Second Thoughts

Busybody Against Abuse!

Did you know that September 27 was "Blog Against Abuse Day"? Yes, one of those fatuous and ineffective Internet memes that coat everybody with a slick of self-righteous elation that they are Doing Good -- but without having to do more than click, or upload a texture. Not surprisingly, Busybody Fugazi (I finally figured out that's what I have to call him! *thunks forehead* is yammering on about the need to bloviate against abuse -- as he defines it. While the original campaigners appeared to have in mind evils like child abuse or elder abuse or even ozone abuse (put away that hairspray can! Now! that's an order!), Busybody of course thought of SL when he thought of abuse. And he didn't think about Lindens announcing nasty things at the last minute like VAT, or griefers who paralyze sims. No, he thought about Ginko's, and the angel choirs and violins swung up to a high pitch.

It seems that Busybody never read the cards on the Ginko's machine. They said it was a high risk investment opportunity. It said they never guaranteed you withdrawals. And so...after nearly 3 years of pumping out free $100 for new accounts, and interest at around .14 (or more for some time) compounded daily, whoops, you had to take them at their word, and they couldn't guarantee withdrawals. No fraud involved here, because they *told* you. Nicholas Port didn't abuse anybody, because people are adults (or should be), they can read, and if they embark on something this nutty and high risk, that appears for all intents and purposes "too good to be true" then, like Zee Linden says, it probably is. So to go whining and snivelling now about "abuse" is just to enterain that grand, noxious entitlement-happy victimology that one finds especially in America, where various imagined minorities and injured-but-not-innocent types try to guilt-trip you into making them special. Please. Somebody on a DSL line, sitting comfortably in their living room, with an expensive computer with a fancy graphic card, who has at least, oh, $10 or $50 US to click and pump into a pixelated place on their computer screen with a label containing the name of an anonymous avatar is not a victim; they are a player.

I marvel also at this rush to criminalize Linden Lab because they cash out people's Linden dollars. They rightly kept their distance; they cannot become involved in resident-to-resident transactions. Full stop. Busybody, like others who want a nanny state, can't grasp that "o means no": they can't get involved. So...don't put your money in prims then, if you can't handle the consequences. Ranting about the Lindens or those who put out such prims is completely irrrelevant and unjustified. And frankly, to be bashing Nicholas makes no sense either -- he did what he said on the can, he tried to make it right, it hasn't worked yet -- maybe it's a total bust now. Um, ok, then...like the man said, "If it sounds too good to be true..." (I never did understand why Busybody sunk so much money into this caper?!)

Fat VAT

Just as the European authorities were first to crack down on the sexual issues of Second Life -- not the "Puritan Americans" as the Euros often claim -- so these social welfare states are the first to raise the specter of taxation to Second Life. I've been amazed that Europeans have been screeching as much as they have about being taxed for Second Life, given that their socialism has to have somebody pay for it -- are they belatedly discovering it's themselves?

Oh, they have every right to be mad about the lack of notification -- the Lindens pulled this with the gambling issue, too, and that just seems inexcusable. There's no reason in hell they can't give a 30-day notification on something like this. If they are warned -- or think they will be warned by some authority -- of course, following most normal practices in law, they will be given some reasonable period for compliance.

I marvel at the angry, buzzing, entitlement happy kids who fume that VAT is always included, it's always *expected* to be included, that's always how it is "done," and that's why they refuse even to grasp the concept that yeah, tax has to be added to make a price higher when it's discovered you have to pay it -- yes, the cost has to be passed on to customers.

And the minute anybody steps on their tail like this, how quickly that nasty anti-Americanism of theirs comes to the surface, we're told we're SUV-driving religious fundamentalist racist freaks, and the Euros want to be left alone, in, oh, Amsterdam, to gamble, smoke pot, and get laid without prudish Americans on their case. But...all those things are taxed if legalized, too, no? And frankly, the whole reason VAT can be "included" is because, duh, there's an existing system set up to include it -- duh? I mean, if I travel in Europe, pay the VAT in a product, it's separable out from the price because I can go get a refund on it at the airport, and often don't even bother. So it *is* separable out of the price -- someone once conceived a price...and added a VAT. If I get a hotel bill, the VAT is shown as added -- if I rent a conference hall, I get a statement showing the fee and the VAT. That's always been my experience doing business in Europe. Now, if Europeans have that absorbed into their pricing (unlike the U.S., where the tax is always shown separately) -- just like their tip is always absorbed in the restaurant bill (making them seem like cheapskates when they don't leave tips in the U.S., thinking it's already in the bill) -- well, at some point, they have to realize the price goes up, it is *added*.

