Contrary to Contraption

By Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor

Ezekiel at Bassett Town 2022

MY GREAT ADMIRATION FOR CONTRAPTION

I've always had pretty much unadulterated love for Contraption, namely Walton Wainright (faust steamer), whom I have interacted with the most over the years. I happily spent fortunes on their gatchas, I buy a lot of their products, although my name may not appear because I have an alt with artificial limbs who is their greater customer, and another alt in their group that I don't log on to much so I don't have to listen to the inane chatter from the group. I'm not a big fan of bloody metal plates that cover my avatar eyes or metal spiders that attach to my face, I'm a norm. But all the steampunk stuff with gadgets and goggles and wind-up things, especially gramophones, I'm a big fan, just like other norms.

I have spent actually many happy hours listening to the Wild West theme Contraption devised for their Fantasy Faire sim, which to me, looked like a Wild West town from Upstate, New York.  

It does sound like they took a World War I tune and Wild Westified it, but that's Contraption, I like that. I have a lot of those gramophones all over. When I say "hours," I'm not kidding. I put that latest one from Bassett Town in this complicated quest I'm making called "The Engineer's Wife," about a Japanese engineer and his Roma wife who goes missing in the late 1800s in Peru. 

Most of the crowd around Contraption are RP types into all kinds of metal, steam, goth, BDSM, whatever. Doesn't matter. I'm always for people doing their own thing on their own sim and everyone else having tolerance for that. Pluralism. And tolerance. It's the principle by which I run my rentals, where anybody of any lifestyle can rent as long as they follow my simple rules and the TOS, like not going over your prim limits.

MY RESISTANCE AGAINST EXTREMISTS WHO INVADE THE PUBLIC SQUARE

I'm not for masters clinking into the public square with their slaves on chains because I think the public square should not be taken over by ideologies that suppress other people even if they claim it is voluntary. The public square should remain a neutrality of pluralisms with tolerance but not hegemony, not an endless serial of diversities, any one of which can become hegemonic.  The presence of so many safehouses for subs tends to give the lie to that claim but I'm not here to debate BDSM today.

BDSM is the lifestyle that is barely restrained -- to make a pun -- at FF because it is G-rated, but the pagan religion and master/slave ethos is everywhere in RP and it's hard to find RP without it. Most RP or even art sims have a very strong male character with various female characters arrayed around them in slavish adulation, with very harsh practices of exclusion and very intense practices of initiation, like cults. (Their RL genders aren't important.) This is Second Life. This. This is the culture everywhere, in a store, in a game, on a shopping sim, on the forums. And I push back against it because I don't like oppression and PS I don't think "capitalism," which doesn't really exist even in the US is more oppressive than "socialism," which doesn't really exist anywhere either.

So, on the rainbow of SL styles and venues, I see Contraption on the lighter and more fun end of the spectrum -- they don't have pale neckos with deep and bleeding flesh wounds and spiked jewelry every Saturday -- maybe just like every six months. If you don't like the weather at Contraption, wait five days, it will change.

What a contrast to my accounts for work and my RL self, and my SL Twitter account. On the RL accounts, there is debate about transgender and abortion and Ukraine and guns but it is thoughtful and intellectual and there is a spectrum of opinion on the left and left-of-center where I am. On my SL account, there is hysteria, calls for violence, insanely distorted stories, disinformation, and everything from QAnon and no-vaxxers to extreme trans totalitarianism and NJ girls getting up a gang to go get Kavanaugh -- it's highly creepy. My feed looks like that on that account because it has SL avatars and tech dudes. That's why. That's how they are. Contraption isn't out at the extreme, even if their customers include some of these goons, one of whom, yes, said he was mounting a "hit" on me. Sigh.

THE TABLEAUX

Still, there's one feature of the Contraption mythic rituals (which I participate in only in a "lite" way or with "OOC" over my head) which I find faintly creepy but then, maybe I don't fully understand it. Again, I don't go to the Contraption parties or play on their affiliated RP sims, I just go to the store and buy something now and then. So my alt went to their 10th anniversary awhile ago, and each time he went to that booth to collect the present for the 10 days, buying gatchas along the way, he found people standing around, posed in their steam get-ups but not talking. Well, that's common, people go to events and go AFK all the time, the managers should just boot them if the sim fills but it hadn't filled really. Or maybe they weren't AFK in fact, but just, I don't know, "Voguing."

And standing at the center of a circle of totally decked-out steamers were Walton and Victor, magnificently dressed in their WW I era gentleman steam duds with all the bells and whistles. They just stood there, swaying slightly -- and they were AFK too. After a few times visiting and seeing them, I realized, that was how it was supposed to be. It was like a tableau -- like the living tableaus of the Soviet era, like the Mormon pageant on Hill Cummorrah (which was 30 miles from our house so we used to go to it every year).

It was -- as I said -- faintly creepy but then it was also kind of like the bot models at the entrance of Fallen Gods. Why not have the actual people's avatars instead of bots? That's fine.

At FF, was it 2 years ago, there was a city called Somniatoris Arx build by Contraption with a character at the center in a huge grave named the Somniator.  He was a large winged skeleton half visible out of his grave and a giant thurible waved back and forth over his grave, high above on a flying buttress. When I went on the sim tour with the Literary group, the tour guide barked at me that I was walking on the Somniator's grave and had to get out of the way. I immediately said that it was Grandpa, and Mom used to let us picnic on the grave all the time, what's with this. See, I can write stories, too. I wrote an elaborate one and sent it in but it was ignored, I think it was past the deadline. I noticed that the Contraption staff would array themselves just above the grave silently, clutching the rosary beads with the wedding rings, which you could change to different colours, also silently, never chatting, and likely AFK -- it was a tableau again.

