Second Thoughts

The Politics of FPS

One of the interesting things I've discovered from owning an island, which is, of course, an education, is the menus that Governor Linden has -- and doesn't use -- on the mainland! Ever wonder why?

I mean the list of "top scripts" and "top colliders". I'll be honest and admit I am not really sure what a "collider" is or does. I picture car wrecks from Nissans dueling Elementals or something. "Colliders" on physics are things that Lindens like Phoenix Linden would tell me must explain why this or that sim I was bitching about was lagging. I rarely, if ever, found this to be the case (though crashed helicopters bring sims to their knees) and figured it was just the standard blow-off.

But "top scripts" is something that everyone who has ever lived on SL land for five minutes is aware of.

Looking at the master menu of my island now which is at full occupancy (see, 13 more of these and I could be on the night shift with Des at Smugburghers!), I can see a huge, long list of scripts owned and operated by tenants which are scripts I had never even thought of before. Nothing is lagging, and the sim is working well (*throws salt over shoulder*) but I do have to wonder -- if I wanted to somehow optimalize all this, what would I do? I have rules about laggy scripts, and that means no security orbs (which I ban for their weapon-like functions anyway) and no avatar greeters/listeners, and I would feel ifI saw a script that was eating up the script time in huge ways that I could IM the person and say, look, this is lagging the entire sim, can you put it in inventory when you aren't here?. So...why can't Governor Linden find and do the same thing?

I've long known, like all sim owners and renters from Governor Linden, that there are basic scripts that lag the hell out of sims:

o dirty listening scripts -- i.e. scripts made badly to listen all the time if a given avatar is online or not rather than being scripted in a more clean fashion not to be doing that (I recall Buster Peel worked a great deal to make listening cleaner)
o vehicles like the helicopters with rotating blades -- it may not be the rotating blades, since everyone claims rotation script isn't laggy (I call it "the appearance of lag," however and a spinning sign is akin to the "broken windows" problem). Or it may be physics, but crashed vehicles are often culprits of sim paralysis, and sometimes you can find them in the sky or deep in the water or even pushed into the ground, which you'll need to use debug menu to find
o various animated pose balls, yes, this means sexual poses, or swimming animations -- but these are more likely to lag because there are a lot of different ones out, not due to any one script being particularly laggy
o various weapons

...and lots more -- doors that open or notecard givers aren't laggy in themselves, but you would be surprised when you look at the list of them all just how many there are -- a house with a door and window shades and a rental box and poseballs can be a little lag bomb.

I always tell tenants, "Lag begins at home." I chuckle when I am summoned to the scene of a laggy sim and find someone in a rocking chair on their porch (those things are really laggy) with a swingset working in the yard, with poseballs, avatar listeners, security orbs, weapons, and many other things ablaze. Remove half of this, the most laggy half -- the sim perks up like a dream.

Of course, we all know the concept of the Perfect Socialist Distributive Lee Linden TD and Sim FPS (TM). This is the political decision the Lindens made sometime in 2005 to change the way sim FPS was handled and measured. Sims were deliberately set to 99 Time Delation and 45 FPS so that in theory, all that happens is that scripts work more slowly when the sim is lagged, not that the sim itself lags. If you have ever gone to Refugio and tried to click on the teleporter or the rental boxes while Barbie Club has 40 guests on the sim, you'll understand how Lee's concept works -- make doors or teleporters work at about 500 percent slower rate, i.e. not work at all for most people, in order to prove that technically, yeah, the sim isn't 'lagging'.

Avatars are the largest creation of lag; any more than 15-20 and any sim really feels it; 30-40 is often a recipe for paralysis. The dance pads or camp-chairs that keep them riveted to a sim is particularly outrageous, because otherwise, the natural flow of traffic might be that more tolerable 15-20. That's one of the idiocies of Second Life. People pay for that extra 10 deathly-lagging customer packet ostensibly to boost their traffic numbers, which will fake out vendors into thinking vendors will do well there, and draw more people to buy from those vendors.

But a) they spend more on camp-chair payouts than they take in from vendors; b) would-be buyers are discouraged from coming to laggy sims and don't buy c) if a vendor doesn't make sales he leaves anyway. Oh, to be sure, these clubs get *enough* vendors staying to keep the whole sick mess going -- the only way to stop it would be for the Lindens to remove "popular places" and I don't think they should do that. I think "popular places" should simply be diluted with a top list of 1000, not 20 so people can browse down to the next levels of stuff with more intellectual and social value like NCE or Svarga or even Prok's Seafood (where you can endlessly contemplate the mysteries of the Missing Diver) -- instead of rewarding the camp-chair kinds with the self-fulfilling prophecy of getting traffic because...they already have traffic because...they paid for it through camping.

But the greatest mystery to me about all this is that now that I see how this land panel works, I can't for the life of me get why Governor Linden, in her wisdom, can't respond more effectively when you summon her minions, the Linden liaisons. to your sim, and point out that it is paralyzed at 3 FPS. Why can't they open up their panel, like I'm doing right now on my island, and say, "OMG, little Heathers' 100 poseballs and scripted dildos are eating up this entire sims' FPS!" or "OMG, there's jay1234's crashed helicopter crashed in the SW on that parcel of that idiot who never logs in!"

They NEVER EVER do this. They mumble inanities. They mouth platitudes. They are completely silent. They do nothing. They say "they will check it" or "have gridmonkeys check it" -- and never do. Heathers' fantastic sexual gyrations, Jay's Interesting TryMe Virus Adventure in Second Life is left to wreck the sim for all time.

Now, do you see why?

They aren't willing to finger little Heather. They aren't willing to finger jay1234's crashed helicopter -- let alone remove it, although the 512 parcel owner last appeared in 2005 in SL merely to buy an annual subscription and never return. They just won't Judge. They are hippies, remember, and judgement is so backward and oppressive.

If the community could see that the problem is Heather and Jay, they might at least IM them politely. "Heather, in between your capacious orgasms, could you put away some of that...stuff?"etc. They might even prevail on the Gov to remove Jay's Amazing Helicopter of No-Show Sheila's land which will be seized by the Governor at year's end *anyway*.

When I went to a Linden recently to try to really get a bead on what was and wasn't laggy (I do this periodically as I hear different things from different Lindens), I got one of those very studied, very political LL answers:

This might be laggy...but really, it's all in how you look at it....and what the residents determine is of value.

That might not be laggy... but if you have a lot of them -- and who is to judge? -- then it might be lag...but I cannot say.

I can only Be....Be Here Now....*sharp intake on fatty*.

See what I mean?

It's a Cloud of Unknowing based on a very political concept of the school of Fuck-You Hedonism -- that FPS is endlessly in the eye of the beholder; that anyone can grab FPS -- victory goes to the strong. FPS is eminently shareable, therefore eminently stealable by any one club on a 1024 or casino on a 2048. The rest of the sim can suffer. And...who is to judge? You think your teleporter working is more important than Heather's orgasms?

I remember first encountering this theory in the early days of my battles with the FIC in 2004 and early 2005, on a water sim where a resident who designed submarines felt it was completely within her rights on her small water plot not only to physically block access others had to their waterfront on 3 sides, but could also completely drag the sims to 10 or 3 FPS with absolutely no repercussions. All kinds of actions against this person only led to the banning of those trying to protest.

A person who had invested in nearly half the sim and had some nice house rentals and boating had his business destroyed and was forced to sell and leave because this arrogant asshole submariner couldn't grasp that she was in a community where the FPS was a scarce and shared good.

That's why Philip's constant bleating about how there are no scarce resources in SL is utterly fake -- FPS is exactly that shared resource as are other features dependent on CPU and server performance -- it is the air and water of our virtual world).

And the way to solve this perennial nagging SL problem is only to band together and confront Governor Linden about her land panel. To make information about top lagging scripts PUBLIC or at least ACTED UPON. So join Mainlanders today, my lobbying group for Governor Linden's tenants, and let's get the old gal to stop huffing fatties and look at the facts of our lagging sims.

I noticed on Resident Answers and Lindens Answers, several new people, some of them savvy programmers, have also plaintively asked this question: why can't you give us a list of laggy scripts to police in the community?

The Lindens will never give this. But what we can do is politically respond to their political actions by asking them to charge for CPU draw the way they charge for tier. Jay's mom will not be happy at the bill that comes in after 90 days of Jay's helicopter. Nor will Heather make her orgasm-dependent equipment stay out of inventory during the weeks she's getting some on her alt.

Charge for CPU. It's the only way.

Comments:

>>Nothing is lagging, and the sim is working well (*throws salt over shoulder*) but I do have to wonder -- if I wanted to somehow optimalize all this, what would I do?

When scripting resources are eaten up, all scripts in a sim start to 'slow down' but there aren't many other effects that I'm aware of. "Listeners" don't listen as frequently, scripted moving objects may move more slowly. But avatars will nowadays generally move around okay without 'lag' in spite of script-related lag and script slowdowns.

Often, 'top script time' items aren't the real issue. The top script may be, say, 1.0 out of a total 22.3 msec allotment. Yet someone unclever might have set out 100 vendor servers, each taking only .05 each but collectively taking 5.0.

Scripts on avatars aren't reported in the estate menu. Yet, avatar scripts do lag a sim like other scripts. Only way to tell by how much is by having an avatar sit down on a named prim. Then look up the prim's name in 'top scripts.'

Theoretically (it's practically really tough) you could set aside X percent of a sim's total 22.3 msec of script time for each parcel, avatars included.

Most (97% maybe) of the server-side lag that I've seen in the last few months comes from image cache issues. Caused by lots of textures x lots of visitors looking at them. This is the real devil that lags avatars; if you look at the sim statistics you can see a tight correlation between images time (ms) and time dilation when images time exceeds say, 5.0. Generally curable by sim restart.

Posted by: Desmond Shang | December 19, 2006 at 03:19 AM

Yes, I've seen the images issues. And you can mitigate that by having a rule on a mall, say, that no textures can be over 512.

But there is no easy way to determine with inworld tools within the client or made as some kind of gadget, what the size/pixels of a given texture is.

So you can't police someone to take down their 1024 m2 texture, only suspect something is up and ask them to remove it.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 19, 2006 at 03:25 AM

Poseballs aren't laggy.

When Celestia was a club on a rented pancake and I was just a friend of the owners, they mentioned how the poseballs were a concern due to the high ms times- it looked like the poseballs were lagging.

When I joined in and we got the island, and I had access to the estate tools, I had a lot of time to check scripts etc while the sim was empty as I was building. The poseballs barely registered.

What happens (and I'm 99% sure this is right) is that any scripted object, when sat on by an avatar, inherits the avatar's script times for reporting.

You can try this really easy:

Load up with your channel 0 listening AO and bling, your scripted BDSM collar and your psitec/protec so you're a walking lagmonster. (Then go to a four corners music event and ruin it for everyone- lol just kidding :D )

Rez a fresh cube, name it "omglag" and click the "make new script" in the contents or whatever it's called. The one that makes it say "Hello avatar" when you click it.

Sit on it, and check your sim script times.

You'll see that poseballs don't lag sims- avatars on poseballs lag sims. Same as avatars on cubes, or standing around. It's just the avatar load is hidden unless they sit on something scripted- then it gets added to that object's number and you can see it.

You can make it a game- rez the cube-of-lag-shame and get your friends to sit on it. I'm pretty sure the numbers will be very close to if you go to a void sim alone and check there in the debug stuff on screen.

Right now in the new sim I'm building in (Deco) there's two xmas trees eating as much ms time as four typical avatars, though. :)

So yes, when poseballs are showing way up the top of your lists (like 0.3+) it's because your tenants are making hay.

Posted by: Ace Albion | December 19, 2006 at 06:03 AM

Sorry, I reread and saw Desmond mentioned the "sit on something" thing. I'm fairly sure it has to be scripted though, and the fresh cube clicky script won't inflate the number hardly any.

Posted by: Ace Albion | December 19, 2006 at 08:20 AM

Ack sorry for spamming-
Image sizes... I don't know if this works with other people's stuff, but if you edit something (maybe even if all the edit boxes are greyed out I don't know) and choose "select texture", click on a face and do shift+ctrl+alt+T (it might only be some of those keys- I mash them all) it will say the face number and the texture size.

Posted by: Ace Albion | December 19, 2006 at 08:24 AM

>>Yes, I've seen the images issues. And you can mitigate that by having a rule on a mall, say, that no textures can be over 512.

Even with textures limited to 512x512 pixels, or even 256x256 pixels, there can still be an issue.

The problem is this:

Let's take a hypothetically extreme case, where the 15,000 prims of a sim are all cubes, each with a unique texture on one side. 6 sides x 15,000 is 90,000 textures. Even at 256x256, a graphics card and the image cache is in deep trouble in such a situation.

Now, nobody does that. But some sims *do* have more textures than can be decently handled.

Best as I can tell, these sims will fall into image cache troubles very quickly, sometimes after just a handful of avatars visit. The only way I know how to get out of trouble like that is to somehow get the numbers and sizes of textures in the sim back down.

Posted by: Desmond Shang | December 19, 2006 at 09:14 AM

Ok, avatars ON poseballs lag sims then. I'm recalling a time when Cristiano used to lament about somebody with scripted dildoes on a sim that he felt was lagging the sim to death. Living on that sim, I didn't see what he meant, but perhaps I was on a different time zone.

I *am* puzzled by this claim though, because even when I have been alone on a sim with nobody on it, I still see the scripts using up 3??? What could be up with this? Is it because once set runnin, even if no one is actually not on them, they keep running for awhile?

Desmond, FlipperPA used to obsess about texture uploads on the forums, and he swore by this rule for malls reducing from 1024 to 512, so talk to him about your claims of deep lag from many facets.

Ace, the problem with your idea is that it only works on my own object I can edit. If I am a mall manager going around trying to cut down lag in tenants, I can't click and see the texture size of someone else's object. I don't see how to do that.

My experience is that LOTS of textures, like in a texture store, REALLY lag a sim. Put avatars in flipping vendors or objects looking at textures loading all the time, and it's a slide show.

Again, as I'm thinking about this, I see that Desmond is merely following the Lindens and other tekkies in relativizing all this and making it seem like its merely a quantity and a time problem, not an inherent nature problem.

And I'd have to disagree. A rocking chair or a helicopter significantly lag sims. Remove them, and the FPS jumps up. If you get rid of mailboxes constantly available to say "Hi I'm online," especially multiple boxes, you can also dramatically improve FPS.

This isn't about numbers of items, but an inherent lagginess. And that's why I don't understand some judgements can be made using real field data. If we all know that mailboxes and rocking chairs lag tremendously, they should be put on a list to avoid.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 19, 2006 at 09:44 AM

It is all of them Ace and Thank You for that information.

Posted by: Khamon | December 19, 2006 at 09:44 AM

"Ace, the problem with your idea is that it only works on my own object I can edit. If I am a mall manager going around trying to cut down lag in tenants, I can't click and see the texture size of someone else's object. I don't see how to do that."

ctrl-alt-shift-T works on when editing other people's objects. Be sure to select just the texture that you're testing.

Posted by: Khamon | December 19, 2006 at 09:52 AM

Thanks, Khamon- it was just a hopeful guess I admit. And still a pain as you have to fly around clicking, but at least you have proof for an argument. Then you find that the 1024x1024 texture on all those boxes is the same one using offsets so not any worse than seperate textures (You see this in some stores where 4 pictures rez at once). No easy solution I guess.

Prokofy, scripts doing basically nothing do sit there using like 0.003 or something, I can only guess this is just "overheads". An actual scripter probably knows the details.

Posted by: Ace Albion | December 19, 2006 at 10:34 AM

> Charge for CPU. It's the only
> way.

I hope they follow through with your idea, because it'll give me something else to laugh at about yours and Philip's and BoingBoing's vision of the future virtual reality world of 1982. As for me and the Pirates, we'll be in our basements using our own paid-for, kick ass processors; we'll be communicating and innovating on cell phones along with the rest of the world; we geeks will happily leave you to your world where where only the rich can perform calculations.

Posted by: Andrew Burton, aka Jarod Godel | December 19, 2006 at 12:05 PM

Well is it better to put three 1024px textures in a 256px screen vendor to display a dozen products or to use twelve 256px textures?

Posted by: Khamon | December 19, 2006 at 12:05 PM

No Jardon, they already charge us for LAND usage! Prim allocations tied to square meters owned in a sim has worked wonderfully. Is it only in my warped Underverse that guest av and scripting allocations can be similarly, fairly distributed?

If someone wants to operate a club with a steady attendance of thirty-five patrons, they *should* have to own enough land in the sim to accomodate that percentage of the maximum. If someone wants to operate scripts that knock the overall clock down a notch, they *should* be required to own enough land in the sim to do so.

Obviously the scripting limitations wouldn't be enforced in sandboxes or "public areas." And I'm not sure how Nancy Drews scipted silks will blow up her nose when she's on somebody else's land. Mayhaps you have some contructive suggestions along that line?

Posted by: Khamon | December 19, 2006 at 12:10 PM

Jarod, if you can measure CPU, if you can trace a script using CPU back to its owner, you can charge for it *shrugs*.

Very simple. No special math required. Like a square meter of server *space* or emulation of space, so CPU time can also be measured; anything that can be measured can be metered.

Of course, this puts an end to your script-kiddie idyll of beging able to hog all the CPU on a sim even if you paid for only 512 m2; it deprives you of your veto on other people's FPS. But that's ok, time to grow up and pay.

If your basement pirates have faster processors, so? You will still have a draw on them. I'm looking forward to the time when you own and operate servers drawn upon by thousands of people, and you grow up and behave like a mature adult instead of a kid endlessly dipping into entitlement wells.

And what Khamon said. Khamon is certified tekkie-wikki (R) and I hope that will convince you.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 19, 2006 at 12:22 PM

You misunderstand me, Prok. I hope they do this. I'm not arguing that it's not possible, not feasible, or even difficult; I believe it's exactly the business plan Linden Lab needs to follow.

Posted by: Andrew Burton, aka Jarod Godel | December 19, 2006 at 12:25 PM

Lemme clarify, charging against an av's account for CPU cycles used around the grid is not a bad idea except for the fact that it will crash The Database All Hail The Central Database. I just think the charges should be applied against a balance generated as a function of the tier that av is paying each month plus a default.

So if I'm basic then yeah charge me for script cycles over default amount. If I'm paying $125/month tier, charge me the default plus some extra. If I'm paying $2925/month tier, charge me the default plus a lot extra.

Then, in a case such as rentals, I need to be able to distribute those cycles I'm paying for to other avs, somehow.

Posted by: Khamon | December 19, 2006 at 12:30 PM

I don't care how it is done; I care THAT it is done. And I'm not talking about a wallet for an avatar's draw as he flies all over the grid; I'm talking about an account on owned land.

And I don't fear it as applied to landowners with script-happy tenants, as I think a large landowner will be able to use rules to keep scripts tamed.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 19, 2006 at 12:50 PM

Overall, I agree that the mainland has long deserved tools to see top scripts and colliders. It's ridiculous that land owners can't know what's going on.

Also, let's get technical about the causes (*yayyy* waves little flag)!

Script performance in general varies depending on how well scripts are coded, but the fact is that every script takes up a minute amount of script time even if it's doing absolutely nothing. Even if all that script does is set a value upon being dropped into a prim, even if that script NEVER has the possibility of raising any events again, it's STILL polled constantly. I think it takes up 0.009ms or something? I forget what it is.

This means that poseballs, dildos, bling, and you name it all take up fractions of that precious 25.0ms of script time, just by existing. The problem is just COMPOUNDED by poor scripting practices. I once saw this pair of wings with 170 prims (can't remember if that was PER WING or not). This particular item changed color or hid itself by having one script on EVERY PRIM. So whenever the owner touched them, these suckers would make the sim, currently doing like 16,000 iterations per second, jump to about 400,000. Hadn't checked how that was affecting script time, but it was pretty horrid in general.

Avatar attachments do tend to be what lags a lot. You don't have to be able to see the script time they're using to know they suck, though. For example, I live in a new sim on a new class 5 server, relatively clean, with a very small build on it currently. We know exactly what is in our sim and what is using our script time. I can say offhand how many scripts are running in the sim, generally. It's also not currently very public, so we don't get visitors very often. This one time, a girl TPs in (not sure how she even found the completely unadvertised island while looking for products that are sold at the main store) and asks about something we sell. I make a note, as she leaves, that she is wearing 535 scripts on her person. Generally, this sort of thing comes from hideous bling attachments with a script on every one of their 500 prims, some silly orbiters, or whatever other poorly scripted devices. It really KILLS just by being there, and you don't even need to do the math to see it, knowing that all scripts take up time by default.

Lastly, 'colliders' really are a big deal, but this tends to be more of a short-term issue than long-term. What I mean by that is while scripts existing generally causes problems by becoming cumulative (even though single items can wreck the sim too, like those damn wings), collision problems aren't so cumulative, major issues tend to spring up instantly and can be easily resolved IF you find out where the hell they're happening. They really do bring sims to their knees, because the Havok engine sucks and because sims aren't programmed to deal with collision handling like they do with scripts (the scheduler). Everything that is physical causes collisions; even your avatar polls more than 5 collisions per second or so just by moving. When physical objects get 'stuck' in each other sometimes, it ends up polling as fast as the sim can handle, and everything else suffers since it can't schedule the collisions or cap their effect on overall performance. I once saw a gun someone made that fired out a little ball, which in turn made about 100 more little balls, and they all just clumped together and kept bumping into each other, causing the physics engine to overwhelm everything else that was happening. Immediately after being launched, this brought the sim to 0.01 time dilation. Everyone was just floating in mid-air, and while we could still talk to each other, no one could do shit. The fact that this sort of thing is still possible is absurd. Scripts got handed down a scheduler to keep one thing from overwhelming the rest or the performance of the sim, even though it's not perfect. Why can't the physics engine, which is notably crappier and more outdated than LSL, also have something like that? Just a thought.

Posted by: Tyken Hightower | December 19, 2006 at 01:24 PM

that she is wearing 535 scripts on her person.

Welcome to Ravenglass Rentals, where Lag Begins At Home.

I often gasp at the hair with 1,000 strands, all moving in flex; the bling, the jewelry, the scripted high-heels, the X-cite parts -- all humming and lagging as the gal puts out a dinette set for 8 which uses 1,500 prims alone.

Can you give more info on what does collide? I don't allow weapons. SO other than billiard balls, what collides?

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 19, 2006 at 02:25 PM

Prims don't have to be physical to cause collisions. Avatars literally collide with the ground mesh when we walk, with prims when we bump into them, in other words, all movement requires examination and facilitation by the physics engine.

A collision even has to be calculated to zero when we encounter a phantom prim. We can move through it, yes, but Havoc still "knows" (is calculating) that we are colliding with the object. Looking at the wora'uld through those eyes boggles the mind.

Posted by: Khamon | December 19, 2006 at 03:06 PM

Things don't have to be physical to cause collisions, but something has to move to collide with them. Avatars cause collisions, and anything in the world that is marked 'physical' can potentially bring apocalypse to bear upon your sim - it's just that most things aren't SUPPOSED to do so. And yes, phantom-physical things do cause collision events to be generated, but the physics engine doesn't have to work nearly as hard to deal with them, so it's much less of an issues. Also, being phantom, they don't get 'stuck' like regular physical prims do, so they don't do that horribly evil thing where they bounce around a million times per second and halt the sim. Sure, everyday collisions like you and I walking around or someone driving their Shadow won't stop the sim, but it's really sad how quickly physical objects can cause negative effects in total. Go to a sandbox where not much is happening, where time dilation is 1.00 or 0.99 and not fluctuating, and drop 20 physical balls (I have rezzing tools to do crazy stuff like this). You'll probably notice dilation cry as they all hit the ground. Make them all fly out in random directions in a crowded area, and no one will be able to move for a couple seconds as all the collisions are processed. Sad.

Posted by: Tyken Hightower | December 19, 2006 at 04:24 PM

On another note, there's a special way you can torture a torus, such that when you make it physical and put it out, this ONE PRIM literally brings the sim to a halt. Just by existing or hitting anything, one little torus will completely decimate your sim. Ask a Linden or someone else about it, it's even sold as a projectile weapon in some popular gadgets. Sick.

Posted by: Tyken Hightower | December 19, 2006 at 04:26 PM

Khamon, from what I understand, in your example of 3 1024 textures vs 12 256 textures, you'd be better off with the 3 1024 textures, with clever offsetting of the texture to show each of the four products (one in each corner). The real hit from excessive textures comes in the networking system of streaming, I believe. Because each texture is compressed into a jpg2000 format, they're already pretty close size-wise when it comes to kbs of data -- but they're all given a header as well during the streaming process, which your client requests from the server. Lots of requests typically = slower response overall, even if the textures are smaller in comparison. While it's true that smaller textures is less data to transfer to the client, it's more the overall number of requests that slows down the system.

Also, once the 3 textures are rezzed -- in your example, possibly within the first three vendor slots -- all the other 9 products will have their textures already rezzed for you.

Posted by: Rez | December 19, 2006 at 07:33 PM

>>Desmond, FlipperPA used to obsess about texture uploads on the forums, and he swore by this rule for malls reducing from 1024 to 512, so talk to him about your claims of deep lag from many facets.

It's not the many facets - that's pretty harmless, especially with cubes.

In my example, the point was that there were a lot of *unique* textures, one per face. I.e. too many textures overall, just like a texture vendor rotating images. All those unique textures really lag a sim.

Rez is correct about the 3 large textures being less trouble than 12 smaller ones.

Posted by: Desmond Shang | December 19, 2006 at 08:26 PM

I have always been frustrated that we are not given the tools or information needed for craftsman-like scripting. I count milliseconds in RL development, it is completely unnatural to me to have ABSOLUTELY NO CLUE as to what the real costs of any particular code are. SL internal architecture (although astonishingly brilliant in many ways) is surprisingly crude when it comes to resource allocation. It is extremely frustrating that those of us who strive for elegance in coding (because we think that's fun in itself) cannot. We just have to guess. And I, for one, do not like that. If I wanted to play a guessing game and repetitively try out different things repetitively [redundant redundancy intentional] I would buy a Nintendo.

Posted by: Buster Peel | December 20, 2006 at 01:29 PM

On a random note, related to CLIENT FPS, not sim related at all, I LOATHE THESE PEOPLE:
http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=156026

Posted by: Tyken Hightower | December 21, 2006 at 08:32 AM

 

Ban-Happy

You know, I've never focused on the ageplay furries. I honestly do not look for trouble in Second Life. I don't honestly *care* about lifestyles that consenting adults get up to in a virtual world. As I always say, my rentals are open to any who pay the box and abide by the simple rules. They don't -- they are asked to leave or even evicted, but for breaking a simple rule, i.e. putting out too many prims, not for the content of their lifestyles.

What they do on their lot is their business. Intellectually, and morally, I find some of these lifestyles reprehensible. When the Goreans and BDSM people aggressively go around to forums arguing their cultic creed, I critique it and rebut it. But I don't go out of my way inworld to try to harass people. I think it's wrong to go and take pictures and try to shame people on websites, even if you disagree with their lifestyle.

This summer, I believe it was, I happened to be summoned to the scene of a dispute between BDSM people, including some kind of Native Americans apparently, and some ageplayers in a house next door. I went wearing my Herald hat. I saw some ageplayers hurriedly removing their RL child porn. The other stuff they had out was child avatar porn, and it was sad. Upsetting for sure. Nobody could like this stuff who has kids. The problem was, however, is that these people were not violating the TOS. Guy Linden flew in, observed the situation, and left without action. The hysterical BDSM crowd seemed mainly preoccupied with finding some other dog to kick, having been kicked themselves. Watching this bizarre scene, with the "Homeland Security" poster, drums banging, and people screaming in all caps about a viritual world, you could see something very unsettling about the way these individuals in the house with the ageplay were being persecuted.

And that's why I decided not to cover the story. Because it was a very awful kind of story -- a story where you'd have to say that one set of people were doing something loathsome to some other people who were loathsome as a concept but were in the privacy of their own home. And even holding the pictures on my harddrive was awful to me -- I just decided "I don't need to do this" -- and I figured Walker or Uri or somebody could do the story if they want to. I knew that whatever I wrote, it didn't matter which side I took, or no side, I'd be treated to a huge ration of shit from lots of people and just add to my considerable burden in SL. I didn't join any groups of any sort; the pictures I took were exactly the pictures visible on the scene. I tried to IM the guy who was being hounded out of the house -- it was set to sale -- and he was too busy to talk to me.

Yeah, sick -- three ways from Sunday.

I forgot all about the story -- this happened months ago -- until this banning and accusation. What recourse do you have, however, when they began to behave like raging assholes? Because their twisted lifestyles of having power over other people often begins to spread. Apparently if they have me mixed up with some "group," that "group" is the SL Herald? But then surely they can concede that the press should be able to cover these incidents in the community???

I honestly had no opinion of something called the Girls' Club in Redear next to properties I own on 3 sims in the same river area. I never gave it a second look. It was an ugly building using Gene Replacement's prim hanging over the river in a stupid way, contrasting greatly with the surrounding beautiful builds in the area, but hey, life is short, then you die -- second life is shorter, then you log off -- who has the time to go grousing about mildly-bad builds? I don't.

I would have left all of this alone except I'm flying around, and the way their land is positioned, their red lines specifically banning me are a huge nuisance blocking me from being able to fly around the area. Since I have tenants and events, it's just a huge pain in the ass. I looked at the group -- they are renting from a landlord who told me the tenants set their own bans. I IM one of them and ask them, hey, what's up? I don't know you, don't know your club, don't get it.

Here's what ensues, and I post it as an example of the evils of mass banning, the evils of banning on hearsay and not direct experience.

I have NO idea what this is about, but it's the sort of thing we will be seeing LOTS more in SL as Philip turns policing over to residents. And therefore the only recourse we'll have is publicizing people like this who falsely accuse and falsely ban.

Prokofy Neva: You want to tell me why I am banned from this property when I don't even know you people?
Prokofy Neva: I live next door and have properties all around here and I can't even fly up the river hardly.
Prokofy Neva: what's up?
Relkin Warrigal: because you are a member of a group that is known for going to ageplay sims and giving them unwanted and unauthorized publicity
Prokofy Neva: ?
Prokofy Neva: I do not go to ageplay sims and give them unwanted publicity? what are you talking about?
Prokofy Neva: I have nothing to do with this? and am not in any groups?
Prokofy Neva: I do not like eating red lines in my neighbourhood, I don't care what people do on their properties, i have nothing to do with these themes.
Relkin Warrigal: SEVERAL members of your star trek group have been going around taking pictures of ageplay sims and posted them in a blog claiming that they are "hiding" the sexual side of ageplay behind what ever other themes
Prokofy Neva: Dude
Prokofy Neva: I am not in any Star Trek group?
Prokofy Neva: I have not taken any pictures?
Prokofy Neva: huh?
Relkin Warrigal: YOUR group's name is on the blog
Prokofy Neva: I have nothing to do with Star Trek
Prokofy Neva: I am not in any group related to these things?
Prokofy Neva: and never have been, I don't do RP things
Prokofy Neva: ?
Prokofy Neva: I run a rentals business
Prokofy Neva: Honestly, I do not do RP, themes, or whatever, I run a rentals business open to any lifestyle
Prokofy Neva: Star Trek I don't take as tenants because they want weapons, I don't allow weapons
Relkin Warrigal: hang on I'll see if I can find the blog or the group name
Prokofy Neva: well please do, I have nothing to do with Star Trek
Prokofy Neva: I have no Star Trek even renting from me due to the weapons thing
Prokofy Neva: all I care about is not flying into red lines, but whatever
Prokofy Neva: I don't like being banned by strangers over some wierd rumour or something I have nothing to do with
Relkin Warrigal: I say star trek because everyone in the pictures that belonged to that group was wearing the uniforms
Prokofy Neva: ok well I assure you a) I am in no Star Trek group b) I don't even rent to Star Trek that I know of due to weapons and griefing
Prokofy Neva: where is this blog? and how is my name associated with it?
Relkin Warrigal: we searched the group and names that were listed in the blog and your name was in group
Prokofy Neva: please show me these links
Relkin Warrigal: I'm trying to find them
Prokofy Neva: the name that is in a group makes no sense -- I am not in any groups
Prokofy Neva: the only groups I have you can see, land groups, my companies
Prokofy Neva: I dunno, I hate people playing police and witch hunt, this is stupid
Prokofy Neva: I have nothing to do with Star trek, furries, ageplay
Prokofy Neva: I recall once I covered a dispute between some girls and ageplayers for the Herald
Prokofy Neva: we ended up not even doing the story
Prokofy Neva: this was ages ago
Prokofy Neva: well if you work for a newspaper and cover a dispute in the community, I guess you are banned, whatever
Prokofy Neva: you people need to get a grip
Prokofy Neva: you only worsen your rep by being paranoid
Prokofy Neva: I assure you I do not persecute people or take their pictures
Prokofy Neva: my rentals are open to all who obey my simple rules, including not harassing others and not shooting
Prokofy Neva: so whatever
Prokofy Neva: do your thing
Relkin Warrigal: if you would be patient I can try to find the link, getting pissed off and being a jerk isnt helping
Prokofy Neva: um, dude, if you don't want a permanent enemy as a neighbour -- when what you had before was somebody merely mystified
Prokofy Neva: do not call me a jerk for being slandered by you
Prokofy Neva: accused of buillshit
Prokofy Neva: and banned for no good reason
Prokofy Neva: find the damn link and stop bullying me
Prokofy Neva: if you don't want red lines yourself all up and done here and don't want coverage for THAT
Prokofy Neva: so stop the bullshit
Prokofy Neva: I have dealt with you in good fath
Relkin Warrigal: I'm not bullying you, I asked you to wait while I looked and you copped an attitude
Relkin Warrigal: I have not been rude in any way, shape, or form to you
Prokofy Neva: baloney, you just called me a jerk
Relkin Warrigal: your name was found in association with a group that was a potential threat to us, that is why you were banned
Prokofy Neva: merely for questioning why the hell I'm banned by strangers over nothing?
Prokofy Neva: falsely accused>??
Prokofy Neva: it's bullshit
Prokofy Neva: I am telling you I have nothing to do with whatever RP thing you're doing here, nothing
Relkin Warrigal: yes I did, AFTER you got pissy with Me
Prokofy Neva: at all
Prokofy Neva: dude you STARTED by being pissy
Prokofy Neva: by banning me? hello?
Prokofy Neva: and accusing me and continuing to accuse me when I am not on any website or doing any of these things?
Prokofy Neva: produce the links please and cut it out
Prokofy Neva: I don't harass people and take pictures as you say, that's ridiculous
Relkin Warrigal: YOUR NAME WAS FOUND IN THE GROUP THAT WAS A THREAT
Prokofy Neva: WHERE IS IT DUMBASS
Prokofy Neva: MY NAME CAN'T BE IN A GROUP ASSHOLE
Prokofy Neva: I AM NOT IN A GRUOP
Prokofy Neva: LOOK AT MY GODDAMN GROUPS DUH
Prokofy Neva: AND PROVE I AM IN SOME GROUP, EVERYONE KNOWS THAT IS FAKE
Relkin Warrigal: nevermind you're being an asshole, so I'm just gonna mute you
Prokofy Neva: you are the asshole

COMMENTS:

Uhm.. I think he might be referring to "Second Life Safari," because we named our ship "The U.S.S. Prokofy Neva" when we did our Star Trek themed tour of Second Life:

http://www.somethingawful.com/index.php?a=4206

And I have absolutely no sympathy for people who engage in pedophile fantasies on the internet. BDSM is just silly, The furry bestiality is disgusting, but the ageplay pedophilia is just sick and awful.