The Lindens cannot at all be expected to have included the VAT, not being a European country company, nor could I confirm after drilling on this question, nor could others who queried them, that they have absorbed it at any point. How could they? It seems they only recently began this SL Grid stuff and began opening up foreign offices and foreign partnerships. Every company I've ever worked with with multiple offices overseas always goes through all these headaches figuring out local fees and taxes and having to put them in place. If the Lindens have to charge more for Europeans, well, they have to charge more, because those states have more welfare. Hello? That's not Lindens' fault, and it's not the fault of "puritan Americans" or evil American land barons whom Gwyn imagines are going to now make a killing, now that their European competitors are driven to peel back their tier due to higher costs.

If everyone makes a big enough fuss, I'll bet the Lindens would consider knocking off $150 per island sale (at the new price where some $300 would have to be added to $1695), and $25 per monthly tier (due to the $50 added to $295 -- this is assuming 17 percent VAT, although it's 19 or even 25 in some countries) -- and meet the Europeans half-way to keep their business. That might be an option, or perhaps someone will figure out how to base all this in Switzerland free of taxes or something. LL might now restore a system they used to have where tier was payable in Linden dollars -- if they have them pegged to a genuine LindEx rate (they used to have them be worth far less when it came to having to pay tier with them), they might beat the problem.

Happy Name Day to Prokofy Neva!

I am as proud as could be that I've managed to make it through 3 years of Second Life. It's been a tough haul. I remember after spending 2 years in The Sims Online, I sat with a friend and made a tally sheet of all my wins and losses in TSO, and concluded that some good had come of it, but at a price. But with SL, I never have to keep nervously tallying, even though I can be "done" now and then, because it's basically so awesome and revolutionary, and it's frankly a privilege to be a part of it -- albeit in a cramped way, as I'm banned from the official blog and such, and the target of hate and griefer harassment.

But that's what I'm most proud of today -- that I've been banned -- or forced to leave -- from a dozen or more forums and blogs, starting with the now-closed official Linden-run forums and their stuffy corporate blog, to their hangers-on and fanboyz in their orbit who run His Master's Voice sort of organs (Hamlet's New World Notes, Aimee's SL Insider). I view banning from these horrid, oppressive, restrained, biased, outrageously controlled venues to be a distinct honour!

Official Linden Blog
Official Linden Forums
Community Round Table List (and apparently all lists)
Clickable Culture
New World Notes
Terra Nova
SL Universe
SL Insider
SL Herald (demoted to "junior" status)

and more!

In the mean time aside from making hundreds of posts on this blog here in my 3 years and hundreds everywhere else all over the place (just Google me!), I've gotten in dozens of RL media outlets (that lets you know that a strategy for corporate blogs is not to permaban people like me, we will merely go to the free media):

The New York Times
Fortune
New Scientist
Information Week
The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Los Angeles Times
Reuters
NPR
Rolling Stone
Toronto Globe

and many others I'm forgetting now! I'm too tired to link all these now, but it's a good thing to do eventually to see a) the insane reasons for which I'd be banned (calling Aimee's name "like a prom queen's?) b) the interesting things I had to say in the RL media. And hey, I *am* going to blow my own horn here -- it's my party, and I can crow if I want to!

What Neil Warns About

Oh, dear God. Celebrated ancient oldbie Neil Protagonist (sacred name!) starts a new blog, I go there full of hope that it won't be the same-old same-old, and within a day, he's sending me a dumb-ass warning, conditioned on his fearfulness of dissing his old beta oldbie pals. Sigh.

