entirely innocent -- the space appears to be somewhat larger -- and while I didn't check every single item in the store, what you could see was row after row of innocent content.

That is, I personally don't think the entire child avatar shtick in SL is so innocent even when it purports to be, and I find it constantly pushing the envelope. The child avatar crowd wants to have beds, chairs, rugs, etc. all with animations, most innocent but some verging into something else once both an adult and child both sit on the furnitures. I've been shocked sometimes at the stuff I've sent back from my rentals violating the TOS when I check up on a diminuitive avatar who tells you they "aren't a child" emphatically; you see the groups in fact have the typical ageplay suspects, and then you find a pink little girl's room with whips and chains -- child-size. It's awful stuff.

The real questionable judgement here is why the G-rated (for all we can tell) Xeo store is on an adult-rated sim (who needs it to be there?) and worse, near a house with adult M/M sex beds. And there's no question who the owner of the house and the furniture is: Stitch Snowpaw.

In addition to owning the modern house on the edge of the sim with the adult bed, Stitch Snowpaw is also indeed the owner of the land upon which the XeoLots store was located as you can still see (as of February 29, 2024) on the "about land" menu:

The rest of the text on the profile says:

Cheap SMB TD Toddleedoo Boy Boys Girl Girls RP Roleplay Clothes Clothing Kids Furniture Tweenster Freebie Free Toys Shop PG Animations Bedroom sale Toddler Baby Advent Calendar

And now he is not in search. Why is he not in search? Well, as we all know, there are ways you can fall out of search:

o You can be banned, and then you will fall out for the duration of the ban - or permanently.

o You can hide yourself and not show up in search, although you will still show up in a group -- unless, of course, the group is large enough to hide its members -- apparently large groups automatically have this happen.

o Your account can be put on hold, which causes you to disappear from search and even groups, but you may still show up online if not logged out, and you may still be pulled up from your objects, so that someone could still write to you or send you content.

I'll add more reasons:

o SL search is not working, broken, not loading, you've forgotten to check off G/M/A for an avatar who might have rated themselves "M" or "A" and you didn't add those search categories.

So Stitch Snowpaws is gone from the People list using the SL search/people function in the browser, although you can still pull up the name using Artizan and see that it has nothing on it now except the photo of the couple and the December 18, 2018 date with a heart.

OR -- to use another tried-and-true sleuthing method -- if you go to Sidewalk Clothing group inworld, the name of the store mentioned on Stitch Snowpaw's profile, you will see the group membership displayed -- unlike other big groups he is in like "Second Life Birthday" or "Bellisseria Citizens" where the membership is hidden. There you can see both Stitch Frostypaws and Scout Frostypaws present in the group list, and shown as logged in on February 28, 2024 -- thereby indicating that Stich is not banned or on hold.

BTW, Sidewalk Clothing has some members who have not logged on since 2007 and 2008! That's odd for a store group to still have members like that unless they charged a lot for membership. Perhaps it's nostalgia. Perhaps THIS is the store and THIS is the original avatar of Patch Linden -- he often tells his foundational myth story of once owning a men's clothing store and we've all wracked our brains to figure out who it could be because there weren't that many back in 2004-2005.  I have to say I have no memory of anyting in SL called Sidewalk Clothing circa 2007 with grunge clothing but that wasn't my thing.

WHAT ELSE IS MISSING?

Well, the Valentine's photo of Patch Linden and Squeaky Mole, even the other day publicly visible on Patch's Flickr page now 404s for me as I don't have permission to view it. I'll watch for a takedown notice of copyrighted material or simple a removal by the blogging platform, as has happened to me before in my years in SL.

If you go on Flickr, you can't find Patch Linden's account visible (at least I can't, perhaps there's a way to block individuals). Pictures of Patch Linden and Squeaky Mole taken by other residents can still be found. 

And...the entire board of Linden Lab. They're just...gone from their web page completely.

As Inara Pey noted, in December 2023, the board showed two Lindens who are now gone from the Lab, their names gone from the People List: Mojo Linden and Styfy Linden. (BTW, the first time I saw Styfy on a Lab Gab, I thought to myself, "Now that's an unfortunate name, dude. Why do you have a name like that which will open you up to ridicule AND be seen a inappropriate? Depending on how you pronounce it.)

On February 6, you could still see the reduced board, with Brad etc. but without the two Lindens missing who just left.

