Second Thoughts

At Refugio Flea Market This Afternoon

Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor

Read @prokofy to follow this prolonged debate with the Contraptioneers; see this blog and that blog and the other blog.

 

[13:33] Alkaia Exonar: is this prok?
[13:33] Meridian Maginot: I'm an Contraption shopper!
[13:34] Meridian Maginot: or was!
[13:34] Alkaia Exonar: there you go, try it out prok
[13:34] Meridian Maginot: now take it out of the box and sell it too
[13:34] Meridian Maginot: We don't allow business in a box here
[13:35] Meridian Maginot: For that reason
[13:35] Alkaia Exonar: what do you mean
[13:35] Meridian Maginot: We don't allow people to sell out of boxes items that they did not create or which they don't own and sell out of a box like a gatcha
[13:35] Meridian Maginot: don't you know what "business in a box" is???
[13:35] Alkaia Exonar: It's not selling out of the box, the box is the item
[13:35] Meridian Maginot: it's all the ripped stuff all over SL, like kudzu
[13:35] Alkaia Exonar: The box does the distribution
[13:35] Meridian Maginot: business in a box IS that
[13:35] Alkaia Exonar: no I mean
[13:36] Meridian Maginot: putting a ripped item in a box
[13:36] Meridian Maginot: now take the ripped rip and put it for sale "as is"
[13:36] Alkaia Exonar: The box could be a plate of food, or whatever
[13:36] Alkaia Exonar: It's not a product in a box, the box is the product
[13:36] Meridian Maginot: my God your literalism will kill the world, you kids
[13:36] Meridian Maginot: the product is in a prim box; it is business in a box
[13:36] Meridian Maginot: so let's see you put the rib itself for sale
[13:36] Meridian Maginot: that's important too
[13:37] Meridian Maginot: hello?
[13:37] Alkaia Exonar: I can't put the rib itself for sale as a standalone rib. What I can do is put it for sale as part of, say, my own trash can plate, and redistribute it as a functional item in the same context you originally sold it.
[13:38] Alkaia Exonar: see?
[13:38] Alkaia Exonar: It's a food giver
[13:38] Meridian Maginot: well, gosh, why can't you put the rib itself for sale, Alkaia?
[13:38] Meridian Maginot: given all your abilities
[13:38] Meridian Maginot: why on earth would that be
[13:38] Meridian Maginot: go ahead put it out, and let's see why you can't put it to sale as is
[13:38] Alkaia Exonar: I can take all the food from your trash can cuisine, put them all in a new plate, and then distribute it as a food giver
[13:39] Meridian Maginot: that's not the question
[13:39] Meridian Maginot: the question is can you put it out for sale on its own?
[13:39] Alkaia Exonar: that is the question. It can be redistributed as a functional item.
[13:39] Meridian Maginot: no, then you don't understand the most mass use case in SL
[13:39] Meridian Maginot: put the item out for sale as is
[13:39] Meridian Maginot: if you can't, well, explain why
[13:39] Alkaia Exonar: That's an incredible narrow definition
[13:39] Meridian Maginot: no, it's very wide actually
[13:40] Meridian Maginot: apparently you don't live and work on the Mainland?
[13:40] Meridian Maginot: do you log in often? stay on your RP sim only perhaps?
[13:40] Meridian Maginot: PS if you want to sell a ripped rib distributor, you should make it on "touch" so that people can test it
[13:40] Meridian Maginot: that's what luc and many others do, including me
[13:40] Meridian Maginot: I mean his aren't ripped, nor are mine
[13:40] Meridian Maginot: I pay for all my models and I follow the TOS
[13:41] Meridian Maginot: if it any time I determine I can't follow that TOS then I take it out of my product
[13:41] Alkaia Exonar: I mean if your position is "the only copy protection that is relevant is specifically preventing people from pulling out an object and selling that object as-is, rather than including it in a product" then yes, your copy protection script (which is more than an anti-rez script) does stop that particular occurrence.
[13:41] Alkaia Exonar: It is on touch
[13:41] Alkaia Exonar: it's just for sale right now
[13:41] Meridian Maginot: no it wasn't on touch
[13:41] Meridian Maginot: it was on buy
[13:41] Alkaia Exonar: Want me to rez it back out so you can click it agan?
[13:41] Alkaia Exonar: there you og
[13:41] Alkaia Exonar: touch it
[13:41] Meridian Maginot: I don't even like ribs
[13:42] Meridian Maginot: but would you say this rib will now stay in my inventory?
[13:42] Meridian Maginot: yes or no
[13:42] Meridian Maginot: BTW you may be British and may not realize that there really truly are restaurants in the south in the US
[13:42] Alkaia Exonar: the rib is temp attached, so no. If you purchase the box, then you will have a rib distributor in your inven for as long as you care to keep it
[13:42] Meridian Maginot: that put these dishes out on trash cans
[13:43] Meridian Maginot: so I'm glad you can concede that temp attach means that the general public clicking on this item can't steal the rib
[13:43] Meridian Maginot: the owner could steal the rib if he went through various steps including turning off scripts on his land
[13:43] Alkaia Exonar: temp attach means that regardless of the scripting inside it
[13:43] Meridian Maginot: you concede you can't sell the rib as is, because it would poof before you could sell it
[13:43] Alkaia Exonar: The owner does not need to turn scripts off on land
[13:43] Meridian Maginot: you'd have to put it a box
[13:43] Alkaia Exonar: it can be done very easily in a matter of seconds
[13:43] Meridian Maginot: temp attach is a script, too obviously
[13:44] Alkaia Exonar: You have to put it in a distributor of some sort - it doesn't have to be a box. I could recreate your trash can cuisine, for example
[13:44] Meridian Maginot: look, I do grasp that a "box" is any container, not just this literal prim box
[13:44] Meridian Maginot: but the use case is "business in a box" prevention and most malls, yard sales etc don't allow "business in a box"
[13:44] Alkaia Exonar: Sure, but my point is that it isn't a container for a product, the box *is* the product, in much the same way your trash can lid *is* the product
[13:44] Meridian Maginot: so they can't stop Copybot re-sales except by social cues
[13:45] Meridian Maginot: it's a component of the product, it's the giver
[13:45] Meridian Maginot: and the mashed potatoes etc are the productlets
[13:45] Meridian Maginot: out of which it comes
[13:45] Alkaia Exonar: yes. And I don't think anywhere on the grid disallows you to sell a giver
[13:45] Meridian Maginot: PS were you able to rip the trash can lid and sell that?
[13:45] Alkaia Exonar: Like, your trash can cuisine doesn't run afoul of any laws
[13:46] Meridian Maginot: well no event I've been in has ever objected and I comply with all the rules
[13:46] Meridian Maginot: I'm not here to break them
[13:46] Alkaia Exonar: If I wanted to copybot it it would be trivial to do so, but as is the trash can itself is no trans and I have no desire to try and circumvent that via TOS breaching
[13:46] Meridian Maginot: if I find something is later disallowed, like many of them now require sales prices = to what the model cost
[13:46] Meridian Maginot: I then remove that item from my stores or revise it
[13:46] Meridian Maginot: well I'm glad you concede that you do live under some kind of rule of law
[13:46] Meridian Maginot: even if you believe only in code-as-law
[13:46] Meridian Maginot: that's helpful
[13:46] Meridian Maginot: ok so our work here is done
[13:46] Meridian Maginot: you couldn't sell the ribs as is
[13:46] Alkaia Exonar: But I can full redistribute it as a functional product
[13:47] Meridian Maginot: only by turning off scripts on your land and fetching it out of a box could you put this single rib item for sale
[13:47] Alkaia Exonar: It took under 40 seconds
[13:47] Alkaia Exonar: No, scripts were on the whole time
[13:47] Meridian Maginot: well how many people need to have separate ribs in inventory?
[13:47] Alkaia Exonar: I can do it again right in front of you if you like
[13:47] Meridian Maginot: you think many people wake up in the middle of the night and say "I think I'll get those hot ribs out and have a bite"?
[13:48] Alkaia Exonar: I don't think you're quite understanding what I'm saying
[13:48] Meridian Maginot: oh well one way to put even the thing itself to sale is to go to a no-script sandbox or griefer home
[13:48] Meridian Maginot: no I do actually
[13:48] Meridian Maginot: You just didn't think through all the criminal use cases as I am forced to
[13:48] Meridian Maginot: as just an amateur creator and Mainland rentals agent worlds below your stratosphere
[13:48] Alkaia Exonar: What I'm saying is I could, say, get a vending machine mesh of market, then take all the food items out of your trash can lid, put them in the vending machine, and sell the vending machine with functional food
[13:48] Meridian Maginot: just interested in helping other people buy and sell besides you top creators in the Ren Faire
[13:48] Meridian Maginot: yeah
[13:49] Meridian Maginot: you could make it more aesthetic!
[13:49] Alkaia Exonar: Or less, as I did
[13:49] Meridian Maginot: you could make a table with porcelain dishes and candles!
[13:49] Meridian Maginot: innovate!
[13:49] Alkaia Exonar: here, look, I'll show you how fast you can get a product out
[13:49] Meridian Maginot: I got it
[13:49] Meridian Maginot: I know
[13:49] Meridian Maginot: my scripter, who is no fool, look him up, does too
[13:49] Meridian Maginot: deterrence is the main goal, and making it so people don't fish things out of inventory
[13:49] Meridian Maginot: which lessons the fun
[13:50] Alkaia Exonar: Did your scripter script the trash can cuisine?
[13:50] Meridian Maginot: but hey, if we have to have people fish no-transfer items out of inventory and attach them, we'll do
[13:50] Meridian Maginot: of course
[13:50] Meridian Maginot: and we walked through all the exploits of it
[13:50] Meridian Maginot: we're actually not stupid
[13:50] Meridian Maginot: he especially is particularly clever
[13:50] Meridian Maginot: just not as famous as you but maybe because he didn't attach himself to an Alpha Wolf
[13:50] Meridian Maginot: He values his originality and freedom
[13:50] Meridian Maginot: he answers to no one from what I can tell
[13:51] Meridian Maginot: maybe someday you will break away and achieve that freedom
[13:51] Meridian Maginot: instead of being in someone's shadow
[13:51] Alkaia Exonar: Tell him he can use llGetLinkName to consolidate all the 17 scripts in the trash can lid into just one single script that distributes everything based on what you clicked
[13:51] Meridian Maginot: worshipping at the feet of a giant statue
[13:51] Meridian Maginot: oh ye knows that
[13:51] Meridian Maginot: it's me who wanted to make them separate
[13:51] Alkaia Exonar: why?
[13:51] Meridian Maginot: I mean he can't control what use I make of his scripts
[13:52] Meridian Maginot: because I used them alone in some settings, the dish by itself, or the dish was in other products
[13:52] Meridian Maginot: I mean he could add to the script weight I suppose
[13:52] Meridian Maginot: PS these aren't laggy and aren't like anti-rez
[13:53] Alkaia Exonar: I mean every unnecessary script adds lag. It's pretty trivial to make a script that can handle being standalone or part of a bigger thing
[13:53] Meridian Maginot: indeed
[13:53] Meridian Maginot: so you may not admit it, but you've conceded the use cases that matter for most people
[13:53] Meridian Maginot: most norms
[13:53] Meridian Maginot: most people just in this sector of having to deal with full perm models with a huge variety of TOS/EULAs
[13:54] Meridian Maginot: some of them insanely restrictive and crabby, given what they are, others more lenient
[13:54] Meridian Maginot: but those people work hard with no credit
[13:54] Meridian Maginot: AND THEIR CUSTOMERS AREN'T ALLOWED IN THE MAJOR EVENTS
[13:54] Alkaia Exonar: Not for anti-rez. The exact situation of nm/c/t temp attach items does warrant copy protection (though ideally as part of a single script, instead of standalone). Anti-rez does not function as copy protection in that situation (or any other situation).
[13:54] Meridian Maginot: AND THOSE EVENTS ARE NOT LET IN TO BE ADVERTISED ON SERAPHIM
[13:54] Meridian Maginot: Of course the world of the little people doesn't matter to you and Walton only feigns that it matters
[13:54] Alkaia Exonar: Your specific copy protection very narrowly protects, but does offer more protection than anti-rez (which I said in my tweets), but could be much better
[13:55] Meridian Maginot: I have never, at any juncture in this debate, had anything positive or ameliorative to say about anti-rez
[13:55] Meridian Maginot: I don't use it; I don't buy things with it; but then I hardly buy clothes
[13:55] Alkaia Exonar: What do you mean by "the world of little people"?
[13:55] Meridian Maginot: the world of people making products from full perm meshes
[13:55] Alkaia Exonar: Also the ENTIRE DEBATE was about anti-rez lmao
[13:55] Meridian Maginot: no
[13:55] Meridian Maginot: it was a corrective on behalf of a type of script used for other use cases that might be lumped under anti-rez
[13:56] Meridian Maginot: it might have been a 4 tweet conversation but the only reason it wasn't
[13:56] Meridian Maginot: is because Walton was peremptory and haughty
[13:56] Alkaia Exonar: Copy protection and anti-rez are different (though you should really have your scripter tighten up your copy protection script)
[13:56] Meridian Maginot: Hello There! he writes to me, his customer, who has talked to him quite a few times for years
[13:56] Meridian Maginot: He then conceded this, but his flying monkeys, sensing they needed to on attack mode began threats and mocking and ridicule
[13:57] Meridian Maginot: 1) I know that; but they are lumped together 2) he knows that as well
[13:57] Meridian Maginot: 3) Walton even conceded it, but YOU told him he was wrong!
[13:57] Meridian Maginot: so I dunno, live in your castle, not everybody can be in Engine Room
[13:57] Meridian Maginot: unlikely Engine Room accepts people using mesh models
[13:57] Meridian Maginot: because most major events DO NOT
[13:57] Meridian Maginot: they want original created mesh only
[13:57] Meridian Maginot: because they don't want these very problems of origin and theft
[13:58] Meridian Maginot: understood
[13:58] Meridian Maginot: but the rest of the world wishes to live
[13:58] Meridian Maginot: and we will go on living
[13:58] Meridian Maginot: Likely with less shopping at Engine Room lol!
[13:58] Alkaia Exonar: They aren't lumped together at all. Especially considering we had specific examples (the shuggles script) brought up very early
[13:58] Meridian Maginot: I'm the one who brought up Shuggles
[13:58] Meridian Maginot: precisely because it is open and you can look at it
[13:58] Meridian Maginot: so be a man
[13:58] Alkaia Exonar: Also, yeah, I mean, allowing non-original mesh is a whole can of worms
[13:58] Meridian Maginot: ask Shuggles why he sells a product to girls who imagine they now warded off Copybot
[13:59] Alkaia Exonar: To make money
[13:59] Meridian Maginot: yes, we are worms, I totally get it. In cans, even.
[13:59] Alkaia Exonar: Shuggles and bosh's anti-rez scripts are fully useless
[13:59] Meridian Maginot: yes I get that, but Bosh has lots of useful scripts like resize, colour etc that everyone buys and is happy with
[13:59] Meridian Maginot: I'd rather they use mod than resize but whatever
[13:59] Meridian Maginot: Now there are other use cases besides anti-Copybot which I tried to outline
[13:59] Alkaia Exonar: Not talking about bosh's other scripts, am I?
[14:00] Meridian Maginot: and which Bosh's customers who aren't all dumb twits would explain
[14:00] Meridian Maginot: well Bosh's useless anti-rez script didn't ruin his business
[14:00] Meridian Maginot: and people who use it have other reasons
[14:00] Meridian Maginot: I mentioned them
[14:00] Meridian Maginot: not likely the idea of study of their product in the round by those who didn't figure out how to turn off scripts
[14:00] Meridian Maginot: it's like not everyone figures out you can sit through a locked door
[14:00] Meridian Maginot: a locked door still has uses even with that hack
[14:01] Alkaia Exonar: Anti-rez isn't a locked door though
[14:01] Meridian Maginot: so someone using anti-rez cuts down on the number of people who will not turn off scripts to look at their item inside out
[14:01] Alkaia Exonar: it doesn't.
[14:01] Alkaia Exonar: because you can wear it
[14:01] Meridian Maginot: of course they could go on a poser and look that way
[14:01] Meridian Maginot: they can use their camera and look all around as they are wearing
[14:01] Meridian Maginot: but people like to rez things out like the parrot vest that um En Pointe I think was selling
[14:02] Meridian Maginot: just to see, how can I fix this? How can I adjust it? Or even how can I make a thing like it?
[14:02] Meridian Maginot: so that's what people deter, they don't like that
[14:02] Meridian Maginot: they want you to wear it, adulate them, and shut up
[14:02] Meridian Maginot: you know, like Walton basically wants
[14:02] Alkaia Exonar: If they want to copy it they can just wear it, though. It's not even an inconvenience really.
[14:02] Meridian Maginot: and you imagine that you can take a set of best practices like mod/copy/no transfer and 'a fair price' and deter ripping
[14:03] Alkaia Exonar: yes.
[14:03] Meridian Maginot: I'd invite you to rent land for $25/50 prims and see if you stop overprimming on group land
[14:03] Alkaia Exonar: Not eliminate, but deter.
[14:03] Alkaia Exonar: what does that have to do with anything?
[14:03] Meridian Maginot: I'd invite you to sell the things I sell for low prices on mod and prevent ripping
[14:03] Meridian Maginot: it's just madneess
[14:03] Meridian Maginot: it's just magical thinking
[14:03] Meridian Maginot: it's just you think your magical thinking is better than someone else's
[14:03] Meridian Maginot: OHHHHHH
[14:03] Meridian Maginot: I'M SO GLAD YOU MENTIONED THAT DETERRING INSTEAD OF 100% IS A VALID OBJECTIVE
[14:03] Meridian Maginot: BE STILL MY HEART
[14:04] Alkaia Exonar: Yes. Anti-rez doesn't deter. That's my point.
[14:04] Meridian Maginot: ok I need to wait on customers
[14:04] Meridian Maginot: I didn't say it did
[14:04] Meridian Maginot: I said protection does
[14:04] Alkaia Exonar: The whole convo was about anti-rez
[14:04] Meridian Maginot: no it wasn't, not the original convo with Walter
[14:04] Meridian Maginot: and he conceded that and he eeven apologized for talking down to me
[14:04] Alkaia Exonar: Like, "a reason to use anti-rez" is not "Something that's not anti-rez can deter people in narrow circumstances"
[14:04] Meridian Maginot: I have filed any number of DMCAs on behalf of my builders
[14:05] Meridian Maginot: like the builder of this very building we are standing in
[14:05] Alkaia Exonar: Cool. Keep doing that.
[14:05] Meridian Maginot: I've commissioned numerous such buildings
[14:05] Meridian Maginot: before he was born
[14:05] Alkaia Exonar: That's the one actual redress we have rightn ow
[14:05] Meridian Maginot: so I don't need to be talked down to because I'm not in your posse
[14:05] Meridian Maginot: will never be
[14:05] Meridian Maginot: well no
[14:05] Meridian Maginot: there are many others
[14:05] Meridian Maginot: but evidently beyond the ken of most of your flying monkeys
[14:05] Alkaia Exonar: I'm not talking down to you, and certainly not because you're not part of my "posse"
[14:06] Meridian Maginot: if you think Linden Lab won't lock this viewer and/or block Firestorm when their lawyers find Copybot with Firestorm to be too much of a problem
[14:06] Alkaia Exonar: I'm just trying to tell you what is and is not actually functional protection.
[14:06] Meridian Maginot: I invite you to review what happened with gatchas
[14:06] Alkaia Exonar: Okay, actually, wait
[14:06] Alkaia Exonar: Lets talk about firestorm
[14:06] Meridian Maginot: Again, I have much more hands on, field experience with Emerald griefers and Phoenix liars than you do, surely
[14:06] Alkaia Exonar: I saw (before you blocked me on twitter) that you wrote a big blog post about how like, firestorm is responsible for copybot
[14:06] Alkaia Exonar: Even though the firestorm viewer itself can't copybot
[14:07] Meridian Maginot: it is, because you can't control use of open source software
[14:07] Alkaia Exonar: and, correct me if I'm wrong, but your general point was that they're responsible because people are taking their viewer and altering it to be able to copybot
[14:07] Meridian Maginot: if someone wants to take firestorm code and make all avatars appear green, they can make a viewer like that, and FS can't stop it
[14:07] Meridian Maginot: yes they are responsible
[14:07] Alkaia Exonar: Yes, right
[14:07] Meridian Maginot: you know, like that dad that didn't lock up his guns and his teenage son is now a school shooter
[14:07] Alkaia Exonar: okay, but, firestorm legally has to be open source
[14:07] Meridian Maginot: like that
[14:07] Meridian Maginot: yeah
[14:07] Alkaia Exonar: And if they're open source, they can't stop that
[14:08] Meridian Maginot: well read the contribution agreement -- which, over the years, has been redacted, and which isn't fully complied with even now
[14:08] Alkaia Exonar: So why is it their fault, instead of someone further up the chain
[14:08] Meridian Maginot: the Lindens are too dependent on FS
[14:08] Meridian Maginot: of course it's their moral responsibility and yes, their fault
[14:08] Alkaia Exonar: "Their" here still being the FS team?
[14:08] Meridian Maginot: and again, if this grows to be a significant issue we can see with THESE owners including the attorney from the US Trade Office, they will lock it down
[14:08] Meridian Maginot: Tonya was in Emerald for 3 weeks, he tells us
[14:09] Meridian Maginot: during that time he scrubbed the code furiously to make Phoenix compliant for LL to accept
[14:09] Alkaia Exonar: I'm just confused as to why you think that copybotting is just because of firestorm, and not, say, because LL open sourced their viewer?
[14:09] Meridian Maginot: what is the link between Emerald and Phoenix? Tonya
[14:09] Meridian Maginot: oh of course that's the problem
[14:09] Meridian Maginot: which is why I opposed it from the get go especially as all those goons griefed me and my tenants and crashed our sims for months while Cory Linden laughed
[14:09] Meridian Maginot: sure that's the problem
[14:09] Meridian Maginot: but yeah, did you know my rental script is open source?
[14:10] Meridian Maginot: I've had oh, 6 coders over 18 years work on it and refine it
[14:10] Meridian Maginot: Swear by it!
[14:10] Meridian Maginot: tho it has some glitches now and then
[14:10] Meridian Maginot: Don't want to be a slave of Casper
[14:10] Alkaia Exonar: Because shutting down firestorm wouldn't actually stop (or even slow) copybotters - the hydrastorm is perfectly capable of spoofing itself as an official viewer, and further there are copybot clients that are just flat out based on the SL viewer platform instead of firestorm
[14:10] Meridian Maginot: yeah Open Source runs the Internet! Twitter!
[14:10] Meridian Maginot: And yet...and yet...Tonya scrubbed like a housemaid to get that thing compliant to LL at least optically
[14:10] Alkaia Exonar: So I don't really get why your opinion is that it's FS
[14:10] Meridian Maginot: it's all about the optics
[14:11] Alkaia Exonar: Well, yeah, because emerald had a bunch of issues
[14:11] Meridian Maginot: yeah there are other rogue viewers not related to FS
[14:11] Alkaia Exonar: So why is it FS
[14:11] Meridian Maginot: the Lindens have a variety of ways of stopping them, not all just literal search strings of code
[14:11] Alkaia Exonar: And not the people making the rogue viewers, or LL?
[14:11] Meridian Maginot: because they are in the hands of 90% of the customers
[14:11] Meridian Maginot: The question is why Ll doesn't just buy and or declare FS official
[14:11] Meridian Maginot: because
[14:11] Alkaia Exonar: But they're not actually *doing* anything to encourage or allow copybotting
[14:12] Meridian Maginot: THEY DON'T WANT THE LIABILITY FOR COPYBOT
[14:12] Meridian Maginot: they don't do the things that libsl did to at least declare they weren't encouraging
[14:12] Alkaia Exonar: Like I said, there are currently operating today copybot viewers that operate off the SL viewer codebase
[14:12] Meridian Maginot: like make a core group of devs and not allow certain ones in they knew to be using it to copybot
[14:12] Alkaia Exonar: If that was their worry, they'd be *currently* liable for copybot
[14:12] Meridian Maginot: you should study what Overte does
[14:12] Meridian Maginot: a fork of High Fidelity
[14:12] Alkaia Exonar: They do have a core grgoup of devs
[14:13] Alkaia Exonar: Who are the only people allowed to push code to FS
[14:13] Meridian Maginot: they made a club, as NGOs are called in Germany, it has a small membership fee, they have rules, they voting even
[14:13] Meridian Maginot: imagine if Firestorm did that
[14:13] Alkaia Exonar: they have that
[14:13] Meridian Maginot: one point about a paid fee is RL names
[14:13] Alkaia Exonar: https://www.firestormviewer.org/developers/
[14:13] Alkaia Exonar: That's the list of people allowed to contribute
[14:13] Meridian Maginot: Jessica gets skittish even if her RL corporation on a government web site is published, and gets Hamlet to block the image
[14:13] Meridian Maginot: reidiculous
[14:13] Meridian Maginot: but anyone can take the code as you have stated and they have stated
[14:14] Alkaia Exonar: I mean, tying their RL names to that wouldn't change anything because *it's still not firestorm doing the copybotting*
[14:14] Alkaia Exonar: Yes
[14:14] Meridian Maginot: and being in that club of "allowed to contribute" did they make a public pledge never to use Copybot? I missed that
[14:14] Alkaia Exonar: Anyone can take the code because that's a legal requirement
[14:14] Meridian Maginot: you want to keep exonerating them
[14:14] Meridian Maginot: yes that's what open source is
[14:14] Meridian Maginot: and the LL viewer is an open source viewer, more's the pity
[14:14] Meridian Maginot: and PS search is terribly crippled
[14:14] Meridian Maginot: I personally prefer Alchemy, has the best search UI
[14:14] Meridian Maginot: wonder why Cinders left FS
[14:14] Alkaia Exonar: I just don't understand why you're pointing at FS as the reason copybot thrives
[14:15] Meridian Maginot: I should ask her
[14:15] Meridian Maginot: she's my tenant
[14:15] Alkaia Exonar: Instead of at the open source LL viewer
[14:15] Alkaia Exonar: or the copybotters themselves
[14:15] Meridian Maginot: because they are the largest market share of users, Oz won't tell you the numbers; no one will; but it's got to be 90% plus
[14:15] Alkaia Exonar: Right but why does that matter?
[14:15] Meridian Maginot: I poll my tenants and I see that only newbies and people with some beef with FS use the regular viewer
[14:15] Alkaia Exonar: If FS didn't exist, those users would just be on a different viewer
[14:15] Meridian Maginot: Did Firestorm core devs take a public pledge not to use Copybot?
[14:16] Alkaia Exonar: If someone came out with a copybot viewer based on alchemy, would that be cinder's fault?
[14:16] Meridian Maginot: yes it would indeed
[14:16] Meridian Maginot: Since CInders is not in the mind meld with you all, e.g. on the spam pods on roads, and other issues
[14:16] Meridian Maginot: she might say "I insist all my core devs take the pledge"
[14:16] Alkaia Exonar: so even if you legally have to have your code available for download, you are responsible for whatever any random person on the internet does by changing that code?
[14:17] Alkaia Exonar: it's not the core devs creating copybot viewers
[14:17] Meridian Maginot: "if we catch any of our little friends using Copybot we ban them from our land/stores/homes etc"
[14:17] Meridian Maginot: Did they take a public pledge saying that?
[14:17] Meridian Maginot: you're not answering that
[14:17] Meridian Maginot: you who have magical thinking about mod, good prices, and bein decent to customers
[14:17] Meridian Maginot: which are all organic principles of decency that you are hesitant to approve on other fronts
[14:17] Alkaia Exonar: I mean, I'm not sure if they have or haven't, but would making that pledge absolve them of responsibility in your eyes?
[14:18] Alkaia Exonar: I don't have magical thinking lol
[14:18] Meridian Maginot: The question to ask if why they haven't taken such a pledge
[14:18] Alkaia Exonar: I just think addressing the whys is good
[14:18] Alkaia Exonar: Because it's a meaningless pledge?
[14:18] Meridian Maginot: and you know full well that in their own ranks, the debate would go like this:
[14:18] Alkaia Exonar: I've never taken a pledge like that. Have you?
[14:18] Meridian Maginot: "but I use Copybot to debug which is a good thing"
[14:18] Meridian Maginot: "But I just use Copybot to adjust my RP clothing personally"
[14:18] Meridian Maginot: "but I just use Copybot to see what the rogues are up to these days, it's research"
[14:18] Meridian Maginot: therefore we can't take that pledge
[14:19] Meridian Maginot: Yes, I'm happy to take the pledges of my world, I don't use bots at all of any kind
[14:19] Meridian Maginot: none
[14:19] Meridian Maginot: they use up resources
[14:19] Alkaia Exonar: Yes but have you actually taken that pledge
[14:19] Meridian Maginot: I don't ad farm, ever, never do I sell a $16 parcel for anything more than $1/m
[14:19] Meridian Maginot: etc
[14:19] Meridian Maginot: of course
[14:19] Meridian Maginot: I've had to put it on my blog over and over
[14:19] Meridian Maginot: as this army of griefers claiming to be Ravenglass bots
[14:19] Meridian Maginot: who aren't even bots
[14:20] Meridian Maginot: invade groups and shout racist Trumpkin crap
[14:20] Meridian Maginot: I'm an Obama and Biden voter
[14:20] Meridian Maginot: I don't invade groups to sell my rentals
[14:20] Meridian Maginot: but an easy way to get people mad at me is to invade groups with the name "RavenglassBot!"
[14:20] Meridian Maginot: and shout crap
[14:20] Meridian Maginot: and it takes the Lindens five minutes to ban them
[14:20] Meridian Maginot: but it takes months to get people to realize they aren't me
[14:21] Meridian Maginot: so yeah, I know how griefers work and I know about pledges
[14:21] Meridian Maginot: OK Alkaia, you didn't take the pledge, you didn't do a lot of things
[14:21] Meridian Maginot: but thanks for your time and your tips
[14:21] Meridian Maginot: it's all appreciated
[14:21] Meridian Maginot: I need to help some customers
[14:21] Meridian Maginot: bye

