Second Thoughts

Walkabout: "So Shines a Good Deed..."

Guy with a giant knife sneaks up on Philip swinging a golf club...he then stabs him in the back...

Poor countries are known for being places where poor people have a lot of kids as a coping tool for the survival of their nation under the duress of poverty and disaster, often man-made...and countries in transition are known for having a lot of different political parties and factions and a lot of newspapers of every persuasion and often as many religions and cults...Second Life is no different. What we have now are LOTS of people.

With all the kids coming in, Dad seems to be about more. He even came on one of his famous walkabouts to Ahern. Absenting himself from his golf game in the walled-garden sim of Santa Cruz or thereabouts, where apparently there is a kick-ass golf course with realistic play (this has to be investigated!), Philip stopped at the WA and did some ejecting of playes, took a pixelated knife in his back and said it didn't hurt, changed out of his preppy duds into the old, familiar, scripted flashing boxer-peeking jeans and quoted what he thinks is Willy Wonka, but as I later told him, is actually Willy Shakespeare, only very slightly different (Portia says, "So shines a good deed in a naughty world," in "Merchant of Venice." Perhaps there are textual variations, I await correction.)

Toward the end, Philip even said that he didn't mind the god-mode thingie. Pictures to come...

The surface area of griefing, squared, cubed, and SeifertSurfaced...

Johannes Faust: upgrade!
Zoar Borel: Our lag who art in lag, give us our lag as we would lag unto thee
Kahn Moore: uggg
Philip Linden: hiya prok
You: Are you finally going to get to play golf in here Philip? I remember you talked about that in the first town hall I ever came to on my first day here LOL
Philip Linden: hiya aces!
Zoar Borel looks for her autograph book
Aces Spade: hey:)
Aces Spade: phillip
Philip Linden: yes I was just playing!!
Philip Linden: When I stopped by here.
Scovir Paz: Hehe!
You: I had a dream of building a mini golf course.
ZsuZsanna Raven: Philip arrives and ppl come outta the woodwork lol
Philip Linden: I've gotta go back to my game actually.
Aces Spade: yep
Philip Linden: Aces is that your real voice?
Kahn Moore: KAAAAHHHNNNN! :)
Aces Spade: like radar
Aces Spade: yes
Andariel Ming: :)
Zoar Borel: :)
You: where do they have golf now? is the physics working for it better?

King Philip's typing away and some other griefer sneaks up...

ZsuZsanna Raven: ~* Hello *~
Katiahnya Muromachi: Spitoonie used to have an awesome golf course
Philip Linden: Prok this thing is so cool I can't believe it.
You: yes but it was really hard to play then
Aces Spade: Hahaha
You: oh?
Zoar Borel: the putt=putt course is good
Doubledown Tandino is online
You: whwere??? must se
Kahn Moore: im so lagged :(
Johannes Faust: Phil - you know Martin Plaehn?
Philip Linden: use that voice carefully aces... it's a dangerous weapon ;)
Zoar Borel: lol
Aces Spade: Hahaha
Mark Assia: lol
Philip Linden: Yes I do Johannes
ZsuZsanna Raven: yeah her voice turns me on daily
Vicho Daikon: Hmmm...
Aces Spade: lmao
ZsuZsanna Raven: Philip, no more updates on wed please ;)
ZsuZsanna Raven: hehe
Mark Assia: lol!
Mark Assia: Unless it's Havok 2
Mark Assia: ;)

Scovir Paz: Updates on Tuesday and Thursday, please. :)
ZsuZsanna Raven: updates really cut into my day off on SL time
ZsuZsanna Raven: heh
Xolso Ferguson: Well, I gtg, cya later alexis
alexis Benford: goodbye
Mark Assia: Philip, I think you guys should switch back to good old CC verification
Nyah Bauer: Hello Everyone:)
ZsuZsanna Raven: FLAVAAAA FLAVVVVVVVVV !!!!!!!!!!!!
Katiahnya Muromachi: Hiyah Nyah
Philip Linden: Mark I think we can make it work.
You: No keep the open accuonts the way you have them now but have a better police blotter
Philip Linden: Give us tommorow and another release or two.
Nyah Bauer: sorry philip
Aces Spade: this is the first time i seen phillip in a diffrent outfit
You: have one with more memory and name all the names of all sides of the case
Philip Linden: And we'll also need to look at policies.
Kahn Moore: that's governor king Philip o_o
Pasta Fugazi: hi all
Philip Linden: Bear in mind that the tolerance here in the WA will be very small.
Aces Spade: Ut oh
Mark Assia: Uh-oh... He's back
Tyrant Ludd: that noob is back on a new account
Philip Linden: So please feel free to call me.
Kahn Moore: wtf?
ZsuZsanna Raven: he's back
Philip Linden: hi lucatony
Mark Assia: Alrighty :)
Andariel Ming: :)
Josy Mathys: lol
Mark Assia: I was going to IM you first since it was the second offense
Katiahnya Muromachi: f00f.
Scovir Paz: A new record!
Aces Spade: nothing like getting stabbed in the back
Josy Mathys: I am guessing that was Poldi
Waterfalzz Extraordinaire: yay for philip
Mark Assia: But I figured you're really busy :)
Kahn Moore: ya see i told you luc is boldi's alt
ZsuZsanna Raven: well he went bye bye fast
Philip Linden: well it doesn't hurt
You: ouch
Mark Assia: Mkay, I'll keep that in mind :)
Josy Mathys: it pushes most people outa the area heh
Kahn Moore: why do people grief?

Preppie as all get-out...

Mark Assia: Thanks, Philip
Tyrant Ludd: because grieifng is fun
Josy Mathys: Thanks Philip
Scovir Paz: For goodness sake? XD
Vicho Daikon: There we go! ^_^
You: Philip did you revise you theory yet about griefing? that if there were enough creative things to do people wouldn't grief?
Zoar Borel: Oh, and by the way, SL is awesome, Philip.
You: remember that theory you have like 2 years ago?
Kahn Moore: ya but it's called PVP
Philip Linden: yes prok I do
You: do you still believe in that?
Nyah Bauer: SL is like Jello, there's always room for it.
Sickness Blackflag: GAY
Mark Assia: lol
Mark Assia: I've never heard it put like that.
Tyrant Ludd: people that grief like messing with other people, i dont think any activitiy besides griefing would satisfy them, they need to be aimed in the direction of the combat sims
You: I mean, here's some guy named Sickness Blackflag shouting GAY at us -- and...it's because he doesn't have enough creative stuff to do here?
You: or?
Sickness Blackflag: but then its not griefing
Kahn Moore: oh sickness is cool
Waterfalzz Extraordinaire: sighs....
Kahn Moore: :)
Waterfalzz Extraordinaire: can we just chill plz
Mark Assia: Maybe we should create an entirely seperate combat grid, with only a few sims
Zoar Borel: Oh, and Philip, send everyone in Blumfield a nice fruit basket for having the vest sim in SL
Mark Assia: TP all the griefers there :P
You: well I'm hardly the one to complain about free speech as you might imagine
Mark Assia: See how long they stay
Zoar Borel: besy*
Zoar Borel: lol
Scovir Paz: Haha, Zoar. :)
Waterfalzz Extraordinaire: NO! doubt prokofy
Kahn Moore: philip are you sending Boldi and his ilk to the "corn field"?
ZsuZsanna Raven: lol
nimrod Yaffle: =O
Mark Assia: lol
Crackhead Boon: who are these people?

...and he switches into his famous scripted-flashing boxers outfit just in time for someone raising money for hookers and prim hair...

You: I got to see the cornfield myself.
nimrod Yaffle: You did??
You: yes
Mark Assia: Hey now, cornfields aren't bad by nature
CarlosDaRat Carlos: "The Cornfield" is "THERE"
nimrod Yaffle: What happened?
Mark Assia: I live in Nebraska >.<
You: I've been meaning to blog all my pics from it
Sickness Blackflag: OK-lets all CHILL and go back to being mindless middle aged cyber sex crazed zombie TARDS please.
You: I was taken there to be deloused when a Linden thought I had malicious scripts put on my avatar even.
ZsuZsanna Raven: evil children live in the corn
Kahn Moore: the cornfiield is where bad SL'er go...
Sickness Blackflag: I CANT TAKE IT ANYMORE
nimrod Yaffle: OoO
You: I was force-ported there.
nimrod Yaffle: How was it?
You: well it was erm inspiring
Mark Assia: lol
Crackhead Boon: I agree with Sickness, but how did I get here?
Mark Assia: What did it look like?
Kahn Moore: mmm... corn
You: I've been meaning to write something about Linden broadcasting using those screenshots of that TV on one channel lol
You: it had corn but with no ears
You: that's the symbolism
Mark Assia: lol
nimrod Yaffle: haha
Sickness Blackflag: IF u dont agree with me-u r one of THEM
Mark Assia: Haha
Mark Assia: I would insert a very stupid joke here
Mark Assia: So stupid it's funny
Kahn Moore: too late

CarlosDaRat Carlos: Don't look up, there are birds flying round
Kahn Moore: :P
CarlosDaRat Carlos: things fall outta the sky
Sickness Blackflag: look at friday here-hes just here to SORT of convince himself his gf/wife isnt cybering other guys.
Sickness Blackflag: hes SORT of a zombie
ZsuZsanna Raven: what the
Philip Linden: ah the adventures of growing.
Mark Assia: My mother annoyed me with it until the day I moved out
Philip Linden: We'll learn.
Indigo Nicholas: star too big hunun
You: Do you still feel like you fit in here Philip going with a preppy outfit now?
You: Is SL the new golf?
Kahn Moore: big giant robot... ah!
starhunter Gall: hey indi where are you
Philip Linden: prok... you are right!
ZsuZsanna Raven: ok seriously
Taylor Forti: where the fuck
Philip Linden: I'm putting them back on now.
Kahn Moore: Philip can you connect SL to SPORE once it comes out?
ZsuZsanna Raven: do you need tho take up the entire WA
You: -you've been scaring me, 3 days now, with this outfit
Philip Linden: you know, I think I want a contest... to make me some nicer ones though.
Zoar Borel: lol
wangzang Yang: holy crap there's a crowd.
You: I mean, Jerry lives, and here you are, lookingt like Mr. Roger's Neighbourhood in that get-up!
Philip Linden: I'd really like to update a bit.
Deco Dou: hey philip dont you have anything better to do with your life than being a linden in game?
Mark Assia: We're like the Linden Mansion Press Corps... swarming Phil with questions ;)
Kahn Moore: because PHILIP is here Wang
Kahn Moore: :)
You: yes have a contest sounds good get everybody thinking about how to update your look
Jessant Sion: why did you boot Annoying?
Philip Linden: This IS my life Demo
Philip Linden: Deco
Zoar Borel: Hi, Jules :)
Jessant Sion: She did nothing
Julliette Westerburg: sorry for the bumps, I can't see
Julliette Westerburg: hey Zoar
Jessant Sion: is pissed
Deco Dou: well, good for you
Julliette Westerburg: Hey Andi
Julliette Westerburg: Jess!
Julliette Westerburg: hey!
Andariel Ming: hello
Andariel Ming: :)
Aces Spade: sickness let e clarify something, what i do here is none of your buisness and that comment you made was uncalled for
Jessant Sion: Hi Hi ^---^
Deco Dou: I think your parents are proud of you
Jimmy Loveless is online
Zoar Borel: scov was just here, don't know where he went
Vicho Daikon: Jess yay. ^_^
ZsuZsanna Raven: Jullilulli
Philip Linden: Ah these pants feel better.
Kahn Moore: lol Soleil... glad to see you have priorities!
Indigo Nicholas shouts: Star not in theat haha
Scovir Paz: Up. :)
Julliette Westerburg: blast, always missingmhim
Sickness Blackflag: it was just an obvservation-i mean why ELSE is he sitting around here?
You: there
Deco Dou: yours are not bad
Jessant Sion: Why don't you idiots read the chat history
Julliette Westerburg: Hey Zsu!!
Aces Spade: if i could reach though this computer screen, i would pop your small head like a daisy
Jessant Sion: instead of booting people
Kahn Moore: dont look now... but i think we're surrrounded
Jessant Sion: just because of their names
Aces Spade: trust me
ZsuZsanna Raven: go SIS go
Philip Linden: that made me laugh aces... thanks!
Aces Spade: stay out of my buisness
Aces Spade: lol
moo Money: what is going on?
ZsuZsanna Raven: I got yer back
Philip Linden: well maybe we need many WA's
Aces Spade: this comment [21:47] Sickness Blackflag: look at friday here-hes just here to SORT of convince himself his gf/wife isnt cybering other guys.
Jessant Sion: they booted someone who didn't do anything
Zoar Borel: wb, scov
Sickness Blackflag: well he IS
Scovir Paz: Thanks. :)
Aces Spade: not funny and i am insukted
ZsuZsanna Raven: oh please
Deco Dou: you can even play golf here as i can see