Posted by: King Frederick | December 17, 2006 at 03:04 AM

You probably shouldn't have yelled at him and walked off, Prokofy. That temper won't get you far.

I've dealt with having a temper like yours - little patience for those who don't have to appreciate simple facts. And ya gotta just hang looser about people as their actions don't impact you if you don't let them.

I hate banlines, too.

Posted by: Crissa | December 17, 2006 at 03:32 AM

Hey prokofy, how about getting Linden Lab to implement smoother banline handling your new project?

You're good at getting through to linden lab during town halls, i'd suggest telling them to change the ban line system so that instead of making you bounce off of ban lines, it either makes you "warp" straight through to the other side of the banned parcel, or maybe even "ghost" through them (that is, on your side it looks like you fly through, but on other clients you get stuck on the banline until you emerge on the other side.

That way, banlines won't be so annoying when you hit them, but they will still work the same way server-side.

Love,
Howie

Posted by: Howie Lament | December 17, 2006 at 03:38 AM

I didn't realize that this ridiculous USS Prokofy Neva was somehow related to Star Trek; that this in turn as going around and harassing furries or ageplayers. I have nothing to do with any of this stuff.

As for tempers, Crissa, tempers start by fucktards who ban other people "just because," and are too dense and stupid to hear the facts when presented with them. I asked the guy 10 times to present me with a website -- something. And he has nothing. I sit there waiting a half hour and he can't produce the evidence he has that I am in a griefing group.

I am not in a griefing group. This griefing group of fucktards merely used my name on a griefing object.

People who harass you, ban you, make false accusations against you, are not people that you accommodate and play nice with. They can only understand force.

I hardly find the sick fucks of somethingawful.com calling the ageplayers sick a very um...compelling...statement. Only in Second Life.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 17, 2006 at 04:35 AM

BTW, an interesting update to this story is how this fellow tried to sic the Lindens on me.

He contacted Live Help to bitch, and these Lindens, who claim they won't be policing the world anymore, and leaving the driving to us, instantly appeared.

[23:55] Lia Olaria: does copying/pasting a conversation publicly outside of SL without the other person's knowlege violate the terms of service?
[23:57] Nicole Linden: yes I believe it does

I've writte to Nicole explaining that it is most certainly not, because there is no language in the CS or TSO about posting OUTSDIE of Second Life.

Furthermore, I've written immediately to Philip to ask for a crystal-clear definition. Of course, he doesn't answer email that often, but this is vital -- if the Lindens are going to literallly throw us to the dogs -- ageplaying furries -- and leave us no recourse when they begin to harass us and unleash rampant injustice on the grid -- then they have to accept that public discussion of the issues surrounding community standards must be permitted.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

Ageplayers get really insanely furious when people zoom in on them, take pictures, and post them on third-party sites to shame them. Well, it's not nice. It's not a practice I condone, singling out a person's lifestyle on their property and harassing them for it.

It's like these fucktards and SC camming into my tenants home, with King Frederick providing the intellectual justification for intrusion by saying there is no privacy in SL, taking a picture of my tenant's stuff, and posting it.

I believe that's wrong. But it's not a TOS violation.

By the same token, if people who don't like that done to them and do not think their behavior is subject to outside discussion, begin to make blanket bans or behave badly in SL, they can't expect people not to discuss it.

It's just going to be dam WIERD if the Lindens leave us locked up in here with aggressive BDSM, Gor, and ageplay furry assholes who literalize the TOS/CS violations in ways such as to harass, and who make every rule bend their way, and police sims in ways that will be really nasty, and then be able to successfully have a veto on public objections to their behaviour.

The only way you can get the good to drive the bad out of SL is when you do not attempt to suppress speech, good or bad, liked or disliked.

 

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 17, 2006 at 04:48 AM

>"It's not a practice I condone, singling out a person's lifestyle on their property and harassing them for it."

You're right, that's not acceptable.

Looking at your chat I noticed something, You did all the talking. At no point did the person accuse you of anything. He or she simply informed you that the griefers were part of one of the same groups you are in, likely one of your rental groups.

If you had simply stopped talking and not gotten so angry and simply informed her "I'm a landlord, I have nothing to do with any of that", she very likely would have gladly removed you from the ban list. But with the harsh way you spoke to her, assuming she was accusing you of something, and continuing to go on and on while she was busy trying to locate the information for you... frankly I would have muted you too.

Actually, having been griefed so often yourself (another thing that is unnacceptable) I would think you would understand a person's desire to do what is necessary to protect themselves.

Posted by: Allana Dion | December 17, 2006 at 05:43 AM

Allana is right. You guarenteed that you wouldn't be unbanned by filling every pause in the conversation with rants.

They made a mistake. Your aggressive reaction to it meant there was no way it was going to be corrected. Yelling at people is a sure way to not get what you want in a virtual world.

Posted by: Ian Betteridge | December 17, 2006 at 06:36 AM

Oh my god, it's absolutely hilarious how you go into a situation that was a simple misunderstanding and could be rectified easily... And totally ruin it because you're an impatient douche. That guy was trying to explain himself and you basically sat there getting more and more worked up as he looked for the link, effectively making the situation worse ON YOUR OWN through threats and insults.

Posted by: Mike | December 17, 2006 at 07:13 AM

I can attest to the fact that prokofy is a griefer of the worst sort. I personally witnessed her dressed in the avatar of an 8yo boy trying to solicit sex from newbies at Ahern. If any refused and called her a 'freak', 'perv' or 'whacko' she filed AR's against them for verbal assault. seek help prokofy....

Posted by: loveless | December 17, 2006 at 09:25 AM

How can so many Lindens be so ignorant of their own TOS?

This isn't the first such instance, by far.

You'd think they'd train them on it, or at least force them to read it.

coco

Posted by: Cocoanut Koala | December 17, 2006 at 10:44 AM

"I hardly find the sick fucks of somethingawful.com calling the ageplayers sick a very um...compelling...statement"

I hope that, one day, you'll be able to tell the difference between stupid, vulgar jokes, and taking pleasure in the thought of raping children. One day, perhaps, one day.

Posted by: King Frederick | December 17, 2006 at 11:28 AM

Allana, once again you're here with your bossy, controlling morality-maven hectoring -- and that's really unseemly when someone represents an objectionable lifestyle, sorry.

You read a text like this with appalling tunnel vision.

This guy accused me of being in a group and decided the information was true -- by banning me. Most people, when you question something politely to start with, as I did, realize there may be a problem and they rectify it -- they don't do a controlling power trip on you making you wait half an hour while they supposedly check something they should know instantly -- that's what this is about. I've had it happen a number of times before when I've been banned and questioned it. The people, when they hear you asking in good faith and presenting evidence are APOLOGETIC it has happened, not belligerent assholes as this guy clearly was.

This guy belligerently came over to the border of my land merely because I flew *to my property* which merely happened to be next door to his, and stood there like a junkyard dog on guard, before I even IM'd him. I was busy IMing the actual owner of the property, the landlord, and trying to see if she had banned me for some reason.

He menacingly stood there and I then began IMing him, dressed in black, carrying some kind of weapon.

My name is not even listed in a group. All that happened is that a griefing group took my name and put it on their griefing object, this airship "USS Prokofy Neva". THAT was enough for them to ban me.

You are unable to read a text like this impartially and critically because you are so blinded by hate and the desire to set other people "right".

Anyone can see that when I said this, "Prokofy Neva: you only worsen your rep by being paranoid
Prokofy Neva: I assure you I do not persecute people or take their pictures
Prokofy Neva: my rentals are open to all who obey my simple rules, including not harassing others and not shooting"

This fellow then went into a rage and called me a jerk. I didn't call HIM a name. I pointed out one once again that he was wrong in his accusations, and told him he was being paranoid. That was the truth.

Most people in SL can't handle the truth.

I'll tell you who is the impatient "douche" in this situation -- the asshole who jumps to conclusions and bans me, and despite a steady, sane, non-insulting response made to him a dozen times, continues to be paranoid, distrustful, wary, suspicious AND a controlling dick. NOTHING apologetic. NOTHING conceding hey, I could be wrong. But then...what can I expect from a hostile asshole ageplaying furry group, eh? I went into the situation not having any particular prejudices or assumption about this club. I hadn't even thought at first that "ageplay furry" might mean they were under attack. In fact, to be honest, I even thought "ageplay furry" was some kind of parody or humorous RP of the sort that Lordfly makes. I hadn't really figured out that, oh, there are not only ageplayers but FURRY ageplayers ROLF.

He could have said, after seeing that I came there and made a good faith statement to him in earnest after the first half dozen tries said, ok, I'm not sure how we came to this conclusion but let me check.

MOST people, when you confront them over a ban like this rationally, as I've found over and over again, realize that if you WERE a griefer, you wouldn't be quietly coming back to them and IMing them days after they have put in the ban, i.e. not five minutes after they've banned you for shooting at them, but weeks later when they discover for some mystery they've banned you can don't know why.

Instead of suspending his nasty suspicions, which are merely based on having an objectionable lifestyle and having to become uber-defensive about it and brutal to other people, he can only go on being the ass that he is.

I didn't make any threats and insults. I said he was paranoid -- which he was.

I had no truck with this guy whatsoever. But now he has insured that this issue will be discussed publicly, and serve as a critical example of what will happen when all the real douches of Second Life -- all the aggressive assholes from BDSM-Gor-Ageplay-Furry-Whatever -- began to take over huge swathes of territory and make everyone they don't like or suspect or think is a problem eat red ban lines.

This is what I want everyone to think about -- hard. This is going to be worse and worse and worse.

I would have left them alone, but not when they take an area that previously was a joy to fly around and put huge square ugly ban lines jutting out over the whole beautiful river. It's just fucked, and I won't have it. Try to imagine this scene here too -- a beautiful, peaceful river basin with three PG sims coming to a corner. The fourth corner is only a point from a mature sim -- a parcel he has taken over with this huge, dominating, ugly furry ageplay bigass club hanging menacingly over this formerly-beautiful basin. It takes a special kind of asshole to buy a property like that, in a four-corner sim area where everyone else for miles has built beautiful homes, waterfalls, and low-impact stores, and menace the entire area with a hulk of a mature build -- and one with hundreds of ban names on the list.

Trust me, I don't do ANYTHING to minimize the rape of children and fight against this where it counts -- in RL.

King Frederick's concerns about raping children are touching -- but abstract by contrast with his ugly group's members *actual* deeds in SL *themselves* including whacking me over the head with a replica of the World Trade Center and ridiculing the deaths of terrorist victims; raping one of my tenants (I don't care if you find such virtual harassment exusable because it is not in RL); spreading the hideous tub-girl picture all over dozens of my sims, over and over again for months causing real revulsion and harm to real people (I don't care if it is a "virtual game" to you), and putting cut-off bloodied furry heads all over my property, causing distress to tenants and furries in particular.

In other words, let's contrast *the actual bad behaviour* of W-Hat/v-5/and other related groups with the abstraction of what they think others do. That's all you can do in SL, you have to document the truth as best as possible.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 17, 2006 at 12:42 PM

Ian, I don't see why I should be dancing attendance and sucking up to some idiot who has banned me and can't even remember why.

After 20 minutes of talking to him politely and making an eloquent case, I could see he was still a total fuck, bent only on persecuting others in the mistaken belief they are persecuting him -- and therefore fueling the whole fucked engine of fuck-you hedonism and aggression in SL.

No amount of reason or eloquence works with people like this who show such sustained periods of idiocy and belligerence.

I think then all you can do is document the injustices.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 17, 2006 at 12:45 PM

You are unable to read a text like this impartially and critically because you are so blinded by hate and the desire to set other people "right"

Hate? No. Another sign that you read your own interpretations into what I say.

Bottom line, you were extremely hostile and made yourself sound exactly like the kind of griefer those people are trying to avoid.

>"Relkin Warrigal: YOUR NAME WAS FOUND IN THE GROUP THAT WAS A THREAT
Prokofy Neva: WHERE IS IT DUMBASS
Prokofy Neva: MY NAME CAN'T BE IN A GROUP ASSHOLE
Prokofy Neva: I AM NOT IN A GRUOP
Prokofy Neva: LOOK AT MY GODDAMN GROUPS DUH
Prokofy Neva: AND PROVE I AM IN SOME GROUP, EVERYONE KNOWS THAT IS FAKE"

Do you not see that for someone who doesn't understand that you are actually the owner of each group on your profile (I'm assuming you are), these statements could sound like you're contradicting yourself?

"I am not in a group"
"Look at my groups"

The SSProkofy suggestion was from King. Relkin said your name was found in a group that was a threat.

Did it ever occur to you to ask what the name of the group was so that you could check up on it yourself and make sure the griefers weren't your own tenants?

Posted by: Allana Dion | December 17, 2006 at 01:19 PM

>"After 20 minutes of talking to him politely and making an eloquent case, I could see he was still a total fuck"

Where exactly was the politeness and eloquence?

Posted by: Allana Dion | December 17, 2006 at 01:20 PM

Prok...I've defended you to others on more than one occasion, and I agree with you that child porn is reprehensible. But your temper is never going to get you anywhere with people. I know you're passionate about your opinions, but this person didn't start off giving you grief. You asked your question and then proceeded to badger him until you got muted.

As for age-play, it's kind of an odd thing. Personally I find it sick, but if it's between consenting adults, it's not my place to tell them how to behave. When they start mixing in actual child porn however, that's when they cross the line and someone needs to put a stop to it. If the people you mentioned had actual RL child pornography displayed, I don't see how that's not illegal in Second Life when it breaks the laws of most civilized jurisdictions (excluding Mississippi and Arkansas).

If that's not a TOS violation, it seriously needs to be. I personally don't care for differing opinions on this subject...the exploitation of children, sexual or otherwise, needs to be seriously punished.

Posted by: Boss Melnitz | December 17, 2006 at 01:33 PM

>"As for age-play, it's kind of an odd thing. Personally I find it sick, but if it's between consenting adults, it's not my place to tell them how to behave. When they start mixing in actual child porn however, that's when they cross the line and someone needs to put a stop to it. If the people you mentioned had actual RL child pornography displayed, I don't see how that's not illegal in Second Life when it breaks the laws of most civilized jurisdictions"

*nodding in agreement*

Posted by: Allana Dion | December 17, 2006 at 02:24 PM

Hi, Boss,

Oh, I disagree about the "temper" stuff (and your waxing indignant on me about the punishable and illegal child porn stuff is silly, because I provide absolutely no safe haven for that).

People who ban others are ALREADY in a temper. People who then come to the edge of of their property in a black suit with a weapon and stand menacing by your property border, merely because you are on your own property, in IMs, are ALREADY in a temper. THEY are in the angry/paranoid/suspicious/hostile zone -- you are merely flying home to your property getting bounced by ugly obnoxious ban lines.

People who then refuse, after 30 minutes of explaining, to "get it" are ALREADY in a temper. After all, their landlord, whom I know well and have done business with repeatedly, is also evidently in IMs during this time quietly telling them, hey, you have the wrong person here, Prokofy is not in Star Trek and not a griefer.

So please, get the context, and stop it with the "temper" stuff. It's not about "anger". It's not about "my temper". It's about the bullying, intrusive temper of this other guy in the first place. So, it's about telling bullies off. Often the technique that bullies use most effectively is emotional blackmail. They adopt this rigid, faux-polite demeanor, and start saying stuff like "I'm only telling you quietly in IMs, Sir," even as they perpetrate something outrageous which is the larger picture people can't see.

As for these people next door, I don't feel it's my duty to camera-zoom into their club or use alts or take pictures and attempt to discern, do they have RL child porn? or do they only have avatar porn -- and frankly, both are as creepy and as sick.

I think it's a very good thing that groups that are outraged about any kind of fake or real child porn and child avis in general are prepared to organize and fight to the death these really grave evils. I think any effort by Lindens or by the age-players themselves to oppress them, falsely accuse them, report them speciously, or suppress their free expression is more than suspect and self-serving -- it's an offense against the freedom they claim to wish to enjoy untrammeled themselves.

So these furry ageplayers need to take about 10 giant steps backwards and stop being such aggressive fucks to other people. Other people can and do have the right to report on behaviour they find objectionable, and to post it on third-party sites. That right is sacred.

Unfortunately -- and this is where the California dope-smokers at LL come in -- the TOS backs up their right to complain effectively if this is done inworld. And that's why all of us need to band together and get the Lindens to stop this idiocy of punishing the publication of chat logs. They have added a utility now in the client that automatically, with one-click, always records chat logs. That ought to be all the proof we need to convince them to stop criminalizing the publication of chat logs.

In this terribly rigged set-up they are about to perpetrate on us, where they are going to leave us at the hands of aggressive fucktard ban-happy ageplay furries, we definitely need to be able to publish chat logs to handle resident disputes. It is all we have. It is the only recourse we have. And we need, like Patrick Henry, to fight for this to the death NOW if we don't want a permanent dystopian Metaverse forever.

From a moral plane, both fake and real child porn are sick and both contemptible. Of course one is worse -- in the real world -- far worse! But in the virtual moral plane, where the effect is on avatars, both are bad.
And in that sense, it's really sick that Second Life has forced us all to sit here and decide in some moral void that one kind of porn that is involving real people is bad, but the kind involving avatars is ok. That's sick. It's a terrible moral erosion. The Lindens have brought us this. It's within their power to ban ALL forms of child porn -- full stop. But instead, they blink, and even say now that they cannot vouch for the ages of the people on their servers unless they are on the Teen Grid. !!!!

It's well known that numerous porn sites put out what really is calculated to appear as child porn by making up the actors to look like they are under 18 deliberately. And they also then put a disclaimer that all actors are over 18. It's manipulative and sick.

The same thing is done in SL by making child av porn -- no one can tell if these are RL children or not.

The people in the house back in the summer next to the Native American lot may well have had RL porn out, or avatar porn made with RL children behind the avs, who knows? I didn't see it, but from what everyone said, and judging from the obvious blank places in a wall of framed pictures, they had quickly removed the RL porn from their walls to avoid prosecution. The evidence is circumstantial but it's likely.

By the time I was there and Guy Linden was there, there was no evidence but hearsay. And it's not for me to check server logs, but Lindens. Complaint were filed -- there were storms of them.

Desmond Shang, the smug burgher of Second Life, has simply put NO AGE PLAY NO DEBATES into his covenants. That's great. That's what everyone should do *who is in a position to enforce it*.

On the mainland, however, this isn't going to be possible if you run a large, open, public rentals agency.

That is, if I saw RL child porn (and that doesn't mean a montage of Harry Potter's head on a naked actor's body which is obviously obscene porn art, but not child porn), I would immediately return it. I absolutely would not condone any such RL child porn photographs, just as I wouldn't condone snuff films. These are against the TOS anyway. The Lindens will declare them "obscene" under their TOS and remove them. So I have a back-up for enforcement.

In a rentals where you have things on open, just like the entire world of SL itself, you cannot go around policing every single person. You have to rely on people self-complying (most do) and the reports of other tenants. I've never seen anything like this on my properties and I get through all the sims constantly. Nor has anyone ever sent in a complaint.

I remember once an ageplayer tried to rent from me, put out thousands of prims, and I had grounds to immediately expel her.

And that's just the sick thing -- the people who ageplay are often doing this as a form of annoyance and griefing to others. I find it quite telling that Baba Yamamoto always appears in a little child avi to make people uncomfortable. There's a high quotient of griefing in chosing to manifest this way in SL.

So Boss, I can only nod in agreement that yes, if the people had RL porn out, not only would it be in TOS violation, I could also readily delete it.

And perhaps it would in fact make eminent good sense for the Lindens to bite the bullet on this and simply say "NO CHILD PORN PERIOD FULL STOP" and push aside this entire foolish grey area of "child porn made with adults using child avis".

But surely you see the issues here:

o People whisk it away when reported
o People use Internet porn designed to look like child porn which may not be
o People use child avi porn which may or may not be made by real children
o People dress as children in SL being adults even when they don't engage in sexual play of anykind -- they are "tinies".

And Boss, I have to point out the context here, so that readers understand who you are. You are my long-time tenant. And you also used to sell soft porn that is legal in mature areas. I haven't seen you sell this porn on any of my rentals lately, but you have in the past -- it is legal to do so. So you could well be hugely invested in trying to carve out a really bright line so that you can go on doing what you want to do, and not be harassed yourself.

I find that many of those bleating the loudest about child porn in SL are both BDSMers and porn movie and picture merchants. They want everyone to know they draw the line so that no brush tars them.

So wax indignant all you like, I appreciate it, but the context is more than a bit self-serving.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 17, 2006 at 02:40 PM

BTW, I really find the W-Hat fake battle against BDSM and child porn utterly manipulative and insincere, given that some of the people wear child avis and do gross and disgusting things, and they are known for their habit of putting out giant pictures or prim sculptures of penises, etc.

Their disgusting "art" is well documented by the odious Arahan Claveau, who also justifies it as "art" and "free expression".

So again, like the BDSMers and porn-sellers in general trying to make a "safe playground" to do whatever the hell they want, they are interested in creating distinctions -- putting furry ageplayers on the other side of the taboo line, even as they do gross and disgusting and immoral things themselves.

It really is sick.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 17, 2006 at 02:53 PM

>>Desmond Shang, the smug burgher of Second Life, has simply put NO AGE PLAY NO DEBATES into his covenants. That's great. That's what everyone should do *who is in a position to enforce it*.

Technically, I only banned simulating sexual activity with minors.

I wasn't entirely sure what the term 'age play' implies, thinking it might encompass more harmless activities such as pretending to be a minor in a Second Life theatric performance, for instance.

Desmond,
Day Shift Manager at Smugburgher

Posted by: Desmond Shang | December 17, 2006 at 04:03 PM

The card I have from a lease in Caledon uses the expression "ageplay" *shrugs*.

Perhaps you've tightened up the language more recently.

Day Shift Manager at Smugburgher is EXACTLY what you are, as your pay is actly the pay of a burger flipper.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 17, 2006 at 04:50 PM

"King Frederick's concerns about raping children are touching --"

Yeah, I know, "don't produce child pornogrpahy" is such a scandalous idea these days.

"but abstract by contrast with his ugly group's members *actual* deeds in SL *themselves*"

Okay, let's compare your list to **The Production and Use of Child Pornography**

"whacking me over the head with a replica of the World Trade Center"

Oh my goodness! You're right, that is just like producing images of 7 year olds getting raped.

"ridiculing the deaths of terrorist victims"

Making an offensive joke -- yup, precisely morally equivolent to producing pornographic images of 8 year olds for pedophiles to masturbate and fantasize raping children.

"raping one of my tenants"

AHahahaha, Yes, because pushing a button and animating their avatar is tantamount to *rape*.

"spreading the hideous tub-girl picture all over dozens of my sims,"

You're right, being an annoying dick with a gross picture is almost IDENTICAL to hosting a community in which adutls tittilate themselves by pretending to rape children and passing child pornography out amongst themselves.

"causing real revulsion and harm to real people (I don't care if it is a "virtual game" to you)"

Yes, 'Real Virtual,' it's a new category like 'Gigantic tininess'

"putting cut-off bloodied furry heads all over my property,"

Wow, depicting cartoon animals being killed -- yes, exactly like having parties where tenants sexually penetrate an eight year old girl.

You are ethically retarded. Wake up and snap out of whatever the hell this *videogame* is doing to you.

Posted by: King Frederick | December 17, 2006 at 06:57 PM

"I really find the W-Hat fake battle against BDSM and child porn utterly manipulative and insincere, given that some of the people wear child avis and do gross and disgusting things, and they are known for their habit of putting out giant pictures or prim sculptures of penises, etc."

BDSM is just weird. Child pornography is awful. W-Hatters might satirize ageplayers (for example, with a recent build having creepy cameras all over a playground) but I have yet to meet any W-hatters who enjoy boffing children.

Posted by: King Frederick | December 17, 2006 at 06:59 PM

BTW, people are not "banned from my blog" for their content.

I have a simple rule. You have to post with a Second Life name, i.e. with an active account name.

So "Petey," whoever the hell he is, is banned until he has a proper name.

BTW, I find it humorous that people google-witch hunt me and fill up articles about me with entire lists of false information based on people with the same name.

I'm not a "failed academic" unless never having been an academic is being a "failed academic" lol. Nor am I a sociologist. My area is Russian studies. I'm a translator by profession, I have many books to my credit. And the jobs I'm known for in RL are all jobs I still have in good standing, and I haven't been dismissed or anything of the kind.

It's amazing how people who disagree with you and also look for targets to bully on the Internet project their own weaknesses and insecurities on others. They imagine them failed, unemployed psychotics living in basements. I actually live on a high floor with a grand view : )

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 18, 2006 at 01:09 AM

I agree with the original poster that the ageplayer furries are fantastically banhappy. They use that banlink system to squelch anyone who may be a naysayer from going to their land, though that is your right. I feel though it seems like the image they are putting forth that they have something to hide. Overall the situation seems like crossed wires.
I guess if you want prok, I can try explaining Second Life Safari to that person and try sort this out. I know how much banlines/group only lines can be a bummer. Might be worth a try if I can find provide I can get some free time.

Posted by: Kerian Bunin | December 18, 2006 at 02:15 AM

ok, this is ridiculous...you keep ranting and raving about how you have been slandered and abused, when in fact, by posting My name and My co-owners name in a public venue in an effort to bad mouth us, you are the one who is slandering us...yes I do admit, we were wrong for banning you without double checking. but as SEVERAL of the posts above point out, YOU were the one that forced this situation to escalate to where it is now....anyone who would actually take the time to stop and talk to us, and at least TRY to get to know us can tell you that we are NOT unreasonable people. As many of the other replies to this article (whining and bitching?) have pointed out, by refusing to listen to Me, and getting pissed off and muting Me, you eliminated the possibility to handle this as adults.

I'd like to point out here, that I have not muted you, I merely stopped talking to a person who refused to converse with Me rationally.....having said that.... I am taking this chance to be the bigger man AGAIN, and offer you the chance to contact Me and work this out....and I ask that you retract any and all "attacks" against Me and/or My group, and I also ask for an appology for not giving Me the chance to show you the evidence I had, which, if you look up at King Fredrick's first post, he has provided....again, it was an honest mistake, and we sincerely appologize.

....and just for the record, My group does not post, nor do we condone child pornography or AV pornogrophy.....ageplay is NOT pornography, the name itself implies that it is fake....agePLAY is just that (at least in My group)....consenting adults ROLEPLAYING aka PRETENDING to live out fantasies that there is no way in hell we would ever do in real life. In fact, many of our members are not interested in the "adult" aspect of ageplay at all, they are merely living out a second chlidhood in a safe environment.

Posted by: Relkin Warrigal | December 18, 2006 at 02:51 PM

as for being "ban-happy" I just did what any respectable person would do when trying to protect they're friends...I banned what at the time seemed like a threat...which as I stated above, does not mean I am unwilling to talk and unban anyone that is willing to be reasonable, and respect My privacy, just as I would theirs

Posted by: Relkin Warrigal | December 18, 2006 at 05:28 PM

Prok, this is simply what you get for participating in Star Trek ageplay groups in your sims.

Yuck.

I hope more people read this so they know to avoid the horrible things that obviously go on in the sims you own and the groups you're in.

Absolutely disgusting.

Posted by: Jellin Pico | December 18, 2006 at 05:44 PM

another side note.....I dont rent from Prokofy, I had never even spoken to him before the other day when he refused to give Me 5 minutes to track down the link

Posted by: Relkin Warrigal | December 18, 2006 at 10:47 PM

1. People who are paranoid idiots and ban people on the basis of blogs or pictures or lists instead of on actual concrete experience inworld are lame losers, and that's the story here. I object to it, strenuously, as it devalues my land. And there was no 'five minutes' but 30.

2.Once again, this is not about friends, privacy, or one's rights on land. It's about going out with rabid paranoid hysteria and grabbing every single stray bit of information to use to defend oneself hysterically. I'm not in any group. I'm not in any Star Trek thing. What Relkin did was grab the stupid name of this griefing ship, "USS Prokofy Neva" and make assumptions that it wasn't in fact made from an object that either spoofs my info or actually uses a moddable object of my on copy. In fact, Scout Detritus is on record buying 30 copies of my planter of Slexchange, something you have GOT to wonder what this weapons maker was buying for -- certainly not plants to decorate his home.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 18, 2006 at 11:36 PM

Everyday, I am amazed at how Prokofy can be referring to someone completely unrelated, and at the same time sum herself up perfectly.

Posted by: Rhetoric Petshop | December 19, 2006 at 12:41 AM

you're right, I did make an assumption, I've appoligized for the mistake...the reason you remain banned, is because, instead of handling this like an adult and being civil, you chose to be a complete ass and start spreading slander about Me....which gives Me reason to not want you on My land....instead of going on and on about how it interferes with your ability to get around the grid, try teleporting, or even flying above the banned areas.....I know this can be done because I personally do it, and I see people doing it all the time....that way you save yourself from looking like a moron by trying to justify yourself in public slander against someone else and proving that the ban is actually justified

Posted by: Relkin Warrigal | January 03, 2007 at 07:26 PM

I didn't spread slander about you. I reported that you hysterically banned me without any direct reason from any direct attack in SL on your land. That's got to be fought, hammer and tong.

Where's the slander? You did *exactly this* as the record amply shows. It's hard to live with the consequences of your behaviour and a mirror held up to it, I realize.

But this is what you did do.

There is never ANY ban that is justified that is not related to actual harassment/griefing/encroachment.

I'm here to fight that -- the idea that you ban people for "content" reasons because "you don't like their behaviour" or "what they write on the forums".

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | January 03, 2007 at 10:14 PM

if you have a problem with people banning because the dont like someone's behaviour, then you better talk to linden labs about doing away with bans all together, because that's what all bans are....griefers are banned for bad behavior, you were banned mistakenly at first, and you have received an appology for it....the ban remains in effect because you're being a complete asshole....try treating people with respect and you might get better responses

Posted by: Relkin Warrigal | January 10, 2007 at 10:39 PM

You're a freak Prokofy. Worse than anyone I've ever met.

Posted by: Anonymouse | December 11, 2007 at 01:03 PM

Bloglog

Explaining Second Life to Howard Rheingold and other Web 1.0 skeptics like Clay Shirky and Web 2.0 skeptics like Danah Boyd

Settling yet another PR maven straight on her misguided notion that she can ask, "Should You Be A Second Life First Adopter?"