Rental Dementia: Tokyo City As a Sign of Stress

Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor

This is from 2021. Sometimes I keep posts I didn't publish for some reason because I didn't finish editing, then I forget to post them

So, thinking of the last few days, there is the ebb and flow that always happens -- and I can't really record it all, even to keep track of all payments and all tenants -- because it's a chore to then make sense of it. That is, I could move to a vendor system that did more of this, but then that's an expense, and it's lag, and I think with this small a data set, it's not worth it, when I can kind of eyeball it. I have always pursued a model of having a number of lots spread out over many sims so that if anything goes wrong on a sim, the land can be abandoned or sold and something else tried. But I also have some compact communities, on 2-4 adjacent sims, and I don't want to be selling parcels out of those, because I could end up with problematic neighbours. 

Generally I have this attitude: never get in the way of someone who wants to buy your land IF it is not in a compact community and has no tenants on it.

Since the death of Ebbe, the continued broken search (now some 9 months), the failure to replace Oz (VP of Engineering) and now this very big dislocation in the gatcha policy, I have been steadily selling or abandoning land when I could. I pulled out of Adscita and put it all to sale.

Interestingly, Winning Witte is there, with his land to sale for $9.8/m, and some holdbacks set for higher amounts (not an ethical model in the view of many Mainlanders). At first, he had yellow crime scene tape to show the borders, and I simply IM'd him and said I thought his land would sell better without the crime scene tape. Which is what I call it. Because that's how it looks.

I had a waterfront in a snow sim and an outpost for my rentals and the Mainland Appreciation Society in a sim called Immortalis, and I decided to liquidate both of those. These days, I prefer to liquidate than abandon. It used to be I would never abandon because I thought it was bad for business -- the name of your group is not there (at that time), and it looks like you are joining the general failure of SL rather than trying to reverse it. 

If you sell land rather than abandon it, you can then have a land baron buy and hold it and sell it for a profit, most likely, and possibly mark it up so high that the end user who will buy it will keep it nice. More and more lately, I just see land flipping among various rental companies, not ending up with end users. Also some rental agencies use "for sale" as a form of advertising "for rent," something I am really reluctant to do -- because for one reason, you have to be online to turn the land back to the rental group before someone buys it out from under the person who just paid rent. I just think that's a situation to avoid. But if you are a larger company with staff etc or you don't care, you do this. I rarely do. I think it adds to the misleading field of noise in SL advertising. But no one cares about stopping this but me.

So I was interested to see -- at what price will bots eat land now? We have known for years that the liquidation price has to be under $1/m, or the price you would pay Linden Lab to pick up abandoned. So it might be 0.9 or 0.7 or something, which I recall selling some back land in Lost Grounds for more than a year ago. But then I saw when we bailed from Kamalakara with the appearance of a beast there with "admission price" checked on the land (who DOES that? Who has EVER DONE that in the history of SL???), that liquidation was now down to like 0.7 or less.

No, it's worse now, at least from my anecdotal evidence. And there are no bots. I have not seen a land bot in ages, even liquidating may be a dozen pieces in the last few months. So I put my snow at 0.4/m finally, and Winning Witte then personally came and manually picked it up -- not a bot. That is, he's sitting there refreshing the page of search land for sale. And he also appeared in person, manually (unless he puts his account on bot mode at night? I don't think so) to pick up the Immortalis piece for 0.3/m, roadside. That flipped, so he probably set it very low; the snow awaits a buyer. 

Usually land barons keep trading tiers, i.e. they will only buy up to X amount of tier so as to avoid tier jumps and lack of planning for the next level at a discount (more than a sim). So maybe small parcels are useful. I think few people value the liquidation role of land barons. I always have. They are there "just in time" to liquidate land in the middle of the night when people fail to sell their land for a high price but don't want to pay the tier about to drop on them at midnight. At least...it used to be that. And it truly isn't any more. I recall one parcel in Kamalakara left to be eaten or liquidated  sat for several days. It's bad out there. But of course everyone has a story. This is just mine.

Immortalis seemed like a great name for a sim. I had a vague notion of putting, I dunno, a castle in there? But I don't like vampires. Why did no vampires buy it all this time? I had settled there after seeing that a former tenant had anchored the sim with his store, nicely landscaped. There was nothing else on that sim or the next -- oh, because a giant Bella dome blighting all life on the planet belore. I used to land at the bottom of the sim, where 128/128 was (I always travel by plugging sim names into the map), and look upward, at a vast field, like Wyeth's "Christina," and crawl up, although sighted, keeping my draw down. PS it's not grass but granite mountain. Speaking of which, that mountain top on Motorcyclone was being let go for nothing, after the owner abandoned a lot of other plots all around it. Should have known that someone who has already abandoned many parcels and has one out of $3000, a 1024, and doesn't answer your request to lower it, is someone who will abandon it in two weeks.

Like my neighbour of some 15 years (!) in Winnipeg suddenly abandoned his land the other day. I have no idea why. He had ban lines which were annoying but he was at the edge of the sim. He had elaborate builds in the sky and who knows what his story was, I never talked to him. You live besides someone for 15 years, they have ban lines up which you bang into with annoyance now and then, they return a tree now and then, wordlessly, and that's it. That's Second Life. That's the Mainland.

So then I went over to Cayuga and decided to square up my land and abandon some more, and if the idiot next to me with the orb wants it, great.  Because...

For some 8 years, I had a tenant on a ragged triangle on the riverfront in Winnipeg -- before that a famous oldbie lived, then I bought that land, then someone else had it for ages, then finally this last person. She never paid on time. Her rent was US $5.00/mo. If she's from Japan, and not Spain, I think, well, that's affordable. Again and again, she's late, I give her a certain amount of forbearance, because I know this jagged land won't rent. So she gets away with this, knowing it as well. She had a viaduct on the land, and some drab brown Japanese store buildings but not a store, with like, I dunno, barrels of saki -- more like a backdrop than a home. Then perhaps she had a skybox, I never looked. So at some point last year when the pandemic got back, she really disappeared for a long time. I heard from others she was sick. Maybe COVID but it was vague. So since she had been there 8 years, I held her land. So a month, three months, four months, five months go by, and then I notice that in fact she has logged on, but not paid anything. I had asked her to pay me some back rent if she showed up again and said I would hold it -- some people will do that; most won't. So when I see a person logging in after a long hiatus, but not paying, then their stuff is return. A neighbour with multiple lots immediately grabbed it; should have freed it up sooner. She says if that person shows up and pays her back rent up to me, she will give it back to her.

Then another month, suddenly this person drifts back in, pays nothing, and takes a cheaper rental in G, always harder to move than M. So I just leave it. Everyone has a story; I have one too, but I am usually too kind hearted than not, and more and more this has to end. It ended in Cayuga more than a year ago when I scrapped the camping site there because of alt infestations in $50 rentals meant to be just for multiple single avatars, and when it happens one too many times, I end it -- as I ended rentals in Brownless, Obscure, and several others over the years -- too much crazy town. I took Patagonia and Itame, formerly cheap small parcels, and converted them to one large parcel and a few large parcels, respectively. And they rent better, and there is no motivation to go on "helping the poor" -- who, 9/10 are really wealthy people with multiple personality disorder and 12 alts they want to put in my cheap rentals. Often with breedables to boot.

So I get a panicked IM from someone who has rented a large lot in Cayuga which used to be my home -- I took my home out -- why take up valuable real estate with my home?! and moved it to the former camp area. It's a pretty area where everyone has nice builds and waterfalls and always rents. So this person tells me that the returnee has now put out a large store with flashing lights and PS has filled up the commons, going over the border of her small rental.

I fly out there and see that this is like a Japanese Time Square -- a moving chyron, flashing lights, glaring glow everywhere, arcades, and a store "look" if not actual prims taking payments. So I ask her to remove it. I say it's not a commercial area -- and that includes "cities" that are fake -- because the WHOLE POINT of having this rule is so that people are not forced out by large, bright, busy buildings. No, I don't want my cheap land in G being exploited for your business, so you benefit more than I do. But the real issue is that it drives others out. I explained this with my usual triadic repetition of the narrative.

Long ago in a course on "The Morphology of the Russian Fairy Tale" I learned the importance of this thrice repetition, "one for each brain" as some put it (mind/heart/body). More prosaically, if you ever listen to someone making plans on the telephone, they always say the same thing three times. This is hard wired. I accept it. I will say things three times.

Then I'm done.

Then I ask you to scroll back.

I pointed out that I had held this woman's build for months on end for no pay; I had let the requirement to pay me back rent go; and now her rewarding me with this flashing building was not acceptable. Put it in the sky. It's ugly. She says very frankly she likes her ugly building, and wants to keep it out in this pretty area. She does concede that she needs to move out of the commons. This goes on and on, with me repeating the offer: 1) put it up in the sky or 2) move roadside on another sim as these buildings are not allowed in residential. By now, another nervous tenant is IMing me, and I now have likely 3 people who will move out just because they think this situation is not being resolved quickly.

Finally, this woman storms out, crying that I am mean and cruel and unfair, that she does not have a store, etc. etc. Peace is restored to Cayuga.

Then the person for whom I did all this, the tenant on the largest piece of land, refunds two days later because she has bought her own land.

And this is how it is. That's why you can't become too attached to land, or expect tenants to stay -- I can always tell when a tenant will leave fastest. They ask for some special favour, to move the rental box (which isn't special, happy to do it) or move some rock (that's already a favour) and they say, "I'll be a long term tenant here". So then I know that I'll be needing to plan for a clean-up of that lot in oh, 3-7 days lol. Maybe not. But much of the time.

So what else...

Someone moves to a much larger lot. Someone else takes yet another lot. Someone moves back who has been away for awhile. I usually don't ask people why, because it's not my business. I'm not renting charm or socializing; I'm renting self-service land. I try to be pleasant and enjoy talking to people who are civil and decent; when they aren't, only rudeness works. Nobody likes the fact that in cheap rentals, where someone is paying you LESS THAN THE CHEAPEST THING IN THE 99 CENT STORE as I suddenly realize, rudeness has to serve as the brake on their endless, endless ability to drain you down.

So I do ask the one, Bellisseria home getting dull? No, they aren't in that, not interested. They just needed more prims on the rental they have of a much larger lot elsewhere, but that landlord didn't have it, so they decided to go to another sim to store -- whatever. I don't look. 

Yet another person resurfaces after a long break from SL -- there are actual new people who take skyboxes -- etc. So is this evidence that in fact the gatchapocalypse won't be so bad?

Why is anyone moving into a bigger rental now? They are unaffected by this? Some of my gatcha store renters have gone on vacation in RL and hope when they get back things will be more clear. Some added space. Some moved out. Hard to tell how this will go.

I think the main factors now for larger rentals or coming back after no rentals are:

o school comes very early this year; my nieces were starting August 1 because they lost so much from COVID. That means stay-at-home parents have more time because they are still working from home as many companies kept remote

o but unemployment is running out, and Grampa Joe is not renewing it and there aren't any more stimulus checks. I read this one economic analysis that says people saved so much while on unemployment, with less travel, less gas, less need for clothes and drycleaners and eating lunch out, that they have money stashed away and are not looking for jobs and can therefore (I think) still play SL.

But I still think there is going to be (and already is) a very stressed economy because:

o people having big fights over things like the glowy store -- that person had no glowy store for 8 years, why now? 

o another person first asks to expand her rentals to twice the size, moves in a boyfriend (the last one left in a sad breakup -- he was one of the most avid hunters for the free month rent eggs). I instantly know this won't last. That is, the rebound boyfriends after a longer relationship tend not to last, but the expansion of her home for him moving in is not how it goes usually. Or at least, I see this dynamic: these boyfriends moving in feel somehow embarrassed and having a girl pay for them -- in front of me. So while she may still pay for a rental, they want it to be somewhere else. Or maybe they WILL pay for it, but then she moves in with him, he controls the situation, he can boot her.

o This tenant very pragmatically tells me she is moving out with the bf about a week later, surprise surprise and she wants me to keep her rental as she thinks it won't last long. No, I say, I can't subsidize people's SL any more than I do. I am cutting it in half again; if it is here when you get back, great, if not, well, I will find you another.

Enter Mr. Fundati, because now I am landscaping again LOL. Mr. Fundati is one of my favourite people in SL although I don't really know him, I've only chatted with him a few times. He made this Breaking Bad gacha with the turtle and the head -- you know the one -- and I said "I can't believe you went there."

"I did," he said, endearing himself to my heart, as I liked Breaking Bad, after rejecting it for years but finally watching it all at once over a really bad 3-day long weekend with a toothache. He did a very good job on that gatcha and his other one, with these Mexicans and their machine guns lolling around the tianda. If someone is going to squawk "cultural appropriation," you came to the wrong place because if he isn't Mexican, he's Latino (actually, he's Russian-- same thing lol). He has a husky avatar in a suit with some kind of helmet with horns, not sure what that is, but he is generous with his weekend sales for $75, mixing in also the art work of Silas Merlin. I have no idea how those two found each other as they seem to be from different worlds, but you know, people do.

The other thing I really admire about Mr. Fundati is that he has a Mainland business, in Horizons, on a 1024. A modest little skybox with vendors and signs and very neatly presented. Even some of the trees. I think they have double prims in Horizon. Still, it's a modest but effective business. Because the main thing to like about Mr. Fundati is his trees. They really are among the best in SL, if not THE best for the desert/southwest/Latin America look I want on some sims.

I asked in his group what trees go in Peru or at least roughly in that area because I had a strange assemblage of like his Greek Firs or Joshua Trees which maybe were not quite appropriate, but it's SL, who cares.

To my surprise, he made a housecall, something I have rarely seen an SL merchant do there are some notable exceptions. He put out some suggestions. I didn't like one, I like another, I went back to the store to buy it. Fortunately he doesn't make gachas to stay live -- he had 2 or 3. Mainly he sells the trees. These much larger companies like Heart and Hayabusa of course have many years on him and bigger customer bases. But I hope he keeps going. His trees in fact are not as expensive as theirs, but unlike Little, are better looking in my view, although I will buy Little if they are 50L.

o Another person who had split up with a bf, then moved into a separate rental, then moved out, who knows where, maybe to another rental merely, maybe to another bf, shows up and moves into my "retirement home" which of course I have turned into sky platforms for now because my God, I hate unplanned purchases like that, it has to get something offset.

o Then another person shows up to take another one. Then all of a sudden I realize I am overbooked. There are no more prims. And I was going to make the villa at least sparsely furnished. So then I see the 2048 on the auction had no bids. I spent awhile talking to someone who landed on it, a simple gentleman who seemed never to have bought land, only rented apparently. He wondered if the scripts on it would work and his Tardis would work. Well, yeah. But he better group it and count the prims. I explain all that. People spend years in SL and never learn about these things. I explain exactly what he needs to do to get this land sanely and without panic.  But he is too reluctant, he drops out, someone else who flew out there says she doesn't want it, and I consult with my son.

o A day later I have this parcel now to fix up the prims, the 2nd person has already left the rental (this is how you can make sure people leave rentals: make sure you have enough prims for them). I have been told how bad the view is down there, and I fly down and notice that next to all this gorgeous Blake Sea expenso stuff, there are people putting their houses in the sky; plywood; junk; and selling land for only $10/m. Oh. Now I see, you can't really be sure you can sail out of there, the land is owned by someone else who has passage now, but that could change...

o I begin a project of retexturing this villa which has a lot of old grungy textures which never stood out to me when this building was up in the sky with no lighting, and which now really bothers me. You can't just paste texture over a building where someone has made 100 mottled and shadowed textures to give it depth and character, so it means finding OTHER textures that have those features, plus hoping that some of your paste-ups without depth and character won't show...

o Someone is not paying their rent. A Trumpkin. Perhaps their stars are not rising. Someone else then pays the expired box. They want the previous person's stuff removed. I often leave it if I think they may be back soon enough because it may not rent. So why discourage the previous tenant/ I'm changing my thinking on this...

Then after I have removed the house and lots of pink sparkly stuff, not really looking at it, this new tenant says:

"Where's the house?"

They always do.

I say, "It's the previous tenant's house."

"But I want it."