Julliette Westerburg: good God Scov
Aces Spade: insulted
You: we have more WAs actually, we have the Infohubs
Deco Dou: great
You: whioch now have a lot more traffic on them then they did when they were hippo havens
Einsman Schlegel: sup karl
Kahn Moore: Waterhead is another WA
Philip Linden: very much so. Golf is great.
Scovir Paz: Hey-hey, Julliette.
Karl Greenstein: hey eins
Einsman Schlegel: how goes?
moo Money: if this weren't so laggy, I'd be filming the drama
Philip Linden: hi eins
Julliette Westerburg: hey Scovi!! what's shaking??
Diraru Murasaki: ...whoa
Deco Dou: I guess you ve never played golf in your rl
Einsman Schlegel: ello Phil
Karl Greenstein: it goes nowehrere
Karl Greenstein: how goes it for you
Diraru Murasaki: Hey where'd you find the mech?
Scovir Paz: Bacon! What's the story, morning glory?
Einsman Schlegel: the endless days ;)
ZsuZsanna Raven: FLAVAAAA FLAVVVVVVVVV !!!!!!!!!!!!
Kahn Moore: vicho like the crazy looking joker avie
Aces Spade: i am tired of being abused by you sickess
ZsuZsanna Raven: stomp em like a roach SiS
Nyah Bauer: Aces, come sit near me, I'll protect you
Diraru Murasaki: ....
Jessant Sion: VICTIMS everywhere
Vicho Daikon: Thanks. ^_^
Einsman Schlegel: been sky diving lately karl?
Jessant Sion: jesus that's boring
Diraru Murasaki: right.
Sickness Blackflag: LOL ive never been abusive to u-in fact i thought u were ok until u started SERIAL BITCHING at me
Taylor Forti: shit
Aces Spade: i said NOTHING to you
Sickness Blackflag: kepp ur NOSE out of my bizz and ill keep mine out of urs
Mark Assia: Guys, keep it PG please
Philip Linden: Be cool sickness..,
Sickness Blackflag: keep*
Diraru Murasaki: oh so you aren't afk
Deco Dou: Have fun with your life Philip
Indigo Nicholas: Starhunter you alive in there
Karl Greenstein: i did a few days ago when my friend blasted me about 10000 meteres into the air with a gun for some reason
Philip Linden: this is the WA... very much PG
Einsman Schlegel: lol
Aces Spade: you have been abusing me and others in the welcme area for months
Taylor Forti: Im Tay
Diraru Murasaki: I was just wondering where you got the mech
Jessant Sion: yeah don't laugh or anything you might get booted
Einsman Schlegel: aint that sweet ;)
Sickness Blackflag: OTHERS yea but not YOU
Karl Greenstein: other than that, i havent been in a while
You: I've often thought if they made the WA more like a long boardwalk with stalls along it it would change the surface area better for less griefing
Deco Dou: great job, you made a fl out of your sl.
Taylor Forti: And no I built this and so Starhunter
Indigo Nicholas: oh hehe taylor sorry
Einsman Schlegel: friend of mine went up 40 mil the other day
Kahn Moore: i can tell too many out of school right now
Aces Spade: i am going to report you again for the 30th time
Karl Greenstein: lol
Philip Linden: perhaps prok
Diraru Murasaki: Oh I see, custom made
nimrod Yaffle: Keep the hostility in the forums, not here, calm down all of you :-D
Sickness Blackflag: i made a POINT of not messing with u since that first time i came here
Einsman Schlegel: now he didnt try to come back down ;)
ZsuZsanna Raven: lol
Ginny Gremlin: Heya everybody
Diraru Murasaki: Sorry to bug ya, i've just been looking for a cool mech like vehicle in SL
Sickness Blackflag: but u still keep winding me up regardless
moo Money: I'm bringing in the fun patrol
Karl Greenstein: how many days did it take to get up there
ZsuZsanna Raven: yeah well the forums were down
Aces Spade: why did you say what you did?
Waterfalzz Extraordinaire: prok your never down here so how do u know how to make the wa run more smoothly...
You: something about the architecture of these areas
Zoar Borel: Hi, Ginny
Mark Assia: I've seen the old WA
Scovir Paz: Hey, Ginny!
Einsman Schlegel: actually
Jessant Sion: I wouldn't be hostile if they actually booted people who did anything
Einsman Schlegel: it only took him a couple minutes
Diraru Murasaki: hm, thats actually AVI add-ons though, not a vehicle
ZsuZsanna Raven: lol Water
Mark Assia: I could imagine how few the greifing incidents were there
Deco Dou: soleil do you need money?
You: it's like the gigantism dwarfs the avatars and they want to do something to be noticed
Aces Spade: i am a person behind my avatar
Karl Greenstein: super duper speed script
Karl Greenstein: ?
Einsman Schlegel: its coming back down thats the other issue lol
CarlosDaRat Carlos: I thoguth he'd be taller!
Karl Greenstein: lol
Einsman Schlegel: something like that karl ;)
CarlosDaRat Carlos: Thought*
Sickness Blackflag: ACES-stay out of my bizz ill stay out of urs-report me if u want u KNOW its a waste of time
Soleil Mirabeau: Obviously Deco or I wouldn't be wearing this sign!
Philip Linden: folks bear in mind that this is the welcome area...
Waterfalzz Extraordinaire: i think your confused with the forums prok
Aces Spade: i am crying i am sick of you
Einsman Schlegel: oh i think i have a pic of what it looks like up there
Einsman Schlegel: sec
Karl Greenstein: lol
Jessant Sion: I'm bearing in mind, but you just booted Juni and other people who said nothing wrong
You: well the welcome area should not amplify the forums no
Philip Linden: so although we certainly respect everyone's freedom of speech and expression in SL
Mark Assia: Philip, perhaps one of the Lindens should whip up a rotating "NO DRAMA" sign :P
Diraru Murasaki: So the first thing alot of new people are gonna see is this...
Deco Dou: what will you offer for the money
Jessant Sion: that's idiotic
Jessant Sion: just clearing people out of here for nothing
Philip Linden: I think it probably makes sense for us to be pretty aggressive here.
Vicho Daikon: Did they actually do that Jess?
Kahn Moore: mark: make it rotate on fire
Jessant Sion: yeppers
Nyah Bauer: I I never understand why people can't be nicer to each other here.
Jessant Sion: annoying got booted for nothing
Mark Assia: lol
nimrod Yaffle: Why not just mute each other?
Jessant Sion: what did she say
Philip Linden: Jessant who are you talking about?
Vicho Daikon: Okay, I have a problem with that. lol
Einsman Schlegel: gah this lag
Jessant Sion: nothing
Jessant Sion: just laughed
Karl Greenstein: no kidding
Soleil Mirabeau: a kick in your ass Deco, and now you're muted. :P
Mark Assia: Fire! Burn!
ZsuZsanna Raven: griefers never do anything wrong lol
You: well but Philip now you have Orientation Island, Help Island, greeters/mentors/helper/instructors --
Karl Greenstein: im not even bothering to change back to my stickman av while here
Julliette Westerburg: gawd Draggon Ball Z fo ever
Einsman Schlegel: ah here we go ;)
You: it's obvious why some wawnt to press the SKIP button
Einsman Schlegel: check it out
Jessant Sion: annoying and juni
Jessant Sion: the people sitting on that bench right there
You: we still need a Hyde Park
Deco Dou: what else belongs to your sadomazo service
Jessant Sion: that you guys booted for nothing
Karl Greenstein: what the hell
Karl Greenstein: lol
moo Money: Hey Aimee and Spin
Einsman Schlegel: lmao
Scovir Paz: Masher! :)
Einsman Schlegel: quite lovely up there
Aimee Weber: hi moo :D
Einsman Schlegel: and peaceful ;)
Honey King is offline
Kahn Moore: KAAAAHHHNNNN! :)
Karl Greenstein: his av is all demeted
nimrod Yaffle: Prok, I think Lazarus Divine (The Bush Guy) was going to build one
Jessant Sion: read the chat history or something jesus
Jessant Sion: is shutting up now
You: um I think he did, it was called "all my 16 m parcels on the mainland"
nimrod Yaffle: He IMed me with one of his alts a day or so ago actually
Einsman Schlegel: sec, brb karl ;)
Jessant Sion: that pissed me off though
Karl Greenstein: k
Deco Dou: so you are a hoocker
nimrod Yaffle: Nah, it was in a sim, he was telling me about it
Philip Linden: you know what jessant... I think that was my fault!
Kahn Moore: all your parcels are belong to us
Philip Linden: I think I accidentally may have kicked annoying!
Kahn Moore: for great justice!
Philip Linden: Oops.
Mark Assia: A sim he griefed?
Soleil Mirabeau: Deco, if you're going to ask for sexual services in Second Life atleast spell hooker correctly.
ZsuZsanna Raven: wow, this is becoming quite the vent
Philip Linden: I think I was targeting that other person.
Philip Linden: Woops.
Jessant Sion: lol
nimrod Yaffle: LOL!
Philip Linden: Sorry Jessant.
moo Money: that's my wife
Deco Dou: I am sorry, you are a hooker
Vicho Daikon: See Jess, all is well. ^_^
moo Money beams
Philip Linden: I will try and reverse than.
Philip Linden: that.
Jessant Sion: okay
zerstoreren Ash: turn the fag music off
moo Money: =O
Jessant Sion: shutting up now
Waterfalzz Extraordinaire: jess dont feel bad data froze me before on accident
Jessant Sion: lol
Philip Linden: As the lowly CEO, I am not as l33t with the CSR tools.
You: Spin u r not my freind 4 ever
Kahn Moore: wow you people are bold
ZsuZsanna Raven: Please disperse...there is nothing to see here
Aimee Weber: lol
Deco Dou: a sadomazo hooker
Kahn Moore: right in from of a SL staffer
Spin Martin: hi folks
Philip Linden: save us aimee!
Aimee Weber: Hi spin :D
Nyah Bauer: Who got booted jessant?
nimrod Yaffle: LOL
Jessant Sion: annoying
Soleil Mirabeau: Thanks Deco, I'm putting "Sadomazo Hooker" in my profile now. <3
Aimee Weber: You have to pray, philip. pray to aimee.
Mark Assia: Hey Philip, have you had a chance to look at that God Mode program they're selling on SLExchange?
Vicho Daikon: Juni did too didn't she?
Kahn Moore: what's a sadomazo?
Deco Dou: earning money by kicking people's butts
Jessant Sion: yep
nimrod Yaffle: You know it's bad when Philip asks a resident to save us... er.. a god :-D
Jessant Sion: went poof about the same time I did
Soleil Mirabeau: I'm not sure Kahn, But I'm intrigued!
Eddy Stryker: Mark: are you advertising again ;-)
Mark Assia: Whoa, Philip Linden, and now Aimee Weber :O
nimrod Yaffle: Mark, I'm using it right now, all the desructive features are disabled
moo Money prays to Aimee
Zoar Borel: lol
ZsuZsanna Raven: *snickers*
Philip Linden: yes mark
Mark Assia: It's like an interview session
Philip Linden: not nice but not in any way dangerous.
Aimee Weber puts a doller under moo's pillow. wait... i think i have that messed up...
Zoar Borel: now no one will believe I'm Aimee Weber's alt
Philip Linden: yep like nimrod said
Deco Dou: why don't you make a hole on your sighn, you ll be able to wear it while working
moo Money: LOL
Scovir Paz: I will believe.
Philip Linden accepted your inventory offer.
Zoar Borel: :)
moo Money: That works too
Scovir Paz: Okay, no, no I won't.
moo Money: are we talking 1USD or 1L?
Zoar Borel: lol
Scovir Paz: Hehehe!
nimrod Yaffle: Hahaha, Deco, that was mean
bboop Ayoob is online
zerstoreren Ash shouts: the hills have eys
Soleil Mirabeau: Deco, I would but the hole would be bigger than the sign itself :P
Kahn Moore: o.o
Zoar Borel: well this beats slepping any time
ZsuZsanna Raven: funny how no one comes here unless there is a Linden
Deco Dou: damn it, did you have so many customers already.
Julliette Westerburg: I dunno, I just dunno :/
Kahn Moore: meh drinking and SL is much more fun :)~
Aces Spade: lol
Soleil Mirabeau: Yes Deco
Mark Assia: Philip, why did you guys drop CC/Paypal verification for registration?
Deco Dou: well then why don't YOU give us some money
Julliette Westerburg: Zsuuuuu, yo!
Spin Martin: is this a town hall?
Philip Linden: Mark because it makes no sense long term. Some places in SL will want it, others won't.
Spin Martin snickers.
You: No Spin it's a walkabout
moo Money: I've been to the WA plenty of times before this
Julliette Westerburg: I can't see you but I read you
ZsuZsanna Raven: Jullilulli my love
Philip Linden: SL is going to be giant. We can't force credit cards on everyone.
Kahn Moore: no it's a hostal
Sickness Blackflag: i.e-THE EASIER IT IS TO SIGN UP-THE FASTER WE GET RICH
Deco Dou: atleast invite us to a party or something
Mark Assia: Ah, I see what you mean
Spin Martin: thanks, prok, i'll get my walkabout hat
Soleil Mirabeau: yeah right Deco. :P
Philip Linden: I'm going back to my golf game.
CarlosDaRat Carlos: you gave up your golf game to be harassed in the WA, that's benevolant
moo Money: awwww
Scovir Paz: Hey, Web. :)
Mark Assia: Alrighty, have a nice game.
Nyah Bauer: Good Luck Philip!
Kahn Moore: philip is about to go HOSTAL on everyone with that golf club :P
Mark Assia: Where do you play?
Philip Linden: call if you guys need me.
moo Money: have a good night!
Web Page: Hi Sco
Sickness Blackflag: LETS ALL PLAY
Aimee Weber: Bye philip
Philip Linden: Remember what I said in the forums that once...
Sickness Blackflag: RINGKISS FOR KUDOS
Soleil Mirabeau: bye Philip!
Sickness Blackflag: QUICK BEFORE HE POOFS
Kahn Moore: bye phil!
Phedre Dassin: scan
Web Page: Phillip, you golf?
Philip Linden: "So shines a good deed in a weary world!"
Katiahnya Muromachi: Sayonara Philip. Don't choke up on your grip.
Scovir Paz: See ya, Philip. :)
Mark Assia: lol
Kahn Moore: and he's gone...
Julliette Westerburg: so what was tat about??!
Kahn Moore: WOOHOOO paray time!
Mark Assia: Let's all search for Golf and go to the first result
Sickness Blackflag: OK U COULD HAVE ALL TRIED HARDER
Soleil Mirabeau: that was riveting
Kevinn Bergson: and the sucking up can end now
Scovir Paz: Chaos!
Jessant Sion: And like that...
Jessant Sion: ...........(poof)
Jessant Sion: he's GONE!!
Sickness Blackflag: I DONT THINK HE LIKES ANY OF U
Jessant Sion: !!!!!! :O
Spin Martin: haha
Jessant Sion: some tard alt
Sickness Blackflag: U SUCK AT KISSING ASS
Kahn Moore: death and destruction! yay!
Waterfalzz Extraordinaire: we are gonna eat u next prokofy
nimrod Yaffle: He hates us
Scovir Paz cries.
Jessant Sion: was banned and came back agian with teh same name
Aimee Weber: :O
Zoar Borel: lol
Kahn Moore: I wish to hurt you! :P
Scovir Paz: Hahaha!
nimrod Yaffle: bye us I mean everyone but me!
nimrod Yaffle: *by
Jessant Sion: and then was talking all this smack to people
Mark Assia: EVERYBODY TP TO KISSES MINI GOLF!
Jessant Sion: and then I got booted cause
wangzang Yang: now what
Web Page: Phillip can have infinite bans tho.
Jessant Sion: i was near him <.<
Spin Martin: oops sorry soleil
Jessant Sion: bastards
Kahn Moore: i got the PHILIP's autograph :)
Julliette Westerburg: let it out Jesss
Jessica Ornitz is online
Kahn Moore: i putting it on ebay
Waterfalzz Extraordinaire: lol jullie
Mark Assia: He gives out autographs?
Mark Assia: lol
ZsuZsanna Raven: watch em all run lol
Web Page: At least WATERZ is still here.
Julliette Westerburg: ~Raawr~
Scovir Paz: Collateral damage. :)
Waterfalzz Extraordinaire: Ha Ha Ha
Jessant Sion: lol I'm having rage blackouts
Waterfalzz Extraordinaire: wassup web
Mark Assia: lol
Mark Assia: That'd be funny if he started handing out autograph textures.
Julliette Westerburg: Scov!! story time? yea? no?
Scovir Paz: Why not? :)
Web Page: how come nobody told me the head bug maker was here?
Pathfinder's Picks Networked Kiosk v2.1: Thank you! Your notecard will be delivered to you soon!
Kahn Moore: ROXEANNNNEEE!
Alaskansnowwolf Barkley is online
Web Page glares at waterz
nimrod Yaffle: Why not just stal khim>
Waterfalzz Extraordinaire: I Don't Know !!
Jessant Sion: Tell me a bunny story
Mark Assia: Web Page, why else would fourty people be in the WA?
Andariel Ming: :)
Julliette Westerburg: sorry for them bumps
Mark Assia: Naked dancing newbies?
Julliette Westerburg: I can't see
Jessant Sion: one where the bunny dies a horrible slow death by choking
Web Page: you came her to harrass Phillip? get a life
Soleil Mirabeau: you mean the WA isn't always this packed? i'm shocked!
Julliette Westerburg: ready?
nimrod Yaffle: Hey EVERYONE Philip Linden is in the sim SANTA CRUZ :-D
Waterfalzz Extraordinaire: Ha Ha Ha
Scovir Paz: Ready, Santa!
Web Page: Ho'w it going Waterz?
Julliette Westerburg: If I were a pony, I would fly away on a unicorn's back, across a rainbow and under a moonbeam
Spin Martin: heh
Julliette Westerburg: to the rings of Saturn; where mommy would let me wear makeup and get my ears pierced! Also, I like sparkles... and porno.
Spin Martin: you just can't write this stuff
Waterfalzz Extraordinaire: im doing dam good
Mark Assia: LMAO
Mark Assia: Everybody TP
Julliette Westerburg: you still got it
Mark Assia: Let's watch Philip play golf.
Scovir Paz: Haha!
nimrod Yaffle: Santa Cruz, TP!!!
Vicho Daikon: Who did I just run into? ~_~
nimrod Yaffle: Lets cheer him on
ZsuZsanna Raven: ha
Kahn Moore: mark can we yell out things like "ya jackass" while Philip plays golf?
Scovir Paz: Unicorn-riding ponies.
Mark Assia: LMFAO!
Web Page: ok everybody who just came to see Phillip, the show is over. Your little hearts can stop going pitapat and you can get along with your lives once again
Mark Assia: I'll drive a car into the announcer's booth.
Spin Martin: heh web
Scovir Paz: Awwww.
Julliette Westerburg: life doesn't get better than unicorns and cotton cand ?
ZsuZsanna Raven: he'd prolly hit ya with his club
Mark Assia: lmao
ZsuZsanna Raven: lol
Waterfalzz Extraordinaire: amen jullie
Julliette Westerburg: -______-
Mark Assia: Philip Linden chasing fourty people with a golf club
Scovir Paz: Indeed. Don't forget the sparkles.
Julliette Westerburg: gawd! yes the sparkles!
zerstoreren Ash shouts: the hills see you
Kahn Moore: KAAAAHHHNNNN! :)
ZsuZsanna Raven: well he won't be able to run all that fast what with the lag and all
Sickness Blackflag: WOW I JUST CANT STOP TALKING ABOUT PHILIP LINDEN
Sickness Blackflag: HIGHLIGHT OF MY WEEK FOR SURE
Spin Martin: so is anyone here actually *new*
Scovir Paz: Linden lust? :)
Mark Assia: Sickness, don't be jealous.
Kahn Moore: ack sorry
Waterfalzz Extraordinaire: Ha Ha Ha
Waterfalzz Extraordinaire: yal crazy
Mark Assia: You can be the center of attention when you make a 100,000+ user metaverse.
Mark Assia: :P
Deco Dou: philip linden is an idiot
Kahn Moore: call me mr butterfingers
Vicho Daikon: Really the highlight of my week is my paycheck. O.o
Web Page: hold still scovir
Vicho Daikon: Then wasting it on games, anime, art supplies. XD
Elror Gullwing is offline
Scovir Paz: Aye!
Scovir Paz: ....
Scovir Paz: Swing harder! :)
Vicho Daikon: No wonder mosts artists are starving...hmmm...
Sickness Blackflag: who wants to be the center of attention-im just TRYING to wake up zombies
Zoar Borel: lol nice golf club, Web
Zoar Borel: lol
Scovir Paz: Get a good follow-through.
Deco Dou: Philip linden is a loser addicted to a game
Web Page: who's next?
Spin Martin: come on web, crack a few heads
Julliette Westerburg: zombies are great, Sick
Kahn Moore: yay im sitting woot!
Sickness Blackflag: not to mention kissing the ring of someone who works for a company that made an online visual chat program half the world doesnt even know exists
Sickness Blackflag: is just GAY
Mark Assia: No, Philip Linden made this game
Julliette Westerburg: they don't annoy
Mark Assia: His comapony did
Einsman Schlegel: its the stick!
Scovir Paz: Zombies are the best.
Mark Assia: Ph*company
Deco Dou: Fuck him
Mark Assia: blah
Julliette Westerburg: heck yes
Scovir Paz: ...should I have gone flying?
Kahn Moore: ninjas > zombies
Aces Spade: sheesh
Mark Assia: So laggy I can't type
Julliette Westerburg: :O
Julliette Westerburg: someone mocking the ninja?
Scovir Paz: Pirate > ninjas > zombies
Deco Dou: Poldi made the game. lol
Scovir Paz: No!
Sickness Blackflag: wow-so its a bit like kissing the ring of say-a local newspaper editor
Aces Spade: idf you so unhappy here deco log off
Web Page: fucking him would be gay... for me
Aces Spade: if*
Jessant Sion: lol
Scovir Paz: Zombies > (pirates + ninjas)
Julliette Westerburg: pirate hookers even better!
Mark Assia: Oh god.
Mark Assia: not again.
Einsman Schlegel: ao on
Waterfalzz Extraordinaire: Ha Ha Ha
Kahn Moore: I want a Pirates of the Carribean movie... Pirates Ninjas together for a no holds bar deathmatch!
Waterfalzz Extraordinaire: yal so crazy
Kahn Moore: to the death
Spin Martin: /ao off
Zoar Borel looks for her pirate hooker shirt
Julliette Westerburg: that would be awesome!
Deco Dou: I am not going to fuck him, I am just telling you to fuck him
Alaskansnowwolf Barkley is offline
Scovir Paz: Ninja hookers > pirate hookers
Julliette Westerburg: get it Zoar!
Waterfalzz Extraordinaire: its pg hurr yal
Deco Dou: if you are gay go on
Andariel Ming: sry
moo Money: PEEGEE
Waterfalzz Extraordinaire: lol
Web Page: or a girl
Julliette Westerburg: ninja hookers are rare
Kahn Moore: pirates get their wooden ships... ninjas get submarines for stealth
Andariel Ming: :)
Waterfalzz Extraordinaire: lmao
Deco Dou: yup
Julliette Westerburg: they're like super special
Scovir Paz: They are not rare, they are stealthy.
Kahn Moore: /yarrr
Waterfalzz Extraordinaire: extra super jullie
Julliette Westerburg: :P
Mark Assia: Poldi, don't be mad just because you can't find anything better to do.
Spin Martin: eat teh cookie.
Julliette Westerburg: yep indeed Waterzz
Deco Dou: philip linden is an idiot
Waterfalzz Extraordinaire: Ha Ha Ha
Waterfalzz Extraordinaire: mark
Zoar Borel: lol
Spin Martin: deco
Kahn Moore: ah! 9_9 your freeaking me out gingerbread person
Waterfalzz Extraordinaire: oh man is that dude back
Spin Martin: do you write your own material
Deco Dou: Who the fuck is that philip linden
Jessant Sion: he's back
Nyah Bauer: um
Jessant Sion: <.<
Kahn Moore: he's the governator
Mark Assia: Deco = Poldi
moo Money: such language
Waterfalzz Extraordinaire: yo decu watch your mouth man
Waterfalzz Extraordinaire: have some respect
Nyah Bauer: there's something on my head
Sickness Blackflag: WELL ananias-its gay when people come in here with WELL MADE yet oversized avs for some ATTENTION when theyre too socially inpet to CHAT online
Nyah Bauer: Abuse!
Deco Dou: did he make the game?
Sickness Blackflag: but THAT doesnt even look good on ANY level
Mark Assia: He's the CEO of Linden Research
Kahn Moore: i like the Avie Sickness :)
Ananias Forte: I just like making people laugh that's all....is that so bad :-)

Web or World?

I began thinking about this issue more seriously (concluding immediately it shouldn't be "all or nothing" on either score) a few weeks ago and then this last week, watching my son close up his games for the summer and tier down his SL account. <CLICK> and characters on WoW that seemed boring or were on an RP server that proved too fake were deleted. <CLICK> and Runescape, skilled out the max with all kinds of swords and helms, is sold to a younger player still thrilled with grinding. <CLICK> and a mall and game-within-game and tons of fascinating content in SL is deleted, sold, forgotten except for a screenshot. I had all I could do to convince him that he should keep his "brand" and leave out a store on a 512 to keep selling content. When he was able to make $53 U.S. in just a week or two, he decided to keep his little store -- but not log on. Well, for one, he's going fishing and boating and that's a good thing!

But...he was curiously "untethered" to his av -- to use an expression I heard Sherry Turkle apply to discussions of virtual worlds at a talk she gave in SL once. That is, his avatar was just a kind of glorified browser. Oh, to be sure, his name was cool and even his look with his amazing armour and fierce fire particles. But...my son could never understand why anyone would want to get married in Second Life. The avatar is just a mule, a closet, a place to keep your inventory. He's a hand-tool for building, in the shape of a person to give you an idea how it will feel to walk around a house. But...he's not a person.

Why marry a hammer, or a closet?

If anything, I'm the opposite, deepening each avatar, adding to his character, legend, possession, experience, associations, friends, societies, groups. This could be age or gender or culture at work, of course, or simply a blatant fact: that these immersive worlds are least impressive and effective in acting upon the very generation that has been exposed to them the most. They may pull the curtain aside and see the little man behind it way, way faster than we do.

Not six months after I declared 2006 to be the "Year of the Avatar" (and all kinds of famous people then copied me yuk yuk), now the eggheads are declaring the "avatar" metaphor to be "dead".

(BTW, I was the one in another TN thread to pose the question of what it would be like to have games/exploration of worlds without avatars, i.e. no body or human or animal like thing, but rays or light or simply chat or perhaps some other thing...)

The avatar had a brief existence as an expression of the soul in an immersive 3-d streaming world, or game, or legend, or society but...as soon as the world was washed out to make the web, the avatar became about as interesting as somebody's Yahoo account named [email protected]

Part of the problem is the outing of identity. While they promised the identies were secure and there was a firewall between them, they were sharking us, as I should know. But it's not just me -- look at the uproar in the blogosphere now as someone with a popular political commentary blog is "outed" to be someone more complex, with possibly a conflict of interests...

Just as there was a stampede for anonymity as a source of creativity, there was a stampede in the backwash in the Metaverse ebb and flow as some people then wanted their own literal real-life names to better position their brand and business. A Linden told me that if I were tired of all these description-less avatars calling themselves "Prokofy" in SL (one called "Prokofy Fugu" is even blamed for grid-crashing during the birthday) I should trademark my name (!). Gosh, $139 to prevent the False Dmitrys of the world? Looking over trademark law, I'm given a little pause...it talks about trademarks being refused to things that don't seem what they are...and I have to wonder if virtual land in pixel format on servers I don't own might not fall into that category...

When we make e-mail handles or blogs, we make up names and personas that are kind of like Avatar Lite. They represent some facet of ourselves, exposing some aspect while hiding another. These are artifacts of the soul. They were bound to merge.

Philip Linden seems to say he wants SL to become like the web, and everything he puts into the mix these days, whether promised HTML-on-a-prim or promised web-services (whatever they are, exactly), or even the dull RL shirt he put on instead of his old rocker's T, seem to tell us that the walled garden of SL, as Tony Walsh called it, the world or worlds-within-worlds, are going to have to thin out, become less deep, lose their immersiveness, become more open, and...flat.

On the one hand.

On the other, in fact Philip and the others are rushing with often what seems like unseemly speed (driven by investors? competitors? the adrenalin of conviction?) in fact to making worlds that are even more worldy -- but more like the Little Prince's tiny planet than a connected, contiguous open grid.

These mini-worlds or fiefdoms have little geographic sense unless their wealthier patrons or more savvy businessmen have created continents out of 4 or more of them. How much world do you want? Caledon or Svarga or RFrye Isle are all worlds -- spectacular worlds, worlds within worlds, with legend, colour, sights, sounds, and culture. They're about as worldy as you could want -- as long as you aren't on the ban list, and as long as you can basically afford the price of the rental admission to live there, which is rather steep in SL terms.

More and more people are rushing in the door, and I personally find myself curiously unconcerned about the greater griefing it means (my solution is to bolster the police blotter with things like Prop 1533 to name all names in discipline cases and establish a justice and dispute system with policies and institutions, not think up more coded technical ways to control parcels--but of course that's hard work).

That is, I welcome anything that removes barriers to account formation, especially for foreigners, and simply people who want a third life now that others have made their second life miserable. I see a lot of use of alts by oldbies precisely to get away from bad relationships, stalking, griefing, and bad associations. Everyone likes to get a second chance, especially when Second Life, which was supposed to be that chance, is ruined.

I'm the first one to protest to Daniel Linden, however, because I don't think the Lindens are telling the truth (to themselves, first and foremost) about the increase in griefing and the increase in the overall surface area of griefing. However, the hysteria whipped up about these accounts, and the Limousine Liberals like Cristiano Midnight protesting about them, are mainly interested in freedom for the sex business and freedom from possible harassment or entrapment for improper behaviour with minors -- griefing with its nuisance or destruction faction is not of interest to those who already live on low-traffic core sims or sequestered private islands.

So the ultimate irony is that all those people lecturing us about how we have to stop being worlders and get with the platform, and how "nobody logs in to every page in the Internet" as I was somewhat peremptorily told today by Foolish Frost, are actually the first to think up a hundred ways to close up these "web pages" and in fact make worlds! It truly is the richest irony!

Foolish Frost has a very interesting thread in which he celebrates all these accounts being formed without ID and wishes for the disappearance of ANY registration requirements like on the web but then...proceeds to think up an elaborate system for anyone who secures a hunk of land to make anyone they don't like not only banned from that land, but unable to see it, hear it, or know about it. He calls it "cloaking," and it's his answer for how we can live on servers in peace and harmony. Hiro Pendragon had once suggested something like this with a misting up or disappearance of people on the other side of my land border -- avatars, houses, ugly signs -- poof. I found this rather like air-brushing people out of history.

In fact, it reminded me a great deal of C.S. Lewis' "Great Divorce," where Hell happens to be just a place where you can't see Heaven very well, everything is grey...you are very tiny...and the blades of grass are so real they are as hard as diamonds and hurt your insubstantial feet. You take care of the problem of evil by just...making it small and almost invisible.

I have always maintained that the creation of an Archipelago of Egos in this fashion will not only be a closed society and an atomized society, but like all closed, atomized, destroyed societies with no social fabric, they will be units rife for totalitarian ideas -- on two counts. One, the forces that are able to withstand the centrifugal force of opening up worlds to the web and flattening everything out of the vertial immersive experience are the very societies like BDSM RP or Gor or other elaborate and controlled game play that provides its own internal, social controls to keep out the openness and spontaneity of the rest of the world. Two, anyone with just one Big Idea, or operative universalist theory, will be able to penetrate the rigid but therefore brittle walls of the walled-in cisterns. Precisely because they are walled in, these little mini citi-states and Republics of Me will be as easy to knock over as the Incas once they lost their chief.

Information wants to be free, you say? Free market models always prevail because they prosper? Think again. In SL, many, many people in fact enjoy the lifestyle of having or being a slave, and a slave subject to the most refined forms of pain and suffering. We can have the Suicide Girls and the trussed-up Pony Girls but...we can't have yard sales. Yard sales are evil, and to be controlled, if not eliminated. Freedom...but not freedom for *other people* to sell *outside my commece circle* say the oldbies who want to control the economy like FlipperPA Peregrine (who is busy invoking the threat of lawyers over a new competitor whom he claims copied his TOS language -- I had a guy once copy my info card word-for-word, even including offers and features he didn't even have in his rentals, and I personally contacted him and told him he was a lamer and an idiot and made him rewrite his cards--people copy my stuff all the time LOL.)

