Many people turning into the saga of Stroker Serpentine, his somewhat public meltdown, and his dramatic departure (ostensibly) from Second Life by scrubbing his islands and leaving out his famous Sex Gen bed -- the subject of lawsuits over unlawful copying in SL -- on all perms for the masses to seize -- well, the small circle of people who might have heard about it on Sluniverse.com and the Herald.
Both the Herald and Sluniverse.com have hyped up the Stroker story as somehow being a function of the vindictiveness of Jumpman Lane, and his stalking and goading Stroker into despair. Jumpman himself is the biggest propagator of this theory -- and it's a line some seem to buy. Jumpman himself has of course agitated mightily to make the curious tweets by Stroker come to light -- I wouldn't have noticed them although I may be following Stroker on Twitter if Jumpman hadn't showed up in my spam files on this blog, which I do try to check daily.
By then, the tweets were some 20 hours old, and Jumpman's warning -- or gloating -- that he may have contemplated or even attempted suicide was coming very late, possibly too late.
Looking at the tweets, as I noted, I was alarmed, and decided to err on the side of caution. I filed a Twitter ticket immediately -- I didn't have anything to go on. I Googled Stroker and found his RL name and city -- he always linked those, and it was on his SL profile. I first tried contacting the Tampa police -- I was asked for a district -- I had no idea. I went trying to find that -- someone suggested doing a whois -- I hadn't thought of that, and once I got that information, I went then to the sheriff at the suggestion of someone else who thought that was more appropriate. The sherrif's office told me to go back to my own NYPD to start there -- evidently that way I myself could be somehow verified. I called the NYPD -- they explained that they didn't handle such out of state complaints and I had to go back to the sheriff's. I went back there -- and it went nowhere, so I left the information on an online form.
Meanwhile, someone calling themselves a friend of Stroker's kept IMing me and asking if I was making progress. This person would not call the police supposedly because of a bad past history where they would not listen and hang up. Odd, that. This person then said they had contacts at the federal level and would use them to get the local police to get moving. I couldn't really argue with any effort to get this welfare check -- as police call it -- to happen, but I did find it...strange. I appealed on my blog and Twitter for anyone in the Tampa area to try to file the complaint, maybe they'd get further.
Of course Sluniverse.com was abuzz but then Baccara Rhodes appeared, said she had heard from Stroker, he was alright, but going through some tough times, and she asked that he be left alone with his family to work things out. Cristiano then closed the thread as if a curtain had to be closed on the privacy of Stroker and anyone questioning anything about this further was somehow as offensive as the JLU, and supposedly stalking people. Much 15-minutes-of-hate ensued against Jumpman, supposedly the cause of all this horror for Stroker.
Sorry, but Stroker is a very public figure -- a public avatar and a public human being. He's deliberately put himself in the news. He has sued Linden Lab and been the subject of numerous articles and even students' term papers. Why does National Geographic get to discuss Stroker, yet the citizens of Second Life don't? That makes no sense.
But if anyone simply watches the movie above -- they will understand that this is not really about Jumpman. Go to about 8:34 to hear Stroker talk frankly about his online fantasies and his sex-bed empire, and how he has virtual sex with his online "daughters" -- acknowledging that this is taboo.
So when you read Stroker's tweets to Jumpman lamenting about how awful it was that somebody was talking to his children asking about ageplay, you can see that this isn't merely Jumpman spreading rumours, this is Stroker himself, bringing it on himself, on national TV.
Now, roll through the tape more slowly. Stroker isn't stumbling, halting, talking spontaneously, blurting something out maybe he didn't intend to say. He is making a very piercing, calm, sophisticated -- even wise-sounding -- presentation. In part, it's that machismo patina over what I have sometimes called his state of being "aggressively undereducated" -- but it is a patter that is a very knowledgeable patter -- a sales pitch, not a stuttering and ashamed confession.
Stroker has spent so many years in SL doing this, he has been online so much with his "daughters" -- consenting adults apparently -- that he has become densensitized. He has stopped seeing it as wrong. He has ceased to *feel*. It is like Mayakovsky's people who lived without their feet every touching the ground, their voices scarcely heard at 10 paces...
He talks about it so frankly and matter-factly because the shock value or the disapproval has long seen ceased to resonate. He could have chosen another word. He could have said "my harem" -- and that would have only encouraged sign-ups, not condemnation.
When Stroker talked about his daughters like this -- he lost friends inworld. And maybe customers. People felt it was really wrong. They thought it was one thing to have cybersex and one thing to have sexbeds, but pretending to have sex with one's own children -- that was beyond the pale, even if they were unrelated adults. Everyone knows about the "families" that people have in SL. But it's often the case that people don't have sex within those families. And engaging in anything that resembles a child avatar in a sexual act, even if the person behind the avatar is actually an adult of 18 age or over is against the TOS and grounds for banning.