Well, if you remove their prims, you don't leave their house which they will come and take away, especially if a single copy gatcha? So I tell this person, who wants a free house basically, that these are parcels without the free houses. But go to Ravenglass and Jubata, where the houses are free, i.e. don't count on your prims, pick one of those out, and I will put it out for you here, but yes, it will count on your prims, because these are empty lots rented, not houses rented, the pricing is different.

This is repeated three times, as per usual, then she logs, and flies around, and then decides that she would rather live in a smaller lot with the free house not counting, than a bigger lot where it would although I think she'd still be ahead in the prims -- and PS I just cleared that lot for her, and now if she moves out, I will have possibly lost the customer who may show up tomorrow, a day late and a dollar short.

I explain three times that she can refund, and the cancellation fee will be returned manually.

She goes over this another few times and then says, as people do, 

[2021/08/15 12:12] [Tenant]: it says 100 l fee
[2021/08/15 12:12] Prokofy Neva: once again, you refund the same box you paid; you move; you pay another box; the fee is manually returned
[2021/08/15 12:12] [Tenant]: oh ok
[2021/08/15 12:12] Prokofy Neva: then that's the fee? and that is manually returned when you rent again
[2021/08/15 12:13] [Tenant]: on other home right?
[2021/08/15 12:13] Prokofy Neva: well, I should think it would be another home in our rentals system and not a spaceship on Mars, but surprise me

Then she tells me she has had a stroke and has a hard time learning things.

Except she was already in my rentals once before, didn't pay, left her things, when I asked if she was staying and could she pay the rent, which was overdue, she brusquely dismissed me.

Then she was back with all this putting and taking.

These are rentals -- could we say it again? -- that you are paying for one week, less than the cheapest thing in the 99 cents store. And maybe US $1.50. $2.50. $5.0. But in this case, it's a $100 rental, that's US $1.44.

I have patience with people who are new, people for whom English is a second language, or people with disabilities, of which there are many in SL, and PS who have the kind of strokes that don't leave them talking as well as this person.

So basically I said, don't pull that on me. Everybody has a story. I would tend to believe a person like this, but you can't be sure. And there's no question she's hustling me. There was a whole extended conversation where she wants to get a radio put in and asks about that over and over -- which I do for 25L usually if not already in a cabin or skybox but usually I don't put them on parcels because people have their own. Here I have come immediately to clear a lot; here I am willing to put another house from another sim; I'm willing to put the radio in for free. And yet I still get drained down further and further.

So then she refunds, I return her cancellation fee since she didn't use it, and she is free to go badmouth me  like Silent Mistwalker.

Now this is wild. She claimed that long ago she and someone else rented from me in Ravenglass with a store and I refused to give ban powers. Since this couldn't possibly be true, I've actually researched this by contacting an old tenant who REMARKABLY for arcane reasons had a notecard with every single lot in Ravenglass and its price and prims, something I don't even had. We reviewed the data, the known tenants at the time and realized what this was all about.

I didn't let them use a security orb because I don't allow them in my rentals on the ground. Of course, you wonder why someone would have a STORE but use a security orb, but it happens. Find another landlord to torment, please.

 

 

I'm Going to Keep Calling Out the Clueless Gits and the Good Samaritans

Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor

 [14:38] Davld Pearl: (Saved Mon De

This is from 2017

04 10:41:49 2017)listen up cunt read tos harrasment you been reported 5 times
[14:38] Davld Pearl: (Saved Mon Dec 04 10:44:50 2017)Harassment

Given the myriad capabilities of Second Life, harassment can take many forms. Communicating or behaving in a manner which is offensively coarse, intimidating or threatening, constitutes unwelcome sexual advances or requests for sexual favors, or is otherwise likely to cause annoyance or alarm is Harassment.
[14:38] Davld Pearl: (Saved Mon Dec 04 10:45:02 2017) https://community.secondlife.com/forums/topic/403539-community-standards/
[14:42] Prokofy Neva: This is a griefer obviously, and has nothing to do with me. Do you have any common sense? What sane person in business for 12 years would have "advertisements" using day-old racist bots?! http://3dblogger.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2017/11/a-reminder-that-no-i-dont-have-day-old-racist-griefers-spamming-ads-for-ravenglass-.html
[14:42] User not online - message will be stored and delivered later.
[21:12] Davld Pearl: your are an idiot spamming yoru shitty rentals instedad of paying for seach your causing lag and violating TOS
[21:12] Prokofy Neva: Um, obviously it's not me, who would do that if they were in business for 12 years? Have some common sense
[21:12] Prokofy Neva: abuse report the griefer and move on
[21:13] Davld Pearl: how dare you jump om rental sims and do unwanted comrerencing I have and so has 40 tenants of mine
[21:13] Prokofy Neva: http://3dblogger.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2017/11/a-reminder-that-no-i-dont-have-day-old-racist-griefers-spamming-ads-for-ravenglass-.html
[21:13] Prokofy Neva: Uh...because it's not me doing it, it's a griefer impersonating me, get a grip
[21:13] Davld Pearl: its you iys open your blog you run bots
[21:13] Prokofy Neva: abuse report the account and the Lindens will remove it
[21:13] Prokofy Neva: I do not run bots, in fact, I state I have no bot
[21:14] Prokofy Neva: further more, that isn't a bot but just a griefer pretending to be one
[21:14] Prokofy Neva: get a grip, abuse report it, and stop harassing me
[21:14] Prokofy Neva: block/ban/report

GTFO Strikes Back

Prokofy Neva, Virtualator

This is from 2019 and still relevant

Reprinting from the forums, where it may be removed or the thread shut.

This thread began innocently enough with Therese Tammas asking if there was any kind of "Mainland Appreciation" group. Indeed there are! I have the SL Public Land Preserve; there was once a group called "Mainland First" which did a lot of work before its founder gave up in frustration; there is Linden Roads Community which is very well organized and active; there are various other explorers' and mainland preservation groups.

Perhaps there isn't one with the very focused agenda called "Mainland Appreciation" -- so I made such a group and shared the ownership with Therese, who unfortunately I didn't know before in her 7 years in SL, but who is a friend and who impresses me with her energy and positive approach.

I'm not as cheery and positive, because I have been through many bitter struggles in SL, with Lindens and with griefers, and I have the battle scars to prove it. And I don't think the task is to forget grievances or dismiss people like me, but to appreciate what we achieved for the people today, a better Mainland with more prims, less ad farms, and better roads. It's not only to the credit of the Lindens' graciousness that we have these things; it's due to struggle. Civic struggle, of which I was one part. I list this here in red on this thread:

I then criticized GTFO, Get the Freight Out, whose familiar green-and-white rectangular sign is spotted all over the grid on the map. I feel it blights the map because when it entirely covers a parcel, you can't see the land's features or anything that might be around it. They likely encroach and use the fact that they are by abandoned or Linden land to make their signs bigger. It's annoying to see them all over, just like it's annoying to see giant rental company signs. I don't do that. I find it tacky and stupid. I don't think it gets you business, long term but alienates people.

So here's the discussion. I say the following, and one of the managers of GTFO, a thin-skinned, not hugely intelligent and aware individual from what I gather, comes on to mightily defend her turf, which hardly needs the defense she gives it -- which is misplaced. I always find people who tell you that you have "incorrect" or "biased" information about their clearly negative behaviour to be totally suspect and even just stupid. OF COURSE giant warehouses are not pretty. OF COURSE they blight the landscape in many ways. The fact that some are prettier, or that people love this game can't mitigate THAT BASIC FACT. So here we go:

GTFO is, on the one hand, a welcome thing because it "gives people something to do," it engages people in building and driving and exploring and such -- I had some tenants who created GTFO warehouses on my rentals. BUT the big problem with them is that they create huge, ugly warehouses on a sim, often by waterfront and roads, of course, and that brings down the whole sim. So it's a mixed bag. Not to mention their blighting of the map with their insignia. GTFO is everywhere, like Tiny Empires even though it doesn't offer any cash value, as I understand it, but is something to do. Maybe someone can beautify GTFO and get them to plan trees and put ponds on their big warehouse sites, but it's not really a solution for Mainland beautification.

 

Vega Firelyte

Hi Prokofy.  I just want to clarify a little on what you said regarding GTFO.  I agree, there is a number of hubs that do have warehouses but the owners are really quite amazing in putting them together, so I always have to give kudos to them for their design work.  They are not the only style though.  I have seen some amazing airports, farms, villages, wine yard (that one is really cute), gas stations, motels, vintage diners, neighborhoods (check our Bedos region), and GTFO HQ.  The GTFO game is a freighting game, where you go from one hub to another, collecting and dropping off virtual cargo and it's a great group of people, many of whom are very dedicated to beautifying the mainland and making it more active.  

I personally own a hub myself, over in Jeogeot, which is a farmers market/diner style and along with a few other hub owners over there, we have been working on building more of a community feel.  We have bus stops now at some of our hubs, so that if you want to take a bus ride, we have that and are working towards more little bus stops over on Satori as well.  I highly encourage you and anyone else to drop by our Basenville region, check out our event/display area, grab a bike and take a little ride through our Hill Valley neighbourhood, that is GTFO enabled, and check out what GTFO looks like now.

Theresa says:

Haven't played GTFO yet, but I was thinking there should be a version, "Get the Milk Out," For roleplaying deliveries of regular things like eggs and milk, and cat food, to residents? And yes, the warehouse thing I noticed too. The same people who like to play aren't necessarily the ones with the aesthetic sense, which is okay,  but then someone has to try to offer to help them, maybe.

 

Vera: There was an interview with the owner of GTFO by Luke Skywalker of Drivers of SL.  GTFO is changing and expanding in the future and Cinn Morgi, the owner, talks about the different things that are going to happen in that future.  One of the things will be the ability of hub owners to control what type of freight they will have in their virtual warehouses.  For example, I have a hub that is a Farmer's Market, along with a bakery, post office and cafe on my hub.  In time, I will be able to decide on what I want to have leaving my place, like eggs, milk, vegetables, pies from the bakery, etc.  Slowly but surely, the face of GTFO is changing and it's changing for the better as it grows.  If you want more information, please feel free to message me inworld and I would be more than happy to try to help you.

Beth McBain, who has already acquired animosity toward me because I challenged her gushing fandom over Bellisseria, and pointed out that she herself on her own blog commented that her boyfriend was away and she went to the PG Bellisseria just out of loneliness and something to do, and she then denied this, which was amazing, given that it was all said in her own blog. She yammered on a bit, although she came to agree with me on other points.  So in part she's now gushing about GTFO as retaliation against me, this is how the forums game is played:

Beth: I've really got to give this GTFO thingie a try. It sounds fun!

I think that one of the side effects Bellisseria is having on SL is a renewed interest in mainland. I know I've never once considered purchasing my own land for a variety of reasons, but now I'm on the hunt for my ideal mainland parcel. I'll be keeping my two Bellisseria parcels because they're so much fun, but I also have ideas of what I'd like to build on my own little plot of land.

Years ago, I did some exploring on the mainland, and pretty much hated everything I saw. It felt very abandoned. Lately, I've been exploring again and the feeling has completely changed. It feels lived in and well taken care of for the most part, and there are people around. The atmosphere on today's mainland makes me want to be a part of it. 

Vega, full of spleen now because I've criticized her organization, and refused to desist even when she "corrects my understanding," then says this, in reply to another user's question:

  On 10/16/2019 at 10:21 AM, Syo Emerald said:

Can someone explain what exactly this group is for? What is its purpose?

Vega: I'm not 100% sure, but it's a group of people who want to see the mainland improve, look better and be more interactive, which is my guess.  If I am wrong though, someone please correct me.

This is what is in the description of the group, "A group devoted to appreciating the Mainland by living, working or visiting the legacy Mainland outside of Linden Homes. Members get a free ad board with "Visit the Mainland" texture created by Jack Linden and a portal script to put in the location of your choice. Gifts will also regularly be provided. Chat is encouraged with recommendations, help, causes. We advocate for Linden policies to encourage Mainland living. A hangout is being developed."

I do admit, I hesitate to join because of that second last sentence, which I have put into bold.  I have seen that abused quite a few times and it all started innocently but went downhill at some point.  Myself personally, I would rather build a good communication between the Moles, Lindens, and Residents where we can work together without the word "advocate" involved and I don't really believe in policies being changed, to make it where you force people to do what you think is right.  I am a believer in people making their own choices.  I may not always agree with someone's choice but I do respect people having that right to make it.

Oh, for the love of Christ. This attitude of conformism -- what in the Soviet context used to be called "the aggressive  silent majority," ie people who suck up to the Soviet powers that be and don't criticize them publicly but bash those few who do quite aggressively -- so pandemic in SL, and it's so needless.

 

So I reply with both gun barrels, which I feel you have to do when somebody TAKING OVER THE GRID WITH THEIR GAME who is AGGRESSIVELY AGAINST criticizing the Lindens in anyway speaks in this horridly way like a com-symp. And completely turns advocacy on its ear, pretending that it is "forcing people to do what you think is right." What's been FORCED here, comrades, is the GTFO game all over the grid, and the Lindens' decision to make Bellisseria a priority and put all their top resources into it at the expense of making the rest of the Mainland more amenable.

Therese says charitably, because she's just a nicer person and has been in SL less time than me:

I'm at work so can't properly reply but I'm loving all this, and yes I think the moves done for Mainland has improved it immensely and renewed interest..there are still floating prims under 1000m in many areas but there is much more love and much more aesthetic planning than previously seen 10 years ago

Vega makes this intervention:

I agree @Therese Tammas, the mainland has greatly improved, compared to what it use to look like in the past.  I also like the exposure/attention that is starting to be directed more towards the mainlands.  Bellisseria was good for more than one reason, not just the kickass homes but the attention it seemed to bring to the different mainlands.  It feels like more people are considerate to their neighbours now, there is more care being taken with the land and it is looking better.  Yes, there is still areas that are problematic, but I do hope with time and more attention, we will see that changing as well.

Well, this simply isn't true. There isn't attention to the other mainlands. The Linden road building which began years ago, which has gone very slowly, which is incomplete in many areas, continues, and there are some nice Mainland builds, but it's nothing at all at the scale of Bellisseria. And you can't possibly say people are more considerate when in fact they aren't. I can tell you of dozens of situations proving this false, and hardly involving only me, as my examples wouldn't be trustworthy. Somebody who keeps their land that has lakewater passage on it blocked on access-only so that dozens of neighbours can't boat on a lake is not "considerate" but a total fucking asshole. The Lindens are to blame for setting up this situation -- it was unnecessary -- but they wanted us to pay tier, not them.

My comment:

GTFO is fine for what it is, but what I think would be good is if there was competition to GTFO based on a different concept. With "get out the freight" literally the root of your concept, the builds tend toward the concrete and steel and the warehouse, whatever eggs or baked goods you might weave in. So as I said, it would be good if some other group made a game/activity focused more on travel itself, or sort of scavenger hunts, or put and take of items, rather than the big builds which require owning or renting land. So for example, I could put out a box on my land that would be coded in such a way that someone could deliver eggs or milk to me or flowers or whatever. Just an alternative idea.

Vega claims:

I would say that it's approx. 60 - 65% of our GTFO hubs are a wide variety of different types of builds, other than warehouses, which is now approx. 35-40%.  I know this because I'm the personal assistant to the owner of GTFO and one of the ladies that helps occasionally do the setups for the hubs.

So what are these "wide variety of builds other than warehouses" given that freight is the main concept? I wasn't deterred from buying and renting out land by Lake Caldera, for example, because I find that GTFO locations don't always stay and sometimes fold their tents but there is quite a hulk of a one over that lake. And I could site others that were like this, i.e. in Itame, that are gone now. Once again, I can only tell you what I see in front of my eyes every day, and what I have seen isn't likely to make me go seek out lovely farmsteads but I'll keep it in mind.

{I could note that this 65% stuff is just an outright lie. Just go on any sim or 100 sims and look at the GTFO on the map and then TP to it. They are warehouses. WAREHOUSES. Not other things. It's astounding to me that she could tell such an outright falsehood.}

So here we go again with Vega "setting me straight" because I am not to believe my "lying eyes" of what I see on the grid, in front of me, but am to disregard "outdated information":

Vega: The reason I commented is because you are working with outdated information.  GTFO "Get the Freight Out", has been, in the last year, undergoing quite a few changes.  There is some areas that still hold onto the warehouse models and that is their choice to do so, which I respect but to say that is mostly what GTFO is now, is incorrect.  Cinn is the new owner from the previous one and she has been working diligently with our Server Elves in expanding and creating a system that will go beyond what GTFO was originally.  I think you will understand though if I keep some of the surprises to come, quiet at this time but let's say that the system is going to be more than just freight, in the future.

It's not "some" but "most". The main change in the last year is WAY MORE GTFOS which means way, way more map blights and warehouse intrusion. If the system is more than freight, I can only express the greatest apprehension, because managers with this much lying, this much misrepresentation of the situation on the ground, this much bullshit, will lie about whatever else they are doing because it gives them either financial benefit or reputational enhancement. Don't be fooled into thinking that people who provide games "for free" or that only have "in-game currency" that only has "inworld prizes" are somehow not making money. I'd ask questions about their rentals of land to players. I'd ask if the Lindens were in on it in any form. And I'd point out that reputational enhancement is not trivial. If you can put on your resume that you ran a massive cross-road freight game, it helps you in RL business and potential other related businesses in SL. This is not altruism, especially when you cannot tell the truth of it.

I ask:

So what are these "wide variety of builds other than warehouses" given that freight is the main concept? I wasn't deterred from buying and renting out land by Lake Caldera, for example, because I find that GTFO locations don't always stay and sometimes fold their tents but there is quite a hulk of a one over that lake. And I could site others that were like this, i.e. in Itame, that are gone now. Once again, I can only tell you what I see in front of my eyes every day, and what I have seen isn't likely to make me go seek out lovely farmsteads but I'll keep it in mind.

Vega says:

Correct me if I misunderstand but you are talking about 1 warehouse that is in your area?

Typical snide assholery of a public official who has lied from the get-go in answer to a legitimate complaint, trying to minimize your true impressions. Um, no, not just one warehouse, comrade. It's safe to say I'm talking about HUNDREDS. Go look on the fucking grid. I reply:

It's not that I'm working with outdated information. It's that your beautification message apparently hasn't reached all your users, and I can only repeat what I see on sim after sim after sim, and I'm happy to go out and take screenshots if that would help. I report what I see, not your aspirations. But SL is a big place. On other continents you may be more pretty, and I don't see it as much. I appreciate that you want to flog GTFO, but honestly, marring the map with your logo (needless), using a term that in fact is a swear word (causing brand confusion for sure), not having any way players can actually make cash -- these are all negatives and your effort, while as I said is great for giving people "something to do" is not without its flaws. But it doesn't matter, truly, because SL is a big place, and I have even had tenants with what might even have been some of your more unlovely builds, but everything needs competition in an open society and it wouldn't hurt for others to appear, just as with horses.

No, read what I wrote. I have land on 50 sims. I visit them constantly. Every day I see GTFO on a map of a sim somewhere. I see lots and lots of GTFOs every day. Beyond those 50 sims, i visit others, where I also see GTFO sites. Lots and lots of them. It's safe to say that I have seen dozens if not hundreds of GTFOs spread over 100 plus sims. Because every sim where I have land has a sim next to it. You're just not willing to hear the problem, but I don't want to go out snapshotting right now, I have better things to do. Accept that because you've given your users free will to use even old "outdated" concrete styles, they...do.

So here's just 5 that I quickly went and snapped -- out of the 5, only one is "aesthetic" in terms of being a field of trees and a dark, although the signs are cluttery -- the rest are all concrete bunkers and tanks and such -- good Lord, one even has Communist insignia. So having a diner among them makes it a little more amenable but they're still...warehouses. Because,  you know, it's a *freight* game. Click on any GTFO on the map, and you find them like 4 of these pictures, not the 5th. I realize there may be charming little Japanese kaiseki restaurants seating only 12 with fresh fish and roe and persimmons and leeks delivered twice daily on GTFO bicycles, creating gorgeously picturesque scenes, but we know what GTFO is. There's no need to argue about it. It's great you're diversifying it. Diversity happens when there's more than one company/game/product.

Vega replies:

Actually, I'm not here to "flog" GTFO as you say but to correct you with your erroneous statements.  You want to claim that they are predominantly warehouses, when that is not the case.  As I said, there is some but they are no longer the predominant style like they use to be.  You don't appear to really be open to correction though and it does seem that you wish to argue with someone who not only has the stats but has visited every one of those hubs, all 500+ of them.  

As for our Logo, you would have to take that matter up with the original owner on why they wished to have it like that but there is no brand confusion at all, regarding it.  Everyone knows what it stands for, including you.  Just to clarify, that logo is very small on the map and is used by the players to help assist them in locating the hubs, especially for our airbourne and water vehicles, though the road drivers do find it very handy as well.  Compared to large signs and logos that I have seen, that cover entire regions, it's miniscule compared to those behemoths. 

As for your point regarding the players earning cash, we don't want to be a pyramid scheme, like some games have turned into, so that is not really a flaw but more of a bonus, because you know we are not there to rip you off in extra charges.  

As for those hub owners who decide to retain their larger builds and older styled warehouses, that is their choice and I respect that because it is also their land.  Our company is inclusive, friendly and non-judgemental.  We won't force anyone to do something they don't wish to do. 

Um, actually, she clearly sees her job or role in a society keen on reputational enhancement to indeed flog GTFO. It's not small on the map. Open up the map of any sim area and you will see it, and note that it is not "small".  It's not miniscule. And it does cover more territory than a small 512 parcel in most areas for sure.

Within 5 minutes, I found 5 and snapped them -- I could have done 105. It will never be enough for someone as aggressive, duplicitious, and dim-witted as this:

Vega: That is a mere 5 and of those 5, one is a Leeward CC area primarily.  That is what they are set up for mainly.  Unlike you though, I will respect their right to set up their land the way they wish.  As I said, between 35-40% of them are warehouses and we have 500+ hubs.  I could also take you through Satori, Jeogoet, Sansara, Heterocera, Fruit Islands, Bellisseria, Corsica, and Nautilus, to name some of them, and show you a ton more that are all really well put together and varied in style.  I'm sorry Prof, but you have your view point and it is erroneous.  I just wanted to correct it but I won't waste more time on someone who just feels like arguing.

See, here's the cruz of the issue she unwittingly reveals. She doesn't police their users. Nobody does. They can "do what they want". It's not true only 35% are warehouses -- she's being literalist by conflating the fact that some of them involve sea or air freight and are staging areas and not technically roadside "warehouses". But they still involve concrete, steel, wood beams, and ugly industrial aesthetic. Some people love industrial aesthetic in SL. I like some of it too. Just not EVERYWHERE. It's not that I'm "incorrect". It's that I'm telling the truth about what is before my eyes, and can be before your eyes, too, if you look. 

I reply:

I think it's great that you developed this game that has kept people involved with the Mainland.

I can only report what I see EVERYWHERE with my own eyes in what I think is a fairly large slice of SL. You keep saying that X percent of the sites are different, but they are different by degrees that still don't mitigate against the whole concept of "warehouse" which by its nature, cannot be an aesthetic park or beach. Clearly, you are very attached to this and spent a lot of effort on it, but it's simply not persuasive to keep telling someone like me who sees a LOT of the Mainland that they have "erroneous information" when I see what is in front of my eyes.