And now the old socialist failed experiment of Neualtenberg has finally bared its fangs and made an appalling new guild-type arrangement where some people, called "meisters," will get more land and better houses if they are more creative and can cover their rent with a certain percentage of their sales (the Government or in this case something that is more like the Central Commitee will hinge their rent payment to their sales by garnisheeing their wages -- this used to be called "indentured servitude"!). Those new or less talented will be granted pushcarts to work their trade and study with their meisters until they can create and sell better. It's hair-raising social Darwinism, Marxism, and fascism all rolled into one.

Other than these obvious and funny internal contraditions -- which we're likely to see plenty of now as those celebrating open accounts and "information wants to be free" get busy closing whole swathes of SL down so they can stream these new accounts as they wish into their microbrewed filtered worlds as the worldiest of all of us worlders -- there are a lot of open questions:

1. When will the Lindens stop calling us "residents" and call us "browsers?" What is it we *live* in when we *live* in SL. For a time, the politically-correct Lindenist way of referring to one's relationship to SL was to say you "used SL" (like a tool, or a drug, for that matter). But they didn't call us "users" like Microsoft called us users, they called us "rezis" and not only because we rez into their world. Will we see some new nomenclature to reflect the changing reality as we lose the world beneath our little avatar feet?

2. Is "try before you buy" really going to work? There's a lot of excitement about something like Amazon.com coming in and making it a clickable experience to share books and thoughts with others in little Starbucks or Borders-like cafes. But...are you *really* going to want an avatar that has the same proportions and body fat as your RL self to get a realistic look when you go shopping? If you are...then you'll be clamouring for making yourself be able to be invisible in appearance mode, for when you switch your cool, hot SL body with its skimpy tart's outfits for your plain self with its saddle bags...I'm somehow thinking this is never really going to take off.

3. What's going to happen to those of us who bought parts of servers on the mainland? It's hard to understand the Lindens' vision for the mainland. On the one hand, they are finishing off the unfinished bit. They're likely to reach the end of it by the fall in terms of the number of sims they said they'd sell. Sims on the auction bring them only $1000, and private islands bring them $1250, so they have no incentive to sell sims that then produce many owners on them as they are sold off. Will they offer trades of land to islands? Or simply tell us -- which they are tacitly doing now -- to sell off mainland holdings if we want to secure our investments and switch to islands? The oh-so-savvy FIC types like Adam Zaius long ago made this move, and of course Anshe Chung, non-FIC though she is, is the preeminent mistress of the private island realm outdoing even the Lindens in putting out servers for people to live on happily.

At one point, when Moofp Murray saw all this land in Governor Linden's hand unauctioned and sitting there, he developed the theory of the death of the mainland. Governor Linden then got off his ass in the next few months to do a veritable, if you'll forgive the pun, land-office business, and sold a record number of parcels in March-May. Now what? People live on them, especially new people. What is the commitment to them? Could we get a statement?

4. Is HTML on a prim really going to be all that? I visited a secret Linden installation today (OK, how secret could it be if I was able to see it on the map and fly right into it LOL) with a strange acronym, owned by Cory Linden, that showed a kind of bazaar, with lots and lots of webpages (screenshots on prims) -- including our own Second Life Herald. Behind each web page/stall were little rooms. Perhaps this is how they envision the HTML-on-a-prim working, that people are actually going to warm their little avatar hands around the fire of a screenshot of a webpage that is a prim with HTML in it that you click on to read that page...except one of the key features of SL culture has been absence of much text. The visuals have always taken pride of place. Oh, to be sure, there are IMs and notecards. But they never worked on creating books except the hard way. I'm not sure that people are going to first come into an immersive world with an avatar they create and dress...and then hurry out again to the wider web to read pages, while their avatar dangles AFK -- even if, as Philip says, they will now have the thrill of being able to talk to all the people who are now on that webpage with them. (It's likely that the first pages that will become 2-D/3-D in this fashion will be webpages like 3pointd.com or the Electric Sheep or others whose content often consists of being "about the thing itself" but ultimately, we're likely to have more depth and diversity with that cafe/book experience already hinted at by the appearance of Amazon.com staff in SL.

5. Will LL change their land/income business model? Currently a large chunk of their change comes from auction sales and island sales and then tier. This is essentially server space maintenance fees. These fees are likely going to get lower if they want more people, and that means they may sacrifice one of the key elements of the SL economy -- virtual estate land sales and rentals, which hinge on the concept of the discount tier level. The Linden's old friend Ulrika Zugzwang has long lobbied against this "exploitation of teh ppl" which she claims comes from awarding land dealers bulk discounts for higher levels of tier (half a sim is $97 US after owning one sim, not $125). The rentals business can command as high prices as they do (I say "they" because I don't charge these prices) by counting on the fact that an individual pays $25 US to own 4096 m2 plus 512 m2 in SL on a premium account, whereas at the discount level of $195 US for tier, I'd pay only $12, at $.002960 US per meter. (Some island dealers are starting to charge only $15 US now for the 4096 to compete with Anshe, who continues to charge $25 US).

Philip has always talked about flat tier so I'm quite prepared for him to junk the main engine of the economy in the belief that he can substitute lots of smaller land holders or lots more wealthier big parcel holders who will have other entities like hospitals, universities, government agencies, or big business to pay tier, and not care about how to make it back.

The destruction of a good chunk of the virtual estate sector will only be hailed by the communists on the forums, and even someone like Anshe Chung or Adam Zaius will likely not protest to the point of quitting. Why? Because a year ago, the Philip and other Lindens sent a very strong message: content uber alles. By breaking the backs of all but the hardiest and most persistent land dealers on their auctions with land glut, the Lindens already ensure a flat price of $5/m which changes little, really. So what they're telling us as social engineers is that we need to have *content* on the land to be able to charge more for it -- either a compelling house or theme or RP or services of various types. Exploiting merely the differential between bulk tier rates and end-user tier rates will be junked as "so 19th century". Of course, it will deprive many of the mom-and-pop and club-sim micro-economies of their livlihoods, but when has that ever troubled the Lindens?

The Lindens can afford to monkey with the tier system now, because many of their customers have gone basic or keep only a 512 to get the $500 stipend each week --and many are on the islands renting from wholesalers, or they pay tier as individuals on the mainland. If the Lindens reduce the tier of a 4096 to $12 or $15 for everybody flat across the board, so there is no longer any differential, mainland owners can only be happy -- they'll now pay $10 or $12 less to own the same land. Island dealers who counted on that discrepancy between individual and bulk tier at first will now not care, because their customers who will still go on paying $25 for their increased value ever really comparison shopped and never wanted to own land and pay tier to Governor Linden, only to deal with griefing, lag, and ugly builds. The extra $10 they have to pay now will seem inconsequential for what they get -- it's a kind of subscription fee to a world...the world the Lindens declined to provide.

So it will be a handful of people like me still offering low-cost rentals with freer terms on the mainland who will be royally screwed. Interesting!

6. If the Lindens offer "host-your-own-server," what happens to the Mainland? Many tekkies are dying for SL to go open-source so they can host their own servers and do their own thing with virtual worlds. They're actually more worlders than they care to admit when they rush to have everything opened up to the Web, to be like the Web, and be all "information likes to be free" stuff, but in fact hurry to make their home brews in their basement like Jarod, and shut out people, thoughts, speech, images, builds, scripts, etc. they don't like. The truly ironic thing about all this is that those of us who were for a world on one grid actually conceived of it as more open to all than what we'll see coming out of all these types clamouring for open source. They will make like-minded little enclaves and shut their doors, and you wonder how much they'll even recruit to replenish their own niches.

This is a common phenomenon in all societies in transition: political factions and parties of every stripe, and newspapers of every political affiliation, proliferate like mushrooms after the rain. It was Lenin who said "Before we can unite, we must differentiate." The differences between Tekkie Vision 123498 and Tekkie Vision 1239487 is going to be indistinguishable and based on subjective preferences, chance impressions, snap judgements. It will be many years before alliances are made, and they'll only be made by really strong, totatalitarian personalities.

I'm thinking Lindens may keep Governor Linden's estate to indoctrinate newbies, and with certified instructions and courses coming, with further stratification, feting, indoctrination, conformism, the Mainland will become harder and harder to inhabit as a place of creativity. Already we see this in the way the entire greeter/mentor/helper/instructor industry is controlled. Once you get past Jeska's Januses, you may be doomed to roam the slag heaps of forgotten first land, abandoned casinos and malls seized and forgotten by the Governor, their greeter scripts still chatting into infinity about money balls and camp chairs, and the entire experience might be like that wrong turn in Back to the Future that occurs if the mother doesn't marry the original father, or if someone steps on a butterfly's wing and we never speak English....

7. Are verified accounts going to make a caste system? I published an announcement that I will rent to any type of account -- this is the opposite of some landholders who are going to demand tools to be able to ban automatically anybody with this "unverified" status on presumption of guilt that they are griefers. This will open up an increasing digital divide, the gray avatars forced to log on from public terminals like in Snowcrash....

8. Is business actually going to improve? The theory is that with many more people, and more connectivity to the Internet, business will flourish. I'm all for that. But I do wonder if it will work as planned. For one, there is quite a sizeable content-creation base that will resist the appearance of big business for no other reason than that it constitutes competition -- they will fight hard, until they stop fighting (like Aimee Weber gave up her childish notion of a global strike) and get jobs with those RL companies...until the thrill wears off on either side. Everyone will come in once -- as I keep saying, but SL could be a one-trick pony unless there is more interactivity, experience, friendship, love, socializing, fun to be had by these "mixed reality" events than we've seen up til now -- and that means worlds. That means *somebody* has to make the worlds, and while the Lindens would like nothing more than to outsource and delegate this onerous function, they still do run the servers and they need to create a dispute resolution process run by reputatable and rotating residents with Linden supervision.

Right now, SL is like a Nantucket or a Greenwich Village. A small cohort of people with a certain lifestyle, mainly wealthy or living such a Bohemian life that they need no wealth (or can mooch off others) are able to live La Deuxieme Vie. This life consists of talking about technology, using technology to make other technology, predicting the Next Big Thing, going to conferences and getting drunk or laid or both, hopefully in RL rather than SL, and doing some thinking and having interesting conversations as well, and doing what all great alternative social movements do in the end...selling out to the Man at the end. All these people will end up working at Google or Microsoft and like Philip, they will hope "they can remember these wild days".

These cultural enclaves will either boutiquify and form the nexus of urbanscapes and suburbancapes around them by people inspired by them to at least shop...or they'll collapse.

What will then become the new engine of creativity? 

8. Everything else isn't going to stay in place, so will SL keep up? Right now, I see movies and new avatar capacity and other stuff happening even in my Yahoo browser -- I see more games, more 3-d stuff happening all over, even outside of what 3pointd.com covers. My favourite gas station or supermarket won't clear all the hurdles to come into SL, they'll make some el-cheapo version of a 3-D world using some other model that will give enough of the visual and social experience to keep most people happy -- and it will be free, too, and not require such a high-end computer and graphics card.

9. The RL doesn't stay static, either, so what happens with the next big war with the Arab world/the next big blackout/the next big terrorist attack/the next big recession? Nobody has yet figured out how to make virtual worlds and our avatars in them work without their tether to the real world and it will only take one such big lesson of the Real Life kind to sober up lots of people quick.

"I hope that we can all remember these wild days!"

