Remember when I wrote this - back on December 11, 2005:
"Next year -- actually even this Christmas season -- is going to be the Year of the Avatar.
We're all going to be so amazingly cool, because we already have -- we already *are*? -- avatars."
and... this:
"Soon, people will give out business cards that contain an avatar name on the back, or next to their RL name, and perhaps a link for that avatar on a Yahoo site or else a virtual world like SL."
Today, in the April 2006 issue of Wired, we read this:
"A decade hence, you'll drop a reference to your virtual doppelgängers just as casually as you give out your email address today."
I remember having that realization, knowing that nobody else had put that phrase out on the Internet yet ("year of the avatar") with this meaning regarding the virtual worlds, and I sent an email to Tony Walsh, knowing he'd be writing it soon and might get to thinking he had thought it up -- it isn't that hard to think up! -- if I didn't stake the concept out, so to speak.
Of course, everybody can say now, or a year from now, that everybody had the idea...or it was all some famous person's idea...in this case, the famous dude who wrote "Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter" -- and probably got paid bundles to write this idea in Wired, where I only lost money writing it for my blog...or you might say it was YOUR idea...anything but *my* idea. That's how the Internet works, and the world of Second Life works.
But what is theft, what is inspiration, what is a meme? Obviously the famous Stephen Johnson didn't read my blog...but maybe he read Tony's mention of it on January 2, 2006:
"Soon, people will give out business cards that contain an avatar name on the back, or next to their RL name, and perhaps a link for that avatar on a Yahoo site or else a virtual world like [Second Life]." -- Avatar Prokofy Neva on weblog Second Thoughts.
Googling, checking links, it seems fairly certain that I may very well have been the first one to pen what then later seemed like a really obvious idea -- and I'll have the chutzpah to do that, just like Walker Spaight says he thuoght up the term "Internet 3.D".
Yet who will remember some anonymous avatar in a game, or even a dogged hard-working journo like Tony Walsh? They'll remember Stephen Johnson, and he'll be the one to get invited to the games conference, and get all the babes at the Herald parties and stuff.
Ah, well, such is life in the big city! Anybody who has ever been in journalist working for a small company or a big company knows how big journalists steal copy from small journalists all the time, and how little journos are always trying to get their copy datelined and stamped to prove they broke a story, and even if it is stolen later by networks or something, they can still take pride in the fact that they got the scoop.
And much of the time, it isn't about theft, because you can't prove any link, and really, there might not be any link; the idea is in the air!
All of us now in Second Life are likely to be scooped in the biggest possible way by all the very big entities that sooner or later will come along and want to grab this world. We can't be sure how our Lindens will behave when that day comes, of course, not only because of their own GOMing tendencies (and please don't bleat to me one more time about how Siggy Romulus' water swimming anims could be GOM'd and he doesn't care so STFU -- I wish the Lindens would not only GOM his beach-house but do a search and destroy mission through every sim in the world to give it a different texture.)
I've had occasion to think an awful lot about theft -- and the line between theft, meme, and inspiration -- lately from those kind of real-life virtual experiences that provide rich food for thought.
In December, just about the time I was providing copy for Tony's blog which Stephen Johnson might or might not read or hear about some day LOL, or might be thinking up on his very own...I started work on a book inside SL.
Readers who have followed this blog for awhile know that publishing books in the world has been an obsession of mine. I first asked Will Gutenberg Come to the Virtual World? when I saw that Hamlet and the Fanboyz (not a rock group) were putting on one of these shows again that were what I've learned to call "vapourware," that is demo or beta versions of features that we don't really have yet, or will have only if some geek gets all the kinks out.
I thought it was an outrage that this world was nearly 3 years ago, and it didn't have a book. Or any means for the citizens to publish, say, a newspaper, except these ridiculous clunky notecards. In TSO, it was a bit clunky too but I was able to publish my satire of the Herald very easily on billboard objects that others could write on too, and we could interact. That's just completely missing from Second Life -- whiteboarding -- and it just seemed insane.
Leave aside all the geeks that are used to just clicking on pictures or video and don't read. There just seemed to be strange technical obstacles too -- literally it involved what Gutenberg faced, the mechanical problem of putting 88 objects in a keyboard into a world, and trying to put out a text then that didn't completely use up all the prims on a server.