What was Stroker thinking? Films like this aren't the 5:00 o'clock news. They aren't made and put up within 4 hours as spot news. They are edited and re-edited and cut and spliced thousands of times during production, that can take weeks or months. He may have even had several takes as he gave the interview. At any time, he could have had second thoughts -- during the interview, while the camera crew was there, or later.
He didn't.
Why?
Because he was desensitized. That is what the depravity of some forms of Second Life do to people.
For me, the most painful thing about this movie is to hear his wife. She is clearly a woman in pain, masking pain and doubt. She is trying to convince herself -- perhaps this entire fandago with NatGeo is trying to convince themselves in their folie a deux. She says that if for one minute she thought her husband was making porn, she couldn't live with it -- so she tells herself that he isn't. That it's only that avatar. That the avatar isn't him. That it is only pixels.
The pain emanating from her expression tells us otherwise about her own heart. She isn't happy with her husband's philandering online -- what wife would be? It's always the cheating spouse that thinks the cheated spouse is somehow cool with it -- if the cheated one tells us it's all good and actually strengthening the marriage, you need to ask what they're smoking.
Apparently Stroker was smoking something -- he makes a reference to using again.
Now, this entire show didn't fit the image I had of Stroker. Stroker was always "vanilla," from what I could tell in SL for years. He sold sex beds, but they were sort of ordinary sex beds for couples. They weren't that kinky. They weren't in a lurid BDSM context. They were in stores that contained cuddle couches and ordinary furniture as well (I remember seeing them early in SL). Maybe I hadn't tuned into SL in his later iterations. But I never saw any blogs, ads, articles, chat, whatever that implied that he had this incest thing going. Maybe it was kept private. Then...why put out for consumption on national TV?!
The show is named "Taboo" -- and this old dead-tree magazines, desperate to reinvent itself with the modern-day version of the African tribal women with the naked breasts so beloved by teenage boys of the 1960s has now upped the ante. Now it has to really go to the edge -- and it egged Stroker on.
The producer has creepy music in the background as the world of SL is described -- which isn't creepy and is creative and isn't pervy the way the announcer makes it out to be -- unless you go looking for it, like porn anywhere on the Internet. Then there is Stroker's strange admission, and then long pans on him driving his daughter to school and helping his son doing his homework and appearing as a family man. Seeing his family -- an ordinary, nice-looking middle-class family with sweet kids and a nice house -- your heart will contract that somehow it has been disturbed or even destroyed by this virtuality that Stroker has invoked. Just selling the sex-beds might be bad enough, but sex with the virtual daughters? Ugh.
Trying to understand this entire story, you wonder if somehow this was in fact a deliberate sabotage, a very methodical time bomb lobbed at Linden Lab and the world of Second Life to compromise it because Stroker was intent on leaving all along and starting a competitive world (he has talked about this).
Stroker was in a long litigation with LL -- he tried to blame them for the fact that his beds were stolen. LL had the "safe harbour" argumentation to mount, of course, but Stroker's defense, as far as I understood it, tried to mount a notion that because LL would get commission fees from sales of stolen beds on SLM or would get currency fees from people buying currency and then buying beds in world, it had a stake in the looting and stealing of Stroker's content.
The argumentation didn't seem to be getting anywhere -- but they settled. For an unknown amount. That did not seem terribly large, but who knows. Stroker is described as having a "million dollar business" in SL and a remodelled home with an office, mo-cap equipment and a kidney-shaped pool and all the rest of it before the settlement. In any event, this settlement did not involve having Stroker agree to leave SL. The Lindens seem not to do that with their settlements. Bragg was permitted to stay after all the negative publicity he brought them. Others have stayed. He wasn't told to go...as far as we know, and we don't.
Pixeleen, ever the griefer enabler and sleuther along the most scurrilous lines in SL, has decided to buy Jumpman's line that he was a "hired gun," sicced on Stroker by the Lindens in a "black ops".
That seems like a very tall story indeed -- the Lindens didn't have to do a damn thing but let nature take its course on NatGeo TV -- Stroker did himself in and griefed himself -- and less he black-opsed himself in some larger caper we can't follow.
The claim was that Blondin Linden informally, possibly with backing, possibly freelancing, went to Jumpman and basically told him to go after Stroker. Jumpman was already going after Stroker and needed no encouragement (he has some tangled vendetta having to do with a girlfriend, ripped skins, her being banned, blah blah). But what he needed was impunity, some pledge that he could go after Stroker but not suffer for it. Or perhaps the Lindens had intel (supposedly).
This story got legs for the Herald because Blondin was abruptly let go from SL earlier this year, for reasons unknown, although there was speculation, including by me. No Linden would explain what it was about, citing privacy. He himself said he couldn't tell you. The usual post-Linden story.