Joselyn Coledale: omg
Joselyn Coledale: yea im here lol
Foolish Frost: <sigh> Did we lose part of the grid again?
Torley Linden: yes, the t hird torch!!
High wings: All Go
Jeska Linden: But Second Life... like first life
Pratyeka Muromachi: wow, did you see Phill fly off too?
otakup0pe Neumann: no appologies needed jeska !
otakup0pe Neumann: c'est la vie !
ryan00 Odets: hmmm anybody else see me as a woamn?
Iris Claveau: WB Philip!
Jonas Pierterson: and no lemony snicket
Shawk Pertwee: yay for fire
Jeska Linden: You gotta roll with it :)
Foolish Frost: That would all seem to point to a decentralized SL: A system where people rent the software for SL servers, and place the software on thier own hardware like an OS.
Neelena Benavente: WB Philip
katykiwi Moonflower: murphys law jes
otakup0pe Neumann: foolish : yes !
Philip Linden: wow I guess that was just me again.
Osprey Therian: Very true, Jeska
Jeska Linden: I for one want to thank you all for coming and hanging through :)
Philip Linden: bummer.
Foolish Frost: Welcome Philip!
Winter Eldrich: roll with it? On second life you can at least log out. ;P
Hiro Pendragon: You're special, Philip. That's why.
otakup0pe Neumann: that woudl be great for schools if nothing else
Elle Pollack: Yes it was, Philip
Sezmra Svarog: wb :P
Mr Mason: get a better graphics card phillip
Mad Wombat: lol
Neelena Benavente: lol
Mr Mason: :P
Zoe Llewelyn: Actually brilliant went down Phillip
crucial Armitage: lol
Philip Linden: Nope it isn't a client crash.
Jesse Linden: Yes, thanks for your patience
Pratyeka Muromachi: Phillip! did you fill a bug report?
You: Hi Philip Happy Birthday
Anne Noonan: update your graphics drivers philip ;)
Iris Claveau: I still want to hear where we are going
Philip Linden: it is a server slowdown of some kind.
katykiwi Moonflower: hi prok
You: hi katy
Philip Linden: I stop getting text.
Torley Linden: :)
Jeska Linden: hey everyone... shhhh :)
Philip Linden: and disconnect.
Jesse Linden: SHHH
Philip Linden: Well anyway what I was saying
Philip Linden: was that when you are on a website,
Schwartz Guillaume: something about beanstalks I think
Philip Linden: noone is there with you to help
Philip Linden: or guide,
Philip Linden: or comment.
Toboe Ingraham: yes, like Yahoo
Philip Linden: And that is, I think, what makes SL so different and better than the web.
Toboe Ingraham: That's why I love it so much
Gwyneth Llewelyn: The Human Touch™.
Harald Nomad: ouch
Philip Linden: Not just the fact that things are in 3D and therefore more memorable and comprehensible,
Philip Linden: but the fact that we are a part of it, implicitly.
You: More emotional
Philip Linden: I guess griefing is the neg side of that.
Joan Nomad: Oh, Harald, do sit down already...
Mr Mason: griefing exists in RL, we just call it crime
Mr Mason: and vandalizme
katykiwi Moonflower: there are always griefers yes
Schwartz Guillaume: or comedy
Philip Linden: But in any case I think that the fact that we are here... together... that is what matters.
Philip Linden: And makes this all so very different.
Mad Wombat: GROUP HUG
Miel Maginot: Philip, you're not the first company to want to creat a "3D web", there have been many failures before. What makes you think this is a good move?
Frans Charming: `=)
Hermia Linden: Yay togetherness
otakup0pe Neumann: mor. personal ?
Iris Claveau: wow
Philip Linden: Because we know to make it owned by you not us.
Philip Linden: Like the net,
Philip Linden: supportive optionally of commerce,
otakup0pe Neumann: philip : was there just an indication that you are looking to make the server system more decentralized ?
Philip Linden: and because we knew that it had to be fun and playful, at first, to get started.
Foolish Frost: Because, to a degree, Philip and his team have already succeeded.
William Niangao: the retention of copyright/intellectual rights is a big reason Itried it out.
Philip Linden: We are looking at making everything that isn't decentralized!
property Resistance: In the net everyone can own server infrastructure :)
Hiro Pendragon: Philip: How is Linden Lab not going to become the next AOL?
otakup0pe Neumann: haha wicked answer.
Neelena Benavente: we were talking about that while you were gone; the co-created reality this is; we are pioneers
Philip Linden: I think that we are looking at long term growth of >1000X current size.
You: Maybe it's ok if it becomes an AOL Hiro
Mera Pixel: shush
otakup0pe Neumann: now that is optimism
Philip Linden: This means millions of servers,
Foolish Frost: Well! What do you know! The old Fool was right for once!
Jesse Linden: SHH
Philip Linden: and hundreds of millions of users
Philip Linden: Same scale as web/net.
Clopin Mendicant: (sowwy)
Philip Linden: This means that along with, of couse, having this all be user created and controlled,
Miel Maginot: Philip, in that cas, why even have inventory and L$ ? Why even have accounts? If all you want is to interact on 3D websites with other people, you dont need all that.
crucial Armitage: can you chay ca...ching
Winter Eldrich: Philip, Why did Linden labs stop verifying peoples IRL identity when they signed up? Isn't that more or less an open invitation to griefers?
crucial Armitage: lol
Philip Linden: that the systems themselves will have to be more open.
otakup0pe Neumann: i like what you are saying !
Philip Linden: Open source, open protocols and standards.
Anne Noonan: Open Source?
Anne Noonan: Wewtwewt =^.^=
Mad Wombat: eahm, open like the internet
otakup0pe Neumann: these things make it easier to get second life into schools !
Philip Linden: So that is something that we are working on now.
Mad Wombat: i meant "yeah"
Philip Linden: Too many people need to work on this. More than can just work for LL.
otakup0pe Neumann: so you are saying LL is open to partnerships ?
otakup0pe Neumann: ;)
Schwartz Guillaume: Miel: because SL isn't just 3d websites, it's collaboration and construction and communication
Neelena Benavente: how do you navigate partnerships and IP rights?
Philip Linden: Way beyond partnerships... we need to be profoundly open in the same way that the web has been
Miel Maginot: Schwartz, that's not what Philip is saying
Baba Yamamoto: I asked about open source like 4 times and each time you crashed... I know you're avoiding it ;0
Sezmra Svarog: lol
Philip Linden: so that this can be secure, extended, controlled by many, etc.
Serenitee Bliss is offline
Hiro Pendragon: lol
Philip Linden: baba I am far from avoiding it.
Frans Charming: haha
otakup0pe Neumann: hee.
crucial Armitage: heheh
Frans Charming: ;O
Gwyneth Llewelyn: Philip, would you care to tell us more about the nifty webservices-based API you're building for the past several months?
otakup0pe Neumann: free as in free speech and free as in free prims !
Philip Linden: I just want to defer making specific announcements on that front until we are ready.
Tao Takashi: don't try a 5th time because then he will switch off the DB server again ;-)
Philip Linden: !
You: Willl these unverified avatars become like the grey avatars logging in from public terminals in Snowcrash, third-class citizens?
Gwyneth Llewelyn: hehe fair enough, I guess!
Philip Linden: Yes, we have been working a LOT on a webservices API
Neelena Benavente: can we cover some business aspects first?
Schwartz Guillaume: it's not a SL anniversary without a Snow Crash reference
Jamie David votes for gohsts
property Resistance: Philip, do you plan to scale up using the current client/server structure?
Philip Linden: so that everything we can put ther will be exposed as web alls.
Baba Yamamoto: We have an open source proposal on the vote page 1483... Nobody believes that Linden Lab would open the client or server
Philip Linden: calls.
Baba Yamamoto: I think you have to do it eventually .... it's got to happen for this world to grow
Neelena Benavente: lots of people want to participate in this virtureal economy
katykiwi Moonflower: baba you are hitting avies with your sign when you type
Philip Linden: I think that the infra where the server simulates the world and many users connect to each server is correct,
Miel Maginot: Philip, does this mean that ultimately, you envision that registration and user access will finally incumb to content providers instead of LL ?
katykiwi Moonflower: i read it an hour ago
Philip Linden: but we will likely need to allow there to be many many hosted servers long term.
otakup0pe Neumann: that's an ambiguous statement phillip. are you saying that LL will control the amount or a majority of the servers ?
Philip Linden: And yes I think that registration will probably be done longer term by you guys, not by us.
Neelena Benavente: how does a large project start up and protect their IP rights? its not as simple as the TOS
otakup0pe Neumann: neelna : carefully
otakup0pe Neumann: LL is fully DMCA compliant if you bring a complaint
Virtual Commons: Where would Linden Labs interest lie in this new architecture?
Frans Charming: RL law Neelena
Philip Linden: otak... very unlikely that we would run all the servers long term.
otakup0pe Neumann: it needs to be backed up with "real world" due process however
Will Webb: what about countries where the dcma does not apply
Virtual Commons: I mean, of course long term LL would still have to be able to show a profit...
Anne Noonan: Philip: creating a community of 10s of millions, unlike the web, needs controls. Will a system of laws and elected goverment ever be put in place?
Raven Singer shouts: Hiya Scope
Philip Linden: Without question... to the extent that 'metaverse' meets my definition...
Baba Yamamoto: That was always the goal
Elror Gullwing is online
otakup0pe Neumann: that is what phillip is implying baba
Mera Pixel: for crying out loud. if this is Q & A, can someone be the IM hub and que up questions?
Baba Yamamoto: read the sign...
otakup0pe Neumann: that LL realizes this
Scope Cleaver shouts: Hi Raven :)
Philip Linden: A digital version of the world,
Philip Linden: real and malleable and compelling enough for us all to do things in it that we can only dream of in RL.
Bub Linden is offline
otakup0pe Neumann: example : blowing up the high school chemistry lab
otakup0pe Neumann: example : magic school bus
Philip Linden: To move people forward by letting them learn and teach and live to the greatest degree they desire
Philip Linden: Look at all the stuff people are learning here!
Clopin Mendicant: It's a bad way to focus on something you want to get out of...
Alazarin Mondrian: so long as 'compelling' isn't a euphemisim for having a lagpit club next to you forcing you to move
Hiro Pendragon: Philip, you are the captain of a very large ship that many of us - especially those of us relying on SL as income - are riding in with YOU. We want SL to succeed - a lot of us like being given notice in advance of a major policy change like registration.
property Resistance: Philip, a question would be if the sim based structure will be kept, and then how these servers will be accessible. Will there be a continuous "landmass" with a map as directory or more like company grids that are seperate, like a Walmart or Ikea grid?
Philip Linden: It is inspiring... plenty inspiring enough to get me through troubles like today!
Philip Linden: As I said before millions of servers.
Virtual Commons: An open SL sounds like a dream come true. You mentioned others being able to help. I am sure you will have no shortage of volunteers for that kind fo project.
Rhiannon Chatnoir: ha foolish
Miel Maginot: Philip, are we talking about a mutation of SL as we know it, or turning it into one application of the open architecture that you propose ?
Elle Pollack: Shh, he's in speech mode
Tao Takashi: problem is probably not the amount of volunteers but how to handle them
Philip Linden: Yes I think that if we can let everyone that wants to work on the SL code... that would be an army.
Baba Yamamoto: Millions of servers, because that's what it takes to make the interent worth visiting
otakup0pe Neumann: or just act as ICANN with regards to distribution ?
otakup0pe Neumann: that is a largely solved problem Tao
Mera Pixel: speaking of volunteer....*cough*
otakup0pe Neumann: "largely"
Philip Linden: Probably the biggest open project ever.
Baba Yamamoto: Philip, do you plan to impliment client services like secured vendor accounts for those worried about pay scams going on on their land?
otakup0pe Neumann: linux seems to work pretty well. but you are right phillip this would rival linux
Newfie Pendragon puts on his hip waders
Jamie David: 7:15 and I got to got to bed. I missed out on so much. Please can we have a transcript. Be well all. and Happy Birthday to one and all. May the party never end
Philip Linden: Hmmm... that is a good q baba but I don't quite understand the nature of the scams.
Baba Yamamoto: Perhaps a system where payments to an unverified object or person would result in a frightening warning
William Niangao: the nature of creativity to create WITHIN SL... I could see that easily flowing out to creating SL itself. so many untapped minds and talents abound here.
Philip Linden: Ah yes I see.
Philip Linden: That is a good point.... we are going to need to add more warnings there probably.
You: We don't need any special services Baba they just need a police blotter account and a bannnig for those doing such scams
otakup0pe Neumann: there wil lalways be miscreants
Philip Linden: that will work too prok
You: Would you consider publishing the names of perpetrators and the names of those who abuse report and the names of prosecuting Lindens, Philip?
Philip Linden: but at larger scale those will need to be local banlists I think.
Kithrak Kirkorian: whoa
Neelena Benavente: the more we know, the more social pressure can be applied against griefers
Clopin Mendicant: With local you mean sims?
You: but Phliip there's no such thing a s a local ban list, people share them and there will be hundreds of servers locked to some people arbitarily on a whim
Jamie David: HUH?
You: will there be recourse and justice?
Baba Yamamoto: Banning people doesnt stop new people from doing the same thing... https and security certs are the only way to pay online...
Philip Linden: Well prok I think many folks are already working on user ban systems,
You: I don't want third-party sites scraping all my business and personal data Baba
Baba Yamamoto: second life needs to impliment secure pay,ment gateways
Anne Noonan: Will there ever be a proper concept of "company" within SL. I.e. company money accounts, etc, etc.
Philip Linden: so we really won't have much choice regarding shared restrictive lists.
Philip Linden: As with black hole email lists on the net,
You: yes Philip I know, they use them on me on a whim : )
Foolish Frost: You mean, like the ban and spam lists that already exist across the net? Nothing can be done about that, Prok. It's a part of the problem with mass-communication.
otakup0pe Neumann: you could spend years on ACL's and never get them right
Mera Pixel: Thank you for your time, Philip. I hope you like the party here.
Philip Linden: we will rely on the effectiveness of the list managers in advertising their policies
ryan00 Odets: prok there is many systems in effect but they arent as reliable as they need to be so, Philip how can LL in effect help control those lists?
Sabrina Bellambi: Hi Shawk
Baba Yamamoto: third party sites? i'm suggesting the land tools offer an area where approved vendors may be registered
Philip Linden: I'm not sure how we can help. But open to suggestions.
You: Oh, and BTW, many Kings issue pardons on the national holiday, can you unpermaban me, especially now that making an alt is child's play?
Philip Linden: permaban?
Foolish Frost: The forums, Philip.
Jamie David: Just like the offers I get for Protection? Hire me and you will not be griefed. Is that a prommis or a threat?
Baba Yamamoto: that would be nice Prok... i would like to see you back ;0
You: I'm permabanned from the forums, remeber? lol
katykiwi Moonflower: prok should be allowed on the forums
milady Guillaume: lol prok
Shawk Pertwee: hi Sabrina
Dash Curry: Philip, since so many of us missed a lot, will there be a place we can get the main points of the discussions?
Philip Linden: The data rate of the forums in now greatly beyond my ability to follow.
Jeska Linden: I'm going to try to piece together a log and post to the forums.
Foolish Frost: Dash: They alwasy post the transcript afterwards.
Philip Linden: Dash I will post my notes.
Hiro Pendragon: End the forums!
Dash Curry: OK, thanks.
Hermia Linden: May I just say how much better dressed you are today, Philip? This makes me optimistic.
You: Perhaps you could updaet your personal blog
Clopin Mendicant: thx Jeska
Philip Linden: Thanks hermia :)
Hiro Pendragon: make forums feedback to LL only.
You: Hermia, he's wearing RL clothes, the thrill is gone : (
Hermia Linden: :o)
otakup0pe Neumann: heh.
Elle Pollack thinks she should change that "better dressed" thing >:)
Philip Linden: Yes I'll put some notes into my blog.
Mr Mason: yes, the day philip took off the chaps is the day I rejoice.
Cereal Milk: I think my laptop is aboutto catch fire
Lopayza Moonlight: Despite the tone of the forums, I find them useful as they are.
property Resistance: Have a great night all and happy birthday again! Good luck with the next step in the busines model, Philip :)
Sabrina Bellambi: you know you're trying to walk through the base of the building?
Philip Linden: Well happy birthday to everyone.
ryan00 Odets: There is a system that relies on entries from a main person but you can be placed on teh list just because the person thinks your griefing them, so that isnt a very effective measure but a good start
Mad Wombat: happy birthday :)
Dash Curry: I'm sure this was covered, but what was the call on Accountability for Access to SL? Going back to Credit-card? I couldn't get back in...
otakup0pe Neumann: i likhappy birtyhday to you eh
Philip Linden: I hope that we can all remember these wild days!
Zoe Llewelyn: Happy Birthday, Phillip, and thank you for the past two wonderful years here.
Dash Curry: Due to a Griefer who wasn't accountable for his account.
Anne Noonan: bappy hirthday!
Will Webb: happy bday
Cereal Milk: I hope this spinning chair doesn't cross a sim
Neelena Benavente: yes, Happy Birthday to SecondLife!
Philip Linden: When this is all recorded in history!
Harris Hare: Congrats on 3 years, Philip and the rest of the Lindens.
nand Nerd: Happy Birthday Philip and many more to come!
You: Yes, thank you for a second life!
Osprey Therian: Thank you, Philip - thank you for having such a huge dream :D
Jeska Linden: Thanks everyone for your patience today and Happy birthday :)
Dash Curry: Happy birthday!
Hermia Linden: Thank you Philip and everybody
Cereal Milk: it's coming perilously close
Clopin Mendicant: congrats :)
Lopayza Moonlight: Thank you for making this world we can play in, despite the growing pains.
Philip Linden: Happy third birthday Second Life. I drink to you and to everyone!
Jesse Linden: Happy Bday
Eggy Flan: Happy Birthday Philip - thanks for all you've made
Hermia Linden: Are you buying?
otakup0pe Neumann: haha you drinking at th pfoffice phillip
You: lol
Ashlee Switchblade is online
Fizik Baskerville: Happy birthday :)
William Niangao: so, other than ban lists, are there any current plans to improve the use of flexis? Without collision detection or a force XYZ aligned to avatar, they're very limited in their usage.
nand Nerd's eyes widen: Who brought beer?
Multi Gadget v1.45.4 by Timeless Prototype
Philip Linden: Take care all. I'm going to need to go.
Will Webb: i think they just spilled beer on the asset server during the bday party
Iris Claveau shouts: Cheers to Philip!! and to SL!! on a job well done!!
Virtual Commons: Thank you Philip! And happy birthday SL
Mad Wombat: bye, take care
Frans Charming: Congratulations Philip!
otakup0pe Neumann: that's what i suspected will
Hermia Linden: Bye bye O Leader
Kithrak Kirkorian: Bye Philip
Harris Hare: Thanks for coming, Philip.
You: 100 years, sto let!
Philip Linden: Bye!
nand Nerd: Bye Philip, take care
Jamie David: Sadly I learnt nothing But it was a hoot.
Lopayza Moonlight: Take care, Philip.
Frans Charming: Take care.
Osprey Therian: Goodbye, El Presidente
Gwyneth Llewelyn: bye :)
Will Webb: cya Phil
Elle Pollack: Philip, someone older than I am told me you once went around the grid in a Sailor Moon costume :)
William Niangao: be well phillip
Mad Wombat: where is governor linden
Will Webb: yeah, where's the gov
Millie Thompson: lol
Harris Hare: I think this is more of a celebration than a town hall, Jamie.
You: He doesn't exist.
Dash Curry: Goodbye.
otakup0pe Neumann: drunk !
ryan00 Odets: damn it
ryan00 Odets: HAhaha
Will Webb: she
Will Webb: and she comes online for the bdays
Mad Wombat: i need her bear :D
You: ok she doesn't exist then
Gwyneth Llewelyn: And Gov Linden is indeed a she.
You: really???
Frans Charming: yup
Will Webb: it's tradition
You: where?
Elle Pollack: Doh. Idnd't get to give him a "present">:)
You: oh you're making that up!
Dash Curry: OK.. So what was the upshot of the whole prop 1503 - 1523 THing? Did he address it?
Newfie Pendragon: Gov. Linden's been a 'she' since 1.0
You: Not directly no
Newfie Pendragon: well that's what the rumours are
Mad Wombat: the gov is the true goddess of second life
Elle Pollack: Dash, at the begining.
You: gosh shows you what a newbie I am Newfie, who knew?
Will Webb: so, any linden here know when we can expect the governor ?
You: Well Gov Linden talks to me sometimes
Frans Charming: lol
You: after hours
You: he/she tells me stuff
Osprey Therian: She was at the last birthday
Sansarya Caligari: lol
Newfie Pendragon: I live next to the mansion, I hava a telescope pointed into her bedroom window
Frans Charming: Gov, is just a work account, not one rl person.
Phoenix Psaltery: Does she slap you and tell you to behave, Prok?
You: she said she was saddened by my failure to believe in her existence
You: no she's real
otakup0pe Neumann: hahaha
You: she talks to me
Gwyneth Llewelyn: haha Prok :)
Dedric Mauriac: hey, keep it PG
Sansarya Caligari: hahaha
Will Webb: check the history wiki, the gov account comes online for the bday
Mad Wombat: Frans, stop spoiling the fun
Hermia Linden: Got a call for help. Got to go. Take care folks!
You: in fact she told me group tool reform is coming very soon
You: like, any wekk now
Virtual Commons: Does anyone happen to know if Robin L is still speaking today?
Osprey Therian: Bye Hermia!
Lopayza Moonlight: Take care, Hermia
Phoenix Psaltery: Oh, like that's news...
Mad Wombat: bye hermia
Jonas Pierterson: good luck hermia
Frans Charming: No.
Gwyneth Llewelyn: Virtual: no, sadly she isn't.
Osprey Therian: Must be so late for you.
Anne Noonan: Bye Hermia
Frans Charming: Bye Hermia, take care
Harris Hare: Thanks for referring Hermia.
You: oh, like where's your seense of humour?
Tozzi Antonelli: Hey guys, are their currently any major brands in SL?
Rhiannon Chatnoir: lol.. i know.. i little did i know we would be earing the same shirt.. :P good choice phillip
Jonas Pierterson: rl brands or sl brands?
Tozzi Antonelli: RL brands
Mad Wombat: Warner brothers
Newfie Pendragon: legal brands, or the bootleg copies? :P
Alazarin Mondrian: BBC
Neelena Benavente: Wells Fargo
otakup0pe Neumann: BBC i've heard
Jonas Pierterson: amaerican something I think
Gwyneth Llewelyn: MTV
Virtual Commons: Gwyneth, ty - thats a shame. Not sure if I could have stood around for that much more 2 fps anyway though. :-)
Miel Maginot: SL is doomed. 3D web will not work, there's no point in it
otakup0pe Neumann: wait. wells fargo ?
Gwyneth Llewelyn: Microsoft
Tozzi Antonelli: American Appearal
otakup0pe Neumann: miel : not with that attitude
Alazarin Mondrian: i dunno... i'm so lagged out i can't follow anything
Rhiannon Chatnoir: American Apparel.. the make of the shirt i have on.. they have a shop now in world
You: Could someone verify that this very build is 512 textures and not 1024 laggier textures?
Hiro Pendragon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfV1DrrY2r4
Hiro Pendragon: machinima footage from the protest earlier.
Frans Charming: Mera?
Midtown Bienenstich: Protest?
Midtown Bienenstich: on what
Hiro Pendragon: About the registration changes.
Gwyneth Llewelyn: Allegedly, Victoria's Secret, but that might be just a rumour...
Jonas Pierterson: its worse than that because of the rotation prok
Elle Pollack: Prok, the stage was rotating and flahsing colors before you got here, I wouldn't make any good assumptions about it ;p
Hiro Pendragon: Victor is Victoria's Secret.
Rhiannon Chatnoir: yeah.. the rotation kills this
Miel Maginot: There is just no demand for a 3D web viewer. It's too high bandwidth and has no added value
otakup0pe Neumann: looks pretty though !
otakup0pe Neumann: miel : yet there is "demand" for a 3d immersive experience ?
Tozzi Antonelli: thats a good amount of brands
Gwyneth Llewelyn: Which Victor would that be, Hiro? ;)
Alazarin Mondrian: the registration changes are a lawsuit waiting to happen
Miel Maginot: yes
otakup0pe Neumann: there is equally as much demand for a 3d web browser
Lopayza Moonlight: I dunno. I can show off things in here I can't on my web page.
Hiro Pendragon: Victoria, Gwynb
otakup0pe Neumann: that being said, there are issues to be ironed out
Gwyneth Llewelyn: Ok, so which Victoria would that be?
Hiro Pendragon: Victor
Frans Charming: Miel, if that is true, why are you here?
Hiro Pendragon: Victoria is a man.
otakup0pe Neumann: but opening would probably help with that
Frans Charming: Must be something that keeps you here.
Midtown Bienenstich: what is prop 1503/1523
Tozzi Antonelli: Lag is really bad here, will Linden Labs ever fix that problem?
Midtown Bienenstich: Of course, Frans.. she is "entertained"
Tozzi Antonelli: Or is this just the norm
Will Webb: for this many avs
Will Webb: it's not bad
Mr Mason: I'm am getting very little lag even right now.
Millie Thompson: Lag is a problem that will exist for all online games.
Phoenix Psaltery: it's because so many ppl are here
Mad Wombat: just wait until the pentium 10000 comes out :D
Will Webb: 1.2 fps here
Mr Mason: lag is usually client side, not LL side
Mad Wombat: then it wont lag anymore
Rhiannon Chatnoir: i am not even able to render all avs on screen.. people pop in and out
Tozzi Antonelli: yea 2 fps
ryan00 Odets: LAG LAG LAG
ryan00 Odets: hah my LAG LAG LAG left when philip left hmmm.........
Zoe Llewelyn: You are experiencing graphics lag. Its on your system due to too many avatars in one area being renedered by your video card. Not at LL
otakup0pe Neumann: i'm under no other impression thant my lag is at my end
otakup0pe Neumann: it's a beefy game
Skye McArdle: speaking of lag and texture sizes, would a vid card with 512 be better than one slightly faster with 256?
Will Webb: yeah, purely client based
Midtown Bienenstich: Lag will end when the whole world converts to uber leet and fast connections and cable distribution.
ryan00 Odets: im very dorry stupid gesture
Gwyneth Llewelyn: You're confusing me, Hiro, there are over a 100 victorias in SL ;) hehe
Will Webb: no it wont
Will Webb: content will bloat to match
Rhiannon Chatnoir: yes, like any large function.. all you can do is turn down settings
otakup0pe Neumann: shiny things grow to fit the hardware
ryan00 Odets: nah cabel connections arent as reliable
You: I turned down settings but this is the l aggiest I have ever seen it
Tozzi Antonelli: Ok, so my next question: What are brands doing to improve the world for SL residents?
You: it's not just that there are lots of avs, we get that all the time
Jonas Pierterson: aside form some movement jumps, Im just a little slower than normal, and my computer sucks
Frans Charming: it's lagtastic
otakup0pe Neumann: define brands
Tozzi Antonelli: Or is it just advertising ploys
Midtown Bienenstich: lol Frans.
Dnate Mars: I am still getting 7FPS, that is not bad
You: it feels to me like there are just way too many builds,k prims, scripts, textures
Tozzi Antonelli: Brands are real world companies
Midtown Bienenstich: Comcast commericials are creepy though
Mad Wombat: 5.6 here
Gwyneth Llewelyn: Tozzi: explain "improve" and why should companies "improve" SL.
Frans Charming: lucky you Dnate.
Zoe Llewelyn: That's because ytour client is trying to render 4 times as many avatars as can usually be seen in one spot.
Alazarin Mondrian: LL refuses to do any ID verification on signup and Phil's showcase speech gets crashed twice...... not a coincidence
You: I'm getting a Lee-Linden-socialist-perfect 45 FPS
You: of course -- at what expense???
Dash Curry: Well, gang.. what hasn't been frustrating was at least educational.
Dnate Mars: I have everything turn to the lowest setting, but I guess it could be worse :)
Dash Curry: Democracy flops again.
Midtown Bienenstich: Did Philip talk already?
Mad Wombat: lol
Alazarin Mondrian: been and gone
Zoe Llewelyn: Yes Midtown
Jonas Pierterson: unrortunately yes
Gwyneth Llewelyn: hehe Midtown — yes, for about 2 hours :)
Jonas Pierterson: bt nothing of substance
You: yes he said "zhit' stalo luchshe, zhit' stalo veselee"
Kithrak Kirkorian: 6 fps on max details, bring em on!
Midtown Bienenstich: then why are we all here.
Gwyneth Llewelyn: Oh, I wouldn't say that, Jonas.
Elle Pollack: I gained several FPS (from 1 to 7ish) mostly by turning down avatar rendering sliders
Zoe Llewelyn: I heard a fair bit of substance Jonas...it just wasn't what YOU wanted to hear is all.
Osprey Therian: 15 fps!
Osprey Therian: w0t!
You: gosh I ahve 45 FPS thanks to sim socialism
Virtual Commons agrees.
Midtown Bienenstich is only here because of the uberly high concentration of green dots on the Map
You: but of course no script works and I can barely type
Cecily Dulce: Hello Jonas
Alec Carson: he also said "budet eshe luchshe"
Jonas Pierterson: hi cecily
Gwyneth Llewelyn: At least next week you'll get a way to validate through LSLwho is "verified" avatars, and who isn't.
Virtual Commons: The open source stuff, if/when it comes to pass will be amazing
Rik Riel: sorry
Cecily Dulce: I hope you don't mine me coming to you
otakup0pe Neumann: that's a step in the right direction gwyneth
Cecily Dulce: mind even
Gwyneth Llewelyn: hehe Virtual — you'll have to wait a few years yet ;)
Alazarin Mondrian: i hope LL has good lawyers.. they're gonna need them when 'concerned parents' find their little darlings in XXX mature zones
Jonas Pierterson: Im ok, its just laggy here
otakup0pe Neumann: as long as you can verify through other than SMS / CC / PayPal
Mad Wombat: oh, gotta water my FUF tree. bye guys
Skye McArdle: lol, I've got 2.8 fps, but my vid card is a crappy pci radeon 9250 :/
Frans Charming: What is your client fps Prok?
Osprey Therian: Bye, fellow residents!
Gwyneth Llewelyn: I would guess so, otaku — phone validation, ID validation, etc
Virtual Commons: Gwyneth - I'm patient, took a few years for the web as I remember too. :-)
Alazarin Mondrian: hiyas HIro
Midtown Bienenstich: There's other way than SMS/CC/ PayPal?
Zoe Llewelyn: Concerned parents aren't to concerned if they don't know what their kid is accessing an adults only system
Frans Charming: Bye Osprey!
otakup0pe Neumann: mail validation
Multi Gadget v1.45.4 by Timeless Prototype
Cecily Dulce: I IMed you.. but you didn't respond.. so I came looking
Gwyneth Llewelyn: Indeed, Virtual!
otakup0pe Neumann: look at the ways that paypal does verification
Gwyneth Llewelyn: mail validation?!
otakup0pe Neumann: you =can= verify by snail mail
Gwyneth Llewelyn: Snail mail, yes.
Midtown Bienenstich: really?
Hiro Pendragon: Freedom of Speech does not include the ability to slander, Prok. --- and I have you on mute :)
Midtown Bienenstich: who signs?
aEo Epod v7: With the compliments of 'aEoLuS Computer Store'
Steve Buscemi: GRRRRrrrrrr!
Midtown Bienenstich: and how is signature compared?
otakup0pe Neumann: it's not signed at all
Gwyneth Llewelyn: you send your ID and a statement :)
otakup0pe Neumann: they mail you out a 8 digit code
otakup0pe Neumann: and you put it in on the website
otakup0pe Neumann: sure, it's spoofable
otakup0pe Neumann: but so are basicalyl all methods
otakup0pe Neumann: i don't think they send to Po boxes though
Midtown Bienenstich: ID and a statement?
Baba Yamamoto: well I'm glad philip said it because I've been saying it for over 2 yaers now ;0 SL must be built on open standards and eventually become open source.. the clients and server are a gateway to content and interaction. without a sturdy system it won't last
Gwyneth Llewelyn: *everything* is spoofable, except for showing up at LL and giving a DNA test :P
Alazarin Mondrian: Sociolotron has a 21+ admissions policy and they're pretty strict about it. OK, LL doesn't need to be that tough, but some safeguards make very good sense
Jonas Pierterson: still upset from last night
Midtown Bienenstich: Gwyn, Can you say "phuck this, I'm heading to There"
Virtual Commons: And not just as an end in itself. The more portability we get, the less we have to worry about what we would lose if LL were no more.
otakup0pe Neumann: hey hey. stay away from my DNA
You: I went to try WOW today
otakup0pe Neumann: wait. me or my AV ?
Gwyneth Llewelyn: Oh, pfft, Midtown — enjoy There while you can :)
otakup0pe Neumann: haha prokofy
Baba Yamamoto: How did you like that Prokofy?
Midtown Bienenstich: :D
Zoe Llewelyn: Kids can get past almost any non-face to face verification system there is IF they have parents that don't care to monitor them. Its the parents that are at fault not LL. And yes I am a parents of a teen.
Sansarya Caligari: how did that go Prok?
You: I killed some boars and got bored, it sucks
Baba Yamamoto: That's what I think
Sansarya Caligari: lol
Gwyneth Llewelyn: Zoe: how true, cousin :)
You: it's all killing stuff even if you chose like priest healer blah blah
Cecily Dulce nods,"I've been worried about you."
Elle Pollack: Sounds like me in that kind of game, Prokofy
Kyevan Thurston: GAH! If this was an slower I would thin that my packets wer being hand-checked n China!
Gwyneth Llewelyn: WoW is a shoot-'em'-up on steroids ;)
Frans Charming: Babam philip has been saying it for a while, now.
Neelena Benavente: is There.com going away?
Baba Yamamoto: that's because the game is task oriented... kill this get that
Rhiannon Chatnoir: bye Osprey!
You: I can't tell the NPCs from the real people it's awful
Hiro Pendragon: Neelena - that's the rumor.
Elle Pollack: Steroids and initiave rolls
Midtown Bienenstich: WoW sucks.
You: well SL is the same way
Sansarya Caligari: WoW is good for getting out aggression :)
Gwyneth Llewelyn: Eventually, Neelena — as well as TSO — they will last while they're profitable.
You: kill this get that
Virtual Commons: yy - I'm hoping registration is going to be a short-term issue
Dnate Mars: I don't think There will ever go away
Neelena Benavente: i beliee it; they havent been able to get their platform stable afaik
Midtown Bienenstich: MMORPG's are naturally boring.
Zoe Llewelyn: In over 25 years o gaming...WoW was the most boring I ever played.
Midtown Bienenstich: They set the limit to your potential
Virtual Commons: Dnate - should have gone away a long time ago, and everyone moved here. :-)
You: it's very shallow as a world
Gwyneth Llewelyn: Dnate: not while they have 60k paying users, no.
You: it's just all these people chasing boars
Midtown Bienenstich: lol Prok
Hiro Pendragon: 60k paying users on There? I doubt it.
You: well I tried to fly around -- you can't fly!
You: imagine a game where you can't fly!
Virtual Commons: Prokofy - agreed!
Gwyneth Llewelyn: Yes, prokofy — but almost 7 million people chasing boars, all dutifully paying their US$ every month ;)
Midtown Bienenstich: :O
Baba Yamamoto: I don't kill things in SL though ;0
Dnate Mars: isn't There free?
You: well the only reason I joined was to be able to debate the eggheads on Terra Nova who set great store by these games
Baba Yamamoto: For me Second Life is a game of convince the lindens to implement my grand plan for teh metaverse
You: I did collect some broken fangs from some kind of long-toothed entity
Zoe Llewelyn: There is free unless you want to buy anything in game
Virtual Commons: Dnate - very easy to spend Therebucks, even easier than L$
Patrick Witherspoon is offline
Dnate Mars: ah, yes
Zoe Llewelyn: Then you buy There Bucks like buying Lindens here
Patrick Witherspoon is online
Serenitee Bliss is online
Virtual Commons: Zoe :-)
Dnate Mars: but they have working buggies there
Hiro Pendragon: Except There prints money on demand
Midtown Bienenstich: No economy?
Midtown Bienenstich: BOO!
Dnate Mars: there is
Zoe Llewelyn: Yes and inflation is HUGE. A basic items costs tens of thousands of Therebucks
Alazarin Mondrian: so the there economy is an illusion?
Gwyneth Llewelyn: there is, of course.
Dnate Mars: the sinks are much much larger
Midtown Bienenstich: Coke?
Dnate Mars: there are no free things in there
Jessica Ornitz is offline
Virtual Commons: Midtown - yes, but without real building and scripting (ownership) I don't think it amounts to much
Midtown Bienenstich: 12,292 Therebucks?
You: well I have an idea for the birthday we're going to do later everybody, everyone bring a prim cube and we're going to stack them up and make a pyramid in Solar Plaza
Zoe Llewelyn: Basically Midtown
Gwyneth Llewelyn: Between There and IMVU, I'd bet on IMVU, though. Half the age of SL, and it has over 100k items for sale
Alazarin Mondrian: no furry av's in There... so i stay here
Neelena Benavente: i agree; you dont own your IP there
Neelena Benavente: in There
Gwyneth Llewelyn: Well, SL has over 30 million, but....
Virtual Commons: lol
Frans Charming: imvu has potentional.
Midtown Bienenstich: I think SL needs a bigger population.
Gaius Goodliffe: IMVU?
Midtown Bienenstich wants Mass Transit Lines.
You: Philip talked about millions of servers, I wonder how they will keep them working
Dnate Mars: I think anshe deals in IMVU
Gwyneth Llewelyn: Midtown: Philip told us today he's aiming for 250-300 *million* users ;)
You: He ducked the question about player government too
Frans Charming: she does, dnate
Midtown Bienenstich: WHAT :O
Gwyneth Llewelyn: prokofy: not Linden Lab. Partners.