I'm not good with tableaus, I like interactive plots, so I made a Somniator myself out of just models from the MP of skeletons and what-not. I bigged it up and put some "rez object on touch correctly" script in it and on the last day of the Faire, I put the grave out and I had the Somniator rise up and dance around under the arch. A few last-minute Contraption shoppers stood by and cheered and snapped some pictures. Nobody really paid attention. I did this act a few times, and also tried to ride the thurible -- the way my brother and I did when we used to picnic on Grandpa's grave -- but you couldn't right-click and sit on it. Drat. The Worthies -- the top builders -- play tricks on each other on the last day and put out giant flamingos -- there was even the long-running gag that Silas Merlin did with his chickens, and I found nearly every one. But they pay attention to each other, not to anyone else. That's fine, I might have actually been slapped with a DMCA takedown for stealing an idea, come to think of it, but I didn't sell this rigged-up Somni, I just added to the story. Now I can't find him in inventory. Oh, well. Look for the pictures on my Flickr.

BASSETT TOWN

On the last day of FF this year, many people gathered at Bassett to see it one last time -- it was truly a magnificent build, with so many subtle details despite the seemingly drab decor in this fly-blown dust-devil Western town. The cemetery in the town square in front of the main building, which is not where cemeteries usually are (they are in churchyards, usually off to the side) with the name "Walton Wainright' on all of the tombstones; the main building that looked like a saloon but was actually a church and doubled as the main store for Contraption -- well, it was all beautifully done. Of course like everyone else I spent hours there not only on the Quest, which I'm bad at, but just in general, admiring the builds. I went on the LitFest tour there, too, which was kind of a straggling affair -- it's hard to do Story when you have so many people of different levels, languages, and computer connection speeds, but still, they did, and it was grand.

So in this square by a broken-down wagon and barrels were arranged Walton Wainright's character for this event, Ezekiel Ricketts, a somewhat sad and beaten fellow, his hand in a bloody bandage  -- I would call him a "whiskey priest" in another era, the era of Diary of a Country Priest.   He was gazing into the distance, with his partner and aide-de-camp, Victor E. Eton (Irving Merritt) standing at attention nearby.  Ezekiel was playing a mournful tune on his banjo, the one you could get in the store for the gramophone. But he had his own Long Version and I swear he never repeated a note. I sat there for 45 minutes, and I swear Walton never repeated a note! That may have been an illusion, but then, that's how well the song was written (and I believe it's another person who authors the songs, I'll have to look).

So it was a very effective scene, the mournful tune never repeating a note, and Victor whose character had a poncho thrown over his bony shoulders and a skeleton for a head (and no doubt he has "walked forty-seven miles of barbed wire/got a cobra snake for a necktie" (PS IM me if you want the skel who dances to that tune which I made). I asked Victor about the meaning of a symbol on his clothing, and he explained it was a thing, related to another thing, that was a thing they were doing. OK, I need to read up on it. PS I have that statue of the guy with the owl head and I'm putting it in my quest. It's the sort of statue in a niche you might think is St. Michael the Archangel and then WHOOPS you realize Mike has an owl hand and OMG. Are these people in Bohemian Grove? Because Bohemian Grove has an owl insignia.

So...Neither of them spoke -- it was that same kind of AFK sort of tableau from the 10th anniversary and other events I've seen. Once or twice Victor popped in to say something -- he does that more than Walton. Maybe this is how two busy people make themselves available to adoring fans who can never have enough of them. It's not mine to criticize. I sort of do this myself at my little level when I stand at the Main Office of Ravenglass Rentals, slumped in an AFK, doing my work in the other window and people IM me to get a house removed.

I remained there at worship in Bassett with the rest of the townfolk, I got the freebies and the buybies and even the dueling pistol. I hate guns. I totally oppose guns in RL and SL. I'm for banishing them totally. Certainly AR-15 rifles to start. Come to my Memorial in honour of the mass shooting victims in the US in Cayuga. So I never buy them in SL. Since my purchase of the Axe of the Leviathan which I obtained as a wee newbie, I never have purchased a weapon other than a static sword to put on the wall or as a fountain. It had a lot of cool animations which I couldn't master. I realized one day when I went to an art gallery in that Bassett get up which was really cool, that while debating US gun policy with an acquaintance there, I must have looked rather hypocritical with that gun, and put it away. My RL and SL are not separate. They are seamless. I'm not anonymous.

FRACTURED FAIRY-TALE

I assure you I did not wake up in the morning and think "I must get in Walton's face today". I rarely see or interact with him as much as I appreciate him. He's not on Twitter that much. He announced he was on leave, so I didn't expect to see a road-rage tweet from him.

So this saga that ensues is not deliberate, and his posse, many of whom came late to the story and suffered from the usual Fractured Fairy-Tale of partial Twitter understanding, and who showered a hail of abuse on me, even threatening to make a "hit" on me, and ranted and raged that I was "trans-phobic," because in another thread, because while advocating for trans rights and tolerance of all forms of transgender and non-binary people, I didn't want the phrase "pregnant people" to be forced on women, merely because a tiny percentage of trans men give birth. That's all.

But with this gang in the vicious, totalitarian world of the RP extremists in SL -- over which Walton presides, like a benign tsar, unaware of what the Oprichina is up to -- you can't win. When Walton fetches up from his RL bed now haughty and self-righteous, how can you get him to read all the crazy? To listen to what the point is? To grasp that if I mention my age and experience, it's the ONLY way to try to bring equality into a discussion where your interlocutor reigns supreme? And whose reign is recognized, by me.

So what is this contretemps on Twitter really about? Read the thread and side convos if you have the patience:

CREATOR TIP:
Do NOT use anti-rez scripts in your products. It is useless and will not protect your products from anything. It just wastes extra memory for no reason.

>> The only time it's appropriate is for HUDs or something being used in a functional game.

— Walton Wainwright (@SLContraption) July 6, 2022

My first thought was that Walton got on Twitter to berate his own people in his own events he runs (The Warehouse, currently in session, and Engine Room coming in September, both excellent, premiere events).  Contraption apparently doesn't have its own Discord, although Second Life Syndicate, the events company, does, although it is probably not targeted enough, I don't know. (The topic of events companies is shrouded in mystery and worth another post).

So as I said, Walton had put a notice on his Twitter account the other day that he is on leave after some months of intensive building and creative activity at Fantasy Faire, SciFi-Con, Warehouse, SLB19 and probably other things -- all the top spring season events of SL. He's already posted to us that he is going on break to work on a very big project with new elements to his story/content creation and sales biz, which some people will follow avidly, and I will probably look in on once. So why does he come out of his vacation to get on Twitter, with his 1,353, follower, with what he calls "a PSA"?!