On Raph Koster's new game in the works.

On Terra Nova fighting Clay Shirky's dis of SL.

Marveling that no one else is freaking at the intrusiveness of Skype having new lie-detection software!
(Go to www.clickableculture.com and look for the article Scan Skype Stress With ‘Lie Detector’
written by Tony Walsh / posted on December 15, 2006 @ 9:06 am - linking is broken.

Confronting Baba Yamamoto about just who *did* make CopyBot and gets no answer.

COMMENTS

Hi, I thought you might want a head's up that your fourth and fifth links might be broken.

Posted by: Allana Dion | December 17, 2006 at 04:25 PM

Tony's links are broken, I can't figure out what's up.

I fixed the other one.

Here's one I forgot:

http://talkback.zdnet.com/5208-11475-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=28398&messageID=531054&start=-1

In reply to Dana Gardner on the eeriness of SL.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 18, 2006 at 01:49 AM

:( Serious business...

Posted by: Baba | December 19, 2006 at 09:30 AM

TIME for a Change

I'm sad for Linden Lab, because no matter how critical I am of their management of the social and political side of Second Life, they have created a social and technical revolution with their 3-D streaming world, and I am an eager and hearty participant in it.

But they've just gotten the worst possible spin on what they are doing, from what is likely the most read source in the known universe -- Time magazine. I hope this doesn't sink them -- but, hey, there's always Newsweek! And U.S. News and World Report and Der Spiegel...

I winced when Time put out their issue a few weeks ago with their top inventions of 2006 -- and they left out Second Life and put in only MySpace. Yuck. How could THAT happen given the huge hype juggernaut rolling for SL now? Yet, I figured that it just wasn't understood or not compelling enough -- the invention will get in the list *next year*.

Now I start to write this blog with the cover story hinted at last night on Google news about SL -- flip to the Time website...and see that the Man of the Year (as we used to call it) is...Me.

That is -- all of us. Person of the Year is YOU. As in YOUTube. MySpace. Social software. An entire celebration of the Me-ness of Me that would make Walt Whitman blush.

And in this special issue on Me and You as the People of the Year -- an issue being picked up, as I know from experience, in the airports in London or Tokyo or Warsaw or Tashkent or Khartoum -- all over the world everywhere -- there is an article on Second Life.

Wince again.

It's about a guy from Time who skips the special tours supplied by Catherine Linden or the Metaverse Myrmidons (and that's a good thing) and goes in the Welcome Area/Orientation Island experience all on his own.

Just like Prokofy has always been complaining, he is swooped upon by one of the Helpers/Mentors/Volunteers -- self-appointed and approved by Jeska -- who in fact use these areas to purvey their own clubs and products and stores.

The hapless Time dude is whisked off to a sex club, where he is clicked on in vain, as he has not spent the $5 -- or actually more like $12 US dollars -- he needs for an X-cite or other brand of realistic, working penis. His entire piece revolves around his...member...and it's unfortunate that his -- and his would-be mentor's -- mind was in the gutter (it's all too easy to "go there" in SL).

And the piece as a result is about the tough learning curve and the $5 penis -- nothing else. That's it. None of the controlled impressions the spin-meisters like to get (Cory is once again citing the unique and very rare example of Shockproof and their work with stroke victims to whiten the reputation of a world threatening to be overtaken -- as you can see even below -- by ageplay BDSM furries...)

Do you think that FINALLY, the Lindens might be willing to completely scrap this system of orientation and newbie welcoming? They were always so chary of ever telling any of the griefers in the WA to get out with their noises and ugly attachments and stupidity -- they were literalists and never could find cause. So they sequestered themselves on closed OIs and HIs, and had their mentor system -- corrupt in part if not in whole -- run the newbie experience. The results we see not only within SL -- but in a lot of other places from university and geek sites that proclaim SL to be "lame" or "gay" or "retarded" to those like Terra Nova and Many2Many which have much more serious critiques.

Or perhaps, I'm naive. Maybe it was hopeless to conceive of SL as anything grander -- it has descended to this, and will proceed on to self-destruct or living in a puddle of its former glory as a 3-D BDSM site, as the educational software is sold to those who will have closed grids. I do like to think they will keep their experiment open and free, however.

Of course, what is now going to happen, after an article like this, is a self-fulling prophecy, hold on to your hats. We are likely to reach 3 million even over the Christmas holidays with the entire known world's English-language reading public now exposed to the idea of cybering anonymously for free without consequences (one of the reasons people don't use porn sites on the Internet is because your credit card leaves a trail -- in Second Life, you can examine porn interactively in 3-D without any trail of a credit card -- and even WITH a credit card, you can create the buffer of the Lindens against you and the press or a congressional committee tracking you. It's your anonymous avatar. The Lindens aren't talking. And unless you wind up in the Herald, who's to know? I guess this is a time to buy stock in SexGen -- hey, and for that matter, to reserve your room at Flamingo Court Motel.

The whole newbie orientation thing needs to be reworked -- the Lindens can't handle it, so they need to outsource it.

Either they hire another company that works with Internet communities, and pay them, possibly even with the incentive of a bonus if they can improve retention rates demonstrably or they open it up to a bidding system for companies inworld and outworld and give contracts or simply the right to administer Linden Land for the public good.

Journalists' impressions can't -- and should not be! -- fixed -- especially if they are honestly come by. You don't take someone like Joel Stein by the hand. What I'm talking about are Joel Stein's *readers* and their experience.

To persist as in keeping the welcome areas such a disaster, leaves the space open for opportunistic mentors hustling Time correspondents off to sex dens -- and lots of less savvy newbies -- and also leaves the gate wide open for vigilante and "police" groups who are often worse than the griefers.

While most people inside SL will shrug about a news story that yet again has failed to capture what is special and important about SL, this cover story in Time is something I imagine many would-be SL project directors are wincing at, too. They had hoped to pitch SL to bosses, funders, board members, colleagues, university presidents, more serious media.

And now, they have a big hurdle to cross -- Joel Stein's penis. Or rather, Joel Stein's decision to make the story of Second Life be about how he didn't have his avatar purchase a $5 penis.

 

Comments:

It's being reworked as we speak
--Tekkiwiki FIC

Posted by: Jesse Malthus | December 17, 2006 at 07:12 PM

I realize Pathfinder is supposedly getting the volunteers in hand and reworking the OIs. I'm completely unmoved. Only completely taking it out of the hands of LL would be a solution at this point.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 17, 2006 at 07:28 PM

"...he is swooped upon by one of the Helpers/Mentors/Volunteers -- self-appointed and approved by Jeska -- who in fact use these areas to purvey their own clubs and products and stores."

Minor factual error. The person isn't a member of SL's volunteer corps, just a person "off the street".

Posted by: Tateru Nino | December 17, 2006 at 08:11 PM

We can't know that though, can we?

And in fact, it might well have been one of those mentors or helpers and you know full well it might have been. The newbies who opts to stay in the controlled OI or HI will face just that phalanx of "help".

If he goes further to the public WIs, he will face these people that are not policed by Lindens -- my point. They never had the starch to get rid of these people even among their own helping ranks. And so they hurl URLs at newbs, throw tuxes at them, and cart them off to clubs.

That's why I'm for making this commercialization of the welcome areas, benefiting only a few like this girl who Shanghaied the Time guy, something open to all through a normal bidding or outsourcing system.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 17, 2006 at 08:33 PM

Got any insiders' insights into how Pathfinder will be fixing this mess up?

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 17, 2006 at 08:34 PM

The Killer App for SL

Here it is! Just in time to declare Pixeleen Mistral the reporter of the year for being the first to understood and cover it, and Kage Seraph the avatar of the year for inventing it.

The Elemental, a vehicle, like 100 other geeky vehicles in SL you might not have noticed or even wished to have on SL's bumpy sim-seams, is the vehicle for something much more important: the ability to do amazing killer viral marketing in virtual worlds -- which are going to be much more important to RL in about five minutes.

I'm kinda pinching myself, watching history be made.

Elemental Viral Marketing in the Metaverse

It's like Hellen Keller learning to spell "water" -- suddenly she is no longer stuck in a black well of silence and can communicate with others because her teacher, Annie, has broken through the wall.

Being able to eye-hand point-click and buy and/or receive -- that frees people from being dependent on land, groups, IMs, etc. The kind of freedom everyone has sought with frustration for years in a world that is open-ended and creative, but like a sea of black wells.

So now people can click and get. They don't have to see something, ask the avatar where they got it, depend on their memory, or fuss with picks and find a store that might have relocated, or whatever. They don't have to fight lag in a store or club, but essentially be at the longest, largest Tupperware Party in the world. Of course, third-party sites were supposed to do this for us -- then they didn't, quite, because people like to see things in the round, and look at stuff 3-D and try on stuff.

Free of land -- which will have tremendous repercussions and will be greeted, of course, with great glee by those who hate land.

That is, groups are one important way to fight free of the 40-avatar limit (or 160 limit) on
sims -- you can have thousands at once in groups. The URL on the media tab is another way, if you have big enough shoutcast servers. And land will still remain as important living and gathering places to have people and things even to do the viral clicking on.

But what people are looking for is a way to make the click from avatar to avatar spread in significant ways with less friction across the silent expaness of SL where there is no mass media. And here it is!

As you can see from this article in the SLH, Kage Seraph, a noted scripter in SL, has figured out how to make viral marketing work differently -- you see a vehicle you like at a friend's house, you click on the vehicle to buy it with a HUD -- not by having permissions set on it and buying it through the SL object-buy mode in the client, not by going to a store, but just by clicking on the object itself and getting a HUD to buy it and have it delivered right there to you. That enables updates, tracking of customer data, etc.

I'm also jumping ahead of myself here, too, because I think that if you can make a HUD click up from an object, you can make one click up from an avatar, too, that she might pre-load with information about where she got her clothes or home.

I've posted more at the Herald about the problems I see with the greed that might surround this, if it is not open-sourced as a script -- I view it as a public utlity that should be open sourced, and not sold for ridiculous sums, or put as a commission type of thing like the old monopolist rental scripts of Moonshine Herbst and Hank Ramos.

I hope the Lindens don't GOM this

I can't see this being too effective. There are major difficulties involved in getting paid for things distributed this way.

Posted by: Yumi Murakami | December 17, 2006 at 10:11 PM

The Second Life Herald site isn't working for me.

Posted by: Khamon | December 17, 2006 at 11:12 PM

well it worked ok for Pixeleen? I mean? What are the major difficulties? lag between servers? if it can work from a third-party site, why not from a HUD?

I'm also still not getting the permissions-debited thing as

Anyway, I could be just drinking the Kool-Aid, but sometimes, somebody has to believe in what is possible or it will never be possible. I guess the ultimate to me is to be able to click on someone and get their clothes to buy. I find it a nuisance that even clothes I did buy, I can't identify who they were made by.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 17, 2006 at 11:17 PM

Khamon, people complain constantly about that. It's a mystery as it has no bandwidth used up or anything anyone can tell about, Walker has been asked about it a million times. IE seems to deal less better than Firefox.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 17, 2006 at 11:31 PM

Distribution like this isn't very new, but not done that much. The added update support does make it much more powerfull though.

The problem that i see with this setup for sales is that the owner have to give debit permissions to the machine every time they rez it. Otherwise the creator won't be paid. Now you can make it so, that if you don't give debit permission it can't be sold.

In a nutshell it won't be as easily transferable and viral as it is now.

But you can device other business models around a free item though. He could put a small advert signs on the sides of the vehicles. And sell/rent the advert space.

Or have this model as free, like it is. And make it possible to buy a more advanced version through the HUD. This also would need the debit permission, but you are more likely to give them when you need to do it if you want to buy something.

But don't get me wrong, it is a cool thing! =)

Posted by: Frans Charming | December 18, 2006 at 12:18 AM

Oh i see on SLHerald you already discussed to points. Just disregard them. ;)

Posted by: Frans Charming | December 18, 2006 at 12:21 AM

I thought the debit permissions was a function of having a money-taking object that provided refunds. Like a rento is paid, and then if the person refunds, it will draw back from my account.

Why can't you just take the blue screen generated by the debit permissions command, and have it say "Pay Creator $100" instead of "grant debit permissions" which scares people. This is a matter of merely changing the text of what is on there.

Please explain.

I think even without decals on the side, you can distribute some sort of item that becomes the loss leader.

I do think that more could be done to work out the purchasing.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 18, 2006 at 01:05 AM

I'd have to see this inworld but I can't see a problem.

You click the thing, it gives you a widget (a HUD in this case). You attach/rez/whatever the widget, and that's scripted to say "let me pay Scripter Creator Guy X from your money?" and you agree, and click a buy button or something and some other inworld cube sends you a shiny bike like slex/slb does. Then you delete/forget the widget except to check for updates maybe.

It's like clicking on something and being given a notecard and landmark, but cutting out the "legwork" of going to the SLURL.

Posted by: Ace Albion | December 18, 2006 at 06:23 AM

Oh yes, Prokofy- that scary "this object wants permission to steal all your money" blue box is pretty unnerving even with things like vendors that you trust when you rez them.

Posted by: Ace Albion | December 18, 2006 at 06:24 AM

Yes, it always unnerves people, but I wonder if it really is about the copy itself -- if it had a more reassuring and normal message than "allow this object to take money" -- and if it say "pay creator $ from you account?" it would create a different psychology of use.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 18, 2006 at 07:09 AM

You can't change what's written in the blue box because it's hard-wired into Second Life. Scripts can put up their own blue boxes, it's true, but if you want to be able to manipulate money from a script then there's one exact command you must use to ask for permission, and it always produces exactly the same blue box.

Posted by: Yumi Murakami | December 18, 2006 at 11:42 AM

Viral distribution like this is not new, check my comment about the Sound Cloud I made back in 24 Jan 2005.
http://www.secondlifeherald.com/slh/2006/12/elemental_viral.html#comment-26709548

Posted by: Timeless Prototype | December 18, 2006 at 03:49 PM

We didn't say viral distribution is new, duh, and that has been made clear; it's viral distribution THIS WAY. You are just like FIC oldbies Cristiano, Timeless, in being unable to accept someone else coming along and doing it better. It's one of the nastiest things about SL, the creator-fascism and conservativism.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 18, 2006 at 06:03 PM

Not at all, I like Kage and think the product rules. It's all about the ideas.

Posted by: Timeless Prototype | December 18, 2006 at 07:31 PM

No Prok, you're one of the nastiest things about SL.

Posted by: Joshua Nightshade | December 18, 2006 at 09:08 PM

Did anyone raise a suggestion with LL for a "Pay Avatar X L$YYY One time Yes/No?" kind of permissions function? That would open up all kinds of further uses for this stuff. Or maybe they'd rather everyone does it through slex/slb these days.

Posted by: Ace Albion | December 19, 2006 at 05:05 AM

>Or maybe they'd rather everyone does it through slex/slb these days.

Yeah, that could well be it.

Why not ask Cory Linden at the Town Hall tomorrow?

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 19, 2006 at 09:35 AM

I'm afeared to allow a script to pay money out of my account unless it's an alt account with a controlled amount of cash. Considering the hackability of LSL and the platform in general, it seems foolish to grant such a permission on my main.

Prokofy do your automated rental boxes operate on an alt that retains a limited amount of money? Or might a hacker one day walk away with a months worth of unconverted cash? The Lindens will not prosecute the offender or retrieve your funds. As far as they're concerned, such transactions are perfectly valid.

Posted by: Khamon | December 19, 2006 at 10:02 AM

.

My Numbers

Everything rents -- from Forseti Svarog's Monomoy Cabin on a 512 m2 in Coney Island of the Mind to Ingrid Ingersoll's Junot House and Myle Cooper's home on a 4096 m2 in Ravenglass Realm.

With all the talk of numbers and graphs and millions -- we reached the 2 million mark today -- it is very hard to see through the fog. What do we really have in Second Life? We see 10,000 or 18,000 logged on at any one time -- but what are they doing? Are they visiting for 2 minutes, crashing, getting a box on their head, or settling in for 2 years with 10 islands and huge commissioned builds? My own feeling is that the second million is more real than the first million, oddly enough -- I guess that's because I've actually been able to *see* the second million.

When I log on, there are so many messages and rentals that I literally can't push out cards fast enough. There is a huge need for help. At the infohub, there is 18,000 traffic on a lot that had 1,000 a few weeks ago, and the text chat is filled with foreign words -- Brazilian, Japanese, even Russian. There are an awful lot of underage kids but also older adults, professionals, people of various occupations, not just computer technology. When I fly over to my newbie communities, which are mainly full, I see lots of newbies crawling around or spread-eagled in appearance mode -- they've come there because they got the idea somehow, word of mouth, that this is where they can go to practice (I have a few sandboxes and notecards and such). After 7 days, I see a percentage of these people gone from the People list, even after renting me for a week, frustrated by the game's difficulties, but most stay if they reach the point of renting.

So...what are *my* numbers? Those are the only numbers I could personally vouch for. Anshe may have made a million US dollars with thousands of customers on 550 sims; Adam may have also made a million with 300 sims; I often make something more like $278.17 US lol. I have a large land preserve I sponsor and the newbie communities and various non-profit public spaces so I try to make the business cover these. I can speak for the real people who really log on and really pay a rental box each week -- I guess that's more proof of their actual status that the current log-ons you see on the web page that may or may not be tweaked -- there's a lot of uncertainty about them.

So basically, what I have are about 900-1,000 people right now across 55 sims, in a total of 15 servers, in land groups -- every type of tenant to a free camper (the old fashioned gaze-at-the-stars kind, not the payout kind) in the forest to a little $35/week stall to a quarter of a sim (they might pay PayPal not Lindens). Here is a breakdown:

Aztecha
Newbies on subsidized parcels, also some vendors 45
Cub Water Club
Apartment building, Tikis, parcels 53
Free Tibet
Townhouses, vendors, stores 52
Jai-By-The-Sea
Parcels 5
Pharos Properties
Stalls, floors, stores, parcels 27
Pharos Rentals
Parcels 7
Ravenglass Rentals
Stalls, Stores, Residential Parcels, Townhouses, Private Islands
Apartment buildings 513
Seven Wonders
Stalls, Apartment Buildings, Parcels, Low-Prim Sim, Townhouses
Motels 77
SL Public Land Preserve
Camping, stalls at TechHeaven 177

Total 958

Number of sims aggregated 14.5
Number of sims with properties 58

Unlike Lindens, I don't keep these people in the group for more than 21 days. If they don't log on, and/or there isn't a payment to a rental box, I boot them so that I can keep the group manageable and free of griefers. With only 2-3 exceptions, these are the real people who logged in the last 1-21 days; most in the last few days.

Are they all paying customers? No, because those who are in the SL Public Land Preserve pay a one-time $50 membership fee, then can vend or camp or have events for free on the various parcels of the land preserve. But they log in and stay in through the months -- and without exaggerating the importance of this group or any of my groups, the reason is simple: they found something to do, everything from business conferences to non-profit work to barrel racing to content creation to cybersex.

And in some cases, anywhere from 1-5 people are living with the paying tenant.

These 958 people who logged in the last few weeks might include a few alts (like mine!) but for the most part, they're real people. There were at least 50-100 more of them over the weekend -- but the patches Wednesday always decrease the numbers and it takes awhile to build them up again.

These 958 people make up only .01 percent of the possible 100,000 log-ons per day -- but at least I know they are real, looking at their log-in times, taking their payments, talking to them.

What else can I say about them? They have grown from a figure like 25 in 2004 to 250 in 2005 to 500 six months ago, with huge jumps in the last few months to where it has broken 1,000, even as the Lindens clocked their millions.

How have I fit them into only some 15 servers, you ask? Island owners are used to chopping up the grid into 16, putting rental boxes of $25 US per 4096, and playing WoW while the kachings come in.

I chose to do it another way. Especially since the big rush of early 2006, I've been wedging in more people. I now have 4 apartment towers, and that means 20 people stack up on a 4096. I have Tiki huts which are laid out on one big parcel so that more prims can be shared. I have floors in towers to rent for store spaces. I have large forest parcels where I don't divide up the land because you can get more prims to share and a nicer wooded look. I have people on little 512s and a quarter or more of a sim or a low-prim sim. I put 25 parcels on my new island, not 16 or 14, because I put in mountains, and cliffside townhouses. In Tibet, there are cliffhouses also stacked up a bit.

I don't mean to provide grist for Jauani's mill (he claims I am a "slumlord") by saying I packed them in, from the little stalls on the boardwalk to the skkyboxes above sandboxes -- but I don't charge huge rents, and it just gets better use of the land. In the land preserve, you could have 10 people spread out in the sky, treehouse, and ground, using cabins or platforms, on one larger parcel, for example.

I would estimate that in addition to the 177 of the land preserve, about another 50 are on the subsidized newbie lots; then perhaps another 50 beyond that in cheaper townhouses. So I don't have the huge income of Anshe; I just haven't sought. I guess I was more interested to see what it takes to build a world.

I would estimate in many areas I have 100 percent occupancy; 85 percent in others. Today, there are so many people pouring in that a laggy apartment rents even in a sim where there are routinely 40 avatars in a club, or even a tiny prefab rents on hard-scrabble PG dirt beyond red lines and ugly 16 m2 signs *rents*.

And of course what rents fastest of all are my larger and more costly parcels of 4096, 8192, 16,384 on beautiful wooded riverfront and ocean properties and my few private islands. Selling out all but 2 lots on a private island I got 2 weeks ago, I see how islanders are able to make such a profit. It's far faster selling and people will pay higher prices than on the mainland. Of course, I could have been making a lot more money with less trouble on the mainland, but it's not interesting to me to flip pancakes.

I've been trying to keep track of the clickthroughs on classifieds -- the arc there has been odd. When classifieds were a new phenom, I had merely to pay for one for $50, and within an hour, it would be sold. It then began to drag as more and more people began to use them. Then a $50 ad might have to run 3-5 days for a sale. I would put some in for $650 or $1500 or even $10,000, and they would take the full 7 days to sell. Again, today, I can run an ad this morning and get 15 or even 40 tps on the ad, and have it well sold by evening.

SEARCH PLACES continues to provide I would say 75 percent of sales, however; it's just the reality that most people use it. Classifieds is harder to search for various reasons.

Even with SEARCH down, and the water not working, and the TPs broken, I was able to get rented all but 2 of the parcels on a new island started 2 weeks ago because there is just so many new people, November and December birthdates.

Most people never tell you about their businesses. While groups are open to see in GROUPS, they hide behind alts, etc. And one of the reasons is with envy and hatred of land barons, you have to take a barrage of shit. And of course with open groups you take griefing.

I think what I have achieved here is a pretty impressive accomplishment. It's nothing approaching Anshe's Dreamland or Dana Bergson's OtherLand, of course, because I'm a part-time amateur, but it has its own great beauties and amazing moments, and most of all, it has paid for itself and it has grown, and it has given people a place to live and work in SL.

I realize all the people who constantly grief my blog here will try to ridicule me, call me names, harass me, mock me, put up Tolstoy passages, claim the Internet is talking to me, and deface my RL picture in world. I don't care. I think it's an important way to learn about the growth and reality of Second Life.

Warning: Technical tangent having nothing to do with Ravenglass

Simultaneous logons are, as a rule, 10% of the total user body, at least in business systems. That would give us somewhere in the area of 150 - 200 thousand active residents. That's quite a lot, but counting all the people (like several I know in RL) who logged in once or twice never to return, as well as all the alts, griefer alts, griefer-griefer alts, etc., giving a figure of two million, is pretty meaningless.

So it looks like an application based around MySQL with modified client-server architecture can more or less handle 15,000 simultaneous sessions. Good. Unfortunately peak logins are now consistently running above that figure.

Moving to an enterprise database is the next step (and should have been the first step).

Moving to grid computing architecture is a tempting alternative for spreading CPU load. This would be like the Seti online project. You offer the use of a computer that is connected to broadband while you are not using it, or spare cycles when you are using it. The computer forms part of a grid (but a different techspeak version of the word 'grid' from the one used for SL itself), processing information for the SL servers. I'm sure residents would be willing to do this, but the security implications would be a bit scary, so it would require careful design.

May Supreme Avatar Smile Upon You!
Br. Taras

Posted by: Taras Balderdash | December 15, 2006 at 06:29 AM

Of course, the most widely-known "enterprise" database (Oracle) has some... interesting quirks that would probably make switching to it tricky (and knowing LL, massive breakage and nasty data loss would result). MySQL also has some additional quirks that makes switching from it hard.

And after all that, they might well find that the performance issues are down to database design issues and badly-written queries, and the whole thing was for naught...

Posted by: Tekki Wiki | December 15, 2006 at 07:05 AM

Fascinating.

It's interesting that we are approximately the same size landwise, though with radically different approaches.

Here are some stats of my island nation:

-14 sims total
(10 standard, 4 openspace sims)

-95% or more occupied
(would be 110% if I could keep up)

-approx 300 in closed group
(90%+ 'recent' logins, <1 week)

-approx 150 people with land

-typical land size: about 4000m

-approximately 2k USD/mo profit

Zoning:
-4 sim-sized 'towns'
(commercial/residential)
-6 somewhat rural areas
(manors/estates)
-4 mostly wilderness areas
(duchy)

Growth:
- 1 sim a month since Feb 06
- 2 std, 4 openspace sims in Dec 06
- sharp pause as I watch to see how new rates affect things
(I don't wish to lose if the land bubble bursts)
- capability: with 2k per month I could easily continue to grow at my usual rate, if I so choose.

Reserve:
- 3 solid months tier even if I had NO tenants
- Content business that can pay tier on 2-3 sims if it had to, or even slowly buy more sims

Advantages:
- private sims, I have total control if I need to use it.
- I can shut off land sales and prevent destructive land speculation activity
- community base: so much momentum there, that I don't think I could fail if I tried

Disadvantages
- I can't contract in bad times without a severe morale hit that could translate to poor finances. how does one 'lose' a bit of one's continent and country?
- I could be landlocked by others

Posted by: Desmond Shang | December 15, 2006 at 09:21 AM

Wow Prok, a positive post :) And yes i have to admit it is quite an achievement. It would be interesting if more Land barons would share their data. It would definitely give a far more accurate figure about actual logins than the official LL's does.

Posted by: Oclee | December 15, 2006 at 09:32 AM

Desmond, if you make $2000 US a month free and clear after tier and expenses from your island windfalls, I do have to wonder, once again, why it was so hard for you to kick in $250 or less *Linden dollars* to a tiny fund to reclaim a camp-chair king's 1024 m2 parcel in Alice.

Your smug and even belligerent indifference on this matter really floored me. No sense of solidarity; only sordid orthodoxy about not abetting camp-chair kings. Ah, that's how they get when they become rich and famous.

And no, I don't make profits at your level, but I'm happy enough. I bet most islanders in fact don't make the kind of profits that come from a highly-controlled theme sim where the much higher-quality content-creating tenants themselves build out the world for you so you don't have to shed blood each month buying new houses to keep trying to retain people who are unable to build or even put out a prefab easily.

Yes, Desmond, I do hope the bubble bursts. Pride goeth before a fall, and a haughty spirit before destruction.

What I see about my 1 whole private island, 1 void sim, and half private island leased from others, is that they sell out quickly, even 100 percent occupancy most weeks, and you can charge much higher prices and not waste time on all the draining mainland activities -- defensive purchases of 512s that some nasty landbaron has chopped up on your flanks; purchase of homes to keep areas looking better; refunds due to the game itself not working and lag from clubs that have a veto on your sim. I could very much increase my rates on the 2 sims where I have a club situation like that which is ghastly.

However, all that happens with profits like this is that you are then conned into buying the next island...the next...the next. Before you know it, while you had planned 1 or 3 or 5, now you have 30. And then you HAVE to have 30 because you have to have the revenue stream to cover that tier, and you can't think too hard about returning that initial investment. I hear people telling themselves all the time that they are "ploughing the profits back into the business" as if this is some rational thing -- it would not be in RL.

Worse, you keep growing because you can't keep turning people away if you want marketshare and you want name recognition to keep the occupancy up to 85 or above. Turn away enough droves of people, and they will stop recognizing your name. It may seem folly for me to spread myself out over 58 sims, but given a fairly lean and scrappy operation, and such poor advertising in SL, it's the only way I can get my logo to have visibility and name recognition.

I have to make sure I show up in each new area the Lindens are doing and put out my shingle at least on a little cottage or something, if not a big waterfront. This gets painful -- waterfront in new sims is now going for $13-$20/meter.

I watch these island operations that continue to bulge, and I do fear for them. First, they want market share in a cut-throat competitive environment where every other guy has a 16-block International House of Pancakes operation.

Secondly, with Anshe speeding ahead way, way ahead of the pack, where you once felt like, oh, I'm 10 percent of what Anshe has (I could say that once long ago), now I'm 1 percent...or .01 percent or whatever...fading from memory...gone -- see how it works?

With this much growth, if you don't grow, no one will appreciate your frugal ways. But if you keep folding profits back into growth or buying in new sims for recognition, in order to keep 85 percent occupancy or above, then you keep getting suckered into the grand Linden pyramid scheme. The only way to beat that insurmountable problem is to have such recognizable high-end theme or content or community or customer service that you can still continue to shine.

Because suddenly a week will come -- and Pixeleen's story on the Herald about these troughs is very indicative -- when your business will screech to a dead halt. It could happen to you, too, Desmond, when suddenly there are enough Steampunks; or Steampunks decide that the game doesn't doesn't work well enough to keep steampunking.

A thing like SEARCH PLACES being down for a week when your business depends on it. Water suddenly disappearing when land looking good is necessary for sales. Griefing in groups on rampant scales. Then suddenly, that $100 or $200 US a day you are trying to make and clear tier through is jeopardized -- 3-7 days like that and you have a huge loss. So you are stuck holding a very big bag.
Then, selling off to pay the tier (which I see people do, thinking that's a great idea) cuts off their cheaper holdings they could have used to maintain revenue stream -- they can only replace that in fatter times with $13/m or more now.

To me, the only salvation and way to beat that racket of the Lindens is to have the units spread out so that I can simply sell the few lone parcels on sims mainly owned by others to those very people who are often looking for prims. Then I don't lose money on my original purchase and either free up cash to buy more popular or visible land, or cover a loss.

Not always a good way to go because you then have tier unfulfilled, something island nations never have to think about.

With the predictable and seasonable angry clamouring on the forums of people saying "land is too expensive" (they mean "desirable cool land with waterfront now $13-20/m)" not "all land"), and with land barons grabbing those desirable parcels and merely flipping them among themselvse now as some try to position for a real windfall, I imagine we will see the Lindens glutting land again. And don't forget we are in for a HUGE CHANGE --and I mean HUGE.

FIFTY PERCENT more land than there was 2-3 months ago. All these islands nobody sees yet, these hundreds of islands people ordered to get in under the wire for $1295 before Nov. 15, which are delayed 4 weeks even, these will all come on line January 2007.

Suddenly, there will be not hundreds of competitors but thousands -- IHOPs as far as the eye can seee.

Right at that time, in February, the Lindens will raise Mainland tier to $295, say it's only fair to keep it equal to the islands, and they may not grandfather mainland tier for various reasons (that's despicable, but I put it in my 2007 predictions because I really do think they are capable of doing something that nasty for contorted reasons).

So the combination of lots of people getting their new islands and pancaking them, and lots of people panicking at the new double mainland tier and liquidating to land barons means that prices will plummet.

That's why the Lindens shouldn't glut now just because they here a dozen people screaming on the forums who can't have their waterfront dream home at the price they think they should pay.

However, they *will* glut because they are addicted to, and need to get every single penny from the auction (land sales are going to be 70 percent of their revenue in 2007 -- look for a very greedy and hungry Lab).

Mainland sales are going for $2500 even on the auction. Why put out another mainland server on the auction to glut it and make that be $1000, $1000 etc when they can just put out one server, collect 2 or 3 times its value, and save whatever servers they have for the islands at $1695 but double tier at $295.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 15, 2006 at 11:07 AM

Does Second LIfe count furries as part of the 2,000,000? I don't think they should. I don't view furries as residents. I view them as our pets. If you leave them out, I bet the true number is somewhere around 1,500,000.

Posted by: SpaceAce | December 15, 2006 at 11:14 AM

Hey, do you have an essay about the SL Public Land Preserve anywhere?

Posted by: Storm Thunders | December 15, 2006 at 11:17 AM

I have a November activities and donations report on the SL Public Land Preserve available in notecards in the tree house at Botany's Grove, use SEARCH to find it and tp there.

Haven't been able to do an essay on my concept for this preserve, which has been great, with numerous people donating even tiny amounts of Lindens or tier and keeping it afloat.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 15, 2006 at 11:24 AM

>>Desmond, if you make $2000 US a month free and clear after tier and expenses from your island windfalls, I do have to wonder, once again, why it was so hard for you to kick in $250 or less *Linden dollars* to a tiny fund to reclaim a camp-chair king's 1024 m2 parcel in Alice.