It's like this horrendous plague of driverless vehicles. I literally see hundreds of stupid green flying buses a day that in any other context would be considered spam and griefing. But because Lindens love the idea of load tests and sim seam tests they don't have to do and pay staff to track, and because there was that one time that a forums queen went on one of these vehicles in 2010 and thought it was delightful, those of us who actually live and work on the Mainland have to suffer this blight. Try to hear it. The map is a shared space, and GTFO is a tragedy of the commons. It's hardly the worst -- the big hearts and those GIGANTIC domes are far worse a problem, but it's annoying.

The logo isn't "very small" on the map because it covers the whole parcel. Lots of people do that and I find it tacky and annoying. It's everywhere. It's also your right. Since it is so hard to find entry into the economy, it's a shame that it doesn't have cash really, although I realize that has all kinds of pitfalls. Maybe it could be like Bing, make users who want to play "Rewards" spent ridiculously long amounts of time searching for stuff or filling out quizzes in order to earn a US $5 value Amazon card. You could give them gatchas once a week.

Your notion that the WAREHOUSES are built better in Nautilus or the Fruit Islands (those are islands, not Mainland) -- again -- doesn't mitigate the fact that they are WAREHOUSES. Because, you know, it's GTFO, hello! And you haven't supplied any pictures, and I gave you 5 in 5 minutes.

Um, I don't "disrespect" their right to do WTF they want on their land, that sacred FU hedonism of Mainland creed which is responsible for its greatest ills. I have even rented to customers who put the damn things on my lot, and since technically they didn't violate my rules, I tolerated it, although I don't think my neighbours with pretty seaside cottages were very happy. But you have a problem here even if only 30% are ugly because of your free-will values. That's a high percent. The end. You're welcome to have whatever last word you need to have, everyone else knows what their eyes see.

anamats, who is someone who repeatedly came to my sim and repeatedly abuse-reported me for encroachment because 1) I criticized his plan for massive takeover of the cross-sim issue with vehicles and scripts of his making 2) he believed falsely that my tiny "encroachment" in Grote was preventing his vehicle from driving -- it was actually a poorly-made Linden road which the Lindens came and fixed -- but not before banning me for a day from SL, losing me business and income, even if in small amounts, for my supposed encroachment. I marvel at this because I went to a great deal of effort to move my ramps and parking lots, even though it now meant my tenants couldn't get out of the parking lot easily at Flamingo Court, so if there was "encroachment" remaining it was miniscule, something missed. But still, I got banned for a day. Because that's how they role. They chose an aggressive scripter of their own clan who loves Capture Roleplay games (Ugh!) with grand visions of grid-wide schemes, over a person who pays them a fair amount of tier. This has ALWAYS been the problem with the Lindens.

Just because it's industrial, it doesn't have to look awful. The climbing ivy improves the brick wall.

A friend's freight hub. Simple and well-kept. Decorative fencing helps here.

Should SL have zoning? Something to think about for mainland. Bellesaria is single-family residential, with occasional public areas. One of the big landlords has about five different zones, from single-family residential to heavy industrial. New Babbage has building inspection for city consistency and quality.

@Vega Firelyte Oh, hey, I see you're my new neighbour in Tuliptree.

And that what you decided to do was to find some abandoned land near one of my areas, buy it, and put up one of your delightful GTFO outlets and get in my face, ensuring that those parcels near it will be unlikely to rent (as is usually the case with GTFO pops up, something I tolerate in my own rentals even when I rent to GTFO at the expense of other parcels, it's a balancing act). I researched this, and I realize you're going to claim you didn't do this, but that's what you did.  

This one is called "FarmFresh" although it has neither a farm or fresh food, but perhaps those are to come? More to the point it has two gigantic, unnecessary billboards. One is on your land, and the other is on a 112 m microparcel you sold to an ad-farmer who put your GTFO ad on his board.

Ugly, unnecessary, and not viewed by anyone, except put deliberately in my face because I dared to criticize your blighting of the Mainland. It's not enough that you entirely blight the map with GTFO every few squares; you have to put up these big billboards which hardly anybody sees except my tenants in small residences who aren't going to do GTFO -- those who want to already rent large parcels. 

You bought land which has literally been abandoned for something like 12 years, since the Lindens cracked down on first-land flippers (they don't have the first-land program any more) and banned some of them and their land was abandoned. The nearby railroad apparently bought it and then abandoned it much later when they needed to tier down. So you requested it, with a mission in mind, I saw what you did there. It's ludicrous, because if speed and efficiency are a function of your game, trying to worm your way out of that tiny entrance and through the railroad works to get out to the highway -- it's NOT roadside - is a ridiculous time loss. 

So when people deliberately try to harass me over my opinions on the forums -- which are valid, and my experience, and my right -- I abuse report them , although it goes "nowhere". But I do think the Lindens need a policy not to sell abandoned land to people who then cut up microparcels for ads or to sell to ad-farmers. They may feel secondary purchases are impossible to police but that's what ARs are for. Abandoned land, which the Lindens now are unloading in large numbers, contrary to their past much slower and more miserly policy.

Remember, those tuning in, my VALID criticism of GTFO's blighting of the map (it's everywhere) and warehouses taking up the view in most of their views, is not my personal opinion, and not driven merely by me having residential lots for rent, but a feeling shared by many, including even in this thread. And our expression of this criticism doesn't harm the increasingly monopolistic and oppressive GTFO, which hasn't lost any business because a few of their neighbours complained on the forums, read by 5% of the user population. If anything, it's GTFO that hurts the business of other businesses next to them, or hurts the pretty view that someone thought they had when they bought, say, lakeside property. It wouldn't occur to me to someone try to sabotage or boycott GTFO merely because I don't like their builds -- that's wrong. And as I've said numerous times, I have tenants doing GTFO! 

But when people attempt to harm me or my business in SL, I fight back. I AR them. I ban them -- that's the minimum, let them taste banlines.

I wait 30 days. Most things go away in 30 days, for all kinds of reasons. Since escalating action often leads to the opposite effect -- you complain about an encroaching build and sim crashing, and you get a giant refrigerator on your cost for four or more years -- I wait.

Then I go to the next steps.

o Brick walls on all sides of the billboard. I have the prims to go up to 4096 if need be. The Lindens have a rule that you cannot totally block another's property on all 4 sides -- this method of fighting the ad farms was something they used to punish users for, as they sat idly by letting their fellow computer programmers sell 16m parcels for $10,000 and remove giant IMPEACH BUSH or MR. LEE'S HONG KONG ad boards. But you can block on 2-3 sides, and with cooperative neighbours, that's often enough.

o Constant publication of bad behavior

o Continued ARS, urging all those affected to AR.

o Mass petitions -- I have a tenant on one sim who got so tired of ONE PERSON blocking the sailing on an entire lake because the Lindens were foolhardy enough to sell water inside lakes and not create Linden protected land inside them that he got dozens of people who lived there to petition the person doing this. She hasn't taken of "access only" yet but he will keep at it. People who put "access only" have the right to do so, and they believe it is necessary for privacy. But there are several ways you can do this and mitigate it:

-- Only put your land to access only when you are actually logged in. If you are mainly not logging on to SL, there's no reason to block boating around your land for everyone. If you're afraid they might fly up to your skybox and go on your sex furniture, understood, but you can either put that away or put up an orb just for the perimeter of that skybox. To block your entire parcel of 4096 plus, when you have no builds on the ground, is insanity.

-- Cut a 32m strip around your land -- leave that open. Put the rest of your land on "access only" but for the love of God, at least let people pass by on water or roadside without being bashed by banlines or orbs.

The Lindens have gotten lax about policing ad farms, and I see them back again with the same insanity, ugly builds and ridiculous prices to "buy back the view". Their rule is that you can't have more than one per sim, I think it is. So that's a basis for ARs, but sometimes just an AR for the extortionist price, if there are multiple instances, can be enough.

When you deal with me, you'll find that I can wait forever. I can wait years for situations to be righted. You can try to harass and bully me off my land or discourage me from expressing my views, but it can't stand. So give it up. Mind your own business. You have enough of the grid under your control without deliberately coming to harass me and my tenants.

Virtual Verse, Same as the First

By Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor

This is a useful thread from VirtualVerse One to review and more systematically rebut when I have some time some day. I've copied it because they, like the Lindens, disappear content there often.

For one, it helps in making my case that the trans women community in SL, many of whose leaders are on Virtual Verse One now (the old Sluniverse) are utterly intolerant of anyone who changes their gender in any way that they haven't approved of. They are horrid exemplars of totalitarianism. If you think your condo board or your office performance committee is authoritarian, wait until you see these people.

They also curiously imagine that if someone hasn't transitioned in the way they imagine, and hasn't had surgery, let alone cross-dressed in SL, that they must have some psychiatric issue, some "dysphoria," or something wrong with them.

It's amazingly hard to change your avatar's gender in SL for this reason, in any direction. The wall of intolerance, the wall of hatred and harassment from people who themselves say they have been harassed all their lives is just astounding!

In RL, I've given birth to three children, one of whom died, and I have had a number of surgeries over the years for various conditions, some related to my rare immune disease, and I can't imagine anything worse -- for me -- than going for any kind of surgery at all. I've never gone to a surgery, and emerged better off than when I went in. It's always worse. That's just my own personal preferences. We get to have those, right? Or we don't? Even if I had no personal history of other medical surgery, I would never wish to perform that surgery, and that's fine, correct? Or are you medical totalitarians like Mengele and Sudoplatov?

If someone wants to have any and all surgeries to transition from one gender to another  to a gender they believe is inherent (and which I am happy to accept as inherent for them), that's their call. Why would this same set of people get to harass and heckle and bully other people who either didn't make this choice for themselves, or due to their traditional beliefs, can't accept it?  Eventually people with old-fashioned beliefs die out. I don't know anybody reliant on a horse and carriage now. But if you need to hasten their demise and bully them into non-existence, yes, you are totalitarian.

I'm not interested in changing my gender in RL just to have an SL avatar of the opposite gender. Listen to yourselves! Do you really think that is required? Do you really think we are not free?! Why did I choose a male avatar in SL? As I explained for Designing Worlds: because I can. That really is all the reason anyone needs or should require. We get to change our genders in SL. Have you?

But...If you criticize tech bros; if you criticize the open source cult; if you criticize big or small tech (something I had no company doing 20 years ago, but have plenty now), it means you have just lost all your rights, if you ever had them. Criticism of tech -- which has many, many features that are eminently open to criticism -- doesn't mean you are stripped of your right to change your gender or not change your gender, or PS to have privacy in RL, something that all these people feel has always been fine to deprive me of for "higher reasons," namely, my criticism of tech.

If you criticize the high priests of our little world, or the tech world at large, these harpies believe that OF COURSE you have to be hounded, harried, doxxed, and exposed as punishment. OF COURSE. You lose your rights.

Today, those immersed in the transgender movement have a term for this: "transmedicalists". See, there's a term for everything. I personally don't make any of this my cause, when there's been the war in Ukraine for the last 8 years, my more immediate and I think deserving focus. I mean, paragraphs like this have about three too many buzz terms I'd need to look up for me to play:

Maybe I’ve just become more aware of it recently, but there seems to have been a rise in the amount and vehemence of people identifying as transmedicalists/truscum online, which is an ideology stating that people have to experience dysphoria to be transgender, though the severity of the ideology varies, to the extent some people think you have to be binary and want every kind of medical intervention possible in order to “pass” to be really trans. And many of the people who believe this make it their life’s work to harass trans people who don’t fit their idea of what a “real trans person” is — for instance, Kalvin Garrah (a truscum youtuber)’s multiple lengthy videos on gothfruits (a non-binary transmasculine gender non-conforming makeup artist/youtuber) calling him a transtrender.

You would never know from the SLuniverse posse that transgender experience might not be monolithic. 

Of course these authors I'm quoting would never use the term "trans totalitarianism" as I do, but that's how I see it. I could gather enormous numbers of examples of how this has worked in SL, where I first recognized, and on social media, where we can all see it now. Some of them are in this thread.

Under this rigid totalitarian cult, if you once had a female avatar (I don't recall any avatar named "Elizabeth" at all and I don't think one ever existed), why, you are not allowed to have a male one, and you must then "shut up" if someone exposes this. Even if someone produces some screenshot with me in an avatar with the name "Elizabeth," so what? Everybody has alts. I have my name. His pronouns are he/him. You do believe in pronouns, right? Or not? Or you believe some people who don't believe as you do get their pronoun rights stripped away? Then, you are totalitarians.

TORLEY IN WATERHEAD IN 2004

In 2004, I remember going to the Waterhead telehub. I had on a pilot's outfit I believe I got from Cubey's venue. That avatar had a female appearance -- I had a variety of avatar shapes and outfits I had experimented with when I first came to SL -- one African female got enormous attention from the Herald at the time --  but then I picked the male avatars because I wished to do so. You get to do that in SL.

So at Waterhead, I ran into an old friend from TSO and she remarked that I had a female avatar, which I rarely had had in TSO, where my main and alts were male, and I said, oh, yes, that's the one today, but I don't think I'll keep it, etc. Nearby was sitting Torley Linden, at that time Torley the resident, playing Mahjong with another resident whose name I don't recall. 

Torley on her alts, or Cienna Samiam (Cienna with other last names) as an alt of Torley, or whoever that resident sitting with her at that time, would then endlessly invoke this incident as if it were some kind of "gotcha". They would never admit they were a Linden, then or now. They would never admit that they were a friend of a Linden, then or now. They would replay this incident over and over on the forums as if this was some kind of grand expose. 

Imagine doing that. Imagine Lindens being like that (they were and are). Torley is a male who had a female avatar and another RL male who had a female avatar as a partner. THAT was the root of the animosity -- the greatest chorus of haters and totalitarians I've experienced frantic to misgender me are totalitarian trans women in SL.

When she became a Linden, Robin Linden insisted that Torley remove her partnership. (If it were me, I wouldn't have become a Linden then, but people need to work and live.) Soon enough that took a toll on that relationship when she agreed to do so to become a Linden. That person, who, unlike Torley was always nice to me, later married a woman in RL. That vicious Cienna, who made eyeglasses that were about the only ones available in SL and who was immensely popular, endlessly heckled and harassed me on the forums and inworld on the mistaken belief that she had some kind of "gotcha" merely because I didn't choose to reveal my RL gender when I began SL and didn't choose to note that I remembered exactly what incident she was invoking. Later, my identity was forcibly dragged from me by both the Herald (whose editor was mad that I criticized his take on TSO in the New York Times) and by the forums, with Lindens approvingly presiding. I'm going to describe this in more detail soon, it's important.

You can change your gender in SL -- but only if you hang with the posse and obey their rigid, totalitarian rules. I choose not to.

CRITICIZE THE ELITE AND LOSE YOUR RIGHTS

It's helpful to remember why the vicious mob on the old forums, some of whom remain today, decided I "needed" to have my RL identity and gender "outed," something which I always took in stride, "making lemonade out of lemons." I'm not anonymous. You are.

It's because I criticized the privileged insider relationship that some of the scripters, designers, and other kinds of "creatives" and devs had with Linden Lab, a system I called "the Feted Inner Core" or "FIC". I criticized them for obtaining inside knowledge of discounted sims, always obtaining media interviews when the media contacted LL to the exclusion of others, obtaining endorsements for their businesses, winning contests and saying later that it was because no one else applied -- and so on. 

To their credit, later, LL cleaned up some of this obvious favouritism and graft from the early days, when 1/3 of the staff came from the user base so it was a revolving door of insider privilege and commerce circles elevated to staff powers. But back then, these people wanted to get revenge. A Linden falsely told a resident, based on reading my RL name on my account and Googling me (a gross breach of resident privacy for which that Linden should have been fired), that I was on alimony and wealthy and sitting with the box wine all day dabbling on SL. I've never been on alimony and had only modest child support from my partner with whom I have raised our children over the years and I've never bought a box wine in my life.

Other Google witch hunters, or that one, decided I was a journalist who had been fired from a newspaper for plagiarism and announced solemnly to the forums that I was "indicted for RL crime". Of course, plagiarism in academic and journalism isn't exactly a "crime," but it is actionable. But...I have never been accused of, or have been found guilty, of plagiarism.  The problem is that I have a very common name. The people with my exact same name, even including the middle initial, even with the same age and location, have done all kinds of things -- worked for the State Department, worked for other government agencies, worked for Greenpeace or worked in journalism or worked or had very public messy divorces. None of them are me.

EXCEPTIONS FOR THE RULERS

Most of all, I criticized and exposed these people for never getting disciplined on the forums. Ulrika Zugzwang, among the founders of "socialism on one sim" in SL, copied my forum avatar and turned it into a bloody exploded head, and made that into her own forums avatar. Nothing could be done about it. It was "creativity" or "parody". But when I said Aimee Weber's name was "like" a cheerleader's name, one of those people who put little hearts as the dots above their "is," I was permabanned. These children, some of them directly related to the Lindens, were terribly thin-skinned! And still are. The nearly 20 years they've had to grow up hasn't helped one bit.

Today, when friends of the Lindens get to have their virtual wedding in a new community center in Fantasseria, when the BBB gets a 4096 and double prims for their RP game in Bellisseria, when certain businesses are touted in front page videos and blogs and others ignored, causing forums drama, I don't have to explain about the favouritism system at all. If only if were just a favouritism system! If only it didn't also involve selective Governance inaction, and even the enabling of griefing of dissidents who won't worship at the altar of the selected ones, and call out their grift. I think some of you have no idea what it's like to live in a world where you see the Lindens hanging out and partying with people who have constantly griefed you and crashed your sim. 

The other point is that I have never worked for the US government or any government as any kind of "agent" or staff person or analyst. I was a freelance translator and news writer as a contractor for RFE/RL, which is a US Congressionally-funded set of radio stations and web sites broadcasting abroad. It properly has "state media" as a label on Twitter. It was and is a tremendously valued resource. That it was funded by the CIA at its origins in the 1950s, and was closed in the 1970s when I was in junior high school as part of a general whistleblowing on CIA support of various US organizations, is irrelevant to my career today or even 30 years ago. When you work for these kinds of agencies, or Russian state TV as a translator, which I did for a time at a NYC TV station, it doesn't mean you are a government agent. And most of my jobs have been for non-profit organizations, and this is all a matter of public record. I'm not suffering from some kind of angst or nostalgia from "my days as a Soviet analyst" because a) this isn't the kind of job I had -- journalism isn't government analysis -- and because I've always had jobs up to the present related to the post-Soviet space, which of course, has many features that grew out of the Soviet Union.

I wish more of these kids would study the history of the Comintern to understand the origins and methods of their beloved Anti-Fa movement as well.

Weatherwax, who is evidently a failed creator who left SL for a time and now has re-spawned as a live musician, falsely denounced the makers of gatchas as greedy grifters. He got static not only from me, who will be the elephant who never forgets on this one, and partially beat a retreat, and remains a non-entity.

 

THREAD ON VIRTUALVERSE ONE

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Da5id Weatherwax

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• #1

I'd escaped for so many years.. but the gacha discussion on the official forums finally got Prok to target me.

Epic meltdown when I laughed at her instead of rising to the bait, earned her a 5-day ban.

Now the dumbass is seeking out places where I've played music in the past and ranting at the venue owners on twitter and other platforms.

I guess my ridicule struck a little snowflake-nerve?

le sigh....

 

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Sid

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• #2

Forums can be risky business.

 

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bubblesort

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• #3

Prok? Now there's a name I haven't heard in a long time.

I think trolling Prok into a meltdown is a rite of passage in SL. Most of the time you never hear of Prok, but when you do run into her, even if you aren't naturally a troll, it's just too hard to resist messing with her a bit. She just brings out the inner troll in regular people.

Don't worry about the clubs, David. Nobody will take her seriously at those venues. Every time I've seen you, you've put on a great show. No club owner who knows what they're doing will ditch a performer like you over Prok's weird drama. If they do, just tell the FIC about it, that'll show em! LOL

 

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Gear

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• #4

It astounds me that someone can still be around after all these years, and still be just as insufferable.

 

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GoblinCampFollower

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• #5

sounds like I'm blessed to not know who the hell this person is...

 

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CronoCloud Creeggan

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• #6

Da5id Weatherwax said:

I'd escaped for so many years.. but the gacha discussion on the official forums finally got Prok to target me.

Epic meltdown when I laughed at her instead of rising to the bait, earned her a 5-day ban.

I've been using Grumpy Cat "Good" quite often lately.

Gear said:

It astounds me that someone can still be around after all these years, and still be just as insufferable.

Prok is Prok, If I was running LL I'd have banned her from the forum AND the grid years ago....like 2006.

GoblinCampFollower said:

sounds like I'm blessed to not know who the hell this person is...

Prokofy Neva, Salome calls her the Crazy Cat Lady of SL. Hates anyone more successful or popular than her, calls them FIC. Also hates Linux users and MTF transfolk. Don't call her she, he uses a male avatar. I suspect Prok is a self-hating FTM. Prok is one of the few SL users I've WANTED to troll when I see her. Basically I'd call her Comrade and wave around a kitschy Soviet flag that plays the soviet anthem on Kazoo. Not that I've actually done it, I've just wanted to do it.

 

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Romana

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• #7

I only know about him indirectly, from forum stuff, but that's enough.
When I was land shopping once I noticed the plot next to the one I was looking at ease one of his.
I noped out of there.

 

Last edited: Aug 14, 2021

GoblinCampFollower

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• #8

CronoCloud Creeggan said:

...Also hates Linux users and MTF transfolk. Don't call her she, he uses a male avatar. I suspect Prok is a self-hating FTM.

ewwwwwwwwww, nothing I can't stand more than people in oppressed groups who think they should be a special exception to their own bigotry... Kind of like gay men who hate lesbians and feminists or immigrants who want to shut the door behind them.

 

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Romana

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• #9

GoblinCampFollower said:

ewwwwwwwwww, nothing I can't stand more than people in oppressed groups who think they should be a special exception to their own bigotry... Kind of like gay men who hate lesbians and feminists or immigrants who want to shut the door behind them.

Noted and edited. He may be a jerk, but I'm not OK with misgendering.
Da5id, what did you say that set him off? I couldn't find it. Was it one of the ones that Kristen Linden removed?

 

Sid

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• #10

Prok's posts cost an extra mouse wheel a year, only by scrolling by, when not on ignore.
Some of his posts do make sense.

 

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Spirits Rising

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• #11

Romana said:

Noted and edited. He may be a jerk, but I'm not OK with misgendering.
Da5id, what did you say that set him off? I couldn't find it. Was it one of the ones that Kristen Linden removed?

Until that one (Prok) directly states that they are - indeed - Trans, you are not misgendering whatsoever.

 

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Abigail Longmeadow

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• #12

I am amazed. I thought Prokofy left a long time ago. Maybe he just stopped posting on the forums. I see he is still a land-lord, running Ravenglass Rentals. It is not that easy to run a mainland rental, because you don't have the privacy and control of a private Second Life island.