Every time I tried to raise this problem, geeks would impatiently wave me away. Soon, we're going to have web-on-a-prim, I'd be told -- although of course, we don't have it, and it might be ages before we do. And most importantly, it wouldn't keep us immersive, with something to hold in our tiny avatar hands (which don't hold stuff much anyway, but...there it is.)
So when Cory Doctorow Came to the World, I happened to be standing in a crowd next to Philip Linden. So I clicked on him and started bitching about how his world didn't have any books. It was all well and good that this famous stranger, who didn't on his own join our world and had to have a custom name and avatar made for him to lure him in, had *his* book published by a little coterie of gushing geeks who were his fans and fans of Hamlet, who organized the venture. But what good was this book for us? It was his book, not ours. When do we get to publish our own books? Where's our printing press?
Philip just replied to me in what seemed like a kind of electronic exasperation fading to an echo-chamber of cool: "Someone will make everything," he said.
Imagine. "Someone will make everyone." That impatience, that self-assurance, that dismissal.
"Someone will make everything."
That is, from the glimpse I could see from his perspective, in his team, his crew, his small community of online early adapters, there was always somebody to make the giant shoe. Somebody always made the car or the house, too. Did you need shoulder armour with a thousand piercing darts? Done. A spa with bubble jets? A volcano? A huge pencil? A prim penis? Done, done, and done. Along with scripted shoes that walked the walk, chatting interactive objects that talked the talk, dance machines, poseballs, and a million other things -- Philip often talks raptuously of the 10 million objects that have been created in this world (I'm afraid to disenchant, but I think at least half of them are in my inventory and they are merely broken prefab house parts with the name "object").
Unhappy that only feted guests get books? Well, shut up, someone will make it soon, or you make it, and shut up.
And they did, as I recounted on November 4, 2004, in a piece, Is Gutenberg Already in the World? -- an account of the flippable, loadable book that Toneless Tomba made.
I wrote, " Last night was a historic first for me. I felt like Helen Keller at the water pump getting the sign for "water" from her teacher Anne. I have a book!"
As Jeffrey Gomez might remember, this was just a silly little book about my Prok's Seafood restaurant, my old friend who came there, and just dilatory junk, that I later turned into a ridiculously long and stupid and pointless novel in that novel-writing month thing I can never remember the name of with a name like FindingNemo.
I then went to work on a book about certain builds in SL. I grinded away on this for days, hoping to make it a Christmas coffee-table book. The point was to try to get more people to visit and appreciate builds, since obviously a thing like that doesn't sell more than a few copies. The thousands of dollars you might spend on texture uploading couldn't ever be offset.
Of course, I wasn't the first one to think up books in SL. Frans Charming was, I guess, or perhaps it was Moriash Moreau who came up with the Humpty Dumpty book. The creator of SL Graphica, the flippable magazine, might be credited...and certainly Osprey Therein picked up the concept of "books" and ran with it for a good long while, with events, contests, and bodice-rippers very well produced.
Naturally, my pointing out that I might have actually been the first to get an idea *for its application to SL* meets only with guffaws from this bunch. Of course, they might peckishly pride themselves with being *the first* to bring Moon Boots or Wallabys or Wing-Tip Shoes or Plastic Pony-Tail Holders to SL...and may sit around hissing viciously about people who have committed real or imagined plagiarism.
I used to run a website called "Separated at Birth". I'd report on the weekly disputes around the contentious fights related to offline Sims interactive website of custom user creation, where people would argue that a certain Fabrege music box was really created by User X and not User Y and they could prove it. I'd usually make short work of these disputes by going to the museum or auction house site that had the original image they had *both* swiped, and putting that up next to screenshots of their works. Sometimes I'd discover that people had independently both gone and swiped the same image!
A few months later, Toast Bard came out with a book of "manners" in Second Life in the "Miss Manners" style of sorts, with an entire chapter devoted to belittling and demeaning me in the name of that sort of juvenile hijinx she and her group are known for and which they mistakenly believe to be high satire. The overspoiled and feted Ms. Bard, whom I suppose has been saved from a life as a teenage cutter by her online Mom and Pop Ingrid Ingersoll and Barnesworth Anubis, definitely made a book, and probably the first coffee table style book in SL.