If you look as recently as February 25, however, the president, etc. and the VP of Product Operations, Patch Linden with his RL name -- which all used to be there in January 2024 and December of last year -- are gone completely. There are no people at all.

Today, there is still NOTHING. No board, no staff. Just a brief discussion and the Tao of Linden -- which we know has changed its nature and text over the years but honestly, I don't have the patience to check this now.

That suggests an unheaval -- but it's an absence, not a presence. The web site is dated 2024 for the copyright.

Meanwhile, Nodoka Hanama, over on blsky (she has left Twitter and shuttered her account) has been burning up the wires with many comments on this sordid affair, but it's mainly heat, not light, with no new information and just restatements of the obvious re SL realities of virtuality and RL laws. She is now promising to soon drop something that will "tell all," related to the Mirai Group, whatever that is, possibly this or this. But, given what we see so far of her content - "Nodoka" is the name of many anime characters, go and Google it -- the story may not be credible, along with many Twitter commentators or the author of an early story as I noted on my last post.  Nodoka Hanama herself had me blocked over something she didn't like, no doubt my criticism of Contraption or my criticism of trans extremism, of the sort insisting that people say "pregnant people," something I find abhorrent to be forced on people in any setting.

BONNIEBOTS

For extra credit, when we landed on the Isle of Theren the other night, who should we see but ostiab, the leader of the intrusive and obnoxious "petplay" gang called Bonniebots. He appears grey here because we have him blocked. He was standing by an empty store. It's not clear if this was anything related to his activities, "petplay" or "bot" (ugh). But his presence on the sim is one more data point in the sordid saga of how Patch Linden shoved the bonniebots down everyone's throats -- apparently because he was already friends with them -- although it seemed from the New World Notes and other sources that they became acquainted after bonniebots came on the scene.

Skyler Pancake -- once so fetchingly photographed with minimally-dressed Patch Linden chasing her, in a scanty nightgown (although he is gay) -- has reportedly sounded off about her "dismay" about all this, and confronted Patch on blusky, I guess the place where the Kool Kids have gone now as they have either been AR'd off by Elon's new crew, or they are disgusted with Elon himself (as we all are) -- or both. Skyler's story about the photo is that she won a Halloween contest that gave her this photo opp...or something. Funny how these contests always have the same winners lol.

Feorie Frimon points out that Scout is the only non-Mole (ostensibly) in this Mole group for the SL Birthday - a sign of nepotism or an alt of a Mole?

So where are we now with all of this? Still, really, nowhere. The MIRAI group "drop" is not likely to be credible; as Nodoka herself acknowledges, her kinky crowd includes some people who have have been banned permanently from SL for "ageplay" -- what MOST gets her goat is that an exception has been made for Lindens and Moles to indulge in it that didn't apply to others.

I agree that it's that sense of "above the law" that really makes it so sordid -- but when it's a crowd of furry cubs and anime/hentai waifus etc making these claims, it really does seem like an internal game war vendetta.

I haven't spoken to any Lindens or Moles about this because I don't speak to them generally at all, unless there is some customer service problem -- I did ask Philip Rosedale to inquire about it merely because he posted something goofy about science always pushing the limits which I felt was actually part of the whole problematic worldview. "Nothing is True and Everything is Possible" -- like the title of Peter Pomerantz's book about the "New Russia".  (I continue to maintain that Dostoevsky's famous quotation should be translated as "If God is dead, anything goes" to convey licentiousness, rather than "everything is possible" to connote freedom, because the tenor of the books are all about people enslaved by their vices).

 

As Dostoevsky said, "Without God, anything goes." And that's why you should intervene with the troublesome situation now at Linden Lab https://t.co/P31sdnpVjg

— pra-COFFEE (@Prokofy) February 28, 2024

 

This is all I have for now and all I think all I'm going to bother to get, because it's not really my story and a lot more people are wound up about it, pro and con. This is a story that the court scribes around SL like @SLHamlet of New World Notes are not going to cover (or cover with massive spin). Those most vested in it seem to be a lot of furry cubs and anime girls. 

Prediction:  nothing more will happen; nothing more will change; the scene has already been cleaned up; and there is really no actionable, material evidence at least from what we've seen so far.

The ONLY thing that suggests something bigger may be coming is the disappearance of the "about us" page on lindenlab.com  No corporation can last long without people being shown -- and this could be an indication that one of the three board members (that's all there are, but that's common in Silicon Valley) could be leaving or more added; or Patch or other top staff are leaving or there are additions. Obviously if only Squeaky were thrown under the bus, there'd be no need to change this page. So watch this space. 