 

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• #13

Do we honestly have a thread seriously discussing Prok? Is it 2007 again?

 

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Katheryne Helendale

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• #14

Da5id Weatherwax said:

I'd escaped for so many years.. but the gacha discussion on the official forums finally got Prok to target me.

Epic meltdown when I laughed at her instead of rising to the bait, earned her a 5-day ban.

Now the dumbass is seeking out places where I've played music in the past and ranting at the venue owners on twitter and other platforms.

I guess my ridicule struck a little snowflake-nerve?

le sigh....

Click to expand...

What's his Twitter handle? I feel like having some fun! 

 

Katheryne Helendale

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• #15

CronoCloud Creeggan said:

I've been using Grumpy Cat "Good" quite often lately.


Prok is Prok, If I was running LL I'd have banned her from the forum AND the grid years ago....like 2006.

Prokofy Neva, Salome calls her the Crazy Cat Lady of SL. Hates anyone more successful or popular than her, calls them FIC. Also hates Linux users and MTF transfolk. Don't call her she, he uses a male avatar. I suspect Prok is a self-hating FTM. Prok is one of the few SL users I've WANTED to troll when I see her. Basically I'd call her Comrade and wave around a kitschy Soviet flag that plays the soviet anthem on Kazoo. Not that I've actually done it, I've just wanted to do it.

Click to expand...

He's not unique to SL. He got his start in the TSO community, pretty much alienating everyone even then.

 

Essence Lumin

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• #16

He was banned from SLU. I don't know about VVO.

 

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Robert Jung

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• #17

The only time I've ever interacted with Prok, was on a walk around Mainland, led by Cubie. Prok didn't say much but was quite civil and quietly participated in the walk.

I didn't understand what was happening then , and I certainly have no more clue today, but it's always been one of my strongest memories , reminding me we can't always predict what will happen in SL.

 

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Noodles

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• #18

All my interest in with Prok was related to hanging around Woodbury before they got banned. I think Ingot mentioned on her blog once for some reason.

 

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Beebo Brink

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• #19

Essence Lumin said:

He was banned from SLU. I don't know about VVO.

He was banned from SLU, and because of that, Cris asked that we not discuss Prok in our forums since any discussion was one-sided. Aside from the occasional oblique reference, we pretty much held to that line.

 

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Sid

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• #20

Must all have taken place just before I joined SLU.
I only know him from the SL forums since a few months.

 

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  Free

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  Sid said:

  Must all have taken place just before I joined SLU.

  During one of your vacas. 

   

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  WolfEyes

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  • #22

  CronoCloud Creeggan said:

  

  
  
  I've been using Grumpy Cat "Good" quite often lately.
  
  
  Prok is Prok, If I was running LL I'd have banned her from the forum AND the grid years ago....like 2006.
  
  Prokofy Neva, Salome calls her the Crazy Cat Lady of SL. Hates anyone more successful or popular than her, calls them FIC. Also hates Linux users and MTF transfolk. Don't call her she, he uses a male avatar. I suspect Prok is a self-hating FTM. Prok is one of the few SL users I've WANTED to troll when I see her. Basically I'd call her Comrade and wave around a kitschy Soviet flag that plays the soviet anthem on Kazoo. Not that I've actually done it, I've just wanted to do it.

  Click to expand...

  First time I ever met Prok she was not on the Prok account. She was on her Elizabeth account (I have forgotten the last name) so she has always been she to me because I knew she was female she presented as female before I ever knew about the Prok account. The one time she tried to claim I was deliberately misgendering her Prok avatar, I told her how I met her. She shut the fuck up but only after trying to turn the tables on me which only got her laughed at because none of what she said had even an inkling of truth to it.
  
  Personally, I think the US government should deport her to Russia. Let her talk shit then.

   

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  WolfEyes

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  Spirits Rising said:

  Until that one (Prok) directly states that they are - indeed - Trans, you are not misgendering whatsoever.

  Something she has never done and I doubt ever will do because she isn't trans. She's what she tries to say everyone else is, communist. 

   

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  WolfEyes

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  • #24

  Free said:

  Do we honestly have a thread seriously discussing Prok? Is it 2007 again?

  Well... Cris did unban her for a while on SLU before the move to VVO and as far as I know Cris did state she is not banned here early on. I 've always assumed she just never knew or never bothered knowing she'd just get herself banned yet again, all while blaming it all on everyone else.
  
  There seem to be quite a few people in SL with some severe mental issues that I have encountered in the past year or two where I had never encountered them before. Fortunately, I haven't really had to deal with any of them on the grid. I just get to watch the meltdowns on other platforms. Some of it is really sad, some is too funny for words, and some is just down right insane.
  
  It's always best to keep your distance. At least until you can reasonably ascertain someone isn't going to stalk you to the ends of the earth and make your RL a living hell.

   

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  Sid

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  • #25

  Trying to win the Internet is seldom worth the effort.

   

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  WolfEyes

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  • #26

  Sid said:

  Trying to win the Internet is seldom worth the effort.

  

   

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  Noodles

  At least I tried to try.

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  • #27

  Sid said:

  Trying to win the Internet is seldom worth the effort.

  Congratulations, Sir and/or Madame! You have won the Internet

  Dear Sir and/or Madame, This website was created to notify you that you have officially Won the Internet.

  you-win-the-internet.com

   

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  Spirits Rising

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  • #28

  Honestly ....
  

  WolfEyes said:

  Well... Cris did unban her for a while on SLU before the move to VVO and as far as I know Cris did state she is not banned here early on. I 've always assumed she just never knew or never bothered knowing she'd just get herself banned yet again, all while blaming it all on everyone else.
  
  There seem to be quite a few people in SL with some severe mental issues that I have encountered in the past year or two where I had never encountered them before. Fortunately, I haven't really had to deal with any of them on the grid. I just get to watch the meltdowns on other platforms. Some of it is really sad, some is too funny for words, and some is just down right insane.
  
  It's always best to keep your distance. At least until you can reasonably ascertain someone isn't going to stalk you to the ends of the earth and make your RL a living hell.

  Making matters "worse" is attempting to be "the bigger person" .... Especially with people like that.
  
  Not worth the effort as such people will go out of their way to work trashing those they believe have wronged them into the most obscure and absurd things ....

   

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  Sid

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  • #29

  WolfEyes said:

  

  Click to expand...

  

   

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  Ayesha

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  • #30

  I met Prok briefly IRL at a Second Life convention about 10 years ago. While I realize you can't assume gender by appearance, they did not dress/present as male at all. I would still address their avatar as male since that is how they are choosing to live in SL, but I saw no evidence of them being a trans man in RL. Maybe they are angry at the world because they never transitioned but wanted to... a lot of their behavior seems like it's rooted in deep self-hatred.
  
  SL attracts some messed-up people, but it also helps people find the courage to live their truth. For every bitter person like Prok with unresolved gender issues, there are another 10 who use SL as a place to explore gender and eventually come out in the real world as their authentic self. SL is what you make of it.

   

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  Fionalein

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  • #31

  CronoCloud Creeggan said:

  Prokofy Neva, Salome calls her the Crazy Cat Lady of SL.

  Prok definatelly is a dog person...

   

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  Romana

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  • #32

  Fionalein said:

  Prok definatelly is a dog person...

  I think they'd scare my dog. Or any of his buddies, even the pit bull mix (who, like most of them, is really a big mush anyway).
  Dogs can sense when someone's off. That individual is way off.

   

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  Monica Dream

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  • #33

  WolfEyes said:

  Something she has never done and I doubt ever will do because she isn't trans. She's what she tries to say everyone else is, communist. 

  She has said that her avatar is trans -so make of that what you will ...

   

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  Free

  Real life NFT

  VVO Supporter 🍦🎈👾❤

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  • #34

  Monica Dream said:

  She has said that her avatar is trans -so make of that what you will ...

  Definitely not like the guy's avatar who is doing hard time.

   

  

  Noodles

  At least I tried to try.

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  • #35

  Free said:

  Definitely not like the guy's avatar who is doing hard time.

  Huh, have not seen that but Its kind of amusing it mentioned SL.
  
  Also, you can totally do Prison role play with timers and junk in SL.

   

  

  Bartholomew Gallacher

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  • #36

  Prok, an ancient relic of the long begone USSR, which should be exhibited in some museum as endangered species? Well yup, old dinosaurs never change their ways. So it was to be expected.

   

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  Monica Dream

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  • #37

  Bartholomew Gallacher said:

  Prok, an ancient relic of the long begone USSR,

  Last thing I expected when I opened vv1 over coffee this morning was to read Prok getting called a tanky
  

   

  

   

  

  Fionalein

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  • #38

  Just wondering... can't we just return to the good old tradition of declaring them an anathema? Not just Prok, all of them troublemakers. What makes us bring them up again and again? This can't be healthy...

   

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  Free

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  • #39

  Fionalein said:

  What makes us bring them up again and again? This can't be healthy...

  I'm now keeping track of the number of times you post to this thread.

   

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  Fionalein

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  • #40

  Free said:

  I'm now keeping track of the number of times you post to this thread.

  Make it so!

  It had to happen sooner or later....

  •  Thread starterDa5id Weatherwax 
  •  Start dateAug 13, 2021

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  bubblesort

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  • #41

  Monica Dream said:

  Last thing I expected when I opened vv1 over coffee this morning was to read Prok getting called a tanky
  

   

  

  Click to expand...

  Rumor has it, she used to be a Russian analyst for America, during the cold war, and that's how she went crazy and started calling everybody commies. I don't buy it, but that's the story. I have known quite a few serious cold warriors, way more serious than any analyst, and none of them act like that.

   

  

  Monica Dream

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  • #42

  bubblesort said:

  Rumor has it, she used to be a Russian analyst for America, during the cold war, and that's how she went crazy and started calling everybody commies. I don't buy it, but that's the story. I have known quite a few serious cold warriors, way more serious than any analyst, and none of them act like that.

  I know enough to say she's as far from a tanky or even someone tolerant of communism as one can get!

   

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  Madi Perth

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  • #43

  Prokofy Neva. Wow, I thought he left SL years ago. I'm going to use the he pronoun here just because when I met him so many years ago I thought it was a male avatar. This avatar has never had any interaction with Prokofy, I think he hates kids. I remember my alt and her husband renting a small parcel off the dam from him. A few days later someone came by and put up a very unfaltering 3d image of him at our place. It was full perm so I grabbed a copy before he came an picked them all up. He came through grabbing them and didn't even bother to say "hi" or even be civil to us.
  
  Other than that, no real interaction just reading some post in some forums and getting the idea that he was a few fries short of a happy meal.

   

  

  Beebo Brink

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  • #44

  An entire thread devoted to discussing -- and mostly criticizing -- a person not even on this forum is really not a good idea. I can understand an offhand comment here or there, but this has gone way beyond that now.

   

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  Cristiano

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  • #45

  I agree with Beebo - I am going to close this thread. I don't want said person summoned like Beetlejuice.

   

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How to Combat Copybot -- And It's Not What You Think

By Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor

Yes, you can combat Copybot, although not in the ways you imagine, and the knowier-than-though geeksplainer -- Contraption's scripter -- on this subject actually don't have it all right, either. Particularly outrageous is the idea that his notion of "best practices" that he's pulled out of his posse's trading-post culture will work. I'll light a prayer candle to St. Jude, thank you, Patron Saint of Lost Causes. PS The notion that you could combat Copybot in 2006 because the viewer was closed leaves out the part about how it was crowbarred open by libsl reverse-engineering it, leading to Copybot in the first place.

If you find it hard to read anything longer than a tweet or a short thread or anything bigger than your hand, it's unlikely that this text will help you to understand the all-important SOCIAL history of Copybot and how it was fought, but then, it was always beyond your ken, anyway.

The Copybot of 2006 copied prims and sculpties; mesh didn't exist yet. The mechanism for this function wasn't the same as the function of today's Copybot which copies mesh. It doesn't matter. The nature of the mechanism is not the issue.

Top content kings like the people of Contraption can't really imagine what it is like living in the lower depths of the SL economy and the "long tail," as much as Walton styles himself as a helper of the little guy, and his arrogant scripter -- who thinks he can substitute his imagined best practice as law when code-as-law fails him (!) -- likely can't imagine what it is like trying to make a living in SL as one of the "people with no talent," either. I can, and I can only watch as my tenants and others do this; I never quit that day job. I'd advise them not to do so, either.

When the Copybot of 2006 happened, there was first an interesting series of events that the biased account from Glyn Moody, himself a copyleftist and extremist on these issues (although compelled to be more measured when filing copy for certain more mainstream tech magazines) only partially reports the story of the wielders of Copybot.

libsl was a group in SL of reverse engineers, or as those of us trying to run small businesses or live our little second lives called them, perverse engineers. They reverse-engineered the viewer not because they altruistically wanted to find bugs and help their beloved Lindens as fanboyz, although there was some of that, but because they wanted to terrorize anyone who didn't want to use Second Life -- or the Internet in general -- as they believed it should be used in their radically fanatic software cult. They particularly hated people who wanted to use SL for commerce, in virtuality or reality; to use it for religious meetings or self-help meetings or education; to use it even for a critical discussion group on the nature of SL itself. They griefed and harassed and destroyed all these activities mercilessly in the way Something Awful, WHat, 4chan, Voter5, etc. do in the Internet at large, often accompanied by outrageous racist, sexist, homophobic, antisemitic, obscene, and grotesque textures spewed as particle spam across sims. I doubt Walton Wainright ever had to spend days on end getting !@#!@#$!$@ textures rapidly spewed into his inbox so he couldn't even log on by the same people who created the Phoenix, then Emerald, then Firefox viewers. (Yes, I'm aware that history is erased, and the current devs think all these projects are separate).

So first, in a staged operation, knowing that my blog was among the most popular at the time with high traffic (hardly the case today, 16 years later), they sent a script kitty to tell me lurid tales of a new invention that could completely and instantly copy avatars, their clothing, and attachments -- and proceeded to do so before my eyes. I think even Walton, with his identically-dressed adoring fans arrayed around him in one of his tableaux, might be shocked to suddenly see 100 identical versions of himself overpopulating and then crashing a sim. I was deliberately told this was a project of a then-popular consulting agency, one of the "Big Six" of the day (none of which exist anymore), the Electric Sheep, and that they needed to copy avatars in full for a RL client who with a clothing store. Later, this was corrected to say only one of their number had a client who wanted to put on a rock show on shards, with identical band players and dancers on every shard (sim); still later this was amended to merely some staff who crossed over to membership in libsl as well prototyping and bug-testing.  As a journalist, I got at least three sources; at least two were in libsl; another was a known griefer with relevant information; two I met in RL; a fourth had to be discounted once he told me he had been deliberately paid to misinform me. Sadly, completely separately, one died in a car accident in RL.

A lot of money was at stake in those days when the likes of IBM, CBS, Coca-Cola, Sears, etc. all came into SL, all bought sims, all hired the top designers -- something I complained about to the NYT in that era because the world was dealt a severe blow from which it never recovered. SL became not a world, but a platform; the talented people who bootstrapped themselves to livelihoods and made money for themselves and the Lindens were stepped on, hard. Only a select few of them -- and as in RL, not necessarily the most talented, but the most connected -- were hired by the RL companies, who sucked them away from the world, leaving it the worse. And it wasn't an accident that this happened because a consultant for big-name clients was cynical about the world and -- as the expression generated at the time had it -- indifferent to the suffering of "little dressmakers".

It's hard to convey to cynical and literalist programmers or designers with their nose in blender and convos in Discord who rarely touch the earth of the Mainland what a shock and horror this was at the time. Most life still occurred on the Mainland, where everything from griefing to grey goo to rumours to fashions rippled quickly across the contiguous simulators unchecked.

When griefers deliberately came in and started copying entire people's avatars and outfits inworld, it spread panic and fear and hatred -- but in fact, the cohort exactly like the griefers (and intermixed with them) -- graphic designers who were also technical experts and in some cases programmers and scripters -- quickly organized to combat this menace. The first thing that an organized group of merchants did was organize a strike of sorts. They locked down all their stores, refused to sell anything, and put up CLOSED DUE TO COPYBOT signs, and assembled for visible demonstrations at the telehubs and welcome areas.

At that time I didn't make anything myself, but in solidarity with all the merchants in my multiple malls, I enabled "no access" on groups (something I never do in my rentals), so that no one could enter the stores (I had more of them then because commerce took place in them in ways it doesn't know, since the advent of the MP and the large shopping events). Many creators began using what they thought was an effective antidote, a spam script that sent a string of text that ended in "quit!" -- which was supposed to force the Copybot to stop. It didn't work much of the time.

The strike grew and people began to complain vocally to the Lindens and the crisis was covered in the blogs and Alphaville Herald, the top resident online newspaper of the day. It was a smaller world, and the Lindens didn't adopt the pose they often did with certain exigencies in the world -- for example, saying they "couldn't" deprecate the bounce script used by Psy and other security merchants to teleport people home merely for flying near somebody's private home -- because they "needed it for elevators" -- of which there were about...two...in SL at the time. (In fact, remarkably, first Philip Linden conceded that the obnoxious script should be deprecated when he saw its effects; then his own staff rolled him because as I've often commented, the Lindens never met a script they didn't like (they love scripting creativity) and because the top resident forums and photo site, beloved also by Lindens of that era, were funded by the maker of the bounce script.

The Lindens, like Walton's literalist scripter sent out to make more public pronouncements today, even disagreeing with Walton's concession about some uses for these scripts, could have held town halls and workshops patiently explaining to their user base -- their beta testers and early adapters who had handed over thousands of dollars to them for sims and content, from which they took a percentage in LindEx sales by that time -- that nothing could be done. On the Internet, not only nobody knows you're a dog; dogs can copy your stuff because if you can see it, you can copy it (a phenomenon known then as "the analog hole"). Of course not only could anyone screenshot a texture and copy it; more relevantly, they could use a device like Copybot on a rogue viewer (this was the dawn of third-party viewers and they had not been accepted yet by LL which did not formally open source its viewer until January 2007) simply to copy quickly an entire avatar, and entire house, an entire vehicle - oh, except the scripts. The scripts, if they were on no-mod and no-transfer, could not be copied because they were server-side. This gave scripters a corporate advantage over other kinds of creators which continues to give them an arrogance all out of proportion to their actual social value.

PEVERSE ENGINEERS

So what did the Lindens do to combat Copybot? Obviously they had a number of urgent -- and private -- talks with libsl, which their COO, Cory Ondrejka -- had encouraged privately and even publicly at various SL and RL meet-ups, to the chagrin of some of us who felt that reverse-engineering of the viewer -- technically banned under the TOS -- shouldn't be something that a few special friends of the Lindens get to do, who -- like Eddie Haskell on Leave It to Beaver -- say "Gee, Mrs. Linden, such a lovely dress!" as they stick out a foot to trip us up and make us fall and crash our sims.

If you think griefing is just a lark, if you think you solve it by ban tools or closed groups or closing your island, I think you have no idea what it is like to be endlessly targeted by people who can circumvent those tools. I do. And when you read the comments of the word-salad chefs, you realize the chief feature about them: they lie.

Many people think that you shouldn't give trolls air time; that you shouldn't publicize griefing because it only encourages them; I don't, as a person relentlessly griefed for my outspoken criticism of the tech bro class and as a person who had changed my gender in SL, I knew that as in RL, you had to publicize abuses or they only grew worse. You had to document them, take names, file abuse reports, publicize them, and while it took awhile, justice would eventually prevail. And it did.

The Lindens decided to declare that Copybot was illegal. It wasn't just a fun sandbox tool to do "debugging"; it wasn't just something that people who took themselves too seriously should "get over"; if it didn't affect all the economy (weapons makers always do well in any season), it was still very wrong and threatened the Lindens' bottom line. They understood that, even if the hackers didn't -- and still don't.

And libsl, which included some people who either worked in RL tech jobs or who worked as consultant to big companies in SL realized that they looked bad if they seemed to be destroying the world and ruining its capacity for creativity and commerce.

So the first thing that happened, and likely at the Lindens' prompting, is that John Hurliman (eddie Stryker in SL), stepped down from the head of libsl. If you still have doubts that he was the engineer of Copybot, do some Googling, it's not a secret. Like some politicians leave to "spend time with their families," Hurliman said "all he wanted to do was code" and didn't want the "drama".

That the drama was inspired by griefers who used his took as intended and not "not as intended" wasn't admitted, although every script kiddie and WHat loser in SL grabbed it to harass people and actually steal and flip content. "Business in a box" appeared all over with hot property and the fences, if banned, merely retrieved the copies from the group notices or sandboxes where their friends hung out, some of whom were always careful to keep their hands clean to help perpetuate the gangs' activities.

"WHERE'S DAD?"

I once went to a tech conference in San Diego where one evening a group of us had an intensive and interesting conversation with famed game designer Raph Koster, in which we tried to get him to appreciate not-a-game SL, and he laid out his plan for making a better open-ended game world (which he did do and ran for awhile before it folded and he did many other things). There was a shy, overweight young man -- a teenager -- sitting on the edge of the group, never talking. Finally, as people began to drift away, he came up to me and introduced himself as the griefer who had shown me copybot. It turned out that he literally lived in his mom's basement. I didn't ask "Where's Dad." He did some sort of work and paid her part of the rent. He acknowledged his griefing escapades.

"Why?" I asked. 

"Because the Internet poisoned my soul," he said -- sincerely.

Of course, now our entire society lives with this poisoning, that still might have been stopped 20 years ago, but that's a topic for another blog post.

THE FIRST RULE OF FIGHT CLUB...

The next thing that libsl did -- again, not as a coded, mechanical activity but a social, organic activity, if you will, was to make a rule for their club. Only core devs could be in their group. If someone wasn't a core dev -- and presumably peer-reviewed in some sense or kept honest by those who wished to be decent and not steal from others -- they couldn't be in the group. 

Now, we totally get it that this hardly stopped the proliferation of the code called "Copybot," which sits on github or whatever to this day. We're not stupid. But these two actions -- changing the head of the group, and cleaning up the membership -- went a long way to restoring faith in the group (of course, not by me, who had personally and severely and repeatedly been griefed by these criminals).

When the Lindens declared Copybot "illegal," of course they couldn't catch every log-on. Whatever hashmarks or identifying features of IP addresses there were could be easily undone by anonymizing or by the Lindens' agnosticism -- if someone logged on from a cornfield in Nebraska, whom we knew to be a griefer because they wrote obscenities on our blog and their IP addressed traced to that cornfield, the Lindens would claim that maybe it was a dorm or a house in which multiple people were logging on, and you couldn't punish all of them. The Lindens refused to block anonymizer addresses, saying that freedom fighters from Iran might be logging on (they showed perhaps 2-3 people, likely foreign journalists or government officials who managed to log on at that time). Corner cases, thy name is Linden.

The Lindens and their code-cave denizens have always been impossible to deal with for us norms, although they have become somewhat more civilized over the years as their staff is recruited not from the user base or "the Internet," but from companies like Microsoft, IBM. Amazon, etc. Today, Cory Ondrejika works at Meta heading up the mobile team; Hurliman runs his own robotics company. Creative! Geeks! They rule our world! Better Living Through Codistry!