Of course...I had had that idea...first -- or so I claimed! As did others no doubt. Who's to know? I can only tell the dates and tell my story. I told it to Barnes while I was struggling with a problem that kept me from releasing it back in January. I wanted it to have landmarks that came out of each page as it was clicked on. That proved to be a technology nobody did, or wanted to do. So I had to laboriously revisit each of the sites, cut and paste the landmark info into a notecarded list, to make the final page of the book. What a fucking chore. I just could never find the hours I needed to string together to complete this picky, arduous, typically hard-slog SL project. So, sucks to be me, I didn't get to be the first in the world, like those first visitors to Narnia, to make the First Lamppost or the First Joke, I only got to *be* the first joke LOL.
No doubt any number of oldbies could step forward indignanty and say, but hey, wait a minute, *I* was the one who made the first book...and the rest of us will find ourselves in an endless online version of "To Tell the Truth". "My name is First Book Maker of SL." "No, MY name is First Book Maker of SL."
(What was silly about this in particular was the way they all kept haughtily telling me about somebody's album on Snapzilla...as if an album up on the Internet was the same thing an an inworld clickable book!)
But...Toast, who no doubt believes she got her idea for her book all on her own, and may well have, since the kind of collaborate soup you fly around in endlessly in SL never has snippets of idea-originations flying along in the air or on people's IMs...didn't do a book on builds.
That remained to be done -- and again in a pre-empting of my idea -- by Forseti Svarog, the Infinite Antalope, builder extraordinaire.
Of course, he got lionized and feted in Hamlet's blog -- he's part of the HIC, or Hamlet Inner Core that gets repeated and repeated in the Hamlet column. And the builds he chose were -- eh, not all that. It was the usual mixture of what I've come to call Maxx-Traxx-Suxx -- huge, heavy, buildings that actually have little community actually associated with them -- some of them genuinely talented, others merely in the list because they're somebody's dear friend. Forseti himself of course is moving from glory to glory, beyond the confines of a mere fanboyz' column like Hamlet's and doing real-world related builds now. All this is truly awesome and talented stuff, but when you have the backstory of your experiences with them inworld where they were condescending and nasty, it colours the build for you and you wonder: why can't these people just be nicer human beings?
Say...let's not forget the little people, shall we? The way it worked was funny. He IMs me and says, "Are you going to do that book on bridges?" (In this case, I had a book devoted to bridges, and another one forming for 'Seven Wonders' types builds.)
Never, "Say, I heard you had a cool idea, would you like to do it together?" These little tribelets of fierce FIC or wannabee FIC quest-guilds are terribly tight-knit, and they always want to hone their identity by whom they exclude, not whom they include.
I asked him how he had heard about this idea I hadn't told anyone except Barnes about. He feined not to remember. "Yes, " I said...but...there was this landmark issue blah blah. We ended up getting into an argument. I urged him not to steal my idea. It's rare I do any project like this and I felt with all his numerous building projects and glory and feting, he should be kind enough not to snipe my idea. He kept telling me that his criteria for projects was "people who are creative and nice," as if he were creating AND nice, and not being a dick lol. Of course, many reading this will decide I'm both non-creative AND not-nice, and they're welcome to take home that opinion : )
Of course, Second Life might as well be called Snipe Life, as we all know. But finally, he grudgingly said he'd stay off the idea. He never explains where he has heard that I'm working on this idea. A few minutes later Barnesworth IM's me and berates me for not "letting" Forseti do a book on bridges -- not "would you like to do it with us" but "stand aside and let someone more competent do your idea, fuckwad". Well, for fuck's sake, I said, it was my idea, I'm working on it, and I hope he might have some consideration. Of course, it was Barnes who had told Forseti the idea, because his little poison posse were all hob-knobbing about what book ideas they could do, now that Toast's manners book was such a hit.
I berated both of them, because I felt, again, for fuck's sake, they have building and creative projects out the wazoo, and they should just let an amateur like myself who has some little idea first get to finish it. But of course, in the cut-throat creator-fascism world of SL, that can't be...
I find it always and everywhere a rich source of amusement that the people in SL who most insist on professionalism and aesthetic excellence are themselves most often the RL amateurs.
...Next thing I know, the forums are singing Forseti's praises for...doing a coffee table book on builds in SL. To be sure, he didn't cover bridges, so that made his little geeky conscience "clean," I guess, given that it wasn't a matter of "inspiration" or "collaboration" but merely swiping.