Raj Date is shown on his Linked-in with membership on the Tilia board "to present" still, and on Tilia's page, but not Linden Lab (as he was shown at Crunchbase). I added this comment to a thread (outdated) about Date on the forums strarted by nikaj -- and a Mole closed it for the dreaded forums offense of "necroposting," I guess. No one made any comment on it prior to the closure.

All the OTHER issues at play here -- the nepotism (which I explained may not necessarily be a bad thing); the reported abusive work climate; Lindens/Moles having businesses and store sims on their alts (or original accounts); scarce Premium Plus Lifetime accounts handed out to staff; avatars and their content "above the law" -- these are not likely to be ever addressed, even now. I'd be happy if a different kind of person -- less of an empire builder with only fiercely-loyal underlings and fanz from the user base -- were in charge of Product Operations. But I'm also keenly aware that only getting rid of this one person would not change the system in which he grew and thrived.

Is This Story True? Allegations Against Patch Linden, Squeaky Mole, and Casper Warden

By Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor

Photo by Patch Linden of himself and Squeaky Mole for Valentine's Day 2023.

My own little flounce out of the Backstage Fantasy Faire over their AI art policy -- and more -- which I dissected here barely had a chance to become Xitter fodder before another blockbuster story broke which so far appears to be an elaborate smear.

By appearing on the respected liberal Medium site where many journos go when they flee persecution at the New York Times or the Washington Post, the blog post titled "The Reality of Second Life's Ageplay Problem" could appear as a credible investigative work. It is by a totally unknown Robert Bartos who has no bio or explanation of who he is. The claims instantly made the rounds of several groups I'm in and was ridiculed as fake precisely because of the anonymous author. Possibly some or all of its allegations are true, as they are consistent with things that do indeed go on in SL but at this point we would have to say nothing of it is confirmed and no one has lost his job. Linden Lab should investigate the charges, with all the server-side information they have and which we do NOT have.

My hunch is that the person who wrote this Medium post is not American, from a number of clues in the text (repeated and specific references to EU laws which don't apply in the US and do not have equivalents). And they also have their own axe to grind but we can't tell what it is. [Note: an earlier version of this post mistakenly noted a religious concern from this author; in fact, the invocation of religious sentiments harmed came from ANOTHER author on this same story, see below at the end--PN].

I personally find a story like this as decidedly above my pay grade to try to investigate, in the realm of stories like "let's investigate the GRU assassins' unit in Europe". I don't have the funds, connections, lawyers, muscled protection, and skillz to do what is required on a story like that so I don't -- and in our little world, the "ageplay" story might as well be the GRU assassin story (and they can inevitably be related as fake stories are the GRU's hallmark). I recall from a few past blogs on this subject years ago that the ageplay lobby, obviously connected to RL criminal groups, have reinforced and weaponized themselves for ages and have numerous means of persecuting journalists who try to take on the topic -- usually by claiming they are guilty of the same thing. It's an impossible topic. Whatever is true about it inevitably drags in reams of conspiracy crazies on the Internet. This is not my fight.

I do want to say for the sake of the Second Life community as a whole that for now, there is very little that can be confirmed in the story other than the presence of a region called "Isle of Tharen" which is adult-rated and has a grunge city with the DRD gothic castle and other similar buildings. I sent an alt over and found that the objectional builds and furniture described in the story, if they ever existed, are not visible now. The dozen or so avatars on the sim aren't visible and appear to be bots for "traffic enhancement." I didn't make a thorough meter-by-meter search through the sky -- someone else will do that.

I'M A MAJOR CRITIC OF PATCH AND LL...

I have long been one of Patch Linden's biggest critics and as a result he refuses to answer any notecards or IMs -- understandably. I've criticized him in recent years for things like having his friends stage their wedding on his shiny new Fantasseria community center sim to launch it -- something that seemed patently FIC-y in ways that even the old FIC didn't demand in their day (the FIC are the "Feted Inner Core," as I dubbed it, the cool kids with privileged relationships -- and contracts  and perks -- with the Lindens). Worse, he had the Moles put up a statue of himself on this sim which really seemed over the top -- the only other statue of any Linden in SL (although there are sims named for Omidyaar and Rosedale) is to Ebbe Linden, who died in RL. 