Getting Started in Second Life

After reading Forseti's primer for newbies, I had to post my own. I find Forseti's as wordy and cumbersome as my own writing usually is, and I'm puzzled why he's using this as an introduction -- it is geeky (using terms like "structured environments"), and overexplains the obvious ("an avatar is a representation of yourself"). Perhaps his text is meant to *sound* better in a speech (written and spoken and Internet/email languages are all different in English). I guess it's my conviction, too, that each business in SL should have newbie orientation geared to whatever its business is, and that motivates both customer and service provider to help newbies.

GETTING STARTED IN SECOND LIFE

WELCOME TO SECOND LIFE FROM RAVENGLASS RENTALS!
IM RANDOM UNSUNG OR PROKOFY NEVA FOR INFO ON LAND AND HOME RENTALS
AND LAND SALES

1. What is Second Life and what is Linden Lab?

Second Life is a 3-D metaverse (beyond the physical universe) or open-ended platform for communication, socializing, creativity, prototyping, gaming, entertainment, business, non-profit work -- and more.

This software and online interactive environment  is not the game you may be used to from The Sims Online or World of Warcraft, although it has some of the same features and you can play various games within it and with it. It is big enough so that you can take it very seriously and make a real income from it, yet small enough so that you can always pull away and say "it's only a game".

Linden Lab is the company that created and maintains Second Life. Lindens are the employees of Second LIfe. "Lindens" is also the name of the game currency.

2. What do I do in Second Life?

You can explore, socialize, learn, create, game, be entertained, start a business, buy and sell land, and more. There's great potential for your imagination but there is a steep learning curve so be prepared to put in a certain amount of time to reap the rewards from this game/metaverse.

3. What are the first 6 things I need to know?

a. The user interface, or game panel -- this screen before you -- has functions for your avatar, or character at the bottom of the screen. Press "fly" to get into fly mode and use the arrows on the number pad to go up, down, and sideways. Or right-click on your avatar to see the pie-chart and select GO to get arrows inworld to use. Press FIND at the middle of the bottom of the page to get EVENTS, PLACES, GROUPS, etc.

b. To zoom in closer, press "alt" simultaneously with left-clicking on your mouse. "Mouselook" which has like an aerial view is up at the top of the screen but can be very wonky to control. "Camera controls" also help you move closer or around an object -- get them from "view" at the top of your screen and click off "camera controls" to see the arrow in-game to move.

c. To make an object, or "prim" -- the basic building blocks of the world named for "primitive" -- right-click on the ground and go into "create" and select a shape. This is known as "rezzing" (from the word  "resolution" and the science-fiction story "Tron" about "resolving" objects on a grid).

Everything in the world is on an X-Y-Z grid, and locations have map coordinates like this:  Columbia 157,53 with the name of the sim, or simulator indicated. "Sim" does not mean "avatar" as in TSO but is the equivalent of "city" in TSO. "Av" means avatar, not "Alphaville". "Avatar=sim".

d.  To travel some where, either ask your friend to send you a "TP" or teleport request you can click on and get to his location, or pick a place on the map, press on it and arrive there.  Another way is to type the name of a sim into the map list and "enter" to get to that sim's center location. Sometimes you can land in a building, and that can be hard to find your way out of, so wait for them to "rez" or become visible, fly downwards, then walk out of them.

e. To give another player an object from your inventory, right-click on her to get her profile, or search for his name, pull up his profile, then drag the object, card, or script from your inventory on to his profile and wait to see if you get the message "accept inventory". If he is offline, it will be waiting for him to accept when he logs on.

f. The forums and classifieds ads in SL are more vital to the game than TSO and other games that have manuals -- this has a hard-to-read wiki and no manual, so go to the active forums as they contain a great deal of useful knowledge, i.e. building tips and the script library and bargain offers on products as well as real estate. Access them at www.secondlife.com and use your avatar name and password to enter; unlike many game pages, it prompts you twice to enter even if you type the password correctly.

4. My game is not working!

SL seems to be an incredibly demanding program that needs just the right set up of computers, graphic cards, drivers, etc. to work right. But unlike TSO and other games, SL provides a lot of customer support on its webpages and in the game to help you adapt.

If you are moving slowly and the game seems slow and choppy, go to edit/preferences and make sure the options for shadows, local light, shiny, video, etc. are all turned off. You may be able to get them turned back on later when you get your bearings.

Read the forums for information about your computer and graphics card because adjustments may be required.

Reinstalling the SL download or client is often the best way to get the game working.

5. How do I acquire skills?

You do not have skilling lots or skill objects as in TSO and other leveling games. Here, you're going to have to do more to skill your human by reading directions, attending classes, talking to other players, and observing.

Look for building, scripting, design, and animation classes in the EVENTS listing. Go to Welcome Areas and events and see if you can pick up a few basic hints.

Among the best ways to learn to build is to go to a sandbox and just watch other players and learn from them as you practice. A sandbox is an area designated for practicing where you will have room to try out a lot of ideas and skills that may not fit on your first 512 land, or may not be appropriate on the land where you are now with friends who brought you here to SL. The builds there are wiped frequently. It's a courtesy to clean up after yourself and delete the practice builds though.

Type the word "sandbox" into the FINDPLACES search form to get the list of Linden sandboxes.

The sandbox for Ravenglass Rentals is in:  Tuliptree, Columbia, Hartwick --  where you can practice building and if you want to keep your build, link and save in your inventory. Ask mentors or live help how to link if you have difficulties, but putting one piece in edit, then dragging the mouse on click will create a yellow box to link everything -- not 100 percent perfect but good enough to start.

Read the documentation in "library" in "my inventory" and the Second Life wiki on www.secondlife.com but we find it's much easier to learn by doing and watching.

Ask other players -- usually a skill can be transferred far more quickly by demonstration than by copious reading.

6.  Where are the jobs? How can I make money?

Second Life does not have the ready-made jobs like TSO where you park your sim or avatar and let him skill away, clicking while you socialize. This is the biggest difference between TSO and SL and can be jarring at first.  You can go sit in camp chairs or pick money trees -- but the few dollars you make, which many owners insist you get by also playing casinos that shake you down for much of the money -- could also simply be purchased for a mere $2 or $5 US on the LinDEX on the SL website.

You will get a stipend of $50 a week from Linden Labs in your box and $500/week if you have a premium account. That actually goes quite far if you pick up freebies and rely on the kindness of strangers.

To make money, you can go to events and win contests, go to money trees (often found at malls), do shopping surveys and other odd jobs like photographing for real estate agents, working as an escort, club bouncer, event organizer, etc. (see "employment opportunities" on the website).

The only way to have a consistent supply of cash if you are not willing to buy it is to create and sell items like furniture, houses, vehicles, etc., or scripts, animations or services.  The economy of SL is highly stratified and limited in the options for work and it will take some time to find your niche. The competition is high. SL encourages players to make content and they respect their copyright and have built in all kinds or protections to prevent copying or theft of original work.

Many newbies do not realize that a simple house, or article of clothing, or texture priced at merely $5-$50 is all it takes to go into business. Mark anything for sale in SL for a low price, and chances are you will find a buyer! Set the price on the object in edit mode, make sure to put "copy" so as not to sell away your only original.

The single most effective way to make money is to sell your first land, if you are not willing to sell your sexual services or other types of services. But for that, you need a premium account, and a premium account is not needed per se to enjoy Second Life -- many people get by on just the basic and have a lot of fun. Still, we recommend even just a month trial of the premium -- it gives you so much more and is only $9.95.

7. Are Linden dollars real money?

Linden dollars are game scrip and the TOS says they have "no intrinsic value" but in fact they can be exchanged on the Linden's own exchange, or LindEx and cashed out to real U.S. dollars via Paypal or check. There are people who are able to make part-time or even full-time livings in Second Life -- usually if they start by not billing their own hours : )

The Linden can be purchased at roughly the rate of $3.00/L1000 at www.secondlife.com and other currency exchange sites like www.slexchange.com and www.anshechung.com  You will have to add to these charges any fees for moving US cash in or out of the currency markets and charges such as Paypal or bank fees.

Keep in mind that the Linden fluctuates sometimes widely from $2.50 to $3.50 or more, so don't be in a hurry to cash out your Lindens until you study the market better.

8. Where can I get clothes and outfits and other items like vehicles?

There is a vast supply of free clothing available in SL. Start by going to the free bazaar in Stillman or the free store at Boardman just hanging around the Welcome Areas where an older player is sure to give you a free gift bag. Attend events and many players will offer you free items from their inventory or will have them out to copy. It's well worth clicking and touching on much of what you see in your first weeks because changes are the items will be on "take copy" and you can help establish their inventory that way.

You can also see if any of the newbies in your area or among your acquaintances have already made nice outfits in "appearance" mode or through uploaded textures and offer to pay them a small amount to encourage them and save in their design work and save yourself hours of toggling to get the right look. Hair can be particularly difficult and is worth buying as a separate object like a wig that completely covers your head and has a more natural look.

We have free items out for copy in many of our residential communities so just ask for a landmark.

9.   How can I write text and notes to other players?

Use the "IM" button in the lower left-hand corner to type a private message seen only by the player you wish to speak to. Press on "Chat" to be in the open chat on the lot where you are located.

Note:  IM text and Chat text can be set so that they scroll by interchangeable but that does not mean anyone in the chat room can see your private IM.

Go to "Inventory" and "create" and open a "notecard". Write the text. Save it.
Make sure now to rename it something other than  "New Note" Also note that writing its title on the top of the card will not rename it or save it with that name -- you must right-click on the card and go to "rename" option.

Drag the notecard on to the profile of any other player's profile for them to receive it. If they are offline they accept it when they log on.

10. How do I buy land? Can I go anywhere?

As a new player with a premium account, you have a wondeful privilege to buy a basic 512 parcel of land, suitable for a newbie home or business, for the cost of only $512, but only on land designated as "first land" subsidized by Linden Lab.

You may have been told in orientation that "you do not have to own land to enjoy Second Life," but it is a great way to start off and have a place of your very own which you will be able to re-sell at a profit to get your first significant amount of game currency without an outside purchase of currency.  We recommend it highly! The scare stories about griefing, ugliness, and rapacious land barons are just that -- scare stories. The reality is that THOUSANDS of people have LOTS of fun with their first land!

While you can freely buy any land set to sale, you should definitely first acquire your first-land using the $512 purchase privilege that comes automatically in the premium account, because you will always be able to resell it at a profit.

First-land listings are in the "Land Sale" tab at the top of your screen. Make sure that you are finding a land tagged by Linden Labs with the green first land tag, and not the player-sold "$" tagged land that can sometimes still have the words "first land" on it because it was just purchased from a newbie, but be available at a higher price than $512.

Go to "view" and click off "property owners" to see the colors of land:
Red means it is owned by a player or by Governor Linden; purple means it is slated for auction; yellow-brown means it is available for sale. Only newbies with the first-land privilege still available to them will see first-land as available for sale -- older players cannot buy it. Additionally, your own land once you possess it will be bright green; group land in any groups you join will be aqua.

Also in FIND press "LAND FOR SALE" to get the full sales list with filters for your price range, siz, etc.

And press on the "MAP" in the lower right-hand corner and the 'LAND FOR SALE' tab to see patches of yellow where land is available in-world -- click on them to teleport them.

NOTE:  sometimes Linden-made first land runs out -- don't panic, wait for a day or two and it will be available in new sims. Watch the growing parts of the world far north and far south to see what's coming up.

11. What is the best land to buy?

The best land to buy is the one you like, with the look and feel comfortable for living in or setting up a business, but be aware that the fundamental rule of Second Life is:

EVERYTHING CHANGES CONSTANTLY.

Because SL is a world where residents create the content and have a lot of freedom to do so, the world changes constantly. What you see around you today that may look like a clear waterfront or pristine wilderness or awesome view will almost certainly look different when others buy the properties in the coming days. Expect constant change, and you will not become frustrated.

Expect that many other people have different notions than you of what is good building or what is beauty, and you will not get angry. The great thing about the changeability of SL is that it is like the weather; if you don?t like it, you don't have to change it, it will likely change all on its own within 24 hours.

The rule of thumb for virtual estate is like real estate: location, location, location. And just like in RL you want to be near the good schools, in SL you will want to shop with the notion of where Governor Linden land or the telehubs are located.

Land bordered by Governor Linden's protected land (in red, not purple, which is his auctioned land) has a higher value precisely because it does not change. So land bounded by Linden sea, Linden woods Linden railroads, Linden roads, or anything that says it is owned by Governor Linden Maintenance or Protected Land is a good buy. Roads are often a sign that an area will have a commercial value so plan accordingly if you are looking for a house.

Be aware that land that looks like it is on the edge of water, but has a scalloped edge and seems to bounce your avatar as you approach it, maybe simply be the unfinished edge of a sim -- the Lindens are still building it. This is *not* waterfront property and could tomorrow become a parcel in the middle of nowhere surrounded by land.

Land right next to telehubs is considered the most prized in SL because of the high-traffic brought to telehub areas that bring sales to vendors and dwell points, or lot points adding up to extra dollars in your stipend, to event organizers.

Flat, green, mature parcels on waterfront are also considered prizes but first land can almost never be found on them because they are difficult to parcel reasonably.

Land in mature is more valuable than land in PG areas and will sell for a higher price.

Snow is not considered a good buy in SL at this time because it is believed to have oversaturated the market.

Mountainous land can have a very beautiful view but it may prove very difficult to build on without more building skills and a house with stilts.

Look for first land that isn't in the middle of the "postage stamps" of numerous areas of first-land in a square. If you buy in the "postage stamps" you will get a flat lot that's great to build on. But you risk having neighbours who may build something ugly or build something to grief and become unhappy being stuck next to them. These areas turn over very quickly as land dealers

To set yourself to home to land on your land, go to "world" and "set home to here" at the top of your screen.

DId you forget where you land is? Well go to "World" and "My Land" and it is listed -- you will see its coordinates.

Next time you get there, stand on it and press "world" and "create landmark here" to get a handy landmark to give people for your home or business.

12.  How much is first land worth? Should I accept my first offer?

First land can be valued at anywhere from $2/meter to $10 meters depending on whether it is in PG or M, waterfront or mountain, telehub or very far away, etc. It's most likely to be around $3-4 for PG and $5-7 or more for mature.

Land dealers often fly around new land areas looking for newbies to buy land from. You do not have to sell to them but it can be handy to take their calling card to see if you might want to contact them later. They are often willing to buy immediately so you can make a fast sale and move out of what you may see by now is going to become first-land hell, surrounded by loads of other people with hardly any room to build or see anything, with your view likely obstructed.

Many people caution you to be afraid of land speculators. Most land dealer, however, are honest and helpful because they want to keep good customer relations for the long term. Keep in mind that you are in control and you can decide at any time to sell your land at any price you wish to fix on it, at any time. No one but Governor Linden can take your land away from you if your account is paid for.

Take the time to compare prices in your area, study the land sale list by alphabetizing it at the top, putting it on "all" and seeing what all prices of land are selling for in your sim per square meter.

Don't accept any offer that involves you taking cash, but first setting your land to sale for $0 or involves giving anyone your password any other information.

13.  How do I sell my land?

Right click on your land, go to "about land" and look for the "sale" option. Be sure never to click this off until you FIRST go and establish a price because if it is at $0 and you click it off, someone using a land scanner to detect $0 and low-priced sales can immediately snap it up and you will likely be unable to get it back.

After determining the price-per-meter, calculate your price and type it in the box. Then check off "sale" on "about land" menu.

To have your land show up in the Land Sale list, you *do not* have to have the "find places" option clicked off on the tab for "options"; indeed, that only causes you to have to pay $30/week and only makes the land display in Find Places which is used more for entertainment and busineses -- land sale doesn't require the fee.

Instead, make sure that you type the name of your sim in the description box, i.e. "Columbia". Then a common practice is to put "M" or "PG" next to the sim name, and then designate the type, i.e. "Waterfront"  "Waterview"  "Mountainview" "Flat Green" etc.

In the description box, you can type a line that helps to sell your land, i.e. "Bounded by Linden land, flat for building, great views," etc.

Search the "Land Sale" list to make sure your land is showing up right with the name of the sim in the description first. You can also try things like using the word "Waterfront" first or "Great Deal" first but it is less likely to be found that way.

Should I just put a high price on it and leave it? Maybe someone will click it?

A common newbie mistake is to put "$10000" on a land or more in the mistaken belief that someone will click on it. Nobody will. Other newbies who might be stupid enough to click and pay for a 512 will not have that much money. And anyone with that much money will be able to shop more effectively. Don't hope for somebody to be that stupid; you yourself would not enjoy making that kind of stupid mistake.

When you put too high a price on land, it sits there, and can even invite suspicions that you are using the high price to grief, especially with a tall build on it. And the people you affect most with that message are your neighbours -- who are you most likely customers!

Many first-landers find they can sell their land to other first-landers who want to stay in the area and extend to a 1024 or 1536. So think of them first, talk to them, and you may make a friend instead of an enemy in your early days.

14. What is tier?

Tier, which is a word for "level," is a maintenance fee or rent which you must pay to Linden Labs *in addition to* the purchase price of land. Go to www.secondlife.com and click on "my account" and "land fees" to see the schedule, or tier of fees.

Premium accounts have a free 512 of tier, and the privilege to buy $512 of first-land on a one time basis only; it is used up after the first sale.

Tier can be complicated to understand unless you realize that tier and land are separate. You cannot buy land without tier. But you can have a tier allocation available, and have no land to which it is applied -- yet. This will show up in your account on the SL web page as land "available for purchase". You must have paid for the tier level to Linden Labs on the web page before you can buy the equivalent amount of land in the world.

If you right-click and buy land above your tier level, your money will be taken, but you will not gain access to the land, and instead will be prompted to go to the SL web page to tier up to the level you wish to cover the purchase. This means you will have to have more money available on your credit or debit card. If you can't cover the land you just bought, you will lose the land and the money you paid for it. So check your tier level carefully.

You are always charged for the highest amount of land you've possessed, even if it is only $1L over the last tier level. So be careful not to accidentally put yourself up in a higher tier level than you want to be.

Note: when the Linden Lab says $5 for 1024, that doesn?t mean it will be another $5 for another 1024. The ladder of tier fees has some big jumps in it so study it carefully before buying land you may not be able to pay for.

The tier level of 1024 includes within it the free 512 you receive in the premium account.

The tier level of 4096 is actually then 4704 because the free 512 is added, not included, in the tier level.

Tier is moveable around the game. You can apply 512 of your tier to a 512 piece of land, then it is tied up. But if you want to move, you sell that parcel, your 512 tier is freed up, and now you can go apply it to another piece of 512 land.

15.  What is tier donation to a group to cover group land?

If your tier is not tied to land after the sale of first land, or you have some tier left over after paying for tier at a certain level, you may wish to donate it to a group.