First off, yes, I do intend to finally cash out a bit in January.

>>Your smug and even belligerent indifference on this matter really floored me. No sense of solidarity; only sordid orthodoxy about not abetting camp-chair kings. Ah, that's how they get when they become rich and famous.

I can't remember exactly what you wrote in IM, because I was lost in several other business IM's at the time and a conversation in-world.

But the sense I got was that it was typical parcel-extortion, and I was *quite* surprised that you would even consider paying such a thing.

Water under the bridge, now.

Maybe that one time it may have been worth it for the sim. I'll grant you that much, but as a general rule, I don't do preventative land buys. A lot of Alice sim is up for sale even now - where would it end?

I still remain in Alice sim mainly because I got my start there and it has some sentimental value. Financially, it makes no sense for me.

As for a land glut, I agree - it will be back. But competitors? Not so many. Sure, there's a flurry of them now, but expect to see most of those sims 'flipped' for cash to those who really know how to make money with a sim.

90% of the people out there don't even bother to try - they get a sim for a while, get bored, then sell it. I'd hazard a guess that this generally happens in a mere 6 to 8 weeks.

Expect Anshe and the rest of us to own most of the Nov 06 sims being released now, within four to six months.

Posted by: Desmond Shang | December 15, 2006 at 04:36 PM

It is most certainly NOT water under the bridge, Desmond. And that's just the problem with you, you don't get it.

When a camp-chair king moves in right next door to 4 tenants all of whom have him in the view, you have to take responsibility. YOU never have to face these problems on your high and mighty island in the snowglobe, but I do. And when the story is complexified by the camp-chair king actually being something like the boyfriend of a tenant's friend's sister or something -- i.e. illustrating the ability to negotiate -- then you also have an opportunity to act.

Unlike any other extortionist who might have put every piece of annoying shit on there and turned the sale price up to $100/meter and fled the sim, *this* fellow wasn't some kind of full-bore extortionist, he was just a guy cheaply turning a buck and a bit clueless. He was prevailed upon using various methods, and he set the price to just $8/m. That's about a dollar higher than most people have bought in Alice in the last 6 months -- high for PG, but not for good-looking PG, and certainly not for someone eager to not lag the sim with 40 avatars on a little parcel, and eager not to have 4 tenants move out, one on a 12,500 m2 lot.

All that was asked was that everyone in the sim kick in a little. Everyone did. But you didn't, because you are an arrogant schmuck. *Shrugs*.

All you can do is jam on your sordid orthodoxies -- that one should "never cave to extortionists." Oh, but I never do. I have never paid one thin dime to BartHeart or Body by Lyra or Mr. Lee's Hong Kong or any of those other atrocious sign extortionists. I never pay any of them, and I wait them out, even losing a tenant here and there.

But this situation was simply different -- and fixable. And you were so busy and so important you couldn't *hear* the details that made it different, and you were happy to have *the rest of us on the sim* keep the sim nice *for your main store*.

Now that really sucks. That's why I'm making this very public. I think it just tremendously sucks, and I don't care who knows it.

Alice sim is not up for sale now unless I've missed something. Huh? There were like 2 lots. One of them I bought because of vulnerability again to griefing and also to have some prims.

What's supremely annoying is that if you remain in Alice only for sentimental reasons, you could surely bestir yourself to help out a situation like this with good will and solidarity with your neighbours. I am always amazed at how inconsiderate and unaware people are of their neighbours. I remember it took me like 5 rounds explaining to Gerami that yes, this happened on the *other* side of the mountain. I dunno, I give up.

And I can't believe your house sales don't cover your tier in Alice.

I'm not as cynical about "Anshe and the rest of us" -- i.e. YOU -- getting these sims in your little paws. Everybody in Second Life always thinks their generation is the best and they are on top of the world. New people come in all the time and do different things and surely more of them will retain and add value to these sims.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 15, 2006 at 04:49 PM

>>But this situation was simply different -- and fixable. And you were so busy and so important you couldn't *hear* the details that made it different, and you were happy to have *the rest of us on the sim* keep the sim nice *for your main store*.

>>All that was asked was that everyone in the sim kick in a little. Everyone did. But you didn't, because you are an arrogant schmuck. *Shrugs*.

You asked for my immediate attention, and cash.

Were the people I was already talking to somehow less important than you?

You didn't preventively buy land on Gerami's and my side of the mountain, which promptly fell to griefers and stayed that way for months - nor did we go crying to you for cash.

Arrogance and lack of solidarity indeed.

Posted by: Desmond Shang | December 15, 2006 at 06:25 PM

Desmond,

I did *too* preventatively buy land on your side of the mountain -- twice, in two different periods, one a while ago, and one just recently. Huh??? WTF???

And you didn't need to answer an IM *then* but you could cough up a lousy $250 like an office pool to help out a sim. After all, it's your sim, too.

If your side of the mountain fell to griefers when I was busy buying other things in your view in Winnipeg, gosh, shoot me. You didn't ask for help, and if they *were* the kind of griefers that put their land to $20/meter, it would make profound sense to leave them alone.

You're just stubborn, Desmond, and your need to be right is so profound, that you're willing to sacrifice friends and neighbours over it. So, your feedback comes promptly and swiftly from me.

BTW, did you spend more than 40 hours, i.e. one week 9-6 only, working on your islands? That's great, because then you paid yourself a normal $50 US per hour for your one week of labour.

Did you spend more? Well, then it was more like $25 US per hour -- or far less.

That's always the secret of the real estate boom in SL -- nobody can pay themselves real wages.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 15, 2006 at 06:29 PM

P.S. In fact I bought two cheap pieces by Gerami enabling him not to be griefed, and he seemed oblivious. OH, well.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 15, 2006 at 06:30 PM

So you did buy more, did you? Well bully for you, you will eventually own all of Alice sim, and stop coming to me for $L to buy even more of it for you.

Honestly, if I was that worried about it, I'd buy out Alice sim *myself* - gods know I don't need your help.

You say you are fighting back, but you are going about it all wrong. Do a search on "Gold Rush" and visit one of those sims. If you can even get in.

The real issue is that just one idiot can bring a mainland sim to its knees with little consequence, and every time you appease these people, yes, even your tenant's sister's boyfriend, you are making the problem worse not better.

Maybe this is why I'm bringing in a factor of ten more than you are on essentially the same resources, without even 'packing them in.' I don't try to bandage the mainland's deeply serious issues by throwing my wallet at it.

* * * * *

>>BTW, did you spend more than 40 hours, i.e. one week 9-6 only, working on your islands? That's great, because then you paid yourself a normal $50 US per hour for your one week of labour.

It's a passionate hobby, not a job. I make no secret that anyone could make more money, more efficiently by sweeping up McDonalds parking lots.

So my hobby nets some income, yay me. My CPA advised me how to report it, done deal.

If it means *that* much to you, hit me up for $L 250. Flush it all in a camping-pad casino for all I care, take a snap and tell us all about it in your next post. I double-dare ya.

Posted by: Desmond Shang | December 15, 2006 at 07:58 PM

Wow, what an amazing post Prok. Thanks for sharing all that. What you have built is definitely an impressive accomplishment.

Posted by: Satchmo Prototype | December 15, 2006 at 10:25 PM

Desmond,

I'm glad you've outed your true nature here for others to see past the gentlemanly exterior.

It's not about being able to pay for land. My God, do you think I couldn't by a $25 US piece of land 10 times over? I surely have enough from my business in SL to do that, let alone RL. It's about human solidarity.

It's about people pulling together when they have a disaster, a mutual aid society sort of thing, that's all. It's not about feeding extortionists.

I never feed them. When I can get them to come down in price and move along -- which is what I did -- I pay a bit more. The alternative would be to lose all my existing paying tenants and they'd be annoyed at being forced to move, too.

It's just a smart move, given the situation. And my desire is simply to stay on the mainland mainly and keep it an open space. It's cost me at times, I've had to eat some nasty situations, but it hasn't been enough to give up. I just find the islands so insular and stuffy, people are each down a well in their own parcels; even in your model themed sims, I would come out on the commons many times and never find a soul.

Yes, the mainland sucks you dry that way, but that's the whole point, you have to try, in those situations, to come together, to pull together, to not take this nasty attitude that you're taking, "I could buy the whole sim and I don't need you," but to say, "many hands make light work."

That priggish, smug arrogance you display so often is so out of place in a world based on contiguity and offering many chances for cooperation.

The situation we faced was so different than the usual extortionist. In fact, to use this term isn't really correct about this particular guy who was more just a quick-buck maker.

It's as if people can never be nuanced and never redeemed.

And as if all that mattered is that you would prevail and be able to buy the whole sim out.

As for the $250, keep it toward the realization of your grand plans. The train left the station. People already cooperated and solved the problem, there and elsewhere.

>Maybe this is why I'm bringing in a factor of ten more than you are on essentially the same resources, without even 'packing them in.' I don't try to bandage the mainland's deeply serious issues by throwing my wallet at it

As for this nasty comment, it's clear that you don't find the building of communities terribly compelling. You've actually written some very jaded comments on sl.homepage.com -- you grow weary with squabbling tenants or whatever. It's not of interest to you, the problem of how people can get along with a few simple things on a sim.

It still is to me. I feel if you can't fix the mainland, you cannot fix anything, it has to be grasped, nettles and all, and I've grasped them.

What I am try ing to do is help disseminate what I feel should be a code of honour. Code-as-law is not enough. And the Lindens don't care about the Mainland, and no amount of granulated land tools could help this problem of camp chairs anyway.

So that means people have to form associations and watch each other's back, to have two basic premises:

o when ever land goes up for sale on the sim, everybody networks and assesses what's up -- can someone buy it to protect it? could it be communal property even? Why is the person selling? Are they selling out a bad situation that in fact could be fixed? So many people do that in SL, and I've had that in Alice "Can I buy your land so that I can avoid having to ask you to do something you may not want to do." Boy, am I familiar with that.

o Pulling together to solve a problem mutually. Because a bunch of people kicked in for that $8000 or whatever, it didn't bite. And that has to be replicated a million times. It's like the land preserve which seemed like such insanity to me, eating $100 month after month, trying to get it going -- but today, it is many hands make light work, there are donations all day long, the purchase price is getting paid for, people are donating land, it's working and people are using it.

Yes, what can help is human solidarity. If everyone in the sim pulls together and says, No, we won't let this happen, we won't let our sim go to the dogs because one person has caved and sold for cheap or one person has put out camp chairs. We will find a way to negotiate the end to their destruction of other people's SL.

It doesn't always work, but it works enough times for me to endorse what Philip says:

"I'd say, stay on the mainland: the idea of clustering and the magic spell of working with your neightbors is just a great appeal." Philip Linden 7-7-06 Town Hall

 

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 16, 2006 at 01:36 AM

>It's as if people can never be nuanced and never redeemed.

I take issue with this statement. What do you do is different from what you say. Granted, when this hypocrisy appears, it's in your statements of debate, trying to reason a point; it's a tool of argument. However, the fact is that it is what it is. It wouldn't bother me if you just kept doing it, but when you call other people out for it, then it gets under my skin.

Posted by: Tyken Hightower | December 16, 2006 at 02:59 AM

Outing true natures, indeed.

1) Yes, it's true, I won't drop half a dozen IM's to focus on yours, just because you IM'ed.

Sight unseen, you assumed you were more important than everyone else, yet you call *me* arrogant?

2) No, I don't generally buy out mini casinos to 'save a sim.'

You've essentially invited every two-bit casino owner reading this to buy into Alice sim just to flip property. Gee, thanks neighbour!

3) As for me not enjoying community building: sooo many people know otherwise that you'll never realise how much credibility you just lost.

4) Disseminating a code of honour, are you, and trying to get people to come together to solve problems? Not quite.

Codes of honour matter when people *don't* agree, not when they do.

I didn't drop everything on a dime for you, I didn't agree with your cash appeasement strategy, so now you are name-calling.

Posted by: Desmond Shang | December 16, 2006 at 03:00 AM

Prokofy, the fact that you want to keep the mainland and the sims you run on it nice and welcoming is a great thing. It really is. It's even a noble cause.

But it's YOUR noble cause. It's important to YOU. It's YOUR passion. And while it's a good thing, It doesn't have to be everyone else's passion. Someone isn't a bad person just because they don't happen to feel as strongly about YOUR cause as you do.

I'm sure that there are things that are important to other people, causes they have that just don't happen to inspire any passion in you. And that's alright.

I have a particular cause that is extremely important to me, so important that it's something I think about even on days when I'm not actively working on it. But I have friends who simply nod their heads politely when I go on and on about it. That doesn't mean I stop being their friend, it just means my particular cause doesn't happen to be as crucial to them.

Anyway, something to think about maybe.

Posted by: Allana Dion | December 16, 2006 at 03:45 AM

Allana, you are full of shit, as always.

The many people who own or rent on the mainland give the lie to your strange sectarian notion. Plenty of people love the mainland. It is not just my cause.

And just because I have a notion and defend it doesn't mean I've deprived others

That's one of the biggest fallacies you all perpetrated. And even Raph Koster is guilty of it, frankly. The tekkie mind and the controlling mind seem to see ANY challenge to their worldview and their systems as a claim to dominance. They don't see it as a defense of plurality. That always amazes me. Why would any of them get to put out a set of views, but I don't get to? Just because I think I am right, and they are wrong, why would that obliterate their position?

Why would I be guilty of advocating the obliteration of their position?

And I think in your case, you have a bad case of wishing to obliterate those who are "wrong" and accuse THEM of the same evil deed. You wish to make them conform, and they must be rounded up into the tribe.

Well, hell no. I will not be rounded up. I support and defend my principles, and I see absolutely no reason why they need to be compromised, especially in the face of uncompromising controlling types like yourself.

I don't know why there is something to "think about" here in that patronizing, bullshit, BDSM condescending way that you perpetrate which is bullshit.

What you need to think about is why you have an overweening need to control other people and round them up and get them to admit they are "wrong".

And force on them an invalidated charge of desiring to control others. You see the world this way -- you project.

It's all about your projection.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 16, 2006 at 03:10 PM

Desmond,

You really are unseemly here. Are you sure this is good for business?

Um, it wouldn't take you to out my true nature -- whatever it is, I state it plainly on my blog and don't mount pretense.

Nobody asked you to drop an IM. How fucking important do you think you are? We all have dozens of IMs being in business. I'll bet I actually have MORE of them because of having more clueless newbie customers. So?

And it is a basic request from your neighbours, who gathered together to fix a situtation. You're capable of leaving a window open and not closing it, like a trouble-ticket, until you don't have time, or simply listing it on a to-do list.

I would think something like your main store sim and its state of beauty or lag would involve you just a tad more, but I guess it's merely some sort of wierd vestige.

No, two-bit casino operations will not be buying in Alice to flip property. That is, if they do, their property will sit there for a very, very long time because I will simply not buy from extortionists who put $15 or $20/m on a sim just because the land market is tight.

This situation was more particular, and the price was only $8/m. That's what you keep failing to see.

Your hectoring lectures about the evils of buying out mafios and encouraging them are utterly lost on me and utterly inappropriate. I have a number of situations I'm waiting out and will never pay to removed, even if the fucktards put the land at a normal price. I've had to face this situation many, many more times than you, and I've adopted a nuanced and flexible set of ways to deal with it.

You sound like you are sitting on your assets, not standing on principles.

You don't enjoy it, Desmond. If you enjoyed making your stuck-up, stuffy steampunk land and bring on others of your ilk, well, glad you found each other. Your cynical post on forums.slhomepage.com about this business and your world-weary signing over having customers asking you to resolve disputes lets us know otherwise.

One thing I never fear is "losing credibility" because you don't gain it by remaining silent in the face of injustices, you don't gain it by not resisting island bullies like yourself who view the mainland as slums but keep their big-ass stores there on cheap land, and don't mind if their policies harm their neighbours because they are ought of sight, out of mind. Very typical of myopic island developers like Bartheart who puts out ugly $12,000 16 m2 to extort people to buy back the view from his ugly sign hustling island parcels -- signs he wouldn't care to put out on his islands themselves.

As for codes of honour, my plan in pushing this point well past the sell-by date, as I have been for months, is to really making it public and really make it something people are forced to think about precisely because people do NOT have to agree. They may hate each other and have a million beefs with each other. But they can agree that on the mainland, to keep a sim residential, they will keep out clubs, malls, and casinos by acting quickly, in concert, to make sure land doesn't go to sale to non-residental buyers and that when it is crapped up, people negotiate to restore their tranquility.

I didn't drop everything on a dime for you, I didn't agree with your cash appeasement strategy, so now you are name-calling.

You are being woodenly stubborn and stupid about calling this "cash appeasement". And when you have a group available of a half dozen people ready to take care of an issue of land that is only $8/m to make sure half a sim isn't blighted and the whole sim isn't lagged.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 16, 2006 at 03:23 PM

*giggle* I knoew you couldn't keep a straight no-bullshit front. Seems like your "positive post of the day" was ruined by your problem with Mister Shang. Oh well, at least you tried.

Posted by: Squeedoo S. | December 16, 2006 at 03:32 PM

Actually, Squeedoo, if you were paying attention, and not being a rabid bitch as per usual, you'd note that it wasn't me who introduced a "problem with Mr. Shang" -- it was the petulant Mr. Shang who had to come into a post that was merely describing my humble numbers, contrasted with "the two million" and explaining at least my little but real part of it, and then had to brag and puff up his chest and say, basically, "Nyah, nyah, I have just as many sims as you do and a third of the customers, but I make ten times the amount of money you do."

Well, aside from the fact that his figure of "ten times" is false, it was unnecessary for him to try to upstage me here on this modest little thing that doesn't pretend to hold a candle to his glorious themed sim. It's a different genre and different enterprise entirely.

So please, get your chronology right of who pissed in whose Wheaties first.

I don't dedicate this blog to printing positive posts. If you have a need for positive, cheery upbeat posts, please go to www.torley.com and also www.3pointd.com and other similar branding, industry news types of blogs. That's not what this is for.

I put my positive work into the world itself, where it really counts. I save my blog for thinking and writing very critically where it is needed.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 16, 2006 at 04:06 PM

>"I think what I have achieved here is a pretty impressive accomplishment."

It is an impressive accomplishment and you have a right to be proud.

As I stated before:
"Prokofy, the fact that you want to keep the mainland and the sims you run on it nice and welcoming is a great thing. It really is. It's even a noble cause."

My compliments were apparently something you missed when you decided to call me "full of shit".

I made a statement I believed was both obvious and rational and made it speaking politely and respectfully. I think if anyone else had made the statement to you, perhaps you would have given it some thought.

But it's clear that your hatred and disgust towards my personal relationship preferences causes you to be unable to see anything I say in the spirit it is intended and to instead apply ugly motives that simply aren't true.

*sigh* Nevermind

Posted by: Allana Dion | December 16, 2006 at 04:52 PM

Accusing Desmond of not being interested in "community building" just elevated this blog to High Comedy.

Posted by: Coyote Momiji | December 16, 2006 at 05:16 PM

I think this blog-post is probably the nicest one I've ever seen you write, Prokofy.

It reminds me a lot of when I first came to SL and someone showed me how to build from the welcome area. There was a huge moment of excitement in that and it's sad that for a lot of new people that excitement will be replaced by frustration over lag, over objects moving away on their own in edit, on crashes, on packet loss. It bothers me and I've been here for years, so I can't imagine a new person is going to put up with it.

I wish I had the optimism I had in beta.

Posted by: Joshua Nightshade | December 16, 2006 at 05:43 PM

No, Allana, all your preliminary preamble remarks were, were setting up a blast and giving yourself an out. You think I don'to see through a little subterfuge like that, writing yourself a little fake excuse in advance -- but I do. You merely wish to pat me on the head and then say, oh, but you act like no one else is right -- even though I never said anything of the kind. So, no, you don't get to "sweeten" your little stabs like that, I call you on them. Shame on you.

Erm, I don't experience "hatred" and "disgust" about BDSM -- it's someone's lifestyle, whatever. I've seen it all in SL. What I do is condemn it as intellectually indefensible. What's particularly unattractive about it is the lying and controlling and manipulation of others even outside this cultish way of life.

Let's be very clear what is happening in this thread here. I put out the numbers involved in my community. I think it is an impressive thing, but it's a small thing, a difficult thing, compared to the many far huger, shinier, and more lucrative attractions of SL.

Desmond, with whom I've already had a long-standing feud, comes on here deliberately and tries to piss on it deliberately -- unable to let it shine alone for a moment -- and has to strut and brag that he has more money with a cooler theme and just as many sims, with a third of the customers. Ok, that was interesting -- but don't expect me to sit still and not call him on what he is doing -- being a smug little prick.

Hey, more than one person has IM'd me appalled at what Desmond did -- but they fear him and will never post here even under an alt. It's only the people who are smarmy little cheerleaders for something like Desmond who can come on here and try to make hay over my differing views about what "community" is.

No, I maintain that no, Desmond is not interested in community-building, really, not in the sense that I mean -- as I've just established. He will not cross the street to help a neighbour because he'd rather be right. He will come and keep defending this odious position to the death and undermine a person's entire business in the process. He will try to portray his smug littel themed empire as something that is "better" in general, when in fact, it's only "better" for a niche of people.

And Coyote Momiji, who is a cheerleader for SC and for Desmond, is going to find anything I say "High Comedy" so that's no surprise.

I find it humorous that like some kind of primitive tribe, you all come bleating to protect your Inca-like leader.

What is community building? Being the sole owner of a mini-continent, building the theme and inviting *tenants* who like that theme, independent of you, and help build it? That's like going to the store and buying a candy bar. It's effortless. You put a product out, someone buys it. If it's a particularly high-priced energy protein bar, only athletes will buy it or whatever -- but only one kind of person.

If Desmond organizes - or promotes -- little activites like theme-related ladies' teas or a map room, that's fine, but it's not community-building as I am meaning it -- it's more like theme-building or niche-building -- it's entertainment, not work, and not rewarding in the same way.

I can buy a Club Med vacation and go to Club Med and live in the Tiki house and use the coral beads at the bar -- but is that building a community or being entertained on vacation>

Oh, sure, it's a very narrow, self-defined themed community. For some, that IS their community, I quite understand. Desmond is interested in that -- up to a point. The fact that Desmond's fanboyz will point and laugh means they don't understand anything broader, or the statement I made.

*That* kind of "community" -- more like a club -- makes me run screaming usually after about a day (and others, too), even though I appreciate the architectural excellence, because the people are so unbearable and smug and so conservative and so forceful in branding.

What I think is much more a challenge, and something that is far more of a realistic community and community-building, is going to a mainland sim where there 10-20 other people on it whom you don't know, with whom you have nothing in common, who might have a completely different view of "art" than you.

That's the experience I have sought in SL, on 58 different sims, where I am not the sole owner. In every single case, there's a story, other people, other interests, a challenge. It's a challenge I deliberately seek, to determine: can some very low common denominator be established in Second Life, about which we can all agree?

Can we all agree, "no spinning signs"?

Can we all agree about *this set of values*?

All Coyote or Allana are saying is, no, we have to live in little exotic hothouses or there is no community.

To me, trying to deal with the myriad interests and forces on an Alice or a Ravenglass or a Columbia and get along with neighbours with whom I have nothing in common and not even a particularly civil relationship, is the real test of what a community is. I defend my notion of community here; I say that having a Club Caledon is not that.

I quite realize that online, people sneer at contiguous RL neighbours and community in the meat-world sense, and they want to endlessly filter, block, strain, keep out, level, permit, mute until they get exactly the little hothouse comfort zone that will make them be niche-happy.

I just find that a hugely stultifying and stifling experience.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 16, 2006 at 05:57 PM

I'd absolutely LOVE you to point out where I said that.

Except, you know. You can't.

Because you're not only a Batshit Looney Champion-of-the-People-in-your-Head, but you're a liar.

Have fun with that. :)

Posted by: Coyote Momiji | December 16, 2006 at 09:13 PM

Um, here it is, right here on my blog?

Accusing Desmond of not being interested in "community building" just elevated this blog to High Comedy.

Posted by: Coyote Momiji | December 16, 2006 at 05:16 PM

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 16, 2006 at 09:46 PM

Oh, and if you mean this statement:

'All Coyote or Allana are saying is, no, we have to live in little exotic hothouses or there is no community.'

This isn't literally what you said, dumbass -- why are you tekkies always so goddamn LITERAL? it's just a sarcastic reiteration of your position, that's all, sorry you can't handle it.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 16, 2006 at 09:47 PM

>"What I do is condemn it as intellectually indefensible. What's particularly unattractive about it is the lying and controlling and manipulation of others even outside this cultish way of life."

I'm not going to take that bait, sorry.

>"All Coyote or Allana are saying is, no, we have to live in little exotic hothouses or there is no community."

Prokofy, not only is that not literally what I said, it's not even indirectly related to what I said.

I was saying that I see both your side and Desmond's side and I understand both. I was saying that the fact that you have differing views on how important an issue it is, it shouldn't have to be a "feud" as you called it. But nevermind.

>"I find it humorous that like some kind of primitive tribe, you all come bleating to protect your Inca-like leader."

I'm sorry, I don't know who you're referring to with this?

At any rate, you really have accomplished quite a bit with your business. You should be proud of it. I know you don't believe that I mean that when I say it, but I do. You've shown you must be a good landlord.

>"Unlike Lindens, I don't keep these people in the group for more than 21 days. If they don't log on, and/or there isn't a payment to a rental box, I boot them so that I can keep the group manageable and free of griefers."

If only the Lindens would do the same thing and actually try being honest with their numbers, their investors, and their customers.

Posted by: Allana Dion | December 16, 2006 at 10:38 PM

I'm starting to grasp that "tekki" is prok-hand for "someone who contributes something to SL beyond slapstick".

Describing me as an actual technical person is, well - hysterically funny. :)

Keep spinning, Prok. Perhaps someday the world will spin in a way that'll suit you.

Posted by: Coyote Momiji | December 16, 2006 at 10:39 PM

Coyote, you've *long* been on a jihad against me, on this blog, on SC, and everywhere. There's *nothing* that I will EVER be able to say that you won't ridicule, blast, object to, etc.

Why? because:

"Atheist, feminist. Anarchist by ideal, socialist in tendencies. "

Everything that is YOUR ideal is NOT my deal. Sorry, but that's my right to condemn just as much as your right.

If you aren't a literal "tekkie," you are a literalist tekkie. See the difference?

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 16, 2006 at 11:00 PM

So, because you disagree with my particular set of beliefs, it's fine to outright lie and misrepresent what I was saying?

Or is it just "Fun with Prok" today?

I did not say or even imply the things you claim I did. You are a liar.

I don't know what happened to cause your particular brand of bullshit, Prok, but I do hope you seek help, because hypocritical narcissists don't have good lives.

Posted by: Coyote Momiji | December 16, 2006 at 11:07 PM

Oh, and you're not a feminist? Hope you don't vote, babe.

Posted by: Coyote Momiji | December 16, 2006 at 11:08 PM

*Dangled bait, notes that she felt for it, hook, line, and sinker.*

No, I'm not a feminist, in your old-fashioned and conversative tribal understanding of the world, that clusters with "atheist" and "socialist" -- no. I'm a liberal. I'm an advocate of women's rights as human rights. Feminism is *so* 1970s.

I vote, and I vote for female candidates too. Imagine!

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 16, 2006 at 11:55 PM

Feminism is the radical idea that women are human. If you believe in human rights applied regardless of gender, you are a feminist.

And - bait? Prok, you might be interested in a point system. Knock yourself out. :) I don't care.

Posted by: Coyote Momiji | December 17, 2006 at 02:18 AM

There's nothing radical about the idea that women are human. It's accepted. UN treaties are long since passed on this subject. You are flailing at windmills. Go back to your Winnebagos circled in the virtual world.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 17, 2006 at 02:49 AM

>>Desmond, with whom I've already had a long-standing feud, comes on here deliberately and tries to piss on it deliberately -- unable to let it shine alone for a moment -- and has to strut and brag that he has more money with a cooler theme and just as many sims, with a third of the customers. Ok, that was interesting -- but don't expect me to sit still and not call him on what he is doing -- being a smug little prick.

Facts:

1) No feud. Takes two for that.

2) Intent of my commenting here: Completely misinterpreted.

3) With regard to incomes, your statement: "I often make something more like $278.17 US lol." - yes, I misread, it's not 10 times more, I think it's only something like seven times. Incidentally, people that offer entire sims without infrastructure do a *lot* better than I do. Mainland should make *even more* with the 10% group discount! But I only exactly know what I'm doing, and what you posted, so if the figures are wrong feel free to correct.

>>To me, trying to deal with the myriad interests and forces on an Alice or a Ravenglass or a Columbia and get along with neighbours with whom I have nothing in common and not even a particularly civil relationship, is the real test of what a community is.

Test failed. You've demeaned me, and anyone involved with my sims quite thoroughly.

I'm sorry we aren't good enough in your eyes.

Posted by: Desmond Shang | December 17, 2006 at 03:51 PM

Desmond,

I deliberately in any interview make this comment about the $217 to illustrate that nobody calculates their BILLABLE HOURS or real costs in SL.
You don't, when you claim a "profit" of $2000.

Try to grasp it -- you're not stupid. I chose to take my profit from my business, and instead of just not cashing out and holding it all there, as you do, and instead of buying Yet Another Island, I do the following:

o subsidize newbie sims
o support a free land preserve -- that means purchase price and tier
o support live music
o support charitable causes
o support instruction
o commission builds and support architecture

etc. etc.

that is simply more interesting than me -- and simply more interesting TO me.

So after doing a variety of things like that, if I have $200-500 or whatever left over, great. I tend not to use it to buy land with -- but then, I don't grow like cancer : )

If you weren't feuding, Desmond, you wouldn't be a stubborn ass, printing crap not only here but on other forums, in which you continue in this smug, superior, vein. Ugh, it is not attractive.

Everyone knows that the people who make money are the pancake flippers who merely put out 16 squares without roads, infrastructure, theme, or customer service. They fill up their islands instantly with people who claim to like nature and infrastructure and themes but at the end of the day, like to be let alone to cyber.

This is why Phil, who is ideological about the way his grid is being used, would like it to be as expensive as possible for people who do that.

The 10 percent group discount merely provides extra prims, which I provide to tenants at a discount price. That's why I can maintain top occupancy, and it also frees me up to defensively purchase to try to keep a sim and its environs good looking. That's an expensive activity, the Lindens care nothing about even the most outrageous griefing, so I think the 10 percent bonus we get on the mainland, enabling us to buy land defensively against griefing, is more than justified.

>Mainland should make *even more* with the 10% group discount! But I only exactly know what I'm doing, and what you posted, so if the figures are wrong feel free to correct.

So, no, mainland should not make shit with the 10 percent bonus. If someone who has a group with 50,000 m2 in it, and got an extra 5,000 m2, and uses it to buy land in his own or the next sim over to prevent a club or casino from vetoing the FPS, he is defensively purchasing.

After all, a mainland sim cannot control all the other sims around it. No matter how many it buys, there will ALWAYS be blight and grief on its flanks. THAT ALONE is reason for the 10 percent bonus to incentivize those who band together, share tier, and try to make sims nice.

It is truly unseemly for island dealers to be lobbying against the 10 percent bonus, when they have free and clear oceans to stare out at, and can at a flick of the wrist, remove top scripts. We cannot get the Lindens to even identify the top scripts on Governor Linden's estate.

As for "demeaning you," Desmond, you demeaned me. You have steadfastly replied in the most scurilous fashion regarding this relatively minor issue of helping each other to avert a lag monster on our sim. Back in forums.slhomepage.com, you behaved like a dick - you could have said, oh, I'm sorry, I was busy, and I don't believe in encouraging land extortionists, but here, I see that this was an exception, here's $250, or sure, you can rely on my to try to deal with this situation in some fashion in the future through some alerting when land goes for sale or effort to see that the land gets purchased by those who aren't going to grief it.

But you just shove that all aside and smugly and superiorly sneer at those on the mainland.

Furthermore, on a thread that didn't require your presence, which wasn't about these topics of extortion, which was merely a post of a mainland rentals agent who makes less money that you do (and who actually did things to help you get your started!) you came on to swagger around and prove you were better.

That was really sucky behaviour. And everyone has noticed it. You demean yourself by doing that, I don't have to do a thing.

As for whining and mewling now that I'm saying "you aren't good enough" in Caledon, don't be ridiculous and don't be manipulative. Caledon is recognized as a superior theme sim. No doubt organizing a community around highly-niched creative individuals who share your smugness and superiority gives you enormous satisfaction. It's not a community in my book.

A community is defined by how well it can tolerate those with whom it disagrees and how well it can take care of its most vulnerable. It's not defined by creator-fascism-defined "excellence."

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 17, 2006 at 04:43 PM

The Liberation of Second Life: Part II, Anti-Hiro

I increasingly get angry at the CopyBot debate -- daily. Not because I am FUDed with Fear Uncertainty and Doubt. We've been all over this. CopyBot is broken, it doesn't work, it never worked, it was inevitable, there is...the grand singular simultaneity of everything everywhere always being copied!

