By Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor
I never, ever, delete blog posts -- ever. If there is some factual correction to be made in them, I will insert it into the text at the end. Rarely, the platform provider may get bombarded with utterly specious copyright claims and get a post removed, but I can only think of one or two times that has happened in my entire life of blogging spanning some 23+ years. I also don't delete tweets unless I've made a typo or name spelling error in them, and then I repost them. Extremely rarely, I might notice that an effort to get a point across in a normal conversation among a few people isn't effective given the ugly pile-on propensities of Twitter especially now. So then, I might delete and make the point elsewhere inworld or not at all. But generally, my policy is never delete. Ever. And the setrecs (setting the record straight) can be made, but they aren't as numerous as imagined.
So far, given every fact I have, I have absolutely no reason whatsoever to ever, in my life, to delete this post, this post or those updating it that came after.
Why? Because those alts are all belonging to the same person, as any idiot in Second Life can tell. They have similar names, dates, and groups. And the payments they made came immediately right after another, within seconds. These are universally recognized in SL and any other virtual world as alt behaviour.
Let's say, if in the course of publicizing these four original alts -- and a fifth that came on still pretending they were all unrelated -- I accidentally included a name of someone unrelated to the alt nest.
Or let's say, one of the four isn't the alt, and four out of the five are.
That person would most likely do the thing most people do in SL: ignore it. Because it doesn't matter. Because they stand for themselves, and their alts, known or unknown, and what some landlord thinks in some two-bit 50L rental about his customers chiseling him in a policy of "limit one per person" in cheap rentals, and his blog, which is hardly seen by anyone these days, do not matter.
Let's say said person mistakenly included in a list of alts decided that they still had a discomfort level from this low level of "publicity". They might IM me once and say, hey, that's not me, would you mind taking me out of that list? To which I could say, "Oh, sorry" -- if I checked, and you really had a case. Or, "Oh, I'm not convinced, and I need to deter people who repeatedly do this to me and shake down my cheap rentals."
What Would Normal Person Do
If they were rational and normal -- and many people in SL are, although I understand a famous artist in SL once said, "Everyone in SL is broken in some way" -- which is also true -- they would shrug, chalk it up to life on the grid, and move on. Because my blog would sink below the fold and into the sands of Internet oblivion where in fact my blog actually stays, because of Google bombing -- SEO techniques to ensure the Internet either "never forgets" or "forgets forever and never becomes findable" -- both of which are practiced by amateurs and even large, expensive firms.
What a normal, rational, human being whose alt has been outed would do, had they used four of them to shake down 4 x 50L rentals in a one-per-person rental unit (80 cents US), would say, "Oops, what can you do, my bad" or "Those are not my alts, good sir, why the very idea!" in indignation just to defend the honour of alt-uniform. But then they'd be done. They'd be gone. We would never hear from each other again -- and believe me, I have plenty of these experiences in SL so I know the difference.
If a person really was wronged, they could say clearly, "It's a coincidence, those are not my alts." They wouldn't keep repeating like a broken record, "I did nothing to you" -- not actually a claim that they were NOT alts -- in the mistaken conviction that grabbing multiple rentals in a limit-one-person area "does no harm." But it does. It's deception. And it takes cheap rentals from other people. My response to this chronic deception is just to make less and less cheap areas. I have probably a quarter of the number I used to because people are assholes and grab and deceive in this particular arena more than others. I sometimes have larger areas at the exact same price so they don't have to take four little rentals and put one skybox in the sky over them; they can just go on a platform that is larger and be done with it. But not endlessly; so the problem persists. So the hell with it, find somebody else to torment.
Absent Accountability
"I did nothing to you" is first of all, a failure to recognize when personal and community harm is done, and I'm here to keep you getting that lesson forever if I need to. Secondly, if the claim of "I did nothing to you" is "my gender deception is not your business," then sorry, it's the business of all of us in a world that makes this easy, but not free from consequences.
What would a person do, if they were ignorant not only of the Streisand Effect, but 0blivious to common sense, or they were in some private jihad they needed to pursue? They would continue to harass, harry, threaten, bully, rant at me. They'd enlist strangers in this jihad. They'd enlist tenants in this jihad. They would endlessly stand around on a Linden infohub where they also had a beef against a Linden and another resident, and add my company logo and name to their "Picks" retailing their grievances. They would stand in front of my office on the Linden road so they couldn't be expelled and picket me so that all prospective customers would see a demonstrator and I would lose business (didn't work; we all AR'd them; finally they were gone.)