I take a WAG and figure it's because Warehouse is under way now, Engine Room, an even bigger deal, is coming up in September, which means creators are already making their wares for that event and staging them. And he doesn't want people with even laggier scripts than he has in his own wares -- and they have in theirs -- to slow down his shopping sims and reduce enjoyment -- and sales -- in the end. I think that's all there is to it. So he's trying to browbeat the largely female and trans women cohort of clothesmakers in SL, in his events, whom he must believe obviously to be stupid and unaware of the properties of anti-rez scripts and Copybot, into removing them. Could his hand-selected creators for his highly elite events be stupid about anti-rez scripts? Possibly.

It's that condescending male geeksplain bullshit that really got to me, but I also realized Walton inhabits a world far from the issues other more lowly creators face -- and as a far more established, high-profiled, and wealthy (in SL terms) business he has the capacity to file DMCAs, while not everyone else does.

Because I don't think he should pontificate about anti-rez scripts without also acknowledging that there have to be other remedies for Copybot then besides driving people to DMCAs.

No one says a word back to him *publicly*. As they didn't much with his last PSA in May before another episode of Warehouse and SciFi con, where he berated people for their cramped understanding of Steampunk as a genre and urged them to be more creative. This was puzzling to me given that I saw things like a Steampunk aquarium (!) at Warehouse at that moment, and I wrote that I wasn't sure if he was referring to the forums debate about SLB19 with this comment.

NATURALLY he knew nothing about the forums debate because he, like the hundreds of other very top creators of SL, aren't ON the forums. I mean, why would they waste time on those toxic cesspools? Why would they harm their image or their brand wrangling with the likes of not even Prokofy, but Coffee Pancake? So I sent him a painting that was going to be the basis for my own exhibition at SLB19, and he was delighted at an example of other colours besides brown, black, and gold.

I don't know what internal convos he had either in his groups or his discords or what, but THAT burr in his saddle wasn't entirely clear, and judging from the output at SL19 as I've written "Just Put a Gear on It!"), few people heeded  Walton, the God of Gear in SL. Oh, well.

ROAD RAGE

Then I began to wonder, given the spleen he showed over anti-rez scripts, which we can all agree are annoying, whether he just didn't have his own personal road-rage over what he saw as a bloaty outfit. I posted the script times of the anti-rez script I bought off the MP and told him examine (it's open source) and measured the script times of Contraptions own attachments, of which I have purchased plenty (or picked up at their various anniversaries and events). A couple of those goggles and backpacks and whatnot -- you have the same script time as if you had only your regular outfit and a worn box with an anti-rez script. So why not, I noted pointedly, take off some Contraption stuff, if the RP sim has a get-up you have to buy and rules you have to follow? He was torqued about having to change his character -- understood.

And as I suspected, in fact, that's what it was about, as he said in a sub-tweet a day later. And he nattered on that he can take everything out of or off his own products obviously but not from something not on mod. I presume he campaigns as hard on the no-mod issue? I do, by not buying those products or if I must, buying them and taking a star off their MP review.

So all of this was about Walton having to change his clothes on an RP sim. If they were his own clothes, he could mod them or take out scripts. But they are no-mod/no transfer clothes with anti-rez scripts in them he views as pernicious. (I bet he never gets this upset about the infestation of HUDs in general as content delivery systems and unpacker scripts which are the bane of SL -- he was happy to cede a fat exemption to any HUD for any purpose like a game. Oh, well).

SIMPLIFIED PACKAGING

I was so, so, so impressed with luc recently. He dropped ALL of the TOTAL NONSENSE in packing we have been subjected to in the last eight years or more. He put his food giver in a plain prim box, and called it a day. You drag the contents into inventory. Walla, you're done, no HUD in your face, no unpacker script firing and deleting the box while you accidentally don't receive the contents, etc. This entire nonsense of unpacking and HUDs was created by this misplaced fear that newbies or slow learners couldn't learn to drag things out of a prim into inventory -- without getting the box on their head.

So the result today is that all of us have to have creepy iron-legged little robots who chant bloody war ditties and clutch on our backs like limpets, to get a Contraption item. Well, they're kind of cute, it's ok.

NEVER CHALLENGE YOUR BETTERS

I totally realize that when these things blow by on Twitter, you should not challenge your betters. Truly I do. Because not only that superior creator but the legions of anonymous goons who fan him will start hectoring you with their perceived or actual knowledge of technical issues. This is what makes people intimidated in SL from ever objecting to anything these superiors say -- but I don't suffer from that problem.

WALTON IS KING

So first, first, the genuflections to all four compass points. I am the first to write that Walton Wainright is THE top creator of SL and I mean that even after this wrangle with him. Why?

o He has the most superior, high quality content in a niche but popular enough genre that not only reaches multiple RP genres like steam or sci-fi or goth that has some crossover to mainstream; not everyone wants a bloody metal mask blocking their face but many people want an old fashioned gramophone that plays mournful tunes;

o He has high attention to details like LOD collapse and lag and the look and feel and use of builds;

o He has high patience and ability to develop story, compelling narratives, arch and witty but sometimes sinister, which people like;

o He writes or commissions very talented and haunting musical pieces;

o He is friendly and himself sometimes comes out to a house call. Example: when I couldn't get My Bird Husband (an item made available at a tribute to Zerkalo's founder Daniel who died in RL) to big up the way I feel he should be for my scene, even if Walton did not grasp why his little bird needed to be big (so as to be like those Half-Deer Birbs I and the Deeries bigged up in Iris), he cheerfully bigged it up and sent it back to me; I also went many rounds trying to trouble shoot his experience-driven mirror. (PS I have probably burned more hours on Experience than anyone in SL except of course Fantasy Faire quest makers. You simply have to have small parcels with a dedicated landing point on them for it to work properly; otherwise non-group members won't land on the destination point. There are other problems with Experience I could discuss another day).

o He seems to be a smart and engaging person with a husband in RL who is also his SL creation partner; I think the consumer public always like to see something stable but romantic at the heart of a merchant story.  I mean, they're like Dave, the Wendy's Guy. Well, sort of. (PS the first time I saw Walton silently building at FF years ago with Victor Eton silent by his side, I thought mistakenly that Victor was his mule alt where he kept his building supplies because his own heavy inventory main account couldn't load content any more during projects -- that's what I'd be doing in a scene like that. But then I came to realize Victor is a real, separate person AND his RL partner. If this is a myth -- and we have no way of verifying it -- shoot me, but from all indications it's true).