TRIANGULATION

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the Lindens used other methods to stamp out Copybot. It wasn't rocket-science. The same people who used Copybot, with that invisible or anonymized log-on, were still in certain groups. They still had all those anime and Bronies etc fetishes. They were still in the same sandboxes or at the same Vore clubs. Even as the world got bigger, you could find them because they victory-danced, that is, they always bragged about their exploits in the IRC channel if not in group chat inworld, and someone with a conscience would eventually AR them. Or they would crash enough sims, and harass enough people even outside the group of me and my tenants, that finally the Lindens had to permaban them and seize their islands. They did this multiple times as they kept coming back on alts, with various Medicis bank-rolling their "transgressive behaviour". 

FIRESTORM IS EVERYWHERE

So fast forward to today. Yes, I live in 2022 quite solidly thank you, not in World War I in the steampunk era, actually. How could you combat Firestorm, which rules the world in more diverse and deep ways even than Casper, the Friendly Monopolist Vendor?

Look up all the groups they have in multiple languages, with multiple purposes, totally infiltrated throughout the entire user base even more than the Lindens who essentially gave up their non-English orientation work, once so robust that they even had offices in other countries.

When confronted by reporters like me, Oz Linden would claim the Lindens "couldn't know" what percentage of log-ons were from Firestorm because the same person might use both viewers. Or that dorm room in Nebraska in fact was really only one person with a bunch of alts. Why, IP addresses dynamically change. Blah blah.

Of course they really know and we all know that it is probably at least 90% or more of the population. Only newbies, critics like me, and a few animesh avatar creators who need to test on multiple viewers ever use the bog-standard SL viewer.

SAVING SEARCH AND SHOPPERS

One of the chief reasons is that Oz and company killed search back at the dawn of 2.0 in about 2012, and continued to cripple it especially in the last two years. Meanwhile, Firestorm kept it as it was in 1.23, imagine that, these "people who live in 2022" who are "not stuck back in the dark ages with Copybot I" kept an old viewer's search arrangement because it was better, and helped shoppers more, and that made our economy. If they hadn't existed, you'd have to invent them to save the world, as the Lindens acquired a religious fervour about their mangled search that we can only explain by some curious internal development like the way they ruined their auctions by buying the ebay guy's auction software instead of using the original inhouse version they had, which was better as it showed who had bid, how much, and who won, and kept a record. Now all of that is missing, and even the winning bid disappears after a week (which is why I try to save some of them at the castle in Sylvia).

The huge debacle caused by the Phoenix-Emerald-Firefox DDoS attack, for which Fractured Crstyal is blamed (but for my bird, Lonely Bluebird was always the more sinister gangster; Fractured was just a teenager) also got the Lindens to finally clean up the third-party viewer mess.

The Firefox team of today some of whom remain from that era constantly tell you that these different versions of the viewer are separate, that you can't speak of them collectively, but when Phoenix dies, and the next thing is named Firefox -- the fire from which the phoenix arises -- and that name still appears everywhere on their literature, you don't have to be Sherlock Holmes. 

Like policemen who try to solve old cases by pinning them on a newly-arrested crook, the devs try to put all the blame on Emerald and a few devs. But we've been to the sandboxes because we were griefed from them and we've watched all the victory-dances on the YouTubes where all the name tags were visible. So let's not be children here. 

Yes, that's my RL head in effigy, eating the Emerald logo on the eve of Emerald's banning. These children were obsessed with me merely because I AR'd them and publicized their antics to expose their endless lies and claims of innocent "debugging".

At any rate, the viewer was used to ensnare its unwitting users in a DDoS attack to make a point in some sandbox fight, and Pathfinder Linden (who plotted in the IRC channel to get me banned, another sensational story of the early years) scolded the boys that you just can't abuse your customers or web sites in that manner. Those directly responsible got permabanned; those who held the cloaks remained to victory dance.

WHO THREW WHOM?

Fast forward another half decade or more and there is only me to remember any of this, and all of it is utterly sanitized. The Lindens held very tense pow-wows with the Firestorm gang, and it's not clear who threw whom. Either party was capable of throwing the other and destroying the world to make a point, I suppose. Somehow they reached a deal. The Lindens insisted on a cooperation agreement, a kind of treaty. There was a list of demands the FS devs didn't want to meet.  Possibly they demanded RL names and locations that some of their griefers didn't want to yield. The Lindens muscled them and they finally knuckled as others before them. Telehub mall land barons anyone? VAT taxed?

Today, Firestorm continues to be used to Copybot. The Firestorm devs claim they can't stop it, as you can see from their routine answer to my routine question just to see if they still say the same thing.

Our software is opensource. There is nothing we can do to mitigate users modifying our code except to close source our code. And that is not possible without violating license agreements and user trust.

— The Firestorm Viewer (@PhoenixViewerSL) July 7, 2022

 

But taking a page from the 2006 book, if Copybot grew more extreme and widespread -- and I don't think it is at this time but we are always only one crisis way from the collapse of our little world -- the Lindens could, in theory, if the situation warranted:

o demand that Firestorm CEO Jessica Lyon step down, and another CEO be found who can better rein in their goons -- and goons are their best customers, and the "users modifying our code" because they can't control their crime;

o demand that the Firestorm team create a core dev group in which others are not invited and not cleared -- obviously that leaves those Self-Compilers of Firestorm and other free agents to do what they wish but at least there is some optical effort at quality control -- optics matter, as generations of Linden PR people will tell you;

o through social ostracizing, group expulsion, land bands, etc. the people who persist in developing Firestorm in non-transparent ways or using it for non-transparent and criminal purposes (Pantera says she knows the forums where they all hang out and has urged me to go tell them not to be bad anymore; to which I can only say "No, you" -- because it's YOUR viewer and YOU are responsible;

o if this doesn't work, block Firestorm from logging on to SL.

Now, would the Lindens do this?

I can only say: watch them.

The high-end creators who sneered and heckled and harassed the makers of gatchas -- some of the finest craftspeople in SL and head and shoulders above the elites simply as people in some cases -- imagine "it can never happen to them".

I'd invite you to think clearly about the Gatchapocalypse. No RL prosecutor or legal authority of any kind in the state of California -- where it matters, because the US is a republic with states' rights and the state law on gambling is what matters -- had indicated in any way, shape, or form that gatchas were in any kind of violation. The lawsuits about children and lootboxes which are a different in phenomenon in games which were launched against Google and Apple failed. They failed.

Instead of taking an adversarial or even just practical attitude toward these developments, the Lindens, under their new owners, who included a politically-connected Harvard-trained lawyer and former US Trade official, decided to pre-emptively remove gatchas to "limit liability for litigation". There was no litigation. You can't say "But Japan" in California even if you have Japanese customers.

If you think they can't do that regarding a widespread IP theft issue, especially as they bring in more and more RL companies as they did in the past, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. Or jump, the viewer will catch you!

LAW AS LAW

Then there's another factor that people in the UK and elsewhere may not fully grasp, even though their own EU is bringing big tech to its knees these days. Section 230, the safe haven for big tech against any claims regarding the content on their servers, is more than likely to be redacted or even abolished.

Again, if you think laws that have been around, oh, for even 50 years, I invite you to look at Roe v. Wade and remember that in our common law system which is NOT LIKE your civil law system in X country, the interpretation brought by Dobbs can undo a federal law completely, devolving it back to the states. And here we all are.

You don't know. The electricity could go off or a comet might hit the planet.

But more to the point, your notion that "Copybot can't be stopped because Copybot can't be stopped because Science" is not immune to organic law and organic politics.

If top creators draw their wagons around them and tell the little dressmakers to go file a DMCA, or even offer magnanimously to help them (um, that doesn't scale, you do realize, right?), maybe that buys them some time, but ultimately, if enough people get angry or simply discouraged, either they leave SL completely, as quite a few merchants have done since the gatcha ban and then the application of the US sales tax and the cashout expenses, or they get more and more desperate and angry over copying, and they fight back.

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

You can't know that they may fight back with inserting anti-rez scripts in their clothing just to piss you off and keep you from their RP sim, even though they know how it works.

You can't know that they might not decide to boycott Firestorm en masse. There's always Alchemy or Catnip.

Of course, the Lindens are in very, very deep with Firestorm. Listen to any of these office hours and you might be horrified. There are more Lindens than residents in these meetings -- the residents don't even feel they need to bother to come. The summaries are on Inara Pey's blog later. The Lindens nearly grovel to theSE Firestorm devs, thanking them for fixing this or that thinglet. The Lindens apologize profusely -- you would think that Firestorm was holding office hours, and Linden fanboyz were coming to symp them.

Now, why doesn't LL just buy Firestorm? That is, Firestorm isn't "for sale," being such an altruistic volunteer open source bunch.

Why doesn't LL just retire its own viewer and pronounce Firestorm as the official viewer? After all, they buy Windlight or various other services for voice, etc. Why not the viewer? Since they can't turn back from having open sourced it back in the day.

Because they can't accept the liability of Copybot and any other criminal use of the viewer.

If they insisted on packing the core dev group, perhaps they could clean it up.

And it's not like there aren't other models for doing just that out there, for whatever reason. Look at Overte. A fork of the High Fidelity software (from Philip's company) decided to go non-profit, rather than commercial. The commercial part has likely formerly Lindens/High Fidelity staff in it -- they refuse to name them, which is of course irresponsible, but then they're coders. 

What they are making, however, is a club. You have to be in the club if you want to be central to the development AND VOTE ON IT. (That touch was particularly nice; I presume they aren't going to just hum like the IEEE engineers, and unlike the JIRA, people will be able to vote "no" -- that's crucial).

Of course, when you hang a towel in the men's locker room in the gym, anyone can wipe their ass with it. And so the Overte people, like Firestorm "can't" control what happens to their open source wonder. And yet...and yet...they seem to have built an efficient hedge around it.

And yet...they are creating a cadre of responsibility around it which they have found necessary -- and we all know that it is vital for their to be TRUST in their world. Any open source world that doesn't have grown-ups and quality control in the form of at least a voluntary club of this nature ends up like Open Sim -- unpopulated. Let me suggest that they better make up their minds quick what their attitude is to IP theft. Open Sim failed there; so will they.

If you put permissions in your world, they have to be meaningful.

If the Copybot problem worsened, if Walton couldn't help all the little dressmakers, if the tide rose higher over people's heads, the Lindens might start taking actions. They might remove some of Firestorm's massive privileges, like all their access to newbies in their help islands, which of course brings them into their commerce circles.

Nothing is certain and everything is possible.

 

Who Rules

Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor

This was written in 2010 after some conferences on the Metaverse but not published for some reason.

Obama doesn't rule America, or senators or Supreme Court judges or your assemblyman or Dad. No, there are three types of people who rule America, and you would never know it -- if you didn't think about it a little.

One is exemplified by a kid with a name like Matt or Jeff -- I'll find it in a minute -- with an elaborate floral tatoo on his forearm, tall, with a shock of black hair and a friendly demeanor, who appears as a dinosaur-type creature, working as a mod in Webosaurus from the company Metaverse Mod Squad. Another is a cheerful, heavyset woman in glasses with intelligent brown eyes who is from Sony Online Entertainment, her name is Laralyn McWilliams, the Creative Director of Free Realms. And of course there's the lanky geek guy in the glasses with the boyish cowlick, owlish eyes, slightly receding chin, and and deadpan grin -- Will Wright, inventor of the Sims.

These are the types of people who really rule America, because they shape the hours an hours and HOURS of time online that your sons and daughters -- and YOU -- spend in their games or worlds. They are the game inventor or dev, the game manager or creative director, and the mod -- the person moderating the behaviour of the users. These three kinds of people have a powerful influence over the education of your offspring -- and your mindset, too! -- and they have way, way, WAY more influence over your thinking and your children's thinking and patterns of behaviour than family, school, or certainly church or club. It is their practices of governance -- best or worse, as we'll see - that determine how people see themselves as individuals and in groups, and see themselves as part of larger systems or civilizations, such as they are.

These three types of people -- and you've seen them all and known them all by various names -- really shape our real and our simulated lives, no question. They decide whether you can gank newbs with impunity because it will be allowed as "fun" (the practice known as "ganking" means to deliberately kill newbs or harass newbs in large numbers -- just because you can), or whether you will be punished for it. Whether you can swear or not swear. Whether you are processed along this incentivizing channel or that one. Whether you get one time-out or a three day ban for whatever is perceived as bad behaviour. Whether you are encouraged to report on your neighbour surreptitiously about what you think he is doing bad -- or not. Whether you have fun, or are miserable, but addicted. Every facet of your game or world experience is controlled by these people's notions of governance, and yet they have little training, awareness or conceptualization of real-life governance (they aren't politicians or political scientists or business managers). They are rulers online in the virtual worlds, and they rule with an iron hand, usually assisted by code-as-law, but also a playbook of what they feel are "best practices" outlining how game publishers should treat their players, and what kind of beings those players must become to fit into the worlds they make.

Will Wright doesn't think, like your church or your Dad, whether it's a good thing or a bad thing if a mafia forms to bully others, or whether a marriage breaks up online over the Sim capacity for stepping out on your real mate. It's not really his problem. It's emergent gameplay, and while he might personally feel a bit rueful about it, it's not something he *works at* changing *as a game function*. If he did -- he'd be the first to tell you! -- the game wouldn't be fun. Platforms, pixels, code, mechanics, blowing stuff up -- that's all just a lot more interesting to him than morality, which isn't necessarily a reproach, just a report.

Laralyn McWilliams, who gave the most absolute best workshop I have ever heard in my life on governance (and that includes a lot of UN and OSCE workshops lol) -- every single game god should take her hour-long course -- likely doesn't think terribly deeply whether her system is sufficiently liberal and democratic. She can't; she has a world to run -- it has horrible exigencies that few of us mortals truly appreciate. And the Webosaurus guy, as he interacts with kids 10 years his junior, trying to round them up to pursue more positive activities than just huddling and gossiping and possibly sexting, which obviously isn't allowed, doesn't ponder heavily whether he is part of a collectivizing experiment that might have a down side. Moderating is just what you *do* in worlds. You *need* mods. Everyone *expects* mods. Mods are inherent. You could have a world without mods. Mods need to mod. Otherwise, you'd get Lord of the Flies. Right?

The Guild in Second Life

Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor

The Governors of the Guild of St. Luke, Haarlem, 1675 Painting by Jan de Bray 

Meanwhile, there is an entire drama off stage from Walton's small but stratospheric world. And that is the anguish of people selling full perm models who increasingly find that their customers sell their packs "as is," or use them as gifts or hunt prizes, and barely change them, violating their TOS. That sort of TOS held better when the world was smaller and made up more of conscientious designers respecting each other's IP -- and customers in a loyal fan base in groups who helped police their beloved creator's TOS. That era is long gone, really, as much as some people try to keep it alive with endless browbeating in groups. People have left and are still leaving -- Gatchapocalypse forced them out, a problem Walton Wainright doesn't feel as he is selling his fatpacks for $5000 now and they were never his bread and butter. I never recall Walton commenting at all on the vicious debates about gatchas -- I'm sure he feels he is above the fray. Then the sales tax, which Europeans can only shrug at, as they suffered it 10 years ago, welcome to the club -- and the cash-out fees, and -- can you imagine? During SLB19? During Shop 'n Hop? When people buy Linden dollars? $222 million Lindens parked at 241 and not budging for days -- weeks -- on end.

I hope Wally doesn't think the creators who made many amazing gatcha items for years in SL were somehow charlatans and incompetents who couldn't make a living without ripping off the public, but he might well think that (although he would likely not speak of it in public; I'm beginning to see how his sub-tweets work). I think if he, living in the rich West, went and looked in the eyes those people in Eastern Europe, Russia, Asia, and Latin America who made a living this way, he couldn't possibly say that to them -- and their work spoke for itself. The world of gatchas isn't entirely gone, but there are two other areas of the economy that have more attention now, art works (about which I will write later) and full perm models. Where once they were invisible in the events -- no need to call attention to something more people might steal, better to stay within the guild! -- now they have multiple fairs just for full perm models and textures.

FULL PERM MESH MODEL CREATORS ISSUE MORE RESTRICTIVE TOS

At least two top sellers of full perm models recently changed their TOS to a more restrictive one in the last few months due to rampant misuse -- I know because I'm in their groups and I frequently buy from them. Others I see on the MP have followed suit.

They changed the TOS to compel makers to only sell their items for a specific price or higher, and never give them away, or only use them on a limited basis in hunts, and only if they significantly changed the item or incorporated it into a more complex creation.

Obviously, it's very, very hard to police people on what amounts to the honour system of abiding by a TOS. LL does not get involved in resident-to-resident disputes. This set of creators and more pointedly their customers, most of them far from Walton's world, where the events won't allow creators who use models (the customers of these merchants), are really hurting these days. Their business is down, the demands of their customers have increased as more and more people become desperate to try to find a way to make and sell things to cover SL expenses, now that gatchas are nearly depleted as a resource (NextUp and so on simply can't fill the gap).

Some of the FP merchants have more and more turned to selling no-transfer items themselves at large shopping events so that they can compete with the big dogs who scorn this sector even if they might acknowledge the skill of those who make mesh models. A few of the big dogs use the models themselves, imagine, but through building and starring in the posse, they gain respect that others will never obtain -- they are locked out of events that demand participants only sell original mesh.

So in the world of model makers and their customers, creators don't worry about Copybot so much, which is kind of an abstraction -- and Copybotters are not going to waste time ripping a 30L Saturday flowerpot they can't re-sell for hardly anything. Rippers want to get the top clothes, vehicles, gatcha rares, because you can sell them for the most money. Did you ever hear of somebody ripping a lawn chair or a skybox?

You wouldn't have to take the risk to deploy Copybot in the world; you'd only have to befriend a customer of an FP store.

NOT COPYBOT, BUT THE CUSTOMER IS THE ENEMY

FP makers worry about their own customers who steal from them by giving all their full perm items away to their friends and alts, or who merely retexture something to re-sell it and thus essentially take away the business of those full perm model makers. Maybe such model makers are doomed to have to go out of business in the Metaverse, I'm not sure. But of course they are the only way that the untalented and amateurs like me have a way to become creative. Of course, what the top class of merchants want us to do is be gawkers and buyers and shut up.

Over and over again, Philip Linden promised "a watermark" to protect copyright. This evidently wasn't practical or doable but more to the point, the Lindens weren't motivated to care about it. There are the top creators that sell the most and are the most popular. Those people can arrange DMCA takedowns if they want. Why bother with the rest -- the rest who used to be called "the long tail" in a positive way -- a term you never hear anymore?

THE GUILD AND THE RENFAIRE

I think this will end with a guild system, where the Lindens, fed up with drama and protests against them and rampant ripping and Copybot all over town, will say to creators: register with us, give us a driver's license or passport and a form of payment, fill out a form here in triplicate, and wait 21 business days...or 45...or never, as it is at our discretion...and you, too, can sell on the MP where the search works, and don't bother with inworld, where the search doesn't work. Other worlds worked like this -- such as There and IMVU. It's not the norm to have user content scattered throughout the world-- game devs and world platform providers hate it. It means ugliness in the world, and endless trouble. Gamerz endlessly rant on the SL forums about how this engine or that engine is better and SL is on life support. But World of Warcraft doesn't have user content in it. Roblox has ways to make separate games or mods or something, but it's not a world where you can make and sell user content. You can't even get married in Roblox. Sure, a world can look good when the content is all absolutely uniform. Been to Bellisseria lately?

The beauty of SL is that it never had this oppressive and exclusive guild system, that it enables people like my tenants to take a kitty they bred and put it to sale; to take a box they turned into a table and put it to sale; to re-sell a gatcha; to even make clothes that at least their friends in their circle will buy.

There is a cohort of creators in SL nobody has heard of. They are never in the top Seraphim events. They aren't even at Mieville fairs and hunts, which is far more tolerant of the amateur and the mesh-model user. They live in the hinterlands and have breedable auctions far from anyone's event list. They have little stores with funny or cute or innovative items. They aren't the new designers that Walton picks out of the line-up and takes under his wing. He will never see them.

I'm amazed when I find a store with someone making things out of mesh out in the boondocks, and no one has heard of them -- they can't break into the posses of the top 200, the Shop 'n Hop cartel, the ones the Lindens feature in all their videos on the blog. That doesn't bother me or them as long as they are free to thrive and aren't broken by heavy tier, taxation, and theft. It was always my assumption that if you could make a beautiful and realistic-looking mesh item, that you would have the talent to get noticed and be accepted into the merchants' events. Not so.

THE EVENTS RACKET

As the critics of this secretive and exploitative system point out that it's not an open system. It's not a matter of merely paying the steep fees - they start at 2500 but I hear they can be double or triple that amount. I've only seen one event, probably because the organizers were getting desperate, where rental boxes were put in the booths so anyone could pay them and put in their wares. Most events have an exclusive list of designers they cull themselves and the creation of strict rules to filter out the incompetent or unqualified.

One of the mysteries of SL is when a totally unknown person, with a new profile or maybe one only a year or two old, springs full-blown into a top event. How do they get in? Are they alts? Do they just apply? Do they work the networks and go to the right parties? Some of these people appear and disappear astoundingly fast, like comets. They have stores sparsely filled, after selling a lot of expensive fancy furniture. Then they go dark. I guess some people like to experiment with other names and looks? Or perhaps they genuinely are new people, but they can't take the heat and get out of the kitchen.

OPEN MARKETS

I could point out that the way Anshe Chung broke the back of the oldbie Guild -- the Feted Inner Core or FIC as I called them -- that seized hold of SL in the early days -- early adapters, Charter members with free 4096s, strung together on alts into entire sims, designers and scripters with stores in the boondocks where they sometimes let a newbie with seeming talent have a little corner table in their store -- was by creating malls with rental boxes anyone could pay. The prices were high, but if you paid them, you could put out your wares and get more eyeballs and more traffic than those boutiques in the boondocks on the early colour sims. This made them furious, and sparked their campaign to get rid of telehubs, where Anshe and others clustered their malls.

CLOSED STALLS

So I've been in four merchant events, two of which were featured on Seraphim -- which is a massively popular and high-trafficked site whose editors select only designers and events they think fit. Each of these events involves event managers endlessly nagging the designers and trying to get them to show up on time, put out their stuff, and not violate rules meant to tame lag. There is always drama about bloggers taking free packs and not blogging. There is always someone who has a fight about some placement of their booth which they think is disadvantageous.

It is so unpleasant being in these groups listening to this haranguing in the group all day, when you have already followed the rules and done what they asked. The wrangling, not to mention the steep fees, was enough to make me leave one event; another event folded because they got tired of chasing all these divas to accomplish the goal of helping them sell their wares. I have great respect for the people of Mieville, who keep cheerfully putting on events, with great hardship since their Mayor is out on sick leave, and herding the cats that make up that delightful place.

They can't get on Seraphim's feed, however -- the portals to virtual prosperity are jealously guarded. You don't pay to be on the feed; but you have to be accepted by the Guild. They do get on the Lindens' Destinations, however, which helps.

MAKE A VIP GROUP?