No, it's rather about the CARPS of the tekkis -- and yes, I'm going to be ragging on them again. Conceit, Arrogance, Reaction, Pride, Self-Reference. I have really been working on finding a good antidote to the awful phrase FUD, which the IRC channelers wield like a pair of rusty scissors to cut off every single conversation you want to have about the harmful qualities of this or that oddball invention or activity they are up to.

So many homilies have been delivered on CopyBot that I could put out a goddamn misselette and put it in the church pew. And I'm sick of being lectured and hectored about the Life's Lessons I am supposed to draw from this devastating event in SL, and not have the assholes who made it, deployed it, justified it, rationalized it, gloated over it, hectored us about it not learn any Life Lessons. Because they, not us, are the ones who behaved immorally, gloating over others' misfortunes. And they, not us, had leaders who bribed a source to lie to journalists; who deliberately and cynically calculated how to scare furries, etc. and just behaved in general like total pricks. I want some ownership and some owning-up to this happening with these people. And the biggest barrier to that is that every one of these libbers are running for cover, looking the other way, and pretending that, as one of them idiotically put it to me, you couldn't judge Windows XP by the fact that a bank robber might have used it to rob a bank.

Um, duh, we grasp that wonderful, oh-so-relevant *cough* analogy. The fact is, it wasn't Windows XP, but a virtual world with as-yet a walled garden, where a singularly privileged and feted group, libsecondlife, with indifferent and silent Lindens in it, and with known, banned griefers in it, stood by or were actively involved while other people were harmed -- harmed virtually, and harmed only in a kind of potential wreckage, but harmed sure enough. It's not like Windows XP. it's like having the board of Microsoft which makes Windows XP have prominent figures who were found to release obscene, floating, tubgirl pictures on people's properties to horrify and disgust them; found to bribe a source to lie and mislead journalists about their activity; found to be selling the very tools of a bank robbery and *and* the security antidotes to it (remember that particularly disgusting episode) -- and be responsible for what amounts to a deliberate earthquake in your neighbourhood. THAT is what it is like.

Try to envision the social ramifications THAT way, and you stop all this silly justifiying and rationalizing and foolish crap about "a few bad eggs".

I've had to take plenty of rations of shit over this, but I keep confronting some of the main actors of libscondlife demanding accountability. Two I know, with whom I have had extensive conversations, and persuaded one who was particularly abusive and nasty to me and controlling and manipulative to finally eat crow and confess he had underestimated the problem with John Hurliman, have *left the group completely*. That means they stop gracing it with their good name. That means they send a signal. That means the Lindens in it have to wake up and smell the coffee. That means that the "few bad eggs" thing can't keep washing.

Because if it were true, and we could buy it, those people with good names could stay in the group. But...because it's not about bad eggs but about and entire hen house of bad chickens, the people who wished to keep their good names intact left the group to disassociate themselves. Oh, I know they will chat in the channel, get the downloads from the website, and probably clap the libbers on the back at SLCC.

But at least they can say they won't stand with a company of men responsible for unleashing the tubgirl script on me and my tenants, costing me move-outs and damaged property [ask me how that works if you don't get how that happens in a virtual world], or stand with a company of men who lie and cheat and bribe journalists and sell griefing tools on alts for a fortune, and all the rest.

The failure of the people not only in libsecondlife to get this but their legions of buddies around the blogosphere, is hugely annoying, but it is starting to crumble. There is a simple thing that has helped this: the presence of an apology, that a cocky young man or men then pulled in the believe that in fact he had impunity. That was a good advertisement for the "not bad egg but infected chicken house" argument.

But...there's more. John Hurliman keeps making tekkie, gloaty statements wherever he can, trying to distract Lindens especially with his technical "brilliance" and refusing to face the music on his lies. Baba Yamamoto remains in the group spouting double-talk. These two and their confreres didn't leave. They are there. People who have griefed me, caused huge damage, and who are documented by Lindens are still in the group.

I simply don't accept that libsecondlife, as it is inworld is a "software users' group". No. It's a group where insecure and insolent young men dine out on the fact that they are with *Lindens* and older beta players they can be impressed with and impress. It's a social entity as much as a technical entity, and trying to whitewash that is absurd. If you need a software, you join a mailing list -- you don't join a club or a salon. That's what libsecondlife *is*. Please, those who are among the 165 members claiming, oh, it's just a list, get a grip. Be cognizant of the fact that in the last 6 months, some 25 or more people were banned permanently from second life for crashing the grid, and heavily griefing people like me with groups in really serious and sick ways. Try to wake and see that. You cannot say that something that crashes the entire world, nor causes such harm to rental managers, is just some software list.

You could say, "I didn't know". I guess groups in SL can be casual, but hey, when I'm in a group from which 25 people are suddenly banned, many for crashing the grid, I say, oh, dear. Am I in the right group? Geez. Could this be more than what it seems?

Night after night, for some three months, I and my tenants got bombarded with the horrific, obscene tubgirl particle script, sending me and poor Lindens running all over looking for the script and the objects it was buried in. Night after night, for months and months, my tenants were griefed, harassed, goaded, and my events were crashed, disrupted, forced to quit, and my properties were awash with things like bloody, cut-off furry heads and idiotic Plastic Duck edutatinment pictures. Lindens temporarily joined my group at once poin

On every single avatar profile of the people subjecting me and others who had rental groups to the worst kind of abuses -- or doing horrific things like sending cut-off genital objects flying over the center of the , fellow who ran the psychological counseling center -- or others who simply had open groups -- on every single one of these griefers was the group membership: libsecondlife. Libsecondlife. Libsecondlife. Libsecondlife. Griefing. Putting out ugly pictures. Cut-off heads and genitals. Not one bad egg. Not two. But phalanxes. Dozens. That's why the Lindens had to ban such a huge group.

Libsecondlife. Libsecondlife. Over and over again. Just think about it, goddman it, and shut the fuck up with this "a few bad eggs". You sat on your sim scripting. Dozens of your fellow group members were on other sims sticking the tub girl in people's vendor prims. You can claim lack of knowledge. But now you know, and knew in October when 25 people in your group hit the dust. So stop it already, with the bullshit.

And I'm grateful that a few get this; but it has to keep rolling, and the Lindens, more than anybody, have to get out. For months and months I would say, hey liaison Lindens, see these new alts? You know how you can tell they are about to put the tubgirl out here? they say "libsecondlife" and "Gay 4 Philip" on their profiles. So stand right here, Lindens, and watch it go down. Do the math. And they didn't. Instead, Im' being banned for demanding that Cory Linden step up to the plate, and explain to me, how he backed a group, whose members repeatedly, for months, unleashed the tubgirl script on me.

Here's my answer to Hiro -- my blog title today not only refers to the anti-heros that are griefers in this group, but my rebuttal of his blog:

>My Thoughts on CopyBot, Copyright, and SL Business in 2007

>Your prim/texture business is at risk no matter what, and CopyBot has no effect.

CopyBot is a social as well as a technical fact. A person who no longer creates for fear that they don't have the resources to hire lawyers and protect trademarks; a person subjected to fear (which I view as a crime of those subjecting them to it, not a crime of those who ostensibly "got FUD"); such a person has been harmed by CopyBot even if it never copied a thing. And the curious thing is that the tekkies are double-talking this. They say it has no effect; they also say it is at risk. Both are true. But neither they nor creators can parse out WHEN and WHERE. That is, to some extent, people with closed private island that control their door and have specialize activities are safer. Griefing script kiddies who bought a thing like this on slexchange.com or something are not likely to gain access. But a huge mainland mall with 20,000 traffic a day *is* a venue for its deployment.

> I am not meaning to come off cynical with this post. I do want to point out facts of which every business owner should make themselves aware.

Nobody died and made Hiro Pendragon lord of the metaverse.

>Assumed: SL continues to increase in size and features.

1. SL will have better search tools made available, either by Linden Lab or through some third party.
2. More and more content creators will make more and more items available.

 

>Result: Residents will have easy access to hundreds of similar products which will force sellers to slash prices to compete.

Well, maybe yes, maybe no. This kind of blogospheric self-assurance remains to be seen. IN fact, buying in Second Life isn't just about some static, disembodied market analysis and statistics. Sure, 10 new mens' wear creators will be a competition to the one who previously existed; he will have to get better, get more advertising or slash prices.

Except...no. He won't. Because in the atomized, niched, grouped, wierd world of SL, he has his network of friends, like a kind of salon, and they buy not only because he is better or his prices are lower -- his prices at a certain point don't matter. They buy because he is someone they wish to support in their circle; they like him; they like his creations; they want him to keep creating and keep wearing his outfits and feeling good.

In SL, those circles and groups around creators, performers, service providers, are there because of social relationships, "commerce circles," and even blake's "trust circles" which I really don't like as a concept. They are the reality, however. There are people who rent from me not because my beach is whiter or my price is cheaper but because they merely got used to me and found it easy to come back to something that was familiar, and might like this or that customized benefit they got or just the lay of the land on the sim. That's it. So while a market analysis would say, but 47 percent other new competitors had lower prices with more prims; but 32 percent rentals with higher prices but greater long-term spenders are a fierce competition, the million little details that go into building a customer list will still prevail.

Of course, tekkies would like to do everything possible to eradicate the organic nature of these commerce circles by subjecting the world to relentless data scraping and analysis and become active and aggressive aggregators and reflectors of the data to affect the world -- mainly in their own business interests. It's like the way the big book stores destroyed the little ones.

But, when people come back to me even if they had a bad experience in SL or even with me, you realize there is just something about the pull of the human and the familiar that market statistics cannot explain.

That kind of love of customers is something you'd think Hiro, who began in SL with his crossed swords and Dojo and Oriental garden, would "get". But, he may not, as that was long ago and far away in another galaxy.

Bottom line, I don't think -- yet -- we can make such absolute predictions and pronouncements about the inevitability of the devaluation or content NOR the innocence of CopyBot and its makers. The sneering and gloating little UTube videos being feted by Sheep and Moo Money can't obviate that.

The miracle of SL is actually that people help each other and buy from each other even if CopyBot threatens to undermine the very structure of their commerce. The tragedy of Second Life is that a few cynical tekkies can kill even an atomized world that should have more buffers like the compartments on the Titanic -- but doesn't. And yes, human agents are needed to make the inevitable happen.

CopyBot didn't happen 3 years ago; it happened now due to a combination of human malevolence and human calculation: the Lindens needed a group of people working for free on solving all their big problems through reverse engineering (or a sandbox to keep griefers happy, it's not clear which); kids who are wannabee game devs needed a biscuit to cut their teeth on. Neither of these parties thought abuot the consequences.

Again, it's the social disaster the geeks unleashed that is by far the worse problem for me than any literal copying or fear of copying. Sheesh, cut it out with that.

>Advice: If you wish to survive as a vendor of virtual items:
1. Start learning to script or get friendly with someone who can. Scripts already are the differentiating factor in most items, and will only continue to be the things that make your products stand out.

Erm, could we say "conceit" and "self-serving"??? Yeah, scripts can't be copied. CopyBotters made sure THAT can't happen. But a dress doesn't need to be scripted to be beautiful; more scripts mean more lag and more griefing, frankly, as more people make them and mess up making them. That's no reason to cramp them, but it is a call to think about balance. Why is the maximal scriptalization of our world a value, except to scripters? Could we get some input from other sectors of the world, please, without the scripterati running it once again?!

>2. Focus on doing custom work. There's an exponentially increasing demand for talented builders of all sorts for Metaverse Development Companies. We also pay in US$, not L$. (At least, the scrupulous ones.)

Infomercial much? Yes, there's a job for you in one of these sherpa operations. But never forget that the sherpas will no longer have a job if Mount Everest isn't there anymore. The main attraction is the community -- communities -- that bother to live in the inworld Second Life, and never forget it.

>3. Establish a rock-solid brand name that will keep customer loyalty.

Yes and no. Brand names are things that happen in a very confused place in SL, as there is no mass media. I asked a woman with a beautiful dress today where she got it. She had no idea. There is no instant way to click and see the creator's name. Instead, she remembered the look of a sim...the store...her friends...everything but that brand name, try though she may. In fact, if someone reading InfoNut where I'll place the picture recognizes it, let me know to get a free ad for your store.

>Notice, CopyBot has nothing to do with your real business risk.

Huh? The entire copyability problem and the lack of true IP is your risk. How will you mitigate it? Networking. Customer service. More customer service. But...you could run yourself ragged doing that. At the end of the day, CopyBot is indeed a great harm hanging over your head for two reasons:

o tekkies who make stuff like this are cynical and don't give a fuck about your world values -- that's your major take-home
o your stuff is copyable -- hello?

>Conversely, those who feel CopyBot is a threat, I say this:

1. Since CopyBot has been declared abuse-reportable by Linden Lab, anyone caught selling things made by CopyBot risk losing their money, account, land, etc.

Baloney. John Hurliman/Eddy Stryker/Prim Revolution sold CopyBot, along with Nimrod Yaffle on his alt Geforce. They were kicked from the game for only a few hours for a day. They didn't lose money, account, or land. Baloney again. So why are we to believe anything about any punishment of this stuff? It's all bullshit. Am I calling for their heads? No, I'm calling for people to *step down* from libsecondlife and make another group or *remove them*. That's all. If CopyBot's "unauthorized use" is wrong; if it is an abuse; those that did make it and abuse it should be getting some heat. They aren't. So kick them from the group. Their work isn't so vital. If somehow it is, I have to say I don't find it so palatable that our world has to be made by liars, stealers, and cheaters. And if the Lindens think the programming abilities of some college kid is so vital to their needs, at least have libsecondlife, where their staff resides, suspend these characters for 30 days -- let them suffer the losses we've had to suffer for the terrible disruption in business.

And before I hear one goddamn spouting about how people shot themselves in the foot by closing their businesses, I'd like to have them sit and talk to my perfectly smart and normal tenants for even 20 minutes about just what they think of that idea. They demonstrated not because something was actually demonstrably copied. They aren't stupid. They are tekkies themselves, in some cases. They demonstrated at the cynical, asshole nature of people who sold the CopyBot deliberately; offered to sell antidotes even; scoffed at people's concerns; and arrogated to themselves the right to tear down the wall in a day. That's what it is about. Social, not purely technical Burn it in, Hiro. Social, not technical.

God damn, it's a good thing the Lindens at least grasped that to solve the SOCIAL problem they had, they had to change the TOS, even though I'll be some Community Lindens had to drag some coding Lindens kicking and screaming to do this, as they no doubt insisted on language talking about putative "arms races". Oops, they did do that. That's exactly what they did. But just because an arms race can happen, doesn't mean you have to have a race to the bottom on morality.

>2. No one will make very much money with CopyBot before being discovered. We as a community have grown too good at spotting freebie-resellers and outing them; this same skill will combat *any* sort of Copyright infringement.

Um, yeah, that worked SO well that first time we dealt with this? Not!

I have to say that having a senior Linden arrive on the scene and simply say, "take that down" worked a lot better than counting on Hiro's network of freebie-reselling haters. And to muddle the legitimate activity of freebie reselling with the illegitimate act of CopyBotting lets us know that Hiro is in a class of people who, for technical, economic, and social reasons, will have to go on being a class enemy. Sad to have to pronounce a Better World to contain such realities, but there it is. People have interests, agendas, differences, better to admit them and manage them then have one triumph over the other in defining the debate.

>3. Spamming "!quit" is pointless. If you stop panicking and think, you'd realize anyone unscrupulous enough to use CopyBot to steal items will just remove that line of code that accepts the "!quit". Don't be a spammer. It lags sims and pisses people off.

Yeah we got all that. It was touching to see people trying to help, however. That's all. People try to help. It annoys, but it is a symbol of the indomitable helping spirit of human beings who want others not to suffer. It is anti-CopyBot in that sense, and anti-Hiro. Leave it running -- as a reminder to him and all the other arrogant assholes who justified the harm of the world in their own interests.

COMMENTS

did you noticed the libsl group is open enrollment? me, you and your mother can join it if you want. You should come really, before spreading lies on your scribbler blog.

When i am not versed on a subject i keep myself from posting about it, a healty beahavior that you should follow you too if you want to become a good writer.

Posted by: Kyrah Abattoir | December 14, 2006 at 05:14 AM

Actually the fact that it's open enrollment has been one of Prokofy's many complaints.

Posted by: Baba | December 14, 2006 at 10:07 AM

While all of the happenings of CopyBot mostly don't concern me.. I'm still mystified as to your stance on scripters thinking themselves and their products 'above' other content creators. As you said, some tekkies, even your own tenants, were of the non-FUD-assuming persuasion, people who even protested themselves. Along another line, you say of scripts, "Yeah, scripts can't be copied. CopyBotters made sure THAT can't happen." In reality, Linden Lab made sure that can't happen. The only parts of the world itself that aren't technologically vulnerable to being stolen are scripts. If you have evidence to the contrary, evidence that indeed scripts can be stolen without some permissions bug and without packet sniffing someone local to their point of connection, I'd certainly be interested and highly concerned (and I mean this in a way not at all intended to sound 'above' other content makers - 'scripterati' - nice). Sure, LL could have encrypted the protocol, made textures and the like much more difficult to steal. They could have chosen a non-OpenGL route, even. Why didn't they? This is not to say that CopyBot wasn't an absurd project. While CopyBot and its purposes are back-asswards and wrong, LL has enabled this from the start as well. I don't believe their mission has ever included TRYING to protect content aside from stopping server-side bugs.

I agree with the idea that things probably won't devalue anytime soon. While there is such a thing as competition, there's so much of it, and so little transparency as to the comparison of prices, that there really won't be much slashing in order to compete. Right now, aside from buying online through SLE or such, you'd really have to go out of your way and TP all over to find *the best price out there*. As long as something isn't ridiculously overpriced, people will buy it. Besides, one designer can mark down their prices all they want; it doesn't mean people won't buy other brands just for the different styles or their own personal tastes.

Open enrollment really is a retarded plan, Baba. If I make any group that isn't just for fun and has some dedicated purpose, I certainly wouldn't let whatever unknown people join as they wish. In a place like this, at that point you're asking for people to start wiping their asses on your group's reputation. That is not to say that I agree with Prok's instant interpretation of all group members' actions as being representative of the whole, but really.. you've never intended to prevent such 'bad eggs' from sprouting up, have you? Sure, you could make libSL itself an open project, but that doesn't mean it's a shiny idea to let just anyone represent your primary members' intentions, especially on the grid. Comments?

Posted by: Tyken Hightower | December 14, 2006 at 10:41 AM

There is a notable side-lesson in the Copybot issue; one that the Ministry of Truth couldn't teach any better than with this example.

Even on the grid, in this supposedly hallowed Information Age, many people on the grid I've talked to don't even know about Copybot. At all.

Sure, *we* all knew about Copybot. But there are the multitudes that see forums, polls, or whatnot, - and just keep moving along.

Their world, their grid, their agenda.

The population is no longer forced to tramp around the color-named sims and soak up the 'main topic of the day' (along with brand names!), simply because there are now other places to go.

Sic transit gloria, for all of us. Likely a good thing.

Posted by: Desmond Shang | December 14, 2006 at 12:28 PM

I don't care if it is open enrollment. Ravenglass Rentals is open enrollment, too. When I get a griefer, I expel them. I keep expelling them. I even close the group temporarily if they keep griefing by joining a group where they have been expelled *for cause*.;

I *do* think that a group involved in *reverse engineering the client* for God's sake might consider having a closed, invitation-only membership, eh? Given everything. Gosh, I know "information wants to be free," but it might be a show of consideration of the rest of us to stop the flow of v-5s and other assholes, including their own long-term, cycnical members like Baba Yamamotoa, and to create a group with a more distinct face and mission that no one can say, oh, it's open, and that's why that asstard joined. I view that as completely facile and indefensible to make that sort of argument, and to hide behind it.

Tyken, Linden Lab and scripters are all of one class of tekkies who sure as hell make damn sure that their scripts can't be copied. They are hysterically anal-retentive and have the motivation to develop systems in this regard. Of course, they can be copied if they are essentially sheets of paper you cut and paste too. I'm well aware of the mechanics of how scripts work as distinct of how textures render. Still, I point out this deep hypocrisy -- they hide behind mechanics, and they have their own heavy motivation to protect *their own* livlihood (here's the livlihood Hiro is even telling everyone to go into now that textures are really not safe).

I dunno, when Aimee Weber and Cristiano Midnight were screaming about the failure to have protections on flaws and exploits and the ability to copy textures, this was accepted as an honourable, legitimate, needed exercise. Suddenly, when ordinary people who aren't famous and aren't FIC ask for the same protections, they are dismissed as suffering from FUD.

Packet-sniffing has been tolerated by the Lindens often for long periods -- remember the questions I asked about Rathe Underthorne and the hysterical reaction?

And yes, there is a question continually to ask: why didn't they go the route of a different path to protect things more? This should be challenged technically and politically.

I am so glad you challenged the "open-group" stuff, Tyken. We've had to hear the point of view of those with malice and hatred of others and their interests, like Kyrah, over and over and over again. It's in their interests to shirk responsibility for the tekkie class as a whole, as they benefit from the largesse given to it.

I'm glad you are honest enough to call them on this. And call you must: because while they can even be making an open-source product, I don't see why they have to have an open group to do it -- especialyl when over and over and over again, dozens and dozens of alts come from v-5 and w-hat to grief people viciously.

I don't know why this is rocket science. People with the membership "libsecondlife" have repeatedly crashed the grid, making self-replicating objects and stuff. The Lindens not only know this, they finally banned those people.

It's as if they and many people who are carrying water for libsecondlife are completely blind to the social and political ramifications of their actions.

They joined libsecondlife because they found it hospitable. Huns Valen in particular has been a willing host and an apologist over and over again, and a victory dancer after many of their antics.

Ravenglass Rentals is an open group too, and some of these same assholes deliberately invaded it and used the exploits to harm other people. I expelled them, over and over again, appealed to the leaders over and over again (that's why I finally got Jesse Malthus to start expelling some of them, until Baba evidently took away his expulsion powers -- funny how Jesse never admits that now publicly).

I kept naming, shaming, abuse-reporting, telling Lindens. I even closed the group for a time. Libsecondlife did nothing like that.

Desmond, your notion that the masses of blingtards in their blissful ignorance and atomized state of SL and its lack of civil society is true; but it is a irresponsible thing to say, nonetheless. It implies that just because every blingtard doesn't know about any of this, it's fine to not care, or imagine that all of us and are concerns are irrelevant.

You know full well that every society has its intelligentsia, its elite, and its educated and aware classes who think in conceptual terms about the world itself, some of whom have the power to affect conditions in the entire world.

So for Lindens, who rule this world; technical elite; FIC and SIC and all the powers celebrating and residing in libsecondlife, it is all completely irresponsible and malicious to allow a thing like this to happen and not take action.

Just because you can't do EVERYTHING and "stop CopyBot," doesn't mean that you can't clean up the act of this group, print the apology that really must go up; kick out the people who really are demonstrable malevolent assholes; and move to invitation-only.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 14, 2006 at 01:18 PM

Wow. I think I'm starting to get this "rant" I've been reading across your many posts. While there are many issues I may disagree upon, I don't think they are worth squabbling over, as the main portion of your message is very articulate and reasonable. I believe this post is the first time it has been framed so well, and that may be attributed to the fact that there were "fewer" accusatory statements and more content actually describing your position.
Since you have done such a good job in framing your point of view, I will not attempt to rehash it. I believe your words can only do that job well. I am however drawn to a metaphor which perhaps pushes in the direction of where I believe you are arguing from.
I would like to draw parallels between this "virtual" world and our real world. I would liken scripters to genetecists in our world and data to DNA. I suppose in this metaphor, our REAL world has been rather "closed sourced" up to this point. But now genetecists have begun to reverse engineer the client that was designed by nature. Science would like to convince us that these little on / off switches in our DNA are the total sum of who and what we are. They are just bits of data, and are not unique and can be easily copied. The humanitarian argument is one that just because DNA can be copied and manipulated, doesn't necessarilly mean that it recklessly should be. Perhaps scripts could be compared to a soul, or consiousness, maybe brain function. At this point not easy to copy or reproduce.
I apologize, this metaphor shall remain incomplete and disorganized as it has just come to my, and I haven't the time to completely flesh it out. I think you may be right though, that many "tekkies" fail to see the human aspect of data, as it is second nature for us to manipulate it. In fact, it constantly amazes me how much humanity there IS in second life. Literally, my mind is blown over how passionate everyone I meet within is about this seemingly virtual world and it's not so real "objects" as though there were REAL life within second life. As though this walled garden actually has a soul to it. Amazing.
Well, I think your writing has managed already to change my mind and make me think a little deeper about the overall issue. Though I still hold issue to many sidepoints you make, I don't find them relevant to the argument you seem to be making here. Of course, I could really just be grasping at straws here, wanting to try to understand just why you are so very passionate about these issues. Well, thanks for the good read. Still glad it's not on the Linden Blogs.

Posted by: Pyutaros Achterbahn | December 14, 2006 at 03:59 PM

Interesting thinking, Prok. I wonder what this post would be if you removed all of your assuming-all-developers-are-evil attitude?

I find it ironic that you first tell me that I've ignored "commerce circles", which is essentially brand loyalty, and then later when I mention brand loyalty, you waver.

Also, regarding making money from copybot, as I understand the person(s) who sold copybot earned a few thousand linden per sale. You know very well that this is peanuts compared to what many content creators make. I, for one, have the vivid memory of the infamous payoff-chatlog in my mind, and if other people remember, that's one hell of a hit to reputation, ain't it?

Posted by: Hiro Pendragon | December 15, 2006 at 06:52 PM

In our little context, they *are* evil. Oh, I've seen quite a few that aren't. I don't think Lindens on the whole are evil, though they have some decidedly evil ideals. But I see currently that the bunch at the fetid inner core are objectively destructive and selfish.

Commerce circles and "brand loyalty" aren't the same thing. If you think they are, you have a shallow understanding of human relations.

Just one person selling it -- there were many -- made $70,000 Lindens. That's only $245 US, but so what? The issue isn't HOW MUCH they made, but THAT they were cynical enough to sell it and take advantage of it and terrorize people more, by disseminating it.

The pay-off chatlog involves John Hurliman arranging to pay $100 US to Nimrod Yaffle, John being the real name of Eddy Stryker and Nimrod -- who is he? Who knows? So no need to be coy; you can reference it. And that hit to the reputation has done absolutely no good -- Eddy remains firmly in place in libsecondlife, even cockily issuing me invitations to join this open group with the "interest group" title. Baba, also the cynic, is also in place.

I'm recalling how a scripter I know well made something that happened to copy a feature of something in SL. And instead of terrorizing people with it; selling it; testing it on unsuspecting people and sewing terror; behaving like a general dick, he tried it out on his own empty land and then talked to the Lindens about it and then heeded their advice not to use it. Some people are simply decent and moral.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 15, 2006 at 07:12 PM

Fix the World For Me and My RL Clients KTx Bye

I had to laugh out loud reading the Blob tonight and seeing this lovely pearl from FlipperPA "Hide Me Online" Peregrine.

You will recall that The Sheep's Flipper lobbied long and hard to get the Lindens to drop everything they were doing and code up a capacity for Flipper to hide his online status from people to whom he felt obliged to get friendship cards. He couldn't say "no" to them; he couldn't go on an alt. That would be a solution.

So, to work these Lindens went, and they also coded up a sort of fake HTML-on-an-avatar which was a web page capacity so that avatars could do things like browse Flipper's slexchange.com slboutique.com inworld.

Now, hidden online, happy that all his customers are browsing Slex SLB from inworld from their very avatars, Flipper now suddenly puts his head up and realizes what we have known for 3 months.

The game doesn't work.

Here he goes:

flipperpa Says: December 13th, 2006 at 2:52 PM PST

Can we get an update on what’s up with time dilation, sim fps, and the presence issues (sim border crossings almost never work now, and you keep flying and have to relog). Trying to walk or fly around Second Life is next to impossible. Showing Second Life to existing and potential clients is currently extremely embarassing because with these bugs, it’s basically unusable, unless you’re sitting in one spot, don’t move, and don’t mind text not showing up, or showing up out of order and late (thank you, packet loss).

It reflects badly on many of us with real life clients, so it would be really nice if we could get an update on what’s being done to address these problems (which have been around for quite a while now). Right now, Second Life is like a Ferrari with a great sound system that doesn’t have tires or gasoline, and it’s quite frustrating.

Thanks in advance for any updates you can provide on resolving these most critical matters. Without fixing the key issues of sim time dilation and presence issues, EVERYTHING else is window dressing.

Regards,

-Flip

Yes. In fact TD doesn't work on a schedule. It crashes to 3 or 30 every 15 minutes as the sim saves itself. Crossing borders has long been a luxury -- only if I want my avatar to go floating like an air-borne boat over the heads of my surprised tenants do I pull that stunt.

Cocoanut started calling SL "PL" for packet loss; so did Khamon. I'm embarrassed for the Lindens that this might catch on.

So, suddenly, Flipper wakes up to what the rest of the world has endured for months and months, after he has gotten his various perks and pets, and says NOW everything else is window dressing (um, frankly, I've been saying this since January -- even new group tools could have waited for me if it meant FPS and sim borders and teleports and grey textures could be removed. First things first!

Of course, Flipper writes this when the world has actually started working rather well. In fact I thanked the hard-working Lindens, and you should too. Flipper may have a bad Internet connection.

But this -- this is over the top:

"It reflects badly on many of us with real life clients."

Oh? Like...it doesn't reflect badly on many of us with SL clients? Like...we are chopped liver? Like...those of us just logging on without businesses but just socializing are somehow less worthy of a working game?

Like, only the threat of bad PR from the Sheep is going to get the world to whip into shape, and whip the tireless Lindens even harder?

It's too bad we no longer have negrates in SL; or gloves like we had in TSO -- Flipper would deserve both for this insensitive and stupid comment.

COMMENTS

Oh, geez, and right on schedule, Jeska "Pose for Flipper" Linden drops what SHE is doing, ignores EVERYBODY else in the thread, and has this urgent yellow bulletin for her pal Flipper:

"Jeska Linden Says:
December 13th, 2006 at 4:35 PM PST

Re: Sim fps/time dilation/sim performance.

I’m going to ask one of the engineers who’s working on these issues to come blog a status update, since he’ll be able to explain things and answer your questions better."

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 14, 2006 at 04:08 AM

You never stop to whine don't you?

Posted by: Kyrah Abattoir | December 14, 2006 at 05:04 AM

"It's too bad we no longer have negrates in SL; or gloves like we had in TSO -- Flipper would deserve both for this insensitive and stupid comment."

Perhaps you are simply over-sensitive and looking to be offended?

Posted by: King Frederick | December 14, 2006 at 08:28 AM

"shut the fuck up you useless piece of shit" kthankbye

Posted by: Jennyfur | December 14, 2006 at 10:31 AM

Since the update, some things have gotten better, some have stayed the same. Some little things here and there, like avatar shapes properly updating when someone TPs in, pants not staying skin-tight and the like. Even textures seem to be rezzing more quickly for me. However, we still have the same nasty packetloss, and who knows what else. I also made a comment at SC on the revelation of how torii affect client performance since the last LOD fix for them. But that's miniscule in comparison to network issues.

What I really liked was how some Linden commented in a previous blog update something to the effect of, "Yeah, the reason the last update fudged everything up was because we tried to update the server and change the client at the same time. Too many changes at once." If that sort of thing were a front-page update there, people would be amazed, nay, fall down in awe at proper customer service. "Hey guys, we screwed up, this is how."

Posted by: Tyken Hightower | December 14, 2006 at 10:50 AM

Let's hope Jeska recruits Joshua Linden to post the updates. He types like a real person.

Posted by: Khamon | December 14, 2006 at 11:23 AM

Reflecting on the actual topic of the entry, yes, we are indeed chopped liver. We're the substrate of SL's transformation into what will eventually bring back investments that have been made into LL. The opening of the protocol, maybe even licensing and decentralization of SL servers so that private buyers and small businesses can make use of it at their own level. That's really where the money will start flowing in, right? Until the point where we've reached a critical mass in user registrations and the technology itself is ready to become opened up, we're just tools. At least, that's one way of looking at it, just from the chain of events. I'm sure there are invisible underlying causes for things like price hikes and the like, and Philip's statement on their investors and mission would have you believe otherwise. I'd like to believe otherwise, because what I've outlined is grim and sounds severely lacking in fun for me. :(

Posted by: Tyken Hightower | December 14, 2006 at 11:34 AM

Congrats Flip on your aquisition of SLexchange!

Are you planning on selling that to ESC so they can own that AND SL Boutique?

Posted by: Siggy | December 14, 2006 at 12:21 PM

Prokofy you're such a fucking idiot.

Stop harassing people you want to get fucked by. This isn't kindergarten.