So it's precisely because Walton is all those wonderful things that I bother resisting. Maybe these people can change. Maybe they can stop being arrogant assholes -- especially the ones who aren't really fully of that nature. Maybe they can grasp the larger issues of our fragile world, headed toward destruction.

CONDESCENSION

Walton doesn't hear or see the terrible condescension in these tweets, when he keeps telling me, in SL nearly 18 years and a creator and business owner, too, even if a far more amateur and tiny one, that I need to learn the facts of life about copybotting, and he's happy to help me. The more I try to explain to him that I truly do know these facts of virtual life and knew them before he was born, the more he accuses me of elitism. To be sure, he apologized later, which was big of him. But he really doesn't want to take the time to hear what the history MEANS.

He doesn't know that I know because I don't count in his world and never had. If I were a top designer in his events and in his friends' circle, he wouldn't dream of lecturing me about Copybot. He accepts that his peers know about Copybot. He doesn't accept his customers, especially from the low, mass culture class, know anything at all. They only deserve to be lectured.

So all of it just sounds arrogant, as I was helping my hired builders do DMCA take-downs for years before he came to SL. I recall when entire picnic tables, desert buildings, etc. were copybotted as both a griefing of me as a critic of SL, and merely as the garden variety copying that goes on in SL. In Ansheland, a copybotter casually copied all my builder's desert buildings in a scene and put them down on their own land next door (!). Anshe shrugged; it took some doing to get the Lindens to focus. We had RL names and addresses we were willing to put down; not everyone does.

If Walton is, say, 35 in RL now, the Copybot scandal happened when he was 17 and not in SL yet. He then has the temerity to tell me not to pull rank with experience -- as if any little lowly land dealer and amateur dabbler could be pulling rank on THE top creator of SL. You see what is so often the case with these geek designers -- they are actually strangely insecure, unaware of their own power and influence, unaware of the world, they lack any empathy, and can't even understand their own greatness and its responsibility.

CLASS WARFARE

He says "we're all in this together".

I wish we were.

We are not.

It is class warfare.

And I am happy to fight that class war, you will find. I don't want to live in a world where only a sanctified Guild of top creators dictate policy of technical or social kind without finding of facts especially, where we can't exist except as rubes and consumers. I don't want to live in a RenFaire. I don't want Fantasy Faire to be all day, every day, forever. I want it only to be two weeks out of the year. I want true diversity and pluralism and freedom and tolerance, and that means people who use mesh models -- are they allowed at Engine Room lol?

I don't know why all those "little dressmakers," as the people sneering at us back in the original Copybot days were called, aren't responding either to justify their use of the script or to say they take his point but don't like his attitude. But it turns out at the end he had "92 DMs" where his posse was all golf-clapping and agreeing -- and the fact that the RP sim owner with those clothes and their makers were not contacted privately, but he "took it to Twitter" is something that he and his posse will have to sort out.

I can totally grasp that my effort to defend these people I don't even know and probably wouldn't care for (I don't do RP sims) doesn't endear me to them and that's fine. 

When I linked to those stories that happened BEFORE HE WAS BORN, it was to help him try to understand the SOCIAL CONTEXT of Copybot. He, like all geeks, and increasingly all males and even all people, as binary thinking and literalist thinking induced by computers takes over the human mind, said that literally THAT Copybot of yore was copying prims and textures by another mechanism but the Copybot of today, the hipster era of the coolest kids, uses another mechanism to suck up the data sent to the server about the mesh features. All those vertices and whatnot. I don't have to know the science and math of this procedure to know THAT it works in that fashion like other things in SL -- it's like how you learn to drive a car without knowing the science of internal combustion. The ability of norms to grasp computer functioning and processes far exceeds the willingness of geeks and designers to admit our increasing abilities. Such is our world.

The SOCIAL side of Copybot -- the panic, the fear of loss of LIVELIHOOD of Black designers in Detroit and retired postal men in Columbus, Ohio -- it was awful, awful. SL was a dream, a commerce based world where you could finally sell and not just be stripped of your personal data for others to sell. This still evades Walton, even though he did, to his credit do two things -- you can see he is not theoretical at all but experience- and fact-based:

FACT-CHECKING

o First, hoping to play "gotcha" as geeks always are with norms, when I said the Mole backpack from SLB19 had the anti-rez script in it (it sure seemed to me like it did), he went and got a backpack and proved it had no such script in it. And that's fine, I don't have a problem admitting I was wrong when I was obviously wrong!

I'll bet big money that he did that not by torturously going through the Swaginator Hunt like I had to, but just IMing a Mole friend who was probably cheering him on in this Twit-fight in the background.

Why did I think the backpack did? Because when I rezzed it out to put it in a scene in a Linden home, where the floors DO NOT suffer from mesh bounce as so many SL houses do, like his own Pollux  -- they have addressed this issue -- it poofed but seemed visible for a second. Normally there are three ways for things to disappear like that in SL: a) you don't have the right group tag on your head -- you see the item for a minute, it disappears; b) anti-rez, where it appears for a second and disappears; c) mesh bounce, where you never see it at all and it disappears. You have to re-log to see it again.

Since the Moles started using -- to my enormous chagrin -- the Casper vendors, I was afraid using resident anti-rez scripts -- they do come from the user base, after all -- might be a sin now, too. So I was wrong.

o Walton went out and bought for $119 the Shuggles anti-rez script which I recommended merely because it's open source and he can see the 

SIDETRACK ON MESH BOUNCE

I'll bet you Walton has never really thought about mesh bounce and its issues because he rarely makes buildings. 

But let's take the gorgeous Pollux office which I love but which doesn't rent because it suffers badly from mesh bounce. I constantly try to educate my tenants that so many mesh houses suffer from this issue, because they were not made or uploaded properly with this problem in mind.