Maxx Monde posted that he was burned out, and that he was leaving SL. I wrote back two words: "Good! Bye!". Far milder than anything that raging asshole mysogynist loser has ever written to me on the old forums, and on SC.

Sure, I can respect Neil wants to turn over a new page. But turning it over on a frank comment that isn't insulting, but just direct, isn't warranted. Making precious little tough-guy warnings in IMs is really lame, too.

My God, Maxx used to routinely wish that I could die of a stroke or a heart attack. He would sneer that I was "getting into the box wine" in the afternoon and constantly printing a slew of false nasties like that about my life as a supposed pathetic housewife, etc. Here's a typical post to SC:

"Maxx Monde
06-12-2006, 06:01 PM
Hey now, we all know if TICky-tappy-typing can't get her daily frustrations out in a long word-storm of WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS, her ticker will stop beating, or something.

Make me wonder how she can take care of her kids, but I'm sure they'll wise up and realize she's insane - right before leaving home, of course."

I'm not interested in being on a fashion-conscious forum like this, no way.

Here's Neal's post to me in IM:

Caliphornication

I love Draxtor Despres' machinima TV shows -- they are talented, brisk, newsy, fun -- and well produced. But he's a young German steeped in all the lousy leftoid idiocies of his tribe and his time, and this occasionally just shows too loudly, no matter how much he tries to "get all the sides to the story". Such is his long-delayed and biased take on the caliphate experiment of Second Life perpetrated by sectarian Michel Manen, a Romanian who has tried out other leftist and wierd experiments in SL -- and failed -- and now reached for the third rail of Islam in a bid to be "relevant" and "in your face" against the evilhatedSUVdrivingBushvoting Americans.

As you only get 500 characters over at YouTube, here's my response to the film:

What a load of tripe, Draxtor! You really presented this tendentiously, which I didn't expect of you. Now that I hear the dulcet tones of the lefty New York Upper West Sider "the lawyer, Rose" (if she's not UWS, I'll be a monkey's uncle), I see that there is even more sectarianism in this caper, and even less authentic religious background -- it's a very old story of the socialist and secular left grabbing at the concept of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend," finding common cause with illiberal religious Islamicist regimes in their own political jihad against Bush.

And in your hacked-up editing of my remarks, you fail to explain that your little "homeland" there in Second Life was, at the outset, hugely intolerant because it has a) demanded that this "multi-culti" discussion take place on "Islamic principles" (whatever they are) and b) insisted on the establishment of the caliphate, a religious comingling of state and mystical religious authority that would have to be imposed by force against unbelievers. It is a basic tenet of the sects ranging from Al-Qaida to Hizb-ut-Tahir, and this caliphation in Second Life doesn't do a thing to differentiate itself from those awful variants. Rose tripping glibly through her pixelated and imagined Islamic past would be like me fetching touching examples of liberation theology from Latin American priests struggling against authoritarian regimes -- the existence of those leftist or liberal trends within Catholicism could excuse the intolerance and arch-conservatism of the more organized form of religion.

What Vint Falken Erases

Vint Falken is still going through a rage spasm and temper tantrum over the fact that I didn't include her in my "Who's on Top?" piece a few weeks ago about the top blogs in SL -- ROFL. Vint is one of those 20-something, spoiled, pouting, entitlement-happy Europeans who hate Americans, are incredibly neuralgic about any criticism of their precious design work, and keep SL brimming with that feeling you had in high school that the prom queens were just getting too much air time ROFL. Aimee Weber has gotten old and long in the tooth -- here's the new Aimee!

Being a good little licentious "liberal," Vint first prides herself on including my posts of criticism of her continuing raging and pouting -- but now she's blanking out my posts imagining she is in some vaunted "struggle for freedom" against the "evil PN". I marvel at how children behave these days LOL. They are so saturated in entitlements and child-centric philosophies of upbringing, and so promoted in the me-media bathos-sphere, that they can't subject themselves or their friends to the slightest impartial look, or bear the slightest criticism, and fly into rages of impotent fury when somebody comes up and points out that maybe their art or their writings are kinda lame. But it's more than that -- they also imagine themselves, while slavishly conformist, tribalist, and oppressive in their outlooks, to be "crusading for freedom". It's a vast pixelated illusion. They'll go on long, extended tours of hatred of "PN," obsessing, creating art around the concept, even, anything to assuage that awful feeling of inadequacy from which they suffer.