My proposal to the Full Perm creators is that they create a category of VIP customer who pays more to be an exclusive group where the members are allowed to use the models in creations that are given away for free at hunts or as group gifts. The problem is that creators who put in their TOS a demand to sell items using their models only for X price (usually more than what the model cost) are merely reducing their customer list needlessly. I personally back away from such creators now unless they have something that seems "must have" for some little egg I'm making.

If they had a VIP group that I paid $500 or $750 to join that would then allow me to use the items in quests, that would bring me back. When I had to gather up 3 gifts for SLB19, I realized that the freebie requirement would kick in with some of these makers, so I culled out anything from any of them from my items, replacing them with others, and if that wasn't possible, discarding that item from consideration. 

Some model makers say they only mean they don't want you to give their pack "as is" as the freebie, even if on no-transfer. But most make it very explicit that you must not use their item in creations given away even with no-transfer, and that they must be sold for X price. This is because of the flood of abuses. I myself have seen how even top creators casually send me a full-perm item they've used in their creation, thinking it doesn't matter if they've paid sometimes a high price for that thing.

THE GUILD RULES?

I don't see how LL can possibly be involved in this sector of the creator economy, but I do wonder if they reach the point of The Guild system, whether they will NOT accept full perm model makers, because it is too hard for them to police IP on the honour method. That is, they actually have the technical capacity to do so! They can scour the servers and find where the FP items are sold by people who didn't buy the kits. They can see where they are given away for $0 or in a giver. They have server logs. We don't. Will they use that power when they get creators to make the tradeoff to be in their Guild -- a privilege that might involve not just presentation of RL ID and possibly even credentials but possibly a higher percentage of taxation than what they pay now (10% on the MP).

The Lindens removed from the MP system an extremely valuable device that consumers could use to keep unscrupulous sellers in check: the ability to comment on positive or negative reviews substantively. (Now you can only indicate whether a review was useful or not). Where once you did not have to buy the item in order to post a comment, on others' comments -- sometimes in self-defense, some times to rebut misinformation -- now that is removed. Thin-skinned divas who don't want any reviews but from their adoring friends didn't mind the comments being nerfed. I imagine we won't have to wait too long til the Linden enable the merchant to remove negative comments. 

When the Copybot and for that matter full perm copying problems grow severe enough, the Lindens will be able to herd creators into the Guild in exchange for help with IP protection -- investigations with their server logs and willingness not must to remove content after a DMCA content, but content their servers prove is stolen -- when a non-IP holder is found selling a cloned item.

Do you know that Google has an automated system that removes hundreds of thousands of videos every day, based on agreements with top copyright holders and simply pro-active automatic searches for obvious key words of the day. This was explained to me personally by a staff person, at an OSCE conference. Google doesn't wait for DMCA takedown notices to limit its liability for litigation, even with Section 230 to hide behind -- not when they face the big guys simply pulling all their content and attempting huge lawsuits (as they have done). We all know the California Ideology led to this situation with Napster and all the rest, but it didn't last. Google takes down the Beyonce copies that aren't from Beyonce's company. There is no reason why LL can't do that on the MP and inworld -- at its little level -- as well with the most obvious cases. Didn't a Linden delete a Coke machine on my property once because Coke was now in SL? Please.

The Lindens could at least on a selective basis (which is how they do Governance now ANYWAY), chase down some thieves and remove the stolen property and assist more in the DMCA process (I don't see that it could be automated). They may already do that quietly anyway, we don't know.

THE POSSE AND THE CASPER BLOCK

But the Copybot problem isn't severe enough -- yet.  The big dogs manage their DMCAs; the little cats have the vitriol and the posses to go chasing into every store of every customer and seeing if they are in violation, in person. Then they can block their purchases on Casper -- this is one of Casper's pernicious features. There is no due process here, of course, and we can't be sure they are right every time they make these blocks.

The biggest difference between the Lindens of yesterday up through Ebbe and the Lindens NOW is that they have a Harvard-trained lawyer among their investors, not merely their staff, and a lawyer who has shown us he is not in adversarial mode regarding the outside world of state prosecutors or regulators, but the unruly user base -- us. Before, it was all geeks like Philip and Mitch Kapor and Pierre Omidyaar, the E-bay guy.

At one time the Lindens had Ginsu Linden (Gene Yoon in RL) who was a nice, quiet man whom Philip once tapped during a RL meet-up in NYC to assure me that Linden Lab would never never never take away my virtual property. (That the Lindens tied forums bans with land confiscation at the time belied this claim was somehow tabled). Ginsu is now running for office in his area in California -- he has a great program and if you live there, vote for him! But that kind of lawyer is long gone. He did the basic work that corporate lawyers do to protect their company, their copyrights, their trademarks, and their ass, in the media, when various types came for them, including some residents like Mark Bragg who sued them for confiscation of land, although he had used an exploit to pay a low fee on the auction.

NOW we have a different kind of lawyer, Raj Date, a politician, a US official and protogee of Elizabeth Warren who served in the US Trade Office. THIS lawyer is ideological and crusading against the user base, which makes it harder to sell this boat in their view, and in a bid to keep the company always ready for inspection -- and sale. It's like when you want to sell a house. You can't leave the kids' toys lying around. From THIS lawyer, we got the ban of gatchas; the end of non-buyer comments on the MP (most likely, though that can't be proven); the sales tax (which they went 18 years without paying) and I suspect, the sudden demand to remove resident logos from SLB18 exhibitions  because they appeared next to LL logos -- but not from Shop 'n Hop, obviously. And there's probably more, I don't know about.

THE GUILD IS THE SOLUTION TO COPYBOT

From THIS lawyer, I think it's reasonable to expect that at some time, his eye will fall on the Copybot and full perm sellers community and their wrangles, and decide that there has to be a registered guild, so that LL knows whom they are protecting, and then protection of that Guild, which is the money maker. (LL always wanted to move away from the land model -- so heavy! All those servers!)

Of course, I have no way of knowing what is really happening, nor do you. Linden Lab's chief counsel is David Kim, a seasoned lawyer with a past resume on bitcoin -- which SL never had and is not likely to get in the near future -- unless his resume means something?

OBSOLETE GROUP BUILDS AND INWORLD CREATOR TOOLS

Recently, when Philip spoke of his "laws for the metaverse," he seem to idealize the group build of yesteryear that never really caught on in SL even in the early days and today is nearly non-existent. He seemed unaware that most creators now work outside the viewers, in Blender and such. They are not pushing prims inworld because they're past all that now, and working with mesh. Philip left before mesh was imposed and took off and I think he just doesn't think about the large divide introduced into SL -- all those who can work in sophisticated programs for designers, and the rest of us who slap a texture on a prim. And what on earth is this screenshot? Is this SL with a lot of debris in the air, or a badly rezzing sim? The ground looks like SL but maybe it's Roblox.

There are minimal requirements for virtual worlds to be useful places for value creation, here are some: https://t.co/b02DnbcBs4

— Philip Rosedale (@philiprosedale) July 8, 2022

 

How long before we don't even have prims any more? I mean, there's nothing to say that they have to be kept, when no top designers work with them anymore. How many prim constructions did you see at Shop 'n Hop?

I feel sometimes that I am the only one making something inworld, out on the lawn in front of my house or in the commons area of my rentals, and all the annoyances that go with this -- the edit window always opening OVER the object you are trying to edit (pushing it to the side works, sure, but you have to KEEP doing that); the flashing lights we now have in the background in edit mode, etc. etc. 

I'm in a small niche of people making things with prims, sculpties, and mesh, who aren't the mass of users -- who barely can place a house these days and never learn to rez a prim (and why should they?) -- and not the mesh creators of the top and secondary tiers

No one feels any pressure to accommodate us and I'm acutely aware of that.

THE GUILD IS ONLY A PREMIUM PLUS CONCIERGE SERVICE!

When the Guild is created, at first it will only be described as a kind of Premium Plus, a registration process that might even cost money (likely it would have to, given the work involved), and Lindens will tell angry complainers that it is not a "Good-Housekeeping Seal of Approval" at all, oh noes. It will be described as merely a bonus to facilitate copyright issues, let's say,  and perhaps provide technical support, like a souped-up Concierge service. In a way, it will be a sop to creators because LL is not likely -- yet -- to have the will to rein in Firestorm (I'll have a separate post on them.)

Gradually, you will be seen as incompetent if you aren't in the Guild. But you won't be able to get in unless you spent years cultivating Lindens and Moles or unless you know a guy who knows a guy.

"The Guild," Linden execs will tell us wearily, at first in a poorly-attended inworld office hour, and then later in a sanitized blog post, "is not perhaps to everyone's liking, but it's the only way we can be in the Metaverse."

"Oh?" we will ask. "What on earth do you mean?"

"Well, you know how you asked if we had joined that Interoperability Group with big tech, and we weren't exactly invited, and then we sort of schnorred our way in...."

"Oh?" we say, arching an eyebrow.

"Well, it turns out, if we want to be interoperable with these other big platforms -- and of course we do, because it means more creativity and commerce for everybody -- we're going to have to make some changes around here. We have to ensure that all user content is not in violation of copyright. We also have to protect creators' intellectual property as there are more people walking from verse to verse."

At this point we'll wonder privately to ourselves why they never did that before, when so much ripping was going on, but ok.

"....And the only way to do that is to have a registry and a Guild...of sorts. We won't be able to keep the building tools in the viewer -- we're finding they didn't get much use, anyway. User statistics are god, you know! So, we think this represents the best solution to preserve what's so special about SL, and..."

By this time, your eyes may be glazing over, or your ears will stop listening or you will be facedesked. But onward to the Great and Glorious Future!

 

 

 

 

 

Anti-Anti-Anti-Rez

By Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor

So that was a very long post because I think out loud and publish my reflections. I thought it would be interesting to think of all the experiences I have had with Contraption over the years, such as they are, as someone totally on the fringe of what I now see is a fiercely-tight-knit and loyalist posse. That is, there are likely hundreds -- thousands -- of Contraption customers who don't read the forums or social media or follow any of these issues, and are just busy trying to figure out now why that funny bird they bought broke when that man at the store seemed so nice. 

But on Twitter, there are all kinds of furries available to pounce, and it's hard to walk around the robots.

So I want to summarize this unfortunately wrangle because it really is important not due to the personalities involved but the issue of how you deal with IP protection in virtual worlds -- through the edicts of top creator gods and their notions of life, or tools within the viewer that may not work, or control of third-party viewers with Copybot capacity that log on with the rest of the majority of the population.

None of these topics are taboo, outdated, or not allowed to be discussed by non-technical people, because we all have a stake in the world.

Walton Wainright issued what he perceived as a "public service announcement" although it had the curt and annoyed tone of an edict. He urged people to stop using anti-rez scripts in their no-mod clothing because such scripts didn't protect against Copybot, as is rumoured, and they only add excess script time and cripple sims and RP choices.

So with this edict, he impugned that creators of clothing -- and many are women -- are stupid. They believe in a myth. They don't know any better and use totemic icons to ward off the evil spirit of IP theft. Worse, they bring down the wrath of content kings like himself because they forced him to buy a new RP outfit -- he couldn't open up the no-mod item and reduce its script usage.

Oh, possibly he meant only NEW creators who didn't know any better. He didn't say that until much later. I will be contacting every user of these scripts simply to hear what they think. I like to check stories.

I don't go to RP sims or at least very rarely but I got to live music and DJ events and art gallery openings and I get it about the need to reduce script time, which is usually done by removing attachments, as a kind of common courtesy in SL. I have no idea if Walton Wainright ever goes to live music or art gallery openings, I never see him. SL is such a small world that every time I go to a shopping event or any event at all, I will see if not a friend or acquaintance, a tenant. I can walk along the mall at Shop 'n Hop and see many people I know. And I'm not famous, and I'm nobody compared to Walton.

So when Walton, who is famous, and the top content creator of SL in my view (not necessarily MY favourite, but the recognized King), I worry when he basically tells everyone to take out IP theft protection scripts, they don't work.

I don't like that, because I know they do work -- when we are talking about certain use cases, and that means givers of food and full perm mesh, among others. 

And that's because the problem MOST creators face isn't Copybot, which isn't as ubiquitous as imagined or we wouldn't have the world we have, but theft by conscious human beings taking full perm models and violating the TOS that went with them. Or taking full perm items meant as freebies for the community, and selling them.

It took a great deal of persistence, and stamina in getting past all the goons that clustered around Walton (I'm going to credit him with not having whistled for them) to keep explaining why he was being so destructive in his pronouncements and get him to climb down.

He then conceded there were other use cases, conceded that for full perm items that were temp-rez, copyright protection scripts made sense, or for certain other uses like HUDs in a game and felt chuffed that he had repeated himself three times -- but I only repeated myself because he still wouldn't see the larger picture.

For one, I don't think he covered all the use cases -- he never acknowledged that some creators just want to make sure people are driven to "add" or "wear" and don't start rezzing things out. He didn't acknowledged that the close perusal of a rezzed-out dress doesn't need Copybot -- it can mean a person is "inspired" to make a similar item, so similar it leads to vicious catfights on the forums, inworld, and on Discord. My God, it's Hair Fair right now. Do you think there isn't a diva weeping into her pillow somewhere that her hair has been stolen?

The regrettable affair might have ended there, but then I began to see Walton in his sub-tweets, and realized I had granted him too much the benefit of the doubt.

Walton styled himself to his posse as someone patiently repeating himself, and even offered a paw of sympathy to a skunk who claimed entirely falsely that I had harassed him, based on his garbled reading of my time line, and claimed I even come into another conversation to harass him. So because I merely responded to a tweet I can see in my feed, this skunk felt his safe space was invaded. The enormous thin-skinned nature of these geeks and designers! They have this provincial belief that they talk only among themselves in their posse when online, and no one else can comment! Why don't they go on Discord and filter the door? I often find these people don't realize they are on the Internet, on Twitter, where anyone who sees a RT of them, or who looks up a topic (I seldom do that) can talk to them. They can always use the mute button. None of them do because they are endlessly primed for drama and curiosity about what you will say.

Of course, if that other convo involves the transgender topic and the debate around "pregnant people" from PaulaNYT,  and you happen to disagree about that term, even if you support transgender people and acknowledge their authenticity, i.e. opposing Macy, then you will be prima facie a TERF or a Trumpkin. So that skunk can then run whining to Walton, who is gay, that someone is mean about LGBT. All of that is utterly false and you just have to read my tweets.

Add to that the utterly insane goon who appeared with my vandalized Wikipedia -- I assure you that a) I don't think Black people put bugs in Romney's apps or that b) because a Democrat shop had a Black coder in it that they deliberately made Romney's apps fail. You can go and read my blog instead of the insanity of Wikipedia and anonymous idiots on Twitter. 

Yes, if SL weren't bad enough, with its totally screechy and unjust forums, Twitter is even worse with these personas. 

Now why did I mix in with this? And I'd do it again in a heartbeat because I don't need to be popular and loved the way these people do.

Because I don't think Walton should tell people their efforts to stop Copybot are empty and worthless -- and indeed they are -- without providing an alternative.

He hastens to tell you that the alternative is him being nice and helping designers with DMCA takedown notices. Sorry, that doesn't scale. He wants now every creator who uses anti-rez -- and there are thousands of them -- to come to his door now? Because Copybot is everywhere, right?

This haughtly dismissal of people's home remedies and admonition to go file DMCAs aren't just condescending, they're absurd -- because we live in a regime that has permissions supplied by a company that claims it provides acknowledgement and protection of user IP, unlike other tech companies. 

Once having put in those permissions, they need to be challenged FOR SURE when they are breached by third-party viewers. The end. This is not hard to understand for those who aren't immersed in the open source cult. 

If you think copyright can only be protected by DMCA notices, why have permissions? They are pointless then. Let's remove "transfer" and be done with it.

After all, Contraption has another very important weapon in the war on Copybot -- the posse. You can be sure that if someone rips Contraption's lovely frock coat with the alchemist symbols, which I wore myself for weeks, that an entire goon squad of his loyal customers and pals will descend on that ripper's head. That's always the social quotient around Copybot incidents.

There might not necessarily be any finding of facts as in a court of law. But if the fake coat isn't removed from the thief's store, then LL might step in, especially if you have a hotline to Lindens as a top creator in their Shop 'n Hop, doing their builds. I would think not 24 hours would pass before a DMCA notice, an alert to LL, before that creep is pulverized and removed from SL, with only red mist where he once stood.

Meanwhile, someone like me will need NINE MONTHS to get grief cubes on physics tumbling up and down a nearby lot with a no-show neighbour removed by Governance.

I can discover something I bought on the MP is in fact a famous cartoon on iphones that I just didn't realize; I can try to send a protest or a complaint somewhere -- but the Lindens don't take complaints -- there is no space on the AR sheet. I can only use the posse method as well, telling people in groups not to buy it, deleting it from my inventory, posting a blog about it. 

LL would have to wait for that famous cartoonist to take an interest in Second Life and send a takedown notice to some fly-by-night operation hawking bad copies of her cartoon on the MP for 10L.

Where is this going to lead? Increasing stratification between top designers with LL's ear who have the resources -- and RL businesses -- to file DMCA takedowns to Copybot wranglers -- and the rest of us who don't. Between people with the loyal posses to fan out and bring retribution to Copybot fencers -- and those of us who don't.

But there are other solutions, about which I will post soon.

Ask Your Doctor If Second Life Premium Plus Is Right For You

By Prokofy Neva, Virtualator

Honorary Consulate of Titania

DOES PP SAVE YOUR MONEY?

Shorter Prokofy: Yes, because after you sell the Lindens from the $650L stipend, and take advantage of the extra 1024 (there is 2048) in the account that normally would cost you another $7 on the PP, you are paying only 40 cents above the premium, or only $12.39/mo -- and you get free uploads and more groups on top of that, which you need especially for rentals or RP. Pick and older Linden Home outright or play Game of Homes and roll for a better new Linden Home or put all your tier in Mainland, the much better buy in terms of space and prims.

Shorter Prokofy: No, because the cost of living in RL is going up, $249 a year or even $29.99 per month to lay out now is way too high a price (that's a day or more of groceries where I live); if you aren't running a business requiring uploads, extra tier, and deflection of costs like the subscription itself, the extra Lindens and tier aren't really a value. Picking your own Linden home seems great, but you can't pick the newest ones and the best have been taken by the power players. Save your RL dollars, buy instead around 7600-8000L Lindens per month enabling you to dress nicely, go out to the clubs and tip people properly, rent a nice home, and enjoy SL more fully -- or shop the discount sales and save for your RL retirement!

So all the time the Lindens have been speculatively and temptingly talking about Premium Plooos (as some of the non-English speakers called it, because that's the pronunciation of the word in some European and Slavic languages), I figured I would get it for the texture uploads alone, which are 10L a pop and add up quick.

It wasn't clear what the other bouquet of features would be, but that was always mentioned. I think this includes sounds as well, need to find out. But textures alone would be "worth it," right.

Except, I did something you all should do. Take the last month or two of your accounts from the web at MY ACCOUNTS and put them in Excel -- or not, you can still go through them and tag them. I tagged my expenses as follows:

o Rent (these are billboards, stalls, signs at furniture stores, etc. I rent to advertise my rentals) and Classifieds

  US $21.20

o Search/Places Ads 130 x 30L 

 US $14.40

o Texture Uploads - 101 x 10L

  US $4.00

o Clothes - 1,267L

  US $

o Tips (Musicians, Venues)

 US $6.92

o Content

 US $184.00

o Art

 US $44.00

 

I wouldn't normally spend $184 on content and this month I've spent like ZERO, but there were three things happening in May: events, where I made things and sold them or gave them away (Silk Road and SLB19), and bought models, and Shop 'n Hop, where many stores had 50% off sales, so it was a chance to stock up on houses and skyboxes and such for my rentals. I also started two new rentals areas and revised several others, so I put the content in those.

TAGGED ACCOUNTS

It's good to look at your accounts regularly, and I wish we had a capacity to tag things somehow but we can't expect LL to make a Microsoft-like spread sheet project when you can export the My Account info into Excel and other apps. To be sure, one you have a huge load of tiny micro-expenses and micro-payments in such a spread sheet, cutting and pasting or tagging them is so much of a chore, I don't want to bother. 

One way I make the tracking work better is to put all purchases of land especially abandoned, which is mainly what I buy only one one account, so I can always see what was spent; all purchases of houses tend to be on one account, etc. But that gets to be a nuisance, fetching them and digging in their inventory. Actually, whatever nuisance it is, it is now a necessity as my account won't load anymore. Every time I log on, I have a different number for my inventory. I constantly crash due to this load, and endlessly clear cache. I try to sort it and delete things, but it's 240,000 items. Finding things in it is a crap shoot -- the cursor slides by and won't stop on the search term. So much time goes into inventory sorting that it becomes pointless to run a business. 

Ultimately, there is no convenient way to do this so I put it in an Excel or even a Notepad to sort it by categories.

$29.99 PER MONTH OR $249.00 PER YEAR

The estimates people made for that "plusness" were often double, like if premium is $11.99, then Plus is $24. Or even less.

You can read about the terms after they were announced from Inara Pey or go to the official blog.

So in the event, it was $24.99 for the first month if you hurried to get that discount, but then $29.99 after that and $249.00 annualized.

So the 45-day sign-up bonus (and a more than a week has gone by so get cracking!) is $3,000 or US $12.00 which slightly takes the sting out of it, but not by much. You "save" US $17 if you get it now and add the bonus, so it's  $232 for the first year.

BTW I use that coefficient of 1000 Linden dollars = US $4.00 because that's the fastest but still optimal cash-out rate -- 241 Lindens per US dollar.

To be sure, to cash out to PayPal, you will pay more fees, and then to bring these spacebux to your RL bank is yet another fee from PayPal which just went up. Someone else may conceive of this only in terms of what the cost is to buy and not sell Lindens if they are consumers, that's understood. I think creators and service providers within the inworld economy like me only can conceive of Linden dollars' sell rate because we are never going to buy Lindens -- what are we, crazy? You would always just wait until you had some sales in world or simply do without (that's my usual stance these days, in austerity mode since a) Gatchas were banned in August 2021, depleting the creator and user secondary sale economy, and after May 2022, when Linden imposed states' sales taxes, if applicable; I'm in New York State, with 0.0875% sales tax.

SO IT'S $32.61 A MONTH INCLUDING SALES TAX IN NYS

If you're in Montana with no sales tax, I'm happy for you, but I don't want to live in Montana (where I have camped many times happily) where I have to drive 100 miles to the store and possibly have to drive to Canada (or...where?) to find specialized doctors -- and face the threat of wildfires. My son lives in Florida and at first I thought that it would be worth changing the accounts to him and have him run at least some collections and tier at least in part even for only 1% less sales tax.

But then the cost for me personally doing that increases in various ways, chiefly because I have to beg and plead each time to get him to do this. He has neither time or inclination for SL (although he was happily on the teen grid years ago and still puts SL creation and commerce in his resume -- he and his pals ran a top-traffic mall and a scavenger game called Sewer Safari and even a trading post for WoW loot conversion into Linden dollars. He still gets jobs with that, imagine.

How're you gonna keep them down on the farm? My hope is that his wife and our niece, when she's of age, may get more interested but -- no. They have their own YouTube cooking shows and Etsy pages and Internet merch sales and all the rest like everybody seems to these days.