My sense is that someone like Walton doesn't live in SL. He doesn't have a house. He doesn't invite his pals over for drinks and snacks. He hasn't tried to decorate his living room and seen all his no-copy gatchs return due to mesh bounce. Again, if I'm wrong, shoot me, but I never heard of this particular Great and Powerful Oz having a house. SL is a hobby, a blank canvas, a chat room with peers. It's not a place to live. Or for that matter work. His work is outside in his RL home on the Internet or with various tools like Blender. That's fine. But then I'm going to firmly call out that he doesn't know what it's like to LIVE HERE.

I DO. (And yes, I "have a life" -- look me up in the book.)

Sure, he comes in and visits some RP sim. This is part of working his fan base and it's all good. But if he had a permanent home in SL especially once he made himself, he would have long ago grasped the mesh bounce problem and fixed it. 

Mesh bounce is when you try to put a mesh object out on mesh, and it just won't rez and gives you a ridiculous message  "The owner of this land does not allow it" (which I've desperately tried to get the Lindens to change to no avail) which angers my tenants because they feel like I personally am telling people who paid me money they can't do something).

There are several threads on the forums about this, and no, this page is all wrong that this is merely a "bug". Lindens refuse to change the message -- I have debated this many times. They persist in thinking it's about the server thinking you are putting your item on another sim, across a sim seam, or on land not your own, but that is definitely not it. I can be in the middle of an entire sim I own and still have this problem because it's about how the mesh was uploaded, not your placement. 

Here's a screenshot. 

Please don't tell me my business when I have to help the customers of YOUR products in YOUR PRODUCTS or OTHER CREATORS. Scarlet Creative used to have horrendous bounce problems; I had long talks with her; she fixed it. PS there are long threads on the forums (that she herself participates in, as she does on the cash-out issue) about mesh bounce. But Walton mentally is making a backdrop, a scene to a story, a sim like FF which is a shopping and philanthropy sim, not a place you live in for long. Barnesworth Anubis had this problem more severely; he began to get rid of it. The Moles making the Linden Homes in Bellisseria licked this problem. Etc. People talk about detaching floors; making them phantom; doing this, doing that, there is One Weird Trick that solves it SOMETIMES but why? Upload your mesh right, guys.

Everyone who has to either rent out or wants to live in houses gets that you have to rez out a prim board to decorate because creators can't be arsed to fix mesh bounce. I make this digression to explain the background of how creators are perceived; the social context for even top-notch, decent human being creators making PSAs they think are a genuine public service, and why no one will bother to listen to them and resent them (oh, except maybe a few eager fangirlz).

WE ARE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER

Walton at one point appeals to commonality. He doesn't really understand this beef. He is probably privately wishing to just block me and be done with it, but who needs a blogging customer mad at you? He thinks if he says "we're all in this together" -- as if he was merely "trying to help for the public good," why, who could fault him?

Well, we're not all in this together.

We're not all in the top 200 designers of SL in Shop 'n Hop

We're not even in the 85 selected SLB19 exhibitors.

And this isn't sour grapes. We can't all be "the best" and the Lindens can't pick critical bloggers especially. That's fine. But, as on forums users asked plaintively years ago:

WHAT ABOUT THE PEOPLE WITH NO TALENT?

There has to be a place for us in this society and we can't be just dumb shoppers expected to endlessly shop at your idiotic weekend sales that never end and your endlessly proliferating events.

Some of us are in the "other" category although we make the bulk of power SL users -- consumers and pro-sumers at the amateur level.

And there is a huge gulf between you and us.

If some creator doesn't like me speaking up for them and think's I'm full of shit, they're welcome to speak up themselves and correct me. But they don't.

And here's why.

They are dependent on the good will of Walton, Second Life Syndicate (what a name! sounds like a mafia), and the coterie of the ne plus ultra creator class who form opinion of what is cool and what is not, partly driven by actual technical exigencies, and partly driven by illusion and swinging dicks.

I don't feel we need to sit still for that and as is well known, I push back.

Now what is it I don't get about anti-rez scripts? Nothing. I've seen them execute many, many times! They don't seem especially necessary to me and I'm able to read their script time on a Xoph sensor as high -- but they don't seem as bad a problem as "no mod" -- also inflicted on the buying public not just for reasons of Copybot. I encounter the idiocy of "no mod" way more than I do any anti-rezzer script because "no mod" isn't just about a creator with a hysteria about Copybot which she thinks thinks she has warded off IP theft with a totemic seal.

But wait. In fact, except for the Copybot problem, which isn't as common an occurrence on a sim as imagined, no-mod is useful in preventing someone from opening up a prim, taking a script or texture or anim, and putting it into another prim. Best of all, if that item is on copy/transfer to serve as food or a temp-attach item, "no-mod" means you can't put it to sale. No-mod isn't just a fetish to ward off evil spirits; it's a function to prevent re-sale literally and to prevent use of the script and animation outside the original object. There is nothing wrong with that. LL put permissions in from the beginning. There has always been an extreme faction of copyleftists fighting it and making all kinds of special pleadings. They've ultimately all been ignored in favour of commerce based on permissions

The default of cynical asshole geeks in SL from time memorial is to tell creators they are morons, to ridicule and demean them, like Electronic Frontier Foundation did telling us that our TOS was shit and nothing could save our tiny economy built on dreams -- and Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig (who tried to impose Creative Commons in SL and failed miserably). They don't respect copyright and perms at all, as you can readily see from some of the comments by low-follow trolls who came into this discussion to tell you that no-transfer clothing is a "problem". Of course it isn't "a problem". Walton himself puts his clothing on "no-transfer". He doesn't make his living in SL, but he doesn't want to give his hobby creations away for free; they have to generate some income to cover costs at least of servers, etc.

IF WALTON REALLY UNDERSTOOD THE RAMIFICATIONS OF HIS STENTORIAN ADMONITION THAT ANTI-REZ SCRIPTS CAN'T SAVE YOU FROM ALL-POWERFUL COPYBOT, HE SHOULD PUT ALL HIS CREATIONS ON COPY AND TRANSFER BECAUSE REALLY, ONLY DMCA TAKEDOWN NOTICES PROTECT IP. THE END.