BONNIEBOTS

Then there was the peculiar interlude last year where Patch first embraced the creepy bonniebots, who were slammed for intruding on people's privacy by aggregating and amplifying and weaponizing existing public information made available by LL -- closing down thread after thread criticizing the bots -- then gradually defanging them bit by bit so that finally most (all?) the objectionable features were removed from their site -- which still exists, along with the fleet of numbered bots that feed it info. I couldn't understand why Patch went so avidly for these creepy "pet play" avatars whose kink is to brutalize animals in BDSM "play".  Maybe they tie into this story.

WELCOME AREA WITH CHILD AVATARS AND BOYSTOWN

Most recently, I criticized him -- along with others who were even more ferocious -- for the lame Exhibition Welcome Area which put in not one but TWO child avatars which I felt was really stepping on a rake again and inviting bad press from mass media. The decision to put in "Boystown" -- which falls on the eye as ANOTHER child avatar problem, although it is an adult-rated sim without children -- is just asking for trouble. Has Patch become so desensitized to the optics of these issues that he no longer sees them? But he's not sequestered within SL -- he has to go out and deal with various outside companies and media. I don't know who does PR/media outreach nowadays (if there is anybody at all with the stature that the now long-gone Peter Linden used to have). This last episode tends to lend credence to this latest Medium-mediated scandal but once again, I don't see anything actually credibly represented, starting with the author himself. That doesn't mean "where there's smoke there's fire" -- there well could be. But better journalism than this has to be done on the story.

HAS PATCH FALLEN SILENT?

I have had the distinct impression even before this story broke that Patch had fallen silent; he stopped posting on Twitter (where he never had a major presence) in October 2023; he has not been making many announcements of interviews, and if I had made any prediction for 2024 last year, it was that he and maybe a few other long-time leading Lindens would be let go to "pursue other projects" as the simple result of a time-worn phenomenon: new owners come into a company, they keep the old owners' chief foremen around for awhile because they know how to turn on (and off) the lights, but as soon as they master those routines, they move them out so they can have their own people they are more comfortable with.

By that time, even the most suck-up types will have quarreled with their new masters over something so it stands to reason. LL had been acquired in 2020 by "an investment group led by Randy Waterfield and Brad Oberwager," the latter who appears in SL with the namer OberWolf Linden if I'm not mistaken, and who made his fortune in organic snacks and a job app -- lives next door to Philip Rosedale in RL and they have been to Burning Man together and apparently are good friends. Philip returned in 2022 and is still present inworld with a sim where he occasionally has meetings (like one on his pet theme, "universal basic income") -- but my impression is that he no longer consults for LL or at least is not mentioned as doing so. BTW he's now also on the board of MidJourney.

(And PPS LL should try to get someone to update their Wikipedia page, very out of date, and also fix with a Google bomb their search returns, which consist of the outdated Wikipedia entry plus an April fool's joke that Meta took them over.)

...BUT YOU HAVE TO PROVE THIS - AND AUTHOR IS TOTAL UNKNOWN

Just using the usual Google searches and searches inworld and pecking around groups and profiles, one can find out a little but the first thing wrong with this story is that the author is an unknown; his picture does not show up in Google Image Search or Amnesty International's tineye.com; who knows if it is authentic (people are already calling it "AI generated"). There isn't any journalist by this name, whatever accountants or unrelated people you might know. I did find one Russian-language allegation on Twitter that someone by this same name "Robert Bartos" was himself a child predator, and had an Instagram -- left two years ago -- with creepy, suggestive pictures -- true enough, and no, I d0n't feel I need to link to any of this. And that would be of a piece -- Bartos himself tells of at least one character in this drama himself implicated in child pornography trying to charge others so he can distract others from his own crimes -- and there's nothing to say Barthos himself isn't engaged in precisely this gambit.

I can see why someone may want to hide behind a pseudonym with an explosive story like this, but it simply undermines credibility COMPLETELY. Making serious charges like this, if you want to remain anonymous, you go to the proper authorities and then remain cooperative but quiet. Either this person failed to get action from the authorities (in California?) or he feels they need incentive, so he published the story, perhaps hoping to put more pressure on LL. LL will not tell you want they are doing about this and my bet is that their lawyers will tell them to SAY NOTHING. 