Posted by: Joshua Nightshade | December 14, 2006 at 12:29 PM

Jennyfur, really - you are not doing the SLCC any service by inserting these comments various places.

coco

Posted by: Cocoanut Koala | December 14, 2006 at 01:26 PM

If I typed "Slex" it should have said "SLB" -- Flipper didn't acquire it, but even though he sold SLB, he still codes for it and gets involved in it and benefits from it financially as a member of the Sheep, or were you implying he does not?

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 14, 2006 at 01:31 PM

Coco, Jennyfur will behave in the most irresponsible and condescending and outrageous way because she feels she has total impunity.

They feel with Jeska and other Lindens to protect their nastiness, they have no accountability.

They already ran two SLCCs and no one stopped them from their assholery.

All we can do is keep exposing this because it won't last forever.

Yes, Tyken, it is a grim scenario. But one in which we need not remain passive. We can keep outlining and exposing it and demand some consideration.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 14, 2006 at 01:34 PM

We can do lots of fun stuff, But we lack the fundamental share holdings of LL to make it work. My guess is that no matter what happens, we'll always have the main grid (provided the asset server or something else doesn't explode after some drunken weekend Linden partying where more booze is spilled on it). However, if things truly decentralize, the community will fracture.

Posted by: Tyken Hightower | December 14, 2006 at 01:40 PM

I'll say what I want and when I want. Stupid assholes like Prok can say what ever the hell they please and lie about whoever they want. So I am justified in say "shut the fuck up you useless piece of shit" regardless of who I am or what I am connected to.

I doubt it does the SLCC a great disservice to put Prok in her place. I have yet to have anyone other than the usual suspects of non-consequence point this out.

Posted by: Jennyfur | December 14, 2006 at 01:46 PM

It reflects badly on the SLCC, Jennyfur.

coco

Posted by: Cocoanut Koala | December 14, 2006 at 01:48 PM

I still think its funny that you think Jeska is our only friend and saving grace at Linden Lab. While she is one of our good friends and there is no denying that we know and are friends with way more people than just one person at LL.

Posted by: Jennyfur | December 14, 2006 at 01:48 PM

Coco,

So fucking what. Prok is a goddamned useless piece of shit and I am not afraid to say it. If YOU think that reflects poorly on me and the SLCC quite frankly I don't give a fuck. My guess is that most of the Prok sympatheizers and supporters won't come to or support the SLCC so its really no big effing deal. I'm sure LL will miss her presence. NOT.

Posted by: Jennyfur | December 14, 2006 at 01:50 PM

While she is one of our good friends and there is no denying that we know and are friends with way more people than just one person at LL.

*Bursts out laughing*. Wow, Jenny-fur, I am SO impressed. You are so cool! You have so many important friends!

Someday, LL will come to regret their association with such mediocrities as FlipperPA and his lovely wife Jenny-fur. I don't have to criticize or ridicule them -- their own posts reveal them to be the glaringly limited and incompetent sullen and insolent types that they are. Like countries that have the leaders they deserve, I suppose the SL "community," (the self-appointed one) has the leadership they deserve. I'm sure we're headed for another fan-filled fun-filled SLCC, where the emphasis is on getting roaring drunk, behaving like you're in a frat house, and having seminars on sex beds and dildos ROFL.

I can't imagine that the Lindens, given their current makeup, will reflect on this image they project because right now, they are flush with success, but in time, look for wiser grownup Lindens to cut these ties.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 14, 2006 at 02:44 PM

>So fucking what. Prok is a goddamned useless piece of shit and I am not afraid to say it. If YOU think that reflects poorly on me and the SLCC quite frankly I don't give a fuck. My guess is that most of the Prok sympatheizers and supporters won't come to or support the SLCC so its really no big effing deal. I'm sure LL will miss her presence. NOT.

I haven't lied, I've been critical about the really unattractive aspects of FlipperPA's influence on our world. On this particular post, I've called him on being a shameless manipulative fanboy getting the features he wants, then going entitlement-happy on the world not working (which it hasn't for months), then sucking up to his little Linden friends, then having those little friends suck up to him. Do you really think I'm not the only person noticing this sordid little interplay?

It's just an expose of the FIC phenom at its most unattractive, and it's good for more and more people to see this, and at some point quietly -- or not so quietly -- say to the Lindens, um, why do you front these asstards and allow them to assume these positions?

Because, Flipper isn't elected or acclaimed. He didn't even hold public meetings inworld for organizing these conferences. Nobody but him and his little circlelet of friends gets to decide the agenda -- and when they do, they do stuff like front Stroker and dildos ROFL and also sessions where they and their little Sheep friends get to brag in really atrocious and embarrassing ways about their noveau riche status as metaversal contractors. Ugh. I'll be giving this a pass!

In time, more sophisticated and interesting people will build some kind of alternative to this old fanboyz kind of stuff and I'd be happy to help.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 14, 2006 at 02:49 PM

I don't think the Lindens per se are drunken partyers who would spill beer on their servers. From everything I've seen of them in RL and just in general in the news and on the grapevine, that doesn't seem to be the issue.

To be sure, they are tolerant of other frat boys in the fan base who are like this, and that's annoying.

The Herald keeps up this running gag about the Lindens always smoking dope and huffing on the fatties and picking the dewey chewey buds, etc. He would know better.

The actual practices of the Lindens don't seem to be like that at all. Instead, the overwhelming live experiences you have of Lindens is that they are total nerds, staying up late on their time zones, and working at bugs or problems way after hours.

Maybe younger Lindens do what everybody in their cohort does which is go out and get drunk on weekends. Maybe it has no reflection on their performance. Most people leave that period in their lives behind. But that's not the issue, these Lindens' lifestyles.

What's at issue is their tolerance of this spectacle of SLCC.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 14, 2006 at 02:57 PM

"If I typed "Slex" it should have said "SLB" -- Flipper didn't acquire it, but even though he sold SLB, he still codes for it and gets involved in it and benefits from it financially as a member of the Sheep, or were you implying he does not?"

No I wasn't implying anything - I was straight up laughing that you used SLExchange - and SLexchange.com instead of SL Boutique....

Not 'if I used' - very much 'did use' - the .com one was especially funny (since edited out -- alas)

It's those pesky lil facts.. the devil is in the details... I I mean if you don't even know what company, webstore, whatever you're talking about - or can't be bothered with that 'tekki wiki literalist bullshit' (what most journalists refer to as 'facts') then why should I pay any attention to whats being 'reported'... I should take as much care with my attention to it as you took to writing it...

....not very much.

Posted by: Siggy | December 14, 2006 at 02:58 PM

I do know what I'm talking about, don't be ridiculous. Everybody knows that Flipper is associated with SLB. Slex is his competitor. It was late, I typed the wrong thing. So? Big fucking deal?

What's your contribution to all this except to be the usual raging asshole, and to prop up the sick fanboy/frat boy culture of the SLCC?

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 14, 2006 at 03:05 PM

Thats easy.. I'm 'pushing back' against lazy 'journalists'

So thats the answer to lazy fact finding? 'big fucking deal'

whats your contribution to all this except misinformation?

Have a nice day Prok ;)

Thanks for playing.

Posted by: siggy | December 14, 2006 at 03:14 PM

Prok, with all your angst against everyone and everything associated with the SLCC again, I hope we can count on your continued boycot of this event.

In either case, it does not matter because like the SL Forums and Linden Blog, you are NOT welcome there.

Posted by: Jennyfur | December 14, 2006 at 04:00 PM

You are a bafoon.

Posted by: SpaceAce | December 14, 2006 at 04:08 PM

>Prok, with all your angst against everyone and everything associated with the SLCC again, I hope we can count on your continued boycot of this event.

>In either case, it does not matter because like the SL Forums and Linden Blog, you are NOT welcome there.

*Bursts out laughing again*. This little snow-globe is about to be broken...

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 14, 2006 at 04:29 PM

Who else is not welcome at the SLCC?

coco

Posted by: Cocoanut Koala | December 14, 2006 at 04:47 PM

"*Bursts out laughing again*. This little snow-globe is about to be broken..."

What??

Posted by: Noooo U! | December 14, 2006 at 05:28 PM

This has been a good exercise, because not only do we amplify the entitlement-happy Flipper's blatherings that might have fallen before the fold on the Blob, we got him demanding service from engineers; we got Jeska running to his beck and call; we got him thanking her with his usual regal manner of nobless oblige, then we got Jenny-fur on here telling us that Jeska isn't even their only Linden friend! Wow! Are we impressed...or what???

Furthermore, in exemplary FIC fashion, we got Jenny-fur in her usual sullen, insolent, and stupid fashion, to tell me I'm not welcome (and anyone who might agree that those two are less-than-impressive); and that not only does she hope my boycott repeats, she tells me to "shut the fuck up" because I am "a useless piece of shit".

Let's go back to what this was about. I have posted repeatedly about the Flipper problem. It boils down to this:

o unaccountable -- never holds inworld meetings
o not elected, not appointed except by Lindens, indirectly
o failed to deliver inworld conference facility last time
o failed to broaden the agenda beyond a few frat-party sort of items like dildos and his money-making schemes as a sherpa
o involvement in CopyBot by claiming he "could stop it" but then "failed to stop it"
o repeated, arrogant and insolent posts about how he runs the Lindens, and hey, Lindens, time to do what I want...and having it work -- the Lindens drop what they were doing and pell-mell stuck in "hide me online" because Flipper ranted about it
o Does Flipper's dad invest in Second Life or something? How does this work??? I've never understood how a seemingly intelligent soul like Philip Rosedale got hooked up with this arrogant mediocrity.

See, moments like this, you realize the problem with the Peregrines is that they just aren't very bright. For a world that seems to have so many bright people, including the Lindens, you have to wonder why they're put in positions of authority. I leave you to ponder this.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 14, 2006 at 05:29 PM

One for all and all for one, Muskehounds are always ready. One for all and all for one, helping everybody. One for all and all for one, it's a pretty story. Sharing everything with fun, that's the way to be. One for all and all for one, Muskehounds are always ready. One for all and all for one, helping everybody. One for all and all for one, can sound pretty corny. If you've got a problem chum, think how it could be.

80 days around the world, we'll find a pot of gold just sitting where the rainbow's ending. Time - we'll fight against the time, and we'll fly on the white wings of the wind. 80 days around the world, no we won't say a word before the ship is really back. Round, round, all around the world. Round, all around the world. Round, all around the world. Round, all around the world.

Ulysses, Ulysses - Soaring through all the galaxies. In search of Earth, flying in to the night. Ulysses, Ulysses - Fighting evil and tyranny, with all his power, and with all of his might. Ulysses - no-one else can do the things you do. Ulysses - like a bolt of thunder from the blue. Ulysses - always fighting all the evil forces bringing peace and justice to all.

Knight Rider, a shadowy flight into the dangerous world of a man who does not exist. Michael Knight, a young loner on a crusade to champion the cause of the innocent, the helpless in a world of criminals who operate above the law.

This is my boss, Jonathan Hart, a self-made millionaire, he's quite a guy. This is Mrs H., she's gorgeous, she's one lady who knows how to take care of herself. By the way, my name is Max. I take care of both of them, which ain't easy, 'cause when they met it was MURDER!

Posted by: Noooo U! | December 14, 2006 at 05:43 PM

Hong Kong Phooey, number one super guy. Hong Kong Phooey, quicker than the human eye. He's got style, a groovy style, and a car that just won't stop. When the going gets tough, he's really rough, with a Hong Kong Phooey chop (Hi-Ya!). Hong Kong Phooey, number one super guy. Hong Kong Phooey, quicker than the human eye. Hong Kong Phooey, he's fan-riffic!

Hey there where ya goin', not exactly knowin', who says you have to call just one place home. He's goin' everywhere, B.J. McKay and his best friend Bear. He just keeps on movin', ladies keep improvin', every day is better than the last. New dreams and better scenes, and best of all I don't pay property tax. Rollin' down to Dallas, who's providin' my palace, off to New Orleans or who knows where. Places new and ladies, too, I'm B.J. McKay and this is my best friend Bear.

There's a voice that keeps on calling me. Down the road, that's where I'll always be. Every stop I make, I make a new friend. Can't stay for long, just turn around and I'm gone again. Maybe tomorrow, I'll want to settle down, Until tomorrow, I'll just keep moving on.

Just the good ol' boys, never meanin' no harm. Beats all you've ever saw, been in trouble with the law since the day they was born. Straight'nin' the curve, flat'nin' the hills. Someday the mountain might get 'em, but the law never will. Makin' their way, the only way they know how, that's just a little bit more than the law will allow. Just good ol' boys, wouldn't change if they could, fightin' the system like a true modern day Robin Hood.

80 days around the world, we'll find a pot of gold just sitting where the rainbow's ending. Time - we'll fight against the time, and we'll fly on the white wings of the wind. 80 days around the world, no we won't say a word before the ship is really back. Round, round, all around the world. Round, all around the world. Round, all around the world. Round, all around the world.

 

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 14, 2006 at 05:47 PM

Furthermore, in exemplary FIC fashion, we got Jenny-fur in her usual sullen, insolent, and stupid fashion, to tell me I'm not welcome (and anyone who might agree that those two are less-than-impressive); and that not only does she hope my boycott repeats

Nope, just you.

Posted by: Jennyfur | December 14, 2006 at 06:25 PM

Chapter I

"Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes. But I warn you, if you don't tell me that this means war, if you still try to defend the infamies and horrors perpetrated by that Antichrist- I really believe he is Antichrist- I will have nothing more to do with you and you are no longer my friend, no longer my 'faithful slave,' as you call yourself! But how do you do? I see I have frightened you- sit down and tell me all the news."

It was in July, 1805, and the speaker was the well-known Anna Pavlovna Scherer, maid of honor and favorite of the Empress Marya Fedorovna. With these words she greeted Prince Vasili Kuragin, a man of high rank and importance, who was the first to arrive at her reception. Anna Pavlovna had had a cough for some days. She was, as she said, suffering from la grippe; grippe being then a new word in St. Petersburg, used only by the elite.

All her invitations without exception, written in French, and delivered by a scarlet-liveried footman that morning, ran as follows:

"If you have nothing better to do, Count [or Prince], and if the prospect of spending an evening with a poor invalid is not too terrible, I shall be very charmed to see you tonight between 7 and 10- Annette Scherer."

"Heavens! what a virulent attack!" replied the prince, not in the least disconcerted by this reception. He had just entered, wearing an embroidered court uniform, knee breeches, and shoes, and had stars on his breast and a serene expression on his flat face. He spoke in that refined French in which our grandfathers not only spoke but thought, and with the gentle, patronizing intonation natural to a man of importance who had grown old in society and at court. He went up to Anna Pavlovna, kissed her hand, presenting to her his bald, scented, and shining head, and complacently seated himself on the sofa.

"First of all, dear friend, tell me how you are. Set your friend's mind at rest," said he without altering his tone, beneath the politeness and affected sympathy of which indifference and even irony could be discerned.

"Can one be well while suffering morally? Can one be calm in times like these if one has any feeling?" said Anna Pavlovna. "You are staying the whole evening, I hope?"

"And the fete at the English ambassador's? Today is Wednesday. I must put in an appearance there," said the prince. "My daughter is coming for me to take me there."

"I thought today's fete had been canceled. I confess all these festivities and fireworks are becoming wearisome."

"If they had known that you wished it, the entertainment would have been put off," said the prince, who, like a wound-up clock, by force of habit said things he did not even wish to be believed.

"Don't tease! Well, and what has been decided about Novosiltsev's dispatch? You know everything."

"What can one say about it?" replied the prince in a cold, listless tone. "What has been decided? They have decided that Buonaparte has burnt his boats, and I believe that we are ready to burn ours."

Prince Vasili always spoke languidly, like an actor repeating a stale part. Anna Pavlovna Scherer on the contrary, despite her forty years, overflowed with animation and impulsiveness. To be an enthusiast had become her social vocation and, sometimes even when she did not feel like it, she became enthusiastic in order not to disappoint the expectations of those who knew her. The subdued smile which, though it did not suit her faded features, always played round her lips expressed, as in a spoiled child, a continual consciousness of her charming defect, which she neither wished, nor could, nor considered it necessary, to correct.

In the midst of a conversation on political matters Anna Pavlovna burst out:

"Oh, don't speak to me of Austria. Perhaps I don't understand things, but Austria never has wished, and does not wish, for war. She is betraying us! Russia alone must save Europe. Our gracious sovereign recognizes his high vocation and will be true to it. That is the one thing I have faith in! Our good and wonderful sovereign has to perform the noblest role on earth, and he is so virtuous and noble that God will not forsake him. He will fulfill his vocation and crush the hydra of revolution, which has become more terrible than ever in the person of this murderer and villain! We alone must avenge the blood of the just one.... Whom, I ask you, can we rely on?... England with her commercial spirit will not and cannot understand the Emperor Alexander's loftiness of soul. She has refused to evacuate Malta. She wanted to find, and still seeks, some secret motive in our actions. What answer did Novosiltsev get? None. The English have not understood and cannot understand the self-abnegation of our Emperor who wants nothing for himself, but only desires the good of mankind. And what have they promised? Nothing! And what little they have promised they will not perform! Prussia has always declared that Buonaparte is invincible, and that all Europe is powerless before him.... And I don't believe a word that Hardenburg says, or Haugwitz either. This famous Prussian neutrality is just a trap. I have faith only in God and the lofty destiny of our adored monarch. He will save Europe!"

She suddenly paused, smiling at her own impetuosity.

"I think," said the prince with a smile, "that if you had been sent instead of our dear Wintzingerode you would have captured the King of Prussia's consent by assault. You are so eloquent. Will you give me a cup of tea?"

"In a moment. A propos," she added, becoming calm again, "I am expecting two very interesting men tonight, le Vicomte de Mortemart, who is connected with the Montmorencys through the Rohans, one of the best French families. He is one of the genuine emigres, the good ones. And also the Abbe Morio. Do you know that profound thinker? He has been received by the Emperor. Had you heard?"

"I shall be delighted to meet them," said the prince. "But tell me," he added with studied carelessness as if it had only just occurred to him, though the question he was about to ask was the chief motive of his visit, "is it true that the Dowager Empress wants Baron Funke to be appointed first secretary at Vienna? The baron by all accounts is a poor creature."

Prince Vasili wished to obtain this post for his son, but others were trying through the Dowager Empress Marya Fedorovna to secure it for the baron.

Anna Pavlovna almost closed her eyes to indicate that neither she nor anyone else had a right to criticize what the Empress desired or was pleased with.

"Baron Funke has been recommended to the Dowager Empress by her sister," was all she said, in a dry and mournful tone.

As she named the Empress, Anna Pavlovna's face suddenly assumed an expression of profound and sincere devotion and respect mingled with sadness, and this occurred every time she mentioned her illustrious patroness. She added that Her Majesty had deigned to show Baron Funke beaucoup d'estime, and again her face clouded over with sadness.

The prince was silent and looked indifferent. But, with the womanly and courtierlike quickness and tact habitual to her, Anna Pavlovna wished both to rebuke him (for daring to speak he had done of a man recommended to the Empress) and at the same time to console him, so she said:

"Now about your family. Do you know that since your daughter came out everyone has been enraptured by her? They say she is amazingly beautiful."

The prince bowed to signify his respect and gratitude.

"I often think," she continued after a short pause, drawing nearer to the prince and smiling amiably at him as if to show that political and social topics were ended and the time had come for intimate conversation- "I often think how unfairly sometimes the joys of life are distributed. Why has fate given you two such splendid children? I don't speak of Anatole, your youngest. I don't like him," she added in a tone admitting of no rejoinder and raising her eyebrows. "Two such charming children. And really you appreciate them less than anyone, and so you don't deserve to have them."

And she smiled her ecstatic smile.

"I can't help it," said the prince. "Lavater would have said I lack the bump of paternity."

"Don't joke; I mean to have a serious talk with you. Do you know I am dissatisfied with your younger son? Between ourselves" (and her face assumed its melancholy expression), "he was mentioned at Her Majesty's and you were pitied...."

The prince answered nothing, but she looked at him significantly, awaiting a reply. He frowned.

"What would you have me do?" he said at last. "You know I did all a father could for their education, and they have both turned out fools. Hippolyte is at least a quiet fool, but Anatole is an active one. That is the only difference between them." He said this smiling in a way more natural and animated than usual, so that the wrinkles round his mouth very clearly revealed something unexpectedly coarse and unpleasant.

"And why are children born to such men as you? If you were not a father there would be nothing I could reproach you with," said Anna Pavlovna, looking up pensively.

"I am your faithful slave and to you alone I can confess that my children are the bane of my life. It is the cross I have to bear. That is how I explain it to myself. It can't be helped!"

He said no more, but expressed his resignation to cruel fate by a gesture. Anna Pavlovna meditated.

"Have you never thought of marrying your prodigal son Anatole?" she asked. "They say old maids have a mania for matchmaking, and though I don't feel that weakness in myself as yet,I know a little person who is very unhappy with her father. She is a relation of yours, Princess Mary Bolkonskaya."

Prince Vasili did not reply, though, with the quickness of memory and perception befitting a man of the world, he indicated by a movement of the head that he was considering this information.

"Do you know," he said at last, evidently unable to check the sad current of his thoughts, "that Anatole is costing me forty thousand rubles a year? And," he went on after a pause, "what will it be in five years, if he goes on like this?" Presently he added: "That's what we fathers have to put up with.... Is this princess of yours rich?"

"Her father is very rich and stingy. He lives in the country. He is the well-known Prince Bolkonski who had to retire from the army under the late Emperor, and was nicknamed 'the King of Prussia.' He is very clever but eccentric, and a bore. The poor girl is very unhappy. She has a brother; I think you know him, he married Lise Meinen lately. He is an aide-de-camp of Kutuzov's and will be here tonight."

"Listen, dear Annette," said the prince, suddenly taking Anna Pavlovna's hand and for some reason drawing it downwards. "Arrange that affair for me and I shall always be your most devoted slave- slafe wigh an f, as a village elder of mine writes in his reports. She is rich and of good family and that's all I want."

And with the familiarity and easy grace peculiar to him, he raised the maid of honor's hand to his lips, kissed it, and swung it to and fro as he lay back in his armchair, looking in another direction.

"Attendez," said Anna Pavlovna, reflecting, "I'll speak to Lise, young Bolkonski's wife, this very evening, and perhaps the thing can be arranged. It shall be on your family's behalf that I'll start my apprenticeship as old maid."

Posted by: Leo Tolstoy | December 14, 2006 at 09:51 PM

Chapter II
[Killed-http://a.tribalfusion.com/i.ad?site=LiteratureNetwork&adSpace=ROS&size=160x600&requestID=42853919-by-size]

Anna Pavlovna's drawing room was gradually filling. The highest Petersburg society was assembled there: people differing widely in age and character but alike in the social circle to which they belonged. Prince Vasili's daughter, the beautiful Helene, came to take her father to the ambassador's entertainment; she wore a ball dress and her badge as maid of honor. The youthful little Princess Bolkonskaya, known as la femme la plus seduisante de Petersbourg,* was also there. She had been married during the previous winter, and being pregnant did not go to any large gatherings, but only to small receptions. Prince Vasili's son, Hippolyte, had come with Mortemart, whom he introduced. The Abbe Morio and many others had also come.

*The most fascinating woman in Petersburg.

To each new arrival Anna Pavlovna said, "You have not yet seen my aunt," or "You do not know my aunt?" and very gravely conducted him or her to a little old lady, wearing large bows of ribbon in her cap, who had come sailing in from another room as soon as the guests began to arrive; and slowly turning her eyes from the visitor to her aunt, Anna Pavlovna mentioned each one's name and then left them.

Each visitor performed the ceremony of greeting this old aunt whom not one of them knew, not one of them wanted to know, and not one of them cared about; Anna Pavlovna observed these greetings with mournful and solemn interest and silent approval. The aunt spoke to each of them in the same words, about their health and her own, and the health of Her Majesty, "who, thank God, was better today." And each visitor, though politeness prevented his showing impatience, left the old woman with a sense of relief at having performed a vexatious duty and did not return to her the whole evening.

The young Princess Bolkonskaya had brought some work in a gold-embroidered velvet bag. Her pretty little upper lip, on which a delicate dark down was just perceptible, was too short for her teeth, but it lifted all the more sweetly, and was especially charming when she occasionally drew it down to meet the lower lip. As is always the case with a thoroughly attractive woman, her defect- the shortness of her upper lip and her half-open mouth- seemed to be her own special and peculiar form of beauty. Everyone brightened at the sight of this pretty young woman, so soon to become a mother, so full of life and health, and carrying her burden so lightly. Old men and dull dispirited young ones who looked at her, after being in her company and talking to her a little while, felt as if they too were becoming, like her, full of life and health. All who talked to her, and at each word saw her bright smile and the constant gleam of her white teeth, thought that they were in a specially amiable mood that day.

The little princess went round the table with quick, short, swaying steps, her workbag on her arm, and gaily spreading out her dress sat down on a sofa near the silver samovar, as if all she was doing was a pleasure to herself and to all around her. "I have brought my work," said she in French, displaying her bag and addressing all present. "Mind, Annette, I hope you have not played a wicked trick on me," she added, turning to her hostess. "You wrote that it was to be quite a small reception, and just see how badly I am dressed." And she spread out her arms to show her short-waisted, lace-trimmed, dainty gray dress, girdled with a broad ribbon just below the breast.

"Soyez tranquille, Lise, you will always be prettier than anyone else," replied Anna Pavlovna.

"You know," said the princess in the same tone of voice and still in French, turning to a general, "my husband is deserting me? He is going to get himself killed. Tell me what this wretched war is for?" she added, addressing Prince Vasili, and without waiting for an answer she turned to speak to his daughter, the beautiful Helene.

"What a delightful woman this little princess is!" said Prince Vasili to Anna Pavlovna.

One of the next arrivals was a stout, heavily built young man with close-cropped hair, spectacles, the light-colored breeches fashionable at that time, a very high ruffle, and a brown dress coat. This stout young man was an illegitimate son of Count Bezukhov, a well-known grandee of Catherine's time who now lay dying in Moscow. The young man had not yet entered either the military or civil service, as he had only just returned from abroad where he had been educated, and this was his first appearance in society. Anna Pavlovna greeted him with the nod she accorded to the lowest hierarchy in her drawing room. But in spite of this lowest-grade greeting, a look of anxiety and fear, as at the sight of something too large and unsuited to the place, came over her face when she saw Pierre enter. Though he was certainly rather bigger than the other men in the room, her anxiety could only have reference to the clever though shy, but observant and natural, expression which distinguished him from everyone else in that drawing room.

"It is very good of you, Monsieur Pierre, to come and visit a poor invalid," said Anna Pavlovna, exchanging an alarmed glance with her aunt as she conducted him to her.

Pierre murmured something unintelligible, and continued to look round as if in search of something. On his way to the aunt he bowed to the little princess with a pleased smile, as to an intimate acquaintance.

Anna Pavlovna's alarm was justified, for Pierre turned away from the aunt without waiting to hear her speech about Her Majesty's health. Anna Pavlovna in dismay detained him with the words: "Do you know the Abbe Morio? He is a most interesting man."

"Yes, I have heard of his scheme for perpetual peace, and it is very interesting but hardly feasible."

"You think so?" rejoined Anna Pavlovna in order to say something and get away to attend to her duties as hostess. But Pierre now committed a reverse act of impoliteness. First he had left a lady before she had finished speaking to him, and now he continued to speak to another who wished to get away. With his head bent, and his big feet spread apart, he began explaining his reasons for thinking the abbe's plan chimerical.

"We will talk of it later," said Anna Pavlovna with a smile.

And having got rid of this young man who did not know how to behave, she resumed her duties as hostess and continued to listen and watch, ready to help at any point where the conversation might happen to flag. As the foreman of a spinning mill, when he has set the hands to work, goes round and notices here a spindle that has stopped or there one that creaks or makes more noise than it should, and hastens to check the machine or set it in proper motion, so Anna Pavlovna moved about her drawing room, approaching now a silent, now a too-noisy group, and by a word or slight rearrangement kept the conversational machine in steady, proper, and regular motion. But amid these cares her anxiety about Pierre was evident. She kept an anxious watch on him when he approached the group round Mortemart to listen to what was being said there, and again when he passed to another group whose center was the abbe.

Pierre had been educated abroad, and this reception at Anna Pavlovna's was the first he had attended in Russia. He knew that all the intellectual lights of Petersburg were gathered there and, like a child in a toyshop, did not know which way to look, afraid of missing any clever conversation that was to be heard. Seeing the self-confident and refined expression on the faces of those present he was always expecting to hear something very profound. At last he came up to Morio. Here the conversation seemed interesting and he stood waiting for an opportunity to express his own views, as young people are fond of doing.

Posted by: Leo Tolstoy | December 14, 2006 at 09:53 PM

Chapter III

Anna Pavlovna's reception was in full swing. The spindles hummed steadily and ceaselessly on all sides. With the exception of the aunt, beside whom sat only one elderly lady, who with her thin careworn face was rather out of place in this brilliant society, the whole company had settled into three groups. One, chiefly masculine, had formed round the abbe. Another, of young people, was grouped round the beautiful Princess Helene, Prince Vasili's daughter, and the little Princess Bolkonskaya, very pretty and rosy, though rather too plump for her age. The third group was gathered round Mortemart and Anna Pavlovna.

The vicomte was a nice-looking young man with soft features and polished manners, who evidently considered himself a celebrity but out of politeness modestly placed himself at the disposal of the circle in which he found himself. Anna Pavlovna was obviously serving him up as a treat to her guests. As a clever maitre d'hotel serves up as a specially choice delicacy a piece of meat that no one who had seen it in the kitchen would have cared to eat, so Anna Pavlovna served up to her guests, first the vicomte and then the abbe, as peculiarly choice morsels. The group about Mortemart immediately began discussing the murder of the Duc d'Enghien. The vicomte said that the Duc d'Enghien had perished by his own magnanimity, and that there were particular reasons for Buonaparte's hatred of him.

"Ah, yes! Do tell us all about it, Vicomte," said Anna Pavlovna, with a pleasant feeling that there was something a la Louis XV in the sound of that sentence: "Contez nous cela, Vicomte."

The vicomte bowed and smiled courteously in token of his willingness to comply. Anna Pavlovna arranged a group round him, inviting everyone to listen to his tale.

"The vicomte knew the duc personally," whispered Anna Pavlovna to of the guests. "The vicomte is a wonderful raconteur," said she to another. "How evidently he belongs to the best society," said she to a third; and the vicomte was served up to the company in the choicest and most advantageous style, like a well-garnished joint of roast beef on a hot dish.

The vicomte wished to begin his story and gave a subtle smile.

"Come over here, Helene, dear," said Anna Pavlovna to the beautiful young princess who was sitting some way off, the center of another group.

The princess smiled. She rose with the same unchanging smile with which she had first entered the room- the smile of a perfectly beautiful woman. With a slight rustle of her white dress trimmed with moss and ivy, with a gleam of white shoulders, glossy hair, and sparkling diamonds, she passed between the men who made way for her, not looking at any of them but smiling on all, as if graciously allowing each the privilege of admiring her beautiful figure and shapely shoulders, back, and bosom- which in the fashion of those days were very much exposed- and she seemed to bring the glamour of a ballroom with her as she moved toward Anna Pavlovna. Helene was so lovely that not only did she not show any trace of coquetry, but on the contrary she even appeared shy of her unquestionable and all too victorious beauty. She seemed to wish, but to be unable, to diminish its effect.

"How lovely!" said everyone who saw her; and the vicomte lifted his shoulders and dropped his eyes as if startled by something extraordinary when she took her seat opposite and beamed upon him also with her unchanging smile.

"Madame, I doubt my ability before such an audience," said he, smilingly inclining his head.

The princess rested her bare round arm on a little table and considered a reply unnecessary. She smilingly waited. All the time the story was being told she sat upright, glancing now at her beautiful round arm, altered in shape by its pressure on the table, now at her still more beautiful bosom, on which she readjusted a diamond necklace. From time to time she smoothed the folds of her dress, and whenever the story produced an effect she glanced at Anna Pavlovna, at once adopted just the expression she saw on the maid of honor's face, and again relapsed into her radiant smile.

The little princess had also left the tea table and followed Helene.

"Wait a moment, I'll get my work.... Now then, what are you thinking of?" she went on, turning to Prince Hippolyte. "Fetch me my workbag."

There was a general movement as the princess, smiling and talking merrily to everyone at once, sat down and gaily arranged herself in her seat.

"Now I am all right," she said, and asking the vicomte to begin, she took up her work.

Prince Hippolyte, having brought the workbag, joined the circle and moving a chair close to hers seated himself beside her.

Le charmant Hippolyte was surprising by his extraordinary resemblance to his beautiful sister, but yet more by the fact that in spite of this resemblance he was exceedingly ugly. His features were like his sister's, but while in her case everything was lit up by a joyous, self-satisfied, youthful, and constant smile of animation, and by the wonderful classic beauty of her figure, his face on the contrary was dulled by imbecility and a constant expression of sullen self-confidence, while his body was thin and weak. His eyes, nose, and mouth all seemed puckered into a vacant, wearied grimace, and his arms and legs always fell into unnatural positions.