Yet, he doesn't, and participates in the social construct of permissions like all of us -- he just wants to optimize the script time, and he thinks shaming people about their anti-Copybot schemes will force this optimization. Well, good luck.

To him, anti-rezzing scripts, even with this follow-up acknowledgement of certain use cases for them, are an obstacle to his goal of optimal creations that are visually appealing but not laggy -- he's obsessive on these topics, likely more than is necessary given the poor computer graphics capacity that most people on SL have, such as not to even appreciate some LOD marvel or Advanced Lighting wonder. I turn all that stuff off, like a lot of people. Artists browbeat and hector us with big signs at the doors of their galleries -- we ignore them totally and enjoy the scenes anyway.

Walton is convinced that all that is necessary is to explain to ignorant women -- it's mainly women who make clothes -- that they are putting script hogs in their products out of uneducated fear, and they should stop, so his events won't be so laggy -- and in general, the experiences of his customers using his script-eating wares. His anticipation is that he will either get the back-up Greek chorus of his fellow geek dudes, or some fangirl gushing, and that will close the door on the subject on the way to the bright and beautiful future.

So this is where I put a big sneakered foot in the door and say, "No."

I say "No" because at my end of the telescope on SL, things look different and ARE different.

First, I immediately speak up on behalf of the benefits of protective scripts such as one I myself commissioned and a noted scripter devised FOR FULL PERM MODELS. I don't want him stepping on this sector out of cultural or even economic warfare and superior sneering (creators who use models are barred from most top creator events, where organizers demand only original created mesh). I don't want the catch all denunciation of "anti-rez" scripts to then capture the protection scripts such as I commissioned and others use which make rezzed objects outside their giver turn black and poof. Food givers have become much more popular, partly because I've campaigned for them, putting food to give in every beautiful creation that didn't contain it, explaining to creators they should do this themselves, and explaining how. The market began to demand this especially with the appearance of andika on the scene, who does such beautiful food delivery items, and luc of course, and it isn't about me at all.

There's no rocket science here with the FULL PERM PROTECTION (note we are NOT talking about NO TRANSFER CLOTHES); it works on the same or similar principles of other such protection scripts. We aren't so benighted as to imagine they work 100% against *Copybot* in particular; but this is like a COVID vaccine. It doesn't have to be perfect. It can work 87% or 62%. It can work not at all after awhile, and then you have to make a new kind. Etc. But it works well enough to MAKE THE WORLD.

My use case involves mainly givers of food or givers of various temp-used items like a book or a magic stick. You can accomplish this in SL by 1) having "rez wearable" whereupon the wearble jumps to the avatar but never comes in his inventory; 2) you can 'give everything but scripts" (there's something Walton should do a public service message on, the need to use GIVE EVERYTHING BUT SCRIPTS so that you don't clutter and confuse other users with excess other kinds of dispense scripts) and  then the person gets it in inventory and then uses "wear" or "add" OR 3) you can use another kind of "rez object on touch correctly" with "temp-attach" and have it work that way, for more refined animations, multiple animations in a series, etc. I bet Walton never has to think of any of these issues for the market in general. He makes his own mesh, he has teams of people doing scripting and optimization and marketing and he doesn't have to think about how he will survive in a field of rampant theft.

It's not just clothes that bounce with an anti-rez script; some teacups or magic spell books do the same thing.

So I first point out that they're used not just for clothes, which is all Walton cares about -- clothes and accessories are the creator items that cost the most and sell the most, we all get it; houses and furniture sell less than even breedables these days, especially with Linden Homes competing.

Walton curtly dismisses the other use case of food givers  with a tone that implies food consumption is low on his list of RP needs and versimilitude, although legions of people demand this and there are all kinds of sub-communities like players of XeoLife and DFS making food growing and consumption like real life.  I personally only recall one from him very recently -- the whiskey tray in Bassett (and my God, you do need a hearty shot of whiskey to get through that very dreary sim about a dying culture of the Wild West). In self-defense, he then says he does do givers, and trots out the whiskey. Sigh. 

Of course, his posse does not include the lowly plebes who eat from Prok's Trash Can Cuisine -- or for that matter luc's latest Stuffed Peppers (I'm the one that got luc to start making his products deliverable and sent him my Trash Cuisine as a model). We are a lesser breed. And we are, I get it, truly I do. Because we have to put our items on copy/transfer to make them deliverables, which means nobody needs to crank up a Firestorm performing Copybot (again, a  reason I refuse to use FS because they will not technically remove or verbally condemn this practice)

OH WOW PROK ARE YOU STOOOPID YOU DON'T GET YOU CAN COPY ANYTHING IN SL ENTIRELY IN SECONDS?

Yes, I describe this as the "analog hole" -- although that term is technically and literally not quite correct any more given the way the viewer functions now but as a generic philosophical term, it will do. This was the term computer specialists used 20 years ago when you all were watching Barney. I see it's not a term used any more, but what it means is, "if you can see it, you can copy it". To serve it to you, LL has to make a copy it puts in front of you; to see and use it, you thereby become able to copy it. This is why Raph Koster would say:

THE CLIENT IS IN THE HANDS OF THE ENEMY

The game devs always see the customer, by whom they profit, as they enemy because they burn through content and demand more; they mod and sell content in illegal ways; they steal IP and sell game currency on ebay, etc and don't behave like the docile customers of the movie and music industry did for decades.

This means some day, we may have only Meta with their high caste of devs and designers and the rest of us will be barred from creation in order to prevent IP theft.

Yes, we get it that now, no human eye is needed; now the Copybot can literally be a bot sent into a sim to have a function performed which involves slurping up the information sent to the server,

But here's the thing. Copybot has to have this virtual setting to function: someone must be waring that coveted frock coat and waist coat and monocle on a crowded event sim where they are either trying on or purchasing the item or participating in some group story around the product like an FF event sim -- and then snatch it within a blink of an eye through the wonders of science. Therefore, reasons Walton, copying happens without any rezzing; therefore no anti-rez scripts are needed.