TWITTER POP-UPS

Meanwhile, several Twitter accounts, most unattached to any recognizable RL (or even SL name) have popped up, with their own creepy child avatar or cub avatar type pictures in the profile, to cluck about this terrible article. One claims she brought these allegations to LL already and got no response. I think as a manager I myself would default to wondering if this is an intra-furry community battle where one is trying to sic the Company on another as a type of weapon -- a very old SL story. They aren't to be believed with their anonymous and child-like profiles, especially when you get the usual moron jumping in to say "oh noes, anime cartoons aren't at all like children blah blah blah". You can see the tropes and the pitfalls on trying to cover these stories are legion, and really, you can only leave it to LL (which may take no action); prosecutors in California (?); or serious media with proper resources who aren't going to bother.

Just some random impressions I had:

WHERE ARE THE OTHER MOLES ON THIS?

o Where is Abnor Mole? He is in charge of the Moles, who are contract employees performing content creation, building, and forums moderation chores (and possibly more). What does he say about this? AbnOrmal is himself heterosexual and married to a Japanese woman, by his own report, and lives in Australia apparently. To my knowledge, he is not associated with any suggestive or sordid sexual connotations like other Lindens and Moles. He usually takes no prisoners on controversies - I remember he was annoyed at being pulled out of a long vacation weekend to look at some forums drama, and once I found he was shown by the system as having made some retort to my comment -- no doubt a caustic one -- but another Mole had removed it LOL. You can be sure Abnor, who is a Second Life Lifer, will have been looking into this intensively and trying to either disprove it or play it down for "the honour of uniform".  He should be asked.

o Where is Soft Linden? He himself is a furry with a constantly refreshed Xitter stream of consciousness of his own plus reposts, much of it highly inappropriate, favouritist, sectarian, and weird in my view for a Lab employee (as distinct from a resident) to be posting, but he's allowed to persist with all that because it neither violates Xitter policy (old or new) or apparently LL employee guidelines. He's also a Second Life Lifer (older than me!) and is in charge of security. If ever there was something that threatened the entire life of Second Life, it's this story which could in theory lead to some authority somewhere (especially in some more authoritarian country outside the US or state in the US) to blocking the website or freezing some operations.

o Where are the other Moles? Some of them are quoted as complaining about an oppressive workplace atmosphere of sexualized jokes (about gay male sex). They could ALL lose their jobs if some board member or boss decides that the whole system of contract workers has to be dumped and the company must move to full-time, benefited, vetted employees. I've seen this phenomenon happen in other companies in my field even where I've worked where suddenly management dumps all the 1099s -- hired in droves to save money and management time -- and a demand goes out that anyone in a program has to work on site -- something people are increasingly unwilling to do since COVID. In any event, whether public or private, if they value their jobs and/or virtual lives, they need to get on this story to either refute it or redress it.

ARE PATCH LINDEN AND SQUEAKY MOLE MARRIED IN RL?

o Are Squeaky Mole (aliases noted in the article) and Patch Linden in fact married in RL? We haven't verified that. They may be shown together but then any Mole or Linden could be posed together for this or that event. I had never heard this but then I really have stopped paying attention to Lindens and Moles for years unless I need a sim restarted. The less you deal with them the better. If you need them for your Second Life, I think you're in trouble. If they are married, and Patch even brought Squeaky to the US (apparently from the Netherlands, if the law referenced is accurate) or somewhere in the EU, then even without the ageplay overlay to the story, wouldn't you have to question this sort of nepotism? At least to ask some questions -- and have some guardrails -- about conflicts of interest. BTW proof that they are married would come in a marriage certificate from their state with their RL names which are credibly linked -- best by themselves -- with their avatars -- not what you "heard reliably" in your furry group.

Husband-and-wife teams have long been tolerated by the US State Department in the Foreign Service, which is even enlightened enough to allow husband-and-husband teams now at some posts. Foreign news bureaus often have couples like this as well. Instead of being seen as nepotism, the practice is seen as beneficial to stability and helpful to get one person posted to a hardship location to go there, if there's a job for the spouse, too. In some ways a virtual world is a hardship post! Obviously nobody at the Lab found anything wrong with this. Handing Squeaky the job of being in charge of Quality Assurance to Patch's VP of Product does seem to be something of a self-interested loop and not the ideal form this accommodation should have been made but we don't know their thinking.