So that's what "lexdisia" and "troppicolor" and "troubletrixie" etc. and her legion of alts do. Any normal person -- or even in broken-people SL -- could tell her: by constantly bringing this grievance to public attention over and over for years, you're ensuring that your alt nest loses its privacy. Otherwise, you might still have it.
Motivations?
If they still do it, then they are mentally unbalanced but usually you can ban and mute such people or LL eventually permabans them because their insanity isn't limited only to you. That this person can keep recurring despite multiple ARs from all kinds of people on various issues, and not just my alt-abuse-in-cheap-rentals issue, lets me know one of three possibilities:
o the Lindens allow this crazy person to harass me as they find it useful;
o the alt of a present or past Linden is behind it -- it's hard to imagine anyone else would have that long a memory; most griefers grow up and either work for Intel or become professors;
o the Lindens can't control their grid effectively because they are unwilling to ban popular anonymizer sites or effectively ban frequent flyer griefers with hash bans or whatever they need to do.
Modus Operandi
I've lost track of the many times this person has harassed me, my tenants, and strangers (and sometimes pretended to be "concerned strangers" to boot). But the latest one takes exactly the same form as all the others:
o the same person with the same or a similar name of someone who should have been banned contacts me, threatening me and giving me "one last chance" to remove a post.
o they put my company log in their profile with insults or threats, telling everyone not to rent from me and my "legion of alts" (LOL) which then is reported to me by various passers-by;
o since they are immediately blocked, they get some passer-by involved in contacting me to deliver their threats; or that's an alt; or they're all related;
o they hang around the same Linden infohub sim (Barbarossa) they always do, related to another grievance they have with a Linden which sounds crazy to me;
o a person repeatedly contacts me with cryptic remarks on yet another name which is likely related;
o the person marks their profile with "deleted" except it isn't lol.
Etc.
So...Block/ban/move on.
AND PUBLICIZE. Because you have to do that to eradicate vindictive insanity in a virtual world; ARing, blocking is not enough.
Why?
Because ignoring griefing does not work, and ARs don't work, yet publicity does get rid of it -- it can simply take a long time
So this time, we will have a post on this subject to instruct the general public as to why this sort of thing happens, in such crazy fashion, and so often.
Why is this happening?
Answer: because this person is a disturbed male deploying female alts to harm others. Sometimes these profiles speak of being a "ladyboy" or some kind of variant of m2f. Sometimes they don't and appear only as women -- and ah, that's the problem. I would simply take them as female -- unless over the years, I notice the same person griefing me now has "ladyboy" or some version of m2f now on their profiles.
I'm not here to help you enact your broken gender issues on my time or in my rentals unless you a) pay the rental box b) abide by my simple rules and the TOS; c) don't grief me or your fellow tenants.
Likely, somewhere in this broken person's online history is someone they gender-deceived who is furious/hurt/won't speak to them now that they've discovered this on Prokofy's blog (let's hypothesize) and now said broken ladyboy must raise Cain in order to get Prokofy to delete this connection so they can go on deceiving that other person (let's say). Maybe not. But likely, given the frenzy around the demand to delete the post.
Well, sorry, I don't help you with your gender deception. I don't practice gender deception myself and I expect others to be decent and not practice it either, although it has been practiced on me a number of times. I lost my privacy at the dawn of Second Life because vicious assholes think that the way you win an argument online is by outing somebody's real gender and their real life details -- a practice now known as "doxxing" because of the "documents" posted on Pastepin or elsewhere, often with a gleeful note that these facts were all discoverable online and therefore "fair game." Sorry, but I don't think my elderly mother-in-law's name and address being discoverable on line means she gets to have police or pizzas at her door because some git in an online game has a beef about their e-house.
Jump, Tor Will Catch You
Just like I don't think the former Linden (!) and Tor gal should get the pharmacist in NJ fired from his RL job because Ms. Privacy -- who felt her identity should be hidden behind seven seals on Twitter but who posted herself on top of the Washington monument in RL -- doesn't appreciate the hilarious satire that said pharmacist delivered to her: "Jump, Tor will catch you." That's not misogyny; that's not incitement of violence; it's the perfect putdown to these legion of fucktards who think Privacy for Me and Not for Thee is a viable life credo.