"It's not going to be a ghost story?" said he, sitting down beside the princess and hastily adjusting his lorgnette, as if without this instrument he could not begin to speak.

"Why no, my dear fellow," said the astonished narrator, shrugging his shoulders.

"Because I hate ghost stories," said Prince Hippolyte in a tone which showed that he only understood the meaning of his words after he had uttered them.

He spoke with such self-confidence that his hearers could not be sure whether what he said was very witty or very stupid. He was dressed in a dark-green dress coat, knee breeches of the color of cuisse de nymphe effrayee, as he called it, shoes, and silk stockings.

The vicomte told his tale very neatly. It was an anecdote, then current, to the effect that the Duc d'Enghien had gone secretly to Paris to visit Mademoiselle George; that at her house he came upon Bonaparte, who also enjoyed the famous actress' favors, and that in his presence Napoleon happened to fall into one of the fainting fits to which he was subject, and was thus at the duc's mercy. The latter spared him, and this magnanimity Bonaparte subsequently repaid by death.

The story was very pretty and interesting, especially at the point where the rivals suddenly recognized one another; and the ladies looked agitated.

"Charming!" said Anna Pavlovna with an inquiring glance at the little princess.

"Charming!" whispered the little princess, sticking the needle into her work as if to testify that the interest and fascination of the story prevented her from going on with it.

The vicomte appreciated this silent praise and smiling gratefully prepared to continue, but just then Anna Pavlovna, who had kept a watchful eye on the young man who so alarmed her, noticed that he was talking too loudly and vehemently with the abbe, so she hurried to the rescue. Pierre had managed to start a conversation with the abbe about the balance of power, and the latter, evidently interested by the young man's simple-minded eagerness, was explaining his pet theory. Both were talking and listening too eagerly and too naturally, which was why Anna Pavlovna disapproved.

"The means are... the balance of power in Europe and the rights of the people," the abbe was saying. "It is only necessary for one powerful nation like Russia- barbaric as she is said to be- to place herself disinterestedly at the head of an alliance having for its object the maintenance of the balance of power of Europe, and it would save the world!"

"But how are you to get that balance?" Pierre was beginning.

At that moment Anna Pavlovna came up and, looking severely at Pierre, asked the Italian how he stood Russian climate. The Italian's face instantly changed and assumed an offensively affected, sugary expression, evidently habitual to him when conversing with women.

"I am so enchanted by the brilliancy of the wit and culture of the society, more especially of the feminine society, in which I have had the honor of being received, that I have not yet had time to think of the climate," said he.

Not letting the abbe and Pierre escape, Anna Pavlovna, the more conveniently to keep them under observation, brought them into the larger circle.

Posted by: Leo Tolstoy | December 14, 2006 at 09:56 PM

Refuse pastynoveltext unless some underlying purpose or meaning is forthcoming.

Posted by: Tyken Hightower | December 15, 2006 at 12:24 AM

Picking up on Tyken's comment way up there about slicing off seperate little grids for corps etc...

I read that LL has about seven grids running for various reasons. I do wonder if there's one they log into now and then that's "corporate" sized that runs so slick and smooth due to low burdens of data that they sometimes look at the main grid and despair. Maybe when they figure it out, they'll offer host-your-own deals to IBM etc, which would be more appealing than getting a couple of islands on the main grid with little control over downtime and access. One of the problems I've heard from educator types wanting to promote SL to their universities is around stopping students getting *out* into the main bdsm porn bling grid. Fixing the grid becomes less of an issue when it doesn't impact on Big Corp's virtual micro-world. There did it with Laguna Beach already.

Posted by: Ace Albion | December 15, 2006 at 08:40 AM

Jen,

Regardless of your feelings toward Prok, you have to admit its kinda funny for Flip to realizing how screwy SL is - at this late juncture.

Where has he been?

Just over 8 months ago I wanted to show my neighbor and good friend SL, and her honking state of the art kick ass computer was brought to its knees.

Talk about embarassing!

So really it is sorta giggly that Flip just noticing this stuff now.

Posted by: Brace | December 16, 2006 at 10:26 AM

OMG, this is amazing, and should be preserved for posterity. I was in turn informed, bemused, suspicious, enlightened, delighted, annoyed, confused, and amused. Sw33t! u guyz r0k!

Posted by: Donnagh McDonnagh | December 19, 2006 at 06:13 PM

Snarky Shirky, or Why the Geeks Got to Go

Not just binary data...elves in Second Life's ElvenGlen helped raise more than $100 US in an hour at a live concert for charity with two popular inworld singers supported by people from a variety of countries and time zones; the donations came from inworld virtual businesses.

I've taken Clay Shirky on before -- with his concept of the "Group As Its Own Worst Enemy" -- the soul of the group is in fact more often than not the enemy of a rapidly, changing, dynamic "group" like the "community" of people using SL.

And by the same token, while a welcome deflation of hype on the sign-ups, Clay's petulant dismissal of Second Life today as a phenomenon is rooted in a deeply-held tekkie bias that increasingly we are coming to see the basis for: let's call it something like "Vietnam Syndrome" -- and call it "Dot.com Syndrome".

Every tekkie like Shirky who was here for Web 1.0 and the dot.com insanity wants to be the first to demonstrate his expertise and tell you about the dangers of bubbles; inflated numbers of traffic; churn; the evils of being a walled garden like AOL; the horrors of being uncool like Geocities -- the menu list of material for Hectoring Homilies is very long.

That's because many of these now-not-so-young men (and they're mainly men) made their careers during the glory days of the early and burgeoning World Wide Web, and some of them got very stung, or watched others get burned. Their collective historical memory is now in the way of perceiving the new phenomenon of Web 2.0 or Web 3.D as Mark Walace calls it.

We're all going to have to walk pretty briskly around them.

Increasingly, I've become aware of this deep, deep problem of the geeks and their turning up their noses at SL.

First, within SL itself, I found the vasty deep problem of the FIC, the feted inner core (Shirky's inner core which would find the larger group its enemy) -- the programmers and scripters and technically sophisticated who were the early adapters -- or as I like to call them, adopters (given how proprietary they can seem).

They are endlessly cynical and dismissive of those technically challenged enough to find that in 4 hours of Second Life, they don't learn how to fly, much less learn how to put two prims together.

I honestly get scared, sometimes, coming up for air in first life and talking to a colleague, trying to explain what it has taken me 2 years to learn -- how to enter Second Life and land somewhere and then mount a project. There's a BIG gap in learning.

Still, that really isn't the point. The learning curve, the technical considerations, or the hype.

The Good News about Second Life is that it is NOT for geeks and the vast majority of users of the program -- even to the bewilderment of Linden Lab, which would like to keep the software cards close to their chests -- are not tekkies and not even especially computer savvy.

The extraordinary compelling nature of a 3-D world that you can jump into and script, cast, prop, and narrate yourself -- not sitting passively in front of a television set or movie theater; a world where you can make at least some simple items and marvel at how they sell -- or resell others or manipulate items you've bought from others who made them -- it's extraordinarily intriguing.

At it's not about those most basic activities, sex -- and the even more popular activity -- shopping. There are many deeply satisfying creative experiences to be had in SL.

Geeks who sneer at people who shop, or drive SUVs (as they imagine), or have cybersex online, are going to be Missing the Moment if they can't get past the mass culture -- in fact that's just it, there's a mass-culture-in-the-making that they aren't seeing, and (thank God!) aren't controlling.

Of course the next generation of mainly young men, but increasingly many young women, too, don't have the scar tissues from Web 1.0 and just keeping coming to SL. While they have heard the war stories, they don't worry about it because they are *already making money*. When college kids in their 20s can make money as seriously as enough to pay for their apartments or even tuitions, and when young people starting out can actually spend all day online and actually be *getting* a life, not fleeing the absence of a life, then you know you are dealing with something quite impressive.

That "impressive" isn't big companies or VC biggies making boatloads -- that's not the story. The story is about *the rest of us this time being the ones to make the money*. Starting to get it now?

When I talk to official geeks at my RL jobs or in various international venues, I find the condescending half-smiles; the shrugs of wonder that people would like moving an avatar around; the dismissals that it can scale. The favourite thing of the naysayers is to tell you that not only is it all built on old crappy engines, it can't scale. It's a good thing that the Lindens are so imaginitive and so persistent in their nearly cult-like intensity to make this thing work, so that they can walk around all those robots that would have killed them and their project long ago. It's hard enough to be Marconi; it's even harder to have been Tesla.

Shirky's essay doesn't even have to be long on real field-tested analysis (I've never heard of him even coming to Second Life; he doesn't appeared to have glanced at the economics stats page); it's enough for him, with his street cred, to begin whining about all the huge hype. I'm a big debunker of the hype, too. Yet the spirit of what is happening in Second Life is being missed in the welter of analysis about fake sign-up numbers and cludgy technology.

The fact is that Second Life represents a new form of emotional bandwidth, as Pathfinder Linden and others have called it, that indicates new forms of communication that might become a medium as well as a message: not that we are all one with hands across the sea -- that is so last century, which was actually chock-full of genocides -- but that even with our very real and deep differences, we can communicate *better* through shared expression, building, projects, and interactivity outside the boundaries of space, time, physical appearance, and even race or gender.

People forget that the avatar has reliably been found to be a window to the soul; and that communion of the souls is possible in SL in ways that aren't so religious as to be off-putting, nor so hippy-dippy as to be meaingless. It's real.

A snarky statement like, "August 1996 may well go down in the annals of the Internet as the turning point when the Web was released from the 2D flatland of HTML pages. Oops." -- misses the fact that for some years now, we've all been released already from 2-D flatland not only of HTML pages, but of 2-D Sims Online. We're in the 3-D world now whether in Second Life, World of Warcraft, or even just a flash shopping mall image on a commercial site. It's here. And more of it is coming. And the secret geeks don't like about it is that *we can all use it easier, faster, and better -- because we can make our own stuff in it.*

THAT is what is prompting the sneers -- the unconscious fear that geeks just may not be as necessary as they once were. Oh, to be sure, the will still pwn the servers and the code that runs it -- but inside the world, users don't need to wait around for game gods to add new features; they make them themselves, in ways that, to be sure, range from amateur to professional -- but just as in the rest of RL, if they are not competent tekkies increasingly they can hire the help they need outworld from start-up companies or inworld from fellow residents willing to take Lindens, depending on the kind of project.

Imagine this, geeks! Without any HTML, without any computer programming, without any especially serviceable skills in math, I can rent and operate sims and provide land and homes and events for hundreds of people -- just by joining SL, reading the instructions, getting some lessons, and working through trial and error. Oh, I know you'd like me to be paying you $50/hour for this fascinating experience, but instead, that kind of money is what I can make myself in day from my business -- and others with more time, and younger, and especially females in their 30s (according to the demographics) are paying themselves much more than that from their creations.

This is going to cause a tremendous shake-up in your world. And that's why you don't like it, and that's why you are constantly picking at it, snarking at it, and trying to diminish its capacity. It's big. And will get bigger. And I say this as a very fierce critic of Lindens and Second Life.

Everyone will be having a Second Life, as easily as they have a second car, job, house, wife, chance. It won't be for the very poor who don't have the hook-ups -- but then much of what is in the Western world isn't accessible to the poor, and that was true of not only the Internet, but even of colour television in the 1960s.

Says Shirky,

Most reporters don’t remember that anyone has ever wrongly predicted a bright future for immersive worlds or flythrough 3D spaces in the past, so they have no skepticism triggered by the historical failure of things like LambdaMOO or VRML. Instead, they hear of a marvelous thing — A virtual world! Where you have an avatar that travels around! And talks to other avatars! — which they then see with their very own eyes. How cool is that? You’d have to be a pretty crotchety old skeptic not to want to believe. I bet few of those reporters ever go back, but I’m sure they’re sure that other people do (something we know to be false, to a first approximation, from the aforementioned churn.) Second Life is a story that’s too good to check.

And as I said, for young people, or newly-enabled and tekkified old people, especially women and non-Americans who have taken to SL by leaps and bounds, these old fuddy-duddy concerns like "skepticism triggered by the historical failure of things like LambdaMOO or VRML" don't compute. What the hell is LambadaMOO? I never heard of it until I branched out from SL into geek-world; I'm certain I wouldn't recognize VRML if it bit me in the ass; but I have a full and engaging Second Life.

As for reporters -- ack, they are superficial and don't come back. But we're now dealing with a very intriguing reality -- a big news media corporation like Reuters as well as CNET and Axel Springer have now moved into SL for the duration.

"What do you mean Reuters and Harvard is *in* Second Life?" a colleague asked me today in confusion. For her Harvard or Reuters was *on* the Internet with information pages and a few pictures; what would it mean for Reuters to be *in* something. I explained and sent the screenshots.

The excitement that people feel when they open up a window that used to only push media at them, which now becomes a pull-media drawing them and their creative impulses into an interactive 3-D world, does indeed spread like wildfire. And like wildfire, it will skip many streams and rocks that simply cannot catch on due to technical or perceptional problems (like the blinkered geeks living their old war stories). The wildfire will leap back and catch them later.

Why does it capture people's imagination? Because they can make and use and manipulate things as soon as they imagine them; Philip, who is as geeky as they get, outlined this dream of his when he described his past at SLCC in August 2006.

All Shirky can say (like Raph Koster) is, "All the good intentions in the world won’t confer atomicity on binary data."

Oh? At what point is my SL home and furniture and relationships and business no longer binary data? At the point when it either moves the emotions? At the point the money cashes out into a bank account? A lot of what millions of people spending their days behind computers are doing is virtual. Do you think that when the U.S. Congress passes a law, or the UN Security Council passes a resolution, they actually force people to do something differently? Once you pick it apart, so much of RL is virtual; once you accept its limitations and suspend disbelief, so much of the virtual is real.

And Shirky has a snark for CopyBot too -- CopyBot is something the snarkiest of tekkies gloat over and woot over because it fulfills their copyleft political ambitions:

Second Life is pushing against the ability to create zero-cost perfect copies, whereas Copybot relied on that most salient of digital capabilities, which is how Copybot was able to cause so much agida with so little effort — it was working with the actual, as opposed to metaphorical, substrate of Second Life.

Except...not? Yeah, everything you can see is copyable. But despite a staggering blow to the world (agida is not about FUD but about anger at callous and cynical tekkies deliberately griefing others) -- people kept on making, selling, buying and forming their little micro-relationships with micro-transactions in their little worlds. CopyBot couldn't copy *everything*. To be sure, the Lindens responded to a powerful social movement of creators and land owners and put in a strict prohibition of the "unauthorized" use of CopyBot -- and that's just it. You don't download on Napster anymore. And sooner or later, somebody has to pay.

Clay, not being in Second Life, scoffs at the idea of SL, asking if American Apparel made any money yet (I'll bet it didn't) or that Anshe is anything other than a fluke (a hard-working fluke with thousands of customers, then) -- and he fails to realize what should be one of his pet theories at work. The Long Tail has kids on the Teen Grid making $50 a month designing armour and swords; it has pensioners and part-time Walmart clerks and stay-at-home moms making $100 US a month to pay for all their utility bills. It seems appropriate that just as the average U.S. family has to absorb a huge new cost for the use of new media, it has found a way to offset the cost by monetarizing their time on line even in relatively small amounts.

We don't have to be with Snowcrash and Keanu Reeves just yet. What we have, as crashy, clunky, and politically stupid as we have now, is just so much better than radio, television, magazines, or novels, that we won't be looking back. It's good enough. And the sale of media ad space ought to tell the geeks this; and the transformation of life to online transactions for everything from banking to health care should tell them this. We're online a good deal of the time -- and by we, I don't have to mean a billion on the planet, because it will be enough if the major urban centers with both intellectuals and educated workers able at least to operate computers are plugged in to have an extraordinary effect.

Regardless of how you count the numbers -- and I'm a big a critic as any of the vaporous "millions" who don't exist at all -- there are lots and lots of people in SL -- and the kind of people the Lindens didn't ask to come, and don't even especially like -- non-geeks, and people with wildly different values and perceptions contrasting with theirs.

The geeks of Web. 1.0 once shook their heads that their bosses and leaders didn't use email; today we who use email, too, shake our heads that they don't get the value of a 3-D life online. But fortunately, increasingly, we'll be making do without them and their purchasing decisions and their gate-keeping and barrier functions. Thank God, there are no more webmasters; everybody can be a webmaster.

Between the geeks within the virtual world in the way of progress (they keep trying to develop and deploy clunky shiny new features like "HTML on a prim" or "Havoc 2" which simply aren't important to most users, instead of stabilizing the world for its increased use) and the geeks outside the world (busy chortling if not sneering at breathless press coverage about people they imagine as one-hand-typing blingtards), we do have some significant challenges.

But take heart, everybody is going to get to be a geek in Second Life!

COMMENTS:

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» Gonna Vom from A Clockwork Mind
The ever reliable Prokofy Neva gives us our puke-inducing quote of the day: " The fact is that Second [Read More]

Tracked on December 13, 2006 at 08:28 AM

Comments

Prokofy,

I can't help but feel that your critcisms of the "tekkie" type are akin to a straw-man argument. You come forth and say "there are people that are bad -- they are tekkies". Then, you say "tekkies are all bad people". You haven't really said anything here, other than telling us that you don't like people that you don't like.

Fair enough. In the interest of having a constructive discussion -- are all tekkies bad? Is it somehow inevitable that once someone reaches a level of knowledge or involvement in the technical realm, that they lose all touch with the rest of the world?

Put another way -- when you talk to a "tekkie", do you automatically assume they look down upon you? What would a tekkie type have to do to earn your respect?

Posted by: bushing Spatula | December 13, 2006 at 06:27 AM

oh, I'd start with your discredited and disreputable group, bushing Spatula, and kick out not only the new v-5/w-hat alts but also have the people found making, selling, and griefing with copybot and other "products" to step down, out, away, gonzo -- not without some different title in the group.

That would only be for starters?

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 13, 2006 at 07:05 AM

Second Life is considerably harder than HTML, and most people still don't have their own web-pages.

Furthermore, according to Google Analytics 99.9400086% of all online shopping without any form of flash or 3D. Those are an impediment to shopping, not an aid.

You don't know about LambdaMOO, you don't know about VRML. That's fine. Not learning from history is a great way to go about repeating it. I don't think i've run across (if only it were "run over"!) anyone quite so proud of their own pig-ignorance before.

Posted by: Cael | December 13, 2006 at 08:35 AM

As a GEEK who has a high interest in MOO and understands its failure, I'm most certainly not one of the people stuck harping on the 'mistakes of the past.' Sure, VRML and MOO were impossible to catch on. It's rather expected, they're not terribly easy to use or implement. The average user playin a MOO will get sick pretty quick. The subset of people who find enjoyment in text-based games is (unfortunately) quite small, the immersion factor is nil for them. In VRML's case (I think, from what I know) the difficulty is in the creation process and feeling of freedom. Here, indeed, only a technically sophisticated person can truly express themselves.

But as new things come along, one can't help but see the new possibilities opened for even larger amounts of people. Long before WoW came around, I played Ultima Online. That's 1997; I joined in 1998-ish. Besides being a fun MMORPG experience (none of its successors have met my expectations as derived from UO), it was quite an immersive world. While limited, you had a quite customizable avatar, in a world where it was so very easy to express yourself as such. It was also notably without levels or quests at the time. Without as much of a treadmill, even 'powergamers' still mixed effectively with the rest of the lot. The possibilities of the player economy were massive. You could own houses, make vendors, sell out of your pack; these could be things you crafted yourself, found, whatever. It's amazing how long it took future games to start catching on to some successful aspects of UO, and most still haven't captured all of them. Supposedly, it was the FIRST MMORPG to break the 100,000 user subscription mark, outstanding for its era.

I think what is happening with each new environment that's emerging is we're seeing the threshold of difficulty to express oneself and immerse into the environment lowered by leaps and bounds. SL happens to have a threshold low enough that it's really catching like wildfire. With all the opportunity within SL, and the possibilities that will be opened in the future by even more sophisticated worlds that follow in its footsteps, indeed, people like Shirky should open their eyes. But that doesn't mean all of us geeks are blind.

Posted by: Tyken Hightower | December 13, 2006 at 10:13 AM

In 1996 probably the only people in my town with significant internet access were in the university.

In 2006 probably half the houses on my street have broadband. It's one thing to say you have to learn from the past, but there's such a thing as critical mass, and now we have myspace and blogs making it even easier for people to be social and/or express themselves through a virtual place they call "theirs". No HTML required.

Maybe SL isn't the next great thing, and it is horrible to get started in- but besides that it's not too difficult to get a 16x32 virtual plot of land, put a prefab cabin on it and call it yours. I speak to people in SL all the time who aren't technical or internet geeks. Some of them likely never did more than book a holiday online before or email family. They're not dumb, they're just not geeks, and that much is clear. But they are in SL now, today. Ok not *now* today, as it's down for patching.

In 1996 *everyone* on the internet was a geek. I think the Chief Geeks who have all the answers and theories about it forget that they've been swimming in internet geekery for decades in their academic or technology speheres. Middle aged couples on your street are figuring it out too, and the computer they got from PC World last year runs SL. That's the difference ten years makes.

It only takes enough people to find something compelling for it to stick. It doesn't have to be more useful than the alternatives. The kind of people immersing (or augmenting) themselves in SL now are not the people who gave up on MOO 10 years ago. Those are the bitter ones sniping that if they want to waste evenings chatting they have IRC for that.

Posted by: Ace Albion | December 13, 2006 at 10:56 AM

What a strange culture gap we have here.

By and large, Prokofy, I think your read is wrong.

Not all tech-savvy people cut from the same cloth. In this essay you conflate several different points of view and lump them all together under "tekkie."

Copyleft is a separate issue from atomicity, which is a separate issue from property, which is a separate issue from community, which is a separate issue from hype. And it is possible to have nuanced opinions about each of these issues individually.

Frankly, many of your comments sound... well, parochial. They are so absolutely centered in just one way of doing things, when there is not yet One True Way for online worlds. I don't mean that as a slam; I'm just trying to point out that you seem to be implying that you & others "get it" while those who have been working hard in this field for years to decades and who are trying to point out some of the pitfalls "don't get it." Frankly, that's silly and shortsighted. Everything you have said about emotional connection, frontiers, bringing in the common people -- every word of it is something that I, and others have said already. We're ON YOUR SIDE on this, but also have been around long enough to be able to point out some of the realities.

I hope you and those like you CAN walk around those pitfalls like they weren't there. But I guarantee that five years from now, you'll look back and say "damn -- look at those huge pitfalls -- we didn't even notice, but it's a good thing we walked left in the darkness right then."

Posted by: Raph | December 13, 2006 at 11:34 AM

SL is considerably harder than HTML?

Well, I know how to do SL, but I don't know how to do HTML.

Maybe part of it is motivation. I had a pretty good reason to learn SL, because I could create anything I wanted to with it.

HTML? As far as I know, I could create a web page with that. I'm not interested in that.

I think a lot of people are more interested in being able to create anything they want - houses, hats, pets, avatars, you name it - than being able to create a web page.

The creation of the web page itself - the HTML, etc. - is not the most creative part anyway. It's what you put ON it that is creative, and I don't believe I need to know HTML in order to put things on a web page that someone else has already created for me anyway.

Similarly, we don't need to learn how to create SL or something similar itself. We may not be interested in creating platforms or games, but we are interested in creating houses, hats, and avatars, and selling them.

Kinda like - I may not want to build television sets, and improve on television sets, but I may well want to be the talent on a television show.

I think it is a truism that, where all things computer is concerned, people WILL struggle to learn that which they have some reason to learn, and will ignore the multitudes of other things, also a bother to learn, which they don't want or need.

(This is true of all technology, by the way - including remote controls, VCR's, digital cameras - you name it; we learn what we want to learn, and ignore the rest.)

One thing I have noticed in my long years on the computer is the general unwillingness of coding types to share their knowledge.

When I first got my computer, I was crazed that no online things really explained things clearly. OK, I thought, these people simply aren't writers, and aren't interested in writing that teaches how to use these products.

Over time, though, I decided these people were actually unusually proprietary about their knowledge, and I toyed various times with the idea of writing truly clear explanations for things.

Since then, though, I've decided they really don't WANT people to understand how to do what they do, or even how to use what they have created.

SL itself is a case in point. It's almost stubborn how you can't find out how to work anything.

With coders, I think it's that way because people are guarding their livelihoods, trying to make themselves irreplacable.

But even with all that, people WILL struggle to learn that for which they see a big payoff, and that means they will learn what they need to - despite the lack of clear instructions, and despite the constantly increasing and changing bugs that presumably aren't important enough to fix - while remaining totally unmotivated to learn HTML.

As Tyken said, it may be harder than some other things, but the threshold is low enough - and, I would add, the motivation high enough - to make it do-able by thousands who want to express their creativity this way, and to profit from it.

Geekiness is a relative term anyhow, by the way. People pride themselves on being geeks, i.e., being computer programmers and the like, enjoying varying degrees of geekiness within confined and specialized hothouse environments like SL.

But to the rest of the world, I'M a geek. (Computer lingo-wise, not circus-wise.) I'm the computer "go-to" person for bunches of people! Imagine that.

And the same is true of Prok's Wal-Mart clerk example. Clerk by day, "go-to" computer person by night, making money selling fashions on SL, and helping her Wal-Mart co-workers with their computer problems.

The singular, and monumental draw SL enjoys over all other things out there is the ability to make content and to profit from it. This is truly unique in the online world, in that SL has done it better than any other place so far.

Good piece, Prok.

coco

Posted by: Cocoanut | December 13, 2006 at 11:57 AM

Priding ourselves on geekness seems, I suppose, as silly as people priding themselves on being "stupid about math" or "useless with those newfangled technical gadgets." Some of us are simply jaded from users incessently chanting "I don't care how it works, just tell me which button to press and, tomorrow, when I need to do it again for a slightly different purpose, I'll call you again and again and again and again."

You don't need tekkies in SL because you can build your own objects and texture them and script them yourself. Thank Heaven for the liberation. No wait, is the point that users don't need tekkies or that tekkies notoriously don't share howto information? Now I'm confused.

Well hopefully PL isn't a bubble and is ultimately scalable and is becoming the free-for-all-users Metaverse. It'll likely be an entitlement for every US citizen to afford the equipment to connect to The Grid All Hail The Central Grid before the decade is complete.

I remember when URU online's original beta shut down. We were aghast that a place we had inhabited and invested so much time working to improve had just ceased to exist in a day. We were frantically posting "they can't do this, it's not right, it's not legal, they just can't." But they did. The same sort of thing happens when a popular TV series finally airs the final segment and that virtual world is closed. Except that fans continue to write stories, roleplay, host conventions and do a hundred other things to expand the universe and keep it alive. Are we yet branching out of the grid so that our second lives consist of more than just living on the shaky grid?

If a closed culture of dedicated livlihood really *has* developed in PL, I feel deeply emotionally worried for the people who are rooted in it. If they don't know how it works, they can't know how tenuous the system really is. Even hours of unplanned downtime and increasing numbers of critical errors don't seem to register. But then people don't evacuate hurricane and volcano zones either, sometimes even when they *do* truly understand the danger.

So we should just continue playing house and having sex and building and scripting and shopping and not caring a wit how it all works or whether it'll continue working tomorrow. I ain't no tekkie gawsh can't neither be pressin no buttons y'all cause in touch with my feminine side and Black Power too.

Posted by: Khamon | December 13, 2006 at 12:50 PM

On a positive note, it's good to see Prokofy and Jarod agree on something.

http://jarodrussell.livejournal.com/

Posted by: Khamon | December 13, 2006 at 12:53 PM

Well, yes, I'm going to keep on doing what I do in SL as long as it's fun, even though I know the whole thing could go poof any minute.

I think most people realize it's tenuous.

coco

Posted by: Cocoanut | December 13, 2006 at 01:53 PM

One of my friends who's a writer and public speaker recently joined SL. She's smart, and a competent computer user. Helping her learn the interface was an adventure. A lot of the newbie experience assumes an engineering mindset; people are expected to just start pushing buttons, picking options, and go explore. The new help material I've seen is far better, but SL's Knowledge Base still feels a lot like using Microsoft's Knowledge Base.

Barrier to entry. Learning curve. Ease of use. Interfaces designed "by engineer."

The worst of the techies that piss you off so much are what my crowd mockingly call 133t Hax0rs. Predatory self-esteem is probably their most noticable trait.

There's techies who are just clueless, most of them can be retrained if they spend enough time outside their usual crowds. They've fallen into the habit of assuming the people they hang out with are "normal" and tend to not understand the difference between ignorance (not having certain information) and not having an engineering mindset. They'll earnestly explain the pros and cons of various network protocols when all their grandma wants to know is whether she'll be able to see her email.

I put bread on the table by wrangling software. I drool at a lot of the toys on ThinkGeek.com. I've also spent time helping newbies. (No intention on my part, but they keep finding me.) I've watched more than one of them go from "I can't script" to realizing they can put hovertext on a prim, or make it spin, or add bling to something. I want to see what they create, when they aren't limited by all the things they can't do. That's why I made and give away those Sound Prims. I think everything they do should have been available from a tab in the editor. I currently can't change the editor, but I like knowing that the retired elementary school teacher I met in SL can make her own doorbell.

 

Posted by: Storm Thunders | December 13, 2006 at 01:56 PM

For techies called "one trick ponies" that kind of change is frightening. For the rest it is exciting. There's always new tech, ideas and abstractions, languages, tools... it is a great career choice if you love learning. There's others (journalism and teaching come to mind) but in the US tech pays better.

Posted by: Storm Thunders | December 13, 2006 at 02:22 PM

Too long, didn't read.

Posted by: INTERNET | December 13, 2006 at 03:13 PM

Geek war! Except one side is the Non-Geek Geeks.

Crazy geeks.

Posted by: Michael Chui | December 13, 2006 at 03:28 PM

Prok,

Nice ad hominem. Pretend you don't have a grudge against me (or the people I associate with, or whatever), and please answer the question in the hypothetical. Again, I'm trying to be constructive here.

When you talk to a "tekkie", do you automatically assume they look down upon you? What would a tekkie type have to do to earn your respect?

Posted by: bushing Spatula | December 13, 2006 at 06:33 PM

"Everyone will be having a Second Life, as easily as they have a second car, job, house, wife, chance."

Could you defend this statement?

Today we aren't even close to the point where everyone has a web-site or profile page.

Dismissing those who have encountered these problems before is shortsighted. There are things that we've learned about online human interaction that are *independent of techonological concerns.* There are still so many problems to solve that ignoring history just compounds your chances of failure.

Posted by: F. Randall Farmer | December 13, 2006 at 07:36 PM

I think it's been made fairly clear by now that one of the leading factors in the gradually increasing success in online worlds is due to how much easier it's becoming to take part in them. Sure, not EVERYONE is making an avatar, getting a blog, or making their own online shopping business. However, the number of people who are doing so relative to the number of people using the internet as a whole is increasing fairly rapidly. Compared to 10 years ago, it's ridiculously easy for someone to set up their own personal website. I can click a few places and sign my name to have any number of blogs available to me. So in response, you could at least bother to outline what these things *independent of technological concerns* are, in your mind. Tell us some of the problems, instead of just saying they exist and not explaining why.

Posted by: Tyken Hightower | December 13, 2006 at 08:11 PM

As it's not my software nor my company, I don't "compound my changes of failure" -- Linden Lab does. I'm merely a customer, and while I'd aspire to have more equal treatment as a respected partner and more democracy, I don't take on all the sins of LL.

Your comment just seems pointless to me, I'm sorry. Everybody *can* have a web page, usually for free. This doesn't mean "everybody in the world even the poor suffering people in Africa". No need to get literal and preachy about it. But everyone who is in a reasonably developed urban educated center. If my colleagues from Africa or Central Asia have email and webpages, and my little cousin in Ohio has a web page, well, lots of people have web pages. If they don't have them, then they have access to one. No need to overstate this, but here's what my statement means: that it is easy for those who decide they want access to it.

I could spend $40 on a cable bill; or spend $40 on Second Life and a 8192 m2 of land on their server.

And, note I said SECOND. Second job -- that's quite a bit, landing and doing. Second wife -- what, the first one wasn't good enough? Was that second one THAT easy to find? Second home -- you mean you are rich enough to pay two mortgages? See, I said, LIKE having the other things in life that are "seconds" so that it is clear: this is the affluent in a middle class kind of way. You CAN have a second home -- if you decide that is what you want.

A lot -- a lot! -- of people have DSL lines or broadband now. That was the biggest hurdle. That means on a lot of new-generation computers, the graphic cards they need are already installed. They log in from all over. It's not ubiquitous; it is not electricity. But it is there, to be had, easily enough.

Why is that so hard to understand, and why would you need to browbeat it?