Do not donate tier if you have not used your 512 first-land purchase privilege because that will use up that privilege and it cannot be repeated -- donation to a land group is participation in that group's tier coverage to own land and is considered the same as a regular land purchase.

Instead, shop for first land, sell it, then consider donating tier to a group.

We offer rentals at Ravenglass Rentals for equivalent of tier donation, i.e. 512 tier for 512 land, 1024 land for 1024 land, etc.

If you want to donate tier in lieu of cash rent, contact the officers to get a step-by-step instruction.

16. What is griefing?

Griefing is when another play intentionally causes you grief by harassing you verbally or physically in violation of the Terms of Service. This includes shooting you in a non-shooting or unsafe zone, pushing your avatar, rezzing prims in your house, flying around with obscene objects, swearing repeatedly at you, etc.

Most griefing episodes happen only once, randomly, and don?t repeat so are NOT worth getting upset about. Most griefers on trial accounts randomly flying around leave the game or are banned before their 7 day trial is up.

The fastest, easiest way to end any episode of griefing is to log yourself out of Second Life and take a breather.  No one can get to you in Real Life!

But if you can keep a calm head, the most effective way to deal with griefing is to pull down "abuse report" from the menu, type in the avatar's name in question, and type a few very clear lines of the offense, making sure to click off 'chat history' so that the chat log for that lot can be included.

As a backup, go into chat history by pressing 'history' at the bottom of the screen, then cut and paste the dialogue into a notecard.

17. How can I gain security from griefing?

Right-click on your land, tab to 'bans' and type in the names of anyone bothering you.

You can either ban everyone except those you designate, or ban certain avatars. That means they cannot enter the parcel.

This can be a fairly effective deterrence, but keep in mind that in SL, there really is no such thing as privacy. Avatars can sometimes use "sit here" functions or fly up above the ban level in the air and still look in. If you find yourself being repeatedly harassed, report the avatars in abuse-report. Customer service seems to respond best when Lindens have accurate, timely reports and have a multiple number of reports for several players who have witnessed the same griefing episode.

Don't use a bounce script or ask us to use them. Bounce scripts cause more trouble with neighbours and even friends than they are worth. Many of them bounce avatars home just for flying by, or they push the avatar sharply away without warning, like a weapon. They can make it impossible to fly around an area and even block you from getting to your own property so other non-griefing neighbours hate them, and will wind up reporting *you* for abuse if you use them.

18.  How can I get more help?

"Help" at the top of the menu contains "Live Help" which are volunteer members of the community. They are not paid staff so don't expect them always to be available and always to make "house calls". Sometimes you never get an answer when you type in a request but most times you will.

Lindens can also be accessed by searching for anyone with the name Lindens in the list. But Lindens are usually pretty busy taking care of the larger issues of the game management and shouldn't be bothered for routine game questions you can get answered either from older players in Welcome Areas or from Live Help volunteers.

You can also write [email protected] but "Live Help" if you are patient -- and adjust your expectations to the fact that you are dealing with volunteer older players, not paid professional staff.

IM RANDOM UNSUNG OR PROKOFY NEVA WITH QUESTIONS

Country or Company or Country Club?

Second Life Views is a program that has proved controversial not only because I objected to it. Of course, on the forums, it's mainly only Cocoanut standing up to the small but persistent inner core of the forums who keep defending the status quo ante ("Founding Fathers Syndrome") even to the point of hysteria. But there are enough other voices resounding on forums and blogs and in world that I hope the Lindens reconsider their notion of forming a permanent resident advisory board.

Some on the forums have purported to find some analogy between our making Metaverse Justice Watch last summer, in its original incarnation, and this "permanent resident advisory board". Of course, there's a big difference: we were self-selected, and all we did was petition the Lindens. To be sure, we were stuck petitioning them like boyars appealing to the tsar, or guilds appealing to the king, in a medieval set-up, not like customers, more like supplicants.

Four things resulted from this meeting -- other than the vilification we were subjected to on the forums.

1) First, the one request we had, for the Lindens to develop and relase their employee ethics requirements, was fulfilled. They did this after about 6 weeks. From discussing this topic, many believed that Lindens were not allowed to maintain big businesses and earn money, lead big non-profit projects, or garner reputational enhancement or extend it to partners or friends. The ethics manual of sorts, a rather wan and thin document (though it's good *something* exists) didn't really clarify this issue at all. Later, we were to watch aghast as Lindens in fact maintained their big RL or SL projects -- finally the attention brought to this issue compelled BuhBuhCuh to "out" that he was Ben Linden (more on this another day -- it's funny that after all the thuggish threats made against me by Hiro and others, the outing proved to be a big non-event for this Linden and his pals, and I think most people didn't notice, didn't care, and haven't glommed on to him anyway now that they know his "true identity").

2) The second thing that happened is that we were told that neither land nor wealth were recognized as stake in SL, unlike RL. This reified the content-creators hold over SL, to our dismay, and helped preserve the model of SL as "Content Tsar's Kremlin" -- create or die, be a creator or be a consumer, etc.

3) The third thing that happened is that while the telehubs weren't on the agenda, contrary to popular hysteria, when they *were* put on the agenda later in the summer by some in the same group as the original MJW, the Lindens took the meeting, took it seriously, and agreed to the buyback. I think it's one of the few times when we can point to the Lindens actually heeding something the land baron lobby said, and acting on it (I suppose their willingness to put in telehubs in the northern atoll continent was another concession, except later it seemed Lindens were letting us know that telehubs were planned for the Iris Moth temple anyway, and I suspect that what the Lindens had really been about last year with first the atoll continent, then the map, and then p2p was trying to do something that was originally supposed to have all 3 things at once:  a spectacular new continent with an intriguing legend; no telehubs in it to mar the experience; and the map and p2p to be able to hop all around it with ease and preserve its pristine beauty. But coding being what it was, they had to sequence these developmental phases.

People imagine the land lobby to have all kinds of clout; in fact the Lindens are always breaking their backs. It's been rather sagely pointed out by a smart friend that the land glut continues on the auctions:  the Linden has devalued another 5 percent in the last month, but land price has only increased by 1 percent, and that doesn't even fit their notion of expanding to meet the population. Something's up.

The failure of the land lobby to get their way is just part of life -- interest groups don't always get their way. If it were a company and customers, it wouldn't matter. If it were a guild and the Middle Ages, it would be too bad too if the landowners failed to beat the craftsmen. In a country, however, it does matter.

4) The fourth thing that happened is that seeing this grassroots organizing by a group of its highest-paying customers, bar-none, the Lindens reacted by attempting to subtly co-opt it. First, they sat idly by as the "community" savaged all the people in MJW (to this day, the forums freaks are still ranting about an alleged claim that we all called everyone else "tourists," when this was only one part of what Anshe said, and was meant in the most ordinary way -- that many, many, MANY people drop into Second Life and NEVER COME BACK (something most people don't even want to talk about, until it gets on a Harvard blog, and then finally Hamlet nee Linden blogs about it).  And LL even cooperated in the splitting of MJW -- manually removing me from the group at Anshe's behest -- and enabling MJW to be made into a farcical political theater occasionally taken over for laffs by Jauani or one of the other regs like Nolannash or Enabrat.

Then they made the Community Round Table. This was going to serve as their cleaned-up, controlled version of a residents' lobbying group by taming and neutralizing it, citing the Big, Bad, Unruly Town Hall meetings. They looked blindly at the audience of these meetings that were so griefed, and refused to admit that it was just W-HAT and their hangers-on and plausible-deniers inworld.

They handily booted me fro the CRT mailing list early on using various subterfuges, but then the CRT got overrun, too, and presented them with a problem: how could they meet privately with the people they liked, and get away with it, with all the scrutiny?

Indeed, one of the main reasons that FlipperPA and the Lindens want to get the hide-from-map function going in the game is so that they can meet with each other, and big clients, and whomever they want, without any transparency, or any pubilc accountability. They want secrecy, invisibility, and most of all, a free-hand to do their thing without complainers or exposers getting in the way.

Making this ResGov, patterned after the ResMods, or one could point out, the Quislings or the satraps or the Russian overlords of the 'stans, the Lindens can feel less nervous about this big world they can't even physically see anymore with all these people on it.

They know that while everybody bitches about resident government, they will roll over supinely and take it up the ass sublimely if it is something like this, where the "company" invokes a "focus group" and the need to listen to its "customers" in the usual consumer model.

One of SL's Greatest Economic Minds (yes, Jamie, there's more than one!) said at the Sutherland Dam last night that I need to drop my "mercantile model" because Lindens are going with a "consumer model" for their business and economy.

Except...I didn't think up the mercantile model, our um progressive Lindens did. SL is nothing so much like a company town of the 1930s, and their corporate philosophy stems from the most ancient and creaking idea of one big CEO and loyal family members, some of them literally relatives (the Lindesidents), and the numerous tool and die makers or welders or clerks or typists spread out through the mammoth chain of factories and franchises all over the land. There's nothing at all modern and "consumer oriented' about this -- in fact those of us with inworld businesses and customers are forced either to go out of business due to rising costs and rapid inflation, or mimic the LL old-fashioned top-down hierarchical model as we queue up and wait for attention from the Concierge, pay heavy taxes to advertise our wares in Classified, pay land fees that would make a Russian serf quit-renter blush, constantly double our prices, and suffer occupational hazards of all sorts that aren't even really studied properly yet by science or government.

In fact a consumer-oriented model (everyone things this is going to be open-source) is years away, possibly even light-years away. In fact, just like they dumped a lot of people off the world with the removal of events grants and development incentive (and now are monkeying even with the payouts to their instructors with a new voucher proposal (!)), so they will dump off many amateur sim owners who rent directly from Governor Linden when they go open-source. Where will those consumers go? They'll be forced to queue up to the few prosumer/satrap overlords whom the Lindens will have developed by that time as the Game Masters, the few who will get licensed copies of the software and either have their own servers or get special discounts on the servers, wholesale. In fact, the model is more like Moscow, the Central Committee, the regional party secretary, and Bishkek than anything recognizable modern, free, flexible, and equal. 

Only when Second Life becomes more like Napster used to be, where people buy and sell worlds and their contents peer-to-peer with out queuing up to Linden Lab, anshechung.com, or SLboutique.com, could there be a real "browser" and "Internet-like" experience like Walker is always talking about on 3pointd.com

Some competitors to LL are already thinking in talking in those terms, where there will be home-brewed light and portable Worlds for Windows or something, but it's not there yet. What's far more likely is this oligarchic model we have now -- which isn't an accident. Many people especially on the forums think of our current actual Second Life, with its brutal prices, land fees, and auctions won  by mainly one company, with hugely stratified land prices and a land glut, as somehow just an aberration, something that is this one person's fault, or something that is corrected by this or that little measure, especially of the bromide type, such as "learning to understand this is a GAME and having some FUN in it!"

Instead, people must realize that it's this way because it *is* this way. As much as the Lindens are enlightened despots, enlightened game gods, as much as they listen more to their customers and by contrast with the Sims Online are a benign tropical paradise dictatorship, the fact is, they are still despots. Code is law. Cory reigns supreme. There is no voting "no". Robin gets to pick 8 people...and 8 more...and the IRC channelers get to cluck or whistle in approval or disapproval. This is how it is. You couldn't change this unless you bought out Linden Lab -- the only way to overthrow it literally -- and that's not going to happen client-side.

Now...we're supposed to discount this country stuff entirely, we're supposed to discard Philip's famous quote as just an example of him smokin' weed, and we're supposed to wise up to the fact that currency exchange, social and economic classes, massive immigration, control of borders, signing of treaties, etc. doesn't amount to a country.

OK, fine, let's jettison all this country stuff for the moment and just take the company stuff on its own terms.

Of course...the forums armchair analysts, especially those with little or no business experience in RL or SL, are fond of wagging their finger at your and admonishing you to "care about LL's bottom line" and "realize they have a business to run". LL is something more like a government-funded experiment (that's why they call it Lab) or a non-profit venture -- it's doesn't yet make a profit. In fact, it's long-term life might be better secured as a think-tank for the Metaverse rather than a software company, which would be a respectable role for it.

But let's just suppose, given that they are "very close" to being profitable (a few more islands! a few more thousand customers!) that they are a real company. And that what they're holding is a "focus group".

Of course, in "focus group" terms it's a bust -- you don't pick people for a focus group *this* way, reaching for a few categories from A to B.

If there really was a "focus group" being made, we'd see the following avatars who really represent SL:

o big, busty black female entrepreneurs "representin' from Hotlanta" who have sizeable amounts of island or whole-sim mainland land holding and events and/or content business and a heck of a lot more fun in SL than most forums-posters.
o some Victorian-clad Caledonian 32-year-old female lesbian musicians who play live music on weekends
o 40-something part-time Wal-Mart employees who work as call girls at Barbies (male or female in RL; female in SL) and live in Prok's rentals until they can buy their own land
o teens posing as adults with names like 1234KewlRick who are talented weapons makers pulling in as much as $50-100 USD a week
o 30-something American males who are insurance adjusters in RL who find love and big palaces and bling in SL and rent from Azures
o 50 year old programmers literally having a second life with SL and who sample BDSM in lite amounts
o Italian or Arabian princes in RL who are squandering the family inheritance on huge shopping islands, bling, and girls before they get bored and go off and play WoW

Well, you get the idea. Not the FIC, or the anti-FIC but completely other kinds of people -- there are lots, lots more of them on the grid than you or me.

So this isn't about the actual customers, even the actual island-buying, premium-account buying customers, such as to make a focus group. Focus groups, and I've been in them, and also made them, are drawn from your user or subscription base or even funders and they are made up of demographics, zip-codes, etc. We could have a whole long discussion about what a focus group is or isn't, but let's face it, that's not what the Lindens are making when they take Kex Godel or Alliez Mysterio -- these are people that either they expect to tell them about programming issues possibly with a very critical eye and mouth (we keep hearing this claim that there are angry young programmers pissed at LL for all kinds of righteous reasons) or people that they figure will tell them stuff they can't be bothered to find out about -- like how the hell you can make a dime off buying 29 of Philip's pet rocks, also known as islands.

I think this isn't really about getting advice from the People, or the Symbolic Representative Groups, however -- the Sounding Board concept. It's more about the message they want these Platonic Ideals to take *back* to the People.

I think the Lindens honestly function in a kind of cult - the love machine concept, this "we're all in a barn together" office layout (I'd make short work of that, as I think anybody who has ever had to run an office would) -- the fatty breaks, the whatever -- whatever that je-ne-sais-quoi is the Essence of Lindenor that they'd like to get people to grok on in person, since conveying it over broadband proves so difficult. If nothing else, you'll get to smell what kind of air freshener they have in the bathroom and take it from there, and also give us the skinny on whether they meet state regulations for emplyoee lunch rooms.

Now...if we're going to reject this idea that it's a country -- sending messages back to the People who emerge convinced and come back and spread the gospel (no doubt this line item is under the "evangelizing" category of PR) then...we'd have to assume that picking 40 customers (remember there will be more than one group) out of the 24000 online any one day isn't the best way to sample even a company's opinion or even the best way to convince all those skeptics like Prok (or that guy on a Harvard-related blog I was just reading who said his first sign-on to SL "wasn't pretty" and he quit in frustration).

So...let's stick with the company thing a minute. The company and its needs and its bottom line (this is the assignment Surreal and others have given to Cocoanut to work proposals against) is supposed to be Uber Alles, correct?

Wrong. If Second Life, the platform and the grid and all the things on it, were just about One Company, All Hail the Holy Company, it would be utter folly.

The reality of Second Life is that it is about *many* companies. It is a prototype of a web application, a software package that will be part of the 3-D web and what's called the Metaverse. So...how it deals with *companies* now given it's long-term prospects is really important.

And this is precisely what they aren't looking at in any systematic way.

The *companies* of Second Life are people who run businesses in SL. They run content, land, event,  venue, or service businesses. These are small, medium, and large. They generate revenue, even if -- much like Linden Lab itself!!!! -- they are "almost but not quite yet profitable". Why only look to the 2000 people who generate $20,000 a year in income by not really billing for their hours and letting their RL gigs feed their online hobby? Why not also look at a lot of other people -- thousands who still manage to cover tier and then some? Each and every one of these little or medium or big operations are tremendously important not only for Linden Lab as a company, but for the Metaverse as a prospect.

Companies. Companies that have other companies, connections, families, co-workers, vendors, suppliers, customers. Very, very few (they tend to be the FIC and *are* the FIC because of this) residents ever use SL in their RL jobs. Of course we know the celebrated Flipper has done this with his gas station, and there are others who are "RL in SL" in ways that are innovative and interesting, though hard to prove valid as a cost center for most businesses.

And of course we have Twentieth Century Fox...once. We have Microsoft...once. We have Wells Fargo...once. We have Warner Brothers...once. Maybe twice. But...their long-term visibility or presence is a wildcard right now.

Resident-created businesses aren't terribly interesting to the Lindens. They actually seem to have a bit of contempt for them, because they've stopped all of their incentives, not even keeping something that would have been a really obvious incentive, like a small business or even any business award that went to avatars that could actually show inworld profit in their accounts over revenue and expenses, or even just substantial revenue enhancement through attempting various strategies.  They could even consider bringing back a voluntary leader board of those willing to subject their accounts to such scrutiny.

But...they are far more eager for quick fixes with big-named companies that can ensure huge splashes of media coverage (be sure to read all the way down the comments on this one for a good horse laugh).

Companies that are just companies, in a vacuum, selling widgets, might bring in their main widget-buyers or advisors in the industry known for good widget-making for a confab and a look-see.

But...remember last year when a bunch of people made what they called "RL FIC Invasion of SL?" Flipper was on it, I think, and I remember Jake Reitveld was on it and gave a thoughtful talk about it at the Sutherland Dam. I distinctly remember what he said: "They want resident government, they want the residents to take over the world, they want to make that possible." THAT is what it's about.

So...let's parse this. How can you take over a world, when there is no world? How can you rule a country, when there is no country? The same people who happily tell you to get over your little fantasy that there's a country turn around five minutes later and talk with somber and fake altruistic faces about governance of the complex world of the grid. Somebody has to Help the Lindens because gosh, it's so big now!

So...there's a lot to think about there, but stick with the Big Company among Many Other Companies model that I'm suggesting.

You are a big supplier of servers, a downloadable client to access those servers, the illusion of land, and a kind of very light and largely ineffectual police service. To make that service/company work, you have to have lots and lots of other companies -- virtual estate sellers and renters, builders, scripters, clothiers, events-planners etc. who take care of all these customers who come in the door. Because that's the model -- it's not about making content, pushing it, have the customers burn through it, making more content. It's about putting out the skeleton for others to build content and push and burn through.

Of the people they've picked for round one, two fit that model of companies-within-the-company -- Alliez and Nexus -- and one, Catherine Omega, is related by marriage, as it were, to the chief clothing making and RL-gig-lander and builder Aimee Weber.

Second Life is a nesting doll of companies. Inside the first matryoshka, is the biggest SL company, Anshe Chung. Inside that, is somebody else who buys Anshe's land or rents Anshe's land, and so on, down the line to the littlest t-shirt maker in appearance mode who sells in a first-land shack for $5.

All of the matroshki can only make sense within the nesting-doll set-up. Nobody buys just one nesting doll, or the smallest, or the medium size -- the whole point of nesting dolls is to buy the package.

And each layer of the nesting doll depends on the previous bigger doll to open it up and uncover it -- unless you unpack the dolls, you can't see what is underneath. In much the same way, any business within SL not only depends on LL for its very essence on the servers (it can't exist yet apart from them), it also depends on LL or some other bigger doll within the nest to open up and uncover it -- the dependency is hierarchical.

Of course, any of the dolls might try to form their own relationship outside the nest, but we don't have a lot of examples of that. In fact, one way to look at it is to see that the big doll is actually a set of littler dolls that it has GOM'd.

Akh, as Tyutechev put it so inimitably, "Russia cannot be understood with the mind alone."

Making the Trains Run On Time

Ordinal Malaprop, SL's equivalent of Rube Goldberg, Victorian-style, has made a cool thing -- a web map application that not only shows off SL to the Internet but evidently, actually helps make something inworld work better.

It's the neatest thing on two legs this week in SL, and I want to be the first (after Ordinal!) to blog about it.

Her Caledon Tram had the same problems that Nigel Linden's train had up in what we used to call the "new continent" and have now taken to calling the "atoll continent" (It actually has some moth name but I can never remember it).  Nigel's was good for many an uproarious time as it would run off the rails and fly over the prairies to the ocean and sink in 8 meters deep, or would pile up cars and crash, or simply disappear. I suspect this has something to do with timing, sim seams, and the angle of the Earth to the Sun.

In any event, the no-nonsense Ordinal was not content to sleep in Europe on her different time zone while North Americans fussed over the train bunching up. So she figured out how to make a web application that would help make it run on time. There's something that rezzes in world, too.

I'm not certain that this train-running-on-time thinger that she has made *requires* the web connection, but since it has something called " a message via llHTTPRequest" which goes "to my Tram Ping Server, with its current location" and the "server then records this information in a file," I'm thinking it does.

So much of the stuff in SL that takes you out to the Internet doesn't really bring you back. Or is a nasty experience. Like the official SL forums, for example. Or Second Citizen, where the Poison Posse reigns supreme, having been drawn off like pus from their infection of the SL forums.

Or other things that brag about all their "apis" or their use of "social software" but which just appear to be so much circle-jerking -- in fact the jerking is so irregular and the circle so broken that it's more like broken-rectangle-jerking.

One of the things Hamlet, Pathfinder and other assorted Lindens and Lindesidents always go on about is "delicio.us". Leave aside the cutesie URL -- um, yeah, we realize it's supposed to be "tasty".  (These cutesie URLs will never be as funny as all those anti-Lukashenka sites that make ample use of the fact that "net" means "No" in Russian lol).

I'm just not getting it about delicio.us. I find it utterly vapid. The material is always arranged by date, which is useless, unless you're an addict already to somebody's page, and for something supposedly arranged by topic, it doesn't seem to be set up that way. The topics are stupid, wavering between Funk & Wagnall's and generic Cool, which is always first-cousin to Lame.

So you'll get somebody's cool blue graphics page, with the kind of range of BIG and tiny typeface that looks like the labels on the face lotion jars at Kiehl's, and then all that stuff. Like it will say:

Architecture
Avitars
Cars
Lime
Second Life
Temple Cats
Virtual Worlds

or some other noveau groovola type of thing, but you click on it and really get nowhere.

A good example is the "Resident Blogs" list that Pathfinder has set up. I don't know why this thing always seems *still* stuck on Aimee Weber, but it's partly because 10 different blogs might have written about her exploits or something. Go look at it, and you'll see how hard it is just to see a list of blogs, or a list of residents, in alphabetical order, which would make sense.