MAKING FAMILIES AFTER HOURS?

o I'm not satisfied that any of those claims of their relationship and their involvement in constructing an elaborate "family" are true or have the implied connotations they do. People make families all the time in SL, I see it constantly among my tenants. It's not necessarily an "ageplay" marker and is innocent more often than not. If I find a child avatar in my rentals and they have adult furniture in their rental, or adult "Daddy and Me" type groups in their profile, they get evicted instantly, and they get an abuse report instantly. I often find they are literally gone within 12 to 24 hours. I sometimes think people like that are parachuting in to try to get me in trouble for content on land I own. So I make sure they get gone quickly and apparently LL itself is highly interested in this as well. I've never had to ask twice with these types of ARs. Governance may take nine months to get rid of a grief prim on physics stuck between my lot and a no-show neighbour's, but this sort of content harms their reputation, exposes them to litigation, and they generally take action.

o While recognizing that people make families as a "thing" in SL, I still have to wonder about the claim that Patch and Squeaky (let's say they really are husbands) would want to spend their hours after work hanging around on a sim with questionable furry cubs making a "family" and doing "family stuff." I guess my default here would be that if I were a full-time Lab employee having to toil in the vineyards of SL sims all day -- either on my computer dealing with their issues, or actually inworld trying not to crash off them at some event -- the last thing I'd want at night is MORE of this. Most people come to SL AFTER their RL job or busy day doing RL things as relaxation -- even those working virtual jobs are doing it as a second job often after RL jobs, family, chores etc. (like me). It just doesn't track for me that Lindens for whom SL is their job would want to STAY in it -- if anything they are accused of not spending enough time in world (and you feel some of them disdain it). 

To be sure, there are Lindens with alts who spend time on their alts whom people have come to know -- perhaps this is all possible and known but I think we need credible sourcing on this from outside the furry hothouse so we can be assured it's not some elaborate vendetta.  And it's true, Patch can be a fanatic admirer of SL -- I once found him in the middle of the night -- my time and his -- collecting stamps in the BBB stamp game (like me). I know he does go to a lot of events and is even made something of a mascot at them, having to be dunked, or kissed, or put in selfies sometimes of questionable taste. But creepy little "families" at night when he has a RL husband to do RL things with in RL? Tolerating questionable content from his hubby when their very jobs are at stake and they are amply familiar with the policies? Not buying this on the face of it.

WAS LOKI ALSO SMEARED?

o Yes, we have to make the tiresome caveat that certain vocal child stars in SL make it known loudly that they are not all engaged in criminal behaviour -- yes, some of them go on G sims, yes some of them do nothing more than make a garden. But I have found in general that child avatars are trouble in SL. Often they are griefers who find it edgy and cool to push the limits and see what they can away with -- but those types are often broken personalities abused in childhood who tend toward ageplay anyways. I make a point of banning child avatars in any form from my campgrounds because "camp" is something that many of these creepy kids want to "play" to enact out childhood traumas or fantasies.

I didn't mention this aspect of Fantasy Faire in my critical post the other day, but every year, FF allows Loki Eliot and his crew to put up some sort of children's scout camp and to RP scouts with quests and roaming around the grid. To be sure, I've never seen anything objectionable coming from him at FF or any other event, or any social media account, or any forums or blog. That's why I'm inclined to wonder if the allegations against him, too, are a smear. Again, the linkages of the objectionable accounts outside of SL claimed to be him, to the avatar inside SL are not solid.

FURSONAS

o The allegations that Squeaky Mole (on another name) maintains an alt fursona on other pornographic sites and inworld are the most serious charges of the article with the most gotcha screenshots, but given that people take cartoon-like characters from all sorts of movies and stories and game sites, it's possible someone could have the same fursona and even name and be unrelated to the same Squeaky Mole of Linden Lab. Child anime/hentai images are very widespread among furries -- and for that matter, griefers. That link therefore has to be better established. There are airy statements about Google searches or sources inworld or known profiles -- but Google searches are different for everyone, the profiles now are either recently scrubbled or were always innocent and we just can't know. These links and claims need to be independently and solidly replicated. A name change to something that sounds nearly the same doesn't need to be a smoking gun; it could be just a desire for something different.

BUT WHY EVEN HAVE CHILD AND TEEN CONTENT LIKE THIS?

o The companies noted such as Imagine Moda making Tweenster (ugh) stuff are definitely creepy. I can't think of a *good* reason why you "need" to make a pre-teen or underage teen boy's suggestively-articulated Speedo-type bathing trunks. I think all of this should be gone from the MarketPlace. Pretending it is normal just doesn't fly. To be sure, the author has presented the screenshots context-free. This particular creator makes a host of clothing, mainly for adult men but also young adults or teens and the majority of the outfits are not suggestive. What stands out for me is that the "tween" bathing suits are more suggestive than those for the adult male, which indicates trouble. But then after you have established this content is objectionable (and it is), you still have to link it accurately to the Lindens/Moles referenced and that is sketchy.