I was turned away and turned off by Second Life the first time I came in 2003. In 2004, I almost left. It's not easy, starting out. But it has gotten better since then in terms of accessibility. I think it's a pretty reasonable statement now that if I have a computer at home or the office with broadband, I can do this.

What's so hard about it? are you artificially hyping imagined hypothetical scenarios just to be contrary?

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 13, 2006 at 08:14 PM

Tyken has summed it up very well. It is ridiculously easy to start a web page or a blog now with far less clicks than 5 years ago. What's annoying is that starting forums has gotten so much harder due to all the spam and anti-spam ware and menus to toggle. I wish I could find a good free forums software -- PHPB or whatsis is a horror.

One of the classic ways that geeks try to emotionally blackmail you into accepting their position is through invoking the poor, the unconnected, the unwashed waiting for um...THEIR intervention and management. I've run across this now so many times as to declare it a syndrome. Geeks, who are supposed to be rational, and high tech, are some of the most emotionally manipulative and infantile types out there. It comes with the hypertrophied development of one side of their aspect, I guess, that they then use wierd logic like "None of the people in Africa have this so you can't". Gosh, if you waited around to catch up Africa to every technological advance, you'd never get anything done. AND Africas in fact get the technology and adapt way more than you think -- and hey, without having to become dependent on Western do-good tekkies as they are more and more becoming educated and becoming their own networkers.

And those that try to say, oh, my brother and my grandmother don't have this are the same people that told us AOL was death for the Internet and AOL is a terrible model. It's as if they can't recognize the truth: HOW MANY PEOPLE ARE STILL ON AOL. This always amazes me. I walk into all kinds of homes and even offices and find people still on AOL. They are supposed to be elite, passe, hopelessly clueless. But...they like AOL -- mainly for the AIM, I guess.

I guess I just want the reality of the culture of ordinary people to intrude more on the consciousness of people who are immersed in geekdom.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 13, 2006 at 08:21 PM

Prokofy! ;0 Are you stoked or what?! They put automatic logging into the client under preferences! Now anyone can have word for word accurate logs of any conversation they have in SL without having to save them out by hand..

This will save you a lot of time I'm sure.. No more worries about crashing before you copy and paste the logs! No more missing important conversational cues while saving the log.

It's truly the dawning of a new age in Second Life! The age of accuracy in reporting! REJOICE!

Posted by: Baba | December 13, 2006 at 09:27 PM

A counter argument or why I'm glad the "geeks" won't go.

http://www.allanadion.com/?p=52

Posted by: Allana Dion | December 13, 2006 at 11:59 PM

Way to stereotype, man. People like you do just as much damage to the way geeks and non-geeks interact as those you decry.

I'm a "tekkie", who is buildin a project in Second Life precisely because of its accessibility to non-geeks. Most of my friends aren't geeks, and I don't look down on them for it any more than they look down on me for my artistic lacks. It takes all types.

Posted by: Nathaniel Eliot | December 14, 2006 at 05:07 AM

It's not a stereotype, it's identification of a deep pattern, and critique of it. The pattern is there to be seen. And Clay Shirky and fans are stereotyping the rest of us non-tekies explicitly. The idea that people who criticize put-downs of SL on the grounds that it is not MMORPG-y or geeky *enough* are somehow "harming relations" is one of those geek fallacies of control. Let it go.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 14, 2006 at 05:51 AM

I'm not stereotyping anyone on those grounds, Prok. Sure, i'm a geek. I've spent the last month or so developing HLSL shaders and procedural animation techniques. When you know what those are, you might begin to see why i think SL is a bad joke....

I honestly don't care about the skills. If someone develops a tool that means you can do everything that i can do or more, that's great. I'll probably use it, too, because i'm lazy that way.

But i mean, seriously, you are coming across in a deeply kindergarten whine kind of way here.

"OH NOEZ, bigger boys keep laughing at my sandcastle!" So what? Why should it be a problem? If you like your sandcastle, that's great. But if i build skyscrapers and dams for a living, then i have the right to comment on anyone charging for sandcastles among my peers, and bitching about it is not going to make me stop.

In this one instance, i think the best thing you can do is stop reading. You seem to be proud of not understanding what you read anyway, so why bother?

You could do something you like better instead. I'm certain that SL-Escorts.com has some suggestions.

Posted by: Cael | December 14, 2006 at 11:35 AM

After everything I've read from you today, I can't believe you describe Shirky's piece as "petulant"! Meow!

Posted by: blackbelt_jones | December 17, 2006 at 07:22 PM

Nathaniel, I'm not criticizing SL for anything of the sort.

Though part of Neva's post is about criticism of SL users and their in-world experiences and behaviors, the post notes that I said nothing about the in-world experience, nor do I pass judgment on its users. As I've said about SL in other forums, passionate users are rightly a law unto themselves, and nothing I could have said about them would have mattered, pro or con, so I said nothing.

The focus on criticisms I'm *not* making obscures the criticism I am making: LL is intentionally advertising misleading numbers. If it wants to be taken seriously when it talks about having residents instead of users, it needs to propose and produce some metric for residence, something it hasn't done.

The question that started that essay is this: how many actual SL users are there, counting users as people who find it engaging enough to return periodically? I didn't have an answer last week, and none of the figures on the stats page provide that number. I have to assume that at least some of the redirection to the straw man issue of 'Shirky is dissing SL users' is that the real question is uncomfortable to answer.

Posted by: Clay Shirky | December 18, 2006 at 09:25 AM

Re: "LL is intentionally advertising misleading numbers. If it wants to be taken seriously when it talks about having residents instead of users, it needs to propose and produce some metric for residence, something it hasn't done."

This is not news to us,Clay. You're just tuning in. Have a bit of humbleness here. We've been harping about this for a year now. Where were you?! Read all our blogs and newspapers that ridicule the hype.

And you want metrics for measuring real growth? I've parsed them and justified what I'd use -- measurement of actual landowners/tier-payers here:
http://www.secondlifeherald.com/slh/2006/12/what_is_the_tru.html

And provided my own business real numbers here:
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2006/12/my_numbers.html

And my colleague at the Herald Urizenus Sklar has pilloried the fake 2 million here:
http://www.secondlifeherald.com/slh/2006/12/2_million_resid.html

You seem to imply, no doubt based on games with game-gods and groups such as the groups you feel are their own worst enemy, that the core and the "right people" are one, united, synonomous.

But in fact there are many opposing forces, and many factions of residents, and it is a much more complex world than you might imagine.

We have an answer -- and we had it weeks ago: measure the actual log-ins every 4 hours, and keep your own records; measure the landowners; measure the profit-making avatars (they include content-creating non-land-owners), etc. The numbers aren't as dramatic; the do show growth.

There's nothing uncomfortable for *us* -- and I hope you are not ascribing this to the user base, all of whom are perfectly aware of the phony numbers as they know just how many alts they have.

And I'm not even certain there is for LL, but their statistics often seem to many to be squirrelly.

As for Cael, his masturbatory musings here are more evidence of why the geeks got to go. The sooner the better. Ugh.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 18, 2006 at 09:42 AM

[quoue]This is not news to us,Clay. You're just tuning in. Have a bit of humbleness here. We've been harping about this for a year now. Where were you?! Read all our blogs and newspapers that ridicule the hype.[/end of quote]

And yet, the hype continues. In fact, it's getting louder and more prevlent than ever. It's always great to get a scoop, but as long as the hype persists, the hype still needs to be discussed, even if it's been discussed elsewhere already. A lot of us are just tuning in, and we need to be brought up to speed.

I didn't get too far in the article. I didn't like the personal tone of it. Basically, it was guilty of everything that Shirky was being accused of. It was whiny, and petulant and "snarky". It was like listening to Sean Hannity discuss Richard Clarke. Subsitute "geek" for "liberal", and there you are.

I'm beginning to wonder if the web isn't going to be the battleground for a whole new culture war.

Is html easier than Second Life? Well, yeah, at least in the most basic and important sense. The interface used to participate in the html-based web is called a web browser, and most web browsers are easier to operate than the interface that is needed to participate in Second Life. Most of us don't need to KNOW html in oder to USE html. The BROWSER knows html.

 

Posted by: blackbelt_jones | December 19, 2006 at 12:15 AM

We are not responsible for the hype.

The hype comes from a) LL marketing b) metaversal consulting firm PR and hypervent c) gullibility of the media not doing its homework.

Why are we, LL's greatest inworld critics, where it counts, to blame for hype?!

And my problem with Clay Shirky isn't about his very belated, and very superficial tackling of the numbers. That's useful, if limited because it's belated -- and snarky.

My problem is his refusal to get out of his MUD past and his Web 1.0 past and see that something else is happening here.

What it is, ain't exactly clear : )

And yes, the web will be a very worth battlefield for a very necessary battle with geeks who have ruled our lives for far too long -- and who are trying to take over virtuality, too.

Second Life is easier than making a website, not browsing a website -- and more interesting than watching TV and making a MySpace.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 19, 2006 at 12:57 AM

why is this blog on typepad on the world wide web 1.0, shouldn't it be like a magic talking bird-familiar in SL or something?

Posted by: xian | December 19, 2006 at 11:23 AM

Because the magic talking bird is Prokofy, you can find him at the Sutherland Dam Club on Friday nights at 6 pm.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 19, 2006 at 11:27 AM

BTW, people who do not post with Second Life names will be warned and then banned. That's why "blackjack" and others coming from Shirky's website are banned. This is to prevent the constant anonymous savage sniping from trolling fucks that is so common to SL.

If you don't want to have an SL avatar, fine, well, write on your own blog then.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 19, 2006 at 11:28 AM

The Tigger Trap

Torley's blog has everything from elaborate references to obscure FlashFlashRevolution files to reams of free textures in neon dayglo. How many people can type their first name into Google and have it be the first thing that appears on the list? That's Torley.

Lordfly has a mean-spired anti-Torley blast on his curiously-trafficked blog -- with Clique Here ready to ensure it even more views, the anti-Torley meme will spread. But Torley isn't the problem, and in fact Lordfly lies, if he thinks there are only "roflcopters" and not good, hard information, complete with carefully-applied "RESOLVED" and "UPDATED" tags on the items. A lot of hard work is going into writing and organizing that Blob, Blob though it may be, and while politically it is still marshmallows and will probably never get any better in that department, the technical stuff is all there. No one could fault Lindens for not being clear on what is happening -- when they know. If all Jeska can say about SL is that it is "behaving strangely," well, can you think up a better explanation?

Torley is of course a "CommMonkey" (don't you love their cutesy terms?!) who just banned me from the Blob, yet I bear her no ill will. I don't even think she's relevant to my banning. Even my banning isn't even relevant, because it's merely a symptom of the larger birthpangs of SL, the Metaverse, the Fetaverse. I tried to reply to Torley when she sent me a curt and fake-cheery IM saying something like "Hi, Prokofy, I thought I'd let you know that your access to the blog has been removed due to trolling" or something like that. I tried to say, Torley, other people are writing the same thing as me, surely you'll see you can't ban all of us? But she just applied that tried-and-true Linden silent-treatment method (ugh). Works like a charm.

Because all kinds of things are possible. The banning of me from the blog could be some idiosyncratic quirk from Torley, who may not like me; she may have unilaterally done it and may have that authority. She may have done it because arguments, friction, turbulence, opinions clashing, people standing up to nasty, arrogant tekkies, people challenging the main Lindens -- this all Makes Baby Torley Cry. She reacts with the banhammer.

Or course, Torley may merely be a myrmidon, and some higher powers, Jeska, Robin, whatever, instruct her to ban me and she does. Then the ban may or may not relate to that actual entry (the entries there are truly perplexing as "ban" material because there's nothing ban-worthy about them, as many have commented). Then the ban is related, I dunno, to "message-sending" with prominent critics, or as punishment and retaliation against the Herald, which the Lindens can't get at and are frequently mad at.

Sigh.

So immediately after my ban, comes the odd column about CommMonkey, and this reinforces two points, one already made here by Taco Rubio: that it's all about who is on duty, and who is on duty gets to decide stuff, and Torley just felt like banning me and did. That's reprehensible, of course, because Lindens should be fair, and even-handed, and just. Of course they aren't. But...this lends them the opportunity for another Linden -- any would do -- to come on and say, oh, that CommMonkey made that rather irritable and too-hasty decision, they got more press for Prokofy than the single paragraph he originally intended would have ever gotten, so, let's just call this last week's problem, restore Prokofy's access, and have Torley say that what she really meant was just a ban for that thread on that day...or something...but being Linden means never having to say you're sorry...

Writing that column, Torley must have felt under fire. And having to write other columns where she explained her life and her psychological issues, you have to worry about her state of mind and her proximity to cracking. Except...Torley has been through a LOT -- and some of her greatest suffering has actually been in Second Life (Second Life has a way of being laser-like in its burns, especially with personal relationships). And no doubt, what didn't kill her made her stronger. She has decided simply to Accentuate the Positive, Eliminate the Negative and Say Goodbye to Mr. In-Betwee --, through the various techniques available through various cults, exercises, books, things like the old "Lifespring" that teach you that you can chose the good and bad things that happen to you -- belief systems that make it seem like negativity and ill effects are things that can be consciously moved away and walked around and beaten by affirmation of the positive.

So that's how Torley copes, and tries to help all of us cope, with the watermelon shtick, the textures (my God, texture packages??? In a game where nothing rezzes these days?!), lowzerama stuff -- the whole works. Perhaps there are some very brand-new newbies who are laughing and finding this fun. More likely there are too many oldbies like Lordfly who are being nasty and mean about it. It's sad.

So what does it mean? It means things are really tough at the Lab. They don't talk. They are having dissent among themselves, and they are all silent about it -- and they shove Torley out in front to deal with the angry, seething masses. In every age, in every situation, there is a Torley, the harmony of the planets seems to depend upon it.

Remember Tigger? Tigger was everyone's favourite game-master at the Sims Online. (Gah, not GM, they had another term, help me out here somebody). (If Uri and Marsellus didn't like her, they were just meanies like Lordfly).

EA.com was notorious for never answering a single email, never speaking on the forums, and never entering the game -- ever. There was that famous cartoon showing a group of players in desperation launching a huge blimp to sale over EA.com headquarters to try to deliver some message to them. Will Wright would sneak in the game on his alt -- but Tigger, well, she was always Tigger. And she was horribly squeezed between condescending and abrupt game devs who were busy polishing their resumes and trying to mop up the messed-up game, and the angry fans who were pissed at corruption, evil, griefing and lack of the new features. They worsened their problem by censoring and over-controlling the forums (you couldn't report evil being done by individuals or groups in any fashion, even obliquely; I used to try to post Aesopian fables drawn from the Russian press about Khodorkovsky in "off-topic" to get the news about the Sim Shadow Government out.)

Some of the most ardent Tigger fans, like Walba Threadkiller (remember how she used to actually keep a diary of each and every game patch installation?!), would join her in this interesting but doomed attempt to prove that community managers were also involved in "development" and that their "creative work" should be put on par with actual game dev work. That was noble in intent, but it was a lot like trying to take housewifes' work and moms' work and glorify it into being on par with office work. We all know that writing a sales report or organizing an event or researching a country is just plain more intellectually refined than wiping a baby's butt and trying to keep him occupied with a Cheerio. Let's not be pretentious here.

In any event, the girls' work of CM was never as praiseworthy as the boys' work of game devving -- with predictable results. Tigger left, not before bequeathing her name for the new sandbox server, Dragon's Cove, and inspiring legions of fanboyz to write stuff about not angering dragons because you are crunchy and go good with milk. The game devs kept crunching code, however, along with the players, and kept not delivering the stuff promised or fixing the broken stuff.

For the life of me, I don't get why coders get to keep doing that, and have no civilian control. Unlike science, that for all its irresponsibility and callousness and impersonality (remember Leonardo da Vinci cutting up all those cadavers?!), would have to bow to civilian control because it would have to be funded by government or academe.

The problem with controlling game devs is that giant media and entertainment companies fund them, or even promising little California start-ups with lots of VC money, and they feel as if they are Masters of the Universe.

Perhaps they are, now, but this can't last, any more than any sort of tyranny ever lasts in the world.

Nobody Fugazi has one of his awful hectory posts up about 10 days ago (unfortunately, he has me even blocked from reading his pages, so I can't link to it) which has a title like "Trouble at Linden Lab". It's full not only of those little nasty digs that the amateur tekkies love to give to the Lindens (has a project in history ever had as many backseat drivers as this one?!). It also has a far too lenient and accommodating position on coders.

Nobody even speaks of the "code cave," some special, dark, arcane realm, where those who can program are allowed to go and disappear for long periods -- and stay and dwell for unaccountably -- and tell others to fuck off, evidently, because they can't get into the head space or whatever. Coding is some kind of high-octane satori, and no one must disturb it. Of course, that's an awful lot of hooplah to be saying about rote activities that involve lining up phrases and number sequences and logic and applying it to systems, but there it is. We're to appreciate the coding involves some, um, grand intellectual fathoming exercise to which none but the most brilliant are admitted *cough*. I *do* await the day for when these people are declared the gas-station attendants and car repair men that they are.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, we'll have to endure them because they have the keys to the kingdom. Nobody thinks they should be fed plates of fast food -- it should be pushed under the door and we should run for cover before they bite our hands off up to the elbow.

Nobody writes of a boss coming up to him and asking him either when something would be done, or whether something else could be done, and Nobody found that to be a tremendous imposition on his special, sensitive coding domain. Baloney. I remember my very first historical encounter with one of these types, back in the days of punch cards. A man sat in an office for nearly 20 hours out of the 24, punching the cards and working those kind of giant room-size computers they had in the 1970s. He ate up resources, fast food, bosses' patience. He was supposedly making a bank fraud file -- something I was doing too, as a $1.60/hour Kelly Girl, and doing manually, and 100 times faster using HUMINT. This was my first exposure to this kind of idiocy -- the sacred realm of programming bullshit. Finally somebody pulled the plug on this guy and sent him back to work on reality.

Gosh, these prima donnas are in need of a thorough upbraiding. Why can't they be controlled? A project like Second Life isn't only about coding, is it? How can it be? It's at least as much about community management and marketing and 100 other things.

So what is to be done?

One thing people try to do, when Torley or any of these other CommMonkeys come on the air, is challenge them to reply to a basic question: what are you doing about stability? If they come on to announce something Shiny, then people squawk, why Shiny, when we need Not-Crashy?

And the usual nasty bunch of credulous fanboyz take up the cudgel. Oh, not all Lindens can be put out to do coding, why, some of them aren't programmers, you wouldn't want the receptionist coding, would you?

But...that's not what we're asking. We're asking *the Lindens who are coders* why the hell they are making laggy, stupid web interfaces to show our blogs (which can be looked at much more conveniently outside of SL) -- when they could be fixing bugs or testing for stability. Why the hell are they making and coding the hide-my-online-status stuff when they could be fixing existing problems. Why are they adding shiny, and not taking away the gray. THAT is what we are asking. And we have a right to ask it precisely of *those people in that department*.

And another answer: well, frankly, given that 1/3 of the staff at least, if not more, is drawn from the player base, we have to worry! But more than that, we aren't talking about the Lindens who bake cookies and hold hands with the community. And Torley, who is no slouch when it comes to tekkie stuff, and isn't just the Tigger type in that respect, may not be able to code per say at the level they need, but she can certainly write bug reports, do load testing, analyze user-interface problems and a hundred other semi-tekkie things that would be helping -- and are helping when they can be done. (In fact, while Torley may barrage Planet SL with watermelon-hued textures, she's also organizing a lot of information systems and handling an enormous number of queries and complaints. If abuse-reports, which most people have no faith in, still get 2,000 complaints a day, imagine how many notices Torley, in whom people still do have faith as an interventionist with the cave-coders, must be getting. I think Hamlet wasn't half wrong when he decided Torley was the most important and influential person in SL.

Of course Torley isn't perfect. She has a maddening tendency simply never to hear or reply to or engage in anything seriously deeply negative -- and right -- you might say. That can be infuriating when you try to express some basic, obvious, glaring bad-ass truth about SL and get her to galvanize.

But...the reason for this I understand. Years ago, one of my friends in Russia was a woman who was unknown, rather quiet, but very important to the samizdat movement, the movement involving people who typed the books of dissidents, or simply copied the news of people jailed, imprisoned, tortured, and got it out to the outside world. She did this quietly, and without much fuss. She then regrettably came down with cancer. Her sister was among the many people still caught up in the GULAG and still facing awful treatment. There was still so much work to do to get her sister and others released, to go on communicating to misunderstanding and neglectful Westerners...she decided that she simply had to be positive. Her day could not contain negativity -- she was sick with terminal cancer, and she had lots to do. She would put on her coat and hat and go outside in the cold to talk to Western reporters, and I can still see her pacing up and down on the cold wintry sidewalks -- you couldn't talk inside because the apartments were bugged. She simply refused to dwell on the negative, on the evils, on the defeats. She kept up a brave face, she kept doggedly doing the simple job she had taken on and kept up her positivity. If you have ever met a person facing a life struggle like that, you know how they seem to have become ionized and to glow. Such people were once described by Rodney Collin as being able to convert even harmful radioactivity into useful radioactivity.'

That's the role Torley takes on -- and it's a killer. She does it to the best of her ability -- and then some.

Now, what does this tell us? Things are out of balance. No one can explain to me why coders, who are responsible directly for the problems, cannot show some more humility and compassion. No one can explain why they can't act less cocky. And that's what the libsecondlife thing is all about, and CopyBot -- not about copying objects in a synthetic world, but about people, and the attitudes you take to them (King Frederick's appalling nastiness about the inability of doors really to lock is indicative of the hateful and insolent W-Hat type of spirit we find in SL -- and it is not absent from some Lindens -- who, after all, came from the player base).

What's perplexing to me is why, if I could be banned from this blog, is that the offensive posts aren't deleted. Aren't they supposed to be just deleted? The rules don't say anything about banning. Early on, I had 2 blog comments deleted. Both were unobjectionable. One caused even Cristiano to speak up in my defense. I know I didn't do anything wrong. I suspect Torley knows that, too. But faced with the "honour of uniform," she has to protect not us, from whom she came, but the coders -- to circle the wagons around them, protect them from controversial questions, and pay fealty to the game gods. While she says she is taking our hand in the darkness on the dreaded path out of the relatively free expression of the blogs into the yawning chill of the blog, swept clean of controversy by deletion and not due process, while she claims she has got our back and is sending us HUGZ in every shape and form, Torley, at the end of the day, is Torley Linden. That can't be forsaken.

And there's no other game for her to go to, like there was for Tigger. So...further on and further up!

COMMENTS:

Comments

first off, before you decide to go off on me for not using my Second Life name, let me make it clear that I am a third party that has been reading the different Blog entries prior to getting any form of account.

From what I have seen in the Linden Blog your comments have caused numerous angered responses - most prominent was the user "Just a thought". I do not agree with what you have posted within that Blog, or within this one. I do not agree with those that have posted in opposition of you. I do however see where your comments can be considered trolling.

What I gather from this entry in your own Blog and in other entries here relating to this incident is that you do not see nor understand why you were banned for trolling. Quite frankly if you did not see that your comments were causing angered reactions in some then you were not paying much attention. If you did know of this reaction and posted anyway then yes, you were trolling.

I for one will not consider getting an account on Second Life until these debates are resolved - how they are resolved is something I frankly do not care about. Ban all the dissenters, find a middle ground, whatever.

Posted by: Doesn't matter | December 11, 2006 at 03:58 AM

Oh, that's complete, unadultered, bullshit.

Not go to Second Life because some debate is not resolved? Huh? What kind of manipulative, fanatical controlling crap is that?

The idea that my posts "caused anger" is silly. Because the people they "caused anger" in are in a distinct minority. They are people like Chris (whoever he is, who is carrying water for libsl) who spouts off shit -- and the few others there gunning for anyone who criticizies libsl. They aren't angry; they are arrogant fucks who think they can roll over anybody -- and do, at least for now. Inciting people like that is a public service, not trolling.

And what happens in a situation like this is that you, like others, look at it in a biased, one-sided fashion. If one person put a post a few others didn't like and "got angry" and angrily denounced it, well, wait a second, why do they get to do that? Why do they get to *be* incited and call names and flame ever after?

And...all they do with that flaming is incite anger in the original poster, and those who agree with the original poster. This is a classic forums problem, and one common to MMORPGs. And I'm having none of it. It's total bullshit. Debates, even strong debates are possible. Nobody has to use insulting bullshit name-calling like "You're a Republican" (I'm not lol).

I raised a legitimate issue, in a legitimate way, and didn't troll even in the fanboyz notion of it, which I reject anyway.

Just as many people agreed with me, and took on this trolling Chris (now there's a troll, posting arrogant, cocky biting comments and not suffering a single whip of the Linden lash).

No, stop being a little dick and post with your SL name, you are a coward.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 11, 2006 at 04:06 AM

Hmm, I wonder what part of "I don't have an account" wasn't understood?

If this is the reaction you have to a third party that quite frankly could just as easily turn around and tell you to **** off for your apparent need to think everyone is out to get you.

Bah, I don't know why I even bothered attempting to explain it to you. You have your own view of what you think is unobjectionable, others have a different view.

I am surprised that the human race has survived this long with people out there that take everything as a possible attack or that think everyone is against them.

Please do not bother to respond to me any further - I won't be back to read the comment anyway. I do not like, nor would I ever allow, someone so negative and disturbed to be on my screen, let alone getting the attention they em to crave. As a matter of fact I think I'll hop back on over to my usual forums, at least there I know there are decent, honest, law-abiding folks that aren't so paranoid as to assume an attack from a formerly interested, and quite honest poster.

My usual forum? Not even Second Life related - TAPS. want to look me up there and confirm it for yourself? Spirits Rising is the username.

Posted by: doesn't matter. | December 11, 2006 at 04:17 AM

Um, what a pretentious fool.

Again, the notion that I'm supposed to accept the huffing and puffing of neuralgic script-kiddies as "incited anger" that is some sort of "crime" is simply beyond the pale.

They get to anger me and others with name-calling and flat denials of the truths we are speaking? Hell, no.

No, the concept of "troll" is outmoded in the modern, free world and comes from the Middle Ages.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 11, 2006 at 04:20 AM

As you well know, just a thought, you have to have your SL name here. I give people the benefit of the doubt if they haven't figured this rule out and leave them with one post -- but not for you, because you knew of the rule when you posted, bitched about it anyway, and then bitched that it isn't posted as a rule. This is a blog, however, with no place for a "sticky" of that nature.

And I don't claim to be the only one banned from the blog. I just report on my own banning. You're welcome to do the same.

I don't think I deserved banning, I don't flout the rules, and my post is within the rules. So the system is unjust.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 11, 2006 at 08:06 AM

I delete posts, and ban posters who do not use their Second Life names. Those are the rules, yes, and have been for over a year. Take your posts to your blog.

No, I'm not required to post any kind of rules section on a blog which isn't forum software with the ability to do that. I simply state them. My house, my rules. It's a simple, clear, and easy rule and one most people keep. It's to prevent people like "just a thought" from endlessly spewing hate with no accountability.

I also don't play guessing games trying to figure out who they are, either, nor do I run around inworld trying to figure out clues. If you want to make public statements on my blog of any sort, you use your SL name, period.

If you need to keep coming back on alts or anonymizers or what-have-you, by all means, waste your time on that, but malicious children aren't welcome here.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 11, 2006 at 09:02 AM

Fascinating read, Prokofy. One of the few that I could actually sit all the way through and read for once (No offence, I have trouble reading long, verbose material on the computer screen rather than the printed word). Articles like this tend to intrique me, since it isn't just rumoring or over reaction, but rather actual thoughtful comment.

Posted by: Talon Lardner | December 11, 2006 at 09:18 AM

Talon, I think this post isn't any different than the others, they are all verbose, and they all speculate, and they all react -- and that's ok. This is a blog to help me think and find others to think with, not a Pulitzer-prize-winning piece of journalism.

I think it's just a question of a topic that interests you. Torley is an all-to-easy target for the cynical and arrogant to attack and make sport of. But I think she is never to blame for whatever aspect of her personality and role is annoying someone. She has someone who was latched on to by the Lindens to serve their purposes, and she is put out in that terrible meat-grinder between indifferent and even angry devs and obsessed and even hysterical players, and there is a person like her not only in every game, but in most countries, offices, etc. The trick is not to focus on the persona of the person who is put in this role, or their various manifestations, but to see what is happening to them as a symptom of the larger grinding phenomena.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 11, 2006 at 09:38 AM

"Crunchy and go good with KETCHUP."

Good piece, Prok.

coco

Posted by: Cocoanut | December 11, 2006 at 11:27 AM

right, KETCHUP, duh, *slaps forehead*. I've mixing up Tigger's dragon thing with Barnes' profile which says he is "dangerously handsome and crunchy in milk"

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 11, 2006 at 11:32 AM

I'm pretty sure you've bloviated about Torley's cuteness before. But, alas, when I do it it's the end of the world.

If you don't like my writing, why are you reading my blog anyways? I surely don't read your tripe unless it pops up with my name in Technorati, filled to the brim with accusations and paranoid delusions.

And here's how you remove me from Cleeker: have everyone in Ravenglass click on your blog furiously. The end, you're on top again, so you can crow about how important you are to the unwashed masses.

Posted by: Lordfly Digeridoo | December 11, 2006 at 12:48 PM

Why, Lordfly, you're reading my blog? Why?

No, I don't think I've written anything extensive on Torley before. But you ARE nasty. What on earth do you think the Lindens are going to tell you that they haven't posted yet? Still mad they didn't put you in SL Views?

You know, you can never be too rich, too thin, and be too FIC, Lordfly, and YOU are just not *FIC enough*.

I don't read your blog. I merely saw it at the top of the heap on Clique Here a few times and out of curiousity as to how it could ever acquire so many readers, cliqued, too -- and got my answer. Because cliques clique.

I wouldn't dream of having everyone in Ravenglss go and click on my blog, that would be silly. But, that line of thinking lets me know how YOU are getting your traffic, no doubt getting Mulch Ennui to click-bomb you in between er, hands, so to speak.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 11, 2006 at 01:08 PM

Sorry to break it to you, but I was already in an SL Views panel. So was my newbie girlfriend. Zomgficerati.

I get around 50 page hits a day. I'm hardly a force to be reckoned with on the blogotron, so you can sit smugly in your little tinfoil hat empire.

And your insinuating that my post is so hateful towards Torley is rich, considering the hate-filled bile that spews from your mouth on a daily basis.

People in glass houses should not throw stones, but you don't care. You just keep rehanging more glass.

Posted by: Lordfly Digeridoo | December 11, 2006 at 09:50 PM

Well, that figures.

coco

Posted by: Cocoanut | December 11, 2006 at 09:57 PM

I do not have any hate-filled bile. The short list of people I criticize -- you are on it -- are criticized, not venomized.

The nasty, unnecessary post against a Linden really seems over the top. I say this not as a fanboy obviously, but as just someone who looks for decency. If Torley is guilty of a wowzerama post now and then, it has to be seen in a context of post after post of useful info. And, it is probably as good as it can get from these Lindens, who circled the wagons long ago. Good thing YOU got on the inside!

If you are in SL Views and those FIC networks, why the hell would you need poor Torley to give you information anyway???

Well, now that is odd, this 50 hits a day. I guess Iron Perth clicks on you. I do not get how you can be the top of the list of anything he has going with 50 hits. Huh? What sort of caper is he running there? I am honestly curious.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 11, 2006 at 10:00 PM

Regarding the Cliquer thing, I've no idea. There should be no reason why I rate higher than, say, the SLH, or even the crap here. You post more than I do, and get 100x the comments.

I shouldn't even be in the top ten.

Posted by: Lordfly Digeridoo | December 11, 2006 at 10:30 PM

Found this piece to be very interesting. I feel that I fundamentally disagree with many assumed premises withing, and though I actually have an overall sick and queasy feeling while reading most of what you have to say, I decided to follow your advice to the general public in a comment or post somewhere and am forcing myself to read a point of view that I highly disagree with. It's becoming a rather enlightening experience, though not so much for your insight, but more for experiencing the consideration of viewpoints that are at complete odds with my constructed reality.

Anyhow, I have but one question. Regardless of the tone of your answer, I will refuse to be offended. Why does your writing so often consist of sweeping categorization of individuals? Is it your actual belief that people are extremely simple and lacking of depth?

Posted by: Pyutaros Achterbahn | December 12, 2006 at 12:01 AM

Um, noooo....that must be YOUR belief if you make that sweeping characterization of *me* : )

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 12, 2006 at 12:47 AM

Okay, I obviously wasn't specific enough in my question, so that it came off as a belief. What I am referring to is specific terms you use, such as fanboyz, tekkies, fascists, and how quickly and easily someone will be tossed into one of these categories as a blanket method of invalidation. So I hope my direct question is clearer now, but if it's required that I expand on it more, I will gladly oblige. BTW - that's a classic deflection technique of debate. I was almost thrown off my feet.

Posted by: Pyutaros Achterbahn | December 12, 2006 at 08:44 AM