The new-age kind of "let's just kinda grok around with it" stuff is supposed to be "intuitive" or "viral" or some other clap-trap, but it's also just stupid. I really wish somebody would go to the trouble to make a normal alphabetical list of all the blogs and/or all the residents to click on with all this typeface and dumb-ass sounding categories signifying nothing.

Delicio.us seems more about a popularity contest, too, where Satchmo can get his friends to click and save stuff and it goes up higher on the list, or somebody with just time on their hand to be a super fanboy can keep saving their friends, and it all floats. This is that "wisdom of the crowds" stuff which actually translates to mob idiocy in a setting like Second Life and the tropism of Lindens to pick their pets. (What's hilarious about Pathfinder, btw, if you haven't checked in to the WAs and his Explorer cards lately is that rather than feeling a modicum of shame for having picked Ulrika not once but TWICE for the picks in the same week (!) and then not updating the card and leaving it out for AGES, he then went and did that again, picking something twice (now utterly unmemorable) and even writing 'I know I'm picking this twice, but..." Will they ever learn???)

These inane social software things reach their apex in something like slprofiles.com I hope everyone reading this will join slprofiles.com and come and Be My Friend 4 Life. If I can only get enough of you to click on me and make me your Friend, I can have More Friends Than Aimee. In fact, I need to take a leaf from the old Will Wright manual for ballooning in TSO, where you *pay* for friends.

These exercises don't enhance the world, while taking you out of it. They don't deepen the viability of it, it seems to me, but just create more inane time sucks, mindless popularity exercises, and more bad grainy pictures of nakie girls and their cats titled "Me and My Pussy".

I have this awful feeling that the Lindens are going to be trying to get into the MySpace game with our avatar profiles, which of course, many people have honed to a fine science, with their picks, pictures, sayings, classifieds, First Life Info, skills, etc. etc. It has an option to check it off on the web, and I think you can do that and appear in the SEARCH now (I tried it and it didn't work but may it will soon). Can you picture the secondlife.com bogged down with this stuff? Probably they'd like to keep it off site and are just as glad to have something like slprofiles.com do it.

Meanwhile, there are more serious applications afoot. One of the most promising ones is www.slhandbook.com run by a new resident named Clubside Granville. I admire Clubside not only for taking on the Lindens right off the bat, challenging the received wisdom that you can never, ever, ever get Governor Linden to change his land, to simply jumping in, hiring a bunch of surveyors, and making a third-party information site without FlipperPA, and without Adam Zaius. It's so refreshing to see somebody just do it, and have the skills to do it, and not being also trying to tweak the platform and economy their way while they're at it.

It's hard to know whether the labour-intensive data entry required for something like this can be maintained, but I gather Clubside is trying to automatize it. What it could mean is at last some order to the chaos of sims.

We all know how bad the FIND works in SL -- even FINDING the FIND is a chore for newbies that I often help them with first thing -- it's that little button hidden at the bottom of the screen, sometimes visually seeming to be mixed up with your task bar from Windows.

SLHandbook looks very busy with too-tiny print at the moment, but that will subside -- it's clearly a very rapidly growing and very intense operation, and that's a great thing to see. Pictures randomly appear, but there's no dumb rating of them like on sluniverse.com  We get some window into a variety of sims with a sense of  real curiosity, "let's go explore this," rather than queuing up at Metaverse Messenger and waiting our turn with the Sim of the Week to see if we can get on the Kewl Kids' Sim List. Ideally, everybody will get to be a kewl kid on slhandbook.com if you just bother to file the data. Lots more could come out of it -- shopping data that is leveraged and becomes a significant counterweight to the Electric Sheep's SLB -- something I'm all for. The more competition the better, especially if those involved are not driven by their need for profit or fame, but by a sense of public service.

Ultimately, if a site like slhandbook.com and other sites get working right, and the HTML-on-a-prim and Mozilla thing happens right in SL, then we could actually open up a little window like a little Zabar's or mini yellow pages in our user panel and use it to get around SL. The dream of typing in "dress, little black" and arriving right at the right shop could be realized. Add this capacity to the inside of the group tools (which are promising to be able to have inventory moveable within it) and you could really make the social software thing rock for a purpose, not just to show off itself and get all giggly and giddy about the technology itself. How? By having better management of everything from rentals to political causes, RL and SL, or things like records of the auctions or the winds of Second Life for sailors. Imagine making a Farmer's Almanac for Second Life that actually lets you predict when that *better* sunlight is going to shine (have you ever noticed that turning on the sun yourself is never quite as good as that natural sunshine?) and the best days to buy on LindEx (Friday evenings).

I guess this is a good time to mention Max Case's Neighbours. Max Case has always been a major irritant to me, ever since he deliberately griefed two of my events with pranksterish, annoying questioning meant to obstruct. Still, if he had created something that helped us maintain a watch on the Lindens and their tendency to make misleading claims about their servers, I was cautiously supportive. He got all uppity when I queried him what he was doing with all the data he was scraping -- they always do! -- but I was willing to have my privacy invaded (isn't it already??? duh, it's the Internet, duh!) for the sake of being able to go to Lee Linden and say, hey, you're overstacking my sims again dude, cut it off.

So after I finally got the Max-o-tron or whatever it is called, and wrestled Max about putting the thinger out more strategically in his store, I flew around with my HUD. It dutifilly recorded the fact (Seemingly) that on Alston, Furness, Maryport, and Ravenglass, sims that I watch over like a mother hen with chicks because my rentals are scattered all over them, were all overstacked. Worse, they were overstacked with some of the private island high-traffic sims, like Anshe Chung's Plush. Now THAT was annoying, I thought to myself, not only is the mainland kicked in the teeth every which way, it is once again sucking hind tit here on servers in competition literally with Anshe's prime servers.

Except...it wasn't true. I documented all the alleged over-stacking and sent it to Lee Linden. Lee is, of course, one of those storied Lindens that people love to sit around the campfire and toast marshmallows to. Most people have Lee stories and many find it fun sport to try to top each other. I think my all-time-great Lee story was when I once complained to him about Erie lagging and tenants moving out, and he hurled me that old Linden chesnut about the "physics objects". I didn't buy it, and pressed him further -- he finally reluctantly conceded that he'd check (given that he was answering LL email from what seemed like home at an odd hour, I was impressed). The next day, he left me a message that went something like this: "I checked Erie. I didn't find anything. Maybe it's different when there are no avatars on it."

Well...yuh. I had one of my Second Life Special Moments (TM) at that time, realizing that it was silly, night after night, trying to put tenants on these sims and getting them to be happy. The sims work *so much better without avatars on them* that really, we should just put sculptures on them and watch from afar as they spin silently like blossoms...

I remember I first fell for that physics bit from Phoenix Linden, not knowing what he was talking abuot, and accepting this as the reason why Louise was sick. To be sure, when a crashed helicopter was stuck in Ravenglass Hall the other day, sim FPS halfed, and the FPS was in the toilet. I moved like a drugged fly, trying to find the problem, dreading the thought of calling Lee and being told it was a physics object once again (they always say that). Well, I think a helicopter does qualify as a physics object LOL.

But in Erie, now for the second time, and no with NO avatars in sight, with its sims ostensibly overstacked like an overbooked airline, sharing space with 4 other sims that were nowhere near it in that wierd Cat-in-the-Hat algorhythm the Lindens got going to get the server farm perking, it turned out that Max's data was all wet.

"Go and see those sims and see which servers they are on," Lee instructed patiently. I have to say that for me, talking to Lee has never been a frustrating experience (except in person on the phone where you don't have some typing lead time to calm your nerves) because he's so brainy and logical. You will never get an illogical thought from Lee Linden. Lee Linden is nothing if not logical.

I went to the servers, clicked on "About SL" and looked at those "agni" numbers. By God, they were different. That is, if I had a list that looked like this:  Erie, Plush, Loon, Hiatus, Plethora (ok I made up those last 2 sim names, geez, who can remember them these days), when I actually went to Hiatus and Plethora and looked under the hood, the numbers were *different*.

I pinged Max and asked him about this -- I double-checked on Neighbours, but each time, while I had different sims, when I actually rushed to p2p, the sim numbers were different.

How to understand? Max didn't respond. Well...hmm...I suppose the sims are overstacked for only brief times...or in fact there is a lag in data.

THAT the sims are overstacked seemed one of those received wisdoms. The Lindens seem to deny it. I suppose we can't learn the truth. In any event, a third-party website has once again been called into question.

Which brings me to my favourite topic, the topic that makes Cristiano hopping mad, and that is the scraping of data.

Few people probably noticed the altorific "Jiggly Puff" (he of no picture, skills, comments, or anything on his profile, despite some time on him) asking really outrageous questions under the guise of "SL Answers," the lobbyist's dream spot (because you ask a question of those polite Lindens, and no other resident can refute you, so that your tripe gets to stand and the Lindens are likely to do a smackdown because they won't want to get involved).

"Jiggly Puff" simply asks Philip to give him the store. He wants to know why there aren't LSL functions to turn over all land data and all group data to him, Jiggly Puff to...uh...study.

Why? why should proprietary data from LL -- and by extension my proprietary data and yours, too -- go to these pseudonyms and anonymous avatars who don't sign the TOS outside of the SL realm? No third-party site is bound by the TOS (nor should it be, except voluntarily). Contacted inworld, JP told me he was just interested in studying stuff or some vague answer, but of course, he could be a famous land dealer or famous IRC channeler or who the hell knows.

I don't see an answer yet to these questions -- thank God -- but I can't be sure that in fact the Lindens, who love server data as much as the next wonky tekkie wiki, won't just hand it over.

Well, aren't we all for information flowing freely? Sure, but why only into one hands, to those who are not publicly accountable? Tekkies always tell you smugly that "information and knowledge want to be free," while they help themselves handily to the locks and keys to it in the code.

Grabbing land data will yield huge amounts of commercial data not only on the land business but all businesses taking place on land, information on all business deals and land changing hands, and even the people who visit lands and the outing of alts. Same with groups -- grabbing groups and their dynamic history can be the kind of information that various mafias and clubs and RPs might pay for or even virtually kill for. Who's in, who's out, who's banned, who's not, etc.

I find it hugely annoying that no one thinks about these things, ever, except to laugh uproariously in your face and tell you that you've got a tinfoil hat on. Yes, and it's dripping with egg salad, too.

I suppose ResAd or ResGov or whatever the Lindens are going to call their Quislings will be first to grab at this stuff or comment on them, given what we're told about all their capacious programming.

Someone, in making sure the trains run on time, we have to make sure we don't end up with regimes infamous for making the trains run on time, but running over a lot of people in the process.

FIC-OFF

An amazing FIC-off is about to take place -- a World Cup of personalities selected by the Lindens for an exclusive, all-expense-paid trip to SF to consult with the Lindens on the future of Second Life.

The next group of 8 in this wierd ochocracy will be chosen to come during the SLCC -- imagine getting chosen to be in the A-list and getting your way paid to SLCC. See, Gwyn, your way will still be paid, not to worry if you can't really justify that kind of expense coming to SLCC from Europe.

Just in time for SLCC, of course, some wit has made a t-shirt with the slogan FIC-off, which they think is a fitting commentary to me -- "fuck off, Prokofy, with your critique of the FIC, because...well...there *is* a FIC and we prevail."

If you bought that line that it's "your world, your imagination," you're a chump. In fact, it's theirs. If you bought the line that the FIC "is an interesting myth," as Robin Linden once put it, you'd be dead wrong -- hell, it's an interesting *reality*. You think I don't get sick of writing this truth? I do. Yet, it's still true, and even more true than ever.

Just take a gander at the Second Life Views list.

"Yet another Linden circle jerk," said bladyblue Bommerang, commenting on the announcementi n the forums. Commentary was mainly running positive -- natch, with that crowd. You know, I wouldn't have put it that crudely, but...yeah.

Pham Neutra -- yes, the clearest signal that the Lindens are socialists at heart -- a German social-democratic type of commentator, always digging at the large land dealers, writing knowledgably enough about the economy, but always with a moral, a message, leaning towards the left. Top writer for SLOG, probably its most frequent contributor, somebody I spar with frequently in IMs -- because I can't post on SLOG, nor can anybody else. This Blog list of FIC de la FIC filled with top scripters and programmers say...the comments thingie on their blog is "broken". Of course, it was only after campaigning endlessly that we got them to open it up in the first place.

Oz Spade -- 2003, I think of Oz Spade as a venderable oldbie, though he isn't as old as some, and as a programmer and IRC channeler. He's an officer of Ouranos, the FIC builders' group that always wins the Linden contests. He's in the SL Education Senate and other elite groups.

Nexus Nash -- 2002. Business partner with Adam Zaius in secondserver.net, GIGAS, and of course Azure Islands, where he has probably been coining money. They have about 50 I think, if not more, hard to count. When Philip Linden logs on to SL, that's where he goes, to talk to these folks. There's at the center of the firey core of SL -- programmers, third-party site operators, land dealers who aren't Anshe yet who make a profit, established burghers of SL. Rarely posts on the forums, but doesn't have to -- has the ear of LL already!

Catherine Omega -- partner of Aimee Weber. Need I say more? Well, yes. Because as a programmer and another 2003 birthday avatar, one of 5 out of 8 avatars who have been selected from early adapters -- which is really making a statement. It's letting us know that the Lindens just can't let go. They would have invited Aimee except...Aimee has a very good reason not to appear in RL to others (she didn't come to the SLCC), and Aimee already has their ears, eyes, website, RL-in-SL gig referrals and lots more. So inviting Catherine is like making a statement, "we love you Aimee, but you know, if we had you, it would really look way too FIC-y, so we'll invite your inworld partner listed on your profile, someone who is an accomplished scripter, and that will accomplish the same thing".

Salazar Jack -- a venerable and respected oldbie. Creator of beautiful sims, preserved land, and legends on the forums. Who could say a word against Salazar Jack? Certainly not me. I've always had good dealings with him, and admire him for staying out of the forum regs' controversies and keeping a kind of quiet authority. But...he's one more 2003 birthdate, oldbie, early adapter. 4 out of 8 is too many; 3 would be a lot; the Lindens have 5 out of 8.

Alliez Mysterio -- This is a comment that says, "Anshe, we will find our own friends who are island queens, too, don't mess with us."  Alliez broke with Anshe last year, and started her own island empire. She has at least 30 I think. When they did that dreadful "most powerful women in SL," her name was posted many times by her active fan/tenant base. Alliez can't be said to stay out of the forums...because she seems to have any number of shills pumping her land on "Happy Landlord Tales". Of course, I'm quite willing to believe at least some of these people are genuinely happy tenants!

Kex Godel. Oh God. The first FIC who got me banned. Petty, pedantic, in-like-FInn with some Lindens, ugh. Kex is old and established FIC and IRC channel. In fact, I think the IRC Channel can say that the team they've fielded out to meet Team Linden at the SL FIC-OFF is well represented from their end.

These people are going to become part of an advisory group that is said to be "permanent". That means a proto-government of sorts from Lindens.

Here's my post on Robin's blog that sums up my critique.

blaze Spinnaker commented what I had originally commented to Robin's post about this concept: they couldn't eat their dog-food, and couldn't come inworld.

Well, time for my next blog about....

Self-Serving

Hamlet nee Linden Au admits that his current blogation is self-serving. It features his favourite SL mascot, Aimee Weber, and her pals at Midnight City.

Hamlet says that the click-through power of his blog is awesomalacious. He says on Friday, when the ad was launched, traffic was at a dull 3686. By Sunday, it was at 8515, an increase of nearly 5000 points.

He claimed there was no special event, and nothing other than the ad to drive people to the store.

Well, uh...the ad says there is a *half-price sale*. And of course, nothing magnetizes avatars like half-price sales of pixelated puffs that are overpriced to start with.

I'd like to contrast these figures with some others inworld just to get a perspective on it.

I have residential or store parcels that have a 750 on Friday -- by Sunday they always have 1500 or 2000 just because weekends are when people tend to come in SL. That's not rocket science.

Simone, one of the top designers, had a sale a few weekends ago, and her traffic, which is normally at 15,000-20,000, and it was more than doubled every day from what it had normally, with a total for all 3 days of half a million. Traffic like that around a sale dwarfs Midnight City, and many designers routinely get double, triple or more what Midnight City gets. The world has just gotten more bigger, and there is more competition, and just more popular designers, as hard as that is for Hamlet nee Linden and other Lindens and of course the FIC to admit.

Another thing to think about is how few people can get the power of Hamlet harnessed to their business. He has a coterie of FIC and SIC he covers over and over and OVER again, and their greased wheels to his blog generates their sales, and it's one of those things that helps solidify the FIC and SIC and make them tough to beat -- having your own press machine is helpful, of course.

Another interesting fact to think about is the obstacles the non-FIC face in the economy. Simone's traffic, for instance, was achieved *in spite* of the vicious net nannies who got the Lindens to remove the announcement of her event from the list. Sales and yard sales and grand openings are supposed to be allowed under "commercial". If they have hosts -- which hers surely did -- they are legal.

The net-nannies and rivals in the fashion industry use a technicality regarding duration -- if you have an all-day sale, or weekend-long sale, you're not supposed to put your event on the event list.

Well, that's stupid, because whether an event lasts 4 hours or 12 hours or 3 days, it's still an event. This is one of those ridiculous things we fought with the FIC and the Lindens about for days last summer in the Events Working Group. We tried to get them to put in a category for events of duration like that, and also to get the clutching paws of the FIC off the list.

FlipperPA fought it tooth and nail and still leads the charge against sales, yardsales, grand openings, etc. which he tries to use technicalities, or blatant lies about (claiming "all yard sales are illegal" which they are not) in order to crush a sector of the economy which is in competition to him. He can't get any commissions off inworld sales, so he'd like to get the killed off and drive vendors and shoppers to his third-party shopping site and inworld stores.

Bleh to all that. Fortunately everybody keeps walking around these obstacles -- which are significant, but not unbeatable.

EJECTED! And the Moveable Feast

I remember the first time I was at Jesrad Seraph's island at dawn, and I suddenly saw a mastadon and a giraffe come lumbering over the horizon. I first saw the camel meandering around in A'ksha, and had seen Jesrad riding out through the brand-new northern sims one night and hopped on, but that was a different effect. The effect of seeing moving, living animals come over the horizon was one of a startled: "My God, I'm in a world."

It's at those moments you realize what's missing in Second Life: movement not by our own agency. That is, I move all kinds of stuff around like a sturdy carpenter, gliding it on the XYZ axis all night long. Or somebody might lob a cage bomb at me and I'll go hurdling across the sim. This is my agency, and some other avatar's obvious agency. But what we usually don't see is movement by some agent that is not ours, but an animal's, or an NPC. That kind of startled "OMG it's alive" that you get from a really realistic NPC or a very skillfully crafted animal hasn't been so developed in SL.

I have a couple of turkeys made by Frans Charming that I put at the Gilded Cage Discussion Club in Derwent just to see them waddle around -- they help create that feeling of "world". They often walk off the world, the dummies, and I have to fetch them out of lost & found. When they first came out with the flexible prims, the eeriest thing about them was to see the way they wriggled and bucked and swayed in odd ways. Somebody left a gumby-like moving stick figure waving at the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and thoroughly creeped me out. Jessica Ornitz made the blanket on the donkey in Memory Bazaar, our newbie orientation project, with flexiprims -- and the thing jerks slightly not as if in the breeze, but as if inhabited by a legion of bed bugs. Particularly funny to watch is the flexiprim hair. No doubt somebody thought that having hair swish back and forth would be sexy. It is...kinda...but also a bit gross, frankly, as you sit with someone on the couch, and their hair keeps oddly swishing around as if you are in an aquarium.

Movement...something alive...the world pushing back...the moment when E.T. rolls back the ball...this is what we've all been waiting for. I knew it was special when newbies and returning oldbies who had mothballed their accounts said it was special -- artificial intelligence, growth, realistic flora and fauna. It was this week's "Business Week" for new memberships.

Hamlet blogged it...so did many others; Raph Koster pronounced these ecosystems "the future of dynamic world environments". Laukosargas Svarog, an old and honoured SL resident, made a special island in which the flowers and trees grow naturally, i.e. from seeds, and the climate changes, adjusting to the growth -- there are clouds, rain -- everything. Amazing! I'll bet even Philip Linden doesn't get to feel as god-like.

I remember first meeting Lauk when she came to contests we had at the club in Refugio. Back when I was a naive nOOb, I thought I was helping to get attention to what I saw as under-noticed artists and architects. I remember the gorgeous fountains she made.

Of course, Lauk, on the forums, turned out to be like a lot of the "creative intelligentsia" of SL, the tekkie wikinistas or FIC and their likeminded ones, who have a very rigid set of views -- rigidity that curiously conflicts with their ostensible free creative spirit. These include:

o a desire for favouritism to be shown to the creator class on the basis of their god or junior-god status
o hatred of the hoi polloi, the masses in their suburban tracts
o contempt for the mixing and matching and chaos of the mainland
o dislike of capitalism or even any kind of profit-making commerce
o heightened belief in one's own superiority

o a conviction that profit-making activity doesn't belong in SL because either it's a game, or it's an altruistic utopian commune.

I could go on. There are a hardy crew like this, as we all know. I remember first tangling with Lauk on the Community Round Table. We were discussing the problem of public space and how to make it available. Since I spend a lot of time and effort on this issue, I really become annoyed when people bleat and carry on about how there are no parks or meeting places and it's all malls and commercial strips in SL. This is horseshit.  Many people put a LOT of time and effort into creating just these parks and meeting places often at their own expense, and it is wrong to denigrate their efforts by calling the mainland a "landfill" as Lauk has done five minutes after departing the mainland for a private island.

In this thread on the CRT, Lauk dismissed my offer to provide public spaces for symbolic rents as "all this commercial crap". I had placed  no such restrictions on these rentals. They are houses and ampitheaters and lodges and spas, with no giant "Ravenglass Rentals" billboard or even tasteful sign or notecard giver. That isn't the point at all. The point is to get the spaces used, and to have familiarity with the communities. Evidently Lauk can't conceive of business with social responsibility or business with any kind of taste...except her own, of course. She sells tree houses and all manner of stuff in her stores, but that sort of commerce isn't "crap" because, well, it's hers, and not somebody else's whose tastes she doesn't share. That's the way of SL.

When I chastised her for having an "allergy to commerce" by so haughtily dismissing my offer to provide public space, which people on the thread were claiming was in short supply in SL (it isn't), bang, Pathfinder, who has long had a grudge against me, booted me from the list. He did this in a really heinous manner, making up a "one strike and you're out" rule and disseminating it *after* he booted me, as the record shows. (My first offense was called "disclosure" for taking an abusive email filled with verbal harassment some asstard sent me, and posting it to the list -- in a frustrated effort, after several direct emails weren't answered, to get the Lindens to realize something urgent -- that their listserve was enabling some idiots to write people on their personal emails, because it was showing them; furthermore, their list was borked in various ways.)