Yes, swiping. When someone tells another person your idea, with the hope that person instead of you will take it up, because you want that person to do the idea to be in your little poison posse clique, and then you have an intense argument with that person and agree that in fact they *won't* snipe you, but then do anyway with an idea just a shade removed, well, it's swiping.
Or not. Or even if it is, so what, what can you do about it. You decide. It's Your World, Your Imagination.
I feel in this concept it is swiping, but of course, what, I'm going to call a lawyer and sue them lol? that would be like the guy with the book on bridges in the bargain bin at Barnes and Nobles suing the other 52 people in Barnes and Nobels who had books on bridges, too, that sold better because the people were more talented or better connected. That's just life! But...we're in Second Life, where things are supposed to be kinder, Better, and more collaborative...no? That ought to be pretty clear, and was to some parties in the conversation, but the arrogant and vicious self-justifying all of them engaged in after that would take your breath away. I lost any will to do my book, simply because now I'd be doing it not just for fun, but to seemingly play catch-up in the Darwinist SL race, and also be greated with a wall of sniggering, ridicule, and hatred by all those insecure poison-posse peeps.
Oh well, I'll get back to my project soon because it was cool....but the story isn't over yet.
The next thing I know I'm facing more trouble from Barnesworth. He's IMing me demanding that I sell a property of mine next to his. He's accusing me of somehow ripping off his fame, or exploiting his fame for evil rental baron purposes.
Of course, we were once all close friends in TSO, where people didn't make money from builds, but just had fun and shared the joy and cameraderie of building in TSO, especially having building contests.
That was back in the day when it was fun to hang out with provincial anonymous nobodies like yourself on the Internet because TSO made everyone equal before the law -- everyone had the same toolset with the exact same content, so that no one was at any disadvantage. If someone was better, it was simply because they were really more talented than you at working that same equal content. But you, too, could participate with them in the same lexicon of a shared content dictionary.
Today, these provincial nobodies, Barnes, Ingrid, and others like them like Traxx, collect lots of real-life USD for even sim-wide projects and they coin money in SL. Their brattiness and arrogance has probably increased in direct proportion to their insecurity as they climb the content-fascists' guild and apprentice ladders to dizzying heights...but are always in danger of being kicked out by someone under the run just beneath, who might be a RL architect. (I had to chuckle at Traxx trying to feign urban chic cool by feigning to be newbish about gushing all over the Gallery about his role in the City Slickers build of Nova Albion where "even Phil" showed up. Of course, those of us who are in the true urban coolescenti know that Philip hates the name Phil and likes to be called Philip. Ah well, I was a tactless newb calling Philip "Phil" once too, what can you do...
"We smoke Lordfly's designs for breakfast," a RL architect told me cooly. He's with a RL design firm now getting their feet wet in SL -- and there will be many, many more of people like him, and many, many fewer of people like us -- and that's why I'm writing about this. The gulf between my artistic abilities and Barnesworth's artistic abilities in TSO might be yeah-big...in SL they might be YEAHH-wide...but a gulf and chasm will open up between all of us and the Real World people already entering in droves. Nobody really talks about this, they just try to make sure they aren't on the wrong side of the newest form of Digital Divide : )
Insecurity, venom, provincial suspiciousness and native spite -- hard to know what drives it. Back on that sim next to all of Barnes and Forseti's stuff, I had put on my rental the phrase "near famous architect's builds" in this long-forgotten out-of-the-way old feted core sim, because I thought that might help to upgrade the kind of tenant who might take the parcel, and I thought they'd only be happy. Indeed, the existing tenants of it for the first few weeks were Barnesworth's own friends. Geez. The money I made from this parcel is like cat spit and barely covers the tier, given that it sat for days unpaid by said friends at times, or given that they suddenly refunded after running out of money or whatever.
Go back and note that I bought said land originally because it was near this now-ex-friend Barnes, thinking it would do him a favour if I a) removed a cheap lot that he apparently didn't want on his tier from the market, along with its ugly spinning sign and clunky build and set it out to rent; b) bought the overpriced Anshe land next to it, that he hadn't wanted to hold on his tier. For months, he never bought it, when others owned it, nor did he ask me to buy it. Now, when he wants to stick me and spite me over some book idea or some other imagined slight, he suddenly needs to buy it.