Now, I'm totally aware that the story of this particular sad loser in Second Life may not even rise to the dignity of having had some important online relationship ruined because their gender deception was uncovered.
Transgender Totalitarianism
I'm totally cognizant of the fact that this may work an entirely different way, as it has all too many times: Lexdysia/TroubleTrixie/Colors may simply be a typically nasty m2f who hates, hates, hates women, lesbians, and f2m, especially f2m who don't hide their virtual or real status. I've sometimes wondered if the reality of my just not caring sweet dick-all if you fuck with me online in this way - and fight back -- is something that makes these fragile, insecure gender-challenged youth go ballistic -- because they live in such fear and self-loathing. We all know that Tizzers, once she finally completed her transition (she looks great BTW), and found happiness, began to grief less. Right? As did her RL husband, deployer of the Giant Refrigerator of Ravenglass.
I do have one question. Did Tizzers have her dick cut off? That might help me and other frequent, long-time victims of her griefing know if she is really serious and Grief-Moor has ceased, you know? Hormones can be stopped; surgery is forever. That's the kind of brutally serious point I make to people who griefed me for five years or more in a virtual world, causing actual damages, merely because I publicized their antics and abuse-reported them and because -- and this is the important one, an insight I got from none other than griefer-coddler Peter Ludlow -- they didn't want me or others to use the Internet in any other way than they did, which was a sandbox. That's all that's about. It's not an argument about creativity or "transgressive behaviour." It's a debate about whether you allow totalitarianism in the world or not. This streak of atrocious behaviour lasting for years isn't something where you get together for "old time's sake," and you kick back and have a beer and chat about these hilarious antics with the griefers themselves as the moronic Intlibber writes in comments I don't publish because you can't grief me and have your comments posted here. No. Say, how's your crypto account doin', big guy?
Transgender Rights
I believe firmly in transgender rights; I believe firmly in the inherency of transgender. That's precisely why I fight transgender extremism that tries to take away choice from other people and to coerce people to adopt their beliefs. And it is indeed about trans-totalitarianism, the most extreme end of the transgender movement -- transgenderism, and yes, I'll call it that -- that lives in a violent, rigid, ideologically controlled world and wants to extend that rigid, ideological, and violent ideology to others by coercion.
In other words, transgender extremism which is the last bastion of male chauvinism.
I first encountered transgender extremism in Second Life; now I see it in Real Life.
Men adopt female alts in games and virtual worlds for all kinds of reasons. Some claim, given our non-mouselook view in SL, they just want to look at a female butt as they fly around instead of a male butt, it's more attractive. Some are just involved in RP and stories of various light or heavy types, which is their right, and I stand by it. Some merely like to experiment, because you can, and that is their right, and I stand by it. Some are actually in transition in RL, and that is their right, and I stand by it. Some are only in transition in SL and may remain there and that is their right, too.
But some just have found an effective way to grief people, by a particular kind of culture jamming, and an f2m simply seems like a good target to them, whether they do this out of a motivation of fear, hatred, self-loathing, or lack of empathy. That isn't their right and they can go fuck themselves with that attitude, and I can and will AR them and publicize them when they do that, the end. They might be in any one of those legitimate categories outlined above -- but they don't get to use any of them as cover for harassing and attempting to silence or coerce other people, no they do not.
So I'll say this again and again and enlarge on it in another post.
But for the purposes of this post, we have before us just some sorry-ass SL loser who can't get gone and who thinks they can keep agitating with their efforts to gain totalitarian control over what others say and do -- by threats and coercion. "Last chance to delete a post"-- or else. Or else what? A lawyer contacts me? An AR is filed against my blog or inworld? Some effort is found to frame me? Some RL violence occurs? That's why I publicize these things, and don't play the game of "don't feed the trolls."
And I'm here to say: no you can't get your way, you infantile loon, go away.
Again, I also like to record these incidents when they happen so that in the event a sorry-ass loser like this "takes it to real life," and hits me over the head with a hammer, the police know where to look.
Publicity is always the best weapon.
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