SL, which to me seems very compelling, doesn't pull. This is something to contemplate in general as to "why," but not now.

Along with that contemplation about my RL friends and family I will add Raindale's latest notice that they are turning SL into a hobby (a wise decision) and going to RL to make money hopefully in design and content on the web in ways that pay better given the war in Ukraine, which has impacted her far more heavily than us, although believe me, with Russian and Ukrainian friends and family, and my job as a Russian translator mainly for media and non-profits, we have been impacted terribly. Since nothing any of us suffer is remotely like the suffering of all the limbless Ukrainian children with fathers and mothers killed by Russian soldiers, believe me, I don't complain. 

I used to think that unless you yourself can make a decent living and have a big, wealthy organization behind you -- a foundation, a rich NGO, rich people in general -- you can't be of much help to people in need. Let me tell you that you can, because anything you have is more than they do, and you can always just send $25 and keep morale up on Facebook or Twitter. That's appreciated, too.

If I can pay a few bills and even do things like send a check to Ukraine now and then, an SL business is all worth it, right? You can't use it to make a living. Still...

CAN WE AFFORD PP WITH RISING COST OF LIVING?

So in this hellscape of high gas prices, high prices of food (why has milk disappeared from our shelves when during the pandemic they complained that NYS had too much milk and companies were going into expensive yogurts due to the surplus -- oh, maybe that's why). Yogurt of the Greek, French, Icelandic etc. is now US $3 or $4 for a tiny cup. Somebody posted a picture of a bin of pink ladies (apples) for US $0.69 a pound the other day and I had to wonder what planet or what state they lived in, because my idea of a sale on E. 14th St. at the Whole Foods is more like $3.69/pound and not for the fancy apples. In fact, I'm taking the spacebux I get issued as a sickie by my insurance plan, to be used only at farmers' markets, to get a bunch of sweet potatoes and apples for the Duration. 

Not sure about you, but we living in HUD housing and dodging subway "incidents" and illegal firearms activity and sitting all day at Bellevue with the rest of the Medicaid patients have already started living in the Recession which Elon Musk isn't sure is inevitable -- but then as he only lost -- what was it -- $64 billion? -- he isn't going to be taking in ironing or living off the ramen from Costcos any time soon. OK, people don't take in ironing any more like my grandmother, they...they....sell on Craig's list? Oh, I know, they go on SL so let me get back on focus.

Someone IM'd me in tears that they were on a fixed income and couldn't possibly afford $249 a year -- the thought being that it would be madness to pay the monthly fee of $29.99 (again, that means inworld, you'd have to make either 62,250 Lindens a year on top of your existing regular, which in Mainland rentals, will not exactly be a day at the beach but in theory possible [5178L per month to cover your PP] if it weren't for that sales tax which makes the $29.99 actually US $32.61 now per month for PP.

So for me, that means you need to generate 8153L inworld extra every month to cover it. See how that starts to jump? So where will I get this 8153L per month? Here is where I have to start to talk about the difficulties of the Mainland rentals business, which is my chose profession in SL, and ask whether PP will really help me in this chosen avocation.

THE HARD SCRABBLE OF MAINLAND RENTALS

So let's take a typical Mainland waterfront (and most aren't this) which I'll rent out for say 0.83/prim (but I have them for 0.75/prim in some places). Let's take a 4096 lot with 1406 prims x 0.83 for $1,166 per month, let's say. I offer 10% discount for 4 months advance, and many people do this -- a rough equivalent to annualizing a premium. So I have 4198L revenue from this lot and it's paid on time and in full. The tier to LL costs me US $10.94 per month for just that lot, at the "discount" rate which means the rate when you own more than a sim. (I'm not going to factor in the 10% group bonus rate because that generally has to go to tiering a commons or extra prims in some way). So I've made US $16.92 from this lot, yay! And I've paid out the tier to LL and now I have $5.98 revenue (not profit). Yay! Now why am I complaining, having chiseled more than the tier costs me from hapless customers on Mainland where their view goes south any minute?!

Well, go to Hector Lake and look around and see why. I have to "buy the view" -- like I just did this week with a purchase of $13,000 for that 4096 -- a steal, perhaps, a 3L per meter, but still, a US $54 expense in my little system that bites hard and cannot be made back quickly -- it's not made back by NINE MONTHS of waiting while I use the revenue of $5.98 to cover that outlay of $54 -- then it can start paying for me. And not all the lots are rented. And a lot of my lots in fact make US 0.72 per month -- 72 cents -- and that doesn't cover the tier to LL I pay for them, or I break even. So you're $180L/mo Motel Court Cabin is 72 cents a month. You're on 288 m2 and tier at my level (discounted when over one sim) is 0.00267 per meter. This is the iron-clad law of rentals math. If LL does give discounts to big customers of 100 islands, that ain't me. So I pay 78 cents to Linden for that little spot, and it has a cabin and furniture that draws from the prim supply on that sim, which have to be paid for as well. So it's really more than 78 cents, and I've got 72 cents back and lost 6 cents. You see how this works? You try to balance it all out, some more expensive lots, some cheaper, some furnished, some not, the whole thing combining -- along with content sales and tips -- at least to cover the land preserve as well, and break even or pay a few bills.

It's hard to get this to work any more not only because of the competition from Bellisseria. Not only because people leave SL, they get frustrated or bored. Not only because of COVID, which is still a factor. Some people are doing well now. They have WFH and less expenses of commuting, clothes, and take-out. They have more disposable income for SL, not less, and with WFH, can log on at will. Others refund because your US $5.00 a month rental is low-hanging fruit to cut out -- they lost a job, or the gas prices and food prices cut into their disposable income. I can often tell when COVID forbearance in the tri-state area where I live, from which a certain number of customers come, ends or is changed to a lower amount, because the "dings" of refunds begin to resound. 

No, it's not just that summer is slow. I have been through 18 SL seasons, so I know from "slow". It's that the economy is in a crisis now, and this may be inevitable with all virtual worlds, not sure.

VACANCY AND SALES TAX

And here's they other reason why that "largesse" that you seemed to see me harvesting on one sim isn't all that: VACANCY RATES. In Mainland rentals, 80% occupancy might be the norm, and then you are already losing money. The occupancy goes down just that amount, and you are in the red. You have to scamper around with 100 other things -- content sales, tip jars, one-time fees for some service like installing a radio or skybox, customers who pay you on PayPal so you don't have to grind through all the fees at both ends and of course sweat equity -- endless efforts to wait on people to keep them as customers, get new customers with advertising and events, etc. etc. You can make it work, like the Cat in the Hat, but then you drop a plate, you drop a spoon.

When the sales tax came, I had to get rid of about a sim's worth of tier at least, and even then, that didn't cover the $229 or whatever I estimated the whole system with 14 sims would have to pay out in sales tax (one sim you can perceive as "free" of tier as it generates from 10 sims -- except read what I just wrote above about commons, extra prims etc.) That is, my sales tax in my state, as I explained to customers means that I have to pay tier on a new private island to LL -- but without the ability to put rentals on it to pay that amount back. Land should ALWAYS be seen as a sunk cost, the cost of doing business, NEVER an investment in a virtual world (I do hope you understand why) and now I would be tiering another island -- another island I never bought all these years (I only have one, plus one homestead) because I don't want to be in the island business and on the hook for big boats of land with no water access that I can't practically sell pieces of and be free and clear of them 100%.

Far easier to spread my 14 sims across 50-60 sims and sell or abandon any of the pontoons when the Titanic hits the iceberg, and the chambers fill up one by one. Then you stay afloat. So that's why when my neighbour in Hector puts her beautiful waterfront out for sale at $3L/meter -- a price that means I will have possibly GTFO, or some BDSM castle queen, or land barons who buy and chop and put up ugly ads.

YES, WE STILL HAVE AD FARMS!

Saffia, Saffia, Saffia. It's not true we "don't have ad farms any more," as you noted in the meetings with the Lindens. While it's true -- after four long years of struggle -- we got an ad farms policy from Jack Linden, who was a prince (they just don't make Lindens like that any more), the enforcement of it lasted only a few years, then the Lindens faced all these "edge cases" and problems stemming from the fact that some of their biggest land customers who outwardly seemed stable and decent even to many of us, in fact engaged in this scurrilous practice, often out of view and they weren't motivated to stop them.

Whitney Linden never knowingly sells a 16 m2 plot by the roadside to an ad farmer on the Auction or after a request of $1/m abandoned land. That is not how it works at all. What happens is that people request the abandoned land. Some of them are the alts of notorious low-life land barons. Possibly the Lindens can track that but likely they can't. The land barons can flip an auction faster than the blink of an eye and now an end user or a newbie baron has it, and may dump it or put some of it to sale because he is in over his head, all too often.

It's then the bottom-feeders pick it up, and that even includes MarkLand, which really should know better. MarkLand has an open and available list of such plots of 16m or 32m that he sells or rents openly. It's not like he needs an alt in the middle of the night. The Lindens could declare this illegal and close it; they don't. It's worked out to be one per sim...sort of.

Ad farms reduce value of your rentals. It makes people move out and never move in. There are certain properties that just never rent due to ad farms or ugly builds, but I don't dump them because they might be part of a coherent community I have built up over years, with people who have actually lived there for 15 years, imagine! Yes, it's true.

THE ECOLOGY OF BOTTOM-FEEDING LAND DEALERS AND AD FARMS

This is how it works. My long-time neighbour thinks she can get $20/m for her so-so Mainland combination roadside/lakefront property. She can't. She's read somewhere about Blake Sea and waterfront; she keeps it at that price for months, even. It never sells. She puts it to $10/meter. It still doesn't sell. Because land like that, on a sim where one idiot with a 2007 birthdate has a little palace with a spinning tower that looks like a dildo, who logs in once a year, is next door. And a lingerie seller with a store in the sky and 0 traffic and evidently her workshop or home sim with ban lines, is next door to that. You see where I'm going with this. My tenants and I co-exist happily with these blights -- high trees help, de-render, and looking the other way help. But it's not a good buy.

So then tier date is coming. Who wants to pay even just US $54 for that hapless neighbour's 4096 running down from road to lakefront? Nobody. Look at the map. There's lots more for sale out there. So she either sells it for 0.03/m which is all you can hope to sell lakefront for, or abandons it, and it is requested. Somehow

And he accepts rentals from the lowliest of the bottom feeders, like Jolie, who then puts a spinning sign on top of that.  It's easy to return -- it encroaches on my lot, and somewhere in about 2006, LL made it possible to return prims that encroached on your lot, to make less work for themselves. It doesn't always work, and PS one thing you can't return is Linden plants/trees, which are a "different animal" in their system. That does need a ticket, and it is not uncommon for it to take 6-9 months to get the return from a no-show neighbour's land. 

I return, Jolene, as I call her, comes back, builds some other ugly thing, I return it, sometimes by spotting it first, or a tenant calls me -- or a tenant refunds, and I figure, oops, the spinning monster went up again. One time I came, and Jolene had rooted a billboard on that 16m2 across my parcel where 0 autoreturn had been put on, likely by a tenant for some reason. She then rooted a big billboard on the Linden road shoulder, which she ordinarily wouldn't be able to do. I AR'd her -- and how many others may have done so, or AR'd me thinking it was "my land". Of course that would do no good -- in fact I even AR'd this billboard a few times before I realized, when "highlight transparent" was turned on, that she had rooted this long thin invisi-prim on her tiny rental, across my land, to Linden land. So once again, I return everything, lather, rinse, repeat. Let me look today. Nope, nothing there, but Marky still owns it.

Some time ago, I urged him just to sell it to me for a normal price. "Normal" means $1/prim or possibly $3 but not $10 let alone $100. He refused. I don't pay extortionists. I'm happy to play this game for years and years, and did so already for a parcel at the other end of the sim which had an ugly billboard for years, crippling my rentals, until finally for whatever reason, it changed hands (never abandoned and never sold for a reasonable price) and another ad farmer put up at least a small cube doing...whatever those small scripted cubes do...which at least isn't a nuisance. (Usually what they are doing is scanning land in order to find cheap land to buy, since bots are no longer allowed for land purchase evidently). So right at this minute in time, there is technically only one ad farm on the sim, and no more, and technically the owner of it isn't violating anything, although of course land barons scraping the bottom of the barrel have multiple alts and multiple groups and we can't be sure the Lindens work their way through these subterfuges. 

But come to my house, as the kids say, and see WHAT ELSE is going on right next store in the view for 4 sims  -- oh that giant GLOWING Sith obelisk that sprouted. As I know from having once contacted the owner and interviewed him for Metaverse Mercury, those people are deadly assholes, destroying view and value all over the grid -- they started by ruining the teen grid ages ago. LL could absolutely care less and they don't fall under the policy. I have testimony from tenants about how they came in, ruined the view with those uglies, forced people to abandon the land, then bought the abandoned land and chopped it up, in collusion with land barons.  A friend who bought nice land next to the Siths shrugs -- he just de-renders them. He thinks they aren't in the land devaluation business because he sees them on one or two sims. Land dealers who see them all over know how hard it is to keep trying to sell or rent land to them -- not everyone de-renders; not everyone realizes they have to keep de-rendering when the object in question changes -- which it does. That's why the more sophisticated griefers rez grief prims that each rez with a different number (and UUID in the system), then disappear after awhile...whereupon a new one rezzes, foiling the de-render function. This is who you see win the land game in SL.

Not so, you say? Well, you tell me why kids from the teen grid who are now 30-year-old men (like my son, age 29 who was on the teen grid) STILL need to have Sith Towers for their "raids" or whatever the hell they did. It seems very clear to me that such games don't need to be all over the grid, and now there's another game. What is that other game? This should be researched and pondered. Usually the only game on the Mainland when it isn't about Blake Sea, or Tiny Empires, is bottom-feeding land sales. One clue is the Marky Mark stall right next to this new Sith Obelisk with freebies. Somebody buys land or requests abandoned from Lindens, whom the Lindens regard as "not ad farmers" because they haven't caught them violating their policy regarding more than one ad on a sim, etc. Some of the warring land barons actually spend time in detention when the Lindens DO ban them, but since they all have other alts and groups to spare, the land still keeps flipping. When those "grey-area" land barons then flip to even more scraping-bottom feeders whom the Lindens themselves wouldn't have sold to, they can't do anything. It is a "resident-to-resident" dispute.

THE LINDENS NEED TO MAKE A NETWORKED ROADSIDE BILLBOARD AD SYSTEM

This is why, as much as I dislike state socialism and state capitalism just as much, I advocate the Lindens banning all ad farms of any kind on any sim, roadside or elsewhere, and replace them with a Linden-run networked roadside ad system, a mixture of small and large signs and billboards, tastefully decided, available on demand for pay like Classifieds, G rated.

OR, even better! Let the ad farmers alone, but create this system. Many people will cross over to it. It will drive out all the crappy and sleazy ad farmers setting their land to sale for ridiculous prices and putting up ugly signs. No one will rent from them or buy them, or few will. But by leaving them "legal," the little far with the cats for sale with a little sign at the end of the driveway will not be outlawed.

If the Lindens can spend the ENORMOUS AMOUNTS of staff time they used to spend on the MP chasing gatchas that were not in the correct category (that was insane and stupid and vindictive), time they STILL spend to get rid of adult content not in the correct category etc, then they can edit ads in a billboard system that brings them revenue.

Brent Linden does not have time to read down into the weeds on my blogs and figure out the very deep and vexing problem here, which is why we request this -- along with capacity to buy ads at info hubs AS WE USED TO HAVE IN THE TELEHUB ERA. At this point I despair of this epiphany coming to Bret or even Saffia, and I move on. Other long-time land or rentals companies I have known on the Mainland with decent people and practices have simply gone out of business, or sharply reduced their offerings. 

What we don't do -- and what the Lindens would like to drive us to -- is to go to the private islands and rent out offerings there. That's because islands are not only expensive, they are not contiguous. You hit a wall a few inches from the beach, unless, of course you can afford additional void and homestead sims to create a large empire or even a small one like Caledon. No thanks.

WHY MAINLAND REAL ESTATE?!

Let Grandpa put in his teeth, and tell you about the time I came back to SL in September 2004 on this account, having bailed out in May 2004 with Dyerbrook Parvenu when he just couldn't stay logged on. He went to a hockey game -- how interesting! It was laggy, he crashed. He flew around doing different interesting things, trying to build something, trying to make things -- and crashed! Fast forward, and the day I landed happened to be a Town Hall with Philip Linden. The site of the actual meeting with Philip was full, but someone explained I could go to Misty Rhodes place where she had a game or a helping depot or something, with benches to sit on and a radio to listen to Philip. I took about 30 tries trying to sit on the bench, as she explained to me what I need to do. Finally, when I got comfy, I heard Philip say that he was putting a feature in the viewer that made it possible to sell land to other people or rent it and retain ownership. He imagined real estate agents would now appear, and add to the diversity of the economy. He pictured an avatar named "Buzz," who would swoop down in a helicopter at the welcome areas, and pick up newbies and show him his rental lands, and help them get settled. 

"I want to be that Buzz," I said to myself.

Did I tell you I now have a working title for my Second Life memoirs, Innkeeping in the Metaverse so eventually you'll hear the rest of that story.

SO...WOULD THE PP STIPEND MAKE IT WORTH IT?

Meanwhile, nearly 18 years later (!), it's different now in lots of ways. 

Could I use that stipend? I have the $500 stipend of the grandfathered sort before 2006. It no longer pays for the Premium account. At $650 per week, the PP stipend, it isn't much more -- that's US $10.40 if you cash it out to pay the cost -- and I would.

Most people discuss PP in terms of annualized, as that is the only way to save money on such a bigger cost. But I don't want to spend $249 immediately, because I need it for a dental bill. Or I need it to repair my computer once again. Or save it to get a new computer. Or I need it to pay my electric bill. Yes, we have electric bills like that in the winter and summer here because we have electric heat and AC. It's 87 out right now, I don't use the AC to save money. I need $249 for life and accident insurance this month. Or maybe the Windows license or the AVG -- I pay for these things, I don't rip them because the ripped versions cause problems. And so on. There are a lot of expenses even in a poor life; $249 all at once is hard to justify on some extra tier and my chosen Linden home -- when the uploads aren't turning out to be the draw.

So looking at the $29.99 after this month, it's really $19.39 per month after the stipend is used as a rebate -- I don't need to buy hair. Let's say that I would have had 200 uploads, that's $8, now it's free, so let's say it's really only costing $11.39 now -- although really, that's not quite how to calculate all this -- you'd have to show that you had so many uploads MORE than this cost that it would be worth it.

HOW ABOUT THE TIER?

So now we're very close to justifying it -- and look, we get 2048 tier! The extra tier in the account means nothing to me -- on the current premium account schedule, I could get 2048 extra tier for another $13/mo beyond the $11.99, bringing the amount to...$24.99 per month plus tax. If you are buying the PP account for the tier only, obviously, that makes no sense, as you can just add to your premium account and actually pay less, after the first month. So don't. Except, if I get a 1024 extra than I would the PP, then I need to take the cost of that extra amount -- US $7.00 -- and subtract it from my figure, now $19.39 after I subtract the stipend. So call it now $12.39/month. 

It's now only US $0.40 above the cost of a regular premium.

I personally hope this will be used to buy on the Mainland and make it better, and hey, you can donate to my rentals and get $355/wk credit for 512 and $710 for 1024.

I would put the tier to my groups and not get a Linden home -- I have a few I put in the SL Public Land Preserve -- a little goes a long way.

GROUPS

So now we come to groups. Who wouldn't want more groups? 70 isn't enough, but I don't need 70 more, even 30 more would do it. I have to use so many for my own rentals and projects because land groups in particular get laggy after about 400-500 people. So I now have like 15 groups just for Ravenglass and related areas and the Land Preserve. I'm endlessly joining groups to be in merchants' events, or for sales. I put alts on the job, but then I have to log them in to see all that stuff and it's a chore.

If I add more groups, then the temptation will be to add more merchants' groups, let's say for $250/each, in order to "save money" LOL. On their sales, which are constantly happening.

I had a good thing with $12.39 a month, right? But if I join even 4 new groups for $250/each, that's US $4.00 for the first month, I'm now up to $16.00+  To be sure, it's a one-time fee, and I stay in them. And I don't HAVE to join the groups with fees. I can join bunches of new fabulous, witty, interesting groups and go and meet fabulous, witty, interesting people. Or make such myself!

But businesses come and go -- where is the wonderfully stylish Mulloy or Sorgo today? Who are these brand new people who came out of nowhere like Fern or Square? There are groups I don't leave because I remain slavishly loyal to the creators, like Green Fairy, although she hasn't issued anything in ages. I'm glad I waited for E.V.E -- he's back after we feared he died of COVID.

Still, I worry that more groups = more spending temptations. While I will hardly spend $184 each month, I might spend $50 or $100 even, if there are compelling things that I "need" to buy, or "save the view" ventures.

The answer to lack of groups is to have them on an alt, even a non-premium one. Because most groups chatter so much they drive you crazy. You can shut them, but you have to KEEP doing that. I'm likely to put even more groups on other accounts including of my helper who rarely logs in except under duress, and I rarely log that account in, either.

My instinct, even after doing the math in favour of the Linden's new product, and whittling that cost with its "savings" down to $12.39, is that $29.99 every month is more than $13.05 every month and is $32.52. That means the Premium Plus costs me $19.47 every month, and I don't really have that extra sawbuck. The extra stipend, tier, and uploads aren't really going to relieve the pain of another day's grocery money out the door because the inworld benefits to my business are always being whittled away by....

SEARCH/PLACES ADS

If I only have 125, at .30/L per parcel, that's still US $15.00 per month. Add to that classifies and other types of ads I indicated.

LL has given no indication that it will add free search/places ads to their customers in the PP offering. They could take a leaf from my book -- I give my commercial customers free search/places ads as part of their rent. I have the group fees system that a certain small percentage of customers hate and go crazy over but most get it and don't mind that...42 cents per year that enables them to move from rental to rental, and get the early cancellation fee removed -- another part of my offerings. 

But boy, I could use relief on that US $15.00 a month, now that I've decided to end group fees after 18 years of their use, and now move to adding $5 and $10 to my rental prices, something that I haven't done ever -- if anything, my rental prices came down over the years as the number of prims per square meter went up from LL. I got rid of land to cover the sales tax, but it's not enough. This rental hike of such a small amount isn't enough either. People will pay $55 instead of $50 for cabins so sure, if I have 100 cabins I now have...US $2.00 per month to cover the sales tax which is both on the premium subscription price AND the tier. You can start to see how this doesn't help -- and see why I'm going down to 75 or less in search -- search works so poorly anyway.

The last thing to do when there are leaks in your boat is to bail water INTO your boat; you bail water OUT. You don't add US $20 in cost to your business each month; you reduce US $20 if you possibly can in various ways. 

Or...do you? Spend a month picking out a Linden home that is tolerable; loading up a huge bunch of textures and trying to make up the half finished things that fill my "My Creations" folder; finish my rental signs and portal boards; put 1024 to the group and kill off one of the extra accounts I use to hold groups together. Likely I'm going to do that simply to do what the cool kids do.

In August, more dental bills, then I'll be gone.