Armed with determination after that experience -- so unjust and so typical of these Lindens who can allow one resident to slam another and call them "filled with commerce crap" but not allow another to say "you have an allergy to commerce" -- I took on Lauk when she posted this huge socialist manifesto to the forums. It's a long-winded screed, so let me give you the highlights...except I just did -- what it boils down to is the idea that creators should be favoured, the mainland is crap, capitalism is evil, etc.

"75% of the grid is basic prefab, what I call "middle american suburbia". (okt it's slightly insulting but it's what I call it." Here, Lauk reveals her hand as the typical Brit with a bug up her ass about Americans, hating them for their mass tastes. Well, get over it. Just like Lauk fled the mainland for the private islands, gosh, I can think of some starving people who fled the British Isles in RL for America for...all kinds of reasons, eh?

1 percent of the mainland is of interest to Lauk. OK, that's how it gets, the funnel narrows and narrows until finally you are a screeching hysteric, neuralgically demanding aesthetic perfection by your lights...until another enraged tekkie wiki creator-fascist aesthete comes along neuralgically to claim *their* vision of perfection...You wonder if she can grant autonomy to even this created flora and fauna...

Lauk was also busy in the forums commandeering the FIC and the forums regs to join in a land preserve effort -- well more on that another day, a separate topic I've studied for a long time with my own preserve.

My topic today is -- hey, I'm warming to it! -- Our Walled Garden. Tony Walsh once called SL the "walled garden," and I imagine I wasn't the only one who thought of the Secret Garden. He no doubt had in mind the high-end computers and DSL line that keeps out the poor and the developing world from this flower of Western technology, this Garden of Unearthly Delights.

But what I often notice about it is the vision of aestheticism, which is so zealous, so fierce, so just plain neuresthenic, as to constitute a kind of cult, really, a form of touch provincialism that makes SL almost unbearable at times. A certain faction of the FIC has a "fuck you hedonism" perspective that says "I get to do What the Fuck I Want On My Land." Another faction celebrates aestheticism to the point of being moronic. They are merely two sides of the same coin: a desire to control others, either to make the kow-tow to anybody's bad build, especially my own, or to make them kow-tow to my aestheticism. Either way, the individual is diminished.

There's much to argue with Lauk about -- and indeed I did that in my "Get Off Our Backs" Thread. I also had another intervening encounter when I saw her casually announce that she was selling Orwood, her sanctuary containing the legendary Lauk's Nest. I was amazed that she didn't put up an offer to people to preserve it. She offered it for sale, at a not-bad price. Random Unsung offered to put tier on it, which wasn't really that much, but urged her to help find others to support the cash purchase, or wait on collecting the cash. Only one 512 donor could be found. Despite events in world, notices on the forums, etc. -- finally she shrugged off all "public land preserve efforts" in favour of selling it to a private individual who had vowed to keep it as it was. Whatever.

Still, forums skirmishes, ideological differences -- frankly, it would never occur to me to hold such things so close as to actually ban a person from my land, or refuse to talk to them and put them on mute (there's only a few truly psychotic or maliciously persistent that I'd do that with). If someone does a good build, and it gets mentioned by the RL media as a coup for SL -- you could only be happy for them and SL.

When I flew off to see Lauk's new island Svarog, that was honestly all I had in mind. I was well aware of all her cranky views, hatred of the mainland, and hatred of people like me with their "tasteless mass taste". Too bad. Even the masses get to go to the park on Sundays and gawk at the Botanical Gardens at the Queen's Palace.

I flew around looking for the growing things -- other than something that looked like a dandelion fuzz after you blow it, I couldn't seem to see much. Suddenly, I caught sight of Lauk herself, with her wings and white dress. I couldn't quite see what she was doing, but it seemed a magnificent scene, so I took a picture. I believe that people who appear on sims open to the public shouldn't be fussy about having their picture taken. I don't think that's why Lauk ejected me, however.

First, I was ejected from what seemed like just one area of the sim. I seemed to be able to fly normally and even light in another part. I figured it was just what I had read about on Hamlet's blog, that occasionally when experimenting she had to eject people for various reasons, I think she said only 8 are being allowed on the sim at once.

So I started down the garden path when WHACK another freeze and eject hits me and a message that I'm not wanted.

I IM'd her and tried to ask if she was banning me, and for what reason. No answer. It's simple, however: she doesn't like me, doesn't like what I stand for, doesn't like my views, or my expression, or my debates against her own point of view. That's all it takes to put someone on a banned list in the Walled Garden. Banned not for griefing or destroying property, but for speech, and speech not even in the world. That's the way of Second Life, and that's the way that Philip Linden wants it when he celebrates "civic redress".

This is how it will be. The Archipelago of Egos. People like Lauk who consider themselves not only more refined and more creative (and in fact may be) but who consider their views on land, the economy, and society to be superior, will seek out likeminded, form sims with them, and keep others out. And...why shouldn't they? Isn't that what freedom is all about, freedom to be you and me and keep the other assholes away?

Of course, such a world made up only of likeminded under glass, in a bell jar, watching things grow and admiring each other endlessly, might get a bit...claustrophobic.

I was thrilled to read what Raph Koster wrote on this subject:

• What is your greatest fear for the future of networked technologies?

  "Humans grew up in tribes where you didn’t get to pick who else was in your tribe. We grew up in situations where we had to learn to get along with people who had opinions that were different from ours, and networked technologies are allowing us to form tribes that are homogenous. They’re allowing us to find groups of people who are just like us. And I think it’s wonderful to be able to find my tribe of people who read the same books I do and like my music and watch the same TV shows and in general share the same view of the world. That’s wonderful, because it makes you feel like you’re not alone any more. But on the other hand I think it’s incredibly important for the human race to be exposed to multiple viewpoints and to get to interact with people that we wouldn’t necessarily interact with if given our choice. One of the real risks in the networked environment is the lessened friction of connecting with people. People will choose to hang out with people they already know. They will choose to read the books they already know they will like, rather than taking a flyer on something new. Statistical analysis shows that this is the case when we look at all of the communities of interest that have formed on the internet. You can graph, for example, what political books people read, on Amazon, and what you find is Democrats won’t read the right-wing books and Republicans won’t read the left-wing books and almost no books cross the divide and are read by both, and that’s a very dangerous thing for our political establishment. That would be my worry about this low-friction information culture. Biology teaches us homogenous cultures are not a good thing – they’re very vulnerable."

I couldn't say it better. So...I won't.

BANNED AND CENSORED!

Somebody's idea of "public library" comes from Thomas Kinkade...

Looking for some items for the infohub project this evening, I couldn't find them in inventory, so I went to visit the ICT Library in Pickerel.

Once a good example of a great use of a PG sim (SL's best kept secret!), and a resource on the mainland -- a place that has a diverse and open public contrasting with the private islands -- the ICT has now put up a big sign that it had moved.

Disappointed that what had been a great part of our little corner of PG paradise in SL in Grace and Pickerel by St. Paul's Cathedral was now getting sucked into the private island maelstrom, I clicked on the landmark...only to get this message:

YOU ARE BANNED FROM THIS REGION.

Imagine that!

In RL, it would be difficult to "ban" someone from the use of a "public information source" or a public library. In fact, even if you were to go in a library, like one of those mentally ill homeless, and shout and spit and deface books, it would be hard to imagine a situation where the library would be able to ban you forever. Indeed, if they called the police, and the police removed you from the premises, there'd have to be some kind of due process for them to do this, your rights would be read to you, and you'd not likely endure anything like a "permaban" from the premises.

In SL, people are banned for bombing, griefing, flying around naked in PG, verbally harassing by shouting racist slogans, etc. That all seems reasonable.

But...banned because during a meeting, in which they had patiently sat through a Newspeak introduction, they happened to *express an opinion* that the program was lame and not serving its intended sector of the public?

Banned on speech grounds? From a public library?

That's outrageous -- and it's the sort of thing that really needs to be fought hard -- and fought hard now, because if we don't, this is what we can expect more of in virtual worlds -- virtual worlds that far from exemplifying the open and free and linked nature of the Internet, are exemplifying more and more the closed and gated grounds of the country club.

Is Second Life going to be a country club or a country?

Let's go over again how Marian Librarian -- Lorelei Junot -- and her colleagues could come to a decision (I have no idea how it was made, as it is not a transparent, due process) to ban me.

1. They advertised on the open events calendar in SL an event that purported to be a discussion for business people in SL to share experiences.

2. I came to it and it seemed to be already a closed little grouplet that was perceiving itself as having a "mandate" from "those who came to Katt Kongo's talk" to "continue to meet weekly". This little sort of closing-in-upon-itself happens all the time in SL. Of course, if 30 avatars may have come to see the popular and vigorously self-promoting Katt Kongo of the Metaverse Messenger, at the SL Library on this occasion, there were now a grand total of 6 avatars, at least 2 of whom hadn't been to the previous meeting (the advertisement just wasn't seen).

3. SL is going through a big upheaval now, with the removal of dwell and the destruction of many resident projects and businesses that relied on it, and the displacement by these original, indigenous projects, by well-funded outsiders. This process was horribly exacerbated by the Lindens suddenly announcing that they would *sell* the Linden, i.e. print their currency rather than merely arrange the interface for buyers to meet sellers. This led to a 30-point drop in the Linden as faith in the currency began to evaporate. In this context, people in struggling businesses are looking for answers, and looking for real support, not fake training exercises by RL people completely unschooled in SL.

4. Accordingly, I asked on what grounds this "public library" felt qualified to "teach". No one expects a library to be an expert on every subject; their role in a community is to organize experts and resources for others. The lame answer I got back was that the person chairing the meeting had no RL or SL business experience whatsoever. The speaker advertised didn't bother to show, and the organizers didn't know why. And one librarian lamely volunteered that the very struggles of the library itself to get up and running was "like" a business.

5. I challenged this concept because unlike the rest of us struggling in resident-based business, this library got a discounted, non-profit rate sim for $950 instead of $1250; its tier is $150 instead of $195. Furthermore, it's drawn heavily from Linden staff time in the form of Pathfinder Linden and other Lindens, and has enjoyed liberal and generous donations of equipment, time, and Lindens. Indeed, the entire project was made possible by "an anonymous buyer of the private island" who I imagine to be someone actually very close to the Linden machine -- it's just a hunch I'm having.

6. As the record amply shows, the discussion took a turn for the worse, particularly because libraries found it difficult to admit that resident businesses have difficulties; that they as outsiders have privileges that the pre-existing residents don't enjoy; that people in SL business need not these lame, irrelevant "RL training" empty exercises, but political transformation and changes in economic policies (and how could they be expected to adopt a more sophisticated approach like this). All kinds of NPR-esque, politically-correct teminology and language patterning was deployed, with all that kind of horrid, smarmy, Children's Public Television "modeling of behaviour" that drives any sane and normal person nuts:

"Prokofy, we want to provide programs from people here in sl to meet your needs."

etc.

and then little barbed comments of the type,

"Prokofy, what does your group do?"

I had vowed to provide my 10 reasons why I have a fundamental critique of this "Second Life Library 2.0", they got erased accidently, so let me try again -- and this is important to understand for the larger issue of why this banning of someone on speech grounds is such an ominous thing in general for the Metaverse.

1. Public libraries, in RL, are public enterprises funded by tax dollars because it is in the public interest to have educational and informational activities be free and available. The public library is among the most vital institutions of civil society. Yet it is no longer one that governments and publics support, beyond educational and intellectual elites, and not even these to any substantial extent. The library as an institution is being transformed in RL as libraries face horrible losses of revenue as the world shifts from print to electronic media, as people use Amazon or their home-based Internet for research, work, or entertainment, and mainly only the very young, very old, and poor use public libraries. Their hours have been reduced, and they've scrambled to revise themselves in this vastly changing scene and become more relevant.

2. The RL library related to this Second Life Library (about which I have only a sketchy idea since it doesn't really lay it out anywhere) is no doubt a library in that very situation, trying to leverage new media, interest of young people, etc. to position itself better to attract scarce RL patrons. Therefore, when we come to participate in their programs, we're part of what enables them to show off to funders that they are "relevant," and that they are "doing good." They can report that they had "prominent business people" and "helped train SL businesses" or even "helped retrain SL workers displaced by radical economic upheavals" or whatever shtick they may deploy -- but if we're going to be used in that fashion in their fund-raising, then we have the right to demand some accountability.

3. Public libraries grow out of civil societies and democratic governemnts. This library didn't grow out of any such thing, because it doesn't exist in SL. Of course, the lack of a world and its substance is of little interest to people merely using SL like a giant book shelf to arrange their vanity projects on for better display. No matter what kind of life that world had or has outside of the bookshelf and the 3-D resume coat-hanger. That's the thing that really galls me the most -- that we don't have any kind of representative government, or even any kind of loose, grassroots assembly to discuss projects of public interest, and in that vacuum, anybody and his brother can just come along and say "We're the Second Life Public Library". There's a tiny elite of Lindens, RL in SL cadres, people like Eloise Pasteur, "Thinker, Educator, Mentor" who flog their mentor title and SL oldbie status for something like this -- and that's what constitutes the "public". The rest of us, if we complain, can expect to be banned.

"Thinker, Educator, Mentor...and exclusive vendor of commercial products in special Linden-subsidized non-profit space."

4. Really, who gets to use the "Second Life" name? I know that when two law students tried to create "Second Life Superior Court," the Lindens ordered them to remove it. When Shaun Altman named his stock market "Second Life Stock Exchange," he was urged to change it, and did so, calling it "Metaverse Stock Exchange". There are a million things in SL called everything from SL Boxing to the SL Public Land Preserve which I founded. Yes, anybody can decide to use the term "SL" and "Public" -- and shouldn't they, if they open up their sims to the public? Yet...how is this decided? I'm happy to open up that debate entirely, including regarding my own use.

We didn't get together and make a public library; it just arrived, on the same little cat's feet that Microsoft or Harvard's Berkman Center or countless other big projects arrived without too much visibility, ushered in by Lindens on wings, and assisted by the usual cadres from the FIC and SIC.

Worse, why would any one resident's group, even a feted outside RL entity, be entitled to use up a public good like the name "Info Island".  This is the equivalent of "411". Why is "Info Island" not owned by the federal government, but owned by a private entity with an anonymous donor? who decided this? I know none of us did -- but that's because we don't exist -- there is no civil society except the nonce groups and flash-mobs and "wise crowds" that the Lindens get up as their posses to run little projects like this.

5. Why is this public library venturing into the roiling waters of business in SL? This is a controversial, even painful topic for many, with the crash of the Linden, and the seeming destruction of the indigenous economy in favour of the Linden's bottom line. Why aren't they sticking more to traditional library-like topics like one I see on the calendar today about art and culture, something they're better suited to do?

I'll tell you why, because they are climbing on the craven bandwagon of the Business Week article like everyone else. In their PR, in their funding, in their selling of themselves, they'd like to be able to say they were "relevant" to the biggest boom phenomenon associated with SL -- business. They'd like to say they provided "value add" and "helped serve the community".

All of this is fake. Their guy didn't bother to show up. Their meeting was lame. People challenged it (and not only me) and they not only got defensive and manipulative, using their social-engineering concepts borrowed from the vast library of child-control and child-centric ideologies out there, they even banned a vocal critic from even entering the space to use the library and its resources. They know nothing about business, and understand less. They got 30 avatars to gape at Katt Kongo, so hungry are people to get rich quick and touch the hem of the garment of anybody who seems to have, if not gotten rich quick, gotten media coverage quick looking as if they did. That's all. To pretend something else is happening is a vast fiction.

6. Why do the Lindens do stuff like this, hand out the 411-like name "Info Island" and the non-profit status and all the rest of the feting they do? Well, because they can. It's their servers and they can do what they want to. And that's the worrisome part. Any game company or virtual world company that wants to take over the airwaves can do so, like Mr. Lee's Hong Kong and the other franchulates in Snowcrash. There's little to stop them from doing that. And they are doing that, and thus our world is being created brick by sectarian, closed brick -- little particularities, little egos, little closed connections, taking the place of a public open space.

7. Lindens don't feel any sense of accountability, and if a protest against the decision of this sectarian little walled garden called "Second Life Library 2.0" to ban an avatar on speech grounds were protested to the Lindens, they'd shrug. They'd shrug REALLY hard. Because as we all know from the last town hall, Philip Linden personally feels that "civic redress" is what should be encouraged for the private island world. Ugh. And here's a good example of the kind of world he is unleashing by absolving himself of any responsibility for arbitrary banning. He may have thought "civic redress" would ban people who fall just short of TOS violation and continue to bother private island owners. "We're not going to be able to stop this," he says. It's like the Bush guy -- let him roll, he "can't be stopped" because "people have to have freedom and creativity." Of course, the freedom and creativity of *others* stepped on when these egos are allowed to run rampant in the public space are things Philip just doesn't think through.

8. When I pointedly asked Lorelei why she should get a $150 sim and I shouldn't, she can't handle the shock of the challenge and the exposure, and told me "You do not have to use the library". Well, that's ridiculous. My challenge of the lameness of her little "business meeting" (which the people in it were IM'ing me about and agreeing with me was lame) and my challenge of the legitimacy of "Second Life Library 2.0" shouldn't be defensively and idiotically lurching to extremes and telling me I don't "have to" use the library.

What, Lorelei Junot, an avatar, is allowed to determine who can and can't use public spaces and public knowledge resources? Huh? By her own whim, just because she feels dissed during a meeting?

...and somebody else's idea of "public library" might be drawn from a public urinal.

A RL equivalent might be one of those kind of lame exercises I see in my own public library. Someone will have gotten a grant to "promote women" or something and they will have a flimsy poster up made with dutiful civic-looking clip-art icons about "preparing women for the workforce". Some motley assemblage of people unemployed at 3:00 p.m. in the afternoon will come to the library. They'll be taught to "dress for success" and "network" and "prepare a resume to catch a recruiter's eye" and all the rest. All well and good. That's what public libraries *do*. They are "resources."

Let's say you attend such a forlorn little gathering in your public library, sitting at the back table next to a couple of the homeless people who are asleep in a warm place since they close shelters during the day. Let's say in between listening to the screams of unruly kids parked in the library after school with indifferent babysitters, or even on their own, left to themselves by parents who can't afford afterschool programs, you struggle to hear how you can "leverage your real life skills" in say, caring for children and old relatives and managing a household, and convincing someone to hire you (let's say you're a welfare single mom).

You might listen to some annoying librarian go on about "skill sets" and "networking" all those other buzz words and you might finally interrupt, "Hey, hon, do *you* have any experience looking for a job in the real job market, as opposed to the non-profit, government-funded sector?" Wouldn't you prefer that she tell you how to ace the post office exam or get to the right people in city hall to get the coveted part-time school-crossing jobs? If you challenged such a "lesson-giver" including her use of public space and public funds, would you expect to be banned forever from the public library? Of course not.

9. Somebody might "helpfully" point out that if I had a 501-c-3, I could give that Tax ID number and application to the Lindens and also apply for non-profit sims. But of course I do, and I have 10 others I could draw into sponsorship if it came to that, but that's not the point. The point is whether or not this is going to be a *virtual* world and a *better* world or just Second Verse, Same as the First. The virtual world makes new kinds of non-profit work possible, with the acceleration of networking, exhange of knowledge, etc. What's really appalling, given all the Better Worldism game that the Lindens talk, is that projects like supportforhealing, which they even fete in some ways, has no non-profit status. Numerous indigenous projects of this sort that have to do with teaching the hard skills of the world itself, like New Citizens as we noted in the previous "Librarians" blog, don't get that recognition of discounted sims. What would it take to get the Lindens to cut loose some non-profit sims to the people REALLY eating the dogfood and trying to live and work and do nonprofit educational work *in* the world and *about the world itself*?

10. We're rapidly coming to a point where far from being a treasure trove of openness and accessibility, the private island system is only perpetuating the "walled garden" or "country club" aspect of life that we were supposed to be getting away from by coming on the Internet in the first place! The Second Life Library 2.0 is a failure exemplifying the failure of the Lindens' original Mainland vision of open and diverse space. They need to "control their parcel" and keep out people like Prokofy Neva who might not pay their library fines.

Everything that I've been jumping up and down saying would happen with these private islands has happened! I kept pointing out that when the Lindens create tools for mass-banning on islands, something Philip actually seems proud of when he talks about people "banned from large land masses" by code-as-law, it would lead to arbitrary decisions like this based not on any kind of real criteria of TOS violation, or actual standard and open notion of griefing, but on the whim of somebody with ruffled feathers -- Lorelei Junot, the land owner of record. It wasn't enough for her that I left her meeting when she asked to, and concluded it was a waste of time to be involved.  It's still a mystery to me why this library has to be involved in organizing business groups, better organized by business people themselve, in venues where they can give each other dwell/traffic (of the list-topping, not payment-giving kind) and support each others' products.

I IM'd Philip during the town hall about where I'd appeal such a banning or "civic address". To whom? How? He didnt' answer, because there is no answer.

I'm going to try a variety of places -- from the RL supervisors of these people in SL to the American Library Association. The more I read this transcript over and over, the more I marvel at the outcome.

Michael Pate made a big show of answering my last critical blog, "Librarians," with one of these smarmy, politically-correct comments:  "Just as in RL, we have no interesting in supplanting or superseding anything anyone else is doing. But also just as in RL, not everyone in a community will see the need for or wish to use our services. We will gladly attempt to meet the needs of those we can and wish the others well."

What's interesting about this self-selected set of people and their Linden feters is that they adopt the same line of thinking as we see on the forums. Group-think. "If you don't agree with even any aspect of what we're doing, there's the door."

I don't need a public library to solve my business problems in SL -- it's proven itself irrelevant except as another headline-grabbing, self-promoting "only about itself" sort of typical, vapourous project in Second Life. Perhaps in time it will grow up, and get over its infantile and juvenile phases where the people write endless blogations about all the neat and kewl things they WOWZER did in WOOT Second Life. However, I remain committed to the principle of keeping public spaces open -- anything that calls itself the 411 of Second Life with titles like "Info Island" and "Second Life Library" cannot be banning on vague speech grounds.

Ultimately, what is worrisome about these projects is their destructive power of the world itself.
As I said in my last blog comments:

"The presence of RL-funded entities with anonymous donors who give them whole sims, and the Lindens feting of these high-profile projects they can show off themselves, by giving them $150 tier and $950 islands, skews the environment for business. It makes it less and less viable for people to use the Linden and micropayments and inworld development that exists within world and not funded by outside entities. This is obvious."

It's not at all clear that taken together, with their own aims and interests, they will make up a world themselves. They very likely will. It will be a sanitized and increasingly totalitarian one where, on the slightest whim, a person who is "sole owner" can elect to restrict freedom of movement and the free flow of information and goods on a whim. That's wrong, dead wrong.