CASPER WARDEN

I hadn't realize that on top of everything else objectionable about him, Casper is alleged to be in the ageplay racket and a furry as well. I'm the only one who stood up and criticized Casper's vast data-scraping biz in SL. For my troubles, he put me as a permanent "sample griefer" in his teleporters (and apparently his ban systems) so that ever after, I could face sudden bans and ejections from stores that I had shopped at for years if they bought his system. I thought that Linden Lab's decision to purchase his systems was driven by a simple business objective: just as they get a piece of every MP sale (10%) and see that as a potentially lucrative revenue stream that will free them from dependence on sim "sales" or rental of server space, so they would like to get a piece of every rental by at some point insisting that only a company-owned rental system can be used (like there is no other shopping site now you can go to and have content delivered within SL; originally the site was SLExchange and purchased by the Lab). 

Now another hypothesis has been put forward, that Casper is part of the Patch-created "family" and nest of sims claimed to have ageplay activity (Robert Bartos, who may or may not be very involved in SL, left out one suggestively-named sim near "UwWu Family" called "Sausage Land" -- both are closed to outside TPs and require a closed group membership or access list. In fact, that he left out "Sausage Land" makes me wonder how solid his in-world investigations really were). I didn't realize at first last year that Casper was "aqui-hired" when LL bought out his company -- and it's not clear they bought out EVERY system of his, eithers. I suppose it's not surprising that he turns out to be a friend of Patch's and/or Squeaky's and that helped sell his biz to the Lab.  Obviously, all that needs to be looked at, with or without any furry ageplay undertow or overlay but it's not like LL is some giant corporation where things just don't come to notice to management in some remote tower. It was likely known and approved because the Lindens have ALWAYS hired their friends. In the early days, the first Lindens were nearly ALL hired from the resident base of beta-tester regulars. It was only in later years that they actually began to recruit from outside companies like Microsoft or IBM. 

UPDATE: An interesting effect of this unproven story is that many merchants are switching out of Caspervend; asking openly on the forums for alternatives; or pleading with customers not to boycott them if they still use Caspervend because it is too hard -- or at least too time-consuming -- for them to change out of. All the years Casper had me as a generic ban inside his products after I asked him some public questions about his use of all the business data he had from SL -- no one chimed in with me, and no one mentioned anything about him being a furry or a cub or involved in anything troublesome. Casper was the easiest person for people to react to because he his business is so public and widespread AND the Lindens bought it out (something that no doubt caused jealousy among competitors) AND aqui-hired him and made him a Linden. Some people are leaving furious notes under @LindenPatch on Twitter reacting as if the allegations are proven -- they are not. I asked @LokiEliot directly if he had a response -- I haven't heard back and no one else is asking him. On the forums, a very tentative exploration into this topic got shut down immediately (I don't know by whom), leaving me to leave Aesopian video links on "What are you watching" lol.

CHASE ZAKS

The unproven theory put forth by the author re: Chase Zaks, that he himself is a furry criminal suspect looking to shift the blame to others by concocting smears, seems plausible but then he is still online, inworld, and not banned. One would think the Lindens would still ban a character like this, once they caught on to the entire shtick. His elaborate profile with all his documented illnesses and problems may have led their lawyers to take a soft touch, I don't know, but there it is, he's not banned.

NEEDS WORK

None of the people mentioned in the article are banned; they are all in the People List on search; many are online.

If any of this is true, it won't be surprising to me, precisely because of the past objectionable calls (like with bonniebots and the Welcome Area) and just the general climate of nepotism, favouritism, and behaviour and dress always veering towards the bawdy. It would be of a piece. I could see how people could get desensitized to this content, think it's all a joke or in "good fun" and even if they are charged to remove it elsewhere, feel they can indulge in it themselves -- by the same logic that griefers use, which is that "we are above everyone else" AND "we can dictate the culture everyone else is forced to accept."

Even so, this story has not even begun to be investigaged properly by real investigative journalists, and hasn't even been done at an Alphaville Herald level with more outside sources and solid connections.