I've come to learn in SL, never think you are doing anyone a favour by holding tier under their build. In fact, never think you are doing anyone a favour, period. What you are doing is merely being a very big chump : )
My first lesson in this evil of course came from Traxx, who deleted a club and a mall we had both worked in together for months, with me getting events and rentals, and him building and also showing his works off to Thinkers' meetings he hosted. What was a minor dispute rooted in his essential inborn tekkie arrogance and irritability with people who didn't share his obsession for the perfectionism of his work escalated into him simply deleting all his builds to "teach a lesson". No matter that for weeks, his builds had a place to be displayed in the world, earning him posrates and friendship cards, rates which translated into actual cash in the stipend before they undid stipend ratings. The events I hustled, the people I chatted with and posrated -- all of that gave him actual cash in his stipend lol. And...No matter his coerced sale to me of his overpriced land that helped him start his own property where he also met people and displayed his buildings to get commissions. Who remembers a stupid thing like somebody paying hundreds of dollars of tier under your hugely prim-heavy buildings? You're just the substrate to someone's fabulous career. And that awareness doesn't bring about bitterness or jealousy because you're "not talented" or "weren't in beta" -- I live very well in SL with absolutely engrossing (for me) projects without being a prim rustler. What it does bring though is an astonishment that people are such grade-A assholes and are willing to take the Better World setting and turn it into a living hell of venom and spite for other people.
Ditto Barnes, who honed the art of Traxxing -- deleting the building of someone who had sponsored him with tier and land and was even willing to *pay* for his build -- honing to a fine art.
Months ago, Barnes wanted a desert oasis to live in with a friend, so I gave him my Ansheland parcel I wasn't using. I did this by inviting him as his friends as officers into the group. In exchange for taking up the parcel and living there for so long, I asked if he could build a palace like he had in TSO, back when he was Emperor Cornelius and I was Eminence Grise to the court and Cardinal Sin. Back then, he built the O-As-Is (get it?) in the shape of an O, and called it Casablanca. In SL, you can do so much more, of course, with custom textures.
He said he would build me the palace and did. It was so beautiful that two other neighbours who saw it out in this Ansheland asked him to build them palaces like that, so he got commissions from showing a building on my land, and he got the praise of many visitors. Not any big feather in a cap already filled with commissions, no doubt, but something. Real cash.
Eventually he got bored of playing Arabian palace and drifted off. I asked if I could buy the palace but he waved it away. He never came to turn the build over to me but just left it. Several times we discussed it and at no time did he say, "You can't have that," or "I need you to pay me for that," but he didn't turn it over, either, because that's too much work. I rented it out once, but it was hard to keep it rented when a neighbour started a huge plywood intensive construction project right next to it for weeks.
So, a few weeks ago, I helped to found the Society for Virtual Architecture. Barnes was one of those invited to join and was helpful. I made his building that Society's building, and I asked him to help decorate it. Several times I cited it as a good work of architecture by him during the meetings. Ah, true to form, our Barnes was ever-so-helpful -- he plunked out of his inventory various Moroccan-type chairs and chaise lounges...with the price tags on them. I was welcome to buy them for the Society if I like...he'd just saved me a shopping trip and a struggle with the multitude of rezzing objects in his store. With the land on autoreturn and guests coming, I decided to buy the items, returning one. That's our Barnes! Generous to a fault! To think, I might have spent hours paging SLEX or flying around his store, but there he thoughtfully plunked it out right there for me with the price tag on it.
We held about 4 meetings, attracting others, visiting builds, enjoying the architecture and talks with people, and I began to think perhaps that venomous atmosphere that these people often create around architecture in SL with their sectarian hatred of some people's builds, their banning from land, their deleting of builds, etc. might dispel.
But then, we had the dispute over the land - I didn't want to sell it, and I denied that it ripped him off in any way whatsoever merely to rent land at a low price to in fact someone in his circle. I didn't feel I should be forced to sell land just to be shoved out of the way of the neo-FIC.
The next Monday, I landed for another meeting of the Society for Virtual Architecture. I had lost a week of SL and RL with a broken computer but now had a brand-new graphics card to see the world. The meeting was already announced and a bunch of people were already asking for TPs. Yet Ansheland seemed to be taking a curiously long time in rezzing...all there were, were these chairs in the air...and the glimmering desert sands...where were the walls...why were they taking such a long time to rez...