What really startled the little darlings was my sharp and legitimate -- and much needed -- criticism of the pompous pin-striper Benjamin Duranske. He's tried the juvenile trick of google-bombing me by posting a link of criticism to my RL name, now the little girls at Vint's site are trying the same lame trick. Too bad when you Google, you get "Benjamin Duranske Must Be Stopped" and not their lame Google-bombs -- and that's without me attempting any Google-bombs, which I find ridiculous. Yes, life is what happens to you when you are making other plans.

I have to chuckle at the latest passle of anonymous fucktards on the Internet strutting around like church ladies "outing" my RL name as if this will somehow "shame" me.

Open Source=Closed Society

Not surpringly, most people don't understand what I mean by the expression "Open Source=Closed Society" -- although I've written on this before, and in my travels, even discovered various fathers of the open-source movement itself who basically came to the same conclusion. The problem is that while technically "open," only tekkies can come in. And not even all tekkies. Even Nobody Fugazi was forced to say, "Hey, what's the secret handshake?"

The first thing that people begin to object when I explain that OS=CS is that oh, but the Lindens have a published blog about it from Zero Linden. Oh, but there are groups and meetings and office hours and anyone can come. Oh, but there's a wiki. But...do you REALLY think wikis work to get a lot of participation? I mean, could we get our heads out of our asses here, people? How many people have taken part in any SL Wiki to date? Go ahead, count them. And look how many essays are in them. Well? See my point? Same for the JIRA. How many of the leaders -- oh, the 1,000 who make more than $1,000 a month as Philip calls them? -- how many of those doers do you see on the wikis, the JIRAs, the blogs? So please, get a grip. That's fake. That's not how you get input. It's only the way for geeks and fanboyz to put in, not even the 10 percent who care and contribute. For that, you need normal, threaded forums. They should be opened back up.

The Sutherland Dam meetings I have are open to the public. But they aren't open to griefers. And that means the frequently flyers who come in each time to grief aren't given a fresh chance, and when they come back on their obvious alts with the same groups like "The Prokofy Fan Club," they don't get to participate. And that's why I moved it, and will likely have to move it again. There is a certain kind of leftist or IRC tekkie who gasps at the idea of banning anyone pre-emptively and imagines this is censorship! But...people who disrupt meetings censor them far more, by not letting people speak, heckling the organizer, putting out particles, pushing objects into the space, etc. If you have any doubts about what this particular set were up to, you had merely to follow us to the next venue, where they crashed again using God-stalking mode or sympathizers like sean Voss (whose SL guide I criticized, and who has therefore made common cause with them); where they tried to push in giant objects, sent particle birds flying in, taunting in chat and IMs, and flew around on Governor Linden land next door after being banned wearing an avatar made from my RL picture to look exactly like me from RL. Now if you think that's ok, let me suggest that if it were done to YOU, I bet you would freak. That it is done to me routinely; that I'm expected to "take it"; that the Lindens do NOTHING about it; that this abusiveness and intolerance and hatred is meant with cries of "but your picture is on the Internet and linked by you in the New York Times" -- that's part of the dysfunction of Second Life -- it's not normal.

Anatomy of Fanboy Geek Idiocy

What's so obvious to the normal, non-technical, non-FIC member of Second Life is just how nasty, arrogant, condescending, and often just plain STUPID the tekkies are. Rote technical knowledge they possess seems to trump for them any intellectual inquiry, and curiosity about the world and how things work that belies their alleged scientific upbringing.

In office hours, the tendency of these geek fanboyz to show off their silly rote knowledge inappropriate, to spout nonense, to let everyone know they are big deals, is enormous and overpowering. Therefore, anyone coming along and pushing back even just a little is bitten back as ferociously as a junkyard dog.