If ultimately it turns out to be sadly true, I will say that some of it comes from arrogance and a sense of entitlement and being "above the law," but it's also about the fact that while norms for behaviour between heterosexuals have been established and refined and reformed over centuries, LGBT+ -- which has come out in the open only within the span of my lifetime -- has not had hardly any time to establish these norms. I have found in RL that certain LGBT colleagues cluelessly tell outrageous stories at staff parties of both gay and straight people, or make inappropriate suggestive statements to other staff or even donors, and don't seem to realize "that's not what we do here." There is the challenge of gaining tolerance and acceptance from the majority -- yet recognizing that decency in certain work and social situations is required, and that it's not oppression to accept this. I think these norms take time to be set -- but set they must be. We associate sexual harassment at the workplace with mainly older, white, heterosexual men. But there's no reason that it can't be a woman or a gay person as well. 

For 21 years, Linden Lab has manifested all the wacky "California ideologies" out there and more, and I've constantly taken to task their lurches from techno-communism to techno-libertarianism to "cosmic engineering" and "transhumanism" and every alternating "tech bro" and "woke" fashion of the day. Companies in Silicon Valley always feel they are above us all and above the law. They get away with a lot.

But they shouldn't be allowed to get away with this at all levels, and they need to act pronto, whether they have been smeared in the present climate, or they are part of what makes up this awful climate itself.

Even so, every bit of this has to be replicated, proved, linked and then there has to be adversarial defense enabled by the parties involved for due process to be served. The fact that they all still have their jobs and this story seems to be at least several months old lets us know maybe there isn't a solid proof of it. But maybe it's just taking a long time.

***

RELIGIOUS LOON

UPDATE: I'm not interested AT ALL in debating little furry cub anonymous creatures on the Internets about this subject -- they can take it to Twitter or their own blogs. I also don't feel the need to keep updating this blog -- it's not my story, I merely commented on the need for way more professional investigative treatment of the Medium post. I am NOT the author of the Medium post and I link my avatar to my RL identity. Do you? Then shut up. The arguments ones hears boil down to "well those who know, know" or "you don't get around much evidently" or "Prokofy is a crazy cat lady" -- and I'm sorry, those doesn't fly.

As noted, I mistakenly ascribed the "religious" speculation to Bartos -- in fact it's another author.

This other article is even more speculative than the one by "Robert Bartos" and can be seen here written back in May 2023 by someone with the handle "PuppyDaddy" (!) -- and that's just it, too many people commenting about this story as if it were true are *themselves* the very types that the stories purport to expose. So they have ZERO credibility. THAT phenomenon lets us know that a very likely scenario for this scandal is that it is a war among furry clans using ageplay allegations as a weapon.

It's PuppyDaddy, not "Robert Bartos" who launches into a conspiracy-theory rant about the sentiments of Christians being harmed by an Easter Egg hunt on the sims of Kapor and Rosedale (named for the founder and one of the first investors) and even the term "Easter Egg," meaning surprises hidden by coders in games, is somehow conceived of "offensive" to believers.  One wonders how religious somebody named "PuppyDaddy" can really be, to get into a lather about what Christians may find insulting -- or another area with doors, which he finds may reference Judaism. The "gayness" of the hunt is said to come from the fact that it has a rainbow with a pot of gold at the end of it. The "Jewish theme" is supposed to come from doors also mentioned in the Torah with symbols on them and "six genders" -- a concept that itself seems to have been interpolated with modern values on to past Talmudic writings and is debatable.  I don't have time for this.

This post is definitely on the loonier end of the spectrum of this topic claiming that people's desire to become furry avatars is rooted in transhumanist philosophy. While that may be true for some, it certainly isn't for many -- I doubt some could even explain what transhumanism is. 

I don't want to get into a line-by-line exigesis of this wacky post -- nor any other. Defending child predators isn't my cause; spending hours attacking them isn't either, precisely because I came to suspect long ago that some of the people involved in this witch hunt business are themselves predators wishing to disguise themselves. People busy going around the grid looking for ageplay content to root out are....looking for ageplay content, you know? That's not what I wish to do. If I see it on my land, out it goes, pronto. I urge everyone else to do the same. I don't have a lot of confidence that LL can sort this out, but it's not my job to do it. When a gaggle of child avatars and furry cubs of unknown provence show up to denounce other furries, I have to wonder if this entire thing isn't concocted. The end.