COPYBOT IS NOT UBIQUITOUS ALTHOUGH YOU THEORIZE AS IF IT IS

But Copybot is not functioning on every sim at every minute, because the Lindens do have various ways of chasing these things. They won't close off anonymizer sites as we wish they were, imagining that freedom fighters in Iran or China are logging on with them (not!); they do scrape hash marks or whatever to track things; they can triangulate a bunch of different data points, each of which tells nothing, and put it together to spell WOODBURY -- we have watched these methods over the years and obviously they don't tell us about them. When Philip was able to kill 50 avatars from Something Awful/WHat in an afternoon (but miss some of the top miscreants who were careful not to get their hands dirty), there was enormous screeching and hollering but you know, LL has the server logs and we don't. Behaviours cluster; people who use CopyBot and sell hot ripped items also crash sims and run around with pornographic avatars in General.

ARE THE BOTS BACK IN THE BOX?

I have written repeatedly about all the other episodes around Copybot, which I witnessed myself -- indeed part of the strategy of the people griefing SL with this to "make a point" was to show it to me and get me blogging about it. The only problem was that the Herald, where I broke this story, was funded by the Electric Sheep, and the Herald's managing editor was on the Sheep's payroll. Since I was a lowly virtual journalist, but a RL journalist who understood how things work when it comes to site funders, I did what I was told and made the setrec, even knowing it to be false and misleading. Later when enough griefing of me personally was done to force me out of the Herald, I did more research. I met the person in RL who showed me the first bots. I met the Sheep staff person who deployed the code. They and others were in libsl. Libsl was busy in 2004-2005 reverse-engineering the viewer. This was disallowed under the TOS, but Cory Linden (Cory Ondrejka) encouraged it. He had a different view than Philip as we came to discover after Cory quit SL.  He wanted to liberate both the viewer and server code; Philip did not.

The Lindens backdated their tolerated TOS violation and havoc ensued as libsl didn't create but griefed, and set Copybot lose in the world. This is not a secret and not hard to find out today. Some people speculated darkly that Intel, where this individual worked soon after, in fact had sabotaged SL because they had their own virtual world in the making; there was a lot of cut-throat competition at the time with even Google making a short-lived virtual world called Lively. I'm always amazed when I stumble on Twitter users describing themselves as the thinkers at the dawn of the Metaverse, ignorant of their virtual grandfathers of 15-20 or more years ago -- they piss on SL as a cybersex dungeon with silly copyright and no interoperability and refuse to see all the very valid lessons and accomplishments of SL. Today, the Copybot coder (although he is a separate person from at least two other nefarious deployers inworld -- which is how he can keep plausible deniability) has his own robotics firm. This is life in the Metaverse.

There's enormous amount of double-talk about Copybot, and claims it was an innocent debugging project. It wasn't. I was there. I recorded what libsl did, the "perverse engineers," they used god-mode to stalk and harass me. I AR'd their obscenities and particle bombings and sim crashes; they tried to shut me up. This was a thuggish gang that constantly harassed me and tried to silence me writing on the Herald about their true nature. Emerald devs -- and yes Phoenix and Firestorm are indeed related to them -- came on my sim Belarus and kicked all the chickens offworld to kill them, this was sport. They made a giant effigy of my RL head and would hold parties with it and make films of it, which you used to be able to see on YouTube. 

Most of all they wanted to hide the fact that big business was using this, via their consultants in SL, Electric Sheep (which doesn't even exist any more), who all had nothing but a cynical attitude toward any IP protection except their own. The Lindens, when they created the Nebraska product, finally created a special closed store like the Soviets had with the Beriozka system where big RL companies could buy from a select set of merchants -- this was to ensure both that they wouldn't face copyright claims AND that they could violate it at will as work-for-hire. They copied these items with the trick of merely resetting a sim in time and reloading it.

Why does Copybot exist, Walton? Do you think it exists for script kiddies to make a buck off a ripped dress or car in a sandbox where commerce is not allowed but no one enforces this law? No. Grown-ups made Copybot to destroy copyright and liberate content so that like YouTube and the California Ideology, the Internet and then the Metaverse have free and available content to attract customers. That your IP is devalued in the process; that the newspaper, media, book, record, digital arts industries are all destroyed except for a few very highly resourced biggies like the New York Times -- who cares? 

YOU don't care BECAUSE IT DOESN'T HAPPEN TO YOU. And if it does, you can get lawyers, do DMCA takedowns, do whatever, as you have a RL business and RL contacts and RL capacity. Many creators don't. (PS that's not me, if I need to call a copyright lawyer I know just whom to call and the media to call to get the issue covered as well).

PERMISSIONS IN SL ARE NOT A FEATURE; THEY ARE A BUG

The concept of enabling creative people to make a living through sale of their content is not a feature of these platforms; it's a bug -- a bug that we all temporarily exploit, but it can't last forever. We all would like that model for the Metaverse and not the scraping and sale of personal data and the incitement of social hatred and division for clicks. But let's not pretend that those who select the former are also altruistic. They're not.

Walton conceded that the other use case for anti-rez is for those customers who haven't figured out yet that they need to use "add" or "wear" and just instinctively rez out a dress. In the old days they had a box on their head because they  were more instinctive about "add" from games or other worlds. There are always new people or returnees learning the lessons of "wear" -- and I would add that people who have already used up their attachment points, and experience a bounce, then might rez it out to see if there is something they might "do" or "edit".

CREATIONS FROM 'INSPIRATION'

And now comes the final point about all this I have saved for last. I was hoping Walton would get it. He didn't. I was hoping some diva would say something. She didn't. Because it's obviously not something to discuss.

It's Hair Fair, and you can be sure somewhere in the Metaverse, some merchant is crying herself to sleep because she thinks someone has stolen her hair -- or they have in fact. The forums, groups, Discords have endlessly wrangles about stolen hair, shapes, etc.

Is this about Copybot and your browbeat about its irrationality?

No.

Because to steal hair or a shape or something like that, sure, you can use Copybot. You may be skilled or not in doing that and may or may not get caught. Not every designer who wants to be respectable wants to reach the top through Copybotting; people will talk.

So there's another thing she will do.