The smarmyness and sycophantic approach to the Lindens is another teeth-set-on-edge experience in these meetings, and it's like a squall of bad weather that you have to fight through.

Yet another deleterious effect of these meetings is the fanboyz answering for the Lindens, and the Lindens sitting mum. There, two things happen. The Lindens get the fanboyz to do their bagmen work for them, and savage residents they'd like to savage but work decorum forbids them. And they also just never answer. They're allowed to not answer questions they SHOULD be trying to answer.

Whole paragraphs and lines go by, with the antics of these fanboyz, and nobody blinks. I could type one line, and a passle of savage sim harpies fly at me and accuse me of hogging the meeting, disrupting the meeting, and blah blah blah -- when all I've done is just ASK A NORMAL QUESTION.

So let's annotate this phenomenon, shall we? It truly is fascinating.

Linden Performance

The worst thing about the office hours and indeed all "communications" with the Lindens is the prevalence of this awful core of fanboyz and fangirlz who are firmly planted around them now worse than ever. They slurp it up, of course. This is like a terribly virulent form of the FIC, FIC 2.3 let's say. By contrast, our old FIC 1.0 seems positively rambunctious and rebellious vis-a-vis the Lindens. These newer tekkies aren't those awful jackals of the old forums, but they populate the office hours like kudzu and are as tenacious as the flu about getting in the way of every legitimate question.

Imagine, the Lindens held this terribly important discussion about the future of all of Second Life after open source with just these awful people -- you know the ones, you see them in the transcripts I put up here week after week. I am still boggling at how they are running this caper, but it's not surprising at one level -- they always select a handful of loyalists and overlords and discuss their pre-cooked plans, gain their vociferous backing and then unleash it on a surly and suspicious public who they know will bite their ankles as they publish it but whom they simply handily kick aside. I've written the huge questions I have about this at Metaversed.com and also asked them in a podcast -- and read the other links there, too, they are fascinating.

This week, I couldn't get the first half of Meta Linden's transcript -- I'm told that Tateru or someone will ensure that this gets posted, but I never see them do it. Here goes:

Sanitized, Corporate Blogs

Outside on my plaza today I was reading the newspaper and listening to the debate of the guys I call "The Park Bench Parliament". This is a motley, shifting crew of retired, disabled, underemployed, night-employed, between-job men (and occasionally women) of various ages, occupations, creeds, colours, and persuasions, who are united by their love of chatting over coffee morning, noon, and night, chewing over the day's news and disagreeing fervently with each other sometimes. If I want to find out what's going on in the world, I know to check with the PBP first -- I'll never forgot the morning of 9/11/01, seeing one of the PBP's holding up a cell-phone in the air to a throng of hushed and worried neighbours who had just come out of a voting poll -- he was already on with somebody on the 101st floor, his face ashen...

So the other day, I overhear one of the PBP fuming about "Sen. Craig, the crapweasel," and another fusses over what it means for policemen to pounce on gays in toilets. They're sounding off about public figures in a public place, banging on senators and policemen and reporters, crabbing and chatting and deciding the world's affairs and having the best of times. You might have to look up the word too; apparently a crap-weasel is somebody who tries to put blame on others or takes credit for others.

Then I go upstairs and I open up my New Yorker in the mail -- hey, there's the dignified Hendrik Hertzberg, in a column called "Offenses," talking about Bayard Rustin, the famous civil rights campaigner (a great man who I had the privilege actually to know and work with long ago), caught in a charge of "lewd vagrancy" and serving a jail term for a gay encounter, and comparing that to the latest case of Larry Craig, the Idaho senator charged with soliciting gay sex in a men's room in Minneapolis. Herzberg recounts the blogger, Michelle Malkin, who calls Craig, "a supremely arrogant, lying crapweasel". Contemplating the elements of the case, Hertzberg writes, "His real misdeameanor is to be conflicted, closeted homosexual who is driven to seek furtive (though consensual) sex by sending coded signals in public toilets. The real offense, the real obscenity, is that even a jurisdiction as enlightened as the Twin Cities still feels free to devote police resources to compounding the unhappiness of such people."