I contacted Blondin today and he vigorously denied that he was engaged in any black ops set up by LL involving Jumpman to force Stroker from SL. He hadn't even seen the Herald story, and went off to look at it.
Do the Lindens engage in black ops on their customers? Naturally I wonder that, given how griefed I was for four long years, and given how I was often told certain high-placed Lindens wanted to get rid of me. Meif Ling has now confessed that he was the one who chalked the "Ban Prok!" on the office wall of Linden Lab -- something that happened because Lindens there at the time let it be chalked. We've seen bad Lindens involved with griefers like Rodney come and go.
But...I basically find this theory of the Linden black ops as not holding water. That's because Lindens don't need black ops. They have "any reason or no reason". They can find an infraction or a payment information out of order or whatever they want and dump you, and are not required to explain why. Every day, they do this to hundreds of people, some of whom are just , say, poor Spanish-speaking newbies who can't make their case and get wrongly accused. It happens. And they can make it happen for people they find just are not welcome anymore as they violate community standards. When I was banned from the forums for a time (I'm no longer banned), a Linden told me very frankly that I had not violated the TOS, but that it was a "business decision" because "the community wanted it".
The "commuuuuunity" are the awful people like Hiro Pendragon and the old FIC; like Cristiano and Sluniverse.com -- Lindens look at their content creation class, they look at their high tier payers, and if they need to, they suppress trouble makers.
So naturally one wonders why Jumpman was not booted. After all, he dissed Torley, the Saint of Second Life, over something stupid, on the wiki, and got suspended. He has probably been suspended for other things, including from the forums, he's a total asshole. So...why was he able to persist?
That's how the story of the Linden "siccing him" on Stroker fits.
But as I've endeavoured to illustrate here, Stroker needed no Lindens, no siccing, no nothing. He griefed himself.
Was this a cry for help?
When Stroker called me back that day, he left me a message. He said the police and the FBI *had* come to his house to check on him. So the phone calls worked. He said "you were right about that little douchebag" -- but he didn't make clear *which* douchebag. He wouldn't be saying I was right about Jumpman, because both of us already thought Jumpman was a provocateur and an asshole. Did he mean Tizzers? or? Stroker told me I should get out of SL, there are bad people there. He said the Lindens were still involved in gambling in PG -- a sort of cryptic message that was later repeated to me by another friend of his. That sort of story is above my pay grade. I poked around the old teen grid and I didn't see any huge pile of green dots that would be expected if there was a gambling operation in the sky. While I was there, that awful Angel Leviathan lobbed me with a $1 payment. Ugh. That creature is still on the grid. And there?
I can only say that if Stroker has people hounding him, if he has allegations to make, he should lawyer up and make them with district attorneys or at least on his blog -- I can't pursue it.
As for Jumpman, gloating and hooting and hollering and carrying on, is he really a hired gun? For LL? Or for whom?
We'll have to go on wondering, but meanwhile, a chatlog that Kalel sent me sheds a bit of light on this -- and opens up the question of whether Jumpman was a hired gun for the JLU. As you can see, Jumpman ran to Kalel to make the claims about CheerGirl -- whom he was already gunning for. CheerGirl I've discussed here and here, and her group The Bimbo Cheerleaders, is in Stroker's group. But would the JLU, unilaterally, or in cahoots once egged on by Jumpman, decide to go after Stroker in revenge over the NatGeo thing? I think that hardly unlikely. For one, it's not in any leaked wiki. It doesn't come out in the chatlog below. No one has ever mentioned it. There are some -- especially on Sharia-Slun -- who'd like to believe that the JLU simply "goes after people it doesn't like" or "all kinds of people". But the JLU doesn't police the sex bed industry and who is on the pose balls, that I've ever heard of -- they go after griefers. Who has ever disputed that? Only CheerGirl...and whomever she whips up in a thread that has steadily lost readership.
Jumpman's claims came from someone else, however. That second source I mentioned before and saw no reason to mention. But I think given the need to establish the story about who really hired Jumpman or whether he was freelancing, we should look at this anew. The source is Corsi Mousehold, ostensibly an enemy of the JLU (see the Herald's long-featured story on the front page) and supposedly at least enough of a friend to be selling Stroker's bed in Furville.
A key element that comes out of the other sensational Herald story screaming that the sex bed industry is now in chaos is that Corsi can no longer sell the Sex Gen to pay Fur Nation's tier. Boo hoo, of course. I had no idea that Stroker had sort of "outsourced" the bed like that. I've learned of one other person who had the full-perms bed before it was let out in the wild. There may be more. Perhaps Stroker knew Corsi was ratting on him to the JLU. Perhaps that full-perm release was lobbed at him?