...and then I realized that Barnesworth Anubis had deleted the building in spite. He had deliberately returned to the Society parcel and deleted the build, without telling me, so that I scheduled a meeting of the Society without realizing everyone would arrive and sit in the air. The topic of discussion was the Seven Wonders of Second Life.
Trust me, Barnesworth Anubis is not one of them.
I know that I didn't do anything wrong. I had a good idea for a book. Rather than urging me to do it with his group, or rather than Forseti offering to collaborate with me on the book, they preferred just to snipe -- snipe at me for not merely turning it over to them as the superior beings they believe themselves to be, and snipe the idea. They couldn't be inclusive, or encouraging, but had to be arrogant assholes, blaming me all along the way for not being "nice" by merely letting them once again take my idea, or take a building they supposedly made for me.
I know that I didn't do anything wrong by not selling him old core sim land -- it was rescued from spinning signs and overpriced Anshification, and rented to his friends at prices they could afford -- and I was lucky to even pay the tier on it, if that, from the rent.
I know I didn't do anything wrong by giving someone my land for months to build on, which enabled him to get commissions, and even making it to be a building for a regularly visited Society.
I know I didn't do anything wrong by even helping to create this Society and try to get others to visit in fact what are these builds Forseti and others feature, as well as many they tend not to notice or not take seriously or not even know about.
No. I know I didn't do a thing wrong here. So I know that when Barnesworth Anubis snarls at me that I should "stop playing the victim," I don't need to go on exposing myself to someone's suburban insecurities. I cut cards like that fast, and I tell this story.
Why? Because it is a tale of how the world is being made, and I'm 100 percent certain I'm not alone in this experience. The greed and vociferousness didn't just start coming into the world, it was always there. Even in the idyllic days of Lindenor when the Lindens lovingly announced every event and Philip came to be on the discussion panel, there were people copying, stealing, ripping off, sniping -- and not collaborating. Or collaborating in such a tightly-wrapped intensely closeknit circle that they have to be mean about leaving others out to keep their identity. It's human nature.
What makes the issue so perplexing, however, is the problem of where the line should be drawn between theft and inspiration (the clothing industry in SL of course has many tales to tell there). And where the line should be drawn between collaboration and helping somone with giving them ideas, inspiration, tips...helping their career with land or money or concepts...and then having them steal or worse, destroy it in spite.
In RL, the people who destroy buildings like that out of spite are types like the Taliban. In SL, however, they are smug architects who merely pocket their copies of their build, and just rez it somewhere else -- it's not destroyed for *them* only *for you*. The Taliban destroy a building for everyone, including themselves. The architecterati of SL put a new spin even on that evil. Did you know there's even a script called "kill copy" that enables a vicious architect to go around the world and even just nuke a copy of a build he has out someone else may have purchased and rezzed copies of *because it was on copy*?
In fact, among the biggest problems I've had with builders in SL is that they smugly and arrogantly just keep cutting and pasting their builds and selling them again. Here's a good time to reiterate that Kavai Onizuka did that to me once, selling me a build for some $7800 -- not much, but a rate he himself specified and even demanded to have in advance before the job was finished. He had already made a build of a mall in one sim...he then rezzed the exact same build, right down to every flower and roof ivy, in my sim. He was dilatory about turning the build over to me (to this day he hasn't returned part of it and I ended up having to destroy half the build simply to do a remodelling and replacement because the objects weren't mind)...and then flying around, I totally accidently found that other build he had done and cut and pasted -- without telling me. If you want to sell me a prefab of a mall, I pay $3000 or $5000 then -- or I don't pay it because I don't want a prefab or a copy. The other guy who had commissioned what he thought was a unique mall was pissed, too.
So much attention is paid by the Lindens to the problem of IP and the howling and screaming of content creators and their need for copyright, that the rights of their commissioners, or the secondary rights of their mass customers as consumers, are irrelevant. They shouldn't be. We need a robust consumer advocacy movement in SL that challenges these content barons and uber architects who think they can get away with either shoddy work, copied work, work they don't turn over, or even deleted work.
Barnes, Traxx, Kavai and others who have done this sort of thing think they are "teaching me a lesson". Um, I'm teaching them a lesson: they aren't professional, but insecure provincial amateurs. Let the record show it.