She will rez the body or dress out on the sim where she can view it in the round. Walk around it. Take her time. Cam into it. Study it up close. Take some screenshots. Turn it around. This process leads to a creation "inspired by" another. It may not be technically slavishly copied, but someone who makes a shape or hair after this intense scrutiny -- thwarted only by anti-rez scripts! -- can make something that may look entirely like the original source of "inspiration".

THAT is the use case. I have no idea how common it is; I think quite common judging from the drama over the years. Someone will no doubt be along and explain that while once that was the truth with prim and sculpty and flexi hair and shapes made inside the avatar outfit creator, now, with mesh, that is less common. I don't believe that to be the case.

Sure, you don't need to rez it out! Duh! You can stand on a posing disc and turn yourself around with the camera and see just fine. Yes, we all do that. Yes, I grasp you can do that. But if you want to see all up and down and inside and out of a mesh clothing item, you can't beat rezzing it out inworld.

BTW sometimes such scrutiny isn't about "inspiration" copying but just about asking for a feature that isn't available, or for demanding "mod" when it isn't there. And sometimes customers get their way.

In any event, if I'm wrong, it doesn't matter, I don't count. What I am not seeing here is the anti-rezzer script users stepping up and explaining that no, they aren't stupid about Copybot, but they use it for: [pick a reason]. They may never show up to speak their piece. If YOU were in a Second Syndicate event run by Walton (or at least in which Walton took a leading role on content creation parameters or rules), where YOU depended on him and that event for your income would YOU speak up? Of course not! Where you were lucky to have gotten into it as not everyone is accepted? Would YOU EVER speak up and contradict the Content Creator-in-Chief? Would you?

Walton thinks that because he has "92 DMs" with approval, that the case is closed. He claims that these creators who used these scripts drove away new users. Of course just about everything in SL drives away new users, especially arrogant content creators who can't be arsed to do CS and sic their rude CS people on you who inflict more damage.

I want to hear from creators who use these scripts, and trust me, I'm going to go through my inventory to find them.

I want to hear from the maker of Bosh scripts, and I will ask him.

I want to hear from Shuggles, whose script Walton conceded wasn't so bad but...

I want to hear if Walton, in the UK, where there is less of this nonsense, thinks that "pregnant people" and "people who menstruate" are terms we must accept for the sake of being inclusive of trans men.

I think trans women are women; I accept that they have transitioned in fact to what they always felt they were; this isn't hard for me to do at all. What I do then object to -- having celebrated trans women as women -- is the need now to subsume that term into a collectivized "pregnant people". That's the big struggle this week, causing people to be fired from their jobs and cancel their subscriptions to the NYC over an article saying we should not have the far left or the far right control women's bodies, and the "pregnant people" is as bad as Dobbs in that regard. I may disagree about Dobbs for other reasons, but I sure do think "pregnant people" has to go the way of MSM, "men having sex with men," the term hospitals and foundations use. It's ok to say LGBTQ+ ; it's ok to use whatever pronouns an individual requests.

COMMON COURTESY

And then the other, related point I have: it used to be part of SL's civic culture that you removed your attachments and heavy scripts -- pre-anticipated by Cheech and Chong's admonition to "let the air out of your shoes" when exiting the Bozo Bus to the Midway of the Future. To help you be a good citizen, LL had a nag screen that tells you your avatar "cost" and it keeps nagging at you and tries to incentivize you to change by warning you that you are not visible to everyone -- the system turns you gray if you are "too expensive". I, like a lot of people, are happy to be good citizens and take off scripted things like a backpack or an animesh shoulder pet to relieve the sim. But we also turn off that nag screen on the Debug screen because it's merely a nuisance.

And here's the thing. The Lindens used to browbeat on all this way more than they used to. Maybe their way of telling us to stop wearing hair when we went out on the town was to shove it up our ass when we teleported and landed. They put in the nag screen after all and make a cursory effort to tell people to remove their attachments all the time, even while recognizing this made them special.

But if you have been in events like SLB19 or Meet the Moles lately or even just Concierge on Wednesdays, you'll notice a different refrain from the Lindens: "We now have new, fast, fresh, powerful Event Servers. Buy them! You will never feel lag again!" So instead of telling people to recycle or walk or take the bus, tp make them buy cloth bags for a dollar, they now have new electric cars that don't pollute the environment. Well, not as much.

Of course, there's this dark side of Event Regions which has to do with "the child is father of the man" as I call it  -- or you know, that child objects rendering in the distance on the cam sim. The cam sim makes things worse, they tell us. But of course, that's to get people to buy an Events Region.

Walton, buy an Events region. You can likely afford it. All these issues will go away.

Until then, I want you to think really hard about what your solution is for Copybot in general -- and don't be Mr. Helpful and tell me you will assist me in filling out a DMCA notice. No sale.

Some day, when you work for MetaSteam 30 years from now and I will long be dead, you will remember the summer night long ago when we argued about Copybot, in a world where we both could still create what we want to and sell it and keep nearly all the proceeds when we cashed out.

 

Comments

[How do you live like this]

You really spent the last 20 hours being this mad writing this much about stuff you don't understand. Bruh Take a vacation.

[Prokofy Neva]

Do they not teach English in North Carolina any more? I don't think "mad" is the word to use on this matter. Trust me, you'll know when I'm mad : )

I'll take this opportunity to remind people of the rules for my blog:

1) You must use a Second Life name, a recognizable blogger name, or a RL name, and that's not "John Smith".
2) You must not incite damages against me or any other person in SL or RL.

[Stress is gonna mess you up one day]

Clearly they do, and you're just trying to make some asinine allusion to someone being uneducated because they live in a particular place. This entire thing is about how you got your feelings hurt and can't get over it and you should probably reflect inwardly on that. Only person that's going to be mad about this in a day is you.

[Frankie Antonioni]

Hey Prokofy, how come your not in search? This is the first time I heard of Contraption.

It looks like the first poster, and the third poster are the same. So this is to the first, and third poster. Why don't you use your SL name when you post?

[Prokofy Neva]

How could you not have heard of Contraption? they are the premier content people of SL. You really should check them out since you're into Doctor Who and all that.

I've hidden my account because a) I have to take care of a sick relative and can't be online this week as much b) I am deluged with griefing and harassment. You can contact Henry Hutchence if you need assistance.

Back soon.